Science On Top
390 episodes - English - Latest episode: 8 months ago - ★★★★★ - 5 ratingsThe Australian podcast about science, health and technology news. Join Ed Brown and his panel of co-hosts each week as we talk about the latest and coolest research and discoveries in the world of science. We're joined by special guests from all over the science field: doctors, professors, nurses, teachers and more.
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Episodes
Goodbye
September 01, 2023 10:48 - 4 minutes - 4.02 MBThis podcast has come to an end. So long, and thanks for all the fish! Links to download the archive of all our episodes can be found here: https://scienceontop.com/goodbye
SoT 358: A Lot Of Poop
August 25, 2020 03:04 - 21 minutes - 15.5 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:30 A team in Kenya and the UK have discovered a microbe that completely protects mosquitoes against the malaria parasite. 00:10:17 Everybody poops, but if you don't it's very bad as one unfortunate record-breaking lizard found out. 00:14:22 This year we've seen three big records broken in solar power efficiency.
A quick update
August 05, 2020 11:47 - 3 minutes - 2.8 MBAn update on what's happening with the show. The quick version: we're still here, but the world's on fire and things are a bit tough. We'll be back. Stay safe everyone. Wednesday 5 August 2020
SoT 357: You Get An Ocean!
June 17, 2020 23:49 - 22 minutes - 16.5 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:28 Good news in quarantine, two pandas in Hong Kong have finally mated! It only took them ten years! 00:04:29 Lots of moons in our solar system seem to have subsurface oceans, and now it looks like Pluto does too! 00:13:59 Soy is everywhere these days, but there are environmental concerns with it. Now a new study suggests fava beans could be a more environmentally friendly source of plant protein. This episode contains traces of Trev...
SoT 356: The Same... But Opposite
May 11, 2020 23:17 - 29 minutes - 21.5 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:39 When it comes to giving birth in the animal world, there's mostly only two options: live babies, or eggs. But very rarely, it can be both! Such is the case with the yellow-bellied three-toed skink. 00:06:37 Imagine solar power that worked at night! That's (kind of) the promise of a new type of solar cell being developed by two American researchers. 00:19:50 If you want to train a robot dog, there's the hard way and there's the eas...
SoT 355: E-mouse-icons!
April 30, 2020 02:30 - 22 minutes - 15.9 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:40 Researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Germany have used a machine-learning algorithm to finally answer one of science's most confounding puzzles: Is that mouse over there happy? Or afraid? Or disgusted? 00:07:54 Astrophysicists from the University of Florida and Columbia University have figured out that a violent collision of two neutron stars released many of the heavier atoms that went on to form our solar system. This epi...
SoT 354: They Smacked It With A Shovel
April 19, 2020 12:35 - 36 minutes - 26.7 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall, Dr. Helen Maynard-Casely 00:03:36 NASA's Mars InSight probe has finally managed to drill into the Martian rock and soil - thanks to a traditional repair technique! 00:13:04 The idea that glass is a liquid that flows is largely a myth.... sort of. It's an amorphous solid, so it does flow but very very slowly. Now an analysis of amber has shed some light on the disordered molecules that make glass a "liquid in suspended animation". 00:26:36 ...
SoT 353: Crazy Finds A Way
April 13, 2020 12:05 - 24 minutes - 17.4 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:35 Professor Maria Croyle from the University of Texas in Austin has been working on alternative delivery mechanisms for vaccines without giant needles. And one promising method she's developed is a lot more palatable! 00:08:15 The formation of our moon is something of a mystery to astronomers. But now new research into the moon's composition further strengthens the most widely accepted theory. This episode contains traces of the SA...
SoT 352: Noodle-Fingered Hugs
March 30, 2020 21:57 - 47 minutes - 33.5 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:27 How do you study wibbly wobbly jellyfish, without damaging them or stressing them out? You give them a noodly hug, of course! 00:08:27 When a satellite runs out of fuel, it's sent up into a graveyard orbit where it can pose a threat to any spacecraft leaving Earth. But a recent test of the Mission Extension Vehicle could mean satellites can be refuelled, extending their lifespan significantly. 00:21:25 People are attaching sensors...
SoT 351: Air Sea'n'Sea
March 20, 2020 10:05 - 31 minutes - 22.9 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:28 An Australian research team has come up with a luxurious plan to save endangered seahorses. 00:04:54 A more precise method of determining the methane produced by human activities draws a timeline of industrialisation. 00:15:07 Remains dating back 65,000 years ago demonstrate that the earliest Australians enjoyed slow-cooking. 00:20:28 Have you thought about the environmental impact your death and burial or cremation will have? Th...
SoT Special 28 – Coronavirus with Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz
March 13, 2020 13:16 - 42 minutes - 30.7 MBAs the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 sweeps the world, the only thing spreading quicker is panic and misinformation. So we caught up with Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, an epidemiologist, writer and podcaster to find out what's really going on with COVID-19. For more information, we recommend: Australian Department of Health World Health Organisation Centers For Disease Control This Week In Virology podcast Coronacast podcast And you can follow Gideon on Twitter.
SoT 350: Rocks Were Never Not Great
February 27, 2020 22:14 - 40 minutes - 28.8 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:01:14 A team at Howard Hughes Medical Institute has been working with Google, and has just announced that they have mapped the “connectome” in the central region of brain of a fruit fly. That's means they've worked out the precise meanderings of 25,000 neurons and their 20 million connections. 00:15:14 About 2 billion years ago, a giant meteorite smacked into the thick glaciers that then were covering Western Australia. The result could h...
SoT Bites 001 - Hot Drinks In Hot Weather
February 07, 2020 06:46 - 8 minutes - 6.04 MBHere's a little taste of the sort of thing to expect when Science on Top returns very soon - on hot days are you better off drinking hot or cold drinks?
SoT Bites 001 - Cuttlefish Watching 3D Movies
January 29, 2020 04:27 - 7 minutes - 5.95 MBHave you missed us? Looking forward to another season of Science on Top? Here's something to whet your appetite - a story of cute cephalopods, curious scientists and 3D glasses!
SoT 349: Our Favourite Science Stories of 2019
December 17, 2019 11:51 - 44 minutes - 32.6 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall, Ass/Prof Mick Vagg 00:00:48 The switch to agricultural societies 12,000 years ago may have changed how we talk, introducing the 'f' and 'v' sounds. 00:04:58 The cane toad is an introduced pest in Australia, with no real natural predators. Until recently, when a small group of water rats learned how to eviscerate them with surgical precision! 00:06:38 The search for Planet Nine continued this year, and a new hypothesis was proposed: it mi...
SoT 348: Massive Stars Are Fluffy!
December 13, 2019 01:13 - 34 minutes - 25.2 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:56 As unprecedented bushfires ravage Australia, Forbes published an article declaring koalas are "functionally extinct". And while they do face considerable threats, the situation is not quite that dire. 00:11:38 Chinese scientists have discovered a black hole that, according to our current understanding of black-hole formation, is so large it shouldn’t exist. Called LB-1, the black hole has a mass 70 times that of our sun, three tim...
SoT 347: Carbonite
December 04, 2019 22:22 - 43 minutes - 31.1 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:01:24 For the first time, doctors at the University of Maryland School of Medicine have purposefully put at least one human patient in suspended animation. This could be a great help to surgeons dealing with traumatic emergencies such as gunshot or stab wounds. 00:10:06 The first geomorphologic map of Saturn's moon Titan has been released. Showing lakes (of liquid methane), dunes (of organic molecule particles) and exposed icy bedrock. ...
SoT 346: Guinea Pig Guinea Pigs
November 26, 2019 12:41 - 35 minutes - 25.5 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:01:23 Danuvius guggenmosi was a great ape that lived 11.6 million years ago in southern Germany and it has just been formally described in the journal Nature. But the really interesting thing about this discovery is what it could suggest about bipedalism - our ancestors were walking upright much earlier than previously thought. 00:10:19 Spaceflight is a dangerous endeavour. Astronauts risk muscle atrophy, bone weakness, cardiovascular iss...
SoT 345: Daisy
November 15, 2019 23:23 - 34 minutes - 25.1 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:35 Researchers at the University of Richmond taught a group of 17 rats how to drive tiny little plastic cars. The rats found driving to be relaxing! 00:11:28 Why do we like music? It's a question that neuroscientists have wondered about for decades. A paper in the Journal of Neuroscience suggests it's related to learning. 00:18:37 Cows can not only recognise other cows, but they form friendships and bonds that don't align with the so...
SoT 344: Teeny-Tiny Black Holes
November 07, 2019 22:25 - 33 minutes - 24.6 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:32 A zebra's stripes seem to reduce the number of flies that they attract, so what would happen if you painted a cow like a zebra? Japanese researchers did exactly that, and found a similar result. 00:08:10 An intriguing new hypothesis for Planet Nine is not a planet at all. Two astrophysicists have speculated it might actually be a very small black hole in our galaxy. 00:25:43 By analysing cut marks on bones left by humans between 2...
SoT 343: More Water Rats!
October 31, 2019 23:50 - 27 minutes - 19.8 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:34 Snails are a French delicacy that has led to the near extinction, and now revival, of tiny culturally and scientifically important snails in French Polynesia. 00:06:45 3.5 million years ago, something in our galaxy exploded. As more evidence comes in, it's looking like the black hole in the centre of the Milky Way gobbled up some young stars. 00:16:04 The scourge of cane toads continues to spread across Australia. But could a nat...
SoT 342: Grumpy, Hungry, Wanting Chocolate
October 21, 2019 23:29 - 39 minutes - 28 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:29 A new hypothesis in the quest to explain the bizarre dimming patterns of Tabby's Star: could it be a moon getting shredded? 00:18:36 It's a belief that's been widely held since 1971: women who live together sync their periods together. But many attempts to replicate the original study have failed, so why is it still such a prevalent belief? 00:28:13 Take a computer algorithm, teach it to read scientific papers, feed it thousands o...
SoT 341: The 2019 Ig Nobel Prizes
October 09, 2019 10:18 - 57 minutes - 41.9 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall, Peter Miller The Ig Nobel Prizes honour achievements that first make us laugh, then make us think. We take a look at this year’s winners: from the benefits of pizza to the temperature of French postal packages! You can watch the award ceremony here. 00:01:16 MEDICINE PRIZE which was awarded to Silvano Gallus, for collecting evidence that pizza might protect against illness and death, if the pizza is made and eaten in Italy. 00:08:26 MED...
SoT 340: They Look Snarly
September 29, 2019 11:11 - 25 minutes - 18.8 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:33 The large holes in T-Rex's skull might not have been for muscles, but thermoregulating blood vessels according to a paper published in the Anatomical Record. 00:06:13 An Australian team has developed a flu vaccine they believe could be the first human drug to be completely designed by artificial intelligence. 00:18:49 A team at Howard Hughes Medical Institute is painstakingly building a detailed map of a mouse brain - one neuron a...
SoT 339: Sauce Is Key
September 16, 2019 12:49 - 44 minutes - 32.4 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:47 After a British teenager went blind, media reports came thick and fast about the dangers of a junk food diet. But was he just a fussy eater, or was there a lot more to it than the headlines suggested? 00:07:50 Is climate change making spiders more aggressive? Well, yes - but only one species was studied and not aggressive in way that you'd expect. 00:20:39 After a spectacular wall collapse last year, a crater on Hawaii's Kīlauea v...
SoT 338: Hidden Bottoms
August 19, 2019 10:46 - 48 minutes - 34.8 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:26 Tiny, often-overlooked "cryptobenthic" fish are much more plentiful than we realised, and could therefore explain how reefs can thrive despite a lack of nutrients. 00:08:30 Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory data have been able to measure how fast five supermassive black holes are spinning. One was spinning faster than 70% of the speed of light! 00:17:26 A new analysis of skull fragments found in Greece is leading a...
SoT 337: Fear-Relevant Non-Slimy Small Animals
July 31, 2019 11:46 - 42 minutes - 30.4 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall, Jo Benhamu 00:00:26 A seemingly successful treatment of a nasty genetic disease would not have been possible without zebrafish. 00:10:52 It may seem counterintuitive, but a strain of virus linked to the common cold has been used to treat patients with a type of bladder cancer. 00:20:44 Fast Radio Bursts - the strong blasts of radio waves from distant galaxies - have mystified astronomers since they were first detected in 2007. But now for...
SoT 336: Text Neck
July 16, 2019 22:51 - 39 minutes - 28.4 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Lucas Randall, Jo Benhamu 00:00:25 Dogs have evolved - mostly through artificial selection - to be our best friends. And a part of that evolution, according to a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, meant developing special muscles to help them give us those "puppy dog eyes". You can test your own dogs "dognition" at dognition.com! 00:15:27 It's widely believed that at the centre of every large galaxy there's at least one superm...
SoT 335: Parmesan Not Brie
July 04, 2019 11:38 - 26 minutes - 20.4 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall, Jo Benhamu 00:00:39 Winemaking in France dates back more than 12,000 years. But new research looking at the DNA of ancient grapes has found one particular variety that's remained unchanged for over 900 years. 00:09:13 The largest crater in the solar system, the South Pole-Aitken basin, is on the far side of the moon. And astronomers have found an unexpected very dense mass there, deep below the surface. 00:19:08 Positron Emission Tomograp...
SoT 334: That's My Clickbait!
June 24, 2019 11:11 - 53 minutes - 38 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Dr. Shayne Jospeh, Penny Dumsday, Jo Benhamu 00:00:54 After many months away from the show, Shayne discusses his depression and how he's been dealing with it. 00:11:26 Two astronomers published a paper that seemed to suggest our hominid ancestors switch to walking on two feet as a result of a supernova exploding around 8 million years ago. And while that may be plausible, it wasn't really what the paper was about. 00:21:09 Dr. Susan Mackinnon, from Washington Universit...
SoT 333: Altered State Of Consciousness
June 09, 2019 04:09 - 36 minutes - 26.7 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall, Jo Benhamu 00:00:23 For bonobo males, sex is often done under mother's watchful eye. But it's not quite that creepy - the mother's are helpful, allowing the primates to copulate in peace! 00:04:33 Detecting lung cancer in the early stages can be tricky even for very experienced radiologists. But a huge test using Google's AI computers found that the algorithms performed better than humans, and made fewer false positives. 00:18:45 There's ...
SoT 332: Muddy, Liefie and Lixy
June 02, 2019 11:39 - 58 minutes - 41.9 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall, Jo Benhamu 00:00:34 Penny gives us a trip report on her recent trip to Lake Mungo - a dry lake in remote Australia that's known for the discovery of 20,000-60,000 year old human remains. 00:09:58 All we know about Denisovans - a species of hominid that split off from the human lineage alongside the Neanderthals - comes from a little finger bone, three teeth and a sliver of bone. But now the discovery of a jawbone, found two and a half thous...
SoT 331: A Hyperactive Toddler
April 26, 2019 12:58 - 19 minutes - 14.4 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Kirsten Banks 00:00:49 For the first time ever, astronomers have taken a photo of the silhouette of the event horizon of a black hole! 00:06:39 The Event Horizon Telescope captured 5 petabytes of data - which is a lot! 00:09:08 XKCD compared the size of the event horizon of M87 with the size of our solar system. 00:11:36 Veritasium expertly described how the photo was taken, and all the permutations that could have happened to give us different photos. Kirsten Banks ...
SoT 330: A Very Large Horn
April 23, 2019 02:05 - 56 minutes - 40.4 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Dr. Kate Naughton, Peter Miller 00:00:40 An extraordinary must-read article in the New Yorker has an in-depth look at the few hours after a meteor hit the Yucatán Peninsula and probably wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs. It also follows an amazing discovery that could answer many questions about the appearance of dinosaurs and whether or not they were already dying out. 00:18:51 A study led by a team at the Duke University Clinical Research Institute has found that trea...
SoT 329: Not The Father Of Lies
April 16, 2019 00:48 - 23 minutes - 17.2 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Chris Curtain-Magee 00:01:22 In 450 B.C., the "Father of History", Herodotus, wrote a 23 line account of a type of Egyptian cargo vessel. This was widely thought to be a fabrication, but a discovery in an ancient Egyptian port city indicates the account was truthful. 00:08:03 The earliest undisputed evidence of humans in Australia comes from a rock shelter in northern Australia and dates back to 65,000 years ago. Now investigations at an ancient midden - ...
SoT 328: Thralala, Thralala, Thralala!
April 02, 2019 10:19 - 39 minutes - 28.3 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:32 Some fish can survive the freezing cold waters of Antarctica thanks to a gene that makes anti-freeze. But how do fish in the Arctic, in the Northern hemisphere, also have the same gene? 00:08:33 Some people can smell when people are sick. Could these 'super-smellers' help diagnose Parkinson's Disease early on? 00:21:26 DNA is made of four nucleotides: G, A, T, and C. Now an interdisciplinary team of researchers has doubled that ge...
SoT 327: You've Been Browned!
March 27, 2019 22:57 - 52 minutes - 37.9 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall, Sean M Elliott 00:01:11 Science educator, communicator and performer Sean M. Elliott has a new show at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Tesla: Death Rays & Elephants! 00:11:00 For a long time it's been believed that having some potted plants around the house will help filter out pollutants and toxins. But now the evidence suggests that houseplants do very little or even nothing at all when it comes to cleaning the air. 00:17:56...
SoT 326: A Very Lovely Molecule
March 21, 2019 01:16 - 49 minutes - 35.4 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall, Dr. Helen Maynard-Casely 00:01:16 NASA's InSight probe begins drilling into the Martian surface - and stops. 00:17:11 Twins are either identical (one egg splits into two copies) or fraternal (two eggs fertilised at the same time). But that's not always the case - as a mother in Queensland found out when she had sesquizygotic twins. 00:25:44 Timothy Ray Brown, who was known as The Berlin Patient, was the first person to be "cured" of HIV. N...
SoT 325: We Just Like Meerkats
March 16, 2019 12:20 - 41 minutes - 29.6 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:57 As the world becomes more and more urbanised, we hear a lot about the dangers to wildlife from humanity's sprawl. But new research finds Australia's koalas may actually be less stressed in cities - provided adequate green spaces are provided. 00:07:43 For the first time ever, a spacecraft built by a private company and designed to carry people has docked with the International Space Station. The success of SpaceX's "Crew Dragon" se...
SoT 324: Kinetic Penetrator
March 04, 2019 19:42 - 47 minutes - 34 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:01:18 Hyabusa 2, Japan's latest sample return mission, has briefly landed on the asteroid Ryugu. It's an ambitious mission looking at the building blocks of the solar system. 00:16:14 And what's the point of dragging samples all the way back to Earth, when we can send whole labs to celestial bodies? 00:20:59 Echidnas are cute but spiky Australian native animals, with rather strange mating habits. But they're in high demand on the illega...
SoT 323: Very Small Frogs
March 01, 2019 00:55 - 54 minutes - 38.6 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall, Dr Cameron Webb 00:00:58 A review study published in the journal Biological Conservation has found that over 40% of insect species are threatened with extinction. 00:29:06 Queensland has seen record-breaking floods this year, and everyone knows that mosquitoes love water. But what do floods mean for mosquito-borne diseases? 00:36:10 By studying sleepless flies, scientists have identified a gene that puts them to sleep when they need it th...
SoT 322: Captain's Log
February 20, 2019 06:39 - 41 minutes - 30 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:01:48 When researchers from the Max Planck Institute were looking at the teeth of an 11th or 12th century German woman they found tiny bright blue specks. This was a clue that illuminated the role women may have played in the history of book production. 00:09:19 What if plants could be trained just like pet dogs? Spoiler alert: they can! Sort of. 00:12:12 Also, plants can hear you with their ear-flowers. 00:21:29 For spiders, their ...
SoT Special: 2018 Bloopers and Outtakes
February 11, 2019 03:19 - 1 minute - 1.63 MB2018 was a big year for science. Is saw the launch of the largest privately built reuseable rocket, the discovery a new organ, and understanding of the wombat's cubic poops. And we talked about all these stories and more on Science on Top. But not everything goes to plan, and this year was no exception! We had all sorts of Skype troubles, we forgot things, we were interrupted by dogs and phones… lots went wrong! But instead of losing the hilarious moments of chaos, we’ve saved them all for...
SoT 321: Our Favourite Science Stories of 2018
January 15, 2019 00:44 - 36 minutes - 27.2 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Peter Miller 00:01:10 There's a planet orbiting star HD26965, exactly where Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry said Spock's homeworld Vulcan would be. 00:04:16 A fresh analysis of 10 year old data finds the best evidence yet of water vapor venting from Jupiter's fourth largest moon, Europa. 00:05:17 Watch Peter Miller's artistic imagining of life on Europa here. 00:06:11 The oldest example of abstract art, from 73,000 years ago, resembles a hashtag....
SoT 320: That's Not A Knife
December 22, 2018 06:38 - 33 minutes - 24.1 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:01:24 The giant tortoise Lonesome George, the last of his species, was possibly as old as 102 when he died in 2012. Now sequencing of his DNA has revealed a number of genes that could give us clues about human life expectancy and particularly cancer. 00:08:10 Research into epilepsy has accidentally led to some exciting new developments in the treatment of depression and mood disorders. This is a serendipitous line of inquiry that came fr...
SoT 319 error
December 15, 2018 00:14 - 1 minute - 2.06 MBOur latest episode, 319 - Number Five Is Alive, had a pretty major glitch in that Lucas' track wasn't there at all. I realised the mistake shortly after posting it, and thought I had replaced it with the correct version, but obviously it didn't replace the file. I've re-uploaded it and tested it now, it definitely works! So if you had any trouble playing that episode - specifically if it sounds like Lucas is being rude and not talking - then you may have to re-download that file again. O...
SoT 319: Number Five Is Alive
December 14, 2018 10:14 - 56 minutes - 40.1 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall, Jo Benhamu 00:02:27 NASA's InSight probe lands on Mars, with a slew of instruments to analyse what the red planet is made of. 00:17:43 Against all conventional knowledge, mitochondrial DNA is sometimes inherited from the father. 00:28:01 Professor He Jiankui announced he's created the world's first ever gene edited babies using the CRISPR-Cas9 technique. His claims of HIV immune babies are extraordinary, but mired in contention amongst et...
SoT 318: A Wacky Eukaryote Is Always Fun
December 07, 2018 10:05 - 40 minutes - 29.1 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:01:10 Wombats - the cute, pudgy marsupials in Australia, have cubic poops. Square, angular blocks of poop. But how and why? We may now have a better understanding. 00:08:25 HD186302 is a star 184 light-years from Earth. And it's so similar to our sun, it could be long lost twin. 00:16:49 A team of researchers have studied the genomes of a group of microbes called Hemimastigotes and found that they are so bizarre, they deserve their ver...
SoT 317: Darknado
December 03, 2018 11:57 - 33 minutes - 23.9 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:02:00 There's a stream of stars hurtling through our region of the Milky Way galaxy, and they're bringing with them a "dark matter hurricane". It's probably nothing to worry about, though. 00:12:16 For the first time since 1889, the kilogram has been redefined according to a natural constant, instead of a lump of metal in a vault in Paris. The actual mass, for all intents and purposes, remains the same. 00:23:51 Previous studies of Nea...
SoT 316 - Venoms Are Amazing
November 28, 2018 07:11 - 39 minutes - 28.4 MBHosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Mick Vagg 00:02:13 How serious is the opioid crisis in Australia? What's being done about it, and what new painkillers are on the horizon? Pain Specialist Professor Mick Vagg gives us the run down. 00:22:15 20 million years ago, dolphins had really long snouts - the question is why? What evolutionary pressures led to their evolution, and what caused them to become extinct? 00:28:11 Are chimpanzees selfish? Do they readily cooperate? A study on chimpanze...