The Science Show - Separate stories podcast

Sara Russell leads a team interested in the formation of the Solar System and the formation and evolution of moons of the terrestrial planets.

Former editor Tim Mendham comments and give a history of scepticism in modern Australia.

Harris hawks are used at sporting events and major tourist sites such as Venice to keep pigeons away.

Cuts are widespread across US science and research impacting climate monitoring. Understanding how climate is changing is vital if we are to have any hope in reducing our impact and preparing for a changing world.

Peter Bernhardt takes us back in time to the trial as told by Brenda Wineapple in her book Keeping the Faith – God, Democracy and the trial that riveted a nation.

It's impossible to escape microplastics. They're in our food and water, and the air around us is teeming with them.So considering they're all around us, how can we minimise our exposure to tiny plastic fragments without resorting to living in a cave?

In this 50th year of The Science Show we celebrate yet another of the program's idols and regular guests, science writer Tim Radford.

Zac Picker is searching for physical impacts of dark matter as evidence of its existence. 

Music is being used at Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital to bring serenity and a sense of calm to patients, family, and medical staff.

With no flood plain, river water in Passau can rise high and quickly threatening people and property. And when the water rises, students in the university town come together for swift community action.

Matthew England is studying global changes in ocean heat and circulation. The AMOC - the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is showing signs of slowing, and as it does, impacts are being felt across the globe.

It feels like you can't go a week without hearing about some new quantum technology which promises to change our lives for the better. But quantum mechanics is already well and truly present in our daily life — and you don't even have to be a physicist to be using it. 

Peter Rose has been editor of Australian Book Review for 24 years. As he retires, a scientific writing fellowship at ABR has been launched.

Shelby Traynor traces the birth and irresistible growth of the quantum revolution.

The Blue Planet Prize is presented by the Asahi Glass Foundation of Japan for outstanding achievement in helping provide solutions to global environmental problems.

Animals play crucial roles in ecosystems and are being lost to fire on a massive scale. Resse Halter reports on Canada's wildfires.

If you've given birth to three daughters, what are the odds that your next child will also be a girl?One in two, right? Well … maybe not.The odds of having a fourth girl could be a fair bit higher than 50 per cent, according to a new study into families with single-sex sets of siblings.

The Nullarbor barred bandicoot (Perameles papillon) was identified as a new species in 2018, despite being extinct for nearly a century. Until recently, all scientists had of the bandicoots were a handful of museum specimens and one black and white glass slide. Now two photographs of the species have been discovered at the University of Melbourne, revealing details about how the animals looked when they were alive. 

Electric scooter, humidicrib, fax machine, Olympic scoreboard — versions of all these inventions (and hundreds more) were created by a pair of brothers, Donald and Edward Both, in their South Australian workshop from the 1930s. 

A wave energy generator trial has been running at Albany on WA's south coast. Researchers say these offshore devices, if scaled up, could be a useful source of renewable power. 

We know that the warming world is devastating ecosystems, but it's not always because organisms are struggling. This is especially the case in the ocean, where different seaweed species can have very different reactions to changing conditions. 

A huge net, weighed down by heavy chains, swiftly sweeps across the ocean floor, scooping up everything in its path. This type of fishing, called bottom trawling, was illuminated in a new documentary, Ocean with David Attenborough. Bottom trawling is known for indiscriminately gathering all sorts of marine species, as well as damaging the sea floor. But with the practice producing around a quarter of the world's wild-caught seafood, are there ways to make it more sustainable? 

Getting blasted by a bolt from the heavens usually spells the end for trees, but some species not only survive these strikes, they thrive.

Tools such as adzes have been found in the thousands in Samoa, each crafted from volcanic basalt. But without harder materials to shape these cutting tools, the question remains: how were they made?

Pages made of goat skin, bright blue inks of powdered precious stones, the occasional bubonic plague flea — we hear about some of the marvels found in books made centuries ago. 

In the three years since the James Webb Space Telescope sent back its first images, it's pulled back the veil on a whole bunch of mind-blowing cosmic phenomena. So how has this $13 billion bit of kit shaped what we know about the Universe — and what is yet to come?

The humble crisp has come a long way since its invention more than 200 years ago.You can get them in flavours such as bolognese, cheeseburger and beef rendang … which taste uncannily like bolognese, cheeseburger, and beef rendang.So how are these complex flavours made, and how do food chemists get them tasting so close to the real deal?

Nearly two decades ago, a small group of scientists in Australia came surprisingly close to resurrecting the extinct gastric brooding frog. Hear from the scientists involved about the highs and lows of de-extinction efforts, and the challenges facing researchers today. 

Since President Donald Trump retook office, the state of research in the States has been precarious for many, with billions of dollars of proposed cuts from science and health research.But there is a silver lining: other countries such as Australia are implementing programs to recruit US researchers looking to relocate.

We often hear about places where the air quality is bad, even dangerous, but what about where the air is the cleanest on Earth?That air can be found blowing onto the north-west tip of Tasmania at Kennaook/Cape Grim, where an air pollution station has quietly been keeping track of how humans have changed the makeup of our atmosphere for 50 years.So what does the world's cleanest air tell us?

A weekly injection that stops that hankering for hot chips and donuts?Many people on Ozempic and similar medications report this phenomenon, saying they no longer have incessant thoughts about sweets and fried food.So how do these drugs, known as GLP-1 agonists, work in the brain to dial down "food noise" and help people lose weight?

It's the size of a sesame seed, but it could cause unfathomable destruction to Australia's forests and urban canopy.A beetle called the polyphagous shot-hole borer (Euwallacea fornicatus) is silently spreading through Perth and its surrounds, forcing councils to chop and chip hundreds of trees — even century-old Moreton Bay figs.So how does the tiny pest cause such massive problems?

First they learnt how to flip open wheelie bin lids. Now they're using water fountains.Masters of the urban landscape, sulphur-crested cockatoos (Cacatua galerita) are more than capable of some quirky (and sometimes messy) antics.So what do these entertaining exploits tell us about cockie innovation — or even cockie culture?

Pauline Newman meets biosecurity officer Brent Madden who explains how a dog's obsession with tennis balls is used to elicit a desired behaviour.

Challenging ideas such as whether plants communicate and planting according to cycles of the moon - a healthy scepticism presented with hope and vision.  

Professor Marilyn Renfree describes the genius and spirit of her late husband reproductive biologist Roger Short.

Get ready for gravitons, dark photons and altered transition states. Kathryn Zurek takes us on a tour of a bewildering world, our world, with us knowing so much, while at the same time, knowing so little.

A couple of months ago, a killer started mobilising off the South Australian shore — one that would wipe out marine life, make surfers feel sick, and smother picturesque beaches in thick foam.The culprit? A bloom of tiny organisms called microalgae. We can't see them with the naked eye, but in big enough numbers, they can devastate ecosystems.So what made the South Australian algal bloom so lethal, and can anything be done about blooms like it?

Len Fisher tackles accusations that some scientific papers and some science books contain misinformation. How well are they checked? Are academics too busy or too few to monitor the work of others?

In her book Beyond Green, Geographer Lesley Head argues that Indigenous presence in wilderness in Australia has existed in a balanced way. And Robyn is taken on a walking tour of the highlands around the Shoalhaven River in NSW by two Indigenous guides.

If you were impressed by generative AI such as ChatGPT, then artificial general intelligence or AGI promises to really knock your socks off.Over the past couple of decades, tech companies have been racing to build AGI systems that can match or surpass human capabilities across a whole bunch of tasks.So will AGI save the world — or will it spell the beginning of the end for humanity?

The next time you pick up a bag of spuds from the supermarket or fill up the car with petrol, you can thank the Treaty of the Metre for the metric system that underpins daily life.The treaty was signed exactly 150 years ago, when delegates from 17 countries gathered on a Parisian spring day to establish a new and standardised way of measuring the world around us.But the metre's inception predates the treaty that bears its name by nearly 100 years. So how did it come about, and how has its definition changed over the centuries?