More controversy over stress-induced stem cells , as co-authors call for the retractions of the papers. An aluminium suit could enable divers to travel to depths of 305 meters, move around and collect samples. A giant virus has been discovered in 30,000 year old Siberian permafrost . It's big and it eats amoebas. An Australian team is working on a project to clear space junk with a powerful ground-based laser . A study of how men and women perceive each other's mathematics skills suggests that b...
Mar 20, 2014•47 min
More studies finding no evidence of 'wind turbine syndrome' , plus a discussion on dealing with climate change deniers. Could enough wind turbines reduce the force of hurricanes ? Maybe, but it would need A LOT of turbines. In 2011 a 6 - 9 million year old whale graveyard was discovered at Cerro Ballena (Whale Hill) in Chile. But with time running out, researchers turned to a digital method of preserving the environmental context in 3D. A thin, stretchy, electric membrane moulded to a patient's ...
Mar 13, 2014•43 min
Vaccines might not need to be kept cold to the extent previously thought. This could make vaccinations in third world countries cheaper and easier. The oldest crystal on Earth has been dated and found to be 4.4 billion years old. This means the Earth had developed a crust very early on, perhaps only a few hundred million years after formation. What's the best way to count whale populations ? It could be from space. To learn about how humans and dogs process sounds and emotions , researchers had ...
Mar 05, 2014•34 min
A thorough investigation of the 'jelly doughnut shaped rock' , known by NASA as Pinnacle Island, confirms it isn't an alien fungus, it isn't a meteorite fragment, it's just a chipped bit of rock. Doubts have emerged about the radical stem cell breakthrough that suggested acid or other stress could turn mature cells into stem cells. The jury's still out on this. Scientists have developed a detailed model of curly hair, which could give insights into the behaviours of all curved rods . Most import...
Feb 28, 2014•44 min
Stephen Hawking has some new thoughts on black holes, but he's not saying they don't exist . For a few weeks, weather uncovered the footprints of five prehistoric humans . And then washed them away again. There's a leech that can survive being submerged in liquid nitrogen for 24 hours. Astronomers have discovered what could be one of the oldest stars , formed from the exploded remains of one of the first stars. The crippled Kepler Space Telescope has been resurrected , with an ingenious solution...
Feb 17, 2014•52 min
A new method of turning adult cells into pluripotent stem cells is discovered. According to the paper, simply bathing cells in acid could be cause mature cells to revert to stem cells that could become any cell in the body. Heart researchers in the UK have managed to turn stem cells into heart cells, that actually beat in petri dishes . NASA plans to create the coldest spot in the universe on board the International Space Station . They're talking 100 pico-Kelvin, which is one ten billionth of a...
Feb 11, 2014•34 min
Jelly donut shaped rock surprises NASA, then gets them sued . Tracking dogs by GPS may give clues to pack structure, but probably not. West Australia's shark cull begins , the same week that a report finds 1/4 of sharks and rays are threatened with extinction . Men supposedly forget more than women do , but the study has big issues....
Feb 04, 2014•35 min
After nearly 11 years, the Rosetta comet-chasing spacecraft has awoken and is preparing for an ambitious mission. A new hypothesis for 'lactose persistence' - why most humans can still drink milk into adulthood. Why do sloths climb down from their trees to poo on the ground ? It could be because of moths. China is getting into genetic modification and cloning on an 'industrial scale' . That's a lot of pigs. Biotechnology company Illumina has announced a machine that can sequence the human genome...
Jan 27, 2014•43 min
2013 was Australia's hottest year on record , and the sixth hottest globally. Plus the 'polar vortex' hitting North America , and one of Australia's "most significant heatwaves" . And the effect of "C2O" on jumping sea snails . Physics professors have searched the internet for evidence of time travel , and didn't find any. Are dolphins getting high on a toxin secreted by puffer fish? Truth is we really don't know. A new Staph vaccine shows promise in rabbits , but might not work as well in human...
Jan 23, 2014•40 min
The turn of the millennium has brought a new dimension to the Space Age - one that was undreamed of only a few years ago. Thanks to a combination of visionary entrepreneurs and an ailing Russian spaceflight programme, space tourism is now a reality that is set to take off dramatically in the near future. In this entertaining and fully-illustrated talk, Professor Fred Watson outlines what we might see as space tourism evolves into a mainstream branch of the industry. He argues that the new ventur...
Jan 21, 2014•55 min
Ed, Shayne, Lucas and Dyani look back on the big science stories from 2013. From pubic lice to meteor impacts, crowd-funding to HIV cures, we revisit some of our favourite news items. For all the stories we mention, check out the show notes for this episode at scienceontop.com/130
Dec 27, 2013•1 hr 6 min
Dr. David Hawkes' Name The Virus crowdfunding project is a huge success - and it got him a spot on national TV . But is crowdfunding just a passing fad? Comet ISON was billed as the "Comet of a Lifetime", but was more fizzle than sizzle . But even though it burned up in the sun , it's mysterious approach could give astronomers valuable insights into comet behaviour . An amazing result from a mice experiment in Atlanta suggests mice can 'inherit' memories from their fathers , and even their grand...
Dec 17, 2013•57 min
Jo Benhamu joins us to talk about a new trial she's conducting to improve radiotherapy for prostate cancer. More progress resurrecting the extinct gastric brooding frog . Scientists in Spain have received funding to test whether an extinct mountain goat can be cloned from preserved cells . The temperature of the lab could potentially skew results of mice-studies. The mouse immune system is stronger at warmer temperatures than most labs are kept at. NASA has plans to send plants to the moon , to ...
Dec 13, 2013•36 min
Launch of the MAVEN probe to Mars , to investigate what happened to the red planet's atmosphere. Richard Lenski's long-term evolution experiment shows no sign of stopping . One of the longest continously-running scientific experiments demonstrates that bacteria evolves and at an increasing rate. The 'clean-rooms' where spacecraft are built are the most sterile places we can make. But a new species of bacteria has been found in two such clean-rooms - not exactly thriving, but not dead either... I...
Dec 08, 20130
Blinky the crab is a mutant freak. It has three eyes instead of two, and an antenna-like structure on its head. But the reasons for Blinky's deformities are a bit of a mystery . Researchers have linked specific human actions to changes in global warming . They found warming slowed down in the nineties, which they believe can be partly explained by the 1987 ban on CFCs. They also found that warming slowed during the Great Depression. New-born babies deliberately suppress their own immune systems ...
Nov 25, 2013•38 min
The RAVE (Radial Velocity Experiment) study finds that our galaxy, the Milky Way, is fluttering like a flag . Sort of wobbling. From the 1960s to the 1990s, adult elphants were culled extensively in South Africa. It was feared that if there were too many elephants they would destroy the habitat. A recent study of the young elephants that were spared shows substantial social and psychological trauma, decades later. Astronomers have crunched some heavy maths and statistically, there could be as ma...
Nov 19, 2013•52 min
Name The Virus is a crowdfunding initiative to develop new viral vectors to help understand the brain and its disease. A species of South African dung beetle has given up the ability to fly to instead gallop across the sand grasping bits of poo . Why do some people have blue eyes, or big noses, or wide mouths? Some regions of the genome previously thought of as 'junk DNA' control the activity of genes for facial features . The practice of recording bird calls and replaying them to lure birds int...
Nov 13, 2013•43 min
A new study shows that while the brain is asleep, it washes away buildups of wastes and toxins. In the early 90s, about 60,000 jellyfish were born in space . When they came back to Earth, things didn't quite work out. A test of alleged yeti samples uncovers an extinct polar bear/brown bear hybrid. A new law of biology: all mammals pee for about 21 seconds. Yes, a team of scientists walked around a zoo with a stopwatch. A new strain of Clostridium botulinum , the bacteria that produces one of the...
Nov 05, 2013•34 min
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2013 was awarded jointly to James E. Rothman, Randy W. Schekman and Thomas C. Südhof ”for their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells”. The Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the dis...
Oct 27, 2013•49 min
In rutting season, stags roar a lot. Deep roars - the deeper the better for warding off competition. And that could have something to do with the human larynx , which is lower than most other animals. It could also explain why Barry White's voice is so popular with women. New research from the UK shows that diesel fumes are confusing bees and preventing them from finding flowers . But the fumes aren't affecting the bees directly, rather they change the smell of flowers. A study of ballerinas sug...
Oct 21, 2013•32 min
Researchers have discovered the mechanism behind the link between blue-green algae and ALS , a type of motor neuron disease also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. Dr. Rachael Dunlop is lead author of the paper, and she joins us to talk algae, Guam, fruit bats and General "Stormin' Norman" Schwarzkopf. The foramen magnum is the hole in the base of your skull that the spinal cord passes through on its way to the brain. But it's position can tell a lot about how you - and your ancestors - walked. Bact...
Oct 09, 2013•50 min
A new form of exposure therapy could treat people's phobias - while they sleep . Can pasta make you drunk? A case study of a man with auto-brewery syndrome . Curiosity rover finds much less methane than expected , crushing hopes of finding life on Mars. A British team claims to have found evidence of extra-terrestrial life. They haven't . The life story of a blue whale has been mapped, with information from an unlikely source ....
Oct 01, 2013•34 min
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 dung beetles to penis amputations! MEDICINE PRIZEA team of scientists from Japan, China and the UK for assessing the effect of listening to opera, on heart transplant patients who are mice. Classical music affects heart transplants PSYCHOLOGY PRIZEScientists from France, the USA, UK, The Netherlands, and Poland for confirming, by experiment, that people who think the...
Sep 26, 2013•46 min
On Friday 13 September 2013, Dr. Pamela Gay gave a talk at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia about CosmoQuest.org and the need for citizen science. There were also some questions about black holes and supernovae. Our thanks to Swinburne University for hosting this lecture, and our apologies for the audio quality.
Sep 21, 2013•1 hr 1 min
Fish expert Phil Kent joins us to talk more about the pacu, the alleged testicle-eating fish allegedly found off the alleged coast of Denmark . University of Washington researchers have sent a signal from one scientist's brain over the internet to control the hand motions of another researcher . The NSA is paying close attention. NASA has discovered one of the largest canyons in the world underneath the ice sheet that covers most of Greenland. The ice sheet is 3km thick in some parts, and scient...
Sep 11, 2013•41 min
In a town with no previously recorded earthquakes, more than a hundred were recorded in one year. It's thought they were triggered by the disposal of waste water from fracking . A new world record has been set for the smallest sequenced genome , and it belongs to a symbiotic bacteria living in leafhoppers. Mother gibbons teach their daughters to sing , using a kind of 'baby talk'. And ancient 'bog body' has been found with the skin intact . The body may be that of a king, killed in a ritual sacr...
Sep 04, 2013•56 min
Mighty Maggots v Flesh Nom Bugs was a Pozible campaign that raised $9,970 for a trial. The trial aims to assess the ability of maggots to improve the rate of healing for people with Bairnsdale Ulcer lesions. A new malaria vaccine has a 100% success rate in a small study. While promising, there are a lot of obstacles that need to be dealt with before this could be a viable Real World treatment. The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has admitted that radioactive water has been leaking from the ...
Aug 26, 2013•1 hr 4 min
Scientists have made "teeth-like structures" from stem cells generated from urine . Mark Post, a Dutch researcher has made a hamburger from cow muscle grown in a lab . The Cultured Beef was cooked at a PR event in London and tastes "close to meat". Brochosomes are tiny 'soccer-ball' structures secreted by leafhoppers that protect them from rain, spider silk and... their own waste. A new technique developed by the CSIRO uses X-Rays to find gold in ore samples. Fewer boys than girls were born in t...
Aug 18, 2013•37 min
Dr. Pamela Gay is an astronomer and assistant research professor at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. She is the co-host of AstronomyCast, one of the longest running astronomy podcasts and Project Director for CosmoQuest.org. CosmoQuest is a non-profit organisation trying to engage people in both learning and doing science. In this conversation we talk about her research on variable stars, as well as her involvement in citizen science and amateur astronomy. We discuss science education...
Aug 11, 2013•52 min
It was thought that the many eyes on a peacock's tail feathers were what impressed peahens. But a new - and really cool! - study suggests that when it comes to wooing peahens, size does matter . It's not the number of the eyes, but the width of the tail. Do dolphins use names? Well, sort of. They may use names to refer to themselves, but we don't know if they use names to refer to each other. Scientists at MIT have developed a technique to insert false memories into mice . Three new studies have...
Aug 07, 2013•33 min
