Dr Katherine (Katie) Mack is a theoretical astrophysicist. Her work focuses on finding new ways to learn about the early universe and fundamental physics using astronomical observations, probing the building blocks of nature by examining the cosmos on the largest scales. Ed and Lucas caught up with Katie to discuss the universe, travel, social media, and her new job at North Carolina State University. Katie's Twitter handle is @AstroKatie and her website is astrokatie.com . She also writes for C...
Oct 06, 2017•1 hr 12 min
Dr. Lynne Kelly is an Australian writer, researcher and science educator. She has written books on skepticism, crocodiles and spiders; and her latest book The Memory Code examines the traditional memory techniques of non-literate peoples. Her theory on the purpose of the Stonehenge megalithic, which she believes served as a center for the transmission of knowledge among Neolithic Britons, is rapidly gaining recognition among anthropologists. Ed, Penny and Lucas caught up with Lynne to talk all t...
Sep 28, 2017•56 min
Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall, Peter Miller 00:01:00 Surprisingly, a lot of plants in the tropics tend to have large leaves. A team of scientists at Macquarie University in Sydney may have worked out why: and it's a balancing act . 00:08:42 After 13 years, the Cassini mission is coming to a fiery end. It's been one of NASA's most successful - and beautiful - missions . 00:19:36 Data from the Juno spacecraft finds that Jupiter's powerful auroras aren't powered the same way that Ea...
Sep 20, 2017•36 min
Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall. 00:01:06 Another plate tectonics mystery could be solved: how thick is a continental plate? According to a study published in the journal Science, pretty thick - between 130 and 190km! 00:10:57 Mars' "bow shock" - where charged particles from the Sun interact with the red planet's atmosphere - has been studied by a team of European scientists. They found that the bow shock's location changes over several Martian years , for a variety of reasons. 00:...
Sep 10, 2017•40 min
Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall. 00:01:12 Four years after a groundbreaking peanut-allergy study, researchers in Melbourne have followed up on the original patients. The results are promising, and could lead to a potential cure for one of the most common - and deadly - allergies . 00:16:59 A new study has discovered 91 new volcanoes beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet, making it one of the densest clusters of volcanoes in the world. 00:22:21 After more than a hundred years, a fruitcake...
Aug 27, 2017•31 min
Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall. 00:01:21 The largest dinosaur ever discovered, found in Argentina in 2013, is now officially known as the Patagotitan mayorum . 00:11:35 An amazingly well preserved dinosaur fossil found by Canadian miners is already giving lots of information about skin pigmentation, camouflage and even its last meal. Also it looks like a wingless dragon . 00:17:16 We're all made of star stuff, but not necessarily local star stuff. A new study based on supercompute...
Aug 20, 2017•30 min
Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall. 00:01:15 Just weeks after the really big iceberg split from the Antarctic ice shelf, a new rift has formed . And the giant iceberg has already begun breaking up. 00:07:14 A new study into the migration of early humans to Australia dates their arrival back to 65,000 years ago . And it also finds they were more sophisticated in their use of tools than we previously thought. 00:15:06 Rare fossilised footprints of Tasmanian tigers and devils , as well a...
Aug 11, 2017•23 min•Ep. 273
00:03:41 An enormous iceberg breaks off from Antarctica. But did climate change cause it , like many news outlets claimed? 00:13:34 Plants don't turn caterpillars into cannibals . But hungry caterpillars will turn cannibal if the plant doesn't taste nice. 00:21:53 Gene modification tool CRISPR has been used to encode an animated gif in the genes of live bacteria . DNA could be the digital storage device of the future! 00:34:03 Ravens are smart - they can use tools, and solve puzzles - and they m...
Aug 02, 2017•56 min
Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall. 00:01:03 The Ancient Romans built sea walls with concrete that is still standing in many places today. What made their concrete so much stronger than modern concrete ? 00:08:24 The chances of finding life on Mars grew even slimmer after a study found chemicals in the Martian soil are highly toxic . 00:15:54 Animals that use tools aren't uncommon, and neither are animals that make sounds to attract mates. But the Palm cockatoo could be the first non-...
Jul 20, 2017•32 min
Hosts: Ed Brown, Dr. Shayne Joseph, Penny Dumsday, Sean Elliott 00:00:48 Sean talks about his Roughbot project , a programmable robot kit that introduces students to coding and robotics. 00:04:47 Every year, 1.2 million blue wildebeest migrate across East Africa, accompanied by around 200,000 zebra and antelope. At one point in their mass migration, however, they have to cross the mighty Mara River. Those that don't survive the crossing end up being crucial to the surrounding ecosystem . 00:11:1...
Jul 14, 2017•42 min
Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:40 We welcome Lucas back to the show, and discuss his battles with depression. Lucas recently blogged about dealing with mental health in the workplace , and how different managers respond to cases of depression. 00:10:34 After three detections of gravitational waves by the ground-based LIGO detector, the European Space Agency has given the go-ahead for the LISA space-based detector . 00:15:42 A data visualisation takes a deep look at the stati...
Jul 08, 2017•40 min
Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Jo Benhamu. 00:00:40 An archaeological site in a Moroccan cave has long been known to have specimens of early humans. But an recent study has dated some of these bones to over 300,000 years old. If correct, that would make them the oldest fossilised remains of modern humans ever found - and it would change our understanding of the spread of humans out of Africa. For books to help explain evolution to young children, we recommend Grandmother Fish by Jonathan Tweet ...
Jun 28, 2017•38 min
Hosts: Ed Brown, Dr. Shayne Joseph, Penny Dumsday 00:00:40 There's a lot of talk about the supposed health benefits of sourdough bread. But a new study seems to suggest that some people may be better off eating white bread , and others may have more to gain from sourdough bread. 00:10:34 A group of about 1200 giant bumphead parrotfish have been caught in the act of mating off Palau in Micronesia. It's the first time they have ever been seen doing so in such large numbers. 00:15:42 A strain of th...
Jun 20, 2017•23 min
Hosts: Ed Brown, Dr. Shayne Joseph, Penny Dumsday. 00:00:39 Baleen whales - the toothless filter feeders - used to be around 10m long. Then 3 million years ago they started to grow to the enormous size they are today (blue whales can grow be 30 metres long!). 00:07:08 A new study has found that gastric bypass surgery disrupts the gut microbiome so significantly, that patients have a completely different bacteria makeup in their guts after surgery. And the new gut flora appears to promote weight ...
Jun 10, 2017•26 min
Hosts: Ed Brown, Dr. Shayne Joseph, Penny Dumsday, Dr. Helen Maynard-Casely. 00:01:03 The first results from the Juno spacecraft are in, giving us new and surprising insights into the largest planet in our solar system . 00:09:39 Some media reports of flooding at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault were somewhat exaggerated. Some water got in at the front door, which happens every year, but the seeds were never in any danger . 00:14:36 Have you ever seen a flamingo fall over? Probably not. Turns out ...
Jun 04, 2017•32 min
Hosts: Ed Brown, Dr. Shayne Joseph, Penny Dumsday. 00:00:41 Rare childhood cancers are, of course, rare. But that means limited access to tissue samples making them harder to study. But the archives of London's Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children could be a previously unconsidered repository of 165 year's worth of samples . 00:05:34 There's a species of bacteria that seems to use quorum sensing to switch on or off its attacking abilities. And that's how it infects animals where normally it...
May 24, 2017•33 min
Hosts: Ed Brown, Dr. Shayne Joseph, Penny Dumsday 00:00:48 A study seemed to find a link between artificially sweetened drinks and serious health problems. Many media outlets quickly proclaimed that "Diet drinks triple your risk of stroke and dementia" (Daily Fail). But how seriously should that study be taken ? 00:05:27 Humans produce about 311 million tons of plastic each year, a number that's is predicted to double in the next twenty years. But an accidental discovery from a Spanish bee scien...
May 18, 2017•24 min
Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:47 NASA's Cassini probe has been studying Saturn and it's rings and moons for thirteen years and is now running out of fuel. And as it comes to the end of it's life, it's begun a series of risky orbits between the planet and its rings . 00:11:03 A team of researchers mostly from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia have successfully created an artificial womb in which premature lambs can be brought to term . 00:17:37 NASA and ESA have produc...
May 09, 2017•30 min
Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:43 The naked mole rat is one of the strangest - certainly the ugliest - creatures on the planet. But on top of all it's other extraordinary abilities (highly resistant to cancer, limited ability to feel pain etc) it can also survive for up to 18 minutes without oxgyen . 00:08:35 For a long time we've assumed our nearest extra-solar neighbour, the Alpha Centauri system, was a trinary star system. But for the first time the calculations have been...
May 01, 2017•22 min
Hosts: Ed Brown, Dr. Shayne Joseph, Jo Benhamu 00:02:34 For the first time, an atmosphere has been detected around a nearly Earth-sized exoplanet . 00:08:45 Results of a large study suggest that a cap that generates electric fields might successfully fight brain cancer. But there are still many doubts about this "sci-fi treatment" . 00:27:06 There's a radiation-resistant bacterial spore found only in spacecraft cleanrooms. To know if they might potentially contaminate other worlds, NASA needed t...
Apr 26, 2017•45 min
Dr Steve Salisbury is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Biological Sciences at The University of Queensland, and a Research Associate at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Ed and Lucas spoke with him about finding the world's largest dinosaur tracks on the North West coast of Australia, and searching for dinosaur fossils in Antarctica ....
Apr 17, 2017•41 min
Hosts: Ed Brown, Dr. Shayne Joseph, Lucas Randall 00:01:03 The difficult thing to do when growing artificial organs is building the intricate networks of tiny blood vessels that keep the tissue alive. A team at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts found a simple way to do that: with spinach . 00:12:00 Set to launch in 2018, the Solar Probe Plus is a mission to study the Sun from a very close distance - about 6 million kilometres . It will become the fastest manmade object ever bu...
Apr 10, 2017•33 min
Professor Lucie Green is a Professor of Physics and a Royal Society University Research Fellow who studies the sun. Ed and Lucas sat down with her to talk about solar research, the Solar Orbiter mission , the Carrington Event, the Eclipse Mega Movie project and much more!
Apr 02, 2017•52 min
Hosts: Ed Brown, Dr. Shayne Joseph, Penny Dumsday 00:01:05 By monitoring two wild elephants, researchers have found that elephants in the wild only have about two hours of sleep each night , and sometimes they go for days without sleep. 00:08:21 Archaea are single-celled organisms that are difficult to study, so scientists don't study them . "Because they don't study them, they don't know very much about them. Because they don't know very much about them, they don't know how best to study them."...
Mar 29, 2017•34 min
Hosts: Ed Brown, Dr. Shayne Joseph, Penny Dumsday 00:00:52 Researchers have trained bees to play soccer! Well, move a tiny ball into a hole, which is a bit like human soccer only faster and more entertaining. 00:06:15 NASA Astrobiology Institute director Penelope Boston has announced that NASA has found life - in liquid, in crystals, in a cave on Earth. But some of these microbes have been dormant for tens of thousands of years, and Dr. Boston claims to have awoken some of them! 00:17:24 Facial ...
Mar 14, 2017•26 min
Hosts: Ed Brown, Lucas Randall and Jo Benhamu. 00:00:51 NASA has announced the discovery of seven planets outside our solar system that all orbit the same star and are about Earth-size. Three of them are firmly located in the habitable zone, and therefore likely to have liquid water. 00:13:15 Last year Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the world's richest doctor, launched "Cancer MoonShot 2020", a coalition of drug and biotech companies working on cancer treatments and personalized medicine. A year later...
Mar 06, 2017•49 min
Hosts: Ed Brown, Dr. Shayne Joseph, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall. 00:01:17 Have scientists really discovered a new continent under New Zealand? Well, sort of! 00:07:24 Bad body odour could be treated by a bacteria transplant from someone with less offensive armpits! 00:12:07 The malaria parasite could be making your blood attractive to mosquitoes . 00:15:11 By combining multiple datasets, astronomers have developed a more accurate idea about how fast our sun orbits the centre of our galaxy . It'...
Feb 28, 2017•27 min
Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall. 00:01:06 New research has uncovered how and why frog tongues have developed to be extremely soft and super-sticky . 00:10:57 By studying the globular cluster 47 Tucanae, researchers have found more evidence of a hypothetical category of black holes . Smaller than supermassive black holes, but more massive than stellar black holes, intermediate-mass black holes have a mass between 100 and 10,000 times the mass of our sun. 00:14:43 When a baby-food co...
Feb 21, 2017•39 min
Robin Ince is a celebrated writer and comedian best known for co-hosting The Infinite Monkey Cage , alongside Professor Brian Cox. And he's touring Australia - with a number of fantastic UK scientists and comedians - in March and April 2017. Cosmic Shambles LIVE is a variety show that celebrates curiosity and reason, an explosion of science, comedy, music and general wonder, with a great sense of fun. Part proceeds from the show will be going to charities like Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors W...
Feb 17, 2017•47 min
Hosts: Ed Brown, Dr. Shayne Joseph, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall. 00:00:45 Help support the show! 00:01:58 Another theory for Tabby's Star - still not aliens. 00:15:47 The bacteria in babies' guts may end up the same no matter how they were delivered. 00:21:21 Could a brief spike of oxygen in Earth's atmosphere 2.3 billion years ago have been a "false start" for complex life ? 00:26:47 DNA is usually made up of G, A, T and C. But scientists in the US have modified bacteria to use two new molecul...
Feb 12, 2017•37 min
