No detail is spored in this episode with a really fun-gal. When we think of infectious diseases, we often think of bacterial infections like pneumonia and tuberculosis, or viral ones like flu and COVID. Fungi often don’t come to mind – yet collectively, fungal infections surpass any other infectious disease on the global death toll. There’s still mush-room for discovery to develop new treatments to tackle ever-adapting fungi that never stop moulding to suit their changing environment. Dr Cat cha...
Sep 01, 2025•46 min
Bugs are more than just “creepy-crawlies” – they can be quite beetleful. Dr Cat chats to bugging entomologist Charlie Disher. What niche pockets of beetle species exist in the sky islands of the Australian Alpine mountains? How did empty beer stubbies once pose a threat to the golden Jewel beetles (spoiler: they were super sexy stimuli)? What can we learn from insects to better understand the natural world? Dr Cat and Charlie dig through leaf litter, scale the Aussie Alps, and discover just how ...
Aug 22, 2025•45 min
Happy National Science Week! We’re celebrating the wild, weird, and wonderful side of Australian wildlife this Science Week with a national vote for Australia’s Most Underrated Native Animal. Dr Cat chats to her friend and colleague, A/Prof Jen Martin. An ecologist-turned-science communicator at The University of Melbourne, Jen is the perfect person to introduce you to ten Aussie animal underdogs. From the eel-lectrifying short-finned eel to the ink-redible giant cuttlefish, the dugong that’s tr...
Aug 13, 2025•47 min
This Science Queeries episode goes deep – over a kilometre down below an old gold mine in an underground physics laboratory. Dr Cat chats to Dr Theresa Fruth, an astroparticle physicist at The University of Sydney who is helping to make elusive, undetectable dark matter detectable. We can’t observe dark matter at all – yet it makes up most of the universe. It takes international collaborations and sterile laboratories way deep, deep down to give us hope of ever being able to directly detect it. ...
Aug 13, 2025•25 min
Celebrating World Hepatitis Day, we have an un-bile-liver-ably great episode of Science Queeries in store for you. The 2025 theme was “Hepatitis: Let’s Break It Down” – and that’s what Jon Kok and Dr Cat are going to do. According to the World Health Organization, around 354 million people worldwide live with hepatitis B or C, and most of them have no access to services for testing and treatment. Even in Australia. Jon Kok is a Workforce Development and Research Officer at LiverWELL and a host o...
Aug 04, 2025•47 min
Pterosaurs once ruled the skies with flap-tastic flair. Palaeontologist Adele Pentland takes us into raptors (read: raptures), digging up the world of Australian pterosaurs. She and Dr Cat also discuss dino-diets, based on a recent news story on what an Australian sauropod (a diamantinasaurus) ate as its last meal. Adele is a final-year PhD candidate in the Western Australian Organic and Isotope Geochemistry Centre at Curtin University, has named two pterosaur species, and is an absolute Superst...
Jul 28, 2025•44 min
We’re talking about the animal “queendom”, because same-sex sexual behaviour is quite common among animals – in at least 1,500 species. For a crossover episode with Big Bi+ Questions, Dr Cat, and two of BBQ’s co-hosts Dave Samuels and Jason Turner, go on a wild ride through some of the animal kingdom’s queerest species. (Stay tuned for a future BBQ episode, on which they will discuss whether animals that display same-sex sexual behaviour are gay, bi+, or something else…) They also discuss how so...
Jul 21, 2025•44 min
Science Queeries is officially a toddler – it’s now one year old! The whole team congregates around the mics for this birthday episode: Dr Cat as your ever-present host, Clayton Wimshurst, who helped kick the show off and continues to help behind the scenes, and Vaughan McCarthy, who turns each episode into a podcast and is the person we can thank for all the punny titles. They replay their greatest hits, confess their “science crushes”, and discuss “confidently incorrect” scientific ideas of th...
Jul 16, 2025•48 min
Science meets feels on this Science Queeries episode. From cortisol chaos to serotonin slumps, Dr Cat and Jesse Crowe (aka the Travelling Scientist) take you through the science of stress and the complexities of our mental wellbeing. While anxiety and depression can weigh heavily, remember that support and solutions are well within reach. There’s no one-size-fits-all, but there is strength in numbers – in reaching out and connecting with your people. This episode originally aired on 1st July, 20...
Jul 04, 2025•45 min
Looking for a breath of fresh… science? Dr Rob Ryan, atmospheric chemist in the School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at The University of Melbourne, clears the air. He and Dr Cat discuss how the effects of air pollution can ripple all the way from humans to reefs. So how can we protect ourselves and keep our reefs coral-ful? This episode originally aired 24th June, 2025. The post A lot of hot air appeared first on Science Queeries ....
Jun 27, 2025•44 min
We’re casting a net to reel in some knowledge. Dr Cat dives deep into the tangled world of ghost nets with marine conservation ecologist, Jess Leck. She is the GhostNets Australia Program Coordinator for OceanEarth Foundation, working with communities across Northern Australia, Asia and the Pacific to address fishing debris in our oceans at their source. Their work shows us that when communities come together, we really can turn the tide. This episode originally aired on 17th June, 2025. The pos...
Jun 21, 2025•40 min
Did you know that someone you know may have ceramics inside their body? Maybe it’s even you. Ceramics are used for so many things – including art and expression, medicine, space exploration, and more. Dr Cat chats to a ceramicist who is (not) straight up kiln-ing it: Rory Young. They get fired up, digging into the rocky geology of ceramics, glazing over its chemistry, and spinning through the tech that’s shaping the future of the industry. This episode originally aired on 10th June, 2025. The po...
Jun 13, 2025•44 min
Space is soooo gay. Let’s go star gay-zing. Dr Cat and Zofia Witkowski-Blake, presenter at Melbourne Planetarium at Scienceworks, orbited queer cosmic stories, launched into what happens when humans are in space, and reflected (or should we say refracted?) on rainbows. Queerness – like the universe – is vast, dazzling, and ever-expanding. This week, we’re going full galactic glam and reaching for the stars, bending light, and being our own rainbows. This episode originally aired on 3rd June, 202...
Jun 04, 2025•43 min
Dr Cat and Dilendra weave together the science of using silk from silkworms and spiders in medicine. Dilendra Wijesekara, a material scientist at Deakin University’s Institute of Frontier Materials, is developing a silk biomaterial for ear surgery. Dr Cat also shares some wild science involving getting goats to produce “spider silk milk”, and using a protein in spider silk as inspiration for cancer treatment. It’s a silky-smooth episode that showcases how strong, flexible, and fabulous nature ca...
May 28, 2025•40 min
This seals the deal: seals are incredible animals. They’re the only mammal that can hear both through air and under water. Pint of Science speaker/Palaeontologist Dr James Rule and Dr Cat go on a fossil-filled adventure (literally – they talk about their search for fossils), dig deep into Australia’s ancient seas and unearth the evolution of seal hearing. This episode originally aired on 20th May, 2025. The post Seals’ flipperin’ good hearing appeared first on Science Queeries ....
May 25, 2025•44 min
