Every now and then scientists hit on something weird - something in the wide world out there behaving not quite as you'd expect. Astronomer Dr Tabetha S. Boyajian discovered one of these weird things: a star with something strange orbiting it. Could it, just possible, be home to super advanced aliens??? We explore the potential (but, in all fairness, not super likely) alien megastructures surrounding KIC 8462852, or Tabby's Star! The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts and Dr Will Grant, proudly b...
Nov 23, 2018•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast If you knowingly put a toxin into the environment at global scales - but it helps your car go faster - is that a bad thing? (Short answer - yes!). Longer answer: we explore the chemistry crimes of Thomas Midgley Jr! The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts and Dr Will Grant, proudly supported by The Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Nov 16, 2018•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast Between the 1930s and the 1960s, Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was heralded as a hero of the Soviet Union - a champion of science, a legend of agriculture, a feeder of the nation. But it was all bullshit: Lysenko was a charlatan, a fraud whose pseudoscience saw millions starve to death and legitimate scientists executed. It was a dark time indeed. So we explore! The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts and Dr Will Grant, proudly brought to you by The Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness ...
Nov 08, 2018•1 hr 11 min•Transcript available on Metacast Temnothorax albipennis - or rock ant - has a unique ability in the tiny animal world: to act like a SUPERORGANISM! Here's a description from our friends O'shea-Wheller, Sendova-Franks and Franks: "...removing [Temnothorax albipennis] individuals from directly within the nest causes an evacuation response, while removing ants at the periphery of scouting activity causes the colony to withdraw back into the nest. This suggests that colonies react differentially, but in a coordinated fashion, to th...
Oct 31, 2018•1 hr 13 min•Transcript available on Metacast Everyone's using Artificial Intelligence these days! Why if you aren't machine learning your police stats, generative adversarial networking your shark spotting, or automating your video game design, you're just not with it! But not all artificial intelligence is as good as its boosters might argue... and in fact, we should probably start to think about regulating the machine, before it decides to regulate us. We explore! The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts and Dr Will Grant, proudly supported...
Oct 24, 2018•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast Tiny messages, hidden in screens... Backwards lyrics, instructing you to worship Satan... (rate us 5 stars in the iTunes store) Subliminal messages! Do you think you're immune to them? Or are you deeply worried that the devil is going to get in through a backwards bit of music? (rate us 5 stars in the iTunes store) Whether they work or not, they've certainly made some people stupid - so we explore! (rate us 5 stars in the iTunes store) The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts and Dr Will Grant, pro...
Oct 17, 2018•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast It's great to be number one at some things - who wouldn't want to have the world's longest toes, the world's fastest pet fish, or the world's grandest collection of wood? For countries it can be great too - the world's craziest TV game shows, the world's most efficient beetroot growing system, or the world's coolest academics! But sometimes being number one sucks... No one wants to have the most murders, the most unhappiness, or the most car crashes... Well guess what Australia: we're number one...
Oct 10, 2018•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast Most people think there's just one use for sperm - making babies, taking part in the miracle of life! But guess what listener, those most people are wrong! There's actually hundreds of weird uses for sperm, including as an awesome suit of armour wearing delivery mechanism for cancer drugs! We investigate these uses, and the weird scientists who are so fascinated by the stuff... The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts and Dr Will Grant, proudly supported by the Australian National Centre for the Pu...
Oct 03, 2018•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast It's an odd thing, but modern scientific medicine depends on doctors occasionally - just occasionally - lying to your face. In this episode we explore the bizarre world of the placebo effect, and its crucial role in modern medicine... The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts and Dr Will Grant, proudly supported by the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science at the Australian National University! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Sep 27, 2018•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast OMG it's a Tarantula Hawk Wasp! Quick question, what body part would you get stung on, for science? Or if you're a little terrified of the Tarantula Hawk Wasp, which other stinging thing would you let sting you? Now sensible people would say 'nowhere' and 'none of them', but Justin O. Schmidt ain't sensible people... Instead, he's a hero of science, happy to get stung by every stinging thing that nature can throw at him! We explore the Schmidt Pain Index! The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts an...
Sep 19, 2018•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the 1920s something like 2000 men (and at least two women) undertook a bizarre operation to enhance their vigour and vitality. This is their story! The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts and Dr Will Grant, proudly brought to you by the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science at ANU! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Sep 13, 2018•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast I hate to break it to you, but if we're going to keep this world even vaguely liveable, we not only need to stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere (though we should definitely do that), we're going to need to suck it back out. We explore how, with 'the grandfather' of negative emissions solutions to climate change, Professor Klaus Lackner! The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts and Dr Will Grant, proudly brought to you by the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science at the ...
Sep 09, 2018•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast Listener, have you had the best years of your life - or are your best years still ahead of you? Sure, our language learning peak (when we were 7 or 8) or our strength peak (25) might be behind many of us, but it turns out no matter what age you are, there's still good things to come... For many of us, we're still going to get better at arithmetic! Want to know when you're going to peak? We explore! The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts and Dr Will Grant, proudly brought to you by the Australian ...
Sep 05, 2018•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast I hate to break it to you, but in the world of science and research there are some... bad apples. Folk who'll bend the rules to get ahead, get their research out there, make a stellar career. Well, some of them get caught - and we investigate those villains out there giving good hard working academics a bad name! The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts and Dr Will Grant, proudly brought to you by the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science at the Australian National Universi...
Aug 29, 2018•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Just wondering: at the end of your long glorious life, would you store your brain in a freezer with the hope of being thawed out - or uploaded to the cloud - in future centuries? Well we've explored the science... and this weird world is getting closer! The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts and Dr Will Grant, proudly supported by the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Aug 22, 2018•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast "Something happened in 2015," he says, "...it was then that many people on the internet became flat earth adherents." I don't mean to alarm you listener - you are, after all, a lover of science, a lover of sensible, well produced knowledge - but flat eartherism (or globular denialism, if you want to flip it around) is SO HOT RIGHT NOW. If there was a chart tracking weird anti-scientific beliefs,* it'd be number one with a bullet. What we want to know is do people actually believe it? And if they...
Aug 15, 2018•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Here in the Southern half of the universe it's coming up to spring - and you know what that means: lambs frolicking in meadows, teenagers frolicking in meadows, people with hay fever sneezing! To celebrate the oncoming season of the sneeze, we explore the world of pollen with ThatPollenGuy, Professor Simon Haberle - we talk ancient roadways, 3d printing, huge sneezes and excellent pollen collections! The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts and Dr Will Grant, proudly brought to you by the Australia...
Aug 14, 2018•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Back in the olden days we beard stroking eggheads used to sit around in our ivory towers, picking buttercups of wisdom, musing deep thoughts about the nature of the cosmos. Profound, but a little bit... useless. But that's all gone now! These days, we're creators of impact - making a difference to the world - changing lives for the better! Well, maybe. Or at least, we're trying to... So to help make The Wholesome Show the highest impact podcast it can possibly be, we sat down for a chat with the...
Aug 10, 2018•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast It's a jungle out there in the academic world... and stalking in the midst of that jungle is a threat - to knowledge, to trust, to our very lives! That's right, it's the PREDATOR! (Predatory journals that is). We explore! The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts and Dr Will Grant, proudly brought to you by the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Aug 08, 2018•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Listener, we love selfies at The Wholesome Show - we've taken photos with every z grade celebrity we can get our hands on!... But I have to confess, I didn't know they were so dangerous... That's right, 10 times as many people die of selfies every year as die of shark attack! It's terrible, so to save you from a terrible selfie related death, we've explored... The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts and Dr Will Grant, proudly supported by the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of ...
Aug 01, 2018•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast Imagine dancing through the forest, barefoot and fancy free. But shoeless, your foot lands... on a slug... and the slug squelches like jelly between your toes. Disgusted? Well it turns out, this is not only objectively gross, but it can make you more politically conservative! We explore the political psychology of disgust! The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts and Dr Will Grant, proudly supported by the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science! See omnystudio.com/listener f...
Jul 05, 2018•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast How's your yoga game listener? Do you have a pretty wicked warrior two? A solid downward dog? A blissful savasana? You may be pretty awesome... But could you hold your lotus pose UNTIL DEATH? That's right listener, this week we explore the Sokushinbutsu - Buddhist monks who took their asceticism to the point of death, even becoming mummified while STILL ALIVE... The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts and Dr Will Grant, proudly brought to you by the Australian National Centre for the Public Awaren...
Jun 28, 2018•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast In July 1518, Frau Troffea stepped out into the streets of Strasbourg and began to dance a fervent dance. She danced through the day - and through the night. In fact, she wouldn't stop dancing for somewhere between four and six days - and during that time 34 other people would join her. Over the course of the month, some 400 people would dance in the streets of Strasbourg. But this wasn't fun. They couldn't stop. They writhed in pain, they screamed for help, they begged for mercy. But still, the...
Jun 21, 2018•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast You can't go anywhere on the internet these days without someone launching something new on the blockchain - a new social network, a currency based on selfies, or a way to fund a trip to the moon! Is the blockchain the greatest new technology since podcasts? Or just the latest crazy snake oil to come out of the fevered imagination of the techno-mafia...? We explore! The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts and Dr Will Grant, proudly supported by the Australian National Centre for the Public Awarene...
Jun 13, 2018•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast Should we be worried about the coming world of artificial intelligence? Some people (ie Will) worry about Skynet and doombots like Roko's Basilisk, but Professor Genevieve Bell from the Autonomy, Agency and Assurance Institute reckons there's far more concrete things here in the now that we should be paying attention to... The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts and Dr Will Grant, proudly supported by the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science! See omnystudio.com/listener f...
Jun 07, 2018•1 hr 16 min•Transcript available on Metacast The phrase NUCLEAR RADIATION conjures up pretty fearful images these days - reactor meltdowns at Chernobyl and Fukushima, the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the three-eyed fish of The Simpsons. But for a brief window in the 1950s a movement of people sought to harness the power of the atom not for weapons or energy - but for ever better... garden crops! We explore the Atomic Gardening Society! The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts (@rodl) and Dr Will Grant (@willozap), proudly supported by ...
May 30, 2018•2 hr 31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Welcome to part 7 of Life in a Herd! In this series we're journeying with our picnicking epidemiologist upstream to find out who it is who's chucking the bodies of our modern world into the river. In this episode we wrap up - what does it all mean, what do we do from here? Enjoy! The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts (@rodl) and Dr Will Grant (@willozap), proudly supported by the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science (@ANU_CPAS)! This series has been produced with some r...
May 23, 2018•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast Welcome to part 6 of Life in a Herd! In this series we're journeying with our picnicking epidemiologist upstream to find out who it is who's chucking the bodies of our modern world into the river. In this episode we talk with Professor Don Nutbeam, Professor of Public Health at the University of Sydney. Enjoy! The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts (@rodl) and Dr Will Grant (@willozap), proudly supported by the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science (@ANU_CPAS)! This serie...
May 23, 2018•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Welcome to part 5 of Life in a Herd! In this series we're journeying with our picnicking epidemiologist upstream to find out who it is who's chucking the bodies of our modern world into the river. In this episode we talk with Associate Professor Cynthia Webster, from the Department of Marketing and Management at Macquarie University. Enjoy! The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts (@rodl) and Dr Will Grant (@willozap), proudly supported by the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of ...
May 23, 2018•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Welcome to part 4 of Life in a Herd! In this series we're journeying with our picnicking epidemiologist upstream to find out who it is who's chucking the bodies of our modern world into the river. In this episode we talk with Professor Sharon Friel, Professor of Health Equity at the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet) at the Australian National University. Enjoy! The Wholesome Show is Dr Rod Lamberts (@rodl) and Dr Will Grant (@willozap), proudly supported by the Australian Natio...
May 23, 2018•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
