Science Queeries

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 t...

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 natu...

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....

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...

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....

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 G...

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...

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...

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 i...

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...

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 communi...

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 thro...

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...