A Little Bit Of Science

Microplastics are everywhere. Birds are masturbating. A trillion dollars is still not a real number. And somewhere in the middle of all that, a mushroom case study pops up and reminds you Alzheimer’s is not just a punchline. This week, we ping pong between lab gear that can fake a crisis, wildlife behaviour that is way more common than we pretend, billionaire maths that breaks your sense of...

Australia has a list of baby names you are not allowed to use, a church once removed a devil statue for being distractingly hot, and one German bloke accidentally kayaked from Europe to Australia. This week, Will and Rod bounce between naming laws, scandalous art, and a seven-year adventure that sounds fake, but absolutely wasn’t. We start with banned baby names and why governments step in w...

A robot exosuit now costs more than most people’s houses, scientists are pitching a telescope built from the solar system itself, and Pokémon Go has somehow ended up feeding the war tech pipeline. This week, Will and Rod bounce between expensive robotics, slow burn space ambition, biosecurity chaos, and a 5,000 year old gut microbe that can still create great beer. We start with a lit...

Mosquitoes are learning how to ignore your repellents, cows can recognise human faces on TV, and Wi Fi can identify you through a wall with the help of AI. This week, Will and Rod flick between animal intelligence, ocean weirdness, and technology that is getting a little too confident.  We start with mosquitoes and conditioning, because apparently even the most annoying creature on Earth can...

A relaxing trip to Japan turns into an accidental run down a double black diamond, a mathematician solves “impossible” problems because nobody told him they were impossible, and missing scientists get pulled into UFO flavoured rumours. This week, Will and Rod bounce between snowboarding psychology, statistical legend, conspiracy culture, and the strange ways expectations shape what we...

Crystals have been fascinating humans for hundreds of thousands of years, chimpanzees might share the same shiny object obsession, and mushrooms may be sending electrical signals through their underground networks. This episode bounces between ancient archaeology, animal behaviour, and the weird possibility that fungi are doing more than just quietly existing in the forest. We dig into evidence th...

Robot wolves are now being used to scare bears away from Japanese schools, scientists have grown mini Neanderthal brains and plugged them into little robots, and snakes are quietly topping the lethality leaderboard while everyone keeps blaming sharks. This week, Will and Rod bounce between wildlife deterrence, prehistoric brain tech, and a public health reality check that hits harder than any movi...

A 1960s mouse utopia that collapsed into a vanity-obsessed apocalypse, a global database of 150,000 enthusiastic stool photos, and a scientific quest to help humans regrow limbs like a salamander. This week, we bounce between rodent dystopias, AI-powered gut tracking, regenerating toes, and international idioms for absolute chaos. We start in the late 1960s with Universe 25, an experiment that gav...

A poll has asked people if they could win in a fist fight against Donald Trump, a survey on female orgasms has wandered into yawning, crying, and hallucinations, and vulture nests are quietly operating as accidental museums of human history. This week, Will and Rod bounce between political fantasy, private biology, and birds that apparently have a better archive system than most institutions. We s...

High school students launch blood samples into near space , a real life love story involves a faecal microbiota transplant (FMT) , and scientists find cocaine in sharks off The Bahamas. Today we bounce between space medicine , the gut microbiome and mental health , and the uncomfortable reality of ocean pollution . We break down what those student rocket experiments could mean for space exploratio...

AI chatbots (and lazy researchers) can be convinced a fake disease is real, Gen Z is side-eyeing the whole “helpful assistant” thing, and apparently, the best way to jailbreak AI is to ask it nicely in the form of cyberpunk short fiction. This week, we bounce between medical misinformation, bureaucratic chaos, nuclear fallout hiding in baby teeth, and the U.S. Space Force anthem doing...

Deepfake scammers are now running full Zoom meetings, birds are lining their nests with cigarette butts like it’s a homewares trend, and Europe’s climate could be one ocean current wobble away from doing something dramatic. This week, Will and Rod bounce between AI crime, urban wildlife hacks, climate tipping points, and a fruit fly brain getting uploaded like it’s just another f...

Cloning is getting more useful and more unsettling, tropical trees may be better at cooperation than we are, and smart underwear is now tracking human flatulence in extraordinary detail. This week, Will and Rod move from organ-growing biotech to forest teamwork, fart analytics, and a deeply worrying case of AI gone wrong. They look at the push to grow organs using non-conscious biological structur...

A parrot in New Zealand makes conservation work wildly uncomfortable, scientists cloned mice until the whole thing started breaking down, and someone has now successfully trucked anti matter across Europe. This week, we bounce between endangered parrots, biological copy and paste and the least relaxing delivery job on Earth, which is a fairly strong effort even by science standards. We start in Ne...

Breaking Bad looks a little more plausible than you would hope, the chainsaw has a deeply unsettling medical origin story, and people are now asking whether AI can guide them through a psychedelic trip. This week, we bounce between crime, childbirth, and chatbot consciousness, which is not a sentence anyone should have to write, but here we are. We start with the so-called Breaking Bad effect, loo...

Brain-eating amoebas, climate change, economists, and Leonardo da Vinci’s robot lion all collide in this week’s episode. We dig into how warming freshwater is helping dangerous amoebas spread into new places, why these rare but terrifying organisms are linked to water going up the nose, and what that means for swimmers, public health, and the very specific fear of warm lakes. It is sci...

Conspiracy theorists hate uncertainty, a mushroom hot pot in China can apparently summon tiny imaginary people, a bunch of seeds have been sitting underground since the 1800s waiting for their moment and scientists are trying to quantify why words like boobs are funny. This week is a mixed bag of psychology, botany and childish humour, which is basically the entire scientific enterprise when you s...

Venting might be making you angrier, Neanderthals apparently had a type, and unborn babies are already forming strong opinions about kale. This week we bounce from modern psychology to ancient DNA to fetal facial expressions, with a quick detour into pokie machines and how they might be made a little less addictive. We start with a meta analysis suggesting venting is not the healthy release we hav...

This week, AI is casually reaching for the nuclear button, a Norwegian scientist has accidentally recreated something that looks a lot like Havana Syndrome, and a brain lesion has turned a marathon runner into an intense foodie. It is a neat little trio of stories that sits right on the edge of science fiction, except the uncomfortable part is that it is all real. We start with simulated war games...

This week we have hippos with hidden bits, hearts that take a mechanical detour, and a medical case study that will make you sit down and reconsider every life choice that led you to having a body. It is science at its best and worst, fascinating, useful, and deeply inconvenient. We start at the zoo, where hippo castration is a real population control tool, partly to manage breeding and partly to...

What happens to the economy if aliens show up? Not the movie version. The real version where markets panic, confidence collapses, and everyone suddenly forgets how money is supposed to work. This week, we dig into the idea that confirming UFOs or UAPs could trigger an ontological shock that rattles financial systems in ways no central bank has a policy for. Then we head into dream engineering, whe...

Winter Olympians are allegedly gaming their suit seams for extra lift, the ocean is still capable of throwing an absolutely giant wall of water at your face with no warning, and somewhere in Queensland, a blob of pitch is taking nearly a century to prove it is technically a liquid. This week, we bounce from sports cheating to monster waves to the slowest experiment on Earth, with science doing wha...

This week, we bounce between sex, psychedelics, and infectious disease, and somehow it all hangs together by the end. We unpack research on porn use that suggests the real issue is not how often people watch it, but why they are watching in the first place, with motivation shaping the impact on emotional and sexual wellbeing. Then we head into the world of magic mushrooms, where psilocybin is bein...

Everyone wants to live forever, dogs are out here doing actual jobs, and someone has tried to work out where heaven might be using astronomy. We dig into the strange science of longevity, including research suggesting reproduction and lifespan might be linked in uncomfortable ways. Then they meet the working dogs sniffing out invasive species, guarding airport runways, and generally making the res...

The FBI’s search for Bigfoot shows that even serious agencies can get swept up in a good mystery. Their investigation ended with a misidentified animal instead of a legendary creature, but the files are still a treasure for anyone fascinated by conspiracies and the unknown. Sometimes, the search is more interesting than the answer. Meanwhile, scientists in Queensland have been busy breaking...