Lost in Science

That stuff pictured above is aerogel, aka "solid smoke", which was used on NASA's Stardust probe to capture dust from comet Wild 2 and return it to Earth—along with a handful of precious samples of interstellar dust, giving a rare glimpse of material from outside our Solar System. In this show, Stu also talks to British scientist Maggie Aderin-Pocock, host of the long-running astronomy TV show The...

Sean Harris from UNSW was part of the Australian team who competed in the RoboCup, the world soccer Robot championship in China this year, he explains how his team won. We discover how music is considered as important as eating and reproduction according to our brains' response to musical cues, and why that may be an evolutionary advantage. Yvette d'Entremont is a well known skeptical blogger who...

Everything gets a little more sciencey in National Science Week, on from 16-23 August. We do a round-up of some of the top events around the country, and take a look at this year's theme for the International Year of Light. We also talk to lung cancer researcher Kate Sutherland about Science in the Square, celebrating 100 years of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI) and...

Amanda Bauer is a research astronomer who studies the formation of stars and why galaxies stop forming stars as they get older, and tells us about the upcoming Space Jam event at the Powerhouse museum in Sydney for Science WeekThe cause of a mystery illness in a town called Kalachi in Kazakhstan remains difficult to pin down. Italian Maremma dogs have been used for years to guard livestock, but in...

Carnivorous plants aren't always scary: some form mutually beneficial symbiotic relationships with animals. The Fanged Pitcher-Plant from Borneo, Nepenthes bicalcarata (yes it actually has fangs), provides a home for carpenter ants, Camponotus schmitzi. And another species, Nepenthes hemsleyana, "communicates" with bats to encourage them to roost inside it, then feeds off their poop. Kathleen Garl...

The unfortunately named Hagfish or Slime Eel reveals a lot about how fish evolved, remaining fairly similar to its form 300 million years ago. It has gills, but doesn't need them to breathe, so what are they for? Rewilding is the protection of natural habitat by reintroduction of native plants and animals and exclsuion of exotic species. But will it save our ecosystems? The Astronomy and Light Fes...

Feeling itchy? You will be soon as you listen to our tale of body lice, Pediculus humanus corporis. These blood-sucking insects are believed to have diverged from head lice, Pediculus humanus capitis, when humans started wearing clothes—which evidence suggests could have been as long as 170,000 years ago. We also talk to astrophysicist Cleo Loi, who discovered giant plasma tubes in the Earth's mag...

Claire fills us in on the life of the Basking Shark, which has been found in Victorian waters for the first time in over 80 years near Portland. Manisha explains details about a program in Africa to prevent Rhinocerus horn poachers by dying and poisoning their horns. And Stu wishes the Hubble Space Telescope a (belated) Happy 25th anniversary in space.

Did you know that the phrase "mad as a hatter" comes from the use mercury in millinery? And that burning coal is the source of most mercury pollution? And that red mercury, a feared and much-sought ingredient of nuclear weapons, probably doesn't exist? Find out the truth about mercury, aka quicksilver, aka hydrargyrum, the only metallic element that's liquid at normal temperature and pressure. Spe...

All clocks are an analog of the earth spinning on its axis, which we divide up into minutes and seconds to tell the time. But the earth's rotation is not constant, and changes speed over time. The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service decides when we need to add an extra second here and there to keep our clocks in sync with the actual length of a day. Chris explains more. Whil...

Guest presenter and bat expert Manisha Bhardwaj tells us about a bacteria that helps fight white-nose syndrome, a fungal disease that's killing American bats, and how it's now being tested in the wild. Bacteria also contribute to medicine by producing drugs, e.g. genetically modified Escherichia coli is used to manufacture insulin for treating diabetes. Now American and Canadian scientists have fo...

Continuing our investigation of the science of so-called unconventional gas extraction, we turn to Australia where coal seam gas is driving community and environmental concerns. Although fracking is rarely used here (see the latest industry statistics), and the entire vast Great Artesian Basin is unlikely to be depleted (see the image above), some local water supplies have been contaminated by lea...

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was a Dutch fabric salesman who made his own microscopes. They were so powerful he saw things nobody had seen before: a world of microscopic "animalcules" invisible to the naked eye. Initially nobody believed his reports, but he went on to document many microscopic life forms for the first time in history. And when people say fracking, what do they mean? Non-conventional ga...

This week we find out that violet appears to be between blue and red due to the complicated way we see colour (see below).We also hear how scientists have turned chicken beaks into crocodile snouts in order to understand how birds evolved, and we take a look at poor, neglected dwarf planet Pluto, to be visited this year by the New Horizons spacecraft.

Measles vaccinations may indirectly prevent other communicable illnesses by protecting the immune system from damage, especially in children. Psephology is the scientific analysis and evalation of elections, but in modern times it faces some problems. Is there a crisis in psephology? Also, how much have our weather predictions improved in recent times? Dr. Hannah Brown studies the relationships of...

This week we bid farewell to the MESSENGER spacecraft and everything it's revealed about the smallest and closest planet to the Sun, Mercury. We also learn that caffeine is the world's most widely used psychoactive drug, and that scientists are using zombie bacteria stuffed with silver as an antimicrobial Trojan horse.

This week on Lost in Science, Beth talks to Phd candidate April Boaden about her research into the impacts of fishing on the Great Barrier Reef. Stuart looks at the impacts of LEDs and what they are, and Chris finds out that the mysterious shapes found in ancient Western Australian rock are not ancient fossils, but minerals in the rock.

On this week's show, Chris discovers why red is a common colour in autumn among the plants. Beth discovers that antibiotic resistance in bacteria has probably been lurking for a very long time. And Stu reports on recent developments in human gene manipulation in living embryonic cells.

A recent paper suggests that there is no discrimination against women at the hiring stage of a science job. We discuss what these findings might mean and talk about other reasons why women choose not to go further in science careers. With the centenary of World War l upon us, Stu talks about why this war is called the chemists war and the chemical processes and poisonous gases that were used at th...

The Brontosaurus is a well known dinosaur, which was soon after discovery relegated to an incorrect synonym: its species had already been described elsewhere and named Apatosaurus. But new evidence suggests that the Brontosaurus is a genuine species of Diplodocid, and is once more recognised as a valid taxon for a real exitinct species. Mice are certainly not extinct, and while we may have been ta...

Lost in Science talks up Nitrogen, where would we be without it? We take a look at a theory of the beginning of the Universe and if it holds up to scrutiny. We then take look at language acquisition in bats and the take a listen to the kind of music that cats like to listen to.

Chris talks to John Gooderham at launch of The Waterbug App (www.thewaterbugapp.com), which helps you measure environmental health by identifying freshwater macroinvertebrates—like the ferocious water tiger pictured above. Meanwhile, Beth talks some more to Linda Blackall about the helpful symbiotic microbes on which we and other organisms depend, and Stu digs into a study from the journal PLOS ON...

The team is joined by a couple of funny scientists with a show in the Melbourne International Comedy festival about the human body, we also discuss the implications of a study showing that pairs of people reach a consensus even when it's obvious a group member is more or less skilled than the other member in the group, and we talk to Dr. Linda Blackall about the importance of microbes.

Limpet Teeth - the hardest substance know to science.