Science Friction

Palestinian-American cartoonist and illustrator Marguerite Dabaie thought she understood her ancestry. But then she had a genetic test and things got messy. It’s not her DNA, it’s the technology

A young ornithologist. A Nazi expedition to Tibet. A Faustian pact in the name of science, but at what cost? This story gets very weird, very fast. But the animals are watching.

One Amish childhood + one strict Christian upbringing = two 21 year olds questioning everything they were ever taught. On the afterlife, evolution, and making your own way. (Summer Season highlight)

Lolita had one of the world's first uterus transplants - then what happened? (Summer Season highlight)

Who needs to get pregnant anymore when you can use a baby pouch? FullLife has the product for you. The sci fi imaginings of Helen Sedgewick. Utopia or the ultimate dystopia? A Science Friction mini-series that takes a womb's eye view of the future of reproduction.

It's boys against girls. Unleash the nerds and mischief. Play along.

Are you a little bit evil or a lot?

The selfish gene. The selfish ape. Survival of the fittest. Remarkable stories of two renegades who challenged a scientific orthodoxy about selfishness.

On poo, pooing and all that palaver. A children's author, a colorectal surgeon, a psychologist walked onto stage...

In the 1950s computers were so big they filled whole rooms. Women were employed in big numbers to work with them. But then something weird happened.

Hidden amongst astronomy's nineteenth century effort to map the stars, is a tale about some of the first women working in computing in Australia.

It's there if you look...under the sea. But how would we know? Join Science Friction on a journey into the lost heart of Doggerland.

What if you suddenly found out you aren't quite who you thought you were? Matty and family's story will move you.

What should you do with the embryos you have left over after IVF treatment?

A mystery about two Californian millionaires and two "orphan" embryos at the very beginning of the IVF revolution.

The signals were weird. But was what happened afterwards even weirder?

Have you heard these stories of what was and what could have been? You'll want to. If we CARE enough, could the internet be way, way better?

Will bioterrorism become more targeted with the help of new tools in biotechnology and synthetic biology? From your cells to crops, pandemics to plagues - are the risks real or far-flung? Natasha Mitchell was the only journalist in a NATO security workshop considering the threats. Hear what insiders have to say.

Scientists can now 'engineer' biological organisms never before found in Nature. What if they make a mistake, and a synthetic virus escapes the lab? Or a rogue mind turns to synthetic biology to wage bioterror? Is anyone watching?

Meet three couples who have taken their romances way further than most. Frank, passionate, hilarious stories of making it work.

Meet a 12 year old scientist who's got a whole lot of questions...enough to take you to the moon and back.

The battlelines are drawn, brains tuned, arguments sharpened and teeth gnashing as two teams go head to head at the BeakerStreet@TMAG festival at Hobart's Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery for National Science Week. Your fearless adjudicator, Science Friction host Natasha Mitchell, cannot and will not be bribed*. (*Except with wombats).

Why is a famous physicist and cosmologist usually interested in Big Questions about the Universe now diving into the deep history of cancer?

88 metres underground, in the labyrinth of chambers and corridors of the world’s large particle accelerator, art and science collide in wild and wonderful ways.

How can a Nobel Prize winning scientist feel like an outsider?