Science On Top

This podcast has come to an end. So long, and thanks for all the fish! Links to download the archive of all our episodes can be found here: https://scienceontop.com/goodbye

Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:30 A team in Kenya and the UK have discovered a microbe that completely protects mosquitoes against the malaria parasite . 00:10:17 Everybody poops, but if you don't it's very bad as one unfortunate record-breaking lizard found out. 00:14:22 This year we've seen three big records broken in solar power efficiency .

An update on what's happening with the show. The quick version: we're still here, but the world's on fire and things are a bit tough. We'll be back. Stay safe everyone.   Wednesday 5 August 2020

Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:28 Good news in quarantine, two pandas in Hong Kong have finally mated! It only took them ten years! 00:04:29 Lots of moons in our solar system seem to have subsurface oceans, and now it looks like Pluto does too ! 00:13:59 Soy is everywhere these days, but there are environmental concerns with it. Now a new study suggests fava beans could be a m...

Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:39 When it comes to giving birth in the animal world, there's mostly only two options: live babies, or eggs. But very rarely, it can be both! Such is the case with the yellow-bellied three-toed skink . 00:06:37 Imagine solar power that worked at night ! That's (kind of) the promise of a new type of solar cell being developed by two American resea...

Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:40 Researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Germany have used a machine-learning algorithm to finally answer one of science's most confounding puzzles: Is that mouse over there happy? Or afraid? Or disgusted? 00:07:54 Astrophysicists from the University of Florida and Columbia University have figured out that a violent collision of two neutron...

Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall, Dr. Helen Maynard-Casely 00:03:36 NASA's Mars InSight probe has finally managed to drill into the Martian rock and soil - thanks to a traditional repair technique ! 00:13:04 The idea that glass is a liquid that flows is largely a myth.... sort of. It's an amorphous solid, so it does flow but very very slowly. Now an analysis of amber has shed some lig...

Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:35 Professor Maria Croyle from the University of Texas in Austin has been working on alternative delivery mechanisms for vaccines without giant needles. And one promising method she's developed is a lot more palatable ! 00:08:15 The formation of our moon is something of a mystery to astronomers. But now new research into the moon's composition fu...

Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:27 How do you study wibbly wobbly jellyfish, without damaging them or stressing them out? You give them a noodly hug, of course ! 00:08:27 When a satellite runs out of fuel, it's sent up into a graveyard orbit where it can pose a threat to any spacecraft leaving Earth. But a recent test of the Mission Extension Vehicle could mean satellites can b...

Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:28 An Australian research team has come up with a luxurious plan to save endangered seahorses . 00:04:54 A more precise method of determining the methane produced by human activities draws a timeline of industrialisation . 00:15:07 Remains dating back 65,000 years ago demonstrate that the earliest Australians enjoyed slow-cooking . 00:20:28 Have...

As the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 sweeps the world, the only thing spreading quicker is panic and misinformation. So we caught up with Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, an epidemiologist, writer and podcaster to find out what's really going on with COVID-19. For more information, we recommend: Australian Department of Health World Health Organisation Centers For Disease Control This Week In Virology podcast Cor...

Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:01:14 A team at Howard Hughes Medical Institute has been working with Google, and has just announced that they have mapped the "connectome" in the central region of brain of a fruit fly. That's means they've worked out the precise meanderings of 25,000 neurons and their 20 million connections . 00:15:14 About 2 billion years ago, a giant meteorite s...

Here's a little taste of the sort of thing to expect when Science on Top returns very soon - on hot days are you better off drinking hot or cold drinks ?

Have you missed us? Looking forward to another season of Science on Top? Here's something to whet your appetite - a story of cute cephalopods, curious scientists and 3D glasses !

Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall, Ass/Prof Mick Vagg 00:00:48 The switch to agricultural societies 12,000 years ago may have changed how we talk, introducing the 'f' and 'v' sounds . 00:04:58 The cane toad is an introduced pest in Australia, with no real natural predators. Until recently, when a small group of water rats learned how to eviscerate them with surgical precision ! 00:06:3...

Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:56 As unprecedented bushfires ravage Australia, Forbes published an article declaring koalas are "functionally extinct". And while they do face considerable threats, the situation is not quite that dire . 00:11:38 Chinese scientists have discovered a black hole that, according to our current understanding of black-hole formation, is so large it s...

Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:01:24 For the first time, doctors at the University of Maryland School of Medicine have purposefully put at least one human patient in suspended animation . This could be a great help to surgeons dealing with traumatic emergencies such as gunshot or stab wounds. 00:10:06 The first geomorphologic map of Saturn's moon Titan has been released . Showing...

Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:01:23 Danuvius guggenmosi was a great ape that lived 11.6 million years ago in southern Germany and it has just been formally described in the journal Nature. But the really interesting thing about this discovery is what it could suggest about bipedalism - our ancestors were walking upright much earlier than previously thought . 00:10:19 Spaceflight...

Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:35 Researchers at the University of Richmond taught a group of 17 rats how to drive tiny little plastic cars. The rats found driving to be relaxing ! 00:11:28 Why do we like music? It's a question that neuroscientists have wondered about for decades. A paper in the Journal of Neuroscience suggests it's related to learning . 00:18:37 Cows can not...

Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:32 A zebra's stripes seem to reduce the number of flies that they attract, so what would happen if you painted a cow like a zebra? Japanese researchers did exactly that, and found a similar result . 00:08:10 An intriguing new hypothesis for Planet Nine is not a planet at all. Two astrophysicists have speculated it might actually be a very small b...

Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:34 Snails are a French delicacy that has led to the near extinction, and now revival, of tiny culturally and scientifically important snails in French Polynesia . 00:06:45 3.5 million years ago, something in our galaxy exploded. As more evidence comes in, it's looking like the black hole in the centre of the Milky Way gobbled up some young stars...

Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:29 A new hypothesis in the quest to explain the bizarre dimming patterns of Tabby's Star: could it be a moon getting shredded ? 00:18:36 It's a belief that's been widely held since 1971: women who live together sync their periods together. But many attempts to replicate the original study have failed, so why is it still such a prevalent belief ?...

Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall, Peter Miller The Ig Nobel Prizes honour achievements that first make us laugh, then make us think. We take a look at this year's winners: from the benefits of pizza to the temperature of French postal packages! You can watch the award ceremony here . 00:01:16 MEDICINE PRIZE which was awarded to Silvano Gallus, for collecting evidence that pizza might...

Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:33 The large holes in T-Rex's skull might not have been for muscles, but thermoregulating blood vessels according to a paper published in the Anatomical Record. 00:06:13 An Australian team has developed a flu vaccine they believe could be the first human drug to be completely designed by artificial intelligence . 00:18:49 A team at Howard Hughes...

Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:47 After a British teenager went blind, media reports came thick and fast about the dangers of a junk food diet. But was he just a fussy eater, or was there a lot more to it than the headlines suggested ? 00:07:50 Is climate change making spiders more aggressive? Well, yes - but only one species was studied and not aggressive in way that you'd ex...