Science Queeries

Before you check out at the Black Friday sales… check this Science Queeries episode out. Why do we fall into a festive food coma after a big Christmas or Thanksgiving feast? Is it the turkey, the carbs, or just the emotional aftermath of spending too many hours with relatives? Dr Cat is serving up a full Thanksgiving science spread. We’re carving into the psychology that makes Black Friday deals s...

Ever wondered how much of you is floating around in the cloud? We dive into the world of big data: who gets counted, who gets mis-categorised, and who gets left buffering forever. From algorithmic bias to the very real land and water swallowed up by data centres, we’re unpacking the hidden costs of the digital world. When it comes to artificial intelligence and big data, the world is messy… and be...

We’re getting very meta: communicating about science communication. Why do some people have more of a “head start” when it comes to pursuing STEM? Shanii Phillips teaches us how to make some serious capital gains – science capital gains that is – and boost your interest in STEM. Shanii is a PhD student at the Australian National University and based SciTech exploring the idea of “science capital”...

Who you gonna call? Ghost Busters! For Halloween, the Ghost Buster is Dr Cat. She talks about the history of Halloween and Día de los Muertos, sheds some light on glowing will-o’-the-wisps, de-spookifies ghosts, and gets all tangled up in the fang-tastic science of spiders. From mysterious ghost lights to spider-powered robots, she’s proving that even the creepiest science stories can be illuminat...

Around one third of the food on your plate is there thanks to the hard work of bees. We’re buzzing with excitement to chat about bees! Thanks to Clancy Lester, aka the Bee Man of “Bees and Blossoms”, for bee-ing on the show this week. Dr Cat chats with ecologist Clancy about his research with the Yolŋu people and their deep connection to bees, honey, and Country – and how these tiny pollinators ar...

How does the immune system bite back against malaria? Malaria is caused by parasites that are transmitted to humans through the bites of infected mosquitoes. The parasites travel to the liver and then infect red blood cells, leading to symptoms. Malaria has been bugging humanity for centuries. It’s hard to control the disease because the parasites can be resistant to drugs and current vaccines onl...

What do you think of when you think “renewable energy”? What is one change we can make to drastically reduce our individual impact on the planet? What should we be planting in our gardens if we’re rooting for the planet? It’s a takeover! Dr Cat sits back from the microphones this week to let three science communication students take the reins. Dominique Bezzina, Daniel Nørk...

We’re bringing science back from the dead — almost literally! Dr Cat chats to Professor Andrew Pask, who is developing tools and resources to de-extinct the Tasmanian tiger (thylacine) – which could help save endangered marsupials before they vanish for good. They explore how gene editing, stem cells and assisted reproduction could give our lost and threatened marsupials a second life. Professor A...

We’re over the Moon about science, cultural stories, and celebration! Perhaps you caught the recent total lunar eclipse, or you’re looking forward to the next Full Moon, which is when we celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival. Quoc Viet Tran, a volunteer for the Vietnamese Museum Australia, reminisces with Dr Cat about cultural stories of the Moon and the Vietnamese version of the festival: Tết T...

The early Earth was quite different to the world we know of today. What creatures lurked in the oceans 500 million years ago? Dr Cat describes the evolution of life on Earth from the very beginning. Then, palaeontologist Alyssa Fjeld comes onto the arthropod-cast to chat about ancient bugs that were around during the “Cambrian explosion”, when life got wilder and whackier. Dig deep into Earth’s an...

Want to be dam well-informed about floods and dams? How do we protect our homes and communities from disastrous floods? Why do insurance companies seem to know more about whether your house is at risk than you do? Water engineer Erin Hughes helps us wade through the world of floods and dams. Erin is a Senior Surface Water Engineer at Hydrology and Risk Consulting. She has led many projects around...

Is all that talk of “quantum” in the movies legit? Dr Cat asks Professor Nick Menicucci about what quantum is, how close we are to getting quantum tech in our pockets, and whether its representation in movies is accurate. They collapse this complex topic of conversation into one very enlightening state. From quantum myths to cosmic time-travel dreams, they measure up some big ideas without any unc...

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...