 Radio National's science flagship: your essential source of what's making news in the complex world of scientific research, scandal and discovery.Primary Format :
Language :
Also Listed as:
City :
State/Province :
Country :
Region :
User Tags:
User Votes:
 RSS Feed
Website
People found this Podcast
Searching for:
View this Podcast on a Google Map. 
 Text Only listing of The Science Show Podcasts
 Methings.com listings of The Science Show Podcasts
If you like this podcast, you might also like:
|
Science Show - 2011-08-06 Monash student helps explain a mystery of the universe
Third year undergraduate student Amelia Fraser-McKelvie, took on a project to use X-rays to follow up an optical observation. The X-rays would reveal physical properties. It was concerned with filaments and pearls of galaxies as point sources of light. Amelia used public data from telescopes. She used the data and her results and wrote a scientific paper which was published. Amelia´s work goes some way to explain the missing mass of th ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2011-07-30 Botanists say goodbye to Latin and Acacias stay in Australia
The International Botanical Congress meeting in Melbourne has decided to do away with Latin descriptions for new plants which until now have been a requirement. The Latin remains for plant names, but the actual descriptions can now be in English. And there´s been a decision regarding a genus of flowering plants with over 1,500 species. Work over the last 3 decades has revealed Acacias are more correctly grouped in 5 separate gene ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2011-07-23 The Space Shuttle flies for the last time
Jonathan Nally looks at the Space shuttle program, the triumphs, the tragedy, and what the future holds for US space exploration as the Space Shuttle flies for the last time.
Kangaroos as human food, and present day intensive animal farming
Last week we presented a full program to the issues around meat consumption and intensive animal farming. This is a continuation of the debate about whether kangaroos should be culled and used as human food. Joe ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2011-07-16 Where's the beef? Or is this the end of meat?
Can we afford all the land, energy, water and carbon release cattle and sheep require? Is farming meat now just too hard? Should roos be used as substitutes? Could we manufacture meat in vats in factories instead, using bacteria? A Science Show special on the future of meat in Australia and the world.
Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2011-07-09 What is life?
Today we hear excerpts from a panel discussion of distinguished scientists including two Nobel laureates who addressed the question, What is life? It was organised by the Origins Project at the Arizona State University and took place on 12 February 2011.
Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2011-07-02 A multi-faceted poison
Botulinum toxin type A as a biological weapon is part of the terrorist´s toolbox. It has governments concerned at the highest levels. But it can also be used judiciously in a range of ways as a therapeutic medicine. Many people know it as a way of restoring youthfulness to aged skin. But now its use is widening to cover treatment for migraine, a range of muscle disorders and even cerebral palsy. Sharon Carleton reports.
Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2011-06-25 Island lifeboats for New Zealand's birds and reptiles
When humans first set foot in New Zealand almost a thousand years ago, they encountered a rich fauna of reptiles and flightless birds. These first human visitors, and visitors and settlers since brought with them rats, cats, mice, rabbits and stoats which feasted on the local fauna, or degraded the environment, driving many original species to extinction. But luckily, a few small offshore islands remain undisturbed. Now scientists are us ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2011-06-18 The long and the short of Roger
Professor Roger Short of Melbourne is one of our most celebrated biologists. He has tried lemon juice to kill HIV, studied elephants to learn whether they were once aquatic, done research with prostitutes, successfully treated jetlag and been to school with John le Carre. This Science Show special looks at his extraordinary life.
Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2011-06-11 Nanobots deliver drugs to kill cancer cells
Eugenia Kumacheva´s group is creating special particles to search out cancer in the body. The particles are covered with smart molecules which recognise chemical groups in cancers. One chemical group recognises and responds to another chemical group. The carrier cells contain drugs. The cancer cells swallow the carrier and take in the drug, which kills the cancer. Heat or pH can trigger the carrier cell to release its drug.
Melatonin for jet lag ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2011-06-04 East Antarctic ice sheet reveals rivers and lakes
Flying a DC3 from Casey Station in East Antarctica, mapping parts of the ice sheet which had not been studied before. The plane flew 1,000km radials from a hub. One valley went to 3km below sea level. Some of the ice went to a thickness of 4km. The total area was similar to that of NSW. Radar was used to map the land below the ice. The original thought was that the bedrock was well above sea level. But actually, the underlying rock is many k ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2011-05-28 X-rays reveal very bright objects and super massive black holes
The masses and formation of the biggest black holes remains a mystery. Fiona Harrison´s lab is building a high energy X-ray telescope. It will be launched Feb 2012 and orbit about 600km above the Earth. It will reveal particles that were accelerated close to the speed of light. When gasses are drawn towards a source by strong gravity, they heat up due to friction and give off high energy X-rays. Low energy X-ray images reveal ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2011-05-21 Soils: the foundation of civilisation and degrading fast
A handful of soil contains about 10 billion organisms. Iain Young presents a range of mind-blowing statistics about the life that exists in soil. Viruses, bacteria and fungi proliferate. And it´s this range of life which makes soil soil, as distinct from the degraded rock which is its base. Iain Young explains how we degrade soils through agriculture, while the pressure to produce more from our soils is increasing.
Red muds for envi ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2011-05-14 Biocrude could power Australian aviation
Thomas Maschmeyer has applied catalysts to processes which produce fuel from forestry and agricultural waste. Compared to production of bioethanol, this biocrude oil using catalysts, and high temperature and pressure, captures four times more energy. When scaled up, the raw resource could come from macroalgae in seawater, and therefore not compete with current land use and water use. Thomas Maschmeyer says his biocrude oil would be perfect for use in ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2011-05-07 Peak oil? Now it´s peak cars
Australian and world peak car ownership per capita was in 2004 and since has shown a slow decline. It marks an end to car dependence. Teenage car ownership has dropped markedly. Figures suggest a big cultural shift as well as structural change within cities. Some very large cities such as Beijing and Shanghai have made it almost impossible to buy a new car. Car transport has reached a limit. Shanghai built a metro system in 10 years, which covers 80% of the cit ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2011-04-30 Car companies get serious with electric vehicles
Major car manufacturers have turned their attention to the electric car. It began when pump prices in the US rose above US$4.00/gallon in 2007. Some suggest this sparked the global financial crisis. Now it seems US$4/gallon is again not far off, and it´s unlikely to stop there. Nissan decided to jump the hybrids and go straight to all electric. Chevrolet´s Tony Posawatz describes the development of the electric vehicle as the charge, sparki ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2011-04-23 Mertz floats off as glacier tongue breaks free
A huge chunk of ice, measuring roughly 80km by 40km has broken off the Mertz Glacier in Antarctica and may contain the body of explorer Xavier Mertz. The tongue of the Mertz Glacier in Antarctica carved in February 2010. An iceberg pushed up against the tongue and knocked it off. The dislodged chunk measures roughly 80km by 40km. Steve Rintoul has just returned from the region where he was looking at the waters in the newly exposed region. Th ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2011-04-16 Fertilising the ocean with iron
When iron is added to seawater, phytoplankton proliferate. The extra photosynthesis means extra carbon dioxide is taken up. The phytoplankton then die and sink to the bottom. It has been calculated that if applied globally, maximum carbon dioxide take-up would be around 1 gigatonne. Human activities produce about 8 gigatonnes per year.
League tables determine universities´ research funds
Australian universities now receive research funds based on a ranking ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2011-04-09 50 years of human space flight
It's 50 years since 27-year-old Soviet air force pilot Yuri Gagarin roared into space. He couldn't have imagined he would set off a space race between the superpowers.
The knowns and unknowns of physics
Physicist Sean Carroll probes fundamental physics by studying the structure and evolution of what he calls the 'preposterous universe'.
Unnatural sciences at our universities
The Australian Skeptics are concerned about what they call
'the creeping of pseudo ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2011-04-02 Competition
Name the five people you hear in this montage and say what they have in common. Enter via the contact us link on the The Science Show's website for the chance to win one of 20 Ockham´s Razor books, Lies, Deep Fries and Statistics.
Food-contact paper packaging possible source of blood pollutants
Fluorinated compounds are found as pollutants in human blood samples worldwide. Scott Mabury suspects these are introduced to the body from the breakdown products of coatings used on pa ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2011-03-26 The optical or light microscope - then and now
Dutch scientist Antony van Leeuwenhoek is credited with inventing the light or optical microscope towards the end of the seventeenth century. Brian J Ford used Leeuwenhoek´s original microscopes and some modern copies to recreate what Leeuwenhoek was able to see. Amazingly, he says, the images seen in the late 1600s, are very close in quality to those obtainable today from the latest modern research optical microscopes. Meanwhile, as Joel Wer ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2011-03-19 Personal rapid transit pods instead of large buses and trains
Trond Andresen compares a NSW train journey to similar journeys in Europe. It´s not flattering. A new approach is to put fewer people into smaller modules controlled automatically. A 2-person module could dart around a network, all controlled by a computer. The plan involves putting small, slim infrastructure within existing transport corridors. He cites a demonstration by NASA and an existing model linking university campuses i ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2011-03-12 Lantana - now affecting tigers and tourism
Lantana was introduced to India as an ornamental plant. As in many other countries, it has gone wild and is spreading uncontrolled. Now lantana is growing in tiger habitat. Tigers don´t like it and avoid it by moving beyond their normal habitats which are already constrained by human land use. Tigers are a major drawcard for tourists to India and it is feared as tigers approach extinction, tourism too will decline.
Small hive beetles - threat to ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2011-03-05 Deep microbes spark revolution in our understanding of life on the planet
Rocks almost 3km beneath the surface of the earth in South Africa have revealed organisms that love heat, similar to those found around deep vents in the ocean. The water substrate is tens of millions of years old. And it´s thought there are components in the water that are billions of years old. This dispels the idea that life is just found in a thin strip on the surface of the Earth.
The Kepler Mission - looking f ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2011-02-26 Will there be any fish left in 2050?
Villy Christensen says fish will survive, but by 2050 the mix will be radically changed. The oceans will be populated by small fish. Large predatory fish will be gone. Over the last 100 years large predatory fish have declined by 2/3. More than half the decline has occurred in the last 40 years. But smaller fish have doubled. Higher temperatures will lead to lower production and less fish. The demand for fish in increasing but the supply is not. Fishing ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2011-02-19 Radiolab: Fate and fortune
It´s a variation of the old nature versus environment argument. What controls the trajectory of our lives? Do we have control, or are we programmed from birth? It turns out that a 4-year-old´s ability to resist a marshmallow says something about that child´s future. And there could even be signs of future dementia in our handwriting. Some fascinating experiments and recent discoveries add to the contention in this second Radiolab from New York´s WNYC.
Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2011-02-12 Radiolab: Falling
There´s more than one way to fall... we can fall asleep, fall in love, and fall flat on our face. This Radiolab presents stories about different ways of falling. We jump into a black hole, take a trip over Niagara Falls, look into the biology and physics of falling cats, and dip into some songs about falling. It´s science and it´s fun.
Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2011-02-05 Patent protects piracy software
Australian inventor Ric Richardson took legal action against Microsoft who he accused of infringing a patent on software he developed to protect software developers against piracy. In January 2011 the US Courts of Appeal ruled in favour of the company founded by Ric Richardson, Uniloc. Ric Richardson tells his tale.
Biodiversity of Moreton Bay Qld
Jeff Johnson describes the extent of the Moreton Bay Marine Park and the range of fish populations on the reefs ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2011-01-29 Whipping race horses - can it be justified?
Does whipping horses produce results, or is it just spectacle, producing pain and injured animals. Paul McGreevy´s work has determined whipping tired horses at the end of a race has no effect on performance. Some say it is abuse and warrants investigation.
South East Asian amphibians barely known
Our knowledge of amphibians in Vietnam is in its infancy. New species are constantly being discovered. Once we know what species are there, then their ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2011-01-22 Radiolab - Oops
Today, Radiolab from radio WNYC in New York presents stories of unintended consequences.
You come up with a great idea. You devise a plan. You control for every imaginable variable. And once everything´s in place, the train hops your carefully laid tracks. In this Radiolab, one psychologist's zeal to safeguard national security may have created a terrorist, while one community's efforts to protect an endangered bird had deadly consequences. And against all odds, a toxic lak ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2011-01-15 Radiolab - Words
Today, Radiolab from radio WNYC in New York attempts to imagine a world without words.
We meet a woman who taught a 27-year-old man the first words of his life, hear a firsthand account of what it feels like to have the language centre of your brain wiped out by a stroke, and retrace the birth of a brand new language 30 years ago.
Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2011-01-08 Naomi Oreskes - Merchants of Doubt
Despite data being collected for over half a century, despite a President being warned about the looming threat of a changing climate in the mid 1960s, and despite plants and animals now changing their behaviour to fast altering conditions, a few scientists continue to raise doubts regarding climate science and its findings.
Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2011-01-01 Tim Flannery - reasons to be hopeful
On the release of his book, Here on Earth an argument for hope, scientist and author Tim Flannery appears in a public forum at The Seymour Centre in Sydney. Tim Flannery attended the Copenhagen climate talks in Copenhagen in 2009 which were largely seen as a failure. Despite this, and most environmental indicators looking bad and getting worse, Flannery outlines the reasons he is hopeful for the future of life on planet Earth.
Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2010-12-25 Radiolab - Cities
Today, Radiolab from radio WNYC in New York takes us to the street to ask what makes cities tick.
There's no scientific metric for measuring a city's personality. But step out onto the footpath, and you can see it and feel it. Two physicists explain one tidy mathematical formula they believe holds the key to what drives a city. Yet mathematics can't explain most of the human-scale details that make urban life unique. Radiolab heads out in search of what the numbers miss, a ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2010-12-18 Pets - are they really good for you?
There are a range of physiological changes when we look at our pets. But owning a dog in a dense city environment isn´t easy. There are increasing challenges for dog owners. Pets suffer from separation anxiety when their owners go off to work all day and will show this by barking. Paul McGreevy is looking at the pet-human relationship from the eyes of both humans and their pets.
New marine species keeping marine scientists busy
John Hooper describes a ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2010-12-11 Illicit web material captured at the scene
A tool has been developed allowing police to search for illicit material on personal computers. It gathers information without writing over or interfering with data. Instead of the computer being confiscated and then sitting on a bench somewhere awaiting investigation, the information is gathered at the scene and removed in a secure way.
Open data UK
After a long campaign dating back to 2006, the UK government has released once classified data, ch ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2010-12-04 Bacterium calls for biology rewrite
A bacterium has been found in the sludge of Mono Lake in California which calls for a rewriting of biology textbooks. Until now, biologists have only known life which has phosphorus as a basic element of its genes. This newly discovered bacterium has no phosphorus and in its place there is arsenic, an element closely related to phosphorus and usually toxic. The result is a radically new organism. Felisa Wolfe-Simon predicted such an organism would be foun ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2010-11-27 The physical approach to biology
Nathalie Balaban is applying the rules of physics and the approach of physics to biological problems. She is looking at bacteria and using `tricks´ to sort them and keep the bacteria which are useful. The hope is to better understand how antibiotics work and correct for the situations where antibiotics are presently ineffective.
Hope for cystic fibrosis
Batsheva Kerem describes her work during the 1980s which resulted in the identification of a fault on a ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2010-11-20 Prime Minister´s Prizes for Science 2010
John Shine is the 2010 recipient of the Prime Minister´s Science Prize for his research and leadership in biotechnology. Part of his work was done in the late 1980s at the Australian National University, determining the gene sequence for turning on and off protein synthesis. Later he contributed to the establishment of gene cloning techniques which are widely used today. He was the first to clone genes for insulin and growth hormone. John Shine des ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2010-11-13 Peak oil - the slow slide down
Oil production peaked in 2008. It has been in decline since. Kjell Aleklett says the reserves are there, but the flow is lower than in the past. Kjell Aleklett disputes predictions of The International Energy Association. He says the price spike in oil in July 2008 was the trigger for the Global Financial Crisis.
Response to Terence Kealey on acne and primates
Last week we heard from Terence Kealey from the University of Buckingham who proposed a range of vi ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2010-11-06 Jan Hendrik Schön, a remarkable scientific fraudster
During the 1990s and early 2000s, Jan Hendrik Schön made extraordinary claims about his discoveries in nanotechnology which would change information technology forever. His claims and published papers were subsequently found to be fraudulent. Author Eugenie Samuel Reich suggests Schön is one of the most remarkable fraudsters in science over the last one hundred years. Annette Langbehn reports.
The advantage of acne
Is ther ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2010-10-30 The Universe seen from Perth
Carley Tillet takes planetarium virgin Chris Smith on a tour of the Horizon planetarium in Perth. She flicks a few switches and, courtesy of six computers and six projectors, the night sky appears on the planetarium ceiling. Carley explains the technology can also be used to see the tracks of animals on Earth.
Eating bacteria as a vaccine
Barry Marshall was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2005 for his discovery that a bacterium in the stomach, Helicobac ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2010-10-23 Spiders - taxonomy vital for medicine and eco management
Staff at the Queensland Museum have described over 1,000 new species of spiders since 1976. Only the American Museum of Natural History in New York has described more. This indicates how many spiders are waiting discovery and description. Australia has only two spider specialists. Robert Raven is alone on the east coast. He says there is extensive misdiagnosis of human ailments and spiders are often blamed for conditions which in fact ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2010-10-16 Predicting earthquakes
Past earthquakes are good predictors of earthquakes to come and as the fault lines don´t move around, knowing that a major quake has happened, even if hundreds of years ago, is an excellent indication that another could happen in the future. The question is.. when! Roger Musson is helping develop an online database of historical earthquakes.
Nuclear power problems now minimal
Wade Allison says Australia and New Zealand are being left behind in their opposition to nu ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2010-10-09 Nobel Prizes 2010
Wendy Barnaby reports on the Nobel Prize winners for physics and chemistry in 2010.
Treating cancer after rapid DNA sequencing
Superfast sequencing of DNA is allowing more targeted treatment of cancer. The human genome project used chemistry invented by Fred Sangar at Cambridge University in the 1980s. The work was split up and performed by groups all over the world. Now that work can be done in a matter of days at a fraction of the cost on one instrument. This speed allo ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2010-10-02 Sceptics´ publishing record on climate
Bob Ward says those who seek to reinterpret the science of climate change often have minimal publication records. Publication involves peer review. This process weeds out experiments and papers which are sub-standard. By contrast, anyone can write a book, write a newspaper article, or address public meetings. Bob Ward mentions a paper by Bob Carter, saying it contains false quotes and numerous examples of inaccuracy. Bob Ward says the Carter paper ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2010-09-25 Beating the menstruation blues
Thelma Lovick describes the emotional changes which accompany menstruation and how a drug may assist. Towards the end of a cycle, levels of the hormone progesterone fall. Reduced levels of the progesterone breakdown product allo triggers emotional swings. Thelma Lovick has discovered a drug which raises brain allo levels, and removes anxiety.
Hazards of walking and texting
About one in five hazards are missed by people who text and walk at the same time. This ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2010-09-18 Catalyst turns 10
ABC TV´s Catalyst is celebrating 10 years of programs. We hear some excerpts from their celebratory program.
Soundscapes - the sounds of the natural world
Bernie Krause records soundscapes. For over forty years, he has been recording in habitats all over the world. As well as wind and surf, these are the sounds of animals, as they call, and crow and cry out. Bernie has been monitoring changes in environmental soundscapes as humans have encroached, forcing animals to chan ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2010-09-11 Matt Ridley - The Rational Optimist
With a background in zoology, Matt Ridley was a science editor and foreign correspondent for The Economist during the 1980s and 1990s. He was non-executive chairman of the UK bank Northern Rock between 2004 and 2007, a period prior to the bank´s near collapse. He has written several books, his latest being The Rational Optimist. In this feature interview with Robyn Williams Matt Ridley describes why he is an optimist in an era where the bleak news seems ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website
Science Show - 2010-09-04 Rowan Webb dies, donates his skeleton
In July we heard from Rowan Webb, who wished to donate his body for medical and scientific research. Setting this in place wasn´t easy. Now Rowan has died and his wishes have been achieved.
Steve Schneider defends climate change to the end
Steve Schneider appeared on the television program Insight on SBS-TV, where climate doubters fired their questions and Professor Schneider batted alone, defending climate science. Just days after the recording, he d ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | |