Episódios
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Many breakthroughs in medicine have been made from studying rats. Antonia, Laura and Ellie discuss several studies of rat behaviour that have mapped how parts of the brain work and discuss how the results could be applied to humans to develop prosthetic limbs or help recover memory after a brain injury. They look at studies where rats are tickled until they laugh, learn to drive cars, navigate virtual reality and perform a Jedi mind trick.
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Ever watch an action movie where someone is hurled across the screen during an explosion and wondered how likely that is? Antonia, Laura, Nick and Ellie talk about movie portrayals, nuclear weapons, disaster investigations, and exploding animals.
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To help tackle the climate crisis, we'll need a lot of new technology to reduce the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Ellie, Jasmin and Laura share a load of facts about the chemicals, energy requirements and land use involved in technology to capture carbon dioxide from the air. They also look at how planting trees compares to this technology and answer questions from a live audience from the Engineering Development Trust about Taylor Swift's private jet and why we're spending money on projects that aren't tackling the climate emergency.
Read the review article that Laura mentions in the journal MRS Energy & Sustainability.
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If you could take a pill to halt ageing and become immortal, would you? Laura, Jasmin and Ellie take a look at some long-lived species, discuss just some of the science behind ageing and decide, if they could, whether they'd want to stay in their biological bodies forever or upload themselves to live digitally.
Read more about the science stories they discuss:
Determining how long the Greenland shark lives forJonathan the tortoiseMing the clamEarth's longest living organismSome other long-lived animals and plantsBenefits of intermittent fasting studied by Cambridge scientistsGenetics studies based on a tiny wormhttps://dogagingproject.org/https://www.quantamagazine.org/cells-across-the-body-talk-to-each-other-about-aging-20240108Blue zonesAn anti-ageing pill for dogsRead some of the books they've read:
Jellyfish Age Backwards: Nature's Secret to LongevityThe Code Breaker -
We've been around for a while and we have a lot of influence over our environment but are we really better than a lion or an orca? Antonia, Jasmin and Ellie discuss whether humans the top of the food chain or whether nature still does it better than we do.
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You might be surprised to know that new species are discovered pretty much every day. Laura and Ellie talk about how these discoveries are made and debate whether it's easier to find an exctinct, fossilised species or one that's still alive.
You can send your spare pennies to our ko-fi fund to support the podcast here.
Read about the discoveries that Ellie and the team at IFL Science have reported on including the Carlsberg beetle, a dinosaur in Utah, a dinosaur hand, the golden mole, a fossilised baby turtle that was mistaken for a plant, and Attenborough's rediscovered echidna.
The Natural History Museum publishes annual stats on discoveries.
The article from Scientific American that Laura mentions is What Makes Us Different.
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The COVID pandemic led to rapid development of vaccines. Laura, Emma and Antonia look at the history of vaccine development, the rapid development of the mRNA vaccine, and speculate on whether future vaccines could be so quickly developed.
Read about how viruses are weakened to be used as vaccines, some mechanisms of vaccination, how smallpox vaccines were developed in the 18th century, whether mRNA vaccines could be used to fight HIV, and the recent Nobel prize for the mRNA vaccine used against SARS-COV-2.
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We may not know it, but pop culture is pretty good at influencing our views. Antonia and Laura discuss several action films that rely on radiation for plot points and discuss whether these plot points could be backed-up by science. They talk about using radiation to trace chemical leaks, environmental changes and to find things in the human body. Is there any way of using radiation to trace money the way thta Batman does? Can injecting yourself with a substance protect you from radiation like they do in Star Trek? Is there any way you could use a spray to neutralise radiation like they do in Die Hard 5?
Read about some uses of radiation to trace aspects of engineering projects in this report by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Read about uses in medicine and more.
Read about the use of radioiodine in medicine.
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It's contributing to the climate emergency but you don't usually hear about it. Laura, Jasmin and Antonia discuss where it comes from, why it's important, and what can be done to reduce emission of this gas into the atmosphere.
Jasmin's research involves methane. Check out her research profile at Imperial College London.
Antonia mentions the gates of hell firepit in Turkmenistan.
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AI is rapidly evolving and we want to know what will happen next. Antonia, Ellie and Jasmin discuss their experience of AI, what intelligence actually means, how AI works, and how it could affect their individual careers as zoologists, science communicators and analysts.
Jasmin talks about her experience with chatbots and references a study on whether people trust them.
Antonia references some opinions of experts shared by Pew Research Centre, The World Economic Forum and AI Experts as well as a video from Answers in Progress.
Ellie mentions a bot that was trained to discover new supernovae.
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Like it or not, plastic is a big part of our lives. Laura, Jasmin and Antonia discuss how different plastics are made, how bioplastics are different to ones made from fossil fuels, what is really meant by biodegradable plastics, and whether plastic can be sustainable. The discussion is also peppered with more weird offshoots than normal as real-life examples add to the conversation. Did you know that lots of clothes include plastic fibres? Ever wondered how easy it is to recycle them? Are you better off just burning them for energy? And what does the great British tradition of bonfire night have to do with it?
To find out a little bit more about the market for different types of plastic, check out this article on European-bioplastics.org.
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The dinosaurs might take all the glory but well before they existed there was a very important period. Laura and Ellie discuss the 'explosion' in animal biodiversity that started around 541 million years ago and how we know it happened. They also speculate on what sort of animal might be missing from the fossil record and somehow come to the strange conclusion that balloon animals might have been real.
Sources of information for the factual stuff:
Rocks (iron) absorbed free oxygen from britannica.comThe study suggesting that animals left the seas as their eyes evolved and got bigger was reported on quantamagazine.comThe study on the oldest animal (the floppy sea-dwelling bath mat) was reported on inverse.com -
Whether you're a scientist or engineer you'll probably handle a lot of data. Laura, Emma and Antonia discuss how they use various data analysis techniques in their different disciplines of energy analysis and physics. They highly recommend towards data science as a resource to learn more and discus a specific example of principal component analysis (the rotating graph) from builtin.com.
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A lot of effort goes in to studying birds and their habits. Laura, Ellie and Antonia talk about nesting habits, what we can learn from them and why it’s important for scientists to know about them. They also talk about what you can do at home to help birds survive as climate and their environment changes.
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An audience from the Engineering Development Trust's Insights to University course quizzes Antonia, Jasmin, Alasdair and Sophie about how they chose their degree course, what sort of research they worked on, if they got to choose modules about climate change, and whether it’s better to do undergraduate masters or a bachelor’s degree. They also discuss how their individual choices led each of them to work in different aspects of the energy industry and whether they would change anything about how they got there.
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Although carbon capture technology is in use now, there are quite a few hurdles to jump before it becomes widely used. Laura, Jasmin and Antonia are joined by a live audience from the Engineering Development Trust's Routes to STEM course to talk about industrial applications of carbon capture in various industries. They field questions from the audience about the wider energy industry, discuss how options for storage compare to using the gas in a circular carbon economy and consider whether planting trees really can make a company carbon negative.
They mention several other episodes during the conversation, possibly more than ever before (because everything is connected!):
Ep 18. Why can't we such carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere?Ep 59. What are E-fuels?Ep 32. What is sustainability?Ep 11. Is battery technology ready for widespread use in electric cars?Ep 03. How can nuclear power help beat climate change?Ep 23. How is fusion energy portrayed in Spider-Man?Ep 17. Is plastic a good thing?Ep 24. How do you build a skyscraper?Ep 26. Should we control the weather or get better at predicting it? -
It’s not often you hear about a new discovery of theory in science that makes you say 'wow!' Laura and Antonia talk about some of their moments of astonishment when they've learned something about black holes or dinosaurs.
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Meteor showers are well worth staying up late for but how often do heavenly bodies fall to Earth and what do they look like? Ellie and Laura discuss this, what to do if you find one, how they compare to terrestrial objects like gold, and discuss whether they're valuable. They also get interrupted by various animals and can't help mention rewilding.
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