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PODCAST

Science On Top

The Science on Top Team

The Australian podcast about science, health and technology news. Join Ed Brown and his panel of co-hosts each week as we talk about the latest and coolest research and discoveries in the world of science. We"re joined by special guests from all over the science field: doctors, professors, nurses, teachers and more.

science natural sciences

All Episodes

27:20

SoT 343: More Water Rats!

Science On Top ·

2019/10/31

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. 00:16:04 The scourge of cane toads continues to spread across Australia. But could a native rodent

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39:51

SoT 342: Grumpy, Hungry, Wanting Chocolate

Science On Top ·

2019/10/21

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? 00:28:13 Take a computer algorithm, teach it to read scientific papers, feed it thousands of journals,

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57:25

SoT 341: The 2019 Ig Nobel Prizes

Science On Top ·

2019/10/09

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 protect against illness and death, if the pizza is made and eaten in Italy. 00:08:26 MEDICAL EDUCATION

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25:29

SoT 340: They Look Snarly

Science On Top ·

2019/09/29

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 Medical Institute is painstakingly building a detailed map of a mouse brain - one neuron at a time.

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44:57

SoT 339: Sauce Is Key

Science On Top ·

2019/09/16

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 expect. 00:20:39 After a spectacular wall collapse last year, a crater on Hawaii's Kīlauea volcano was

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48:17

SoT 338: Hidden Bottoms

Science On Top ·

2019/08/19

Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:26 Tiny, often-overlooked "cryptobenthic" fish are much more plentiful than we realised, and could therefore explain how reefs can thrive despite a lack of nutrients. 00:08:30 Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory data have been able to measure how fast five supermassive black holes are spinning. One was spinning faster than 70% of the speed of light! 00:17:26 A new analysis of skull fragments found in Greece is leading

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42:31

SoT 337: Fear-Relevant Non-Slimy Small Animals

Science On Top ·

2019/07/31

Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall, Jo Benhamu 00:00:26 A seemingly successful treatment of a nasty genetic disease would not have been possible without zebrafish. 00:10:52 It may seem counterintuitive, but a strain of virus linked to the common cold has been used to treat patients with a type of bladder cancer. 00:20:44 Fast Radio Bursts - the strong blasts of radio waves from distant galaxies - have mystified astronomers since they were first detected in 2007. But now for the first

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39:06

SoT 336: Text Neck

Science On Top ·

2019/07/16

Hosts: Ed Brown, Lucas Randall, Jo Benhamu 00:00:25 Dogs have evolved - mostly through artificial selection - to be our best friends. And a part of that evolution, according to a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, meant developing special muscles to help them give us those "puppy dog eyes". You can test your own dogs "dognition" at dognition.com! 00:15:27 It's widely believed that at the centre of every large galaxy there's at least one supermassive

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26:39

SoT 335: Parmesan Not Brie

Science On Top ·

2019/07/04

Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall, Jo Benhamu 00:00:39 Winemaking in France dates back more than 12,000 years. But new research looking at the DNA of ancient grapes has found one particular variety that's remained unchanged for over 900 years. 00:09:13 The largest crater in the solar system, the South Pole-Aitken basin, is on the far side of the moon. And astronomers have found an unexpected very dense mass there, deep below the surface. 00:19:08 Positron Emission Tomography - better

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53:59

SoT 334: That's My Clickbait!

Science On Top ·

2019/06/24

Hosts: Ed Brown, Dr. Shayne Jospeh, Penny Dumsday, Jo Benhamu 00:00:54 After many months away from the show, Shayne discusses his depression and how he's been dealing with it. 00:11:26 Two astronomers published a paper that seemed to suggest our hominid ancestors switch to walking on two feet as a result of a supernova exploding around 8 million years ago. And while that may be plausible, it wasn't really what the paper was about. 00:21:09 Dr. Susan Mackinnon, from Washington University in St

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36:32

SoT 333: Altered State Of Consciousness

Science On Top ·

2019/06/09

Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall, Jo Benhamu 00:00:23 For bonobo males, sex is often done under mother's watchful eye. But it's not quite that creepy - the mother's are helpful, allowing the primates to copulate in peace! 00:04:33 Detecting lung cancer in the early stages can be tricky even for very experienced radiologists. But a huge test using Google's AI computers found that the algorithms performed better than humans, and made fewer false positives. 00:18:45 There's a climate

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58:47

SoT 332: Muddy, Liefie and Lixy

Science On Top ·

2019/06/02

Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall, Jo Benhamu 00:00:34 Penny gives us a trip report on her recent trip to Lake Mungo - a dry lake in remote Australia that's known for the discovery of 20,000-60,000 year old human remains. 00:09:58 All we know about Denisovans - a species of hominid that split off from the human lineage alongside the Neanderthals - comes from a little finger bone, three teeth and a sliver of bone. But now the discovery of a jawbone, found two and a half thousand

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19:54

SoT 331: A Hyperactive Toddler

Science On Top ·

2019/04/26

Hosts: Ed Brown, Kirsten Banks 00:00:49 For the first time ever, astronomers have taken a photo of the silhouette of the event horizon of a black hole! 00:06:39 The Event Horizon Telescope captured 5 petabytes of data - which is a lot! 00:09:08 XKCD compared the size of the event horizon of M87 with the size of our solar system. 00:11:36 Veritasium expertly described how the photo was taken, and all the permutations that could have happened to give us different photos. Kirsten Banks is an

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56:55

SoT 330: A Very Large Horn

Science On Top ·

2019/04/23

Hosts: Ed Brown, Dr. Kate Naughton, Peter Miller 00:00:40 An extraordinary must-read article in the New Yorker has an in-depth look at the few hours after a meteor hit the Yucatán Peninsula and probably wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs. It also follows an amazing discovery that could answer many questions about the appearance of dinosaurs and whether or not they were already dying out. 00:18:51 A study led by a team at the Duke University Clinical Research Institute has found that treatment

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23:14

SoT 329: Not The Father Of Lies

Science On Top ·

2019/04/16

Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Chris Curtain-Magee 00:01:22 In 450 B.C., the "Father of History", Herodotus, wrote a 23 line account of a type of Egyptian cargo vessel. This was widely thought to be a fabrication, but a discovery in an ancient Egyptian port city indicates the account was truthful. 00:08:03 The earliest undisputed evidence of humans in Australia comes from a rock shelter in northern Australia and dates back to 65,000 years ago. Now investigations at an ancient midden - a trashpile

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39:31

SoT 328: Thralala, Thralala, Thralala!

Science On Top ·

2019/04/02

Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:32 Some fish can survive the freezing cold waters of Antarctica thanks to a gene that makes anti-freeze. But how do fish in the Arctic, in the Northern hemisphere, also have the same gene? 00:08:33 Some people can smell when people are sick. Could these 'super-smellers' help diagnose Parkinson's Disease early on? 00:21:26 DNA is made of four nucleotides: G, A, T, and C. Now an interdisciplinary team of researchers has doubled that genetic code

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52:45

SoT 327: You've Been Browned!

Science On Top ·

2019/03/27

Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall, Sean M Elliott 00:01:11 Science educator, communicator and performer Sean M. Elliott has a new show at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Tesla: Death Rays & Elephants! 00:11:00 For a long time it's been believed that having some potted plants around the house will help filter out pollutants and toxins. But now the evidence suggests that houseplants do very little or even nothing at all when it comes to cleaning the air. 00:17:56 There's

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49:46

SoT 326: A Very Lovely Molecule

Science On Top ·

2019/03/21

Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall, Dr. Helen Maynard-Casely 00:01:16 NASA's InSight probe begins drilling into the Martian surface - and stops. 00:17:11 Twins are either identical (one egg splits into two copies) or fraternal (two eggs fertilised at the same time). But that's not always the case - as a mother in Queensland found out when she had sesquizygotic twins. 00:25:44 Timothy Ray Brown, who was known as The Berlin Patient, was the first person to be "cured" of HIV. Now a second

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41:01

SoT 325: We Just Like Meerkats

Science On Top ·

2019/03/16

Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:00:57 As the world becomes more and more urbanised, we hear a lot about the dangers to wildlife from humanity's sprawl. But new research finds Australia's koalas may actually be less stressed in cities - provided adequate green spaces are provided. 00:07:43 For the first time ever, a spacecraft built by a private company and designed to carry people has docked with the International Space Station. The success of SpaceX's "Crew Dragon" sets the

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47:11

SoT 324: Kinetic Penetrator

Science On Top ·

2019/03/04

Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:01:18 Hyabusa 2, Japan's latest sample return mission, has briefly landed on the asteroid Ryugu. It's an ambitious mission looking at the building blocks of the solar system. 00:16:14 And what's the point of dragging samples all the way back to Earth, when we can send whole labs to celestial bodies? 00:20:59 Echidnas are cute but spiky Australian native animals, with rather strange mating habits. But they're in high demand on the illegal pet trade,

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390 results

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