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 unfo
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 look
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-t
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 a
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
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 develo
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
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
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.
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
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
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 qui
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 surgeon
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 ab
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 ques
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
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
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: wome
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 po
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 ha
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 headlin