PODCAST · science
Science On Top
by 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.
Episodes
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Goodbye
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
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SoT 358: A Lot Of Poop
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 unfortunate record-breaking lizard found out. 00:14:22 This...
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A quick update
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
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SoT 357: You Get An Ocean!
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 looks like Pluto does too! 00:13:59 Soy is everywhere…
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SoT 356: The Same... But Opposite
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-toed skink. 00:06:37 Imagine solar power that worked at...
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SoT 355: E-mouse-icons!
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 afraid? Or disgusted? 00:07:54 Astrophysicists from the...
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SoT 354: They Smacked It With A Shovel
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 a liquid that flows is largely a myth.... sort of.…
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SoT 353: Crazy Finds A Way
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 developed is a lot more palatable! 00:08:15 The formation of...
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SoT 352: Noodle-Fingered Hugs
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 a graveyard orbit where it can pose a threat to any...
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SoT 351: Air Sea'n'Sea
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 timeline of industrialisation. 00:15:07 Remains dating...
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SoT Special 28 – Coronavirus with Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz
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. For more information, we recommend: Australian...
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SoT 350: Rocks Were Never Not Great
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 means they've worked out the precise meanderings of...
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SoT Bites 001 - Hot Drinks In Hot Weather
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?
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SoT Bites 001 - Cuttlefish Watching 3D Movies
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!
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SoT 349: Our Favourite Science Stories of 2019
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 Australia, with no real natural predators. Until...
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SoT 348: Massive Stars Are Fluffy!
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 quite that dire. 00:11:38 Chinese scientists have…
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SoT 347: Carbonite
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 surgeons dealing with traumatic emergencies such as gunshot or...
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SoT 346: Guinea Pig Guinea Pigs
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 about this discovery is what it could suggest about...
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SoT 345: Daisy
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 question that neuroscientists have wondered about for...
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SoT 344: Teeny-Tiny Black Holes
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 result. 00:08:10 An intriguing new hypothesis for…
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SoT 343: More Water Rats!
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...
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SoT 342: Grumpy, Hungry, Wanting Chocolate
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…
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SoT 341: The 2019 Ig Nobel Prizes
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....
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SoT 340: They Look Snarly
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...
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SoT 339: Sauce Is Key
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...
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SoT 338: Hidden Bottoms
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…
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SoT 337: Fear-Relevant Non-Slimy Small Animals
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…
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SoT 336: Text Neck
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…
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SoT 335: Parmesan Not Brie
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...
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SoT 334: That's My Clickbait!
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…
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SoT 333: Altered State Of Consciousness
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…
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SoT 332: Muddy, Liefie and Lixy
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…
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SoT 331: A Hyperactive Toddler
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...
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SoT 330: A Very Large Horn
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...
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SoT 329: Not The Father Of Lies
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…
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SoT 328: Thralala, Thralala, Thralala!
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.…
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SoT 327: You've Been Browned!
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...
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SoT 326: A Very Lovely Molecule
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…
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SoT 325: We Just Like Meerkats
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....
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SoT 324: Kinetic Penetrator
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...
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SoT 323: Very Small Frogs
Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall, Dr Cameron Webb 00:00:58 A review study published in the journal Biological Conservation has found that over 40% of insect species are threatened with extinction. 00:29:06 Queensland has seen record-breaking floods this year, and everyone knows that...
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SoT 322: Captain's Log
Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:01:48 When researchers from the Max Planck Institute were looking at the teeth of an 11th or 12th century German woman they found tiny bright blue specks. This was a clue that illuminated the role women may have played in the history of book...
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SoT Special: 2018 Bloopers and Outtakes
2018 was a big year for science. Is saw the launch of the largest privately built reuseable rocket, the discovery a new organ, and understanding of the wombat's cubic poops. And we talked about all these stories and more on Science on Top. But not everything goes to plan, and this year was no...
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SoT 321: Our Favourite Science Stories of 2018
Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Peter Miller 00:01:10 There's a planet orbiting star HD26965, exactly where Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry said Spock's homeworld Vulcan would be. 00:04:16 A fresh analysis of 10 year old data finds the best evidence yet of water vapor venting from Jupiter's...
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SoT 320: That's Not A Knife
Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:01:24 The giant tortoise Lonesome George, the last of his species, was possibly as old as 102 when he died in 2012. Now sequencing of his DNA has revealed a number of genes that could give us clues about human life expectancy and particularly…
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SoT 319 error
Our latest episode, 319 - Number Five Is Alive, had a pretty major glitch in that Lucas' track wasn't there at all. I realised the mistake shortly after posting it, and thought I had replaced it with the correct version, but obviously it didn't replace the file. I've re-uploaded it and tested it...
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SoT 319: Number Five Is Alive
Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall, Jo Benhamu 00:02:27 NASA's InSight probe lands on Mars, with a slew of instruments to analyse what the red planet is made of. 00:17:43 Against all conventional knowledge, mitochondrial DNA is sometimes inherited from the father. 00:28:01 Professor He...
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SoT 318: A Wacky Eukaryote Is Always Fun
Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:01:10 Wombats - the cute, pudgy marsupials in Australia, have cubic poops. Square, angular blocks of poop. But how and why? We may now have a better understanding. 00:08:25 HD186302 is a star 184 light-years from Earth. And it's so similar to our...
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SoT 317: Darknado
Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall 00:02:00 There's a stream of stars hurtling through our region of the Milky Way galaxy, and they're bringing with them a "dark matter hurricane". It's probably nothing to worry about, though. 00:12:16 For the first time since 1889, the kilogram has…
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SoT 316 - Venoms Are Amazing
Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Mick Vagg 00:02:13 How serious is the opioid crisis in Australia? What's being done about it, and what new painkillers are on the horizon? Pain Specialist Professor Mick Vagg gives us the run down. 00:22:15 20 million years ago, dolphins had really long snouts…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
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.
HOSTED BY
The Science on Top Team
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Science On Top have?
Science On Top currently has 50 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Science On Top about?
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,...
How often does Science On Top release new episodes?
Science On Top has 50 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Science On Top?
You can listen to Science On Top on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Science On Top?
Science On Top is created and hosted by The Science on Top Team.
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