Shows / Talking Science
Talking Science
Talking Science is your weekly dive into the wonders of the scientific world. Join our hosts as they break down complex ideas into fun, engaging conversations—covering everything from cutting-edge discoveries and mind-bending theories to everyday science that shapes our lives. Whether you’re a curious learner, a science enthusiast, or just someone who loves a good "aha!" moment, Talking Science makes big ideas accessible, entertaining, and thought-provoking.
Episodes
Talking ScienceFungi – The Hidden Kingdom
The mushroom on your pizza is just the tip of the organism, a temporary fruiting structure sitting above a vast, mostly invisible network that might stretch…
Talking ScienceUranus and Neptune – The Forgotten Ice Giants
The last time a spacecraft visited Uranus or Neptune, it was 1986 and 1989 respectively, and nobody has been back since. This episode explores why these two…
Talking ScienceCaves and Karst – Landscapes Dissolved by Water
Rain that vanishes into the ground in a limestone landscape isn't just soaking away — it can be dissolving solid rock, one drop at a time. This episode…
Talking ScienceNeutrinos – The Ghost Particles
Right now, a hundred trillion particles from the Sun are passing through your body every second, and you'll never feel one. This episode traces the neutrino…
Talking ScienceMetabolism and Diabetes – How the Body Handles Fuel
Skip a meal and feel foggy an hour later? That's your body's fuel-management system sending an urgent signal. This episode explains what metabolism actually…
Talking ScienceThe Cosmic Distance Ladder – How We Measure the Universe
How do astronomers know a galaxy is two million light years away, or thirteen billion? This episode climbs the cosmic distance ladder rung by rung, from…
Talking ScienceDeep Time – How We Learned the Earth's Age
Hold an ordinary rock in your hand, and you're holding something that, statistically, is probably older than every human civilisation combined, older than the…
Talking ScienceGravity – The Weakest Force in Charge of Everything
Pick up a small fridge magnet and use it to lift a paperclip off the table, and you've just watched electromagnetism, working through a scrap of moulded…
Talking ScienceAllergies and Autoimmunity – When Defence Misfires
A bee sting that sends one person to hospital and barely bothers the person standing next to them; a pancreas that quietly stops making the insulin the body…
Talking ScienceSagittarius A* – The Monster at the Milky Way's Heart
On a clear, dark night, away from city lights, the Milky Way arcs overhead as a soft river of stars — and buried in the dense, glowing crowd of that river's…
Talking ScienceFossils – How Life Turns to Stone
Turning into a fossil is far rarer than a museum full of skeletons might suggest - it takes a specific, unlikely sequence of chance and chemistry, and most…
Talking ScienceFriction – The Force That Wears the World Down
Friction is so ordinary that it's easy to overlook - it's the reason your shoes grip the footpath and your car can stop at a red light - but it's also one of…
Talking ScienceBlood – The Most Complicated Fluid You Own
Blood looks simple - a red liquid that appears whenever you're cut - but it's actually one of the most sophisticated tissues in the human body, carrying…
Talking ScienceMeteorites – Rocks That Fall from the Sky
Every day, tonnes of material from space drift down through Earth's atmosphere, and every so often a fragment survives the fall intact enough to land in…
Talking ScienceMinerals and Mining – The Rocks Underneath the Economy
Every phone, car battery, kitchen bench and steel beam traces back to rock pulled out of the ground somewhere, shaped over geological time by processes most of…
Talking SciencePressure – From the Deep Sea to Diamond Anvils
Your ears popping on a flight, a sealed bag of chips ballooning up at cruising altitude, a pressure cooker cutting a stew's cooking time in half — all of it is…
Talking ScienceAnaesthesia – Switching Consciousness Off and On
Every day, in operating theatres all over Australia, people are deliberately, reversibly switched off, their pain, memory and movement suspended long enough…
Talking ScienceRadio Astronomy – Listening to the Invisible Sky
The night sky isn't only the pinpricks of starlight we see with our eyes — it's also quietly broadcasting on wavelengths we can't see at all, and for the last…
Talking ScienceThe Arid Zone – How Life Works in the Australian Outback
Roughly seventy per cent of Australia is arid or semi-arid, yet the outback is far from empty: it runs on a distinctive boom-and-bust rhythm built around…
Talking ScienceFire and Explosives – Chemistry in a Hurry
Fire and explosives are, at heart, the same chemistry running at wildly different speeds: rapid oxidation releasing energy. This episode covers the fire…
Talking ScienceSmell and Taste – The Chemical Senses
Smell and taste are the body's chemical senses, detecting actual molecules rather than light or sound, and between them they quietly create most of what we…
Talking ScienceThe Oort Cloud – The Edge of the Solar System
Far beyond Neptune, past even the icy Kuiper Belt, astronomers believe an enormous, invisible shell of ancient comets surrounds the entire solar system: the…
Talking ScienceEl Niño and La Niña – Australia's Boom-and-Bust Rainfall
Ask an Australian farmer about the years that stick in their memory and you'll usually hear about extremes: a drought so long the dams cracked, or a wet season…
Talking ScienceGlass – The Solid That Never Quite Settled
There's a persistent piece of trivia that old windows are thicker at the bottom because glass slowly flows downward over centuries, like an extremely patient…
Talking ScienceHearing and Balance – Physics Inside Your Skull
Walk out of a loud concert and the world sounds muffled, with a faint ring that takes hours to fade — a small, temporary demonstration of just how much…
Talking ScienceEclipses – The Cosmic Coincidence
Stand under a leafy tree during a partial solar eclipse and something strange happens to the ground: instead of round blobs of sunlight, you get hundreds of…
Talking ScienceOcean Currents – The Planet's Conveyor Belt
The ocean isn't the calm, flat expanse it can look like from the shore — it's laced with enormous rivers of moving water, from wind-driven surface currents to…
Talking ScienceMetals and Alloys – The Materials That Built Civilisation
A spoon bends; a ceramic mug shatters. That simple kitchen-table difference comes down to a "sea of electrons" binding metal atoms together, and it's the same…
Talking ScienceVision – How the Eye Builds a Picture
The sharp, seamless, full-colour picture you seem to be looking at right now isn't a direct recording of the world — it's a construction, built by your brain…
Talking ScienceTitan – The Moon with Rivers of Methane
Saturn's largest moon looks almost like a distant cousin of early Earth: a thick atmosphere, rivers, lakes, rain and genuine weather. But every drop of that…
Talking ScienceSea Level Rise – Why It Isn't the Same Everywhere
In some coastal cities, ordinary high tide on a clear, calm, cloudless day is now enough to send seawater bubbling up through the drains and into the streets…
Talking ScienceCrystals – Order Inside Solids
Tip a little table salt onto a dark plate and look closely, with a magnifying glass if you have one, and you'll find that every single grain is a tiny…
Talking ScienceThe Kidneys – The Body's Filtration Plant
Every single day, without you noticing or doing anything at all, roughly 180 litres of fluid are filtered out of your blood, checked over in extraordinary…
Talking ScienceNebulae and Star Clusters – Where Stars Are Born
That faint, fuzzy smudge hanging below the three stars of Orion's belt isn't a star at all — it's a cloud of gas and dust several light years across, and…
Talking ScienceGlaciers and Ice Sheets – Rivers of Ice
A glacier looks like the stillest thing on Earth, and yet it is quietly flowing, carving valleys and fjords, and preserving an extraordinarily detailed record…
Talking ScienceStates of Matter – Solid, Liquid, Gas and Beyond
An ice cube melting in a glass of water quietly demonstrates one of the most fundamental ideas in all of physics and chemistry: matter changing between states…
Talking ScienceHormones – The Body's Chemical Messengers
The flutter before a big moment, the sleepiness that arrives as the room dims, the steady pull of blood sugar back to normal after a meal — none of it happens…
Talking ScienceCosmic Rays – Messengers from Violent Space
Every second, invisible high-speed particles born in the deaths of distant stars — and possibly in sources far more extreme still — are raining down through…
Talking ScienceClouds – The Biggest Uncertainty in Climate Science
Clouds form through a simple, elegant recipe of rising air, cooling and condensation onto tiny particles of dust and salt — yet that same familiar sky-scenery…
Talking ScienceAcids, Bases and the pH Scale
From the sourness of a lemon to the acid in your stomach and the slow chemical drift of the oceans, acidity is a single, simple idea — the concentration of…
Talking ScienceFrom One Cell to a Body – The Science of Development
A single fertilised cell, in the space of months, becomes a fully formed body with a beating heart, a working brain and everything else in roughly the right…
Talking ScienceThe Interstellar Medium – The Stuff Between the Stars
Space between the stars looks empty, but it's filled with a vast, thin soup of gas and dust called the interstellar medium — the raw material of new stars and…
Talking ScienceThe Anthropocene – Humanity as a Geological Force
Humans have become so powerful a force that we're now leaving a permanent mark in the rock record itself — from plastics and concrete to nuclear traces and…
Talking ScienceThe Theory of Everything – Physics' Greatest Unfinished Quest
Modern physics rests on two spectacularly successful theories — one for the very large, one for the very small — and they flatly contradict each other. The…
Talking ScienceGeoengineering – Should We Hack the Planet?
As climate change advances, some scientists have begun seriously studying a set of dramatic, deliberate interventions in the Earth's systems — from reflecting…
Talking ScienceSound – The Invisible Waves We Live In
Sound is so constant that we rarely stop to ask what it actually is. The answer is surprisingly physical: sound is a wave of pressure rippling through the air…
Talking ScienceBushfires – Fire, Ecology and a Changing Landscape
Fire is woven into the Australian landscape in a way few other places on Earth can match. Many native plants don't just survive fire — they depend on it. But…
Talking ScienceHeat and Temperature – The Rules Everything Obeys
Heat feels like the most ordinary thing in the world, yet the science of it — thermodynamics — turns out to be one of the deepest and most far-reaching in all…
Talking ScienceFresh Water – The Coming Scarcity
Water covers most of the planet, yet the fresh water that farms, cities and ecosystems depend on is a startlingly thin slice of the total — and it's unevenly…
Talking ScienceEarth's Magnetic Field – The Invisible Shield
A compass needle swinging to point north is hinting at something enormous: our entire planet is a giant magnet, wrapped in an invisible field that reaches far…
Talking ScienceRadioactivity – The Clock Inside the Atom
Radioactivity has a fearsome reputation, but at its core it's a natural process that's been happening since before the Earth existed — unstable atoms shedding…
Talking ScienceAustralia's Unique Wildlife – A Continent of Evolutionary Experiments
Australia is home to animals found nowhere else on Earth: mammals that lay eggs, marsupials that raise young in pouches, and a bewildering array of species…
Talking ScienceSemiconductors – The Material That Built the Modern World
Almost everything electronic you own runs on tiny switches carved into silicon — a material that is neither a good conductor nor a good insulator, and whose…
Talking SciencePlastics and Polymers – The Miracle Material We Can't Put Down
Plastics are so useful, cheap and durable that they transformed the twentieth century — and so long-lasting that they've become one of the defining…
Talking ScienceRivers and Erosion – How Water Carves the World
Given enough time, a trickle of water can cut a canyon a kilometre deep. Rivers are the great sculptors of the land, patiently carrying mountains grain by…
Talking ScienceCatalysts – Chemistry's Quiet Matchmakers
A catalyst is a substance that makes a chemical reaction go faster — often dramatically faster — without being used up itself, quietly making possible…
Talking ScienceBiodiversity and Ecosystems
Nature isn’t just a random collection of plants and animals — it’s a vast web of connections in which everything depends on everything else. This episode…
Talking ScienceGravitational Waves – Listening to Spacetime
A century ago, Einstein predicted that violent events in space should send ripples through the fabric of spacetime itself — and in 2015, after decades of…
Talking SciencePain – How the Body Signals Damage
Pain is something we all want less of, yet it’s one of the most important protective systems we have — and it’s far stranger than it seems, because pain is not…
Talking ScienceThe Fermi Paradox – Where Is Everybody?
The universe is vast and old, with billions of Sun-like stars and billions of years for life to arise — so by rights the galaxy should be humming with…