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 ScienceEpigenetics – Beyond the Genetic Code
Your DNA is often called a blueprint, but a blueprint doesn't explain why a skin cell and a brain cell — carrying identical genes — behave so differently. The…
Talking ScienceBatteries – How We Store Energy
Batteries are so ordinary we barely notice them, yet the ability to store electricity in a small, portable package underpins phones, laptops, electric cars and…
Talking ScienceThe Future of Human Spaceflight – Who Actually Goes?
For decades, sending humans into space meant a handful of government astronauts in low Earth orbit. Now reusable rockets, private companies and renewed…
Talking ScienceThe Great Barrier Reef – A Living Wonder Under Pressure
Stretching more than two thousand kilometres along Australia's north-east coast, the Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on Earth — so big it's…
Talking SciencePandemics – How Diseases Spread
A pandemic is what happens when a new infectious disease spreads across the globe, and the mathematics of that spread is both simpler and stranger than it…
Talking ScienceAnimal Intelligence – Minds Unlike Our Own
We tend to measure animal cleverness by how much it resembles our own — but some of the most remarkable minds on Earth are built on entirely different plans…
Talking ScienceWater – The Strangest Ordinary Molecule
Water is so familiar we barely notice it, and yet almost everything about it is scientifically peculiar — it breaks the rules that other liquids obey, and life…
Talking ScienceFossil Fuels – Ancient Sunlight
Coal, oil and gas power most of the modern world, but few of us stop to think about what they actually are: the buried, transformed remains of living things…
Talking ScienceVenus – Earth’s Twin Gone Wrong
Venus is almost exactly the same size as Earth, made of the same stuff, and formed right next door — yet it became one of the most hellish places in the solar…
Talking ScienceOrgan Transplants and Xenotransplantation
Taking a living organ from one person and making it work inside another is one of medicine’s most astonishing achievements — and the biggest obstacle isn’t the…
Talking SciencePluto and the Kuiper Belt
In 2006 Pluto was famously “demoted” from planet to dwarf planet, and plenty of people are still cross about it — but the real story is far more interesting…
Talking ScienceCarbon – The Element That Makes Life Possible
Every living thing on Earth is built around a single element, and it isn’t there by accident — carbon has a chemical talent that no other element can match…
Talking ScienceGenetics of Inheritance – Why You Look Like Your Parents
Your smile, your eye colour, the shape of your nose — you carry echoes of your parents in your very cells. This episode unpacks the genetics of inheritance…
Talking ScienceVoyager – Humanity’s Farthest Messengers
Launched in the 1970s with less computing power than a modern key fob, two small spacecraft have journeyed further from home than anything humanity has ever…
Talking ScienceRenewable Energy – Sun, Wind and Water
The world is racing to shift how it makes electricity, away from burning fossil fuels and towards energy drawn from the sun, the wind and moving water. This…
Talking ScienceChemical Bonds – Why Atoms Stick Together
Everything around you — water, salt, metal, your own body — exists because atoms join together in a few specific ways. This episode explains chemical bonds…
Talking ScienceThe Gut-Brain Connection
We talk about “gut feelings” and “butterflies in the stomach” as if they’re just figures of speech, but there’s a genuine, physical conversation happening…
Talking ScienceLiving in Space – What Zero-G Does to the Body
Floating weightlessly in orbit looks like the ultimate freedom, but the human body evolved under gravity’s constant pull, and taking that pull away does…
Talking ScienceThe Ozone Layer – A Problem We Actually Fixed
High above our heads sits a thin, invisible shield of gas that makes life on land possible — and in the twentieth century we very nearly destroyed it, then…
Talking ScienceAgeing – Why Do We Get Old?
Getting older feels so inevitable that we rarely ask why it happens at all — but ageing is a genuine scientific puzzle, and researchers are steadily uncovering…
Talking ScienceAntimatter – The Mirror Universe
Antimatter sounds like pure science fiction, but it’s entirely real, it’s made in laboratories every day, and the fact that it exists at all points to one of…
Talking ScienceHow Rockets Actually Work
We watch rockets thunder off the launch pad and vanish into the sky, but the physics that gets them there is both simpler and stranger than most people…
Talking ScienceViruses – Alive or Not?
A virus can shut down a city, yet on its own it can do almost nothing at all — it can't grow, can't feed, can't even reproduce without hijacking a living cell…
Talking ScienceSpace Junk and the Kessler Problem
Orbiting the Earth alongside our working satellites is a growing swarm of debris — dead spacecraft, spent rocket stages and countless fragments — hurtling…
Talking ScienceThe Atmosphere – Layers of Air
The air around us feels like empty nothingness, but it's a thin, structured, life-giving envelope wrapped around the planet — one that shields us, warms us…
Talking ScienceThe Large Hadron Collider – Smashing Atoms to Understand Everything
Beneath the border of France and Switzerland runs a 27-kilometre ring where scientists hurl particles at each other at almost the speed of light and sift…
Talking ScienceExtinction – The Five Great Dyings
Extinction is the normal fate of almost every species that has ever lived — but five times in Earth's deep history, the losses spiked into catastrophe, wiping…
Talking ScienceThe James Webb Space Telescope – Seeing the First Light
A million and a half kilometres from Earth, a golden telescope the size of a tennis court's sunshield sits in the cold and dark, catching faint infrared light…
Talking ScienceSoil – The Thin Layer That Feeds Us
We call it dirt, we scrape it off our shoes, and we rarely give it a thought — yet almost all of our food, and much of life on land, depends on the thin skin…
Talking ScienceLasers – Light in Lockstep
From the checkout scanner to eye surgery to the internet itself, lasers are woven through modern life — yet most of us have no idea what makes laser light…
Talking SciencePhotosynthesis – How Plants Eat Sunlight
Every breath you take and nearly every meal you eat traces back to a single quiet chemical trick that plants, algae and some bacteria perform: turning…
Talking ScienceComets and Asteroids – Visitors from the Deep Past
Scattered through the solar system are billions of leftover scraps from its birth — rocky asteroids and icy comets that never got swept up into a planet. This…
Talking ScienceNeutron Stars – Matter at the Edge of Impossible
When a massive star dies, it can leave behind an object so dense that a sugar-cube-sized piece would weigh as much as a mountain: a neutron star. Some spin…
Talking ScienceThe Water Cycle – The Journey of Every Drop
The water in your glass is older than the dinosaurs, older than the planet's first life — the same finite supply, recycled endlessly through ocean, sky, land…
Talking ScienceSuperconductors – Electricity Without Resistance
Cool certain materials below a critical temperature and something almost magical happens: they carry electricity with no resistance at all, and they can…
Talking ScienceStem Cells – The Body's Master Cells
Every one of the roughly thirty-seven trillion cells in your body traces back to a handful of unspecialised cells that could become anything. Those are stem…
Talking ScienceGalaxies – How the Milky Way Was Built
The faint band of light our ancestors called the Milky Way turns out to be the disc of our own galaxy, seen edge-on from the inside — a spinning city of a few…
Talking ScienceCoral Reefs – Rainforests of the Sea
Coral reefs cover a tiny fraction of the ocean floor yet shelter a quarter of all marine species. They are built by tiny animals working in partnership with…
Talking ScienceThe Standard Model – The Universe's Ingredient List
Everything you have ever touched, seen or been made of comes down to a surprisingly short list of fundamental particles and the forces between them. That list…
Talking ScienceMemory – How the Brain Stores a Life
Memory feels like a recording — press play and there's the past. But the science tells a stranger story: remembering is an act of reconstruction, assembled…
Talking ScienceDark Energy – Why the Universe Is Flying Apart
For most of the twentieth century, astronomers assumed the universe's expansion had to be slowing down, tugged on by the gravity of everything inside it. Then…
Talking ScienceThe Heart – The Pump That Never Rests
Your heart beats around one hundred thousand times a day, every day, for your entire life, pushing blood through a network of vessels that, laid end to end…
Talking ScienceSleep — Why We Spend a Third of Our Lives Unconscious
Every night you switch off consciousness, lie down, and become vulnerable for hours. Evolution doesn't tolerate a waste of a third of your life — so sleep must…
Talking ScienceThe Ice Ages — When the World Froze Over
Just twenty thousand years ago, ice kilometres thick buried much of the northern world, and the sea was so much lower you could walk between continents. We…
Talking ScienceDark Matter — The Universe's Missing Mass
Everything you've ever seen — every star, planet, person and speck of dust — adds up to only about a sixth of the matter in the universe. The rest is "dark…
Talking ScienceEvolution by Natural Selection — The Best Idea Anyone Ever Had
Natural selection is one of the simplest ideas in all of science and one of the most misunderstood. We build it up from three plain facts about living things…
Talking ScienceExoplanets — Finding Worlds Around Other Stars
A generation ago we knew of exactly one planetary system: our own. Today we've confirmed more than five thousand planets around other stars, and the count…
Talking ScienceWeather vs Climate – Why the Difference Matters
“It's freezing today — so much for global warming.” It's a common jab, and it rests on confusing two different things: weather and climate. We untangle them…
Talking ScienceNuclear Power – Splitting the Atom
Nuclear power is one of the most emotionally charged technologies we have — associated in many minds with disaster and weapons, yet it quietly produces vast…
Talking ScienceEntropy and the Arrow of Time — Why Yesterday Is Different From Tomorrow
Why can you remember the past but not the future? Why does a broken cup never reassemble itself? The answer lies in one of the deepest and most reliable laws…
Talking ScienceNuclear Fusion — The Star in a Bottle
Fusion is the reaction that powers the Sun, and for seventy years it's been the great dream of clean energy — limitless fuel, no carbon, no long-lived waste…
Talking ScienceThe Big Bang — The First Three Minutes
The Big Bang is probably the most misunderstood idea in science — starting with the fact that it wasn't an explosion in space, but an expansion of space…
Talking ScienceCyclones, Hurricanes and Typhoons — Engines of the Warm Ocean
A tropical cyclone is the most powerful storm on Earth, and it's really a gigantic heat engine running on warm ocean water. We explain how these storms form…
Talking ScienceThe Origin of Life — From Chemistry to Biology
How did non-living chemistry become living biology? It's one of the deepest open questions in science, and while we don't have the answer, we've learned a…
Talking ScienceElectricity and Magnetism – One Force, Two Faces
Electricity and magnetism feel like separate phenomena — one lives in wires and lightning, the other in fridge magnets and compasses. One of the great triumphs…
Talking ScienceThe Sun – The Engine That Runs Everything
Almost every scrap of energy you use — the food you eat, the wind, the fossil fuels, the light of day — traces back to one object: an ordinary star…
Talking ScienceThe Microbiome – The Trillions Living Inside You
You are not, strictly speaking, a single organism — you're a walking ecosystem, home to trillions of bacteria that outnumber your own cells and carry hundreds…
Talking ScienceSaturn's Rings – A Structure That Shouldn't Last
Saturn's rings are the most beautiful sight in the solar system and also a bit of a scandal — they may be far younger than the planet, and they're…
Talking ScienceClimate Change – The Physics Behind It
Set aside the politics for a moment: at its core, climate change is a physics problem, and the physics has been understood since before the light bulb. We walk…
Talking ScienceLight – Wave, Particle, or Both?
Light is the most familiar thing in the world and one of the strangest. For two centuries physicists argued about whether it was a wave or a stream of…