Science On Top

More controversy over stress-induced stem cells, as co-authors call for the retractions of the papers. An aluminium suit could enable divers to travel to depths of 305 meters, move around and collect samples. A giant virus has been discovered in 30,000 year old Siberian permafrost. It's big and it eats amoebas. An Australian team is working on a project to clear space junk with a powerful ground-based laser. A study of how men and women perceive each other's mathematics skills suggests that both men and women unconsciously - and wrongly - believe women are 'bad' at maths.

More studies finding no evidence of 'wind turbine syndrome', plus a discussion on dealing with climate change deniers. Could enough wind turbines reduce the force of hurricanes? Maybe, but it would need A LOT of turbines. In 2011 a 6 - 9 million year old whale graveyard was discovered at Cerro Ballena (Whale Hill) in Chile. But with time running out, researchers turned to a digital method of preserving the environmental context in 3D. A thin, stretchy, electric membrane moulded to a patient's heart could be the next stage in health monitoring.

Vaccines might not need to be kept cold to the extent previously thought. This could make vaccinations in third world countries cheaper and easier. The oldest crystal on Earth has been dated and found to be 4.4 billion years old. This means the Earth had developed a crust very early on, perhaps only a few hundred million years after formation. What's the best way to count whale populations? It could be from space. To learn about how humans and dogs process sounds and emotions, researchers had to train dogs to lie still in an fMRI machine. Which is amazingly cute. The fourth new species of an Australian marsupial with bizarre sexual behaviour has been discovered. These rodent-like animals actually disintegrate during their marathon sex-fests.

A thorough investigation of the 'jelly doughnut shaped rock', known by NASA as Pinnacle Island, confirms it isn't an alien fungus, it isn't a meteorite fragment, it's just a chipped bit of rock. Doubts have emerged about the radical stem cell breakthrough that suggested acid or other stress could turn mature cells into stem cells. The jury's still out on this. Scientists have developed a detailed model of curly hair, which could give insights into the behaviours of all curved rods. Most importantly, headphone cables. An artificial hand wired directly into the nerves of an amputee gives the sensation of touch. The recipient could tell if objects were hard or soft, and even their shapes. A trace fossil gives clues how dinosaurs peed. We don't know which dinosaur, but we do know it was a lot of pee. The Burgess Shale is famous for its large collection of varied soft-tissue fossils, and another similar site has been found nearby. A 248 million year old fossil of a dinosaur giving birth has been found and raises q

Stephen Hawking has some new thoughts on black holes, but he's not saying they don't exist. For a few weeks, weather uncovered the footprints of five prehistoric humans. And then washed them away again. There's a leech that can survive being submerged in liquid nitrogen for 24 hours. Astronomers have discovered what could be one of the oldest stars, formed from the exploded remains of one of the first stars. The crippled Kepler Space Telescope has been resurrected, with an ingenious solution that restores part of its function.

A new method of turning adult cells into pluripotent stem cells is discovered. According to the paper, simply bathing cells in acid could be cause mature cells to revert to stem cells that could become any cell in the body. Heart researchers in the UK have managed to turn stem cells into heart cells, that actually beat in petri dishes. NASA plans to create the coldest spot in the universe on board the International Space Station. They're talking 100 pico-Kelvin, which is one ten billionth of a degree above absolute zero. Antioxidants may worsen lung cancer. Swedish scientists have determined why two antioxidants speed up the development of tumours. By training wallabies to 'play the pokies', an Australian team has discovered that wallabies see colours more like dogs than fellow marsupials.

Jelly donut shaped rock surprises NASA, then gets them sued. Tracking dogs by GPS may give clues to pack structure, but probably not. West Australia's shark cull begins, the same week that a report finds 1/4 of sharks and rays are threatened with extinction. Men supposedly forget more than women do, but the study has big issues.

After nearly 11 years, the Rosetta comet-chasing spacecraft has awoken and is preparing for an ambitious mission. A new hypothesis for 'lactose persistence' - why most humans can still drink milk into adulthood. Why do sloths climb down from their trees to poo on the ground? It could be because of moths. China is getting into genetic modification and cloning on an 'industrial scale'. That's a lot of pigs. Biotechnology company Illumina has announced a machine that can sequence the human genome for under US$1,000. Personal genetics company 23andMe has run afoul of the FDA, but are they really that bad?

2013 was Australia's hottest year on record, and the sixth hottest globally. Plus the 'polar vortex' hitting North America, and one of Australia's "most significant heatwaves". And the effect of "C2O" on jumping sea snails. Physics professors have searched the internet for evidence of time travel, and didn't find any. Are dolphins getting high on a toxin secreted by puffer fish? Truth is we really don't know. A new Staph vaccine shows promise in rabbits, but might not work as well in humans. A species of sea anemone has been found on the underside of Antarctica's ice sheets. They are the only marine animals known to live embedded in the ice, and no one is sure how they survive. When seven-year-old Sophie wrote a letter to CSIRO, Australia's peak governmental science organisation, she wanted to know what research was being done on dragons. The CSIRO responded beautifully, first apologising for the lack of dragon-research and then making her a titanium dragon with a 3D printer.

The turn of the millennium has brought a new dimension to the Space Age - one that was undreamed of only a few years ago. Thanks to a combination of visionary entrepreneurs and an ailing Russian spaceflight programme, space tourism is now a reality that is set to take off dramatically in the near future. In this entertaining and fully-illustrated talk, Professor Fred Watson outlines what we might see as space tourism evolves into a mainstream branch of the industry. He argues that the new venture is not merely an expensive diversion for the very rich, but a necessary step in humankind's emergence as a space-faring species.

Ed, Shayne, Lucas and Dyani look back on the big science stories from 2013. From pubic lice to meteor impacts, crowd-funding to HIV cures, we revisit some of our favourite news items. For all the stories we mention, check out the show notes for this episode at scienceontop.com/130

Dr. David Hawkes' Name The Virus crowdfunding project is a huge success - and it got him a spot on national TV. But is crowdfunding just a passing fad? Comet ISON was billed as the "Comet of a Lifetime", but was more fizzle than sizzle. But even though it burned up in the sun, it's mysterious approach could give astronomers valuable insights into comet behaviour. An amazing result from a mice experiment in Atlanta suggests mice can 'inherit' memories from their fathers, and even their grandfathers. Researchers have successfully sequenced the oldest known human DNA - 400,000 years old - and uncovered further mystery about human ancestory. The male contraceptive pill could be a step closer thanks to an unusual approach taken by Australian scientists. Instead of looking at hormonally controlling sperm production, they are looking at controlling the release of sperm at orgasm. China has launched Chang'E 3, a probe with a rover set to land on the Moon. If successful, China will be the third country ever to land a

Jo Benhamu joins us to talk about a new trial she's conducting to improve radiotherapy for prostate cancer. More progress resurrecting the extinct gastric brooding frog. Scientists in Spain have received funding to test whether an extinct mountain goat can be cloned from preserved cells. The temperature of the lab could potentially skew results of mice-studies. The mouse immune system is stronger at warmer temperatures than most labs are kept at. NASA has plans to send plants to the moon, to grow in a 3D printed miniature greenhouse. We pay tribute to Frederick Sanger, a two-time Nobel Prize winner and the 'father of genomics'.

Launch of the MAVEN probe to Mars, to investigate what happened to the red planet's atmosphere. Richard Lenski's long-term evolution experiment shows no sign of stopping. One of the longest continously-running scientific experiments demonstrates that bacteria evolves and at an increasing rate. The 'clean-rooms' where spacecraft are built are  the most sterile places we can make. But a new species of bacteria has been found in two such clean-rooms - not exactly thriving, but not dead either... It's well established that modern dogs are an evolutionary off-shoot of wolves, but there's a lot of debate about when and where they branched off. With theories suggesting China, Europe and the Middle East as being the sites of the separation, it's an ongoing question.

Blinky the crab is a mutant freak. It has three eyes instead of two, and an antenna-like structure on its head. But the reasons for Blinky's deformities are a bit of a mystery. Researchers have linked specific human actions to changes in global warming. They found warming slowed down in the nineties, which they believe can be partly explained by the 1987 ban on CFCs. They also found that warming slowed during the Great Depression. New-born babies deliberately suppress their own immune systems to allow beneficial microbes to colonise their gut. Asteroids 'dead' rocks in space. But recent images have shown one to have tails - six of them! A fossil of a 'coupling' 165m years ago shows two insects loving each other in a very special way. The fossil seems to indicate that the genitals of modern froghoppers are the same as their ancestors', but their favourite sexual position may have changed. 

The RAVE (Radial Velocity Experiment) study finds that our galaxy, the Milky Way, is fluttering like a flag. Sort of wobbling. From the 1960s to the 1990s, adult elphants were culled extensively in South Africa. It was feared that if there were too many elephants they would destroy the habitat. A recent study of the young elephants that were spared shows substantial social and psychological trauma, decades later. Astronomers have crunched some heavy maths and statistically, there could be as many as 20 billion Earth-like exoplanets in our galaxy. A study of tail-wagging dogs finds that a dog's heart rate and anxiety levels increase when it sees another dog wagging its tail to the left.  With India's successful launch of the Mangalyaan probe to Mars, some people are suggesting this could be the beginning of an India-China 'Asian space race'. Others are criticising the AU$77m project in light of India's widespread poverty.

Name The Virus is a crowdfunding initiative to develop new viral vectors to help understand the brain and its disease. A species of South African dung beetle has given up the ability to fly to instead gallop across the sand grasping bits of poo. Why do some people have blue eyes, or big noses, or wide mouths? Some regions of the genome previously thought of as 'junk DNA' control the activity of genes for facial features. The practice of recording bird calls and replaying them to lure birds into view is frowned upon by many bird-watchers, but some people still do it. A new study shows that it can stress birds out and harm them. The strains of human papillomavirus that most commonly affect black women are different from those targeted by the HPV vaccine.

A new study shows that while the brain is asleep, it washes away buildups of wastes and toxins. In the early 90s, about 60,000 jellyfish were born in space. When they came back to Earth, things didn't quite work out. A test of alleged yeti samples uncovers an extinct polar bear/brown bear hybrid. A new law of biology: all mammals pee for about 21 seconds. Yes, a team of scientists walked around a zoo with a stopwatch. A new strain of Clostridium botulinum, the bacteria that produces one of the deadliest neurotoxins we know of, has been discovered. Researchers have taken the unusual precaution of whithholding key details of the bacteria's genome.

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2013 was awarded jointly to James E. Rothman, Randy W. Schekman and Thomas C. Südhof ”for their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells”. The Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider”. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2013 was awarded jointly to Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel ”for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems”. A new study shows that even without training, elephants can understand pointing. A protein found in the venom of the Chinese red headed centipede could be a total painkiller.

In rutting season, stags roar a lot. Deep roars - the deeper the better for warding off competition. And that could have something to do with the human larynx, which is lower than most other animals. It could also explain why Barry White's voice is so popular with women. New research from the UK shows that diesel fumes are confusing bees and preventing them from finding flowers. But the fumes aren't affecting the bees directly, rather they change the smell of flowers. A study of ballerinas suggests that with extensive training they change their brains to allow them to spin without being sick. South Korean scientists have engineered bacteria that produce short-chain alkanes, key components of gasoline.