Shirtloads Of Science

Dr Karl and Dr Alice put their heads together to discuss the latest research into well… all sorts of stuff! What do hairy leaves have to do with burning plants? Is Dr Karl’s fruit and veggie classification (serve it with ice-cream it’s a fruit, with gravy it’s a vegetable) scientifically accurate? And what exactly do killer kangaroos have to do with being unable to sleep in an unfamiliar bed? Listen up as the Doctors tackle these questions and more. And, if you talk to dogs (like Dr Alice does) there’s an experiment you might just want to try.

Maritime history’s greatest scientific breakthrough was working out longitude, the distance (measured in degrees, minutes, and seconds) of how far a point is, either East or West, of the Prime (Greenwich) Meridian. Dr Karl unravels this discovery with Kevin Sumption and James Hunter from the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney, as they talk about the history of navigation and their 2016 exhibition, Ships, Clocks and Stars: The Quest for Longitude. Hear about extraordinary nautical instruments, different methodologies for calculating longitude, and the impact of these inventions and explorations on the world today.

Over 200 million people are infected with malaria every year. Dr Alice Williamson, research chemist, lecturer and science communicator at the University of Sydney talks to Dr Karl about her work with Open Source Malaria. This is a worldwide drug discovery project that shares all data and results (no patents please!) in an incredible collaborative effort to tackle the disease. Hear about the problems encountered, Alice’s work in the lab, the thrill of working together with high school and undergraduate students, and the problem researchers are hoping to have that will point towards a possible cure.

Part Two reveals what happened when one, and then two (!!) of the Kepler Spacecraft reaction wheels went to lunch, how the news almost drove Dr Karl to whiskey, and how the engineers found a brilliant solution and continued on with Kepler Mission 2. A jaw-dropping discussion about the discoveries made, including potentially habitable earth-sized planets, the inconstancy of stars, and the probability of finding evidence of life beyond planet Earth.

Dr Karl looks to the stars to kick off his new podcast with NASA Ames research astrophysicist Dr Natalie Batalha, the Kepler Mission Scientist. From 2009 to 2013, the Kepler Space telescope looked for exoplanets – planets outside our solar system. It stared unblinkingly at a patch of sky which Dr Batalha had selected hoping to find not just exoplanets, but exoplanets in the Goldilocks zone. Find out what happened, what can go wrong and how Dr Karl’s mind was blown to astronomical proportions.