The 13 best science and nature podcast episodes from ABC Conversations
Does a serving of science or some fascinating nature facts get your synapses firing?
Are you feeling some serious holiday podcast bingeing coming on?
Well, look no further my inquisitive, science-minded friend. From marine biology and psychology to computer science and palaeontology, we’ve got you covered.
We’ve pulled together a collection of ABC Conversations’ episodes where Richard Fidler and Sarah Kanowski spoke to scientists and other experts, who shared captivating tales about their discoveries.
1. The hunt for deep-sea bioluminescence
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Guest: Edith Widder, marine biologist
Highlights: In the dark regions of the world’s oceans, strange, wonderful creatures make spectacular light displays called bioluminescence, which Widder has spent her career studying.
Inside submersibles, she has been lowered into the depths of the ocean, where she has seen jellyfish that squirt luminescence, viperfish with fangs large enough to “impale its own brain”, and a giant squid as big as a two-storey house.
2. Monkeys, Attenborough and filming planet Earth
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Guest: Chadden Hunter, biologist and wildlife filmmaker
Highlights: In his quest to capture the natural environment on film, Hunter has had hair-raising encounters with Arctic wolves, polar bears, and parasitic worms (in his brain!) and made an otherworldly discovery in a volcanic ice cave in Antarctica.
3. What happens while we’re under anaesthesia?
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Guest: Kate Cole-Adams, writer and journalist
Highlights: Cole-Adams has discovered what happens to our brains while we dwell in the chemical oblivion of general anaesthetic.
She also shares the very rare cases where people have woken up during a procedure when their anaesthetic has worn off too early.
4. On the trail of the mega-shark
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Guest: Tim Flannery, palaeontologist and environmentalist
Highlights: When Flannery was a boy, he found a fossilised tooth of a prehistoric shark, that was as large as his palm.
The find changed the course of his life as he dedicated his studies to uncovering the secrets of the world’s largest ever predator — the great shark Otodus megalodon.
5. The whistling frogs of Fiji’s forests
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Guest: Nunia Thomas-Moko, herpetologist and conservationist
Highlights: Thomas-Moko is Fiji’s leading expert in rare frogs and crested iguanas.
In her fascinating interview, Thomas-Moko describes working in Fiji’s cloud, wet and dry forests among diverse wildlife — from riotously coloured birds that hoot and bark and monkey-faced flying foxes, to listening out for the devilish low whistle of the endangered Fijian ground frog.
6. Could we live to 120?
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Guest: David Sinclair, geneticist
Highlights: Sinclair is leading the scientific fight against the inevitability of ageing, which he believes we can find a cure for.
In the process, his lab has cured blindness in mice and has created tiny little brains out of human stem cells, which look like “little flesh-coloured peas”.
7. Seeing the world through a dog’s eyes
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Guest: Laura Vissaritis, dog behaviourist and psychologist
Highlights: Vissaritis believes the increasing tendency in Australia to view our dogs as quasi-people has led to heavy expectations on many dogs.
She says when a dog is displaying “difficult” behaviours like too much barking, pulling on the lead, or jumping up on people, the first step in the process is often changing the behaviour of their human.
8. The power and perils of ChatGPT
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Guest: Toby Walsh, computer scientist
Highlights: Professor Walsh is a leading expert in artificial intelligence (AI) and charts the rise of generative AI chatbots. The likes of ChatGPT can synthesise complex information, compose a song, write computer code and even tell you what to cook for dinner.
But, despite their promise, AI creators have warned that these chatbots also present an existential threat to humanity.
9. The alluring aliens of our forests
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Guest: Alison Pouliot, ecologist and environmental photographer
Highlights: Fungi have given us many gifts, from penicillin to food, but they can also be quite scary, toxic and parasitic.
Dr Pouliot spends her time trying to understand these strange, alien-like things that are neither animal or plant. They are so different, fascinating and unknown to us that they get their own classification.
10. Lessons from slime mould — a brainless blob
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Guest: Tanya Latty, entomologist
Highlights: Latty is an insect scientist, but it’s the lessons from slime mould — a primitive organism — that she’s most fascinated by.
Latty believes the knowledge gained from studying the behaviour of slime moulds and insects could help to solve complex organisational problems in the human world.
11. The cave of lost hominids
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Guest: Lee Berger, palaeoanthropologist, explorer
Highlights: This real-life Indiana Jones has been bucking the odds.
First, he found a pair of hominid teeth in southern Africa, and then, after a fossil-hunting dry spell, his nine-year-old son found the jawbone of a completely new hominid species.
12. Yolarnie’s mission to protect the pig-nosed turtle
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Guest: Yolarnie Amepou, herpetologist, zoologist and conservationist
Highlights: From its adorable snout to the way females go into hypnosis when they lay eggs, the pig-nosed turtle is an unusual animal. But it’s also under threat from human harvesting. Amepou spends most of her time in a remote part of Papua New Guinea, researching the turtle and supporting communities along the Kikori River to conserve the turtle’s numbers.
13. Making peace with stuttering
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Guest: Jonty Claypole, writer and producer
Highlights: After a childhood stutter returned in his 30s, Claypole began to investigate the history and science of stuttering — known as disfluency — and read stories of those who have struggled with the spoken word.
He found an astonishing array of people who have lived with stuttering, including Lewis Carroll, BB King, Carly Simon, King George VI, Emily Blunt, Nicole Kidman and US President Joe Biden.
Find more episodes of the Conversations podcast on the ABC listen app.
