Biology Baubles

Often times I sit back and reflect on the late-stage capitalist world we are living in. The environment! The child labour! The lack of free handouts for lazy podcasters! In this episode, I am joined by Professor Adam Chippendale to talk about some surprising subjects of eons of persecution: Mitochondria, as well as their radically feminist “kill-all-men” cousins, the bacteria Wolbachia. Disclaimer! We at Biology Baubles (by ‘we’ I mean Thor, Thor writes this and does everything), as well as our guests fully understand that feminism is a movement about equality, not creating a utopian world of ecologically woke Amazon warriors- as nice as that would be.

Since the George Floyd protests and the movement for self-education, many horrific aspects of society were revealed to those willing to look. Today, Thor van Walsum is joined by Roshni Desai to talk about the fundamentals of one of the less visible forms taken by society’s deep set discrimination- environmental racism and environmental racialization.

Life. Air. Breath. Oxygen. They seem to go hand in hand- as, indeed, we have assumed for millenia-  but, as we all know, don’t. Why is that, and what adaptations do the creatures that creep the earth have to accommodate anoxic life? The answer will take your breath away. Truck yeah.

Any time you experience nature, be it through the lens of a nature documentary or a guided fungus walk, you are experiencing the world as it is translated to you by our human understanding. In this episode we discuss this phenomenon with regards to human and animal sexuality, as well as the moral, philosophical, and sociopolitical meanings therein. In other words, gay animals.

Take a breath. Take another. Take as many as you like, but the truth of where what you’ve breathing has been is just the tip of this episode’s iceberg as we explore the deep and diverse world of diatoms.

When someone invites you to a rave, there is a certain novelty to it- a pride in knowing that we, the modern generations, invented the concept. This is not the case. Listen to this week’s episode to find out why!

Sometimes, be it intentionally or otherwise, tidbits of terrifying misinformation leak from the scientific community into the world and cause quite the ruckus. This holiday season, Thor van Walsum updates you on the tumultuous realm that is the Australian Koala scandal, and the silent war on the world’s biggest anthropogenic landscape that caused it.

Going outside, be it in the winter, summer, spring, or fall, you are sure to be surrounded in the chatter of birds. A walk in the woods is brought to life by the passing of notes- but what are they saying, and how do different birds communicate? This episode I am joined by professor Paul Martin of Queen’s University of Canada to enlighten us on the fascinating world of bird gossip.

At some point, living organisms developped consciousness. What better way to understand where we are in the present than by investigating our past? This pilot episode, No Brainers, me and beloved on-campus singer superstar Sam Zimmerman learn about our brainless predecessors and talk about the implications of some shocking findings on various deep-sea animals.