IFLScience - The Big Questions

Gay penguins and fish that change sex? How about birds engaging in lesbian behavior? We delve into the natural world and its often underreported queer behaviors that have frequently been steeped in historical prejudices and biases.  

From mammals and birds to squid and beetles, queer behaviors and biologies are more prevalent than you might imagine among non-human animals.

So just how queer is the natural world? Host Eleanor Higgs speaks to Josh Luke Davis, author of A Little Gay Natural History, to find out more about one of the more controversial zoological topics.

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Improving the detection and treatment of dementia is at the forefront of 21st-century neuroscience. As with many gnarly problems, experts are not united on how best to approach this. Some research garners lots of attention from press and public alike; some, much less so.

Host Laura Simmons speaks to three scientists looking at dementia from three quite different perspectives.

Fernando Gonzalez Ortiz, MD, PhD is a doctor and neuroscientist at the University of Gothenburg who specializes in blood-based biomarkers for the detection of neurological disease.

Dr Anna Mallach is an Edmond and Lily Safra Research Fellow at Imperial College London and Emerging Leader at the UK Dementia Research Institute who studies how the brain’s glia cells contribute to neurodegeneration.

Dr Ben Goult is Professor of Mechanistic Cell Biology at the University of Liverpool. His research into how cells store and use information has led to the proposal of the MeshCODE framework, which suggests that networks of proteins may act as mechanical information processing systems inside cells.

Together, these conversations take us on a journey through some emerging and innovative aspects of dementia research, and give us a glimpse at what the future may hold.

Read more from IFLScience: Alzheimer’s Drugs That Target Amyloid Plaques Have No “Meaningful” Effects, Says Major Review, Sparking Fierce Debate From Scientists

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Do you ever wish you could talk directly to your pet? Or have the Eliza Thornberry or Dr Dolittle experience for real? Unravelling the mysteries of animal speech might be closer than you think with Project CETI’s work on decoding sperm whale language. With remarkable similarities to human speech, just how far away are we from learning the language of another species?

Host Eleanor Higgs spoke to Dr David Gruber, founder & CEO of Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), about decoding whale language, what we'd ask first, and who should really be doing the talking.

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Large language models, often called artificial intelligence (AI), are everywhere nowadays. There is potential in the use of this form of AI, but also many drawbacks. Lots of excitement, plenty of concerns. The biggest worry? That AI could become conscious. Maybe they already are… 

Host Dr Alfredo Carpineti speaks to Dr Alex Hanna, sociologist and director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute, to talk about the big claims surrounding these computational approaches. 

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As global temperatures continue to rise, heatwaves, wildfires, droughts, floods, and storms are becoming more numerous, lasting longer, and affecting places that were never built to withstand them. Understandably, many people feel unsettled by this growing uncertainty - but are these disasters inevitable?

Join Dr Russell Moul as he talks to Dr Samantha Montano, a disasterologist and emergency management expert, about the ways in which disasters are changing and how societies respond to them.

They discuss who is most at risk, how climate change is reshaping planning and preparedness, why Hollywood so often gets human responses to disasters wrong, and how we can all adapt to extremes that are becoming part of the background rather than the exception.

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The world of taxonomy is a puzzling one. Some species names are grand, some are funny, some are seemingly unoriginal. Others are a hat tip to Indigenous Peoples or geographical places, while some isolate a single scientist or celebrity. This got us wondering, how exactly do you name a species?

To find out, Senior Science Writer Rachael Funnell sat down with Professor Paul Barrett, a palaeontologist at London’s Natural History Museum who has seen taxonomy from the other side, naming new species himself. He even has a dinosaur named in his honor. So what does it take to name a new species?

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Amid all the recent noise around generative AI, it’s easy to overlook the fact that there are scientists across almost any field you could think of who have been using artificial intelligence in their work – sometimes for decades. This technology is being leveraged to explore some of the most weighty and complex problems facing humanity, and medical research is no exception to this.

Host Laura Simmons speaks to Professor Florian Markowetz, Professor of Computational Oncology at the University of Cambridge and Senior Group Leader at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, to ask what may be one of the biggest questions of all: could AI find a cure for cancer?

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We don’t know if life exists beyond Earth. If it does, we don’t know if these lifeforms have technology like us or maybe even better. Perhaps they could detect us? Despite the unknowns, humans have sent messages to the stars in an attempt to communicate with hypothetical aliens. 

Host Dr Alfredo Carpineti speaks to Dr Vishal Gajjar, an astronomer with the SETI Institute, about should we, not just can we, actively message aliens and how we are already pretty noticeable to anything out there if they were looking too. 

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What is magic? Rabbits out of hats? Card tricks? Someone in a sparkly outfit getting sawn in half? Well, yes, but it’s also about defying expectations.

To psychologist and magician Dr Gustav Kuhn, founder of the UK’s only MAGIC Lab, it’s about causing you to question what you think to be real. Having practiced magic from a young age, he embarked on a psychology degree to try and get a better understanding of what made a good trick, or a good performance.

Thing is, he realized along the way that a lot of the big questions in psychology are addressed by key concepts in magic. Sleight of hand, card forces, and misdirection – it all challenges our attention and exploits our weak spots, making us believe what we see, and see what they want us to.

In this holiday bonus episode, join us as we explore the many ways in which magic is being used as a tool for science, encompassing some of the biggest challenges of our time, from cybercrime to misinformation.

In this bonus Halloween special episode of The Big Questions, IFLScience takes on the “mystery” of the Loch Ness Monster.

Although it’s been nearly 100 years since Nessie was first brought to international attention, no one has provided any unambiguous proof of its existence, and yet every year, thousands of people flock to Scotland in hopes of seeing it. To find out what’s going on, we dispatched our IFLScience Investigates team – a motley bunch of intrepid sleuths – to dig into the story’s origins, question local monster hunters, and explore the science that has taken place in the loch’s murky depths.

Join Russell Moul, Eleanor Higgs, and Katy Evans as they discuss searching for everyone’s favorite cryptid and what it was like to film IFLScience's first feature-length documentary on location, exploring this weird case. Did we find Nessie? You’ll have to listen to find out.