IFLScience - The Big Questions

The COVID-19 lockdown was a very weird time for everyone. Few can say their time was quite as unique as David Knoff and his team from the Australian Antarctic Division. Having arrived in Antarctica in late 2019, they were told in June 2020 they couldn’t return home as planned. Their mission was extended –  indefinitely – with no end in sight. All in all, Knoff and his troops were stranded in Antarctica for 537 long days.

Host Tom Hale speaks to Knoff, author of 537 Days of Winter, about working, keeping entertained, and the psychology of surviving 18 months of lockdown on the world’s most remote continent. And yes, they made sourdough.

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The fossilization process makes it possible for us to study ancient life that dates back millions – even billions – of years. 

Like detectives piecing together clues, palaeontologists can look for fragments of ancient ecosystems and piece together past landscapes. But how is it possible that something as delicate as a feather can become preserved in rock?

Host Rachael Funnell speaks to palaeontologist Professor Steve Brusatte to find out about the different kinds of clues we can find in the fossil record. From whole animals to last meals, you’d be surprised just how much we can learn from them.

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We live in an age of large language model artificial intelligence, making it possible to have lengthy conversations with a computer. These systems will discuss anything you want. Recipes. How-to guides. Even medical advice. But can we trust what they are saying?

Host Rachael Funnell speaks to Professor Hannah Fry, presenter of the BBC series AI Confidential, to find out how AI chatbots can and have become a part of people’s lives, and what can happen when such a relationship takes a turn.

Are AI chatbots safe? That is certainly a Big Question. 

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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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*Terms & Conditions: 25% OFF PROMO CODE: SCI25 offer for 1 billing period of an All Access Subscription: Annual paid subscription. New users only. Offer subject to change or cancellation at any time. Subscription auto-renews at full amount unless cancelled. You can cancel at any time. Membership paid subscriptions are only available in Canada, the United States (excluding Puerto Rico and US territories), the United Kingdom, and Australia. Our standard terms & conditions apply.

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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*Terms & Conditions: 25% OFF PROMO CODE: SCI25 offer for 1 billing period of an All Access Subscription: Annual paid subscription. New users only. Offer subject to change or cancellation at any time. Subscription auto-renews at full amount unless cancelled. You can cancel at any time. Membership paid subscriptions are only available in Canada, the United States (excluding Puerto Rico and US territories), the United Kingdom, and Australia. Our standard terms & conditions apply.

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?

You can listen to this episode and subscribe to the podcast on all your favorite podcast apps: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podbean, Amazon Music, and more.

Like what you heard? Get 25% off All Access annual memberships with code SCI25* and start funding independent science journalism today. 

*Terms & Conditions: 25% OFF PROMO CODE: SCI25 offer for 1 billing period of an All Access Subscription: Annual paid subscription. New users only. Offer subject to change or cancellation at any time. Subscription auto-renews at full amount unless cancelled. You can cancel at any time. Membership paid subscriptions are only available in Canada, the United States (excluding Puerto Rico and US territories), the United Kingdom, and Australia. Our standard terms & conditions apply.