IFLScience - We Have Questions

DNA analysis confirmed in 2023 that a trapdoor spider lost to science had been rediscovered in the Portuguese village it was named after following a 92-year disappearance. Fagilde’s trapdoor spider (Nemesia berlandi) was first described in 1931 before apparently dropping out of existence – but all that changed when an expedition team happened to look under just the right rock. 

It marked the 12th “most wanted” lost species to be rediscovered since Re:wild’s Search for Lost Species launched in 2017, which got us wondering: how on Earth does such an epic mission unfold? Fagilde’s trapdoor spider was rediscovered by an expedition team led by the Global Center for Species Survival at the Indianapolis Zoo, where Sérgio Henriques is the resident Invertebrate Conservation Coordinator. We caught up with Henriques to find out just how much work goes into tracking down a missing spider. 

Stick two humans in an enclosed space with nothing to do, and before long, someone is likely to suggest a game of I Spy. Kids are so hot for smartphone games that it inspired its own meme format, and while certain generations might like to tell you this compulsion is a new thing – the fact is, humans have been playing games for thousands of years.

It’s believed that gaming actually predates language, begging the question: why do humans play games? We spoke to Kelly Clancy, a neuroscientist and author of Playing With Reality: How Games Shape Our World, to find out.

From the brain-exploding Martians of Mars Attacks! to the wonderful diversity of Men In Black’s extraterrestrial entourage, the possibility of alien life is a concept that has captured the imagination of our entire planet. Most of us only get to explore it at the movies – but for some scientists, the search for alien earths is at the core of their career. 

One such scientist is Professor Lisa Kaltenegger, an astronomer who quite literally wrote the book on Alien Earths. That was why we were so excited to catch up with her at CURIOUS Live to find out what the search for life elsewhere in the universe actually entails, and how we even know what to be on the lookout for. 

Point Nemo is the most remote place on Earth, the coordinates where – most of the time – the nearest humans are those occasionally whizzing overhead on the International Space Station. They sail by at a lofty 408 kilometers (253 miles) above the water’s surface, but recently a father-son explorer duo went splashing through the waters of Point Nemo. 

Chris Brown is on a mission to become the first person to tick off traversing all of the “Poles Of Inaccessibility”, and on his latest adventure, he brought along his son, Mika. It would take them 2,688 kilometers (1,670 miles) from the nearest land – a journey that brought with it enormous swells, incredible sea sickness, and a surprise attack from an animal just as they reached the finish line. So, what was it? 

Geese are famously aggressive animals whose sassy attitude appears to be crucial to their social rank. Large in size with peculiar "geese teeth", they can be scary, and yet despite this, 45 percent of Britons reckon they could take on a goose. It’s a curious question that got two naturalists wondering: isn’t it time someone did a podcast on how many animals you could take in a fight? 

That’s just one segment of How Many Geese, a nature podcast headed up by Jack Baddams and Roddy Shaw that aims to bring comedy and science together. We caught up with the duo to find out how an expedition to Madagascar led them to podcasting, what sort of animals they’re fighting (theoretically), and what on Earth is up with the world’s biggest wild goose being poisonous. 

Sometimes surgeons need to remove parts of our bodies to make them healthy, but where do those sections of human go? They can be destroyed, but other times – with the patient’s consent – they are handed over to scientists to see what we can learn from diseased tissues.

Those scientists work in what we call tissue banks, or biobanks, and they are a curious place indeed. As a technician, you never quite know when – or what – is going to arrive in a bucket at the door, but when it does, they must be treated as rare and valuable, because they are.

Removing a tumor doctors hardly ever get to see could be the pivotal moment that leads to a novel therapy, or even a cure, and we have the donors of these tissues to thank for the opportunity. It’s a rich, varied, and unusual place to work, and as luck would have it IFLScience’s very own custom content manager Dr Beccy Corkill used to work in one. So, we sat her down to find out what it’s really like.

Episode 2 of the We Have Questions podcast asks “What’s It Like Working In A Human Tissue Bank?” - a question taken from issue 21 of CURIOUS, IFLScience's e-magazine. Also in this issue, we ask if animals have friends, what was the first work of “art”, and we meet author Professor Chris Lintott and read an excerpt from his new book Our Accidental Universe.

Submerged settlements, also known as sunken cities, might sound mythical but they are very real, and while their migration underwater makes them harder to find, it can also preserve them far better than they would have fared surface-side. Marine archaeologist Professor Jon Henderson knows this all too well. As Head of Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh, his studies have taken him from the frozen crannogs of Scotland to the submerged ancient town of Pavlopetri in southern Laconia, Greece. 

Underwater archaeology pits researchers in a race against time as they must study ruins emerging from the sediment before the sea has a chance to wash vital information away. So how do they end up underwater, and what’s in a marine archaeologist's toolkit to capture sunken cities before it’s too late?

Episode 1 of the We Have Questions podcast asks “How Do Sunken Cities End Up Underwater?” - a question taken from issue 20 of CURIOUS, IFLScience's e-magazine. Also in this issue, we ask if technology helps or harms grief, if there is any truth to personality tests, and we meet author Dr Jen Gunter and read an excerpt from her new book BLOOD: The Science, Medicine, and Mythology of Menstruation.

Join IFLScience as we explore the questions nobody thought to ask but everyone wants the answers to. Get the behind-the-scenes conversations from CURIOUS magazine’s We Have Questions interviews, as we hunt down the experts to answer some of science’s stranger questions.