Ockham’s Razor

If you could take your brain and zoom in a couple of times – and then a bit more – you’d see structures that look like towers and tentacles, and behave like pieces of automatic Lego. 

It’s a crazy miniature world, and one we’re going to get a tour of today.

Our tour guide is Dr Kiara Bruggeman, who’s hijacking and hacking these nano-sized structures, in the hopes of helping stroke-affected brains heal.

You know in movies, where it turns out the scrappy young hero had the power to succeed inside themselves all along – they just had to learn how to harness it?

It turns out this is more than just a storytelling trope – it can also be true for communities, recovering from disaster.

Look, don’t put your mobile phone in a blender. Just… trust me on this one.

But if you did, you’d find more of the periodic table of elements in that pulverised phone dust than you might expect.

What’s that, you want more context? Allison Britt from Geoscience Australia can explain.

We’re pretty used to walking into a supermarket and expecting the stuff we want to be on the shelf.

Or at least we were until last year, when panic-buying lifted the curtain a bit on just how complex our food supply can be.

Lucky for us, it’s something smart people are studying hard – including development economist Katie Ricketts.

We know that giving students choice and ownership over their own learning is best, but has it been lost from the education system?

When I say “brown coal”, what word comes to mind? Dirty?

Well maybe that’s fair… if you want to burn it. But Vince Verheyen reckons there’s a future for it in a net zero emissions world.

The starting point is understanding what it is, geologically, and how to make the most of its ingredients.

Why is it that so many people are horrible online? Are they always bad people?

Caveat emptor – buyer beware.

There are those places in nature that we come back to, again and again. The reason we come is because they’re so beautiful, or peaceful… but it’s the act of returning regularly that helps us notice when things are different. The landscape is telling us in those subtle changes what’s happening to it.

Why are medicos often so bad at giving us a straight answer to this question – and how could they respond better?