Ockham’s Razor

Have you been unlucky in love?

Keep swiping right on the wrong ones?

Well just remember it could be worse. You could be a male spider.

Let's get empathetic for these arachnids who live in constant fear their partner's going to bite their head off – literally.

Guest: 

Anastasia ShavrovaPhD candidate, School of Biological, Earth, and Environmental Science, UNSW Sydney

Host:

Tegan Taylor

Producer:

Gemma Conroy, Tegan Taylor

When you're feeling down, are you someone who needs to hear a sad song to let your emotions out, or do you seek out an upbeat track to pump up your mood?

Do you think we're alone in the universe? Could there be other life out there?

And, whether there is or isn't, how does life come to be, anyway?

(Is this sounding a little like your mate on a camping trip getting a bit too deep while looking up at all those stars?)

Well, this time we're hearing from someone who's trying to unpick the origins of life — here on Earth, and maybe other places too.

Does your routine when planning any outdoor activity involve checking the weather radar for rain?

Sometimes you can see a clear radar and it's raining – and sometimes, that radar image shows heaps of activity but there's not a cloud in the sky… so what's happening?

Rebecca Rogers, who's a techno-ecologist, is big into using radar – but not for weather watching…

Flexible. Innovative. Sensitive.

They're attributes of the next generation of electronics. They're also great attributes in the people who are designing them.

Madhu Bhaskaran is an engineer who embodies all the qualities we mentioned before – and she knows that coming up with new tech is only the first step in a long journey to market.

To say that malaria elimination is close to home for Varunika Ruwanpura is an understatement.

Her mum literally gave birth to her while sick with malaria.

Varunika is now lending a hand in the fight for elimination.

She's chosen to focus on health policy – it might sound a little unsexy at first, but as she explains, it's a powerful tool many of us don't think about enough.

What makes a pig-nosed turtle's flippers so special?

What's the most dangerous creature you'll encounter on a research trip to the Amazon jungle?

What's the optimum age for freaking your kids out with wildlife cosplay?

Carla Eisemberg has the answers to all these questions and more as she gives us a tour of what it's like to be an ecology researcher and teacher.

If a tree falls in a forest and there's no one around to hear it… you've heard this one before, haven't you?

What about if someone does a groundbreaking bit of science, but no one finds out about it?

Tom Carruthers makes the case for, not just good science, but good science communication. 

When we think about climate change, we're usually looking up – towards the sky, where greenhouse gases form a heat-trapping blanket over the planet.

But some people — including Freya Mulvey — say part of the global warming equation is found in the other direction… right beneath our feet.

There are a lot of fields that claim to fuse art and science.

But while it might not be the first one that springs to mind, the field this week's speaker specialises in is arguably most worthy of the fusion.

Jared Archibald has spent a large chunk of his career as a taxidermist. It's science for sure – a knowledge of anatomy and animal behaviour are essential – but there's an artistry to it too.