Sunday Extra - Separate stories podcast

“Cooking for Seamus” is a TV cooking project funded by Screen Australia.

The uniqueness of this show comes from the fact that Seamus, the judge of this cooking show, is an Angus bull with a rare palsy condition.

Peter Shmigel's story began in New York City where he grew up steeped in the culture of his Ukrainian refugee parents. His life has since included stints as a Western Sydney builder, a member of an underground resistance group, CEO of one of Australia’s leading suicide prevention service, political advisor and now correspondent for the Kyiv Post newspaper.

It’s the Ornate Burrowing Frog! 

As their name implies, these frogs spend much of their life, particularly in dry times and during the day, buried underground. They emerge to call and breed, and are known to form huge choruses with other species after heavy rains. After they breed, you'll find foamy clumps of eggs left behind.

Thanks to Dr Jodi Rowley and the Australian Museum Frog ID Project. 

Antarctica is at the frontline of witnessing the effects of climate change and Dr Chen Zhao is one of the lead researchers mapping how the Antarctic ice-sheets are affected by global warming, and the potential consequences of this on rising sea-levels. The importance of her work has now been recognised by the Australian Institute of Policy and Science, who named her one of two 2025 Young Tall Poppys of the Year.

Guest: Dr Chen Zhao, glaciologist and ice-sheet modeller with the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania.

Large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, are usually trained on Standard American English. But with all the dialects of English that exist outside of this - how do LLMs understand emotive language from non-American English speakers, especially when it comes to good old Aussie sarcasm.

Guest: Aditya Joshi, Senior Lecturer in the School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of NSW.

People on the internet love to like, in fact clicks on 'Like' buttons "now add up to over 160 billion per day - roughly equivalent to every person on the planet, from toddler to great- grandparent, clicking a Like button 20 times daily on average”.

Dr. Arne Rubinstein has spent more than 30 years helping parents and teenagers through the complex transition into adulthood through his Rites of Passage Institute, which seeks to empower young adults and their communities through positive, healthy transitions focusing on personal growth and resilience. He has now been acknowledged for his work by The Fathering Project with the award for the 2025 Australian Father of the Year.

Guest: Dr. Arne Rubinstein, CEO and Founder of the Rites of Passage Institute and recipient of The Fathering Project's Australian Father of the Year Award for 2025.

This week Federal Attorney General Michelle Rowland introduced the Freedom of Information Amendment Bill to Federal Parliament. The Centre for Public Integrity says the bill continues "a worrying trend of prioritising government efficiency over transparency”.

In 1943, Australian Attorney-General Doc Evatt sent UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill... a platypus. 

Why? For diplomacy, of course!

When it inevitably perished two days before arriving in Liverpool, our guest, in the Journal of Environment and History, wrote “Winston’s death cannot have come as a terrible surprise: he was travelling in the middle of the war, constantly under threat by German U-boats.5 He was also a platypus.”.

GUEST: Dr Harrison Croft, recently awarded a PHD from Monash University.

Dr Kate Marvel was named by Time Magazine one of 15 Women Leading the Fight Against Climate Change in 2019. She was described as someone who “cuts through misinformation about climate change with storytelling”.

She is a former cosmologist with a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Cambridge University. Her professional focus now is modelling climate change.