Sunday Extra - Separate stories podcast

2025 is UNESCO's International Year of Quantum Science and Technology and so the annual Marie Curie lecture series is being given by two women who have already made their mark in the world of quantum physics in spintronics and quantum computing. While Marie Curie was usually the only woman in a room of physicists, these two physicists report that the percentage of women in their field remains stubbornly low.

Guests: Dr Danielle Holmes, Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer at UNSW and Dr Sol Jacobsen is Group Leader at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology NTNU

Santiago Velasquez Hurtado has just graduated with a degree in electrical engineering at QUT and he is only the second blind person in the southern hemisphere to do so. He is also developing technologies to solve accessibility issues in transport, navigation, business, education and employment. What problems did he have to solve in completing a degree while vision impaired.

Guest: Santiago Velasquez Hurtado 

The sale of illicit tobacco in Australia is rampant, with high tobacco prices fuelling demand for cheaper cigarettes.

More than a decade after Australia introduced world first plain packaging for tobacco, is Australia losing the war on smoking?

GUEST:

Becky Freeman Professor of Public Health at the University of Sydney 

The 25th Garma Festival is a much bigger event than the first Yolgnu community meeting  back in 1999. It has now become a huge event, with arts and culture, dancing and discussion with Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians from across the country meeting together at the Gulkula Ceremonial Grounds. This year Yothu Yindi - who performed at the first Garma Festival will be performing again and the Prime Minister will also be in attendance.

Guest: Denise Bowden, CEO of the Yothu Yindi Foundation and Garma Festival Director

Hiroshima and Nagasaki will mark the 80th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb this August. Among the hundreds of thousands who died in the bombings were over 38,000 children.  The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) has created an online Children's Peace Memorial, which brings to life the stories of more than 400 of the children who died in the hours, days, weeks and years after the bombings. ICAN hopes that connecting us with their stories will remind us all of the horrors that nuclear weapons can wreak. 

Guest: Tim Wright, Treaty Coordinator at ICAN, and the initiator of the Children’s Peace Memorial (childrenspeacememorial.org)

This week's tweeter is the Brown Falcon.

It's a medium-sized bird of prey, measuring about 40- to 50-centimetres. And, like its close relatives, females tend to be larger than males.

If you see it perched on a fence post, you might notice its distinctive, dark "tear-drop" stripe running down from the eye.

It hunts creatures such as small mammals, birds, lizards, snakes and insects across Australia and New Guinea.

Peter de Waal arrived in Australia in 1957 from the Netherlands as a young man uncertain about his sexuality. Within ten years he had found his life partner Peter Bonsall Boone known as Bon and together they joined the first gay activist movement CAMP and remained campaigners for a better life for the gay community for the rest of their lives. From appearing on television for the first male to male kiss, attending the first mardi gras, they even campaigned for marriage equality. Sadly Bon died before they could marry. 

Guest: Peter de Waal, author of his memoir It Wasn't Dutch Courage. You can order a copy of his book from Australian Books Online. 

There’s a city wide Open House in Melbourne this weekend.

Churches, banks, numerous private houses and public buildings - even an Egyptian style mausoleum - have thrown open their doors  for the event “Open House Melbourne” run by the independent not-for-profit also called Open House Melbourne.

GUEST:

Tania Davidge Executive Director of Open House Melbourne.

Whether you favour a thumbs up, a laughing face, or a smiling poop, chances are you’ve used an emoji.

There’s currently 3790 different emojis sitting in your phone. And the ominous-sounding Unicode Consortium is in charge of exactly which images of flags, faces and faeces are allowed.

Emojis have captivated society, from love-hearting posts on Instagram, to rating our bathroom experience on a scale of smiley faces. They capture something that words alone do not. New ones are regularly added like we add to the dictionary... so should we be thinking of emojis like a new language?

Guest: Keith Houston, author of 'Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji'.

The United Kingdom has just announced that it will be lowering the voting age to 16 for all future elections. But the UK is not the first country to make these voting reforms, with several countries in Europe and Latin America already allowing 16 and 17 year olds to vote, either nationally or regionally. Social scientist Christine Huebner, has spent years researching youth voting, and her conclusion is - lowering the voting age does not have any negative side effects for democracy. 

Guest: Christine Huebner, Lecturer in Quantitative Social Sciences at the University of Sheffield