Talking Science

Stavros kinnas

Talking Science is your weekly dive into the wonders of the scientific world. Join our hosts as they break down complex ideas into fun, engaging conversations—covering everything from cutting-edge discoveries and mind-bending theories to everyday science that shapes our lives. Whether you’re a curious learner, a science enthusiast, or just someone who loves a good "aha!" moment, Talking Science makes big ideas accessible, entertaining, and thought-provoking.

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Yesterday · 25 min
Sagittarius A* – The Monster at the Milky Way's Heart
On a clear, dark night, away from city lights, the Milky Way arcs overhead as a soft river of stars — and buried in the dense, glowing crowd of that river's centre sits something almost too strange to picture: a supermassive black hole roughly four million times heavier than our Sun, compressed into a region smaller than the orbit of Mercury. This episode follows the decades-long detective story that revealed it, from patiently tracked stars swinging around an invisible point, to the 2020 Nobel Prize, to the blurry orange ring released to the world in 2022 as the first image of our own galaxy's central black hole. You'll come away understanding what a black hole actually is and isn't, how astronomers weighed something they couldn't see by watching stars orbit it, why Sagittarius A* is strangely calm compared with the ferocious black holes blazing at the centres of other galaxies, what the Event Horizon Telescope actually captured, and why nobody yet has a settled answer for how black holes this large came to exist so early in the universe's history. Talking Science is sponsored by Kinsoft. Visit www.kinsoft.com.au Further reading: NASA – "Black Holes" overview and Sagittarius A* mission pages; Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration – public results on the 2022 image of Sagittarius A*; The Nobel Prize (Nobel Foundation) – 2020 Physics Prize scientific background; European Southern Observatory (ESO) – long-term Galactic Centre star-tracking research.
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Tuesday · 26 min
Fossils – How Life Turns to Stone
Turning into a fossil is far rarer than a museum full of skeletons might suggest - it takes a specific, unlikely sequence of chance and chemistry, and most living things that have ever existed left no trace at all. This episode looks at how life occasionally turns to stone, how scientists work out how old that stone actually is, and what two remarkable Australian sites reveal about deep time. You'll come away understanding why fossilisation is so rare, the difference between permineralisation, moulds, casts and trace fossils, what makes an exceptional fossil site a Lagerstätte, how fossils are actually dated, why an incomplete fossil record doesn't undermine the evidence for evolution, and what makes Riversleigh and the Flinders Ranges globally significant. Talking Science is sponsored by Kinsoft. Visit www.kinsoft.com.au Further reading: Australian Museum, Geoscience Australia, Natural History Museum (London), Nature
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Sunday · 23 min
Friction – The Force That Wears the World Down
Friction is so ordinary that it's easy to overlook - it's the reason your shoes grip the footpath and your car can stop at a red light - but it's also one of the biggest sources of wasted energy in the modern world, and stranger, at the microscopic level, than it first appears. This episode gets into what friction actually is and why it doesn't always behave the way intuition suggests. You'll come away understanding the difference between static and kinetic friction, why a smoother surface doesn't always mean less friction, how lubrication actually works, why friction costs the world such an enormous amount of energy, how brakes, tyres and ball bearings put friction to work, and how your own joints manage to stay almost frictionless for a lifetime. Talking Science is sponsored by Kinsoft. Visit www.kinsoft.com.au Further reading: Scientific American, Nature, CSIRO, Australian Academy of Science
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October 1 · 22 min
Blood – The Most Complicated Fluid You Own
Blood looks simple - a red liquid that appears whenever you're cut - but it's actually one of the most sophisticated tissues in the human body, carrying oxygen, fighting infection, repairing wounds and ferrying chemical messages between organs, all at once. This episode pulls a single drop apart to explore what it's really made of and why it matters. You'll come away understanding what red cells, white cells, platelets and plasma each actually do, how bone marrow manufactures new blood cells around the clock, why blood types exist and why transfusion compatibility can be a matter of life and death, what causes anaemia, and what a routine blood test is really measuring. Talking Science is sponsored by Kinsoft. Visit www.kinsoft.com.au Further reading: Australian Red Cross Lifeblood, Better Health Channel (Victorian Government), Nature, Scientific American
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September 29 · 24 min
Meteorites – Rocks That Fall from the Sky
Every day, tonnes of material from space drift down through Earth's atmosphere, and every so often a fragment survives the fall intact enough to land in someone's paddock, or their letterbox. In this episode we trace the journey from meteoroid to meteor to meteorite, explore what these ancient fragments reveal about the birth of the solar system, and visit some of the extraordinary places on Earth, including Australia's own Nullarbor Plain, where they're found. You'll come away understanding the difference between a meteoroid, a meteor and a meteorite, how atmospheric entry actually works, what the main types of meteorites tell us about the asteroids and planets they came from, why the Murchison meteorite is one of the most scientifically important rocks ever found on Australian soil, how impact craters form, and how scientists once dismissed the very idea of stones falling from the sky before painstaking evidence changed their minds. Talking Science is sponsored by Kinsoft. Visit www.kinsoft.com.au Further reading: NASA, Geoscience Australia, Museums Victoria, Australian Museum
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September 27 · 26 min
Minerals and Mining – The Rocks Underneath the Economy
Every phone, car battery, kitchen bench and steel beam traces back to rock pulled out of the ground somewhere, shaped over geological time by processes most of us never think about. This episode explains what a mineral and an ore actually are, how the Pilbara's ancient banded iron formations came to hold so much of the world's iron, how bauxite becomes aluminium and how lithium and rare earths are found and refined, how modern exploration locates ore bodies, and the genuine environmental trade-offs involved in digging them up and putting the land back together afterwards. You'll come away understanding the difference between a mineral, a rock and an ore, how ore bodies form geologically, why Western Australia's Pilbara region holds such vast iron ore reserves, what bauxite and lithium mining and refining actually involve, how geologists search for new deposits, and what's genuinely difficult, and what's genuinely improving, about mining's environmental legacy and rehabilitation. Talking Science is sponsored by Kinsoft. Visit www.kinsoft.com.au Further reading: Geoscience Australia – mineral resources and ore genesis public information; CSIRO – research on mineral exploration and mine site rehabilitation; Western Australian Department of Mines, Industry Regulation and Safety – Pilbara iron ore and mining data; Nature Geoscience – reviews on ore deposit formation.
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September 24 · 23 min
Pressure – From the Deep Sea to Diamond Anvils
Your ears popping on a flight, a sealed bag of chips ballooning up at cruising altitude, a pressure cooker cutting a stew's cooking time in half — all of it is the same simple physical idea showing up in everyday life. This episode explains what pressure actually is, why the crushing weight of the atmosphere above us goes entirely unnoticed, how pressure quietly rewrites the boiling point of water, what happens to the human body in the deep ocean and why divers have to ascend slowly, and how scientists squeeze tiny samples between diamonds hard enough to recreate the conditions inside a planet's core. You'll come away understanding pressure as force spread over an area, why atmospheric pressure doesn't crush us, how altitude and sealed vessels change boiling point, why deep-sea animals cope fine with pressures that would kill a diver who surfaced too quickly, what decompression sickness actually is, and what a diamond anvil cell can reveal about matter under extreme conditions. Talking Science is sponsored by Kinsoft. Visit www.kinsoft.com.au Further reading: NOAA Ocean Exploration – public information on deep-sea pressure and hydrothermal vent life; Divers Alert Network – patient and diver education on decompression sickness; Nature Physics and Science – research features on diamond anvil cell experiments; Bureau of Meteorology – background on atmospheric pressure.
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September 22 · 24 min
Anaesthesia – Switching Consciousness Off and On
Every day, in operating theatres all over Australia, people are deliberately, reversibly switched off, their pain, memory and movement suspended long enough for a surgeon to work, and then switched safely back on again. This episode explores the different kinds of anaesthesia, from numbing a single tooth to erasing consciousness entirely, what anaesthetic drugs actually do to nerve signalling, and the surprisingly honest scientific fact that nobody yet fully understands how general anaesthesia achieves what it does. You'll come away understanding the difference between local, regional and general anaesthesia, how anaesthetic drugs interfere with nerve signals at the cellular level, why the exact mechanism of general anaesthesia remains a genuinely open scientific question, how depth of anaesthesia is monitored during surgery, what intraoperative awareness is and how rare it really is, and why the development of anaesthesia transformed what surgery could achieve. Talking Science is sponsored by Kinsoft. Visit www.kinsoft.com.au Further reading: Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists (ANZCA) – patient information on anaesthesia and safety; Royal Australasian College of Surgeons – history of anaesthesia and surgery; Nature Reviews Neuroscience – reviews on the neurobiology of general anaesthesia; National Institutes of Health – overviews of anaesthetic pharmacology.
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September 20 · 25 min
Radio Astronomy – Listening to the Invisible Sky
The night sky isn't only the pinpricks of starlight we see with our eyes — it's also quietly broadcasting on wavelengths we can't see at all, and for the last century a small community of scientists has been learning to listen. This episode traces radio astronomy from an accidental discovery of cosmic static at a telephone company, through the giant dishes and continent-spanning arrays used to hear it properly, to two of Australia's flagship instruments in the outback of Western Australia and New South Wales. You'll come away understanding what radio waves are and why they reveal things visible light physically cannot, how Karl Jansky stumbled onto cosmic radio noise while chasing a phone-line problem, how a radio dish and an interferometer actually work, what the 21 centimetre hydrogen line lets astronomers map, what pulsars and fast radio bursts are, and why Australia's dish at Parkes and the Square Kilometre Array in the Western Australian outback occupy such a special place in this science. Talking Science is sponsored by Kinsoft. Visit www.kinsoft.com.au Further reading: CSIRO – Parkes (Murriyang) radio telescope and ASKAP public science pages; ICRAR (International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research); SKA Observatory – public information on the Square Kilometre Array; NASA – Imagine the Universe, radio astronomy overview.
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September 17 · 24 min
The Arid Zone – How Life Works in the Australian Outback
Roughly seventy per cent of Australia is arid or semi-arid, yet the outback is far from empty: it runs on a distinctive boom-and-bust rhythm built around unpredictable rain. This episode explores why the continent is so dry, the water-saving adaptations of plants like spinifex and mulga and animals from kangaroos to burrowing frogs, and the role of fire, feral species and tens of thousands of years of Aboriginal land management in shaping this landscape. You'll come away understanding why Australia's interior is so dry and why its soils are so old and nutrient-poor, how boom-and-bust ecology works after rain, the specific water-saving adaptations of arid-zone plants and animals, why fire and cultural burning matter so much to this landscape, and how feral species and climate change are placing new pressure on one of the most distinctive ecosystems on Earth. Talking Science is sponsored by Kinsoft. Visit www.kinsoft.com.au Further reading: CSIRO – research on arid zone ecology and Australian biodiversity; Australian Museum – outback and arid zone species explainers; Bureau of Meteorology – climate and rainfall variability in arid Australia; Australian Government (Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water) – Indigenous land and fire management resources.
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September 15 · 27 min
Fire and Explosives – Chemistry in a Hurry
Fire and explosives are, at heart, the same chemistry running at wildly different speeds: rapid oxidation releasing energy. This episode covers the fire triangle, why flames take the shape and colour they do, what activation energy means, and what genuinely separates an explosive from an ordinary fuel — strictly the underlying science, with no preparation methods, formulations, quantities or procedures discussed. You'll come away understanding what combustion actually is at the molecular level, the three ingredients every fire needs and how each is used to put a fire out, why some materials ignite far more easily than others, the difference between deflagration and detonation, and how this same fast chemistry is safely harnessed in car engines, mining, demolition and the airbag in a steering wheel. Talking Science is sponsored by Kinsoft. Visit www.kinsoft.com.au Further reading: CSIRO – bushfire behaviour and fire science research; Australasian Fire and Emergency Service Authorities Council (AFAC) – public fire science resources; Nature – reviews on combustion chemistry; Nobel Prize organisation – background on Alfred Nobel and the history of explosives safety.
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September 13 · 26 min
Smell and Taste – The Chemical Senses
Smell and taste are the body's chemical senses, detecting actual molecules rather than light or sound, and between them they quietly create most of what we experience as flavour. This episode explores how olfactory receptors work as molecular locks, why smell connects so directly to memory and emotion, the five basic tastes, and why chilli heat and mint's coolness are really pain and temperature signals in disguise. You'll come away understanding how smell and taste receptors actually detect molecules, why a single scent can trigger a vivid memory almost instantly, what the five basic tastes are and how umami earned its place among them, why most of what you call flavour is actually retronasal smell rather than taste, why capsaicin and menthol trick your body's temperature and pain sensors, and what losing your sense of smell reveals about how much quiet work it normally does. Talking Science is sponsored by Kinsoft. Visit www.kinsoft.com.au Further reading: The Nobel Prize – Linda B. Buck and Richard Axel's 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for olfactory receptor research; Monell Chemical Senses Center – public research summaries on smell and taste; Australian Academy of Science – explainers on the senses; Nature – reviews on olfaction, taste receptors and chemesthesis.
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September 10 · 21 min
The Oort Cloud – The Edge of the Solar System
Far beyond Neptune, past even the icy Kuiper Belt, astronomers believe an enormous, invisible shell of ancient comets surrounds the entire solar system: the Oort Cloud. This episode traces how a Dutch astronomer inferred its existence from comet orbits alone, why it has never been directly observed, how it differs from the closer, flatter Kuiper Belt, and what "the edge of the solar system" actually means once you look closely at the question. You'll come away understanding what the Oort Cloud is thought to be and how it likely formed, why long-period comets are the key evidence for its existence, the difference between the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud, what the heliopause is and how it differs from the Oort Cloud as a definition of the solar system's edge, and why honest science communication means treating the Oort Cloud as a well-supported hypothesis rather than a confirmed, directly observed structure. Talking Science is sponsored by Kinsoft. Visit www.kinsoft.com.au Further reading: NASA – "Oort Cloud" and "Kuiper Belt" overview pages (Solar System Exploration); European Space Agency – background on comets and the outer solar system; Australian Academy of Science – public astronomy explainers; Scientific American – features on comet origins and the outer solar system.
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September 8 · 25 min
El Niño and La Niña – Australia's Boom-and-Bust Rainfall
Ask an Australian farmer about the years that stick in their memory and you'll usually hear about extremes: a drought so long the dams cracked, or a wet season so relentless the paddocks turned to lakes. Much of that boom-and-bust rhythm traces back to a single, slow-moving climate pattern playing out across the tropical Pacific Ocean, thousands of kilometres from any Australian coastline. This episode explains El Niño and La Niña in plain terms, from trade winds and the Walker circulation to bushfire risk, flooding, the Indian Ocean Dipole, and the real, honest limits of forecasting them. You'll come away understanding what the El Niño–Southern Oscillation actually is, why it swings Australia between drought and flood, how the Indian Ocean Dipole adds a second layer to the picture, and how the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO track and forecast these patterns, along with a realistic sense of how far ahead that forecasting can actually see. Talking Science is sponsored by Kinsoft. Visit www.kinsoft.com.au Further reading: Bureau of Meteorology – ENSO Outlook and Indian Ocean Dipole updates; CSIRO – climate research on ENSO and Australian rainfall variability; Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO – State of the Climate reports; World Meteorological Organization – seasonal climate outlook resources.
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September 6 · 26 min
Glass – The Solid That Never Quite Settled
There's a persistent piece of trivia that old windows are thicker at the bottom because glass slowly flows downward over centuries, like an extremely patient liquid. It's a wonderful story, and it's wrong, but working out exactly why it's wrong opens up one of the more genuinely strange materials in everyday life. This episode looks at what actually makes glass different from ordinary crystalline solids, how it's made, why it's transparent, how toughened and laminated glass are engineered to fail safely, and how ultra-pure glass fibres ended up carrying the modern internet. You'll come away understanding the real difference between amorphous and crystalline solids, why the old-glass-flows myth persists despite being false, how sand becomes a window, why glass lets light through at all, what makes toughened glass shatter the way it does, and how a hair-thin strand of glass can carry a conversation across an ocean at the speed of light. Talking Science is sponsored by Kinsoft. Visit www.kinsoft.com.au Further reading: Corning Museum of Glass – public education resources on glass science and history; American Chemical Society – explainers on amorphous solids and the glass transition; CSIRO – research on optical fibre and photonics; Nature Materials – reviews on the physics of glass.
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September 3 · 20 min
Hearing and Balance – Physics Inside Your Skull
Walk out of a loud concert and the world sounds muffled, with a faint ring that takes hours to fade — a small, temporary demonstration of just how much delicate mechanical engineering is packed into a space smaller than a coin. This episode follows sound on its journey from vibrating air to nerve signal, through the eardrum, the three smallest bones in the human body, and a fluid-filled spiral called the cochlea, before turning to the inner ear's other job: keeping you balanced. You'll come away understanding how the ear matches airborne sound to the fluid inside the cochlea, how the cochlea sorts sound into pitches, why hair cell damage from noise is usually permanent, how the vestibular system detects movement and tilt, and what's actually happening during vertigo, motion sickness and tinnitus. Talking Science is sponsored by Kinsoft. Visit www.kinsoft.com.au Further reading: National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) – public guides on hearing and balance; Better Hearing Australia and Audiology Australia – hearing health resources; Nature Reviews Neuroscience – reviews on cochlear hair cell function; World Health Organization – guidance on safe listening and noise-induced hearing loss.
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September 1 · 23 min
Eclipses – The Cosmic Coincidence
Stand under a leafy tree during a partial solar eclipse and something strange happens to the ground: instead of round blobs of sunlight, you get hundreds of tiny crescents, every gap between the leaves quietly turning into a pinhole camera. This episode explains why solar and lunar eclipses happen at all, unpacks the extraordinary coincidence of size and distance that makes total eclipses possible, and traces the science from ancient eclipse records through to the 1919 expedition that helped confirm Einstein's general relativity. You'll come away understanding the difference between solar and lunar eclipses, why eclipses don't happen every month, what the saros cycle is, what actually happens during totality, how a solar eclipse once helped prove one of the twentieth century's biggest scientific ideas, and how to watch one safely. Talking Science is sponsored by Kinsoft. Visit www.kinsoft.com.au Further reading: NASA – eclipse science and safety pages; Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand and Astronomical Society of Australia – public eclipse guides; Nature – historical coverage of the 1919 Eddington eclipse expedition; Bureau of Meteorology and Geoscience Australia – public astronomy resources.
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August 30 · 20 min
Ocean Currents – The Planet's Conveyor Belt
The ocean isn't the calm, flat expanse it can look like from the shore — it's laced with enormous rivers of moving water, from wind-driven surface currents to a slow deep circulation spanning the entire globe. This episode traces ocean currents from the Coriolis effect and rotating gyres down into thermohaline circulation, heat transport, upwelling and fisheries, closing with an honest look at the uncertainty around a possible slowdown in deep circulation. You'll come away understanding how wind and the Coriolis effect combine to create gyres like the East Australian Current, what drives the slow, deep thermohaline circulation and where its dense water masses form, how ocean currents move heat around the planet and shape regional climate, why upwelling zones support such disproportionately rich fisheries, and what scientists do and don't yet know about a possible weakening of the Atlantic overturning circulation. Talking Science is sponsored by Kinsoft. Visit www.kinsoft.com.au Further reading: NOAA – ocean currents and thermohaline circulation overviews; CSIRO – research on the East Australian Current; Nature – research on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation; Scientific American – features on ocean circulation and climate.
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August 27 · 21 min
Metals and Alloys – The Materials That Built Civilisation
A spoon bends; a ceramic mug shatters. That simple kitchen-table difference comes down to a "sea of electrons" binding metal atoms together, and it's the same basic idea that carried humanity from bronze swords to stainless steel sinks. This episode traces metallic bonding, smelting, the Bronze and Iron Ages, alloying, corrosion, and aluminium's surprisingly late arrival as an everyday material. You'll come away understanding what metallic bonding actually is and why it explains a metal's properties, why metals conduct electricity and heat so well, why they bend rather than shatter, how smelting turns ore into usable metal, why bronze and later steel transformed ancient technology, how alloying lets engineers deliberately design a material's properties, why stainless steel resists rust when ordinary steel doesn't, and why aluminium was once valued more highly than gold. Talking Science is sponsored by Kinsoft. Visit www.kinsoft.com.au Further reading: Royal Society of Chemistry – resources on metallic bonding and metallurgy; ASM International – materials science and the history of alloys; CSIRO – Australian materials science research; Encyclopaedia Britannica – history of the Bronze Age and Iron Age.
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August 25 · 23 min
Vision – How the Eye Builds a Picture
The sharp, seamless, full-colour picture you seem to be looking at right now isn't a direct recording of the world — it's a construction, built by your brain from a stream of messy and genuinely incomplete signals. This episode follows light on its journey from the cornea to the visual cortex, covering rods and cones, the blind spot, three-channel colour vision, and why optical illusions count as scientific evidence rather than mere party tricks. You'll come away understanding how the eye focuses light onto the retina, why rods and cones divide labour between night vision and colour vision, what causes the blind spot and why you never notice it, how just three types of cone can produce a near-limitless range of perceived colour, why illusions reveal the assumptions the brain relies on to fill in gaps, and what's actually going wrong in short-sightedness, long-sightedness, astigmatism and colour blindness. Talking Science is sponsored by Kinsoft. Visit www.kinsoft.com.au Further reading: American Academy of Ophthalmology – patient education on how the eye works; National Eye Institute (part of the US National Institutes of Health) – vision basics and common eye conditions; Scientific American – features on visual perception and optical illusions.
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