Talking Science Podcast
Fossils – How Life Turns to Stone
Walk through the fossil hall of a big museum and it can seem as if the past is crowded with skeletons. Dinosaurs tower over you, ancient fish lie…
Articles
Biology & Life
Australia's Unique Wildlife – A Continent of Evolutionary Experiments
Show a visitor from another planet the animals of just one country and ask them to guess where they had landed, and Australia would give itself away…
Biodiversity and Ecosystems
Walk through a patch of bush, or even a suburban backyard, and it is natural to see it as a collection of separate things. A magpie on the fence, a…
Convergent Evolution – Nature Repeating Itself
A dolphin and a shark glide through the water with the same sleek, torpedo-shaped bodies and the same powerful fins, yet one is a mammal that breathes…
Bioluminescence – Living Light
On a warm summer evening, points of golden light drift and blink across a darkening meadow. Fireflies are performing one of nature’s most enchanting…
Symbiosis – When Species Depend on Each Other
We often picture nature as a ruthless competition, red in tooth and claw, every creature out for itself. There is truth in that, but it is far from…
Epigenetics – Beyond the Genes
For a long time, we imagined our genes as a fixed script, handed to us at birth and unchangeable, determining everything from our height to our…
Proteins – The Molecular Machines of Life
If DNA is the instruction manual of life, proteins are the workers who actually get things done. They digest your breakfast, carry oxygen through your…
Cells – The Basic Unit of Life
Hold your hand up to the light and you are looking at roughly thirty trillion tiny machines, each one alive, busy, and quietly cooperating. Your skin,…
Extinction – The Five Great Dyings
Extinction is the normal fate of species. Over the vast sweep of Earth’s history, the overwhelming majority of creatures that ever lived have…
The Microbiome – The Trillions Living Inside You
You are never truly alone. Right now, inside your gut, on your skin, and in countless corners of your body, trillions of microscopic organisms are…
Coral Reefs – Rainforests of the Sea
Slip beneath the surface of a tropical sea and you enter one of the most crowded, colorful places on the planet. Fish in every shade dart between…
Animal Intelligence – Minds Unlike Our Own
An octopus unscrews a jar to reach the crab inside. A crow bends a piece of wire into a hook to fish food from a tube. A dolphin recognizes itself in…
Stem Cells – The Body’s Master Cells
You began life as a single cell. From that one starting point came the roughly thirty-seven trillion cells that make up your body today—the neurons…
Viruses – Alive or Not?
Somewhere on your desk right now, invisible to the eye, there may be objects that can copy themselves, evolve, and reshape the history of entire…
Genetics of Inheritance – Why You Look Like Your Parents
Look through a family photo album and a pattern jumps out. A child has her mother’s eyes, her father’s chin, and perhaps a grandparent’s unruly hair.…
The Origin of Life – From Chemistry to Biology
Somewhere in the deep past of our planet, something extraordinary happened. A world of ordinary chemistry, of rocks and water and swirling gases, gave…
Photosynthesis – How Plants Eat Sunlight
Step outside on a bright day and look at any green leaf. It seems to be doing nothing at all, just sitting there in the sun. In truth it is running…
CRISPR – Editing the Code of Life
For most of history, the genetic instructions inside living things were something we could read but not rewrite. We could study DNA, compare it, and…
Evolution by Natural Selection – The Best Idea Anyone Ever Had
Some ideas are clever. A rare few are so simple, so powerful, and so far-reaching that once you grasp them you can never see the world the same way…
DNA – The Instruction Manual for Life
Inside almost every one of your cells sits a molecule so long, so densely coiled, and so quietly important that it is easy to forget it is there at…