Ockham's Razor - Program Podcast

Living as we do in a country that’s prone to drought, it’s no surprise that the subject of irrigation for farming can become a contentious one in Australia. Stepping up to the mic today is Rose Roche, who wants to bring some much-needed nuance to the water debate… and she’s enlisting the help of fairy tales and Disney princesses.

If you could take your brain and zoom in a couple of times – and then a bit more – you’d see structures that look like towers and tentacles, and behave like pieces of automatic Lego.  It’s a crazy miniature world, and one we’re going to get a tour of today. Our tour guide is Dr Kiara Bruggeman, who’s hijacking and hacking these nano-sized structures, in the hopes of helping stroke-affected brains heal.

You know in movies, where it turns out the scrappy young hero had the power to succeed inside themselves all along – they just had to learn how to harness it? It turns out this is more than just a storytelling trope – it can also be true for communities, recovering from disaster.

Look, don’t put your mobile phone in a blender. Just… trust me on this one. But if you did, you’d find more of the periodic table of elements in that pulverised phone dust than you might expect. What’s that, you want more context? Allison Britt from Geoscience Australia can explain.

We’re pretty used to walking into a supermarket and expecting the stuff we want to be on the shelf. Or at least we were until last year, when panic-buying lifted the curtain a bit on just how complex our food supply can be. Lucky for us, it’s something smart people are studying hard – including development economist Katie Ricketts.

We know that giving students choice and ownership over their own learning is best, but has it been lost from the education system?

When I say “brown coal”, what word comes to mind? Dirty? Well maybe that’s fair… if you want to burn it. But Vince Verheyen reckons there’s a future for it in a net zero emissions world. The starting point is understanding what it is, geologically, and how to make the most of its ingredients.

Why is it that so many people are horrible online? Are they always bad people?

Caveat emptor – buyer beware.

There are those places in nature that we come back to, again and again. The reason we come is because they’re so beautiful, or peaceful… but it’s the act of returning regularly that helps us notice when things are different. The landscape is telling us in those subtle changes what’s happening to it.

Why are medicos often so bad at giving us a straight answer to this question – and how could they respond better?

Think about the stem cells in an embryo – they’re a bit like a teenager on the brink of adulthood, with the potential to be almost anything they want to be.

Morbid question for you - how long do you reckon your remains hang around for, after you die? How about the rest of the things you’ve used in your life?

Take a moment and imagine yourself in nature - whether it is walking in a magical rainforest, swimming in the ocean, or a moment of wonder at the animals and plants around.

What happens when you’re very young can have a life-long effect on your relationships, as Raquel Peel knows all too well.

What do your undies have to do with the health of Australian soils?

What did you do when you woke up this morning? Social media on the mobile, checking the weather on your speaker or your heartrate and sleep patterns on your smart watch?

If the numbers of TV shows on the topic are anything to go by, everyone loves a cold case – trying to crack a mysterious death from the past.

What makes someone who cruises through life relatively happily different to someone who struggles with mental health issues?

What if our entire universe, including you and I, could be boiled down to one object: a vibrating string?