Colossal 'jets' shooting from a black hole defy physicists' theories
In this episode:00:45 The biggest black hole jets ever seenAstronomers have spotted a pair of enormous jets emanating from a supermassive black hole with a combined length of 23 million light years — ...
18 Sep 202434min
Ancient DNA debunks Rapa Nui ‘ecological suicide’ theory
In this episode:00:45 What ancient DNA has revealed about Rapa Nui’s pastAncient DNA analysis has further demonstrated that the people of Rapa Nui did not cause their own population collapse, further ...
11 Sep 202441min
The baseless stat that could be harming Indigenous conservation efforts
The often repeated claim that "80% of the world's biodiversity is found in the territories of Indigenous Peoples" appears widely in policy documents and reports, yet appears to have sprung out of nowh...
6 Sep 202414min
Long-sought 'nuclear clocks' are one tick closer
In this episode:00:45 Why a 'nuclear clock' is now within researchers’ reachResearchers have made a big step towards the creation of the long theorized nuclear clock, by getting the most accurate meas...
4 Sep 202431min
Audio long read: So you got a null result. Will anyone publish it?
The 'file-drawer problem', where findings with null or negative results gather dust and are left unpublished, is well known in science. There has been an overriding perception that studies with positi...
30 Aug 202417min
Covert racism in AI chatbots, precise Stone Age engineering, and the science of paper cuts
In this episode:00:31 Chatbots makes racist judgements on the basis of dialectResearch has shown that large language models, including those that power chatbots such as ChatGPT, make racist judgements...
28 Aug 202420min
Can ageing be stopped? A biologist explains
For millennia, humanity has obsessed about halting ageing and, ultimately, preventing death. Yet while advances in medicine and public-health have seen human life-expectancy more than double, our maxi...
22 Aug 202430min
AI can't learn new things forever — an algorithm can fix that
00:46 Old AIs can’t learn new tricksAn algorithm that reactivates dormant ‘neurons’ in deep learning based AIs could help them overcome their inability to learn new things and make future systems more...
21 Aug 202419min
