Ockham’s Razor

Sexual selection is a potent evolutionary force responsible for much of the weird and wonderful diversity of life on our planet. So what happens when it's disturbed by human-induced environmental change?

What’s Australia best known for? Venomous creatures? Football with weird rules? What about… space exploration?

Who’s the strongest person in the world? And how would you measure it? Today’s guest has a metric in mind.

Somewhere between the very, very big physics and the very, very little physics is ... condensed matter physics.You might not have heard of it before, but it’s just as mindblowing – as today’s guest Elise Kenny will demonstrate.

If you’re not something straightforward like a lawyer or a teacher or an electrician, there’s a question you hate getting at dinner parties – what do you do?And this week on Ockham’s Razor we're hearing from someone who particularly dreads this question.But Johanna Nalau's job – and what it means for our future – is an important one to get your head around.

It’s no secret that Australia is home to many a venomous snake but this week’s guest wants to convince you that we should look at this as a blessing, not a curse.

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.First broadcast 11 July 2021.

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.[First aired July 25, 2021]

They will have played a critical role in many of your favourite albums, but what exactly does an audio mastering engineer do?And how is artificial intelligence shaking up what's traditionally been an exacting audio science?

What makes someone who cruises through life relatively happily different to someone who struggles with mental health issues?At least part of it lies in our genes – and there’s not much we can do about that. But there are other factors that we can control. Mary McMillan is trying to figuring out the divide between the two through a highly scientific process involving ... spit in a cup.First broadcast 28 March 2021.