The Science Show
Getting more from fertiliser, viral DNA's vital role and help from hookworms!
17 Apr 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: How do hookworms contribute to autoimmune disease treatments?
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Time for another science show, and this time with energetic nylons. I'm Belinda Smith. And as we explore the unexpected, for the first time in the science show, a young person who once hated science.
I like to play it out and cover the truth, but I have to say, I absolutely hated it. Even for reference, if I quote from my bright pink Hello Kitty diary, I wrote, I hate science. It's so boring. Even a snappy message from my eight-year-old self detailed very clearly and very fervent hatred of science, which poses a question.
How does a child who quite frankly was told off continuously for asking why and how express such hatred for science? And not only that, but so early on in their schooling career.
Thank you.
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Chapter 2: What challenges are associated with nitrogen fertilizer usage?
It's something that's useful. And there's recent literature out there to show that it has biodegradable pathways. So it is something that can be broken down. And it can be something that's not just... set and forget and microplastic that leaches slowly into the environment. It's something that we can actually use in the long term, is durable, and then at the end of its life, we can reuse it.
So how do you make nylon, which I think about as something that I would have in my running gear or my swimsuit, how do you make that generate electricity? Conventionally, when you look at how people make any piece of electric film, not just nylon, it's a two-step process. So the first step is to make sure you have a good arrangement of atoms within the molecules of the nylon.
Then the next step is to get all these pieces ordered. So you'll have the first step, which is, for example, stretching the material to like three times its length, even longer in both directions. And then that would give you the great arrangement of the atoms.
And then the second step is to apply a really high and intense electric field, which can damage the piezoelectric material, for example, nylon or PVDF or what be it. And also it ends up becoming a very energy intensive process. So you've made a piezoelectric nylon that only uses a fraction of the energy to make, and you've brought some into the studio with you. Can I have a look, please? Yep.
So here you go. Oh, it's in a little Petri dish. A little Petri dish. So these are squares of clear film, each about the size of a fingernail. It feels not quite as flimsy as a plastic bag that you might get to put your fruit in. Slightly more rigid, but yeah, that just feels like plastic to me. Yeah, I mean, when you look at it at the surface, you're like, this is nothing special.
But when you use it in the way that we've shown it to be used, like, for example, running it over with a car, it works. It produces electricity. Okay, well, before we get into why you might want to run over it with a car... You have a new method of making piezoelectric nylon, which involves electrical fields and vibrations.
And together that creates these mini molecular batteries you mentioned before and arranges them stacked neatly so that when you bend it, it can generate electricity. Yeah. Okay, so tell me, why have you been driving cars over this nylon material? There's two ways we can look at using this, and that's either to harvest energy or for sensing. For example, like embedded in our roads.
So imagine if you have in the future cities, you have these next generation devices embedded in the road, and it could tell you traffic conditions, it can tell you the weight of a car, it can tell you how many cars are passing over, and it's all in a self-powered way. So there's no need for external batteries. It'll give you direct information continuously and for a long period of time.
So smart infrastructure is one way, and we're keen to look into that and develop that further. And then the second way is to enhance its piezoelectric performance. So to maximise beyond just sensing how much energy it can actually produce. So imagine ideally you have it embedded in roads, but it's also charging the streetlights. It's also powering other things alongside the road.
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Chapter 3: How can slow-release fertilizers improve agricultural efficiency?
So viruses like this have existed in the koala population for a long time, but they are still in this active phase of integration. So what that means is there are different viruses out there in the koala population. And so obviously the koala population spans all down our east coast in our native populations.
And there are viruses out there in this population that are currently integrating into the genome. So there are some viruses that koalas from the northern part of Australia have that koalas from the southern part of Australia don't have. And studying how those things mix together and how they might be shared across that population is really integral to understanding that integration process.
And it actually lets us learn a little bit about how that might have worked for early humans as well.
Do we know what these koala viral hanger-on-ers are doing to the koalas?
Lots of things. Again, just like humans, some that are positive and some that are negative. So some of the really amazing research that's happening at the moment is looking at
what integrations are giving koalas positive traits and so are improving their lifestyle or their longevity and prioritising, when we think about breeding programs, prioritising koalas that have those positive integrations and deprioritising those negative integrations that might shorten lifespan or encourage the koalas to develop diseases like cancers, for example.
Desiree Cox from the University of Wollongong. And koalas, who knew? Thanks, Bill. This is the Science Show on Radio National, where we try to explore the wealth of research outside big capital cities. And the present theme is Northern Queensland. Why?
Well, there's a centre of excellence at the James Cook University, particularly using indigenous knowledge as a source of ideas and to apply to creating a local industry to help everybody in so many ways. Meet PhD student Deanne Walter and Professor Alec Lucas, Distinguished Professor and Director of the Australian Institute of Tropical Health and Medicine. And they're worms.
Tell me, what are we looking at? There's a screen, so we're not seeing them directly, but they're looking like several elegant worms wriggling around. What are they?
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Chapter 4: What role do enzyme inhibitors play in fertilizer effectiveness?
It's two of the Ashnorts, Christina Cook and Victor Glover, and they're talking about how they felt when they looked through their Orion capsule windows at the moon as they flew past.
At one point, towards the end of the images of my time in Window 3, I just had an overwhelming sense of being moved by looking at the moon.
It lasted just a second or two, and I actually couldn't even make it happen again.
But something just drew me in suddenly to the lunar landscape, and it became real. And the truth is, the moon really is its own universe.
body in the universe it's not just a poster in the sky that goes by it is a real place and when we have that perspective and we compare it to our home of the earth it just reminds us how much we have in common everything we need the earth provides and that in and of itself is somewhat of a miracle
I wanted to start off with connecting with what Christina said that it was very moving to look out the window.
I had the unfortunate sequence to start looking out the window and then moved to the long lens and it was hard to speak looking through the zoom because I went straight where Christina went and I was walking around down there on the surface climbing and off-roading on that amazing terrain.
Thank you.
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