A 10-PART SERIES · AUSSIE SCIENCE CLIPS
Australian Science
Ten things Australians invented or discovered: what they solved, how they work, and who really deserves the credit. Honest about credit: what was genuinely Australian, who shared it, and what came before.
EPISODE 1 · 12 min
Wi-Fi: how CSIRO beat the echo
This season is about things Australians invented or discovered, told honestly. What each one solved, how it works, who shared the credit, and what came before. We'll start with the famous one. You've probably heard…
EPISODE 2 · 11 min
The black box: David Warren's flight recorder
Every airliner carries two boxes that nobody hopes to open. Everyone calls them black boxes, but they're painted bright orange. And the idea for one key part, a recording of the voices in the cockpit, came from a fuel…
EPISODE 3 · 11 min
The bionic ear: Graeme Clark's cochlear implant
If the part of your ear that actually hears is gone, how can you hear? For hundreds of thousands of people, the answer is a thin wire coiled inside the inner ear, talking to the nerve in electricity.
EPISODE 4 · 12 min
Penicillin: from Fleming's mould to a medicine
Before the nineteen-forties, a scratch could kill you. The first antibacterial drugs, the sulfa drugs, had only arrived in the mid-thirties, and hospitals were still full of people with blood poisoning from a cut. In…
EPISODE 5 · 12 min
Seeing with sound: Australia's ultrasound pioneers
How do you make a picture of the inside of a body using nothing but sound? No knife, no X-rays, just a crystal pressed against the skin, listening for echoes. Australia didn't invent that idea.
EPISODE 6 · 12 min
The doctor who drank bacteria: Marshall, Warren and ulcers
How do you prove that a germ causes a disease, when almost every expert is sure it can't? In 1984, a young doctor in Perth tried the most direct way there is. He drank a beaker of the bacteria. To see why, and why it…
EPISODE 7 · 12 min
A vaccine against cancer: Frazer, Zhou and HPV
You can't catch cancer. Or so most of us assume. But almost every case of cervical cancer starts with a virus you catch, and can vaccinate against. In 1991, two scientists in Brisbane and their small team made the…
EPISODE 8 · 11 min
Spray-on skin: Fiona Wood and Marie Stoner
If a burn takes most of your skin, where does the new skin come from? In Perth in the 1990s, a surgeon, Fiona Wood, and a scientist, Marie Stoner, started spraying a patient's own skin cells onto burns. The headlines…
EPISODE 9 · 11 min
Plastic money: how Australia made polymer banknotes
Scrunch an Australian banknote into a ball, and it springs back. Try to tear it, and it's hard even to start. That's because it isn't paper; it's plastic. So why would a country print its money on plastic, and how…
EPISODE 10 · 11 min
The Dish: how Parkes helped show the Moon landing
In July 1969, an estimated six hundred million people watched a man step onto the Moon. Most of that moonwalk reached them through a radio telescope in a paddock near Parkes, New South Wales. A famous film made it…