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Shauna Murray is an associate professor and ARC Fellow at the University of Technology, Sydney in the Climate Change Cluster C3 Centre where she researches microalgae that produce toxins that are eaten by fish and could end up on your dinner plate, giving you an illness like Ciguatera. Ciguatera fish poisoning can cause major problems with circulation, digestion, breathing and the nervous system. Shauna's work includes identifying where the microalgae are growing so that fishers can be warned not to take any seafood from those areas and prevent the spread of the illness.

Gurjeet Singh Kohli is a Research Associate studying the genes of the microalgae that cause Ciguatera with both Shauna at UTS and Bret Neilan UNSW. He has recently handed in his PhD thesis. I asked him why it was so difficult to make a test kit that detects the toxins that cause Ciguatera.



Sustainable Aquaculture Group UTS
What is Ciguatera Fish Poisoning?

The Public Library of Science has announced the six finalists for their ASAP Accelerating Science Award Program. They hired me as a freelancer to record an interview with finalist Professor Matt Todd about his Open Source Science project to crowd-source a cure for Malaria. Adrian Tan worked as my videographer.

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At Nerd Nite Sydney in the Cafe Lounge, Dr Peter Jonason lecturer in personality and individual differences from the University of Western Sydney, spoke about the evolutionary functions of the different kinds of sexual relationships people choose to have from casual, to committed. He hung around after the gig, we went outside the noisy club, and spoke to me about the behavioral ecology of sexual relationships.

Peter Karl (PK) Jonason, Ph.D

Nerd Nite Sydney

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In light of the revelations that the US and UK spooks are treating us all like criminals by spying on our every move, I went to the very noisy Pitt St Mall to talk with David W. Campbell Senate candidate for the Pirate Party about PRISMbreak and the Protect Our Privacy protest.

Pirate Party Australia
PRISM break
Snowden reveals Australia's links to US spy web
NSA Surveillance of Australia Exposed!
Agreements with private companies protect U.S. access to cables' data for surveillance 

NSA recruitment drive goes horribly wrong

www.flickr.com iwoolf's PRISMbreak Sydney 2013 photoset

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At Nerd Nite Sydney, outside the noisy Cafe Lounge I spoke with Astrid Zeman about her research into using optical illusions to improve computer vision. (This interview was recorded on my phone, surrounded by a crowd, before I bought the new microphone, so my apologies for the noise).


Astrid Zeman's profile at Macquarie University

Astrid's paper 2013 paper: The Müller-Lyer Illusion in a Computational Model of Biological Object Recognition
NBC coverage of Astrid's work

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Angus Devenson is the organiser of RoboWars Sydney 2013. He spoke to me about the sport of building and battling robots, funded by the crowd. RoboWars Sydney 2013 will be on the 3rd and 4th of August, in Redfern.

RoboWars
RoboWars Sydney 2013 crowd-funding

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Dr Sara Lal and PhD student Diarmuid Kavanagh spoke to me about their research into wiring up driver's brains to detect fatigue, and intervening before it causes accidents, at the School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney. This interview was recorded as part of the Science Communication Education Project, in which I was Project Officer.

Brain scanning technology is quickly approaching levels of detail that will have serious implications (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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For Brain Awareness week 2013, the Museum of Human Disease held Get Into Your Head to help people experiment with their brains. I visited the Museum and spoke with Thomas Fath, Christine Froud, and Bridget Murphy about the experiments.

Museum of Human Disease
Brain Awareness Week 2013

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I went to the Red Cross Blood Service in Alexandria, where all the blood donations are sorted and tested before being passed along to hospitals to speak to with Joe Patkes.

Joe Patkes, is Red blood cell serology manager for the Red Cross blood service for NSW. He's had 22 years experience in the blood transfusion business, 7 years with the Australian Red Cross, and before that, 14 years in the United States. He spoke with me about blood types and transfusions. Please excuse the occasional buzzing from the machines in the background.

Red Cross Blood Service Transfusion site
Red Cross Blood Service Donation site

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Mark Changizi,is a theoretical neuro-biologist, and director of human cognition at 2AI Labs. He has a radical theory about the evolution of colour vision. I began by asking him about the difference between animal colour vision and human colour vision.

Clostridium difficile (Photo credit: AJC1)

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Professor Thomas Borody of the Center for Digestive Diseases is researching which illnesses are caused by the bacteria in the bowel going wrong, and developing bacterial therapies to restore health. In 1999 I spoke to him about how bowel flora affects the brain, and the triple-S, sick flora syndrome.

Since that time research around the world has started to catch up, and for one illness at least, clostridium difficile infection, this poo transplant will become the standard treatment. Other illnesses may follow.

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This is my first interview using my POV wearable Looxcie camera, and my apologies, but it wobbled a lot. I'm also new to video editing on linux, so I used Openshot until it failed, and then exported video to avidemux to edit the final version. Unfortunately I lost quality in the process. I'll put up a better edited version later. For future videos I'm looking at mounting the camera on my glasses instead of on my ear. It should wobble much less.

Youtube is taking longer to upload so this is hosted on the Internet Archive.

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Inventor Mark Pesce has launched MooresCloud, a lamp with a LAMP stack, which means it runs Linux, Apache web server, MySQL database and Python or Perl programming language -L.A.M.P. Mark spoke to me in the stairwell of the Fishburner's building in Sydney at his product launch, about playful smart devices that talk with you.

My apologies for the squeaking stairwell door on the end of Mark Pesce's parting words: "You can have the smartest dishwasher in the world, but if it can't talk with anything, who cares?"  You can find out more at www.moorescloud.com, and support the project on Kickstarter

I'll be posting the Point-Of-View Looxcie version of this interview soon.

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Professor Gabriella Weaver from Purdue University gave the keynote speech at the Enhancing Learning in Science Through Inquiry and Technology Forum held last week at the University of Technology Sydney. She's designed and run a curriculum that engages first and second year science students in contributing to authentic scientific research. I spoke with her in the tea break.

You can find out more about the Center for Authentic Science Practice in Education CASPiE that allows first and second year science students to engage in ongoing, authentic scientific research at www.caspie.org.

Grabriella Weaver, Professor of Chemical Education and Physical Chemistry

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Phillip Rhoades, is one of the directors of the Neural Archives Foundation. He collects brains, and freezes them, in hopes that future historians will be able to read their frozen memories. I spoke to him at the Sydney Futurist meetup.

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The universe is expanding at an ever faster rate! Professor Robert Kirshner from the Harvard Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics spoke to me about supernovas and their use in measuring the acceleration in the expansion of the Universe, at the fourth annual Southern Cross Astrophysics conference at the Sydney Maritime Museum.

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Energy too cheap to meter! So claims Italian inventer and entrepreneur Andrea Rossi for his invention of the E-Cat Energy Catalyser power generator, which he claims combines hydrogen and nickel with a secret catalyst to make heat and copper.

Ian Bryce is an aerospace engineer, and Chief Investigator for the Australian Skeptics. I spoke with him about his experiences with the Australian investment agent for Rossi's "cold fusion power generator".

This is the full version of the interview broadcast on Diffusion Science Radio

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Imagine designing molecules on paper and then making them in the lab. Dr Andrew McDonagh of the School of Chemistry and Forensic Sciences and the Institute of Nanoscale Technologies at the University of Technology, Sydney. He's been working on dye sensitised solar cells. I asked him what he's been synthesizing.

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As the Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP17
finished this weekend, climate change is on everyone's mind.
Professor Ann Henderson-Sellers from Macquarie University wants you to show her what to do about it.
I asked her to explain about the Climate Fix Flicks.

More information on the competition to create a short video to show how we can all fix the climate

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Galit Segev is a chef and biochemist, combining her love of food and science, in public talks on the science of food. Galit is a volunteer for Vision Australia creating recipes and cooking classes for people with vision impairment. At the Ultimo Science Festival she spoke to me about her love of food, her love of chocolate, and the science of making chocolate.