Can plants get cancer?

At first, you might think it is a plot from a zombie movie: that undead animals are coming for you.But it turns out that Australia's animals aren't just dangerous when they're alive — they can be deadly even when they're dead.Ann Jones is joined by science reporter Belinda Smith ...  Show more

Bush rats are not black rats — that's the first thing you need to know.Ann Jones is joined by ABC Top 5 scientist Dr Patrick Finnerty to understand why researchers are going around sniffing bush rats — and how it might help reintroduce them to Sydney's nature reserves.Find out mo ...  Show more

In the past 18 months we have heard lots about the human immune system, as we all learn about how our bodies fight off Covid-19 and how the vaccine helps protect us. But this got listener John, in Alberta, Canada, thinking about how trees and plants respond to diseases and thr ...

Since their discovery in the 1970s, artemisinin-based drugs have become the mainstay of treatment for malaria caused by the Plasmodium falciparum parasite. Researchers have identified artemisinin-resistant malaria parasites in Southeast Asia since the early 2000s, but now, there ...  Show more

There are over 400,000 species of plant on earth, they’re on every continent including Antarctica. But humans only regularly eat about 200 species globally, with the vast majority of our nutrition coming from just three species. Many of the fruits, leaves and tubers that other ...

The tiny sap-sucking aphid, at just a few millimetres long, is the scourge of many gardeners and crop-growers worldwide, spreading astonishingly rapidly and inflicting huge damage as it seeks to outwit many host plants’ natural defences. With insights and guidance from aphid expe ...  Show more