IFLScience - We Have Questions

The Biggest Wild Goose is... Poisonous?

Geese are famously aggressive animals whose sassy attitude appears to be crucial to their social rank. Large in size with peculiar "geese teeth", they can be scary, and yet despite this, 45 percent of Britons reckon they could take on a goose. It’s a curious question that got two naturalists wondering: isn’t it time someone did a podcast on how many animals you could take in a fight? 

That’s just one segment of How Many Geese, a nature podcast headed up by Jack Baddams and Roddy Shaw that aims to bring comedy and science together. We caught up with the duo to find out how an expedition to Madagascar led them to podcasting, what sort of animals they’re fighting (theoretically), and what on Earth is up with the world’s biggest wild goose being poisonous. 

What's It Like Working In A Human Tissue Bank?

Sometimes surgeons need to remove parts of our bodies to make them healthy, but where do those sections of human go? They can be destroyed, but other times – with the patient’s consent – they are handed over to scientists to see what we can learn from diseased tissues.

Those scientists work in what we call tissue banks, or biobanks, and they are a curious place indeed. As a technician, you never quite know when – or what – is going to arrive in a bucket at the door, but when it does, they must be treated as rare and valuable, because they are.

Removing a tumor doctors hardly ever get to see could be the pivotal moment that leads to a novel therapy, or even a cure, and we have the donors of these tissues to thank for the opportunity. It’s a rich, varied, and unusual place to work, and as luck would have it IFLScience’s very own custom content manager Dr Beccy Corkill used to work in one. So, we sat her down to find out what it’s really like.

Episode 2 of the We Have Questions podcast asks “What’s It Like Working In A Human Tissue Bank?” - a question taken from issue 21 of CURIOUS, IFLScience's e-magazine. Also in this issue, we ask if animals have friends, what was the first work of “art”, and we meet author Professor Chris Lintott and read an excerpt from his new book Our Accidental Universe.

Read it here: https://www.iflscience.com/do-animals-have-friends-find-out-more-in-issue-21-of-curious-out-now-73576

How Do Sunken Cities End Up Underwater?

Submerged settlements, also known as sunken cities, might sound mythical but they are very real, and while their migration underwater makes them harder to find, it can also preserve them far better than they would have fared surface-side. Marine archaeologist Professor Jon Henderson knows this all too well. As Head of Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh, his studies have taken him from the frozen crannogs of Scotland to the submerged ancient town of Pavlopetri in southern Laconia, Greece. 

 

Underwater archaeology pits researchers in a race against time as they must study ruins emerging from the sediment before the sea has a chance to wash vital information away. So how do they end up underwater, and what’s in a marine archaeologist's toolkit to capture sunken cities before it’s too late?

 

Episode 1 of the We Have Questions podcast asks “How Do Sunken Cities End Up Underwater?” - a question taken from issue 20 of CURIOUS, IFLScience's e-magazine. Also in this issue, we ask if technology helps or harms grief, if there is any truth to personality tests, and we meet author Dr Jen Gunter and read an excerpt from her new book BLOOD: The Science, Medicine, and Mythology of Menstruation.

Read it here: https://www.iflscience.com/does-technology-help-or-harm-grief-find-out-more-in-issue-20-of-curious-out-now-73026

Introducing 'We Have Questions' Our New Science Podcast

Join IFLScience as we explore the questions nobody thought to ask but everyone wants the answers to. Get the behind-the-scenes conversations from CURIOUS magazine’s We Have Questions interviews, as we hunt down the experts to answer some of science’s stranger questions.