Science books for Christmas and a portrait of Matthew Bailes
51:51 Share

ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more. Time once more for The Science Show with later one of the top stories of this year. A visit to Taronga Zoo and creatures behaving strangely. And to begin that story from last week, a walk in the forest but one you will never see except in the weirdest of dreams. Where is this? Can it really be a society?

She woke early on her birthday. The birds were calling in the garden as dawn crept around the blinds. He snored on beside her, his soft, whinnying snore. As she lay in bed, in the warmth of nothing to do, she was thinking of mortality. Not so surprising on a birthday, another year on the clock. Mortality, eternity, infinity have ever voided the mind, she reflected.

Time and space without end challenge logic and reason, just as humanity knew it faced the obverse, a finite span punctuated by death, non-existence.

People had tried to make sense of it as best they could, of course, she knew, creating religions and philosophies and forming scientific theories of time and space, even of parallel universes and realities, although somehow these didn't help much when you were stuck in the one you were in.

And yet, she considered as she lay there, had not mortality marked humanity as different from its gods, even superior in a way, as human follies passed into time while those of the fickle, irascible gods were eternal. She slipped on her robe and went barefoot from the room. There was an early stillness through the house that she loved in the muted fall of foot as if on trimmed turf.

The glass wall of the living room gave its green and pleasant vista of the woods behind. She picked out her favourite tree, the Japanese maple, in full leaf, perfection of form and balance. She tucked her feet up under her on the sofa and gazed out and wondered if the purpose of her existence was to admire this tree, in which case, what did it mean if she outlived it?

She put the kettle on for tea. There was a congenial ritual to its preparation that was considered beneficial. It framed the day, as did meals and drinks. The kettle was a vintage whistler that she liked. She warmed the pot and put in two teaspoons in case he woke and wanted a cup. She poured in the boiling water, the vapour twitching her nose, found the tea cosy she had knitted with the big ruby strawberries on top,

cloaked the pot and waited for the tea to draw. She took her time. It was her birthday after all, and there was no need to hurry, not that there ever really was anyway. She poured the tea into her favourite cup, the cornflower blue one, delicate as a nautilus shell, with the white seaside daisy pattern on it, added a dash of milk and went outside.

It was a wonderfully cool morning in the hills. Rags of mist lay forgotten in the crooks of valleys. The treetops were stills, and above them, in the hazy early light, the clouds curled in dreaming pillows. Gems of dew adorned pine needles. The steam from her cup rose and drifted off like half a question.

there was so much time for everything for the steam to dissipate before her eyes and to watch each tendril fade she sipped the cup warming her hand when she finished she set it down on the garden table where they had their wine at dusk and walked down the garden

She reached out to the maple and touched its trunk as one might the cheek of a lover. How could something so old still be so sapling smooth, as if it could be young forever? Her trailing fingers left it and she meandered on along the narrow path with the forest thick and lush by either shoulder. She felt the humus and soft shreds of bark beneath her toes and thought this was how it was to love.

As she strolled, she wondered how they filled up all the hours. There was an endless horizon of them, days, years, decades. What did they do with all that?

They ate, read, walked in the woods, watched films. She wrote poems and he took photographs. They devoted a lot of time to selecting wines and pored over vintage recipes. They read, they played squash and swam in the pool. They worked in the garden and watched the roses bud, bloom and shrivel to hips.

They mulched, composted, grafted and pruned. They enjoyed their own potatoes, tomatoes and plums. Sometimes they made love, other times they went on picnics. They travelled all over the planet, even ascended Olympus Mons. They visited friends across the valley or in town and sometimes friends came to dinner and they were talking to the small hours of politics and authors and joke about some silly new fad in art.

Later the two of them would sit and pick over it all. It was engaging, nice and past the time. There was time for it all and all in time. Nothing was ever early or late. Things happened and the time passed. But there was so much of it, with unimaginably more to come.

She followed the pathway down through the woods. Animals, including leopards, dingoes, bears and wolves, were increasing in numbers and could well be about, not that that was any real concern. They delighted in their presence and Julie reported their sightings. She threw back her head and looked up.

If you peered very closely, you could see the ultra-fine membrane of their region's biodome. Beyond it, two tiny moons whirled around their planet. Winding to the bottom of the valley, the path led to their little stream and she lingered by it. She touched the moss on a log. It was so soft it tingled her fingertips. She dangled her toes in the stream and giggled at how icy it was.

as she did the encrypted message she had been expecting came in from the society her gift was on its way happy birthday the chair said she crossed the stream at the stepping-stones and went on climbing the far bank

There was another stand of trees there, these once huge-trunked, towering, with a dark canopy. They called it their own Wild Wood, from the wind in the willows. She had loved reading the book to the children. So long ago, beyond the Wild Wood comes the wide world, said the Rat.

She padded along the path through the dark, dank, wonderfully musty, sour-smelling half of the wood until she saw what they called the hatch up ahead, the rectangle of light at the far end, and stepped out through it into the sun on the lofty rock ledge beyond it, just three or four paces short of the edge. The view was wondrous here, a joy unending.

across the valley to the grand stone bluffs on the far side, brushed soft peach and rose by the early light. The drop-off was spectacular in itself, sheer and straight down to the rocks far below. It was always a bit dizzying to stand by the edge, even if in reality there was nothing to fear. She felt powerful arms encircle her from behind. "'Early,' he said, nuzzling into her neck."

She kept looking across to the bluffs. I'm so very happy, darling, she said. Good, and just for the record, you are also so very beautiful. She turned around to him. Are you sure? she teased. Your body might be a twenty-year-old, he said, but you still look wonderful as ever. I thought you might think it's time for a new body, for us both perhaps now.

Not yet, he said. We've barely run these in, and haven't you seen the new models? No? The new skin is amazingly soft and supple, true. But the cheat-up features, the plump lips and bulbous breasts, the bulging pecs, I thought we were past all that. Some things were never past, she said. He kissed her. They had been together back to when they both still had hearts and bones, for so long now that friends good-naturedly gossiped.

They didn't care. "'Happy birthday, darling. Thank you,' she said. "'And the big 200 coming up next year, eh?' She nodded and smiled. She knew that in that moment the last of her memory banks and all their backups were being secretly hacked and deleted from every single secure official data storage simultaneously by her friends in the society.'

Soon all that remained of her would comprise the tiny mineral web work inside her carbon-thymocranium. And that cranium was strong, it was true, but no match for rock. "'I'm making you a special birthday breakfast,' he said. "'Come on.' "'You go on ahead, darling,' she said. He paused, shrugged, gave her his smile and started walking back. He knew her. "'I just want to admire the view one moment more,' she said."

as he went back through the hatch. Yes, a personal reminder for me. I need a new bodily system due soon when I too am 190. But who is the society? A clue. It's the last chapter of Larry Buttrose's book Everyone on Mars. Yes, your life in a few decades perhaps when that planet is ready to open the hatch and join those animals. A slim but powerful set of stories from the redshift

As Larry puts it, Mars one day. The Science Show on Radio National. And another author we met last week talking about his walk near Hobart, Seasons in the South with Simon Grove.

We do actually, we have an annual expedition, we call them our expeditions of discovery, where we try and focus our collecting efforts on a relatively undocumented part of the state and there's plenty of those still even though we're only a small state. And then it really does take the rest of the year to go through the material that we collect and I

identify it, what we can anyway, and report on it, put it into some kind of state and national context. And there's always goodies to find wherever you go. There are new species, there are range extensions, and just all sorts of interesting discoveries. Well apart from that, which is full-time seven, eight days a week, you've just been to Uganda. How come? In a previous life I worked in Uganda. Thirty years ago I worked as a conservation trainer in the forest department there.

and my wife also worked there habituating chimpanzees for an ecotourism project. So we went back to visit old haunts and we caught up some of the old colleagues and some of the guides that my wife had trained. It was an amazing experience 30 years on. How do you habituate chimpanzees? It's a matter of gradually getting them to accept the presence of humans.

You do have to cut a network of trails so that you can actually locate the chimps. They move around hugely in their vast territories, but you home in on them where they're feeding, which is generally fig trees, and you just try and sit with them. And the first time you do that, they're likely to scamper off within a minute. But gradually, if you keep doing that day after day after day after day, then they'll come to accept you and

After months, perhaps years, you can start bringing more people and eventually they're habituated well enough that you can bring in small groups of tourists. And that was the idea, it was to benefit the local community by bringing in ecotourism money for the community. And grown-up chimpanzees can be very large and very strong and, if you're not careful, rather fierce. How did you handle that part?

I think the worst that happened to anyone was that if they took exception to you, they would just do a poo into their hands and fling it at you. Sounds like Australian politics, doesn't it? No comment. Thank you and congratulations on the book. Thank you very much, Robin. Simon Grove, and the book is Seasons in the South, a Tasmanian naturalist's journey of discovery. And a third book now, for which we must go to Taronga Zoo, for Snore and Roar.

Well, I didn't write any of this at all, actually, Robin. I'm very, very lucky to say that I've been asked to talk about it because of my passion for books. And it's books like this that started me off as a child as a...

absolutely mad animal person. Books like this flick what I call the love nature switch on in me and that's what I've always been attracted to here at Taronga but to have a big book of animals as a child to pour over on the lounge room floor or when you're lying there falling asleep with it in bed was one of the best things in my life. Quite a large one to go to bed with. It is, you probably have to get mum or dad to take this off you at the end of the night that's for sure.

And what I think I love about this book, Robin, is it's also hardcover, which makes it that little bit more luxurious. As a child, they have a hardcover book. It always is one of those things you cherish and you look after and you make sure that it goes back in its place. But it's an incredible book. Where you've got it open now, it's got a little bluebird, a blue wren with, by contrast, a little bit of petal in its mouth. Mm-hmm.

to contrast with its own blue so that it's more noticeable and it's waving it at a likely female. Potentially the blue wren. What a beautiful, beautiful little bird. When I was a child,

Those birds I would seek out in my backyard, down in that bushland, that native bushland that my father kept. Blue wrens were aplenty, and the blue being the male and the female not being as well adorned with colour, but still as important, used to flit around. And I used to spend a lot of time seeking these animals out. Let me just give an idea of the uniqueness. It's got various areas that it looks at, the jungles, the sea, forest such like.

And in each part, you have a collection of animals and you've got pictures of them. Not too much in the way of drowning in information at all. It's got lovely little facts which you can look at and then wonder about the creature. For instance, I've heard a little bit about sloths. They're very sleepy. They're South American. But I didn't know they never fart.

How do you find that out? Well, I'm probably going to have to talk to the sloth experts about that one. I'm not really sure of the answer as to why their flatulence is not as prolific as mine. And everyone else's because it's a unique...

in that regard because it reabsorbs the gases and I think pees them out or burps them out or something. Yeah, and I think, I'm going to look that up. Let's look it up right now, Robin, and remind ourselves as to why the sloth doesn't fart. Talk amongst yourselves, folks. Maybe it's too polite. We settled on that. Sloths are polite and the huge brilliant tome is the Taronga Big Book of Animals and it's lovely.

But the great thing also is the glossary. The glossary of terms is really, really important, I think, for young people and older people alike to understand. We use the word macropod a lot here in the zoo. Bigfoot, that's what all our kangaroos are, macropods and wallabies and many more species. But to know those words as a young budding scientist or

Animal Lover is fantastic. You feel like you're immersing yourself in the natural world and not just talking about the hoppy things that you see out in the middle of Australia. I do have to say though, this is not just a book for children. No, it's for everybody. I think that any adult could pick this book up.

and without a doubt learn something with every page they open. And we've got many of our centenary species and our species that we have a lot of programs going on with. And I've got one earmarked here for you. And I think that's a really important one. There's a Taronga's action for the wild, like a little award sort of symbol in some of the pages.

and that we've got some of the largest marine turtle nesting areas in the Indo-Pacific region. And Taronga Wildlife Hospital in Sydney, we treat on average about 40 marine turtles a year. And that information is really, really important for young people and older people alike to understand as to why. And the why is in this little caption as well, that they're normally found entangled in rubbish or having swallowed fish hooks or fishing line or plastics.

So there's messages throughout the book. And I think that's really important because just knowing facts is great and it's really interesting. It's good social currency for kids. But understanding the why is really, really important as well. And then if you understand or you've come to the zoo or you've heard about one of our animals that have...

been brought in, rehabilitated and put back to the wild, you can tell that story. I think there's a very, very big difference between just facts than story. Story will make people remember. So if you can involve those facts within the story, that's a really, really beautiful way to get people to engage with the planet. Well, let me tell you about one fact. I don't want to seem as if I am preoccupied by poo, however, but there is another one.

about dung beetles who are navigating by means of the Milky Way. Now, a dung beetle's quite small and you're on the ground and looking up at the sky and seeing which way the Milky Way is pointing

and then having somewhere to go. Where do they want to go? Around the garden. I am determined to look that up to find out more because what this book does is give you a tantalising example. So true. And then you can take it further. Reputable and reliable information is really important, I think. But dung beetles are incredible creatures and so many birds.

animals on the planet we still don't know everything about and I think that's what's the beautiful thing about the living planet not knowing everything

puts you out there in wonder every time you read or learn a new fact about an animal, you have a tendency to want to go a little bit further, finding out a bit more about it. I'm really proud that the zoo has done this. I'm really proud that we've got beautiful information coming out for the next scientists in the world. And there's a front page or a couple of pages in, Robyn, I just want to go to, and I think it's a really great part for the reader,

Welcome to the Big Book of Animals. If you're reading this book, it's quite possible you are one of the following. A. An animal lover. B. A budding scientist. C. A curious mind. And D. All of the above. And I think sitting here with you now, I think you and I are D. All of the above. Now we're obviously in Taronga Zoo and we're in a wonderful building here.

It's comfortable. And you've got various dwellings around it. And you've got a link over there.

What's that link? Well, you happen to be sitting in one of my favourite places in the zoo and it's what I happen to manage here, which is the Roar and Snore Camp. And it's the brand new refurbished Roar and Snore Camp, 17 tents down here on the harbour foreshore. We have a maximum of 44 people a night stay with us and have hopefully a potential life changing experience.

It's probably one of the places in the zoo that we spend most time with people and can gently drip feed our conservation messaging and our behaviour change through to because they're with us from five o'clock at night till nine o'clock the next morning. So we have the opportunity to bring them down here to the site after they've had some incredible animal experiences through the night and the next morning. But on that screen that you were talking about, Robin, I've always wanted to have a screen in this tent, this main tent.

because what we pipe into that is a live stream of five different African waterholes. Okokoyo Waterhole in Etosha, another waterhole in the south southern part of Namibia, Kenya, Botswana and South Africa. And a lot of people when they're standing here having their morning coffee or their glass of wine in the evening and just relaxing down here at the site think that it's a video. They think that we've put something on and when I explain to them that's a live feed

Suddenly the world opens up. Suddenly the lights come on. We want people's lights to come on for the wild. We want to make sure that they understand that we are not just local, we are global, but local is just as important as global. And I've got a bit of goosebumps when I said it like that. But you're trying to change the subject from poo. Now, on one of the pages there... I would never do that.

The pandas, and I don't know whether this diminishes their wonderful treasure-like attraction, it says there they poo every 20 minutes.

Well, that is true. And I'm going to the Panda Poo page just for you, Robin. And I'm heading up there right now. I've just looked up in my index. They're eating bamboo all the time. They are. And that's pure fibre, no wonder. Yeah. And look, they're not ungulates. So they don't have the same digestive system as an ungulate, a hoofed animal that can break down cellulose very, very well. Most ungulates, hoofed animals have a very...

successful digestive system and get the most out of that, breaking down the cellulose. I don't think that the old pandas have that same system and I think it just goes in one end and comes out the other quite quickly. I'm sure they got sore freckles. On average, they poo every 15 to 20 minutes. Well,

I must admit on some of my travels around the world, I may have felt like that as well, but we won't go into that. Thank you and congratulations. It's wonderful for a present, obviously. Beautiful present. Absolutely beautiful Christmas gift, I have to say. And if I am going to do that sell, please, really have a look at this book. Even if you need to come into the zoo, feel it, touch it. It is a beautiful reference book for Fast Facts. Over 200 for Fast Facts.

curious kids and I reckon just as curious adults. Hayden Turner in the roar and snore section of the zoo with the gorgeous Taronga Big Book of Animals. And another lovely book just out this year is by my namesake, Ryan Williams. And its title is One Little Dung Beetle, Loads of Other Beetles and Good Fun and Good Science.

And I noticed we haven't mentioned many birds so far in this bestial science show on Radio National. So here's Pauline Newman once more with a friend and a very special bird. Hi, I'm David Lottie from the City University of New York and I study the evolution, especially of behavior in birds and mammals. So I suppose there are all sorts of different ways of studying evolution. What's your approach?

I like doing field work. I don't do very much work on genetics in the laboratory, but I do sometimes breed birds in order to find out what proportion of their behavior change is because of plasticity or learning and what portion of their change is due to inheritance or genes. But my favorite thing is to go out into the field and look at what they're doing out there. And my

specific method I would say is my favorite is to look at introduced species or species that have had extreme ecological changes over the historical period and then seeing how they're adapting to that. You've chosen birds, why birds? Well they're easy to study, they are not very afraid of people but they're complex and they learn a lot

But social learning is very important to birds just as it is important for humans. And so I'm interested in the relationship between learning and inheritance. And so birds are a natural choice. And do you have a favorite species to study? Well, I guess if I had to point out a favorite species, it would be the village weaver bird, Plocius cuculatus. And I like weaver birds in general. There's about 120 species of them, mostly in Africa.

And we would call them small to medium size. Larger than a fairy wren, but smaller than a bronze cuckoo. I don't think we have them in Australia. No, there have been a few hundred vagrants that have been seen there, especially in the southeast, but there are no weaver birds in Australia permanently.

From what I remember, weaver birds make very beautiful but very complex nests. Is that right? Yes. As a matter of fact, the subfamily Plocinae, for which the entire family is named, are among the best, if not the best nest builders among all birds. And the males build the nest, which is unusual for birds. Usually females build the nest because they're going to be laying their eggs in them.

But in weaver birds, the male builds the nest and then advertises the nest, and the female goes around and picks the nest and the male as her home and her mate. And weaver birds are adapted to very stormy areas of Africa. And so the nests are globular, they're like baskets, and the female is going to be laying her egg inside one of these baskets, and it has to be very robust. She won't choose a nest if it's brown, so it has to be green, it has to be made with fresh materials.

Wow, so she's very choosy, but what does this tell you about evolution? Something that happens inside the nest is interesting because when females lay their eggs,

they can be accosted by a cuckoo that lays eggs inside the nest and foists all of the parental care on the weaver instead of the cuckoo making her own nest. And so if the cuckoo is successful at that, then the weaver is going to have a completely null reproductive attempt. So it's very important for her, the female weaver, to be able to tell the difference between a cuckoo egg and her own egg.

And it's sort of an arms race where back in history, the weaver bird would just lay eggs that look like any other weaver bird. Then the cuckoo started laying eggs in the weaver nest.

And when the baby cuckoo hatches, it kicks out all of the remaining weaver eggs from the nest and they crash on the ground. And so the only baby in the nest then is the cuckoo. So in response to that, the weaver bird has evolved very distinctive eggs that are different from individual to individual. Even sisters will have different egg colors. It's very distinctive.

unusual in birds. Normally, in almost all birds in the world, you could have a field guide to eggs such that you could identify what bird it was, what species, by just knowing what the egg looked like. So there's a hyper variable genetic basis for egg color. And one female will lay an egg that is tan and another one will lay one that's beige, another one will lay one that's blue, green, white.

Even very closely related individuals can have highly divergent eggs between them. And if you think about why that would be beneficial for the weaver bird It's that a cuckoo can no longer lay an egg that is going to look like every weaver bird so it's going to be much less likely for a cuckoo to be able to fool a

Weaver because all the weavers even one species are laying different color eggs and so the weaver is able to memorize the color of her own eggs and

So well that she doesn't even have to compare them right in front of her in order to be able to tell whether the cuckoo egg is hers or not as long as she's laid eggs before in her life she knows what her egg colors are and then she just rejects an egg that looks anything different than that. That's really remarkable isn't it? It is. So weaver birds in Africa have extremely precisely the same egg color every time they lay an egg. Matter of fact

In fact, when I have a cuckoo and a weaver egg in my hand that are only very slight shades apart from each other, I can't tell the difference, but the weaver can. So that's an evolutionary story in and of itself, but I'm interested in what happens when weavers are introduced to islands across the world that don't have egg-mimicking cuckoos. And what happens is essentially on those islands they lose the ability

to distinguish their eggs from other eggs. So I can play the part of the cuckoo and place an egg in their nest and they will be none the wiser for it. So what's going on? Right, so during the silk trade, this species, the village weaverbird, was introduced from South Africa into several Indian Ocean islands such as Mauritius.

There are no egg mimicking brood parasites. There are no cuckoos in Mauritius. And so they essentially don't need to have these unusual adaptations about egg color variability and then find discrimination. So even after a hundred years, they have lost some of that ability. And right.

I wanted to mention also that after 250 years away from the cuckoo, which is between West Africa and the Dominican Republic, where birds were introduced about 250 years ago, because the French ladies liked the weaver feathers in their hat and walking around with birds in cages and that kind of thing.

they lose even more of the egg variability and discrimination ability. So you can predict how much of these adaptations they will lose based on how much time they've been away from the cuckoo. Quite incredible.

What happens if the weaver birds are introduced somewhere and then maybe a cuckoo is introduced? Well, that's essentially what I simulated. So I played the part of the cuckoo in these places and parasitized them by putting an egg in their nest. And since they can count, I have to remove one of theirs and replace it with another egg. And yeah, they're getting worse and worse in the absence of the cuckoo. So it is possible that if a cuckoo were introduced to someplace like Dominican Republic, they

they would be able to clean house, so to speak, because the weavers no longer have adaptations to fight them. How long would it take for them to develop those adaptations? Have you experimented with that? I haven't because it took about 75 generations to have the first little bits of them fail in terms of the adaptations going away. Of course, I can't sit around for that long to wait for them to come back. But since the genetic basis for these adaptations is still there,

to some extent i expect that if a cuckoo were to go back into one of these populations or be introduced into dominican republic or something like that

It would be much quicker than the original evolution of the adaptation So originally probably it took thousands of years to evolve these adaptations But once they have them and they've lost them because of mutations Disrupting them. I think they could probably Revolve much more quickly David Lassie from New York with Pauline Newman experiments on evolution and genes

But did you see the story on the news last week on koala populations with too little variety in their genomes and how scientists are moving others, other koalas into the group to avoid inbreeding? This is the kind of experiment that's won Emily Roycroft at the ANU a L'Oreal award. Congratulations on winning the award. What aspect of your work were they celebrating?

Thank you. It was a real honour to receive the award. So we work a lot on threatened mammals and using genetic approaches to inform conservation. And for that, you just say genetics so straightforwardly, but how do you find out what their genomes are like across time?

So we're really lucky that technology's come a long way and we can actually sequence the entire genome of our really interesting, fascinating native wildlife in Australia. So using genetic sequencing technologies, which sounds complicated, but is actually relatively routine now, it was used during COVID to sequence the genomes of COVID, and we can use that same approach to sequence genomes of mammals and to understand how they're related to each other and what their population health is like.

So presumably this means that they respond as a population to the way the environment changes. Temperatures go up or there's more water or certain diseases, all that you can read on their genes.

Yeah, that's right. So we can back through time, look at how the populations have changed in terms of numbers, whether or not they've accumulated harmful mutations through time in response to any of the environmental changes that have gone on, and as well the longer term evolutionary patterns and how they're related to other species. How do you look at a genome, all those sequences of various letters of the alphabet and see, ah, there's a harmful mutation? Can you actually read such a thing?

Well, we do it by comparing to a reference database of lots of different species. So we know which parts of the genome code for proteins, and then we know which changes within that might change the structure or the function of the protein. And we know that from lots of work in model systems like mouse models and other lab systems, which mutations might have

the biggest impact and we can transfer that information across to non-model animals like our native species. I love the way you say models, mouse models. Presumably you've got model rats as well.

Yeah, so I work on native rats, but we're lucky that we have a really rich resource because the lab rat has been used in medical studies for many years and they've learnt a lot about how mouse biology works through that research that's really actually directed towards human health, but because of that work we can transfer that information to our native rodents which are only 12 million years divergent from the mouse model. It's a long time, but in mammal terms it's not as long as it could be.

I see. And what's the difference between an invasive rat and a model one? In other words, an Australian native rat.

We have a number of invasive rodents in Australia. The house mouse, which is the same one that's used in the lab, and black rats and brown rats, they're recent arrivers into Australia. They've arrived since European colonisation and they're very evolutionarily different from our native species. So our native species have been around in our region for at least eight million years, but certainly in Australia for the last four or five million years.

and they're part of a different evolutionary group to the invaders. So they're really unique and worth protecting. But how do you protect them? Okay, you've read out these codes, you know what they're made of, but then what do you do next?

So there's a whole lot of different things that we can do. One of the most important parts of how we use genetics to inform conservation is to look at the genetic health or the genetic diversity of threatened populations. So just like in humans, having a low genetic diversity and small population sizes can lead to inbreeding. And inbreeding is not good because you can see things like harmful mutations coming out, genetic diseases developing, and this can all lead to population collapse.

and extinction. So in our threatened species, we want to maintain a good high level of genetic diversity and our work can measure that and measure that through time and help us to decide whether we might need to intervene to increase genetic diversity in any of the threatened species we work on. How do you do that? Introducing other animals and letting them loose?

Sort of, yep. So where there are other populations elsewhere in Australia or potentially in zoos that might have different genetic makeup, we can look to bringing in individuals to a threatened population. That can boost genetic diversity, bringing in new genes and new alleles, and that can increase the genetic health of populations. Is that what they're doing to some extent with Tasmanian devils with their cancer problem?

Yeah, so that's a unique one because they're really all in Tasmania. So there's not any really different genetic sources to bring into, but by managing which individuals breed together in terms of devil management, they can determine whether they're having the best chance of having high genetic diversity within what remains. Emily, I've got a picture of your work of your looking down microscopes and punching away at computer screens and so on. Do you actually go out into the field as well?

I sometimes do. I do a lot of work in the lab and on computers analysing all this data and sometimes I'm lucky enough to go out with colleagues and actually sample the animals and get to interact with them in real life. But I'm also really lucky to work with a lot of ecologists who spend most of their time out in the field doing that aspect of the work. So I love to get into the field when I can. And you do that for leisure as well? Where do you go?

Well, even just nearby in Canberra, you can go to Mulligan's Flat and see the reintroduced populations of some of our most threatened species. So we've got quolls there, pukela, which is a threatened native rodent that have been brought back to regions where they're now extinct from. So that's really special. That's a fence sanctuary in Canberra. But yeah, I think in everybody's local area, they can probably find somewhere where they can go and experience wildlife to see some of our species in action.

And when it comes to students, because we are at the Australian National University, is there interest in their studying such, following up your wonderful example?

Yeah, I think students are really passionate about wildlife. Our students here get the opportunity to work at Mulligan's Flats through some of the units that we teach. And I think there's a real interest in the younger generation in preserving biodiversity and trying to come up with new strategies to help secure the future of our wildlife. So we're really lucky to work with passionate students here. Congratulations. Thank you so much.

Dr. Emily Roycroft at the Australian National University in Canberra, a winner of a L'Oreal award given to women in science every year. And her name gives me my good excuse to offer my nomination for a book of this century, as we're doing on Radio National. Passionate Minds by David Bodanis, all about Émilie du Châtelet and the great love affair of the Enlightenment.

Emily was formidable, learned maths and physics to keep the boys away, but it didn't work. So she tried sword fencing, at which she was superb. She spoke four languages fluently, translated Newton's Principia Mathematica into French, correcting it and expanding it as she went.

and discussed philosophy with her man. He was called Voltaire. Passionate minds, David Bodanis. And Emily was also responsible for the c squared in the equation E equals mc squared. She led to Einstein.

And for our final top story, apart from the one about mammals in the Science Show two weeks ago, which also qualifies, in my opinion, here's Bianca Nogredi, who writes for the journal Nature and Australian Geographic on an impeccable true scientist. Six-year-old Matthew Bales waits on the edge of Adelaide's Glynburn Road for a gap in the busy traffic. He sees an oncoming car and wonders why he can see it. Later, he asks his parents...

Why can we see cars? Why can we see anything? Deceptively simple questions that his parents' high school education hadn't equipped them to answer. It just made me wonder how the universe worked, he now explains simply. Billions of years before that suburban Adelaide scene, in a galaxy far, far away, a cataclysmic event occurs, releasing an unimaginably powerful burst of energy.

It's gone in the blink of an eye, but sends a blast of radiation that ripples out through the vast cold vacuum of space. At some point in its billions of light years journey, this wave washes over a small blue planet in one arm of a spiral galaxy, and its radio shriek is picked up by an antenna on a dry red continent.

Yet again, Matthew Bales, now working as an astrophysicist at Melbourne's Swinburne University of Technology, finds himself asking, why can we see this? The answer was so astounding, its cosmological implications so profound, that Matthew and his colleagues are now being whispered about as contenders for a Nobel Prize in physics.

Between those two events, Matthew, now Professor Bales, Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery, has done a lot of asking and answering of questions about the universe. The precocious child who could add and subtract before starting school grew into a talented student nicknamed The Professor. He loved the rules and logic of mathematics and consistently topped his class in it.

Then in year 10, he discovered physics. We learnt about force equals mass times acceleration and I went home and stripped my bike of every bit of extraneous weight so it would be easier to ride home, Matthew recalls. It was love at first lesson, the discovery that equations could describe how things from cars to planets moved. It captured his imagination and set him on the career path he still walks today.

Matthew's father wanted him to study engineering, but a charismatic first-year university lecturer opened his eyes to the possibility of a career in physics. He changed degrees, moved out of home and supported himself with tutoring. For his honours project at the Australian National University, Matthew chose to study pulsars.

These spinning neutron stars have magnetic fields that focus their energetic radiation into two polar beams of such intensity that they can be seen thousands to millions of light years away as they rhythmically sweep past with the star's rotation. That aspect of physics I found really exciting. The black holes and neutron stars and relativistic gravity, Matthew explains.

The chance to delve deeper into these cosmological phenomena came in 1985 at a national astronomy meeting where he bumped into Antipodean astrophysicist Richard Dick Manchester, a world authority on pulsars. He was amazed that I knew so much about pulsars, but I was kind of in love with them, Matthew says.

He began a PhD at CSIRO with Dick and Ken Friedman, another astrophysicist, as his advisors. The high-achieving, hard-working Dick and the politically astute and knowledgeable Ken set the tone for Matthew's career. When he was considering who to ask to referee his thesis, Ken told him to send it to scientists with the most fame and influence in the field.

So, he sent it to Venkatraman Radhakrishnan, then head of the Raman Research Institute in India. At that time, Venkatraman and Matthew had been locked in a major scientific dispute. Even though we were on opposite sides of the debate, I sent my thesis to him to mark, almost as a challenge. It was a ballsy move, but it paid off.

He recommended me for the prize for the best PhD at ANU, and the next time I saw him, he said, you kicked my arse. The PhD won the university's Crawford Medal, which led to a job at the University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Observatory. Matthew moved with his wife, a medical doctor, to the UK to work with the three Pulsar gods, Dick Manchester, Andrew Lynn and Joseph Taylor.

Matthew particularly enjoyed intellectual jousting with Andrew. "He and I got on very well, although my PhD was arguing against his favorite model of how neutron stars evolve," Matthew says. "I remember I gave my first talk when I arrived here, basically slamming Andrew's theories on magnetic field decay in neutron stars." Matthew also took it upon himself to modernize Andrew Lin's data software.

At the time, Andrew's team had been studying an odd pulsar with a wobble in it. Matthew's new software suggested the wobble could be explained if there was a planet about 10 times the size of the Earth orbiting the pulsar. We thought we'd discovered the first planet outside the solar system, which is one of the holy grails of science, Matthew says.

With great excitement, they published a paper in Nature in 1991 announcing their discovery, with Matthew as lead author. It made global headlines and for six months they were feted at astronomy conferences around the world.

Then, a week before Andrew was scheduled to give a talk on the planet at an international astronomy conference, he discovered an error in how the software had processed the data and the assumptions that the humans using it had made. When that error was corrected, the planet disappeared. Andrew turned up at my house at 7am and said, I think you know why I'm here. I said, the planet? And he said, yes. I said, it's gone?

He said, I'm afraid so. That moment has haunted Matthew ever since. The groundbreaking discovery was retracted and Matthew seriously considered leaving science altogether. For a week or so, I was thinking, I'll never get a job. I'll never get a grant. Everybody's going to review our papers much more harshly, he says. I was pretty devastated. But his love of pulsars wouldn't let him quit.

He got back to work at Jodrell Bank, then returned with his wife and child to Australia to work, first at CSIRO, then the University of Melbourne and finally Swinburne University. He brought with him two substantial research grants from the Australian Research Council that enabled him to establish what is now the Swinburne Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing.

It was there that, during a conversation with his former student Duncan Lorimer, now a professor of physics and astronomy at West Virginia University, talk turned to an unusually bright one-off burst of radiation, first spotted by Lorimer's student David Narkovich. These non-repeating pulsars had first been discovered by Maura McLaughlin, who was also Duncan's wife.

Duncan and Matthew analysed the data of this strange flash, looking at the characteristics that would indicate how far away the burst had occurred. In particular, how much the lower frequencies of radio waves were delayed by encountering random electrons in their journey through a near vacuum. Their conclusions were astounding. The source was a billion light years away, which would make it both mind-bogglingly distant and powerful.

They checked and rechecked, Matthew's phantom extrasolar planet lurking in the back of his mind. Then they decided to publish. We just thought, if this is real, this is so enormous that it's worth the risk. The Lorimer Burst paper, published in Science in 2007, blew open a whole new astronomical phenomenon.

Hundreds of these so-called fast radio bursts have since been discovered by astronomers around the world. A repeating fast radio burst directed by the giant Arecibo telescope in Chile proved the distance was cosmological. And then it was like, ah, there's a whole new area of science now.

That discovery earned Lorimer, McLaughlin and Bales the prestigious Shaw Prize in Astronomy this year, earmarking them, as a Shaw Prize often does, for a possible Nobel Prize. It was a confidence boost, Bales says, acknowledging that it's ironic that an astrophysicist who's generated more than $75 million worth of research grants should lack confidence.

It also finally banished the spectre of the nearly career-ending era of the phantom planet. While the Shaw Prize brings considerable scientific fame, prestige and validation of a worthy career, Bales cares far more about the relationships and careers he's nurtured along the way. Every year there's a Shaw Prize winner, but the relationships I have with my former students are very important to me, he says.

He continues to invest so much of himself in being a mentor and the kind of leader he looked up to when he was a student. And that brings rewards that no prize can ever match.

It's those little moments where you get with a group of people, when you've got a team and you've made some breakthroughs, and it's like, this is awesome. The story of the year, Matthew Bales from Alice Springs. And as Bianca Nogredi didn't mention, winner of this year's Prime Minister's Prize for Science, the top one.

Bianca wrote that for Australian Geographic magazine, and she also writes for the journal Nature. How to deal with a mistake, fess up, keep going despite the shattering blow, and show how science at its best is self-correcting and collegial. Bales, one of our top 100 scientists. Another is starring next week, Sir Charles Todd on the Telegraph across Australia. Lady Todd, Alice, gave her name to Matthew Bales' hometown.

After Todd, we have the Extremely Large Telescope with Jonathan Webb and kicking off next year's science shows, Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna with Merlin Crossley. And also next year, the science show Turns 50. My thanks to producer David Fisher and technical producers over the year, Anne-Marie de Bettencourt, John Jacobs, Bethany Stewart, Emery Cronin, Craig Tillmouth and Tegan Nicholls. I'm Robin Williams. ♪

You've been listening to an ABC podcast. You can discover more ABC podcasts, live radio and exclusives on the ABC Listener.