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Measles is a nasty infection that you don't want to get. It can cause death and, what's more, it can also erase your immune system's memory. Only relatively recently scientists have measured this directly - by concentrating on antibodies – which can be generated by natural infection, and by vaccines.

Anticipation is a strange experience. It can take you all the way from hope and trust, to anxiety and fear. But there’s a happy balancing point where anticipation can enrich your life.

Who’d’ve thought that one of the most sober animals is the humble hamster. They love alcohol but it doesn’t affect them. And who’d’ve thought that there’s a way to measure inebriation levels in animals - it’s called the Wobbling Scale – but hamsters NEVER wobble. 

The average recommendation is to wash your bed sheets at least every two weeks. This is because every day you shed a mix of dead skin cells, sweat, germs, and body oils.. Sometimes you can delay bed sheet washing, it all depends on what kind of things you get up to in bed.

Very long and very widebut only a few kilometres thick, atmospheric rivers carry water from the tropics towards the poles – and they shift huge amounts of heat as well. A few decades ago, atmospheric rivers hit West Antarctica and collapsed two massive ice shelves.

A discovery in weather in the 1990s was the Atmospheric River. They've been around for pretty much ever though - one of them bankrupted California in 1862, and another dumped lots and lots of water onto Brisbane, in February 2022.

Whales are the giants of the marine realm, and here's why they get that way. This episode was originally published in May 2018

The star Earendel came into existence a long time ago, and is now famous as the most distant single star that astronomers have been able to obtain an image of.

The Koran, the Bible, the Sanskrit Mahabharata, and the Greek Illiad all mention plagues of locusts, and they're seen as carvings in ancient Egyptian tombs. Large numbers of locust could have come about because, in certain circumstances, grasshoppers metamorphose—into locusts.

The drug ivermectin is really good for treating worms; unfortunately it was falsely promoted as a COVID cure due to data errors, drug trial anomalies, or insufficient publication review.

There are many cases of drugs being repurposed once a new aspect of them is discovered—their new use is often very beneficial. One such drug is ivermectin. It works well against various parasitic infections. It does not work against COVID.

Ball games were happening 3,500 years ago, and ever since then we’ve bounced and batted in all sorts of fun ways. We're especially interested in the mechanics of a ball curving as it travels through the air—which happens in swing bowling.