They get a bad rap in the movies but just dangerous are they really? Laura, Ellie and Jasmin compare human-shark interactions to other – seemingly less dangerous – activities, and talk about shark behaviour as well as their senses and evolutionary history to figure out their tactics for swimming with sharks.

Read more:

• London’s Natural History Museum for a selection of sharkey facts
• NOAA fisheries for some more fun facts
• The Australian Institute of Marine Science for data on shark attacks and deaths by falling coconuts
• News from the BBC on cocaine sharks
• Statistics from Florida museum about sharks attacking people
• News from the Smithsonian about sharks being scared of orcas
• News from IFL Science about sharks making friends

Did you know you have fungi living in your gut? Ellie and Laura share recent improvement in anti-fungal drugs, the relatively new discovery that fungi are found in many types of cancer and speculate on what this might mean for future cancer therapies. They also consider their own experiences with fungus and how they can bias a person's point of view.

Ellie mentions a book in relation to how fungi in the gut affect mental health: The Immune Mind by Dr. Monty Lyman.

Read more about antifungal drugs as well as fungi in cancer:

• The podcast episode from the journal, Nature, which provides a transcript and excellent summary of antifungal drug development
• A news story in The Guardian about lethal fungal infections
• Well known research about fungi and pancreatic cancer from 2019
• Research from 2022 which surveyed 35 different types of cancer and found evidence of fungi in all of them
• Research from 2023 that replicated the study from 2019 but found no evidence of fungi causing cancer
• An in-depth summary from BBC Future about the effects of bacteria and fungi in cancer

As the world tries to wean itself of fossil fuels, alternative ways of producing and storing energy are being developed. Antonia, Jasmin and Sophie talk about how hydrogen can be used to store energy, different ways it can be created, how developed the technology is, and what hydrogen is currently used for.