The Conversation Weekly

Firefighters in Los Angeles continue to battle devastating wildfires that have killed at least 27 people and left thousands of homes destroyed. Today, we’re revisiting an interview we ran in late 2023 with Emily Lindsey, a paleoecologist who works at the La Brea tar pits archaeological site in Los Angeles, about a wildfire warning from southern California’s ice age history. The interview originall...

From Gaza to Ukraine, today’s war zones are being used as testing grounds for new systems driven by artificial intelligence. Billions of dollars are now being pumped into AI weapons technology, much of it from Silicon Valley venture capitalists. In this episode, we speak to Elke Schwarz , a reader in political theory at Queen Mary University of London in the UK who studies the ethics of autonomous...

Every year, 400 million tons of plastic are produced worldwide, and every year, approximately 57 million tons of plastic waste is created. And yet in November, the latest round of negotiations to agree the first legally binding international treaty on plastics pollution collapsed. So what can we really do about the plastics pollution problem? In this episode we sat down with Mark Miodowonik , prof...

In a special episode to start 2025, we’ve brought together three science editors from The Conversation’s editions around the world to discuss what to look out for in the world of science and technology in the coming year. Host Gemma Ware is joined by Paul Rincon from The Conversation in the UK, Elsa Couderc from The Conversation in France and Signe Dean from The Conversation in Australia.  Th...

Zimbabwe is on the cusp of abolishing the death penalty after its Death Penalty Abolition Bill was approved by the senate on December 12. The bill is now sitting on the desk of Zimbabwe’s president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, a known opponent of the death penalty, waiting for his assent. In this episode, we speak to two experts on the death penalty, Carolyn Hoyle and Parvais Jabbar from the University of...

Surveys suggest that in many western democracies, political trust is at rock bottom. But is it really such a bad thing for people living in a democracy to distrust their government? In this episode, we talk to political scientist Grant Duncan , visiting scholar in politics at City St George's, University of London, about why he thinks a certain level of distrust and scepticism of powerful pol...

An orca that pulled along the corpse of its baby for 17 days. An opposum that plays dead to fool predators. And a chimpanzee that cleaned the teeth of its dead baby. Observations of behaviours like these suggest animals have a complex relationship with death. In this week’s episode, we speak to Susana Monsó , an associate professor of philosophy at the National Distance Education University in Mad...

The online retail giant Amazon is known for its resistance to unions. In this week’s episode, we tell the story of what happened at one warehouse in Coventry in the UK when its workers tried to gain official recognition for the GMB union, one of the country’s biggest labour unions. We talk to Tom Vickers , a sociologist at Nottingham Trent University in the UK, who spent weeks observing workers’ e...

It's been 50 years since the American paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson discovered the fossil of ancient hominin 'Lucy' in the Afar region of Ethiopia. The find took the story of human evolution back beyond 3 million years for the first time. Yet, despite largely centring on the African continent as the "cradle of mankind", the narrative of hominin fossil discovery is striking for its lack of Af...

For generations, cod fishing was a way of life in Newfoundland and Labrador, the easternmost province in Canada. But in 1992, after cod stocks in the north Atlantic plummeted, the federal government imposed a moratorium on cod fishing. It was to last for 32 years until June 2024, when the government lifted the ban in a controversial decision. In this episode we speak to Tyler Eddy , a research sci...

What happens when a gangster leaves their life on the street? How do they transition to something new? We find out through the life stories of two people who joined them as young men and came out the other side.  Featuring an interview with Gaz, a former gang member in Sierra Leone, and Dennis Rodgers , a research professor at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, Switzerland who leads a global r...

Amid deep political polarization and extreme campaign rhetoric, the U.S. presidential election on November 5 is likely to be decided by a small number of voters in swing states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan. But why is it so close? In this episode Naomi Schalit, senior politics editor at the The Conversation U.S., speaks to Jesse Rhodes , associate professor of political science at UMass Amher...

Take a walk along a beach in parts of South Australia, and you may come across unusual patches of pink sand. When a team of geologists began analysing samples of this mysterious sand to find out where it comes from, their search took them back through time to a previously undiscovered mountain range in Antarctica. In this episode Sharmaine Verhaert , a PhD candidate in earth sciences at the U...

Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun were awarded the 2024 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for their discovery of microRNA, tiny biological molecules that tell the cells in our body what kind of cell to be by turning on and off certain genes. In this episode, we speak to Ambros , who is professor of natural sciences at UMass Chan Medical School in the US, about the discovery that led to his Nobel p...

In an extra episode this week, we're running the first part of Know Your Place: what happened to class in British politics, a new series from The Conversation Documentaries. Host Laura Hood, senior politics editor at The Conversation in London, explores when the relationship between class and voting in the UK broke down and why.  Featuring John Curtice , professor of politics at the Universit...

The Middle East is perilously close to all-out war. In the year since the October 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel , millions of people have been displaced from their homes in Gaza, Israel, the West Bank and now Lebanon, and tens of thousands killed. In this episode, we speak to two experts from the Middle East, Mireille Rebeiz and Amnon Aran , to get a sense of the strategic calculations being made...

A new drug to prevent HIV infection is showing hugely promising results in clinical trials when injected every six months. In this episode, we speak to South African HIV doctor and scientist Linda-Gail Bekker at the University of Cape Town about her involvement in one of the trials for lenacapavir and why she thinks it could be so ground-breaking.  This episode was written and produced by Men...

What makes some people more likely to feel disproportionate sympathy to people facing accusations of sexual misconduct – a concept known as himpathy? In this episode, we speak to a human behaviour expert whose research seeks to understand the psychological factors behind it. Featuring Samantha Dodson , assistant professor of organizational behaviour and human resources at the University of Calgary...

A rare and ancient plant has been waiting for its long-lost mate. The only known specimens of Encephalartos woodii , a rare and ancient species of cycad, are male, all clones of the same plant found over 100 years ago deep in a South African forest. Now a team of researchers is on a mission to find an elusive female version of the plant with the help of drones and artificial intelligence...

An epidemic of mpox in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, is spreading quickly, particularly among young children. Mpox is a serious, at times fatal, virus – and the world knows how to prevent it. There are effective vaccines stockpiled in many western countries. Yet, after an earlier global epidemic in 2022 was largely brought under control in Europe and North America, the ongoing battle t...

Dating apps are having a rocky moment, with some of the biggest struggling to attract paying users. In this episode, we hear from researchers exploring how dating apps have changed modern dating and the expectations around it. And we find out why some dating app users aren’t actually there looking for love, but keep on swiping anyway. Featuring Treena Orchard , associate professor at the School of...

In the second of two episodes on geoengineering, we hear the case against trying to reflect sunlight to cool the Earth. Solar radiation modification has attracted attention and investment in recent years as a way to potential reverse the effects of climate change, but it remains a controversial idea. We hear from researchers pushing a non-use agreement for solar geoengineering who explain why they...

Geoengineering, the modification of the climate using technological interventions to reverse climate change, is a hugely divisive issue and we’ve decided to explore it in two episodes. In this first episode, we talk to scientists working on potential geoengineering technologies who argue the case for conducting research into these interventions. We speak to Shaun Fitzgerald , director of the Centr...

As we take a short production break in August, we're re-running an episode from 2023 about Neanderthals, and what new discoveries about their research could tell us about Homo Sapiens . For generations, Neanderthals have been a source of fascination for scientists. This species of ancient hominim inhabited the world for around 500,000 years until they suddenly disappeared 42,000 years ago. Today,...

As The Conversation Weekly takes a short production break in August, we're bringing you a recent episode from our partners at the Borders and Belonging podcast about Japan’s evolving stance on immigration. With a rapidly ageing population and a shrinking workforce, Japan is facing an unprecedented crisis: by 2030, it's projected to have a shortfall of nearly 6.4 million workers. But despite Japan’...