The Conversation Weekly

AI is transforming the world around us, offering increased productivity and promising to tackle difficult problems like global warming. But behind the scenes, its environmental costs are mounting. From massive energy use to vast quantities of water required to cool data centres, AI’s footprint is growing fast. So, in an age of water scarcity and climate crisis, can we justify this technological bo...

Scientists can get animals to do the strangest things. They’ve taught goldfish to drive cars, primates to perform calculations with Arabic numerals and giraffes to do statistical reasoning. But what’s the point? In this episode, biologist Scarlett Howard from Monash University in Australia – who has taught bees to tell the difference between odd and even numbers – def...

Countries around the world are meeting in Geneva in August to negotiate a global plastics treaty aimed at curbing plastic pollution. The last round of negotiations failed last November after oil-producing countries refused to sign up to a clause calling for the world to reduce its production of plastics.   But how did the world become hooked on plastic in the first place? This week, we'r...

Donald Trump is suing Rupert Murdoch, alongside the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones and others, for libel after the Journal published an article alleging that Trump once wrote a “bawdy” birthday letter to the convicted sex offender, the late Jeffrey Epstein. Trump is seeking US$10 billion in damages. Trump and Murdoch have a transactional friendship that goes back decades. Despite past...

Israel has never officially confirmed or denied having nuclear weapons and has never signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Instead, even as evidence has emerged about its nuclear capabilities, Israel has maintained a policy of nuclear ambiguity. The origins of this opacity lie in a secret deal forged in a one-on-one meeting between Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, and the...

The majority of the world’s rechargeable batteries are now made using lithium-ion. Most rely on a combination of different rare earth metals such as cobalt or nickel for their electrodes. But around the world, teams of researchers are looking for alternative – and more sustainable – materials to build the batteries of the future. In this episode, we speak to four battery experts who are testing a...

 Across Europe, far-right movements are gaining ground. By normalising nationalist rhetoric and challenging democratic institutions, these parties raise comparisons with former periods of fascism on the continent. Between 1943 and 1945, when Nazi forces occupied northern Italy, ordinary people in towns and villages across the country took up arms against fascism in one of Europe’s largest resistan...

The language from European leaders was fawning and obsequious. At one point, the head of Nato, Mark Rutte, even called Donald Trump “daddy”. But when the US president left the Nato summit in late June, there was a sigh of relief that he had not made any more angry criticism of the alliance. And after months of American pressure, Nato members agreed to increase their spending on defence to 5% of GD...

Robert F Kennedy Jr caused controversy in April by promising to find a cause for autism by September. Claims by the new US secretary for health and human services that autism is a “preventable disease” with an environmental cause,  contradict a body of research that suggests autism is caused by a combination of genetic and external factors. The US government announced that to support its new resea...

Faced with the choice in their daily lives, their work or their politics, why do some people decide to keep quiet, to censor themselves in anticipatory obedience, even if they’re not ordered to do so? In this episode we talk to self-censorship expert Daniel Bar-Tal at Tel Aviv University about what drives people to censor themselves, and its consequences for society. This episode was written and p...

As Jaws marks its 50th anniversary, sharks continue to get a bad rap. Film after film portrays them as terrifying hunters, the bane of surfers and swimmers. But in Indonesia, sharks are the hunted. It’s the world’s largest shark-fishing nation, with more species of sharks found in Indonesian waters than in any other country. So Indonesia was the ideal place for conservation scientist Hollie Booth...

In October 2021, 136 countries agreed to establish new tax rules requiring large multinational companies to pay at least 15% in corporate tax. Nearly four years later, this ambitious agreement is finally being implemented around the world, but its success faces big challenges. In the second part of The 15% solution, we examine progress towards implementing the Organisation for Economic Cooperation...

For decades, multinational corporations have used sophisticated strategies to shift profits away from where they do business. As a result, countries around the world lose an estimated US$500 billion annually in unpaid taxes , with developing nations hit particularly hard. In the first episode of The 15% solution , we explore how companies have exploited loopholes in the global tax system. We speak...

More than two thirds of guns recovered at Mexican crime scenes originate in the U.S. For decades, Mexico has struggled with staggering levels of gun violence fuelled in large part by weapons trafficked across its northern border. Now an investigation published by The Conversation has arrived at a new estimate of the scale of this illicit gun trade between the U.S. and Mexico in 2022: 135,000 guns....

For much of the 21st century, one theory has dominated research efforts to cure Alzheimer's disease: the amyloid hypothesis. Beta-amyloid is a protein that builds up in clumps, or plaques, in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease and is linked to their cognitive decline. But in recent years, despite the emergence of a couple of new drugs targeting these plaques, some scientists have begun...

Three months after the Trump administration made drastic cuts to its aid agency, USAID, the effects are being felt across the world, particularly in Africa. In this episode we speak to Bright Simons, an African aid expert and visiting senior fellow at ODI Global about where the decimation of US aid leaves the debate about the future of development assistance. This episode of The Conversation Weekl...

Liverpool FC just won the English Premier League. Contributing to their 5-1 victory over Tottenham to seal the title was Mohamed Salah, the Egyptian superstar who is the league's top scorer in the 2024-5 season. We're revisiting an episode that we first ran in December 2022 about research which used Salah to demonstrate how a celebrity footballer who is openly Muslim can help to reduce Islamophobi...

The Trump administration’s cuts to funding for American universities and research have left many scientists reeling and very worried. At the National Institutes of Health, which has an annual budget of US$47 billion to support medical research both in the U.S. and around the world, nearly 800 grants have been terminated. The administration is considering cutting the overall budget of the NIH by 40...

Few places on earth are immune to the explosion of anti-vaccination conspiracy theories and health disinformation fuelled by the COVID pandemic. But in countries like Brazil, where the disinformation flowed from the very top of government, the problem is even more acute and some people are exploiting the fear of others to make money. In this episode we speak to Ergon Cugler at the Brazilian Instit...

The Birkin bag made by French luxury retailer Hermès has become a status symbol for the global elite. Notoriously difficult to obtain, the world's rich obsess over how to get their hands on one. But when US retailer Walmart recently launched a much cheaper bag that looked very similar to the Birkin, nicknamed a "Wirkin" by others, it sparked discussions about wealth disparity and the ethics of con...

Some of the leading brains behind generative AI have warned about the risk of artificial superintelligence wiping out humanity, if left unchecked. But what if the influence of AI on humans is much more mundane, influencing our evolution over thousands of years through natural selection? In this episode we talk to evolutionary biologist Rob Brooks about what AI could do to the evolution of humanity...

Five years since Covid, not only has the pandemic affected the way we live and work, it’s also influencing the way researchers are thinking about the past. In this episode archaeologist Alex Bentley from the University of Tennessee explains how the pandemic sparked new research into how disease may have affected ancient civilisations, and the clues this offers about a change in the way humans desi...

Ships transport around 80% of the world’s cargo. From your food, to your car to your phone, chances are it got to you by sea. The vast majority of the world’s container ships burn fossil fuels, which is why 3% of global emissions come from shipping – slightly more than the 2.5% of emissions from aviation. The race is on to reduce these emissions, and quickly, to meet the Paris agreement targets. I...

For over 40 years, the Kurdistan Workers Party, the PKK, has waged an armed insurgency against Turkey, fighting for Kurdish rights and autonomy. But in late February, Abdullah Öcalan, the PKK’s imprisoned founder, called for the group to lay down its arms and dissolve itself. Days later, the PKK, which is labelled as a terrorist organisation by Turkey, Europe and the US, declared a ceasefire with...

When the first cases of COVID-19 began to spread around the world in early 2020, people in Iquitos, a remote city in the heart of the Peruvian Amazon, weren’t unduly worried. They assumed their isolation would protect them. It didn’t. Peru, and Iquitos, were hit fast, and hard . In a surreal situation, people were left to fend for themselves, fighting to get hold of oxygen on the black market for...