Kim reads out listener feedback on the show.

Kiwi-Scottish starman Dr Stephen Curran returns by popular demand to unpack cosmic goings-on.

Dr Archa Fox has an unusual background for a scientist - when she was three her parents packed the family off to India to join the Orange People cult. Now Dr Fox is an associate professor at the School of Human Sciences at The University of Western Australia, and is part of a group of mRNA scientists who successfully lobbied for a mRNA vaccine manufacturing facility to be built in Australia.  [image_crop:125582:full]

[image:268000:third] Gary Fettke is the only doctor in Australia to be banned from giving dietary advice to his patients, after recommending those with complications of Type 2 Diabetes reduce their sugar intake. Now Dr Fettke has set his sights on the anti-meat lobby, claiming the current demonisation of red meat has nothing to do with science, but is about religious ideology and processed food industry profit.  

Writer, activist and historian Rebecca Solnit's latest is Recollections of My Non-Existence, a memoir that describes being a 19-year-old in San Francisco - where she started to forge her voice as a young writer during the era of punk rock and amid an atmosphere of gender violence.

In 2013, journalist Jessica Bruder hit the road to document the growing subculture of Americans who have given up traditional housing to move into 'wheel estate' — many because of economic or personal hardship. The project spanned three years and the resulting book Nomadland was released in 2017 and made into an award-winning movie. 

In his day job Ian White is the general manager of a cyber-security company, dealing with issues of hacking and ransomware, but in his spare time he has another important role: as 'big buddy' to a young boy who doesn't have a father in his life.

New Zealand’s ‘COVID-naive’ population will offer unique data to global research as part of a new clinical study looking at how our bodies respond to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

Over the last eight months, conflict in Tigray, in northern Ethiopia, has killed thousands of people, displaced two million and pushed 350,000 to the brink of famine. Robert Patman is a Professor of International Relations at Otago University, and an expert on the Horn of Africa. He joins the show to discuss.

Kim reads listener feedback from the show.

Protein scientist and writer Danyl McLauchlan joins Kim to tackle life's big questions, ideas and thinkers. This week he's discussing the current relevance of Nicky Hager's 1996 book Secret Power in relationship to the Five Eyes network, the GCSB, and New Zealand's ongoing role in global surveillance.

The father of modern Kiwi comedy John Clarke is being celebrated in a new online collection launched by NZ On Screen. Clarke's daughter Lorin Clarke, a writer, broadcaster and columnist based in Melbourne, worked with NZ On Screen to bring the collection together. She joins the show to discuss her father's incredible legacy.

At age 94 Boyd Klap continues to have a remarkable life helping make remarkable things happen. In recent years these have revolved around the memory of Anne Frank.

Founded by Alexander the Great, the city of Alexandria sat at an important junction of the southern foothills of the Hindu Kush mountains. And then it vanished. Alexandria, the new book by Dr Edmund Richardson, doesn't just dive into what happened to this lost city - it tells the extraordinary 19th century story of Charles Masson, an ordinary boy from London turned deserter, archaeologist, and highly respected scholar.

The beloved stars of The Casketeers, Francis and Kaiora Tipene, show how the traditions of tikanga shape their lives while juggling five sons, three businesses, and a television show in their new book Tikanga: Living with the Traditions of Te Ao Maori.

Over the last 10 years there has been a dramatic rise in far-right movements across Europe. London-based New Zealand journalist Tim Hume has been investigating the rise of these far-right movements for his five-part documentary 'Decade of Hate' series, currently featured on Vice.

Professor Alan Merry is a world leading anaesthetist, and deep thinker about safe surgery on a macro and micro level. Professor Merry says that while New Zealand's health system is pretty safe, it could be safer.

Our regular commentator Cambridge University consultant clinical virologist Dr Chris Smith joins us with the latest Covid-19 science, and to answer your questions.

Julian reads listener feedback from the show.

Nobody really knows why we dream. Erik Hoel, a research assistant professor of neuroscience at Tufts University in Massachusetts, was inspired by the techniques used to train artificial neural networks for his own theory of "overfitted brain hypothesis".

Musicians often sing about environmental problems, but what about the environmental issues tied up with the materials from which their guitars are made

Sahra Ahmed works in Christchurch as a refugee health nurse, helping new arrivals find their footing in a strange new land. It's a journey she has also undertaken.

In South Africa there's a saying: 'You're not a real Springbok until you've played the All Blacks'. It's a testament to one of the fiercest rivalries in rugby history - that between South Africa and New Zealand - which sports writer Jamie Wall examines in his new book The Hundred Years' War.

Sarah Helm, the Executive Director of the NZ Drug Foundation, joins the show to discuss how we should be reshaping our drug laws - and in some cases looking at decriminalisation.

When the Berlin Wall came down how did over 100,000 Stasi officers manage to disappear? In his book The Grey Men, former FBI agent Ralph Hope investigates what happened to the former East Berlin spies.