Silicon Valley’s bet on a future of AI-enabled warfare
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 o...
16 Jan 202532min
How the world fell in love with plastic without thinking through the consequences
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 agre...
9 Jan 202529min
Brain implants, agentic AI and answers on dark matter: what to expect from science in 2025
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 technolog...
2 Jan 202537min
How Zimbabwe reached the point of abolishing the death penalty
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, E...
19 Des 202426min
Why distrust in powerful politicians is part of a functioning democracy
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...
12 Des 202427min
How do animals understand death?
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 th...
5 Des 202426min
The story of one Amazon warehouse in the UK that pushed to unionise
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 o...
28 Nov 202432min
50 years since the discovery of ancient hominin fossil Lucy in Ethiopia, calls grow to decolonize paleoanthropology
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 bac...
21 Nov 202427min
