Humans become unwell and can die from cold and heat.  Shilu Tong has spent the last few years unravelling the effects of both on emergency hospital admissions and deaths. In addition to assembling the numbers,

Today’s guest, Leah Stokes, has looked deeply into the politics of renewable energy. She outlines Ontario’s solar feed-in tariff experience and the pivotal role of pricing on public support, and how Arizona has become a case-study of regulatory capture...

Good governance and sound policy are under continuous threat from political corruption.  No country is totally free of it. This week’s guest, Elizabeth David-Barrett, has made this area her specialty and discusses with Charles not only the different fo...

Why did “pink slime” in human food take so long to appear in the news?  How is our generosity affected by disaster stories? Would voters be influenced by sensational stories even if they are not about the candidates? This week’s guest,

In this week’s episode Luzia Helfer outlines her clever experiments on the relationship between politicians and journalists  – one of mutual dependence and wariness. Luzia has taken a novel approach to the topic by running carefully designed experiment...

What role did China’s 2008 milk contamination scandal play in transforming agriculture and food production in that country? How big is China’s organic food industry today? How tough are its standards? Dairy products were never traditionally a major par...

The Arctic region is hotting up. Climate change is making its presence felt more strongly at the top of the world than in other regions, and as ice cover declines, speculation about economic exploitation in this harsh and fragile environment has intens...

India needs power. But while coal industry advocates have tried to make energy poverty a moral issue, arguing that renewables cannot meet the demand, Charles’s guest Nikit Abhyankar from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has been busy working o...

Every Google search and each Facebook post you make are diligently tracked and run through complex algorithms to target online ads at you.   You may find some of the targeted ads useful, other amusing, and a few slightly sinister. -

We all love (or at least use) stuff. And it all needs to be moved around. Freight transport efficiency might not seem a particularly appealing topic, but consider for a moment how much extra energy is used moving goods from Point A to Point B,