Does the misunderstanding of science begin in schools? Science journalist and former BBC Science correspondent, Sue Nelson visits the UK’s National Space Centre to discover how space is being used to entice children into studying science. She also speaks to teachers around the world about the challenges of ensuring the next generation better understand the scientific and technological world around them. Presenter: Sue Nelson Producer: Richard Hollingham (Photo: Pupils of the Ecole Vivalys elemen...
Nov 03, 2021•27 min
Sometimes it’s right to be sceptical about new technologies. US tech reporter Katherine Gorman joins Sue Nelson to report on artificial intelligence and how it’s rapidly pervading our lives. Katherine reports from New York on controversial facial recognition cameras and we hear how regulators are struggling to keep up with innovation. Image: Concept illustration of an electronic eye (Credit: ValeryBrozhinsky/Getty Creative)
Oct 27, 2021•27 min
Across Europe, activists fearful of 5G technology have attacked phone masts. Science journalist and former BBC Science correspondent Sue Nelson teams up with science reporter Hidde Boersma in the Netherlands to find out how conspiracy theories take root and what can be done to combat them. She also hears how scientists can improve their communication and what they have learnt from debates around climate change. (Photo: Protesters march against 5G technology in 2019, The Hague, Netherlands. Credi...
Oct 20, 2021•27 min
Anti-vaxxers, flat Earthers, 5G arsonists and climate change deniers – why have so many people given up on science and where are governments, scientists and the media going wrong? As Covid-19 continues to affect us all, what is the best way to communicate public health messages, when the bottom line is saving lives? Umaru Fofana reports from Sierra Leone on the Ebola prevention and vaccine campaigns and former BBC science correspondent, Sue Nelson, speaks to public health experts and fact checke...
Oct 13, 2021•28 min
Lainy Malkani looks into the story of sugar in Thailand, now the second biggest exporter of sugar in the world. We hear how farmers there are coping with climate change, what sustainable production might look like and what sugar cane can be used for once the sweet juice has been removed, from fuel to water bottles. Lainy looks at the future of sugar, talking to those experimenting with sugar to try to make it healthier, like the company Douxmatok, who are hacking sugar crystals at a structural l...
Oct 06, 2021•28 min
Lainy Malkani focuses on the story of sugar in the USA. From one of the oldest confectionery shops in New Orleans where the local delicacy of pecan nut pralines are made every day, to a former sugar plantation along the Mississippi river, she hears about the role of sugar in the history of Louisiana. She speaks to Khalil Gibran Mohammed about the legacy of sugar and slavery in the region, and hears from the manager of the Whitney plantation about what remains there today. From there to the sugar...
Sep 29, 2021•27 min
Humans have always been delighted by sweetness. In this three part series Lainy Malkani explores how sugar forged the modern world, from its role in the slave trade and the European colonisation of the Americas, to the consequences of our dependency on it today. For some countries, their past is built on it; for others, their futures depend on it. Across Britain, the USA and Thailand, Lainy digs into the past, present and future of sugar. Beginning in London, Lainy samples sweet treats in Brick ...
Sep 22, 2021•28 min
A decade after the end of dictatorship, Libya is gearing up for planned elections at the end of this year that many hope will finally bring a peaceful and democratic future. The country is slightly more stable since the end of civil war two years ago. But despite a peace agreement, it is still effectively split in two, politically and militarily. Separate forces control the two halves of the country, backed by different foreign powers. And some think war will break out again. BBC reporter Tim Wh...
Sep 15, 2021•28 min
BBC reporter Tim Whewell, who covered the 2011 uprising, returns to the country to ask why plans to integrate the militias into a unified national army came to nothing. He talks to past and present militiamen - including the young man Wadah al-Keesh, who later left his group in disgust - and Mohammed al-Durat, truck-driver turned police commander, who has reunited with a band of friends to fight in every major battle over the last ten years - and believes he will in future too. Tim talks to revo...
Sep 08, 2021•28 min
In February 2011, the arrest of a human rights lawyer in Libya sparked an uprising against the 42-year dictatorship of Col Muammar Gaddafi. The Revolution spread - supported by foreign airstrikes - and within eight months Gaddafi was killed, his regime overthrown. It was one of the climactic moments of the 'Arab Uprisings’. But what happened afterwards to Libya's Revolution? Ten years on, it is still unfinished. It has brought thousands of deaths, civil war, a strategically vital and oil-rich co...
Sep 01, 2021•27 min
International economist Jim O’Neill asks economists and historians if President Biden’s ambitions to ‘build back better’ - with a new focus on investing in human capital and addressing racial and financial inequalities - could result in fundamental changes to the characteristics of America’s economic system. Has the resilience that is critical to the DNA of America's economic system - its capacity to weather recurring financial storms and bounce back - survived Covid? (Photo: US President Joe Bi...
Jul 28, 2021•27 min
International economist Jim O’Neill explores the implications for the dollar of America’s response to the Covid-driven economic crisis. With help from economists and historians, he asks if China can challenge the dollar's dominant place in the global economy - or whether digital currencies, such as bitoin, could prove more disruptive in the long term? (Photo: Representations of the Ripple, Bitcoin, Etherum and Litecoin virtual currencies on a PC motherboard. Credit: Reuters)
Jul 21, 2021•27 min
Prior to Covid, the US economy had been declining compared with other countries, and the pandemic itself highlighted existing weaknesses. Now America’s economy is surging, powered by President Joe Biden’s massive financial stimulus plan. International economist Jim O’Neill hears from economists who argue that new fiscal policies could support a transformational moment for America’s economy - and from others who warn that dangerous inflationary pressures are being stoked. (Photo: President Joe Bi...
Jul 14, 2021•27 min
Jewellery designer, Rajvi Vora discovers more about precious gold as she looks ahead to the future of gold. With cryptocurrency snapping at its heels, can it remain a financial powerhouse? Ravi unearths what goldmines are doing to our planet and to the people who work at them, including the Indonesian families being poisoned by the goldmines on their back doorsteps. But there is a good side to gold too. She hears from the scientists beginning to tap into the potential of using nanogold to treat ...
Jul 07, 2021•27 min
Jewellery designer Rajvi Vora discovers more about the precious metal that has had such an impact on her life, and the world. Rajvi is learning about gold’s current role across the globe and hoping to understand the many faces of it. From where it starts life in the goldmines of Colombia - hidden in lush forests that serve their communities, to Ghana where illegal goldmines are killing crops and livelihoods. She also speaks to celebrity jewellers making extravagant creations for the rich and fam...
Jun 30, 2021•27 min
Throughout time our definition of what is valuable and what is rare changes. Yet as economies boom and bust and fashions come and go, one thing seems to remain both financially valuable and personally precious - gold. Across three episodes for The Compass, we will explore gold's past, present and future and humanity’s obsession with it - from being worshipped in the ancient world, to changing immigration forever during the Gold Rush, and the part it plays in our jewellery, coinage, finance and m...
Jun 23, 2021•27 min
Speaking with a variety of experts and working Americans, Daniel Susskind considers how we might negotiate a world without work. He hears the story of Youngstown, Ohio, where the collapse of the steel industry in the 1970s led to severe job losses and created a perfect storm of societal problems that a fresh wave of rapid automation could replicate on a mass scale. If we’re to avoid such a future, we’re going to have to rethink our attitudes towards taxation, wealth distribution, and even the na...
Jun 16, 2021•28 min
Economist Daniel Susskind asks what the new wave of high-tech automation means for jobs. He hears from a company leading the way in the development of driverless trucks, and a long-haul truck driver who’s deeply worried about it. If jobs like trucking disappear, many of America’s millions of drivers may be forced into sectors like the service industry, but, as we hear on our visit to the world’s first automated restaurant, that isn’t immune to automation either. With technology already encroachi...
Jun 09, 2021•27 min
Technology has complemented our work since the invention of the wheel, but we may finally be approaching a point where automation stands to replace some human jobs entirely. Economist Dr Daniel Susskind explores how automation is affecting work in the United States, from fully automated restaurants to driverless trucks, and hears from the people whose livelihoods are being affected. A world without work could be a utopia, but without the correct policy to ensure people still have incomes and a s...
Jun 02, 2021•27 min
Native American Tribes have flipped their fortunes by building casinos on their land, but that is under threat from the new players in the market - the online sports betting companies. Dr Heather Wardle meets Greg Sarris, Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria in Northern California, who shows her why his tribe’s casino is a lifeline to the local community, and how online betting on smartphones is the new threat to his tribe’s survival. (Photo: USA Graton Casino, owned by the Fede...
May 05, 2021•27 min
Albania was plagued by problems caused by gambling; high levels of debt, divorce and suicide triggered the government to ban it. But it did not have the desired effect. Instead the ban sent the industry underground and into the hands of organised criminal gangs. Dr Heather Wardle sets Fatjona Mejdini, a journalist who writes about Albania’s development, the task of investigating the state of gambling in her country and asks whether banning betting can solve the problems caused by it.
Apr 28, 2021•27 min
Jonah is a university student, and a gambler. For him it is the only way he can earn a living. He explains why there are so few opportunities for young Kenyans like him and why betting on foreign football matches has become such an attractive and easy way to make money to fund his university studies. Gambling behaviour expert, Dr Heather Wardle, wants tougher laws on gambling but she wonders how that might impact the University students who need the money they earn from betting. Producer: Lydia ...
Apr 21, 2021•28 min
Water is at the heart of many of the most serious ecological crises we face, including the biggest one of all: the climate emergency. Alok Jha shows how water itself may offer solutions to give us hope. Alok witnesses nuclear fusion in action at an experimental reactor in England. Simple seawater provides the fuel for this futuristic technology that has the potential to solve the world’s energy problems and eliminate fossil fuel power generation. Meanwhile chemist Fernando Romo walks us through ...
Apr 14, 2021•27 min
Journalist Alok Jha argues that if humans are to survive and thrive for the rest of the 21st Century we must urgently transform our relationship with water. Many of the serious geopolitical tensions over water as a resource that we looked at in the previous episode of this series are rooted in worsening ecological crises. In this episode, Alok shows how the global water crisis is inextricably linked to the climate crisis – and how neither can be dealt with alone. In Bangalore, we hear how incred...
Apr 07, 2021•27 min
Journalist Alok Jha shows how the way we are using freshwater has made it a precious finite resource. And it’s a resource on the edge of collapse. By 2050, over half the world’s population will live in a water-scarce region. But rather than working together to manage crucial water supplies, powerful states are manoeuvring to control the remaining stocks for themselves. Beginning with one family’s well drying up in the desert of Arizona, and following the story all the way to political tensions i...
Mar 31, 2021•27 min
Journalist Alok Jha argues that if humans are to survive and thrive for the rest of the 21st Century we must urgently transform our relationship with water. To change that relationship, we first need to understand how the relationship evolved. Alok looks at cultural history to understand how water shaped our deepest psychology. Alok finds that our relationship with water – always struggling for a balance between too much and not enough – fundamentally influenced the religious and spiritual world...
Mar 24, 2021•27 min
Writer Jessica J Lee, sets out to describe the myriad ways that forests operate in our lives and the life of the planet. In the final part of ‘Under The Canopy’, Jessica looks for stories of hope to set against the headlines depicting the mass deforestation that continues to take place around the world. She speaks with a variety of groups - in Canada, Burkina Faso, Brazil, Germany and Great Britain - who are finding different ways to re-invigorate forests, whether through peaceful protest, re-fo...
Mar 03, 2021•27 min
Writer Jessica J Lee, sets out to describe the myriad ways that forests operate in our lives and the life of the planet. She outlines the exciting developments that have taken place in our understanding of the ways forests work over recent decades, with science offering radical new ways of recognising these places as communities of mutually supportive trees rather than competitive spaces where individual trees fight one another for survival. She speaks with Peter Wohlleben who is one of the chie...
Mar 03, 2021•28 min
Jessica unpicks the profound role that forests play in our imaginative life. We know of course that they feature heavily in the fairy tales and myths we use to navigate life as children, and as we hear from writers like Max Porter, Richard Powers and Melissa Harrison, they also offer ways of understanding the complexities of desire, politics and history in our adult lives. Poet Carl Phillips describes how forests mirror the wilderness within us, while Jinni Reddy tells of how she found beauty in...
Mar 03, 2021•27 min
Contrary to popular opinion, the Arctic is not a pristine, empty white desert. It is home to four million people distributed across eight distinct nation states: The USA, Canada, Kingdom of Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Russian Federation. Allan Little looks at how the region is fast becoming fraught with geopolitical tensions. Despite all sides stressing this is still an area of low tension, Russia is building up its military presence and capabilities, with Nato countries re...
Feb 24, 2021•28 min
