Namibia has elected its first female president, who is she, and what cultural and political obstacles will she need to overcome?
How the rape of a woman in Mauritania has sparked national protests and reflection
As surrogacy becomes common in Nigeria, there is a new bill to regulate the practice.
Presenter: Audrey Brown
Producers :Bella Hassan, Sunita Nahar and Rob Wilson in London. Blessing Aderogba in Lagos
Senior Producer :Paul Bakibinga
Technical Producer: Jonathan Greer.
Editors :Andre Lombard and Alice Muthengi
Ghanaians are preparing to vote in their presidential election this Saturday. The election is being contested between vice-president Mahamudu Bawumia and former president John Mahama. What are the key issues voters will be focusing on?
Also, Sierra Leone's desire to return to being a rice exporter, instead of importing the country's most favourite food
And French President Macron's pivot towards anglophone countries in Africa.
Presenter: Audrey Brown
Producers: Rob Wilson and Victor Sylver in London
Technical Producer: Nick Randell
Senior Journalist: Karnie Sharp
Editors: Andre Lombard and Alice Muthengi
Nigeria air strikes: Tudunbiri village continues to mourn dozens of deaths and cope with injuries one year later on
We look at the impact of mercury poisoning caused by illegal mining in southwestern Ghana
And how easy is it for you to travel to another African country?
Presenter: Audrey Brown
Producers: Bella Hassan and Amie Liebowitz in London., Charles Gitonga in Nairobi.
Senior Producer: Paul Bakibinga
Technical producer: Francesca Dunne.
Editors :Andre Lombard and Alice Muthengi
US President Biden is in Angola for what is likely to be the final foreign trip of his presidency. It’s his first visit to Sub- Saharan Africa and it's part of a promise the president made, during the US-Africa Leaders Summit in 2022, to travel to the continent. But, it comes almost at the end of his tenure, so what does the president's trip to Angola say about the US Africa policy?
Also, we'll hear hearing from the Mozambican opposition leader, Venancio Mondlane, as protests continue over election results
And who is Maxim Shugalei and what's he doing in Africa?
Presenter: Audrey Brown
Producers: Frenny Jowi in Nairobi. Rob Wilson and Victor Sylver in London.
Technical producer: Nick Randell
Senior Journalist: Karnie Sharp
Editors: Andre Lombard and Alice Muthengi
What do Airbnb, Facebook, Spotify, and LinkedIn all have in common? Peter Thiel. They made his fortune, but he’s since rejected Silicon Valley for being too "woke". He’s a contradictory character: a libertarian who made billions from big state surveillance; an intellectual who purports to hate politics, but who’s poured millions into political campaigns, including Donald Trump’s 2020 bid. Some call him a free-thinking genius, while others say he wants to watch Rome burn. Simon Jack and Zing Tsjeng tell the intriguing story of Peter Thiel, the man who ousted Elon Musk from their company PayPal, and who’s signed up to be cryogenically frozen. Then they decide if they think he’s good, bad, or just another billionaire.
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We hear from a Ukrainian refugee who says cold water swimming has helped her tackle depression and keep moving forward. Also: making fuel from washed up seaweed; how a community rescued a pod of whales; and driving rats.
Do you find your bearings quickly or are you easily disorientated? Do your friends trust you with the directions in a new city?
Finding our way in the physical world, whether that is around a building or a city, is an important everyday capability, one that has been integral to human survival. This week CrowdScience listener David wants to know whether some people are ‘naturally’ better at navigating, so presenter Marnie Chesterton sets her compass and journeys into the human brain.
Accompanied by psychologists and neuroscientists Marnie learns how humans perceive their environment, recall routes and orientate themselves in unfamiliar spaces. We ask are some navigational strategies better than others?
Professor Hugo Spiers from UCL shares his latest lab for researching navigation and tells us that the country you live in might be a good predictor of your navigation skills.
But is our navigational ability down to biology or experience, and can we improve it?
With much of our modern map use being delegated to smartphones, Marnie explores, with Prof Veronique Bohbot what an over-reliance on GPS technology might do to our brain health.
Presenter: Marnie Chesterton
Producer: Melanie Brown
(Photo: Man standing on rural road holding up a road map, head obscured by map. Credit: Noel Hendrickson/Getty Images)
Negotiators in the South Korean city of Busan are trying to reach the first ever a global treaty on plastic.
How stress from climate change is leading to increased violence against women.
And a film maker’s odyssey to preserve the legacy of a local Ugandan photographer.
Presenter: Audrey Brown
Producers: Rob Wilson, Nour Abida and Nyasha Michelle in London. Blessing Aderogba in Lagos.
Senior Producer : Paul Bakibinga
Technical Producer: Francesca Dunne
Editors: Andre Lombard and Alice Muthengi.
It’s Black Friday! Everyone is camping in the street, staying up all night for the very best deals around. And Unexpected Elements are joining in.
We take a look at the huge underground trade of vital resources...not run by criminals but fungi.
Then it is onto illegal animal trade and the 300 pets who got a terrible deal, strapped to a man’s chest as he tried to make it through airport security.
Have you ever asked a pigeon for advice when gambling? We hear from a professor of psychology about why you should not.
And finally, the story of Lee Sedol, the world’s best player of the board game Go, who was challenged by Google to a game worth one million dollars.
Presenter: Caroline Steel, with Phillys Mwatee and Christine Yohannes
Producers: Emily Knight, Harrison Lewis, Imaan Moin and William Hornbrook
Sound engineer: Searle Whittney
November 1974 became known as the “November Revolution” in particle physics. Two teams on either side of the US discovered the same particle - the “J/psi” meson. On the "J" team, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, Sau Lan Wu and colleagues were smashing protons and neutrons together and looking for electrons and positron pairs in the debris. Over at Stanford on the other side of the US, Dr Michael Riordan was in a lab with the "psi" team who, in some ways the other direction, were smashing electrons and positrons together to see what was created. They both, unbeknownst to each other, found a peak around 3.1Gev.
It was shortly after that the full significance was clear. The existence of this particle confirmed a new type of quark, theorised in what we now call the Standard Model, but never before observed - the Charm quark. And with Prof Sau Lan Wu’s team’s subsequent discovery of gluons – the things that hold it all together – a pattern appeared in what had been the chaos of high energy physics and the nature of matter. Sau Lan and Michael (author of "The Hunting of the Quark: A True Story of Modern Physics") tell Roland the story.
Prof Matthew Genge and colleagues at the Natural History Museum in London have found evidence of a bacillus growing on samples of the asteroid Ryugu brought back from space by the Hayabusa 2 mission. Rather than evidence for alien life, as they suggest in a paper this month, the contamination shows how easily terrestrial microorganisms can colonise space rocks, even when subjected to the strictest control precautions.
And Per Ahlberg of Uppsala University and colleagues report in Science how they have taken a load of fossilised faecal matter and mapped out the evolution of dinosaur diets. First came the carnivores… then the vegetarian revolution…
(Photo: Samuel Ting (front) shown with members of his J/psi experimental team. Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory)
