Our Changing World

For a long time, nuclear fusion was viewed as a powerful, but unachievable, energy source, because the technological challenges were just too great. But recent advances, particularly in the… Read more Audio

One hundred new ‘sea pods’ have been installed along the sea wall in Tauranga's Te Awanui harbour. Justine Murray joins a marine scientist to check out the rocky shoreline, and find out how these… Read more Audio

In Our Changing World, the team heads to the Mackenzie region in the South Island to meet one of New Zealand's rarest fish - the lowland longjaw galaxias. Dean Nelson, a senior biodiversity ranger at… Read more Audio

Speckled, pencil-thin and sporting an underbite: the lowland longjaw galaxias is New Zealand’s rarest freshwater fish species. With just seven known populations, this species is considered… Read more Audio

The story of tuberculosis goes back to the start of recorded human history, and since the 1800s it’s estimated it has been responsible for over 1 billion deaths. In New Zealand today we don’t have… Read more Audio

2020 saw the start of two global pandemics. Covid-19, of course, but also H5N1 bird flu. The latter has swept around the world leaving millions of dead wild birds and marine mammals in its wake. It… Read more Audio

In late 2024 a cluster of sick green sea turtles washed up around the Rangaunu Harbour on the east coast of the Far North. It was just another mystery in a long line of all the things we don’t know… Read more Audio

One from the archives! By the 1990s Chatham Island tÅ«Ä« had all but disappeared from the main island. Slightly different to their mainland counterparts these songbirds had survived on nearby Pitt and… Read more Audio

Smoke explosions. Fire tornadoes. Burning couches. It all happens in the fire lab: a purpose-built facility where researchers can set safely stuff on fire and study how it burns, for science. New… Read more Audio

How do you go about dissecting the world’s rarest whale? In December 2024, images from a concrete room in Mosgiel, just south of Dunedin, spread around the world as a team of people spent a week… Read more Audio

For nearly 30 years, researchers have been banding black petrel fledglings before they make their maiden migration to Ecuador. Only a handful of birds have ever come back. RNZ’s In Depth reporter… Read more Audio

Each year five Prime Minister’s Science Prizes are awarded in the most prestigious New Zealand science awards. We explore the AgResearch science that got the top recognition this year and catch up… Read more Audio