Our Changing World

Ngutukaka, or kakabeak, is a popular garden plant in Aotearoa. But in the wild, it is now rarer than kakapo, with only about 100 individual plants surviving on steep, inaccessible cliffs. The East… Read more Audio

Invasive redback spiders are highly venomous, threatening both people and New Zealand’s native species. A team of scientists is developing a cunning tool to trap male redbacks, by concocting an… Read more Audio

The MRI technique advances coming out of the MÄtai Medical Research Institute in Gisborne have been described as ‘pioneering’, ‘groundbreaking’ and ‘world leading’. Claire Concannon speaks… Read more Audio

A trip into the bush and through a wetland to meet conservationists working to help the forest and its inhabitants. About two hours south of Dunedin, in the Catlins, the Tautuku and Fleming rivers… Read more Audio

Every year in New Zealand, recreational hunters shoot more than half a million wild game. Most are shot with lead-based ammunition. Now, researchers are investigating what happens to that lead, and… Read more Audio

To keep their eggs safe some birds build simple cup-shaped nests, others elaborate fully-enclosed domes, with porches, fake entrances and ledges. But is this intricate construction of nests a set… Read more Audio

It’s almost 40 years since the first report of an ozone hole over Antarctica and 35 years since the Montreal Protocol to ban CFCs came into effect. In this week’s Our Changing World, Claire… Read more Audio

The science behind how we know our dogs love us, and how best we can take care of them. Audio

We all experience anxiety - when our brains look into the future and imagine bad things happening. It’s normal and has helped keep us alive as a species. But levels of anxiety are rising… Read more Audio

Claire Concannon learns about research into anxiety that uses breathing experiments to investigate the brain-body connection. Audio

It's been almost 30 years since a team joined forces to investigate a particularly aggressive form of stomach cancer that was afflicting one Tauranga whānau. Kimi Hauora Health and Research Clinic in… Read more Audio

This week, we're hanging out in the terahertz area of the light spectrum! Sandwiched between infrared light and microwaves, terahertz has kind of been the long-forgotten cousin of the light family… Read more Audio