The Conversation Weekly

Mar 06 2025 210 ep. 33 mins 3k

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A show for curious minds. Join us each week as academic experts tell us about the fascinating discoveries they're making to understand the world, and the big questions they’re still trying to answer. A podcast from The Conversation, hosted by Gemma Ware.

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The fossil that proved humanity's common origins in Africa

Mar 06 2025 25 mins

One hundred years ago, a paper was published in the journal Nature that would radically shift our understandings of the origins of humanity. It described a fossil, found in a lime mine in Taung in South Africa, which became known as the Taung child skull. The paper’s author, an Australian-born anatomist called Raymond Dart, argued that the fossil was a new species of hominin call

Scam Factories Ep 3: Great Escapes

Feb 25 2025 44 mins

Every day that he was locked up in a scam compound in Southeast Asia, George thought about how to get out. "We looked for means of escaping, but it was hard," he said. Scam Factories is a podcast series taking you inside Southeast Asia's brutal fraud compounds. It accompanies a series of multimedia articles on The Conversation.In our third and final episode, Great Escapes, we find

Scam Factories Ep 2: Inside the operation

Feb 24 2025 38 mins

A few weeks after Ben Yeo travelled to Cambodia for what he thought was a job in a casino, he found himself locked up in a padded room. “It’s a combination between a prison and a madhouse,” he remembers. He was being punished for refusing to conduct online scams.Scam Factories is a podcast and multimedia series taking you inside Southeast Asia's brutal fraud compounds. The Co

Scam Factories Ep 1: No skills required

Feb 23 2025 33 mins

Scam factories is a special three-part series taking you inside Southeast Asia's brutal fraud compounds. Hundreds of thousands of people are estimated to work in these scam factories. Many were trafficked there and forced into criminality by defrauding people around the world.The Conversation collaborated for this series with three researchers: Ivan Franceschini, a lecturer in Chin

Tariffs: the winners and losers

Feb 20 2025 29 mins

As the Trump administration ratchets up its threat to slap tariffs on allies and economic rivals alike, the world is bracing for another wave of costly economic disruption. This protectionist shift is all the more remarkable given how the US championed trade liberalisation for decades. So what does it actually take for a country to use protectionism to grow its economy? Some develo

How does decentralised social media work?

Feb 13 2025 27 mins

Since Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter in 2022, many users have looked for alternatives, fuelling a wave of online migration from the social media platform. How do alternative platforms such as Mastodon or Bluesky differ from traditional social media, and what does the future hold for these online spaces? In this episode, we speak to Robert Gehl, Ontario Research Chair of Digital

Where support for Germany’s far-right AFD is growing and why

Feb 06 2025 36 mins

As Germany heads towards elections on February 23, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AFD) is polling in second place on 20% of the national vote. The AFD's roots are in nationalistic and racist movements. It continues to take an ultra anti-immigration stance and is calling for "demigration" – effectively the deportation of migrants. In this episode, Rolf Frankenberger, an

How close are quantum computers to being really useful?

Jan 30 2025 30 mins

Quantum computers have the potential to solve big scientific problems that are beyond the reach of today’s most powerful supercomputers, such as discovering new antibiotics or developing new materials. But to achieve these breakthroughs, quantum computers will need to perform better than today’s best classical computers at solving real-world problems. And they’re not quite th

A wildfire warning from California's Ice Age past

Jan 23 2025 23 mins

Firefighters in Los Angeles continue to battle devastating wildfires that have killed at least 27 people and left thousands of homes destroyed. Today, we’re revisiting an interview we ran in late 2023 with Emily Lindsey, a paleoecologist who works at the La Brea tar pits archaeological site in Los Angeles, about a wildfire warning from southern California’s ice age history.The

Silicon Valley’s bet on a future of AI-enabled warfare

Jan 16 2025 32 mins

From Gaza to Ukraine, today’s war zones are being used as testing grounds for new systems driven by artificial intelligence. Billions of dollars are now being pumped into AI weapons technology, much of it from Silicon Valley venture capitalists.In this episode, we speak to Elke Schwarz, a reader in political theory at Queen Mary University of London in the UK who studies the ethi