Författare: Gemma Ware Host The Conversation Weekly Podcast The Conversa

The only known specimens of Encephalartos woodii (E. woodii), a species of cycad, are all clones of the same male plant found over 100 years ago in a South African forest.

Now a team of researchers is on a mission to find an elusive female version of the plant, with the help of drones and artificial intelligence.

In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we speak to Laura Cinti, a research fellow at the University of Southampton in the UK, about her determined quest to save the species – called the world’s “loneliest” plant.

As one of the rarest plants in the world, E. woodii is highly sought after among collectors and botanists. Laura Cinti likens the cycad to a relic from a time bygone.

They’ve been around since before the time of dinosaurs. They were once widespread, but today they are actually the most threatened and the most endangered plants on our planet.

Laura Cinti looking at an E. Woodii clone at Kew Gardens.
C-LAB, CC BY-NC

The only known wild specimen of E. Woodii was discovered in 1895 by the botanist John Medley Wood while he was on an expedition in the Ngoye Forest in South Africa. All the plants in existence today in botanical gardens around the world are clones of this same specimen.

E. woodii is prized for its striking appearance, with a scaly trunk and large, long fronds that form a majestic crown, like a palm tree. On top sit golden cones, used for reproduction. The cones on the male plant are generally more elongated and those on the female plant, rounder and more egg shaped, explains Cinti.

Cycad reproduction relies heavily on this fascinating interaction between insects where the pollen gets transferred from the male cone to the female cone. Without a female, pollination or sexual reproduction is not possible.

Many people think of plants as nice-looking greens. Essential for clean air, yes, but simple organisms. A step change in research is shaking up the way scientists think about plants: they are far more complex and more like us than you might imagine. This blossoming field of science is too delightful to do it justice in one or two stories.

This story is part of a series, Plant Curious, exploring scientific studies that challenge the way you view plantlife.

Cinti is fascinated by the plight of this cycad, which is vulnerable to disease or other environmental stresses because of its limited gene pool. So she assembled a team to search for a female version of the species.

We were driven the hope of that a female E. woodii might still be out there, because as far as we know, the Ngoye Forest, where it was originally discovered, hasn’t been completely explored.

While all previous searches of the forest had been done on foot, Cinti’s team had access to modern technologies. They’ve been using drones and remote sensing technology to take pictures of the forest and have also trained an AI model to help identify if any of the pictures they’ve taken could be of E. woodii.

Listen to our conversation with Laura Cinti on The Conversation Weekly podcast to find our more about her search for a female partner for the world’s loneliest plant.

A transcript of this episode is also available.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Mend Mariwany with assistance from Katie Flood. Sound design was by Michelle Macklem, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Gemma Ware is the executive producer.

Thanks to Laura Cinti for sending recordings of the drones used in the search in the Ngoye Forest in South Africa.

You can find us on Instagram at theconversationdotcom or via email. You can also subscribe to The Conversation’s free daily email here.

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An epidemic of mpox in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), is spreading quickly, particularly among young children. At least 20,000 people are known to be infected in the country, and more than 600 people have died, more than two thirds of them children. Cases have begun to appear in neighbouring countries Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda.

Mpox is a serious, at times fatal, virus. The world knows how to prevent it. There are effective vaccines stockpiled in many western countries. Yet, after an earlier global epidemic in 2022 was largely brought under control in Europe and North America, the ongoing battle to protect people in Africa from mpox was ignored.

In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we ask a virologist and a paediatrician why Africa’s mpox crisis was so neglected – and what needs to happen now to save lives, particularly children’s.

Wolfgang Preiser is the head of medical virology at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa. In a compelling article for The Conversation, he argued that the current mpox epidemic is yet another example of how infectious diseases, often perceived as someone else’s problem in mainly poor, developing countries, can suddenly pose unexpected global threats.

This is a virus which we thought was circulating naturally in small mammals in rainforest areas of Africa. But it’s just another very worrying reminder that these viruses are good for nasty surprises.

The mpox virus was discovered in captive monkeys in 1958, and the first human case of mpox was detected in an infant in 1970 in the DRC, but there was little human-to-human transmission.

I think we all became complacent. Yes, there were the occasional reports in the World Health Organization’s (WHO) weekly report about monkeypox, as it was still called up to last year. Cases in a village somewhere and some contacts and they were investigated, but there’s still a lot we don’t know about this virus.

A small outbreak in the US in 2003, caused by the import of infected rodents that spread to pet dogs, caused a global wake-up call. And then in 2022 an outbreak that had begun in Nigeria a few years earlier turned into a global epidemic, causing over 99,000 laboratory-confirmed cases in 116 countries. It spread particularly in communities of men who have sex with men.

In May 2023, the WHO announced this outbreak was no longer a public health emergency of international concern. “I was stunned,” says Nadia Sam-Agudu, a professor of paediatric infectious diseases at the University of Minnesota in the US, who also has affiliations with Nigeria’s Institute of Human Virology and the University of Cape Coast in Ghana. Transmission was still happening on the African continent, and not long after, a new strain of mpox began to emerge in the DRC.

In African countries we lost ground because this pandemic was declared over in 2023. And we are seeing the effects of that declaration, right now, because we have outbreaks really out of control.

In August 2024, a day after the African Centres for Disease Control (CDC) labelled the current epidemic a public health emergency of continental security, the WHO said mpox was once again a public health emergency of international concern.

Children at high risk

Previous mpox outbreaks in Africa have hit children particularly hard. As a zoonotic disease, it’s commonly passed from animals to humans – often young boys who go out hunting for small rodents in forests where the virus is endemic.

But even in the current outbreak in the DRC, driven by human-to-human transmission, young children are also particularly vulnerable to getting a severe form of the disease, and to complications from the infections. Current data suggests that 58% of the cases in the current epidemic in the DRC are children under the age of 15.

The African CDC said that 10m vaccine doses are needed by 2025 to bring the current epidemic in Africa under control . Some donations have begun to arrive in the DRC, but not of vaccines approved in children. One vaccine, Jynneos, made by the pharmaceutical company Bavarian Nordic is not yet approved in under 18s, although trials are planned in children aged two to 12. Another Japanese vaccine called LC16, has been given to children in Japan, but has not yet received global approval.

Sam-Agudu says this is part of a larger problem where approving vaccines for children and vulnerable adults, such as pregnant women, hasn’t been seen as a priority.

On account of their vulnerability they are pushed aside, but then it’s because of their vulnerability that they continue to have disproportionate effects and consequences of these diseases.

Listen to the conversations with Nadia Sam-Agudu and Wolfgang Preiser on The Conversation Weekly podcast, which also includes an introduction from Nadine Dreyer, health and medicine editor at The Conversation Africa, based in Johannesburg.

A transcript of this episode is available on Apple Podcasts.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Mend Mariwany with assistance from Katie Flood. Sound design was by Michelle Macklem, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Gemma Ware is the executive producer.

Newsclips in this episode from BBC News, CNBC Television., DW News, TRT World, Sky News and Reuters.

You can find us on Instagram at theconversationdotcom or via email. You can also subscribe to The Conversation’s free daily email here.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. Läs mer…

Dating apps are having a rocky moment. In February, Bumble said it would lay off 30% of its workforce after disappointing results in 2023. Match Group, which has struggled to maintain paying subscribers for its most popular app, Tinder, in recent years, announced plans to cut 6% of its global workforce in July. It seems people’s relationship with dating apps, particularly among generation Z, is starting to sour.

In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we hear from researchers exploring how apps have changed modern dating and the expectations around it. And we find out why some dating app users aren’t actually there looking for love, but keep on swiping anyway.

When Treena Orchard first decided to sign up to an online dating app, she was 45 years old and nervous. Not many of her friends had used dating apps, and she says it was “terrifying” to think about doing dating in a completely different way to what she was used to.

As she set out on her new dating journey, Orchard, an associate professor in the School of Health Studies at Western University in London, Canada, decided to use her training as an anthropologist to conduct a self-ethnographic study of dating apps.

I found it so bewildering and fascinating that it quickly became a sort of a dual situation where yes, I was on these apps to meet people, but I was also very fascinated by them as a culture in the palm of my hand.

The result was a book, on what she calls the “darker side of dating apps”, chronicling her experiences. She says the darker side of the apps refers to the “widespread misogyny” that she found streaming through these platforms and the people who use them. It also refers to the way:

The algorithm shapes users’ experiences … and the way that users are rewarded for being extra productive on dating apps and also punished when we’re not.

Orchard found success on dating apps required a profound amount of emotional and technical labour. She said this effort has become common, and normalised to an extent, but it shouldn’t be.

It’s not normal to talk to 100 or 200 people a day or swipe on 200 people a day. We would never do that in the flesh … I don’t think we’ve adjusted all that well to it.

Not there to meet up

Carolina Bandinelli’s research looks at the different ways people use dating apps and what this is doing to their idea of love. She’s an associate professor in media and creative industries at the University of Warwick in the UK and just published a book about the influence of dating apps on the digital culture of love.

When Bandinelli set out to interview more than 50 people in the UK and Italy about their experiences of using dating apps, she was expecting to hear “tales of adventurous sexual and possibly romantic life”. But she says:

Most of the people I’ve talked to weren’t even meeting anybody by means of dating app, let alone having sex or beginning a relationship with them. The actual dating, like meeting another human in flesh and bones somewhere, and drinking a beer, that was within the realm of things that people would consider to happen, but it was not the main, or most significant, part of it.

One woman told Bandinelli that she set her location to match with people who weren’t close by at all to “test her femininity and to test her seduction potentialities”, but that she would have felt very embarrassed to meet a stranger. Another man would use apps to match with people in other countries.

Match, match, match

Bandinelli argues that an ideology around efficiency is one of the key traits of the digital culture of love, and it’s reflected in the promotional narratives dating apps use.

They promise a solution … to find a digital fix for love, to make things easier, to maximise the possibilities, to widen the range of choices.

She thinks all this is changing the way people think about love, dating and romance – and that a new ethos is emerging that she calls a post-romantic utopia.

One of the traits of the post-romantic utopia is that of an ideal of love that has to work efficiently in a way that does not threaten the integrity of the subject and ideally, in a way that does not hurt. So post-romantic love is a kind of love devoid of the risk, the potential of trauma, the potential for pain and suffering.

Listen to the full episode on The Conversation Weekly podcast, which also includes an introduction from Nehal El-Hadi, interim editor-in-chief at The Conversation Canada.

A transcript of this episode is available on Apple Podcasts.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Mend Mariwany with assistance from Katie Flood. Sound design was by Eloise Stevens, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Gemma Ware is the executive producer.

You can find us on Instagram at theconversationdotcom or via email. You can also subscribe to The Conversation’s free daily email here.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. Läs mer…

One technique involves releasing particles of sulphur dioxide high up in the stratosphere. Another involves trying to brighten the clouds over the sea by spraying salt water off the back of ships. Both are potential methods of solar radiation modification (SRM), a type of solar geoengineering aimed at trying to reflect more sunlight away from Earth, thus helping to reverse the effects of global warming.

While SRM has attracted attention and investment in recent years, it remains a controversial – and some argue, dangerous – idea.

The Conversation Weekly podcast is running two episodes about geoengineering. In the first part, we heard from scientists working on different potential geoengineering technologies on why they believe they’re worth exploring. In this second episode, we hear the case against SRM from researchers pushing a non-use agreement for solar geoengineering, who explain why they’re so worried about this technology.

Chukwumerije Okereke is professor of global governance and public policy at the University of Bristol in the UK, and co-director of the Center for Climate Change and Development at Alex Ekwueme Federal University in Nigeria. In recent years, he’s become a prominent critic of solar geoengineering technologies:

I think they’re untested, they’re risky, and they run the risk of exacerbating the problem of climate change.

One of the big risks associated with solar geoengineering is that once a technology such as the release of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere begins on a mass scale, if it’s then stopped, any cooling effect could be reversed. This is called “termination shock”.

Okereke is also concerned that companies will try to use Africa as a testing ground for SRM:

The idea that we want to use this to help Africa seems to me very disingenuous. If you want to help Africa, how about investing significantly in renewable energy technology? How about a transfer of proven technologies – wind and solar? How about scaling up climate finance for Africa? How about putting more money for loss and damage?

Mounting pushback

Okereke was among those who successfully mobilised against a proposal put forward at the UN Environment Assembly in Nairobi in February 2024, to create a working group to examine the benefits and risks of solar radiation modification. A group of African countries pushed back against the proposal, which was withdrawn. Okereke explains:

There is a slippery slope that is imagined where people will say ‘let’s just research the risks and benefits’ – and then in so doing, gradually legitimise the research and ultimately the testing and use of this technology.

Meanwhile, companies and researchers trying to pursue solar geoengineering experiments are meeting real-world resistance. Mexico banned solar engineering in 2023 after it emerged that a US start-up ran unauthorised experiments in Baja California.

In 2021, an attempt to test solar geoengineering technology in Sweden near the Arctic Circle was blocked by the Swedish government after opposition, including from Indigenous groups. The proposed test was under the umbrella of the Scopex project, led by two Harvard professors. In March 2024, Harvard announced this project was closing and the technology would be put to other uses.

Non-use agreement

In 2021, a group of academics got together to push for a global non-use agreement for solar geoengineering. One of those behind it is Aarti Gupta, professor of global environmental governance at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Gupta argues that the complex governance arrangements needed to manage a planetary-scale intervention like solar geoengineering don’t exist yet:

It’s very difficult to envision what kind of governance arrangements would be both legitimate and effective but also stable across decades and centuries, and would allow for democratic decision-making.

Like Okereke, who is also a signatory of an open letter calling for the non-use agreement, Gupta is concerned solar geoengineering will be a dangerous distraction from reducing fossil fuel emissions:

Just keeping the SRM option on the table – researching it, funding it, talking about it – can have this effect of delaying the urgent decarbonisation that we need, the just transition to renewables … Every ton of carbon dioxide emitted while we’re talking about SRM is a huge problem, and that’s a risk we just simply cannot afford to take.

Listen to the full episode on The Conversation Weekly podcast, which also includes responses from Shaun Fitzgerald at the Centre for Climate Change at the University of Cambridge in the UK.

A transcript of this episode is available on Apple Podcasts.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Mend Mariwany with assistance from Katie Flood. Sound design was by Eloise Stevens, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Gemma Ware is the executive producer.

You can find us on Instagram at theconversationdotcom or via email. You can also subscribe to The Conversation’s free daily email here.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. Läs mer…

With global temperature records broken for months on end, and the severity of extreme weather events routinely attributed to climate change, you might think any technological developments with the potential to stop global warming would be welcomed the world over.

But the pursuit of geoengineering – attempts to modify the climate for the purposes of reversing climate change – is a hugely divisive issue. So divisive, that we’ve decided to explore the debate on geoengineering in two episodes of The Conversation Weekly podcast.

In this first episode, we talk to scientists working on different potential geoengineering technologies who argue the case for researching these interventions. In our second episode, we speak to researchers mounting a campaign against a particular type of geoengineering called solar radiation management.

For Hugh Hunt, geoengineering is a “band aid, this thing we need to do to buy us time”. Hunt is deputy director at the Centre for Climate Repair at the University of Cambridge in the UK, led by his colleague Shuan Fitzgerald. They’re leading a team of scientists exploring potential engineering strategies to reduce global warming.

In arguing the case for climate repair, Hunt points to a graph first set out by scientist John Shepherd in 2010. Now referred to simply as the “napkin diagram”, it suggests that aggressive emission reductions, combined with large scale carbon dioxide removal could take temperatures back below 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels by around 2300.

Once we get our emissions cut and we get our carbon dioxide removal that’s great, but that’s not for another 150 years and the Arctic ice will have melted and the Antarctic glaciers will be irreversibly damaged.

Advocates of geoengineering believe technological fixes can help in the meantime, including through technologies aimed at reflecting more sunlight back into space to help cool the Earth, known as solar radiation management.

At Cambridge, Fitzgerald and Hunt are also involved in a number of research projects assessing various potential technological interventions. One, explains Fitzgerald, is how to increase ice cover in the Arctic.

We are looking at whether we can get more sea ice in the Arctic, especially in the Arctic summer … and the way to do that is to see whether you can grow more of the stuff in the Arctic winter.

This involves pumping sea water on top of the sea ice in various volumes to assess how much this helps to thicken the ice and in what ways. The centre is collaborating with a UK-based company called Real Ice, which began a pilot study in northern Canada in early 2024. The team pumped sea water over about 4,000 square meters of snow. Four months later, in May, they returned to measure the depth of the sea ice in that area and in a control area.

What they found was that the ice depth was 50cm greater in the area where they had flooded the snow compared with the control region.

More experiments are being planned for the coming Arctic winter to test various permutations of this ice flooding technique and their effects on the sea ice.

Tricky calculus

Even among scientists actively researching geoengineering, there is debate about its potential risks and benefits. Ben Kravitz, assistant professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences at Indiana University in the US, spends much of his time modelling the potential effects of solar geoengineering. This includes a technique called stratospheric aerosol injection, which involves releasing particles of sulphur dioxide high up in the stratosphere to reflect sunlight away from Earth.

From all of the climate modelling and natural science research that we’ve done, the conclusion is … it’s not a replacement for reducing our emissions, but by and large for most people, a little bit of geoengineering is helpful.

However, Kravitz says when you get into the social implications of geoengineering “things start to get a lot more messy”. He’s looked into the various national security and geopolitical risks involved in solar geoengineering, but he’s also worried about what deploying these technologies might mean for food security and people’s livelihoods.

It’s really important to remember that climate change is causing a lot of risks too. It is entirely possible that geoengineering would alleviate some of those risks, and also possibly introduce new risks. That’s the sort of calculus that we really need to get a handle on if people are going to make an informed decision about whether we should do this.

Listen to the full episode on The Conversation Weekly podcast, which also features Stacy Morford, the environment and climate editor at The Conversation in the US. The second part, featuring interviews with solar geoengineering critics Chukwumerije Okereke and Aarti Gupta, will be released on August 30.

A transcript of this episode is available on Apple Podcasts.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Katie Flood with assistance from Mend Mariwany. Sound design was by Eloise Stevens, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Gemma Ware is the executive producer.

Newsclips in this episode from DW News, BBC News, Al Jazeera English and CBS News.

You can find us on Instagram at theconversationdotcom or via email. You can also subscribe to The Conversation’s free daily email here.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. Läs mer…