Our Changing World

Our Changing World is an RNZ science podcast that treats research as somewhere to go. Claire Concannon narrates. The narration sets each scene, walks through doors and down corridors, and then hands over to the researchers, who explain their work in their own words. The destinations vary a great deal. At the National Kiwi Hatchery just outside Rotorua, North Island brown kiwi are hatched and minded through their first vulnerable months, and a torch-like light passed through an egg shows how far along it is. In a containment corridor of small rooms and incubators, guarded by layers of sticky traps, a team nicknames its facility Area 51 because the insects inside are not found in New Zealand. The star there is the samurai wasp, a parasitoid that lays its eggs inside the eggs of the brown marmorated stink bug, and a researcher talks about building an army of them. The narration cheerfully compares it to the chestburster from the Sigourney Weaver films. There is also a stormwater drain. The Northland plastics episode opens by setting lasers, 3D printing and remote islands against one person sorting whatever washed into a drain, and the monitoring it reports found plastic in seabirds and microplastics in every shellfish sampled. Wildlife is only part of the picture. A professor whose team trialled oral ketamine calls it probably the most exciting development in treating depression and anxiety in 30 years. The explanation leans on an image anyone can hold: dendrites branching like a tree, regrowing so nerve cells can connect again. At the Jim Dunkley Heritage Orchard, where mixed-up notes left the apple varieties in doubt, SNP arrays reading 50,000 points in the DNA settle which tree is which. Near Matamata, Mohi Korohina of Ngāti Hinerangi leads the way along an ancestral route where flax was traded for seafood. That walk belongs to 'Iwi-led conservation in the Kaimai Mamuku ranges', about a project that began through the Jobs for Nature initiative during the COVID-19 pandemic. Episodes open with a greeting in te reo Māori and close with thanks in it. Credits name the production team, including script editing and sound engineering, and listeners are pointed to show notes for links. The stink bug story ends with a practical instruction: catch a suspected bug, photograph it and call MPI rather than killing it. The result feels close to a field trip, with the explaining done by the people who do the work.