Radio New Zealand - Te Reo Irirangi o Aotearoa

Show notes for Saturday 11 August 2012

Quick Hits

12:15  Talking plants  

12:30   Future protein

12:50   Bedbug DNA

13:15   Behind the scenes at the internet

13:50   Team Greeni

The small print

First up this week, talking plants! Plants respond to light and chemicals and can even make sounds. But are they able to communicate? Dr Monica Gagliano is an evolutionary ecologist from the University of Western Australia investigating bioacoustics in plants.

Then at 12:30pm, with global populations rising and with more cash to spend on food the world's protein demands are set to increase. we speak to Dr Mike Boland of The Riddet Institute who's looking at what New Zealand could be doing to position itself for this looming protein gold rush; everything from using pet food for humans to using more of our food waste to feed animals.

Then before the 1pm news, bedbug numbers are on the rise worldwide. The global surge was first documented after the Sydney Olympics in 2000. Nowadays it costs businesses millions of dollars, with hotels and pest controllers fighting costly legal cases. So genetic fingerprinting techniques are being used to track down the source of bedbug breakouts.

After the 1pm news, it's hard to imagine the internet as a physical place; it exists as a sort of abstract notion. That's until your internet connection stops working. That's exactly what happened to Andrew Blum when he was forced to confront the fact that the internet is made up of tubes. We speak to him about his book Tubes: Behind the Scenes at the Internet.

And before we go, we meet a team of young Canadian inventors using a Kinect gaming sensor to make buildings smarter when it comes to energy usage.

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