Nights for Thursday 21 December 2017

6:30 Peak Christmas Shopping Respite Half Hour

Stop shopping for half an hour - because you're worth it!

7:12  Literacy Graduation

Earlier today, the Howard League held a literacy and driver's licence graduation for prisoners at Mt Eden Corrections Facility in Auckland. Among the graduates, is a 64-year-old prisoner who is learning to read and write properly for the with the help of a Howard League volunteer. This prisoner's main goal was to be able to learn to read the much-loved children's book, "The very hungry caterpillar" by Eric Carle, as this book is the favourite of the prisoner's 4-year-old granddaughter.

7:35 New Horizons

For his penultimate show of the year, William Dart pulls together a few tracks that had to be left out of his previous programmes. Randy Newman and Neil Finn; Andrew Bird, Fiona Apple, and Lorde.

8:12 South Auckland Scope

Photographer Raymond Sagapolutele is our South Auckland cultural ambassador tonight.

8:30 Window on the World

The first of four science stories - The Alcuin of York -  ‘the most learned man in the world.’ And it was this monk and his puzzles that laid the foundations for a branch of mathematics called combinatorics - the thinking behind today’s computer coding and cryptography. Philip Ball speaks to historian Mary Garrison from the University of York to learn of Alcuin's character and how he encouraged his students to learn for the sake of learning, as opposed to salvation. And University College London mathematician Hannah Fry shows Philip just how much of a role combinatorics plays in today’s world.

9:07 Our Changing World

This week on Our Changing World - good news for quake-affected Hutton's shearwaters, and a special investigation into how the New Zealand farming industry could react to the challenge of synthetic food.

9:30 This Way Up

In This Way Up Simon Morton visits a biotech startup in the US where scientists are using the latest genetic technology to discover how microbes can help us grow more food.

10:17 Late Edition

A round up of today's RNZ News and feature interviews as well as Dateline Pacific from RNZ International.

11:07 Music 101 pocket edition

In this week's Pocket Edition Melody Thomas speaks with Ruban Neilson of Unknown Mortal Orchestra, we hear Blackbird Ensemble's Bjork show  'All is Full of Love, and Glass Vaults are live in session.