Our Changing World for Thursday 4 October 2007

Science:

Computer graphics you can touch and manipulate. A virtual fighter jet you can walk around and view from all angles. Pop-up books enhanced with moving 3-D images. These are just some of the new technologies on display at HIT Lab NZ, a research centre at the University of Canterbury devoted to radically changing the way we interact with computers.

Environment:

The world's first Marine BioBlitz is underway on Wellington's south coast. Stretching over a month and bringing together scientists, recreational divers, community groups and the general public, the BioBlitz is an attempt to identify and inventory every aquatic species in the area that will become the new Kupe-Kevin Smith Marine Reserve.

If you're finding all the new developments in carbon trading a bit bewildering, be puzzled no more. Amelia Nurse is heading to the NZ stock exchange's new carbon emissions exchange, TZ1, to find out what emissions are, how we measure them and why anyone would want to trade them.

Health:

Mitochondria are the "internal combustion engines" of living things, found in every one of our cells. Nobel Prize winner Sir John Walker of Cambridge University talks about the vital role mitochondria play, transforming food and oxygen into energy.