The Documentary Podcast Folgen

A bonus episode from The Global Jigsaw looks at how the Taliban's return to power in Afghanistan has led to the erasure of women from public life. There’s a UN-led campaign to recognise it as “gender apartheid”, but the international community is divided and lacking leverage. Three years after the group took the capital Kabul, our experts explain what life is like for half of the population and why women have become a proxy for the nation’s image of itself. Producer: Kriszta Satori, Elchin Suleymanov Presenter: Krassi TwiggThe Global Jigsaw looks at the world through the lens of its media. Think of us as your media detectives, helping you get past the propaganda and misinformation. The Global Jigsaw comes from BBC Monitoring, which tracks, deciphers, and analyses news media in 100 languages. At BBC Monitoring, we don’t just speak the language, we understand the narrative. So we can help you untangle the context and single out rhetoric from reality, deception from truth. For more episodes just search The Global Jigsaw wherever you got this podcast.

This is a bonus episode for The Documentary of The Engineers: Intelligent Machines. This year, we speak to a panel of three engineers at the forefront of the 'Machine Learning: AI' revolution with an enthusiastic live audience.Intelligent machines are remaking our world. The speed of their improvement is accelerating fast and every day there are more things they can do better than us. There are risks, but the opportunities for human society are enormous. ‘Machine Learning: AI’ is the technological revolution of our era. Three engineers at the forefront of that revolution come to London to join Caroline Steel and a public audience at the Great Hall of Imperial College:Regina Barzilay from MIT created a major breakthrough in detecting early stage breast cancer. She also led the team that used machine learning to discover Halicin, the first new antibiotic in 30 years. David Silver is Principal Scientist at Google DeepMind. He led the AlphaGo team that built the AI to defeat the world’s best human player of Go. Paolo Pirjanian founded Embodied, and is a pioneer in developing emotionally intelligent robots to aid child development. Producer: Charlie Taylor (Image: 3D hologram AI brain displayed by digital circuit and semiconductor. Credit: Yuichiro Chino/Getty Images)

A killer fungus is ravaging plantations of the Cavendish banana worldwide. It travels through the soil at lightning speed and chokes the banana plant so its leaves shrivel up and die. The disease is known as Tropical Race 4, or TR4 for short, and it has spread across the globe from Australia, to the Philippines, Pakistan and Mozambique. Now TR4 is widespread across Latin America. In Colombia where 30,000 people are employed in banana plantations, the government declared a state of national emergency when the fungus first arrived on farms in 2019. An international community of scientists is experimenting with different techniques to try to halt the spread of TR4 whether that's through gene-editing, selective breeding or injecting microbes into the soil.