The coronavirus forced businesses to close their doors and 700,000 Australians lost their jobs. So what’s on the other side of this pandemic? Will the old jobs still be there or will wages and conditions change with workers being offered reduced hours, more casual work or a revamped award system ? The government wants unions and business to negotiate a new deal as the economy gets back on its feet.

During the Great War, Australia imposed a regime of draconian laws restricting basic freedoms, like the right to protest and freedom of speech. What can we learn, a century later, from the actions of a wartime government, as we battle another crisis.

Confirmation bias. It’s enemy number one of all balanced and evidence-based debate. This urge to believe what you’re already convinced of, regardless of the facts.

The solution is ‘critical thinking’ – the skill to discern emitted variables and wrong causalities, to look at all sides of an issue.

And then to align your point of view with the evidence.

We know computers are smart but they usually excel in a particular skill like chess or understanding speech . How close are we to building a machine which, like the human brain , has the flexibility to problem solve across a range of cognitive tasks?

Computer scientists are hard at work trying to create artificial general intelligence and , if they succeed , who knows what conscious machines might decide to do?

To deal with the Covid-19 pandemic, governments have curtailed freedom of movement and enforced new rules on social distancing and quarantine. They've closed borders and shutdown workplaces and venues where crowds gather.

And to trace the spread of the virus we’ve all been encouraged to download the CovidSafe App. What have we lost and what have we gained in the name of public health? Could government surveillance and reduced individual freedoms become the new normal?

English singer-songwriter, and political activist, Billy Bragg, talks to Paul Barclay about politics, BREXIT, his book -'The Three Dimensions of Freedom', life under COVID19 lockdown, and music.

Accountants are unlikely revolutionaries, but according to author Jane Gleeson-White, they’re leading the charge in reforming the global economy for the good of us all. An international movement has begun in the finance world.

Global companies are looking at how to include nature and society in the costs of production. The triple bottom line: profit, people and the planet. Jane says that double-entry bookkeeping revolutionised accounting five hundred years ago and in the twenty-first century accountants can help us to make critical decisions about climate change by putting a value on the social and environmental impact of capitalism.

Humans are an inventive lot and science and technology has transformed our lives. There's a dark side to some of the ways we use science but there's also hope that it will solve some of our most pressing problems such as climate change and genetic diseases. Scientists on the cutting edge in a range of disciplines imagine how their discoveries will be put to use to solve the problems of the future. They discuss the future of genetics, climate change modelling and materials science and artificial intelligence.

Haben Girma is a success .She graduated from an elite law school. But unlike her fellow students,  Haben is deaf-blind. She speaks to the ABC's Disability Affairs Reporter, blind journalist and newsreader Nas Campanella, about how she gained her law degree from Harvard and her advocacy for disability rights. And we hear from disability advocates about the need to design inclusive technology which is able to be used by all people, regardless of their disability.

The Murray Darling Basin is our food bowl. It covers 4 states. And it has been in poor shape for a long time. Margaret Simons travelled through the basin, talking to locals, irrigators, bureaucrats, and scientists, to get the lowdown.