Front Burner

After decades of research, in early December scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California made a historic breakthrough in nuclear fusion by generating more energy than it took to create it. It’s a major scientific step because, according to experts, nuclear fusion has the potential to deliver clean and abundant zero-carbon energy.

Richard Carlson is the director of energy policy at an environmental charity called Pollution Probe. Today on Front Burner, he'll explain how nuclear fusion uses the same process that powers the sun and why it could be a game changer for clean energy, if we can figure out how to harness it.

James Cameron has directed Titanic, Terminator, and Aliens. But he says the project that kept him from giving up on filmmaking entirely was Avatar.

But for all of the film’s initial success Avatar’s lack of cultural impact has become a running joke over the years – there’s even a Buzzfeed quiz called: “Do You Remember Anything At All About Avatar?”

Now today, 13 years later, its sequel, The Way of Water, arrives in theatres.

CBC Entertainment reporter Jackson Weaver takes us through the first film’s fall from grace, what the sequel’s all about, and whether James Cameron has another big commercial hit on his hands.

On Sunday, Twitter owner Elon Musk joined comedian Dave Chappelle on stage and was roundly booed. Musk responded on Twitter saying, “Technically, it was 90% cheers,” and that “It’s almost as if I’ve offended SF’s unhinged leftists … but nahhh.”

Musk has said that he’s politically a centrist, but the tweet is just one recent example of how he’s adopted partisan language in a social media culture war. Musk has distributed Twitter records that are supposed to reveal biased censorship, indulged in far-right talking points about COVID-19 and unbanned white nationalist accounts.

Today, a discussion with the Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel about how and why Musk is aligning himself with different factions of the right. Warzel writes the Galaxy Brain newsletter about tech, media and politics.

In recent weeks, the latest versions of AI art-creating tools, along with a compelling new AI chatbot have flooded social media.

The tools can be fun, with people creating artistic and enhanced selfies using Lensa, strange concept art with DALL-E 2, or exploring the way the chatbot, ChatGPT, creates seemingly original and complex prose in seconds. But the new tools are also a demonstration of how powerful AI has become, and hint at a relatively near future where it could convincingly replace human workers.

Today, Will Knight, senior writer with WIRED, joins us to discuss what’s behind these popular new AI tools, some of their pitfalls, and the impact they’re already having on society.

A surge of respiratory illness is putting pressure on an already overloaded healthcare system in many places across the country and making it even harder for many Canadians to get examined by their family doctors, at walk-in clinics and even in the emergency room. Today we’ll be hearing personal stories from people who say they’ve struggled to get timely access to the medical care they desperately needed.

Julia Murray is a mom in Conception Bay South in Newfoundland whose 3-year-old son Jack came down with an awful fever in early December. Bianca Gallant of Memramcook, New Brunswick, says she recently had a 14 hour wait in a Moncton ER that ended in her needing emergency surgery.

The price of food is soaring and so are the profits of Canada’s major grocery stores, raising questions and concerns among consumers, politicians and economists about their conduct.

A parliamentary committee is scheduled to question officials for Metro and Save-On-Foods about their prices today and representatives from Loblaws and the owner of Sobeys defended themselves at the committee last week, saying they are not taking advantage of inflation to drive profit.

Today on Front Burner, we’re talking to Jim Stanford, an economist and the director of a progressive think tank called the Centre for Future Work, who says grocery stores are profiting off of inflation, at the expense of struggling Canadians and that they are far from the only industry doing it.

In what’s being called the largest anti-extremism operation in modern German history, thousands of police officers conducted raids across the country on Wednesday.

An active soldier, a judge and even an aristocrat were among 25 people arrested. Police say 27 more are suspected of allegedly plotting to overthrow the state in an armed coup. The group is thought to have been inspired by right-wing extremist conspiracy theories. But this is just the latest example of politically-motivated crime in the country.

Today on Front Burner we’re talking to the political editor of Der Spiegel, Ann-Katrin Müller, about the details of this alleged plot, who’s behind it, and the state of right-wing extremism in Germany.

Domperidone, a gastrointestinal medication, is often prescribed off-label to breastfeeding women in Canada to help increase their milk supply. Many have described it as a “miracle drug” that has helped them feed their babies. But, as a CBC investigation has found, some also believe that withdrawal after they stopped taking the drug left them in severe psychological distress — and even, in some cases, suicidal.

Today, Tara Carman — a senior reporter with CBC’s national investigative unit — walks us through her team’s findings.

**UPDATE** - An earlier version of this episode said 120 million prescriptions for domperidone were filled in 2020, based on data from Health Canada. After publication of this story, Health Canada corrected their publicly available data to reflect that 1.7 million prescriptions were filled in that year, representing around 120 million tablets. This episode now reflects that change.

Winnipeg Police are alleging that a serial killer murdered four women earlier this year.

Investigators believe that each of the man’s alleged victims died between March and May, and – despite only having identified three of the women – that all are Indigenous. The accused is now facing four counts of first-degree murder.

Today, CBC Winnipeg reporter Stephanie Cram helps us understand more about the lives of the alleged victims, and how communities are grappling with further loss in a province some advocates call “ground zero” for violence against Indigenous women and girls.

With concerns mounting over the upcoming expansion of medical assistance in dying to include mental illness as the sole condition in March 2023, we ask Liberal Member of Parliament Marc Garneau if the federal government will listen to growing calls from mental health experts and hit pause on the controversial change.

Marc Garneau is the Member of Parliament for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount and the co-chair of the Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying. It’s a committee that is looking into this issue for the federal government.