In the Anglo-Saxon world we love a good fight – our politics, our judicial system, our industrial relations, it’s all about opposing sides battling it out for supremacy. Surely there's a better way? Well there is, says Deakin University Law professor Jean Du Plessis. And it involves the use of co-determination - a different approach to industrial relations and corporate governance. We also go inside Y Combinator, one of the most influential Silicon Valley startups and look at how effective social media can be at predicting personality types.

Imagine being an astronaut and planning for a space mission you know you have no chance of joining; a journey that won’t even happen in your lifetime, or possibly even your children’s. We meet the long-term thinkers and planners – the space visionaries not afraid to think outside the square.

Wikipedia was once the enfant terrible of the information world. Now it’s just part of the online furniture—establishment even. We speak with Sue Gardner, the Executive Director of the organisation that governs the crowd-sourced encyclopaedia about the website’s struggle for plurality. We also look at an innovative new project to map the human brain.

Powerful new telescopes are allowing us to explore the once unimaginable. But astronomy is fast becoming as much about data management and interpretation as it is about star-gazing. Computers are one solution, but as we’ll discover, nothing beats the human eye and mind when it comes to making sense of the cosmos.

The mainstream media may sometimes confuse digital pranksters with trolls and vandals, but the modern prankster is often a trickster in the tradition of the court jester: a mischievous challenger of society’s norms and sometimes a mirror to its absurdities. We explore the nature of digital pranks - ensuring we don’t take ourselves too seriously!

It’s one of the great unseen drivers of our world—silently altering and shaping our social lives, the way we communicate, our access to information, our economies, our culture, the very future itself. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you—the algorithm! (This program was originally broadcast in March 2012)

We often hear the term 'information overload' but is it a case of over-consumption as much as filter failure? There’s a school of thought that says we now take in information in the same way we consume fast food—without control or moderation. (This program was originally broadcast in February 2012)

As our fast paced digital world continues what does that mean for the way we think about preserving things like old webpages and obsolete media formats? Are there possible lessons from our digital past for our digital future? We explore the fragility of our electronic data and also the temporary nature of the technology we use to access it. We also join the excavation of a 1970s computer chip called the 6502! (This program was originally broadcast in January 2012)

The overall picture for indigenous language preservation is pretty bleak. But some highly driven people using modern technology are refusing to let some languages die. We’ll hear about the work of the World Oral Literature Project, which started in Nepal. And also Miromaa—a software program developed in Newcastle which is being used by indigenous communities around the world. (This program was originally broadcast in March 2012)

We meet members of a sub-culture that’s been quietly spreading across the world. It involves things made of cardboard and paper and may even include some dice! We enter the world of board gaming. What do board games have to do with the future? Well the revival in their popularity is part of a broader retro-trend – like listening to vinyl. But it’s not just about nostalgia.