The blockbusting US novelist Harlan Coben has a new book out: it's called The Boy From The Woods and this week he was meant to be on a book tour to promote it.

Journalist Ed Caesar has been globe trotting through Africa and Europe on the trail of the world's largest rough diamonds.

Consultant clinical virologist (and Naked Scientist) Dr Chris Smith is back with the latest science about what we're discovering about COVID-19 and its spread.

Jaimee Perrett is a primary school teacher from Nelson who's been fundraising to rebuild a school in Tetrem, a village about 300 kilometres north west of the Ghanaian capital, Accra.

There might be at least one silver lining as the world navigates its way through the coronavirus pandemic. Paul Monks is Professor of Air Pollution at the University of Leicester.

Finland was named the happiest country in the world this month...again!: It's the third straight year the country's come out on top of the World Happiness Report. So why are the Finns so damn happy?!

Planetary astronomer Michele Bannister has recently arrived home after working in Canada at The University of Victoria in British Columbia, and at Queen's University in Belfast. A passionate communicator on matters astronomical, her research interests include mapping the outer solar system, interstellar comets, and satellite mega constellations. Now back in New Zealand, she wants to help the country launch its own interplanetary space missions, informed by her experiences overseas.

Professor Steven Taylor is an Australian academic who's been living in Canada since 1988. On the 1st December 2019, just a few weeks before the full scale of the novel coronavirus outbreak became apparent in China, he released his book The Psychology of Pandemics: Preparing for the Next Global Outbreak of Infectious Disease. A Professor and Clinical Psychologist in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, he also has a clinical practice in the city specialising in mood and anxiety disorders. Regarded as an expert on the psychological reactions prompted by pandemics, he's interested in the interplay between individual anxieties and how these can spread to group behaviour. Meanwhile, he's just been asked by the Canadian government to conduct research into self-isolation and its psychological impact. As well as toilet paper-seeking behaviour, he's also noticing another social phenomenon: people flouting meeting restrictions to attend pubs and coronavirus parties.

Working from home isn't exactly a new experience for phylogeneticist Dr James Hadfield. Based in Wanaka but employed by Seattle's Bedford Lab, he works on the open source Nextstrain platform: this allows scientists all over the world to share and compare genetic information about SARS CoV-2 and other viruses in one central location, and then track their rate of mutation and their spread in real time. The data helps to build up a 'family tree' of a virus revealing the timeline of where transmissions in a particular country started and came from. The response to the COVID-19 outbreak has seen information about hundreds of samples from 33 different countries being logged and shared in the quest to understand and fight the virus better.

It's proving to be an unlikely-sounding global hit. The six-part Netflix documentary series Cheer follows the US's best college cheer-leading squad, Navarro College from Texas, as they train for the 2019 national championships. Under the exacting gaze of its glamorous coach, Monica Aldama (aka The Queen) viewers follow Cheer Team luminaries like La'Darius Marshall and Gabi Butler through endless practices, bone-crunching injuries, and jaw-dropping tumbling stunts. 

Cheer's developer, producer and co-director Arielle Kilker was meant to be attending the Big Screen Symposium in Auckland in a couple of weeks. The event's now been postponed but the Emmy-nominated film-maker, whose work includes Chef's Table and Last Chance U, joins us from Los Angeles to discuss the competitive cheer-leading scene and how she connected with Aldama and the Navarro College team.