A new heavily mutated Covid variant is causing global alarm. Our regular commentator, Cambridge University consultant clinical virologist Dr Chris Smith joins us to discuss.

Preeminent literary magazine Sport was founded by writers Damien Wilkins, Elizabeth Knox, Nigel Cox and their Victoria University Press (VUP) publisher Fergus Barrowman in 1988. Sport folded in 2020 as the pandemic hit and VUP have now published an anthology of the magazine's latter years, A Game of Two Halves: The Best of Sport 2005-2019, edited by Barrowman.

Listener feedback from the Saturday Morning programme.

Sophie Roberts is working on an ambitious Silo commission called Break Bread which broadcasts the rambunctious hidden lives of all of us. Working under the constraints of the pandemic, the production looks to move beyond traditional black box theatre and into the digital sphere while retaining the shared, immersive characteristics of live theatre.

All this week RNZ has been celebrating 100 years of broadcasting in New Zealand, the first broadcast having been made on the 17th of November 1921 by Professor Robert Jack from Otago University's physics department. But what of radio’s future? James Cridland is a self-dubbed radio futurologist and consultant with radio stations based in Brisbane.

Groundbreaking new research at the Malaghan Institute in Wellington has found that immune cells in the skin behave differently than their counterparts found elsewhere in the body, suggesting they play a much bigger role in the onset of allergies than originally thought.

When Christchurch's Hagley Park was created in the late 19th century native plants such as ferns, cabbage trees and flax were replaced by English plants like beech, elm and oak. As part of the Scape Public Art Season 2021, Dunedin artist Aroha Novak is presenting The Native Section, nine hand-embroidered billboards surrounding the park.

The origin of Covid-19 still remains a mystery that may never be solved. Was it the result of a spillover from animals to humans, or the result of a lab leak? The idea that the SARS-CoV-2 virus could have accidentally escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China has been widely condemned as a conspiracy theory fuelled by anti-Chinese sentiment. But some people insist lab leak is a plausible theory, and one of them is Canadian molecular biologist Dr Alina Chan. She's a gene-therapy specialist at the Broad Institute of MIT at Harvard, and has co-authored a book with popular science writer Matt Ridley, Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.

Over the last few years renowned choreographer Michael Parmenter has shifted his focus from contemporary dance to the realm of participatory social dancing.

Our regular commentator, Cambridge University consultant clinical virologist Dr Chris Smith joins us with the latest Covid-19 science, and to answer your questions.