The Australian scientist, writer, explorer and environmental activist Tim Flannery is passionate about climate change, and how to stop it. But he's fed up of the disconnect between the politicians' words, and the realities of greater greenhouse gas emissions.

He's become the academic poster boy of the intermittent fasting movement. Professor Valter Longo's work on how the human body behaves when we deprive it of energy has inspired a range of diet books (including his own).

Novelist, travel writer and academic, Sarah Moss is earning rave reviews for her latest novel Ghost Wall. It's been described as a Brexit-inspired parable, populated by characters plotting a path through a present resounding to the echoes of history.

The English singer-songwriter Lloyd Cole came to fame in the 1980s with his band The Commotions, releasing a string of catchy, crafted hits like Perfect Skin, Rattlesnakes and Lost Weekend.

Professor Nicholas Wareham is a British epidemiologist from the University of Cambridge who researches obesity, diabetes, and other metabolic disorders.

A new interstellar comet some 20 kilometres wide and trailing gas has recently been spotted entering our solar system.

Data scientist Hadley Wickham is developing open source ways to help people collect and analyse the information that surrounds us every day. He's yet to meet a data set he doesn't like and loves poring over his own heart rate statistics, hospital admissions data, and obscure surveys of national eating habits. As well as revealing that bananas were by no means a common food in the 1970s, his work also helps businesses and journalists make sense of the data around them. Born in New Zealand, he grew up in Hamilton and studied in Auckland before moving to Houston where he's now based.

Kim Hill reads listener feedback.

In 'Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica' science journalist Rebecca Priestley tells the story of her visits to the 'wide white continent' that started in 2011. With a lifelong interest in the place, a fascination for the science that's being done there, and awe at its landscape and wildlife, the Antarctic also becomes a theatre for her own anxieties. Some about the physical act of getting there and others about our planet's future in the face of potentially catastrophic climate change. Rebecca Priestley is a writer, former science journalist and director of Victoria University of Wellington's Centre for Science in Society.

Best selling Scottish crime writer Val McDermid has sold more than 15 million copies of her work worldwide. She's arrived in New Zealand to take up a role as a visiting Professor of Scottish Studies and Crime Fiction at the University of Otago. Over the next three years she will teach courses, mentor postgrads and do a series of public lectures and readings. She's recently released two books How the Dead Speak, the latest in her Tony Hill series and My Scotland, which explores the landscapes that have inspired her work Val will be making appearances in Christchurch at The Great Ngaio Marsh Game Show & Awards tonight, Celtic Noir in Dunedin in October and the Verb festival in Wellington in November.