Professor Michael Fuhrer is an ARC (Australian Research Council) Laureate Fellow in the School of Physics at Monash University. He directs the ARC Centre of Excellence for Future Low-Energy Electronics Technologies (FLEET) and co-directs the Monash Centre for Atomically Thin Materials. Prior to coming to Monash, Fuhrer directed the Center for Nanophysics and Advanced Materials at the University of Maryland. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society. His research explores novel two-dimensional materials such as graphene. Fuhrer has been in New Zealand as a plenary speaker at the The MacDiarmid Instutute's AMN19 conference.

Succulent smugglers have been targeting a particularly beautiful specimen of the plant in southern California and last week two people were in court charged with poaching 1800 Dudleya farinosa, or Powdery Liveforever) from a state park. It was the fourth such prosecution in a year and reflects a growing demand by Dudleya fans, especially those in China and Korea. San Diego-based Debra Lee Baldwin is a garden photojournalist and author of three books about growing succulents - her most recent is the second edition of Designing with Succulents, which came out in 2017. She says give them adequate light, good air circulation and fast-draining soil, and you can grow succulents in a pair of socks.

Musical duo The Proclaimers are Scottish twins Charlie and Craig Reid. The pair - most famous for their 1988 hit '500 Miles' are coming to NZ in May. Charlie talks to Kim Hill ahead of their visit.

Listener feedback to the Saturday Morning Programme.

US singer-songwriter Sam Phillips began her career singing Christian music in the 1980s under her given name, Leslie Phillips. She switched to mainstream music in 1988 and started going by her nickname, Sam, in honour of music producer Sam Phillips who discovered Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash. Her 1994 album, Martinis and Bikinis, was nominated for a Grammy Award. Phillips composed and performed the music for seven seasons of the TV show Gilmore Girls and reprised that role for the new Gilmore Girls (A Year In The Life) revival for Netflix. She has also contributed music to the Emmy Award-winning The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Phillips released her latest album, World on Sticks, last year. She also co-wrote 'She Remembers Everything', the title track of Rosanne Cash's 2018 album, and the song was number 3 on the New York Times list of best songs for 2018.

Moe Laga is a performance artist from South Auckland. She is the head of COVEN an arts collective which specialises in voguing and performance art. Her practice includes a large number of stage (Neon Bootleg, Inferno, Femslick) and screen productions (Baby Mamas Club), as well as a collaborative visual arts work that has been shown in Australia and at the Pingyao International Photography Festival in China. Laga has a diploma from the Pacific Institute of Performing Arts and recently completed her Bachelor of Creative Arts at Manukau Institute of Technology. She has also been part of the LGBT arts collective FAFSWAG since 2012. COVEN's new performance, Ethera, opens at Auckland's Basement Theatre next week.

Kim talks to Diarmuid Brazendale, a resident of Redwood Valley near Nelson, who describes how firefighters fended off the bush fire to save his house and animals.

Ten years ago, Stephanie Land escaped an abusive relationship and moved with her nine-month-old daughter into a homeless shelter. While navigating a tangle of Government assistance that never amounted to much and left her often sick and starving, Land took a job cleaning houses to survive, and has turned her grueling experience into a memoir called Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive. She also works as a freelancer and as a writing fellow through both the Center for Community Change and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Salon, The Nation, and many other platforms.

Emergency Poet was conceived by poet and writer Deborah Alma as a fun way of bringing poetry to people. After six years of dispensing poems as cures from the back of an old ambulance, Alma is establishing the UK's first poetry pharmacy in Shropshire. She's written poetry and held creative writing workshops for many years, and works using poetry to help communicate with people with dementia, both for The Courtyard Theatre in Hereford and for Ledbury Poetry Festival. She has been lead writer for Writing West Midlands Writing Squads in Shrewsbury & Ludlow teaching creative writing to young people, and wrote and taught poetry writing at the University of Worcester.

Scottish born James Crabb is widely regarded as one of the world's leading ambassadors of the classical accordion. Crabb was professor of classical accordion at the Royal Danish Academy of Music, Copenhagen, from 1995-2010 and held a long-standing guest professorship at the University of Music and Dramatic Arts in Graz, Austria. He is currently artistic director of the Four Winds music organisation and festival in Australia. Crabb has performed as soloist with many orchestras including BBC Symphony, BBC Scottish, Sydney and Melbourne Symphonies, London Philharmonic and London Symphony. He is an authority on the music of Astor Piazzolla. Crabb is in Aotearoa to perform at the Adam Chamber Music Festival in Nelson.