Sunday Extra - Separate stories podcast

Recognised as Victoria’s Senior Australian of the Year 2024 for her work in animal advocacy, Glenys Oogjes shares her journey from Animal’s Australia’s first employee all the way to becoming the organisation’s CEO. 

In the late 7th century, silver coinage started to be used in north-west Europe, transforming the economies of the time.

But where did the silver in the coins come from? New research says the answer is Byzantine silver treasure and a mine in France.

In his latest book, Engineers of Human Souls: Four Writers Who Changed Twentieth Century Minds, author and former arts editor of New Scientist magazine, Simon Ings has focused on four writers: French nationalist Maurice Barre; Italian poet and muse for Mussolini’s fascism, Gabriele D’Annunzio; Maxim Gorky who was very close to Stalin; and Maoist writer Ding Ling.

The International Society for Humor Studies held its annual conference in Texas and one of the papers that caught the eye was, “How funny is ChatGPT?”. The answer seems to be, funnier than people, at least according Drew Gorenz, a PhD student at the University of Southern California and the man behind the data on whether artificial intelligence comes up with better jokes than folks. 

What does 30 years of satellite data from Antarctica and the Arctic sound like? Japanese composer and Geoscientist Hiroto Nagai combined his two passions to create a moving ‘musification’ of recordings that plot a changing climate at the poles. 

25 April 2024 marks the 10th anniversary of the water crisis in the US city of Flint, Michigan.

The health emergency still has ramifications to this day.

But what was the cause? And has justice been done?

Guest: Dr Benjamin Pauli, associate professor of social science at Kettering University and author of Flint Fights Back: Environmental Justice and Democracy in the Flint Water Crisis.

At this week’s World Energy Congress in Rotterdam, one of the themes will be  clean energy security for First Nations communities. Communities in Canada  have been adversely affected over many years by fossil fuel industry projects, while remote communities in Australia deal with unreliable and often dirty power sources. They’re all feeling the effects of climate change.

A woman has lost the ability to speak and is forced to communicate by blinking. From her hospital bed she tries to blink out a request, but hospital staff refuse to help.

Background Briefing can reveal that similar situations are playing out in many public health facilities across Australia, as patients pursue their legal right to die, and healthcare workers say "no".

Can you guess this week's tweeter?

Queensland sheep farmer David Elliott's dinosaur bones discoveries have  reinvigorated Australian palaeontology.