This Way Up for Saturday 22 March 2014
Foldscope
Image courtesy of the Foldscope team.
Manu Prakash is the inventor of the Foldscope, a cheap, easy-to-use microscope that costs less than a $1. It's printed on a piece of paper, and with a few folds here and there and a watch battery you've got a fully functional microscope. It even projects the images on any flat surface so it's perfect for classrooms.
Rough diamonds
Dr Graham Pearson of the University of Alberta has got his hands on a real rough diamond. It comes from about 500kms underground and is only worth about $20, but provides priceless evidence of a gigantic wet zone way under the earth's surface.
Spotify bandwidth
A listener called Paul is having some issues with his internet data plan blowing out recently, and the culprit's the popular music streaming service, Spotify. Our tech correspondent Peter Griffin looks at how Spotify works and has some handy tips to help you save money.
Parisian car ban
Anne Penketh is a journalist based in Paris, where half the cars in the city got banned from the roads this week in a desperate attempt to fight pollution.
Mountain biking
Ash Burgess is a super-keen mountain biking instructor teaching children and adults how to ride.
Naked Science
Chris Smith of The Naked Scientist on the discovery of gravity waves, revealing the secrets of the earliest days of our universe. Also our sense of smell is way more powerful than anybody thought.
Faecal transplants
We look at the debate going on in the US- soon to come to NZ- over how faecal transplants should be regulated. With Mark Smith of MIT and the OpenBiome stool bank.
