How much plastic is in the Ocean and can Mr B...

Tim Harford investigates some of the numbers in the news. On the programme:Last week, Annunziata Rees-Mogg took to X to post a claim about the proportion of sex offences in Dorset that are committed by asylum seekers, writing that “asylum seekers make up 0.8% of Dorset’s populati ...  Show more

It’s said that AI could soon be coming for the jobs of artists, lawyers, and software engineers. But it might now also be threatening a role at the height of academia – are pure mathematicians safe? Last month, a Stanford mathematician woke up to an email, claiming to have the so ...  Show more

These days plastics contribute to 300 million metric tons of waste in the world. In the early 2000s, our plastic waste rose more in a single decade than it had in 40 years. But what if there was a way to intercept that plastic before it enters our oceans?Talib talked with Lonely ...  Show more

Every single second, 20,000 single-use drinking bottles are sold around the world. That is more than a million pieces of non-biodegradable rubbish produced every minute. And as demand grows in developing economies, so will the mountains of waste, with much of it ending up in the ...  Show more

“If you’ve eaten seafood, you’ve eaten plastic” It’s time to talk plastics. Every piece of plastic we consume stays in the environment for up to hundreds of years. The sheer scale of plastics in the environment are dramatically impacting ocean wildlife and human health. For this ...  Show more

A couple of decades after Leo Baekeland invented the first fully synthetic plastic – Bakelite – plastics were pouring out of labs around the world. There was polystyrene, often used for packaging; nylon, popularised by stockings; polyethylene, the stuff of plastic bags. As the Se ...  Show more