Promise and Peril at the Bottom of the Sea

For years, a debate has been simmering in Silicon Valley over the right way to build artificial intelligence. Should it be open and free for anyone to use, or should we tightly control how it’s made and who can access it? Mike Isaac, who covers technology for The New York Times, ...  Show more

This summer, wildfires have been raging across Europe. France and Spain have been hit particularly badly, with hundreds of thousands of acres incinerated and entire communities devastated. Chico Harlan, the global climate correspondent for The New York Times, and Mark Landler, th ...  Show more

How rocks on the ocean floor could be key to the transition to electric cars. Justin Rowlatt speaks to Gerard Barron, boss of DeepGreen, a company that wants to gather rocks from the ocean floors rich in the metals essential for making electric car batteries. He tells us why this ...  Show more

This episode of the Weekly Tradecast looks at the rare metals and minerals used in mobile phones, laptops and electric car batteries with Clovis Freire, chief of the commodity research and analysis section at UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD). Electric vehicles are seen as clean ...  Show more

Resting on the bottom of the ocean are potato-sized nodules of valuable minerals that are more or less up for grabs. Multiple corporations and some nations are racing to build deep-sea drones that can withstand the extreme conditions at the seafloor and bring these 1 ...

The rush to extract battery metals from the bottom of the ocean and what that could cost financially and environmentally. Michelle Fleury sees a specialist mining robot in action and hears the arguments for and against deep sea mining. Presenter / producer: Michelle Fleury Image