What can the climate of the past tell us about the future? Chris Turney is in the pod to help us decipher the messages from extreme weather in the Earth's history. He's a professor of physical geography at Exeter University, where he researches past climate change and what it means for the future, and he recently published a new book, "Ice, mud and blood – lessons from climates past".
The Guardian's religious affairs correspondent Riazat Butt talks to Michael Heller, a priest and cosmologist who has just won the controversial Templeton Prize. The £800,000 gong (previous winners include physicists Freeman Dyson and Paul Davies, and the philosopher Charles Taylor) is given to a living person who has made a contribution to affirming life's spiritual dimension, whether through research, journalism, practice or scholarship. We discuss whether the spirit of the award corrupts science (at least that's what Richard Dawkins seems to think).
In the newsjam, we discuss why living near trees might prevent your kids from developing asthma, how global warming might slow down for a decade, and James Randerson dissects the media calamity that was pixie dust. Has someone really invented a powder that makes fingers grow back? Well, of course not.
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