As we welcome in the New Year, we eagerly anticipate a fresh roster of IDEAS programs to inspire new ways of looking at our world and understanding it. From the phenomenon of the ‘27 Club’’ to exploring literature from Labrador, to social media influencers who push their intellectual pursuits, join host Nahlah Ayed to find out what our producers are cooking up for the 2026 season.

Kritika Vashishtha has been pursuing a cure for jet lag and it's possible she's found the answer. The Canadian aerospace engineer recently invented a variety of light that fools human bodies into switching time zones while aboard an aircraft. She shows two IDEAS producers around her laboratory inside an airplane to explain how the process works. Kritika plans to direct her discoveries towards making space travel easier on astronauts.

*This episode is part of our series Ideas from the Trenches, which showcases fascinating new work by Canadian PhD students. It originally aired on April 29, 2024.

If we weren't so used to having books, we would think of them as a "miracle." That's how historian Irene Vallego

views what she says is humankind's greatest and most influential invention: the book. "With their help, humanity has undergone an extraordinary acceleration of history, development, and progress," she tells host Nahlah Ayed. Vallego has traced written texts back to their earliest origins and she's written a book of her own, Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World.