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When Alexander Litvinenko set out for London's Millennium Hotel one November day in 2006, he already knew he was embroiled in a political conflict. The dissident Russian agent had, after all, fled Moscow to escape the wrath of Vladimir Putin and the country's feared security service. What he didn't realise was that the men he would drink with that afternoon were about to throw him into another battle: a brutal fight with a little-known but devastatingly toxic poison.

Steve Jobs had it. George Clooney has it. Charisma is intangible but powerful - the personality trait that's used to win friends and influence people. Olivia Fox Cabane wasn't born with it. She was a high-school outcast in a country where she didn't fit in, a socially awkward teenager baffled by the nuance of social interactions. But she was also an analytical thinker. After high school, she found ways to reverse engineer her own shortcomings.

All his life, David has been afflicted by a strange and uncomfortable feeling: that his leg belongs to somebody else. It's left him angst-ridden, depressed and confused - and after years of torment, the only way he can think to is to get rid of it completely. In this disturbing, award-winning investigation from the science and technology publisher MATTER, acclaimed writer Anil Ananthaswamy delves accompanies one man as he travels the world to get the illicit surgery he craves.

In an attempt to go green, governments around the world are shunning coal and embracing a supposedly better alternative: natural gas. It's a decision that will shape the future of our planet - but it may not be the right one. Meet Bob Ackley, former pawn shop worker and gas company contractor, who has spent years crisscrossing America collecting data on the gas leaks that pepper the country's cities. And what he has found could mean that the fuel may be as damaging to our climate as coal.

With a violent, alcoholic mother and a father who committed suicide when she was just a baby, Yokia Mason's life has never been easy. And after a childhood in which she and her siblings were subjected to vicious beatings and abuse, some of her family also turned to violence and crime.How do we make sense of a life like Yokia's? Scientists have spent decades trying, and their focus has been the complex sociology of urban life. But now a small band of researchers is claiming that biology plays a vitally important role.

Regenerative medicine has long targeted the impossible - regrowing a diseased organ, or a hand lost in an accident. But biologist Michael Levin thinks an astonishing breakthrough may be within reach. He has resurrected a much-maligned branch of science, and shown that a little-understood process can trigger remarkable feats of regeneration in animals. As his research advances, he's moving us closer to the day when regeneration is possible in people.

A new kind of computer con has emerged in the past few years. It's technically mundane but psychologically brutal: using false threats of arrest, scammers trick low-income victims into repaying debts that do not exist. And one rainy day last January, they accidentally targeted one of the smartest hackers around. Mike Davis is a good guy who gets to play at being a bad guy, a man who gets paid handsomely for testing the limits of his clients' security systems. Davis wanted a new challenge; when the fraudsters called, he realised he'd found it.

MATTER is a nexus for people who are passionate about healthcare innovation and healthcare transformation. This podcast highlights a broad array of perspectives from the conversations we’ve had with entrepreneurs, change makers and industry thought leaders. Sign up to hear these perspectives live at matter.health/events and follow us on social media at @MATTERhealth.