Robert F Kennedy Jr caused controversy in April by promising to find a cause for autism by September. Claims by the new US secretary for health and human services that autism is a “preventable disease” with an environmental cause,  contradict a body of research that suggests autism is caused by a combination of genetic and external factors.

The US government announced that to support its new research effort into autism it would build a “data platform” involving data on claims, medical records and consumer wearables.

 In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we speak to Amy Gaeta, a  research associate at University of Cambridge in the UK who studies disability surveillance. Gaeta talks us through some of the strategies people are using to avoid potential surveillance, from self-diagnosis, to withholding information or being careful with the language they use to describe themselves.

This episode was written and produced by Katie Flood. Gemma Ware is the executive producer. Sound design and mixing by Eloise Stevens and theme music by Neeta Sarl. Read the full credits for this episode and sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.

If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, an independent, not-for-profit news organisation.

Faced with the choice in their daily lives, their work or their politics, why do some people decide to keep quiet, to censor themselves in anticipatory obedience, even if they’re not ordered to do so?

In this episode we talk to self-censorship expert Daniel Bar-Tal at Tel Aviv University about what drives people to censor themselves, and its consequences for society.

This episode was written and produced by Katie Flood with assistance from Mend Mariwany. Gemma Ware is the executive producer. Sound design and mixing by Eloise Stevens and theme music by Neeta Sarl. Read the full credits for this episode and sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.

If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, an independent, not-for-profit news organisation.

As Jaws marks its 50th anniversary, sharks continue to get a bad rap. Film after film portrays them as terrifying hunters, the bane of surfers and swimmers. But in Indonesia, sharks are the hunted. It’s the world’s largest shark-fishing nation, with more species of sharks found in Indonesian waters than in any other country.

So Indonesia was the ideal place for conservation scientist Hollie Booth at the University of Oxford to test out a new idea: would paying fishermen to release any sharks and rays caught accidentally in their nets help to keep more alive? Listen to Booth and her colleague M. Said Ramdlan in Indonesia discuss the unintended consequences of the incentive programme.

This episode was written and produced by Gemma Ware with assistance from Katie Flood and Mend Mariwany. Sound design and mixing by Eloise Stevens and theme music by Neeta Sarl. Read the full credits for this episode and sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation.

If you like the show, please consider donating to The Conversation, an independent, not-for-profit news organisation.