The Week Unwrapped: Sex and health, the Earth’s core and another new year

Olly Mann and The Week delve behind the headlines and debate what really matters from the past seven days. With Leaf Arbuthnot, Holden Frith and Abdulwahab Tahhan.

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In this week’s episode, we discuss:

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Women’s healthcare

A global survey revealed this week that women in the UK are increasingly dissatisfied with the healthcare they’re receiving, and suggested that the care provided here is as bad as Kosovo and Kazakhstan’s and worse than China’s. Less surprisingly, the UK ranked below the US, Australia, New Zealand, France and Germany. Analysts said the UK’s poor score was due to difficulties accessing to preventative care and slow diagnoses for chronic pain. Can the NHS do better?

The Earth’s inner core

Research carried out at Peking University in Beijing, and published on Monday in Nature Geoscience, suggests that the inner core of the Earth is now rotating at the same speed as the rest of the planet. This is a recent development: until about a decade ago, it was rotating faster than the rest of the Earth. What consequences will this have? And why do we know so little about the Moon-sized planet within a planet that lies deep beneath our feet?

Lunar new year

This week was the first of the new year in the lunar calendar, observed in China and parts of Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, in the Muslim world, we’re in the year 1444 – or 2973 in some parts of North Africa. Does it matter how we count the months and year? And what do our date systems tell us about our culture?