This week, the Unexpected Elements team have been glued to a story about a $126 million fraud caused by fake US postage labels. That inspires a show filled with lies, cheats and deception. We meet the flower that catfishes its way to reproductive success by intimating a female fl ...Show more
Building bridges
A new bridge has just been opened between China and North Korea after a 12-year delay. And that got the Unexpected Elements team thinking about some bridge-related science. We start things off by finding out about the microscopic bridges connecting undersea bacteria. We then delv ...Show more
When the deadly Ebola virus broke out in West Africa in 2014, scientists in the USA set to work analysing it. What they discovered would eventually lead to a treatment. Pardis Sabeti is a virologist at Harvard University and leads the team who sequenced the Ebola virus genome - s ...Show more
We talk to volcano scientist Ed Marshall in Iceland about working at the volcano which has burst into life spectacularly again after a year of quiet. Also in the programme, we'll be following migrating moths across Europe in light aircraft to discover the remarkable secrets of th ...Show more
How Did a Volcano Turn a Brain to Glass? Plus, Measles, Mystery Illness and Microbes
Officials have confirmed the first measles death in an outbreak in West Texas. A meeting to discuss which strains to focus on for next year’s flu vaccines was canceled by the Food and Drug Administration. Public health officials are investigating two outbreaks of an unknown disea ...Show more