Surprises from a Martian Lake Bed

After the end of a near 17-year legal battle between popstar Katy Perry and fashion designer Katie Perry, the Unexpected Elements team has been inspired to explore the question at the heart of the case – what's in a name? First, we hear how marmosets use their calls as a way of n ...  Show more

With this year’s Oscars on the horizon, and vampire film Sinners nominated for a record-breaking 16 awards, the Unexpected Elements team sinks their teeth into some blood-sucking science.First, we discover that Vlad the Impaler, the Romanian prince who inspired Dracula, may have ...  Show more

The nearest habitable world beyond our Solar System might be right on our doorstep . Scientists say their investigations of our closest star, Proxima Centauri, show it to have an Earth-sized planet orbiting about it. What's more, it is moving in a zone that would make liquid wate ...  Show more

When Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins – who passed away this week – looked down on the earth from lunar orbit during those days in 1969, he saw more ice and a smaller liquid ocean than you would see today. Of the 200,000 glaciers outside of the polar and Greenland ice sheets, ...  Show more

Victoria Gill and guests discuss the signs and symptoms of melting ice and anthropogenic climate warming, illicit CFC production and the racket we make in the seas. As two robotic missions from UAE and China arrive at Mars , and a third from NASA arrives next week, UK astronaut T ...  Show more

NASA's Perseverance rover has been trundling around the Jezero crater since it landed successfully in February 2021. A few weeks ago it made its first attempt at collecting a sample of rock. Unfortunately the rock turned out to be so crumbly it disintegrated away. But Perseveranc ...  Show more