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
Data collated from swab samples taken in Wuhan’s market in the early days of the Covid pandemic suggest animals sold in the market were carrying the virus at the time. It’s the strongest evidence yet for an intermediate species – one which passed the virus on to humans after beco ...Show more
Microbiomes are a multi-million-pound industry. Every week, many people send off poop samples to be examined so we can learn about our own ecosystems of bacteria, virus and fungi that live in our guts, with a view to improving health. But how accurate are these tests? Microbiolog ...Show more
We are a teeming mass of interconnected microbes and the impact of this microscopic universe on our health, our minds, even our moods, is profound.Made in collaboration with Wellcome Collection, Claudia Hammond and an expert panel explore one of the fastest moving areas of scienc ...Show more