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Unexpected Elements

Factual: Science & Nature

Factual: Science & Nature: Science & Technology

The news you know, the science you don’t.

The news you know, the science you don’t. Unexpected Elements looks beyond everyday narratives to discover a goldmine of scientific stories and connections from around the globe. From Afronauts, to why we argue, to a deep dive on animal lifespans: see the world in a new way.

The Science Hour

Unexpected Elements: Curbing mobile phone waste

Mobile phone recycling

28/02/2015

Curbing mobile phone waste

BBC World Service - Unexpected Elements, Curbing mobile phone waste

The CLEVER project that aims to curb mobile phone waste

The CLEVER project that aims to curb mobile phone waste. Desalination to solve water shortages. Recreating the womb to aid language development in premature babies

Clever: Mobile phone recycling
UK researchers aim to close the loop between manufacturing.   A team of scientist at the University of Bath believe their project, called CLEVER, will curb mobile phone waste. 

Desalination
Water shortages around the planet might be solved by desalination – the removal of salt from seawater to make fresh water. But desalination has a very damaging ecological footprint. A team of engineers at Aston University in the UK believe these water purification plants could become part of an interconnected solution

Premature Baby Language
Babies born prematurely are more than twice as likely to have difficulty with language and understanding words, than those carried to full-term.  A study, published in the journal PNAS, suggests that recreating a womblike environment with recordings of a mother's heartbeat and voice could potentially correct these deficits. 

Fight Sensing Cameras
A team at Cardiff University in Wales is investigating how crowd behaviour changes in the lead up to violent behaviour. If they can get computers to recognise these clues, it could give an early warning to the police to move in and start to break things up. 

Sharp Teeth and Mouth Cancer
Research into sharp teeth, one of the five recognised causes of throat and mouth cancer has been somewhat neglected. But Dr Christopher Perry, at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane, has carried out analysis of hundreds of patients and found that after tobacco, sharp rubbing teeth were the next biggest cause of mouth cancer.  

Mental Health Cafe
Cafes can offer more than coffee and croissants. They can also contribute to improving mental health. That is the ethos of the Dragon café in in South London – a café especially for those with mental health issues, hoping for life-changing outcomes at the cafe.

Science Hour was presented by Gareth Mitchell with comments from BBC science reporter Jonathan Webb
Produced by: Colin Grant

Photo: Mobile phone recycling  Credit: Getty Images

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