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Unexpected Elements

Factual: Science & Nature

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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.

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Unexpected Elements: Chernobyl

Discussion & Talk

A view of a housing project in the ghost town of Pripyat near Chernobyl's nuclear power plant

30/04/2016 GMT

Chernobyl

BBC World Service - Unexpected Elements, Chernobyl

Thirty years since Chernobyl's nuclear accident, its impacts on human health

Chernobyl; Bt Crops; VR Gets Real; CERN; LA Wildlife; Ice sails; Spot Squeezing

Thirty years ago this week an explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant. A fire raged for 10 days, spewing radioactive materials on the surrounding area and was detected throughout much of a continent.  Yet, so many decades on, why is it so difficult to accurately measure the impacts on human health?  Richard Wakeford of the University of Manchester is an epidemiologist who has looked at the research done over the years, and he explains to Adam Rutherford why making definitive connections between the Chernobyl explosion and long-term illnesses or premature deaths is so very difficult.

Dealing with Resistance to Bt Crops
Genetically modified Bt crops have been hailed as one of the success stories of GM crops.  Cotton, maize and soybeans which have the ‘insecticide gene inserted’ are thought to be responsible for increases in global agricultural productivity of US$78 between 1996 and 2013.  But now farmers are starting to see crop pests developing resistance to the Bacillus thuringiensis toxin.  It is one of the evolutionary arms races that nature is so famous for.  But now scientists at Harvard University are harnessing evolution in the lab to fast-track themselves to a new generation of the insecticidal toxin.  Jack Stewart talks to Professor David Liu who is one of the authors of the paper published in the journal Nature.

Virtual Reality Gets Real
Virtual reality and 360 degree immersive film technology heralds the next revolution visual communication, potentially as dramatic a change into how we view the world as that which came about with the introduction of cinema.  But if we have been here before with virtual reality, this time it looks set to stay.  In a special programme recorded in front of an audience in the BBC’s Radio Theatre, experts, including VR film-makers, performers and philosophers debated the transformative power of virtual reality.  Gareth Mitchell talks to one of these experts, Sandy Smolan, who is an award-winning film director based in Los Angeles. 

CERN
Scientists at CERN have also been trying to sort out the wheat from the chaff, continuing their efforts to understand a blip in their data identified and scrutinised over the last few months. Jon Butterworth of UCL and CERN dons the Cloak of Speculation and talks to Adam Rutherford about the possible implications for physics if it does indeed turn out to be a new, unpredicted, particle.

Los Angeles Wildlife
The city may have a reputation as a concrete jungle, devoid of wild areas, but a team of scientists in the city say appearances are deceptive.  They have opened an Urban Nature Research Centre to co-ordinate, what the director of the city’s Natural History Museum, is calling the world’s largest urban study of biodiversity.  As the BBC’s Los Angeles Correspondent James Cook reports they are only able to do so with the help of an army of citizen scientists.

Glaciers with a Flotilla of 'Ice Sails'
Rare and somewhat esoteric, these are the huge pyramids of ice that stand proud of the surface on some glaciers.  To date, the phenomenon has only really been seen around the Karakoram mountain region of Pakistan.  The Baltoro glacier, which begins life at the very summit of K2, has some particularly fine examples.  Up to 25m in height and with widths of up to 90m, their triangular shapes when viewed from a distance give the impression of a flotilla of sail boats.  Now, scientists are getting a handle on how these giant "ice sails" form and wither over time, and how the processes involved depend on the special conditions that exist in the Karakoram region.

Spot Squeezing 
There seems to be an online trend for watching online videos of huge spots being squeezed. Sites such as Dr Pimple Popper attract hundreds of thousands of viewers. Claudia Hammond discussed this fascination with Daniel Kelly from the Department of Philosophy at Purdue University, who is the author of a book on disgust called Yuck! and Dr Nisith Sheth, Consultant Dermatologist for the British Skin Foundation.


(Photo caption: A view of a housing project in the ghost town of Pripyat near Chernobyl's nuclear power plant © Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty Images )


The Science Hour was presented by Roland Pease with comments from BBC Science Correspondent Jonathan Amos


Editor: Deborah Cohen

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