In Their Element

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Factual: Science & Nature: Science & Technology

Scientists tell stories of the elements, explaining how chemistry made the modern world.

Scientists tell the stories of different elements, explaining why these well-known substances matter for chemistry and also for the development of modern civilisation.

In Their Element: Series 4: Strontium

Strontium

Series 4

BBC Radio 4 - In Their Element, Series 4, Strontium

Chemist Andrea Sella ends his festive series with fireworks and the element strontium.

Andrea Sella, Professor of Chemistry at UCL, celebrates five elements that enhance our lives. Today he admires how strontium gives us red fireworks and reveals our ancestors' past.

Strontium is the 15th most common element in the earth yet we really only come into contact with it in fireworks. It gives us the deep red colour we admire in a pyrotechnics display. Andrea Sella, Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at UCL, meets Mike Sansom of Brighton Fireworks who explains how a firework is constructed and reveals the chemical mix that creates the bright red flashes. 

The Science Museum's Curator of Chemistry, Rupert Cole, shows Andrea a Thomas Rowlandson etching of Humphry Davy experimenting with the then recently discovered element in front of a fashionable audience at the Royal Institution in London in the early 19th century.  

Professor Thomas Klapötke of the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich talks about his search for a substitute for strontium in fireworks and about how the element can get into our bones. 

And Janet Montgomery, Professor of Archaeology at Durham University, explains how strontium traces have revealed that our Neolithic ancestors moved around much more than was previously thought. Nearly half the people buried around Stonehenge were born in places with different rocks from those under Salisbury Plain.

In Their Element: Series 4

Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

Andrea Sella, Professor of Chemistry at UCL, on five elements that enhance our lives.

In the 150th anniversary year of the publication of Mendeleev's Periodic Table, Professor of Chemistry at UCL Andrea Sella celebrates five elements that enhance our lives.

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