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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.

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Unexpected Elements: Wildfires and wild animals

Discussion & Talk

15/06/2023 GMT

Wildfires and wild animals

BBC World Service - Unexpected Elements, Wildfires and wild animals

Smog in North America leads us to conservationists using air pollution to track animals.

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

The show that brings you the science behind the news, with Marnie Chesterton and an inter-continental team.

This week we take the headlines of the wildfires in North America, pull out the science and run with it. We explore what’s actually in smoke-polluted air, looking at the part the El Nino weather system plays in starting fires, and discover why a surprising element of air pollution is helping conservation biologists to track animals.

We look at how tobacco is not just bad for your lungs – it’s bad for some of the farmers who grow it too. We get the Kenyan perspective on farmers trying to move away from tobacco production.
We continue our quest to find The Coolest Science in the World with a researcher who studies grasshoppers that are the noisiest on the planet, but might not actually be noisy enough.

And as Ukraine struggles with the devastation caused by the destruction of the Kherson dam, we look at dam building along the Mekong river and ask why a lack of flood water might be causing a problem.

All that, plus your emails and whatsapps, and a listener gets an unexpected answer to a question about whether we can send taste and smell over the airwaves.

Presented by: Marnie Chesterton
Produced by Alex Mansfield, with Ben Motley, Margaret Sessa-Hawkins & Sophie Ormiston

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