Celebrating science on Africa Day

Unexpected Elements

BBC

Science

4.4 • 565 Ratings

🗓️ 29 May 2026

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How do you translate the latest science work across the 2000 different languages spoken around the African continent? And have you heard of sky mountain? Africa Day has the Unexpected Elements team taking a deep dive into a range of unexpected stories from across the continent.

The day is celebrated every year to mark the establishment of the African Union in 1963. In the Turkana region of northern Kenya, we learn about a team of geologists who have been studying continental break-up. Researchers think it could be one of the weakest areas of the Earth’s crust. We explore the difficult process of translating scientific papers into the many languages spoken across the continent.

Plus, entomologist Dr Gimo Daniel tells us about the unexpected joys of dung beetles. And we learn how AI and large language models are finding new ways to track conservation and mass animal migrations.

And finally, we explore why bats harbour so many diseases yet seem to be tolerant to things that humans get ill from.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton, with Tristan Ahtone in Finland and Phillys Mwatee in Kenya Producer: Margaret Sessa-Hawkins, Alice Lipscombe-Southwell and Robbie Wojciechowski

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts.
0:07.2	Things just swirling around my head.
0:09.6	Am I really the product of this?
0:12.1	Astonishing secrets uncovered by at-home DNA tests.
0:17.0	Little did I know what more was to come.
0:19.5	I'm Jenny Clemen, and in the new series of The Gift,
0:23.6	we'll hear more stories emerging out of the ever-expanding global DNA database.
0:28.8	They did know that I was different.
0:31.7	You had kids together.
0:33.0	Yeah.
0:33.5	Then you met.
0:34.3	Then we met.
0:35.2	The Gift.
0:36.1	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:42.0	Have you ever looked at a map of the world and wondered why some borders seem to have been drawn with a ruler and pencil rather than any natural boundary formed by rivers, mountains or centuries of conflict between groups.
0:56.2	In Africa, there's no getting around the fact that this is due to colonialism,
1:02.0	specifically a conference in Berlin over Christmas 1884 when European countries carved up
1:08.2	the continent. In 1913, an attempt was made to draw a better border between Sudan and Uganda,
1:16.7	in a mission involving a British official from each country.
1:20.6	Captain Kelly from Sudan was keen to meet each ethnic group and draw a boundary that reflected their distribution.
1:28.0	Captain Tufnal from the Ugandan side was keen to go on leave.
1:32.3	They didn't get on.
	...

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