Some of our universe is missing
Unexpected Elements
BBC
4.4 • 567 Ratings
🗓️ 10 August 2023
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on the show that looks for the science behind the news, Marnie Chesterton investigates mystery after mystery. Where is Yevegeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Group, and could science help to trace him? Which animals would do best at a game of hide and seek? And we hear about the time when half the stuff in the universe went missing, and how cosmologists found it again.
We continue our endless quest to identify the Coolest Science in the World. This week’s contender studies the murky side of the genome – dark DNA. Plus the low-down on the indefinite doctor’s strike in Nigeria, we look behind the latest news about our warming oceans and have you ever felt someone else’s pain? You might be the 1 in 50 people known as mirror touch synaesthetes.
All that plus your emails, whatsapps and even more fruit chat.
Presented by Marnie Chesterton Produced by Ben Motley, with Margaret Sessa Hawkins, Alex Mansfield, Sophie Ormiston, Katie Tomsett and Florence Thompson.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Oh, hello. You have chosen a BBC podcast, but before you listen to it, we thought you might |
| 0:04.7 | like our podcast too. You might. You might. It is called Sightracked with me, Nick Grimshaw. |
| 0:09.2 | And me, Annie Mack. And we talk about the week in music. All the news, all the cultural |
| 0:14.0 | happenings in the UK and beyond. And great guests. And it's on BBC Sounds. Yes, where you can |
| 0:19.7 | also enjoy lots of playlists, music mixes and |
| 0:22.6 | live radio. Everything from my six music breakfast show to Radio 3 Unwind. But obviously start with |
| 0:29.3 | our podcast sidetrack. Obviously. Obviously. So if you like music, listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:34.4 | The captain, you know, he went on the radio and he's like, |
| 0:42.3 | we just want to make sure everyone knows he has a Paralympic champion on the plane. |
| 0:48.0 | On the podium is back with more Olympians and Paralympians sharing their remarkable stories. |
| 0:52.4 | On the podium, listen now, wherever you get your BBC podcasts. |
| 0:59.2 | So this week I went hunting for the internet. |
| 1:02.5 | I've never really thought too much about where it lives, |
| 1:06.7 | until recently when I was trying to track down the physical internet, |
| 1:09.3 | all the cables, the servers, the satellites, |
| 1:11.9 | just to find out how much of it is out there. |
| 1:19.2 | 1.4 million tonnes of cables under our seas connect us all at two-thirds of the speed of light. |
| 1:25.4 | And in my country, most of those cables come ashore in a rural county on the southwest tip. |
| 1:29.8 | The various telecoms companies build little houses to protect these cables as they arrive above ground and they've made some efforts to make these things |
| 1:35.0 | blend in with the landscape. Drive around with your eyes peeled and you notice that, wait, |
| 1:40.8 | that house has no windows, only vents. It's actually a crucial part of the network that connects us, hiding in plain sight. |
| 1:50.2 | I'm Marnie Chesterton from the BBC World Service. |
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