Super Science
Unexpected Elements
BBC
4.4 • 566 Ratings
🗓️ 22 November 2024
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Headlines that Canadian uranium deposits could make it a nuclear superpower has the Unexpected Elements team musing on all manner of superpowers.
Tardigrades are an obvious candidate – boil them, freeze them, irradiate them in space, these adorable creatures are almost indestructible. We also meet Dr Deep Sea, Joseph Dituri, from the University of South Florida, who lived under water for 100 days and swears by it as a boost for our health.
As the leader of the free world goes on an Amazon jungle tour, we talk tiny frogs, giant frogs and radiation tolerant frogs.
We also hear how cancer survivors may have a secret superpower and how we’ve co-opted plants superpowers for medicines.
Presenter: Marnie Chesterton, with Camilla Mota and Affelia Wibisono Producers: Imaan Moin, Harrison Lewis and Dan Welsh Sound engineer: Gavin Wong
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Can I just say? |
| 0:01.5 | You're about to listen to a BBC podcast. |
| 0:04.0 | It's such a wonderful listen. |
| 0:05.6 | So nice. |
| 0:06.5 | There are loads more like it on BBC sounds. |
| 0:08.8 | Different paces, different heights. |
| 0:10.6 | The roof is buckling. |
| 0:11.9 | Where you can also listen to live sports commentary. |
| 0:14.2 | It's right foot goes for goal. |
| 0:16.7 | And then enjoy even more podcasts full of analysis and reaction to the big stories. |
| 0:21.6 | The stat that is astonishing is they ended with the lowest amount of possession. |
| 0:25.2 | And she's had to live with that. |
| 0:26.8 | So if you love sport, a passion, it's almost like a religion. |
| 0:29.7 | Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:31.8 | Sort of expecting that every week now. |
| 0:44.5 | So last week I have mainly been in bed feeling sorry for myself with a stinking cold. |
| 0:50.1 | Now bed sounds like the ideal opportunity to catch up on reading, although when you're ill, |
| 0:56.2 | it's hard to do more than doom scroll. I have watched all the dog videos on the internet, which turns out is quite a large fraction of the whole internet. But also the news keeps coming, and so |
| 1:02.7 | every time I look, there's a new bit of news and it's my duty to be across it, and it all adds up. |
| 1:08.8 | Across my two gadgets, which keep a tally of what I've watched and when, |
| 1:12.9 | it seems I've clocked up a shocking 58 hours on the internet. That's more than a full-time job, |
| 1:20.2 | and maybe on reflection I would have recovered faster had I spent fewer hours monitoring |
... |
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