The colour of science
Unexpected Elements
BBC
4.4 • 565 Ratings
🗓️ 6 March 2026
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Hindu festival of Holi has the Unexpected Elements team delving into the science of colour. First up, forget chicken and egg, we bring you a whole new controversy of which came first: colour or colour vision? Then, we learn how a new development in infrared contact lenses could extend our range of vision and help people with colour blindness.
We’re then joined by marine biologist Roger Hanlon who explains how octopuses are great at changing tones, even though they can’t appreciate the colours that they make. Plus, what’s orange, cream, 5,000 years old and worryingly resistant to most of our common antibiotics? And why does reading on dark mode leave one listener seeing things? All on this week’s Unexpected Elements.
Presenter: Marnie Chesterton, with Andrada Fiscutean and Chhavi Sachdev Producers: Imy Harper, with Ella Hubber and Lucy Davies
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:07.0 | I'm no longer ravenous. I'll no longer eat until I fall asleep. |
| 0:11.0 | The Hunger Game, a new five-part series exploring the meteoric rise of weight loss drugs. |
| 0:16.0 | It's been an incredible story with these drugs. |
| 0:18.1 | The uptake, the amount of product that's been sold, the amounts of money |
| 0:21.2 | is cost. What the drugs do, how they work, and the knock-on effects of their widespread use. |
| 0:26.5 | We'll be sitting here in three years' time going, oh, it caused problems that we're now going |
| 0:31.3 | to have to fix. The Hunger Game with me, Professor Gilesio. Listen first on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:41.6 | Thank you. Me, Professor Gilesio. Listen first on BBC Sounds. The Lee Miller Photography Exhibition recently ran at London's Tate Gallery, and I caught it on its final day. |
| 0:49.8 | If you don't know Lee Miller, she's the sort of person whose life seems full enough for six lifetimes worth. |
| 0:56.4 | She was a muse in 1930s Paris, an artist co-founder of the surrealism scene in Cairo, |
| 1:02.9 | a war photographer during the Second World War. |
| 1:06.1 | Her lens captured the hunger of civilians in bombed out cities in the horrors of the concentration camps. |
| 1:11.9 | There's even a famous photo of her taking a bath in Hitler's bathroom, her boots still caked |
| 1:17.8 | in the mud from Dachau, all expertly captured in black and white, which to me gives this |
| 1:23.9 | an other-worldly quality. After the war, Lee Miller started cathartic cooking |
| 1:29.6 | and became a celebrity chef, and right at the end of the exhibition were her food pictures, |
| 1:36.2 | a rainbow of dishes. It was like a different world, her farmhouse and her food experiments. |
| 1:42.2 | And it's not a stylistic choice here. War was black and white |
| 1:45.7 | and food is in colour. It's just that colour film was cheaper by the 60s. But it really takes a |
| 1:52.4 | technicolor image of a tomato soup cake to convey the joy cooking it must have brought her. |
| 1:59.3 | I'm Marnie Chesterton from the BBC World Service. This is |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.