Following recent coups in Niger and Gabon, and with seven African coups in the last three years, some political commentators are suggesting that there might be an epidemic of coups. But are coups really contagious, and what does the political science say?

Caroline Steel and the Unexpected Elements team across three different continents go on a quest to find the science lurking behind the news.

We find out what trees in Chile can tell us about coups and we meet the wasp that performs a coup on a poor unsuspecting cockroach, turning it into a zombie and eating it alive.

There’s light relief in the form of cows listening to classical music, the answer to a listener question about carbon capture and reflections on efforts to rid the world of plastic bags.

All that plus your emails, whatsapps, and more fruit chat than you can shake a banana skin at.

Presented by Caroline Steel

Produced by Ben Motley, with Margaret Sessa Hawkins and Sophie Ormiston

India's successful moon landing has the Unexpected Elements team engaging in some serious lunacy. We look at where the moon even came from, how it helps us navigate, and whether it has a cultural and ecological heritage.

Also on the show, is Dr. TikTok leading to a raft of self-diagnoses, should we be eating banana peels and worms, and we go back to the moon to see if it has any effect on our sleep.

This week, we start off by digging into conspiracy theories. What’s behind their enduring allure? And have they always been around? Marnie and the panel investigate.

Many conspiracy theories are based off of misinformation… but what’s actually going on in our brains when we lie? We look into the case of the man who was physically unable of spreading tall tales.

Sometimes, the truth is there, but is difficult to uncover. Delving for this deeper meaning is something particle physicists like Dr Harry Cliff have been doing for decades. Harry tells us where we are in the ongoing quest to understand our Universe.

Also, we hear the ingenious way Costa Rican scientists are dealing with pineapple waste, and we answer a South African listener’s question about evolution.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton

The conversation this week starts off on corruption. There are allegations of political or corporate malfeasance in the news regularly throughout the world. But can science bring anything to the investigators? We look at some efforts to bring empirical rigour to the fight.

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

The World Cup has us looking at why women get more ACL injuries, how to avoid cracking under pressure, and why some animals play dead.

Also on the program we consider the pros and cons of Artificial Intelligence in Africa, whether the continent is turning to nuclear power, and if banana skins are hallucinogenic.

As Netflix cracks down on password sharing around the world - something it once encouraged - we wondered why people like to share passwords to other things, such as phones, email accounts and logins.

Passwords and encryption exist as ways of protecting us from hostile agents in most aspects of life. But timing is everything. Nature has been doing it for years of course. But climate change is upsetting some of the ecological match-ups of locks and keys, migration and feeding that have evolved over the millennia. We hear how the shifting patterns of weather and food availability is affecting cuckoos in Europe and India.

Another aspect of natural subterfuge is camouflage. Whilst physicists have been trying to make optical invisibility cloaks from ingenious new "metamaterials", Marc Holderied and team have been looking at how certain moths have used metamaterial properties in the structure of their wings to effectively hide from bats. They are acoustically invisible. Could similar materials be manufactured to make, for example, sound-proof wallpaper?

Also, we hear how India's Chandrayaan-3 moon mission - due to land on 23 August this year - is exciting millions of people.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton

Unexpected Elements looks for the science behind the news, and this week the news is glittery and pink with the release of the Barbie movie.

The movie has very pink aesthetic, so we get philosophical about the colour pink – does it actually exist and if so, how come it isn’t in the rainbow?

We also discover how this iconic doll has performed some actual valuable science, helping cryogenic researchers design space suit technology to help future missions to the moon.

In Ask the Unexpected this week we’ve got dog science as we answer the age old joke: how does my dog smell? Terrible, obviously, but it also depends on something called the vomeronasal organ..

And there are newcomers in Germany and they’re troublemakers. We hear how an unpleasant mosquito borne virus has arrived in northern Europe and consider whether climate change might be to blame.

All that plus your emails and WhatsApps, language pedantry and an ewaste dating service.

Presented by Marnie Chesterton

As Nato meets, we look at what science says about consensus decision-making, whether the universe is left-handed, and what chemistry can tell us about our ancient past.

Also, we examine windfarms potentially blocking reindeer herding, our quest for the coolest science in the world continues with Beth the bee queen, and Caroline contemplates the long road that got us to a malaria vaccine.

This week time is up for the UN to come up with rules about how to mine the ocean bed. We hear about the mysterious potato shaped objects on the sea floor that contain lots of valuable minerals that are essential for electronics like mobile phones.

Our team on three different continents compare how recycling of precious metals is going in their parts of world, and we hear why early Lithium batteries kept catching fire.

This week’s Under the Radar story is a personal tale of floods and landslides in the Himalayas, and what science tells us about the huge cloudburst that caused them.

Our search to discover The Coolest Science in the World continues with a fascinating look at sonification with a researcher who straddles science and music, and we dive into the fact that human use of underground water has redistributed the weight of the planet.

All that plus your emails and WhatsApps, the answer to a question about heavy metal and the wonderful laugh of a Nobel laureate.

Presented by Marnie Chesterton