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Strontium is the 15th most common element in the earth yet we really only come into contact with it in fireworks. It gives us the deep red colour we admire in a pyrotechnics display. Andrea Sella, Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at UCL, meets Mike Sansom of Brighton Fireworks who explains how a firework is constructed and reveals the chemical mix that creates the bright red flashes.

The Science Museum's Curator of Chemistry, Rupert Cole, shows Andrea a Thomas Rowlandson etching of Humphry Davy experimenting with the then recently discovered element in front of a fashionable audience at the Royal Institution in London in the early 19th century.

Professor Thomas Klap枚tke of the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich talks about his search for a substitute for strontium in fireworks and about how the element can get into our bones.

And Janet Montgomery, Professor of Archaeology at Durham University, explains how strontium traces have revealed that our Neolithic ancestors moved around much more than was previously thought. Nearly half the people buried around Stonehenge were born in places with different rocks from those under Salisbury Plain.