This week on Earth Beat... we look at the BP oil spill three months - and countless barrels of oil - after it began. We hear what it looks like, what it sounds like, and how to clean it up. Also on the show... the world's slowest Porsche, musical vegetables, and violin bows made of endangered wood.

Listen to the whole show below

OIL, OIL, EVERYWHERE

Three months of spilling oil
Countless newspaper column inches, loads of TV have covered the BP oil spill, but there are still some fundamental things about the disaster that we just don’t understand. Like, for example, the seemingly straightforward question: Has anyone been able to calculate how much oil is actually out there in the water? We asked Dr. Ralph Portier. He’s a professor of environmental sciences at Louisiana State University.

Listen to Dr. Ralph Portier

Top 5 crazy – or clever – cleanup ideas
One of the more surreal things about watching this disaster unfold has been the stream of deeply bizarre ideas that all promise to clean up this mess once and for all. First there was human hair, then actor Kevin Costner turns up with a gadget he’s been working on… we needed a little help separating the good science from the bad. So we asked Tony Wood, the Director of the National Spill Control School at Texas A&M Corpus Christi to help us out with our top 5 clever – or crazy – clean up ideas.

Hear the top 5 crazy - or clever - cleanup ideas

Envirominute

Given that some of this oil was destined for people’s gas tanks, maybe it’s time to look at running your car on something else. This week’s envirominute takes a 60 second look at the alternatives.

Listen to the envirominute

World’s slowest Porsche
For those of us who see the end of oil coming sooner rather than later, there IS an automobile solution. And it’s not what you think. Hannes Langeder, an artist in Linz, Austria, decided to build what he call his dream car – the world’s slowest Porsche.

Hear about the world's slowest Porsche.

Watch the world's slowest Porsche

Musical greens
Imagine an orchestra that, in the interests of both acoustics and sustainability, shops for its instruments… at the market. The Wiener Gemuseorchester, or Vienna Vegetable Orchestra has been around for about 10 years, and is about to release its third album. Two of its members join Marnie to discuss the joys of making and playing their own instruments, and how to shop for them.

Hear from the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra

An indispensable instrument
Liza Fershtman is a young Dutch violinist, used to being centre stage in concert halls all over the world as soloist and chamber musician. She described the importance of the bow in making music.

Listen to Liza Fershtman

Searching for Pernambuco
All violin bows are made from the wood of just one type of tree, the Pernambuco Tree. It’s also called the Brazil wood tree and it’s found in the Brazilian rain forest. Over the centuries wood has been highly sought after as a dye, in furniture making and later by bow makers. So the exploitation of the Brazil tree is nothing new. More recently the wood has faced a new threat as vast swathes of the rain forest have been demolished for soya plantations. Documentary maker Otavio Juliano went to explore the dark depths of the Brazilian Amazon to find out more about this imperiled wood. But was he even able to find some?

Hear about the search for Pernambuco

Watch The Music Tree

What’s so special about Pernambuco
Klaus Grünke is a bow maker by profession, working in the family’s workshop outside Nurenberg, Germany alongside his father and younger brother. Marnie asked him what’s so special about pernambuco wood?

Listen to Klaus Grünke

NEXT WEEK ON EARTH BEAT:

On next week’s edition of Earth Beat… Dirt. We walk on it, grow our food on it and generally can’t live without it. But eating it?

I drank the water, it had absolutely no taste. But the minute I released my nose, it felt like someone had just taken my face and pushed it into the mud. But it was a wonderful sensation. But it was like fresh mud, straight in my mouth. And that’s the point of it.

Eating – or just tasting – dirt… in the next edition of Earth Beat from Radio Netherlands Worldwide.