Nicola Davis
speaker
498 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 18 Aug
Nicola Davis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
He's also interested in plants that hyper-accumulate elements from the soil, especially aluminium.
And it just so happens that's exactly what tea does.
I asked David to take me back to when he came across an advert on an online message board connecting academics to commercial operators.
He got stuck into the literature.
The tea growers needed something that was only sensitive to the growing environment, not the species itself.
After all, there isn't such a thing as a native Scottish tea plant.
The idea works like this.
The chemical composition of soil is dependent on where in the world it is.
That's because what's in the soil is influenced by the type of rocks that lie beneath.
Elements in soil from somewhere in China might be at very different concentrations to what you'd find in a sample of soil from somewhere in Ethiopia.
And the tea plants passively suck all these elements up from the soils in tiny amounts, which can then be detected in the tea leaves.
It's like a geographical fingerprint.
So with his method in hand, the next thing David needed to do was create a kind of reference dataset.
Once David had developed the method and created his two reference data sets, it was time for the Scottish tea growers to come clean about what they really wanted testing.
Tea supposedly grown or sold by Tam O'Brien.
Not only had they bought Tam's tea from the shops, the group had embarked on a little subterfuge to gain some of the samples.
At this point in our meeting, David turned to a big cardboard box that had been sitting next to us, stuffed full of plastic packages.
Refusing David's kind offer, despite the rarity and price of some of the teas he was now unpacking, I asked him to show me an example of what he was sent by the tea growers.
So it looks more like cinnamon or something.
It's that fine, isn't it?
Showing 241–260 of 498 · page 13 of 25
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