Outlook Mixtape: Heart of Glass

After a 30-year career, Maya Husseini had planned to retire. She was Lebanon’s first female master glazier, she’d worked through civil wars and overcome sexism to create masterly stained-glass windows in churches and buildings across her city and abroad. Then the 2020 explosion in the Beirut port shattered almost everything. Retirement plans were shelved and Maya got back to work, bringing together a team of women to rebuild, and restore her beautiful creations. She spoke to Jo Fidgen in 2024.

When a crew of eight people entered an enormous air-tight glass terrarium in the Arizona desert – known as Biosphere 2 – for two years in September 1991, they were hoping to prove that humans could survive on other planets. The intention was for them to cultivate the farmland and plant life inside, to create the food and oxygen they needed, but it wasn't long before they began to run out of both. Four of the original 'Biospherians' - Mark Nelson, Sally Silverstone, Jane Poynter and Taber MacCallum - told Saskia Collette how they endured what's been called one of the most audacious, unusual and controversial experiments of the last decade. Sally Silverstone sadly passed away shortly after recording this interview in 2020. You can learn more about her life and work in the book she wrote with Mark Nelson called "Life Under Glass: Crucial Lessons in Planetary Stewardship from 2 years in Biosphere 2".

Precious objects or artworks are at risk of theft, vandalism, even terrorism in some cases and so, keeping them safe is quite a task. In 2018, reporter Alessia Cerantola went to meet an Italian man called Alessandro Goppion whose bulletproof glass cases protect some of the most valuable objects in the world, including the Mona Lisa painting in the Louvre Museum in Paris.

Presenter: India Rakusen
Producer: Andrea Rangecroft

Get in touch: outlook@bbc.com or WhatsApp +44 330 678 2707

(Photo: A transparent 60-minute cassette tape with a white label bearing the words: The Outlook Mixtape. Credit: Getty Images)