"Hello, I'm Dara O Briain." "Welcome to the show which seeks out the very latest, ground-breaking ideas in science and attempts to answer some of the most fundamental questions in the cosmos." "Tonight, we shine a light into those hidden worlds all around us that we usually can't see." "Including some we've only just become aware of." "This is the place where we find out how great ideas are changing the world we live in." "Welcome to Science Club." "Good evening and welcome to the show." "As ever, we have some fantastic eminent guests with us and, of course, we're joined by our regular team." "And we've also got" "Professor Mark Miodownik, our resident materials and demos man, who'll be getting to grips with hidden forces." "Because tonight on the show, we're exploring invisible worlds." "We're sort of tuning up our senses to allow us tonight to see, hear and feel things which are normally beyond us." "And what an astonishing cornucopia of wonders we've unearthed." "Science journalist Alok Jha discovers he's playing host to an entire ecosystem of microbes." "More and more, we're starting to see links between your gut type and disease." "In the studio, Mark will reveal some liquids with gravity-defying powers." "It's quite spooky, isn't it?" "That is really eerie and wrong." "And we take a plunge into the nanosphere to make the world's toughest high-performance material." "And what an exotic material it is." "But first, forensics." "The fight against crime has taken us into many hidden worlds, from fingerprints to DNA." "But can any criminal ever have imagined that the noise from a fridge could put them behind bars?" "Mark investigates." "Each time you use your phone you're leaving a trail of potentially incriminating information behind you." "Theoretically, the record of our calls can be used to pinpoint exactly where we are." "And now they can even tell when the recording of a specific, potentially incriminating, conversation was made." "Something an itemised phone bill can't do." "And it's all down, weirdly, to the electrical hum from your fridge." "Or your cooker." "Or your hi-fi system." "In fact, anything connected to the mains." "It all comes down to the power of electricity." "This whole place can power two million homes." "Now, apart from all this massive power generation, something subtle is going on - a code is being generated, and it's going down every electric cable into every home and every office." "It provides a faint audio fingerprint and a connection between our phones and Britain's National Electricity Grid." "This fingerprint comes from the way our AC, or alternating current, is generated." "The electrical current should alternate at exactly 50 times a second, 50 hertz." "But it doesn't." "And that's crucial." "It oscillates, it's going up and down depending on who's using what electricity, whether you're putting your kettle on or whether some massive factory's starting up." "And this pattern, just an accidental outcome from the National Grid, really is a kind of code." "Because it has a unique shape at every moment in time." "So could we use that code to precisely date a phone call?" "Let's find out." "Sometime ago, I called a friend..." "PHONE RINGS" "..who recorded our conversation." "All their electrical appliances will be coded with a fingerprint of the alternating current." "Invisible and inaudible." "But it's there in the room." "Some of it would have leaked on to the recording, leaving a tell-tale trace of exactly when this" ""incriminating" conversation took place." "I've got the time and date of my phone call written down in this envelope and, Phil, you're going to use your software to work out when it was, right?" "Yes, I am." "Both the police and professional sound recording analysts, like Phil Harrison, have been recording the National Grid's hum for many years." "By comparing their archive of the data with the hum of my phone call they should be able to pinpoint exactly when I made it." "Does sound like me." "Sounds like your voice." "First Phil has to find traces of the 50-hertz hum amongst our voices." "It's that tiny peak." "That tells us that there's something there in the signal." "You're looking pretty confident." "I am, yes. 100%?" "99.9." "Wow, OK." "Now the software takes over, comparing the blue line - the database for the hum - with the red line, the hum on my three minute phone call." "We can see here that there's clearly not a match." "The shape's all wrong, so it's not that time." "So you basically just try and compare that to every single time instance that you've got on record, to see whether you get a pattern match?" "Yeah, exactly." "Eventually, the computer thinks it's found the answer." "This is the closest." "This is what I'm..." "That's the best match?" "..calling the match, yeah." "The time there is 18th of June, three minutes past four in the afternoon." "I'm just going to ask you to open this envelope and see if you're correct." "Do you want to change it?" "No, no... 18th of June, five past four." "Five past four." "So we have a slight discrepancy of two minutes." "Mm..." "But whose clock was that?" "Oh, OK!" "You're saying that we're wrong?" "How accurate was the clock?" "The old, "We're wrong," ploy." "Still, that's quite impressive." "Although these titans of engineering boom out their power to us, they also whisper their secret code down the wires, a unique code that's part of all of our lives." "There have been already cases in court, in which they can match this..." "Yeah." "The most recent case, they secured a murder conviction on the basis of this technology." "Does it indicate that the National Grid is one thing?" "Is one potential...big huge pool of electricity and the minute you touch it anywhere it changes the entire thing." "I think you think about electricity as the sort of stuff that comes out like a fluid maybe, right?" "And has a big reservoir somewhere." "But it's this thing that's constantly equilibrating itself." "And it has a particular frequency." "So you change one bit somewhere in Scotland and actually it's going to have an affect all the way through the land." "Physics can often be reduced down to a series of fields, or different forces, and we can't see them, obviously, but we can see their effect, like gravity and magnetism." "I mean, we live on a giant magnet." "So magnets have been around for a long time." "And here's a bit of metal." "It looks like roughly any other bit of metal." "And then..." "It, you know..." "In fact, that's one we stuck earlier and we can't get it off!" "LAUGHTER" "This is the latest neodymium magnet." "These really strong neodymium ones are ceramics." "Sorry, I'm just going to get the nearest audience member." "I'm just grabbing you because you're nearby." "Have a go at that." "Look - technique, as well." "No." "OK, right, shoot, go." "Back to the crowd." "These magnets are so strong, for their weight and size, they're getting into everything, electric cars..." "In fact, the whole electric car technology sort of relies on us having good supplies of this stuff." "And they're useful for other things as well." "So the latest use, which is, I think, you know, sort of..." "We're kind of familiar with bits of metal that are magnetic." "But what about this?" "This is some oil." "Just going to pour it on." "Just car oil?" "Yes, motor oil." "And what I'm doing, I'm trying to simulate an oil slick," "OK, so imagine this is an ocean." "Traditional clean up method presumably is to run a line around it try to essentially scoop it off the top." "Yeah." "An inventor in Greece came up with really intriguing way to get rid of oil slicks using magnetism." "So he's got this kind of foam-like material." "Have a look at it." "It's dry, yeah." "Feels a bit like polystyrene." "And it's got a material that likes oil so the oil is sucked up when you put it on top of it." "And then little magnetic particles in there so, in theory..." "Let's see if this works." "You can see it being sucked up." "Yeah, yeah, it's definitely hoovering up the oil." "So now all I need is a magnet." "OK." "OK now, look." "CROWD GASP" "Yeah, that's very satisfying." "Don't you think?" "That is fantastic." "If this was a massive ocean" "I wouldn't be just spreading it further around." "But, you know, you get the idea." "There it is and then you can just take it off." "And that pushes off quite easily?" "It's not like it's glued to this as the magnet was to the table." "Oh, that's fantastic." "Wow." "And could this be done on a huge, industrial scale?" "Well, they have done a trial." "I think we've got some VT of this." "When there's lots and lots of oil, mechanical methods will still be relatively essential." "At the moment they put detergent in and that's actually the big problem cos those little droplets of oil and detergent then get spread in the whole ocean and they cause a lot of damage." "So this is, potentially, a really interesting solution." "You can see it there." "Lovely." "OK, what else have you got?" "Pop that down." "Is this oil again?" "This is another idea about trying to do oil slicks, but imagine, instead of trying to absorb the oil, what you did is you made the oil magnetic." "Or at least respond to a magnet." "Have a look at this, this is just a demo to show the idea." "This is a magnet under here." "This looks like a normal bit of oil." "What they want to do is turn oil into this material." "That is fairly astonishing." "This is called ferrofluid and what it is, actually, is a liquid with tiny little magnets in it." "They're so small they're bonded, in a way, to the water." "And this means it basically takes the water with it and you get..." "Those peaks are invisible forces that we were all introduced to at school." "Like the iron fillings that would scatter - those are just a 3D version of it." "This is evidence that they're real." "And this is a field that you can see." "That's fantastic." "Imagine you could turn an oil slick into this stuff." "Then all you'd have to do is get a magnet and you could confine the liquid." "And you could just pull it into..." "Well, you could pull it by doing this the other way round." "If you hold that..." "OK." "If I put the oil slick on the bottom here." "Ahhh..." "I know." "You're absolutely right, past history has told us..." "Can you put that on there?" "OK, so the magnet is there." "Yeah." "Fields all around it." "Yeah." "And then you basically could suck up the liquid." "I mean, literally, physically suck it onto a ship." "AUDIENCE MURMURS AND GASPS" "DARA LAUGHS" "APPLAUSE" "It's quite spooky." "That is really eerie and wrong." "And it's actually arranged itself along lines of field." "Yeah." "And it's really messy." "Yeah, cos if I..." "If I take that off it's going to it's going to come splashing down." "Do you want to have a try?" "No, I don't, I'll leave you to do that." "Ladies and gentlemen, thank Mark Miodownik." "We'll see him later in the show." "Now, we humans are very proud of our individuality and our cleanliness, so it might come as a bit of a shock to discover that each one of us is, in fact, a complex community." "Cos it's not just ourselves but also a large and active microbe population." "There are ten times as many microbes in our bodies than we have cells - 100 trillion in all." "Our bodies are like entire ecosystems, with territories like our scalp or our armpit as different from each other as a savanna and tropical rainforest are on the face of the earth." "There are about 1.4 kilos of microbes that live in our gut alone." "That's about the same weight as our brain." "And despite what your mother told you when taking a bath, the most barren region for microbes is behind the ear, with only 15 species." "Not only is the skin teeming with bacteria, but also fungus." "And the richest site in the human body for fungus?" "That would be the heel." "Home to about 80 different type of fungi." "So now we've discovered we've got these menageries living on us, the natural question to ask is, what are our personal ecosystems - or microbiomes as they're known - doing for us?" "Well, it seems the microbes in our gut could have a significant effect, and not just on our health." "Alok's been to find out more." "There's no way to say this nicely - but one of the hottest research areas in science right now is your poo." "Jeroen Raes literally can't get enough of it." "If it were up to me we would have tens of thousands of samples all over the world." "It might feel strange for some people, but, for me, poo really matters." "That's because he's a pioneer in an extraordinary new world." "It's called our microbiome." "And it's changing how we think about ourselves." "In terms of cells, only 10% of you is, well, you." "The rest, a full 90%, are microbes that live on you and, well, within you as well." "And it's these gut bacteria that may be crucial to our health." "In the last few years we've learned that more and more diseases are linked to a disturbance of the gut microbes and so diseases like obesity, type 2 diabetes," "Crohn's disease, colon cancer, and even things like autism are more and more linked to changes in the gut bacteria." "That's such a wide range of things." "Were you surprised when you found all this out?" "Yes." "It is very surprising." "It's something we've only learned in the last few years." "Previously, people always thought that it was your own genome or defects in your own genome or environmental conditions that caused this." "But we see more and more a role of the bacteria in your gut." "Two years ago, Jeroen and his team made one of the first intriguing discoveries about the gut microbiome." "There seemed to be three major types, irrespective of where you live." "What they found was that someone in London could have the same gut type as someone in Tokyo, or someone in New York." "It turns out that gut bacteria might be less to do with environment and much more to do with what you eat." "That's because your diet's not only feeding you, it's feeding your microbes, too." "So different strains will dominate depending on what you feed them." "And they impact your health." "It's early days, but more and more we're starting to see links between your gut type and disease." "In ten years the doctor will not only be taking a blood sample for analysis, but also a faecal sample and that way detect all kinds of other diseases that we can't detect before." "As scientists probe ever deeper into the relationship between our gut microbes and our health, even more fascinating is the news that they affect our behaviour, too." "Professor John Cryan is a neurobiologist in Cork." "He's discovered that the presence of certain microbes in the gut can actually alter mood." "It seems really counterintuitive that your gut would have anything to do with your brain." "One of the key signalling pathways is this nerve here, the vagus nerve." "You can see it here in this model, it's in yellow." "And, basically, it's the main communicator from the intestines up to the brain." "And what we've shown is that this is very important for how bacteria in the gut signal to the brain and modulate brain chemistry, physiology, and behaviour." "So, the bacteria are producing chemicals or they're structured in such a way that it activates this vagus nerve and that communicates with the brain and manifests itself as some sort mood?" "Absolutely, yeah." "So far, John's shown that fresh microbes introduced into the guts of rodents can reduce stress." "The results are so powerful that he's just received part of a whopping 27 million euro grant to start a clinical trial with humans." "It sounds really exciting." "Where's it going in, like, ten years?" "Well, we don't know ,but it's a very, very exciting field right now and the potential is that we could have a bacterial-based product for treating stress-related psychiatric disorders." "Whether we'll be using microbes as a diagnostic tool, or taking microbes as a form of medicine, there's no doubt it's a mutually beneficial relationship." "What we're getting with this microbe research is the first glimpse at the mechanisms behind all of that." "It seems that these invisible creatures have a much bigger influence on our health than we've ever thought." "Well, joining myself and Alok is Ian Henderson, professor of microbial biology at the University of Birmingham." "Have we only just realised just how interdependent, just how symbiotic the relationship is between ourselves and the bacteria that we're host to?" "Yeah, I think that is actually very true and I think what we've seen so far is just a prelude to all these studies." "The technology is advancing so rapidly that we're going to actually be able to answer greater, more in-depth questions." "And I can see why it would be very useful as a diagnostic tool, but for something as proactive as a stress relief..." "The stuff at the end there about mood, that's really interesting." "It's like you can take things to affect the bacteria down there, which will have an effect on your mood." "So say that if you discover that there's a connection between that and depression or some other thing, maybe take a yoghurt or something with bacteria in it, or food for the bacteria that makes it all better and gives you some sort of pleasure." "We've had people selling probiotic yoghurts with good bacteria and bad bacteria." "This isn't what we're talking about." "No, but people have leapt on this kind of thing." "In some ways, this science has slightly been ruined by the advertising men having already grabbed it and tried to use it." "Absolutely, absolutely." "We talked about the connection there between things." "There's a group in Manchester, lovely study, where they could show that the outcome of stroke depended on what was growing in your intestines." "And that's fantastic." "So that's a real connection between your intestines and your brain." "Obviously we wanted to test how it would work as a diagnostic tool and we felt that you were exactly the man who should offer a sample, which we got you to do, did we not?" "I thought you'd never bring this up." "Basically, the great Hunter S Thompson, he'd be very proud of me for doing this." "I gave a sample." "It was my honour to contribute to science and here it is being assessed." "And over the course of a month the stuff was sequenced." "Paul, what can you tell me about my faeces?" "Interestingly, we discovered that you don't carry any methanogens, which are a group of bacteria which make methane in your gaseous excretions." "So no farting?" "I knew that was true." "On the contrary, it means that you may emit more gases than other people." "Oh, you're saying that I fart a lot, is that's what you're saying?" "You emit different gases." "You will have lots of hydrogen carbon dioxide and probably hydrogen sulphide." "OK." "Thanks very much." "This is wonderful, can I have this?" "You certainly can." "Thank you very much." "Fantastic, congratulations." "You emit pure hydrogen." "I've had that printed on a T-shirt." "There it is." "This is my microbiota." "What he said there is I'm basically a green energy source." "I emit pure hydrogen." "Someone should tap that." "I have the full medical report here and you were compared to, cos that's the University College, Cork, and the average young Irish person..." "Now, I am typical Irish so we're not the healthiest people in the world, generally." "But you have more Bacteroides and Clostridium genera than the average, suggesting you consume a higher proportion of meat than the average Irish person." "I don't know if I should read bad news to you," ""The functionality of your gut is reduced by lack of microbial diversity."" "I'm pleased I've found this out." "I've yet to find out what the scientists can tell me to do about this." "Well, it means, you have" ""less protection from potentially pathogenic bacteria, such as C Difficile."" "OK, well I'm glad I found that out on national television." "Rather than in my own doctor's surgery." "Eat more vegetables is essentially what they said." "Because we normally pick up most of our microbiome at birth, the mother's birth canal, and then the first few years..." "Of life." "Once you get into five or six then that sort of flora stays with you." "Until you have impact on your flora, like taking antibiotics, for example." "Or you go to India or somewhere else and get a dose Delhi belly, and you flush your whole intestines out." "And then what gets repopulated might be unbalanced and that can cause things like" "Crohn's disease and irritable bowel disease." "These are always mentioned as things that this could be a very interesting development for." "There's also a connection with diabetes." "It's fantastic, there's just a myriad of different non-infectious diseases associated with the microbiota." "OK, thank you very much, Ian, and thank you very much Alok." "Take a look at these." "These are iconic images that feel very familiar to us, but these shots were the first of their kind and gave us insights into a world we'd never seen before." "The man who gave them to us was a scientist, not a photographer." "His name was Harold Edgerton, a professor of electrical engineering." "I'm going to shoot this at f2.8." "He also developed high-speed cameras to reveal a hitherto hidden reality." "He even developed a camera that could photograph the first moments of an atomic explosion, with exposures of 100 millionth of a second." "He first used strobes to study electrical motors, but very quickly extended their use to photographing everyday objects." "Flash a strobe on it and the drops will appear like they're standing still." "Two streams arranged so that the drops come from exactly the right height so that they collide." "So with those kinds of images and basically opening a window to us and things that previously had moved too quickly," "Harold Edgerton has definitely earned his place on the Unsung Scientist Hall of Fame." "There you go, Harold, congratulations." "Still to come tonight" " Mark delves into the nanoworld to see what tricks we can steal from nature." "Dr Helen Czerski learns about an amazing new way of beating some of our biggest killers." "And are we ever going to be invisible?" "Now I'm joined by one of the foremost experts in the field of biotech, the professor of biomedical materials and regenerative medicine at Imperial College, London, Professor Molly Stevens." "Welcome to the show, Molly." "Thank you." "We're throwing around this term "nanotechnology" a lot." "Does it actually have a specific definition?" "It's really something you can think of in a couple of ways." "So it's a particular size scale, so you could think of it as being a thousand folds smaller than a human hair, for example." "But it's also about how materials act differently, once they're out the nanoscale." "One of the most astonishing things you're working on is regenerative frameworks, essentially scaffolding for tissue and bones to rebuild themselves." "Exactly, yeah." "And how does that work?" "So the idea is that if you've had, for example, a fracture that can't heal or your knee has got damaged and maybe you've had a heart attack and part of the heart has died," "you want to be able to help the body to regenerate itself cos it won't always heal spontaneously." "So the sort of things that we've been doing are thinking about the kind of things you have in nature, so your tissue in the body, for example, you have your cells, but your cells are actually" "surrounded by a nanoscale mesh, if you like, of tissue, which has lots of different proteins and fibres and things like that." "So our idea, and the idea of people in this field, is that you can make materials." "This one here is a gel-type structure." "That's actually a Hydragel so that's a water-swollen network of material." "But the interesting thing about it is that it's actually held together by nanoscale building blocks." "So these are little zippers, if you like, that will hold this material together, and you can put cells in it and then put that in the body." "And does that trigger the cells of your body to perform an action that they weren't previously performing?" "It depends entirely how you design it." "The way that we design these is we'll put in some little bits that cells can stick to, cells can walk around on, cells can decide to suddenly divide and make more tissue." "But also those little nanoscale building blocks that are like mini Lego, if you like, can also be recognised by the cells and the cells can munch through and make their way through the material." "So it depends how you design it, but you can put in lots and lots of features." "It's sort of a blank slate that you can then decorate." "So onto something as tiny as that, at the very smallest level, you can basically encode information that will make the bodies' own cells grow cartilage back where previously it wouldn't grow cartridge back." "That's the aim." "You can have, like, keyhole surgery in which this stuff is injected onto the hole..." "Yes, so this will actually start as a liquid and you'd inject it as a liquid." "So it can fill a really complex space." "And then within about five minutes or so it'll become a gel and basically be able to fill that whole volume and help in regeneration." "But it's still a way from clinic." "Yes." "Stay with us, have more conversations about this, but thank you very, very much." "Molly Stevens." "Molly's not alone in investigating these exciting technologies in the brave new world of nano - there's a lot going on and Mark has been to Cambridge to see what else we should be getting excited about." "20 years ago, it looked like nanotechnology could change our lives." "We were promised a new era of atomic machines crafted from individual atoms." "Instead, all we got were PR stunts and the closest thing to a nanobot was an Atomic Man." "Now, nanotech is getting real." "Today, scientists are looking for practical applications, and many of them have turned to nature for inspiration." "This is a flat plate covered in nanoparticles, in a surface structure inspired by the lotus leaf." "Have a look what happens when I drop some water on it." "Intricate patterns engineered at the nanoscale mimic the natural structure and achieve the same hydrophobic effect." "This spoon is coated with the same stuff and that means it repels water with ease, and you can see with this droplet." "And that has another effect, that means that, as the droplet moves around the surface, it picks up all sorts of dust and that cleans the spoon." "So this technology opens the door to all sorts of self-cleaning materials." "And hopefully something a bit more groundbreaking than a self-cleaning spoon." "Copying natural nanotechniques is one thing, but researchers here have learned how to play God, by tweaking nature's building methods to create entirely new stuff." "The iridescent colours in butterfly wings and berries are based on the special way their nanostructures reflect light." "To make their own version, these scientists take ordinary paper and break it down with acid." "As it dries out, natural forces cause the cellulose fibrils to obediently line up into a perfectly-layered structure." "And here it is, a transparent material with the same beautiful iridescence you see in the natural world." "The complex structures that create these colours could be exploited to make inks that never fade." "Or tag banknotes with patterns that are impossible to forge." "And it's easy to make." "You just create the right conditions and it makes itself." "And that provides a powerful paradigm for working at nanoscale - we can copy nature's self-assembly mechanisms and tweak them to create entirely new synthetic materials." "That tendency for self-organisation is also being exploited in this decidedly un-nano-looking workshop." "This may look Heath Robinson, but it's a highly sophisticated piece of kit." "It's a high temperature furnace into which gases are being pumped to create a carbon source, an iron source, and a small percentage of sulphur, to create the perfect conditions to produce an advanced material." "And I'm going to go and extract some." "Carbon nanotubes were discovered 20 years ago in samples of soot." "Each cylindrical lattice of atoms is extremely strong and light." "But on their own they're of limited use." "The dream of stringing them together to make a useful fibre has eluded nano-engineers for a long time." "What you need to do, just look up the tube, just twirl it round, and then slowly pull it out." "In what looks like an enormous candyfloss machine, scientist here are perfecting a new technique to spin nanotubes into a useful fibre." "Just be careful as you pull it out cos the top of it gets very hot." "That's pretty beautiful." "The most delicate material you've ever seen and it's just coming out of a red-hot furnace." "That's what's so bizarre." "As they emerge from the furnace, the individual tubes line up the most energy efficient way they can, knitting together into a single coherent thread." "This is a thread of carbon nanotubes." "And what an exotic material it is, it's coming straight out of the furnace." "It's almost unbelievable that you can create something that is so strong, so marvellous, and yet..." "There it is, super strong." "Super fibre." "For a long time carbon nanotubes were lab curiosities." "They were extraordinary, they were beautiful, but...invisible and impractical." "But this, this is a piece of evidence that shows you they can be engineering materials and that is big news." "Because the properties of this material far eclipse materials like steel or silk or Kevlar or even carbon fibre composites." "This stuff is lighter, stronger, more flexible." "And means that the next generation of bridges, cars - even planes - could well be made of this stuff." "It's a glimpse into the future." "What are the properties of this wonderful material?" "Well, the thing is, it's so light because it's made of carbon, one of the lightest elements, and it's structured with this hexagonal way of connecting to itself, so these tubes, they're hollow." "If you're familiar with rolling up a piece of paper and suddenly it becomes stiff..." "Yes." "So you've got this, but at a molecular level and the extreme light elements." "And then you throw into the mix the fact that the bonds that hold the carbons together are really strong intermolecular bonds and you have..." "It's kind of almost the most theoretically wonderful structure you could ever have." "Really?" "And in the way that we use it..." "I mean, this is carbon fibre." "I've got a bicycle made of carbon fibre, it's a very common thing at the moment." "How much stronger is...?" "It's the same weight, presumably, as that?" "Well, yeah." "What you really want to know is it's strength per weight, and it's hundreds of times stronger." "It's made of things that are totally invisible." "But it's also a great conductor." "People are talking about replacing copper." "All these copper cables that are strung across the country, they're quite expensive." "It's a reasonably high-cost material." "Carbon is potentially a much cheaper solution, and lighter." "But also there's a word that keeps popping up here, which is" ""self-assembly." And that pops up for many of these things." "If you create the right kind of environment, whether it's the right temperature, the right kind of mixtures, they will fold themselves into these useful shapes as it is." "Well, it's very, very relevant in my field, in biomedical engineering because much of chemistry is about self-assembling." "I mean, DNA, of course, is a very famous example of nanoscale self-assembly." "And is the application going to be in biology, material science?" "Is it going to be in everything?" "Well, cancer therapy is obviously a big issue because, A, it affects so many people and it's so close to everyone's heart, but there's a huge number of people round the world using nanoparticles" "and functionalising their surface and using them as targeting to..." "Targeting them to tumours." "Yes, so it's not just as a diagnostic tool, but as a cancer..." "As a therapy because if you design them in a particular way, you can also heat them up with near-infrared light or other things, so you can use them as..." "You decorate them with something that will target to just the tumour and once they get there you essentially zap them and they'll then destroy the tumour around them." "That's incredible." "Thank you very much, Molly, much appreciated." "And now with an update of some of the most interesting stories in science, here's Helen." "The mosquito is one of the most successful and one of the most deadly animals on the planet." "And now the complexity of its main weapon has been revealed in astonishing detail." "For the first time, researchers have filmed beneath the skin of the host as the mosquito bites." "This is the main needle-like mouth apart and you can see it's not rigid, it's bent, almost at a right angle." "And it's made up of six different mouth pieces." "So here, these thin filaments help to pierce the skin and to grip on to the flesh." "And then here, you can see that the main tube splits into two, and one side is putting out saliva while the other side is sucking in blood." "Videos like this really show how formidable a creature the mosquito is." "We live in a solar system that's littered with debris and NASA's just released this image." "It's the culmination of eight year's work." "And it shows the paths of 1,400 asteroids that have been tracked by NASA scientists." "What's special about these ones is that they're classed as potentially hazardous." "And that means that they're quite big." "And they'll also come with 7.5 million kilometres of Earth." "But none of these are thought to be a threat, at least not in the next 100 years." "By tracking and observing these asteroids," "NASA can refine its estimates of where they are." "All this could also help identify near-Earth objects for future humans or robots to explore." "Still to come" " I pit my talents against the computer to identify whiskey..." "It's a nice whiskey, that's what it is." "..and Helen gets the inside story on how we can beat viruses at their own game." "Now, the show this week is shining a spotlight on large, unseen worlds." "It seems only right that we should have a look, if this is the right term, at invisibility itself." "Ask most people what superpower they'd most like to have, and top of the list has got to be invisibility." "Ever since Plato, we've been telling tales of how cool it would be to disappear in the crowd." "But the idea has remained resolutely in the realms of science fiction." "This machine utilises X-ray, ultraviolet and alpha, beta and omega rays." "HE SCREAMS" "And our fantasies of doing incredible things like opening doors unseen... or picking up scissors... have remained just that - fantasy." "However, science fact might finally have arrived at the invisibility party." "Creating metals invisible to microwaves." "And shields that bend light around objects." "If these developments manage to escape the laboratory, out into the real world, it'll definitely be a cause for celebration." "Here we go gathering nuts on a cold and frosty morning." "Whoops!" "Invisibility, we'd all want it but we're not going to get it, are we?" "I think we are." "Do you?" "Yeah, there's already existing prototypes of invisibility shields." "And they work this way - to make me invisible to you, the light from behind me will have to be diverted around me and then back to its original path, as if it had gone straight through me." "So we need a material that will do that." "And actually those are called "metamaterials"." "They can't make them this big yet to cover me, but they can make them small, and at the moment they only do it for microwaves." "OK, so they only do it on very small things and they only do it on very tiny parts of the electromagnetic..." "But you think, the fact that they can do that at some part on that and for some things, means it's only a matter of time?" "I think so because it's reasonable to say." "Here's the electromagnetic spectrum." "And we have microwaves down here, which we just said we can sort of do invisibility on." "And then next up here comes infrared." "So this is heat." "Which is the same type of electromagnetic radiation, just a bit smaller wavelength." "Then we have visible light, which we see." "Then ultraviolet, which we can't." "X-ray, gamma ray." "So if you look at that whole thing, we can do it here " "I say "we" I mean the science community." "Yeah." "Then, actually moving it up to visible doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility." "And we have some examples of things." "We talk about refractive index." "HG Wells even used refractive index." "That Invisible Man clip we had there was about refractive index." "It's just the amount at which light is bent as it goes into a different medium." "So, for instance, this tank of water here, when light comes through it, has to change speed." "It goes at the speed of light in water, which is slightly different." "And that means it bends." "The measure of the bend, of the change in speed in the light is called the refractive index." "And if we have something in there that has a very similar refractive index to water, it would appear invisible." "Because it wouldn't bend the light." "Yeah." "And in fact we do." "Watch this." "Look at that." "In there." "And nearly impossible to see." "It looks like frosted glass." "They're almost the same refractive index as water so it's very, very hard to see them." "What is this, by the way?" "Is this some sort of super military science?" "No, it's a polymer that came out of the florist industry for absorbing lots of water." "It absorbs 400 times its own weight in water." "And so it's very good for putting in flower vases to keep them hydrated." "Really?" "One of the interesting things, of course, and we're talking about unseen worlds, is when you look at this electromagnetic spectrum, we only see this bit here." "Yeah." "That's incredible, isn't it?" "There are some animals that see the infrared, which is the sort of invisible light that's basically heat." "Some snakes see that." "And in the ultraviolet, which we don't see, bees can see that." "Why would it be an advantage for a bee to see the ultraviolet?" "Plants use ultraviolet pigments to guide them in." "We see all these flowers here as yellow." "Let's say I'm a bee without ultraviolet vision, I'm like," ""Oh, my God, I don't know which one I favour."" "Under ultraviolet they're not just yellow." "We can see what this is, this is just a buttercup, right?" "And buttercup to us is yellow, yellow, yellow." "But to a bee it's much more pronounced, the difference." "It's a type of way the plant can communicate with the bee and say, "Hey, I'm interested in you." "The rest of them can go away."" "And the different part is obviously the bit the bee needs, the bit with the pollen, in the middle." "We also have..." "Is it hawkweed?" "It looks a bit like a dandelion there." "In our visible spectrum." "And to a bee?" "So, quite pronounced, the difference." "Another use of light, and this I find quite interesting, is in detecting counterfeit whiskey." "LAUGHTER" "Now, how does it do that?" "Can I just point out how great it is to see these magnets are still here." "We still can't get them off." "They're here for a week." "But the counterfeit whiskey, it's a big deal." "But each whiskey has a signature when you run light through it." "If you take the original drink, you can shine light through it and take the scattered light that comes off it and then compute the chemical nature of the liquid." "I'm sceptical about this and its ability to beat me." "Let's test it." "OK." "Let's try..." "You take a sample first before I..." "This is the machine over here." "It was developed in St Andrew's University." "And we're going to use their kit." "Which one do you want to try first?" "Let's try this one first." "OK." "So I'm going to take a sample of A. OK." "Now you take a sample of A. You can spit it out." "I think there's a spittoon somewhere." "I'm not going to spit it." "We're nearly at the end of the show." "It's going to be fine." "You can taste that and see if you know what type of whiskey it is and over here the computer is going to have a look at the sample I've taken." "It's a nice whiskey, that's what it is." "What this machine is doing is it's taking that sample of whiskey and working out its chemical composition." "And then it's comparing it with a library of chemical compositions for different whiskeys that it already knows and seeing whether it is one it knows or one it doesn't know." "It's like a fingerprint of the whiskey." "You need to tell us what you think A is." "It tastes like a perfectly good whiskey." "I'm not going to place it on some..." "Well, is it a single malt?" "It's single malt, it's definitely single malt." "Very confident about that." "A label or...?" "Oh, I don't know." "It's not too peaty." "So, actually, I don't know." "Glenmorangie." "So you run the light through it..." "Now the computer, comparing it, says it's a pure malt, correct, but a Japanese." "A Japanese pure malt." "OK, so let's find out if the computer is right, if I'm right." "Is the computer right?" "Yes, it is, very good, well done." "Fabulous." "Let's leave that for after the show." "Fantastic." "Let's face it, that's not a trivial task for a computer, which knows nothing about whiskey, really, in terms of it." "But by shining lasers through it has worked it out." "That's impressive." "The way the light is scattered by the hydrocarbons in that tiny sample is enough to give a distinct signature for any given whiskey." "Yeah." "Clean that off." "We've got two more to go." "Which one shall we test?" "B?" "Yeah, you try that." "I presume, I think, almost by smell alone... ..that this is the counterfeit." "Oh!" "APPLAUSE" "Hang on, hang on." "That, in and of itself, doesn't prove anything." "This is actually the bottle." "Let's lift it up and see if both myself and the computer are right." "This is..." "Oh, actually it doesn't have a label on it." "It just has the words "Scotch Whiskey"." "Alok's pee." "That is somebody's microbial flora... made liquid." "And this, I presume..." "Ah, that's a Macallan." "OK, fine, yeah." "But that is clearly a counterfeit whiskey." "The very fact that it hasn't got a label!" "These aren't very good counterfeiters that we're talking about here." "These are not master criminals." "That's the easier bit." "Wow, that is the best experiment we have ever had on this show!" "Presumably you could do it with perfumes?" "Yeah." "I can image the future mobile phones having something like this." "You can think of these date drugs, Rohypnol and things like that." "If you were ever in a situation where you thought, "It's a bit dodgy."" "You could shine this through it" "I think these things might be coming through as a technology." "OK, grand." "Thank you very much, Mark." "Now, just because we can't see something doesn't mean it can't jump up and bite us." "The world of the very tiny harbours some real nasties." "And chief amongst these is the virus." "Smallpox virus alone ended half a billion human lives before it was snuffed out 50 years ago." "And pandemics are still the stuff of nightmares." "But we're fighting back and Dr Helen Czerski's been to investigate a new way of tackling these viral invaders." "Viruses are tiny natural invasion machines." "They sneak into the cells of living organisms and use those cells as a breeding ground to make more viruses." "And that makes the host ill." "But here, scientists are taking everything they know about how a virus works and using that to beat the virus at its own game." "The bodies' immune system recognises the shape of a virus' outer shell." "To disable them, it produces antibodies that latch on to this shell, preventing it from attacking healthy cells." "Vaccines work by training the body to produce those same antibodies, which ultimately gives us immunity to the disease." "Traditionally, vaccines are made from inactive versions of the real virus so they can stimulate the production of the right antibodies without actually infecting our cells." "But those traditional vaccines are far from perfect." "Because it involves the live virus, the production of these vaccines is a dangerous process." "And, in the body, they can break down quickly, so the immune response they provide can be weak and ineffective." "So this team of British scientists set out to make an entirely new vaccine, a synthetic vaccine designed to mimic the real virus to trigger an immune response, but without any risk of infection." "They have several viruses in their sights." "But their first target is Foot-and-mouth disease, which cost the country £8 billion and resulted in the destruction of over six million animals during an outbreak in 2001." "To create a synthetic vaccine, the team's first step was to use one of the world's most powerful microscopes - a synchrotron... able to reveal the atomic structure of the outer shell of the virus for the very first time." "A normal microscope uses visible light, but this one uses X-rays." "Electrons are accelerated through here and, as they bend to go around the ring, they emit intense pulses of X-ray radiation." "And it's these powerful X-rays that allow scientists to see right down into the structure of matter, and to image even the smallest virus particles atom by atom." "Using the structure of the virus revealed by the synchrotron, the team could design a vaccine with the same outer shape as the original virus, but without the infectious material inside." "This will become the synthetic vaccine." "The next step is to take this blueprint and grow the vaccine in the lab." "This is a tissue culture, so it's lots of healthy cells grown altogether on a plate." "And a cell is basically a chemical factory." "Depending on the genetic material inside it, it will produce different things." "So the clever bit now is to give these cells the genetic code to make the vaccine, and then let them do their work." "The only way to know if the synthetic vaccine is going to work is if it matches the real virus down to the last atom." "To be certain of that, the team have come here to the UK's latest and biggest synchrotron." "So, on this screen we can see the image that was collecting on the detector in there." "Professor David Stuart is one of the vaccine's creators." "He's been working on this project for more than 20 years." "So this is the actual shape of the molecule, atom by atom?" "Atom by atom." "The molecular picture that has been built up shows that the synthetic vaccine is an atomically perfect match for the virus it was deigned to imitate." "As far as the body's concerned, this and a virus are indistinguishable." "However, the big difference is if we cut the protein away we'd see that there is an empty cavity within here which has nothing in it." "In a virus, that would contain the genome of the virus, which is what causes the infection." "So there's no nasties in your vaccine?" "No, it's lovely and clean." "So for the very first time, a safe, synthetic vaccine has been created for this dangerous virus." "So this is it." "That sort of foggy layer in the test tube there." "A new type of vaccine." "And a whole new weapon in the fight against disease." "Astonishing film for a number of reasons, not least the speed with which we can now build vaccines." "Yeah, there were so many astonishing things about this and what this allows is..." "There is no nasty, there's no genetic material." "So you don't need security." "It makes it much safer to make and it means it can't ever become active again." "So it's really useful technology and it can be deployed really, really quickly." "Previously we had to second guess, to an extent, which flu would be the one each year because it takes nine months to create a new vaccine." "Yeah, so the normal period of time from the first sort of diagnosis to the first case of influenza you're talking about nine months before you get a vaccine into clinic." "And this brings that time down to what?" "They think they could do it three weeks." "If they knew what the virus was." "So presumably then we don't have to take the gamble of stockpiling lots of vaccines that we may not use." "The thing about viruses is that they mutate." "One of the reason they're such difficult things to deal with is that they're always changing." "The bird flu virus has lots of different forms and it's mutating and it could mutate into a form which will spread between humans and that's potentially an enormous thing to happen." "But until that mutation happens you don't know exactly what the new virus will look like." "Whereas here you could identify that new virus very, very quickly, turn around vaccine, get it shipped out and nip in the bud the pandemic before it starts." "What intrigues me is how much of this, and I'm going to bring you back in on this, is because we can see further and see more." "The models, those computer models of the actual molecules being used, we're manipulating at it a stage and we can see it at a far greater state than we ever could before." "Just gives us far more control of very tiny building blocks." "Absolutely." "I think particularly in healthcare the applications are just massive." "I mean, they're in regenerating the tissue, they're in detecting the disease earlier, they're in the drugs that you're going to deliver." "They're in all the personalised medicine, which is now such a hot area in medicine." "100 years ago people were still arguing whether there were atoms or not." "Not everyone was convinced." "So it's a really rapid rise in the technology." "And the level at which we can manipulate individual atoms, it's astonishing." "This is a much more prosaic..." "This is just like a proper 1950s straightforward piece of technology." "A Geiger counter." "In terms of what we see or don't see around us." "We haven't brought any really dangerous pieces of radiation out." "If we just turn it on..." "GEIGER COUNTERS BEEPS" "That's it on." "And none of you are registering particularly highly." "Are shoes apparently...?" "You can pick up sometimes little... things, bits of granite." "Well, listen, let's find something we know definitely will." "What type of glass is this?" "It's uranium glass." "OK." "I'm going to hold this close to my mic so you can hear it." "So nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing." "GEIGER COUNTER CRACKLES" "And that is... uranium." "And that funny yellowy colour is from the uranium atoms themselves." "Is this now illegal to make this?" "Yeah." "I mean, that's a fruit bowl." "They were made in their hundreds and thousands." "I found that in an antique shop in Australia, where you can still find these items made of uranium glass." "People were very excited about radioactive glassware." "And now, of course, less so." "That's not dangerous, is it?" "This is the traditional use - the glow in the dark hands on a watch." "I was wondering how this actually..." "GEIGER COUNTER CRACKLES" "It doesn't sound healthy." "That's radium, which is a much higher..." "I wasn't expecting that." "Get it away!" "It's facing that way, you're all right." "It doesn't come out the back (!" ")" "See?" "The leather pack has stopped it." "The ladies who painted the dials on those used to lick their paintbrushes and a lot of them got mouth cancer." "And this was in the 1930s and '40s and this is when people really started to get aware of the fact." "They were making face creams out of radioactive stuff like radium." "I've always wanted to play with one of those." "This is a great product, this is a hydrophobic substance." "Which basically means you spray it on something and it will repel water." "Let's test it." "One of these shoes is sprayed, one of these shoes is not sprayed." "These are your shoes." "ALOK:" "In my continuing contribution to science, these are my shoes." "Here we go." "Let's watch." "How impressive is that?" "That's pretty good." "That really works." "So you want to see a really good demonstration of it?" "This is a Kindle." "Right, this was sprayed with the hydrophobic spray." "Is it still going?" "No, it's still going." "Wow, that's great." "Previously on this show, because we felt that you alone shouldn't be the one who got tested, the four of us offered up our belly buttons." "We can actually look at it." "This is Alok." "Who's belly button contains Staphylococcus." "I have nothing left." "And Micrococcus, which actually makes it healthier that most of Alok." "Who's next?" "Helen's next." "Again, Staphylococcus and Micrococcus." "By the way, you're the microbiologist, anything we should be worried about there?" "No, no, normal flora." "OK, fantastic." "Again, Micrococcus and Staphylococcus." "So again normal the whole way." "Normal the whole way." "One left." "Just you." "Here I am." "This is my..." "Whoa!" ""Unknown."" "What were you doing?" "What happened?" "What's going on there, professor, because I'm OK with this one - they all had this one - but I'm sure about "unknown"." "Maybe an unusual Bacillus." "Not just a regular Bacillus, an unusual one." "A super Bacillus of some description." "Is this a good thing or a bad thing?" "Bacillus is a normal environmental organism." "Well, yeah." "But this one's unusual." "Yes." "Name a bad Bacillus." "Er..." "Anthrax." "LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE" "I don't think that's Anthrax." "Anthrax, really?" "That's an unusual Bacillus." ""Unusual Bacillus."" "The key word!" "The only thing we know is "unusual Bacillus."" "I have Anthrax in my belly button." "What an ending to the show, ladies and gentlemen, to find out that" "I have to have my belly button shut down as a chemical weapon." "There goes my belly button dancing career, ladies and gentlemen." "I'd like to thank, at the end of that, while I try to gather... just soak in that information, thank my guests, Professors Molly Stevens and Ian Henderson, thank you very much for coming." "And our team, Helen, Mark and Alok." "I'm Dara O'Briain with a sick tummy." "I'll see you again." "That's all from Science Club." "Good night." "Thank you very much." "Subtitles By Red Bee Media Ltd"