"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, from the minuscule to the enormous, we discover why size matters, and how discoveries at either end of the scales are changing the way we view the universe." "This is the place where we find out how great ideas are changing the world we live in." "Welcome to Science Club." "Good evening." "We have a terrific show for you this week." "Here in the studio with me are some wonderful guests, along with our regular team, and our resident experimentalist Professor Mark Miodownik, who will, amongst other things, be showing us live pictures of his internal organs later on in the show." "Looking forward to it..." "I think." "Excellent." "Tonight it's all about size." "Whether the inter-galactic scale of an expanding universe, or the very other end of the our battle with the smallest creatures on earth, investigating the incredibly vast and the infinitesimally small, is helping us solve some really big problems." "Science journalist Alok Jha has been to Canada to see a premature baby unit where big data is providing a new way of saving tiny lives." "In the studio Mark reveals the explosive effects of size." "And most of our universe is missing." "Dr Helen Czerski goes to South Dakota to join the hunt to capture that most elusive of substances - dark matter." "So first, to a group of tiny creatures, among the first life forms on earth." "Bacteria." "Responsible for keeping our own ecosystem ticking over, but when they attack us, it's an ugly sight." "Superbugs like MRSA are a major danger, especially in hospitals." "But could it be, that of all people, the Victorians had the answer to defeating superbugs all along?" "Mark goes to Southampton to see an amazing discovery." "Bacteria are the most successful life forms on the planet." "They are everywhere around us in unimaginable numbers." "Most of them are harmless, but some have become our most formidable enemies." "Our fight against antibiotic-resistant bacteria, so-called superbugs, is going to be one of the key health issues over the next ten years." "What if there was a way to kill the bugs before they get to us, instead of using antibiotics after we get infected - to literally stop them in their tracks?" "At the University of Southampton, Professor Bill Keevil and his team have spent years trying to find a way to intercept and kill superbugs before they even have a chance to infect us." "And the solution they've found is simpler than anyone imagined." "It's one of the oldest metals known to mankind." "It's cheap and abundant." "It was known to the ancient Greeks and the Egyptians." "We've been using it for more than 5,000 years." "It's copper." "To demonstrate copper's superbug-battling credentials," "Bill contaminates a copper plate and a steel plate with ten million MRSA bacteria." "That's about one handshake's worth." "We're taking an epidemic strain of MRSA, strain 16." "It's the most virulent strain in the UK, responsible for many outbreaks in hospitals." "These blobs are the DNA of the bacteria, stained to glow under fluorescent light." "But only if they're alive." "Now, if we look at what happens on copper after five minutes, you'll see the big difference." "Wow!" "Most of them have lost their green colour, and the ones that have still got it, they're fading out." "That means that they're dying or they're already dead." "So you've gone from ten million bacteria to a few hundred..." "Yes." "..in five minutes." "And this is just a piece of copper, a normal piece of copper." "If we look at stainless steel..." "Wow!" "And that's after five minutes." "It's teeming with bacteria!" "The contrast between the contaminated steel and the copper is staggering, and that's due to the natural reactivity of copper." "As soon as the organisms land on the surface, the copper floods into their cell." "Once in the cell, they punch holes in the cell membrane." "So think of a balloon starting to burst." "They also stop the bacteria respiring, they can't breathe." "And then they also destroy the DNA." "Now, it's reckoned that 80% of superbug infections are actually transmitted by touch." "And even with thorough cleaning, it's really difficult to stop a chance encounter." "The problem is that we're a very tactile animal." "Think of all the things you touched today, how many handles you touched, how many surfaces, how many rails, how many buttons." "Now think about how many times you touched your ear, or slightly picked your nose." "And then think about how many other people touched those surfaces..." "Not your nose, obviously, that'd be weird." "But all the other ones." "It only takes one of them to be infected and it will rapidly spread." "Unless everyone in hospitals, doctors, consultants and visitors, are hermetically sealed off with masks and white suits, it's virtually impossible to keep the bugs out." "And this is where copper comes in." "Trials have just been completed in the intensive care units of three US hospitals where they made a few simple changes." "They replaced the tray table, the IV stand, and most importantly, the bed rails with copper." "The results published in a paper in May showed they had slashed superbug infections in intensive care units by an astonishing 60%." "It's incredible that something so simple and commonplace as copper could become a key weapon in our battle with superbugs." "Now, we're joined by Mark and a very special guest this evening " "Professor Dame Sally Davies, the country's Chief Medical Officer." "What do you two make of this?" "Well, it's exciting, isn't it?" "We know we have a problem with bugs that are resistant to antibiotics, and here is a potential way to reduce the number of bugs around the place, whether they're resistant or not." "Cos you're not just talking about copper..." "Alloys of copper with 60% of copper in them, so that includes brass, which used to be a material for making doorknobs and handles, the Victorians used it all over the place." "And we should acclaim in this, we're always talking about unsung scientific heroes, it was Phyllis Kuhn who originally recognised this." "She carried out a study with some students, and she was teaching them how to take swabs and see what grows on them." "She noticed that when she did swabs of these brass and copper handles, that they had hardly any bacteria on them." "What a lovely story." "She said, "hold on a minute " ""this could be a really significant point,"" "and it's taken this long to get real trials done in hospitals." "That's... 40-odd years later." "It's incredible how you get these ideas going." "Yet, in other areas, people have known about this all the time." "The wine-growers in France use Bordeaux mix, which is a copper-rich solution, to kill fungus on their vines." "The Egyptians knew about it." "They knew about copper and its ability to heal wounds." "So, it's funny that sometimes the solution is right there and yet no-one can grapple with it and get it going." "Cos we as humans, we're brilliant at spreading bacteria." "It's one of our great gifts." "You tested this for us, didn't you?" "Yeah, yesterday when we were setting up the studio we asked some of the erm..." "Stage crew, let's call them?" "Stage crew, yeah, to put on their hands a substance that's invisible but is fluorescent, so we'll see where it ended up because they constructed this whole set for us." "You can see them here." "He's being quite generous with it there, to be honest." "Massive hand prints." "That's too much, that's too much." "They were handling all the furniture and the set and everything, so you'd expect to see it, you know, around..." "What we'll do, we'll turn down the lights and we'll stick on some ultraviolet lights and you'll see exactly how obvious it is." "AUDIENCE LAUGHS" "Now, some of these you would expect." "Obviously there are hand prints on the back walls there and all over the couches." "What is most surprising, I think, is if you look at that pillar." "The pillar wasn't put in by us, but it's constantly been touched, presumably in an almost unthinking, casual way." "I think we're just very tactile people." "You don't realise how much you touch things till you do an exercise like this." "Tempting though it is to do the entire show under ultraviolet light, we should probably return to normal lighting." "If we can have the normal lights back up and the ultraviolet down, cos it was like a crime scene, which is a bit creepy." "It is a general problem we have with antibiotic resistance?" "We've got a big and increasing problem with antibiotic resistance of all bacteria." "Most people have heard of E coli and increasingly klebsiella." "Now, you have said we're in danger of returning to a 19th-century situation, in which case we're dumped back into a very frightening scenario of sepsis, people dying, amputations..." "How bad do you think it could be?" "Well, I think it's a serious risk." "What we have at the moment is antibiotic resistance in a large number of bacteria going up and up." "Not surprising, the rate they multiply, and everything with spontaneous mutations." "Meanwhile we haven't had any new antibiotic classes since the late '80s, so the antibiotics that are in preparation are actually only modifications of old ones." "And, increasingly, we rely on antibiotics for routine healthcare." "So, transplants could not be done without antibiotics, most cancer care, a lot of routine surgery, people have antibiotics either as prophylaxis or because they've got wound infections, so it would dramatically impact on our modern health service" "and system, and it would get us before climate change." "If we go on as we are, we would have a pre-antibiotic era, mid-19th century picture." "Now we're going to return to this and other public health issues with you later in the show." "Thank you to Mark, thank you to Sally." "Now, for more information on the show, please go to our website or follow us on Twitter." "Details should be on the screen at the moment." "Tonight we're investigating why size is so important." "Why does size matter for life forms?" "What did it mean for a dinosaur to be so big or an ant so small?" "Why is the giant redwood tree giant, and the dwarf salamander dwarf?" "What affect did their size have on what they could do?" "Well, the size governs everything that an organism can do." "It's really the most important factor, and it boils down to this - we're sort of three-dimensional beings, all organisms are, and they have an area and have a volume." "When you get bigger or smaller, the ratio of those two things changes, and that governs what you're allowed to do." "So, elephants can't dance, they can't jump." "And insects can walk on water, again surface to volume ratio." "That's amazing." "We'll pick an example." "A similar example is how you cope with a fall." "Yes." "I don't know if anyone here has fallen any distance, but I thought I'd show you a quick demo about why it really does matter how big you are as to whether you survive or not." "So, we've got balloons with ballistic jelly in them." "What's ballistic jelly?" "It's like a jelly you make for a children's party, but it's slightly stronger and it's actually designed to replicate the flesh of the human body or a mammal." "Give me a parallel of what animal we're talking about here." "That..." "Let's say that's a hamster." "OK." "So here goes the hamster." "And..." "The hamster's fine." "Hamster's fine!" "The hamster has survived." "It's jumping, it's totally fine." "We can even see the hamster in slow motion." "Can we?" "Yes, we can." "Here's the hamster." "Wow." "I'm not saying the hamster's going to be the better of that." "There did look like a bit where the hamster turned entirely inside out and then reformed as a different kind of hamster." "So let's move up the scale." "As soon as you get bigger, even though you're made of the same stuff, we're made of flesh and bones, and essentially the design is the same in terms of our body plan." "This is the size of a medium-size dog, let's say." "Yeah, OK." "Like many people would've received at Christmas and loved for the rest of their lives." "And now we're going to drop them." "I'm sure no-one here or at home is going to do this." "Let's see what would happen if you did." "OK, grand." "And..." "Oh!" "That is not what we expected to happen." "And it's fine!" "It's totally fine." "I would say that that is, in scientific terms, a negative result." "Yes, it is." "Let's drop the dog one more time." "Do you know what?" "We're going to carry on dropping this dog." "Are we?" "Yeah." "We'll drop this dog until he does exactly what he was trained to do." "I think you should go to one higher step." "OK, here we go with the dog." "Oh!" "You're applauding, but this is essentially what would happen to any of us who fell off a building or anything like that." "Due to our size, we're not going to survive large falls, and yet small animals can." "Right." "Let's have a look at a replay of this." "I want to see this happen in slow motion." "You were just waiting to say that, weren't you?" "I glazed over cos I wanted to see this." "There he goes." "Woof, woof, gone." "Oh, wow!" "So, what can I safely drop from this height here?" "You mean in terms of...?" "Give me a living thing to drop." "OK." "That was a point of reference to these cockroaches, I think." "Yeah." "So these should be fine." "These are..." "Look at that." "They're much lighter than our little hamster." "Anyone want to pick these up and go anywhere near them?" "No." "Neither do I." "Cos when you try to pick them up they get really antsy!" "And start twiddling their little legs." "I think they might be like horses, Dara, they need a firm hand." "You whack it in there like, "Right, let's go." Oh, you're right." "You're right." "Oh, there we go." "Good for you." "Now." "Put it back in, I'm not touching it!" "Come on, Dara." "No, no, no, I have a technique worked out for this." "Oh, you have, OK." "Oh, look, he's clinging!" "He likes you!" "OK, so there's two huge cockroaches." "They should be fine at this point." "Yeah, even though they're huge cockroaches, they've got a very high surface to volume ratio." "They are going to hit the floor, and this will show you something else about surface to volume ratio, I hope." "OK." "Here we go." "Bye-bye." "Oh, no, you're sliding!" "You're sliding away!" "Oh!" "They're fine." "So, there's another issue about surface to volume ratio, it's not just the pressure on the ground, it's also the air resistance." "So in that drop for something as small as that, the air resistance was appreciable, and that's to do with how much area you present." "So their terminal velocity will be much lower than ours." "Now, let's move this over cos we want to demonstrate a couple more things with regards to the..." "But it isn't just living things that surface to volume ratio change, and I really want to show you this because it's a really good demonstration of why surface to volume ratio is just one of those slightly all-encompassing" "ratios that you should always worry about." "People always say, "What's your height?" or "What's your weight?" No." "What's your surface to volume ratio is more important." "Yeah." "I would like you to put some safety glasses on." "You're fine." "You're nearby, but you're not so close that this is going to be an issue." "OK, so this is just some icing sugar." "If I put that there and I just start putting the blowtorch on it, it's acting as a single substance." "There's a bit of flame, but then it just melts." "Now, exactly the same stuff and I'm going to blow it through this tube." "Ready for this?" "There might be a slight bang." "Wow, you look like some magician from..." "DARA LAUGHS" "You think this is a cute demo, but actually it caused lots of explosions in flour mills, and still to this day, any place that creates powders that have got a calorific value..." "The powder mixed with the air..." "Look at that." "..has some sort of energy trapped inside it." "It can be explosive." "It has been." "People die all the time..." "You've never said a truer thing on this show, Mark." "People die all the time." "OK, yeah." "It's true." "I like to be accurate." "Yes." "OK, we've other experiments to do with you later." "Literally on you, in you." "In me." "Thank you very much to Mark." "Now, to a surprising new way of helping the newest and most fragile of lives." "In today's electronic world, we generate and capture incredible amounts of information." "And if we know what to look for, we have the computing power to analyse it and make unexpected discoveries." "In Toronto, big data, as it's called, is being used to help premature babies by predicting when they might fall ill." "Alok Jha investigates." "To any newborn baby, the world is a hostile place." "Premature babies are particularly vulnerable, so need careful monitoring 24 hours a day, seven days a week." "Their immune systems are particularly weak." "Even in the developed world, if a premature baby contracts one of the most serious forms of infection, they'll have a one in five chance of not making it through their first weeks of life." "If we could spot an infection before it became an illness, then it would buy valuable time." "And thanks to the huge amount of data generated by monitoring newborn babies, that can now happen." "Carolyn McGregor is a doctor of informatics." "Her background was originally in the world of retail, but in 1999 she decided to use her expertise to help premature babies." "As an outsider to the medical world, she saw a huge opportunity to use all the data that could be generated." "When I went into that environment and I saw all the data and I started to learn about the way they work, and they told me that the nursing staff write numbers on to the paper chart every hour, I said," ""But that number over there is flashing every second." ""What's happening with that?"" "And I was almost in shock because there was so much data we could learn so much from, and it was all just scrolling out of memory because we just didn't have the computing systems to analyse the sheer volume of data." "Apart from a professional interest, Carolyn was drawn into premature baby care because of a deep personal involvement." "My daughter was born premature." "She had a very rare chromosome abnormality and she passed away." "But I realised what it's like to lose a child, and when you've been waiting so long to have a child..." "And for other families who have something happen that means the baby has to come into the world early," "I want to do everything that I can to make sure they get to take that baby home." "Premature baby wards generate constant streams of data about heart rate, respiration and blood oxygen levels." "Carolyn created a computer system that could scan all of this data and look for extremely subtle changes in heart rate." "And she revealed something no doctor had seen before, that if a premature baby had a stable heart rate, it was an advance warning of a serious infection." "This was extraordinary." "Carolyn's system could make a diagnosis up to 24 hours before doctors saw any visible signs of illness." "In 2009 Dr Andrew James was the first to test" "Carolyn's computerised detection system in the premature baby ward of the hospital for sick children in Toronto." "If I were to know at any point of time that a baby's heart rate variability had decreased, then I would be highly suspicious of an infection." "That gives me the opportunity to examine the baby, to do a blood test and to start antibiotics." "I'm quite excited about this approach, because I, as a clinician, I will start treating these babies up to 24 hours earlier, and I just see that leading to better outcomes." "The same system is about to be rolled out in a second" "Canadian intensive care unit this year." "Four years on, Carolyn's big data processing has proved it can become an integral part of diagnosis, and even save lives." "Now, obviously you couldn't have wished for an environment in which you would want advances more than caring for premature babies." "We've obviously been measuring things and gathering information for a long time." "Why now are we doing something different?" "The differences now is that the software now allows you to record that information in real time, process it as a stream of data, then spit out something useful for someone like a doctor to then do something with that information" "in enough time to actually help a patient." "That's what's new about what's going on there." "So, big data isn't just what I always presumed it was, which is basically the fact that we can source lots of material." "We have sensors in every direction, we have cameras pointing all over the place." "It's more the fact that not only can we finally have the memory in which to store all this data, we also have the computing speed to do it immediately." "Yeah." "It's phenomenal." "I think until 2003 we created..." "From the dawn of time till 2003 we created something like 500 million gigabytes or something." "We did that every two days in 2011, every ten minutes in 2013." "It's incredible." "The stuff's so easy to collect now." "Now we just need to do something with it." "OK." "You've been awesome, cos one of the things we like on this show is to give people further reading on these kind of topics, particularly this one which is a very new and exciting development." "Absolutely." "What have you seen that you would you recommend to people?" "Big data can seem very abstract, so there's a book called The Human Face Of Big Data." "This is one of those books which is something to read as well as look at." "Yes." "It's also, as you would expect, it's an app as well." "Let me show you a few of the things that this app can do." "Where do they get all the data for this particular big data?" "This data is collected from all of us." "We live in an ocean of data." "Smartphones, twitter, Facebook, all these things." "We're just streaming data all around us." "We have a sort of smoke trail of this stuff all over the place." "This idea was put together as a way of showing you how big data affects us and how we're already collecting, essentially." "They've nicknamed it the Planetary Nervous System, and some good examples of things..." "What about Find Your Teenager." "There's a thing where you can just monitor phone records, texts, browser histories, GPS and just locate your kids wherever they are." "By the time your kids are teenagers, I'm sure you could do this, and they would love you for it." "LAUGHTER" ""Each of us leaves a trail of digital exhaust."" "It really tells you what they think of the kind of stuff teenagers put online." "That's slightly terrifying, in a way." "It raises questions of privacy, right?" "I'm sure that parents would love that." "There are more." "The Driverless Car, for example." "What it needs to do is constantly monitor the world around it and build a model of that." "And it does that using ridiculously fast streams of data all round it - cameras, sensors, all sorts of things." "By 2040, they reckon 75% of all cars will be self-driving." "Do you believe that?" "I don't know about that." "I don't know about that." "I don't know whether I want it to be like that." "Well, I'm worried about the 25% who aren't run by a computer." "All the information on that and other books that you've recommended are available to us on the website, aren't they?" "Yes, they are." "It's fascinating to see what we're already giving out there, and this is just the tip." "Fantastic." "Still to come on tonight's show..." "Dr Helen Czerski will be going underground, in the hunt for dark matter." "Mark Miodownik will be swallowing a camera to reveal his internal organs, and who doesn't want to see that?" "And Alok will be in the New York Stock exchange to see exactly how much a millisecond is worth." "There are plenty of illustrations of the different scales in our universe." "Some of you might remember being shown the brilliant film Powers Of Ten when you were at school." "Well, we've found a modern contemporary version of this amazing graphic created by Cary Huang." "It allows us to flit seamlessly from our scale to other scales." "There we are." "We're just a little larger than a dodo bird, but if we go down, we move through sleet, an ant, we move through the scale till we get to a chloroplast, and then we're into wavelengths of red light," "slowly getting smaller and smaller, until we get to the helium atom, the hydrogen atom," "And then we move all the way down, past the quarks, down to quantum foam, or we come back up again through the various levels." "This is all on the website." "Trust me, you'll play with this for ages." "Past us, there we go, there's the ant again." "There's the dinosaurs, the Eiffel Tower." "It gets bigger and bigger and bigger until we get to the moons of Mars." "There's our sun, look how small our sun is compared to other suns." "You get a real sense of just how tiny..." "There's the Kuiper belt there, but then we move into different nebulae and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger." "See, it goes on and on and on and on." "The Magellanic Clouds." "And eventually you'll get out past the local groups to the very limits of the observable universe." "That, trust me, is a time sink waiting to happen." "You will spend absolutely hours looking for yourself on that." "It's all on the website." "But while we're on the subject of size of the universe, why is it the size it is?" "This is a puzzle for scientists because we simply can't see enough matter in the universe to explain why it's holding together the way it is." "It should've expanded more." "They reckon that there must be a lot more matter that we simply can't see - dark matter." "But does it actually exist, or is it just a figment of a crazy physicist's overwrought imagination?" "Dr Helen Czerski's been to South Dakota to see what's going on." "The exact nature of dark matter is one of the top mysteries in science." "So much so that all the biggest guns of science are turning their attention to this cosmic dark horse." "From the most powerful telescopes in space, to the Large Hadron Collider." "But so far, this elusive material has refused to show itself." "Here we are in the 21st century and we still don't know what the majority of the universe is made of." "23 years ago, Professor Rick Gaitskell left behind a career as an investment banker to devote himself full-time to hunting down dark matter." "It's all great from a curiosity point of view, but why should society care about this?" "Our universe as whole would be fundamentally different if it wasn't for the dark matter and, frankly, we probably wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the presence of this dark matter." "Rick and his team are hunting for it in an old gold mine in South Dakota." "Deep underground." "We're going to be going down about 4,850 feet, which is a little bit less than a mile." "The reason we're going to do it is to get away from the cosmic rays." "So, I'm about to be as free of cosmic rays as I've ever been in my life." "Down here, Rick's detector is shielded from most of the sources of radiation on the surface that could affect his results." "The key to observing anything in nature is to watch it interacting with our world." "But that's something dark matter rarely does." "This isn't just about weird stuff out there in the universe." "If dark matter's real, and the evidence is growing that it is, then it's passing right through me right now." "It's here, I just can't see it." "But it's a really strange counter-intuitive idea." "Dark matter will actually pass completely through the earth with very little probability of interacting." "If we were to pile this rock up all the way to the nearest star and then beyond about 300 light years of rock, if we put a dark matter particle through it there'd still be a 50-50 chance that it came out without interacting." "That's the infuriating thing about dark matter." "Although it's supposed to far outnumber conventional matter, we can only guess it's there from its influence." "For Rick, hints and after-effects aren't enough to see how dark matter holds the universe together." "He believes we've got to be bold." "He's going to catch it." "If we can begin to identify dark matter events and dark matter particles specifically interacting in our detector, then it for the first time will be giving us direct evidence for this idea that our Milky Way is completely dominated" "by these particles." "But how do you even begin to catch something that can slip through our world without even touching it?" "In 2012 Rick's team started installing the Lux Detector." "Inside the detector, a small tank of xenon lies undisturbed by everything else in the universe..." "Except dark matter." "The dark matter is streaming through the detector all of the time, but very occasionally, one of the dark matter particles will actually interact with conventional matter, with one of the xenon atoms in our detector, and in doing so it gives it a kick," "and there's a release of energy, a flash of light, and it's that flash of light that we are able to measure directly and shows us that we have a dark matter event in our experiment." "So, you've got a tank in the middle with xenon, and light detectors all around it just waiting for that flash." "That's correct." "The Lux Detector is only weeks away from taking readings." "A year from now, we could have caught dark matter in the act of colliding with our world." "And that's the beginning of a much bigger story." "All the stuff that we see that we take for granted is just like a tiny detail on top of what the universe is really made of." "We could be on the edge of a real revolution in human thinking." "Helen is with us, and we're joined by Dr Jo Dunkley, a lecturer in astrophysics at Oxford University, who studies the evolution of the universe." "This is not a new idea, dark matter." "No, that's right." "We've known it's been around for quite a while, although that in itself is quite remarkable because we're looking up into space and we're looking for stuff that's invisible to us." "But we can see the effects." "Which measurements were they that initially made us suspect there's more to it than we can see?" "So, people studying how galaxies spin around." "So, imagine a galaxy's a giant disc of stars, and they're moving quite fast around it." "Astronomers were measuring how fast the stars were spinning, and they were actually going too fast, especially the ones at the edge of this galaxy." "The only way you can make up for that is to make the galaxy way more massive, five times more massive." "I've seen these experiments before where there's a bucket in a mineshaft." "They're very famously used for finding neutrinos." "Yes, that's right." "This is different stuff." "So, the thing about this, as Jo said, by looking out at the biggest things in the universe we can see where this stuff must be, but we haven't seen what it is." "This experiment is actually to get at what it actually is, and the only way to do that is to look right in at the smallest scales, in the same way as you would look for neutrinos." "But it's even rarer, the chances of this stuff hitting, interacting with normal matter that we see is so, so small." "So you've got to put it in a very pure environment and wait for a very long time." "Then you get a chance of seeing what it is, because the way it interacts will tell us about what it was that happened." "You can understand why people are occasionally very cynical about this level of physics, right, because we've observed that we haven't expanded as much as we should, so therefore there exists dark matter." "We've also observed that on another scale we're expanding for reasons we don't know, and therefore dark energy." "So 93% of the universe we just call dark." "That's right." "You can understand why people get a little bit cynical about this." "But we've so many different measurements." "They're all pointing to the same thing." "Do you think something like this experiment here, as pristine and pure as it is, will actually manage to observe an interaction?" "I hope so." "It would be so exciting." "I think..." "The trouble is we can't be sure what dark matter is." "If it's the kind of particle that they hope to find, yes, that would be wonderful." "There's a line we use here about all the big guns of science, we're looking for this on the International Space Station, we're trying to create a Large Hadron Collider, I mean, everyone is fixing on this particular..." "It's like that analogy of blind men looking at an elephant." "One of them feels the trunk and says," ""Oh, it must be like this." One of them feels the legs and says," ""Oh, it must be like this." This is how this is proceeding." "There's something there." "No-one knows what it is, and all these different detectors and the things in space and the things on earth are kind of poking and prodding at this thing in different ways." "The picture will be built from the collection together, not from any individual one." "Fantastic." "Thank you both very much." "Dr Jo Dunkley and Dr Helen Czerski." "Can you work out what that is?" "That is the lovely view of the inside of somebody's guts." "The fascinating thing is you can see they're constantly moving." "Right now your guts are doing a jig at all times." "But to get an insider view of what they're up to," "Mark has volunteered to swallow a miniature camera." "In many ways we're doing our own experiment to hunt out dark matter." "But to do that..." "LAUGHTER" "..we also need to bring in a gastroenterologist." "Please welcome Dr Simon Campbell." "How are you?" "Pleasure to have you here." "APPLAUSE" "Mark, you've never done this before, you've never had an endoscope..?" "Nope." "No, it's all unknown territory down there." "It's exciting, isn't it?" "I've seen stuff come up, early in days when I was younger." "Yes." "But I haven't been down." "OK, good." "It's probably as well." "And also we've kept you from eating much food today." "Yes, I haven't really eaten anything today, except for a bowl of soup and some water." "There was a brilliant idea that we should've give him alphabetti spaghetti so that the camera went down it would spell out messages." "How does this work, Doctor?" "So, within the actual capsule itself it has its own light source." "Shall I get it open?" "We can't touch this now, obviously, cos..." "Cos it's going to be part of me for about ten hours, right?" "So there's a clear plastic dome which acts as a fisheye, and just underneath there is a CMOS chip that you find in any digital camera." "And within the white area of the capsule there are some batteries, and then at the back there's a transmitter." "And we can see a flashing light there, presumably to conserve battery energy, it takes a series of snaps." "Yeah, so it's taking two pictures a second and transmitting that to the belt here." "How does it finish its journey?" "Uh, in the toilet." "Really?" "Raises the question." "What?" "We all wanted to know." "Everyone wants to know this, don't they?" "It's a one-time thing, isn't it?" "Yes, it's single use." "It's flushed away." "LAUGHTER" "You said to me, "Just practise by swallowing jelly beans,"" "but the jelly beans I bought weren't giant capsules." "It's quite solid, isn't it?" "Let it linger in your mouth for a minute as well so we actually see what we can see in there." "Aah, well, what..." "My God, even your mouth is weird." "OK, let's see what we can see here." "Oh, hello, it's gone on a journey now, hasn't it?" "How long should it take to get down the oesophagus?" "Roughly ten to 15 seconds." "That's a lot of bubbling going on there." "Is it in his stomach already?" "Yeah." "So we're already into the stomach now." "We're looking at the acid." "Oh, that looks good, doesn't it?" "I'm quite proud of that." "It looks quality, it does look quality." "Definitely something biological." "That's quite icky, whatever that is that's trailing there." "Eat some food, let's see if it arrives." "I want to see how long before it arrives." "Yeah, let's go yellow." "I don't think it would be that good at picking up." "Not yellow?" "Yeah, go yellow, or green." "Go." "Don't chew it too much." "We don't want some unidentifiable paste." "You've very cleverly pointed the camera straight up your oesophagus at the moment, so we should see it all arriving any second." "Is that my oesophagus?" "I presume so." "No, this is looking down the stomach." "Oh, is it?" "Excuse me, sorry." "I'm not actually a gastroenterologist myself." "Feel free to step in." "Feel free to step in, Doctor, at any point, if you see me making an incorrect assumption like that." "OK." "Do you know who Alexis St Martin is?" "No." "Alexis St Martin in 1822 was a French Canadian who joined the fur trade and who got shot in the stomach when somebody accidentally discharged their weapon." "There was a doctor beside him, and the doctor thought he would die, but he did not." "Dr William Beaumont spotted the opportunity because he had a hole in his stomach, he had a fistula, which is a hole that won't cure because it keeps seeping, the wound, presumably." "So, the doctor, realising that the hole went straight the way to his stomach, used him as a living experiment to find out how the stomach worked by taking pieces of food, putting them through the hole..." "..and then taking them out again and seeing what happened to them." "Lived to a fine old age, apparently." "And that was the beginning of gastric sciences, wasn't it?" "It was one of the first experiments ever done." "Yes." "It's incredible." "He fathered 20 children with a hole in his stomach." "Yeah, cos the ladies love that." "LAUGHTER" "Nothing more attractive than that." "You've been very kind." "What's happening now?" "Are we seeing anything?" "Oh, hello, are we taking a journey?" "Yeah, so it's descending further down into the stomach towards the pylorus, which is the lower valve." "How long will it take for him to go from the stomach to the upper..?" "Gastric emptying varies between individuals, but between about an hour and sometimes as long as four hours." "Is there any danger of seeing food?" "Is there any danger?" "Yeah." "No." "Really?" "Why am I eating it?" "LAUGHTER" "He said." "I know." "Maybe that part of it we didn't think through." "We genuinely felt that a burger would appear floating past..." "Is that because the camera's facing down?" "If the camera was facing back would you just see this avalanche of pepper?" "Yes." "Correct." "Oh, so we just got unlucky with that." "Yeah." "Just luck of the draw." "Shall we turn him upside down?" "LAUGHTER" "OK, listen, Mark, he's been very good." "And thank you very much, Simon, and thank you very much for showing us inside of you." "Really, the most gripping side of you." "Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for Mark as well." "Thank you very much." "APPLAUSE" "OK, I'm joined again by Professor Dame Sally Davies, the Chief Medical Officer." "That's a very grand title, by the way, and you're the first female Chief Medical Officer, am I right in saying that?" "I am, in 165 years." "Yes, we have a little brief history of the role itself that we want to show people first." "this is how the post arose." "In the 1830s, Britain wasn't particularly health-conscious." "Few cared whether you lived or died." "After a number of lethal epidemics, it was decided that trying to preserve the lives of its citizens might be a good idea." "So, the role of Chief Medical Officer was created." "This noble breed has been responsible for changing our lives and extending our life spans." "They've revolutionised sewage disposal, and overseen difficult births." "TV ANNOUNCEMENT:" "On July 5th, the new National Health Service starts." "And at a time when the general attitude was this... ..they convinced us of the considerably less than friendly effects of cigarettes." "Precariously balanced between medicine and politics." "For 150 years, the mission of the Chief Medical Officer has been to help preserve the health of the nation." "Basically, you're the health conscience of the nation, to a certain extent, aren't you?" "Are you the one who puts warnings on things and corrects our choices and tells us to put down the chips?" "Yes, my children and their friends complain." "And your job is to advise the government in the case of, say, Tamiflu, in the case of the recent measles outbreak and its relation to MMR in Wales, to be, presumably, the voice of evidence and of medical authority in this." "Absolutely." "I'm appointed by the civil service as an independent advisor to government." "So I don't have politics, all I'm interested in is what is the evidence, how does the science stack up and what does that mean for us as people, the public patients, and what, therefore," "should the government do." "And what are the major health challenges, then, that we face?" "Well, clearly there's always what we call health protection." "Infections, and we've talked already about antimicrobial resistance and that's going to become worse, but, I mean, we've had a pandemic in 2009, we know there's flu in China at the moment," "we know there's novel coronavirus coming out of the Middle East." "But as well as that, we've got new epidemics." "Some people talk about the non-communicable diseases, but there are lifestyles ones." "There are size because we like food." "It's an abuse of alcohol, actually, particularly in our young and our young women, and it's lack of exercise." "If there's a magic bullet, it's exercise." "Comments we get from people a lot about..." "We are living to be older and older and older and older." "At some point as a society we have to have a conversation about how old we actually want to get." "Is there a point where we..." "Not that we'll become greedy about it, but that we could emphasise other things, that we could fight people dying too young, rather than worrying about extending our general life span." "I would like to see the young healthy, and brought through to a healthy old age." "But how long that healthy old age should be, I can tell you, my husband knows to turn off my ventilator." "He knows I do not want to live a long time with dementia, and I think we need a much more realistic discussion about what is a dignified end." "A pleasure to have you in, by the way." "This conversation could go on and should go on much longer, and will with the others." "Thank you very much, Sally." "Thank you for coming." "Now Helen has some of the latest stories and images from around the world of science." "Dolphins are some of the smartest animals on the planet and it seems that they could even rival humans, at least when it comes to remembering their friends." "Every dolphin makes a whistle noise that's unique to that animal, and researchers in the US have just shown that dolphins can recognise the whistles of companions, even if they haven't seen them for 20 years." "So, for example, this video here shows these two dolphins responding to a familiar whistle being played through a speaker here, and this whistle comes from a dolphin called Hastings that they used to be tank mates with." "But this dolphin over here never met Hastings, and it's not responding at all." "This evidence suggests that long-term memory plays a role in social bonding in dolphins, just as it does in humans." "Every year five and a half million of us get a stomach bug, but it looks as though we could be on the way to neutralising the bug's main weapon." "This blue structure here is yersinia, and that's a bacterium that can cause stomach pains, fever, diarrhoea, and it works using these little syringe-like structures on the outside of it, and they poke into our cells" "and inject toxic chemicals." "This is the first time that researchers have been able to see these structures in such amazing detail, and the idea is that the more we understand about their structure and how they work, the better we'll be able to design drugs" "to block them." "And this knowledge could not only be useful for this bacterium, but it could also work against other stomach bugs like salmonella." "Our building materials are becoming increasingly hi-tech." "Self-darkening windows have been around for a while." "You can even get them on aeroplanes now." "But the team of researchers in California have made a new smart window, one that can control the amount of heat and light that pass through it." "They use a window coating made of two things." "One of them is semi-conductor nanocrystals, which act as sponges absorbing heat from the sun's rays." "The other is a special glass which can darken when a current passes through it." "When the two are put together, and a voltage is applied, the amount of heat and light passing through can be controlled." "If you put smart windows like this in offices or homes or in cars, you could dramatically reduce the amount of energy needed for air conditioning, especially in hotter climates." "The banking crisis of the last few years has highlighted the astronomical sums of money that are traded around the globe." "Something around 4.5 trillion every day." "In this world time very much is money, and the margins are incredibly fine." "Alok Jha went to New York to find out exactly how much a millisecond is worth." "New York City, where a lot can happen in a short time." "A camera flash takes five milliseconds." "A blink takes 120." "But light can travel 186 miles in just one millisecond." "Here on Wall Street, they want to make deals at the speed of light because time is literally money." "The annual trades on the New York Stock Exchange are worth 35 trillion." "That's more than the combined GDP of the UK, China and the USA." "Half of those transactions are done by people, poring over screens, keeping track of price changes." "The remainder are now done by computers, automatically and remotely from all across the US, with no direct human involvement." "This is no game." "Our global economy's increasingly based on machines making decisions for themselves, as fast as the technology will allow them." "The man in charge of the computers here is a Brit" " Ian Jack," "Head Of Infrastructure at the New York Stock Exchange." "So, Ian, these machines are doing things that humans can do, just much faster." "Well, if you think about these traders here on the floor that can do maybe a couple of trades a minute." "In the world of electronic trading, high frequency trading, a computer can do thousands of trades in seconds." "Speed is absolutely key." "Computers speak in streams of electronic data that could flow between them at the speed of light, but that's in free air." "The cables between computers slow that signal down." "It's not by a huge amount, but because the trades are so fast these days, the length of wire between computers is becoming a real issue." "Every millisecond, every metre counts." "In this new high-speed world, the computers thousands of miles away from New York are the losers." "Vital milliseconds are wasted as their data travels across the country." "To remove that disadvantage, the stock exchange built this huge data centre just outside New York." "This place is incredible." "It's the size of three football pitches." "The whole purpose is to bring everyone here into the same environment and give them equal access into the market." "It levels the playing field." "So the tiniest fractions of a second count?" "Well, yeah." "Even down to this hall." "It's 200 foot long." "If you imagine a nanosecond per foot, the speed of light, even here we've got the same length of cabling from each customer's equipment into the stock market." "Wherever they're positioned in the..." "Wherever they are." "It's absolutely fair." "The financial race against time doesn't end there." "Electronic traders on the New York Stock Exchange might now be all in one room..." "..but the United States is so big, it has more than one giant trading centre." "I want to show you now something that really brings home what people are prepared to do to shave off those milliseconds." "800 miles that way is the Chicago Mercantile Exchange." "It's a massive financial hub in its own right, but it's also vital that Chicago connects to New York at the highest possible speed." "So, in 2010, one company tunnelled through mountains and under cities to lay their own optical fibre cable the whole way." "That reduced the time it took for information to flow between Chicago and New York, from 14.5 milliseconds to 13.1 milliseconds, which is fantastic, except that it cost more than 100 million." "It took just two years for that bold step to be outdone." "A line of 22 microwave towers stretching all the way from New York to Chicago." "Because sending information through the air is even faster than sending it by optical fibre." "The race to save time sounds incredible, but in the crazy world of high speed trading, it actually makes sense." "Microwaves travel at the speed of light." "They're only slowed down a fraction by the air they travel through." "And even though it cost 30 million, they slash the connection time by another five milliseconds." "So, each millisecond costs 6 million, but how much is a millisecond worth to a trader?" "Billions." "That's astonishing." "We're talking about five milliseconds off the trading time from Chicago to New York by air, erecting a series of microwave towers, which makes me..." "How many trades are being done to make up that tiny margin of advantage?" "The competition is intense because..." "Like the guy said, the trades a person can do maybe a dozen or so in a minute, or maybe over ten minutes, and these can do hundreds of thousands per minute, hundreds of millions per day." "The crazy element of this is that every millisecond is actually incredibly important to these companies." "There were people suggesting that because the New York and London Stock Exchange needs to communicate faster and faster, people flying drones across the Atlantic to make sure that the connections were as fast as possible across there." "If you remember, a couple of years ago there was the suggestion that neutrinos might travel faster than light." "Obviously not true." "But when that was announced, these algorithmic traders got so excited, they started to look into ways of using that to communicate with each other." "Can you imagine the paradoxes in time?" "They would send information back in time to make trading decisions." "Whatever makes money." "Wow." "That's fantastic." "Now, of the many issues we've discussed in terms of large and small, human population..." "That continues to grow." "We have a graphic of the of the population explosion, in the last..." "Well, in all of history." "From 1460 AD, which strikes me as a fairly manageable amount of population." "Just in the last century, the level to which that has grown through modern medicine and information to that level." "Seven billion and growing at the moment." "You, this week, came up with..." "In tandem with that is the fact that resources are strained and that if we all expect to eat the meals, for example, that the developed world eat, there's no way we can farm that amount of beef." "And you store food randomly in bits of your body, we have no idea where it goes." "So this was actually a UN suggestion a little while ago, that more of the world would take their protein from insects." "We can spin that around." "For example, this is a bug." "There's 13 grams of iron per 100 grams, which is the same as a serving of chicken liver." "I think the thing about these insects is that it's the amount of energy you have to put into the system to get the certain amount of protein out." "They're so much better." "It's like one sixth or one sixteenth of the amount you'd have to do to get the same amount of protein out from rearing cows." "This thing, whatever this thing is, there we go." "That's a locust, presumably." "Is it?" "It looks like a locust." "76 grams of calcium, which is almost the same as a fromage frais." "Cos that is your natural choice." "I'll either have a fromage frais or lots of locusts." ""Kids, kids, what do you want as a treat?" "!"" "Jo, from the very small to the very huge, the University of Central Lancashire, I believe, have they discovered, this year, the largest object in the universe?" "They've discovered what they think could be the largest object in the universe." "It's a giant cluster of galaxies, and it's four billion light years across." "Now, the entire known universe is 14.7 billion light years old." "That's right." "So it's a bit bigger across." "Yeah." "Would take 4 billion years to get from one side to the other." "And, sorry, back down to the very small," "I want to show you an animation." "Each dot of this animation I'm going to show you is an individual atom." "Now, this is made by scientists at IBM to show a kind of atom manipulation technique using a scan and tunnelling microscope." "Now, this is just proof of how well they can manipulate individual atoms using a scanning tunnelling microscope." "Jo, are you familiar with the technology that they're using?" "Somewhat." "It's brilliant." "It's astonishing, isn't it?" "It looks like ball bearings on a plate of mercury." "It doesn't look like what it is." "They could've claimed it." "They could've made this..." "A competing one with ball bearings and a plate of mercury, and make a better film." "So in that film they're manipulating different atoms." "Actually, they're molecules, They're very small molecules." "It's carbon monoxide." "One carbon and one oxygen next to each other, they're moving around as a unit." "They're still very, very small." "What's amazing about nanotechnology, which is essentially what this is, is that for a long time we could see what was going on down there, but we couldn't manipulate it." "This show you that you can manipulate individual atoms, you can make individual molecules just atom by atom." "The thing I like about this is that it had to be very cold, cos if you warm that up even a little bit," "I think that's minus 200-and lots degrees Celsius." "It's very close to absolute zero." "That's the only time atoms are still enough to do that." "The rest of the time they're buzzing around and you couldn't keep them under control." "That's really cold, it's actually quite a special situation for them to be in that they're cold enough that they'll stay where they're put." "Most atoms are moving constantly." "Is this the future of nanotechnology where you are building little machines to do..?" "Their intention with this, it's to show that they could do it, and their intention, I think, is to show that we can store information using individual atoms, which would actually hit a limit on what's known as Moore's Law," "that our storage capacity doubles every 18 months or so." "It will obviously will reach, it's a scale which is that scale, where that's the limit." "It's a point where your mobile phone could carry every movie ever made." "Anyway, Mark, how are your guts?" "Well, it's funny." "I never get to sit on a sofa with a picture of my stomach." "It'll never happen to me again." "Have we gone past your stomach now?" "This could be my..." "Is it your duodenum?" "Yeah, it's my small intestine." "Cos you've got more furry edges..." "Yeah, the furry bits and these, erm..." "So, it must be." "That's not the technical term for them, is it?" "No, villi." "There you go." "Actually, that's rather beautiful." "Thank you." "LAUGHTER" "I'm not entirely convinced by the beauty of it." "It was the furriness made me feel slightly icky." "And so that'll continue..." "That doesn't pause again, does it?" "It should just keep going." "It better." "Yes, or you've got colic in bed." "Brave sailor, as you navigate the dark trenches of Mark's insides." "Listen, it's been an absolute pleasure." "The one regret I have from the spiralling conversations about large and small is that you didn't eat one of these." "Oh, is that it?" "That's one of your regrets?" "It's one of my regrets, for no other reason than" "I would love to see a shot up your duodenum of a cockroach slowly emerging down." "Advancing like some hideous monster down." "That, to me, would've completed the show." "Other than that, it's been fantastic." "I want to send thanks to everyone who's been here." "Professor Dame Sally Davies, Dr Jo Dunkley, Alok Jha," "Dr Helen Czerski, Mark Miodownik." "It's been a pleasure to have you here." "I'm Dara O'Briain, that's all from Science Club." "Good night." "Next time we shine a light on some invisible worlds." "From the nanosphere to a hidden world within it that controls our health." "And in the studio," "Mark will reveal some liquids with gravity-defying powers." "It's quite spooky, as well." "That is really eerie and wrong." "Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd"