Summer Science Live 2022: Meteorites, llamas, chocolate and the third thumb | The Royal Society

[Music] [Applause] [Music] hello and welcome to summer science live the very first live broadcast of this special summer event my name is dr anna pozzayski i'm a material scientist writer and storyteller and unfortunately roma agrawal can't be with us today but what i'm going to be doing is taking you through the next few hours meeting some of the amazing scientists that we've got here at the royal society's summer exhibition we'll be hearing everything from the science of chocolate to taking a

deep dive down to the bottom of the ocean and even finding out how berries might hold the solution to the problem of sustainable energy throughout this afternoon we would love to hear from you and you can send your questions and comments over to our scientific experts on slido.com so if you go to slido.com and enter the code sse22 i will be taking your questions and putting them to our scientific experts so do please get in touch we'd love to hear from you we've also got live captioning today so

if you want to see that then you can click on subtitles or live captioning sorry um closed captioning sorry and you'll be able to see those there if you want to tweet us today you can get in touch as well at summer science live now to give you a bit of a background to these events the summer science exhibition all started back in 1778 with the president of the royal society then called joseph banks now joseph banks started these events called conversations which later became called soirees and

these events were basically so that the royal society's fellows could exhibit and sort of broadcast their scientific ideas their great new um amazing science that they've been working on throughout the year now eventually those events sort of became bigger and bigger and bigger and now they are public facing events where people can come and hear from uk scientists about all of the amazing stuff that they have been working on throughout the year this is the first time that the summer science exhi

bition has been back in the building since 2019 the 2020 and 2021 events were all online and if you want to check those out they're actually still online so you can go and watch those back on the royal society website so if you want even more summer science exhibition content today then those are available too but for now i'm really excited to be joined by my first guests on the sofa today uh dr seraphine pedicus and reini sharer from the university of essex and you're here at the royal society

summer exhibition talking to us about mind over mata so tell me what have you got on your head so what i'm wearing now is a easy headset so eg stands for electro encephalography so essentially it is a device it is a set of sensors embedded in this elastic cap that are able to pick up the electrical activity of my brain if there is any that is going on so yeah and more specifically this is a kind of dry electric technology as we say which you know the sensor simply needs to touch my head and can

measure the activity of my brain without having to add anything obtrusive like gel or anything else so you can put on this special swimming cap and your the electrical signals from your brain are able to be picked up by those sensors why do we want to do this well the main reason we do this is because we want to establish what we call a brain computer interface system now what is that these are systems that are able to somehow circumvent the normal pathways that humans use to interact which is t

he peripheral nervous system and our muscles of course our limbs and try to manipulate the world or establish communication directly through our brain so in this way what we really want to do is circumvent any kind of disability that disrupts the the life of people that are inflicted by it sure okay and what sort of what sort of benefits would this bring to patients well i said this can become effectively an assistive technology so you can imagine people using a brain computer interface or a bci

as we call the acronyms they can use a bci for instance to communicate through text spellers you can imagine especially how useful this would be for people for instance with terminal amiotropic lateral sclerosis that they have no other way to communicate but their brain activity is intact and they're cognitively fine and they're essentially locked into their body and what we're trying to do essentially is unlock them but there are also other applications like for instance controlling a telepres

ence robot and meeting your friends and family in other rooms or controlling an orthotic device and even these days this technology also has applications in neural rehabilitation so somehow using a bci to get rid of the bci sure so how does this compare with other technologies that are trying to do a similar thing well of course there are a number of other asus technologies there are eye trackers there are many other things i would say that the bci maybe i don't know if ryan agrees it's maybe a

kind of last resort you may say because maybe it's a little harder to establish so you need a very elaborate machine learning techniques the signal we are recording and have to use is really bad signal very low signal to noise ratio which is not the case for some of these other technologies however we are those that have the least prerequisites from the end user from the patient so you just need to be able to think right and you don't need to be able to move not even your eye blinks so okay mayb

e if i can have yeah the difference is that the difference is between having a communication and not being able to communicate so speed is not really really the biggest issue is of course is an issue because as soon as you're trained and this is not something which we put on and it's working it has to be calibrated for each individual independently um but yeah so it if someone has a muscle left and can control this muscle that's the way to go and this is then the next frontiers hopefully in a fe

w years we will have more robust systems so how far through the development process are you we can obviously see that there's a prototype here today how close do you think you are to actually implementing this there are different um systems already out there today who work and are used by patients so it really depends a little bit uh on the application so if you want to use this to really control a dextrous movement of the hand that's probably not possible now to a good degree however what we ca

n do now is support stroke patients or this is a study we're currently running to detect the intent and if we can detect an intent of the movement we can use some other technology like a robot to to move the hand and then closing the the feedback loops and hopefully the brain learns quicker another project we're working on is mathematics anxiety so how can we use this we can detect some mental states and if we can detect for example you have frustration or or anxiety or other emotional states th

en then if we can detect those we could change adaptively uh learning environment and keep the learner in the flow so that it's it's really a challenging activity and we hopefully get rid of to some of the mathematics anxiety which is really a big problem in schools sure sure that's really interesting if i cannot do i mean maybe you can say that we are at the point that now this technology is moving finally out of the lab but it's not quite there yet so there are still advances that we really ne

ed on multiple fronts both of the hardware levels so we need better signal there are a lot of people working on that both on the algorithm side so having alloys that are able to increase the accuracy of this decoding of the mental state we're trying to do and yeah maybe also in the interaction aspects so yeah we're moving towards applications real commercial industrial applications but maybe not exactly there yet these things take time it's difficult also to put in numbers because you're always

here five to ten years whatever technology is right in ten years um yeah yeah so we can pick up this number but i think the important thing is the technology is reliable enough so that the end user who really benefits for it really has has the benefit yeah yeah sure and what about the teams of scientists behind this then what what are your backgrounds in terms of the subjects that you studied and how diverse is your team in terms of the backgrounds that people have been you know bringing to the

table we are multidisciplinary bunch yeah i mean in my background is computer science with with electronic engineering biomedical engineering and mix and biomedical informatics we have have colleagues from psychology we work with people from biology from from with medical doctors with mathematicians because we need we need to involve everyone if we want to create the systems which have impact because you know if we in the lab we design something which is doing a really nice job this doesn't mean

it translates into nhs processes and procedures and really arrives at the end user so we need to include everyone which is very beautiful and very challenging at the same time because we all need to find a common vocabulary yes can you imagine 10 people on a room everyone from a different background and then you start discussing a topic so it takes some time to just bring everyone at the same level so and agree on what to agree and disagree on yeah what a biologist says a cell is very different

from a computer scientist right so you have to use find a common language yeah exactly yeah and how they understand things yeah i would imagine yeah so you've been at the summer science exhibition now for a few days what sort of reaction from the public have you had the public is super interested yeah it's it's really amazing i did not expect it that we were engaged basically from from from 10 to 6 in discussion it's very exhausting but also very good to to see that people is really interested

some they come with some misconceptions which allows us to because you know yeah we get it's not bad kind of straightforward yeah exactly so we get we get uh we are a domain which is which is very yeah challenging and let me let me just say it like this but it's good to have a conversation and see how to perceive this or getting some good feedback also from from the public because you know they they see it for the first time you try to explain it and then you figure out oh i could improve this i

could improve that and then someone makes this really nice comment and so it's really it's really pleasant even if it's challenging and tiring but it's really good yeah what's been the most challenging question that you've had from the public this week in terms i just i i had some really interesting discussions with people from so from engineering in general how to improve specific things or simply simple um questions where people challenge the the way we do it or why we do it because it's just

very often there's one word missing in the explanation and then it you know you don't really understand why why this technology can be so so important um and so just being very specific and and answering this discretion or just removing the doubts uh was really a challenge i mean this was not a really specific answer but um this was at least what was i remember the um the most having this this conversation about what's possible what's not and and just getting rid of the fears as simi's was sayi

ng about that we can remotely control people the easier way to remotely control it totally yeah exactly and it's one of the key benefits i think to being an event like this is um having that feedback from the public and you know that can even influence the direction that your research goes in hearing their you know wants and needs and concerns about the work exactly yeah fantastic well thank you for joining me today um dr sarah from vidiquez and ronnie sheriff from the university of essex thank

you so much best of luck with your research thank you i'm now joined in the studio and by georgina limon vega who's going to be talking to me about the most deadliest animal on earth which might not be the one that you expect georgina welcome to the royal society sofa thank you so tell me what is the most deadly animal on earth oh i don't know i mean probably one of the smallest ones can be very dangerous like mosquito takes a lot of vectors that uh transmit diseases to animals and also to human

s so it's also trying to find the balance between like in the interaction between different animal and species yes sure so tell me then about your research what have you brought to the royal society today yeah so well yeah i'm epidemiologist uh vet by training so well we've one of the stunts that that we have today in the royal society is trying to take people through the disease investigation outbreak investigation so from when you have a suspicion of a disease and so then they can go through a

ll the interaction um discover what the disease is how can we control it how we spread so kids can play with it and and see all the process that we go as a scientist when we are doing outbreak investigation and trying to control it fantastic so some hands-on demonstrations then of how disease is spread throughout populations and of course this is something that we have all been very sort of impacted by directly um in the last few years so i bet you've had a lot of public interest in terms of und

erstanding that spread and then presumably an important aspect is then controlling that spread right so how do you go about that yeah so i mean we have different examples i think coffee is one of the examples we have other other examples like zikan nippa virus so diseases that have animals play a role on this so we have i tried to explain what astronautic diseases so that diseases that draw me from animals to humans or vector bone diseases they want to tell me about mosquitoes or another vector

like dicks or medias um so they can go um through each stage and and and they get one disease and and go step by step so i think it is quite good so is the idea to study those kind of intermediaries you know the the animals the insects that carry the diseases like mosquitoes for example and target them as a way of stopping the spread of disease before it gets to humans yeah so we we explore different ways of controlled diseases so one is controlling the the vector so it can be simple things like

no leaving water so the the vectors cannot put eggs and reproduce there and though there was something much more complicated like modify the genetically modified the the mosquito so they cannot spread the disease uh and then we we explore other other ways of control like vaccines if there is a vaccine or not and if it is how they can see how how the way it works and other things like physical barriers or simply just cleaning the pain better when when where the animals are so you can go from ver

y simple ways of controlling diseases to very complicated genetic engineering of mosquitoes wow and so can you maybe tell me a story about one example of a disease that you've been studying to try and control the spread of yeah so i've been i've worked quite close with foot and mouth disease and lumpy skin disease um this one love the skin has been in africa for for for a long time but now it's starting to spread through asia and it's a lot of concern that it will also start spreading north now

with climate change so it is transmitted by by mosquitoes still we're still trying to understand all the vectors that can can transmit it so we've been doing a lot of work in endemic countries in africa trying to see how how it transmitted things like bringing animals together is a risk or keeping it in certain ways can control it or or spread and working with farmers with people in the field because they have also a lot of experience they've been seeing it for a long time so trying to understan

d how how it works and then bringing back samples to the love then people in the lab trying to run the test understanding better back to the field so it's kind of a a circle there to to to with a lot of uh players um so what sort of scientists do you have then working on these problems yeah so we have uh people that understand the immune response or immunologists uh try people that are developing the vaccines in the lab so vaccinologists trying to under develop vaccines that are specific for the

se diseases but we start also working with other institutions that have social scientists or economists to try to tackle every angle and and and understand it and control it yeah so what sort of questions have you had from the public then at the summer science exhibition this year yeah so we have questions like uh is it very dangerous can campidos escape from the love yeah i think some a fear that some people have but it is very highly controlled like the the biosecurity and i love dealing with

these diseases is is very high you know so for example in the high content in people you have to shower out every time you've been caught in the lab so you have to change clothes and then shower out so so it's really like highly controlled and biosecurity is very high so the risk is it's super super low so people can be sure that this is a very unlikely event well i think it's a fear that a lot of people have sure yeah but the diseases are always contained within that and is it true that some of

the um the diseases that you will study there'll be a modified form so they actually there is no risk of them kind of spreading yeah so we for example when we bring samples from endemic countries uh we call it heating activated so we've kind of warmed the sample i've created a certain temperature so the virus is inactivated so it is very low low risk so we have a lot of measurements to to to transport samples in a very safe way so we have like two or three containers and then up with an eye so

it's different ways to to make sure it's safe whenever we are so you've got lots of different scientists working on this problem yeah um can you give us a sense of what one of their labs might look like i'm sort of picturing you know great big cages of mosquitoes here and then some scientists doing gene engineering over here what's the reality like yeah okay so i'm mainly a person from the field more than they love so i interact with a lot with people from the lab but no it's quite ah well it ha

s a lot of the like microscope and a lot of the machines to like see if um for example run the pcrs to see the if if a sample have the dna of a buyer that we're interested in so yeah there are a lot of machines but bench is working on but it's nothing scary i think like people are working just like ah normally we're taking a lot of control uh safety measures but in a normal way really it's not crazy people working there or like with really a lot of equipment it's just like just a normal love so

you said that your work is mainly in the field what sort of challenges do you encounter when you're working in the field yeah so well sometimes it's the distance because we want to go and see where the disease is and for this we have to sometimes travel a lot so like long journeys and in a car and then walking a lot to get to places that are very isolated so there is one language barrier can be one so a lot of places you need a translator but you know just the languages also like people how peop

le interpret things or been doing the cultural part of it of the disease or dealing with it so i'm trying to understand why people do things because it's normally a reason behind it it's not very obvious at the beginning but so yeah i think distance and language is most of them and what's your hope for your research what do you want to achieve yeah well i think our main aim is to start controlling diseases and and make people livelihoods more sustainable because a lot of these diseases are quite

detrimental for people so it's the animal getting ill more so it's the livelihoods how they the milk or the meat they produce is probably the feast for kids to go into school so if we can improve people's livelihoods and make it better and a safer place that would be that's a dream fantastic but working with the people who are directly affected by those diseases must be really gratifying and make you feel like you're really making a difference yeah i think like once you start controlling it and

and working through the barriers it is very gratifying and yeah and very interesting discussing with them and understanding it yeah fantastic so finally what's been your favorite bit about taking part in the summer science exhibition this week uh i think just looking at the range of different uh stunts and and science that that goes in here so it is really really diverse and very exciting to see what other people is working on and potentially how can we interact with other with other scientists

yeah collaboration because working in teams is is really key to solving some of the big problems yeah yeah i think a lot of the the problems nowadays are multi-factors so we really have to take into account different things like environment the animal diseases the human side so like yeah seeing the different parts of it here is very exciting fantastic thank you for joining me georgina limon vega from the per bright institute thank you for coming um people at home don't forget you can send your

questions in to us on slido.com if you enter the code sse22 i will be putting your questions to all of our scientific experts throughout the programme today now we're going to go to edinburgh to meet dr kartik sub from the university of edinburgh who's going to tell us about how to program proteins proteins are essential for life on the planet they're tiny biological machines that perform important functions in our bodies things like repair digestion production of energy bolstering our immunity

and so on i find it hard to believe that the amazing array of proteins we see in nature makes up just a small fraction of all possible proteins i'm here to meet a team who are striving to give nature a bit of a helping hand hello i'm esme nice to meet you hey i'm coptic nice to meet you hi chris nice to meet you nice to meet you guys so tell me about this place what are we doing here so we're standing in the edinburgh genoa foundry and this is where we make the dna instructions that we use to ma

ke our custom proteins and then we go upstairs to the eppf and we express that we actually make those proteins and characterize them and understand how they behave incredible now this might like a bit of a silly question but what's a protein made of no no that's not a silly question at all proteins are chemicals long molecules that are made of building blocks called amino acids and this is an amino acid here this is a representation of it and there's 20 different amino acids with different chemi

cal variants here in nature or you can do this chemically as well you can link together thank you you can link together these amino acid building blocks to make long protein molecules and on average um proteins have about 200 to 300 building blocks inside them and so if you think about that the the with 20 different options at each of these positions even if you had 100 building block protein that's 20 to the power 100 possible combinations and that's 10 with a 130 zeros after it this is an abso

lutely staggering amount of possible proteins and only a tiny tiny fraction of those have been explored in nature despite the amazing complexity of biological systems that's a huge number so are you saying that nature's been a bit lazy when it comes to making proteins evolution is definitely a much better optimization algorithm than is a sort of innovation engine so it's much easier to make existing proteins better than it is to make totally new proteins but we don't have the same types of restr

ictions that evolution has so we can make giant leaps instead of small steps ah how hard is it to make a new protein well if you think of a protein as a tiny molecular machine that's trying to carry out a function then it's incredibly important to model the physics that goes on in this without considering the physics it'll be like a toddler trying to build a really tall stack of lego blocks without considering stability the frustrating thing about this is that many of the experiments will result

in nothing they will just come down crashing well i've heard you've got a demonstration that might clear this all up for me absolutely yeah do you want to come and see let's go so i'm seeing a lot of people in coloured tops but what actually are we doing here so we're going to do a protein folding simulation but we're going to do it with people rather than molecules interesting so should we see it in action yes let's go okay so what we're going to do now is we're going to make the polypeptide b

ecause we have the end terminus up at the front so what chris is doing here is he's trying to mimic a computer simulation each person here is going to be uh pretending to be an amino acid which is a component of a protein and as you can see they're lined up with either our left or right hand out and in a minute what we're going to do is ask them to play the simulation out and they're going to try to find other amino acids to either move towards or move away from that's it this is the way this co

mpact no no we've got a broken chain there we go there we go we've got a saw bridge we've got one saw bridge right we can rearrange can we rearrange oh can we break you up temporarily yes right compact come back to everybody together right here [Applause] right and then compact yes this is it we've got a stable right and stop this is great what have we just seen here so we ran our simulation and then the polypeptide chain the protein folded up into a compact three-dimensional structure or two-di

mensional in this case it seemed very chaotic is this a good structure so so yeah absolutely i think it's a really nice a representation of what happens on a molecular level you know when the forces that fold up the protein they make the chain wiggle and jiggle until it gets and it folds and unfolds and goes back until it gets to this energetically stable state and this is what we've got here basically hopefully you can see that we have all of the black amino acids in the middle these are hydrop

hobic they don't like water so they want to be heading out from this environment here and we've got all of the blue and red and white which like water all on the outside and you can see that the blue and red have found each other and paired up so this is a good structure what this simulation shows you is how a protein falls but one of the problems that we're excited by is the inverse problem where you give us the shape this shape for example to design a vaccine for a virus and then ask the quest

ion what sequence of colors should we line up in order to end up here all right thanks very much amino acids [Applause] well that did seem quite difficult in the end absolutely so hopefully the demonstration showed you that it's difficult to design a sequence of building blocks that will make a protein that forms into a compact structure repeatably and this is really this difficult problem is the reason that kartik and i collaborate between the school of informatics and the school of biological

sciences to make new computer algorithms that we can use to make proteins that go beyond nature computer algorithms are very effective at detecting patterns and what chris and i are trying to do is try to teach these algorithms to detect patterns that result in consistent successes or perhaps even failures now kartik i heard that you actually worked at disney before you returned to a life of academia was it a similar skill set you used there well that was magic of a different kind about 10 years

ago the animation and special effects industries rely heavily on approximate physics model uh but what's really cool about the work that chris and i are doing together is that this goes beyond entertainment we're trying to solve problems maybe even speed nature up so you're speeding up nature with the help of technology now is this just science for the sake of science or is it science that can actually help us one day it's going to help humanity there's no doubt about that natural bridges are i

ncredibly important we use them broadly already in all sorts of areas but we can design new proteins that go beyond nature then we can start to solve problems in medicine and agriculture related to sustainability in the environment and it's starting to happen now we really are at the beginning of our revolution when it comes to protein design well thank you so much for chatting to me guys and there you have it nature has so many proteins left undiscovered and experts are using ai to try and disc

over them and hopefully these discoveries will help us all out someday i'm so excited to see how the science progresses in the future back to you guys at the royal society researchers there from the university of edinburgh telling us all about how to program proteins it's mind-blowing stuff i'm joined here now on the royal society sofa with dr chloe james from the university of salford and dr heather allison from the university of liverpool welcome thank you now tell me about your exhibit it's a

ll about um the microbial muppet masters tell me more puppet masters so the so the puppet masters these this is what we're working with uh these are bacteriophages okay so what's a bacteriophage a bacteriophage is a virus but it doesn't infect human or animal cells it actually infects bacterial cells okay and so they use these tail fibers to infect the bacteria that they're targeting to recognize the molecules on the surface and then they can infect them and we're researching the different ways

that they then can change the evolution of bacterial populations so this is a big blown up 3d printed version how small would one of these be in real life yeah this is absolutely massive so normally this capsid head would be around about 50 nanometers in diameter so yeah incredibly small so bacteria are about a millionth of a meter and so phages are about 20 times smaller than that so pretty tiny so uh we've got some models of so these are models of bacteria um in which case we need even tinier

oh well these are still massive models of bacteria and we've designed them to demonstrate some of the different ways that phases can affect bacteria okay and what does this all have to do with us really why do you want to study these bacteriophages well i mean bacteriophages are the most abundant organism on the planet for every grain of sand there's about a thousand bacteriophages so there's billions and billions and millions of them but there's a huge amount we don't know about them in our par

ticular research we're interested in cystic and fibrosis lungs of people with cystic fibrosis are infected with uh well chronically infected with lots of different bacteria and fungi and phages have quite an important role to play in that infection um there's a bit of a jekyll and hyde relationship isn't that in in that some phases are being used as therapy to kill the bacteria so that's a really exciting new treatment particularly as lots of bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics but the ty

pe of phages that we're really really interested in actually perform a partnership with the bacteria and they can help the bacteria to adapt and survive longer in the cystic fibrosis lung so the more we can try and understand how that works then we can better understand how we can manage these infections so hacking nature to kind of turn it against itself in a little way to contact to cure these diseases um talk to me about these other models that you've got what we've heard about bacteriophages

looking at this what's this one so this is a model of the the way in which we can use phages for phase therapy okay so check clubby you want to show them yeah okay so this is the bacterium this is a phage um what you notice with these phases is all the phases are different they're incredibly diverse so there's different colors there's different shapes and sizes so if i try to infect this bacterium let's give a go with this one the phage recognized molecules on the cell in a very specific way an

d not every interaction with the phage is going to be productive so do you want to try it doesn't always work yes okay so i'm a little phage and i'm coming into my bacteria i'm going to adjoin to the surface nothing else nothing happened okay right i'm going to try this one right let's see no nothing happened so this would be happening in the body for example right they'd be coming along lots of different phases interacting with this um bacteria i feel like you killed themselves i cut this out a

mazing look at all the faces that you made okay so we've reproduced phages using a bacterial cell look identical to the phage that did the infection yes and they're going to go on to kill other cells that look just like this so these will then go on and they'll meet another one and so if this was causing the infection all of its siblings are going to die as well okay so what we want to do is to modify one of these so that it doesn't reproduce in that way is that right well if you want to do use

it for therapy you don't want to modify it at all you want to harvest its ability to see the pathogen and let it do its thing gotcha so we actually want to be helping these little guys do what they do and seek out ourselves seek out its bacteria and let it do its thing so how do you do that so people can isolate phases from all over the place the most common place is from sewage um and then you purify the phage out from there okay the the big challenge is that particularly in cystic fibrosis the

re's been some big good news stories recently where phage therapy has worked but it's quite important to manage expectations for that because as these models demonstrate the phases are incredibly specific so some phages that are able to kill a bacterial population in the lungs of one person might not work in the same even if it's the same species they might not work against the other bacteria in somebody else so at the moment it's really tantalizing exciting um therapy but the technology is not

quite there yet to sort of have this as it's never going to be a one fits all type of therapy okay so does that mean that you would have to work with the individual patient and study their cells and what's going on in the bacteria in them in order to tackle it correctly and so it's going to work for their body is that right potentially it'll have to be that specific yeah potentially yeah so this is what we call personalized medicine and exactly it's something that we're hearing quite a lot about

now as kind of the future of medicine and being able to um target what we do to an individual patient is that ever going to be realistic in your work it it could be we're not sure but actually we want to get across the message that there are other types of phase as well so we work with temperate phage so if you remember earlier i said sometimes phases form a partnership with their bacteria and can make the bacteria cause more severe disease so we want to understand how that works as well have w

e got time to tell you show you our second model quickly so this is the second model that demonstrates that um so you're going to try and infect me now aren't you well not you personally yeah absolutely only your bacteria because bacteriophages only infect bacteria yeah right so um let you have a go yes i'm excited about this right so same thing again bacteriophage coming along to the bacteria interacting with it no results no it's fine i'll let you have another go okay right it's got a circle o

h here we go oh very good now that had a very different effect on the sale didn't it yes the sale actually grew ah okay so at the summer science exhibition we're referring to that as the acquisition of a superpower i like it tell me more okay so this is the kind of thing that we're studying so what's happened is during the phase infection the genetic information inside the phage has been acquired by the host cell and it's entered into the chromosome of the bacteria now that could be anywhere the

bacterial cells acquired anywhere from 50 to about 250 genes that's a lot of genetic information and it's been able to change the traits of the host cell we don't actually understand a lot about the traits that have been altered and that's what we're studying but it's this ability my claw hands it's this ability to to manipulate the bacteria like a puppet master i see that is gives the name of our exhibition and it's those traits that we're studying so we've actually found one of the phases tha

t we're studying that changes the rate at which the the set the the pathogen pseudomonas originator isolated from the lung of a cystic fibrosis patient the rate at which it can grow so we know that this is one of the traits that is given by a single bacteriophage interesting bacteria have been bombarded with phage for millions of years and they've kind of been in this evolutionary dance and they've so phages over the years have um enabled pathogens to evolve and if we can understand more about t

hat we can understand how to better manage the disease so there's all this dark matter at the moment isn't there and we're trying to pull the curtains back on that and hopefully the ideal therapy is one that doesn't kill the bacteria but actually makes it less well adapted to the environment and less able to cause disease because then the sort of development of resistance will be slower because you're not actually trying to kill the bacterium so that's like a real long-term plan but i think our

part to play with that at the moment is to identify the function of those genes so once you understand how these genes work you can then start trying to we can target those traits yes we can we can make those advantages less advantageous gotcha so we've got a question in on slido from kate who asks will bacteriophages be the solution the solution to the antibiotic crisis well that requires a crystal ball and i don't think any of us have a crystal ball but it's certainly one of the solutions that

certain many labs across the world are working on fantastic i think you know antimicrobial resistance is such a global challenge and to tackle it then it needs to come from all sides from all kinds of sectors of the community and there's lots of exciting new therapies coming along and i think phage therapy is one of them absolutely yeah fantastic and i think the uk is playing a big part in that as well so some of the first clinical trials have occurred in the uk and i am very proud to say and b

e a part of the uk scientific community yeah well thank you for telling me all about your work it's completely blown my mind i knew nothing about this before but now i understand a lot more so thank you so much for joining us today dr chloe james and heather allison i'm delighted to be joined now by another of our scientists at the summer science exhibition is dr cena fisher from the university of nottingham who's going to be telling me about a topic that is very close to my heart we're going to

be hearing about how science is impacting the research on the science of chocolate now don't forget you can send our scientists your questions at slido.com by putting in the code sse22 and i will be putting your questions to our scientists so dr cena fisher welcome to the sofa thank you for having me come and tell me about your research that you're exhibiting here yes so we studied the chocolate making process and in particular one aspect of that and that's the fermentation so i brought you her

e a cacao pod this is sort of the outside they come in a lot of different shapes and sizes and colors some are red some are green and we cut one open here for you to see the inside so these are the cacao beans and they are surrounded by this pulp you can see a little bit better here it's sort of moist and and white initially and it contains a lot of sugar and if you smell the inside of these beans inside of this pod what can you smell it smells quite fresh quite nutty fruity fruity citrusy maybe

but certainly doesn't smell like cacao no no chocolate whatsoever no no chocolate whatsoever in comparison if you smell these beans yeah so these feel much more dry than what we just had there it's almost like quite astringent quite sort of sour almost like coffee yeah so this is certainly much more nutty and much more going into the direction of chocolate already so we're getting close here now the difference between this fresh bean these fresh beans coming from the pod and these drier beans i

s that these were fermented fermentation is of course microbes acting on food or other products in this case the cacao beans and changing them in a way and yeah it has been this has been a process that has been utilized by farmers for ages to make chocolate in the end without the fermentation you you could roast these beans all you liked you would never be able to turn them into chocolate they would remain very bitter they would remain these citrusy flavors would remain predominant and you would

not get the chocolatey taste so in the production making process of chocolate making that fermentation process is crucial to the flavors that we love absolutely yes so where does the science come in then we study this process we investigate which microbes are present during the fermentation and how they change the fermentation is usually done not usually it's done at the farms so the cacao is harvested by farmers and these beans and the mucusy-like pulp is are scooped into big wooden boxes and

then the beans are left there to ferment for about five days and after that time they would have this color and they would be placed outside to dry and then they're ready to shipment to the chocolatier and then they would proceed with further refinement steps and a good chocolatier is able to really tease out all these great notes in the chocolate but if they get low quality beans there's nothing they can do about it so the fermentation is really crucial in this process and what we want to know

if we have chocolate that tastes fruity has berry notes and we have a chocolate in comparison that has more floral notes or almost tastes like vanilla then what was the difference during the fermentation okay so sort of reverse engineering almost working out what happened during that process what microbes were acting to create that fermentation exactly and then i guess if you want to in the future purposefully create certain flavors in a chocolate you would be able you would know what bacteria o

r what microbes are required exactly yeah it's much more complicated than let's say for example wine making because as you know wine is also fermented but here we need yeast and it's mainly yeast there are a lot of different yeast strains known to brewers and they would even cultivate them and add them to their certain wines although yeast is already growing on the grapes themselves so it's not technically required but they can refine it this process but for the fermentation of cacao we've notic

ed that if you just add yeast for example you would not be able to produce these cacao notes and if you just add bacterias of certain kind you would also not get these different flavors what you really need to have is a specific combination and of course if i start to combine only three things it goes up but we have we have studied this in several thousand samples now and we see hundreds and difference of microbes during the fermentation their profiles change from day one to day five in in conce

rt with that the ph changes the temperature changes on all of these are important factors so it's just it's a much more complicated process very complex process and so are those uh the microbes that are responsible for the fermentation are those present they must be present presumably sort of in the bean or in the place in which the beans are coming from so do you see bacterial variation in terms of where the beans have grown and is that the sort of root of the different flavors it's an excellen

t question yes so we asked this as well because it wasn't known right so this process was completely not studied scientifically farmers have a certain ability to control fermentation by stirring changing temperature and so on and so forth but what we did was we went to colombia and to trinidad and we worked with farmers there they are usually small farms family run and we were asking them well would we be allowed to participate in your harvest and take samples so we went we took samples from the

surface of the pod from the inside of the pod from the boxes that the fermentation is occurring in and then throughout in order to answer these questions and basically the answer is they are everywhere and they are very diverse between different farms so not even say colombia has a different microbiome to trinidad but a specific farm in colombia has a very specific microbiome and this is why if you want to have a really impressively unique experience in tasting chocolate you need to buy single

origin chocolate because there you get these unique flavor developments these fine flavor chocolates also have the characteristic that they don't taste the same throughout so you start tasting a piece of chocolate and it would start out maybe a little bit bitter a little bit sour but then this would fade away and you would get all kinds of other notes coming through and this is characteristic for all fine flavored chocolate as soon as you start to bulk which is what you get in uh bulk produce ch

ocolate you lose that characteristic so you sort of yeah you sort of blend if in a blend you wouldn't get those specific flavors yes super interesting um how does your research impact the people that are responsible for growing the beans you know farmers that are working on this does your research help them in any way this is our goal yes so we work with as i mentioned these small farmers actually the majority of cacao especially in south america is grown on small farms so for them if a fermenta

tion doesn't go quite well and produces what we call off flavors which could be very bitter notes or sometimes almost moldy tastes then they the quality of the bean would be much lower than they would like and they'd have to sell it at a less price than they need to basically sustain their businesses so our hope is by correlating flavors and microbes we would be able to advise them on best practices how do they avoid these bad fermentation outcomes sure dr cena fisher from the university of nott

ingham thank you for explaining the science of chocolate to me and i wish you all the best with your research thank you very much thank you we're now going to go to dr paul hanel from the university of essex who's going to tell us about smashing stereotypes nowadays it feels like we're in conflict all the time in parliament online even around the dinner table we believe our values are poles apart from that of our opponent and there's the no common ground between us i'm in chiswick to meet two re

searchers who want to flip this idea on its head what if our values aren't quite as different as we first thought hello hi guys thank you for meeting me here so let's talk about your research what motivated you to tackle this thorny issue for me it's a fascination with values and how people mentally picture values in their heads and how they mentally picture the values of other people because values are at the heart of our most bitter conflicts such as war but it's not just war is it because it'

s we see it on a smaller scale as well yes so we can also see value conflicts in politics for example in political political debates around issues such as brexit or climate change sexism or racism and these debates make it appear like the country is quite polarized so not only on a political spectrum between leaf and remain voters or conservative and labour voters but also between young and older people for example and all these debates make it appear like we all have very different values is th

at climate change an example of that because it's something i really care about but sometimes feels that other people just don't care the same way it's a great example when we see the news about climate change and the damage that it's causing and then we see examples of behaviors that just keep going that keep damaging our environment we can be tempted to draw very sweeping conclusions other people just don't care about the environment we often i think we often forget that the things other peopl

e are doing for the environment so in this morning hundreds of thousands or even millions of people have been commuting um by public transport or by bike or walked as opposed to using their car and at the same time we can forget the times when we've behaved in a manner that's not consistent with protecting the environment times when we've done things that you know we know we shouldn't that are perhaps environmentally damaging but often we've got a good reason for doing them we have a reason that

we can see like we we had to make this particular journey that perhaps was actually unnecessary and that's natural that's human instinct to of course see the reasons why we do things what we struggle with is to see the reasons why other people do things and then we can we can draw big conclusions about differences between the values other people have in our own but are they right so i hear you have a demonstration for me absolutely should we go we do yes yeah let's go come on okay here we are h

ow has your work led us to a snooker hall we have found that people are actually much more similar and different in their values so the way we find that out is we give people surveys which ask them about their values and these are surveys basically ask them questions about a variety of abstract ideas that people consider to be important in nations around the world these are ideas like equality freedom independence achievement power tradition the list is very long to demonstrate let's [Music] let

's assume that the wet balls represent labour voters and the blue balls represent conservative toby waters and so if we asked labour voters about the values of conservative voters and the other way around we usually find that they perceive the values of the other group to be quite different to their own values people think their values are very far apart yes but actually we find that so for example for the value helpfulness we find that um 93 overlap um mostly meaning that both labor and conserv

ative authors believe that helpfulness is important or very important and it's particularly important to remember in all this that people are agreeing that these values are highly important so if we imagine this end of the snooker table as being the distribution of people who are saying that these ideas are really matter a great deal to them there are relatively few people who consider them to be say less important if we imagine this end of the table being those people who think the values are l

ess important there aren't so many compared to the people who agree highly with the concepts interesting so what you're saying is even if i might think my values are stronger than the person i'm disagreeing with i'm probably wrong exactly so a lot of the time we're all just arguing about nothing do you think that we could apply this to politicians when they're tackling big subjects well perhaps but that's also very complex because the vested interests and the group processes and involved in poli

tical debate but with people in general certainly we found that simple tasks can engage people with discovering their own values and the values of other people and then they learn that their values aren't as far apart as they thought and actually the differences between people tend to be more and how they imagine fulfilling the values than in the values themselves amazing thank you both well there we go maybe the best way to settle a conflict is to focus on what we have in common rather than our

differences right then are you guys keen for a game of winners days on absolutely who's first [Music] researchers from the university of essex they're talking about smashing stereotypes i'm now joined at the royal society with by laura holland from the rosalind franklin institute laura tell me what do llamas have to do with viruses well that's an excellent question not an obvious pairing i think it's fair to say so we are here talking about a piece of work that has been ongoing since the early

days of the pandemic and we're based at the rosalind franklin institute which is a research institute in south oxfordshire and we're working with colleagues at reading university at reading they have a herd of research llama which again probably isn't a phrase that many people expected to hear and we are really interested in a very specific type of antibody that llama produce so llama their cousins alpaca and camels all have this very special quirk of their immune system that some of their antib

odies which are the molecules that your body makes in response to seeing a disease or a pathogen or something it isn't expecting to see those molecules i'll just show you this this is a human antibody okay so you can see that it's quite large it's got several components to it the most important thing that your antibodies do is that they stick really specifically like a key and a lock to one particular target now this is human this is llama so it does the same job it sticks very specifically but

you can see it's missing all of this heavy complicated machinery and it's just doing the sticking bit so we've known that llama can do this for a long time uh it's 1993 i think it was discovered that their immune systems work in a slightly different way but when the pandemic came around we thought okay we we know how to work with these we've been using them for a long time what could we do against covert what would a what would a nanobody do against this emerging pandemic threat so we produced t

hese we um injected llama at uh reading with and i'll use the virus now with this is curvid so just a friendly curvature you can ignore the eyes they don't have eyes in real life you can see all the spikes we're familiar with the term spike proteins so we exposed the llama to just the spike so we didn't give the virus any live virus to the llama just in the way that the vaccines work we showed them very specifically the spike protein and that causes the llama to produce antibodies so these emerg

e and those antibodies stick very specifically to the spike protein and what we discovered is that they stick to it which helps the um the immune system of the llama recognize that there's a threat they also kill the virus they stop it from working because spike is how the llama is how their virus gets into the cells when it's infecting so by effectively blocking those spike proteins you block an infection and the virus dies so we had these what we then did the llama's immune system does a brill

iant job of making quite strong sticking but we thought we could we could improve that so by taking it through several rounds of um of iteration looking at the exact sequence of the antibody we made it stick even more tightly even more strongly and what we can do with the rosalind franklin is we can use very very advanced microscopes to look at the exact atomic structure of the nanobody bound to the spike so that we can really understand okay it's sticking really well there what is that what doe

s that mean for the amino acid sequence of the protein how can we make it stronger how can we make it better so we now have an antibody agent that is uh curative so it works beautifully well in animal studies um it completely cures covid in those animals they get better in a very short space of time and really excitingly you don't have to give it as a an injected therapy so you don't have to deliver it straight into the bloodstream you can deliver it as a nasal spray so a quick sniff the nanobod

y goes into the bloodstream does its job mops up the virus kills the virus so really exciting obviously you can't overstate these things because it needs to get into humans next and we've got a lot of work to do but in terms of how drugs work it's it's a good a good candidate that's really exciting so that's the next stage then is it is human clinical trials um how long would those tend to take you know when might we start that sort of thing that a million dollar question is it so as a imaging i

nstitute so we're basic research our interest in nanobodies has never been in in the therapeutic space we don't make drugs we're not a pharmaceutical company so we're partnering with um with someone else to do that next phase and we are hopeful that we'll see that um move into the next phase in the next few months but need to keep everything crossed yeah very exciting how did we first discover that llamas had this different way of immune their immune system working do you know that that is the s

tory that i would love to know the answer to as well so they have been known about since um since 1993 like i said um different camelids have different proportions so some some antibodies in the llama look a bit more like this um others are the tiny nanobodies that we're interested in they have different percentages so camels have a different percentage of nanobody to large antibody to alpaca who has a different percentage to llama we don't actually know what the evolutionary advantage of that i

s so we don't know why their immune systems have come up with this this solution it must be a solution to a problem because that's how evolution works but yeah we're not sure what it is but we're very glad that they do because they're very useful so definitely so there could be lots of other animals out there whose immune systems work in in other ways like the llamas that might be out there that's something you've got you also find nanobodies in sharks but from a uh husbandry perspective i'd say

llama where they're the better candidates dangerous yeah in south oxfordshire absolutely fantastic so for you then in terms of the teams that you work with your based working on the sort of molecular side of this you know they're very very zoomed in working out what what the atoms are doing inside these materials um what other types of scientists do you work with um so at the rosalind franklin institute we were we were born as a technology institute so we're there to make the next generation of

microscope the next generation of tools that will help us see further into cells see see life in a new way the nanobody work actually is part of that so nanobodies are used as a tool to stabilize proteins when we're imaging them to help hold them still or it's a general rule that the more interesting a target the harder it is to look at so that tends to be because very very interesting proteins doing really important jobs um they're often based in the membrane of the cell which means that they

they have complicated moving parts so we often just need to hold them still while we while we image them and nanobodies were used as a tool in that but we work with all kinds of scientists we work with physicists and computer specialists to build detectives and build new microscopes we work with people like clinicians to bring us new interesting research problems to apply to our microscopes and our technologies so it is a a very interdisciplinary place to be yeah definitely and so let's hope not

but maybe one day a similar type virus will come along that's different from covert and we will again science will have to come together and react to that very very quickly will your type of work be able to sort of learn from what you've done with this type of disease and in the future produce something maybe quite quickly to be able to tackle that yes so that's a really important next step for us so so the curvid work is incredibly important but it it makes far more sense to pursue that as a a

s a pipeline that we can apply to new emerging threats to uh or even to existing viruses because it's really important to know that there's there's hardly any therapies against viral disease so we can vaccinate and that's a we've seen the importance of vaccination as a tool um but vaccination isn't for everyone there are there will always be some groups who can't be vaccinated for medical reasons or where vaccines are hard to deliver out into communities in low and middle income countries um so

having a therapy that works is really important so we're we're hoping that um our nanobody tools will form part of a 100-day challenge so the g7 met um after during the the covered pandemic and they set the challenge of okay for the next time this happens and it will happen again 100 days is the target you need to get therapies and vaccines out within the first 100 days to stop pandemic situations occurring and we think tools like this could be really important in that 100-day challenge super im

pressive and very exciting stuff laura laura holland from the roslin franklin institute thank you so much for joining me we're now going to talk to the young researchers zone so the young researchers zone for the very first time actually at the royal society summer exhibition has featured um students from schools across the country who are all running research projects as part of the royal society's partnership grant scheme this week more than 180 students have been here in the building at the r

oyal society demonstrating their projects to the public in lots of new and creative ways so our topic is are we excusing the role of medical polymers in their plastic pollution crisis so medical plastics and disposal plaques it's a real problem in today's society so there are lots of plastics used in hospitals syringes needles masks stuff like that and it's actually quite difficult to dispose of them most hospitals burn them away using incinerators but obviously that pollutes the environment and

really isn't the best solution so we did our research into contact lenses now the problem with contact lenses is the hydrocarbon gels that are patented by big companies so it's actually quite difficult to understand what's going on inside them and how we aim to dispose of them so what we've decided to do we went through a bunch of different possibilities and ways so we initially tried burning them we tried soaking them in water but obviously i didn't work and then we came to this we found a way

using alcohol hand gels to actually break them down and we're hoping to go for a spectroscopy in the university of liverpool to find out what's actually happening molecularly we also set up this board here where we do a sort of dot survey to see what many people think about like this pollution so the question in the middle how should we deal with uh medical plastic waste use as you can see we have a load of different answers so first burn it so we put it in incinerator get rid of it chemically

problem is it releases greenhouse gases into the environment can be very bad for our environment as we know because of climate change and everything like that the second way is to find ways to help it decompose which is what we've actually explored our project into now the problem with this is there are many different types of plastics and it's actually quite hard to find an easy way to make them decomposed that's not very industrialized another way is to recycle it which many people have done b

ut the problem is some plastics aren't recyclable so it's not very practical and then our final way to prevent this is to use less of them but the problem with today's society is not willing to really regress and go back and stop using things that have already been established as good things to use for convenience-wise and that's basically our project so we're studying uh the genomics from a chloroplast genome from two different cultivars of daffodils and we're trying to see how different they a

re because one's uh called hornatus and the other one is called empress and they obviously look very different so we hypothesize that they are going to have some differences in their genomic sequence um and also the fact that they come from two different countries one of them comes from england and the other comes from france so how we figured out their genomic sequences was we manually round up the frozen dafter leaves and then we used a bunch of buffers and things to chemically break open the

cell wall so that we could really access the chloroplasts in the dna once we got the purified extracted dna sample we cut it into fragments this is a mnion and it is oxford nanocore technology and there's a current running through the nanopores and each base of dna there's four different bases disturbs the current by a different amount and the computer knows by how much each space disturbs the current so we get a reading like this it's quite disturbed but then the computer knows which base is wh

ich and it deciphers the current like this so based off our research we created a little kind of competition using the pets which you use in the dna extraction so we have three levels you have easy medium and hard and we time you and you have to try and recreate the pictures in these multi-well trays so if i were to make let's say i'll do the hardware [Music] [Music] the best [Music] it is a competition though so you do a lot faster and then we put the top times on our leaderboards so our focus

was data logging and we're really interested to see how we can use data logging to improve a plane and the model of a plane um so what we did is we took these uh devices called microbits now what we use these for is that we put these inside the planes as we throw them and it means that we can actually see what planes work best how far they fly and what issues might be going on we actually had 30 different plane models and we fitted these micro bits inside and we threw them across the classroom a

nd we were able to figure out what the best design for airplane was and how it could fly easily by using this data we've also tried more drastic conditions so we've done it in high winds we've done it in some unreliable winds and we're using it to test out different planes and effectively work out what the best plane for which situation is our inspiration for this was the um boeing 737 max fight they added an on-board ai artificial intelligence to allow them to be flow and the ai was basically p

rogrammed to you know save as much fuel as possible so it does a dip here that's its planet we'll do a dip here that'll save a lot of feel and it'll be much more ecoefficient and you can see as the pilot was effectively he was convinced that the ai had gone wrong he was committed it was going to crash so he was trying to protect the people on his plane by keeping it upwards and as the plane tries to correct itself because at this point thinks it should be down here he wrenches away the controls

and pretty much panics um taking the plane up to a height so much and so fast that it stalls and as you can see it begins to plummet back down and by the time that they're you know trying to re-entry control it's too late they're moving too fast and unfortunately regrettably they do crash it really is this data we're using and data logging is the future and it will save so many lives in the future not only for flights but in every aspect and it's very important young people get involved because

you do have access to things like these micro bits which are only 15 pounds online and you can code it online when we are able to simulate this sort of thing in a simple model so you can see it is sensitive to movement and you can see the path of this [Music] our entire medical system really relies on antibiotics this would be the biggest health crisis that we've experienced this century we don't hear about it but it's already here nobody is safe until we're all safe what would a world without a

ntibiotics look like [Music] well i think it would look a lot like the past where a lot of people would die younger than they do now just think about war more people died of infections than their wounds than died actually on the battlefield [Music] here man has locked his heaviest artillery against premature death antibiotics the discovery of various classes of antibiotics in the 20th century had a profound impact on healthcare so treatment of infection suddenly became very straightforward and i

t's something that we benefit a lot from today antibiotics protect people during operative surgery cesarean sections replacement joints let alone cancer treatments antibiotics added on average 20 years life to everyone [Music] [Music] i went to the hospital the emergency room they said they gave them a broad spectrum antibiotics and then they took me to another room and they're like your son has an infection we don't know the source we were in the icu with like 10 doctors and they said he wasn't

really going to make it at that point i knew that he was dead i could feel it and that's when we learned that simon had contracted an antibiotic resistant bacterium a superbug and i had never heard of any of this use penicillin today an english physician dr alexander fleming alexander fleming's discovery of penicillin was immense noticing that in a petri dish where bacteria were growing there were white areas where the bacteria were not growing and he realized that something had happened he loo

ked and found the fungus penicillin our first effective antibiotic that saved masses of lives most antibiotics come from soil and fungi [Music] when i expose bacteria to antibiotics they're gonna become resistant which is very bad because we haven't discovered a new antibiotic in like the last 30 years [Music] growing up back in mexico you didn't need a prescription to get an antibiotic you had a little bit of a sore throat you go to the pharmacy and get an antibiotic and that only gives more an

d more chances to these bugs to acquire mutations to become persistent [Music] the time may come when penicillin can be bought by anyone in the shops then there is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to the non-lethal quantities of the drug makes them resistant the situation today is more serious than people realize it's actually the first real study looking at all the data 494 million patient records to model what is happening [Music] it is

predicted that by 2050 10 million people are gonna die every year from complications with superbugs resistant microbes so we really have to find alternative strategies to find against these bugs a world without antibiotics i sometimes call it the post antibiotic apocalypse would impact on our food chain too because animals would get ill plants would get ill and die we would really be in the most dreadful mess as an individual i think one of the most important things is don't ask for antibiotics

if they're not offered to you if you are prescribed antibiotics then make sure you finish the course of antibiotics that you're given because if you don't finish the course even if you're feeling better there might be some residual infection that could become resistant we have probably found the easy to find antibiotics but that doesn't mean there are not many more to be found if we keep recycling the same old treatments then the problem is just going to exacerbate one of the main bottlenecks w

ith antibiotic research is that the easiest thing to do is to look at the structures of existing antibiotics and modify those slightly to try to overcome the resistance it's much more challenging to find a completely new class of antibiotics so we have to fund quite widely in order to be able to identify those strategies that are going to work best i think if there were more awareness then there would be more general pressure from society on governments and on companies to fund more research int

o targeting this problem we should be anticipating problems and doing something about them before they become enormous global crises humanity's addiction to fossil fuels has to end we all know that but the problem of how to power our lives without them is one of the biggest challenges scientists face today i'm on my way to meet an expert who may have found a solution hi i'm esme nice to meet you hi i'm nick so what's brought us here today behind us we actually have the tate modern now the tape b

efore it was an art gallery actually used to be a power station supplying energy across the city and the country and at the uk aea we are trying to develop this new energy source called fusion energy i've heard of fusion and i've had people get really excited about it but what actually is it fusion is the process that powers the sun and in fact the powers all starts right inside the center of our sun you get atoms made of nuclei and it's the nuclei of small light elements that come together unde

r extreme conditions inside the center of the sun and when they're under the pressure of those extreme conditions they can actually get so hot and so energetic that they fuse together and that fusion is actually what produces the energy for the sun to create its heat and light i hear you have a demonstration for me yeah i certainly do shall we go and check it out all right so you're trying to create the conditions of the sun here on earth how is that even possible yeah it does sound quite a chal

lenge and it is uh and we need to create some very extreme conditions and we need to create a plasma inside our machines and what is plasma plasma is actually what we have here inside our plasma wall now it's quite hard to see and that's because we've been blessed with some bright sunshine today plasma is actually just the fourth state of matter we all know about solids and you can heat those up melt them into a liquid and then you heat up liquid boils and evaporates into a gas but then when you

heat a gas it can actually get super hot and ionized into plasma at our fusion site in oxfordshire we put in our hot hydrogen gas until it turns into a plasma and then we can control all of that hot plasma with powerful magnets it all sounds very clever how far have you got with fusion so we've actually come quite far not long ago our jet machine achieved a world record for fusion energy output we proved that you can actually produce a high level of fusion energy for a sustained amount of time

and that's a really crucial thing for us to be able to prove that we can do it over a small amount of time now and then we'll make it happen over a much longer amount of time when we scale it up to power plants amazing and tell me about the research you're bringing to the summer science exhibition one of the key challenges in fusion is actually dealing with high heat loads so around the edges of the machine we have to develop materials that can withstand some level of heat and we also are trying

to reduce that heat load using what's called a diverter where we can actually steer the plasma down into these exhaust channels and help us to get rid of some of the excess heat and also get rid of some by-products that might have built up helping us to make a more efficient stable plasma and meaning we don't need to repair and replace parts of the fusion machines when we make power stations out of this stuff how far away are we from seeing fusion power plants here on earth we hope that we're n

ot actually that far away we're moving into what we call the delivery era where now our focus is on trying to develop the full-scale fusion power plants of the future one of our main projects we're working on right now is called step and this is actually a uk design for a prototype fusion power plant in this country and step is aiming to be on the grid by 2040 so really not that long away to wait and we're really excited about step project incredible well there you go harnessing the power of the

sun here on earth could give us sustainable energy in the future the ocean covers over 70 percent of our planet and yet what we know about it barely scratches the surface beneath its swell is a largely unexplored universe until recently beyond the gaze of human eyes so why do we know so little about the ocean for a start immense pressure presents huge challenges for divers and equipment alike in many ways it's easier to send a mission to space but with new technology such as submarine robots th

is hidden realm is starting to reveal its secrets [Applause] so what's down there well there's water lots of it 1 billion 419 million 120 000 cubic kilometers to be about as precise as you can be and in that water there's fish the main source of protein for around three billion people but there's a lot more than just fish down there extraordinary otherworldly creatures dwell in the depths with new ones discovered all the time many are gelatinous jellyfish that disintegrate if you try to catch th

em in a net in 2020 scientists found the giant siphonophore apolemia an organism made up of millions of interconnected clones its thin twisting body reminiscent of a long piece of string and the ocean floor is far from being the flat and featureless seabed you might imagine if you were to drain the ocean the landscape would emerge just as spectacular as anything on land boasting some of the highest peaks deepest canyons and longest river channels on the planet there are even waterfalls under the

sea the largest being the denmark strait cataract here the cold waters of the greenland sea meet the warmer waters of the irminga as the cooler water is forced down it creates a giant three and a half thousand meter drop undetectable to anyone who might be bobbing about on the surface and that's nothing compared to the chilling 11 000 meter drop to the bottom of the mariana trench the deepest place on earth it was here that in 2020 scientists made an alarming discovery at a depth of around seve

n thousand meters in one of the most remote and inaccessible crevices on earth they came across a new species of crustacean and it had plastic in its stomach they called it eurythene's plasticus a living reminder that even though we've barely begun to explore the ocean our impact on it is already being keenly felt in fact by 2050 it's estimated there could be more plastic in the sea than fish it's not just plastic that's a problem there are also dead zones areas with insufficient oxygen to suppo

rt marine life these are becoming more common thanks to pollution the sad truth is when it comes to the ocean the reach of human activity goes far beyond the reach of our knowledge it's easy to feel detached from the ocean particularly if you live in land and this might explain why we've treated it as a dumping ground but the more we explore the more we find it has to offer for example the gene pool of deep ocean life such as sponges and microorganisms could hold the key to solving the urgent pr

oblem of antibiotic resistance more importantly the ocean is key to almost all life on the planet half the oxygen we breathe comes from marine photosynthesizers such as phytoplankton and seaweed the ocean also regulates our climate mediating temperature by distributing solar heat around the planet we may not feel it but every one of us is affected every day by the role the ocean plays in our finely balanced earth system and yet the efforts we've made so far to protect and preserve this vital lif

e source are well a drop in the ocean there's still so much we don't know so many breathtaking canyons unseen so many creatures undiscovered but new technology is revealing more about our ocean than ever before perhaps if we knew more of the ocean's secrets we might look after it better [Music] hello and welcome back to summer science live here from the royal society summer exhibition we're here all afternoon talking to some of our amazing scientists at the exhibit about their research and what

they've brought to the summer science live exhibition so i'm joined here on the sofa with dr nick eldred and dr anna sturrick both from the university of essex and then you've brought an exhibit all about ocean travelers so tell me what animals can we study in the ocean and what can they tell us about the world i'll kick that off i suppose we're the ocean traveler exhibit so what we're trying to do is introduce people to movement of all things in the ocean we think people are probably reasonably

familiar with movement of the big things the whales sea turtles schools of fish these types of things and they know that human activity can affect those often negatively we think they're less familiar with the really tiny things and they're equally important arguably more important because they're the basis of ocean ecosystems so on our exhibit we have all the all of the things from the very tiniest all the way up to the uh the biggest and what can these open ocean travelers tell us about what'

s going on in the oceans so yeah i mean we've got some uh we've got a whole mixture of things but some of them are just going from the very small things like diatoms and their movements within the kind of estrogen muds and we don't really think about those movements but they're happening every single day and they're really important in terms of carbon sequestration and oxygen production so about 20 of all the oxygen we breathe made by diatoms wow we've also got barnacles like these ones just her

e so some really important practical applications i mean not many people realize that three percent of global greenhouse gas emissions come from shipping so that's about the same as germany so even a one percent efficiency increase on the whole of a ship can be really important for reducing greenhouse gas emissions so you don't want barnacles producing friction yeah and growing all over your ship producing drag so although barnacles don't move as adults though we move them around the world's oce

ans they can become invasive and they can cause problems on the halls of ships they also have planktonic larvae that they use as a dispersal because if things can't move as adults they still need to be able to disperse somehow and they do that by releasing larvae and they're very selective about where they go to so my research began being interested in how selective these larvae are about where they go and it's ended up studying the least selective which are the ones that grow uh all over ships

okay so once we understand why they grow and how they grow then the idea would be to try and stop them from growing so to make those ships more efficient and reduce greenhouse gas emissions we're still using coatings to prevent biofouling that are similar to those that were being used 100 years ago okay so we're trying to produce more and they're they're very toxic they're heavy metal based all of that ends up in the ocean so there are many facets to this we're trying to produce overall a net en

vironmental benefit yeah what sort of materials what are these anti-fowling coatings made out of so 90 percent of antifouling coatings on ships that you see moving around the oceans are copper based so they contain heavy metals copper is the most common one and that's there just to kill marine organisms that might settle there and they're designed to pollute so they're designed to degrade and all of that copper ends up in the ocean so those are the kinds of technologies we're looking to replace

but they have to work because if they don't work we have another problem which is growth all over ships more greenhouse gas emissions the global supply chains suffer and we transport invasive species around the oceans yeah okay so nick your research is about the very very small organisms and i know your research is looking at larger organisms so how do we actually study the movements of bigger organisms in the ocean great question i was hoping you'd ask so yeah my research primarily uses a mixtu

re of tags attached to the animals or natural tags within the tissues of the animals and so traditionally we would just do things like mark recapture so it might be this little little number that you've kind of basically attached to the animal and then you get where you released it and where someone recalls it if they if they ring you up and let you know the number then they kind of evolved to these data storage tags just like this one this was a very early tag made by cfas and this was attached

to a north sea place uh around stuck onto its body with thick glue and it told us the temperature and pressure and so you can get their movement patterns from something like this and they're evolving it was a big place i think you'd be hard-pressed to find a place big enough to put this on now unfortunately um they've evolved a lot since then they're quite streamlined and we've also got tags that were used on tuna to look at their movement patterns and then we're also really highlighting some g

reat work by a company called oh search where it's not this tag but a tag like this they'll put it on the dorsal fin of the shark so we're showing great white sharks and whale shark movements and when they kind of come up from the surface they'll dry out and as they dry out they'll ping up to a satellite so the great thing about those tags is you don't need to recapture them from the animal to get the information back so we get loads of information from them but you can see the size of it feel h

ow heavy it is you can't put something like that on a baby fish no you couldn't it would just sink exactly exactly so baby fish actually most of our fish die when those very early life stages and so if we want to try and make more fish that we can catch to eat we really want to protect them and so to understand which nursery habitats are most important i use you won't be able to see them on camera but it's called an otolith it's an ear stone of a fish i also use eye lenses because what happens t

hey grow in layers like until you get tree trunk rings effectively in them and then what we can do we can look at the chemistry in each of those layers to work out where it's from basically a chemical tracker and what it ate so i use that to say okay this nursery habitat is very important let's protect it wow that's fascinating i want to ask you another question about those i guess gps type trackers and location trackers why can't we track why do they have to dry out above the water why can't we

track all of their movements when they're under the water that's a really good question and to be completely honest i'm not quite sure but i believe that the the they need to in order to ping they need to be above the surface so if a species lives under the water only you need different methods and so sometimes you might use something like this where you need to recapture it other times they'll use kind of acoustic tags or kind of blue tech bluetooth technology but those ones you need an array

of receivers around the ocean to be able to receive that information when the fish goes past it so depending on the species we'll use different type of tag and of course there are things we can't track at all like the larvae of marine invertebrates so things like coral larvae there's been lots of progress in understanding coral reef ecology and we want to preserve coral reefs restore coral reefs what we don't understand very much about at all is how the larvae of corals return to coral reefs and

produce new corals so there are enormous gaps in our in our knowledge of the ecology of these things that can be improved by understanding movement of all of these things around the oceans and i will say with that one of the best things we can do is combine these techniques so geneticists come together with chemical trackers with kind of electronic trackers and an oceanographic modelling that's really when the magic happens so we've heard about benefits to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and

protecting important fisheries what other sort of industries or areas can this sort of research touch on i could go first i suppose my core research for a long time was actually understanding adhesion so it's understanding how things like barnacles actually stick to surfaces what the materials are that they've evolved over the course of millions of years to stick to all kinds of surfaces one of the challenges with preventing biofouling is that these things have had a lot of practice i mean they'

ve been they've been attached there's been an arms race going on for millions of years with animals often that are trying to keep themselves clean trying to prevent the settlement of of barnacles and barnacles trying to develop glues that outwit those animals so they're highly optimized and they're mainly protein based so the glue of a barnacle is about 90 proteins so we can do interesting biochemistry with those understand how they work and if we can develop synthetic versions we can do things

like produce glues that work underwater that work in the human body where the environment is very similar to the sea it's salty um it's got high on it ionic potential so yeah there's lots of potential there wow so medical uses as well yeah yeah exactly yeah i'll just add that one of the good things about these kind of chemical trays is they also record water temperature on the animal effectively and so then we can start understanding and actually a lot of these trackers do as well they'll also r

ecord temperature and so now we can start understanding what temperatures they prefer or can tolerate so then we can predict how kind of movement's going to species are going to shift in their distributions in a future climate yeah so you've both been at the summer science exhibition now for a few days talking to the public about your research what sort of questions have they been asking you you know what are the what the public thinking about this well some of the some of the a lot of people se

em to really like our game we've got a game called the maze of misfortune uh where we've got like a salmon a turtle and a narwhal and you've got to try and get them successfully around the maze and avoid being eaten so there's been a few questions about i want more levels um download the maze of misfortune yes um we've also had some available on google play yes very quickly [Laughter] i've had some really interesting questions about um you know where barnacles stick to turns out some of them sti

ck to shark's butt which i thought was quite cool and i didn't know that before so barnacles stick all over the feeding time at the barnacle enclosure has been the highlight i mean if i'd known if i'd known that barnacles were going to be so attractive or got on the road with them years ago bringing it back to seriousness actually one thing i did want to say was uh sorry um was was one of the questions well why does it matter if we know about these behaviors of these big animals it's cool sure b

ut what what's the matter and so part of it's just public outreach and you get people excited about it this so search you've got this app so you can track your favorite shark or whatever if you want to but one of the things that i find really striking is that we see that this intro specific so within species diversity is super important so the loss of that diversity has been likened to the hidden biodiversity crisis because we focus so much on when a species goes extinct but we're not really we

don't really often really understand when we're losing these behaviors and this variation within species so that's something i'm very passionate about we're only starting to get the tools to look at that really now fantastic well thank you so much for joining me today it's been really lovely to talk to you about your research dr nick aldred and dr hannah sturrick from the university of essex best of luck going forward i can't wait to see what you come up with next thank you very much cheers don'

t forget you can ask your questions to our researchers on the um slido which is slido.com and enter sse22 on there you'll be able to ask our researchers your questions which i can then put to them in the studio so get asking your questions and i'll be putting them to our researchers i'm now joined on the sofa um by researchers from the from university college london so welcome um who are you and what are you exhibiting today well i'm professor tamara makin we're actually now in cambridge univers

ity msc cognition brain unit and together with danny who's been my collaborator for the last four years we run research on augmentation so motor augmentation aims to enhance people's bodies um passing suppressing beyond the flesh and blood limitations that we were born with in order to allow people to do more with their buddies and uh danny who would introduce herself with this hi yeah i'm danny claude i'm a designer and i designed the third thumb which is a 3d printed augmentation device for th

e hand it's controlled with the toes i don't know if you guys can see so i've got pressure sensors underneath my big toes and i'm doing the two degrees of freedom of the third thumb and the third thumb was um my graduate work from my masters at the royal college of art where i made my first prototype i'm now probably on prototype 350 and started collaborating with tamar after she saw it online actually yeah wow what a cool collaboration so so tell us more about how it works then so you've got yo

ur thumb at your your toe is what's controlling it yes yes so i've got little pressure sensors um underneath my big toes inside my shoes um and this uh speaks to these uh kind of little computer chips around my ankles which then wirelessly connects to up here and this is all just battery packs because batteries are challenging uh big big devices and then that's connected to the motors on the wrist which is controlling um the thumb but yeah design everything myself and 3d print everything so we'r

e actually on our stand we've got our 3d printer that i print all the thumbs up great amazing so why did you want to come up with something like this what was the inspiration um yeah so i designed prosthetic arms as well so i worked with the alternative limb project also and i really wanted to understand what it was like to you know and i want to investigate the relationship that forms between um the wearer and a prosthesis it's really unique product um and and it's kind of really unique relatio

nship forms and i wanted to experience it for myself so i very much just wanted to try it out for myself first um for my master's project and then um i didn't realize how much of an impact it could have in neuroscience research yeah so prosthesis then are you know either robotic or kind of non-electronic devices or items that we have on our bodies that represent a kind of a new limb or a replacement limb right yeah so we've got i mean the two kind of main areas i guess are congenital one-hinders

so people born with one arm or no arms or people who have suffered a loss of an arm and those are very different kind of people to design prosthesis prosthetics for and we actually researched them in the lab as well yeah so how does your research sort of interact with with yours um so when i first met danny i got a great big you know funding uh grant in order to explore what happens to the human brain when we start controlling a body part we've never had before because there's very rich complic

ated questions um for example if you use your toes in order to control a third thumb together with your hand is your toe going to become more like a hand and then if you need to use it again it's like a toe for example when you're walking home are you going to be a bit more clumsy so there's lots of questions about how the brain adapts to controlling this new body part and how it finds a way to do it very efficiently and we with that question in mind i was looking for a collaborator and for me a

s a neuroscientist i wanted a technology that is very versatile so people could do whatever they want with it not just what we can do in the lab and really important for me that people can take it home with them and use it throughout the day and the only technology that was at that level of versatile readiness was coming from dany amazing so what sort of um findings have you observed then in terms of how people's brains adapt to having in this case a third thumb so we've learned so much since st

arting to work with danny one really important result for us is that if you use your thumb then you can demonstrate if you use your thumb together with your hand you can grasp objects with various fingers and configurations and that means that you're changing radically the way you use your own hand in daily life and we found that this has direct impact on how the brain represents the hand because you're radically changing the way you use your hand in other studies we were trying to understand ho

w the brain learns to create this collaboration between the toes and the hand and we've learned that it comes up with really creative ways to substitute the information kind of in this gap between the feet and the hand we're running a lot of research with fmri to look at how the brain responds and here we're really lucky because danny has designed for us a thumb that is mri safe so we actually put people in the scanner and see how they control the thumb if it's the first time they control it if

they control it after they've learned to use it and become experts and how long does that learning take so this is what we're studying in the royal society in this week so we set up a little challenge uh which is um can anyone learn to use their thumb within one minute or less we've got two sizes we've got i've made some kid-sized ones as well especially for the royal society yeah and we've got some later ones as well yeah so so far we looked at i think 400 visitors and only three out of the 400

was unable to learn to use the thumb within a minute wow gosh so will you take that data and you know make that scientific and kind of publish this research absolutely and this is where the this is where uh we really get to benefit from the royal society not just by exposing people to our ideas and you know and the importance of this technology and introducing people to the israeli novel technology and consequences on the brain but we can also get a little something back for the scientific comm

unity yeah absolutely so what have some of the public's reactions been to suddenly having an extra thumb yeah it's been good i mean the the reactions are always always quite uh quite fun um and uh yeah it's always the the little kids that are really kind of like not not quite sure it's at the start but then absolutely love it by the end um and uh yeah i mean we've had lots of questions we've also got a 3d printer printing um and yeah everyone picks up so well and yeah really enjoying it which is

great yeah awesome what sort of questions have people asked you um yeah i've just i've kind of been more about by the 3d printer and um yeah i can't think of any of it on my head so for for us uh people are really keen to understand if we want to control the thumb directly with our thoughts with the brain and to this i say i really don't because if we want to create invasive technology we need to first get into the brain because unfortunately technology that we have right now that is non-invasi

ve just doesn't pick up enough information and i'm really not keen to cut people open and what's more i think there's so much more we can do with our bodies that we're not exploiting for technologies such as rehabilitation technologies that i think we need to uh we have a lot more to explore before we need to give up and go into invasive solutions so i for one am really excited to tell them uh your brain control your trolls so therefore the brain controls the phone yeah absolutely just going via

the toes yeah um so what are you what is your hope then for this research for the third thumb what are you hoping to achieve um well we're i'm i've taken it to a couple of different conferences one in particular was was reach which is kids with up a limb different so um i actually kind of gave a third thumb to lots of different kids with different kinds of hands um it kind of helps extend the functionality of their hand so working perhaps with patient groups like that we're also excited to perh

aps explore stroke patients as well in terms of either augmenting their their hand that they have the best control over or additionally help with rehabilitation in terms of the control of the thumb as well also temporary immobilization such as breaking a wrist um you know we have options for kind of augmentation like crutches when you break an ankle but when you break a wrist there's not so many options so we're excited um you know especially with all this research we're getting that it's so eas

y to pick up so quickly and would be great for kind of those temporary groups as well yeah and in terms of the hardware you mentioned this is you know one iteration of the prototype that you've been developing over a long period of time what are the challenges in terms of creating something right there well yeah i mean i've spoken to a couple of my robotics as friends and and it is you know even if you're working on something like this um which is kind of on the low inc in terms of um money beca

use i'm 3d printing everything i set myself but as opposed to you know hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of um robotics engineering we still suffer with the same problems which is kind of motor strength over size battery power and size and especially wearable components as well everything has to be external to the body as opposed to with a you know arm designs you get to kind of hide everything within kind of this area which is usually used not it's kind of empty as a you know you've got the

socket here and the hand and there's kind of more space internally um so augmentation and wearable technology is always so challenging and then obviously yeah kind of making sure the body fits everything yeah would you like to try a mechanic version we've just got a little manual one yeah but right hand like so yep perfect so this is just to give you a sense of how it feels like to have an extra finger oh it's quite handy the pulleys you have here two degrees yeah two main degrees of freedom so

it's across the hand and up and down yes yeah yeah so it's flexion extinction across the hand um and adduction and abduction towards the towards the finger okay so that one goes that way and this one goes this way amazing oh you could do that at the same time so imagine this would be normally controlled with your toes yeah i got you i'm surprised that people can learn this in a minute that's very impressive it's much easier much more intuitive with the toes oh really the brain could sort of on

that's really interesting yeah because at the moment my my other hand is involved in controlling doing something very non-intuitive for the hand yeah exactly but it moves really nicely and try i'm sorry and try uh meet your other fingers as well so that's kind of one of the main tasks um which is yeah finger opposition because we want you to kind of collaborate with um with the digits we find that people when they first try they really just want to focus on using the thumb by itself which is obv

iously something we don't normally do with our fingers we always kind of work together two or three fingers together to do something yeah oh it's beautiful it's really nicely made as well i love these the the kind of hinges here really clever yes it's all printed in one piece yeah and it must be quite quick to print then as well um yeah about eight to ten hours very impressive yeah which is quite quick for 3d printing doesn't sound very fast wow thank you so much for um for coming to show us thi

s um yeah and good luck with your research i can't wait to see what you come up with next thank you thank you so that's us from the studio for now we're going to a quick break where we're going to um hear about um from professor sandra dan from loughborough university who is going to talk about how we might move towards a more sustainable future by replacing oil unless you've been living under a rock recently you'll know that we urgently need to end our use of fossil fuels getting our energy fro

m renewable sources such as solar and wind instead but we don't just use fossil fuels for energy millions and millions of everyday items such as clothing makeup and phones are made using crude oils but how can we make these items without digging up fossil fuels from the ground and what about these mysterious catalysts that turn raw materials into stuff i'm at the queen elizabeth olympic park in east london to meet a scientist who's hopefully going to clear this all up for me hi i'm esby nice to

meet you hi i'm ariana nice to meet you thank you so much for meeting me here today and i have to say this isn't the first place i think of when i think of a chemical engineer well sports chemistry and chemical engineering they do have quite a lot in common and actually that is the energy so first of all how much of everything we use contains oil platform chemicals that we actually get from the crude oil are crucial for us it's in the materials that we use every single day when we think about th

e plastic packaging to medicine shampoo and also various types of materials so you need those building blocks and they all come from oil they are the platform chemicals interesting so if platform chemicals are the building blocks what are the catalysts oh that's an exciting part i have a demonstration to show you if you want to follow me fantastic let's go [Music] so this is tom and tom's part of your demonstration yes indeed so we talked about catalyst a little bit earlier on what exactly is a

catalyst then so more than 85 of materials are actually made with some sort of a catalyst catalyst is a chemical helper it actually helps us to reduce the energy that we need to put in in the reaction to be able to get the product so tom is actually going to demonstrate our energy input and he's going to go and run up the stairs so tom if you want to go and run up the stairs please thank you so what are we seeing in this demonstration what does tom represent so tom is actually an energy input wh

en you think about the reaction you need the reactants at the start so tom running up to the top of the stairs he's putting a lot of energy and when you're on top of the stairs because your products have lower energy team coming down the slide would be the product in the end there we are well done so tom how did it feel to be part of a chemical reaction yeah fun so what really happened is that tom running up the stairs he has put quite a lot of energy into the reaction as a second part of this d

emonstration we're gonna have actually tom running halfway through and that would be with the catalyst okay so he's going to start halfway up and then using a catalyst he can get to the top with half the amount of energy indeed yeah so tom do you want to head to the lift and get a head start i'd love to so [Music] here he is so how do you feel having done it with a catalyst was it a bit easier that was much easier yeah so hopefully now you understood why the catalyst is so important and why it's

very important to get the right catalyst with the platform chemicals that you're using absolutely well thank you very much for being a great demonstrator you're very welcome so where are we going to be getting platform chemicals from in the future and how does it relate to catalysts at the moment we are obtaining our platform chemicals from the crude oil and if we want to move from the crude oil we have to look for the different sources of our platform chemicals and actually in our research is

the biomass it's actually the waste from other farms or even the breweries so does that mean that the waste from beer could be turned into like plastic bottles say hopefully yes in the future but we still have a long way to go we want to make sure that we use the waste there's a new way to source those platform chemicals so we're not going to throw away those materials like a biomass in the landfills or the oceans and having said that i think it's really important to create new types of catalyst

s and they also think about going away from the traditional catalysts what about the catalysts so the traditional catalyst all the catalysts are doing is actually they're breaking the bonds between the carbons and hydrogens so something like this and they're creating a smaller molecules and these molecules in the reaction they would rearrange and actually create new types of products in the end uh using less energy and these kind of like catalysts if they get into the biomass biomass is full of

different ways that we would end up probably poisoning the catalyst so we need a new types of catalyst to treat the biomass well this is so interesting thank you so much and i really like the idea of closing the loop and having no more waste so thank you so much for speaking to me today thank you so next time you throw away a plastic bottle wash your hands using soap or use a pen remember that all these products have been made using chemicals transformed with the help of a catalyst all these pro

ducts are important to our standard of living and it's the engineers and chemists who ensure we can keep using them without costing the earth hello and welcome back to the royal society summer science exhibition this is summer science live i'm dr anna podisky material scientist writer and presenter and all throughout today i'm going to be taking your questions and putting them to our scientific experts here in the studio you can pose your questions to them on slido.com slido.com and if you put i

n the code sse22 on there then i'll be able to put your questions to our scientific experts here today now i'm joined here in the studio by samantha bell and catherine harrison both from the university of manchester and i understand that you've brought to the summer science exhibition the story of the winchcon meteorite tell me more i do so here is a sample which can be tried to see very well to hold it thank you um so the winch computer fell in february 2021 um i'm really lucky that this is one

of the most pristine samples that we have one of those pristine meteorites because it was collected within 12 hours of it falling on the earth's surface which is super special for us um so this beach right is full of uh water and organic material so it means it came from a kind of asteroid that might have brought water organic to earth so it's really important for us to study to figure out how the earth is formed in this kind of way wow so a rock like this that fell to earth from space millions

billions of years ago so it would have formed uh 4.6 billion years ago yeah so it's got some things in it that's like all this thing you'll have the hole in your hand wow but oh my goodness fell to earth about a year and a half ago it felt earth a year and a half ago but something like this could have been the rock that came and brought life and water to earth when it originated absolutely wow that's really mind-boggling so why do we want to study rocks like this now well because it's 4.6 billi

on years old on earth we don't tend to it's rarer to get rocks that hold on earth that are sort of preserving that far back because we've got things like erosion plate tectonics recycling the crust so these provide like snapshots into the very early solar system that we're just not otherwise able to to investigate so yeah they're really important and this meteorite landed here in the uk which was pretty lucky as well yeah so it's the first meteorite to fall in the uk for about 30 years wow so it

's really really special um and the biggest reason that we we knew that had fallen because of uh we've got a meteor meteor camera network in the uk um so we've got cameras across the uk they're constantly looking up at the sky it's ready to track um fireballs so when meteor meteors come through the atmosphere they start to burn up and produce a fireball similar to like a shooting star um and if it's big enough a bit of it will land on the surface of the earth so what we can do is we can use a tr

ajectory of the fireball to work out where the meteorite was going to fall so we had people that figured out it was most likely going to be uh in the winchcom area so near uh near cheltenham so so my colleagues went on the news and said if anyone can find anything like a suspicious black rock please get in touch with us and then we're very lucky that um robin catherine wilcock heard this on the news and then they woke up the next morning and on the driveway there was a massive splats of black ro

ck and it was the meteorite and it landed on their driveway so they got in touch with us and we rushed over and then we found loads of meteorite which is just amazing yeah and what happens next then so you find this meteor right how do you actually study it uh so downstairs we've actually got a scanning electron microscope which is one of the techniques that we're commonly used to sort of identify different minerals within the meteorites um but essentially yeah they'll get cut up into different

sections and distributed to several different universities and institutions around the uk are involved in sort of classifying the the meteorite is the sort of initial steps and then i'm sure there's lots of interest in science that's going to be coming in the next few years out of this sample so it's not finders keepers no so um robin catherine woke up they donated everything they found the museum which was amazing yeah yes really amazing for scientists to then study it amazing and tell me about

this sample that you're so yeah we also brought a bit of a bigger one um so this is an iron meteorite yeah so it's nearly pure iron it's got a very small amount of nickel in it um and these iron meteorites come from the cause of asteroids and so just like the f's got a solid metal core if an asteroid gets big enough it can separate out and get us all the denser iron will sink in towards the middle and form this core and then if there's been a collision with between two asteroids it reaches righ

t into the core bit so that car gets flung off and uh yeah some intersect and land on the f and we've got a big chunk of one here amazing so this must have been a big chunky one that landed yeah so some of them can be like 20 plus tons of materials that's landing on your house and there's something really interesting here i'm a material scientist so i'm nerding out right now because there's some really interesting sort of patterns that are formed um in the metal of this meteorite if i remember w

riting these are quite unique aren't they two years like really um high pressures to form these sort of uh i think it's vindman statin patterns that's right yeah i remember that so yeah it's quite diagnostic of these iron meteorites and where they originated from so if you did find this in your garden you could take a slice and look for this and that would tell you that it was meteoric amazing so people at home might be asking themselves you know we can study these rocks to you know find out wha

t they're made out of and sort of think about where they might have come from what can this tell us about our solar system so as a citizen specifically with sort of um meteorites like the the windshield meteor right they're telling us about sort of the first stages of our solar system like how planets were forming where the sort of molecules that would eventually potentially have brought life to the earth and things like that where they were um in the early solar system and what was happening wa

y before even we you know we were recording any of that on in rocks on earth so yeah a unique sort of snapshot into the very early solar system exactly what happened and kind of where we came from so you've been here at the royal society summer exhibition experiencing it talking to members of the public what have they had to say about this uh so they're really really interested um i think it's such a unique thing being able to see something that's come from space um and obviously because it fell

in the uk it's really captured a lot of people's imagination um and also we've got such a range of meteorites on display as well um i think yeah people are pretty amazed that they can hold something that's 4.6 billion years old that's come from space and fell in the uk kind of thing yeah definitely so what kind of scientists work on this then and so i guess a lot of us uh geologists but um there's also lots of chemists and physicists as well with different backgrounds coming together to look at

these meteorites um but yeah i think we're both a geology perspective yeah yes amazing and what are you hoping to kind of do next what's next for you guys uh so i guess um one of the the biggest things that we're really hoping to do is get more camera cameras out across the uk so the more fireballs that we can track the more meteorites we can hopefully find um so i think that's really helped having the winch community right fall has made it's really let the public know that meteorites are finda

ble so and also people can send in their own videos so like doorbell cameras and cameras and cars um people can submit all their videos of fireballs and we can use all that information to to work out lots of interesting science from it so how many fireballs are there in the uk every year is this a rare occurrence um so there's there's like shooting stars all the time so i think we expect um a meteorite to fall in the uk about once every year i think sure a big enough one that would land and b so

there was a meteorite that potentially fell in shrewsbury a couple of months ago so we all went out hunting unfortunately we didn't find anything um yeah so we're on track for about one every year i think hopefully it's really exciting proof for the windshield that it like it does work that you know we can track these things and go out yeah fantastic oh thank you so much for talking to me today and good luck samantha bell and catherine harrison from the university of manchester we're now going

to take a quick break and go to a piece on by jack monaghan from the welcome sang institute speaking from kew gardens to learn more about this immense project charting the diversity of life on earth called the dna tree of life have you ever tried to build your own family tree if you have then i'd guess you probably haven't got more than 100 years back over 200 and i'd be really impressed well the group of scientists i'm about to meet are building their own family tree except theirs goes back a f

ew billion years and it's not just humans on it it's all species in britain and ireland their project is called the darwin tree of life and they're decoding the dna of over 70 000 different life forms trying to understand the history of life and much more along the way hello i'm esme nice to meet esme i'm elia and i work here at kew gardens i'm ross i work at the urlham institute in norwich so elia would you guys tell me a little bit more about the darwin tree of life and what it is it's this am

azing ambitious program it's all about dna sequencing about decoding the genomes of living organisms and by sequencing all the species in britain and ireland it's going to provide us with this huge wealth of data to provide us a real snapshot of the life on these islands and how they've evolved together amazing well you mentioned decoding genomes yep what's the genome what is a genome indeed it's the full dna code found in living organisms in each of their cells and dna itself you know it's made

up of four different chemicals that we refer to by the first letter a t c and g so for example if we're going to take your own genome and take a little bit of it and sequence it we might see the dna sequence going ttta ggg or something like that but our genome of course is much larger than that but to illustrate how large i brought along you know this lovely first copy of harry potter the first book that was produced and that's got just over 70 000 words and if we counted all the letters that's

about 350 000 letters and we might think that's a lot of letters but in fact our own genome is made up of 3.5 billion letters and so that's equivalent to about 10 000 copies of this harry potter book if we want to understand what are the different bits of the dna doing what we need to be able to do is to compare the dna sequences between different genomes so that's where the darwin tree of life comes in because we're going to generate sequences for all the animals the plants and the fungi as we

ll as the protists which live here but i'm going to leave that to ross actually to explain these amazing group of protists yeah ross tell me what is a protist so yeah the darwin tree of life project is going to sequence everything in the british isles that includes the big stuff you can see the oak trees the animals but also the really really tiny organisms you can't see without a microscope and those are called the protists protist is a collective term for any single celled organism that isn't

a plant or an animal or a fungi and because they're not one group they're very very different from each other as well as from us they're as different from each other as we are from plants for example so if you imagine every animal you can think of all the dogs people birds fish insects they all fall on one branch of the tree of life all of the plants are on another branch and all the fungi and yeast are on another branch and there are eight other branches with potentially as much diversity as al

l of the animal kingdom but in order to access all that information we have to get the genome sequence but erner at the welcome sanger institute can tell you more about that hi anna i'm esme lovely to meet you please meet you too so everything has its own genome sequence which is microscopically tiny and has millions and millions of letters in it i want to know how you can possibly read that genome sequence yeah good question i'll tell you how we go from this sample like a leaf to a full genome

sequence so first we've got collectors in the field who find a species and like this daisy and they take a small part of it like this leaf and they want to get the leaf and the dna inside of it in the best condition possible so they put in a tube like this and send it to us frozen in the lab and where we need to get the dna out so we need to break open the cell release the dna and we separate the dna out from all the rest of the material inside the leaf and so we've got different teams with vari

ous expertise on for different organisms and they use methods to get out the dna in a tube like this which we then send for full genome sequencing and what is genome sequencing sorry i need to know that's perfect genome sequencing is where we use these machines that work out the order of the a's t's g's and c's in the dna so the information we get out of these genome sequencers is in these little big jigsaw of dna fragments so we need to then use these super powerful computers which then compare

the fragments and see where they overlap um to then piece together your full complete genome just for a sense of scale for a genome for this daisy for example and if we were the letters were all this size it would stretch all the way around the world the genome with the daisy amazing once we get our genomes we then need to study them to get the most out of them so we've got computer scientists called bioinformaticians they study these genomes and find the most interesting parts and at the end o

f the project we intend to have 70 000 species so that'll be we'll need a lot of bioinformaticians to study those genomes that is a lot of species yes it is well thank you so much for explaining that to me i'll go and catch up with elia and ross thank you well it was so interesting to speak to ernest then what happens ross once we have the genomes so once we have the genomes that's when the really interesting stuff can happen because that's when the analysis happens and actually we don't really

know necessarily what we're going to find we're spending all this time and effort gathering all of this data and we don't really know what it's going to lead to if you think back to darwin himself he didn't set out to discover the theory of evolution when he set sail aboard the beagle but it was by collecting the data that led him to that conclusion but we are already making strides in that area at the urlham institute we've sequenced the genome of an organism called euglena and it kind of lives

in ponds it's that thin scummy layer you sometimes find on stagnant water and it's quite often mistaken for an algae but it's not related to algae at all it's actually got an algal cell living inside its cell it might be that we can bioengineer this to fix carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and produce biofuels which could have huge implications for climate change and global warming so fascinating and elia you said earlier on 70 000 species how are you getting on we're getting there we're start

ing to get towards our first target which is to release these sequences for nearly 2 000 species by the end of this year we hope to be then moving towards our next target was to go for the 10 000 species and build up from there so we're getting there amazing well good luck with it thank you so that's the darwin tree of life project it's a collaboration between ten different research institutes so kew gardens welcome sanger and erlem who we met today plus seven others they're all working together

to sequence the genomes of all those plants animals fungi and protists and share those genomes with everybody they're going to be providing new tools for conservation new ideas for biomedicine and bioengineering new connections for better understanding evolution and they're gonna change the way we do biology [Music] so from one way of studying plants to something completely different now i'm joined by dr marina freytag from newcastle university who's been working on using berries to solve probl

ems in renewable energy marina tell me more so what we do at newcastle university is developing indoor photovoltaics in photovoltaics okay and we want to replace batteries actually to power internet of things devices and wireless devices just to make our life a bit more sustainable and energy efficient so we no longer have to plug our phone charger into the wall when we're at home we can have a device that will charge it gather electricity just from light that's inside yes so we use zen energy b

asically that's usually untapped which surrounds us so i would say light is the only form of energy we can see and we should use it makes sense definitely so whereas the sort of um the solar cells that we might have on our houses at home they rely on the sun's energy like the sunlight what you're talking about is light that exists indoors but that we can still harness to produce energy exactly so of course the light indoors is much much less intensity just 1 000 still of solar radiation and it's

a very different spectrum so we specifically make to match a spectrum okay and how do the berries come in um i would say come in very nicely because they they have dyes which can attach to a semiconductor that's usually does not absorb the light well okay and it's there nice and dark and match very well the visible light so the idea is that you have your sort of photovoltaic material that you can make more sensitive with the substances from the berries so that they can produce more energy for t

he light that's falling on them this is at least what fill out the visitors do and um i don't know if i can show this yeah so what we usually have we just have a semiconductor here and it's titanium dioxide this is what you have on everything that's right in your life basically every time sunscreen in some countries donuts what you know paint and then we have another electrode which just has a stick on it to stick it together and in between we put them in berries literally thank you very much it

smells nice smells very nice it does smell good yes that's my lunch thank you oh but yeah okay so i can see i can see what you're holding up actually buried underneath here so you literally put the titanium dioxide into berries yes and it functionalizes it yes so the dyes and the berries have an acid group which attaches to the semiconductor to the white paint sorry i've just broken your tweezers it's okay at least i didn't break this photovoltaics okay i'm trying to hold it up it's not toxic i

f you don't worry about your fingers that's good okay oh so i can just pick it up yes it's amazing this is just exactly right that makes sense okay so we've got these little dye sensitized solar cells fine how do we um connect those up to electronics uh pretty much like this so we have two electrodes as i said one is a photon and one is a counter electrode and here we have the barometer it's our homemade iut device actually and what it does is it's communicates with internet of course so once i

press this red button you can see it here it's tweets so my solar cell tweets its own results right now so if you look on twitter it will say hello and right now on the screen you can see the qr code so if anybody's we usually have them in a sticker if anybody scans us they have their own results always available so our point is to show how we have sustainable solutions even for the new technologies fantastic and so this is a substance right the the molecule that you've got from these berries is

a natural material it's a natural substance that is created by nature um what's the benefit of this type of approach compared to what's what else is happening in dye sensitized solar cells and i would say that in a laboratory scale we don't directly use berries but what we do is we take the dyes from the berries and just makes them better sure okay so right at the moment because dyson satisfies also bioma biomimetic solar cells because we really try to mimic what happens in the nature yeah and

make it better so biomimicry is this idea that we look to nature for inspiration or materials that we want to create in the lab find out how they work and what's going on there and then try and create synthetic materials or synthetic you know substances or molecules in the lab so that we then don't have to go and buy blueberries from the supermarket every time we want to make a solar cell yes very good um i wouldn't dismiss very so much we calculate that one of those berries houses actually can'

t compensate one uh one of these coin batteries you know some people don't watch it so it's it's not so bad it is quite a lot of energy it's already saves that is yeah massively um so tell me about how we can kind of see how these devices are sort of converting that energy or kind of making this electrical energy is there something that we can see on the laptop to sort of show that happening unfortunately not i would really recommend just come over and make a solar cell yeah except how you can i

magine is that this paint you have is actually nano spheres it's just 20 nanometer thick balls basically and what they create is a massive surface area for this dyes to attach this is how they get so colored because the amount of the dye of course it's very very little yeah how did we kind of first come up with the idea of mixing berries with electronics um i think it was 91 when professor michael gretzer who is in episode switzerland actually came up with a nanoporous uh titanium dioxide with t

he spheres and by then he used routinium dyes which are not the very most sustainable material it's also very expensive i would say but back then you already got seven percent and then several research groups started to also look into natural dyes so i would say every country has their own favorite dice okay it is berries in uk yeah awesome so how far are you then in terms of commercializing this there's several companies right now i would say in every continent that's are looking into disaster

type hours for indoor specifically actually yeah okay so you've got a few competitors not in your car not in the uk excellent so yeah when do you think you might be able to start commercializing this me myself let's see i'm working on it uh recall company for example in japan is already printing them you can get them and power your little devices with it they might not be as efficient as ours of course got you of course um so is this the sort of thing that you would be able to buy um and have in

your home and it would provide free energy essentially to power devices and to provide energy to various electronics could you take it for example camping you know would it work in a tent in kind of that sort of environment as well i would say this is a little bit too little energy if you consider a tent what i would like to see them is consider that 75 billion iot devices will be distributed worldwide is in the next 10 years 70 of them will be indoors and right now i wouldn't say this is neces

sarily energy saving technology if you consider that each of them needs a battery or needs to be wired so i won't tap and make this technology actually sustainable yeah and this technology is theirs to actually help us to reduce energy footprint for all of us right and you talk about the internet of things you mentioned that this is the idea of you know lots of different devices that help us do all sorts of things in our daily lives that are all connected to the internet and also talking to each

other and making our lives easier um why specifically are you looking to power things that are internet of things things why what you know why not just something that isn't connected to the internet um it's i think recently uh or let's say a couple of years ago i read the paper in science actually and it said that because there's this vast amount of devices being deployed so i got worried that it's basically every human will have 10 devices on their neck so i thought really this is a moment whe

re you can make a difference so it's to do with the rise of the internet of things that will need power somehow it's called the forced digital generator revolution for a reason actually wow and that's all to do with the fact that we now want everything to be internet enabled and talking to things the this technology will is already everywhere we just don't realize it anymore because it's so embedded in everyday life yeah okay so the fourth revolution is already with us yes so you've been talking

to members of the public now for a few days at the royal society summer exhibition what have they had to say about this i think it's amazing to see especially children how excited they are when they have their own solar sound i would say so just couple minutes ago we reached one thousand solar cells we made just here and i i would say that ninety nine percent of four of the solar system first solar cell yeah so it's it gives them a sense how easy it is actually to make a solar cell yes and how

easy to be it to make a sustainable solar cell actually fantastic so in the future then would maybe individuals be making their own solar cells at home or is this something that would still be you know mass-produced i don't think it's so unrealistic in my first lockdown i was cooking solar sauce with my children in my kitchen it's very very feasible of course i know how to but yeah it was all available online to be delivered at home when i was cooking solar cells cooking solar cells wow fantasti

c who knew fantastic well dr marina freytag from the university of newcastle thank you so much for sharing your amazing technology with us today thank you so from plants to berries and now looking to the soil we're now going to find out what the soil can tell us soil it's one of the most underrated and little understood wonders on our fragile planet here's why far from being lifeless dirt it's estimated that in a single gram of soil there could be as many as 50 000 species of microscopic organis

ms or microorganisms and in one teaspoon of soil there are more microorganisms than there are people on the earth but much of what lies beneath in this hidden and deep universe is still alien to us despite being literally under our feet humans have so far only identified a tiny fraction of the extraordinary life teaming underground but these animals and microorganisms provide an invaluable role millions of years of evolutionary competition have led the microorganisms to produce antibiotic compou

nds to fight their neighbors and these compounds form the basis of many of the antibiotics used by us humans we literally make medicine from our soil no one knows how many new treatments could be lying under our feet waiting to be discovered one of the most special creatures living in soil is the earthworm darwin was fascinated by them and said it may be doubted if there are any other animals which have played such an important part in the history of the world due to their importance in making a

nd sustaining soil earthworms journey down and around creating breathing holes like lungs in the soil this creates space for plant roots to grow and keep soil alive under the soil there are also vast and intricate webs or fungal threads plants and fungi need each other to thrive and so they do a deal fungi can't capture carbon dioxide to grow like plants can but they're better than plants at mining sulfur nutrients so they trade plants give fungi carbon to grow and fungi give plants nutrients li

ke nitrogen and phosphorus it's a mutually beneficial relationship and just one example of the interconnected ecosystem we're all part of plant matter decays and provides food for microbes they provide food for worms worms are food for birds and so on soil provides us humans with almost everything we eat but it's not just about what soils can do for us it's important we value appreciate and crucially protect soil for a whole load of other reasons too think about this for a moment it takes more t

han a hundred years to build just five millimeters half a centimeter of soil but just moments to destroy through chemical contamination urbanization landslides erosion and more some soil is really ancient dating back millions and millions of years the oldest soil in earth is thought to be in south africa and dates back 3 billion years in the uk our soil is around 15 000 years old and it formed after the last ice age soil is also a really valuable carbon store capturing carbon locking it away in

stable forms deep underground it stores three times as much carbon as all the plants on earth combined including trees but because it grows so slowly we need to protect what we have we are not succeeding we know many of the problems intensive farming is one of them it releases carbon from our soils and we're losing soil 50 to 100 times faster than it's able to rebuild in europe 60 to 70 percent of soils are thought to be unhealthy and in croplands in the uk in less than 30 years from the end of

the 1970s we lost more than 10 of the carbon the soil had stored for us and since then well we just don't know because in many countries this little data on soil is poorly protected and regulated we grow on it building it build from it it filters and cleans our waters reduces flooding and regulates our atmosphere it's one of the most biodiverse habitats on earth and a vital part of the nitrogen and carbon cycle on our planet but the sad truth is right now soil hasn't enough champions fighting fo

r it we literally treat it like dirt and yet there is so much untap potential so much wonder and so many secrets just waiting to be discovered in the ground beneath our feet [Music] welcome back to summer science live we've heard from all sorts of different scientists today on the sites that they've brought to the exhibition this year we've heard about how scientists studying the movement of animals in the water can help us reduce carbon dioxide emissions from shipping and can help us study how

animals are moving around our oceans the royal society has a very long history in studying our oceans and i'm joined on the sofa now by keith moore the society's head librarian to tell us about the exhibition that you've brought to the royal society which is uh it's a collaboration between google arts and culture and tell us a bit more about your exhibition uh well it's about fish or rather the kind of long history of marine expeditions some of them are sponsored by the royal society uh starting

in the 17th century and moving as far as the 20th so we want to tell the story of how people began to understand the depths of the sea and the ways they went about it and how why did we first become interested in this and how did we first start studying it well uh in the early royal society and the organization was started in 1660 um quite a few of the early scientists were interested in what was happening under the water obviously fishermen and mariners knew the surface of the oceans very well

but people like robert hook the society's curator experiments began to design equipment so that they could start to see what was happening underneath the sea uh so hook designs a water sampling device edmund halley who we tend to know better as an astronomer exactly right he designs a type of diving bell and a diving suit mostly for wreck reclamation but you can see that they began to get interested in other things down there and holly particularly when he becomes a sea captain he he leads expe

ditions to the south atlantic he begins to start collecting fish drawing them and presenting them to the royal society fantastic and what could this these fish tell them about the oceans what the society was interested in in the beginning was trying to classify life and we're very familiar with this kind of concept now um but they wanted to try and record everything in the natural world and give it names classify it and be able to identify it the leading figures in this this kind of area in the

royal society were two naturalists called francis willoughby and john ray they together uh did expeditions and uh collecting visits uh in britain and in europe and they decided that uh john ray would produce a history of plants willoughby would look after animals and and collectively they they'd produce these great works of natural history now unfortunately willowby died so the work fell upon john ray and the royal society supported him in this and he uh produced one of the famous books of the e

arly royal society which was uh the history of fishes the history of fishes so what did that contain it contained um identifications of marine life so previously uh if something swam in the ocean it was classified as a fish so if it was a crocodile it was a fish okay if it was a whale it was a fish so uh what john ray was trying to do was to give names to things but also exclude things as well wales did sneak into his book i should say they are they are mammals we know but uh he begins to look a

t previous illustrations in in fish books the royal society had its own museum which collected objects including fish and he produces his great work which tries to capture all the fish in the sea it or at least all the ones they knew about at that time and i have the royal society's copy right here wow can we take a look we can take a look you can see immediately it's a very beautiful thing and it has some fabulous illustrations in here of pretty much anything you can think of that was known at

the period wow and was it the explorers the scientists themselves that were doing these illustrations or did they collaborate with illustrators for that uh they collaborated so the there would be original illustrations and sometimes they were taken from other books uh the royal society had some fish of its own of course and these things would be sent off to the engravers and the engravers would produce these these wonderful copper plate prints society had a bit of a history of this i mean one of

the great books that we published in the early days was micrographia which had wonderful illustrations of uh microscopic life amongst other things so they thought that a wonderfully illustrated book like this would be a runaway bestseller and um they decided to print lots of copies of it i didn't quite work out that way go on tell me more ah this is the book that is generally considered to almost have bankrupted the royal society uh the royal society paid for the the printing of it so there is

text as you can see in the beginning and it uh got sponsors to give money to produce each of the copper plates and very often you can see the names of the sponsors just here so this one is samuel peeps who is president of the royal society and he sponsored lots of plates in this book but it cost so much that the royal society was in some difficulties and they couldn't sell copies fast enough that they in the end were beginning to uh use copies as a kind of currency so that they try to pay people

with with copies of uh the history of fishes um and uh one of the reasons it's famous is because isaac newton's great work principia mathematica was also being printed around this time and the royal society couldn't fund that work because it had spent so much money on on this one wow so we nearly didn't have one of newton's greatest works because of this book the history of fishes yeah yeah and we have an account book here from the royal society so this is the manuscript accounts of the period

this is the 1680s and uh you can see rows and rows of figures here of the money they were spending uh to a whole host of engravers uh there's at least seven or eight on this page alone where they're farming at work to produce uh the history of fishes and uh the the money is going out in this column here goodness wow but presumably the royal society you know stood by the decision that this type of work you know documenting these animals was was worthwhile you know this was important scientific wo

rk yeah so this is is pre linnaeus who we know very well for classifying the animal kingdom but yes the royal society not only paid to print the book but quite a few fellows got involved in the the process of trying to uh classify the fish involved i tried to eliminate some of them so ray had a mini research team around him with fellows who knew a little bit about natural history and they helped to refine the work and get it through the press so thinking then about science in the modern day you

know this summer science exhibition is all about celebrating the recent research that's been going on where does this sort of work fit in that story and is it still relevant to researchers today i think it is relevant obviously this is a very much a paper exercise and the exhibition we have uh in the building is to do with scientists not just sitting in an office and looking at this kind of thing but actually going out and finding out about the natural world and this is important there's a long

history of great voyages of discovery and uh many many of them were to do with uh finding out about marine life we know uh probably the most famous one is is charles darwin's beagle voyage yes now we uh we tend to associate that with galapagos islands and darwin's finches but darwin was was collecting fish as well he he collected many specimens the great 19th century exhibition expedition was hms challenger uh which occurred in the 1870s first properly oceanic grand oceanographic expedition uh t

he royal society helped set it up and it sailed the world's oceans for years collecting specimens finding about the nature of the sea how it changed at depths what the uh sea floor was composed of so it really was a big moment in in the history of science and today of course we're interested in the oceans for the impact that man is having on them so uh many of the 20th century expeditions and societies involved into the great barrier reef and to the seychelles they're important because you can s

ee you can be begin to see changes in those environments so the uh people at aldabra are looking at plastics in the ocean how much they can collect and obviously you know um a few years ago they they weren't there uh great barrier reef expedition told us a lot about coral so it's a benchmark for that and of course we're very concerned today about acidity in the ocean plastic pollution death coral and many other things so uh it's it's important that we look back on these expeditions to see what t

he oceans were like in comparison to what they are now yeah the oceans are changing so rapidly that for us to have i guess this sort of time stamp to suggest how they were that you know hundreds of years ago it allow it gives us that benchmark to then compare the rate of change now and um and sort of the importance of making sure that we are you know preserving these creatures that we know have been in our oceans and of course the deep oceans are still largely unexplored uh and therefore uh it w

asn't just uh john ray and francis willoughby finding new things uh there are new things still to be found in the seas so it's worth preserving them until we find out what is there yeah definitely so let's talk a bit about then so you're you're the society's head librarian is that that sort of correct job title yeah um these look incredibly incredibly good nick what are the challenges with um you know preserving these types of artifacts um from this period uh paper is pretty good actually so um

this is handmade paper it will last a thousand years if it's kept in the right conditions so we try to keep it in the right conditions so the royal society has a huge collection of both printed books and manuscript material going back to 1660 and even beyond that because uh rothschild fellows have collected manuscripts over the years things of interest designs these are kept in uh environment environmentally controlled stores so they kept it standard uh temperature and humidity uh and the the ai

r in there is is cleaned um of course uh things deteriorate over the years fellas have used the books in our collections so they do need rebinding and repair from time to time and we we do do that but today the movement is definitely towards uh not just keeping these things in archive stores but getting them out to where people can see them not just in the search rooms but online as well so we're digitizing material very very hard at the moment and uh we hope to launch all of the manuscript cont

ent of the philosophical transactions in uh january 2023 and that will include unpublished material and things like referees reports on uh what one scientist thought about another scientist paper they're quite fun those ones because ah there's nothing like a good argument between scientists definitely yeah and hopefully providing some comfort to scientists today that even the greats had their work criticized sometimes that's right even even the big ones have had papers rejected so i you shouldn'

t feel too bad about it we're all in this together fantastic well keith moore thank you so much for talking to me about your job as um head librarian at the royal society and telling us the story of the history of fishes thank you very much and it's great to get these things out there definitely we're going to now hear from uh over to lancaster where dr michael aspinall from the lancaster university will be telling us about his work in monitoring extreme space weather this morning i checked the

weather forecast to see if i needed to bring a jacket or not but i didn't need to because it's a lovely day here at hazel rig weather station near lancaster one thing i didn't check though is the space weather i'm about to meet michael who's going to explain to me what space weather is and how worried i should be hi i'm esri nice to meet you hello i'm michael so what are we doing here today can you tell us a little bit more about this site yeah we're at the hazel rig weather station it's a met o

ffice field site and for over the last 45 years it's been collecting data relating to our weather here on earth what actually is space weather so the sun is always spewing out material into space known as the solar wind this is a stream of electromagnetic radiation and charged particles which travels towards earth at a million miles an hour as a result a short-haul fight gives you the same dose of radiation as a dental x-ray and a long-haul flight more akin to a chest x-ray that sounds quite ext

reme so what are the potential implications from this extreme space where they're coming from the sun should we be worried most of the time here on earth it's absorbed by the earth's atmosphere or deflected by the earth's magnetic field but at its worst it can harm astronauts damage satellites and unprotected electronics and cause power grids to fail even scarier space weather once caused a passenger plane to nosedive and it's even been attributed to some planes disappearing altogether what's ha

ppening here is solar radiation passes through the electronics on board the aircraft causing data corruption essentially changing ones to zeros and zeros to ones another example is space weather causing a voting machine in belgium to register an extra 4096 votes for one candidate extreme space weather causes fluctuations in the earth's magnetic field this is known as a geomagnetic storm the earth is covered in millions of miles of wire carrying electricity when these are subjected to fluctuation

s in the earth's magnetic field a current is induced the current can cause the grid to overload shut down and even fail here we have a coil of wire representing the millions of miles of wire that's around the earth's surface and here we have a magnet representing the earth's magnetic field when there's no geomagnetic storm no current is induced everything's fine during a geomagnetic storm when there's disturbances in the earth's magnetic field currents are induced in the coil of wire which can b

e detected on this galvanometer this sounds like a really serious problem how do we know when and where on earth is affected space weather events have been monitored by ground-based instruments since the 1940s there have been over 70 ground level enhancement events ranging from the barely detectable to the very strong ones leeds in yorkshire holds the current record on the 23rd of february 1956 their instrument detected an elevation of over four and a half thousand percent in background radiatio

n unfortunately that equipment no longer exists i see so i'll get more risk nowadays the only difference between the 1950s and even the 80s is our reliance on technology space weather has remained fairly constant over the decades but we're making ourselves more and more vulnerable year on year so how do we protect ourselves from this because i assume we can't stop space weather from happening we can't stop space weather from happening but if we understand it better and we're able to monitor it b

etter we can prepare vulnerable sectors and help manage space weather events safely there are less than 50 monitors worldwide none of these are in the uk they rely on technology that dates back to the 1960s and the detectors are either highly toxic or made of material which is no longer viable too expensive so what you're saying is that even though space weather is becoming more a problem because of our dependence on technology quite ironically we don't have the technology here in the uk to moni

tor it anyway basically yes but researchers at lancaster university supported by the uk atomic energy authority and uk smes are developing a new type of cosmic radiation neutral monitor that's cheaper more compact and yet capable of producing comparable results to the existing network it's our hope that data streamed from these monitors will feed into the met office space weather operations center enabling the uk to be able to better prepare and predict space weather events in theory then does t

hat mean that when i check the weather to see if it's gonna be raining on my commute there could be a space weather warning which might inform me of any potential disruptions maybe not quite but it'd certainly be used by engineers maintaining the national grid aviation operators satellite operators and even railway operators great well thank you so much for meeting me michael and here's hoping we can monitor any future events inbound to the uk we wouldn't want this live stream dropping [Music] w

ell that's it from us here at summer science live we hope that you have enjoyed hearing about all the amazing scientific breakthroughs that are happening and are being exhibited here at the summer science exhibition 2022 if you've been inspired to learn more you can watch lots of lectures extra videos and extra content on the royal society's youtube channel so check that out on the link below the 2021 summer science exhibition was entirely digital and that is all still available as well on the r

oyal society's website there's everything from activities escape rooms quizzes virtual tours and it's all there for you to explore you can do things like design your own aeroplane wing based on the wing of a bird and you can find out what a bee's favorite flower is or even discover where galaxies come from and everything in between and so do check that out on the royal society's website as well the royal society summer exhibition will be back same time next year and so put the date in your diary

now for the beginning of july and come along down to that this year the royal society's summer exhibition is still going on until tomorrow as i speak it's saturday so you can still come down on sunday if you can make it down to carlton house terrace all of the exhibitors that you've seen today will be still here tomorrow as well so do come on down if you can to check out the end of the exhibition keep tweeting us online we're still at summer science live we would love to hear from you your thou

ghts and you can put your questions to the researchers that will be able to get back to you too so until then it's a very warm goodbye for me my name is anna prajejsky it's been a pleasure spending this afternoon with you and we will look forward to seeing you here at the royal society very soon [Music] [Music] you