Super-Senses Richard Hammond's Miracles of Nature

Humans are always trying to be better, brighter, faster,

stronger, tougher... It's one of the things that makes us human.

But nature has spent 3.5 billion years

producing ingenious answers to life's questions.

So a lot of the problems we're trying to solve

have already been solved...

by evolution.

Meaning the animal kingdom is teeming with bright ideas.

Like, how to hear through solid rock.

Hello!

'How to see without using your eyes.'

This is what we'll all be in. This is the future.

'And how to feel something that happened 30 seconds earlier.'

That's astonishing.

'In this programme, we'll reveal some amazing animal abilities...'

Totally silent.

I had no idea she was there.

'And I'll discover how those same animals

'have inspired a series of human inventions

'at the very frontiers of science.'

Yes, it's gone!

'We'll have to go around the world

'and into some pretty unlikely situations.'

Let's hope they don't confuse this with the female elephant.

'Because you never quite know

'what surprises the animal kingdom has in store for you.'

Go! Ha-ha!

'It's all part of the miracle of nature.'

Every one of us experiences the world through our senses.

But in the animal kingdom,

there are creatures with senses that go far beyond ours.

RATTLING

As I'd like to show you

with this Western diamondback rattlesnake.

But first, I'll need a bit of stick.

Quite a big bit.

So, first of all, a walkie-talkie.

There you go.

Now...telephone.

'OK, relax. That's the tense bit over with.

'I hope.'

Now, let's say I want to talk to my rattlesnake.

Walkie-talkie.

Hello, Mrs Snake.

'Hello, sorry to wake you up.

'Hello. Hello?'

Nothing.

And with good reason.

She can't hear. She has no ears.

So let's try something different.

Maybe she'd rather communicate by telephone.

The phone over there is on vibrate

and not ring, and that's quite important here.

It's dialling.

TELEPHONE VIBRATES

Straight away, a response.

TELEPHONE VIBRATES

Immediately.

TELEPHONE VIBRATES

Now, that's because, while she can't hear,

she can feel the vibrations from that phone.

They go through the metal she's lying on, through her body,

and up to something called the quadrate bone,

in her head, just by her jaw, that vibrates,

so she can hear, if you like, the vibrations.

'In fact, rattlesnakes are so sensitive to the power of vibration

'that it provides them with a sort of super sense.'

And that is something that takes us to what we're doing next,

which is very clever indeed.

I need to get my phone back, I...

I'll come back for it later,

I'll stick with this one.

These animal super senses are what this programme is all about.

Super senses that engineers and scientists are using

as inspiration to help improve our own lives.

Hello, right. I'm in the gold mine.

'I'm in like a very narrow corridor, it's very cramped.'

I have agreed to take part in a pretty unusual experiment.

From here on in, I'm at the mercy of these two men,

who are about to trigger what can only be described

as a rather dramatic chain of events.

I've come to like an old, broken wooden door thing.

'I'm going through.'

Hello? Can you hear me, hello?

MUFFLED NOISE

Of course, they can't hear me, the radio doesn't work down here.

And my cellphone, well, that's long since given up the ghost. No signal.

So I have no means of communication between here and the surface.

And that is a problem, because, in about 30 seconds' time,

they're going to explode the doorway into this gold mine.

They told me that by the time I lost phone and radio signal,

I'd be deep enough to be safe.

I hope they're right.

So here's the situation.

I am now trapped in the mine.

I've got no means of telling anybody on the surface

where I am or how I am.

The only thing that stands a chance of saving me

has its roots on the other side of the planet -

in Africa.

And the answer lies with one particular African animal.

The biggest African animal of them all -

the elephant.

Because some scientists think

that elephants can communicate over huge distances

using nothing but vibrations through the ground.

And elephant researcher, Dr Kate Evans, has offered to show me how.

-OK, now, this bit, I understand, is a speaker, quite a big one.

-Yes.

But you're pointing it straight down at the ground.

Now, with a home stereo, that'd be a disaster,

but you're doing something different here.

Well, what we really want to do is kind of pretend it's an elephant,

-if you see what I mean.

-Yes.

-A very large elephant, you wouldn't want to come across it, that's for sure!

-Enormous!

SHE CHUCKLES

'Obviously Kate's only building the foot. Not the whole elephant.

'But it will send an elephant signal straight down into the ground.'

The theory is that the energy passes down into the ground and out.

So that's why we want a really good connection with the ground.

-Right. OK. I will hammer.

-Hammer away.

-Yes.

'Nailing the speaker to sand might seem a bit, well, daft,

'but we do need to get the best connection we can

'if we're really going to punch out those low frequency vibrations.'

-This is genuinely quite exciting.

-SHE CHUCKLES

'We even mimic the elephant's weight by piling sand bags on top.

'With our elephant-tech transmitter finally complete,

'Kate and I retreat to a safe distance.'

This sound, who's saying what in it?

We previously recorded a known female.

She was going into oestrus,

which is when females are receptive to mating.

And so, what we hope is that this call will attract the males in.

'So, to put it bluntly,

'we're broadcasting an elephant come on.'

But even with an offer like that,

there is no guarantee of success.

Because the nearest male elephants

our camera team have been able to find

are more than a mile away, drinking at a bend in a noisy river.

Is it even remotely possible that they'll pick up on our signal?

Time to find out.

The call isn't being transmitted through the air,

so we can't hear it.

But we can see the speaker moving.

We agreed to trigger the signals at a pre-arranged time.

So if there's any reaction from the male elephants at the river,

we've got a better chance of spotting it.

Our camera team don't have to wait long.

Within moments, the three males are moving away up the bank.

But we've no way of knowing

if they're responding to our empty promise of elephant romance.

Not unless they come straight to our transmitter,

which might create its own problems.

They will after all be looking for love.

Let's hope they don't confuse this with the female elephant,

cos I'm not sure this is going to sustain five tonnes of weight.

Yeah, well, it's a nice-looking truck, but even so...

SHE CHUCKLES

Ooh, I wish you hadn't said that, I don't want to sit here and wait now.

SHE LAUGHS

But wait, we must...

..because it's going to take those elephants

a fair while to get to us through the thick scrub.

Unfortunately, the terrain proves just too overgrown

for our camera team to follow.

The last they see of them,

the elephants are disappearing into the trees.

There you go!

'And then, out of the blue, they appear.'

There's three! Wow!

-They're straight through.

-Yeah.

-He's definitely looking for something.

-Yeah.

He's got something on his mind, hasn't he?

There's no doubt the lead male is interested.

So you can imagine his disappointment

when, instead of an amorous female,

all he finds is a scruffy pile of sacks.

We've all been there.

But he has provided pretty compelling evidence

of the elephant's ability to do what a rattlesnake does -

hear through the ground.

I'd like to think we just had a bit of a chat...

What did we say?

Shot the breeze. I've no idea, no idea.

SHE CHUCKLES

'So, with the help of elephants,

'we've successfully managed to send signals through the earth.

But can that elephant technology help rescue me

from a Californian gold mine?

Well, it's not quite an elephant, but it is an ELF -

an extreme low frequency device.

And it can do, hopefully, what elephants can do so effectively,

which is transmit, communicate through solid rock.

Quite a lot of it, in this instance.

All I've got to do is assemble it.

'It works in exactly the same way as our artificial elephant's foot.

'Only this time, the speaker is pointing upwards.'

This bit here will connect the device with the rock.

Obviously, you don't need me to tell you

that people do get trapped in mines for real

without the benefit of a TV crew

and, more importantly, without the benefit

of any means of communicating with the surface.

Sometimes with terrible consequences.

This device could give them a chance.

The whole system has been designed so it can run on 12 volts,

from car batteries,

which is pretty handy if you're stuck down a mine like this.

So the control box has various zones, various sectors,

because in any mine, such as this,

they would have agreed in advance where different sectors are.

So if I set this into five, that is telling them...

And there it goes.

That's telling them I'm in sector five, so they know where I am.

And I can tell them the air quality is OK.

So now, they know where I am and how I am.

At least, I'm telling them,

because I know the signal is leaving me and going up into the rock.

What I've no way of knowing right now

is whether or not they're receiving that vital information.

In other words,

have we the capability to do what the elephant does,

and pick those vibrations up?

100 feet above me, the ELF's inventors,

Jim Squire and Jay Sullivan, believe we have.

With the help of this small spiked cylinder.

This is the ELF's receiver,

relaying any vibrations from below back to Jim and Jay's base unit.

All right, let's start acquiring.

At this sort of depth, we should have the answer

in around 10 seconds, if he's sending right now.

OK, it looks like we're getting a signal now.

And there it is.

Location five, good air.

And that's the point at which they'd normally send in the rescue teams.

But...I don't really need them.

Well, no, they didn't actually shut me in a gold mine

and blow up the only exit.

There'd have been a lot of paperwork.

And, anyway, the point is we've proved it works. Thank you, guys!

And thank you too to the African elephant,

whose extraordinary super sense

might help transform mine safety and save lives.

With results like that,

it's no surprise that scientists and engineers

keep coming back to the natural world for inspiration.

And there's plenty to inspire them.

At this very moment,

there are more than a million species of creature alive on Earth.

Scientists estimate that, in reality,

there might be eight or nine times that amount.

So who knows what some of those creatures might be able to teach us.

Lessons we could apply to a whole host of human problems.

Problems like - how can you see in the pitch black?

I want you to watch the next 30 seconds very carefully.

In just a few minutes,

a second rider is going to come down this track.

Through the same twists and turns,

over the same humps and bumps.

But with one, big difference -

this rider is blind.

So how is that possible?

When practically all he sees around him...

..is black!

To find out, we need to start with a creature

that spends the majority of its life in permanent darkness.

A creature that can navigate its way around these caves and caverns

without using a head torch.

In fact, without using its eyes at all.

I'm talking about bats. Of course!

Because we all know that bats can get around in the dark.

But bat expert Dr Dean Waters is about to show me

that their senses are far cleverer than that.

-Have you got one?

-I've got one here.

-This is an Egyptian fruit bat.

-Hello, Egyptian fruit bat.

And they are very sweet-looking creatures,

cos some bats, horseshoes and such are...

look like, "Argh," they're horrible.

Yeah, I mean, no offence, I'm sure they look lovely to one another,

but this, to us, is aesthetically, quite a handsome little thing.

So beautiful big eyes and they also have this lovely ears that are very, very mobile

that they wiggle around a lot.

And they echolocate through their mouth.

They'll open their mouth and click from side to side with their tongue.

CLICKING SOUND

-That's it?

-That's it, very simple.

So it's not like a special... It's just their tongue...

Just a click, that's it.

CLICKING SOUND

'But that simple clicking is enough for the fruit bat

'to find its way about with amazing precision.

'And Dean believes it can build up

'an incredibly detailed picture of its surroundings.

But just how accurate is it?

Time to put the bat's super sense to the test.

We're using a very hi-tech combination

of cup hooks, bells and string

to make a type of bat slalom course.

OK, then, Dean. Lights out, let's see what we've got.

-We've got a dark cave, thin strings and bats.

-Yeah.

What are we hoping for?

Well, we're looking at how good these bats' echolocation calls are.

It's always been described as a simple or primitive system.

-It sounds rubbish.

-Yeah, it doesn't sound very impressive.

No. But if you look very carefully at the call structure,

it's almost exactly the same type of calls that dolphins use.

And we know that dolphins are very, very good echolocators.

So what we're hoping for is that they dodge the strings,

and we'll know if they hit them cos of the bells.

Yeah, absolutely. Right.

But we really haven't made it easy for them.

The strings are less than a centimetre wide

and the gaps between them are much narrower

than the bats two-foot wingspan.

Yeah. Unfortunately, our experiment has one fatal flaw.

We can't actually see if it's working.

We don't hear any bells,

but the bats might have all flown off for all we know.

So we have a little re-think,

set up a special night-vision camera,

and turn on an infrared light.

The bats will still be in pitch black,

but now, we should be able to see them via Dean's laptop.

Success.

Except the cave appears to be completely empty.

But then, a single bat appears.

And what he does next is remarkable.

Nearly, go on, you're going to go through...

Oh, that's perfect, no, that's absolutely perfect.

That was... He was bringing his wings in,

he knew they were either side, exactly where they were.

-Right, so again.

-Here comes one now.

So this supposedly primitive system

is capable of picking up even the slightest of obstacles.

So accurately that the bats don't even bother pulling their wing in

till the last possible moment.

They make it look easy, but it's not.

There's an awful lot going on to enable that little bat

to fly around in the pitch dark.

It is a wonderfully sophisticated little animal.

And the thought was always that these guys, their echolocation system was a bit primitive,

a bit basic compared with the other smaller types of bat.

-Yeah.

-But what this proves, in fact, is that it's not at all,

I mean, it's quite finesse.

They'd go down to this wide.

Absolutely, these guys know exactly where these wires are,

and that's purely through their echolocation system,

cos it's pitch black in here, there's no other way they'd know they're there.

So if a bat can use sound,

a series of small clicks, to see in the dark,

maybe it could work for human beings.

This man, Professor Brian Hoyle,

believes he's found a way to do just that,

by putting bat-tech in a stick.

So, this isn't just a bit like the way a bat works.

This is echolocated.

-It is very, very similar indeed. Over to you.

-Right, it's beeping at me!

-That was you!

-It was me.

-It's found you! Look at that!

And if I move it off, it stops.

I'm going to go behind you, so I can see what's going on.

I felt you walk through.

So, what I'm doing now, this is sending out a noise,

the same as a bat does, and then listening for it bouncing back,

echoing back off objects, which is exactly what our bats did.

-It then tells me, by buzzing, on this.

-Absolutely.

And you can feel it. So, if I walk towards that.

-Ooh, it's found something.

-Just take it slowly.

-It's buzzing through my thumb.

-Good.

-If I move off, it's not.

-Great.

So, it's telling me there's an object to my left.

-You found a safe path to the right.

-There's nothing to my right.

Nothing, Nothing... Oh! There's a sudden buzz.

If I move off to the right - nothing. To the left - something.

To the right, nothing. So, I would know I'm OK going this way.

And it gets faster as you get closer to it,

it buzzes through your thumb more quickly.

That's correct, absolutely.

You don't need me to tell you, Brian, that your invention works.

-Because it does!

-Fantastic, great.

Bring on the blindfold.

Let's give this a proper go.

Right, let's see if I can pick up in a matter of minutes

what it's taken the fruit bat millions of years to perfect.

Nothing - oh! Something, to my right.

Hang on, there's a gap there.

I've got something to my left, there. And to my right, there.

Picked up something, then.

Oh, that's a mannequin, isn't it?

Slowly, but surely, I can see how somebody could build up a picture.

Right, the only thing is, I have no idea where I've ended up.

Right, I had no idea that I was here.

Well, I think you did really well,

and I don't think you bumped into anything.

I didn't hit anything.

'Surprisingly, that's not down to luck, but to my brain.'

And what you're doing, then,

is this information goes into your brain, and it's processed

through the same part of your brain

-that actually processes sight.

-It is.

Which means when we talk about using this to see,

as far as sure brain's concerned, you really are.

You're building up the picture in the same place you're seeing.

If you think it's the brain that sees, not the eyes,

-then you're seeing.

-Right.

'And that's the remarkable thing.

'Our brains can adjust astoundingly quickly

'to using our senses in a completely different way.'

So, I thought, what if we take this whole idea a step further,

and use bat sonar to enable blind people to do something

they wouldn't normally even attempt.

So, I've taken apart a couple of canes,

and I've come up with this, the Bat Bike.

Now, let me talk you through this.

Essentially, it's a prototype at the moment, but it shows the principle.

We've got two Bat Cane handles up here on the bars,

with the contact pads, feeding back information to the rider from

the sensors in the handles themselves,

then we've got two more down here.

I reckon that should be enough information feeding back

to the rider to enable a blind person to ride

a mountain bike down a mountain bike course.

Now I say it out loud, that is quite a big ask, but it could work.

By the time engineers have built our Bat Bike properly

a few of the details have changed, but the theory remains the same.

These sensors send out and receive a series of clicks

and a couple of vibrating buttons tell the rider what's up ahead.

But now it's actually come to it,

I'm not sure who's more nervous -

me, or 21-year-old Dan Smith, who actually has to ride this thing.

A keen cyclist, Dan tragically lost his sight nine months ago

from a rare genetic condition.

He hasn't been able to ride a bike on his own since.

Although most of the damage to his eyes is invisible, trust me,

Dan can't see anything in front of him.

Five, four, three, two, one, go!

HEART BEATS

MACHINE BEEPS

Dan only had a few short hours to practice on this bike,

but bat technology is allowing his brain to see the course.

Well, there can be no clearer proof the bat tech works.

Yeah, very good, actually.

It's really good to be back on a single bike again,

but the technology works, because I've just navigated

the whole track by myself, so I'm very pleased, yeah.

Now, obviously, it might be a little while

before visually-impaired cyclists take to our roads,

but bat technology may just have opened up their lives

like never before.

Super senses don't just sound cool, they're really useful.

It's a huge advantage to an animal to be able to see more clearly,

or hear more clearly.

But, what if you're on the receiving end?

What if you're an animal that doesn't want to be seen or heard?

Well, evolution can provide an answer to that, too.

This place is very special.

At about this time of year once, maybe twice a week,

a unique phenomenon occurs, almost within touching distance.

And that's why, although this beach is far from easy to get to,

it draws fascinated onlookers from all over the world,

each hoping to see and hear something they'd be

very unlikely to encounter at such close quarters anywhere else.

And it's something that's going to happen any moment now.

All we can do is watch and wait.

This is it. Here it comes.

It's the weekly arrival of Flight 785 from Amsterdam.

All here to see this. I know!

Because here, on this very beach, you can get closer

to a landing jumbo than practically anywhere else on the planet.

And it's an ear-splitting experience.

PLANE ENGINE GROWS LOUDER

Now, believe it or not, most of that noise comes not from

the plane's engines, just from the wind rushing around the aeroplane.

In other words, turbulence!

ENGINE ROARS

A lot of it!

I mean, a lot!

That turbulence is generated every time a plane pushes through the air.

But, surely, there has to be a quieter way to fly?

There is one creature which, despite having a top speed

well in excess of 30 miles an hour, is virtually silent.

Somewhere around here is one of those creatures

that's been specially trained to go into a hunting mode

when they hear this noise...

-MACHINE BEEPS

-..that's coming from that

beeper down there, being operated by this button in my hand.

So, here's the set up.

I'm going to lie down here,

with the beeper hidden next to my head

and sound it.

My job is to try and take a photograph of the creature as it attacks.

But to make that just an extra little bit tricky,

give me more of a challenge, I shall be blindfolded.

So, really all I can do is listen for my attacker.

Right.

Well, let's get started. I am now the prey.

MACHINE BEEPS

Time to summon my trained attacker.

It's surprisingly tense.

MACHINE BEEPS

If the creature appears, I've got nothing but my ears

to warn me of its approach.

MACHINE BEEPS

MACHINE BEEPS

It's the waiting that gets you!

MACHINE BEEPS

And this is that creature - a barn owl.

GRASS RUSTLES

CAMERA CLICKS

Wow, that was genuinely amazing.

When somebody tells you something like,

"A barn owl can fly silently,"

I generally take it with a pinch of salt, but trust me, they can.

I had no idea she was there until she hit the ground.

Totally silent.

And owls need to be.

Take this tawny owl, for instance.

Silent flight, as we've seen, allows an owl

to creep up on its prey.

But it also means that their wings can operate quietly enough

that they can hear that prey over their own flapping.

But to see what makes owl flight so special,

we need a little experiment.

Starting with this pigeon.

Just watch what happens when it flies across a bed of feathers.

That is turbulence in action.

Now here's an owl attempting the same thing.

There's almost no disturbance at all.

But how on earth is it doing it?

Well, it turns out that owl wings have three very special features.

These tiny knobbly teeth stop the front edge creating

one big whirlpool of air.

Then a layer of soft, velvety feathers keeps

that airflow close to the wing.

And finally, that tattered back edge reduces turbulence

as the air leaves the wing.

So I thought, what if I could make an airplane wing like an owl's wing?

Unfortunately, I could only find one place willing to let me have a go -

an airplane graveyard.

I've had to improvise a bit, with materials and such,

but that's how it is with science.

And here it is, it's got everything.

The egg boxes give the leading edge that knobbly profile,

to break up the airflow into smaller vortices.

The carpet, the texture,

breaks up the huge bubble of disturbed air and reduces noise,

and the trailing edge is serrated, and that cuts down on noise, as well.

So, why don't all aeroplane wings look like this?

Well, it turns out it's not that simple.

The problem is one of scale.

That amount of egg boxes and carpet

would just slow the plane down too much.

And the serrated lino would apparently

get in the way of the flaps they use for braking.

So it looks like the sightseers of St Maarten

are safe for the moment.

Science isn't about to spoil their fun.

But all is not lost.

It turns out there are smaller wings that would benefit

from owl technology.

It's just that they're attached to fans.

And that might turn out to be even more important.

FAN WHIRS

OK, so a silent fan might not sound as exciting as

a huge, furry aircraft wing, but bear with me,

because silent fans would make a bigger difference

than you might think.

FAN GOES SILENT

Imagine silent computers, silent hairdryers,

silent vacuum cleaners, silent wind farms, silent air-conditioning.

Because all those fans suffer the same sort of problems

with turbulence that planes do.

So, the inventors of this fan have used owl tech to break up

that turbulence, by adding serrations to the back edge.

And the result is a fan that is very, very quiet indeed.

No matter how hard you listen.

So, this owl technology, copied directly from the way

a barn owl protects its super-sensitive hearing from wind noise,

could end up making our noisy world just a little bit quieter.

At least until the next plane comes along.

PLANE ENGINE ROARS

Sometimes inspiration from nature is right under our noses.

Take whiskers, for instance. We all think we know what they're for -

so that cats don't get their heads stuck in railings.

But, in fact, they're far more sophisticated than that.

And this is exactly the animal to show us.

Harbour seals spend much of their time submerged in murky waters,

where visibility is next to nothing.

And yet they're still able to hunt fast-moving fish

with frightening accuracy.

Well, believe it or not, they're finding them with their whiskers.

A harbour seal called Henry is going to show me how.

-Hello.

-Hello.

-This is Henry, then?

-This is Henry, right.

-Hello, Henry.

-Say hello.

-Hello.

So, these whiskers, I don't want to touch them because they're so sensitive,

-are they very delicate if I touch them?

-Yeah, you can touch them.

I know that these are serious instruments, aren't they?

What can he do with them?

They can use them similar to us, our hands, so they know your fist

-is smaller than my fist, for example.

-He can tell this is a smaller hand than yours, with his whiskers?

-Yeah.

Now, normally I wouldn't advise you to do this. Seals are quite bitey.

But Henry is a particularly accommodating harbour seal.

He works hand-in-flipper with Doctor Sven Wieskotten.

And when he's doing this work with you,

why is he willing to be trained and to work with you like this?

That's easy.

-Yeah. He does like a fish, doesn't he?

-He does like the fish.

So this whole array of whiskers around his snout here,

-that's another sense?

-That's another sense.

So they don't have hands like us... Goodbye.

-Goodbye, Henry. Go have a splash.

-He got bored, I think!

But Henry's whiskers are useful for much more

than a game of guess the size of the presenter's hand,

as Sven is about to show me.

All we need is a remote-controlled submarine, a friendly seal

and a blindfold.

-How are you going to put a blindfold on a seal?

-Oh, that's easy.

-We trained this and now he's jumping through the mask.

-No, he's not!

He jumps through it.

-RICHARD LAUGHS

-That's astonishing!

Having jumped into his blindfold,

Henry obligingly moves into his starting position.

Sven puts headphones over his ears and plays him pink noise...

STATIC

..a sort of audio static, which drowns out any sound from the outside world.

So Henry can't see, and as long as those headphones are on,

he can't hear.

-OK, so when you say go, I go.

-OK, go.

-Go.

My job is to control the model submarine.

I can send it anywhere in the pool.

And Henry knows that if he finds it, he'll get a fish.

But he'll only get the chance to start his search

when I've stopped the sub completely,

so there's no motor noise or splashing to help him locate it.

OK, Henry. Do your stuff.

-He's found it! He found it blindfold.

-Yeah.

It's no problem for him.

In fact, because he's blindfolded, it's only the sound

of Sven splashing that enables him to find his way back to us.

He's not using his eyes, he can't. There's nothing to hear,

because it's not running any more, I've stopped it. That's astonishing.

And it looks like Henry wants to play again.

But it doesn't matter how many times we do it,

or what route I choose for the sub. Henry finds it every single time.

-Good!

-Oh, that was fantastic.

And it's not just the fact he finds it that's impressive,

it's the way he finds it.

He swims the exact same route as the sub.

What a clever boy.

Believe it or not, Henry is finding the sub with his whiskers.

They're so sensitive that they're picking up the underwater trail

the sub has left behind.

That's amazing. Do it again.

And he swam the exact trail of where it had been.

That's astonishing.

'So astonishing that Sven has to prove to me

'that it's really Henrys whiskers that are doing the work.'

In this small tank, the water is almost completely still...

..allowing the researchers to generate

tiny precise eddies coloured with green ink.

Even though they create barely a ripple,

Henry's whiskers pick them up immediately,

twitching on the side the eddy is touched.

Which, I have to admit, is fairly convincing.

This whole concept of whiskers letting you feel your way around

is something that I can use myself.

This is a very big car and, historically,

I have struggled to put the thing away, back it into the garage.

Not any more,

because what I have here is a set of purpose-built whiskers.

I'll be able to feel my way into the garage.

Ah, this is going to be brilliant. Right, let me explain.

These are the whiskers, obviously.

When it encounters, let's say, a garage door or the wall at the back,

it moves. And when it does that,

it moves inside this little loop of metal,

which touches this coil on the outside of the whisker, like that.

And I can demonstrate with the control box, here. You see?

That whisker's touching, it lights up.

And that's pretty much how a real whisker works.

The bristle itself has no feeling at all, but the movement

against nerve endings at its base sends signals back to the brain.

It's a deliciously simple idea, and I thought of it myself entirely,

and at no point did my mate Hadrian help me with it.

It was me. Right, that's fitted. This is brilliant.

There's actually no technology here that they didn't have in 1934,

so I don't know why they didn't fit it as standard.

Right...

Oh, yeah! Ignition on.

Please start.

ENGINE SPUTTERS

Ooo-ooh!

Right, I'm slightly scared all of a sudden.

It's at this point you should probably know that this car

used to drive the Queen Mum about.

And it's actually worth quite a bit.

Oh, hang on, I've got a contact there.

So that tells me I should move a bit further that way.

It works!

Well, I think this is straight.

Let's have a go. No lights, so I think I'm through. Yes!

I've never been able to reverse this car into this garage on my own.

I've always had to have somebody with me.

Now, thanks to my whiskers technology...

Aw, yes!

That actually works. I mean, genuinely...

This is the horrible thing, cos it's a very long car,

it's a limousine, this will now tell me when I hit the back wall.

-Well, obviously

-before

-I hit the back wall!

Whoa, there we go!

I'm in!

It turns out that if you scale that exact same idea up, quite a lot,

you end up with something pretty cool.

ENGINE PURRS

Oh! We're off.

This is the Terramax.

It's a 10-ton, six-wheel drive military truck,

there's nobody in here but me, and I'm not driving.

Yeah, it's driving itself.

And it really is.

It's not remote-controlled, it's not some glorified form of sat-nav

and there's no hidden driver.

Which begs the question - how can it see where it's going?

In fact, it's using whiskers.

All right, if it's got whiskers, where are they?

But these are a very special sort of whisker.

Because they're invisible.

In fact, they're lasers.

Up on the roof, that spinning cylinder houses 64 of them,

each one revolving 15 times a second.

And that equates to it managing to gather, every second,

1.3 million touches on the landscape.

And this is what that looks like.

Each tiny dot on the screen shows a point a laser whisker has touched.

Build those up over a couple of seconds and the Terramax gets

an astonishingly accurate map of its surroundings.

The idea is that a convoy of these supply trucks could drive

behind enemy lines without putting servicemen at risk.

But what would happen if they came upon something unexpected?

Something like this.

12 concrete-filled bollards.

It should be terrifying, but it kind of isn't. It's kind of joyous. This thing has a personality.

It's as close to alive as I can imagine a truck being.

So how good are these things going to get?

When will it end?

When will we reach a point when somebody will say to you, "What?!

"You're not driving yourself, are you?

"I mean, why would you do that? It's dangerous and irresponsible."

This is the future.

This little truck, with its array of whiskers that work in exactly

the same way that a harbour seal's whiskers do,

it's just that these are lasers, is the future.

This is what we'll all be in.

It's brilliant.

'Next time on Miracles Of Nature,

'I'll be looking at animal super powers...'

Ah, this is not at all pleasant.

'..and discovering how scientists have copied them to help us

'keep our cool...' That was a new personal best.

'..make us ten times stronger...'

And it works.

'..and turn invisible.'

That is astonishing!

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd