The Imagineers

For years, chemotherapy has been used to treat cancer.

Drugs that attack cancer cells are injected or swallowed,

but because they are very toxic they can also cause unpleasant side effects.

So is there a way that you can use drugs to just target

the cancer cells, without harming the rest of your body?

This may not sound like a problem for an engineer, but it is.

I'm at the Institute Of Bio-medical Engineering at Oxford University

to meet the creator of a pioneering medical technique.

Dr Eleanor Stride trained as a mechanical engineer

before recognising the medical benefits of her work

and doing a doctorate in ultrasonics.

One of the big problems with cancer drugs is,

they're effectively poisonous.

So when you give them to a patient you're poisoning the entire body.

The only reason they work is,

cancer cells are more sensitive than normal cells to those drugs.

But because they're similar to the other cells in the body,

it's very difficult to actually get the drug to differentiate.

What is the overall goal of what you're doing?

So, what were trying to do is, to develop systems that allow us

to deliver drugs to specific parts of the body,

rather than what happens currently, which is a drug is injected

into the bloodstream and it goes absolutely everywhere.

We want to target where that drug ends up.

'Eleanor's drug transportation system starts small.

'In fact, so small, it's microscopic.

'She engineers tiny bubbles of gas coated with a clever shell

'that can survive the sometimes hostile macro-highways of a human bloodstream

'in order to deliver their life-saving payloads.'

Because we are engineering the surfaces of these bubbles, the coatings,

we can put drugs into the bubble.

And you just inject them? Eat them?

-We just inject them!

-Ah, inject them.

-Yep.

We link the drugs onto the coatings, or actually inside the bubble.

The drugs then stay in the bubble as they move through the bloodstream.

'OK, I get the idea. Tiny bubbles carrying chemotherapy drugs

'travel around the blood vessels. But, how do they know where to go?'

In addition to putting a drug into the bubble,

we put magnetic particles.

And that means that we can move the bubbles around

using a magnet, that's applied outside the body.

'Love it! Magnets are such a simple engineering solution

'to the complex problem of navigation through the body.'

So if we imagine that this is the human body.

And the tracks within the cube are like your bloodstream.

And the little silver ball is our magnetic bubble.

If you use the magnet, you can guide where the ball is within the body.

OK. How much smaller is your bloodstream

and the magnetic bubble that you have?

So you could say that's about a centimetre.

The small blood vessels, where we're trying to guide the bubbles to,

which is what you'd have around a tumour,

are about 10,000 times smaller than that.

Oh, my word. And I'm finding this one difficult!

Is it just one bubble going to it?

Oh, no. We're injecting probably a few million if not a billion bubbles,

but compared with the dose of the drug you'd give

if you gave it to the whole body, it's still absolutely tiny.

Because we only need a minute proportion of the drugs to get to each cell.

So this is another advantage of targeting,

as we don't need to use as much drugs.

'To make it more of a challenge, the human body isn't transparent,

'so guiding the bubbles is quite tricky.'

It's more equivalent to me doing that!

Right. And I've got to move...

You now have to get your magnetic micro-bubbles in the right place at the right time.

Right!

SHE LAUGHS

I don't even know! I don't even know where the ball is!

Oh, it fell!

We need a method for looking inside the body.

Yeah, you do!

'The solution for tracking the bubbles is ultrasound,

'which works like the echolocation dolphins use to find their prey.

'Ultrasound is a high-pitched soundwave

'that can be sent into a human body.

'Each time it meets a different layer, some of that wave is reflected back.'

It's those reflections that we use to produce the ultrasound image.

So how does this help you with your micro-bubbles?

The great thing about having bubbles is, because they're full of gas,

it's a very different type of material.

So the echo they produce is really strong.

'And because they are strong echoes

'they stand out from the rest of the body.'

So I suppose it's a bit like you're sat there waiting,

and you're waiting for a bubble to go past your area of interest

and you'll be able to see the bubble because of the gas

and then you will be attracting it with your magnet

and you will see that it's arrived, I suppose, at its destination?

Yep. And the more bubbles that arrive, the brighter the image gets.

So you can actually work out what sort of concentration of bubbles you have.

'So once the magnets have the bubbles in position,

'Eleanor needs a way to burst them to deliver the drug.'

We increase the energy in the ultrasound beam.

The bubbles oscillate more violently.

They break open and we release the drug.

-A bit like smashing a wine glass with sound?

-Yep.

So what sort of drugs could this deliver?

In principle, almost any.

So as drugs are being discovered,

more than half can't actually be used,

because they're simply too toxic to inject directly

into the bloodstream, or to take as a pill.

-Hang on. Half of the drugs that are designed?

-More than half.

More than half of the drugs that are designed,

we can't use, because they're basically too poisonous?

Yep. Exactly.

So having a technology that allows us to encapsulate those drugs,

keep them inside a bubble until they've got to the right place, is incredibly valuable.

So how long do you think it will be before this package of treatment

ends up as something that we could get in a hospital?

It takes probably three years to get to a clinical trial stage,

and then it's another...maybe five. So, overall, 10 to 15 years.

So in 10 to 15 years' time,

this could be a treatment in your local hospital.

The most incredible moment will be seeing this translated

into the clinic and actually working to help cure disease.

If you wanted to provide communities in the developing world with electricity, what would you do?

Give them solar panels? Give them wind turbines?

Well, the technology certainly exists

but who's going to fix them when they go wrong?

It's a problem that's got the attention of mechanical engineering PhD student Jon Sumanik-Leary

at the University of Sheffield.

He's trying to prove that you don't have to be a trained engineer

to harness the power of wind for yourself.

So say if you were to go to a remote community and build a wind turbine,

how long do you think it would last without breaking?

You'd be lucky if it got to the end of the first year without something breaking on it.

Wind turbines, they really are unreliable things.

I've been to Nepal, to Nicaragua and to Peru

to go and study this technology,

to go and see what kind of impact it's having.

We visited three wind turbines, all of which were broken.

So after seeing the situation as it was

did that give you any ideas in ways you could help?

Well, it inspired me to continue working with technology

that you could manufacture locally.

Jon's concluded the best way to keep wind turbines running

is to get the people who want them to build them themselves.

So he's doing research on a kit that anyone can build.

I think I might give it a whirl.

-Can I build it?

-Absolutely. Anyone can build a wind turbine.

You're going to have to work a few things out for yourself,

-but fortunately...

-You mean I don't get a booklet?!

You don't get a booklet, but I don't think

you'll need that much help. It really is quite simple.

OK, erm...

What's the best bit to start with?

So there's the three holes there, which will match with the three holes there.

'Despite a lack of instruction booklet,

'the kit contains the components for a small turbine that,

'given enough wind, could easily provide energy for lighting,

'phone charging and a few low-energy appliances.'

-This isn't really a one-person job, is it?

-It is easier with two people.

And with this one, the more people you have, the better.

I suppose as well like, because then the more people that have built it,

the more people take ownership of it, and then if something happens

to one person, there's other people that know how to fix it.

Exactly. You want as many people knowing about the technology as possible.

All wind turbines are designed with one thing in mind -

to efficiently use magnets and wire to generate electricity.

This one just does it more simply.

Nice!

So we've got a magnet sandwich, with the filling being the coils of wire.

We're going to spin the coils of wire through the magnetic field

and generate electricity in the coils of wire.

By working with simplified turbines,

Jon's goal is to empower communities to do it themselves.

It's taken a little over an hour and it's already assembled,

but, there's a blade missing.

Well, I'm afraid I've sabotaged it.

You're going to have to make another one, so just like you would do

if you were in a remote community in the developing world.

-Say one of your blades breaks.

-Uh-huh?

-You would then have to build another one.

'Some of the components for the kit would need to be made in bulk by a local manufacturer,

'but the idea is that most are made by hand, by the people building it.'

Ah, yep, good. Done.

Plastic is one of the easiest ones to make a small turbine,

because it's already got this curvature here.

'Replacing parts that break often needs to be as cheap as possible,

'as the areas Jon is hoping to help are some of the poorest in the world.'

The most vital thing that they're using electricity for

is as a replacement for open-flame kerosene lamps

so this is essentially a candle made with kerosene, jet fuel.

Not only is it really dangerous but it's really poor light.

Having electric light to be able to do homework in the evening

is one of the biggest benefits of having something better than candles.

I suppose with electricity you can get the things that can educate you.

You can communicate with not just the people in your community, but also the rest of the world.

You can have a better chance of working your way out of poverty because of it.

Okey-dokey! Blade number three.

So I just put this on, then I'm done?

Simple is sometimes just the best type of engineering, isn't it?

The simpler it is, the less likely it is to break

and the easier it's going to be to fix when it does.

'It's time to get my turbine tested.

'And, thankfully, we don't have to rely on the British weather.

'The University of Sheffield have a wind tunnel.'

So now we're in the test section of the tunnel.

So this is where you put things to do experiments,

-so the wind comes in this way

-Comes IN this way?

Comes in this way and gets sucked out that way, by the fan.

-That fan is impressive.

-Yeah, it's big!

'The electricity generated isn't like the stuff that comes out of your plug socket.

'It has a range of voltages, so it needs to go through a regulator

'to narrow that range, before it's stored in a special battery.'

-So we're charging the battery?

-We're charging the battery, yeah.

Press the magic button and start up the wind.

Go on, go on!

When we have enough electricity stored, we can test it out

by playing music from an MP3 player through an amp and speakers.

Do you reckon we've got enough now?

-There's only one way to find out, isn't there?

-I'm ready for the play!

So, everything's set up here, yeah?

Yeah, we're all good to go. You've just got to press the button here.

DANCE MUSIC PLAYS

That's amazing!

So imagine how it would be if you were in a community where

you've never had electricity before. Imagine how excited you'd be then.

Yeah, I'm excited!

I'm excited and I get electricity every day!

So if it was the first time, that would be amazing.

So if you can do it here, then it's something that can be replicated

over in the developing world,

using only the same basic tools and basic techniques that we use today.

'If Jon can get a project up and running to supply these kits

'where they are desperately needed, renewable energy won't just be

'something remote communities can have,

'it'll be something they can keep.'

Well, Jon, I actually never thought I would get to build

my own wind turbine. So, thank you so much!

I can't take it home, can I?

Is it possible to save the lives of thousands of people across the world

every year, by re-engineering just one household object?

One of the most common killers of women and children

in the developing world is an object they can't live without.

The cooking stove.

Inhaled fumes from fires used to cook, heat and light cause massive health risks and premature death.

It's a problem that humanitarian organisations around the world

are trying to tackle.

And I've come to the University of Nottingham

to meet engineering students Samuel McGovern and Astha Desai,

who are part of a global project close to designing a solution.

Now, I've heard that you guys are part of a team

that are working to save thousands of lives. Is that right?

Yeah, we're part of the Score-Stove team.

Three billion people in the world cook on an open fire.

The smoke tends to stay inside their house

and that's what causes the problem.

Millions die unnecessarily from inhalation of smoke.

Why aren't they using chimneys?

They don't understand the dangers.

And they've grown up seeing their parents cooking on it.

They don't have the education and also money.

A lot of these are social problems.

Would you consider these to be engineering problems?

Yeah, because we have to take in all of these factors when the design's made.

We actually recently did a project in Nepal,

so we actually went out there to see first-hand what it was like.

Whatever we do design has to be made for the people that are using it.

Right now, this project is trying to find a way to increase the use

of chimneys in developing countries like Bangladesh and Nepal.

And what they've come up with is the Score Clean Stove.

Under all those cables and instruments is a prototype cooker

designed for the needs of the communities they are working with.

Oh, my word!

This looks amazing!

Well, it looks a bit complex here

but essentially the principles of it is,

the fuel would go into the bottom,

the heat produced would be able to heat what they're cooking.

We also have the chimney problem solved.

But what's interesting about our design

is that it produces electricity also.

-You've got a stove that produces electricity?

-Yep.

That's awesome!

'And that is the sheer genius of this invention.

'Offering much-needed electricity to encourage the use of chimneys.

'Working with a team from Kathmandu University,

'the project succeeded in building a prototype stove that worked.

'Heat from the fire generates electricity, and it does this

'by first creating a sound inside the plastic pipes at the back.

'I'll demonstrate with the help of Astha and a boiling tube.'

-And all I've got to do is heat up that metal thing inside the tube, haven't I?

-Yep.

The metallic wire inside is a pot scrubber.

It's important that all the components are readily available anywhere in the world.

It's making it hot at the bottom but the top part of that metal bit is still cold.

-So you've got, sort of, like a temperature gradient, haven't you?

-Yeah.

Different in temperature, and that will make the air wobble

in a certain way that should make a sound.

PIPE EMITS HIGH-PITCHED HUM

Yeah.

That's awesome!

-And that's just by having the bottom hot and the top part cold?

-Yeah.

Causing vibrations. And you can hear it now.

So that's how you get the heat into the sound.

-And this must be how you get the sound then into the electricity?

-Yeah.

The vibrating air is then used to physically move a magnet

backwards and forwards between a coil of wire.

Which is essentially how all generators create electricity.

And even that doesn't need to be high-tech

because a speaker has all the right parts, and it's what the stove uses.

Should I try it? Let's see if I can produce electricity. OK.

The oscilloscope shows the lovely sound I'm making

is creating a current.

That is brilliant!

'It's a beautifully simple technology

'that uses easy-to-find components

'to not only generate electricity, but also solve the problem

'of indoor air pollution that's killing millions each year.'

With them being able to have that electricity on tap,

means that they are more likely to go,

"Yes, I'll have your stove with the chimney."

It becomes a really big incentive for them.

They're more likely to buy the product.

-How much do you think your stoves are going to sell for?

-About £60.

We're still working on lowering that so it becomes affordable for them.

This is one of the main engineering challenges that we're facing at the moment.

For many people in Nepal, an investment of £60 per household

could represent a massive improvement

in health and standard of living. But that's just the start of it.

This technology can be adapted for anywhere in the developing world,

potentially bringing massive benefits to the lives of the three billion people

at risk of death from poorly ventilated cook fires.

If you were a city planner

and you needed to add a new transport network in one of the most

densely populated cities in the world, where would you put it?

The obvious place is to go underground, like the London Tube.

But what if the city was in a region that was at high risk of serious earthquakes?

Would you still go underground?

You'd probably seek professional advice.

Which would bring you to the door of a geotechnical engineer like Dr Barnali Ghosh.

With a PhD in seismic planning, Barnali is currently working on

earthquake-proofing the next phase of Delhi's underground network.

With the Indian capital massively over-populated

and choked with traffic, this metro is vital for the country's economy, despite the danger of earthquakes.

The certainty is that the earthquake will happen.

The whole concept of earthquake engineering is really about a risk assessment.

You have to look at if the earthquake did happen.

What are the risks that will come from that project being in a seismic area?

Delhi is close to the Himalayan plate boundary,

an area where two continental tectonic plates are colliding.

As a result, its 17 million inhabitants regularly experience

low-magnitude earthquakes, and it's considered at risk from bigger ones.

Historically, Delhi hasn't had very major magnitude earthquakes.

The risks are more because of the ground conditions.

In terms of geotechnical engineering, the ground doesn't have enough strength.

If there is an earthquake in a very distant area in Delhi,

ground motions are going to be amplified by 2 to 2.5 times.

So this is actually an area of big concern for Delhi.

The ground condition that worries Barnali is a wet, sandy soil

and she needs to understand how it might behave in an earthquake.

She's brought me to the geotechnical lab at Cambridge University,

where Dr Gopal Madabhushi and a team are running experiments

on sandy soil similar to Delhi's, using an earthquake simulator.

What we have here this afternoon is a model apartment building,

which is sitting on wet sand, saturated.

There'll be important clues in this experiment, which will tell us

a lot about the behaviour of the ground.

Can we see it in action, do you think?

Yes, let's have our first small earthquake.

'Gopal starts the experiments

'with an earthquake equivalent to 4.5 on the Richter scale.'

That's not quite as vigorous as I thought it was going to be.

In terms of engineering design, anything less than magnitude 5

is of no consequence, because it's too small for human perception.

There's just one thing to do.

Are we going to take it up a bit now?

Yes, that is what we will do next.

-Shall we do it?

-OK. Here we go.

'This time it's a magnitude 6.5,

'which may not be massive in earthquake terms,

'but is of a realistic size to hit Delhi.'

What has happened is that the whole building has sunk in.

If that was like a 10-storey building,

eight floors would be underground?

'I find that level of devastation disturbing,

'but it's exactly what this team wanted to see.'

I think it's very important for us to create failures at model scale

so that we can avoid creating them at full scale.

OK, so that failure was a good failure?

I think it's a very good failure.

Understanding the ground, characterising the risk is so very important.

'Understanding that ground is at the heart of a seismic engineer's training.

'Before a significant earthquake even hits,

'Barnali already knows that Delhi faces one of the most dangerous effects an earthquake can cause.

'It's called liquefaction.'

Simply speaking the shaking is so fast that the ground just loses its ability to support

the structure on top of it, and starts behaving like a liquid.

'We're going to go again and this time they are putting a tunnel in

'to see what would happen to underground buildings if liquefaction occurred.'

-OK, you want a strong earthquake?

-I do! Yes, please.

'Because it has air in it, the tube floats to the surface.'

You can imagine in this situation, if you had an underground structure

-like a pipeline or something...

-Or like a railway.

-Exactly.

It would been busted and come out to the surface.

It has happened in many earthquakes. What this experiment has shown us

is the importance of really understanding your ground and

what an important role geotechnical engineers will play in any project.

So what are your solutions that you could do?

There are several solutions which we could apply in our project.

We could make the ground denser. We can build stone columns.

All of this works on the same principle,

that you're just making the ground stiffer.

The exact solutions Barnali will end up using

will depend on the very local conditions of the soil.

So every few hundred metres of tunnel

will need different ground-stiffening procedures.

It has to be the right one for what you are trying to do

and that you will end up with an efficient and safe design.

'So, with Barnali working on the next phase of the Delhi Metro,

'it means that quite literally it'll be built on firmer ground.'

Each year an estimated one billion items of clothing

are put into landfill in Britain alone.

The manufacture and shipping of each and every one of those items has a carbon cost on the planet.

Now, donation and recycling does help, but is it enough?

Or is there a smarter way that we can reduce the impact clothing waste has on our planet?

It's a question for Dr Veronika Kapsali at Northumbria University's P3i lab.

Once a fashion designer, Veronika discovered

the fabrics she was working with weren't working hard enough.

And now she's pioneering a brand-new engineering discipline

that could help reduce the carbon footprint of our clothes.

What we're quite interested in doing or working on is the idea of trying

to create material systems, garments that can do more than one function.

Can carry out more than one task, without necessarily having to

include lots of different materials and processes.

'If Veronika can make one fabric do two or more jobs,

'manufacturing waste would be significantly less

'for some of our clothing, like the waterproof jacket.'

So this first layer here is a very tightly-woven nylon material.

That would prevent any water from coming through.

On the back of this there's a membrane that's been laminated onto it.

This is your basic insulating layer.

Lots of fibres, lots of space, lots of air trapped,

that's what's keeping you warm.

And then you have this innermost layer here, which is a polyester.

Three, four different fabrics in it. A lot of detailing, of cutting,

a lot of processing that's gone into it.

It does seem a bit wasteful.

'To help solve the problems of excessive manufacturing waste,

'Veronika has turned to the natural world for her inspiration.

'There's a lot we can learn from millions of years of evolution.'

So one of my favourites at the moment is the penguin.

We're doing quite a bit of work on them at the moment.

Their coats are absolutely amazing.

They can switch instantly from becoming a highly insulating jacket

to becoming a wetsuit, effectively, within seconds.

'The penguin keeps warm by trapping lots of air in its lower feathers,

'represented by this model.'

So this would be the high insulation position.

So when you wanted to dive into the water,

what happens is that goes flat down like that.

Imagine if we had garments that could do that.

Yeah! Winter coat, wetsuit.

Winter coat, summer coat.

So you wouldn't necessarily need to have two or three different coats,

you could just have just one.

'To help turn her futuristic ideas into our reality,

'Veronika's lab has just brought in

'the most futuristic manufacturing tool on the planet.'

Ah! A 3D printer!

That's right.

This is the Ferrari of 3D printers at the moment.

It builds structures by depositing fine lines

and those lines can be fractions of millimetres.

It's super-accurate.

You can actually work with up to five materials.

They can all have different melt temperatures, so they can have

very different properties and processing properties.

So I suppose with this machine it would be perfectly possible,

-would it, to make a representation of a penguin feather?

-Absolutely.

We've got several ideas, which we can do that, but I can't tell you!

'But what she can tell me is how she has used the humble pine cone

'to make clothing that can switch

'from keeping me warm to keeping me cool.'

It all stems from the fact that a pinecone closes up if it gets wet.

It has this functionality purely because of the way

the material it's made of is designed.

It's a two-layer system.

One layer absorbs moisture more than the other

so that the layer that absorbs more moisture causes it to curl up.

And we've interpreted that into a fibre which,

once you add water to it, it curls up on itself.

'A fabric made with these fibres will keep you warm,

'but if you sweat and the fibres get damp, they curl up

'inside the yarn, creating holes for better air ventilation.'

We've actually got to the point

where we've turned it into a commercial material.

This is made from your material?

This is made from that material, yes.

'Designed to keep us either warm or cool when needed,

'these smarter garments change their structure

'at an almost invisible level.'

This one's actually blended with some merino wool.

Our garment is about 30 times more permeable to air

than 100% merino wool.

'Veronika's work is pure engineering.

'She's identified a problem, found inspiration,

'and with the help of technology is designing a solution.

'And with it, our world could become a better place.

'And that's engineering.'

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