09/04/2016 Click - Short Edition

I'm looking for something that is thinner than a human hair.

And that's because nanotech is about building things

on the nanoscale, up to about 100 nanometres in width,

or one 200th of the width of a human hair.

Last week, we looked at one instance of nanotechnology -

Remember, those sheets of carbon that are just one atom thick

Well, now I've come to Cambridge, where researchers seem to be pulling

What we are looking at is carbon-nanotube based fibre.

So even that is not one carbon nanotube, that's

Thousands of entangled carbon nanotubes.

And here in this lab, they've finally cracked how

to incorporate these tiny tubes into a copper cable to make

OK, having a lighter, more conductive copper wire,

because of the carbon nanotubes inside, who benefits from that?

The biggest beneficial is the transport industry.

In a single aeroplane, you may find from a few hundred

kilograms of copper cables up to five tonnes of copper cables.

It would bring huge savings on fuel consumption,

it would reduce CO2 emission, and who knows?

Even possibly provide some extra space for your luggage!

Always about the excess luggage, tell me about it!

And nowhere will this make more of a difference than in space travel.

At the moment, it gusts an average of $20,000 to send each kilogram

of a payload into space on one of these.

Well, swap out any wiring for something perhaps

even half the weight, and it's easy to see how everyone

from Citroen to Nasa are interested in this kind of tech.

But beyond its weight, the increased conductivity

of the wire will mean faster data speeds.

Carbon nanotubes can take many forms, so not only do

we have these long strands, which are carbon nanotubes,

or intertwined, we also have a film of carbon nanotubes here,

we have a powder that is carbon nanotubes.

This is interesting, these are the scrapings

They are also carbon nanotubes, and they also work.

There are thousands of projects now operating on the nanoscale.

On a more everyday level, nanotech could see the creation

Researchers at RMIT university in Melbourne in Australia

have come up with a cheap way to grow nanostructures

directly onto textiles that, when exposed to light,

And then there's this, which is a lavatory

In fact, it produces clean water from what you...put in.

A nano-thick covering seals off any waste material

that goes into the bowl, preventing any smells,

and that waste is passed through a nano carbon filter

that is so fine that what comes out the other end,

so to speak, is technically OK to drink.

Although we are told it does whiff a tiny bit, so you may

just want to water your plants with it instead.

This is Bojan Boskovic, the boss of the company set up

to make the most of nanotech research

I think a lot of people, when they hear the word

"nanotechnology", think of tiny robots and tiny motors

Well, we're pretty much there with the size wise,

so the size of the smallest carbon nanotube, single-walled carbon

nanotube, is already in the range of the DNA molecule.

So we're not going to get much smaller than the atomic level,

and what is going to happen, those molecules and atoms,

we will learn how to manipulate them, and that is all

about nanotechnology engineering, at the nanoscale.

So we will learn to use them, but probably robots like we think

of small tiny parts going inside, it's not going to happen.

But could you make cogs and motors that are the size of molecules?

And put them together into something very tiny that could be

It could be, it could be, and we will see more

and more tiny machines, but the real stuff is not probably

going to be machines in the sense that we think it now,

It is going to be what we call molecular machines,

so clever molecules doing things the way how we want.

for delivering drugs exactly to the cell that we need it.

They can also use, be used to kill the cancer cells,

Many things would be basically far more precise

and far more controlled, and that's the way how

Right, next, we're off to Malawi in Africa,

and to a clever scheme that we've reported on before.

We visited a school in Lilongwe, which had just been introduced

to 30 tablets used to teach the children maths.

And the results were really startling, so much so that the same

tablets and apps are now being used in the UK with similar results.

Well, that the small scheme has grown at a phenomenal pace

Dan Simmons has been back to Malawi to see what's new.

This is the primary school, one of the busiest in

There are 9000 pupils attending this primary school,

and classes of up to 250, which makes teaching,

It makes getting through the playground quite

It is seven o'clock, and the first shift of school begins.

These children will either come for the morning or the afternoon,

because you can't teach 9,000 kids otherwise.

how to deal with 100 schoolkids wanting to shake hands!

This teacher is brilliant, she's fun, engaging, authoritative.

Even though it's maths, she manages to hold the children's attention.

But she can't monitor what they've written down -

whether it's legible, whether they're all keeping up -

and after this there will be another class of 80.

The classes are so large here, many are held outside.

A few years back, Malawi made primary education open to all,

before it had enough schools to cope, and it still doesn't.

a different kind of classroom has been popping up across Malawi.

It's very much shoes off and time to plug in.

because everyone's wearing headphones.

The UK's VSO charity is working with onebillion.org

and 68 schools to teach maths and, this year, the local language,

Chichewa, as well as English, to four and five-year-olds.

And when someone does well, the whole class knows about it.

What it does mean is that, for the first time here,

teachers are able to monitor every pupil's progress.

Staff at the school or back in the UK can watch

what works and tweak the lessons to get better results.

Early analysis by independent universities suggests this method

is hugely effective and it needs to be, because each child enrolled

gets just two half-hour sessions in this room each week.

Reading even one sentence after two years' schooling has proven

This British project has set its sights on teaching more

than 20,000 children here how to read complete books

in their own language by the time they leave.

And how about this for interactive lessons?

This project it is the first in the country,

maybe even the continent, to run off a solar panel.

Using sunlight is a classic African answer to an African problem,

but the key thing with this project is the projector uses very low

power, so three hours' worth of exposure to the sun

will give these guys three days' worth of lessons.

Every school in the area now wants one of these projectors,

because the electricity here is so unreliable.

Now, you might think Malawi, being one of the poorest ten

countries in the world, doesn't have much to boast about,

but directly across the valley is Lilongwe's new $70 million

stadium, being built and paid for by the Chinese -

It sticks in the throat a little that those

on this side of the valley have to pump their own water

But the marriage of self-sufficiency and technology is hugely empowering.

any power cuts here won't be stopping work.

That was it for the short version of Click. In the long version, we have

online dating that really works and mind control robots. You can find

the version on iPlayer now. Follow us online. See you soon.