24/10/2015 Click

filling up with hydrogen. Today, I am driving a very rare

car. One that could save the planet. And our lungs. If there's one good

thing that's come out of the Volkswagen scandal, it is that it

has highlighted just how bad diesel is for the environment and for our

health. Cue my ride for the day, a car powered by hydrogen. This one is

a modified Hundai and I have someone on hand to talk me through the

science. -- Hyundai. There it is. May I congratulate you on a really

ordinary looking piece of equipment. That looks like a normal engine. But

it does work in a different way, doesn't it? This is a hydrogen fuel

cell. This vehicle generates its own electricity onboard. How it does

that, we draw hydrogen gas in, because that with oxygen, and

electrochemical reaction gives us a couple of results. One is a flow of

electrons that powers your motor, another is pure water. In one

sense, this runs just like an electric car, the difference is how

it gets electricity? That's exactly how it is. This is an electric

vehicle that produces its own electricity onboard. You don't need

to plug it in. There is hydrogen fuel cell technology big at the

moment? Well, nowhere. OK. Who is most likely to make it big? First,

this is something interesting, 20 years ago Europe and Japan made two

different decisions on whether to back diesel. Europe said yes, Japan

said no. This is what happens next. Yes, diesel usage in Japan pretty

much disappeared. And it looks as if they were bright to turn away from

diesel. Instead, Japan concentrated on alternative sources of power.

Think of the electric Nissan, Mitsubishi and Honda have also been

pushing electric vehicles for a while. Now Japan is putting a lot of

political will behind hydrogen cars. If it was right with diesel, will it

be right again? Here is Dan Simmons with the case that Japan is putting

forward for the hydrogen society. Japan is in a hurry to make cars

differently. So, why are Japanese carmakers assembly lining up to

create what in the past has proven to be an expensive, impractical,

unloved white elephant? The answer is as much political as it is about

technology. Ahead of the 2020 Olympics, they are thinking big. We

need to have a dream for the This is Tokyo's first hydrogen

filling station. The city has five now and they are all as busy as this

one. Gosh, it's quiet. Traditionally hydrogen has been made using fossil

fuels but Japan doesn't have any of those on the Honda has made a clean

away, using electricity, ideally produced from renewable sources and

it is designed stations that store and make it. This is one of the new

stations and overhear this is where the hydrogen is stored. About 18 kg

work. But the new method does have its limitations. It can only top

that up by about 1.5 kilograms a day and that's particularly bad news

when you consider that if any more than four of these hydrogen cars

rock up in a day and want filling up that would be this station

completely emptied. It would need two weeks to fill itself up again.

It may take a while to produce but the beauty of hydrogen is its only

waste product is the pure water emitted through the exhaust. Japan

has set its sights on being the leading exporter of these super

clean cars to the rest of the world. To go to recently revealed the first

of its fuel cell cars to parts of Europe, and here in the UK. This is

the world's first mass-produced hydrogen car designed from the

ground up, which means they have just taken an existing model and put

the hydrogen tank in it. They put the tanks in the back and

effectively the engine, with all of the chemical reactions going on

between the two front seats, so it handles nicely. It is a little bit

heavier than the normal car, but it stacks back up. 111, top speed, zero

to 62 in about nine seconds. But there is one statistic that might

concern you. The cost. It is over ?66,000. About twice the amount you

would expect for the sort of car in its petrol form. In California,

these cars receive a 25% subsidy. In Japan, it is over 40%, making them

much more affordable than the UK, where there is no discount to make

this technology get out first gear. Of course the Japanese can't help

that, but to go to is keen to speed things up by sharing all 5000

patents it holds for this car by other manufacturers. And it has gone

the extra mile to quell any fears over safety. What with hydrogen

being quite flammable at all -- and all. We crashed to that heavy

speeds, set fire to it, even for shot it with a high velocity rifle

and it can take something like 150 tons of pressure on the fuel tank

casing. So, it is as safe as anything on the road. It's a safe

and slow start to Japan's waterpowered revolution.

That was Dan Simmons. Meanwhile, I am at one of four hydrogen fuel

stations in the UK, although there are only seven Hyundai hydrogen cars

on the road at the moment so I guess that is a reasonable figure. Time to

fill up. This is one of the selling points. It only takes few minutes,

compared to a whole lot longer to charge an electric car. This is

where the hydrogen is stored. 104 litre tank and a 40 lead a 40 just

in front of it. Yes, it is bigger than a petrol tank, but what can you

do? And that's another selling point over electric. A full tank of

hydrogen can drive you for up to 400 miles. Back at the front, here is

Robin again. Next question. How do you make the hydrogen that goes into

this car? There's two ways for hydrogen production. One of them is

heavily dependent on fossil fuel. That's one method which does have a

carbon footprint associated to it. The other method, which we are

pushing towards, is producing hydrogen from renewable energy,

solar or wind power, which gives you a good carbon footprint and zero

emissions. To create the hydrogen in the first place requires

electricity. When you put it in the car, you are turning that hydrogen

back into electricity? Yes. Why do we bother putting this hydrogen

complication in? You will get a higher storage of energy in hydrogen

than batteries. The site of the battery required to store the energy

this has in its fuel tanks is enormous. First question you will

probably want answered, what noise does this car maker? Ready? Here we

go. That's it. A nice little tring and

the radio, but no other noise. If you have electric vehicle you will

be used to the complete silence that will will be driving under. So,

seeing as the engine really is working, -- assuming the engine

really is working, off we go. Given this is a green driving experience,

you get all the dials and stats on the dashboard to show off that you

are regenerating energy when you brake, you can see the usage stats,

where the flow is going to which part of the car. Don't scrape the

car please! You have no expensive to make idea how expensive this is! --

you have no idea how expensive. It will be awhile before hydrogen cars

can relieve us of all of the diesel fumes, which hearing this part of

London really bad. That's because down there is Oxford Street, which,

according to scientists, is the worst place for nitrogen dioxide

emissions in the world. Goodness! Well, in the meantime, maybe we

should all try and use technology to limit our exposure to the fumes. We

have been finding out how. It isn't much better here on this road, where

the slightly secretive wooden structure hides one of the UK's

largest air pollution monitoring centres. Kings college London has

over 100 sites throughout the city. They are looking for levels of

dangerous fine particles in the air. These are 2.5 Micra metres in

diameter, or smaller, as well as gas and nitrogen dioxide. Nitrogen

dioxide is prevalent in emissions from diesel cars and tends to stay

in one area, but the dangerous particles spread around a bit.

Living in London I know the area is extremely polluted. It is

disgusting. I can come home, sometimes there are black things

coming out of my nose when I get home from work. That stuff in your

nose, those are large particles. But the particles we are really worried

about are the small ones that you can't see. They are very small. They

are cooling the air from the roof, they come down this pipe and onto a

little filter which sits inside there. These filters start off...

They start like that. Clean? Particularly white. After a couple

of weeks... Wow! They end up like that. That's mainly black carbon

from the traffic outside. But after two weeks? Unbelievable. These

detailed readings are now being fed into a variety of applications to

help motorists and cyclists. You can use this data to plan your walk

around London. It gives you the best route to avoid the worst of the

pollution. Simply enter your location and destination and its

maps out the best route with the cleanest air. You can also get the

latest pollution forecasts. Another fresh air app is Clean Space. It

offers rewards to its users to cut down on air pollution. From

November, it will link up to a portable carbon monoxide sensor. For

the first time in a commercial device, the sensor will be

permanently power with by using unused radio waves in the air. These

invisible waves provide a very small amount of energy from wireless and

mobile frequencies through this paperthin harvesting antenna. The

company developing this tech is led by a former UK science minister. He

was actually part of the Labour government that promoted diesel car

use but he now says that was a mistake. He thought it was any --

only able to power things using small amounts of energy. It is

recycling energy, which will otherwise go to waste. We aren't any

to any of the transmissions, so we don't have the need to have any

dedicated transmitters to boost the signal. We can harvest just the

ambient energy. Yes, we do silly -- see it as a sustainable way of

powering small devices. The readings would be as sophisticated as those

we saw from King's College, but being portable has its benefits. It

is early days. The sensors need more work. But in a few years it will

give us much better information about what our individual exposure

is, as we move through the city. The big tech news this week was the

announcement that YouTube is to launch a subscription service

offering original and exclusive content. Originally only available

in the US, YouTube Red will cost about $10 a month and be completely

ad free. Never fear, there will still be normal YouTube with

billions of cat videos to watch, filled with lovely adverts. It was

also the week that Disney announced it would launch a streaming service

in the UK. TalkTalk was hacked, leaving customers' banking

information up for grabs. And seals using the internet. It was also the

week that Apple News finally arrived in the UK and Stanford engineers

celebrated acts of the future day in the best way possible, with a self

driving DeLorean that does doughnuts -- Back To The Future. Finally, we

got a glimpse of what reality might look like once it is augmented,

believed to involved a form of retinal projection. Magic Leap has

promised to change the world. They have raised $500 million from

investors but this video made without special effects apparently

is a little teaser of what they have in mind. And let's face it, every

office could be brightened up by having a solar system hovering

around our desks. Here at Bridge And college in Wales, his high school

kids are not cheering for us. They are cheering for their sporting

heroes who are paying them a visit. -- Bridge End College. Three of the

All Blacks who may be the world's best rugby team are here to play

with the kids. And for us it's a trip to see the tech that keeps them

top of their game. Today these youngsters are donning kit usually

reserved for elite athletes. Sensors on their bodies will be monitoring

their performance as they play. With millions of data points collected

during a game, the coach can analyse the performance of a particular

performance of a team as a whole. The big thing in professional sport

now is all about workload. With it being such a saturated calendar

throughout the year it is really important for us to understand how

hard the athletes are working on when to back off and when to push

forward. There were some papers released recently where we saw that

when they are operating at high heart rate intensities and after

running at high speed they are not necessarily making the right

decision or they are avoiding making a decision. Sensors like these,

providing GPS tracking, and Excel matter, and heart rate tracking, are

pretty normal these days. It is the software doing the numbercrunching

afterwards that is more interesting. And this is where

competition is getting stiff. The numbers of parameters that you can

monitor is in the hundreds. So it is used in all sorts of sports. Each

coach can personalise the stats they'd like to analyse, with the

software then providing the rather colourful chart. And for us as

viewers, we can see some of the data on our TVs. I think you've got to be

careful that you use it for what its purpose is. You can overemphasise

some of the technology. The key part is it allows us to be more

individualised with the way that we prescribe things, to be able to put

a training programme in front of a player that we know is being

monitored. And we can track their progress more accurately, is of

course really helpful. And of course no tech can prevent every injury but

the use of these EMS sensors could help speed up recovery times. I

always like an excuse to work out on the job and today are definitely got

one. Here is a sensor attached to my bicep and I now need to do some

bicep curls. So what better to do them with than the Click monopod.

Here behind me on the screen we can see the movement of these biceps. I

can show you what it looks Lacroix the other totally relaxed. You can

see that there is no movement being tracked at all. As soon as I pick up

monopod you are going to start to see a bit of a change in the graph

and when I actually do bicep curl, look at that. You can see I'm doing

it properly because if I now do it at a slightly awkward angle... That

graph completely changes. Being able to isolate a single muscle and track

its engagement isn't just useful for rehabilitation, though. It can also

teach us to activate the right muscles in the first place. Today we

are attaching these two biceps or quads but of course you can attach

them to every muscle in the body, cut your? Correct. In rugby we can

attach it to the leg muscles and see how the leg muscles actually

contract during the scrum. The aim of all of this is to make athletes

more safely, efficiently and harder, well, it seems to have worked on the

kids. Did it make you want to run further and run faster? Yes, it is

after he showed me I wish to rant a little bit faster so I could beat

every one else. And when I spoke to the All Blacks players, they told me

the difference the technology has been making, even at their level. It

is to be a lot of games where you feel like you have done a lot in the

and you have trained really hard, you will wants to make sure the risk

of injury isn't higher. There is a lot of monitoring in terms of

heavyweights, but now it is all about the speed that you move the

weight at, which is meant to be more relative to the game you play.

You're not moving 200 kilograms often but you're trying to move

things as hard as you can. You feel that actually makes a difference to

how you play? You see the way the game has evolved. Guys are a lot

quicker, they are a lot more powerful, and that has got to be at

attributed to the weight goes up training now, from a younger age.

We've been talking a lot today about dirty, dirty air. From cars that

don't pollute the apps that tell you whether fumes are. Well, here's

another project that is the about in London although this time it is

using a camera. Following successful trials in the Netherlands, the

iSpecs EU project is expanding in Europe and hoping to attract

volunteers who don't mind attaching a small gizmo to their phone and

pointing it at the sky. It is all to do with checking the spectrum of

light and turning your phone into an optical sensor that can measure tiny

atmospheric particles. Air quality is a massively important health

issue for many. And Hugo and the team are hoping that 1500 people

across the UK will volunteer to join the project, and give them a good

chunk of data to analyse. Are there not, with all respect, sessional

pollution monitoring project out there? -- professional. Should this

be left to volunteers with smartphones? Well, the technology is

really quite advanced in this little widget. On the problem is that you

only have spot checks, so on the problem is that you only have spot

checks, so what road it measures the pollution at ground level. But you

don't know what the ambient pollution is. So it's quite

important to get a good idea of how pollution moves across the city, all

forms in a city, and where the pollution is coming from, so that is

what we hope to get out of it. The results from this project will be

fed into what, and affect what? I mean, this is real science. So this

is... These results will then hopefully fed into policy to some

degree -- be fed into policy to some degree. But at the moment it is an

experiment. We are hoping we are going to get really good data.

Obviously it relies on having clear skies which might not necessarily

happen. And just before we go, a sneak preview of some of the

greenest cars on the planet. Every two years, Australia Post is the

World Solar Challenge. It is a race for cars powered entirely by the

sun. And Jonathan Blake has been accompanying one of the teams from

West Sussex, right here in the gloriously sunny UK. Three years of

work finally coming together. Students from this college in West

Sussex have designed and built a solar powered car from scratch. The

group had travelled from England to Australia and are now getting ready

for their epic journey. It has been a huge amount of work just to get to

this point at the team have arrived in Darwin and for the few days

before the race they are based here at the Hidden Valley test track,

where teams are putting the finishing touches to their cars

before the race. We first competed three years ago, and it was his

idea, and he proposes to a few of his students. We started getting

together and working on this car. Every time we sold some kind of

problem there is another problem that occurs. Every step we take, if

feels like you're taking another step back. It is so weird, we always

wanted to be here and we didn't know if we were going to make it. The

fact that we have is amazing. So it is the day before the race now, and

after a very early start and a couple of last-minute hitches the

team are ready for a test lap, and what they call dynamic Skuta

nearing, testing this steering, and the brakes, and a few other things

before they can compete. Just a few days ago now and there is plenty of

sun, which is the main thing. That was Jonathan Blake in

Australia. A World Solar Challenge has now been run. If you'd like to

know the results you can get them online. I won't spoil them for you

here because we will have the full story of what happened next week. I

hope you have enjoyed our low emissions programme. Read easy, we

will see you soon. -- breathe easy.