Adventures in Time Dara O Briain's Science Club

Hello, I'm Dara O Briain.

Welcome to the show which seeks out the very latest

ground-breaking ideas in science and attempts to answer

some of the most fundamental questions in the cosmos.

Tonight, we're going on a journey through time.

What exactly is time, when did it start and how can we get more of it?

This is the place where we find out how great ideas

are changing the world we live in.

Welcome to Science Club.

Good evening and welcome to the show.

We've got a great show tonight, some fabulous guests talking later on,

and we'll be joined the usual team and Professor Mark Miodownik,

our hands-on demos man, who'll be doing

some interesting things with time.

-What have you got for us, Mark?

-We've got a huge amount of safety equipment for tonight's demo,

-so that's always a good thing.

-It's always a great sign. Now, on the show tonight,

we're exploring something we tend to take for granted - time.

But time is a very strange concept,

and our perception of it varies from person to person

and moment to moment, and it impacts on our lives in surprising ways,

some of which we'll find out about tonight.

Alok investigates the multi-million-pound technology

behind the British bobsleigh team's push for Olympic glory.

In the studio, Mark will be revealing the mysteries of explosions...

by slowing down time.

There you go.

And Dr Helen Czerski witnesses the most amazing recreation

of a beating human heart.

Could this buy us more time and mean the end of organ donation?

You can see it's starting to move

just like a healthy heart should move.

But first, if ever there was a place where time was all-important,

it's in the rarefied world of Olympic medal rankings,

especially in the speed events, where thousandths of a second

can make the difference between front-page glory or back-page also-ran.

Alok goes to see the extraordinary lengths the UK's Olympic bobsled team

is going to on their quest for gold.

A machine built for speed.

One that will go fast enough to make four men Olympic champions.

-You guys were fifth in the World Championships.

-Yeah.

How much better would you have had to be to get to a medal position?

Seven hundredths.

-Seven hundredths of a second?

-That all it was.

Team GB four-man bobsleigh -

they're fighting for a medal at next year's Winter Olympics...

running at speeds of up to 80mph.

What slows them down is not the ice but the air.

The aerodynamics of the sled - its ability to move through the air -

that is where they could save

those crucial seven one-hundredths of a second.

To fulfil their Olympic dream, they've come

to BAE Systems in Preston, where they build the Eurofighter Typhoon,

a plane that can accelerate to twice the speed of sound.

Part of that extreme acceleration is down to this sleek design.

Every single surface on here has been aerodynamically sculpted

to slice cleanly through the air, and the bobsledders are her to use

that same multi-billion-pound engineering to help them go faster.

To save just tiny fractions of a second needs kit

on an extraordinary scale.

Wind tunnels generating hurricane-force airspeeds.

What the team are here to find out, from project leader

Kelvin Davies, is how a bobsleigh deals with that level of airflow.

For race speed, 70mph, perhaps 80mph, the sled

has to move something like 20kgs of air out of the way every second.

-20kgs of air?

-20kgs.

-So, that's like 20 bags of sugar flying at you.

-Yeah.

-Out the way?

-Out the way.

Deflecting 20kgs of air every second -

how hard could that be?

Come on.

FAN WHIRS

Wow!

'Well, it's enough to literally take your breath away.

'And at 70mph, it feels like your skin's coming off.

'But this is what the team are up against on every run.'

So, when the tests begin, everything counts -

the sled, the body shape, even their clothes could slow them down.

With smoke to show exactly how the air is flowing,

a smooth plume is what they're looking for.

Any break-up of smoke indicates air turbulence,

which increases drag, losing vital time.

Today, they're testing the precise shape of the helmets.

So, what difference can a helmet actually make?

A big difference. If you look at the way the athletes are sitting,

the way they're aligned in the sled, the way that the backs of the helmets are protruding -

any of those can make a big difference.

These helmets are looking good.

The flow around them is smooth,

and the red line indicates that drag is low.

But could a new helmet be even better?

THEY CHATTER

The shapes look almost identical,

but a tiny difference is all they need to win an Olympic medal.

Is the flow smoother?

It's so hard to tell with the naked eye,

but the computer has spotted something.

So, we'll start seeing a line appearing here?

Yeah, you'll see the first point slightly below, which is good.

That's good. That's good.

It's fantastic. It's clearly lower.

Exactly how the helmet has done this, we can't actually say -

it's a closely guarded secret.

And will it be enough on move Team GB up from their current place

of fifth in the world?

Well, we'll just have to wait

until the Winter Olympics in Russia next February.

So, we're going to see you next on that podium somewhere?

That's the plan.

Yeah?

That's, I have to say, looks like a lot of fun, bar the bit

where we had you standing with your face being rearranged.

It was more fun that it looked. I have to say that it wasn't the most pleasant experience.

-I mean, I've done worse, what can I say?

-For this show, we've had you do worse!

Presumably, the Americans are doing this, the Russians are doing this, the Germans are doing this?

Yeah, you'd guess so. I mean, we might as well use the technology we have,

the engineering we have, to help our Olympic athletes get to gold, right?

-It's a really good use of that technology, I think.

-Essentially, it's a sporting arms race.

In more ways than one, yeah.

It's not just bobsleigh, of course, a lot of the Olympic team

from 2012 used this sort of wind tunnel technology to save

those hundredths of seconds...

The captain of the UK cycling team David Brailsford said that

the philosophy of the team is always tiny changes,

tiny changes on a number of different things.

They have stripped the bikes - their tyres are now made of silk...

-Yeah.

-..so they inflate them to 200psi.

Their clothes have a waterproof nano coating.

So, they don't absorb the water - the water just, sort of, flies off.

Cos every kilogram you add...

If you're cycling outside, every kilogram of water or mud

you add on, adds about ten seconds onto your time.

I mean, that's a world of difference at Olympic level.

OK. Thank you very much, Alok.

Well, we're quite used to playing

with time in terms of camera technologies

because we can speed things up or slow them down -

that's how we get our photo finishes.

But we can see a lot about the nature of materials,

about the nature of physical events...

-And explosions.

-And explosions?

-Yes!

-Nice.

So, this is our high-speed camera,

and we've used this several times on these shows to look at demos.

And we thought it'd be good to show you an explosion in high speed.

Cos, actually, what you're doing is slowing time down,

and seeing the details of something that is

over in milliseconds, and all you experience is this "bang".

So, in this balloon we've got a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen,

so this should explode and produce water.

-We've got ear defenders and...

-And head defenders.

There we go. Fine. So, hydrogen and oxygen, give it a bit of kick,

let's see you create water.

So, see if you guys can see what's happening with your naked eye. Ready?

BANG

It was loud, but it was just an explosion. I didn't see anything...

It's very hard to see anything at all of the details of that.

But with the slow-mo camera, and this is 12,000 frames per second...

There you go.

And because it was a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen,

air didn't have to come in.

So, you could see that the explosion was, sort of, flowing in one direction there.

And this kind of recreation of explosions is what

people are using scientifically and engineeringly for, to work out...

Let's say, explosion inside an aircraft frame,

people are using these high-speed cameras

to work out the physics and the mixing of these different gases.

We can solve a historical mystery too,

and this is a really good one, because for a long time,

there was this thing called the Prince Rupert's Drops.

It's basically a piece of glass that was observed

to behave very strangely in the 17th century.

I'm just going to make one for you now.

All I'm doing is heating up this glass rod.

-OK, you can see it going.

-I can see it going, yeah.

The important thing is to get it red-hot

so it just drips into this water.

This is the drop...

Nice.

-OK.

-Right.

So, this is a small Prince Rupert Drop

-and it's now very small indeed.

-So, it makes a tiny teardrop.

Yeah. Now that has very strange properties.

You can hit the end with a hammer, and it's fine...

..but if you snap the tail off, the whole thing explodes.

I mean, literally, explodes.

Although a small one, you may think is not impressive -

we just made it that size to show you -

here's a bigger one which a glass blower made for us earlier,

but the same process.

And we're going to need to put, actually...

It is such an explosive thing,

we're going to need to put a Perspex screen up.

We're not over-reacting, you'll see what we mean when it happens.

-OK.

-There we go.

Have you got your...?

-I've got gloves.

-Yeah.

You don't need ear protectors for this, but you definitely need this visor.

-Now, are we going to try hitting it with a hammer first?

-Yeah.

So look...

I'm not hitting it massively hard, but this is glass.

I mean, that's quite impressive.

Watch what we do if I just clip the end of it off with some pliers.

Are you ready for this?

GLASS SHATTERS

HE LAUGHS

And it took until the last century for people to work out what was going on?

Yeah. And I think it's all about slowing time down to see what's going on

and then getting the scientific explanation.

So, we've got here, this is 2,600 frames per second.

-Look at that - that's so fast, it's one frame.

-Yeah.

Can we slow it down even more?

Yeah. We've got it at 97,000 frames per second.

Have a look at this. Look at it.

This explosive compression wave, basically,

comes right down here and shatters the whole thing.

And it's because, when you dip it into the water,

the outside cools first and hardens, but the inside is still warm.

It's still liquid. That means the outside has compression on it,

-so when you hit it, that holds it strong, like a bridge's arch.

-Yes.

And then...

But all these forces are exactly equal and opposite.

So, as soon as you disturb this equilibrium - anywhere -

there's a compression wave that tears the whole material apart,

as you saw.

At the speed of sound.

-Really?

-Yeah.

-That's incredible.

Can we slow down time even more?

Yes. So there's this new femtosecond photography.

That's a trillionth of a second.

What can you usefully photograph at a trillionth...?

There's a group at MIT, who have been developing this process...

actually have been photographing light itself.

So, seeing a pulse of light traverse an object.

It sounds ridiculous, but have a look at this, cos this really is remarkable.

So the light is basically a bundle of light photons,

from a laser - a pulse, if you like.

You're seeing that actually traverse the object,

so that is slowing time down so ridiculously fast.

If this was a bullet going from this end to this end,

and we did the same experiment to see how long it took,

we would have to be here for a year...to see it.

-So, that is travelling at the speed of light?

-Yeah.

And the camera is actually a giant computer as well - it has to recreate this image.

So, it's not just a snap.

If you want to see more of this incredible camera,

including how it can actually see around corners,

because it sees the light it reflects come back at it,

there's a great short film on our website that Alok made when he was in the US.

Check out...

And you can follow us on Twitter,

and we're online for all that sort of stuff.

That is exciting stuff. Thank you very much, Mark.

Well done.

It has long been a dream of humanity to live for ever,

whether through the fountain of youth or the philosopher's stone,

or when Chinese emperor Shi Huang took mercury to extend his life and it didn't work.

And we're still at it - check out these two from 1984.

Both are in their early 40s and every day,

they both consume over 35 chemical substances,

which they believe are helping to maintain their youth

and prevent the ravages of age.

This is ornithene, it's an amino acid, causes the release

of a growth hormone by a gland in your brain.

Growth hormone causes you to burn off fat and put on muscle

like a teenager with very little exercise.

It also has a very powerful immune stimulant - it makes your body

better able to fight off infectious diseases and even cancer.

We want to live a lot longer.

We'd like to remain young and healthy as long as possible,

perhaps even indefinitely.

We, and many other people now alive, have a very good chance

of having an indefinite life span.

One limited not by ageing or cancer or cardiovascular disease,

but rather, one limited by accidents, murder and suicide.

LAUGHTER

Yes, that is why we all live like that now.

I presume you're expecting a punch line, something like,

"And then four years later, they both walked off the end of a cliff." No.

They're still with us, they are in their 70s now,

we actually have a still of them that was taken in 1999.

They're fine, they're grand, but so are plenty of other people

who didn't do that every day.

Now it seems that we do have within our grasp

the possibility of understanding and even halting the ageing process.

I'm joined by Professor Emma Teeling from University College Dublin

and a very, very special friend.

Eh...

Now, that is fantastic.

-What is that?

-It's a Lyle's fruit bat.

A Lyle's fruit bat.

Will he, or she, sit comfortably there?

-He will, we hope. Yes, on you go.

-There we go.

Now, bats seem an unusual candidate for seeking out eternal life.

Why bats?

They would seem that way, but in nature, there's a hard, fast rule.

And in nature, how long you can live for is typically predicted

by how big or small you are.

Small things - they live very, very fast.

-Think of a mouse.

-Yes.

Whereas, big things live much more slowly, they live in a slower lane.

This is always said in terms of the number of heartbeats as well.

Is that a very rough...?

Heartbeat, again, is this rough estimate of metabolic rate.

The faster you live, the shorter your lifetime.

However, these magnificent creatures, these beautiful bats,

they defeat this rule.

Bats are very, very unusual, because what they do is they live very, very fast,

yet they can live for an extremely long time.

So, the secret of an extended health span lies with their genome,

and that's the work that I look at.

We're not advising people to sleep hanging from their feet.

No, no.

Within animals, cells have a certain amount of time

-that they can keep regenerating and then they stop.

-Yes.

In each one of our cells, we have all our DNA.

And along each length of our chromosomes, we have these repetitive regions - these telomeres.

There's a big problem in how DNA replicates. Every time your cell divides and replicates,

your DNA gets shorter and shorter and shorter.

So, telomeres are at the end of our chromosomes

that allow us to deal with all this replication.

But what can happen is that

there is a theory that cells can only replicate so many times,

because as the telomeres get shorter, they get to a critical point

and then bam, that cell dies.

So, again, it's a bit like these heartbeats - how many heartbeats

can you actually have over a lifetime?

So, the question is, do the bats have some way of lengthening these telomeres,

or are they stopping them actually degrading?

The oldest caught bat was 42 years of age.

It doesn't look particularly happy.

He loved it. We fed him a mealworm, he was just fine.

It's hard to age them, cos they already look creepy and really old.

This one's beautiful.

He's very, very lovely,

but he is really creepy.

With the hanging upside down and the leatheriness...

That's all Bram Stoker's connection, forget that.

Think secret of everlasting youth,

not nasty, blood-sucking vampires.

OK, grand. You're rebranding the bat as we're going along!

The thing of it is - they may have something genetic, and we hope

-to find that and then possibly use it?

-Yes.

That would be the idea. So, what is that they're doing?

As we age, some of our genes get switched on and switched off -

there's an ageing-related disregulation.

Do the bats not experience this?

Then we need to realise that if they don't experience it,

what is it that they're doing that allows them control of the regulation?

And then the question is - how would we do this?

May I? Or would it be inappropriate for me to touch...?

-You might want a glove.

-I might want a glove. Really? Are they...?

-Do they grip?

-They will grip.

-Will they hurt?

-No, not if you're good.

-OK.

Wow, I didn't know there was an element of judgment on behalf of the bat!

The idea will be, if you can try to get him off this,

you want to try and pull him off and get your hand higher.

-Don't use this hand, cos he might bite.

-No. OK.

He does seem to be resisting his.

Hello, how are you?

Look at his little ears!

His little ears are going round and round!

He can hears things I can't even imagine.

A pleasure to have him here.

Listen, we're going to talk to you in the future,

but thank you for bringing this fabulous animal in as a demonstration.

Thank you very much, Professor Emma Teeling.

Still to come on the show tonight...

Mark explores the missing piece of the history of the universe -

the mysteriously named Cosmic Dark Ages.

In the studio, we delve into the curious nature of liquids.

-Yeah!

-Wow!

And Alok goes to Philadelphia

for an encounter with some time-travelling rats.

Another element of rejuvenation is regeneration.

When it comes to internal organs breaking down or wearing out,

we've been relying, since the 1950s, on transplants.

Until now, that is.

Helen has been to Texas to see a remarkable new development.

At this lab in Texas, medical researcher Dr Doris Taylor

is creating something that could be from the realms of science fiction.

I've been called Frankenstein.

I've been accused of playing God.

She's building a human heart that one day could be made to order

using some powerful cells that are found in us all.

We're made of trillions of cells,

and they come in thousands of different types.

We've got skin cells, muscle cells, blood cells,

and they're all special in their own way.

But some cells are extraordinary and they are the stem cells.

The most potent stem cells are embryonic ones.

Their job is to create every other type of cell in our bodies,

and after six days of doing that, they're gone.

But there's another type of stem cell we all still have.

These are adult stem cells.

They help our bodies repair themselves.

We believe that we can use your stem cells to build an organ

that matches your body.

Recently teams have begun to build simple tissues with stem cells.

A windpipe, a bladder.

So we have said can harvest those stem cells and use them

to build the ultimate muscle - the heart.

Doing that would be an extraordinary achievement.

But the heart is an extremely complex three-dimensional structure

with an intricate vascular system.

Vasculature or blood vessels are really the Holy Grail

of tissue engineering.

Can you imagine trying to build that?

Instead, Dr Taylor and her team found an elegant,

if somewhat bizarre, solution.

This used to be a pig's heart,

but it's been stripped of its pig cells,

leaving behind a perfect scaffold made of proteins like collagen.

This is done in rather a surprising way.

We use soap to wash all the cells out.

-You wash the heart.

-Exactly.

This is a heart that's partially through the process.

You can see that we've got a tube into the major blood vessel

of the heart. We're letting soap go in.

Essentially, it then goes through all the normal blood vessels

in the heart.

The cells that normally blood would be feeding,

it's instead bursting and washing out.

The resulting structure is virtually identical to that of a human heart.

It's a weird thing to look at.

It hasn't got any pig cells, but it's got two really important things -

it's got the structure of a heart and it's got the blood vessels of a heart.

Turning the framework into a working human heart

falls to cardiac surgeon Luiz Sampaio.

He's seeding what was once just a scaffold with adult stem cells.

They've been extracted from donated bone marrow,

fat or simply blood, then cultivated in the lab.

And now billions of them

are injected into every layer of the heart's structure.

There, an extraordinary transformation happens.

Embedded in the scaffold, the stem cells become heart cells.

How do these cells know what to become?

The remarkable thing about this scaffold framework

is that it seems to have cues in it that tell the cells where to migrate

and what to become.

The cells know where they are based on the location,

based on what other cells they find around them,

and in ways we don't understand yet,

they organise themselves and seem to know what to do.

The cells take over the structure making a fully formed human heart.

But there's something even more astonishing

about how the cells behave.

A heartbeat.

It's starting to move just like a healthy heart should move.

The cells don't beat together unless we train them.

To do that, we essentially create a blood pressure

against which the heart has to beat.

Training the heart cells to beat as one takes about a week.

The first time I saw it beating...

You come in, you've put the cells in, you go home, you come back...

It's really beating, not just, "OK, is it maybe beating?

"Don't we think that one's moving?" It's really beating.

You don't even... I mean, it's breathtaking.

So far, the team have managed to create a heart that can pump

at a staggering 25% of an adult's heart.

Dr Taylor expects to be ready to transplant one of these hearts

into a human in less than ten years.

One day, it might be possible to generate any human organ

using this technology.

You could grow those organs when you needed them

and where you needed them, and you wouldn't need anti-rejection drugs,

because, biologically, they'd already be part of the patient.

So this now maybe confined to a lab, but in the future,

I can see how this might become a normal part of medicine.

Of all the many experiments

and the many reports we've done, I think the one that will remain

with me the longest is the image of a heart

pumping in a jar, a heart that's been artificially created.

The great thing about it is that it's actually...

It's not simple to do, but it's a simple concept,

and their motto is, "Give the body the tools it needs

"and get out of the way." Cells can do this.

The stem cells we have,

when we have a problem, stem cells go to that part of the body,

they recognise what they need to do, and they pick up the cues

and grow into the right sort of thing.

So this just that but on a much more complex scale.

It's astonishing, isn't it?

I think the thing that absolutely amazes me

with all of this is think old biology.

So, how do cells know where to go?

And there's lots of signalling that happens in a developing embryo,

but here there's an adult pig structure.

It's an adult, it's not a baby, it's not an embryo,

and yet the cells can still use signals.

The signal hasn't yet disappeared in the heart structure to say,

"This is what type of cell you should be." To me, I think

that is right cutting-edge brilliant science.

Presumably there's a pacemaker just...

That's the most wonderful thing that you didn't see.

There's the heart, and then the body is over here

and the body is a mechanical object.

There's a mechanical nutrition source,

there's lungs that are oxygenating it,

and there are all these little machines,

and all of those things are needed to keep a heart beating.

If someone needs a transplant because they have a genetic defect

in your heart, if you're using your own stem cells to repair that,

are you not likely just to build a heart with the same defect?

I would've assumed that this would be the case.

Is the defect in building the outside structure?

Where does the defect come from? What does it look like,

and so do you not the right coding regions to build?

But maybe if the structure's already there, you get around it.

So this would allow us to really advance

what we understand about genetic disorders of the heart.

This type of experimentation that we can now do is just spectacular.

And what about the idea of taking your own embryonic stem cells

from your umbilical cord?

They've thought about that, the idea that

when a baby is born, you could then store them. Those are the best ones.

The umbilical ones are the most useful ones.

-How would you store them?

-I got offered.

I have two babies, and what happens is you give birth, there's the placenta,

chop it off and you stick it into liquid nitrogen at minus 80.

Boom. Frozen for ever.

The fact that now you can use your own stem cells

to regenerate organs, I mean, think of the likes of any type

of spinal injury.

How can you make the cells grow up into a spinal cord?

Perhaps the way is just simply in the scaffolding,

and you can use adult scaffolding, and to me, that's brilliant.

Thank you very much, Helen and Emma.

Now, it might surprise you to know that the first person to patent

a functioning artificial heart was not a well-known

heart specialist or a cell biologist,

but was in fact a ventriloquist and film voiceover artist.

Responsible not only for the voice of Dick Dastardly

from Wacky Races, but also Tigger from the Winnie The Pooh movies.

His name was Paul Winchell.

We have a picture of him with his working colleague...

Before he was a ventriloquist

and a voiceover artist, he was a medical student.

And later in Hollywood,

when he was all successful he was at a party

and he met Dr Henry Heimlich, of the manoeuvre,

and discussed medical matters with him, and it reignited his interest,

and he started patenting,

including the first ever artificial heart.

Ultimately, however, he felt that the voiceover work paid more,

but I do think it's time to resurrect him

to his rightful place in the pantheon of heart innovators.

Paul Winchell, I induct you

into the Unsung Scientist Heroes Hall Of Fame.

APPLAUSE

Now, our special guest tonight is cosmologist

and professor of physics and the director of the enigmatically titled

Foundational Questions Institute at MIT - Professor Max Tegmark.

Professor Tegmark, a pleasure to have you here.

Foundational questions,

what qualifies as a foundational question?

It's the big questions that are the foundations of what we know,

and we want to support people who go after these questions,

even if it's likely to not work.

For instance, if some guy had written the grant proposal

today for a government grant saying,

"Hey, my name is Albert Einstein, I'm working at a patent office,

"cos I couldn't get a job in physics, and I'd like you to give me

"some money to think about the nature of time."

MAKES A NEGATIVE NOISE ..Said the review panel, you know?

There would've been no way to predict that that research

would've lead him to realise that energy and matter are the same thing,

that you can get nuclear power that might be keeping these lights on.

And I think it's very important for humanity to invest in things

that are probably going to fail

but will have enormous transformative effects if they work.

So you were travelling round the world, possibly allowing people

to engage in the most open-minded of investigations

in the world of physics. You may be, then, the man to bring...

to go to with some questions like time. What is time, exactly?

-Do we have a grasp on what that is?

-That's a wonderful question.

We've heard about perception of time a little bit here

and how it sometimes feels like time goes slower

when we're being bored and such, but we've also come to realise

that time itself actually does go slower sometimes.

Nature really messes with it.

Like, if we were having this conversation

near the monster black hole in the middle of our galaxy,

the audience here would hear us...

(SPEAKS LOW AND SLOW) ..talking kind of like this...

because our time would actually be slowed down,

yet we wouldn't notice anything.

That's the idea of relativity that you always feel that

you're right about your perception of time and everybody else is wrong.

So we would feel that they're talking...

(BABBLES QUICKLY) ..way too fast.

We're going to take a look at some observations about the universe

in a second and we're going to keep you there for that.

Thank you very much, Professor Max Tegmark.

We'll talk to him again later in the show.

The age of the universe is something scientists have wrestled with

for a long time. Just last year, after centuries of revising

the number upwards,

they decided it was, in fact, 13.798 billion years old.

We know quite a bit about how it has developed

over those 14 billion-odd years, but there's a huge gap

in our knowledge known as the Cosmic Dark Ages.

Mark's been to see if we can shine some light on the subject.

Scientists can trace the story of the universe

right back to the Big Bang.

But there's an important part missing.

The time when the first stars were born

and started to forge the very stuff our world is made of.

So when it comes to how stars and light itself began,

we're quite literally in the dark.

Dr Jonathan Pritchard has dedicated his career to working out

what happened to the universe in its formative years.

So what do we know about how stars are created in the universe?

I mean, if we go right back to the beginning.

Although we understand the physics and we can try

to put to put that into a computer to simulate what happened,

we actually can't get the simulations all the way

to the point where the first stars formed.

So the universe starts off with a spark of light

and then there's dark - literally dark.

Literally dark until the first stars are able to form and produce

starlight, initiating what we have come to know as the Cosmic Dawn.

Although we can see flashes of energy from the first atoms,

we've never been able to see how they became the first stars.

I can see why the Cosmic Dark Ages are so frustrating.

I mean, we've got pictures of the evolution of the whole universe,

except for one tantalising gap, but it's a really important one.

I mean...imagine the universe was me.

We've got pictures of early me.

Here's early me. That's when I was about four.

Here's me as a grad student.

But if this was the universe, then there's a whole segment missing.

My teenage years, in effect, are gone.

Those early stars began to forge the matter that built our universe,

transforming simple gasses into the building blocks of life.

When we say we're made of stardust, this is when it all began.

But we've never been able to detect those first flickerings

of visible light.

The Cosmic Dark Ages have remained beyond the scope

of even our most powerful telescopes, but now scientists have found

a way to shed light on that distant darkness.

And what is this new giant of technology

that makes it all possible?

The low-frequency array - LOFAR.

I'd always imagined a telescope fit for a job like this

would look a bit more hi tech than a few antennae

in a field in Hampshire.

But Dr Filipe Abdalla is using them to map radio waves

from the time light was born.

Where do these radio waves come from?

These radio waves, they actually come from hydrogen.

You can imagine that the hydrogen atoms in the beginning

of the universe is like a fog, and we can see it

with these antennas.

For the first time, Filipe can scan the dark fog of hydrogen

that made up the universe before the stars and galaxies formed.

He's looking for gaps in the fog, because that's a giveaway sign

of where gas turned into the first stars.

When you have a star forming, it will burn up the fog around it.

So we're actually looking for these tiny little holes

in the beginning of the universe.

-So you're looking for what is not there.

-Exactly.

Radio telescopes are nothing new.

We've been using them to map the skies for decades.

So why haven't they been able to reach back

to the Cosmic Dark Ages yet?

Well, at that distance, hydrogen's radio waves become stretched,

and you need a dish the size of Europe to make sense of them.

That's what LOFAR is part of -

just one of a network of listening posts.

Working together, they create the equivalent

of a Europe-sized radio telescope.

So you've turned the whole of Europe into a giant telescope?

Absolutely.

There's this huge fibre network that actually links these stations

together and takes all this data to Holland, and there all this data

is put together by this massive supercomputer.

'Filipe is compiling snapshots of holes in the fog

'to reveal what he describes as "bubbles".'

And those bubbles, they would then be the places we expect stars

to be born or maybe a black hole in the early universe, is that right?

Exactly. A lot of people are very excited about this, and it's...

in my opinion, is one of the most exciting things in the field,

because it's painting a picture of the universe that we don't have.

'LOFAR is poised to finally show us what the first dawn looked like.

'A postcard from the time when the universe became recognisable to us.'

It does look like a ridiculously low-tech solution

to a fundamental problem.

It's a very elegant bit of physics, actually, to really think like that.

It sort of goes back to the early days of physics where people...

didn't have huge amounts of money to throw at problems

and still managed to discover huge amounts about the universe.

But there is one bit that you couldn't have done before,

which is the number-crunching. There's so much data,

there's petabytes of data coming out of this thing, and they just...

So I asked them what would you like to increase your ability

to do this work, and he said, "A bigger computer."

It's really a huge number-crunching operation to take

these very faint signals from all over Europe.

There's a chronological map of what we're talking about

when we talk about this era here.

Big Bang there, inflationary period there,

that is the microwave background radiation here,

and this is, basically, the universe as we know it.

Right, and here are the Dark Ages that we have no clue about.

So there's a huge burst of microwave radiation at this point

and then there were no stars. There was nothing.

What was happening here?

Back then, our universe was actually very boring.

There was obviously stuff there that later formed the galaxies.

It was actually gas, mostly hydrogen gas.

Gradually, this boring stuff was amplified through gravity into...

big clumps, galaxies, stars, planets

and ultimately all of us here.

By the way, is it stars they made or black holes?

-Ah!

-No-one knows. This is why it's exciting science,

cos people don't really know what happened in that Dark Ages.

Was it the stars that formed first and black holes maybe came later?

Or, as some people think,

the black holes were the things that started first.

-The supermassive black holes.

-Yeah.

We used to think of black holes as the bad guys in our universe.

Just...ate things up and destroyed things,

but now we're beginning to think that they were probably very important

in the whole formation of galaxies.

We have a monster black hole in the middle of our galaxy.

It weighs four million times as much as the sun,

and even though black holes are actually portrayed

as just these vacuum cleaners often in cartoons and stuff,

it's very hard to feed them.

It's actually very much like feeding a small baby,

for those of you who've tried this.

Almost all of the food you give at it just comes flying back out again.

It's a big puzzle in science how can a black hole,

which presumably was formed weighing a million times less or so,

have grown so much?

Maybe it was those beasts that first lit up the universe,

-in that sloppy feeding process.

-Fantastic.

We're hoping to learn that.

Thank you, Professors Max Tegmark and Mark Miodownik.

APPLAUSE

Still to come tonight,

Alok has a time-travelling adventure with some rats in Philadelphia.

And we smash and punch liquids

to reveal some of their stranger properties.

Now here's Helen with some more of the most interesting

science stories right now.

This looks a bit like science fiction,

but it's actually a telescopic contact lens.

And it works in two ways.

You can either look through the middle of it here,

and that gives you normal vision, or it's got ringed mirrors

around the outside that magnify the image you see up to three times.

And you can switch between the two.

It's designed for people who have a disease

called macular degeneration, but anyone could wear this lens,

so maybe all of us could have bionic vision.

We know there's lots of plastic in the ocean.

Some people think there could be 100 million tonnes of it out there.

But nature could be fighting back.

Researchers have found that on a single fleck of plastic,

there could be a whole mini ecosystem of microbes.

And these microbes are not just living on the surface,

but they're burrowing into it.

You can see on this photograph, they're sort of digging in.

And they might even be eating it away and helping it break down.

NASA have announced they've built and tested

a fuel injector for a rocket, made entirely from 3D printed material.

What's impressive about this is the temperatures

and pressures in a rocket engine are really extreme.

If 3D printing can do this, it can probably do almost anything.

NASA are even considering taking 3D printers into space,

so that they can make spare parts whenever and wherever they need them.

OK, I want to talk about things that operate slowly in relation to time.

-Yes.

-I'm going to put a question to the audience.

Hands up, how many of you think this is a liquid?

One, two, three. About half a dozen hands. How many think it is a solid?

So more. I think about four times as many think it's a solid.

-Quite a lot undecided.

-There were. People aren't sure.

You're cagey about this.

Well, it's clearly...let's put there...there we go.

That is clearly a solid. OK? Let's try this one.

Right, how many of you think this is a solid?

OK, how many of you think this is a liquid?

-A few very smart people raising their hands.

-Yeah.

There has to be some sort of trick. What is it?

This is pitch, which you probably will know is asphalt.

The stuff that's on the roads.

If you mix it with stone, you get tarmac. But this is the stuff.

And it is liquid.

People think that often about glass.

Glass sometimes has different thicknesses.

Glass, although it is not crystalline, so it's amorphous,

so liquids have an amorphous structure too.

It is a solid.

Whereas pitch, this is a liquid, but it's only understandably a liquid

over long periods of time, so it's time that fools you in this case.

So viscosity is the big one when you're talking about liquid.

So here's water, and it has a very low viscosity,

and it will fill the container and flow in there.

-Here is something that's a bit more viscous.

-What is that?

-It's oil.

-OK.

-And then, this is more viscous still.

So that's flowing but very slowly.

Now, if I put this bit of pitch in here, you think -

well, that's not going to flow! But it will flow!

It just flows over very long periods of time.

In fact, the oldest known laboratory experiment is still going.

It's about the flow of pitch in a very similar apparatus to this.

A guy called Parnell in 1927, he started off this experiment

and he waited for three years for this first bit

to settle into the funnel,

and then he said, "Right, the experiment goes now,"

and every ten years or so, a drop has dribbled out of it.

Well, not dribbled - we don't even know what happens to the drop, because no-one's seen the drop go.

So there's been eight drops so far, and they've all not been observed.

There's not even a photo, amazingly enough.

Once every ten or 12 years.

This one is going to happen soon, and we've got footage of the webcam.

The last one, they had a webcam, but it broke. That was in 2000.

This time, they've got three webcams.

That's ridiculous. OK, grand. There are different properties of fluids.

Tell me about a non-Newtonian fluid.

Again, this is where time plays tricks on you.

We've got this liquid, it's called a non-Newtonian liquid,

and it's basically just cornflour and water.

To really show you what this stuff does,

I need a volunteer from the audience, because it is very odd.

-It does different things over different periods of time.

-Can I grab you? Hey, chap, how are you?

-What's your name?

-James.

-Hi, James, how are you?

So now I want you to do two things. I want you to slowly stir it.

Actually, it's quite a relaxing thing, a bit like going to a spa.

No, put your whole hand in there. Go on. Does that feel nice?

-Yeah, it does.

-It's quite thick, isn't it?

Quite viscous. Very nicely done.

You can see that's just a normal liquid,

there's nothing strange about that. Now I want you to punch it.

So I want you to try and move it but very fast.

Over a short period of time. Go. Go on.

Yeah. More, more, keep going.

-Yeah.

-Wow.

Oh, wow, that's incredible.

All right, all right, let it go, let it go.

Did it feel like a solid?

Did it feel like punching a plastic, like a punch bag?

-Yeah, like a solid skin.

-That's remarkable...

Your hands aren't even wet from that, so why does it do that?

-By the way, thank you.

-I would shake your hand, but...

-No, don't.

-Plus you're like a really aggressive man.

-Quite strong.

Powerful but also really hates the cornflour. Thank you very much.

-Give him a round of applause, please.

-APPLAUSE

He was punching that and he wasn't even breaking the surface,

there was no fluid coming off in any way.

So, at slow speeds, in normal time,

if you like, this thing will just behave like a normal liquid.

It's got little particles in it, and they can get past each other, so they can flow past each other.

But when he was punching it really fast, he was trying to get

the particles to move very speedily past each other, and they couldn't find a way.

Not in that time frame. So they locked up like a big traffic jam.

And then the whole surface goes sort of semisolid.

This is presumably the most viscous material.

What is the least viscous?

Well, helium, if you cool it down, get it to a superfluid state,

and actually it is so runny, if you like, it will go through solid objects,

because it will find little ways through the atomic scale structure

to find its way through and just drip through a glass beaker.

I think we might have... Yeah. So this is superfluid helium.

-That's near absolute zero temperature.

-Yeah.

And you see this dripping...?

It is basically going through the molecular structure of the beaker

and dripping out the bottom.

Finding little ways through, because it has got no viscosity at all.

That's incredible. So we have seen potentially the most viscous

and the least viscous liquids in the world.

Thank you very much, Mark.

APPLAUSE

The human concept of time is fundamental to our success as a species.

Many of the compliments of higher thought are down to

our ability to visualise the future. It's how we make plans.

We've long believed that no other animal has been blessed

with this simple but powerful way of thinking, but sensational new evidence has emerged

that perhaps we're not as unique as we like to think.

Alok Jha reports.

I'm driving this car and I can imagine just abandoning it on the side of the road

or running that red light ahead.

Now, I've never actually done those things

and I don't have those memories in my head, so I can't replay anything,

but I can imagine what it might be like.

Scientists enigmatically call this ability mental time travel.

For decades this was thought to be a uniquely human ability,

something that set us apart from every other animal.

At the University of Minnesota, Professor David Redish is redefining

our relationship to the rest of the animal kingdom...

by reading the minds of rats.

There was the day that my student actually came into my office

and said, "Dave, my rats are doing mental time travel,"

and I just told him it was crazy.

The revelation came from an experiment which gave rats

the options to choose what they ate.

The rats know that there are different flavour foods

dispensed in each corner.

As they approach a corner, a countdown tone tells them

how long they will have to wait for that flavour.

There's a really high pitch, so he just skipped it.

There is another high pitch, he's going to skip it again.

That's a low pitch, and he just went and did it.

So the high pitch is saying he is going to wait a long time,

and the low pitch is saying he will get quickly.

The rats haven't just learned to look for the food with the shortest wait,

they know where their favourite flavours are too.

When a hungry rat hears there will be a long delay for its favourite food, it hesitates.

It seems to be using that very human-like thinking,

weighing up the options about whether it's worth the wait.

What you've got here essentially is a food court,

and instead of the Chinese and the Thai restaurants

and the Indian restaurants, we've got different flavours of pellets,

banana, cherry and whatever else.

You, the rat, are walking around thinking,

"I'd wait about half an hour for Mexican, but, you know what..."

-It's not worth it.

-"For the Chinese over there, I'm not going to wait that long."

-Exactly.

In other words, it's planning ahead.

However, simply interpreting an animal's behaviour

is not hard scientific evidence of its thinking.

So David devised a way to remove any doubt of what is on a rat's mind.

The key here is that we actually have access to the brain,

because we can hear the individual cells that make up the brain.

David has found a way to tune into the rat's locator cells,

brain cells that are active when a rat is thinking about a specific place.

Just by looking at which ones were firing,

David can tell where a rat was within a maze.

He noticed that sometimes the rats were not thinking

about where they were but where they could go next.

The cells that say, "I am here," they stop firing.

And the cells that say, "I'm over there," they start firing.

We interpret that as being an imagination of that other location.

By comparing the rat's thoughts with its position in the maze,

he can demonstrate they were planning ahead.

We'll actually see a sequence of cell firing ahead of the animal,

matching going from where the animal is to the feeder site.

The circle shows where the rat is in the blue channels of this maze.

The red pixels show the rat actually imagining the different places

it could move towards.

When the rat stops, you can see the representation jump back and forth.

It's on one side and then it'll be on the other side.

So here it's imagining what it is like to go over there.

-Then it makes a decision.

-Exactly.

This rat has got to make a decision of,

"Do I want to go forward to the feeder or do I want to go back?"

and what we will see is that, very clearly, it goes right backwards.

So it is thinking, "Shall I scoot that way

-"just in case that's a better place to find my food?"

-Exactly. That's right.

This is the first direct evidence that this special skill

of being able to plan ahead is not uniquely human

but is a skill we share with other animals.

Do we want to have rats that can plan ahead?

Those rats are now running that lab. This is true.

Well, the interesting thing about this is that it says something about evolution.

It says that whatever planning is,

whatever it is that you do when you're mental time travelling, as they call it,

it occurred in animal evolution

at some point where we had a common ancestor with rats.

Therefore, if it has been conserved for that long,

it means that it is much more fundamental to our survival

than just planning what you're going to eat for dinner tonight.

You can imagine an evolutionary benefit to having

this kind of skill, but if this goes back that far in the tree,

-what other animals are also included in this?

-You'd assume primates.

Birds have been shown to be very intelligent.

We haven't done experiments,

but certainly they would be a candidate for this as well.

I think that, as humans, as a human animal, we are extremely arrogant.

We judge intelligence, we judge other animals,

other nonhuman animals' ability to think about things based on ours.

However, I wouldn't he surprised, trying to survive, trying to find new places,

trying to remember where you've gone, trying to imagine forward

should be a fundamental ability of most animals.

It's amazing that we now have data to show how the brain is functioning

within rats, but I am not surprised.

You don't believe that we are particularly unique in this.

I think studying our universe makes us humble, and studying mice,

I have been very humbled by a mouse, actually.

I was humiliated for a period of about five days trying to catch a mouse.

I set up a webcam, and the mouse came

and figured out that he could eat the peanut butter from my trap

without going into it from the hole in the side

and even waved at the camera while he was doing it.

For me, as a physicist, I agree we need to get away

from this anthropocentric way of thinking of animals.

I think of a mouse brain and my brain as a bunch of particles

doing a very complicated computation. So, for me,

just like it's fascinating to look under the hood of the computer

and see how does the computer chip do this,

this gives fantastic insight.

LAUGHTER

-What is this achieving other than making me look kind of cool?

-Making you look like you're on Tron.

What it's doing as it's got these little green LEDs

that are shining up into your eyes.

Now, those photoreceptors in your eyes are sending signals

which regulate melatonin, which is the hormone that seems

to be in control of setting the body clock.

Those are designed for people who are either having difficulty

sleeping or they're jet-lagged maybe, and the aim is to help them

-reset the clock.

-You actually are jet-lagged.

-I actually am jet-lagged.

-I need these.

-Yeah, why am I denying you actual medical help?

-You're telling me that...

Don't put them on now, because they'll stop you sleeping.

I feel refreshed already.

And you're telling me, though, that you still don't know.

We still don't know really why I'm jet-lagged,

because you have found a clock system.

It makes me wonder, how can these 17-year cicadas,

who gave name to the circadian rhythm, know that now is the time to come up?

Think about it, how does a baby know that it should be born at nine months?

There are inherent development stages.

It takes 17 years for those cicadas to go down

into the ground and then develop into nymphs at the right time.

That's inherently built into how your body will function.

Two things to show you very quickly.

The first one is this, which looks like an ordinary clock.

It is in fact a decimal clock. Which was only attempted once.

-Do you know where they attempted to do this?

-France probably.

-France.

-They love the metrics.

-They ran for two years from 1793 to 1795.

I'm just going to put this paste on my hand

and hit myself with a hammer.

Do I want you to do it? No, I don't.

Because obviously the force has to go somewhere,

and you would enjoy it too much.

It's essentially very similar to that cornflour mixture.

It's a non-Newtonian fluid. It is a fluid.

If you put it into this box, it will go back into that container nicely.

So the idea is, and they've done it here, you can see

these garments here...the idea is to create protective wear,

motorcycle wear, which are very flexible,

that don't feel stiff, like these enormous bulky things.

Flexible, you could wear that, but in a crash,

in an emergency situation, it will do what it did in your hand,

which is lock up and protect you.

If you put that and that on, you'd be Buck Rogers or something.

-It's that kind of combination.

-He then went to the decimal clock.

-Go to the decimal clock.

Wow, I'd be like Flavor Flav, but also Buck Rogers.

The weirdest combination of all.

We want to thank our guests tonight, Professor Max Tegmark

and Professor Emma Teeling, and our team - Alok, Helen and Mark.

I'm Dara O Briain. Good night from Science Club. We'll see you again.

APPLAUSE

Next time, how powerful,

affordable technology is ushering in a new year for DIY science.

From fighting disease and detecting earthquakes to saving lives.

We'll look at the technology which promises to change our world.

That really is not as safe as I expected it to be.

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