DIY Science 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 - are we entering a whole new era of DIY science?

Powerful, affordable technology is available to us all

and it's ushering in a whole new era of creativity,

so are we all scientists now?

This is the place where we find out how great ideas are changing

the world we live in.

Welcome to Science Club.

APPLAUSE

Good evening and welcome to the show.

We've got a terrific programme for you tonight,

some fabulous guests later on,

and I'll be joined by the regular team

and Professor Mark Miodownik - our resident experimentalist

and demos guru who will be having a bit of a shock later in the show.

-We've got the best demo we've ever had on Science Club.

-Fantastic.

-And it may genuinely hurt.

-LAUGHTER

On the show tonight we're looking at how science is moving out of the lab

and onto the street and involving all of us

and how we're all becoming citizen scientists

and what extraordinary feats we can achieve together.

Science journalist Alok Jha is in San Francisco to see

how people-power could create a cheap but effective earthquake alert

which will give vital extra seconds warning

if the Big One is on its way.

Professor Mark Miodownik

reveals an ingenious way of making the world a bit safer.

-Whoa.

-Wow.

And in a brilliant piece of DIY science

Doctor Helen Czerski reveals

how one man is helping the mosquitoes turn on their own

in order to combat dengue fever.

All right, off you go, little mosquitoes.

But first - how much do you think about your health?

You may weigh yourself every now and again,

take your blood pressure occasionally,

sign up for the odd flu jab.

But if you've got one of these,

you've got the ability to monitor your entire body 24/7.

Will that make us fighting fit?

Or is it going to make hypochondriacs of us all?

Mark's been finding out.

In the last few years a whole new swath of gadgets

laden with hi tech sensors have hit the market

which are, I'm told,

set to transform what we know about ourselves.

Here they all are, these gadgets I'm going to use

to track my biological functions day in day out.

Well, not all of them, but still, you get the idea.

But before I start I've got a confession to make -

I am the sort of person who,

when I get a headache in the middle of the night,

I'm convinced it's a brain tumour, and I've been wrong so far,

but I'm really interested to know whether this stuff,

and knowing more about myself,

helps allay those fears or makes things worse.

So, for better or worse,

I'm going to get to know myself in ways I never imagined.

That's it, I'm all wired up.

Wish me luck.

Over the next few days

the gadgets will be measuring my heart rate,

how much exercise I'm getting and even my sleep patterns.

It's odd and a little disconcerting at first

because the urge is to constantly check and see what's going on.

I just put this heart rate monitor on as I was walking around the building

and noticed something quite disturbing

which is my heart rate is really...

alarmingly high by just walking up some stairs.

'Brilliant.

'Less than a few hours in

'and I'm already feeling undermined by the monitoring.

'The thing is there's no escape from it.'

My task for tonight is to put on the X4 Sleep Profiler and monitor...

my sleep.

I know what you're thinking - I look ridiculous.

But I'm not the only one -

there are thousands of people across the world

monitoring themselves day in day out.

The Quantified Self is a movement

to incorporate technology and data acquisition

into every aspect of your daily life.

It combines wearable senses with life logging and surveillance.

'Now, if enough people do this kind of thing

'it might help monitor populations and help find links between behaviour

'and general health and wellbeing.

'But personally,

'I worry it's a bit unhealthy, a bit, well...

'self-obsessive.'

Morning.

According to the data...

I got seven hours and 38 minutes sleep.

My meditation rating is just abysmal, but my attention is good.

It's interesting, but I don't quite know what it means.

It feels a bit like I'm sort of overwhelmed by the data.

I'm not sure I can cope with doing any more monitoring.

It's exhausting knowing so much about myself.

Just filled in my biometrics into the stress app

and I find that I'm 49% stressed.

What does that mean?

Does that mean I should go for a walk?

'OK, so let's see what all this monitoring means.'

Breathing rate - I breathe pretty well, it looks like.

OK.

I'm seeing a graph of force of each foot

and they're definitely different.

That's the first thing that strikes you - that I do not walk evenly,

I have not got an even gait.

Now I'm going to have a look at the sleep report.

Snoring... Oh, my God!

..30% of the night. That is appalling!

Now I'm feeling overwhelmed with all this data,

I don't know what to do with it.

'I could see how this monitoring malarkey could have benefits,

'like working out how much you're sitting still,

'or keeping tabs on what you've eaten.

'It might even pick up early signs of an illness.

'But for me it's all a bit too much.'

I have a funny walk apparently and I've got a sleep disorder,

and for someone like me, who's a worrier anyway,

that's a bit much frankly, so I'm glad this experiment is over.

APPLAUSE

-Mark, it does appear like a bit of a hypochondriac's charter.

-I think so.

I think for people themselves, they could suffer with this data

and not really know how to manage it and get really worried about it.

But in terms of it monitoring whole populations,

this is potentially very important

because small correlations between behaviour and outcome

-could be discovered this way.

-OK.

Let's get some proper home-made science

because we do tend to have you doing all sorts of experiments here.

Now, lightning. Lightning strikes 240,000 people a year.

Yeah, worldwide,

and it kills about 24,000 people a year which is a huge number.

This, by the way, is a map of lightning strikes across the world.

It's intriguing. Not over the ocean.

Very much not over northern Europe for example.

Not over the deserts in Africa.

But if you're in Florida, Florida is extremely high

because it's a landmass that extends into the Tropics

and it's a place where a lot of people hold up iron...

-as they're playing golf.

-LAUGHTER

And the general advice is - don't go under trees,

don't hide under...

Yeah, we thought we would demo why that is a problem.

Imagine you're out in a field, you see a thundercloud above you...

The hotdog by the way represents you and me and anyone normal.

This is just plastic, it's non-conducting.

-This represents a tree?

-Yeah, a bit of wood.

Let's say you see this thundercloud,

which is represented by this Tesla coil,

so we've got a high voltage here, maybe 40 or 50,000 volts, OK?

-Right.

-It comes over and it decides to lightning over you.

What it's doing is finding the easiest path to the ground.

It's looking for highly conductive things like bags of water.

The tree is not as desirable for it, but they tend to be tall.

But they can hit the tree and jump over to you.

What you want to do is get low to the ground -

that is the best advice you can get.

But even then, it can hit you and what you don't want it to do is

go through any vital organs to try and get to the ground.

Because the effect when it hits a human body,

a lot of the time it doesn't even go through the body,

-it will pass over the surface.

-Yeah.

If you're lucky it will go round your skin and go through to the ground.

-It will still pass in that pattern, won't it?

-Oh, right.

So, you see that lightning pattern? That's it finding a path,

lowest energy path, so it's exploring lots of roots

and that's what you think of as a lightning fern-like pattern,

so it's a fractal pattern, actually.

And you can see that when people get struck by lightning.

It actually burns the outside of their... Yeah, here we go.

These are sort of fern-like fractal patterns.

And is that still the lightning trying to find a path?

Yes. If you're unlucky it will go through the core of your body

and then it will interfere with either your heart rhythm

or your lungs and if it stops those two you die.

So a lot of people die from heart failure

or from asphyxiation, weirdly.

And if it doesn't kill you that way...

it will just boil you because the amount of current

going through a lightning bolt is enough to just

heat your body up and boil it.

What we can try and simulate now is, if you get struck by lightning

and it goes through your core.

This is actually quite dangerous, this bit.

Yeah, don't do this at home.

Just to reassure everyone,

this is not connected yet, even though I've plugged it in,

-until these two buttons are pressed.

-OK.

So that's a gherkin.

Imagine that's you, you get hit by lightning

and now it's going through the core of your being.

So first of all, you see it boiling quite quickly

because there's a huge amount of current going through there.

So it's boiling up, steam's coming out,

and then it starts breaking down the very fabric of the gherkin,

which could be you. LAUGHTER

And then... the temperatures go...

-Wow, that's quick to boil, isn't it?

-Yeah.

-Come on.

-Oh, yes.

-There we go.

And then it's so hot you're getting light come off it,

and that light is a particular orange/yellow

-which you might recognise, Dara.

-Street light.

-Yeah.

-Sodium light.

-Yeah. And that is sodium from the salt in the gherkin.

Wow.

-Ow.

-LAUGHTER

It's quite a few thousand degrees probably inside there.

-Is it OK to go in?

-Yep.

That's the effect it will actually have on flesh.

But is there a vivid way of seeing the actual path?

Why does lightning happen?

It's a high charge trying to get through the air,

the air is an insulator, so how does it get through?

It has to break down the air and make it into a conductor.

And there's a really fantastic demo which I would like to show you

which sort of reproduces that situation. This is...

Let's say this is a piece of air.

It's actually Perspex, but they're both insulators.

And we've irradiated it with electrons,

so there's lots of electrons in here.

You can't see them, but there's a high voltage in there.

They've got nowhere to go cos this is an insulator, they can't get out,

and this is the same with lightning.

There's a huge amount of charge, it's looking for somewhere to go.

The electrons are sitting quite happily at the moment,

so how do we shake them out of that?

We need to give them a high potential,

basically a concentration point,

and I'm going to hit it with a hammer.

OK, let's bring the lights down so we can see this.

Oh, that's quite moody actually.

LAUGHTER

You tell me when.

-We're ready to go.

-OK.

Although that looks like a crack, it's not. If you look at it very...

There's some more lightning.

There's still lightning occurring as it goes along.

Cos it's still giving power to the electrons. My God.

-How long does that go on for?

-It can go on for hours

because bits of the electrons that are marooned in this insulator

are finding this path

which it creating by breaking down this insulator,

melting it basically, vaporising it.

So little holes are what you see here, feathery holes.

And these patterns...

You saw that on the people who are burnt,

you saw that on their skin, cos that's exactly the same process.

Here's the same effect in slow motion.

So hitting it with a hammer creates that effect.

Let's see it.

That is the flash of huge temperatures.

That's tens of thousands of degrees centigrade

because it vaporises the insulator.

And then that creates that fern-like pattern

and all the electrons are channelled down to Earth

which is why this hammer was connected to it.

-That is incredible.

-And it's still going.

Wow.

OK, let's bring the lights up.

We really should meet somebody who's been struck by lightning.

Eric Brocklebank, I believe we have him here. Eric, are you here?

-Eric, you had...

-APPLAUSE

It's all very well to talk through this in theory,

-this actually happened to you, didn't it?

-It certainly did, yes.

-Where were you?

-I was on a airbase with air cadets.

-You were out in the open?

-Out in the open.

They were doing marching practice, were they?

They were doing a marching practice on parade ground.

We had a storm come in, put my collar up

and the first flash went whizzing past me

and hit the perimeter fence which was at the side of me.

I signalled to the cadets, they ran for cover under trees,

which was the wrong thing to do.

We now know that's a bad thing to do.

Don't go that.

I went and got transport for them, collected them

and took them to what I thought was safety.

An interesting point, the correct thing to do would have been...

Try and get to a vehicle, a metal vehicle

cos that acts a Faraday cage.

If that gets hit by lightning

the electricity will go on the outside of it

and protect the occupants.

It's weird, yeah.

Don't go to a tent with a long pole.

Yes. Where did you go? A tent, wasn't it?

I then took these cadets, put them to safety

and took four cadets with me

to get them something nice and hot to drink and something to eat.

-Went in to get the sausages.

-But you were in the tent?

-I was in the tent.

Took a sausage out...boom.

Came straight through the tent, got the tongs into my hand,

melted into there, up my arms, down my side, across my hips,

blowing holes in my feet as it left my body.

And how long were you in hospital?

One hospital for the first two, three days

until I was transferred then to a major hospital who could deal with

the internal injuries that I'd got.

That's incredible. Thank you, Eric for coming in. And Mark Miodownik.

-Thank you very much.

-APPLAUSE

Not all of nature's forces can be simulated on a table top,

but for even the most destructive, acting collectively may be key

to a greater chance of survival than ever.

The San Andreas Fault in California

faces a estimated 99% chance of a major quake

in the next 30 years.

And the search is always on for an early warning system

which normally costs a fortune.

However, simple ideas shown that the solution may be no bigger

than a mobile phone.

Alok Jha reports.

Our understanding of earthquakes

comes from expensive equipment buried deep underground.

This bunker contains some of

the most sensitive seismic equipment on the globe.

If there was a magnitude five earthquake

on the other side of the planet, this would see it.

This incredible piece of kit

has helped us understand the anatomy of an earthquake

and revealed something amazing.

When an earthquake ruptures along a fault line,

two types of energy waves emanate from the epicentre.

The first wave, the primary or P-wave travels fastest.

The secondary or S-wave is slower,

but it's the real destructive force.

Seismologist Richard Allen explains

how the time lag between the two waves

is the basis of an earthquake early warning system.

If you're about 100 kilometres from the earthquake

then the difference between the P-wave and the S-wave

is sort of 10 to 20 seconds.

Tens of seconds, that doesn't seem like a huge amount of time.

It's not a lot of time, but you can do a lot.

So, for example, you can take cover as an individual.

Things like train systems can start to decelerate the trains.

Airports stop planes from landing.

Any kind of manufacturing facility

can shut down its sensitive equipment

so that everybody can get back online more quickly

after an earthquake.

The problem is, even here in San Francisco,

where hundreds of thousands of people live directly on

the San Andreas Fault zone

the current sensor network isn't good enough

to send reliable warnings out to the public.

The challenge we have is that we have gaps in our sensor coverage,

so we really need to increase the number of sensors

so that we can improve the speed and quality of the early warning system.

Building thousands more seismometer stations at about 80,000 each

isn't really feasible.

But luckily for Californians a much cheaper solution

might just be around the corner.

Doctor Elizabeth Cochran is a LA-based geophysicist

who's passionate about teaching earthquake science

to her local community.

So we're going to try and demonstrate

our different kinds of waves.

She's figured out a way to use a cheap 40 seismometer

to transform a regular laptop into an earthquake monitoring station.

Here we have a sensor

and it's actually connected into the laptop just by USB port.

Any time I move the sensor

it sends the information into the laptop

and we can see the readout here on the screen.

We're actually using these sensors

to record moderate to large earthquakes here in California

and around the world.

But Elizabeth's real breakthrough

is to recruit a network of thousands of volunteers to host these sensors.

All they need to do is plug them into their laptops,

take them down and then they'll start sending vital earthquake data

to a central computer for analysis.

This is so tiny.

How does this compare to your professional equipment?

This is quite a bit less sensitive, but it has some benefits -

they're pretty low cost and we can have them say

in every block or in every house.

How does this become part of an early warning network then?

What these sensors do is

they fill in-between our large network sensors

and we can get more records faster

and get the location of the magnitude much more accurately.

Every additional piece of information we have

will allow us to have longer warning times.

Already, Elizabeth has recruited over 2,000 citizen scientists.

One day she hopes to have sensor networks on every block

in Los Angeles and across every fault zone in the world.

But I think the real significance of what she's achieved

goes beyond earthquakes.

This might be small,

but I think it opens up a new era in science

when research isn't confined to universities

and expensive laboratories but it's something we can all take part in.

It opens up scientific discovery to everybody.

APPLAUSE

Alok, this is very dramatic claim to make,

of new eras opening in science.

How powerful is this kind of thinking?

It's easy to think that

something so small is just a toy that we're all using,

and therefore it's not of any use to scientists,

but you heard there,

Doctor Cochran talking about the fact that these sensors,

because they're easily available and cheap, 40 each,

and you can put them in lots and lots of different places,

it allows them to collect much more information,

and actually, it's useful information.

The US Geological Survey have funded her to do this

and so therefore,

they're thinking this is a useful way of collecting information

across large areas without having to put in

those enormous 80,000 seismometers

that we saw at the beginning.

So it's real stuff.

We're joined now by Doctor Hilary Geoghegan from UCL.

Doctor Hilary,

this is the direction we seem to be going in a lot of projects now,

crowd-sourcing information,

getting data points from enthusiastic amateurs

who wish to join in the research.

Yeah, that's definitely true, people are passionate about science,

people want to contribute, people want to feel part of science

and there are a variety of science projects

that allow people to do that now.

What are the factors in terms of getting people involved in this?

I know you've studied people's enthusiasm

and how that can be marshalled.

You can see why people in this part of the world

want to be part of an early warning system for earthquakes,

so how do we get more people involved in projects which have

obviously less of a tug in matters and that?

Well, in the UK there's an initiative called OPAL,

called Open Air Laboratories that's based in Imperial College,

and they're working with government scientists on a new

tree health survey, which is to monitor pests and diseases in the UK

that some that are here yet, some that are not,

but they want to develop a group of citizens across the country

that will be able to take part and identify these pests.

So it's like eyes and ears on the ground, really,

that scientists just can't get that

sort of geographical coverage on their own.

We can't trust this with the traditional image of a scientist

going out and collecting specimens themselves.

And that just takes a long time, it's deliberative.

This is what Darwin did to make his great theories.

But imagine if Darwin had an army of people out there

that could help him collect all that information.

He'd have probably got to evolution by natural selection WAY quicker.

LAUGHTER

Are scientists actively looking for projects

that they can marshal the public support in?

Astronomers have been doing this for a while now,

so Galaxy Zoo is the famous one where you have to...

You gets lots and lots of images of what look like galaxies

and you have to decide whether they're elliptical ones,

spiral ones or so on, and our brains are much better at doing this

than computers are, hence we can do it.

And it's incredibly popular,

and that's diversified into all sorts of other projects.

All this stuff needs lots of effort from people and we can all help.

Something we didn't see in the VT, there is a quake readiness.

There's a general atmosphere of quake readiness in that part of the world.

You would have to be quake ready in that part of the world.

You took part in a training module, as it were, for...

Would you call it that?

They put you in a room and they made it slide around, essentially.

It's footage worth seeing. This is a quake simulator, isn't it?

Yeah, that's right.

Certain people in that part of the world are trained in what to do

if they feel and earthquake - get under tables and so on.

But you sometimes need to just feel it to really get the impact.

What force of quake is that?

This is simulating a magnitude eight earthquake. You can see...

There is it. LAUGHTER

It looks less impressive when you see it.

From the outside is doesn't look great, Alok.

This is simulating a magnitude eight earthquake.

The idea is that they take this round to schools, businesses and offices,

to show that buildings pretty much nowadays

are good at surviving earthquakes.

It's the stuff inside that gets thrown around,

so you need to have all that fixed.

The apples and everything were falling all over the place.

I just want to point something out,

that the guy who did that for us said that

no-one can stand in a magnitude eight earthquake.

I think that you'll find, if you go through all the rushes,

not once did I fall over in that thing, so there you go.

LAUGHTER

-You are quake ready. Stamp.

-I am.

Thank you, Alok and Doctor Hilary Geoghegan.

APPLAUSE

Still to come on tonight's show,

how hacking techniques are giving science power

back to the people.

Fighting mosquitoes bearing deadly diseases -

the British scientists with the ingenious idea.

And how crash-testing was once very DIY.

Now, Helen, there's another piece of technology which marshals crowds,

but often in a very literal sense.

I mean, look at that screen - if I step on this

on it pops. What exactly is going on here?

This works on a very simple principle -

the idea that whenever you squeeze something, you're putting energy into it

and if you're clever you can use that energy for something else afterwards.

People might be familiar with these, they're little torches

and you can squeeze them for a while

and doing that stores up enough energy so that when you press

the button you get light out of it.

And this works on a similar idea,

so whenever you step on the ground, you squeeze it a little bit.

It can save up four or five joules of energy just a little bit,

but just think about how many steps you take in a day.

Lots and lots and lots,

so the idea is that you can put these out in places where, you know,

bridges, pavements, stations, all that kind of thing,

and all that walking-around energy that people are just wasting,

effectively, can then be used for something,

and this can save energy that's useful for other stuff.

It won't drive a high-voltage thing like a washing machine

or a...you know, but it could work lights for example.

Yeah, lots of the technology we have now available, like LED lights

and displays and little computers, require really low voltages,

so that's perfect for this.

And the other thing is it generates energy exactly where it's needed.

So, say you can imagine having a street with street lamps

that only lit up when someone was actually needing the street lamp,

when they were walking underneath.

We ran a little experiment here where we got our studio audience,

120 people arriving in,

and we put a line of these together.

What sort of power was generated anyway?

So, for our 120 people,

they generated 18,000 joules of energy,

which is enough to charge up four mobile phones

or to run the LED lights that would light a room for 24 hours,

so a useful amount of energy

which people didn't even know they were giving away.

Thank you very much, Helen, and, indeed, thanks to you.

APPLAUSE

We like to think we're very much

proponents of the field of lo-fi science,

but it does look like there's a whole culture of DIY science

going on at the moment.

Here we have the Newcastle Maker Faire,

the place to show off your very own techy breakthroughs.

This is a robot that knits.

It isn't just people making things in sheds, however.

There's a growing movement who describe themselves as hackers,

not in the old computer science term,

but people who liberate technology,

apply imagination and possibly have world-changing results.

Mark's gone to see what's going on.

We've been using tools for thousands of years,

but recently those tools have become a lot more sophisticated

and our relationship with them has changed.

Back in the day, we understood how the gadgets in our lives worked -

we could take them apart, we could fix them.

But these days, modern gadgets, well, they're altogether much more complex.

We don't really understand how they work.

They could be powered by magic.

And that makes us afraid to take them apart

and to try and repair them,

but it doesn't have to be that way.

Mitch Altman is a virtual reality pioneer and inventor from California.

And, as a hacker, he's part of a new movement

that's all about unlocking the potential of technology for yourself.

Well, hacking is more than just about computers,

it's about pretty much anything.

Cos hacking is taking what exists, anything,

and improving upon it and sharing it.

And the lure of getting creative with technology

is bringing people together.

Hackerspaces are physical places

with supportive community for people to explore and do what they love.

They're everywhere.

There were about 50 five years ago and now there's almost 1,4000.

Wow. That's a huge explosion.

Hackerspaces may be multiplying fast

but what does all this playfulness really achieve?

It's easy to write this off as just a bit of fun,

but there's something much more important going on.

The urge to make things is fundamentally human,

and the hacker community are reclaiming the right to make stuff

from whatever you can lay your hands on.

It's a chance for everybody to unleash their inner geek.

And I'm going to have a crack myself

by transforming a piece of off-the-shelf technology

into something completely different.

It's not designed to be taken apart.

That's more like it.

That in the middle is what we're looking for.

That is the CCD chip.

Instead of looking outwards, we're going to look inwards.

OK, I've got a bit of an unfair advantage -

in our workshop I can speed up the hacking process with a laser cutter.

Yay!

Finally, after a couple of hours, I've managed to turn a £5 webcam

into a high-powered electronic microscope.

Oh, tell me that's not a worm.

Oh, my goodness.

So this is a microscopic worm in some pond water which we're seeing

via an electronic microscope that WE made

by just hacking a webcam.

And I think that's just incredible

because it's not just about having a microscope,

we can all have microscopes,

we've got loads of high-powered microscopes in this university,

but it's the act of turning one object into another,

that you learn so much, it's magical and it empowers you,

and that is the beauty of hacking.

But let's face it, this is still just mucking about.

The true power of hacking is that the same ideas can be applied

in a way they can actually make a difference to someone's life.

At Imperial College, Doctor Aldo Faisal

wants to bring cutting-edge medical technology to the masses.

Incredibly, this robot arm is being controlled by my eye movement alone.

Whoa.

That is a weird feeling. It's like being a cyborg slightly.

I mean, this is the closest I've ever felt to being a cyborg.

For someone unable to use their arms,

something like this could be life-changing.

But commercial eye-tracking systems are intrusive

and cost £20,000 to £25,000.

So Aldo starting hacking to make his

high-end system user-friendly and much cheaper.

The whole system, as you see mounted here, cost £9.95.

That's incredible! That's really impressive.

-And the software can run on a normal computer?

-Yeah.

These are two standard cameras that you can plug into your USB port

and basically any PC can operate this system that we've developed.

Aldo customised high-speed cameras from a popular games console

originally designed for tracking your tennis shots or dance moves.

He's transformed a recreational toy into something

that can transform lives.

And the value of hacking doesn't stop there.

And what about for research people? I mean, you're doing this with kind of cheap kit.

Is there an advantage for you to use ubiquitous technology?

I think it just spawns creativity, as once it's so cheap,

you just start to think of all sorts of applications

because you sort of don't have to take it so seriously any more.

And that's where real innovation, creativity is unlocked.

Not only is hacking empowering for the masses,

but it can produce sophisticated new technology with real-world value

at an astonishingly low cost.

APPLAUSE

-This is the microscope you made?

-Yeah.

It's an ordinary webcam that you took apart.

Basically reversing the lens system using the same detector as a webcam.

-It took us an hour.

-Really?

-Yes.

Just an ordinary webcam that you can turn into a microscope that you can plug into any computer.

-Yeah.

-That's ridiculous!

-It is. It is staggering, actually.

Yeah. This is particularly ridiculous. What is this called?

This is called the beet box. A college of mine made it.

And what it is is just some vegetables

that you can turn into sound.

VEGETABLES BEAT RHYTHM

LAUGHTER

Have a go.

VEGETABLES BEAT RHYTHM

-You've got rhythm.

-Thank you very much. Not much!

There's nothing strange or weird, no pressure-sensitive pads?

They're normal, ordinary vegetables.

There's two interesting things about this... Apart from the fact that it's just...

You can grab anywhere on...

It's very moreish as a thing to play with.

-The fennel's particularly good, I think.

-The fennel is good.

And it's driven by this, which I think is one of the kind of things

that's going to revolutionise hacking or model-making or hobby-making

and computer programming - this is the Raspberry Pi,

which came from Cambridge University, didn't it?

Yeah, it was a spin-out from Cambridge.

These guys realised is that you can make a fully functioning computer,

and that is a fully functioning computer

with a full operating system and output for about 30 or 40 quid.

All you have to do is plug in a keyboard and plug it into a monitor

-and you're up and away.

-That's fantastic.

And that's what's in here.

Although the interface is not a keyboard, it's vegetables.

What exactly is THIS measuring off the vegetables?

There's a Raspberry Pi in here connected to some speakers

and some wires which are cunningly hidden into a set of nails.

The nails go into the vegetables, and all the Raspberry Pi is doing

is monitoring the capacitance, so how much charge these have got on them.

And because they're full of water, they're quite sensitive conductors,

and you're full of water, so when you touch them the capacitance changes.

In the instant you touch the vegetable, it becomes

the collective capacitance of you

and the vegetable rather than just the vegetable itself.

-So that reading will dramatically change.

-Yeah.

And that's how your iPad

and your touch screen works on your other smartphones too.

This is imaginative and fun and it illustrates a point,

but more seriously, there are teaching resources,

digital teaching resources that you can hack.

In the developing world, this is a projector made of a lunch box

and a hacked mobile phone.

It is astonishing what you can do and how useful this could be

and a cheap way to develop things.

It's an important point about the Raspberry Pi is, this is not

-a for-profit organisation, this is charity selling these.

-Yeah.

It's fantastic. Thanks very much. Mark Miodownik.

APPLAUSE

Now here's Helen with this week's top stories

from the world of science.

First up is an invention that could change the way

we look after our health.

Scientists in Japan have managed to embed hundreds of electronic sensors

into a super thin film that's not only durable, it's stretchy.

A patch like this could replace all the bundles of tubes

and wires that we currently use to monitor everything from heart rate

to muscle activity.

The patch could be worn like a second skin anywhere on the body

or even inside it.

The spotlight is on bees at the moment

because their numbers are falling,

but scientists think they've finally worked out

how their beautiful geometric honeycomb is made.

You can see here that each cell starts as a circular tube

made of beeswax, and then special heater bees use their wing muscles,

vibrate them and heat the wax up.

As the wax softens, it's actually surface tension that pulls it out

towards the corners to make these beautiful hexagons that are

so regular they almost look man-made.

Something that's intrigued me this week

is this video made by a team from Switzerland.

These are droplets of liquid, and it looks as though

they're being suspended in zero gravity but they're not.

They're actually being levitated by sound waves

coming from this speaker here.

For the first time, this technique is being used to mix liquids together

without them touching anything that could contaminate them.

This could radically change how we handle everything,

from DNA samples to hazardous chemicals.

Still to come, Mark shows how to make the world a safer place.

-Whoa!

-Wow!

-Brilliant!

And the British scientist whose ingenious idea

could save us from a deadly disease.

All right, off you go, little mosquitoes.

Now it's time for our unsung heroes of science.

This week we dedicate it to two men who really did do it for themselves.

Larry Patrick and Colonel John Stapp.

Back in the 1950s before crash-test dummies had been invented,

scientists had to experiment on themselves.

That's Colonel John Stapp on the rocket sled.

The rocket sled was an invention

specifically to design harnesses for pilots.

And he was the man who sat in it as it accelerated from standstill

to 632 miles per hour in five seconds.

He still holds the record for the fastest man on rails.

Not only did it accelerate, it decelerated from 632 in 1.4 seconds.

That's him slowing down there.

Which meant that he went under 43 Gs as it slowed down.

The equivalent of being driven into a wall at 120 miles per hour.

The good colonel suffered broken ribs, broken arms and legs,

he even suffered temporary blindness,

but in doing so, moved on the technology of harnesses for pilots,

and then in the more civil realm, we have Larry Patrick.

Larry was going a similar kind of job for car companies,

also working on a sled.

This is Crazy Larry Rides Again.

Not only did he go on the sled, he allowed himself to be hit by

ten kilogram weights in the chest,

to be hit by metal bars in the knees.

Here he is being thwacked again.

We'll see him on the sled in a second.

And between the two of them, they pioneered airbags,

safety harnesses and, probably most important to their health

and wellbeing, the use of crash-test dummies.

LAUGHTER

It's worth noting that despite all of the pain

they put themselves through, Patrick died at 85, Stapp at 89.

They lived long and happy, healthy lives.

And now we have our unsung heroes over here, and I think their place

is richly deserved on the board here along with our other unsung heroes.

APPLAUSE

Mark, one of the innovations of car safety took a long time to

get to the market, didn't it?

Yeah, the airbag, which we're going to demo in a minute.

In the 1950s, they sort of had the idea, and as they sort of tried

to make it a reality, the first thing was how to get it to go off.

So, first it was manual, they had this canister of gas, and a bag,

and they thought if you're in a crash you just have to pull this lever.

But of course you haven't got the reactions, no-one has,

to actually do that. So that didn't really work.

And then they had to develop things called accelerometers

which could judge when you were in a crash and then deploy the safety.

But then there was another problem which is the canister of gas doesn't deploy

fast enough to stop you hitting the windscreen

or the steering wheel, and so it wasn't for a while

until they got the current solution, which is a chemical reaction

between sodium azide and potassium nitrate, and that does it

so fast that it can actually slow you down and protect you.

Does it run an electric current through, how does it initiate this?

Yeah, so it's a little electric current,

it initiates the reaction and a huge amount of gas is produced very,

very fast indeed - in 20 milliseconds so to put that into perspective,

blinking is about 120 milliseconds so it's within a blink of an eye,

it's out, it's ready to protect you. Did you want to have a look at this?

-Yeah.

-It is a fantastic piece of technology

and it's saved thousands of lives. We need this.

Because, ironically, we need safety gear!

LAUGHTER

This will bang, by the way, so you may want to cover your ears.

Do you want to do a running commentary of the accident?

Oh, what a lovely day out we're having, Mark, you and me driving...

Oh, my God! What's that horse doing on the road?

BANG

-Wow.

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

LAUGHTER

Instead of actually just the bag coming,

the entire steering column...

will take off.

And actually, this is another thing, is that it turns out that

actually all of this fumes is actually a problem for...

-rescue.

-What is this? Nitrogen... What is it?

COUGHING

-You don't die in the crash, but you choke to death.

-Yes.

This is disgusting.

It's very impressive. Well done, Mark.

I really see why that has taken off as a safety measure.

We just hadn't tied that down right.

Reassure people at home as we weep through the cloud of smoke...

Is that gas? What's burning my throat?

That is talcum powder which is used to lubricate

-the deployment of the bag, amazingly.

-Wow.

We can see in slow motion, actually. This is lives being saved.

And that's the steering column...

Oh, my, that's quite elegant, isn't it?

-It looks quite Apollo, doesn't it?

-Yes.

Let's presume the technology works.

You can see why they waited 40 years.

We can use it for that,

-but of course now we can use it for other things as well.

-Exactly.

And the sensors, those accelerometers,

they're microscopic now, they're tiny little things.

You can put them on you so you can start making clothing that becomes

an airbag, or a helmet that's not a helmet but becomes one in a crash.

Is this what this is?

This is another good example of DIY science to a certain extent

because this is not some massive company who made this.

No, some design students in Sweden.

This, have a look at this, this is the...

I'm going to take a guess, the Hovding,

and it will go round your neck as you cycle.

Now, that does not look like a helmet.

Let's have a look. We've got someone who's going to try.

Let's check that we've got everything.

-Oh, wheel.

-Let me take that.

That would be very ironic if the safety feature

in that steering wheel managed to knock over our cyclist.

Let's bring on our cyclist.

-Whoa.

-Wow.

Brilliant.

That's fantastic, look at that.

APPLAUSE

-Do you feel...? Just thumbs up. Do you feel fine?

-Yeah, great.

That's great.

-And before you hit the ground, you could feel that?

-Yeah, definitely.

As soon as I was coming off, bang.

Yeah, a few milliseconds.

It's got several sensors, it recognises something's wrong,

deploys the helium, bang, and you get a fashion statement at the same time.

Hm, maybe.

But, no. I heard of this, that it might be...

Often I find myself slamming on the brakes

cos I haven't quite got to the lights,

I would like not to suddenly be beside a car with a massive

white Darth Vader,

good side of the Force, helmet on me.

This where the very fast computing power of small microchips

with these sensors starts to make...

It knows when it's crashed

and when you're just trying to run the lights, these things can be made

to understand when it's a crash and when it's not a crash.

-Thank you very much.

-Thank you very much.

-A pleasure, thank you.

APPLAUSE

Here is our most clever example of DIY science -

using a dangerous animal's own genes to destroy its threat.

Helen Czerski went to Brazil to find out how.

600 miles north of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil,

scientists are breeding the most dangerous animal in the world.

An animal that has killed more humans than any other in history.

Every week 100,000 mosquitoes are born here.

But these are no ordinary mossies.

They've been engineered by a team of British and Brazilian scientists

for a mission that could save millions of lives.

These mosquitoes are part of a battle against a disease which is becoming

even harder to control over malaria and that's dengue fever.

It's a disease for which there's no cure and no vaccine.

It's an agonising virus which can reduce your blood pressure

so much your organs start to fail, and it can be fatal.

Dengue already affects over 100 million people every year.

It's become an epidemic here in Brazil.

But what makes dengue so dangerous is the way it's spreading.

No longer confined to the Tropics, it's the fastest growing

mosquito-borne disease in the world.

And last year, it reached as far as southern Italy.

The only way to stop this disease spreading is by wiping out

the mosquito population that transmits it,

and that's really difficult because of how quickly they reproduce.

Female mosquitoes only mate once in their ten-day life,

but when they do, they can produce up to 500 offspring.

To fight back, you need to intervene at this crucial moment.

And that's exactly what the ones being bred here can do.

They're the descendents of a very special kind of mosquito

created 5000 miles away.

In this Oxfordshire lab ten years ago,

Doctor Luke Alphey made a remarkable discovery -

how to genetically modify the dengue-carrying mosquito

so its offspring would self-destruct.

I thought up a way to use genetics to control pest insects.

If we could modify the male mosquito

so he passes a gene through the sperm to the fertilised egg

that stops the fertilised egg developing into an adult mosquito

then that will be fewer adult mosquitoes in the next generation.

To insert the lethal gene that will stop the offspring developing,

mosquito eggs are micro-injected with modified DNA.

You can imagine mosquitoes aren't very big

and their eggs are correspondingly rather smaller

and so that's quite a difficult operation.

The transformed mosquitoes are also given a fluorescent marker

so they can be tracked.

We actually arranged for them to die at this larva stage.

So these are baby mosquitoes.

These ones all have the lethal gene

so none of these are going to make it through to adult.

Luke's discovery had huge potential.

But there was a problem.

If the transformed mosquitoes

were to have any impact on the wild population,

millions of them needed to be bred.

But that was impossible if the offspring were programmed to die.

The team needed a way to override the very genetic modification

that they had created.

This is the solution to the problem - this innocuous looking liquid.

It's an antidote.

It's basically a switch for the lethal gene.

If you give this to a mosquito that's programmed to die,

it will live.

But if you take it away, the mosquito will die.

Fed to the mosquitoes from birth,

the antidote gives the team precise control over the lethal gene.

They can turn it on and off.

It means that millions of the transformed mosquitoes

can be kept alive into adulthood and bred where they're most needed,

like here in Brazil.

Field manager Doctor Andrew McKemey oversees this process.

Every week he and his team can produce 100,000 mosquitoes

primed for the mission they've been born for.

After the precision engineering of the lab,

this final stage is surprisingly low-tech.

All right, off you go, little mosquitoes.

Simple as that.

There are some lazy ones left in there that won't go.

This is where over a decade of research pays off.

These mosquitoes carry the lethal gene

and that means they'll go out here, they'll mate with females

and those offspring won't be able to survive without the antidote.

And out here, that antidote just isn't there. The offspring will die.

Every time I come to the field and do the release,

it amazes me that these males will actually go out

and find all the females in all those tiny crevices,

in the roofs, under beds, in people's cupboards,

in wardrobes, and they are the best thing to actually find females

and mate with them

and that leads to the decline of the population.

The team has been testing this process here for two years

and the results are dramatic. In some areas,

they've managed to wipe out 85% of the mosquito population

and that will radically reduce the spread of dengue fever.

APPLAUSE

Thank you very much, Helen.

We're also joined by Doctor James Logan,

senior lecturer in medical entomology

at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Helen, does this work?

Yes, and in fact they did an earlier study in the Cayman Islands

and they basically eliminated the mosquito population of that species

in that area, they were gone.

How do you feel about this?

I mean, this level of tampering, are you impressed by it,

or is there some element of...?

To be quite honest, I'm really excited by it

because I think it has a really good future.

Other scientists and Oxitech are in fact working on

malaria mosquitoes as well and that's a very exciting area.

You do all the work in the labs,

you get to the point where you've created the mosquito,

but once you've got it, it's then very, very easy

to take it around the world and let it breed.

These aren't the ones obviously that have been genetically modified,

-but they're the same family of mosquito, aren't they?

-They are.

So these are aedes aegypti,

dengue fever mosquitoes and yellow fever mosquitoes.

They don't have dengue fever right now

and they're not genetically modified,

but I brought them along from my lab.

This is one of those boxes in which I could if I wish to put my hand in.

-But I will be bitten.

-You will be bitten. You're very welcome to...

-No, I'm OK.

-Are you sure? They're very hungry.

I have no desire to be bitten.

If you don't want to do it, I'll do it.

-Go on then.

-I'm braver than you.

Yeah, all right, don't put it like that.

I'll do it. They look relaxed.

I presume I'm not going to leave it in here for long,

so let's make sure we've got a camera rolling on this.

-Don't try this at home.

-Yeah.

-It's not advisable.

These are male, aren't they?

Rather than female, they don't carry malaria, am I right?

If they were male, they wouldn't bite you,

cos it's only the females that bite, so these are definitely females

and they're definitely hungry.

-On you go.

-They are already excited.

I'll just hold this to make sure none escape.

Oh, immediately.

What they are doing is basically sensing your smell,

your body odour from your hands and they're straight in there.

-Look at that.

-That one on your knuckle's going to hurt.

-Oh, thanks, great.

-LAUGHTER

Let's get it out.

-They don't hang around, do they?

-No. They're straight in there.

There is a glorious tradition, of what I've just dipped into there,

of scientists, not that I am one, injecting themselves or being...

Of using themselves.

You have as well, haven't you?

Well, self-experimentation is my thing,

I do that sort of thing on a daily basis pretty much.

But the other thing that I have done is I gave myself hookworm,

intestinal worms, and there was a reason for this.

I don't have them now, it's fine.

So basically, what intestinal worms can do is

they can modulate your immune system,

so I have a food allergy and I can't eat bread without being quite ill.

So when I gave myself hookworm, I gave myself 50 worms,

and they did modulate my immune system and I was able to eat pizza

for the first time in years without being ill, which was incredible.

-Wow, I mean, it's a glorious bit of scientific tradition.

-It is indeed.

It seems doctors and medics in particular are into this.

In the 19th century, people developing anaesthetics

seemed to test them on each other.

The Nobel Prize winner in 2004, 2005...

Barry Marshall. He had this idea that ulcers were caused by bacteria.

No-one believed him in the '90s at all. He was pilloried.

And so he decided the only way to prove it was to test it on himself.

He drank a broth of the particular bacteria and he got ulcers.

-Newton put a needle in his eye, didn't he?

-Bodkin.

-Why did he put a bodkin in his eye?

-Just to see what happened.

Nothing did.

And he kept his sight,

fortunately for the rest of us and for the rest of physics.

That's remarkable. By the way, this is beginning to itch.

-Yes, it might do.

-Yeah, thanks.

This is an experiment that we should probably mention.

I'll be intrigued to see how many of you follow me on this.

This is a filtering system which says that the mesh is so fine

it will filter out all bacteria and viruses.

To test this, this is Thames river water

that we've got. It looks very, very appealing.

What would you get out of this?

Anyone know what's going to be in this?

Weil's disease probably, I don't know. I'm just guessing here.

Weil's disease would be in it. Let's have a look.

-E coli.

-E coli, definitely, cos sewerage goes into the river.

Salmonella,

campylobacter, enterococcus, enterovirus.

Not a cocktail you want.

No, it isn't. Let's see how well we do.

This is the footage we have to show that we definitely took this

from the Thames earlier on.

We have footage of somebody scooping this out. Oh, my lord, look at that.

Are some of the big bacteria at the bottom, are they?

Is that the way it works.

Apparently eight pushes are enough.

Nine, ten, just making sure.

So this is apparently is enough

and I'm hoping someone will shout in my ear if it isn't.

There we go.

OK.

-It looks great.

-It does look good, doesn't it?

So which scientist wants to try it themselves?

LAUGHTER

-I'll try it.

-You'll try it?

-Yeah, go on.

It looks much better than that.

That's an incredible filter, look at that.

I think we should look at it under the microscope first.

I honestly don't trust your microscope.

Oh.

Dara's right in there.

You took most of that.

SPEAKING OVER EACH OTHER

It tastes really fresh.

Yeah, it does, yeah. That's really, really good.

The filter is thin enough to filter everything out.

It's remarkably good.

By the way, speaking of technology, we mentioned twice,

it came up repeatedly, about the technology we use.

You have yours there.

This is the sensor from the seismology experiment

-we talked about earlier.

-Why is it so good?

There's something interesting we mentioned before,

this tiny little sensor which you can plug into your computer,

senses movement essentially. 40 it costs.

If you think about the big ones, they cost 40,000, 50,000.

And the reason this is so cheap is because of the games industry.

The sensor in there is the same as

the sensor you get in games controllers.

And because they sell millions and millions and millions,

the technology became very cheap

and scientist thought to themselves, "We'll have a bit of that,"

and took it off and they can use it for actual science,

and that's just one example of technology.

The same thing occurred in the film you were talking about

where tracking with his eye movements to control a robot,

-again it's a sensor from a video game controller.

-Games consoles.

And in fact, you know, the chips that drive the graphics are

being increasingly used for all sorts of applications,

cos they are so incredibly powerful and they are so cheap

because they sell by the millions.

And they have these interfaces that you can program,

so we're about to enter... You're really itching, aren't you?

-That's the worst thing you can do, is itch your bites.

-Really?

-Yeah.

Yeah, thanks. Your advice was to put my hand in there in the first place.

The games industry that supplied us with the information

also supplies the format which works for crowdsourcing.

Because if you make them in the form of a game,

people are more likely to join in.

And the fact they can do it without even knowing that

that's what they're doing.

And there's several games out there which are just fun as games.

The nice thing is you don't have to get involved

in the science if you don't want to, but once you've learned

what you've done, you might get more involved afterwards.

They're finding that a lot of people are playing these games

and after a while they sort of get curious about what it is

they're doing and they've already achieved something in science.

My favourite piece of crowdsourcing is that in astronomy,

one of the interesting results in astronomy occurred

because people are really suspicious of the Russian police force.

So people in Russia who drive have dashboard cameras and then when

the meteorite struck in Russia we had hundreds of different views...

Which looked like Hollywood movies.

Yeah, they all looked like special effects. We have some of them here.

And the reason is all cars in Russia...

-DARA SNEEZES.

-Excuse me.

I've got gastroenteritis and malaria at the moment.

People drive with dashboard cameras on

because they want to use them in possible court cases.

Look at that.

That's astonishing.

And they all come with GPS and they all come with a time on them.

And so it was a fantastic resource for seeing

the trail of a meteor as it struck.

Just thank you all very, very much for everything tonight.

I want to thank all our team here, Mark, Alok and Helen.

And our special guest Doctor James Logan

and earlier on we had Doctor Hilary Geoghegan as well.

Thank you all very, very much for coming along.

Please get involved with the citizen science projects.

More information as always can be found on our website.

We'll see you next week for more on Science Club.

Don't forget, doesn't matter if you've been bitten

by a malaria-carrying mosquito or you've drank Thames water,

weirdly enough, the thing that really hurts is the talcum powder.

We'll see you next week on Science Club. Thank you very much.

APPLAUSE

Next time we'll be spinning forward to the future

to meet the latest in humanoid robots

taking part in one of the most ambitious science projects

ever undertaken.

And naturally we'll be checking out the future of fashion.

-You impaled them on the giant spikes of the dress?

-Yeah.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd