Episode 8 World's Weirdest Events

Let's face it, our world is downright weird...

SCREAMING

..crawling with creatures you've never heard of...

I can't believe that's a living thing.

..full of the unexpected,

like freak weather exploding out of the blue...

I thought I was going to die.

..and rocks that spontaneously combust...

I thought it was dynamite going off.

..and the unexplained -

an unborn twin, discovered inside a brain.

There was multiple hair follicles, bone and teeth.

We've scoured the globe to bring you the very weirdest stories.

Yeah!

I could feel this intense pain

as if you were being stabbed by hundreds of syringes.

In this series, we're going to examine the evidence,

test the science and unravel the mysteries.

We're going to discover what in the weird world is going on.

In this episode, we'll uncover the secrets

to some of the natural world's weirdest events.

How can a lake form beneath the ocean?

-Sick.

-Whoa!

-Whoa!

-Oh, wow!

And can money really grow on trees?

Just how exactly can a kingfisher

help you design the perfect train?

And how are bird brains being used to battle disease?

On our journey around this weird world, we've come across

all sorts of different things -

exploding birds, mutant frogs, even a giant slick

made of anchovies.

But today we're going to Siberia for a mystery

of an altogether different magnitude.

Yes, our first story comes from Siberia.

The Yamal Peninsula,

known locally as "the end of the world."

In July 2014, a pilot flying over this barren wilderness

spotted something strange.

What looked like a crater, or a mysterious hole...

..and not just any hole.

It was 60 metres across and 70 metres deep -

large enough to fit a 25-storey skyscraper inside.

And then, over the coming weeks,

more holes began appearing,

with four confirmed locations

and three more reported by local herders who almost fell in.

Stranger still, scientists predict that there could be

20-30 more yet to be discovered.

When these first appeared, they created global attention

to the extent that scientists all over the world

were asking the question -

what caused these gigantic craters?

Now, extraordinary holes appear all over the planet

for a variety of reasons...

..like this sinkhole in Louisiana which emerged

when a cave ceiling collapsed, swallowing an entire lake

and the surrounding trees.

Oh, wow!

In Turkmenistan in 1971, it's thought that natural gases

were ignited and they're still burning to this day.

And meteorites like this one which streaked across the sky in Russia

can create huge flat-bottomed craters on impact.

But here's the thing -

our Siberian hole didn't look like any of these.

And for one geologist, it was this unique appearance

that had him intrigued.

I think the thing that makes the Siberian holes unique is

their morphology.

They really are these strange sort of deep chasms

with a crater around the outside.

You almost walk up and peer into the abyss.

They're in such a remote area, the information about them is little

and sparse, and that adds an extra mystique to their formation.

What could it have been?

Alien landing?

Come on, I don't think so.

But whatever it was, it had those scientists completely baffled.

That is, until one bright spark came up with the idea

that they were looking in the wrong place.

Rather than concentrating on the exterior of the crater,

the scientists decided to head down into the abyss.

They took measurements, collected samples,

looking for clues as to the source of this mysterious monster.

The first theory that the scientists came up with was that this

was a pingo.

Not a penguin, that's a pingu - a pingo - and pingos

are geological formations produced when a glacier retreats.

You see, they leave a large ball of ice embedded in the ground

and then it melts, leaving a crater.

Simple.

But this theory had a flaw.

If a pingo had formed and a giant ball of ice had melted,

where had all the water gone?

Pingos are often associated - or melted pingos - with lake deposits,

and because that's not the case here, it does add a bit of intrigue.

So, what was going on?

Was there something else present in the crater that would have

been powerful enough to cause an explosion?

Some of these sinkholes, you can actually measure natural gases

escaping from them. Now, that could be that they're just

natural areas for gas to escape from the ground,

or it could actually be the smoking gun that tells you that

one of the things that formed that feature was gas escape.

And gas is exactly what they found,

and not just any gas, they found...

methane in exceptionally high concentrations.

But what was it doing there and where had it come from?

Well, methane is a naturally occurring gas

produced by the decomposition of organic matter.

Deep underground, bubbles of methane become trapped.

A volatile bomb ready to ignite.

So, methane could be to blame,

but not in the fiery way you might think.

What happened in Siberia was all down to an

immense release of pressure.

The escape of gas through the ground could cause a hole-like structure

by building up the gas and not allowing it to escape.

It builds up enough pressure, and then boom!

It pops through the surface and causes almost like

a pock-like blister on the earth's surface.

It's a bit like how a cork...

..gets shot out of a champagne bottle,

but in this case, the pressure release as the methane escaped

would have had the power to shift thousands of tonnes of solid rock.

Now, the data still needs to be analysed thoroughly

before the case is closed on this mystery,

but the methane theory?

Well, it's looking pretty good.

So, a monstrous methane explosion could have been the culprit

and, thankfully, it occurred in the middle of nowhere.

Imagine if that had happened in the heart of a city.

Doesn't bear thinking about.

But then, phenomena like this can crop up almost anywhere.

I mean, imagine a lake at the bottom of the ocean.

Sounds impossible, doesn't it?

The mysteries of the deep have intrigued

oceanic explorers for centuries.

But one man in particular has taken marine exploration to extremes.

As a deep-sea biologist, I study animals that live

at the bottom of the ocean at depths usually greater than a mile.

Chuck has spent thousands of hours in submersibles,

combing the sea floor, discovering all kinds of amazing new species

along the way.

But nothing prepared him for what he and his team saw from a sub

at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico in 2006.

At a depth of over 2,000 metres,

he came across this.

-Sick.

-Whoa.

-Wow.

-Oh, wow.

A lake...

at the bottom of the ocean.

You're down a half a mile looking at a lake on the seafloor.

You can see it as a pool on the bottom of the ocean.

When the submarine lands on it, it floats.

Little ripples go off from the edge...

..which is an otherworldly experience.

OK, let's get this straight.

What we're dealing with here is a lake, which is a body of water,

within an ocean, which is a larger body of water.

So, that's water within water, which surely can't be possible, can it?

Well, it's all to do with different water densities

and how they interact with each other.

Imagine this is an ocean...

..and then we create a separate solution of brine,

four times more salty than seawater...

..and when we bring the two together,

they don't mix.

The saltier brine solution is heavier,

so it sinks, resulting in two very distinct layers.

The bottom layer represents the underwater lake.

Imagine this tomato is Chuck's submersible.

The brine is so dense...

..that it floats on the surface of the pool.

The same thing is happening at the bottom of the ocean.

Hundreds of metres below the surface, this dense briny water

is sitting below the typical salty seawater.

The question is - where is all of this salt coming from?

The continental shelf of the Gulf of Mexico

is a really unique place, cos underlying the continental shelf

is a salt evaporate.

It was laid down in the Jurassic, it's called the Louann Salt

and it's several kilometres thick.

So, a thick layer of salt as old as the dinosaurs is moving up

through cracks in the ocean floor

to form these underwater lakes...

and these deep-sea lagoons can be massive -

up to 100km in length...

..and subaquatic lakes are just the start.

Now, there's other places in the Gulf of Mexico where

the brine is coming out on the side of a slope

and you'll have a brine river and that is also

a very otherworldly experience, to be on the seafloor a mile deep

and look down and see a river going by.

Ripples on the surface, just like you're looking at a mountain stream

on the surface of the planet.

Whoa.

Rivers underwater are awesome!

Yes, underwater rivers, I kid you not.

In fact, one has been recently discovered in the Gulf of Mexico

and when the seabed was mapped,

it was found to be 120 metres deep.

If this river existed on the surface,

it would be the fourth deepest in the world.

Deep enough for the Statue of Liberty to stand inside -

torch and all!

It's amazing, isn't it? That something as simple as salt

can produce such a wonder,

but then ancient mineral deposits show up all over the place.

They turned up here in the 1860s, causing a gold rush,

but these days gold turns up in much more unusual places.

Australia is one of the largest gold-producers in the world.

Since the gold rush in the 19th century,

people have been flocking here with dreams of striking it rich.

But gold is becoming more elusive.

Discoveries have declined by 45% in the last decade -

all very disappointing.

That is until recently, when a specialist team began

prospecting in an unlikely place - a eucalyptus forest.

But, surely, money can't grow on trees?

Here are some of the gum leaves here that we have been sampling.

What we found by looking at them under the microscope, we've actually

been able to see very small gold nuggets within the leaf structure.

But hold on to your horses, before you all up sticks

and head to Australia, secateurs in hand -

this isn't exactly a get-rich-quick scheme,

there's a catch.

The pieces of gold are microscopic.

Each nugget is only one fifth of the diameter of a human hair.

In fact, it would take 500 trees to make just one gold ring,

and the leaves go through numerous complex processes, taking the

most advanced systems of microscopy to spot the micro-nuggets.

So if the amount of gold in the leaves is

so small, why is everyone getting so excited?

Well, these tiny fragments of gold are actually

indicators of something bigger - a lot bigger.

The eucalyptus, or gum trees, that Colin and his team have been

sampling have the deepest roots of any tree found in Australia.

It can be so dry here that these roots need to grow deep

underground to find hidden water sources,

reaching anywhere between 20 and 50 metres deep.

So deep, in fact, that some trees have quite literally...

..struck gold.

You see, these root systems act like hydraulic pumps sucking up water,

and if there are mineral deposits beneath the tree,

particles dissolved in that water can get sucked up, too.

Although incredibly valuable to us, precious metals like gold

are actually toxic to the eucalyptus.

So the tree reacts,

transporting the deposits out to the leaves,

where they are eventually discarded.

So importantly for Colin and his team,

gold in the leaves means gold under the ground.

By sampling the trees

and by analysing the leaves to very low sensitivity for gold,

you may be able to determine that the trees in one part of the forest

have more gold in them than trees in the other part of the forest.

Therefore, one area has more potential

for mineralisation than the other.

So the trees are indicators.

They can show the prospectors exactly where the gold is.

Which is crucial, because traditional mining methods result

in thousands of hectares of forest being felled for gold exploration.

Thanks to leaf sampling, gold-rich areas can be targeted

far more effectively.

And it's not just happening in Australia.

In Canada, prospectors are locating mineral deposits using pine trees.

Not the easiest place to sample, so they've had to get innovative -

extreme sampling.

Mining companies are no longer looking for a needle in a haystack.

It's early days, but this technology could

revolutionise the way we find precious metals for ever.

So money doesn't grow on trees. Sadly nothing new there.

But what it has done is perhaps stop the unnecessary destruction

of our forests.

It's an ecological result from a weird phenomenon.

From mysterious holes appearing all over the Siberian wilderness...

..to lakes and rivers being created underwater...

..and the secrets of where to strike gold.

It's a weird world of mysteries, just waiting to be revealed.

And now, from talking in tongues to firing fish out of a cannon.

Yes, you heard me correctly - firing fish out of a cannon.

But first, how would you feel if you woke up in the morning...

HIS VOICE CHANGES: ..and you didn't recognise

the sound of your own voice?

NORMAL: Or the words you were speaking?

THEY SPEAK MANDARIN

-BOTH:

-Oh, my God!

Meet Ben McMahon, born as an English-speaking Australian,

he now speaks fluent Mandarin...

HE SPEAKS MANDARIN

..and stars in his very own Chinese talk show.

His fluency, however, is down to something far more dramatic...

-BOTH:

-Oh, my God!

..a car crash.

I can remember the morning, having breakfast with my dad,

but apart from that it was a blank week.

From what I understand, I was a passenger in the car

and a truck crashed into the side of the car.

Ben was involved in a horrific collision which left him

,in a coma for a week and when he woke up,

things were very different.

He could only speak Mandarin...

HE SPEAKS MANDARIN

..a language he studied at school,

but, by his own admission, he was never fluent.

So what on earth had happened?

Well, to understand it, we first need a lesson in how our brains

learn languages.

Where language is stored in the brain

is still somewhat of a mystery,

but the area commonly associated

with language is found in the

frontal lobe of the left hemisphere,

a region called the Broca's area.

And although we don't know exactly what happened in Ben's

brain following the accident, we do know that he was

sitting on the left side of the car when it was hit, and suffered

injuries to the left side of his head -

specifically his frontal lobe.

Experts believe that Ben's language switch could have been

due to the damage to the Broca's area of his brain.

We're still learning lots about why this phenomenon occurs when somebody

speaks with a different language following a head injury or a stroke.

In Ben's case it would seem that the area of the brain where

he stored and used his native tongue, English,

was more damaged than that where he had learned Mandarin as a child.

Unintentionally switching languages in this way is

known as bilingual aphasia, and those with the condition can

often find themselves suddenly better at their second language.

Ben was now speaking Mandarin more fluently than he ever had before.

So had his accident improved his language skills?

Surely not.

It would seem that there's some sort of selective effect, such that

one language is affected and not another.

Once English was taken away from him he could only use Mandarin.

Access to that second language is improved

because that's all that you've got available to you.

Luckily for Ben,

once the swelling on his brain had gone down, his English

began to come back, which should have meant that

his days of speaking Mandarin were over -

but, fantastically, Ben kept his new-found fluency.

It seems that this freak accident permanently unlocked

the second language and changed Ben's life for ever.

When you think about it, language is really important to us.

It's one of the things that truly defines us as human.

And animals, well, of course, they are very, very

good at communicating with one another - we know that.

But what about plants?

Surely they can't communicate in the same sort of way?

Surely that's the stuff of fiction, isn't it?

Let's take a walk in the woods,

through the shadows and the dappled sunlight.

Woodlands can be wonderfully mysterious places,

with the whisper of the wind in the trees.

But, wait, what if it's not the wind?

What if the trees were really talking?

When plants are attacked by insects

or by microbes that are trying to invade and cause disease,

straightaway those plants respond -

they produce chemicals to deter aphids, for example.

'What we didn't know until recently'

was that plants can actually communicate

this information to their neighbours.

So plants DO talk to each other.

Scientists have confirmed this

by introducing aphids on to one plant

and then seeing how the others respond.

They found that those nearby

soon began to prepare for an attack,

pumping out distasteful defence chemicals

before the aphids were even close.

They knew the aphids were coming.

They'd been warned of an approaching attack...

..but how are they sharing this information?

Is it through sound, vibrations, a sort of plant-based semaphore?

Well, no.

The plants aren't communicating directly at all.

There's a middleman...

..fungi.

But it's not the mushroom we see growing above the surface.

It's the tiny thread-like tubes found under the ground,

known as mycelia.

When we think of plants,

we usually think of a plant as being an individual organism on its own,

but, in fact, plants are intimately connected to fungi via their roots.

These fungi, they form networks through the forest floor,

so one plant could be connected to another plant

by a fungal network.

These networks move

water and nutrients around them and, at the same time,

they can move, communicating signals from one plant to another

in the same way that we might use the telephone network

or the internet.

A vast network of natural cabling, perfect for secret chatter.

So these subterranean networks

transmit the messages from one plant to another.

A bit like e-mail,

or, in this case, tree-mail.

And it doesn't just convey warnings.

It transports vital resources, too.

These fungi feed the plant with water

and with mineral nutrients

and, in return, the plant gives the fungus sugars

that it's made during photosynthesis.

It's a cosy arrangement

and this wood-wide-web

has another similarity to its technological counterpart.

Much like your own home broadband,

you getter a better service if you pay more.

Yes, plants that give more food to the fungi get a faster connection.

The fungus holds all the power

because it can decide where the messages go.

So unless you're keeping your fungus sweet,

you may not find out about an aphid or disease attack

until it's too late.

A wild web of fungi - what a fantastic thought,

but what might we learn from this sort of covert communication?

Not just chitchat, as it turns out.

In fact, a way to save human lives.

Autumn in the UK.

The skies are full of starlings,

flying in beautiful formations, known as murmurations.

With as many as 3,000 birds in flight,

it's a remarkable spectacle of coordination and teamwork.

And it's this behaviour that's of interest to Sabine Hauert -

not because she's a twitcher, no -

Sabine is a mathematical engineer.

It's fascinating when you look up to the sky and you see

these huge flocks of birds

that are doing these beautiful, complex behaviours.

You can keep adding birds to the flock, they keep flying as a group.

If a bird falls from the sky,

the whole flock doesn't fall to the ground,

and together they're much better at avoiding predators

for example, so they're better as a group than the individuals.

And it was this flock movement

that inspired Sabine to create something,

well, slightly creepy...

..her very own robotic swarm.

We don't actually know what the birds are doing exactly -

it is quite complicated to understand what each bird is doing.

But what we can do is we have a set of basic rules we can follow

that gives us behaviours that look like flocking,

or like murmurations.

WHIRRING

And these basic rules are, you know, if you take a robot

that's trying to behave like a bird in a flock,

that robot would just look at its neighbours

and then it would be attracted to its neighbours

because it wants to stay in a group.

That robot is also going to be repulsed from its neighbours -

it wants to go away because otherwise they would all collide,

and then it tries to match the speeds

of the robots that are around it.

With those three basic rules,

you get some very interesting flocking-like behaviours.

Swarming robots are something that scientists around the globe

have been working to develop for many years.

Moving intelligently and flying in a variety of formations.

Their potential uses range from exploring hostile environments

to delivering your latest online purchase.

But Sabine wants to take her robots to a whole new level.

Sabine has got an even more bird-brained idea.

She wants to go weird, radical - she wants to go small -

she wants to put the swarm inside you.

It sounds like the stuff of science fiction,

but the plans are already underway.

Thankfully, Sabine is not an evil genius.

Her mission is a noble one,

because she plans to use her robot army against cancer.

So, imagine that the red robots are the cancer cells

and the green ones are the swarm

programmed to flock together.

When they come into contact with the cancer cells,

they go into attack mode.

They turn blue and bind together,

preventing the cancer cells from spreading.

Now, clearly, this is too big to fit inside the human body,

but Sabine has plans.

Once she's perfected the simulation of the cancer-killing swarm

in the lab, she wants to make these things smaller.

Much, much smaller.

Once Sabine's got the perfect formation,

she can downsize from robots to programmable particles.

Swarms of up to a trillion drug-delivering nanoparticles,

each tinier than the width of a human hair.

Once in your system,

these attack particles will swarm to seek out and target tumours.

It's a nice example

of how sometimes we can take the lead from the natural world,

and occasionally, of course,

we get to help animals back - and so we should,

particularly when it's us

that's caused them problems in the first place.

Salmon.

Every year they migrate thousands of kilometres

from the ocean back to their freshwater spawning grounds.

It's one of nature's greatest journeys,

but increasingly they have a new hurdle to deal with.

Now, salmon have an astonishing ability

to leap and clear natural obstacles.

But even the strongest, most determined salmon has its limits.

There are already 75,000 dams in the United States alone

and this number is set to increase.

It's a bleak future for our salmon friends.

So in some cases as much as 50 or more percent of the habitat

that used to be used by the salmon has been completely blocked off.

The numbers of fish that are now returning

is a fraction of the historical numbers.

Until now, the solution was fish ladders.

OK, they're not actually ladders,

but incremental steps along the side of a dam

which take advantage of the fish's natural instinct to leap.

These are OK for small dams,

but they are no good for 40-metre-high structures.

No salmon, however desperate, would climb a ladder that high.

And on that account, some great minds

have got together and come up with an invention which is...

Um, well, I'll let you decide.

It's called...the salmon cannon.

It's not a joke.

The salmon cannon is a brilliantly bizarre problem-solver.

The company originally started in the fruit business,

um, moving soft fruit,

trying to solve the problem of

taking fruit from a tree

and putting it in a packing case in the field.

So they came up with this.

An octopus in an orchard.

And you have to stay with me here -

I promise this isn't descending into the realms of the ridiculous,

because apples and salmon are both easily damaged

and need to be transported carefully. No bruising.

And if apples could be gently sucked through tubes

to their destination,

why not a salmon?

So, the engineers got to work

adapting their kit from fruit to fish.

The cannon itself relies on...

high-volume, but very low-pressure air

to move the fish gently through this tube.

The fish enters the cannon,

a door closes behind it and then a blower

pushes the fish and a little bit of water

through this slippery tube.

Though it's called a cannon,

the device doesn't actually blast the fish out at force.

It's more of a fish flume,

pushing the salmon through the tubing.

Quite a ride, though, at up to 15mph.

But don't worry - the salmon pops out unscathed.

So we've been very careful to make sure

that the design doesn't harm the fish.

They still spawn successfully

and there's no impact on the number of young that fish can produce.

With a fish fluming through every three seconds,

this weird technology has already helped over 10,000 salmon

clear the dams, and it's now being rolled out across rivers

in America and Europe to help salmon on their way, in style.

I wonder if they'll be offering them any frequent-flyer incentives.

The salmon cannon!

What a brilliant solution to a slippery problem.

I just love it, absolutely genius!

It's the least we could do,

after putting so many "dam" obstacles in their way.

So, a brain injury can really help you speak another language.

-BOTH:

-Oh, my God!

While fungi are the woodland communication experts,

in the future we might be cured by tiny swarms...

and an apple-picking octopus has given salmon wings.

So, our next chain of thought hops weirdly

from some unexpected sniffing to some animal-inspired technology.

Let me introduce our next story.

Like many introductions, this one starts with a handshake.

A greeting used all around the world,

it's part of our cultural identity

and can even be your entry into a secret society.

But a recent scientific study may change our understanding

of the handshake...

for ever.

This is the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

271 human test subjects are secretly filmed...

..shaking hands.

We sat them in a experimental room and we filmed them

without them knowing.

An experimenter would enter the room

and shake their hands

and we observed their behaviour.

You see, Idan and his team had spotted something curious

about handshaking.

So together, they set up this very experiment to see

if their suspicions were correct.

But it wasn't the handshake itself they were interested in,

it was what happened next.

Watch closely.

See that.

And that?

She did it too.

Moving the hand to the face.

It's a subtle gesture, basically.

Actually bringing the hand to the nose

and taking a loud inhale.

Basically a sniff.

Idan's suspicions were correct.

Up to 40% of the test subjects were caught

apparently sniffing their fingers following a handshake.

Weird and maybe a bit gross, but why?

What curious correlation could there be between the two?

Idan needed to know exactly what his test subjects were so keen to sniff.

So, he popped on a glove and shook hands again,

gathering a sample from the subjects' palm.

We shook hands using the glove

and we just sampled the surface of the rubber

of the actual glove to see which chemicals are being deposited.

The samples on the glove showed the presence

of a multitude of pheromones -

chemical signals that reveal many aspects of a person,

ranging from their emotional state to their genetic make-up.

Idan's team believe that the purpose of the handshake could be to

gather these vital clues, helping you determine

whether the person you are greeting is scared,

a dominance threat, or even how sexually compatible you might be.

It's the type of valuable information that animals

look for when they greet each other.

Although they use a more direct and, some might say,

less gentlemanly approach.

And it's thought that we actually evolved the handshake

to allow us to get the same information,

but in a more discreet way.

Just imagine all of the sniffing that

goes on around a boardroom table.

It's fascinating, isn't it?

And the interesting thing is I'd never thought of it before,

but from now on, whenever I shake someone's hand,

I'm going to be consciously aware of whether I then...

..have a little sniff or not.

So, handshaking is a clever tool with all sorts of hidden uses,

signals and meanings.

But what if I were to tell you that it's

not just us humans that are making use of it?

SCREECHING

I'm very interested in chimpanzees and their behaviour

because they are our closest living relatives.

We discovered a certain kind of grooming behaviour

that's not typical for chimpanzees.

It's called the grooming handclasp.

Personally, I think it looks like they're sniffing

each other's armpits.

But scientists in Tanzania believe there may be more to

this handclasp than meets the eye.

We think that the chimpanzees might engage in

a grooming handclasp behaviour to establish close social bonds.

It's a behaviour where they give each other a handclasp,

a handshake or a high-five, raise their arms up in the air

and groom each other with the other free arm.

It's a very intimate posture

and they seem to do it more after some times of separation.

Handclasping behaviour in chimpanzees had been

witnessed in the wild in the 1960s,

but Edwin's discovery at Chimfunshi Wildlife Sanctuary

took this behaviour to a whole new level.

The chimpanzees were split into four separate groups

and what was so exciting was that each of these groups

had developed their own style.

They can either clasp each other's hands with the palm...

..or with the wrist...

..or even the forearm or elbow.

Edwin realised that the handclasping behaviour

was part of each group's identity.

It wasn't part of their genetic make-up -

it was learned and part of their social character.

So, just like humans, depending on where they were born

and who they grew up with,

the chimpanzees develop a very specific style of handshake.

And these handshakes were being passed down

from generation to generation.

The handclasp behaviour in chimpanzees, it links to

our human greeting behaviour in a sense that it's

something that we learn socially.

It's something that you are not born with, you just copy each

other's behaviour and, therefore, a group tradition emerges.

So, one member of the troop comes up with something new,

some of the others take it in,

they copy it and then, critically,

they pass it on.

It's a bit like a new craze at school.

And I've got to tell you that shaking hands is not the only

fashion that's taken off in the chimp community.

No, at the same sanctuary, Edwin also witnessed

some other strange behaviours.

It was behaviour that started with one female who just started

putting grass in her ear...

..and instead of just tickling her ear,

she would just leave it there for the whole time

and started doing other things, like playing or grooming.

So, she would just walk around with grass in her ear -

sometimes out of two ears -

and that is the most peculiar thing I've ever seen in chimpanzees.

The chimpanzee was called Julie - she was known to be a bit kooky,

if a chimp can be such a thing,

so Edwin wasn't too surprised.

Until, as the weeks went by, he realised something extraordinary -

the other chimpanzees in the group had started to copy her.

The grass-in-the-ear phenomenon can tell us

about chimpanzee societies in the sense that it sheds light

on the fact that chimpanzees copy each other's behaviour,

even when there's no function for it.

So, unlike the grooming handclasp behaviour, which has a purpose,

the grass in the ear seems to have no benefit at all

to the chimpanzees.

So, why on earth are they doing it?

This might be considered as a case of chimpanzees using

things in their environment to accessorise themselves.

So, it's a new chimpanzee fashion craze.

Where Julie's inspiration came from, we may never know,

but what we do know is that it's become a tradition

for the chimps in this group and, some might say,

Julie was the trendsetter for this new fashion fad.

Um, bit of grass behind the ear.

Not exactly the most inspired fashion choice, is it?

But very often, changes in an animals' appearance have got

nothing to do with fashion sense.

They, in fact, can be real life-savers.

All of these animals have gained a new lease of life

with the help of some human intervention.

Derby was born with deformed front legs,

but, with specially designed replacements,

he can now walk, run and romp on all fours.

This dolphin was given a custom-made prosthetic fluke...

..and stabilisers were the perfect support for this goat

born with underdeveloped hind limbs.

Modern technology gave this lot a second chance to love life again.

And with further advances in science,

even the most complex of animal injuries can be repaired.

July 2014, off the Mediterranean coast of Turkey,

a loggerhead turtle was swimming near the surface

when it was struck by a boat propeller...

..ripping off its lower jaw.

It was rushed to a local turtle rescue centre.

It had a fractured jaw and 60% of the right side of its beak

was missing.

Unable to eat on its own, the turtle had to be handfed.

So, was this loggerhead then destined for a life in captivity?

The problem is that a turtle's beak is a vital tool

for its survival.

It's used to break open hard-shelled prey.

Without a beak, there was no chance of an independent life.

But hope wasn't entirely lost.

Recent news stories showed animals that were in the process

of being helped by some rather impressive new technology.

So, could this be the answer for our lone loggerhead?

Well, some Turkish tech whizzes decided to take on the challenge

and make the first ever 3D-printed turtle beak.

These scientists had only ever worked on human prosthetics,

so this animal challenge would be tough.

Taking scans of the turtle's face, they hoped that they could

recreate a beak that would be the perfect fit.

After four months in development, the titanium beak was printed

and the turtle underwent a 2½-hour operation to fit it,

involving ground-breaking surgery.

And, finally, it has its new beak.

It's still undergoing observation to make sure it doesn't

reject the prosthetic, but the hope is that, soon, it could be

released back into its ocean home.

So, state-of-the-art technology helps these animals live long,

fruitful and happy lives, which is a good thing.

And it's not all a one-way street, either, because sometimes

the genius of animal design helps us solve our technological conundrums.

Case in point -

how could a spot of bird-watching revolutionise rail travel?

The Shinkansen, otherwise known as the bullet train.

This is the jewel in Japan's rail network.

With an estimated 64 million people a day travelling by train,

this futuristic, high-speed service revolutionised rail travel

when it was introduced back in 1964.

However, in the early days,

when these trains sped from city to city, strange things started

happening in the countryside they were travelling through.

BOOM ECHOES

BIRDS SQUAWK

Deafening booms were heard, sending shock waves through

the surrounding villages.

BOOM ECHOES

Reported from far and wide, these explosive sounds coincided

with the train passing through a tunnel.

As an acoustic engineer, this is fascinating, cos it's such

an unusual phenomena.

Fundamentally, sound is little variations in pressure.

As I talk to you now, I'm creating little

fluctuations in pressure that you're listening to.

And it's the movement of air creating sound which explains

what was happening in the tunnels.

As a train goes through the countryside, it's pushing air

out from the front and down its sides.

Now, when it reaches a tunnel, that air's got nowhere to go.

What you get is a pulse of air being generated.

It's a bit like putting a plunger down the end of a tube.

The air gets trapped in front of the train and when it reaches

the exit, this compressed air is expelled,

creating a loud boom.

It explains the sound, but why was this phenomenon only

occurring in Japan, when trains go through tunnels all over the world?

These tunnel booms are actually quite rare,

because you need three unusual factors to come together.

You need a high-speed train, you need very long tunnels,

but you also need very narrow tunnels.

And that was what made the Japanese problem unique.

Not only were its trains fast, but the tunnels were narrow

and exceptionally long, meaning there wasn't enough

space for the air to escape.

So, we understand the problem, but how can we solve it?

Clearly, replacing the tunnels wasn't an option.

Experts were reaching a dead end.

Until, one day, a solution came from a very unusual place.

Eiji Nakatsu, an engineer from Japan Railways, was out bird watching.

Through his binoculars, he noticed the exquisite dive of a kingfisher.

Well, a kingfisher has a pointy bill, so when it

dives into the water to get fish, it cuts through the water very easily.

You can imagine what it would be like if it had a flat-fronted beak,

it would be really painful every time it tried to get into the water.

So, could the streamlined bill of the kingfisher be the answer?

Over the years, the animal kingdom has provided

a wealth of inspiration to many of our design conundrums.

From shark skin that inspired super-sleek swimwear...

..to termite mounds that have informed

air-conditioning systems in buildings

Yet again, nature had the answer.

But the blunt-fronted bullet train needed a nose job.

They transplanted a diving bird's beak onto the front of the train.

If you make the train pointed, it cuts through

the air at the start of the tunnel. And what this means is,

the pressure pulse is not so severe and you don't get such bad booms.

Eiji Nakatsu and his team put their bird-inspired train

into production and they were amazed by the results.

The new shape not only reduced the sonic booms, it reduced tunnel

pressure changes and lowered power consumption, too - all good stuff.

But, most importantly, villagers near the train lines could

finally have a peaceful life, free of mysterious booms.

The silent splash of the kingfisher had helped solve

the engineer's design dilemma.

It's a perfect example of a hi-tech human problem

being solved by nature.

So, handshakes might allow us to sniff each other in secret.

And show that chimpanzees have a sense of identity and style.

3D printing could be bringing new life to animals who

thought their number was up.

Whilst a bird's beak provided the accessory required to improve

the world's fastest train.

We've lifted the lid on all that's weird about the natural world.

What can I say?

We told you it was going to be weird and, boy, has it!

It's been curious, it's been astonishing,

it's been sometimes surprising and, at others,

absolutely terrifying.

But the one thing that's still for sure

is that there's a lot more weirdness just waiting out there.

So, try and find it for yourself, weirdos!