Sailing, Audio And The Great Barrier Reef - BBC Click

[Music] this week what a show we've got for you we are on the water under the water [Music] and we have no idea oops there's been a spillage [Music] hey welcome to click hope you're doing okay lara's here too how you doing mate i'm good thanks this week i started talking to friends about how the winter was likely to be would we head back to doing zoom get togethers what do you think well there was novelty for a couple of months wasn't there in meeting friends on video chat but then to be honest i got fed up with them even an anti-social geek like me realizes that things are better in the flesh so true but the idea of heading back to video calls doesn't seem to have been missed by fashion designers all you need to do is take a look at some of what was on show of milan and london fashion weeks and there seems to be a bit of a theme of waist up fashion all about big collars and logos around the necklines i mean for a while now it hasn't seemed so important how we dressed our bottom halves i don't know what you're talking about but listen this week i have actually been out and about meeting real people i am wearing proper trousers now these people are going to do something incredible they are trying to make the fastest sailing boat that they can to compete in one of the toughest ocean races that there is and for one day only they let me in to see how they're doing the america's cup is like the formula one of boat racing fast ultra competitive but with all of the power coming from the wind and the boats don't so much sail as fly relatively small foils underneath the vessels act like wings that help to lift the entire hull out of the water and massively reduce drag well i learned to sail god you know 35 years ago or something i take myself back to that eight-year-old kid thinking about the boats that we're sailing in now doing speeds over 50 knots you know 65 miles an hour i just think that's absolutely nuts here in portsmouth olympic champion sir ben ainslie's team is designing one of the five boats that will race next march now the americas cup has a weird rule and that is that whoever wins the event gets to decide all of the rules for the next one now i'm not just talking about the location and the date or even how many heats there are they get to dictate the type of boat that's used and the number of sailors you can have on board so basically every america's cup requires teams to design a new boat from scratch in this case the previous winners oracle new zealand have chosen guess where new zealand as the location they've switched from a two-holed catamaran to a single hole boat and they've made a host of other rule changes one of the big changes in this cup with regards to the rules was that we're not allowed to do any physical testing so we can't test in the wind tunnel or the toe tank so all the testing has been done in this united world in computational flow dynamics on machines max star is part of the team who've tested many many virtual boat designs repeatedly building and rebuilding them in software to try and improve their performance in the water and in the air so ineos team uk have a big mathematical problem to solve which is simulating all of the air conditions and the hydrodynamic conditions on the yacht as it sails through the water under an insane number of different scenarios to simulate what happens when water strikes the whole of a yacht or when the air hits the sail of a yacht we pixelate those surfaces we put little square pixels all over that yacht at each one of those pixels we do a little bit of math we understand what the temperature pressure and forces are that are acting there then we can work out what's going to happen next and how that how that cascades all the way down the line to the next pixel and the next pixel and the next pixel and suddenly we've got an idea of what a real living boat is going to look like when it's in the water in race conditions and the more detailed your simulation is the more pixels that you can break your boat into the more accurate your model becomes but every single pixel is simulated by a different computer processor which means you need a massive amount of computing basically you need to harness the power not of the wind but of the cloud now the crew do get to test how the virtual designs handle this simulator knows exactly how the current design will behave when under the control of a master sailor so let's see how it does with me i was sailing so wow one of the foils has gone into the water and then once we're around there if you just go hard right and down that's it you've got a little bit slower at the top and you fell off the foils oops we seem to have sunk i'm going to guess though that that's user error and not a problem with the boat [Music] it's not all about design of course the sailors are at the top of their game all of them need to be in peak physical form and that's the job of head of human performance ben williams who also uses data this time captured by garmin watches to monitor the fitness regime and try and find the best mix of training and rest what i'm interested in is how much training they have done how their body's adapting to that training and how much recovery they need to harvest that training stimulus people think that you get fit from training you don't you get fit from recovering from training so the training is the stress once you've put a stress on the body your body will adapt to be able to cope with that stress but only when we recover from that stress and you might be wondering how fit do you really have to be to be a sailor well now here's something i didn't know about sailing it used to be the case that if you wanted to move the sail or an appendage on a boat you would turn the winch as and when you needed to but modern boats are so powerful that the only way you can move something like the sail is using hydraulics or batteries but here's the thing the only way you're allowed to recharge the battery is by doing that it's called grinding and eight sailors all built like brick ship houses do this for the whole of each race to keep those batteries charged yes of course i'm going to have a go and of course it's going to go well just get your load on first so we'll be doing we'll be doing this for the duration of the radio hopefully a few more what's in that um right do you want to turn that up then you know where do you want it go all the way that's what you get all right how can you do this tall weather what is fascinating about this sport is that it's not like formula one here every boat can be really really different it's a massive unknown and there's no tried and tested formula for success how quickly do you think you'll be able to tell whether you've got it right or whether someone else has got the better boat we'll we'll know within the first five minutes we've got a race in december christmas race which is kind of a warm up today to the series itself and pretty quickly in that we'll know whether we've got it right or wrong hello and welcome to another week in tech this week nokia struck a deal to become the largest equipment provider to bt following the government's decision to block huawei from the uk's 5g networks amazon confirmed it would be joining google microsoft and nvidia in the cloud gaming market with the reveal of a new streaming service called luna and it's the end of an era for the original incarnation of farmville after facebook announced it would be closing in december after over 11 years due to the end of support for flash the uk's first driverless car lab has been launched by telecom's company backed by the government and the uk space agency the darwin satcom lab will trial driverless cars that use 5g and satellite technology amazon has announced a new payment service for real-world shops that uses a customer's hand to authorize transactions its amazon one scanner registers an image of the user's palm and is initially being trialled at two stores in seattle and finally if a device on your head for vr isn't enough how about robot boots these new creations from ekto vr are what they call the world's first robotic vr movement solution they allow the wearer to walk through the virtual space without actually moving virtual insanity you decide around this time of year the big tech companies do their annual hardware showcase where they show off everything that will be going on sale just in time for christmas last week it was amazon they've turned their echo speaker into a sphere and they had a flying home security camera nothing creepy about that this week it's google's turn with an online event of course so let's see what they announce so first up is google tv it looks a lot like apple tv and amazon fire tv it brings in recommendations and gives you a lot to choose from and there's a new chromecast which has a voice remote control just like the apple tv and amazon fire tv we actually knew this was coming because it went on sale early in some american retail stores by accident we're moving on to smart speakers the newest one is the nest audio which is designed for people who like to listen to music on their smart speakers and to make it sound good they've embedded a high frequency tweeter not donald trump moving on to the phones and it's our first look at the new pixel phones so just a few months ago they brought out the pixel 4a a cheaper version of the pixel 4 and they've updated it now with the pixel 4a 5g there's a 5g version and here's the new flagship the pixel 5 it has wireless charging and reverse wireless charging so you can charge your headphones on the back of the phone it's interesting because they've actually got rid of a lot of the flagship features of the pixel 4 so the face unlock camera is gone they've replaced that with a fingerprint reader and that solely radar has gone that was supposed to let you control the phone without touching it although in reality the most you could kind of do was skip through songs by waving your hands over the phone but that's all gone but it will let them sell the pixel 5 at a lower cost and that's probably going to be quite important given the global situation we're in but there are some impressive new software features it can now take those blurry background portrait shots while in night sight mode in low light conditions that's quite cool you can also artificially illuminate a portrait with an artificial light just by dragging your finger around in portrait mode that's also very cool and that's it tell you what these events go by much quicker when they're just pre-recorded and you're not watching presenters fumble through things on stage that might have been the most low-key launch for a flagship phone i've ever watched but i have to admit the pixel cameras usually are really good every year google brings new innovation to the pixel camera i can't wait to try those new features now as entertainment venues have been struggling to reopen safely one company hopes to bring an experience to your kitchen table via a smartphone now this is an audio only experience so the idea is that you close your eyes and you listen to the strange things that start happening around you both and they really do sound like they're happening in 3d space because they've been recorded using binaural sound now this is something we've heard before on the program and it is incredible so with no idea what to expect spencer and i put it to the test and if you want a taster of the experience from home you're going to need some headphones too dark field radio is everybody here yes now get yourself a glass and fill it with water we are all in our different rooms many couples in this same configuration sitting at a table across from each other now close your eyes close your eyes and keep them closed if you open your eyes before the session is complete you might experience a tormenting mismatch or renting of the thin membrane that separates this world from the other competing worlds next door i say when i open my eyes with you eyes closed try to form an image in your mind of the person sitting opposite you don't look don't check if they have closed there okay this performance is aimed at couples but ignoring that minor issue it's all about placing yourself in the story double is the latest show from darkfield radio its recent sound only productions took place in pitch black shipping containers now though it's possible via an app and a pair of headphones so when we're working with creating these experiences at home we still want them to feel like a live experience so um one of the important elements of that is it is a time show something that happens at a certain time so there is some feeling of community about it even though people are scattered in their different homes the main reasons that i think that that there's a lot more interest than by normal sun now is because of vr and and of this increasing interest in immersive experience that place you at the center of the narrative i'm kind of on edge because i wonder whether something is something to make his people who have job each other for however many years sit on either side of the table one of them has been replaced by a demon whose intentions are unclear and unlikely to be benign and the other is planning a murder claddy a murder is that you i don't know one of us has turned into a demon and the other is planning the murder we both sound a bit dodgy what was that you have no idea much like the binaural sound recordings we've seen on the show before it's recorded using a binaural sound head shaped like a human in both ears and microphones you treat this head as if it were the audience man that was going to be then listening to the performance so every everything that uh that the head hears is will be from the perspective of the future audience member listening with headphones and one of the the things that analog binaural recordings do better than any uh real-time audio spatialization is proximity so we're also developing some other tech elements to include um live microphones with the audio of the microphone spatialized speech recognition and a few other things that would allow us to increase this because interactivity me the demon has its eyes closed and so i stabbed it okay and now that the demonic copy is done our real partner can come back it's whispering in my hair thank you you can remove your headphones thank you oh and over our eyes goodness that was quite bizarre oh that was a bit of fun conceptually i thought it was brilliant but i wasn't sure about the storyline because i didn't actually want to murder you and even though it sounded good i think we probably would have both benefited from over ear headphones true what's interesting though is that because they ask the two people to face each other they really can make things sound like they come from a specific place in the room because they can send one person a sound in their right ear and they send the other person a different feed where the sound is in their left ear so you can both agree that the sound happened over there really interesting concept i have to say on to the great barrier reef wonder of the world the largest living structure on the planet at over 1400 miles long it's so big that you can see it from space but as you probably know it is under threat rising water temperatures and a changing environment caused the coral to go white to bleach and the reef has just undergone its third mass bleaching events in the past five years this time for the first time white stressed coral has stretched from one end all the way to the other while cyclones and climate change pose huge threats to the reef there are other factors too so nickweck's been finding out the great barriers to the reef's survival sugar a billion dollar business to australia almost all of its cane is grown here in queensland with the great barrier reef right on its doorstep when it comes to conserving the reef a lot of work is being done out at sea but there's also stuff happening right here at sugar cane farms like these which are dotted all around the tropical coast it's the runoff from these sugarcane farms the pesticides the herbicides that are posing to be a huge threat to the future health of the great barrier reef chris and belinda have developed smart water sensors that remotely measure nitrate levels in farm lagoons nitrate can lead to more algae build up and less coral diversity out on the reef that's where the light shines through and that's where you get your reading from their system including a bunch of sensors and a computer in a waterproof box helps them remotely secure more accurate readings around the clock and crucially gauge the effect of specific rain events we might not have a lot of nitrogen leaving every paddock on every farm but all it really needs is a little bit over a large area of land those marine systems there haven't evolved with high nitrogen levels so once that changes a little bit you change the balance one solution could be this herbicide spraying drone that zones in from above and targets hard to reach weeds thus greatly reducing the amount of chemicals spread across a field often here especially in the wet tropics you actually can't get back onto the paddock so it's too wet to be able to get onto or as we have with sugarcane it becomes too large so the only way to get any product back onto it is to do it with an aircraft of some kind the dji drone has four radar sensors on board so it can get close enough to crops without crashing and the nozzles have been specifically designed to form just the right amount of liquid so droplets don't blow off into the wind airborne contraptions are helping the reef in other ways these three little bumps just there yeah that means that this is live coral right so you can infer just from the shape of the wave yeah dr karen joyce uses drones equipped with sensors like spectrometers to capture detailed information unseen by the human eye it measures the way the way light is reflected or absorbed so for example we see trees as green because they reflect green light different things on the reef reflect light differently as well that helps us to understand the types of things that we have on the reef but also how healthy they are you just realize how small an area the drone can capture so that would be like 15 minutes work to do just that little bit there and this only represents one of three thousand of the reefs at the great barrier reef to better understand the scale and complex ecosystem of the reef i've come to the epicentre of tropical marine research the australian institute for marine science behold the csim one of the most advanced reef replicators on the planet 33 tanks more than 140 pumps and over 42 kilometers of piping all controlled with custom tech and of course i just had to have a nosey behind the scenes the bits and pieces you see along the back wall here they're what control our ph they provide dynamic active control of the process occurring in the tank and that means we get much much better control much tighter control of our sea water so the conditions are more like what we actually see out on the reef they've got taps tubes a giant orange snake this enables us to control our temperature to within plus a minus 0.1 of a degree we can create profiles whether that be seasonal or daily we can control salinity so replicating freshwater plumes we can replicate contaminants whether they'd be nutrients or pesticides insecticides a whole range of different parameters the cesium is able to precisely replicate the conditions of the great barrier as it's found in nature but it's also able to look into the future what will the reef look like in say 50 or 100 years from now we're looking at those mechanisms that make corals more thermally resilient this isn't a solution but the solution is dealing with climate change and the carbonization of the economy we're just looking at ways of assisting this to enable those corals to survive until we find a solution to that bigger issue scientific facilities drones monitoring sensors these are just some of the many efforts to importantly buy time for the reef while seismic shifts are required to truly preserve this natural phenomenon small actions can lead to big change fascinating stuff that was nick in australia and that's it from us for this week as ever you can keep up with the team on social media throughout the week on youtube instagram facebook and twitter at bbclick thanks for watching and we'll see you soon [Music] bye [Music] you

Channel: BBC Click

Views: 7,605

Keywords: bbc, bbc click, bbc news, bbc world, new zealand, sailing, boat, ship, ineos, americas cup, ben ainslie, australia, robot, great barrier reef, binaural, news, roundup, tech, technology, science, sound, audio, google, hardware, software

Id: XbL1AgeFMiw

Length: 24min 31sec (1471 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 08 2020