The Life Power - Nature Tech 3/3 - The Secrets of Nature

sunlight and plants the alchemy of life the source of energy to power the natural world [Music] and nature uses that energy as efficiently as possible every creature has been shaped by natural selection for economy every creature except for one when humans unlocked the secret of fire they unleashed enough energy to free us from natural constraints energy that fueled a series of revolutions the bronze age the iron age the age of industry the industrial revolution has changed the way we live producing energy and materials in quantities we never had before but at what cost to our planet [Music] in recent years our lives have been transformed by yet another revolution an information revolution built on the backs of those that have gone before [Music] industrial and digital man has grown apart from nature but now the new science of biomimetics is taking us in a different direction understanding the basic principles behind nature's energy and information revolutions offers radical new ways of living our own lives on planet earth [Music] [Music] every living creature needs energy and luckily the world is full of renewable energy sources food that comes in a huge variety of shapes and sizes but the real challenge is to find food without becoming a meal yourself [Music] this ancient battle has driven the evolution of many different ways of refueling some of them very spectacular [Music] [Music] so [Music] this way of finding energy has attracted the attention of engineers what if robots could do the same but we needn't fear for our children and pets just yet ecobot can't match skills honed by millions of years of evolution but it does get its energy in the same way by digesting flies it can't catch them yet though the next version will it has to be fed dead flies which are digested in a special microbial fuel cell this uses chemical energy driven by bacteria decomposing the fly to produce a trickle of electricity but even after a hearty meal of flies it doesn't produce much electricity ecobot has to sit for several minutes digesting its meal before it stored enough energy to move a couple of centimeters and that's it until it's digested a bit more fly but the system does work eco-god has been programmed to move towards a light source and to take a few test measurements on the way over 20 minutes or so it covers a couple of meters all on nothing more than a lunch of flies in ecological terms ecobot is a predator but nature's food chain starts much lower down and it's here that bio-inspired thinking might hold the key not just to self-refueling robots but how we make and use energy a whole new future for humanity ultimately the energy budget of the natural world depends on plants or bacteria the raw fuel is sunlight and every leaf or blade of grass is busy converting this to high energy sugars or carbohydrates that feed the rest of the world [Music] these are nature's power plants our planet is run on photosynthesis photosynthesis even fueled the growth of civilization the industrial revolution was built on the dead remains of plants buried and transformed into coal these plants trapped the energy of the sun beating down on the earth hundreds of millions of years ago [Music] when humans mustered fire they could unlock that ancient energy by burning but the cost is to gradually fill our atmosphere with carbon dioxide even today most of our energy powering our ultra modern computerized lifestyles comes from this crude process of setting fire to prehistoric plants nature suggests there are other ways [Music] [Applause] like leaves solar panels make energy from sunlight and nature can help make our designs more efficient for maximum efficiency a solar panel needs to absorb as much light as possible and that's also a problem faced by animals that need to see in low light levels evolution has designed eyes that can see in light levels in which we are blind moth eyes absorb every last scrap of light to help them navigate through the night sky and they do this by having an anti-reflective coating on the outside of their eyes magnified over 25 000 times the surface of the eye is covered in tiny precisely spaced bumps that stop light bouncing off and so increase how much is absorbed it only works because of the exact spacing of the micro bumps an incredible example of natural nanotechnology now modern technology can match nature's achievement and produce a similar micro surface trademarked under the name mother these structures are so small and so precisely arranged that the fraunhofer institute in freiburg had to develop new manufacturing techniques to work at this scale a light-sensitive coating on a sheet of glass has been exposed to a precise holographic pattern of laser light when the coating is washed off the areas fixed by the light pattern are left forming a surface covered in micro bumps that work in exactly the way a moths eye does because they absorb almost all light falling on them very little remains to be reflected the difference is remarkable half of this monitor is covered in a conventional surface the other half with mother looking straight onto the surface there's not much difference but at an angle the moth eye surface on the right cuts out all the glare mother technology will also work on solar panels increasing the amount of light absorbed and making them more efficient and this green technology can be made even more efficient by mimicking another idea from nature arctic puppies have to grow their seeds during the short arctic summer so their flowers track the sun like miniature radar dishes keeping their developing seeds as warm as possible the designers of the gemini house in austria have borrowed this idea the solar panels on the house rotate to follow the sun so we might call this green technology but it doesn't work in quite the same way that leaves do solar panels are much more efficient than leaves but they're very expensive to make nature's solution is to make inefficient but cheap power plants and then put them everywhere so what could the power industries of the future learn from this solar panels make electricity while leaves make chemicals how they do this is still something of a mystery but the leaf's alchemy is slowly being unraveled inside an individual leaf cell are tiny green capsules called chloroplasts [Music] and inside each of these are stacks of membranes it's the chemical machinery attached to these membranes that holds the secret to photosynthesis light kicks an electron out of a chemical called chlorophyll the stuff that makes leaves green and sets off a chain reaction that ends with water being split into hydrogen and oxygen the oxygen is released into the atmosphere and the hydrogen is fused to carbon dioxide to make a simple sugar but this mechanism is so complicated that a scientist could spend a whole career on just one step in the process but in the last few years they've succeeded in making an artificial beef or at least mimicking chloroplasts with tiny man-made structures which can make high-energy chemicals from sunlight if this is a vision of the future how would we use it one thing artificial leaves could do is generate hydrogen the ultimate clean fuel in reality the whole planet humanity included is already fueled by hydrogen we are in orbit around a massive nuclear fusion generator deep in the sun hydrogen atoms are fused together to form helium and in the process release vast amounts of energy the ultimate power source for life on earth we've tried to mimic this process but so far we've made very little progress towards building our own nuclear fusion reactors but a hydrogen economy could still bring a bright future just as with our present hydrocarbon fuels we already burn hydrogen it's highly flammable it's how we fuel our trips into space now engineers have developed car engines that can also burn hydrogen this car is a hybrid that can burn ordinary gasoline or at the flick of a switch burn hydrogen the performance of these engines is improving all the time not surprising for a car running on rocket fuel early problems with running cars on a highly flammable gas that must be stored under high pressure have gradually been solved refueling looks a little complicated but it's now almost as simple as pumping gas and the advantage of cars burning hydrogen is that all that comes out of the exhaust is water but in essence this hasn't really moved us on much from the stone age it's still just setting fire to stuff [Music] where hydrogen really scores is when it's used to power a fuel cell in a fuel cell hydrogen is fused to oxygen in such a way as to produce a flow of electricity and the electricity can then be used to run the advanced engine of this car like the combustion engine the exhaust is still just water but while the internal combustion engine is only around twenty percent efficient the hydrogen fuel cell runs at eighty percent efficiency already scientists are developing hydrogen fuel cells small enough to replace the ordinary batteries in a laptop in theory there's no reason that in the future we couldn't have hydrogen power stations to produce all our electricity ultimately powered by the sun the biggest problem with hydrogen fuel is that at the moment most of it comes from breaking down fossil fuels it's the hydro part of hydrocarbon this produces as much damaging greenhouse gas as does burning the hydrocarbon in the first place but there's a vast source of hydrogen that bio-inspired thinking like artificial leaves could unlock without any pollution at all [Music] water using only the power of sunlight we could extract all the fuel we need from pure clean water and when we use that fuel either by burning it or in a fuel cell we simply produce more water the ultimate in recycling but while we wait for a new future of limitless clean energy there are other lessons we can learn from nature such as using the energy we already have as efficiently as possible termites are nature's master builders they use mud mixed with saliva to build huge castles of clay inside these fortresses the termites rear their young and in some cases even grow their own crops these structures are not just mounds of earth they're highly sophisticated buildings a termite colony uses as much oxygen and produces as much carbon dioxide as a cow and they create a lot of heat yet they live sealed inside their mouths so they must be somehow ventilating their buildings engineers from loughborough university in the uk and biologists from the state university of new york have teamed up to find out what the termites are up to many of these mounds in namibia have been modified to allow the scientists to monitor what the termites are doing recording the temperature inside the nest the scientists found that it stayed constant throughout the day they also found that the termites can control carbon dioxide levels and humidity as well as temperature they seem to be living in a perfect air-conditioned building to find out how they do this the scientists fitted observation windows into the mounds so they could video the termites over long periods of time they found that if they injected carbon dioxide into the nest the termites changed their pattern of building constructing subtly different patterns of tunnels through the nest it looks like the secret of the termites amazing air conditioning lies in the fine details of their nest construction and that means somehow trying to map an entire nest down to its smallest tunnels something no one had done before for one thing the outer walls of the mount are like concrete but that's not something to put off an engineer they plan to use a jcb as a precision tool to slice a nest in half to look at the basic structure it was a big job the tower can reach up to three meters but the nest also extends several meters below ground [Music] this is where most of the termites live and where they cultivate their gardens of white fungus the only thing they eat [Music] above the underground living quarters most of the top half of the mound is a network of empty tunnels there's one large chimney running up the center of the tower and surrounding this a complex network of smaller tunnels feeds into the main chimney but these tunnels also branch and twist to end up running just beneath the outer surface of the mound but this way of dissecting the mound was too crude to see the finer details of the termites construction techniques so the engineers came up with a new idea to inject a nest for the gypsum mixture that fills all the tunnels and sets hard it's a tricky business the mixture had to be just the right consistency to flow into all the tunnels and not set until it had filled the entire nest not surprisingly no one had ever tried this before the crew excavated the base of the nest then covered the whole mound in a protective layer of gypsum then they could start pouring the mixture somehow they had to work out when the nest was full then they had to wait until they were sure the gypsum had set hard all that remained was to reveal the inner structure of the nest by blasting the mud away with a high pressure hose hopefully leaving the complex tunnel system outlined in gypsum intact it worked the scientists were left with a beautiful intricate termite carved sculpture showing just how complex these mounds of mug really [Music] are but they're still not satisfied [Music] this technique reveals how all the large tunnels link together but it destroyed a layer of finer tunnels that the scientists had noticed in the jcb excavations [Music] so they came up with an extraordinary way of visualizing the mount right down to its finest details they built the world's largest flatbed scanner over a mound that had been injected with gypsum the idea was to shave a thin layer off the top of the nest and to photograph it the white gypsum-filled tunnels clearly stand out then over the next two weeks working day and night the mound was shaved away millimeter by millimeter taking photographs all the way [Music] the scientists then loaded the long sequence of photographs into a computer and using software designed to piece together similar slices from an mri scan they could build up a composite picture of the nest finally this model could be fed into a 3d animation computer to produce something no one has ever seen before an exact replica of a termite mount that we can fly through to see exactly how the termites have made it based on this the scientists could work out that the air conditioning system is driven by the wind the complex network of tunnels damps out variations in wind speed and strength producing a steady circulation of air through the nest chamber and gardens and up into the central funnel if the circulating air current is not strong enough the termites extend the mound higher and build more tunnels to compensate analyzing the details of such computer models is suggesting new ways of building energy efficient buildings [Music] that like the termites mounds can be air-conditioned by the wind but we can only think about such new and complex designs because over the last few decades our society has been transformed by the power of computing the information revolution has touched all our lives in countless ways at the touch of a few keys we can access vast quantities of information instantaneously and from anywhere in the world without ever leaving our homes has also had its own information revolution the evolution of complex life forms brought the need for more sophisticated ways to sense the environment to find food mates or shelter or to detect danger a cockroach is bristling with high-tech sensor arrays for touch sight scent taste it can even detect the slightest movement of air the two tails of a roach are called circe and they're covered in hairs that respond to tiny air movements many other insects have similar air current detectors and it's such a sensitive system that scientists at reading university in the uk are trying to unpick its details by recording how insects respond to the smallest breath of wind these tiny air currents are produced in a precisely controlled way from a speaker producing very low frequency sound each individual hair is mounted in a socket that only allows it to bend in one direction but by having hundreds of hairs each orientated in a different direction the insect can pinpoint exactly where the air current is coming from as well as what size creature might be producing it it means a roach can tell exactly where a predator is and when it's a good idea to move giant nerve fibers from the circuit run straight to the leg's control centers so the roach doesn't even have to think about escaping such elegant and economical designs have attracted the attention of space engineers designing the next generation of remote planetary explorers so perhaps future missions to mars might be carried out by rovers fitted with an array of sensors inspired by insects scientists have already made progress in copying these air current detectors which might be useful devices for a mars rover whirlwinds have been recorded on the martian surface powerful enough to destroy a rover but equipped with the roach's ability to detect strength and direction of air currents it should be able to steer clear of trouble some insects can also pinpoint sound with the same deadly accuracy this is a female ormia fly and she needs to find food for her offspring they only eat mold crickets so almia's problem is to find one male mole crickets sit in the entrance to their burrows often head down and sing and omia can tell exactly where the sound is coming from once she's found a mole cricket she lays her eggs on it and when her larvae hatch they will burrow into the mole cricket and slowly devour it it's an impressive feat but just how accurate is a female or mere these scientists at cornell university are trying to answer that question an almir fly is lowered onto a ball supported on a cushion of air when synthesized cricket song is played from the speaker the fly will try to run towards it turning the ball the ball is linked to a computer which works out in which direction the fly is trying to run and how far it goes in response to the song the experiments show that omers can pinpoint sound with unerring accuracy alternating the sound between two speakers either side of the fly doesn't fool her ormea gets it right every time so how is she doing this an auntie fly has very unusual ears hidden beneath her head they're made of two membranes either side of a stiff bar a mole cricket song makes each membrane vibrate but if the sound is coming from one side it reaches one membrane first and causes them to vibrate out of phase the vibrations of both sides are transmitted to the central bar and by decoding how this is being distorted the fly can tell exactly where the sound is coming from based on this elegant system scientists have developed a highly directional microphone which looks like being a major step forward in the design of hearing aids all thanks to this tiny fly and her search for food for her offspring to be a model parent this smoke beetle depends on an even more unusual sensor at the base of its thorax it has some very strange structures sense organs but for what in the laboratories of the university of bonn careful experiments show that these structures respond to infrared radiation to heat and they're highly sensitive outside the lab it uses these unusual organs to detect forest fires the lab experiments suggest that a beetle can detect the heat from a 10 hectare forest fire up to 12 kilometers away and the beetle can also pinpoint the exact direction of the blaze beetles are drawn from a wide area to the smouldering logs and it's here that they find their partners and mate when they're young hatch they burrow into pine wood but in a healthy pine tree the larvae would be killed and entombed in resin as the tree defends itself but by laying their eggs on recently killed trees these beetles save their offspring from that fate scientists are now looking closely at this extraordinary ability thinking about making our own heat detectors more effective when it comes to finding the way nothing beats the honeybee [Music] a worker bee returning to the hive from a good source of nectar can remember the distance between the hive and the flowers and in what direction it lies with that information she can always find her way back again but she can also tell her sisters how to find the same flowers encoded in this waggle dance is information on both the distance and the direction and all that is going on in a brain smaller than a grain of sugar such navigation skills would be extremely useful for robots particularly those exploring alien planets on their own so how does a bee do it scientists at the australian national university in canberra designed an ingenious experiment to find [Music] out they persuaded bees to fly down a long tunnel lined with black stripes to a dish of sugar water [Music] these bees then flew back to the hive and told their fellow workers about this new all-you-can-eat food joint but then the researchers replaced the stripes with much narrower ones this time when the bees flew back to the hive to gather more workers the new recruits flew straight past the tunnel they'd been told the wrong distance these it seems are using a trick called optic flow to measure distance they estimate distance by the flow of information across the eyes when the bees fly past more narrower stripes their optic flow system is fooled into thinking they've flown further than they have this system has all kinds of uses by keeping the flow rates equal on both eyes the bee knows it's flying down the center of the tunnel and on final approach to the hive a bee uses optic flow as a kind of autopilot to slow it down ready for landing most flying insects seem to use a similar system so scientists at caltech the california institute of technology have devised a computerized system to look in more detail at how insects navigate for this they've enlisted the help of the classic lab insect the fruit fly in this experiment fruit flies are released into a wind tunnel the scientists then project moving bars onto the wall of the wind tunnel and infrared sensors track how each fly responds they found that the flies always turn to fly away from this pattern of diverging bars but to understand exactly what is happening means looking in more detail at how individual flies respond so the caltech scientists built a kind of fruit fly flight simulator a single fly is tethered inside a cylinder which can generate different patterns right around the fly by monitoring its wing beats the scientists can tell what the fly is trying to do when it sees different patterns if the pattern's rotating the fly tries to turn in the opposite direction this would automatically compensate for it being twisted by a gust of wind if the fly was in free flight if the pattern is expanding on one side the fly tries to move away from it again in free flight this will automatically compensate for a constant wind blowing the fly to one side in other words these simple built-in programs act like an autopilot that keeps the fly stable and on course it's such an effective and elegant system that future mars rovers might well use the same tricks to measure how far they're traveling and at the same time navigate through difficult terrain on the martian surface and this is not the end of an insect inspired space age another thing insects do very well is work together wood ants live in enormous colonies that scour the forest floor around their nests for anything small enough to eat if they find a particularly good source of food more workers can be recruited to help just like honeybees and back at home the ants cooperate to maintain the thatched roof over the nest to keep it waterproof and by opening and closing entrance holes around the nest they keep the temperature and humidity at the right levels for their growing larvae but no single ant has a master plan in its head a grand overview of what the colony is trying to achieve this apparently cooperative society emerges out of each individual and following a few simple rules such simple programs leading to the completion of complex tasks has inspired robot designers to build robots that can work together in a similar way [Music] these robots at the university of the west of england have been designed to test these ideas they can pick up discs move them around and drop them [Music] but they've also been programmed with a few simple rules first if you bump into a disc pick it up second if you bump into a wall or another robot turn around third if you bump into a disc while already carrying one drop your own disc [Music] put a dozen robots programmed with these rules into an arena with scattered discs and something strange happens [Music] over an hour or so this little swarm of robots works together to gather up all the scattered discs and leave them in neat piles [Music] so can we now make mechanical swarms an artificial ant colony ants it seems are not quite as simple as we first thought but these new layers in and society have only been uncovered by long and painful study by marking and following individual ants over long periods as the colony's fortunes rise and fall the ants seem to have a complex communication network and the shape of that network changes and adapts as the colony's size changes ants do far more than just follow simple rules in fact each ant has its own character these researchers from russia spent so long following individual ants they could recognize them even when their paint marks wore off by their different personalities so these complex colonies work not just because each ant is pre-programmed with certain rules but because the ants can communicate with each other and adapt those rules accordingly and that has said robot designers thinking [Applause] these machines at penn state university in philadelphia have an amp like ability to communicate both with each other and with a base station computer they've been asked to search an area of ground but not to search the same patch twice they're not under remote control they're following their own built-in search programs but modifying that program to take into account what the other machines have done it's another step in the direction of an artificial ant colony so perhaps our future mars rovers won't be working alone think how much more effectively we could search for life on mars if we could set a swarm of rovers loose on the surface each talking to all the others and coordinating their behavior like extraterrestrial ants [Music] it seems extraordinary that humble insects might help humanity explore alien worlds but an increasing number of scientists are realizing that nature can do far more than that it could open up a future of new materials made in new ways it could shape how we make and use energy in short it could transform the way we live on planet earth [Music] and all this potential has come from studying just a few hundred species yet there are tens of millions of species out there and each and every one holds secrets that we've yet to unlock any one of these species could hold the potential for creating a new and sustainable future for mankind in ways we can't even begin to predict the possibilities are limitless the diversity of life on earth is humanity's greatest resource yet it's disappearing at a rate that has only been matched in the past by a few cataclysmic natural disasters but this latest mass extinction is caused by us the very creatures that could benefit most from four billion years of biological exuberance it's like burning the greatest research library on the planet it was the evolution of our intelligent minds that cause these problems and now that same intelligence is seeing a new value in nature so as much as biomimetics can benefit humanity perhaps the birth of this new science will give us the best reason yet to become better stewards of all those lives that could make our own lives [Music] better [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Go Wild

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Keywords: orf universum, documentary, blue chip, natural history, secrets of nature, planet earth, wildlife, free documentary, watch full documentary, nature films, wildlife films

Id: oIMUPPIoqPY

Length: 51min 53sec (3113 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 21 2021