Brave New World with Stephen Hawking (2011) s01e04 Episode Script
Environment
Science is on the brink of changing your life.
Right now, men and women around the world are making amazing breakthroughs.
Are making amazing breakthroughs.
This is incredible.
Our team of leading scientists have chosen the discoveries they think matter most.
Whoa! An almost limitless supply of clean energy.
It's these which are the basis of one of the most important of all conservation enterprises.
From the car you will drive to medical advances that could save your life.
This miracle means that we can replace surgery.
On a journey that spans the jungles of Africa I'm here to join the hunt to find one of the biggest threats to human survival.
To the quads of Oxford.
This is arguably the most complicated thing in the universe.
We will show you how science is a force for good.
Prepare to see your future.
This is the beginning of that brave new world.
Tonight, we want to tell you how science is fighting to save our world.
Finding new ways to create energy, clear pollution, prevent solar disasters and preserve animal species in a 21st century Noah's Ark.
These are the discoveries that could secure the future of our planet.
Recently, this elephant made headline news.
She was being kept in horrific circumstances in a circus.
But then, she was rescued and now, well, she's old and she's arthritic but she's in much better, happier conditions here in Longleat Park.
So, how old is she? Between 57 and 60-years-old.
Elephants have the same kind of lifespan as we have.
We think she's probably the oldest elephant in Europe.
Was she born in captivity? No, she's actually from Sri Lanka.
She was brought over I think there was about 15 of them brought over from Sri Lanka back in the '50s and she's the last surviving one.
I've been lucky enough during my life to spend quite some time watching and filming elephants and I find it appalling to think that there might be a time coming when nobody will be able to see a wild elephant.
The fact of the matter is that these majestic, wonderful creatures are fast disappearing from the earth.
Hello.
Yes, yes.
Hello.
It's a lot more solid on her foot.
The cuticles are looking better.
Great big chunks coming away.
That's great.
Good girl.
That's great.
Good girl.
OK, good girl.
A vet is now taking a blood sample from this lovely old creature.
It will preserve genetic information that could last for hundreds if not thousands of years.
It's all part of a project to save the genomes of our most endangered creatures.
Part of a project called the Frozen Ark.
'Once the blood is taken, 'it must be processed and refrigerated quickly 'before it starts to clot.
'Contained within every one of the thousands of blood cells here 'is the entire blueprint for this Asian elephant's species.
' Anne is particularly interesting, in my opinion.
She's an Asian elephant, but we know she was wild caught in what was then Ceylon over 50 years ago so, the genetic provenance, if you like, is extremely good.
She's good material? She's good material? Absolutely.
I think she's fantastic.
Asian elephants, as a species, are important to the Ark and very unusual to come across an elephant that was wild caught.
We know exactly where she came from.
Well, she's a lovely animal.
The sample is whisked to London and the Frozen Ark stores in the Natural History Museum.
But as quickly as samples are collected, more species join the list of those in danger.
Extinction is a natural process.
99% of the species that have ever lived on earth are now extinct.
But never before in the history of life, has just one species been responsible for the extinction of so many others or in such a short period of time.
It was the threat of extinction that inspired the Frozen Ark.
In the 1960s, Ann Clarke went to the South Sea Islands to study snails.
Over 30 years, she saw over 100 species disappear, so, she set up this vital gene bank to tackle the problem.
The Frozen Ark has started.
What are your targets? 10,000 species or so are going to go extinct in the next 30 to 50 years and so, I suppose one could say that our targets are those 10,000.
But we are starting with the most endangered groups which are extinct in the wild.
Which, I suppose, is practical, but in an ideal world, we would ask biologists everywhere to do this tomorrow.
Absolutely.
So, we hope that this will become really a sort of last resort conservation effort.
If species extinction continues at its current rate, the work of the Frozen Ark will be even more critical.
The only link future generations may have to our rich diversity could be DNA preserved in liquid nitrogen.
Although science isn't yet capable of resurrecting an extinct species from frozen DNA, the possibility is not that remote.
Deep in the basement of the museum, the Ark's bio banks await the next delivery.
It's here that I add another vital sample.
So now, the DNA from that lovely elephant is safely preserved here where it will remain undamaged for centuries if not thousands of years.
Our ever-growing population places great demands on the planet.
But science is working to meet those demands.
Creating new ways to feed the world.
Like millions of farm animals around the world, these pigs exist for one only one purpose.
For us to eat them.
Around the globe, human beings consume around 250 million tons of meat a year and that could double by 2050.
All this meat-eating means livestock is quite literally taking over the planet.
Currently, we use around a third of the world's land for livestock production.
We're exhausting our resources trying to produce meat, and it's only getting worse.
So imagine for a moment a world in which meat is produced without having to breed it, rear it, feed it or kill it.
A world in which meat is produced in tiny little plastic dishes.
Science fiction? Maybe not.
I'm Mark Evans, and as a vet, I've done a lot of work on animal welfare.
So the idea of lab-grown, or in vitro meat is intriguing.
And it's been around since the start of the last century.
Winston Churchill boldly predicted in 1931 that science would soon be able to create a chicken breast without a chicken.
And when we got into space, NASA pursued the idea of artificial meat as a way of feeding astronauts on long missions.
Now it's scientists here in Holland who are leading the artificial meat revolution with nothing more than a few cells, collagen and squares of Velcro.
I'm meeting the man at the frontier of this new science, Dr Mark Post, a specialist in tissue engineering at Maastricht University.
The process of creating in vitro meat starts with a small biopsy taken from a live animal.
The cells are tiny, and they need to grow out of these muscle cells so you need to cut it first, in very small pieces.
Then treat it with an enzyme so that the texture becomes looser, and you can let the cells grow out.
These are the cells that if we have an injury of our muscle, will actually repair, and that principle we use to grow muscle in the lab.
What you're doing is damaging the muscle fibre cells to start the stem cells doing their work, and they will then grow new muscle fibre cells out of the damaged one.
Exactly.
The cells are then cultured by adding them to a medium of nutrients, amino acids and lipids that kick-starts their growth.
Each cell doubles every 18 hours, and after two weeks, the results are pretty impressive.
This dark outline here is the original muscle fibre cell.
Right.
And they've now divided into every one of these structures here is a separate cell? Yeah.
Right now, we can make them to double 20 times, which means that one cell becomes a million cells.
And if we improve that, theoretically we can go up to 50 times or maybe even higher, and then you can create an enormous amount of cells from one single cell.
At this stage, though, the cells aren't formed together like meat.
The next step in the process is to seed them in a collagen gel which should cause the cells to organise into muscle fibre.
Or that's the theory.
This Petri dish has just come out of the incubator at 37 degrees.
And when it went in, each one of the six wells in it contained a million chaotically organised stem cells.
I've been promised that there is now a dramatic change.
So I'm on low power at the moment, but when you wind the power up, this is when it gets exciting.
That's incredible! What's happened is that these chaotically organised cells have somehow managed to line themselves up, so they're kind of running parallel now and they're starting to produce muscle fibre cells.
Muscle that has been nowhere near a farm, it's been created by stem cells in a Petri dish.
It's not clear why the cells are organising themselves like this, but it seems to be with the way they bind to the collagen similar to the way that fresh scar tissue shrinks.
That is really remarkable.
It's definitely meat, but not as we know it.
This product could play a huge part in satisfying our hunger for more and more meat.
That's if we actually eat it, of course.
These small pieces of tissue we can already make right now as it has already an animal protein content that is 70%, which is more than the regular sausage that we buy, so this can be processed into processed meat.
Have you tried it? I haven't tried it but a Russian reporter who came by a couple of months ago tried it, and he confirmed that it doesn't taste like meat yet.
Are you not tempted to try it? Not really.
This whole process is still in a scientific phase and these are experiments.
And people work hard on getting scientific questions answered through these experiments.
And then I'm going to eat it for no particular reason other than to satisfy my very simple non-scientific curiosity of how does it taste.
Of how does it taste.
But it's a critical factor, isn't it? This is going to go nowhere, and will just become a piece of scientific history unless that thing has the flavour, the texture, the taste the market demands.
There is very little known about what defines the taste of meat.
So that's one of the scientific outcomes, if you wish, of this project, that we can, step by step, define what determines the taste of this meat product.
One way Dr Post is looking at to improve taste is to add fat and iron.
Another challenge he faces is bringing down the cost of production it's still very expensive.
But one wealthy American businessman has seen the potential and is investing in the next leap forward.
Next year we are going to try and make a hamburger, and it's going to be a 250,000 euro hamburger.
How confident are you that that's possible to get from here to a recognisable hamburger, that presumably tastes like a hamburger in 12 months? I'm reasonably confident.
Apparently convincingly enough to get financing for it! Scientists here in Holland seem pretty confident that sooner or later, possibly sooner, they will be able to grow burgers, sausages, even chops and steaks that are hard, if not impossible, to tell from the real thing.
It may be controversial, but in vitro meat certainly has the potential to make the world a better, healthier place, and it could happen if billions of us can be tempted to eat it.
The challenges facing us often seem daunting.
But science is constantly searching for ways to overcome them.
Next, a story of how we may be closer than ever to creating a new source of energy.
One that has the power of the stars.
Our modern world has a lust for energy.
We're consuming more and more of it each year, and the amount we're gobbling up is due to double by 2050.
We are burning our way through fossil fuels, renewable energy looks like it's not going to fill the gap and nuclear energy is again under the spotlight after recent events in Japan.
It all seems a bit hopeless.
But as a physicist, I know there's an alternative, an almost limitless supply of clean energy, almost no pollution.
Too good to be true? Well, I believe it's not that far off.
Since the 1930s, we've been trying to unlock the hidden energy bound up in the nuclei of atoms.
After the development of the atomic bomb, scientists worked to harness nuclear energy in a more controlled way.
A new landmark rises at Pleasanton.
It's the nation's first privately financed and operated atomic power plant.
Just behind me is the site of one of the earliest nuclear power plants.
It's decommissioned now, but when it operated it was on exactly the same principles as every nuclear power plant working today.
That's something called nuclear fission.
This is a tremendously brilliant source of energy, but it does have its drawbacks.
It relies on burning heavy metals like uranium, which are in limited supply and won't last for ever.
It produces dangerous, radioactive waste that needs to be dealt with, or at least buried in the ground for a very long time, and if released can be deadly.
But there's another way of unlocking the energy trapped within the atom and it's called nuclear fusion.
Unlike in fission where we split the nuclei of the very heaviest atoms like uranium, in fusion we combine the nuclei of the lightest atoms, like hydrogen.
This takes incredible temperatures and pressures, but when it works, it releases far more energy than we put in, much more even than in nuclear fission.
The thing is, it's going on above our heads every single day.
It's fusion that powers the sun.
For decades physicists have been trying to create controlled and sustained nuclear fusion.
Just down the road I'm going to visit a group of men and women who think they might be close to cracking it.
This is the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore laboratory in California, home to one of the most important scientific endeavours in the world.
They've a rather nifty piece of equipment at their disposal.
The world's largest laser.
That laser begins life as a tiny beam the thickness of a human hair.
Then over the course of three football pitches it becomes amplified in power 1,000 trillion times.
It's then divided up into 192 separate beams, which are then brought back in focus onto a pellet of fuel the size of a grain of sugar.
Bruno Van Wonterghem is the operations manager.
This is the core of the facility.
Here is where all the action starts.
Where the laser itself begins? Specifically in this room are where the laser pulses are born.
Believe it or not, the only laser in this facility is located right here behind that panel.
This is that initial tiny laser? Yes.
This tiny laser beam is split and amplified through almost a mile's worth of lenses.
The end result, not one, but 192 giant lasers.
These are the world's largest lasers and it's also the world's largest optical instrument.
These laser beams travel inside these tubes.
Each of these laser beams looks like this, 40 by 40 centimetres.
We have 192 of these beams.
Each of these beams is the world's most powerful laser by itself.
Each of these lasers is destined to fire onto a tiny fuel pellet with two types of hydrogen isotopes at its heart.
These pellets are prepared on site.
It's painstaking, precision engineering.
Even a flake of human skin could spoil the process.
So I've got to suit up.
Let me show you the capsule over here.
So, that's the capsule at the end.
Right.
A two millimetre diameter capsule.
Do you want to hold it? I'd love to hold it, yeah.
It's incredible to contrast the size of the facility with the lasers, everything focusing down to this tiny, little sphere.
The fuel pellet is tiny, but it's home is huge.
This 130 tonne structure is at the heart of the experiment.
It's a structure that's like a temple to the power of the atom.
It's the target chamber.
OK, we'll go right inside to the target bay.
So this is it? This is your star chamber? This is it.
This is the target chamber where in the centre we create a little star when we illuminate a little fuel pellet by 192 laser beams.
This is the most beautiful machine I think I've ever seen in my life.
That's three stories high just the blue target chamber itself.
Then you've got these massive arms beaming in the lasers.
Can we get to look inside the chamber? Yes, the viewing window allows us to look inside the vacuum chamber.
Here inside the chamber is where it all happens.
Here's where we have the target, right in the centre of this 10 metre diameter sphere.
The green light is beautiful.
It makes it seem as if magic is going on inside there.
The fuel pellet has to be placed in the dead centre of the target chamber.
Caught in the crosshairs of the lasers, the capsule and the hydrogen atoms implode in 20 billionths of a second, releasing a vast wave of energy.
Let me give you some numbers.
Over a trillion watts of power will be focused on the tiny pellet.
The pressure it'll be under will be 100 billion atmospheres.
When the hydrogen fuel within the pellet reaches a density ten times the density of lead, and its temperature 50 million degrees, five times hotter than the core of the sun, that's when the fuel ignites.
Fusion is initiated and the energy within the nucleus will be released.
The team have achieved the first target firing the lasers and hitting the pellet.
Now they face the big challenge, generating a fusion burn that releases more energy than it takes to set it off.
To do this, they need to get the pressure and temperature high enough to cause the nuclei of the atoms inside the pellet to fuse and released their energy.
It's a tall order, but they hope to achieve it in the next year.
Ed Moses is the principal associate director of this ambitious project.
If you found a way to make widespread, economical fusion energy it changes everything.
What is your fuel? Your fuel is the water in the ocean? How much do you need? A million people need a few hundred gallons per year.
The fuel you're using has no carbon in it, so it's not polluting.
It has no fission activity, so there's no long-term waste.
Your by-product is helium, a very small amount, but that's it.
You don't have geopolitics because all your energy, everyone can have it.
It's not a proliferate technology, you can give it to everyone.
And it does baseload electricity.
It would provide power for billions.
The way we live our lives, work and play depends on us producing enough energy.
Although we don't like to admit it, we're living on borrowed time.
We're consuming more energy, our supplies are running out.
Our whole way of life is under threat.
Well, nuclear fusion could change all that.
We have seen how science is tackling some of the man-made problems that face our planet.
There are also natural forces that threaten our existence.
Next is a story of how scientists are battling to protect us from the destructive forces of our sun.
Above the relative calm of our atmosphere there is trouble brewing.
An almighty clash? When the solar winds interact with the Earth's magnetic field, bringing a storm of electric matter, radiation, and fast-moving, high-energy particles.
All that activity is known as "space weather" and as a space scientist, I know how volatile and dangerous it can be, especially when an event like a solar maximum occurs.
That's when massive eruptions from the sun's surface send billions of charged particles into space, some of which reach the Earth.
Events like this don't happen all the time, but solar scientists say there's one just around the corner and it poses a major threat.
In previous centuries, great storms far above our heads didn't matter much.
But now we are very vulnerable.
Our world is dependent on a complex electrical network that could be devastated by a surge from space.
I'm Maggie Aderin-Pocock.
I build telescopes and satellites so I'm fascinated by what we can do to stop a solar disaster from happening.
I'm here to see someone from the Solar Dynamics Observatory.
I'm here to see someone from the Solar Dynamics Observatory.
Do you know where you're heading to? I think so.
I think so.
Have a good day.
I think so.
Have a good day.
Thank you.
That's why I've come here to NASA's Goddard Space Lab, where scientists are working to predict the next big event and to protect us from its effects.
Place one between the oscillator and the synthesiser They're getting data from a special satellite launched in 2010.
It provides a constant stream of data, including the most extraordinary images of the sun we've ever seen.
These are images of the sun in multiple wavelengths of light.
Starting over here we have visible light.
That looks familiar.
This is the sun you're familiar with.
It's just basically a boring yellow ball with some dark patches which are sun spots.
And then as we move this way, we go to ultraviolet light.
You see a bit more structure.
We'll move up to Slightly higher.
We'll skip this one for now.
This is extreme ultraviolet, the first of the extreme ultraviolet wavelengths.
Now we see the dark areas before are bright because now these areas are hotter than the rest of the sun.
NASA's satellite has allowed scientists here to view solar activity in remarkable detail.
OK, so what I want to show you now is a really amazing event that happened not too long ago, June 7th.
Whoa! Whoa! That's pretty amazing.
Whoa! That's pretty amazing.
That's quite scary.
If that's the sun, how big is that? If you put a quarter right by it, it's a little bit bigger than the Earth but that's about the size of the Earth.
So that's the Earth? So the matter falling out is many times bigger? Many times bigger.
Even though a lot of that material fell back on the surface, a good portion of it also escaped into space.
These events are known as coronal mass ejections.
When material from such an event heads to Earth, the consequences can be dramatic.
In a worst-case scenario, electromagnetic radiation would disable satellites.
The knock-on effect, disruption to crucial communication and navigation systems.
Electrical surges along power lines would melt transformers.
Cities would be plunged into darkness.
What you see here is an animation Fortunately there are NASA scientists like Antti Pulkkinen protecting us.
His analysis of coronal mass ejections provides an early-warning system.
So we can have a projection that there's a major coronal mass ejection, velocity say 2,000km per second, and our estimate is that it will impact the Earth one and a half days from now, OK? We feed this information to our power industry friends, and of course, if you don't deliver electricity in the power grid, there will be no impact.
So if you switch the system off while the coronal mass ejection passes, you're OK.
Ejections happen most frequently during a solar maximum.
The next one is predicted for 2013.
No-one knows just how disruptive it might be.
That's why NASA's research into how to forecast these events is so vital.
Some experts suggest that the damage caused by a major solar event could cost the global economy ?2 trillion.
Now I don't believe we will ever be able to tame the power of the sun and stop these events in their tracks.
But by using science to understand and predict them, we can at least prepare for the worst and hopefully stop a global catastrophe.
We are a planet addicted to oil.
In our search for new sources, we take risks that can lead to disaster.
So science is using the natural world to fight back when a catastrophe strikes.
I'm here in the Louisiana marshes on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico and it was here where one of the largest oil spills in history spewed out almost five million barrels of oil.
The oil flowed for months before it was stopped, by which time it had caused untold damage to this part of the world.
The scale of the pollution was vast as oil pumped directly from a pipe on the sea bed.
When it was time for the clear-up, the environment was hit again.
Over a million gallons of controversial chemical dispersants were used to break up the oil slicks at sea.
On shore, they had to remove the oil by digging up vast tracts of land.
Is this as bad as it gets? So this is definitely one of the hardest hit.
You can see the anchoring plants, the things that provide the foundation for the ecosystem, have died back.
Dr Michael Blum and Bree Bernick are biologists who have monitored the aftereffects of the disaster.
I see there are all these air guns lined up along the shore to scare away the birds.
Those propane cannons are supposed to keep the birds out of this entire area.
Have you seen an improvement, that it's somehow trying to recover from the devastation? You can see in certain areas that plants are regenerating.
It's hard to know if those roots are penetrating past any residual oil in the soil.
Which is still there.
In some places it is still there.
We'll have to wait and see what the long-term ecosystem effects are of introducing that much chemical dispersant into the Gulf of Mexico.
The threat of more oil spills hasn't gone away.
But when the next one happens, science may have a new way to confront the disaster.
Here in New Orleans, scientists have found a way of tackling the pollution by exploiting the behaviour of tiny life forms, invisible to the naked eye, that have been around on our planet for billions of years.
Professor Somasundaran is obsessed with surfactants? Compounds that are the most important part of any cleaning agent.
They help break down, separate and disperse fats and oils.
So they're an important component of the chemical dispersants used to clean up spills.
He was convinced that he could find a surfactant made by nature that would be kinder to the environment.
So he started looking at microbes.
I am a believer that mother nature does it best.
And that is done using bio-surfactants.
They are produced by microbes.
So the question was can we use these bio-surfactants that are natural and benign? Is that essentially the advantage of using these bio-surfactants, that they are biodegradable? Biodegradable and environmentally compatible with the surroundings.
So Somasundaran and his team started the search.
After hours and hours looking down the microscope they made a discovery.
One particular microbe called Bacillus subtilis did something very special.
It produced an incredibly effective surfactant, a protein that formed a very tough film around the oil droplets and kept them apart.
So inside all of these droplets is oil? Absolutely.
Exactly what's needed to break up an oil spill.
We were really surprised to discover this shell that forms is so robust so that it will prevent a merger of droplets with each other and so dispersion will be stable for a long time so the microbes can do their job.
Micro-organisms have been keeping life going on this planet for billions of years.
Some of our greatest scientific achievements have come from our manipulation of these tiny and tireless creatures.
They've cured us of disease, they've provided us with fuel and now, for as long as we depend on oil, armies of these one-cell wonders could be released to help clean up the mess we always seem to leave behind.
At the start, we showed you how science is fighting to preserve the future of endangered animals.
Now a story of how we are defending another part of our natural world.
I grew up in the Midlands, in Leicestershire, and I learnt, as a boy, a lot about insects and birds and plants from hedgerows and meadows just like this.
But today, much has changed.
The meadows have been swallowed up by the city as population growth caused it to expand.
The hedgerows have been torn up as agricultural practices have changed, and in the world at large, global warming is beginning to bring in changes.
And all that means is that plants are in great danger.
In fact, in Britain it's now estimated that one species in five of plants is now in danger of extinction, and that applies worldwide.
But part of the solution to this terrible problem is provided by plants themselves.
Seeds, when you come to think about it, are truly extraordinary objects.
They're tiny capsules that enable a plant to travel through time.
Some, exactly like these, which come from a plant called Leucospermum, an African pincushion plant, were found in the Tower of London and brought here.
And when they came here, they were watered, treated properly, and after two or three hundred years, suddenly they sprouted.
And it's these which are the basis of what seems to me one of the most important of all conservation enterprises, the Millennium Seed Bank.
So far, the seed bank has collected nearly two billion seeds, saving more than 30,000 species.
Many come here, to these state-of-the-art facilities at Wakehurst Place in the south of England.
Paul Smith is the director of this ambitious but vital project.
We try to collect right across the spectrum, but we prioritise the most endangered species, the rarest species and those that we think are most useful to people.
Seeds come in almost daily, but there's lots to do before they're stored.
Today, a large shipment of seeds has arrived from Madagascar.
First, they're cleaned and dried for up to six months.
A sample is then X-rayed to check the seeds are properly formed and contain an embryo.
Those damaged by insects are discarded and the healthy ones are finally stored in glass containers at -20 degrees Celsius.
In this one room, there are a billion seeds.
The amount of variety of plants represented here is quite extraordinary.
But is this treatment working? Will these seeds be kept alive by these conditions? The plain fact is that nobody really knows.
It's a gamble.
But by testing the gases given off by the seeds, the seed bank can check that they're still alive.
The seeds that survive all this will only be of use if they can germinate.
So the bank is creating a set of growing instructions for future generations.
These are the Mongongo, which is a ten-metre tree from southern Africa, from the Kalahari desert.
And they're very like an almond.
They're a bit larger than an almond, but inside, the kernel is very high in protein content and oil content, very nutritious, so people make it into a porridge.
So what's the problem? The problem is, how do you germinate it? If you just pop it in the soil and you add water, nothing happens.
This species has evolved to gain a competitive advantage by shooting up immediately after fire goes through, and the trigger for that is smoke.
So we have to break the nut, cut the seed, and we have to smoke-treat it.
And the way that we do that is we use a smoke solution.
You can smell it.
It smells of smoke.
- You can smell it.
It smells of smoke.
- Yeah! And we pop the nut in a flask and that will soak for 24 hours, and the chemicals in the smoke will break the dormancy and trigger germination.
Wonderful.
Really wonderful.
'It's possible that several hundred years from now, 'someone will germinate one of these Mongongo seeds 'and once again it will provide a vital food source.
' The seed bank is only here because we have destroyed so much of the natural world.
Part of me hopes that we will never need it.
But another part is thankful that it's here as the last resort.
The human species has conquered Earth.
But success has come at a price.
Our demands on the planet have created problems for generations to come.
As we have seen, science does have solutions.
We are in a race to ensure our future.
Next time: Biology and the power of life how bacteria is creating fuel This is a biodiesel produced from E.
coli.
The power of regeneration I see it moving now.
That's pretty impressive.
And unlocking the secrets of a long and healthy life.
Just by tweaking a few genes, we can really influence the ageing process.
Right now, men and women around the world are making amazing breakthroughs.
Are making amazing breakthroughs.
This is incredible.
Our team of leading scientists have chosen the discoveries they think matter most.
Whoa! An almost limitless supply of clean energy.
It's these which are the basis of one of the most important of all conservation enterprises.
From the car you will drive to medical advances that could save your life.
This miracle means that we can replace surgery.
On a journey that spans the jungles of Africa I'm here to join the hunt to find one of the biggest threats to human survival.
To the quads of Oxford.
This is arguably the most complicated thing in the universe.
We will show you how science is a force for good.
Prepare to see your future.
This is the beginning of that brave new world.
Tonight, we want to tell you how science is fighting to save our world.
Finding new ways to create energy, clear pollution, prevent solar disasters and preserve animal species in a 21st century Noah's Ark.
These are the discoveries that could secure the future of our planet.
Recently, this elephant made headline news.
She was being kept in horrific circumstances in a circus.
But then, she was rescued and now, well, she's old and she's arthritic but she's in much better, happier conditions here in Longleat Park.
So, how old is she? Between 57 and 60-years-old.
Elephants have the same kind of lifespan as we have.
We think she's probably the oldest elephant in Europe.
Was she born in captivity? No, she's actually from Sri Lanka.
She was brought over I think there was about 15 of them brought over from Sri Lanka back in the '50s and she's the last surviving one.
I've been lucky enough during my life to spend quite some time watching and filming elephants and I find it appalling to think that there might be a time coming when nobody will be able to see a wild elephant.
The fact of the matter is that these majestic, wonderful creatures are fast disappearing from the earth.
Hello.
Yes, yes.
Hello.
It's a lot more solid on her foot.
The cuticles are looking better.
Great big chunks coming away.
That's great.
Good girl.
That's great.
Good girl.
OK, good girl.
A vet is now taking a blood sample from this lovely old creature.
It will preserve genetic information that could last for hundreds if not thousands of years.
It's all part of a project to save the genomes of our most endangered creatures.
Part of a project called the Frozen Ark.
'Once the blood is taken, 'it must be processed and refrigerated quickly 'before it starts to clot.
'Contained within every one of the thousands of blood cells here 'is the entire blueprint for this Asian elephant's species.
' Anne is particularly interesting, in my opinion.
She's an Asian elephant, but we know she was wild caught in what was then Ceylon over 50 years ago so, the genetic provenance, if you like, is extremely good.
She's good material? She's good material? Absolutely.
I think she's fantastic.
Asian elephants, as a species, are important to the Ark and very unusual to come across an elephant that was wild caught.
We know exactly where she came from.
Well, she's a lovely animal.
The sample is whisked to London and the Frozen Ark stores in the Natural History Museum.
But as quickly as samples are collected, more species join the list of those in danger.
Extinction is a natural process.
99% of the species that have ever lived on earth are now extinct.
But never before in the history of life, has just one species been responsible for the extinction of so many others or in such a short period of time.
It was the threat of extinction that inspired the Frozen Ark.
In the 1960s, Ann Clarke went to the South Sea Islands to study snails.
Over 30 years, she saw over 100 species disappear, so, she set up this vital gene bank to tackle the problem.
The Frozen Ark has started.
What are your targets? 10,000 species or so are going to go extinct in the next 30 to 50 years and so, I suppose one could say that our targets are those 10,000.
But we are starting with the most endangered groups which are extinct in the wild.
Which, I suppose, is practical, but in an ideal world, we would ask biologists everywhere to do this tomorrow.
Absolutely.
So, we hope that this will become really a sort of last resort conservation effort.
If species extinction continues at its current rate, the work of the Frozen Ark will be even more critical.
The only link future generations may have to our rich diversity could be DNA preserved in liquid nitrogen.
Although science isn't yet capable of resurrecting an extinct species from frozen DNA, the possibility is not that remote.
Deep in the basement of the museum, the Ark's bio banks await the next delivery.
It's here that I add another vital sample.
So now, the DNA from that lovely elephant is safely preserved here where it will remain undamaged for centuries if not thousands of years.
Our ever-growing population places great demands on the planet.
But science is working to meet those demands.
Creating new ways to feed the world.
Like millions of farm animals around the world, these pigs exist for one only one purpose.
For us to eat them.
Around the globe, human beings consume around 250 million tons of meat a year and that could double by 2050.
All this meat-eating means livestock is quite literally taking over the planet.
Currently, we use around a third of the world's land for livestock production.
We're exhausting our resources trying to produce meat, and it's only getting worse.
So imagine for a moment a world in which meat is produced without having to breed it, rear it, feed it or kill it.
A world in which meat is produced in tiny little plastic dishes.
Science fiction? Maybe not.
I'm Mark Evans, and as a vet, I've done a lot of work on animal welfare.
So the idea of lab-grown, or in vitro meat is intriguing.
And it's been around since the start of the last century.
Winston Churchill boldly predicted in 1931 that science would soon be able to create a chicken breast without a chicken.
And when we got into space, NASA pursued the idea of artificial meat as a way of feeding astronauts on long missions.
Now it's scientists here in Holland who are leading the artificial meat revolution with nothing more than a few cells, collagen and squares of Velcro.
I'm meeting the man at the frontier of this new science, Dr Mark Post, a specialist in tissue engineering at Maastricht University.
The process of creating in vitro meat starts with a small biopsy taken from a live animal.
The cells are tiny, and they need to grow out of these muscle cells so you need to cut it first, in very small pieces.
Then treat it with an enzyme so that the texture becomes looser, and you can let the cells grow out.
These are the cells that if we have an injury of our muscle, will actually repair, and that principle we use to grow muscle in the lab.
What you're doing is damaging the muscle fibre cells to start the stem cells doing their work, and they will then grow new muscle fibre cells out of the damaged one.
Exactly.
The cells are then cultured by adding them to a medium of nutrients, amino acids and lipids that kick-starts their growth.
Each cell doubles every 18 hours, and after two weeks, the results are pretty impressive.
This dark outline here is the original muscle fibre cell.
Right.
And they've now divided into every one of these structures here is a separate cell? Yeah.
Right now, we can make them to double 20 times, which means that one cell becomes a million cells.
And if we improve that, theoretically we can go up to 50 times or maybe even higher, and then you can create an enormous amount of cells from one single cell.
At this stage, though, the cells aren't formed together like meat.
The next step in the process is to seed them in a collagen gel which should cause the cells to organise into muscle fibre.
Or that's the theory.
This Petri dish has just come out of the incubator at 37 degrees.
And when it went in, each one of the six wells in it contained a million chaotically organised stem cells.
I've been promised that there is now a dramatic change.
So I'm on low power at the moment, but when you wind the power up, this is when it gets exciting.
That's incredible! What's happened is that these chaotically organised cells have somehow managed to line themselves up, so they're kind of running parallel now and they're starting to produce muscle fibre cells.
Muscle that has been nowhere near a farm, it's been created by stem cells in a Petri dish.
It's not clear why the cells are organising themselves like this, but it seems to be with the way they bind to the collagen similar to the way that fresh scar tissue shrinks.
That is really remarkable.
It's definitely meat, but not as we know it.
This product could play a huge part in satisfying our hunger for more and more meat.
That's if we actually eat it, of course.
These small pieces of tissue we can already make right now as it has already an animal protein content that is 70%, which is more than the regular sausage that we buy, so this can be processed into processed meat.
Have you tried it? I haven't tried it but a Russian reporter who came by a couple of months ago tried it, and he confirmed that it doesn't taste like meat yet.
Are you not tempted to try it? Not really.
This whole process is still in a scientific phase and these are experiments.
And people work hard on getting scientific questions answered through these experiments.
And then I'm going to eat it for no particular reason other than to satisfy my very simple non-scientific curiosity of how does it taste.
Of how does it taste.
But it's a critical factor, isn't it? This is going to go nowhere, and will just become a piece of scientific history unless that thing has the flavour, the texture, the taste the market demands.
There is very little known about what defines the taste of meat.
So that's one of the scientific outcomes, if you wish, of this project, that we can, step by step, define what determines the taste of this meat product.
One way Dr Post is looking at to improve taste is to add fat and iron.
Another challenge he faces is bringing down the cost of production it's still very expensive.
But one wealthy American businessman has seen the potential and is investing in the next leap forward.
Next year we are going to try and make a hamburger, and it's going to be a 250,000 euro hamburger.
How confident are you that that's possible to get from here to a recognisable hamburger, that presumably tastes like a hamburger in 12 months? I'm reasonably confident.
Apparently convincingly enough to get financing for it! Scientists here in Holland seem pretty confident that sooner or later, possibly sooner, they will be able to grow burgers, sausages, even chops and steaks that are hard, if not impossible, to tell from the real thing.
It may be controversial, but in vitro meat certainly has the potential to make the world a better, healthier place, and it could happen if billions of us can be tempted to eat it.
The challenges facing us often seem daunting.
But science is constantly searching for ways to overcome them.
Next, a story of how we may be closer than ever to creating a new source of energy.
One that has the power of the stars.
Our modern world has a lust for energy.
We're consuming more and more of it each year, and the amount we're gobbling up is due to double by 2050.
We are burning our way through fossil fuels, renewable energy looks like it's not going to fill the gap and nuclear energy is again under the spotlight after recent events in Japan.
It all seems a bit hopeless.
But as a physicist, I know there's an alternative, an almost limitless supply of clean energy, almost no pollution.
Too good to be true? Well, I believe it's not that far off.
Since the 1930s, we've been trying to unlock the hidden energy bound up in the nuclei of atoms.
After the development of the atomic bomb, scientists worked to harness nuclear energy in a more controlled way.
A new landmark rises at Pleasanton.
It's the nation's first privately financed and operated atomic power plant.
Just behind me is the site of one of the earliest nuclear power plants.
It's decommissioned now, but when it operated it was on exactly the same principles as every nuclear power plant working today.
That's something called nuclear fission.
This is a tremendously brilliant source of energy, but it does have its drawbacks.
It relies on burning heavy metals like uranium, which are in limited supply and won't last for ever.
It produces dangerous, radioactive waste that needs to be dealt with, or at least buried in the ground for a very long time, and if released can be deadly.
But there's another way of unlocking the energy trapped within the atom and it's called nuclear fusion.
Unlike in fission where we split the nuclei of the very heaviest atoms like uranium, in fusion we combine the nuclei of the lightest atoms, like hydrogen.
This takes incredible temperatures and pressures, but when it works, it releases far more energy than we put in, much more even than in nuclear fission.
The thing is, it's going on above our heads every single day.
It's fusion that powers the sun.
For decades physicists have been trying to create controlled and sustained nuclear fusion.
Just down the road I'm going to visit a group of men and women who think they might be close to cracking it.
This is the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore laboratory in California, home to one of the most important scientific endeavours in the world.
They've a rather nifty piece of equipment at their disposal.
The world's largest laser.
That laser begins life as a tiny beam the thickness of a human hair.
Then over the course of three football pitches it becomes amplified in power 1,000 trillion times.
It's then divided up into 192 separate beams, which are then brought back in focus onto a pellet of fuel the size of a grain of sugar.
Bruno Van Wonterghem is the operations manager.
This is the core of the facility.
Here is where all the action starts.
Where the laser itself begins? Specifically in this room are where the laser pulses are born.
Believe it or not, the only laser in this facility is located right here behind that panel.
This is that initial tiny laser? Yes.
This tiny laser beam is split and amplified through almost a mile's worth of lenses.
The end result, not one, but 192 giant lasers.
These are the world's largest lasers and it's also the world's largest optical instrument.
These laser beams travel inside these tubes.
Each of these laser beams looks like this, 40 by 40 centimetres.
We have 192 of these beams.
Each of these beams is the world's most powerful laser by itself.
Each of these lasers is destined to fire onto a tiny fuel pellet with two types of hydrogen isotopes at its heart.
These pellets are prepared on site.
It's painstaking, precision engineering.
Even a flake of human skin could spoil the process.
So I've got to suit up.
Let me show you the capsule over here.
So, that's the capsule at the end.
Right.
A two millimetre diameter capsule.
Do you want to hold it? I'd love to hold it, yeah.
It's incredible to contrast the size of the facility with the lasers, everything focusing down to this tiny, little sphere.
The fuel pellet is tiny, but it's home is huge.
This 130 tonne structure is at the heart of the experiment.
It's a structure that's like a temple to the power of the atom.
It's the target chamber.
OK, we'll go right inside to the target bay.
So this is it? This is your star chamber? This is it.
This is the target chamber where in the centre we create a little star when we illuminate a little fuel pellet by 192 laser beams.
This is the most beautiful machine I think I've ever seen in my life.
That's three stories high just the blue target chamber itself.
Then you've got these massive arms beaming in the lasers.
Can we get to look inside the chamber? Yes, the viewing window allows us to look inside the vacuum chamber.
Here inside the chamber is where it all happens.
Here's where we have the target, right in the centre of this 10 metre diameter sphere.
The green light is beautiful.
It makes it seem as if magic is going on inside there.
The fuel pellet has to be placed in the dead centre of the target chamber.
Caught in the crosshairs of the lasers, the capsule and the hydrogen atoms implode in 20 billionths of a second, releasing a vast wave of energy.
Let me give you some numbers.
Over a trillion watts of power will be focused on the tiny pellet.
The pressure it'll be under will be 100 billion atmospheres.
When the hydrogen fuel within the pellet reaches a density ten times the density of lead, and its temperature 50 million degrees, five times hotter than the core of the sun, that's when the fuel ignites.
Fusion is initiated and the energy within the nucleus will be released.
The team have achieved the first target firing the lasers and hitting the pellet.
Now they face the big challenge, generating a fusion burn that releases more energy than it takes to set it off.
To do this, they need to get the pressure and temperature high enough to cause the nuclei of the atoms inside the pellet to fuse and released their energy.
It's a tall order, but they hope to achieve it in the next year.
Ed Moses is the principal associate director of this ambitious project.
If you found a way to make widespread, economical fusion energy it changes everything.
What is your fuel? Your fuel is the water in the ocean? How much do you need? A million people need a few hundred gallons per year.
The fuel you're using has no carbon in it, so it's not polluting.
It has no fission activity, so there's no long-term waste.
Your by-product is helium, a very small amount, but that's it.
You don't have geopolitics because all your energy, everyone can have it.
It's not a proliferate technology, you can give it to everyone.
And it does baseload electricity.
It would provide power for billions.
The way we live our lives, work and play depends on us producing enough energy.
Although we don't like to admit it, we're living on borrowed time.
We're consuming more energy, our supplies are running out.
Our whole way of life is under threat.
Well, nuclear fusion could change all that.
We have seen how science is tackling some of the man-made problems that face our planet.
There are also natural forces that threaten our existence.
Next is a story of how scientists are battling to protect us from the destructive forces of our sun.
Above the relative calm of our atmosphere there is trouble brewing.
An almighty clash? When the solar winds interact with the Earth's magnetic field, bringing a storm of electric matter, radiation, and fast-moving, high-energy particles.
All that activity is known as "space weather" and as a space scientist, I know how volatile and dangerous it can be, especially when an event like a solar maximum occurs.
That's when massive eruptions from the sun's surface send billions of charged particles into space, some of which reach the Earth.
Events like this don't happen all the time, but solar scientists say there's one just around the corner and it poses a major threat.
In previous centuries, great storms far above our heads didn't matter much.
But now we are very vulnerable.
Our world is dependent on a complex electrical network that could be devastated by a surge from space.
I'm Maggie Aderin-Pocock.
I build telescopes and satellites so I'm fascinated by what we can do to stop a solar disaster from happening.
I'm here to see someone from the Solar Dynamics Observatory.
I'm here to see someone from the Solar Dynamics Observatory.
Do you know where you're heading to? I think so.
I think so.
Have a good day.
I think so.
Have a good day.
Thank you.
That's why I've come here to NASA's Goddard Space Lab, where scientists are working to predict the next big event and to protect us from its effects.
Place one between the oscillator and the synthesiser They're getting data from a special satellite launched in 2010.
It provides a constant stream of data, including the most extraordinary images of the sun we've ever seen.
These are images of the sun in multiple wavelengths of light.
Starting over here we have visible light.
That looks familiar.
This is the sun you're familiar with.
It's just basically a boring yellow ball with some dark patches which are sun spots.
And then as we move this way, we go to ultraviolet light.
You see a bit more structure.
We'll move up to Slightly higher.
We'll skip this one for now.
This is extreme ultraviolet, the first of the extreme ultraviolet wavelengths.
Now we see the dark areas before are bright because now these areas are hotter than the rest of the sun.
NASA's satellite has allowed scientists here to view solar activity in remarkable detail.
OK, so what I want to show you now is a really amazing event that happened not too long ago, June 7th.
Whoa! Whoa! That's pretty amazing.
Whoa! That's pretty amazing.
That's quite scary.
If that's the sun, how big is that? If you put a quarter right by it, it's a little bit bigger than the Earth but that's about the size of the Earth.
So that's the Earth? So the matter falling out is many times bigger? Many times bigger.
Even though a lot of that material fell back on the surface, a good portion of it also escaped into space.
These events are known as coronal mass ejections.
When material from such an event heads to Earth, the consequences can be dramatic.
In a worst-case scenario, electromagnetic radiation would disable satellites.
The knock-on effect, disruption to crucial communication and navigation systems.
Electrical surges along power lines would melt transformers.
Cities would be plunged into darkness.
What you see here is an animation Fortunately there are NASA scientists like Antti Pulkkinen protecting us.
His analysis of coronal mass ejections provides an early-warning system.
So we can have a projection that there's a major coronal mass ejection, velocity say 2,000km per second, and our estimate is that it will impact the Earth one and a half days from now, OK? We feed this information to our power industry friends, and of course, if you don't deliver electricity in the power grid, there will be no impact.
So if you switch the system off while the coronal mass ejection passes, you're OK.
Ejections happen most frequently during a solar maximum.
The next one is predicted for 2013.
No-one knows just how disruptive it might be.
That's why NASA's research into how to forecast these events is so vital.
Some experts suggest that the damage caused by a major solar event could cost the global economy ?2 trillion.
Now I don't believe we will ever be able to tame the power of the sun and stop these events in their tracks.
But by using science to understand and predict them, we can at least prepare for the worst and hopefully stop a global catastrophe.
We are a planet addicted to oil.
In our search for new sources, we take risks that can lead to disaster.
So science is using the natural world to fight back when a catastrophe strikes.
I'm here in the Louisiana marshes on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico and it was here where one of the largest oil spills in history spewed out almost five million barrels of oil.
The oil flowed for months before it was stopped, by which time it had caused untold damage to this part of the world.
The scale of the pollution was vast as oil pumped directly from a pipe on the sea bed.
When it was time for the clear-up, the environment was hit again.
Over a million gallons of controversial chemical dispersants were used to break up the oil slicks at sea.
On shore, they had to remove the oil by digging up vast tracts of land.
Is this as bad as it gets? So this is definitely one of the hardest hit.
You can see the anchoring plants, the things that provide the foundation for the ecosystem, have died back.
Dr Michael Blum and Bree Bernick are biologists who have monitored the aftereffects of the disaster.
I see there are all these air guns lined up along the shore to scare away the birds.
Those propane cannons are supposed to keep the birds out of this entire area.
Have you seen an improvement, that it's somehow trying to recover from the devastation? You can see in certain areas that plants are regenerating.
It's hard to know if those roots are penetrating past any residual oil in the soil.
Which is still there.
In some places it is still there.
We'll have to wait and see what the long-term ecosystem effects are of introducing that much chemical dispersant into the Gulf of Mexico.
The threat of more oil spills hasn't gone away.
But when the next one happens, science may have a new way to confront the disaster.
Here in New Orleans, scientists have found a way of tackling the pollution by exploiting the behaviour of tiny life forms, invisible to the naked eye, that have been around on our planet for billions of years.
Professor Somasundaran is obsessed with surfactants? Compounds that are the most important part of any cleaning agent.
They help break down, separate and disperse fats and oils.
So they're an important component of the chemical dispersants used to clean up spills.
He was convinced that he could find a surfactant made by nature that would be kinder to the environment.
So he started looking at microbes.
I am a believer that mother nature does it best.
And that is done using bio-surfactants.
They are produced by microbes.
So the question was can we use these bio-surfactants that are natural and benign? Is that essentially the advantage of using these bio-surfactants, that they are biodegradable? Biodegradable and environmentally compatible with the surroundings.
So Somasundaran and his team started the search.
After hours and hours looking down the microscope they made a discovery.
One particular microbe called Bacillus subtilis did something very special.
It produced an incredibly effective surfactant, a protein that formed a very tough film around the oil droplets and kept them apart.
So inside all of these droplets is oil? Absolutely.
Exactly what's needed to break up an oil spill.
We were really surprised to discover this shell that forms is so robust so that it will prevent a merger of droplets with each other and so dispersion will be stable for a long time so the microbes can do their job.
Micro-organisms have been keeping life going on this planet for billions of years.
Some of our greatest scientific achievements have come from our manipulation of these tiny and tireless creatures.
They've cured us of disease, they've provided us with fuel and now, for as long as we depend on oil, armies of these one-cell wonders could be released to help clean up the mess we always seem to leave behind.
At the start, we showed you how science is fighting to preserve the future of endangered animals.
Now a story of how we are defending another part of our natural world.
I grew up in the Midlands, in Leicestershire, and I learnt, as a boy, a lot about insects and birds and plants from hedgerows and meadows just like this.
But today, much has changed.
The meadows have been swallowed up by the city as population growth caused it to expand.
The hedgerows have been torn up as agricultural practices have changed, and in the world at large, global warming is beginning to bring in changes.
And all that means is that plants are in great danger.
In fact, in Britain it's now estimated that one species in five of plants is now in danger of extinction, and that applies worldwide.
But part of the solution to this terrible problem is provided by plants themselves.
Seeds, when you come to think about it, are truly extraordinary objects.
They're tiny capsules that enable a plant to travel through time.
Some, exactly like these, which come from a plant called Leucospermum, an African pincushion plant, were found in the Tower of London and brought here.
And when they came here, they were watered, treated properly, and after two or three hundred years, suddenly they sprouted.
And it's these which are the basis of what seems to me one of the most important of all conservation enterprises, the Millennium Seed Bank.
So far, the seed bank has collected nearly two billion seeds, saving more than 30,000 species.
Many come here, to these state-of-the-art facilities at Wakehurst Place in the south of England.
Paul Smith is the director of this ambitious but vital project.
We try to collect right across the spectrum, but we prioritise the most endangered species, the rarest species and those that we think are most useful to people.
Seeds come in almost daily, but there's lots to do before they're stored.
Today, a large shipment of seeds has arrived from Madagascar.
First, they're cleaned and dried for up to six months.
A sample is then X-rayed to check the seeds are properly formed and contain an embryo.
Those damaged by insects are discarded and the healthy ones are finally stored in glass containers at -20 degrees Celsius.
In this one room, there are a billion seeds.
The amount of variety of plants represented here is quite extraordinary.
But is this treatment working? Will these seeds be kept alive by these conditions? The plain fact is that nobody really knows.
It's a gamble.
But by testing the gases given off by the seeds, the seed bank can check that they're still alive.
The seeds that survive all this will only be of use if they can germinate.
So the bank is creating a set of growing instructions for future generations.
These are the Mongongo, which is a ten-metre tree from southern Africa, from the Kalahari desert.
And they're very like an almond.
They're a bit larger than an almond, but inside, the kernel is very high in protein content and oil content, very nutritious, so people make it into a porridge.
So what's the problem? The problem is, how do you germinate it? If you just pop it in the soil and you add water, nothing happens.
This species has evolved to gain a competitive advantage by shooting up immediately after fire goes through, and the trigger for that is smoke.
So we have to break the nut, cut the seed, and we have to smoke-treat it.
And the way that we do that is we use a smoke solution.
You can smell it.
It smells of smoke.
- You can smell it.
It smells of smoke.
- Yeah! And we pop the nut in a flask and that will soak for 24 hours, and the chemicals in the smoke will break the dormancy and trigger germination.
Wonderful.
Really wonderful.
'It's possible that several hundred years from now, 'someone will germinate one of these Mongongo seeds 'and once again it will provide a vital food source.
' The seed bank is only here because we have destroyed so much of the natural world.
Part of me hopes that we will never need it.
But another part is thankful that it's here as the last resort.
The human species has conquered Earth.
But success has come at a price.
Our demands on the planet have created problems for generations to come.
As we have seen, science does have solutions.
We are in a race to ensure our future.
Next time: Biology and the power of life how bacteria is creating fuel This is a biodiesel produced from E.
coli.
The power of regeneration I see it moving now.
That's pretty impressive.
And unlocking the secrets of a long and healthy life.
Just by tweaking a few genes, we can really influence the ageing process.