Ooh.
Ha-ha!
Ooh!
Ha-ha-ha-ha!
ALARM CLOCK RINGS
Hello viewers, and welcome to my World Of Invention -
the show that irons the jeans of genius
and keeps you connected with kinetics.
Someone once said, "Necessity is the mother of invention."
Well, not necessarily.
Today, we're looking at inventions with another mother altogether,
Mother Nature.
We'll be seeing how she's provided inspiration
for many a delightful discovery.
Such as the robot that thinks it's a venus flytrap.
Eight dead flies
makes it work for 12 days.
And my science correspondent, Mr Jem, proves a dab hand
at breathing underwater, thanks to an artificial gill.
I'm doing it, breathing air that's been pumped out of water.
And we'll be meeting Mr Theo Jansen, a man who makes
perambulating pets out of plastic tubing.
Oh, yes. He does, you know!
But first... ELEPHANT TRUMPETS
Shh. Quiet, Kevin.
ELEPHANT TRUMPETS
Some machines you might think rather fishy.
Over to you, Ashley m'dear. Why, thank you.
I'm sure you'll agree, Wallace, that Mother Nature
is the best inventor of them all.
She's been perfecting designs for about four billion years or so.
Whether it's a super-extendable tongue for catching bugs,
or elastic tendons for extra jumping power,
or one bizarrely long finger for getting a bit of grub,
Mother Nature is the ultimate engineer.
A German technology company has decided to make the most
of nature's great talent for original design.
The team here at Festo is turning marine biology into machinery.
Their inspiration comes from this spectacular sea creature,
the manta ray.
They are very energy efficient, they are agile
and they can manoeuvre very easily.
So how do they turn the grace and agility of the manta ray
into high-tech engineering?
Well, they copied the internal structure of its fin
to come up with this, a fin-gripper.
It's so flexible, you can use it to make a robotic hand so sensitive
that it can pick up easily bruised fruit and veg.
But the engineers have come up with a more dramatic use
of this fin technology - meet the radio-controlled manta ray airship.
We have here the "fin ray" structure.
We move it up, turn it,
and then move down.
Turn it, and move up.
And it's like birds are flying
or even if a manta ray is swimming in the water,
it's the same behaviour.
With its ray-like wings and tail fin,
the Air Ray can twist and turn as nature intended.
This is not just an executive toy.
With some natural inspiration, we can create flying machines
without noisy, gas-guzzling engines or big swirling propellers.
The Air Ray just needs helium to give it buoyancy.
But controlling its fins requires an extra set of hands.
Couldn't do that in air-traffic control.
Perhaps air-traffic control may one day be a thing of the past.
Studying penguins under water has inspired the technology
that these are testing.
They move without bumping into each other or their surroundings.
Even a mechanical penguin is happier in the water.
The artificial fin technology lets them move smoothly and silently -
a perfect vehicle to observe marine life with minimum disturbance.
But how nice would it be to have a couple of low-flying penguins
gently following you around?
Ooh. And Ray and Gunta can come, too.
That all went swimmingly.
Anyway, here's a young lad who brings a new meaning to the old saying, "time flies".
Yes, Wallace, time flies.
And sometimes, flies can be time.
Let me explain. Take this clock, for example.
You never need to change batteries or plug it in because it gets energy
from eating these things.
Design student James Auger is creating bizarre clocks and lamps
with an appetite for insects.
So where did James's ideas come from?
We looked at nature, specifically carnivorous plants.
They've got various methods for attracting insects,
then capturing them,
eventually consuming them to create energy.
It's in those organisms that we looked for inspiration.
The insect-munching plants that inspire James
live in soil that short of nitrogen.
They top up their diet with a bug or two.
This is the fly paper clock, inspired by the drosera family.
This plant has got a shiny surface.
Flies are attracted because they think they can get a drink.
Actually, it's sticky so the flies get stuck and they're consumed.
So we have a sheet of fly paper revolving around two rollers.
Flies get stuck to the fly paper, pass over the blade,
which scrapes them off into the fuel cell which generates electricity
to turn a motor powering the rollers and the clock.
But how does he turn a fly into a buzz of electricity?
The solution comes from inventive minds at Bristol robotics laboratory.
We want robots to get energy from the environment.
Animals have already cracked this problem because animals eat stuff.
They turn that stuff, biomass, into energy.
We want to get robots to turn biomass into electricity.
A robot powered by flies? That might just take off!
So, let's meet the fly-powered ecobot.
It's all thanks to something clever called a microbial fuel cell.
This is a microbial fuel cell.
We use bacteria and food.
The bacteria munch away on the food.
We steal the electricity, the electrons inside of the bacteria.
We manage to steal those electrons
and that electricity is what powers the robot.
Eight dead flies in the microbial fuel cells
makes it work for about 12 days.
Thanks to Professor Melhuish,
maybe one day this will be a renewable energy source.
Insects might be powering more than robots and clocks in the future.
There's never any shortage of flies.
Oh, yes!
We've been thinking about green energy, haven't we, lad?
Or should I say "greens" energy?
ELEPHANT TRUMPETS May I proudly present my jumbo generator! Ha-ha-ha-ha!
Kevin here takes the sprouts in one end
and after a few moments...
FARTING Thank you, Kevin.
He can produce enough gas to run the entire studio.
That's wind power for you!
Speaking of which, let's meet a man who uses wind
in an unusual but rather more tasteful way.
He's this week's Inventor Of The Week.
Come with me, Wallace, to a wind-swept beach in Holland.
This is home to an incredible creature
that only needs a slight breeze to spring into life.
My name is Theo Jansen.
We're here in Holland,
where I work every day and try to make new forms of life.
Which keeps me busy 24 hours a day.
I put them out on the beaches where they can live in the future.
They don't have to eat. They get energy from the wind.
Theo has been making his creatures for over 20 years
and is evolving such clever designs
that he hopes they'll leave home and live in the Dutch sand dunes.
Incredibly, his animal-like creatures are only made from PVC.
He's worked out how these pipes
used to cover electric wires, can become a curved foot,
a leg bone and a flexible, hard-wearing joint.
Inventing wind-powered creatures was never going to be plain sailing.
In 1991, he discovered the first of many problems.
The first challenge was walking.
The first leg was very complicated.
They had to be a very complicated system.
Then, the second generation came
and what I did was I combined the wheel with legs.
He came up with a way to build a rotating hip bone
and worked out all the different lengths of PVC legs he'd need
to turn a spinning hip bone into the perfect low-powered footstep.
This circular movement is transformed
to a complex movement here.
As soon as it has put its foot on the ground,
it draws a straight line and the animal stays on the same level.
Getting them to walk smoothly was the first step,
but his animals still needed their creator to get them going.
He had to pull them into the wind before they could scuttle back.
Theo didn't want to always have to pull his offspring.
So the next generation got a propeller.
Then to give them more power,
he borrowed nature's best wind design and gave them wings.
But, you might say, what if the wind stops blowing?
Would he have to come to their rescue? He's thought of that, too.
They can now capture and store wind in a stomach of plastic bottles.
The wings are not connected directly to the feet any more, but to pumps
that pump air into lemonade bottles.
You could say this is "pressed wind" and they can use this energy
in situations that the wind has fallen away on the beach and the tide would come up.
They have energy in their stomach to reach the dunes and save their lives.
Incredible stuff!
But before his beach-dwellers can live without their creator at hand,
they have another problem - they're not keen on taking a dip.
Big waves versus a light plastic body.
It's not going to end well.
So his new family have a water-detection system -
a tube to pick up signs of water
and PVC-built sensors that spring into action
and send his water-shy creatures back up the beach.
It feels the water.
This will be very important for the beach animals to survive.
Through hours of experimenting and trial and error,
Theo's designs are becoming more and more independent.
What I found about this experience of making new forms of life,
is that you discover the problems which the real creator must have had
creating this world.
These animals will survive on their own.
Like you raise your children and there comes a day
that you kick them out the door and they live their own lives.
Hopefully, they will survive a lot better than they do now.
Then I could die quietly, knowing that I will live on for the beaches.
# Bom-bom-bom Curiosity Corner. #
Oh, welcome to Curiosity Corner.
Oh, dear! Looks like a power outage.
Not to worry. This calls for power sproutage.
Load her up, lad.
ELEPHANT TRUMPETS
FARTS
Ah, there! That's better.
So, now, let's shine the spotlight on the humble termite,
and some rather clever creature construction.
Clever's the word, Wallace, because from the humble termite
we can learn a lot about how to build our own houses.
Termites live deep underground,
with up to two million living in one intricately designed nest
centred around a huge queen who can live for 45 years!
But they do get a rather bad press.
Mention "termite" to anyone from, say, Texas,
it's enough to strike terror into their hearts.
These miniature critters in less than five months can eat you out of house and home.
But here's the curious thing.
Termites don't just destroy houses. They build them, too.
Termite mounds.
These eight-metre-high towers are built out of sand and termite spit!
It seems that these structures can teach us about building.
Not the use of spit, but something else - air conditioning.
What you see here is a natural air-conditioning system.
Termites designed the structure with a labyrinth of tunnels
allowing old or stale or warm air out,
and new fresh air in.
The hot air from the nest rises and escapes out of the chimney.
It's such impressive engineering
that we've started to build termite-inspired buildings,
like Portcullis House in London, next to the Houses of Parliament.
It's full of MPs' offices, so it needs 14 tall chimneys
to get rid of all the hot air.
Termites also inspired this shopping centre in Harare, Zimbabwe.
They keep the insides cool when it's 40 degrees outside -
a whopping 90% energy saving.
Our termite-inspired buildings
let air blow in through holes in the walls,
but termite mounds don't need these large holes.
Their ventilation system is far more clever.
Construction engineer Rupert Soar is part of a team
unearthing just how smart those termites are at building.
..one, go!
In 2004, he went to Namibia
to discover exactly how their towers were put together.
'We started filling termite mounds with plaster of Paris or gypsum,
'the white material used for leg plaster casts.'
A couple of minutes and that will be set.
Then we built this enormous scanning machine
that we put over the mound.
Then we cut away 1mm at a time, taking away 1mm slices.
We literally photographed each of those slices,
looking down, seeing the structure.
We take the thousands of photographs
and reconstruct those into a full model
of the inside of a termite mound.
They discovered the insides are incredibly complex.
A network of fine tubes soaks up the energy of passing wind.
The flow of the wind pushes air through the porous soil,
allowing the nest atmosphere to mix with fresh air.
It's a gentle ventilation system for a cool fresh home without drafts.
Rupert and his colleagues are sure that we can copy these techniques
for incredible energy-efficient houses of our own.
We want to take that digital information from the termite mounds
then start to use the computer to grow skins and even whole walls
for buildings themselves.
We can use bricks that soak up energy from the wind
that keep our houses fresh and cool.
Houses that could look a bit like these.
Looks interesting. Just not sure where you'd put the bookshelves.
But then, I guess termites aren't bookworms.
Yeah. Clever little critters, aren't they?
SNIFFING People often ask me, what...
Hey! What's going on?
Kevin. Get out of my particulars.
Oh!
Oh. Um... Anyway.
My top five animal-inspired contraptions.
Let's see what my archive librarian Goronwy has got for us.
Right ho, Mr Wallace.
For this week's contraption countdown I've got five inventions
inspired by the animal kingdom.
It's these boxfish.
It's from these fish that we got the idea for boxes!
We'd have nothing to put things in and the world would be untidier.
What? Oh!
That's completely wrong! I'm sorry.
Boxfish have contributed to the design of motorcars.
Have they really? Well done, boxfish.
Who can guess what animal inspired this?
I'll give you a clue.
It's an elephant. Oh. I've given it away now.
They say elephants never forget.
I'm certain that real elephant won't forget this in a hurry.
This fantastic aquatic robot built by Professor Huosheng Hu.
It looks like a fish. It moves like a fish.
And it comes with chips.
Microchips, of course!
New technology. Old joke.
I'm not saying that the wheel was invented by this sausage dog.
The wheel has been around for ages. The wheel has always been a-ROUND!
And Hotspur here, who was born with paralysed back legs in 1936,
goes to show what human ingenuity and doggedness can achieve.
If you were inside a shark's skin it used to mean you'd just been eaten.
But not any more.
A swimming costume has been modelled on the skin of a shark,
which lets swimmers go faster.
Or you could just do what I do and let a real shark in the pool!
That'd make them go faster. Ho-ho. Brilliant!
Here's another item inspired by our fishy friends, artificial gills.
Don't hold your breath. They never got off the drawing board.
Thanks, lad. Mmm... Over to you, Mr Jem.
Thank you, Mr Wallace.
400 million years ago primitive life made the ultimate journey.
It crawled out of the sea to begin a new chapter of existence
on dry land.
Which is why it sometimes seems odd
that human beings now take every opportunity to get back in.
Dreams of deep-sea adventures are suffocated by one big problem.
Our lungs absorb oxygen from air.
We're not designed to take it straight from water.
Being a good inventor, nature solved the problem eons ago by giving fish gills.
Fish make it look so easy.
Their gills filter oxygen that's dissolved in the water.
Compared to fish, we're a bit of a damp squib.
But like so many things in nature, building an artificial version
has had inventors stumped for generations.
Early divers used long tubes from the surface to pump air down to the sea floor.
God knows how that felt!
Then in 1943, legendary marine explorer Jacques Cousteau
perfected his aqualung.
Divers could now take the air down with them and swim around freely.
When the tank runs empty, we've got to come to the surface.
To stay down forever, we need a way to mimic the fish
and use the air that's dissolved in the water to breathe.
And, believe it or not, this might not be as far off as you think.
Alan Badner from Haifa northern Israel
has spent nine years trying to get his underwater breathing invention
off the drawing board.
He's trying to extract breathable air from the water
so, one day, divers could stay underwater for as long as they want.
I knew there was oxygen in water. The fish use it for breathing.
So the only thing was how we can take this oxygen out and breathe it.
Fish are smarter. They can leave the oxygen in liquid form and breathe it like that.
We have to first convert the liquid oxygen into gas because our lungs need gas oxygen.
What's the ultimate aim? The aim now is for underwater habitats.
Maybe in the future, we'll make it small enough for individual divers.
Maybe in the future we'll all live underwater.
'For any of you who fancy living underwater, here's how Alan's invention works.'
If you've ever opened a bottle of pop,
you've probably seen the system work.
Fizzy drinks are made by dissolving gas into water.
The amount of gas water can hold depends on the pressure it's under.
These are under a fair bit.
If I release the pressure, the water won't hold as much gas and it'll come out as bubbles.
That's what Alan's doing.
He's reducing the pressure of the water
so the dissolved gas bubbles out.
Then he needs to collect the bubbles and quickly,
because we need a lot of air.
So, he makes a whirlpool.
All the bubbles migrate to the centre of the whirlpool.
The dense water is flung to the outside,
the bubbles migrate to the centre.
Alan then puts a pipe into that column of gas,
sucks it out for a fella to breathe.
In Alan's prototype machine, water is pumped through this pipe
into a plastic drum where it's put into a spin
which creates the whirlpool.
This is attached to a vacuum pump that sucks out oxygen-rich gas
and delivers it as a nice breathable mixture out of this pipe.
This lean, mean marine machine collects enough air from this pool
to keep someone breathing for 20 minutes.
To prove this is more than "fishful" thinking, he's becoming a human guinea pig.
Soon, Alan's machine has sucked a tankful of air from the water.
This is the moment of truth.
More people have walked on the moon
than breathed air extracted from water.
Let's see it. I'm so intrigued now.
Wow! Hi, there!
First...
Yeah. I'm just smiling.
I do. Yeah? Good with that? Right.
Next big question.
Yes, I do feel like a fish.
A fish in a fish tank, maybe. And, finally...
Sure. Come on. Really?
People have been wanting to do this and finally, I'm doing it,
breathing air that's being pumped out of water.
Alan's invention works.
Clearly, there's no way a diver can carry one of these on their back.
Our dreams of swimming like a fish are still on the drawing board.
Maybe one day, we'll never need to come up for air.
Alan? Alan!
Oh, Mr Jem!
All that floundering around. Still, I won't carp on.
ELEPHANT TRUMPETS Hold him steady, lad.
Finally... Oh, no! THUNDERING
He's after me buns.
Kevin. Bad boy! Sit!
Stay!
Oh, Kevin. That's blown it!
Well... That's it for this time.
Next week we'll be... FARTING
Oh, Gromit!
Gromit, have you got 50p for the meter?
If you've enjoyed our show,
log on to our website.
You'll find a fantastic competition, details of our roadshow
and lots of ways to get you inventing.
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