experience and explore fascinating for its cultural heritage sites. d w world heritage three sixty get the. railing to read. up everyone who loves books has to go insane. t.w. literature list british must reads. hello and welcome to tomorrow today the science show on t w coming up. we'll find out how chicken feathers can be turned into bio plastic. investigate the fruits of an alliance between plants and robots.

and explore hydrogen's potential as a sustainable energy carrier up tomorrow. but first we'll head to the final frontier. in the hollywood movie gravity exploiting satellite daybreak nights with a space ship with disastrous results. and accident that dramatic hasn't happened in real life but waste all this india is a growing problem since the first satellite was launched in one nine hundred fifty seven thousands more have followed many are now derelict but still circling earth along with other space junk that poses a danger also for the international space station.

march twenty twelve four hundred kilometers above the earth's surface the crew aboard the i ask that suddenly receive an alert a red late conjunction something is on a possible collision course by controllers standing by here and to be fucking to. separate from an old satellite is bearing down on the station. mission control orders the crew to evacuate to a capsule that serves as an escape craft but then your. part of that sort of. the danger has passed this time a piece of the old cosmos two two five one a russian satellite missed the i assess by a few kilometers but the space station's crews strangest to close calls like this its windows and exterior walls bear the scars of less life threatening encounters space might be vast and launching the empty but in all cosmic neighborhood it's

clogging up with lives out there right now called a million pieces of potentially dangerous space junk orbiting the planet. they include decommissioned satellites and even larger objects like components from spent rockets british sound designer nick ryan has developed an audio based system that identifies and localizes space junk most of the debris is tiny but the speed at which it's traveling makes it a force to be reckoned with. even the size of a flock of paint its. satellites or the international space station called for birds. it can cause. catastrophic damage it threatens our infrastructure and us because we were launching a century satellites and weather satellites and. the space debris is currently threatened. all of the search. and each impact has the potential to unleash

a cascade as the amount of deadly grows so does the frequency of collisions between bits of junk this could eventually produce a nearly impenetrable cloud of it enveloping our planet if we want to continue sending up new rockets we need to start cleaning up this one has supplies for the i s s on board and also a small satellite called simply remove debris once it arrives the station's crew prepared the satellite for a special mission the first attempted clean up operation in outer space profess a good game or a yeti and his team at the start we space center in england are tracking the mission they designed the space junks we. look to be you to be able to speak to the future we really have to start the new clean up the i s s releases the removed debora

a satellite that contains the suite of instruments that will be deployed to grab space junk. back on earth its systems worked well but things might go very differently up here. the first test begins the satellite releases a small box into space then seeks to recapture is the live video feed shows how the space dredger casts its nets. and they snare the mock dead really is captured in one fell swoop. the thing that struck me was i've i've been a fan of space for so many years but i've never seen anything like that i'm incredibly proud of this actually and you say realize this is a world first you know it's never ever been done before to be involved with something like that is really incredible. remove debris is set. to test

a number of cleanup techniques in the months to come it's other equipment includes a retractable harpoon but what happens next will the satellite itself turn into a drifting chunk of space junk. to be a bit strange of a mission the technology for removing debris at the end the produces some of the results we're going to clean everything after this mission. the final experiment will be for the sweeper satellite to destroy itself that involves deploying a large drag sail that should cause its orbit to decay until it enters the atmosphere the satellite and its junk will burn up on re-entry. getting there but i think when you want to do this mission and for example remove some of the old southern us that are no longer working and then with your few dollars they're not really big the missions are going to be more expensive and clearly you have to convince all the various the calders to fund these kind of

missions i think is a similar thing like with the autumn everybody agrees yes it's a good idea to try to please but who's going to be fun. and when the little litter picker does come to a fiery demise it'll look like any other shooting star as it takes its final plunge into the atmosphere. your screen goes dark no more tomorrow today your cell phones and sat nav don't work either without satellites every day life would be very different. there'd be no weather forecasts with repercussions for farmers one way or another we need satellites treated at oh i had a question about that. what's the usual distance between satellites. artificial satellites have been launched for more than sixty years and there are currently around two thousand of them orbiting the globe at differ. altitude still

pending on the job day two. most are in low earth orbit or early go at altitudes of up to two thousand kilometers in the lower part of this region are satellites that monitor the earth the international space station also orbits in this. medium earth orbit or m.e.d.o. accommodates satellites at distances of two thousand to thirty five thousand kilometers from mars this region of space is frequented by navigation satellites. the next level at just under thirty six thousand kilometers is for satellites in geostationary orbit satellites here follow the direction of the earth's rotation they're typically used for telecommunications including global television broadcasts each geostationary satellite is assigned to a box around a hundred kilometers wide the distance to the next box is around five hundred kilometers. geostationary satellites have

a habit of drifting out of orbit due to factors such as the earth's uneven gravity distribution. once a geostationary satellite reaches the end of its mission or has become redundant it can end up in a graveyard orbit this is located two to three hundred kilometers above its operational altitude. nonetheless the space junk that has accumulated over the decades remains a problem the problem is red white but only if you. do you have a science question that you've always wanted oncet with happy to help out send it to us as a video text ovoid smell if we answer it on the show we'll send you a little surprise as a thank you can i just ask. you to find as i did have a dot com slash science all drop us a line at d w underscore site tech. on facebook.

here on earth we also have a waste problem and plastics. body great plastic made from renewable resources could be a tentative but that would. resources. the plastics innovation. chemistry. industry making. now he wants to develop eco friendly. new materials should be recyclable and bio based but they should not.

use up. so this is not sustainable. something that's widely available. could prove to be part of the solution. to give credit eight million dollars. forty five million dollars locally. to make new plastics. easy to achieve renewable biodegradable product a circle. that his colleagues have come up with some potential products made from. first. films out of the material and some of them are very flexible let's look at

one. as if it's really like a plastic film that you can pull and stretch. well now we want to see how we can do it better and optimize the manufacturing process. of. the. chicken feathers are made up mainly of the protein keratin the rest. keratin is also found in hair. nails. and lids provide structural stability. keratin has both water repellent and water attracting properties making it ideal for use in all sorts of polymer. the feathers a ground up the fat is extracted in several steps using bio based chemicals.

from feathers to carrots and powder. to plastic granular to a product that's not yet quite ready to market. we can certainly use it as an as an ice cream but it will function also at very low temperature but at the moment this product is very flexible as you can see so it will not work perfectly so we need to optimize these properties and that's what we do research for. and if that works out then the humble chicken feather could end up helping to solve the world's plastic problem. let's hope it works we produce a staggering three hundred million tons of plastic every year. to give you an idea of how much that is if you loaded it all into a truck convoy it would circle the planet three times over. well it was what do

you do to reduce plastic waste. romeo take out doesn't use plastic bags or straws it takes bags with them when you go shopping and tries to use paper or other natural materials. such as dimitri avoids plastic water bottles and uses refillable and a million bottles instead it's a start at least. question of sido feels that individuals can't make much of a difference and that it's up to governments to phase out the use of plastic. gloves chevys says that casting manufacturers should be regulated to reduce plastic production thanks for your comments. plastic is controversial but of course it's extremely versatile no wonder scientists are hard at work developing bioplastics. architecture to was looking for more sustainable raw materials what if we could build our homes not with bricks or

concrete but out of living growing plants. would is one of the oldest building materials in the world trees and certain other plants have a property that distinguishes them as a source of building materials they grow. in humid forests in northeast india tree roots have been trained intended sometimes over a period of centuries to form bridges they are living structures. if you built a steel bridge in that climate it would soon rust and become unstable for its load capacity would decrease. but with the living roots you get the opposite effect it grows bigger stronger and anywhere in ten is repaired by thing new roots that grow up. with. the idea of

a living structure fascinates heiko hammond he's not a gardener but robotics expert and he heads a project called the flora robotic and. his team in lubec studies and develop symbiotic relationship between robots and plants here red and blue lights are set up to steer plants. the robotic sensing and control elements help reduce living architectural structures. we're building an autonomous system distributed robotic system that can independently change the direction plants grow and. no one had tried this before so we had to do a lot of the basics. to find out what kinds of sensors really work and how bright the area delight's need to be. is sign we have to do a lot of technical engineering well to get it up and running. and so.

sensors measure distance to a plant it's growth if it's supposed to change direction the light source moves. blue light attracts the plant. by dosing the color the robotic elements control the direction in which are climbing plant grows. the right these braided structures are the basis for more complex architectural forms. the braves are created by robots as lightweight scaffolding on which the plants will later grow and take over. a special grading technique was developed for the project to enable plants to be deployed flexibly. india has lots of the idea is to make architecture with such a braided structures we can actually simulate anything we can build a classical rectangular house but we can also make roof structures. we

can also change the properties of the material by getting the plants to grow through here to stiffen it. and that makes it interesting for architecture. to. develop sensors for floor robotics. they measure all the data that indicate how a plant is doing and what it needs carbon dioxide nutrients light. one surprising result of the research has been how sensitive plants are. they sense not only physical contact but even the wife in the room. and plants are surprisingly smart if they're exposed to moderately bright light and the sensor is connected to a kind of demmer they will control their light supply on their own. not first nothing much happens the average value is fairly steady then after

a certain time two or three days this average value starts to oscillate up and down . the light varies between bright and the plant create its own day night rhythm. one thing we discovered working on this project is that plants are capable of learning from experience. in lubec data from the sensors is fed into robots the more precisely the scientists can gauge a plant's needs the more precisely they can control its growth. this swarm of tiny robots learns how much light is needed and looks for places where the plants can get it. eventually they will act as guides for the plants showing them the way other robots will break climbing

frames for them. on duncanson and so they could interact with the plants leading them along a particular path with blue light. giving them red light to keep them away from darker place is simple to understand them and us and the researchers have already developed concrete procedures using plant machine interactions but their green architecture remains a distant dream. i think it will take a couple of decades for us to get that far first we have to do the basics that's where we are now. we've done that the next step is to gradually develop a product and that will take some time. as for. women time comes all the plants will need to do is grow. solar and wind energy is sustainable but not always available it needs to be stored

what kind of virginia could help it's plentiful in water and in combine form in all living things now a team of researchers has found a way to use it for any of the storage. in much of the world when the lights go on at night the electricity that powers them comes from coal fired power plants but burning fossil fuels produces c o two which contributes to global warming. so why don't we get power from sunlight and wind there's lots of it and that's better for the climate. but there is a drawback it's dark when we turn the light on the sun has gone down and it might be windy but it might not be and. so we need to be able to store solar and wind energy and that can be

a tricky business. these researchers are working on solutions. but i mean. basically there is enough energy in the world and the sun supplies us with more energy than we even need for this energy isn't necessarily available at the right time and in the right place that means we need an efficient energy storage and transport solution and we found one that you would lose on the phone. but haven't the solutions been around for ages what about storage batteries well they don't have a lot of capacity even though they're big. a six hundred kilo battery in an electric vehicle can only store the energy equivalent of ten meters of gasoline so what alternative energy carriers are there. with hydrogen is an excellent carrier because it can be regenerative really obtained from water

because it can then react with oxygen to form water so there's no carbon dioxide production and no damaging emissions i know sort of miss on. the advantage of hydrogen is that it's clean hydrogen gas produces only water vapor when it burns even so it hasn't been used for energy storage all that much because it takes up a lot of space. getting a hydrogen balloon down to a manageable size requires either enormous pressure or very low temperatures. that makes hydrogen a problematic potential energy carrier especially for use in cars. village of the bubble or. more in terms of mobility the future is liquid. all the fuels used in the field of mobility are liquid so we convert hydrogen into a liquid fuel. the trick is to chemically react the hydrogen with another compound to make

a liquid then it can be transported and stored as easily as gasoline or diesel. in canisters tanks pipes tanker trucks rail wagons and ships. sounds good but how do the three researches do it. they take hydrogen gas and use a chemical catalyst to help it react with a compound called di benz will tolerate or d.p.t. . tonally is a nontoxic liquid that binds large amounts of hydrogen. the hydrogen rich form of d.v.d. can be transported and pumped like gasoline but while gasoline is a hazardous material by bands all taller wayne is non-flammable. really extracting hydrogen in order to use it as fuel requires another catalyst a lot of research went into bits the process was first tested on a small scale in the lab. the hydrogen was bound to the dye pencil tolling then

split off and channeled into a fuel cell to make electricity. now the process works on a large scale in this outdoor container it can be deployed anywhere where there's excess energy to be stored as hydrogen or where hydrogen fuel is needed. the d.p.t. functions like a deposit bottle it can be filled up with hydrogen in places where there's lots of solar and wind energy available to make the hydrogen then it can be transported to wherever energy is needed the d.p.t. releases. hydrogen and is then available for another filling back where the sun is shining. in about flight performance i'm confident that in future hydrogen will play a major role in our energy system and we will see global trade in renewable energy equivalents there will be hydrogen mobility i'm also confident the bound hydrogen which is what we are working on will also play

a major role by nick was abolished. hydrogen tomorrow's energy carrier using today's infrastructure. that's it for today next time we take a look at what's going on in the brain when you're having a lucid dream so when you're aware that you're dreaming it's a technique you can actually learn with the help of virtual reality for example. that and more on the next edition of tomorrow today.

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