tragedy. the solution to all this is not the kind of freedom that we want. how did it become a great way to islamist terror. until now this sorry gun animosity has. an exclusive report from a destroyed city. philippines in the sense of virus starts. on d w. two. 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 exploding satellite daybreak collides with a spaceship with disastrous results. an accident that dramatic hasn't happened in real life but waste orbiting the earth 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.

manch twenty twelve four hundred kilometers above the earth's surface the crew aboard the i asked that suddenly receive. a red late conjunction something is on a possible collision course flight controllers standing by here in the middle of the refund 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 there. 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 strangers to close calls like this its windows and exterior walls bear the scars of less life threatening encounters space might be vast and largely empty but in our cosmic neighborhood it's clogging

up with lists of never overhauled 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 flat paint its. satellites or the international space station god forbid. it can cause. catastrophic damage it threatens our infrastructure on us because we were. satellites and weather satellites and. the space debris is currently threatening all of our infrastructure. and each impact

has the potential to unleash a cascade as the amount of debt we 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 removed debris once it arrives the station's crew. repair 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 summary space center in england are tracking the mission they designed the space junk sweeper. live to be you to be able to space in the future we really have to start the new clean up the i s s releases the removed debora a satellite it contains

a 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 began the satellite releases a small box into space then seeks to recapture it the live video feed shows how the space dredger casts its nets. and they scenario the mock devry is captured in one fell swoop. the thing that struck me was i have 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 on the recruitment

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 look initially at this there's the technology for removing debris at the end the produces some the results we're going to clean everything after this mission. the final experiment will be for the sweeper samsonite to destroy itself that involves deploying a large. drag sail that should cause its orbit to decay until it enters the atmosphere will the satellite and it's 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 satellites that are no longer working and they wait you know a few dogs that you know really big the missions are going to be more expensive than 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 ocean everybody agrees yes it's a good idea to try to please but who's going to be fun. and when the little little pika does come to a fiery demise it'll look like any of the 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 families one way or another we need satellites treated at zero have yet 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 different altitudes depending on the job they do. most are in low earth orbit or early zero 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 and. medium earth orbit or amnio accommodate satellites at distances of two thousand to thirty five thousand kilometers from mars and this region of space is frequented by navigation satellites. the. exploitable at just under thirty six thousand kilometers is for satellites in geostationary orbit seven lights 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 if our love is right why don't you. do you have a science question that you've always wanted answered it we're happy to help out send it to us as a video text over smell if we answer it on the show we'll send you a little surprise as a thank you can i just ask. to find a dot com slash sign or drop us a line at t w underscore site tech on facebook d w dot science.

here on earth we also have a waste problem and plastics make up a big part of it. biodegradable plastic made from renewable resources could be a sustainable alternative but that would also gobble up our natural resources it's enough scientists might have found a solution. but you can see. this for my prairie in this town a. purposed and now houses the plastics innovation competent center. director has a ph d. in chemistry he worked in industry making plastics for more than thirty years now he wants to develop eco friendly alternatives. the new materials should be recyclable and bio based but they should not use corn or

other food stuffs as a starting material. need to have. resources we can just continue to use up what is there and then throw it away or burn it so this is not sustainable. something that's widely available and usually just thrown away could prove to be part of the solution. to give credit to eight million songs in europe forty five million dollars globally but that's the crowbar to make new plastics large volumes easy to achieve renewable biodegradable product for a circular called. colleagues have already come up with some potential products made from chicken feathers. have made our 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 is. character and is also found in hair. nails. and let's provide structural stability. keratin has both water repellent and water attracting properties making it ideal for use in all sorts of polymer first the feathers a ground up the fat is extracted in several steps using bio based chemicals.

from feathers to carrot 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 if 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 trucks a convoy circled the planet three times over. the following what do you do to

reduce plastic waste. it would take doesn't use plastic bags so 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. gladys chavez 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. wood 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 human 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 and is repaired by the new roots that grow. 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 are. his team in lubec studies and developed symbiotic relationship between robots and plants here red and blue lights are set up to steer plants. the robotic sensing and control elements helped produce 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 and. the assailant 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 a climbing plant grows. these braided structures are the basis for more complex architectural forms. the brains are created by robots as lightweight scaffolding on which the plants will later grow and take over. in a special grading technique was developed for the project to enable plants to be deployed flexibly. this is not india's last 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. and 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 at. 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 loopback data from the sensors is fed into robots the more precisely the scientists can gauge of plants 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 duncan's enough that they could interact with the plants leading them along a particular pathway of blue light. giving them red light to keep them away from darker place is simple to understand and anger since 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'll take some time. when the 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 it conjured in 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 energy 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. and 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's 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 could use any good reason before. but haven't the solutions been around for ages what about storage batteries well they don't have a lot of capacity even though that 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 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. last. twenty. 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.

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 die denzel tunnelling for d.d.t. . die pencil tolerate is an 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 talo in is non-flammable. really extracting hydrogen in order to use it as fuel requires another catalyst a lot of research went into this the process was first tested on a small scale in the lab. the hydrogen was bound to the dye benzo talo in 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 is excess energy to be stored as hydrogen all 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 that releases. hydrogen and is then available for another filling back where the sun is shining. in about floyd the former i'm confident that in future hydrogen will play a major role in our energy system and we will see global trade and renewable energy equivalence there will be hydrogen mobility i'm also confident about 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 dream it it's a technique you can actually know with the help of virtual reality for example. that and more on the next edition of tomorrow today.

isolated. dirt poor. and a nuclear power. north korea. but who supplies the country with its expensive nuclear technology and who's behind kim jong il in the shadowy financial system the system is set top like it's the dictators men tell all.

in seventy five minutes on w. . it's time to take one step further. than face. time you're up just such the up. and the fight for the troops. time to overcome down trees as connecticut. it's time for. indeed everything is coming up ahead. mines small killing spree are the changes. the people making it possible eco africa. fantastic right tried that as they set out to safety environment. learn from one another. and work together for

a bit. see for yourself comfort. w. . africa. paul kagame a new president of rwanda at the end of the london patriotic front to include tiny the rebel army and in the one nine hundred ninety four genocide wasn't when little in the router's it was and when it was given me to reinforce it because of the new news but does that mean he was not floating in a group. controversial leader whose success is beyond question. time. wanted tragedy starts people fish on t w.

this is the news live from berlin turkey's president suffers a blow in local elections the opposition is celebrating as it gains control of the capital ankara the commercial capital istanbul looks set to follow what does this all mean for president care to want and the future of the country we'll get the latest also coming up. it's no laughing matter.