Transport of Tomorrow

The UK Met Office recently launched its space weather forecast centre to help protect us from the threat of severe space weather events. 

So-called solar storms begin as a sudden flash on the Sun's surface followed by a "coronal mass ejection" - a radioactive maelstrom of particles that surge out into space. If this hits the Earth it can damage satellites, knock out GPS systems and destroy power stations.

So how predictable are these events and what causes them? A team led by Tahar Amari at the Ecole Polytechnique near Paris has studied a previous one in detail and now they think they know.

Chris Smith has been looking at the study, published in the journal Nature, with Reading University solar scientist Chris Scott...

Chris S. -  One of the things that drives space weather are huge eruptions in the sun known as coronal mass ejections.  Each one of these is about a billion tons of material.  If one of this comes towards the Earth, it brings with it a magnetic field which can disrupt the Earth's magnetic field and lead to all kinds of consequences for our satellite and ground based infrastructure.  So, predicting when one of these mass ejections is going to erupt is really the holy grail of the science.

Chris -  What is frustrating our efforts to do that at the moment?

Chris S. -  Well, the sun's atmosphere is an incredibly complicated soup of electrified plasma that's churning around and generating very complex magnetic fields.  We know that something happens to reconfigure those magnetic fields, which allows the material to erupt from the surface.  Because it's so complicated, several mechanisms have been proposed as to which one would be the cause of such eruptions.

Chris -  Is that with prediction in mind?

Chris S. -  Exactly that, yes.  So, the Met Office called this ensemble forecasting.  You run them up many times with slightly different initial conditions.  And so, you can then get a probability of what it's like - in the weather forecasting terms, you can say, "60% chance of rain."  With this, you could look at the sun and the solar atmosphere and you can say, "Well, there's a 60% chance that a mass ejection will be erupted from this region."

Chris -  This new paper, what have they done and what does this add?

Chris S. -  So, in this one instance, it looks like they've actually been able to model, pretty successfully, the evolution of that magnetic field and this knot a material on the sun, and predict when it was going to erupt into a mass ejection.  The challenge is to go from this one observation where you have the benefit of hindsight and you can wind the clock back and you can wind it forward and you can hone your model to match the data.  Can you then do that to make a genuine prediction?  Can you observe these initial conditions and say how the solar atmosphere is going to erupt?

Chris -  How much of a threat are events like coronal mass ejections to the Earth?

Chris S. -  We have an increasing reliance on space infrastructure for navigation, for communications.  So, modern technology is becoming more vulnerable to the vagaries of these conditions in space.  We've only been really been measuring these things in space for the last 50 years or so and we know that the likelihood of a really major mass ejection is maybe once every hundred years or so.  So, anything that we can do to predict when they're going to come will enable us sort of batten down the hatches as it were.

Chris -  That was going to be my next question, Chris.  What could we do about it?

Chris S. -  A spacecraft is going to be sitting amongst these particles and there's not really much you can do about it, but what you can do is you can turn off any high voltage electronic systems on the spacecraft.  It's a bit like the advice we get, don't drive on the motor ways if it's very windy for example.  They're just saying, the risks are higher, so if you can possibly avoid it then do so.

Chris -  What about, any 'would-be' space tourists or people who happen to work in space, astronauts aboard the international space station for example?

Chris S. -  What you need to do is to just make sure the astronauts are not outside and exposed to the worst of the conditions.  There are even a couple of places on the space station which have a little bit more shielding than anywhere else.  So, you could get your astronauts to shelter in there.

Type 2 diabetes affects around one in ten of the UK population and costs roughly £1 million per hour to treat. Diabetics can't control their blood sugar levels properly because they can't make enough of the hormone insulin. One way to manage the condition is with strict control of weight and dietary intake.

Drugs that boost insulin levels can also help, although they come with side effects that can cause long-term health problems. But now a team at Imperial College have been working on a way to increase the effectiveness of a common diabetic drug called sulphonylurea, by shining light on it, as David Hodson explains to Kat Arney...

David -   We've based our drug on a sulfonylurea which has been around since the 1940s.  It was discovered just after the World War.  What this drug does is it binds to cells in the pancreas and increases their ability to release insulin.  So, what we've done is we've taken this drug and we've made it photoresponsive.  So, that means it becomes active when we illuminate it using a light.

Kat -   Can you show me then?  How does this work?  We've got some pictures here.

David -   So, this is basically the molecule here.  This is the 3 dimensional structure of the molecule but what you will see is that when we light the molecule, it changes shape.  So, when it's illuminated, the molecule becomes smaller and this increases its ability to function in the pancreas to release insulin.

Kat -   It's bent in half and that makes it more effective basically.

David -   Essentially, yeah.  The reason it does this because it contains a special chemical structure called an azobenzene.  Most people are familiar with these structures because they're used in dyes.  They're very colourful so they can be purple, they can be orange.  But the reason they're colourful is they absorb light.  So, it's this property which we've taken here and inbued upon our molecule.

Kat -   Then what happens?  You've got this molecule that bends in light.  So, how do you get it to where it's needed?

David -   At the moment, we've only really sort of looked at this in vitro sort of in test tubes and in tissue from human donors.  But what we do know is that when you apply - this is an example here.  You can see nothing happens to the cells in the pancreas.  This is a recording here.  As soon as we switch the light on, you can see the cells beginning to flash and flicker, when the cells are flickering like this, that means they're releasing insulin.  Essentially, we can turn it off.  I've just turned the light off now and these cells are doing nothing.  So, we can switch it on and off very quickly to increase how the cells activate to release insulin.  In terms of using this in humans, well we're obviously quite a long way off.  I mean, this is not sci-fi.  This functions well in the lab but we need to figure out ways in which we can non-invasively deliver light into the human body.

Kat -   Yeah, because your pancreas is quite deep inside and then how you get to blast it?

David -   I guess one of the other problems with diabetes is that it's mainly associated with obesity.  So, you've got to get this light into some fairly large abdomens as well.  But one of the beauties about this compound is it's extremely light sensitive.  So, it only needs a little bit of light to activate.  So theoretically, you should be able to get light through into your abdomen.  I mean, a good one is when you were a kid and your parents let you camp in the garden with your mate and you've got a torch.  So, you stick the torch in your mouth and you illuminate it in the dark and you see instantly - light obviously penetrates through the skin, but whether we can get this into the abdomen, we need to begin to investigate and we're currently getting those studies underway to see if this is going to be a practical possibility.

Kat -   Say that it does work, what could be the benefits of making this much more targeted?

David -   One of the benefits is that, when you think about a drug, it's like taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut.  It's going to work on its receptors in many different tissues throughout the body.  This causes side effects, undesirable side effects.  So, being able to target a drug to where it's needed is incredibly important as a refinement to treatment.  But also, it allows you to switch on and off drug activity when required.  This is particularly important here because if you think about it when you need to release insulin, it's after you just ingested food and had a meal.  So ideally, you would switch the drug on, release insulin after you've ingested food and then switch it off.  This stops you kind of overstressing the cells and releasing too much insulin.

Kat -   So, you can almost imagine sitting down and you have your meal and then quickblast of light, off you go.

David -   Exactly, yeah.  They'res some way off, but I mean, the hope would be, you would sort of have like some LEDs attached to you, something no bigger than a Nicorette patch or something like that and then you would literally just remote control it.  you would just switch it on using Bluetooth or your telephone and then this would switch the drug on and allow you to pack away the glucose.  So, it's not causing any undesirable effects.

Mirko Kovac and a team of scientists at Imperial College London have been designing a type of flying drone, bio-inspired by swiftlets - tiny birds that build nests using their own spit. He brought in one of his Micro Aerial Vehicles, MAVs for short, to show Kat Arney what it's capable of...

Mirko -  Drones are basically flying robots or flying unmanned aerial vehicles. So, what they can do is they can take pictures from above, from the sky, but it can also interact with the environment and create structures, repair structures, or take samples of the soil or of water.

Kat -  We mostly hear about drones in the context of military spying or doing nasty things like dropping bombs and stuff like that.  That's presumably not what you're about here.

Mirko -  Of course, there are a lot of ethical questions and discussions that happen around these areas.  What's different from these big military drones is that they are basically airplanes. But the small drones that we can buy for a few pounds are fuelled by consumer electronics and cell phone technology.  So, they are really cheap now and they are widely available.

Kat -  Now, I'm kind of a bit worried about the idea of lots of drones flying around that could take pictures of me.  Would they take pictures of me while I'm sunbathing in my bikini?  I don't really want that.  How do I know what's a good drone or maybe a pervy drone?

Mirko -  Yeah.  So I think we need to discuss this as a society, what is ethical use of drones?  There are different questions that come to mind.  One is on privacy i.e., not to film people when they don't want to be filmed.  I think we need to protect that.  But we also need to take care that drones don't do something that is potentially dangerous.  That they're not in the hands of terrorists for example or that they're not carrying out tasks that are critical, or dangerous, or making life and death decisions.  I think there are things that the human needs to be in the loop and we need to create a framework, an ethical framework of what should be allowed and what's not.

Kat -  So, we've got a couple sitting on the desk here. Talk to me about this one.  This thing is I guess the size of the span of my hand. It's got 4 little helicopter blades sitting around something about the size of an egg I guess.  What's this here?

Mirko -  So this, I would call it a nano quadcopter.  It's very small and they can carry some sensors.  We use those in research to swarm based control and swarm coordinated actions.  We can have thousands of them that will be deployed from a bigger airplane or from a mother ship drone, and then create and interact together to collaborate and do things.

Kat -  Like a flock of these tiny things going out there.

Mirko -  Exactly.  So, they could be in a flock that can build structures like termite woods in flocks, or even swarms collectively, or they can also just sample environments because we have many of them.  Even if we lose part of them, even if we lose 80% let's say, they're very cheap and disposable. So, we still get a lot of data back.

Kat -  Okay, let's put this one to the test.  Shall we do a little test flight here in the studio?

Mirko -  Let's do it.  I can try.

Kat -  Off you go.  Okay, so that seems to be slightly hard to control.  How are you and your team working on how to control these little drones and take them out in the world?

Mirko -  Yeah, I'm not a very good pilot for these drones.  So, that's why we work on autonomous control so they can control themselves based on on-board sensing and on-board intelligence. This is one of the key areas that we work on.  What we also work on is on the platform design.  So, creating new drones that can do new things such as repairing structures.

Kat -  So, how would that work?  How could something that's a small little flying drone build a structure?  How does that work?

Mirko -  For that, we look at nature and we look at the animal kingdom in particular, these birds that use their saliva to build nests.  So these birds basically invented 3D printing many million years ago and so, we copy their principle of additive layer manufacturing to build up structures.  Now, we do this with expanding foam on the drone.

Kat -  Not spit.

Mirko -  No.

Kat -  Unlike the birds.

Mirko -  No, the drones is a polyurethane foam or could use any kind of other chemicals that can layer up and just build up structures or repair structures.

Kat -  So, I can see that could be really useful for very far away environments or possibly really dangerous environments.  I guess we heard about the Fukushima nuclear reactors.  You wouldn't want to send people there to repair it, would you?

Mirko -  Yeah, that's exactly right.  It's a very good application.  There are areas where people don't want to go, but also importantly, there are areas or situations where quick response is required such as an oil spill or a leak in an oil pipeline.  So, they're very important to quickly react to this, a drone could go and seal this leak very quickly and effectively.

Kat -  We've also heard recently in the news about the idea of delivering things with drones or online shopping or something like that.  Perhaps even a pizza.  I'm feeling quite peckish.  Where are we with that?

Mirko -  I think we're pretty close to that.  So, we're not so far, but there are a lot of challenges on how to fly drones safely in cities close to humans, how to avoid each other, how to have a regulatory framework that allows the regulation of the traffic, like air traffic control.  But the technology is almost there for delivery.

Kat -  What could be some of the applications?  I mean for example we're, in the grip of the Ebola crisis at the moment, one big problem is you can't get medications, you can't get tests through.  Is this the kind of area where drones could really help?

Mirko -  I completely believe so.  In fact, in areas where the infrastructure is not developed yet such as developing countries, so instead of going into building roads or building ground infrastructure, there's a big movement in creating aerial drone based delivery systems at a fraction of the cost that would be much faster and more effective for medical deliveries, blood supplies for example.

Kat -  Obviously, the need in some parts of the world is incredibly urgent for this, but how soon do you think we might start seeing little drone armies or drone swarms going out and doing these kind of things?

Mirko -  So, I think the drone delivery is very close, so we need to create legislation for that.  We need air traffic control, but we also need on-board sensors and ways how to avoid each other, how to avoid obstacles.  Then again, I think we can learn a lot from nature that does it already very, very effectively.

Getting a window seat on a plane is a hot commodity, but what if the aircraft was completely see-through? No more leaning over your fellow passengers to gape (or quake) at the views below...

This is just one of the concepts aeroplane manufacturer Airbus are hoping to incorporate into future designs, along with biosensors, "handprinting", and cabins that are customised to the needs of individual passengers. Sounds pretty enticing, doesn't it? But how will this all work?

Colin Sirett, Head of Research and Technology at Airbus UK, talked Kat Arney through their vision for a futuristic plane journey...

Colin -   Well, you probably start before you actually get anywhere near the aircraft, once you'VE purchased your ticket, you'd already have your details, your personal preferences on record.  A lot those actually exist today. So that the aircraft and the airline know exactly what your personal preferences are.  So, when you scan or have a palm print to enter the aircraft rather than just a normal boarding pass, it knows exactly where you like to sit.  iT WILL have an idea of how often you want to be disturbed for example with the drinks trolley or even what sort of meals that you actually really would prefer not to have.  So, we can actually build up a print of exactly what every passenger's requirements are.  Where you actually sit in the aircraft might not in the future be by the relative class - first, business or economy.  It could be by what you want to actually do during the flight.  If you want to work during the flight, there'll be a work space area.  If you just want to sleep, a sleep area, or if you just want to immerse yourself to connectivity and your own social media then there'll be a full entertainment area.

Kat -   The thing I struggle with and I know tall people have the opposite problem, the seats just aren't comfortable for me at all.

Colin -   Yes.  We've conducted a lot of work with looking at morphing structures.  These are structures where you actually sit on the seat and the seat then over a short period of time adopts the shape of your body.  So, you don't have any particular pressure point in your posture. 

Kat -   One of the things that we've mentioned is that the see-through airplane.  To some people, that might be the most absolutely God-forsaken terrifying thing in the world.  But to someone like me, I think that's cool.  How would that work?  How would you have a see-through fuselage?

Colin -   Well, we've actually got the technology around us today to create the illusion of a see-through fuselage.  That would be by having small cameras around the outside of the aircraft, projecting an image directly onto the interior skin.  Now, that as you say is quite a scary prospect for a lot of people.  But we could take it one step at a time where we could eliminate all windows in the aircraft and just have patches of these transparencies to simulate the windows.  That for us, reduces a significant amount of weight for the aircraft.

Kat -   I guess one of the hot topics in aviation is the amount of energy, the amount of fuel that it takes to do a flights.  Is there anything that you guys are doing briefly to tray and maybe reduce the costs or use alternative and maybe less environmentally damaging types of fuels and energy source on these planes.

Colin -   There's a great deal of research that's being conducted on biofuels and we should say that they are sustainable biofuels.  We're now cleared to have up to 50% mix of biofuel and fossil fuel and still fly.

Kat -   Also, you've got quite a lot of warm bodies on the plane.  Could that be any use to you?

Colin -   It is and one of the - coming back to our seat again, we're looking at energy harvesting and that's actually taking the heat from our body to convert that into electricity and then feed that in maybe to power the interior lighting system of the cabin.

Kat -   I love the idea I could be sitting on a flight in the future, pairing my own TV in front of me from my own body heat.  thank you.

Colin -   That exactly would be the case.

Kat -   That sounds absolutely wonderful and it could be really cool, but is this really feasible financially?  How much would this kind of technology cost?

Colin -   The cost of technology is - this type of technology is coming down all the time.  we can see a route to a lot of the technologies that we've put forward in the future aircraft and the concept cabin.  Everything, quite naturally, has to buy its way onto the aircraft.  We wont pay as a travelling public.  We don't want to pay any more than we are today.  So, the challenge we always have is not just technology for technology's sake.  It's got to come at a price point where both yourself, myself, and everyone else is prepared to pay the ticket price.