Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition 2024

The Royal Society's Summer Science Exhibition has been taking place in the heart of London. It’s a free event and no ticket is required, and it’s all about showcasing the best of British science. James Tytko went along…

James - You join me at the Royal Society's Summer Science Exhibition showcasing some of the cutting edge research from across the UK. I'm here in the main hall, eager to chat to some of the participating scientists to hear all about their projects. Hopefully I'll be able to catch them as I'm wandering through and I'll take you with me. Hi, nice to meet you. I'm James from the Naked Scientist Podcast. What's your name?

Ryan - I'm Ryan.

James - Could you sum up in a sentence for me the exhibit you brought to the exhibition today please?

Ryan - Yep. So we are engineering atom by atom. We're a collaboration between the University of Manchester, Leeds and Imperial College London. And we are showing how we can use ion implantation to create the materials of the future today.

James - Amazing. I mean engineering atom by atom. So literally taking apart or putting together individual atoms.

Ryan - That's right, yes. So we can take a single atom, we can charge it to create an ion and then we can position that into another material with very high accuracy. And that allows us to create new applications such as quantum computers, topological insulators, or single photo emitters.

James - It's absolutely mind blowing to me that engineering something so small can have ramifications for how we interact with our physical world.

Ryan - Yeah, it's really exciting as well to be doing that. And it does change the material properties so we can put in individual ions and then collections of ions that will change the material properties in ways that we can measure as well.

James - I know quantum computing's a highly hyped field. What are the main challenges with achieving what it's going to be able to unlock for us?

Ryan - So we are working on atom resolution, so a hundred thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair. And what we can do is we can also make these materials for our sources. So if we are implanting an ion, we need to have an alloy that will be stable and allow us to create that ion and then implant it into our material. So there's lots of scientists working on this project to allow us to improve the capabilities of this tool.

James - Alright. Well it sounds terrific. Thanks so much for chatting with me. Have a nice rest of the exhibition.

Ryan - Thank you. You enjoy it.

James - Hi, I'm James from the Naked Scientist Podcast. Can I get your name please?

Ben - So, I'm Dr. Ben Moat from the National Ocean Center in Southampton. So, our planet is warming at present, the ocean is absorbing 90% of this excess heat, this sort of anthropogenic heat that we and our ancestors, with CO2, have put into the atmosphere.

James - How on earth do you measure something like that 90% figure? Can you, can you expand on the methodology there?

Ben - So, since 2000 we have this program, this big international program called Argo. And we use these robots that basically measure the ocean for up to five years and they measure the top 2000 metres of the ocean. So we measure the temperature of its salinity and we transmit that data back every 10 days. So sea surface temperatures are rising. So we've all heard about coral bleaching. So the Great Barrier Reef, for instance, is dying, but there are other consequences as well. As the oceans get warmer, it can hold less oxygen. 50% of the oxygen we breathe comes from the ocean, but also 30% of that excess CO2 is going to the ocean that is then changing its pH. So that means it's harder and harder for these animals that build shells up around themselves to form. So there's a whole impact for the whole food chain.

James - How are these findings that you've acquired through these techniques going to lead to things we can do, actions we can implement to improve that situation.

Ben - So what we need is a large coupled ocean atmosphere, these big mathematical models to try and look at how it's gonna change in the different CO2 scenarios, carbon dioxide futures. We make the observations, we see how it's changing. We use those observations to benchmark or basically truth, these big ocean models.

James - Terrific. Well thank you so much for your time. Have a lovely rest of the exhibition.

Ben - Thank you very much. Thank you.

James - Hi, I'm James from the Naked Scientist Podcast. Can I get your name please?

Julie - I'm Professor Julie Forrester from the University of Sussex.

James - Tell me about Baby Boogie. What's the project?

Julie - So babies from birth have what we call rising movements and they're kind of like a belly dancer. They've got their arms and their legs going all at the same time. You see this kind of really smooth movement throughout the body. And it's, it's relatively constant. There'll be bursts of it and then it will calm down and burst again. And we can see different kinds of features in this writhing movement. Clinicians have known for a long time that children who are in high risk clinics, maybe they've had trauma at birth, that they can tell whether or not that repertoire looks healthy or poor. In talking with the clinicians and trying to better understand what they see in poor repertoire and good repertoire, we've learned that the complexity and the variability of infant movements seems to associate with their cognitive development. So good high variability and complexity tends to associate with healthy cognitive development.

James - So we might see language development skills come a lot later in babies who would otherwise have those more fluid movements that you were talking about.

Julie - So not even necessarily later, but possibly disrupted if we see poor repertoire. And so the idea is that right now our screening for autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders tends to be quite late. We wait until we see a deficit or with language or social behaviour. And so our diagnoses end up being two years, three years, four years, or even later. But what we think now we can do is find earlier risk markers that are visible and present within the motor behaviour of babies from birth. The Baby Grow project is already revealing promising results. We're seeing that babies in the first eight weeks of life are already showing differences in the high and low risk groups.

James - What are the benefits to those babies of understanding these developmental concerns as early as possible? How does that help you help them?

Julie - Oh, great question. The idea is that the earlier we can see risk factors, the earlier we can get in there and have new interventions. We don't have those interventions yet. They're things we need to develop, but we can develop motor interventions that help mitigate against some of those more severe language and social disorders that might happen otherwise.

James - Well, good luck with it. Thank you so much for your time. Been a pleasure.

Julie - Thank you so much.

James - Big thank you to everyone that's given me some of their time. Signing off from the Summer Science Exhibition here at the Royal Society. Get down here if you get the chance.