- 18 hours ago
Explores the history and future of human civilization through the lens of material science, showcasing pioneers who are transforming technology, from early stone tools to advanced bionic limbs and self-healing structures.
材料科学必将定义人类历史的下一个世纪，并有望彻底改变我们生活的方方面面。这部影片将带领我们踏上一段旅程，结识材料科学的先驱者们。
材料科学必将定义人类历史的下一个世纪，并有望彻底改变我们生活的方方面面。这部影片将带领我们踏上一段旅程，结识材料科学的先驱者们。
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TechTranscript
00:03Take a journey through any modern city and you travel through the story of materials.
00:17From stone and wood to shimmering glass and steel, these are the stepping stones of our own human story.
00:31Today, materials are on the cusp of a revolution, where anything seems possible.
00:44Bionic limbs that can feel.
00:47That was the closest thing to come to a human terminator.
00:51Self-preparing shoes.
00:52Self-growing, self-reproducing even.
00:56Mind-bending metals.
00:57It's a bit like my parents' cat.
01:01They can be utterly baffling.
01:03It's like a magical world.
01:07Or totally wondrous.
01:10It was developed to catch stardust, so it's basically a poem.
01:13I mean, is there anything more poetic than something light to catch stardust?
01:18And now, working with the basic building blocks of matter, scientists are blurring the lines between the living and the
01:25non-living.
01:27They're actually making structures which nature doesn't make.
01:38And transforming our world.
01:57The natural world is where our relationship with materials began.
02:01With stone, iron and wood, we made everything from tools to musical instruments.
02:11Gareth Ballard is a luthier.
02:14A craftsman of wooden stringed instruments.
02:16But he specialises in the ultimate in musical craftsmanship.
02:21The violin.
02:27The violin's an amazing instrument, really.
02:31One of its features is it can sound very much like the human voice.
02:34You can really make it, you know, scream.
02:39Or you can get a real nice deep power note.
02:44For a good player, that is.
02:46Gareth is a traditional craftsman, but he embraces new technologies.
02:52Now, he's going to be taking on a new challenge.
02:55One that will really take him to the frontiers of modern science.
03:00What I want to do is make a violin using new materials and technology.
03:06The material he'll be using is thermoplastic polymer.
03:10And the technology is 3D printing.
03:14Can Gareth produce a beautifully sounding violin
03:17from a material that's as far away from natural wood as you can get?
03:24To try and capture the tone, which is something that people have fallen in love with,
03:29will be very challenging.
03:32Even more challenging because the violin will be played in four weeks' time
03:37to a live audience.
03:46Una Palliser has played on some of the biggest stages in the world.
03:51Her music ranges from classical and folk to gypsy.
04:00Hi, Una.
04:01Come in, nice to meet you.
04:02You too.
04:07I think when you have a really good violin,
04:10it doesn't just do what you have in your head.
04:13It also gives you inspiration and it gives you something.
04:17So it's really, it's massively a relationship between you and the instrument.
04:23But will Una trust in Gareth's crazy scheme?
04:27So, Una, how would you feel about testing out our 3D printed violin?
04:32I'd love to do it.
04:33Do you think you would be difficult to please as a violinist?
04:35Yeah, I do.
04:36Great.
04:38But can Gareth deliver a violin good enough for Una to play?
04:45Reputations are at stake.
04:47It doesn't matter what the limitations of the instrument are,
04:50it's going to reflect on me.
04:57It's our senses that connect us to materials and make us human.
05:03In the remote landscapes of northern Sweden,
05:06one man is crossing the boundaries between human and machine.
05:11He's been called Europe's first cyborg.
05:15In 2013, 10 years after his cancerous right arm was amputated,
05:22Magnus Niska agreed to test a revolutionary artificial hand
05:26that would be controlled by his own mind.
05:29This arm is really amazing.
05:31I use it to everything.
05:35With advanced materials that fuse with human tissue,
05:38the science fiction of the bionic man is becoming science fact.
05:54Magnus lives with his wife and young family
05:57in the small Swedish town of Haperanda.
06:00After struggling with a conventional prosthesis,
06:03he agreed to test one that would be bolted directly into his bone
06:07and connected to his nervous system.
06:09It transformed his life.
06:14With his prosthetic hand, Magnus controls movements with signals from his brain.
06:19If he wants to pick up a jigsaw piece, the hand responds.
06:24With this arm, I can work with almost everything.
06:30It's not feeling like a machine.
06:32It's more like my own arm.
06:38In the family life, I don't feel handicapped.
06:49So how does this prosthetic arm work?
06:54Scientists are now learning how to interpret the signals from the brain.
06:58Electrodes implanted in Magnus' arm transmit signals from his brain to the hand.
07:04From man to machine.
07:1350 miles away in Gothenburg, Max Ortiz Catalan is the brains behind the technology.
07:19You have the cough electrode that is for the nerve.
07:24And this one also has a lot of different platinum iridium contacts inside
07:28that are arranged in a special way so you get a high signal-to-noise ratio.
07:34The implanted electrodes, unlike usual skin electrodes,
07:38live permanently within the human body
07:41and will connect directly to Magnus' nerve tissue.
07:46You will open it and go around the nerve and place the nerve inside there.
07:51And then you will just let it coil around it.
07:54The reliability of these electrodes, or the whole system actually,
07:58is very important because these are not toys.
08:00People use these devices to assist them on their activities of their daily living.
08:05And that's why we're doing this, because we want the control to be more intuitive.
08:14But something is still missing.
08:17A sense of touch.
08:20What if the signals could go both ways,
08:23and the brain could interpret what the artificial hand touches?
08:33Researcher Loredana Zolo believes it's possible.
08:36Our big challenge is to be able to implant a prosthetic hand to an amputator
08:43and to feel the amputator who says,
08:46I feel that it's my hand.
08:5012 years ago, Dennis Sorensen lost his left hand in a firework accident.
08:57In 2013, he volunteered to take part
09:01in the pioneering Life Hand 2 experiment.
09:05For me, it was kind of a duty when I thought this is so exciting,
09:11and I really would like to be a part of this huge project.
09:17Dennis traveled from his home in Denmark to Rome.
09:21Hello, Professor. Thank you.
09:23Where he underwent a grueling seven-hour operation.
09:26Four electrodes were implanted into his nerves, which connected to this hand via a computer interface.
09:35What happened next was remarkable.
09:39Soft.
09:43Hot.
09:45Amazingly, Dennis was feeling sensations from an artificial hand.
09:50They put this round object in the Life Hand and I squeezed around it and I could immediately tell that
09:58it was round.
09:59After ten years where you haven't had any kind of sensation of form, then suddenly you are able to actually
10:11feel again in your lost hand.
10:13That was really incredible and something I will never forget in my life.
10:20It was really a special moment.
10:24The Life Hand 2 experiment restored sensation that Dennis thought he'd lost forever.
10:30But unfortunately for him, the experiment was authorized only for 30 days.
10:37New materials, however amazing, need to be safe.
10:57The electrodes had to be removed and his sense of touch in that arm was lost once more.
11:03The fact that it was taken away again, I knew from the start.
11:07Yeah, it was just incredible and I was very proud and also humbled to be the one who was selected
11:16for the project.
11:22Loredana and her team continue their painstaking work.
11:27But merging man and machine brings with it new responsibilities.
11:32Is society ready to rethink what it is to be human?
11:49Our sense of touch can be the key to the sometimes baffling world of new materials.
11:56Zoe Lachlan, a curator at the materials library in London's University College, is an artist as well as a scientist.
12:06And her love of materials is about sensuality and fun.
12:11You've got to kind of touch materials to really understand them.
12:14And one of my favourite to touch is this guy.
12:16Now, this is quite heavy.
12:21And it looks like it wouldn't be.
12:24It's soft and it's fine.
12:26So delicate.
12:27Each one of these individual strands is like the tenth the size of a human hair.
12:32And it's incredible because this is 100% steel.
12:36But it's super, super soft, super silky.
12:40I mean, it's a bit like my parents' cat.
12:42It's kind of beautiful, elegant, steel, yarn, ball, stuff.
12:48Beautiful.
12:51Zoe also cherishes materials because they bridge the past and the future.
12:58In amongst the synthetic skin, spacecraft soup, diamonds and socks, Zoe has a soft spot for the comedians and shapeshifters
13:07of the material world.
13:10This really unassuming piece of wire is actually really remarkable.
13:14It tells you a lot about the crystal structure of metals, but also the relationship between materials and objects.
13:18So, I put that there and grab this blowtorch.
13:22So, we need a bit of heat to activate this.
13:25So, turn it on.
13:27And then, it transforms into a paperclip.
13:35And what's happening there is the crystal structure of the metal is realigning itself.
13:40And the crystals are returning to the place they were when they were born.
13:43So, this memory, the memory of the metal is the memory of the crystals.
13:47And they'll realign themselves to form the shape of a paperclip.
13:52For Zoe, materials might be magical, but she knows very well they're not magic.
13:58Their special effects are down to hard science.
14:02It's really difficult to pick a favour out of the thousands of materials we have.
14:06But if I'm pushed, I always come back to aerogel.
14:09Now, this is something that was donated to us by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA.
14:14And at the time they made it, it was the lightest solid in the world.
14:18So, nothing was lighter than this.
14:20But it's blue for the same reasons that the sky is blue.
14:23So, it's how light scatters through it, not how it absorbs and reflects certain wavelengths.
14:27So, it's basically like solid sky.
14:30And it was developed to catch stardust.
14:32So, it's basically a poem.
14:33I mean, is there anything more poetic than something light to catch stardust?
14:44Capturing the light and energy of the sun has been the holy grail of scientists for centuries.
14:51In the field of modern solar energy, Professor Michael Gretzel is a renowned pioneer.
14:58But it wasn't always that way.
15:03For 30 years, his colleagues thought he was crazy.
15:07It's been a rough start and also a rough ride, especially in the beginning.
15:12People were sceptical and we went against the prevailing opinion.
15:22When Professor Gretzel started out, solar technology was based on silicon panels.
15:28But he had other ideas.
15:30For him, the answer was in the colours of the natural world.
15:35I always feel very happy.
15:38Surrounded by green trees in my orchard.
15:41I love nature and was inspired by the natural system.
15:48Nature has its own way of converting sunlight to energy through the process of photosynthesis.
15:55Gretzel started researching how he could imitate that process to create a source of sustainable energy.
16:03I was passionate about finding systems that would produce electricity from light.
16:09By not exactly imitating natural photosynthetic systems, but taking the most important cues from the photosynthetic system.
16:17His pioneering work was based on a simple principle.
16:21The pigment that gives every plant its colour is also the chemical that converts sunlight to energy during photosynthesis.
16:31Based on these colour pigments, Gretzel created his own dyes.
16:35Today, they help make the Gretzel dye-sensitised cells.
16:40And they work like this.
16:46Dip a piece of conductive glass coated in titanium dioxide into mashed up raspberries.
16:52The resulting pink pigment makes a great anode.
16:57To create the cathode, simply scribble a layer of graphite across a second piece of glass.
17:05Add a couple of drops of iodine to complete the circuit.
17:13Expose it to light to represent the sun.
17:18Excited by the sunlight, the electrons then flow out as an electrical current.
17:24And there you have it.
17:26A fan powered by a raspberry juice solar cell.
17:38All over our cities, Gretzel saw millions of metres of glass reaching to the heavens.
17:43If all this glass were coated in transparent Gretzel cells, it could help power those buildings.
17:51But back in the early 90s, the efficiency of his solar cells was poor.
17:56And no one was prepared to back him.
17:59Our funding dried up.
18:00Nobody believed in it anymore.
18:03But I was convinced.
18:07And sometimes a scientist has to be very persistent in this approach.
18:14But in 1994, something happened that turned Gretzel's life, and his work, around.
18:21That's when Toby came in.
18:28I'm Toby Meyer. I am now CEO of Solarnix.
18:32Before that I was doing my PhD work in Professor Gretzel's lab.
18:37Ah, bonsoir, Professor. Bonsoir.
18:40Working side by side with Toby, Gretzel was faced with the challenge of improving the performance of the solar cells.
18:48And they still had to deal with the scepticism that often comes with the promises of new materials.
18:55It was a total scepticism at the beginning, that this ever would be a solar cell that can be useful.
19:00People had an expectation that now this new thing will come out quickly in a very fast and elegant way.
19:07That was kind of the misconception.
19:10So, to win people over, the partners improved the efficiency of the synthetic dye, enabling them to deliver real products.
19:22What you see here is a table that's fit with the solar cells and that charges a phone or any
19:30electronic device just by picking up the daylight.
19:34And when you need, you can charge up the phone with the table for free.
19:46Gretzel's work began 40 years ago with a simple idea and a lot of ambition in his sunlit orchard.
19:59Today, the coloured windows in the Swiss Convention Centre, covered in a thin film of Gretzel cells, are a celebration
20:05of his vision and determination.
20:10And if their efficiency can be increased, as they hope, then maybe one day they'll help to power whole cities.
20:21This may be a long way off, but Gretzel will keep striving.
20:26And you know, learning for a scientist, that is the opium.
20:30It's our opium.
20:33Understanding and learning.
20:35Should never finish.
20:40Thank you very much.
20:41Thank you very much.
20:42Thank you very much.
20:42Thank you very much.
20:43Thank you very much.
20:47For traditional violin maker Gareth Ballard, his craft is a constant process of learning.
20:53You learn from every instrument you make, so it's an ongoing development process for every maker.
20:59But making a 3D printed violin, Gareth is on a whole new learning curve.
21:10Today, he's come to Warwick University, a leading centre for 3D manufacturing.
21:16He's going to be making the most important decision in the whole process.
21:20The material that they'll use.
21:24You can use a range of materials from polymers, plastics, metals and ceramics mainly.
21:32Professor Greg Gibbons is a material scientist and 3D printing expert.
21:37Well, the way I see it, Greg, is that the sound of the violin is defined by its shape, design
21:44and the material used.
21:46How close are we going to get?
21:48I mean, the shape's no problem.
21:49Yeah.
21:49You know, we've got that.
21:51The scanning's accurate.
21:52The building's accurate.
21:52Mimicking the material is going to be the really big challenge to get that to sound acoustically the same.
21:59I think a very, very big challenge.
22:10Gareth is close to deciding on a material, but he needs a second opinion.
22:14His friend, Filippo Pretani, is a fellow violin maker.
22:19These are three samples of the plastic that they can print with.
22:23Right.
22:24Which one would you rather make a violin out of?
22:27OK, let me feel them.
22:30I'm not sure.
22:36It's very heavy.
22:39It sounds horrible.
22:40It's a bit dead.
22:41It's really dead.
22:47This has got a nice ring though.
22:50It's got a long ring.
22:53Between these two, I would probably pick this one.
22:58It feels the stiffer to me.
23:02Even though Filippo chooses the same ABS polymer, Gareth is still wracked with doubts.
23:09I don't think it's ever going to be stiff enough.
23:12Just hope it doesn't collapse.
23:17To begin the process, Gareth provides the violin to be scanned.
23:24With over 3,000 individual images, they now have the computer model that they'll be working from.
23:33And now it's time to unveil the CAD on the big screen.
23:38We've actually got all the graining, that is the accurate graining we've managed to pick.
23:41That is the actual graining?
23:42Yes, it is.
23:42It is indeed, yeah.
23:43If you had a Stradivari, you'd be able to recreate a material that would behave a little bit like that.
23:49You need to do a lot of physical testing of materials and a lot of physical development processes to get
23:56there.
23:56And certainly in the time that we've got, there's no chance of doing that.
24:00So Mark, realistically, what do you think we might be able to achieve by next week?
24:04One thing's for sure, you've given us a real challenge in the time available and we'll certainly do our best.
24:09Right now, the chances of making a plastic violin that sounds good aren't looking promising.
24:16For Gareth, the sound of a violin is about the wood it's made from.
24:20And for him, it's spruce every time.
24:24The wood plays a very important part in the construction of a violin.
24:28And this wood is very important because there's lots of long tubes going down it, which makes it very resonant.
24:35The tubular hollows in the spruce give each of Gareth's violins their strength and flexibility.
24:43It's a lot stiffer in its length than it is across the grain.
24:46For me, that's a very important feature because it makes the whole top plate vibrate in a very particular way,
24:52which will give accents, certain harmonics and resonances, that really, that is what makes the character of a sound.
25:02So would the ABS polymer sound better if it had a similar internal structure to spruce?
25:09At this stage, the computer design can still be changed, so Gareth sends an email to Greg at Warwick.
25:17What I suggested was to put tubes going through. You can see them here.
25:23If you imagine putting lots of straws together on a flat surface, let's say, they would be a lot stiffer
25:28on their length than they would crossways.
25:30The idea of this is not necessarily to make it resonate better, but to make it resonate more like a
25:36real wooden violin.
25:38Gareth will find out whether his plan has worked in just one week's time, when the violin is played to
25:44a live audience.
25:51Just as science seems to solve our problems, so it creates them.
25:56As populations expand, so the pressure on natural resources increases, threatening the traditional way of life of many communities.
26:08Welcome to Crete.
26:10Summers here are getting longer, hotter and drier.
26:14Great for the booming tourist industry, but not so great for farmers like Nikos Epitropakis.
26:21He's worried that fresh water resources are starting to run out.
26:39In the 1970s, when the island was facing catastrophic water shortages, farming was in sharp decline.
26:48To solve the problem, the government drilled deep boreholes to reach subterranean freshwater streams.
26:59Some of the water that Nikos draws from the boreholes today can be recycled, but not enough for the long
27:07term.
27:09So what happens when those streams dry up?
27:14The problem we are facing here is that there is no other way to make these streams healthy.
27:22and they are very adversely.
27:28Frustratingly, there's water all around the island,
27:31but one bucket full of saltwater could kill the hardiest crop.
27:37But what if there was a way to desalinate,
27:40to filter out that salt?
27:43The sea is beside us and it's an unsteerous water.
27:46If the sea was a good energy and low cost,
27:52it would cause us the problem of saltwater in the future.
27:57To find a possible solution, we're going north.
28:06Denmark, a country that's not short of water.
28:13In Copenhagen, researcher Sylvie Brackvelt and her boss, Klaus Nilsson,
28:20are developing a revolutionary new material
28:22that could increase our freshwater supplies.
28:26Their inspiration was right under their noses.
28:30Their bodies.
28:32The whole idea came in the context of biomimicry,
28:36which basically means that you use principles from nature
28:40to apply them in an industrial environment.
28:45We're all made up of trillions of cells.
28:48And each cell wall has minuscule channels
28:51that let water into and out of the cell.
28:54These channels are made from proteins called aquaporins.
28:59The aquaporin channels, they have been designed by nature
29:03during billions of years of evolution to filter water and only water molecules.
29:08So they are very essential for human life.
29:11They do this by the natural process of osmosis,
29:15drawing water through the aquaporin channels
29:19into the more concentrated solution within the cell,
29:22but leaving salt ions behind.
29:26But how has the team used this natural osmotic pressure
29:30to filter water outside of the human body?
29:35Incredibly, they've developed a new material that mimics the cell wall.
29:41So we've developed a technology to print those aquaporins
29:45embedded in a polyamide layer onto a support membrane.
29:49Right now we are producing around a thousand metres per week.
29:55Embedded into the surface of the material,
29:57the aquaporins only allow water molecules through.
30:01Everything else, including salt, is filtered out.
30:05But how does this material improve on existing filtering systems?
30:15A large water filtering plant works on the same principle as a coffee plunger.
30:23It's an effort for Sylvie to push even this small amount of coffee through the filter.
30:28Now imagine that scaled up millions of times.
30:32It costs a lot of energy to push water through these filters,
30:36which means that the membranes get dirty very soon.
30:39So we need a lot of chemicals to clean them.
30:42So it's basically very expensive.
30:45And it takes a huge toll on the environment.
30:49But the new aquaporin system is low on energy and on cost.
30:55So now Sylvie wants to test it in the real world.
31:06If the aquaporins could filter the salt from sea water, Nikos's future could look very different.
31:15Hi.
31:16Hi, I'm Sylvie.
31:18Nikos.
31:20Sylvie wants to show him, with a simple demonstration,
31:23how aquaporins could be used to water his crops.
31:29First, the raw material, sea water.
31:39So all we need to do now is wait.
31:41On one side, the sea water.
31:44On the other, a more concentrated liquid fertilizer.
31:49Through the process of osmosis, water will naturally be drawn,
31:53as it is in the human cell, towards the more concentrated solution.
31:57In this case, the fertilizer.
32:04If you put the aquaporin material between the two solutions,
32:08water molecules, and only water molecules, pass through,
32:12to dilute the fertilizer.
32:29So, water from the sea, now pure enough to water Nikos's crops.
32:35But aquaporins don't just work on seawater.
32:38They can be used to filter out pollutants and contamination.
32:43There's lots of people in the world who are lacking water,
32:46but they don't have the energy to make water.
32:48So, the potential of this technology is huge.
33:05The new low-energy technologies, such as aquaporins, will become ever more important to communities vulnerable to the threat of
33:13water shortages,
33:16providing them with a real chance of a sustainable future.
33:38scientists who are trying to develop new sustainable materials for the fashion industry also mimic nature.
33:49Scientists who are trying to develop new sustainable materials for the fashion industry also mimic nature.
33:51These brilliant colors of the natural world have inspired the development of a unique material,
33:58and fashion designer Amy Winters has already caught on.
34:04This type of color is found in materials such as the morpho butterfly and beetle wings, and also fish underwater.
34:10The material actually starts to contort to your body shape.
34:14So, depending on how you move, the materials start to have a completely different type of color.
34:19For centuries, fabrics have been colored by chemical pigments, some highly toxic.
34:26But this extraordinary material generates its own color from its own structure.
34:32It's called Polymer Opal, and it was inspired by a stone.
34:37This is an opal that was dug out of a mine in Australia. It's iridescently colored. You can see it
34:42has different color play.
34:44And this has always been interested for people in the fashion industry.
34:47Part of the reason it's expensive is it's rare. So we haven't got a way of making things like this
34:52until now.
34:53So what we're interested in doing now is to make materials which show those same properties.
35:00Studying real opals in his lab, Professor Jeremy Bornberg observed rows of evenly spaced glass spheres.
35:09He realized that the arrangement of these glass spheres was the source of the opal's changing colors.
35:19So what's an opal? So let's imagine that we take a whole lot of oranges and we try and stack
35:25them up together.
35:26Only we haven't really got oranges. They're a million times smaller.
35:29They're tiny, tiny spheres of glass. And what we have to do is we have to actually stack them in
35:34a perfect sequence.
35:36So if I do that with oranges, that's not so difficult. I just put them in lines like this.
35:41The way that the opal works to actually give these amazing color effects is just because of the regularity of
35:47the stacking.
35:49So each of these spheres is about half the wavelength of a particular color of light.
35:54And if it's transparent, the light bounces through and then bounces off the back side.
35:59But it also bounces off the top side as well.
36:01So we have all of these waves of light which are adding up with each other.
36:07Jeremy knew that microscopic glass spheres would be impossible to manipulate accurately.
36:12So he manufactured his own plastic spheres.
36:16We take essentially plastic bags, which are completely transparent, and we chop them up and then we have a process
36:22where we can actually extrude them.
36:25Where suddenly, when they become ordered like this, they start having a color.
36:30To do that, he squeezes a mass of plastic spheres into a tape.
36:36So this is the tape we've just produced from the extruder, and now it's just a mass of nanoparticles, not
36:41in any particular arrangement.
36:43So the first thing we have to do from this is to make a film.
36:47And I can show you sort of what goes on like this.
36:50So these are our spheres.
36:52That's sort of disordered.
36:54But if I just shake them around, then what happens is they start to form a really nice lattice, just
37:00like the oranges on the stall.
37:01If we shake them in the right way, we get perfect ordering, and then we get a beautiful green or
37:07a red color from the light scattering through this structure.
37:13As he heats and flattens out the tape, the microscopic particles are squeezed into an ordered interlocked position.
37:22The play of light through the spheres produces the structural color.
37:27And in fact, we can loop it around a number of times.
37:31And when we go backwards and forwards, what we get is a film that looks something like this.
37:35So you can see it's already much greener. That's because all the spheres are now really locking into their nice
37:41positions.
37:41And that's what makes the polymer opals.
37:44The color of the polymer opal depends upon the spacing between the spheres.
37:49If you stretch them, they change color because the spacing between the spheres changes.
37:53So this is something the fashion industry's never had.
37:56And whenever we show it to people who make clothes, they're desperate for it.
38:02What I find particularly exciting about this type of material is not only the color change.
38:07I mean, it's great that it can change color, but the fact that it's so flexible and the potential it
38:13offers for the future and the design ideas which you could incorporate into this type of material are endless.
38:18It's closer to who we are as human beings and it starts to stretch a bit like our skin.
38:24You can start to have clothing in unusual shapes and each bend and twist of the material will create a
38:32different effect.
38:32The imagination is your limit.
38:35With the potential to revolutionize how we produce color in everything from banknotes to bras, Jeremy's polymer opal could make
38:43toxic chemical pigments a thing of the past.
38:55For violin maker Gareth Ballard, it's a big day.
39:01The violin he's been working on with scientists from Warwick University is about to be printed.
39:07It's away. It's doing the first layer.
39:11Following the digital design, the printer builds layer after layer of white ABS polymer.
39:18So how long will it take?
39:20Around about 24 hours or so to build this violin.
39:22So how does that compare to you making a wooden body?
39:25It's a little bit quicker than me. I mean, it'd take us about a month.
39:30It's not quite what I imagined. I feel a little bit skeptical.
39:38I think we're going to fall quite far short of sounding like a real violin.
39:51Today, the 3D printed violin finally arrives at Gareth's workshop.
39:59Now, the moment of truth.
40:02Has his plan to improve the sound and strength of the violin worked?
40:08So this is the moment.
40:12Wow.
40:17Feels remarkably strong, I must say.
40:19It almost feels like we've been underestimating the stiffness of this material.
40:25It doesn't feel like it's going to collapse.
40:28And the neck, what I've been worried about with this is that this would be too bendy.
40:32But, I mean, the neck, it might just about manage it.
40:40It doesn't sound un-violin-Vinny-like.
40:48I expected it to ring less than that.
40:55It's like a magical world.
40:59It is. It's like a snowscape. I can't quite work out what's going on.
41:04But, yeah.
41:07Interesting.
41:08I must say, I'm probably pleasantly surprised.
41:12I feel happier than I thought I was going to, I must say.
41:17That's the beauty of being pessimistic.
41:24The violin, printed in a white ABS, looks promising to Gareth.
41:29But it's all about the sound.
41:32Professional violinist Una Palliser has her own concerns.
41:36I'm a bit nervous.
41:38And in the gig, it doesn't matter what the limitations of the instrument are.
41:42It's going to reflect on me.
41:44I'm going to have to be the one who somehow pulls it off.
41:47Hi.
41:48Hi.
41:49How are you? Nice to see you.
41:50You too.
41:52I want to see inside.
41:54What do you expect it's going to sound like?
41:56I don't know. I think we should just open it and see.
42:01Oh my God, it's white.
42:03Wow. Gosh, it looks like wood though.
42:06It looks like something from a museum.
42:08It has got a funny texture on it, hasn't it?
42:14Let me start.
42:15It's having the smell test.
42:17Wow.
42:17Okay, ready?
42:18Okay, drum roll. Go.
42:25It's like a viola.
42:31It kind of does pretty much what I wanted to do.
42:34I think you've done a really good job.
42:36Garrett, wow.
42:37Wow.
42:38Amazing.
42:39Totally amazing.
42:40It's way better than I was expecting.
42:43I think we can do a gig on it and it should, you know, we can play some actual tunes.
42:49Yeah.
42:50The violin's big test will be in front of an audience in two days' time.
42:55Played alongside handcrafted instruments, will it stand up to the scrutiny of a discerning audience?
43:10Cambridge.
43:11Historic town of dreaming spires, academic excellence, punting on the river Cannes, and jungle music.
43:20Always carry a sound system because you never know when you're going to need to DJ.
43:28So I live in Cambridge and I'm a scientist, but for the last few years I've been running a company
43:36that I started called Novalia and it's all about adding interactivity to print.
43:44Novalia might look like an average print company, but there is one big difference.
43:48Their prints make a lot of noise.
43:54So this drum post is fun, you can touch it, it plays some beats, but we also make print that
43:59is Bluetooth and can connect through to your smartphone and then can connect onto the internet.
44:05Using a thin layer of ink containing nanoparticles, Kate has printed electrical circuits on the paper.
44:12This one is like a soundboard.
44:13After giving a TED talk on nanocarbon inks, Kate demonstrated some scratch DJing.
44:19On paper.
44:20Then she was contacted by a very special fan.
44:31A year later, I got a message from probably the best scratch DJ in the world, DJ Cuba, to say,
44:38hey, senior talk at TED, I'm bringing up my first album in 15 years and I'd love you to make
44:46the album cover.
44:46And we want working DJ decks in the album cover. And we've partnered with the DJ app company and it's
44:54probably been the hardest thing we've ever done.
44:58Kate's nanocarbon inks have converted Q-Bert's Humble Album sleeve into an interactive electronic conductor.
45:06Via Bluetooth, the mixer on the sleeve controls the DJ app on the phone.
45:13When someone touches them, they just, it's almost like they lose where they are and they get a massive smile
45:20on their face, just like they're a child.
45:22And actually, they're learning about technology without even knowing they're learning about technology.
45:27And I get massively inspired and rewarded by seeing that.
45:31But nanocarbon inks have become more amazing since the discovery of the world's latest wonder material, graphene.
45:41Graphene is just one single carbon atom deep. Stronger than steel and transparent, a piece the size of a football
45:49pitch would weigh less than a gram.
45:52Well, graphene is special because it has a lot of superlative properties which are much better than any other material,
45:59like strength and conductivity and flexibility and transparency and all that.
46:04But the most important thing is that it's all of these things in one material rather than a different material
46:10for each.
46:20Graphene was first isolated at Manchester University.
46:23It may be the most advanced material in the world, but it's produced from graphite, or as most people know
46:30it, pencil lead.
46:34When graphite was first dug out of this mine near Burrowdale in the 16th century, they didn't know what to
46:41do with it, so they used it to mark sheep.
46:49Now, Manchester University researchers Nick and Sarah use graphite to produce graphene.
46:56The normal sort of graphite that you dig out of a mine would look something like this. It's kind of
47:00rocky looking.
47:01But if you get really lucky and find a nice pure piece, it will have this shine to it.
47:06Now, this is nearly all carbon arranged in these two-dimensional layers held together by weak forces,
47:12which means that when you write it on paper, you can actually sheer off some of the carbon layers.
47:17We can describe the structure of graphite like a pile of paper, where it's easy to slide the sheets over
47:24each other,
47:25but they tend to clump together. But if I use a piece of sticky tape, then I'm able to pick
47:32up just one sheet.
47:33And we can play the same trick with graphite. If I take a flake here and stick it down onto
47:40sellotape,
47:42I can then peel the rest of the flake away, leaving a thin layer of graphite behind.
47:49So this will still be quite a thick piece of graphite, but obviously if I peel it, it will become
47:55twice as thin.
47:56Split it again to make it four times as thin, and then eight times as thin, and I can keep
48:02going.
48:03And that's the key. If we do this enough times, we get down to a single layer of graphite, and
48:08that's graphene.
48:11At Manchester, Nick and Sarah are part of a multidisciplinary team
48:15that are working hard to get graphene out into the marketplace.
48:20We have people from physics, chemistry, material science, engineering, maths, biology.
48:28So basically pretty much every discipline, even the business school, is involved in doing studies on graphene at the moment.
48:34For all its amazing qualities, graphene isn't substantial enough to be used on its own.
48:39The Manchester team are working out ways to layer graphene into other materials to change their properties.
48:48In terms of these layered materials, I think it's a very unique situation where you're actually making structures which nature
48:55doesn't make.
48:56If the team can scale up the process of graphene layering, the possibilities are endless.
49:01Flexible screens, improved solar cells, DNA sequencing, and even faster electronics.
49:22The strength, conductivity, and transparency of graphene offer new possibilities to Kate.
49:28With pure pieces of graphene suspended in water, graphene ink is tough enough and transparent enough to be printed directly
49:37onto any surface with a normal printer.
49:40The F major scale.
49:42There's a piece of transparent plastic laid over the graphics, and on that transparent plastic we've printed some graphene ink.
49:49And we're using graphene as a transparent conductor.
49:52So when I touch this button, it connects to my phone and makes the music play.
50:01So we've created a fun experience, but actually its purpose is to inspire.
50:05And we have no idea where this is going to go or where graphene is necessarily going to end up.
50:11More likely than not, it's going to be combined with other inventions, other pieces of technology.
50:17And it's when we combine those things together that we end up with properties, experiences, or technology that we've never
50:25dreamed could happen.
50:31Every runner wants the ultimate trainer.
50:34So imagine this, a trainer so high-spec that it behaves like a living organism.
50:41It just keeps growing. People would like that.
50:44That future may not be so far away.
50:57Meet Artemis, a Persian blue cat, and his owner, researcher Dr. Martin Hanzik.
51:05Experimenting on the boundaries between the living and the non-living,
51:08his findings could revolutionise our relationship with materials.
51:15Passionately committed to preserving the natural and the built environment,
51:20he's working with a technology called protocells.
51:23Artificial materials that can be made to respond like living organisms.
51:29When he's not walking in the Alps, Martin works in the beautiful historic town of Trento in northern Italy.
51:47Much as he loves them, he knows that every building here, like any structure man has ever built, is slowly
51:54deteriorating.
51:56When we look around a city like Trento, we can see that the building materials were set there and they
52:02are slowly crumbling into their environment.
52:05And this is normal. And actually it adds to some of the romantic beauty of these kinds of ancient places.
52:12We can see various types of architecture and various types of materials that were used to build this town over
52:17the centuries.
52:18And they typically are very hard, static, unresponsive materials that one could shape to make, for example, the paving stones
52:26in the streets.
52:29Traditional inert materials like marble or even iron and brick can't adapt to their environment.
52:35Left unprotected, they would corrode and eventually perish.
52:44To find new materials that resist the ravages of time, Martin is working with these.
52:54These unpromising looking blobs of red oil are called protocells.
52:59And here at the Centre for Integrative Biology, they are the focus of Martin's ground-breaking work.
53:06So in the laboratory we do research about artificial life.
53:10So we are trying to make non-living chemical systems that behave like living systems.
53:15First I will create the environment for the experiment.
53:20Which is basically soapy water. Nothing toxic.
53:24Normally an oil droplet, when you place it in water, doesn't do anything. It'll just sit there.
53:30But Martin adds a simple chemical agent to the red oil, which makes it behave in a very different way.
53:37So now I'll just introduce a small population of self-moving droplets to the system.
53:46And the droplet immediately starts to react. It's changing shape.
53:50And now it's starting to move through this little chemical environment that we've made.
53:55And exploring the different parts of it.
53:58You can see there quite a bit still moving.
54:01And it looks like there's a bit of sort of pairing up and dancing in one corner here.
54:07To compare this behaviour with normal oil, Martin then adds droplets of blue oil that aren't treated with the chemical
54:14agent.
54:16And we can see by putting in this control droplet that it doesn't move.
54:20It's not interacting with its environment in any way.
54:22And that's how we can distinguish between the two systems.
54:31Martin's vision is to apply the principle of these reactive materials to our homes and cities.
54:38We are thinking ahead to new kinds of materials that one might be able to use in the built environment
54:44to make buildings, to make homes that are more responsive and more integrated into the environment.
54:55But what if these new materials could do what the old materials cannot?
55:01What if they could be like living systems trying to maintain and preserve themselves?
55:08They would need to move to change their environment, just as the oil drop Protocell does.
55:16One of the future visions for making new materials with lifelike properties
55:21is that you would have a structure that is self-repairing, perhaps self-growing, self-reproducing even.
55:30It may sound like sci-fi, but Martin's vision has already inspired London-born designer Shemise Aden.
55:38I'm a speculative designer and I was very much interested in looking at the future of footwear design
55:42and how emerging technologies could impact the way we run in the future.
55:47Transforms resources.
55:48I actually saw a TED talk on Dr. Martin Hanzig and I was really excited by his body of research
55:54that he was doing on Protocell technology.
55:57And just by chance, I just emailed him out and just said, would you be interested in collaborating with me
56:03as a student, interested in new materials?
56:04And we started working together on developing this concept of this pair of running trainers.
56:09They will adapt to the individuals as they're running.
56:12They'll be more in tune with the individual's foot and reconfigure and adapt depending on the pressure and the time.
56:19The Amoeba shoe is still only a concept, but the potential of Protocell technology is real and present.
56:40Now I'd like to introduce sort of a special guest, a 3D printed violin.
56:47I'm a bit nervous about playing it in a gig.
56:50Shall I show it to you?
56:58So it looks like it's been painted white, but actually it's made of plastic.
57:04And this is actually the colour that it came out.
57:07Yeah, we'll give it a go.
57:20Oh, don't you go.
57:26I got a space in my bed full of words I said.
57:29I got a bullet in my gun full of things I've done.
57:33I'm a man's mind full of words.
57:37I'm a club full of words in my mind full of words.
57:57It's been brilliant.
57:58I do feel proud of what I've done and how it's turned out.
58:03It's been a voyage of discovery.
58:06It seems like there's a lot of possibilities for it.
58:38The story of materials begins in the natural world.
58:43A world that's given us the resources and the inspiration to enrich our human story.
58:49As new materials defy our imagination and enhance our world,
58:55so they're helping man and nature to thrive and grow.
59:01So what we hope to create is kind of synergistic ecology
59:05between what is natural and what is artificial.
59:07To make a more harmonious type of integration of technology with society,
59:13with humans and with nature.
59:47So what I hope to create in this world is really authentic,
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