Science is on the brink of change in your life.
Right now, men and women around the world
are making amazing breakthroughs.
This is incredible!
Wow!
Our team of leading scientists have chosen the discoveries
they think matter most.
Whoa!
An almost limitless supply of clean energy.
It's these which are the basis of one of the most important
of all conservation enterprises.
From the car you will drive...
Ah!
To medical advances that could save your life...
This miracle means that we can replace surgery.
On a journey that spans the jungles of Africa...
I'm here to join the hunt to find one of the biggest threats
to human survival.
To the quads of Oxford.
This is arguably the most complicated thing in the universe.
We will show you how science is a force for good.
Prepare to see your future.
This is the beginning of that brave new world.
Tonight, technology.
The innovations that we predict will shape the rest of the 21st century.
The latest use of lasers.
A company colonising space.
The lab unlocking the mysteries of the universe.
And the city of the future.
It's technology to transform your world.
TELEPHONES RING
'If you use a mobile phone,
'everywhere you go, every call you make, every text you send,
'and every website you look at is being recorded.
'My name is Kathy Sykes.
'I'm a scientist and, like everyone,
'I'm living through this technological revolution.
'Many of us are concerned about who has access
'to all this personal information.
'And how corporations and governments might use and abuse it.'
But there are some people who see this information as a resource
of how everyone behaves.
They want us to trust them with our personal information
because they believe they can use it to help us all live happier,
healthier and easier lives.
'I'm in Cambridge, near the city of Boston.
'Here, at the Media Lab
'at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
'is the man who wants us to trust him with our data.'
So, this is the new part of the Media Lab...
'His name is Professor Sandy Pentland.'
Walk this way, please.
'He's the father of reality mining.'
Reality mining is using the sort of digital breadcrumbs
that we leave in everyday life to understand our behaviour.
So, as you walk around with a cell phone,
you leave position markers, you call people, you use your credit card.
And what we can do is we can collect those up
to build sort of a psychological profile of you,
or, if we do it for lots of people, we can build a profile
of the community and the rhythm of the community.
'To get a sense of what researchers can discover from our phones,
'I agreed to be guinea pig and take part in one of Sandy's studies.
'Using a special app, he's been collecting my data for ten days.'
I picked out a day, July 9, when you were moving around and doing things.
And what we see here is a graph of your physical activity
around about 13:00, so early afternoon.
And you can see that you were moving around and so forth here,
and then you stopped for a little bit,
and then you did something really quite energetic.
And at that time, this is what you were doing.
So, you were walking around.
And then you seem to have walked around this place here,
which I don't know what it is.
But we could find out if you'd like to.
Could we? How close is it to my house?
Well, it's quite a way from your house, actually.
'The red line represents the route I travelled that day.'
Somehow you went to this...
I think I know where that is.
Oh, it's my mother's.
Yes.
Well, let's see what that all looks like there.
That's her street!
There. That's her door, I take it?
There, you went in the door.
And I went in the door!
That is amazing.
So, I found out where you live,
where you were walking around in the park,
and a little bit about your habit of doing that.
And if we looked at more of your data, we could get a sense of
how sociable you're being at what times of day,
how much exercise you're getting,
where you work, where your friends live.
And where I'm spending all my time.
'By collecting and analysing data from mobile-phone users,
'Sandy and his team are able to predict certain elements
'of an individual's behaviour with up to 95% accuracy.
'In San Francisco, reality mining has been used
'to try and discover who might be at risk of an early death.'
So here's people moving around in San Francisco,
cell phones moving around.
And the black dots are the most popular bars and restaurants
and so forth.
It looks like it's a nicely mixed city.
But, in fact, it's made up of subgroups or tribes
that barely talk to each other.
They spend a lot of time together, they go to the same places.
They spend a lot of time together, they go to
the same places. The same places, all together.
And they pick up the same habits through social pressure.
And as a consequence,
once you've broken the city up into these groups,
you find that there's lots of patterns
that are shared within the groups.
So, for instance, there's one group there, the green guys,
that has a higher risk of alcohol poisoning than the other guys.
And you see one group has a high risk of diabetes,
but the other ones don't.
'Remarkably, the research was able to break down the participants
'into very specific groups.
'Groups that could then be targeted directly.'
If you're doing a public-health intervention,
where would you put up free screening for diabetes?
Well, you're not going to put it up in the blue areas or the red areas.
You're going to go to
the people that have high risk for diabetes.
And if you're somebody who, for instance,
is struggling with an alcohol problem,
you can see all these places that I hang out, it's being reinforced.
So you could try to join a group that does the opposite.
That's right, you say, "I shouldn't go to the green dot places,
"I should go to the other places."
'Reality mining gives a God's eye view of the world.
'There's a real possibility that it could be used to predict
'how epidemics may spread or how a population might react
'in a natural disaster.
'The big problem is how to convince people to hand over personal details.
'Sandy believes it requires a radical re-think.
'That we need to treat the information like a commodity.'
The question I began to ask about four years ago
was, "Is there a win, win, win solution for this?"
And the win, win, win solution
is that you have to own the data that is about you.
And so treating data,
personal data, on the same sort of footing as you would treat
land ownership or money ownership is really what we're talking about.
And when you set up that presumption of ownership
on the parts of the individual,
then you get a different balance of power.
'Reality mining is technology getting personal.
'The next move is up to us.'
I think many of us feel anxious about our personal data
and keeping it safe.
And this technology can find out things about us
that are incredibly sensitive.
But our data is already being stored by banks, by companies
and governments, and more and more of it is going to be stored.
So, the idea of being able to choose to use the data for yourself
and decide what information is kept about you,
I think, is really empowering.
(STEPHEN HAWKING) Technology is the engine that drives society.
In our next story, it's lasers that are making the difference.
Making the impossible possible.
The city of Leuven in Belgium.
It's steeped in history and tradition.
But I've come here to see a cutting-edge technology
that could revolutionise manufacturing.
My name is Max Lamb.
I'm a product designer, so I'm fascinated by materials...
what you can do with them
and how you can use them to make extraordinary objects.
From cups and saucers and the casing of your mobile phone
to complex aircraft components,
designers and engineers are constantly looking
for better ways to manufacture the objects that surround us.
A lot of traditional manufacturing still operates on principles
that have been around for ages.
To make an object, you often start with a single block of material
and, using machines and tools, you take away material
until you have the object that you want.
But you've also got a lot of waste.
So what if you were to make exactly the same object...
but instead of taking away material,
you build it from the ground up, layer by layer,
using just the material that you need?
That's what's happening on the outskirts of Leuven, at Materialise.
The engineers here are transforming the production line
with a process called additive manufacturing...
also known as 3D printing.
Additive manufacturing does exactly what it says on the tin.
It's a way of making objects by adding material,
rather than subtracting it.
It works on the same principle as the laser printers in an office.
But instead of sending a document to print, you send an object.
You start by creating a 3D design, using sophisticated software.
Then that's sent to these printing machines,
that build it layer by layer.
This one is building a prototype car dashboard,
made from a type of liquid resin.
A laser solidifies the resin
to create the first layer of the dashboard.
Then the floor of the machine drops a fraction,
and a mechanical arm sweeps another layer of liquid resin on top.
Gradually, the whole object is built from the bottom up.
The dashboard appears to grow before your eyes.
To make this product in the conventional way,
you'd first have to build a model, then take a mould,
and finally injection-mould the component in plastic.
It can be expensive and very time consuming.
But with this process, you simply create a design and press "print".
But additive manufacturing
isn't just transforming the world of prototypes and one-offs.
It's now creeping into some of the world's biggest industries...
making parts for some of our most sophisticated machines.
This is EADS Innovation Works, outside Bristol.
They're working on the next generation of aircraft.
OK, so this is the EADS Airbus A400M wing assembly plant...
'Jon Meyer is research team leader.'
This is the sort of scale of product we're working with.
'Jon and his team are using additive techniques
'to try and make better Airbus components.'
This is an example of a typical aerospace part.
So this is actually a casting from an A320 aircraft.
This hinge actually holds the...
You'd describe it as the bonnet to the engine on that aircraft.
It holds that in place. And you can feel the weight of that part.
It holds that in place. And you can feel the
weight of that part. Yeah, I mean, it's heavy.
Yeah, it's a pretty heavy part.
Now, if we look at what we can do with additive manufacturing,
we're kind of freed up a little bit
in the manufacturing constraints of the technology,
so we can come up with more elegant geometries
that can carry the load much more efficiently.
So you can show me that here.
Yeah, so you can see this is an example of a component
that's been designed to directly replace that part.
This would fit in exactly the same location.
So this does exactly the same job?
Precisely the same job.
It looks lighter. It feels lighter.
'The hinge is lighter because additive manufacturing
'lets designers create a more complex and efficient shape,
'using the minimum amount of material required.'
So you can see that's something
we're targeting with the technology - weight saving.
And that has direct implications for the aircraft
because the lighter the aircraft, the less fuel you burn.
And over the course of the life of the aircraft,
you can imagine the millions of dollars that could be saved
by the airline industry if we're saving weight in this way.
'The technology is really being pushed to its limits
'by engineers at the University of Cranfield.'
This is one of the largest additive machines in the world.
It's still in the early stages of development,
but it could transform the way we manufacture things.
It combines the traditional welding process
with the principles of additive manufacturing
to melt metal and build it up, layer upon layer.
What's so exciting is the scale.
In principle, the mechanical arm could be extended to any length,
and move in any direction.
So in this case, size really does matter.
When you see a machine like this,
you realise the potential of this technology
and begin to appreciate how this process
could make really big stuff.
Stuff as big as airplane wings.
This technology isn't going to take out
traditional manufacturing in one fell swoop.
But more and more, it will sit alongside it
and, in the not-too-distant future, there could be additive machines
on many of our factory floors.
Chances are it won't stop there.
It could also arrive in our neighbourhoods.
Soon, it might be possible
to pop down to your local additive shop
and print out a spare part for your washing machine.
As a designer, what's so exciting about additive manufacturing
is the way it frees up the imagination.
It brings us closer to the process,
and it allows us to bring to life objects that, in the past,
we could only dream about.
Ever since I was a boy,
I've dreamed of travelling into space.
I've watched as technology
has taken us into orbit and beyond.
Now a new breed of space explorers is leading the way.
This is Los Angeles.
The city of dreams.
Here, in a former aircraft hangar,
an extraordinary project is taking shape.
The task - to do what only nation states have ever achieved.
Send rockets and people into space.
This is SpaceX.
My name is Kirstin Grantham.
I am the Director of Corporate Communications at SpaceX.
Kirstin has a remarkable range of products for sale.
This is the Falcon 9 rocket, with a Faring configuration.
With that, you would be carrying a satellite to orbit.
Prices start at?54 million.
Over here, we have the Falcon Heavy rocket.
The Falcon Heavy will be the most powerful rocket in the world.
That allows for you to carry very large satellites.
It also allows for deep space missions
that were previously impossible.
The Falcon Heavy rocket sells for anywhere
from?80 to?105 million.
At SpaceX, we're bringing about new affordability.
Not everybody's got?54 million, but if someone can show
that they can afford a launch, then we will sell to them.
There are restrictions, of course.
The commercialisation of space travel comes at a critical time.
(REPORTER) 'Having fired the imagination of a generation,
'a ship like no other, its place in history secured,
'the space shuttle pulls into port for the last time.'
When the space shuttle was decommissioned,
an era came to an end.
As we transition away from the Constellation programme
we're seeking completely new ways of doing business in space exploration.
One man who has taken on the challenge
of private space exploration is Elon Musk,
the founder and brains behind SpaceX.
This is my sword.
(LAUGHS)
Elon Musk is a billionaire.
He made his fortune by inventing the internet system PayPal.
Then he used the money he made
to build a rocket company.
My real interest in space started in university
when I was considering what were the great problems
that humanity will face,
or the things that will most affect the future of humanity.
And one of the things that I thought would have a huge impact,
perhaps the biggest impact, is life becoming multi-planetary.
Elon's space adventure started many years ago
when he wanted to launch a probe to Mars.
But the governments and companies were too expensive.
So I decided I have to create a rocket company
and try to make a big difference in rocket technology.
His first challenge was to build a rocket.
The breakthrough came with the creation of the Falcon.
Elon designed it himself.
By refining the technology,
the company was able to improve efficiency and reduce costs.
The Falcon 9 rocket is quite a large rocket.
It's got a thrust of about a million pounds of force,
which is equivalent to four 747s
at full thrust.
And it's capable of throwing payloads as far as Mars
or even Jupiter.
SpaceX became the first private company
to put a spacecraft in orbit and return it intact.
(CONTROL) 'T-minus 45 seconds and counting... '
Next, it plans to deliver cargo
and people to the space station.
Helping lead the astronaut programme
is Garrett Reisman.
What I'm standing in front of right now
is the original Dragon capsule, which flew in space.
Our intention is fly seven people inside the Dragon.
And compared the amount of crew habitability volume
in the space shuttle,
things will be a bit tight, if you look at the size of Dragon.
But the idea is that we'll get those seven people up to the space station
and then home in a matter of days.
We're not talking about weeks living inside Dragon.
Already, SpaceX has received
a billion dollar contract from NASA.
Its ambitions don't end there.
The goal for SpaceX is to enable life to become multi-planetary
by transporting tens of thousands,
hundreds of thousands, millions of people
and millions of tonnes of cargo to Mars,
making life multi-planetary for the first time.
I often say I hope mankind will move beyond earth
and colonise other planets.
This is a step in that direction.
Since I first started making television programmes
nearly 60 years ago, the population of the Earth
has increased by nearly three times.
That's an astonishing and terrifying statistic.
All those people need places to live and food to eat,
and over half of them chose to live in cities.
Science can't solve all the problems
that these increased numbers mean,
but it can help find ways of making those extra numbers
make less demands on the Earth's resources.
Now a new metropolis is emerging with a blueprint for the future.
This is Abu Dhabi,
one of the fastest-growing cities on the planet.
It's also one of the hottest places on Earth.
It's a city that has harnessed the power of technology
to defy the laws of nature.
Outside, it's 45 degrees.
Inside the towering hotels
and shopping malls, it's chilled to perfection.
And even thought we're in a desert,
everywhere you look there are lush green lawns
and spectacular fountains.
'My name is Tara Shine.
'I'm an environmental scientist.'
There may not be much fresh water here in Abu Dhabi,
but one thing that is not in short supply is fossil fuels.
To power the air conditioning, sprinkle the golf courses
and desalinate the drinking water,
Abu Dhabi relies on its rich oil deposits.
For some people, Abu Dhabi is their idea of the city of the future.
For me, it's not.
'I believe that the real cities of the future
'need to use technology in a radically different way.
'Just outside Abu Dhabi, they're starting to do just that.'
With so much wealth and available space,
Abu Dhabi has begun an amazing new experiment
to build a new, green city from scratch.
Its name is Masdar.
Masdar is a risky experiment to create
the most sustainable city on earth.
Currently under construction on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi,
it will cost about 18 billion dollars
and eventually be home to 40,000 people.
When you get to Masdar, the first thing you do is park your car
here on the outskirts of the city.
Then you get into one of these. A driverless, electric car.
It's all a bit James Bond.
(TANNOY) Your vehicle is now ready to leave.
Please be seated so that you may depart.
'The cars are among the most advanced electric vehicles in the world.
'They're guided by GPS,
'with route and speed pre-determined.'
It's a very strange, out of control feeling.
The car is accelerating and braking and I'm not doing anything.
I feel a little bit like I need to hold on for dear life.
'The city planners have ditched the traffic-clogged highways
'of Abu Dhabi to create a radical alternative.
'The ultimate in clean-energy public transport.'
These cars operate in a specially built basement
underneath the city of Masdar.
The advantage of that is it leaves the ground level
free for pedestrians to enjoy with no traffic.
It's the kind of thing you can only do
when you're building a city from scratch, from the ground up.
The doors are opening. Please mind the doors.
But the pod cars are just a taster.
Now it's time to head up to street level where the city really unfolds.
I'm in Abu Dhabi to visit Masdsar,
an experimental city rising out of the desert.
The idea is to create a sustainable metropolis for 40,000 people.
At street level things could not be more different
from the city I just left.
The architects have turned away from the Abu Dhabi model of ever
taller towers and ever wider highways and reverted to
the low rise buildings of traditional Arab architecture.
Although it's the middle of the day it's surprisingly comfortable here.
The streets are narrow and shady and it has a nice breeze.
It's an altogether nicer place to be than in the streets of Abu Dhabi.
Masdar is not just about the latest technology.
It's also about the best technology for the job.
This wind tower is a perfect example.
At the top is a series of louvers that open
and shut depending on the direction of the wind.
It catches the cool air blowing in from the desert.
What you get is nature's own air conditioning.
Wind towers like this used to be part of every Arab town.
They brought cool winds down into the centre of market places
and courtyards, but now people prefer to shop
in air-conditioned shopping malls and these don't get built any more
which is a real shame because they work and they're zero carbon.
But here in the city of the future they're not just changing how
they use energy, they're changing where they get it from.
Masdar is already home to the largest solar power plant
in the Middle East.
It covers an area the size of 35 football pitches
using 88,000 solar panels.
The plant produces more energy than Masdar City needs,
so the excess is sent to the Abu Dhabi national grid.
But they're not settling for conventional solar power.
This is the Beam Down project, the only one of its kind in the world.
It's a new way of harvesting the sun's energy.
The man in charge of this solar revolution is Simon Brauniger.
So Simon, can you explain to me what this is.
It's a tower plant, you can say.
What does that mean?
So we are concentrating sunlight,
and we are concentrating it towards the tower.
You have the heliostats here. They're mirror-erased.
They turn and they focus and reflect the sunlight
on to the top of the tower.
So we beam up from that mirror up to these secondary mirrors,
and then we beam the light down again.
So the light is reflected up and then down again.
And the receiver is positioned on the bottom.
By beaming the sunlight up to the mirrors on top
and back to the heat receiver on the ground,
it concentrates the sun's rays like a magnifying glass.
The super-heated water in the receiver then drives
a powerful steam turbine.
And the advantage of this technology would be increased
efficiency in terms of solar power.
When you're comparing it with other solar power plants yes,
this has a higher efficiency, because we reach higher temperatures.
So, this is purely experimental, the only one of its kind.
Yes, it's purely experimental, and we need to see if this works out
in a large scale installation.
What's so inspiring about Masdar City is that it's a laboratory.
An attempt to apply some of the wonders of technology
to an entire city.
To test new ways of living that could set an example for the future.
It's been great to visit the experiment that is Masdar,
but it will remain just a very expensive experiment,
unless the technologies developed here are used in other cities
around the world, like London, Lagos and Mumbai.
Then we'll really be creating cities for the future.
For me, the greatest achievement of science,
is to allow humanity to realise that our world is comprehensible.
That through science and rational thinking,
we can understand how the universe works.
If you don't understand how the world works,
then everything is a mystery to you.
If everything is magical and mysterious,
then you really don't work on logic any more.
Then everything is all about belief.
Our sanity depends on understanding what goes on around us.
That is isn't just blind fate, that there are reasons for things.
Reason is science. Understanding the reason for things is science.
HAWKING: For me, the technology that is most important
helps us answer the big questions.
How does our universe work and how did it begin?
In our next story, scientists are travelling deep into the earth
to help unravel these mysteries.
Every second, a trillion tiny particles
pass through our bodies without leaving a trace.
These minute fragments flow around and through us,
close to the speed of light.
They're called neutrinos
and they're believed to be fundamental to
the way our universe works.
I first studied physics because I was fascinated by the particles
that make up our world,
how they work and where they come from.
Neutrinos are produced in nuclear reactions so they're
streaming down on us from the sun, the stars, and even the big bang.
They're coming up from the earth from radioactivity in rocks.
Every few seconds, the sun is emitting more neutrinos
than there are grains of sand on the planet.
Neutrinos can help us understand how the sun works
and the evolution of stars, galaxies, and the universe itself.
But they're so elusive, they're extremely difficult to detect.
Neutrinos have been dubbed the ghost particle.
But in the mining town of Sudbury in eastern Canada,
a surprising experiment is trying to capture those particles.
Before I get to see the experiment,
I have to take a short trip in a lift.
It's just two kilometres down.
Deep beneath the surface of the earth, beneath a working
nickel mine is the SNOLAB...
short for Sudbury Neutrino Observatory.
It's one of the deepest labs in the world.
It's home to a neutrino detector,
a spectacular feat of engineering and one of
the more curious experiments that physicists have attempted.
Down here, the detector is sheltered from other particles
produced by the sun and stars.
The observatory is this far underground for a reason.
Cosmic rays interfere with the detection equipment.
So they mess up the results.
This is as deep into the planet as the scientists could get.
The huge complex consists of corridors
and caverns carved out of solid rock.
It's home for some of the world's top scientists working to
uncover the secrets of neutrinos.
But the centrepiece of the lab is the detector itself...
an enormous acrylic sphere suspended in a huge underground cavern.
The neutrino detector is in a chamber directly beneath me.
When it's operating it's filled with heavy water.
But right now it's undergoing maintenance
work, so it's been totally drained.
And that means that we can have a rare peek inside.
The interior is only accessible through a small hatch at the top.
To get inside, I have to be lowered down by a winch.
It's a long way down - a 65-foot drop to the bottom
One of the largest fishbowls in the world.
And we're going to be going into it.
This feels amazing.
It's like being suspended
in a giant,
glassy mirror ball.
There are no edges to the walls,
and the floor is curved.
It feels magical.
No one has ever filmed inside the neutrino detector before.
So for the first time we can show you it from the inside.
This detector is made of this giant acrylic globe
that I'm standing on.
Usually there's a thousand tonnes of water in here.
And behind, underneath, all around this globe,
are thousands of light sensors,
all trying to detect neutrinos as they interact with water.
When the neutrinos interact with the water,
flashes of blue light are emitted.
These flashes are picked up by the incredibly sensitive light sensors
and alert the scientists to the presence of neutrinos.
Before this experiment,
scientists had only detected a third of the neutrinos they expected.
SNOLAB found the missing two thirds
and that there were actually three different kinds.
Mark Chen is one of the neutrino hunters.
The SNO experiment confirmed
that our understanding of how stars work,
the energy generation mechanism in stars,
was correct, because neutrinos are like the exhaust
from the engine of the star.
And so by counting neutrinos, we get to see how the engine
is working and what it is that it's burning.
By detecting these solar neutrinos we get a way to understand
the composition of our sun and what it's made up of,
and it allows us to peer all the way to the solar core,
so that's what makes them so exciting to detect.
Over the coming years,
the scientists at SNOLAB will be running ever more sophisticated
experiments to detect the most elusive particles in existence.
Nobody really knows where the research being done here will take us.
But when scientists split the atom, nobody predicted it would
lead to nuclear power, precision electronics or the atomic bomb.
But unlocking and understanding the secrets of nature
and the universe
is a part of being curious and a part of being human.
And we know from the past that this kind of fundamental science
has the potential to change the world.
Technology touches all of our lives and changes them
in ways that are hard to predict.
From objects built by lasers,
to telephones that save our lives,
cities fuelled by the sun,
and space rockets for hire.
What we have shown you today may seem extraordinary.
By tomorrow, it may be our new reality.
Next time: the environment.
We join the hunt for the ultimate energy source.
This is your star chamber.
Explore the future of test tube meat.
Wow, that is incredible.
And the quest to protect our most endangered species.
A vet is now taking a blood sample.
It's science fighting to save the planet.
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