Animate materials with Mark Miodownik | The Royal Society

uh oh uh good evening everybody and welcome to tonight's event building the future animal materials as part of british science week well you might ask what are animal animal materials and i like to think of them as a new phase in the way that we make stuff the future of stuff you know we started out civilization naming each part and and progress of civilization after the materials so we have the stone age the copper age the iron age and as we've moved forward in time so we've innovated in materials and made new materials and made cities and made transport systems and clothes and electronics and all sorts of things and the future the future and that's what we're going to discuss tonight of this stuff is i believe and and the panel may or may not believe that and that's what we're going to discuss and you may not believe that and again you are an integral part of this discussion is about animate materials we've got an excellent panel joining us and i will uh introduce them in a minute um and also you're going to get a chance to submit your ideas and we'll be discussing them and and and uh and and interacting with you live through something called slido we've got live captioning available this evening and if you'd like to see these please click the subtitles closed caption button at the bottom bar and as i said if you want submit your ideas please go to slido.com if you've not used it it's a very easy interface submit the code a103 and then you'll be in into the interface for this meeting animate materials and you'll be able to submit your ideas and they'll come up and we can we can start discussing them we'll also have polls so you can vote some of the best ideas and what you think of them if you're on twitter and you'd like to tweet please use the hashtag animate materials and royal society so tonight's event is inspired by a new report by the royal society which is uh identified potentially transformative class of material called animate materials and and i've i've sort of introduced a little bit but we're going to get into more details in a minute but first let me introduce our panel um now my name is mark miodovnik i'm a material scientist from university college london and i'm going to introduce um russell morris who's a professor of chemistry uh becky earley who's a professor of materials and design and and professor molly stevens so first of all over to russell russell would you like to just say a brief word about yourself hi there everybody welcome welcome to this event my name is russell morris i'm a chemist and i'm interested in how materials store and absorb and deliver gases for lots of different applications from the environments absorbing carbon dioxide to medicine delivering medical gases to people i look forward to this very much thank you thanks russell becky unmute uh hi everybody my name is professor becky earley i am a textile designer um i'm based at university of the arts london where i run a research center which is focused on circular design so my real passion is about clothing and textiles for the future that we can reuse time and time again thanks becky and and over to molly hi everyone it's a real pleasure to be here i'm a professor at imperial college um and i am sort of passionate about biomaterials and my group in particular focuses on applications in regenerative medicine and also biosensing looking forward to the discussion thanks molly so let's just kick off the discussion for a minute about animate materials and i'm going to introduce i'm going to ask my panel one by one to kind of talk about animate materials from their own perspective um so so in a minute i'll i'll hand over to becky and and ask about you know textiles and clothing and and and where you see animate materials coming in and by anime well you know i haven't really defined that and and in some ways that's that's the point but but in the report we we we highlight the fact that what we what we have made until now in terms of materials are inanimate stuff largely so largely stuff that you make it you put it there it does something uh so it's some it's a piece of clothing or it's it's optical and allows me to see or it's a building or it's a bridge and then when those materials get damaged well then they either have to be repaired manually or uh or we have to replace them um and as by animate what we mean is these materials will become more lifelike and and by lifelike that means being able to sense their environment being able to sense perhaps that they're damaged being able to compute something about what they should do next and then be able to actually do it so actuate in some way so perhaps heal themselves harvest energy to do that healing or communicate with something else so that vision of materials that can do those sorts of things and that covers a vast range of applications but if i hand over to becky now and just say becky what you know what kind of materials with those attributes how would they affect your world the world that you research well it's potentially really really exciting i mean what a good match fashion with something that has the potential to change so it could be you know a dream scenario for the industry um especially an industry that's linear and wasteful and toxic you know is this a a real solution you could have pattern changing of course um but you could have clothes lasting a lot longer if they can self-heal um clothes that adapt to temperature of course um and you know reading the report and thinking about it i had all kinds of visions come in my mind and kept thinking about a biker jacket wouldn't be great if a biker jacket was you know seriously good at protecting you and it could heal and sort of whenever you were scratching it up but actually if you were wearing it out maybe it could have cooling properties too so you wouldn't get too hot in it and you know so it it could be great but i suppose the big concerns are going to be about toxicity and if you sort of take everything and weigh it up and you use life cycle assessment is that going to be better than that you know and it's going to be about finding just the right context to make it really work i have to say becky thank you for that that the the ideas coming in through slido are there's lots of them on on on wearables and but they they're not so focused on the sustainability side of things they're more on the sort of functionality the amazing thought that you might be able to have a jacket that suddenly becomes insulatory so you could get you know if it suddenly gets cold it just puffs up on you perhaps um the ability to self-heal comes up a lot but clothes that can stretch or shrink depending on the fluctuations in the wearer's weight and i'm thinking of all the money i've spent on my children's clothes if i could have only bought one right at the beginning and they just gross with the kid that would have been fantastic um and clothes that can um darn themselves when they get here when you did mention that i mean do you you know are there are there people working in your fields that are starting to work out how this might happen i know i know i know energy generation has already been quite a big part of textile research yeah so i mean that functionality side of things is of course it's sort of um uh you know about finding just the right product where that is absolutely essential and you kind of can't live without it you don't want things to feel fatty we don't want we sort of like we don't want gadgets actually more gadgets in our life or more software in our life um clothing is about joy and pleasure a sense of belonging so there's a real sort of social need attached to clothing as well so um it's about finding the right balance really between what the materials can do what you can do for yourselves so i'm kind of interested to sort of understand you know almost the price point that we're talking about is this super luxury will it always be super luxury or will we really ever have like i think one of your examples that came in was self-healing nail varnish sounds brilliant i could literally show you a chipped nail right now but you know are we gonna i'm interested to know whether that's really feasible or whether we're just never gonna be dealing at that price point this is actually sort of super top end stuff thanks becky and you've raised the economic thing which which i think we need to kind of come back to which is who pays for this and and and where the where the killer apps will be for the first set of um animate materials um one of my bets is that it's in healthcare and no wearables are in healthcare and and they're growing in importance because um being able to sense whether someone who's had an um a shoulder operation or um or some other surgical intervention whether they're rehabilitating if they could wear something a piece of clothing that immediately communicates with their surgeon or their clinician exactly how well they're doing how much they're moving and in the case of prosthetics we already know that these kind of things um being able to communicate not with just conditions the clothing and and and the assistive technology but with the user i you're getting too hot uh you know you should you just take a rest these things are already sort of starting to come on the market but i wanted to hand over to molly because molly this is your area and already materials i mean arguably animate materials already being implanted into the body and we we highlight some examples in the report because you know already and perhaps you could tell us a bit more about that and the future perhaps which is you know we can implant bone substitutes that turn into real bone they turn into the user's bone molly what do you think yeah thanks so much mark um i think i think it's really interesting actually if you think of the evolution of of biomaterials as a field um you know many of the early materials that were implanted in the body were selected for um implantation based on the fact actually that they were quite inert um and and that sort of um inertness was almost what the surgeon was looking for so if you think of the first intraocular lenses and you know sutures and many other applications but actually after a while people realize that there's a lot of promise in putting in materials that can be active and bioactive and actually interact with the body so that example that you just gave around the the bone implant type materials you know there are materials now available that when you put them in the body their coating will change for example it will actually be interact with cells in the body encourage those cells to start to form new bone and get them to come in and grow and eventually be completely replaced and form bone and that's really that whole field of tissue engineering and and there's so so many other areas as well i think where um animate materials can have impact but coming back to becky's point about who will you know what will people pay for like i mean it feels to me that in healthcare if it's going to give you an extra 10 years or it's going to give you your be able to walk again this feels like something people really will pay for and i know that cartilage growth in knees is one where you really feel like there's such a huge market for materials that that solve that problem of knees going bust yeah yeah that's right i mean cartilage is is it is difficult because it's it's it's not just cartilage actually it's thinking about the way it interacts with the bone underneath the cartilage as well and so you have all these different gradients in there and and also also it changes uh over time and so actually to be able to have materials that can maybe respond to changes in the body um in the body or as you say you know with cartilage maybe these change as you're running right become bouncier or stronger as you run uh you know it could be all sorts of different things you could um think about um i think some price points may be high but actually some things particularly for example for the bone repair may not necessarily have to be that more expensive than than other solutions and so um there will be i think applications that can really benefit a lot of people and as you say will over time save a lot of money um because they'll make people um able to live healthier much longer thanks molly and i'm just gonna hand over to russell and just kick you off with this idea russell which is which is you know about gases and how and the co2 the pesky co2 we're having to deal with in terms of climate change and do you think there will be buildings and infrastructure of the future made from materials that harvest the co2 and and use it and so in a sense suck it up from the atmosphere is that is that somewhere we can go with animal materials i think that's absolutely something that we could we could actually do uh with with buildings and materials that cover buildings like paints for instance you know they're always in contact with the atmosphere and we want to keep our atmosphere as clean as possible you know it's in the news all the time at the moment really interested in these these types of environmental applications and just imagine when if we could coat or build build a building out of a material that if there's a lot of carbon dioxide in the air we'll actually start to suck it up and store it and keep it out of the atmosphere those those types of applications are really something that people are thinking of at the moment and really looking looking to see how they'll how they'll work thanks russell i i think that you know that this thing about you know people somehow now are really alert to gases because both of kind of um co2 but also pollution and air pollution indoor and outdoor and i think indoor pollution you know is is another area where you can imagine you know these materials coming into play i'd like to bring our audience in now if possible um and those are people on slido um if they could vote on a poll which which we want to want to put to you which is which properties from the living world would you be would you think most useful for human-made materials so we've been sort of you know talking about what life-like properties we're going to move into the material world and should they be self-repairing self-healing properties should they be growing yeah is is it possible that a building might in a sense grow an outer skin slap it off and like a tree perhaps um or or a road or molly's already talked about growing within the body um should these materials harvest and store energy of course this is this seems like a huge opportunity isn't it there's a lot of energy being knocked about plants have worked out how to photosynthesize why don't why don't our buildings and infrastructure harvest energy surely we can we can crack that problem um should they move these animal materials i mean anima implies to some extent that um but are you comfortable do you really do we really want this stuff to have that much agency um and should these materials detect and respond to change in the environment and we're just talking about that with russell like you can imagine a building turning a different color in a very polluted zone to to alert everyone that there's a huge area of pollution here do we want that um another another example on that is um buildings that change color with uh with temperature so that when it's very hot they go white and reflect heat and when it's very cold they go dark and absorb heat and it's been shown in america but where there's lots of flat roofs that you could you could knock 10 to 15 of cooling costs and heating costs of the whole you know of the whole infrastructure if you could do this so there's a lot of opportunity there so um we've got we've got a live poll coming in now can i see the results that's the question oh they're coming up okay so that's good okay so 41 have said they like self-repairing self-healing oh there's more results coming into the harvesting energy um this is like watching a race isn't it and coming on the outside coming on the outside coming out it's detecting and responding to changes um it's coming up i mean i i think this area of being able to see what's invisible is really appealing and and certainly our audience think that uh but harvesting energy and surely that is an important thing growing and moving independently these these appear to be marginal um and um really it's it seems to be these top three that our audience so 69 people now have voted and we've got self-repairing self-healing is is winning out and harvesting energy they both seem in a sense no-brainers don't they because they would extend the lifespan in the case of self-healing and self-repairing and that surely from a sort of energy perspective and a material perspective would be a good thing um and harvesting energy of course will then allow us to mop up a lot of energy that we're at the moment having to produce using fossil fuels um becky can i can i can i ask you if um if there are any aspects of this poll you know in terms of the energy generation i know i know that there was a big fad in textiles uh probably about 10 years ago now for coats that could charge your mobile phone what they don't seem to be around anymore is that because of the technology because people didn't actually want them in the end all right it's good question i don't really know it's not you know smart textiles not really my field so much but i did always look at those and think you know is it do we want our coats doing that you know what what's the risk here and what's the sort of you know and especially for me anything that has sort of you know the metal um fibers in the in the yarns means that it's really hard to recycle later on and there are more considerations going on but yeah i think i mean friends that i have that are involved in that smart side there was always a question around the capacity and battery you know the amount of battery we now need to run a smartphone for example um but who's to say that that's not still entirely possible lighting perhaps our way rather than you know charging our phone um but it's it's about needs people are funny at the end of the day they're like i just want to hold a torch and have a normal jacket you know the price hike isn't worth it so it's a long game i think with those kind of developments yeah thank you becky um molly there's a question here in slido about your your insight into the bouncier cartilage that would change its absorbs absorbed properties um depending on you know whether you're going for a run or i guess walking through the park uh and the question is whether there's a sort of it would then affect elite sports and and this has always been a problem with materials development hasn't it because you know you you get you get you know carbon reinforcement uh carbon cop carbon fiber reinforced plastics and suddenly tennis changes because the rackets all change and golf changes and formula one changes and and now if we're starting to engineer people's bodies well that will affect sports too right yeah that's very interesting i mean there's there's already um bouncy um scaffolds being made for cartilage so work led by julian jones at imperial um who we've been collaborating with is working in that area but but i guess i was thinking more futuristic even that that the material properties actually change you know as you start running and things like that and i i guess yeah there would be the uh potential for enhancement in in sport and um that would have to be considerations um we also have a project funded um with the university of bristol at the moment which is on a soft robotics and the i is very futuristic project and the idea is that ultimately you'd be able to interface uh living muscles with artificial muscles and of course that also has the potential for enhancing um human function as well as repairing uh in the case of disease yeah i mean i i think that i'm always i'm always um my my own feeling about this is that we kind of we concentrate so much on on let's say the negative effects of technology push in in sport and how it sort of made a particular sport less enjoyable to watch let's say but we don't concentrate enough on how it changes the everyday person's experience of the world and in the case of this kind of technology as i see it i mean i i think that it's you know these sorts of technologies that allow people to play tennis to the age of a hundred uh or go skiing i i mean i'm am i kind of over egging the pudding here molly or do you think that or am i being naive perhaps actually that isn't how the technology will be used in the end i i i don't know how it will be used but um it's not unreasonable to think that you know at the moment most people are striving to develop materials and approaches to sort of repair tissue that's damaged or you know tissue that might be missing for example if you've had a tumor removed um but actually if you can design materials that are really really active and um you know can essentially promote self-healing and things like that it's not unreasonable to think that there's the possibility to design materials that can actually augment uh tissue function um as to whether um you know who who would do that and where it would be applied i wouldn't have the answers on that but but i think the sciences is certainly possible um and and on the horizon you could you could think about doing things like that thanks molly um russell there um there's quite a lot of chat here on on on slido about self-healing and it came up as a very high on that um on that pole we put out you know there's a huge appetite i think for people to have things that don't break and when they do break they can look after themselves i mean where do you see that technology going well there's i mean it's the classic i think anime material that's an animated property that's easy to to understand if you cut yourself you heal you self-heal if you're small cuts you will you will heal so that's that's a really good thing where does it go i mean we already have some of these materials available right there are car companies out there with paints that advertise if you scratch it it will heal itself so but you can you can extend those sort of self-healing applications all the way to uh things that annoy us at the moment when we drop our mobile phone right break the screen could we could we develop materials that will actually self-heal or could we after after us some cold weather we had a last month could we could we uh have roads that rather than just form holes themselves could they actually repair themselves before big potholes form you know all those sort of things that really annoy people at the moment could make our lives much more much nicer but also make it much more sustainable you know i don't know if you've seen the news today about about one of the laws coming in about repairing instruments and and things we have in the home and there's a law just about to be passed that means that companies are going to have to make things repairable taking that one step further is having things self-repairable that's a really obvious idea then to to look at how we can how we can make the world a better place in terms of much less waste make things last much longer thanks russell becky there's a there's a there's a question here about um close and end of life which is right up your street which is about the possibility of programming clothes to have a secondary use at the end of their life to help the environment in some way um to to in a sense well i i wonder if that is possible anyway but but but i mean in in your area at the moment i suppose they focus on recycling clothes right so putting them back into the system but i get i guess there is the sort of um other other option here which is that they they could be put into a compost heap or something like that and they could be they you know they'd be triggered to decompose and be nutrients for the soil is that is that possible it's desirable even who knows okay so it whether or not it's desirable is is completely dependent on the type of garment and the context of course but yeah what we have in a circular fashion and textile future are clothes and textiles that need to last as long as possible so the potential for the self-repair self-heal is great tick but then at the end of that finally finally when it's come to the end of its life it's going to need to disassemble it's going to need to come apart because i would sort of you know obviously suspect i think that it's not going to be a mono-material garment so we we're having problems sort of recycling things that are lots and lots and lots of different component parts you know and so actually this idea that we can have something that can self-disassemble and sort of trot off to its own sort of correct route could be incredibly appealing um but in terms of composting that's a real tricky one i mean we sort of did some research hoping that there was a solution here for fast fashion but um the way material scientists that we've worked with see it is that's just a waste if you're going to compost it you've actually lost that resource you sort of made it so you've actually got to move forward with it it needs to keep going into material cycles perhaps rather than compost but i love the fact that this field does have this potential to play with pace i do think there are parts that could come away and then the core could stay so animate material materials could sort of help you change the garment shape by almost sort of re-styling re-tailoring uh a garment too so i mean it's a sort of dream brief to give a design student really this this this report which i shall be giving my students uh to work with here's here's another question for you on this front but it's a slightly different one having i mean i know there's a lot of work in your area in this making clothes having living tissue in them or living living organisms in them either to clean them or or to or to you know interact um in terms of you know warding off diseases and things like that i mean this this hot one in the report we didn't we kind of we wanted to focus on man-made materials and we we didn't want to kind of in a sense bring in living organisms as part of the animate materials but but but what do you think about um sort of living tissues as a sort of clothing option so i mean uh is is it is that exciting i think it's interesting i think that you know 10 years ago i was getting my head around um bacteria dyeing our clothes and that's really moving ahead so you know we i think people having things next to their skin is is the issue here you know what and how and what do they understand and how safe do they feel and um you know should we be putting those that kind of technology there in that intimate space or or are there a more appropriate context i don't know but then if you're putting it inside the body and making you know joints that assemble then surely we've got to be able to sort of adapt that to have safe clothing on the outside that's doing beneficial things as well thanks becky um i i wanted to um bring in another poll here if possible a slider poll for our audience there's lots of huge numbers of questions coming in so more than i can keep up with so a i'd like to say to the public thank you this is it's really exciting um but uh and on that note because there's so many ideas coming in i thought we we had this like we we would like to pull you on some some ideas and see what you think so um here here they are which potential for animate materials are you most excited about this is for everyone to vote on clothes that can change shape or color depending on the wearer's mood mobile phone screens that heal when they get cracked heal themselves um trainers that clean themselves at the end of each day so they're pristine and great smelling in the morning building materials that can generate and store energy for the future machines small enough to be injected into the bloodstream that could repair damage and collect data i guess about disease in your body now we'll get on to sort of ethics and and people's worries about these technologies in a bit of the second half of this uh panel but this is this is about the future like what are you most excited about so start voting on these please here we go uh we've already got 30 people who've got their buttons on the buzzer and materials that can generate energy and store um store energy for future use are a leading machine small enough to be injected into the bloodstream are also doing very well clothes that can change shape or color depending on whereas mood are not getting such a big and well i'm surprised at that because that is one of the things i'm really keen on um because you know for someone like me i often get into this mode where i especially in the mornings where i actually a bit grumpy but i can't actually tell anyone i'm grumpy and if my dressing gown could express that for me with some sort of color i would actually be very indebted to that trainers that clean themselves i cannot believe that is not getting more traction with our audience come on you must be very sweet-smelling people out there is this not a problem mobile phone screens that heal themselves is the lowest i mean that's is that because people don't believe it's possible because it's glass and somehow glass is is the most inert the most unable to be active they don't want something like that on their phone i'm surprised that i'm surprised that those bottom three i i have to say and i i i'm also surprised uh it says 91 people can we get 100 people doing this it'd be great but i'm surprised i'm not surprised that building materials that generate energy is up there because i i think it's got to be one of the focuses of scientists and engineers now i really think this is a this is you know when we think about sustainability of the future it's crazy to me that that nature uses photosynthesis in its you know in all its wonderful varieties and forms and harvest energy from the sun and we only need to harvest a few percent of the solar flux on the earth to already meet all our current energy needs do you know that only a few percent of what we currently get from the sun and we would already meet our engine needs so this seems like a no-brainer we've really got to be on this and there are some technical many technical issues to solve obviously solar cells are sort of not doing at the moment because they're an add-on and they're very expensive and a price i think is going to be one of the big things there but machines small enough to be injected in the bloodstream i want to turn to molly now because i'm surprised at this not because i don't think it's a good idea but i'm i would have thought people would have found this a little bit it feels like we've got a very avant-garde audience tuning in molly are you surprised at that um i think the reason that things like the mobile phone screen and and so on are not up there um are not that people don't want it it's just that they could only pick one choice on the slider um and and similarly for the fashion i mean who wouldn't want to know be forewarned if someone's in a bad mood so or if someone's really joyful they'd be nice to go and have a chat with yeah um so i think yeah i think we have got a bit of an avant-garde audience actually um because this is i think one of the things that people maybe might worry most about about you know is little machines you might have in the bloodstream but but actually the concept of having um you know well-controlled but small uh things that could go around and maybe detect disease really early sort of cure cancer before it spreads you know um that has a certain appeal doesn't it so i guess that's why people are getting excited by that and you've done some great work in diagnosis using small machines haven't you i mean you know that's not putting them into the body but it is it is it is the design of these machines do you want to say a little bit about that yeah i mean i mean there's all sorts of things you can do with very small particles to sort of um get them to self-assemble in interesting ways and that self-assembly in itself can lead to sort of color changes or dif different types of properties maybe release a molecule that could be used to to heal and there's also some work done in the body where those types of materials but not as advanced as what you're proposing in that poll we're still not there yet and we'll get i think i think in a minute we'll get on to the ethical issues of of how society accepts some of these things i mean i mean um already you know we are used to having injections of certain things um i mean vaccine is is the current one at the moment and and a vaccine you know is a little micro machine it albeit from a from a delivered you know it's from a biological source um but let's carry on i'm just going to turn to becky and russell about some of the other things becky you know are you are you upset that the trainers and and the and the textiles that change color didn't get higher ratings is this a setback for you no i'm not upset at all i actually feel a bit guilty because i actually feel like i've been a bit of a sort of um you know luddite going oh i don't really want that on my skin and i've put everybody off but um i think you know maybe people have tuned in and from a sort of fashion sustainable fashion background with that mindset and i think that the solutions that are being sought at the moment are very much about sort of more about how natural our materials can be with less chemicals with less sort of interference if you like and um making them you know sort of lighter as a footprint on the earth so maybe there's a sort of an element of understanding sustainability just a bit more um before we can find the right garment proposals clothing proposals for this i mean natural i mean animate materials are not natural so in that sense um it it you know this they would be completely opposed i mean the opposite of that um what what what is it about the term natural that appeals because it's a kind of difficult word to actually define natural isn't it it's i think it's piggybacking on the food um conversations quite a lot isn't it you know we have become aware in the last few years that there's an awful lot of stuff going on behind closed doors to make money for an awful lot of people you know not us kind of thing and we were aware now of what's in our bread so we make our own bread you know and that's sort of translating of course into our clothes and and a great concern around oil and all the synthetics that we're making now some of those synthetics are fantastic and better than something we would call natural in the right garment in the right context it's complicated but we do have tools to work it out and we do have ways to sort of measure our decisions but that's not always easy to get through sort of in a way the media to the average shopper in the store so we've got a lot of work to do to really understand what sustainable is going to be but looking at that poll it seems to me that that maybe i mean maybe yeah i'm reading too much into it of course but it seems to me that you know where there's an application that seems to be a benef of clear benefit so you know we we've got an energy problem we're all we've got a renewable energy problem so you know let's forward your head with technology but where where in clothing perhaps perhaps people don't see new technology as as a solution to anything they perhaps see it as slightly suspicious maybe is that fair yeah maybe but it's also the sort of micro macro isn't it it's like here's the world and we want to fix it we want to make it a better place and this is a new technology it could do so much for us and here's my jacket you know it's it's sort of getting on i mean people don't really know the scale of the impacts that come from clothing and textiles that's being talked about a lot more recently but um you know so there's a there we should be talking about it on the macro level but and i don't know who the audience is i don't know what their understanding is of the clothes but there's certainly a sense of it maybe it's not quite as important here's some big things we need to deal with yeah thank you and russell um on on the generating energy front from infrastructure and and that sort of thing um i mean what what's your take on this i mean you you you hang out with chemists um and i know they've been working on artificial photosynthesis for a long time and it's such an interesting problem and it maybe our audience are sort of surprised that we haven't worked well it's not that we haven't worked out how it works in plants but that it can't be in a sense transferred over to the built environment is have you got any insights in into that and had to how hard it is to essentially mimic nature and make photosynthesis work on a building so i think it's it's a very good it's a great question why why isn't it so easy to do one of the things of course the solar panel does do is mimic that photosynthesis process it does take sunlight and turn it into energy but it's not a straightforward process and if you think about leaves on a tree there's lots of surface on a on a tree and they don't have to be so efficient to to get enough energy for it for the leak to go whereas you know what we're really looking for in a building is to cover all the surfaces with with something that will either create energy from sunlight for instance sunlight's the obvious one we think that would work really well or in fact store energy from just because obviously it's not always sunny we have we have night time right when when when we can't produce energy so that even the building material itself could store the energy as well so there's it's more than just photosynthesis as the as the possibility because that doesn't work without all the time so we we have to have a mixed approach but i think one of the one of the ways we need to move forward is to get materials that that don't rely on the just having a small or a relatively small solar panel on top of on top of the roof to produce our energy but the whole roof needs to be made of a material that can do that that's what we really need and russell i mean this comes back to the question that you and i both discussed quite a lot when we were sort of helping put this report together which was that um if you if you if you treat these materials as an add-on like so so we can talk about a paint you can put it on the outside of a building and maybe imagine the paint isn't photosynthesis paint it's a magic ingredient hooray but how long will it last answer a few months maybe six months maybe 12 months it starts flaking off and then then you're back to square one so you can't think of these materials or at least i think we came to the conclusion there's no point really trying to think of these films as add-on to existing technology like you build a building the normal way and then you put a paint on it and then you're done that actually we have to rethink what we build buildings from so that one of their properties not just strength and not just elas you know stiffness is is harvesting energy and then and then you have to think well it also needs a network to get that energy out of the system and store it and that also has to be part of the intrinsic building materials which is it's actually quite a big ask now it's not like a solar cell that's been put on the outside of a building it's actually changing the building material itself and and and russell do you want to say a bit about you know the kind of work that you know people are doing in chemistry from the ground up to to reimagine building materials well not necessarily building materials but just mata you know and stuff yeah i mean it's absolutely it's key you're i mean i i don't want to downplay the idea of the add-on because that's all that's often where you first introduce the technology and where it first becomes useful and then you slowly develop that as you go forward for these types of for these types of uh of solids and materials that we can we can do you know there are there is a ton of work going on out there on in all these ideas uh and energy is a particularly is a really important one this idea of of intermittent energy in particular we i live in scotland and you know we're fantastically resourced with wind and even sunshine right we do have it and that's you know these sort of things we we could use but we need to be able to work out how to how to do it all the time and how we can store the energy and how we can how we can create it how we can store it they're all they're all tricky challenges that that need it's like a jigsaw puzzle of bits of science done in this area bits of science done in that area and in fact one of the one of the the recommendations we have in this report is people really need to work together so we can connect the left hand side with the right hand side to produce the whole system that will deliver the material it will deliver the energy and this of course is why we need biologists involved you know because living systems i mean the anima in the in the title gives it away i mean living systems are so good at this and they not only build structural materials like bone in our bodies and sensing materials like our skin and brain and nerves and but they they all they have the ability to grow and and and and regrow and re-heal um molly you know you work a lot with biology um do you feel like it changes the way you see material science and and and because you you know much more about how biology builds stuff because it feels like that's really one of the places we need to start where we want to try to achieve these technologies yeah but biology's uh biology is just fascinating i mean it's so complex though mark i mean there's still so much that we don't understand even about a single cell you know never mind all these cells interacting together um even with it within a single cell you know just science is advancing all the time in terms of our understanding um and and i think yeah it probably probably does influence a little bit how we think about designing material systems and certainly some of the work we do on bone for example is inspired directly by trying to understand what does native tissue structure look like and you know what are the sort of organizations of the different components of that native tissue but but biology is to me um absolutely fascinating and still not fully understood as a field you know there's still so so much to learn on that complexity and and can we touch a little bit on the ethics side of this now um because um i want to just go get a sense of well where the does the panel feel uh that there are any applications that should be off limits um you know things that we you know shouldn't be doing with these materials there's a few questions in the chat about you know what animate materials mean um whether it means movement or harvesting energy or sensing um and it strikes me that that sensing is is sort of not very controversial harvesting energy doesn't sound too bad people would have no objection to it but but um are we missing something here have we not understood perhaps some of the dangers here and because yeah we we mustn't go ahead in certain areas if we if we without thinking it through i suppose i don't know um molly if you have any worries or qualms i mean i mean i think as with anything if you use it in the wrong way that's going to be a problem so so it's not so much um you know do i see areas um of danger or whatever i i think like with any any emerging area of science every single part of it that is moving forward you need to just consider very carefully on a case-by-case basis and i think also just keeping the wider community really informed and engaged about what's happening in the field and keeping that communication really early so that any potential red flags can be um identified really early can be discussed can be um you know in a very open forum so i i think there's potential with any branch of science um for it to be used in the wrong way and and just just being aware of that and being very ethical about how you pursue those goals uh is is the way to go forwards thanks molly um becky what about you i mean uh you know is this a time to row to become simpler in our materials or or do animate materials have a have a have a role that we should be embracing and and how would we make sure that we don't make mistakes that we've made in the past and let's say like like with plastics where we kind of got very enthusiastic about them but forgot um about end of life and and about the downsides of pollution well yeah i mean i it's a good moment to say how brilliant the report is what a fantastic clear and brilliantly sort of um argued sort of set of ideas around what this could be um and it allowed me in as a non-specialist to really sort of fantasize a little bit about what this might mean fashion textiles and circularity um but i guess i kept coming back to the idea of the really technical end of clothing needing clothing to really do something that can't be done at the moment in a maybe in a simpler lighter fashion and there are certainly applications um where that would be useful i really like the idea that you're having these conversations at the early stage and that you're bringing in as many people as possible to collaborate around the issues and discuss it in a really holistic way um we're doing a project at the moment which is using cow poo and you know seaweed for clothing and it's all about these small regions just sort of keeping fashion not as this massive linear cross-continent supply chain but something localized and and lighter in its whole footprint and made from waste and you know that's a really vibrant conversation and we're having to work out how people feel what about a fiber that's made from cow poo or a next to their skin you know so it's it's a a sort of um a great place to be sort of starting these material conversations um and uh yeah i don't know i don't know the answer i i'm i'm i think like a lot of people i'm thrilled to be part of the conversation of something so early stage and i have concerns but i'm also excited so that's good no i'm sure and we all feel that way i think um thank you becky um and russell um yeah we had conversations quite all the way through about the economic impact of let's say having road systems that self-repair right so you have a system of roads and now instead of having to spend a few billion every year repairing them you don't have to spend a few million every year because they repair themselves but that means that of course all the people who repair the roads are now out of work and you know forging ahead with these technologies you know it might benefit society and it benefits co2 emissions because you're not spending so much energy repairing stuff the whole time and but but but but of course it does affect certain sectors of society who then are greatly impacted what do you think we should do about that and of course it's a great question and it's it's hard to to see uh a clear answer to all to all possibilities you know the road one is a good is a good example where where and in fact in any in any technological advance there'd been those arguments forever the luddites you would destroy the weaving uh because it took away jobs you know it's um all those sort of things we have to we have to think about now of course all these advances they need to go hand in hand with with changes in society as well producing new jobs we can't we can't just be thinking about getting rid of a whole set of jobs and not replacing them with anything else so i think that's that's a that's a really important important aspect that is bigger than the than the just the technology themselves it's more it's a lot there's a lot of culture involved there's a lot of society involved you do have to think about those sort of things as well and as well as the economics and of course the ethical ideas of you know i think i think you're right there's some uncontroversial ones collecting energy i think is and then using them in medicine also pretty uncontroversial but highly regulated but uncontroversial whereas things that move inanimate objects you might call them now that become animate and people do start to start to worry about things and especially if you take it all the way through to sort of artificial intelligence and link up link up ai with with an animate material you know you could be in a situation where people did start to get nervous about about some of the technologies so lots to think about yeah thanks yeah no you're right i think thanks russell we're getting close to the end i don't want to finish by by not having the last poll that we got ready which is a slido paul again for everyone um which is here's the question if you go onto the slido app now where do you think animate materials might have the most benefit in society is it infrastructure is it medicine is it clothing or is it electronics now the last one we didn't really talk much about i'm afraid um but you know i think you know the application in electronics is appreciable we've all suffered from the problem of stuff just breaking down on us and it's imponderable how it's suddenly failed screen goes blank and that's it you've lost all your data um could you could you have circuits and chips that heal themselves how how great would that be um we've got self-healing brains and nerve systems well some of the nervous systems are self-healing um and um you know it's when things are tiny that you really need self-healing right because you can't go in there you can't get into into a silicon chip and repair it um and so arguably electronics is is a is it is a different application which is incredibly powerful but let's see how everyone's voted infrastructures winning energy harvesting probably you know um and and um absorbing co2 i'm sure those are high on people's minds um medicine is winning too coming up strongly on the outside medicine medicine coming up on the outside um we've got 57 people already voting on this um electronics my little bid for electronics did some good there there's a little bit of enthusiasm there i mean i personally feel like space exploration is going to push the electronic stuff forward because it's going to be nothing so disappointing as as sending something to mars and then finding that a tiny chip has gone bust and then you know that particular test or um exploration rover is no longer working again and it's one of those things where i know that space um technology they always send duplicates up in fact mostly it's three three three independent systems to get around this so you're putting a lot of weight into into these redundant systems just because it won't self-repair unlike humans that if you send them into space they themselves self-repair and that's that's they're so versatile we are we're so versatile um clothing is is you know i think led by becky who's skeptical about it her skepticism has has been rewarded and uh she's persuaded her audience unlike me who i want a moody jumper uh there there is there's not appetite for that okay so that is that's good we we've had a good romp through the whole topic uh and we've touched on many different issues the ethics the economics the deep science the engineering the the possibilities the futuristic uh thoughts about how the world could be different the sustainability angles um we've only got a few minutes left and i would um i think i'm just going to use those to ask each panel member in turn uh if they've got any concluding remarks and i'll kind of prime them by saying you know where do you know that question we just asked really where do you think they are going to most impact society um do you have a personal vision for a particular animal material for the future that you particularly want to happen uh and do you think we can make this reality and if so what kind of time frame are we talking um shall i start with molly yeah i think i'd like to really sort of bring home the point um that i'd love to see things happen in this area that could help impact on sustainability as well um and and and of course i should be talking about medicine and i see tons of applications in medicine but i loved uh your sort of comment earlier about you know electronics that should no longer be allowed to break down and you can have um actually companies have to be responsible for for um providing mechanisms of of repair and then if i'm just just sneak something in i think sustainability is you know really top top top in terms of importance but um if i'm to think about uh also applications in medicine then um materials that can sort of react and almost talk to the body um that's really really exciting to me in all sorts of different areas great thank you molly um russell yeah i mean i think i agree with molly in both those both those things i'm i'm really interested in the sustainability improvements we can get you know this idea that we've got plastics filling the oceans is terrible if we can develop the next set of top technologies and design into them that they won't do that and they will be they will last longer they will be more sustainable and they will be circular and becky's idea of of you know obsolescence designing something in that will just fall apart when it needs to in the right way it's a fantastic idea and i really would like to see that happening and i think it's you know it's not this year on the time scale it's probably coming over the next few years some more examples but in 20 years 30 years time i think we will be seeing some of these materials thanks russell that's great and and becky oh i feel like i've got to sort of like come back now with you know get those scores up i'm so sorry no i think there's fantastic possibilities don't forget textiles is also interiors so we haven't really talked about all our wallpaper being able to change patterns and colors and uh clean the air you know and as well as our curtains um and so there's lots of potential there i think and i'm not giving up on clothes i do think there are are things this could really work for i think the idea of clothes with medicinal benefits and vitamins and sort of positive sort of relationships between the organisms and the skin i'd love to sort of know more about that and i'm not giving up on self-repair and darning because my mending basket is you know i'm the joke of the sustainable design world for just never working through my mending basket and all my kids clothes and you know i need help and if that basket could help lend itself that would be great so yes i vote for that too um well thank you very much becky and it's it's been a real pleasure having you on this panel and you know it's been great it's been all these different viewpoints so you know russell thank you so much molly thank you so much it's been a fascinating conversation and seeing everything from your different viewpoints and i hope that we can make this an annual occasion and each year each year we can see how much animate materials have moved forward and and and what the next horizon looks like um but it it is unfortunately my duty now to bring this to a close this this this year's conversation about animate materials but i want to i want to say just a couple of closing things one is to say that um i'd like to thank all the audience and to apologize i haven't managed to get through all your i mean hundreds of questions um and i hope you forgive me and we are you can all see each other's questions and i hope that we've addressed enough of them um do do subscribe to the royal society youtube channel for more content on these things uh and and have a look at um them and on social media animate materials bill this is just the beginning of the journey and so please keep tuned to us um you can download the report from the website in the world society animate materials and read it if you haven't already and there's a lot of other resources there uh we'd like to hear more of your ideas so if you have more ideas in the middle of the night something i do i wake up for a pee and then i kind of go ah um don't write it down uh that's the beauty of modern life um and and certainly we we're we're starting to think what the the future the library of future materials and the royal society and we'd like you to contribute to the library of future materials which will inspire scientists engineers textile designers uh and and you know all sorts of people who are going to join us in this journey towards animate materials and yes we've got other things to say about evaluation and if you'd like to do that we'd love to hear from you but yeah that's it thank you everyone in particular thank you to the whole royal society team uh who put this together so seamlessly and uh you know the behind the scenes gang brilliant um but until next time it's goodbye from me and it's goodbye from the panel bye bye all right you

2021-03-13 05:24

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