hello good evening and hi and thank you once again for joining us at changing world conversations with the university of edinburgh which have been inspired by the cop 26 corporations later on in glasgow now we've talked already about some fairly revolutionary concepts in those changing world conversations and this evening we've got something which to me is so eye-opening now and what a fabulous guest my name is susan morrison i am your host and you are part of the audience you are part of the experience if you're watching us if you're watching us on youtube there's a chat box function and you can send your questions in which are then passed to me and on the wonders of technology ipad i get to ask those questions of our panelists and this is this is so exciting this is just so interesting catherine i'm so thrilled because this is about nature inspired technologies it's just three words that i just don't usually see together it's just amazing but before we get into that dr catherine dunn tell us a little bit about yourself well um at the moment i'm a lecturer at the university of edinburgh but i've been interested in science and engineering since i was about 11. so i first got the bug when i was at school and that i had a very enthusiastic physics teacher who would be showing how you can split white light into a rainbow with a prism about the same time pathfinder landed on mars and we were able to watch that through the old dial-up internet very grainy video but it was absolutely amazing um spent quite a few of my teenage years building model rockets i was going to bring one today but unfortunately couldn't work out how to transport it properly yeah it is a bit of an heirloom so that's still at home but um then i went to university went to the university of oxford studied physics graduated with a first-class master's degree and then i stayed on for postgraduate study and i'd actually always been interested in biology and physics and engineering and how you can bring them all together and with my doctorate i managed to tie those all together with nanotechnology as well with the science of the very small so i was looking at how you can use a biological molecule in that case dna to actually build synthetic structures that are you could fit many thousands of times across a human hair and after that i moved on to the university of york where i was looking at bioelectronics and biological computing as a postdoctoral researcher before eventually coming to edinburgh i sometimes joke that i'm moving north throughout my career and eventually i'm going to end up in the orkney islands or something um so my job as a lecturer involves a bit of research and teaching but my overall philosophy is that nature inspired technologies can help us to solve some of the most challenging problems of the 21st century so if we look about us and look at the natural world we can get inspiration for how to build those new systems that could say could solve those problems like climate change and hopefully today i'll be able to explain what i mean by nature inspired technologies and convince you that they are part of the solution for climate change so fingers crossed right okay so first of all i'm so um i'm just so excited to hear that you did physics biology uh and and all these things together engineering because in my educational career they were very very separate and you were you were in physics or you were in biology but there was absolutely no chance that you could cross over you seem to have brought them all together very much so as mother nature actually does i guess yeah and you've got um but but why why take inspiration from nature well there are a couple of very good reasons for doing that firstly we can't really help it so nature is all around us unless of course you're in the middle of a mega city but the other reason is that nature has had millions of years to try out different things to find optimal solutions to very tricky problems the problem of staying alive in a changing world is itself a very difficult problem so nature's been trying out all these different things getting solutions that really work and it makes sense to learn from the best so your average engineer is going to have a few decades to invent things but nature's had millions of years so what's really exciting is that you can look at nature and find inspiration for almost any kind of technology because nature is so diverse we've actually got a picture i think showing a few examples of biological sources of inspiration so there are some classic examples that we refer to when teaching our undergraduates for instance at the bottom of the screen you can see that big leaf that is a lotus leaf and it has a coating that is hydrophobic so the water actually forms those big round droplets and rolls off so maybe if we wanted to develop water repellent coatings we would look to the lotus leaf for inspiration if we wanted to develop materials that are strong and stretchy and maybe even have antimicrobial properties we could look at spider silks so that's the material that spiders use to make their their webs but the example that i've got at the top of that picture is a gecko now geckos are really rather cool animals because they can actually walk up walls or along ceilings and if we wanted to look at new kinds of adhesive that can be stuck and unstuck in a reversible manner we can look at how the geckos feet are structured to enable them to actually do that so these are some classic examples of biological inspiration that we can use to develop new technologies but the first step to applying nature inspired engineering is to actually define the problem that you want to solve so you need to say this is the problem this is what's required to solve it and for tonight of course that problem is climate change it's climate change i should also have mentioned can you not mention spiders okay i'm sorry mildly that i didn't bring any along with me so it's just a picture of the web but climate change is the problem right so give us a recap climate change 101 indeed so if you want more detail more details on this then you can go back and watch the program from a couple of nights ago um called it's not too late but i'll just summarize the the key issues here most people are probably aware that we've been pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere more and more since the industrial revolution so from almost all areas of human activity we're producing this carbon dioxide and that's a problem because it traps heat and that's causing the global temperatures to increase so there's much more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there used to be and the planet is getting significantly hotter so that's causing big changes in the planet's climate we're seeing more extreme weather events and this is a really huge problem that we have to sort out it's not an easy problem to solve because there's carbon dioxide coming from all these different areas of activity keeping the lights on keeping ourselves warm putting food on the table getting from a to b all of these things are causing us to pump carbon dioxide into the air so we can't there is no silver bullet we've we've got to have solutions that deal with all of these different areas of activity and really there are three things that we need to do we need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions pull carbon dioxide out of the air and also find ways to deal with the climate changes that have already happened and are unavoidable and we can take inspiration from nature for technologies that will address all of these three things um in particular something i'm going to talk about quite a lot today is electricity generation so generating electricity and heat accounts for a very large percentage of the carbon dioxide emissions which is why we're pushing towards more and more renewable sources so wind and solar in scotland it might seem to make more sense to use rain rather than sun as a power source but in fact we can still get quite a lot of energy out of the sun it's surprising how much solar power could do in scotland if we applied it yes it would be surprising it is surprising um but um one of the big problems with solar power is that it's intermittent like wind so you don't have sunlight at night and there's less in winter than summer and what that means is that we need to couple these technologies with storage so we don't just have solar panels on the roof we need something like battery banks in order to store the electricity so that we can make dinner after dark using energy we got from the sun or keep ourselves warm in winter using energy that fell on the solar panels during the summer this kind of this kind of thing and in fact as i'll explain in a minute the biological inspiration can help us look at new ways to both generate electricity and to store the energy for later use oh yeah totally so if it's a sunny day in scotland it's been known uh how do we store the energy that's been generated where do we start but are there any nature inspired ways of storing electricity we have there'll be some so there are various kinds of bio batteries and so on but actually if we look at a classic um biological system just the plant what that is doing is absorbing sunlight and it's taking in the energy from the sunlight and using that to make sugar basically and make the biomass that it needs to keep itself alive so what we can do is to look at the plant as a source of inspiration the process of photosynthesis is the one that harvests that solar energy and that is a process that makes life on earth possible so taking in the sunlight taking in the carbon dioxide taking in taking in those things and ultimately using them with water to make sugar and to keep keep the plant alive so if we talk a little bit about what's inside a plant i've got a picture showing um the plant leaves and cells i think um our colleagues in the other room can show that on the screen we've all been joined by i think we might have skipped i think we've skipped we skipped one so we've done things in a different order thanks thanks guys so inside the plants we have um a whole host of plant cells and those are packed with chloroplasts and the chloroplasts are the site of photosynthesis so we can make all kinds of devices by taking inspiration from the way that um plants are absorbing the sunlight and um and processing it so what happens in those chloroplasts is a series of reactions um that involve movement of electrons and charged particles and this sort of phenomenon um can inspire us with development of new types of solar cell and i actually um have created a new word which you saw briefly a moment ago and so if we can just go back to the new word electrosynbionics so this is a word that i've created to describe the creation of engineered devices using components derived from or inspired by biology to harvest to generate use or store electricity so that could include bio photovoltaics by batteries a whole range of different um systems there's an awful lot of vowels and coincidence getting thrown around for no women like media bionics first as that's the new word so that's got the three components the electro bit which is related to electricity the sin part which is related to synthetic devices the idea that we're engineering things rather than just um rather than using something rather than doing something else and then the bionic part which is the inspiration from biology so that's electricity in bionics i then use the terms bio batteries and bio photovoltaics so a bio battery is essentially a device that can produce electricity using a biological or bio-inspired mechanism we can talk about a couple of examples of that sort of system in a bit um but the biofilter photo bio photovoltaic or biological solar cell is something that is using biological components right to harvest sunlight so that's the photo bit and voltaic create a voltage so bio biological photo light voltaic volts and electricity so a bio photovoltaic is a device that will harvest energy from sunlight okay i'm sorry i'm gonna have to wear my face of i really don't know if i believe you is there is there anything that actually does that well actually you can um create a form of biological photovoltaic using the chloroplasts from a plant cell so you can extract the chloroplasts from leaves and from those plant tissues and dump them onto a surface illuminate the chloroplast with light and then that would that conject that can under the right conditions generate a flow of electrons that you can harvest and people have actually used those to um to power very small electronic devices so um it can be done at the moment these devices are not producing very much electricity but it can it can be done so these living things not necessarily so they the if you extract the chloroplast from the plant it's not that really she's not going to do that to you no i promise i didn't i didn't bring my lab kit my lab coat and all the equipment sorry um so that would not be living anymore but you can actually make living photovoltaics using organisms called cyanobacteria or others and these are actually living cells that are absorbing the sunlight and exporting electrons into the surroundings and you can pick that up and use it as a current so you can have either biological components in a non-living system or actually living photovoltaics so this is a solar cell it could be yes so photovoltaic and solar cell i tend to use interchangeably so uh yeah so could this could be like this could be a new could it be a form of new solar panel in principle yes at the moment these devices are um quite um aren't they're not producing the sort of output that we would that we would need in order to um in order to put them on a roof and be useful but the other problems that we have are the lifetime of the components so if you take the components out of the plant cell and you try and use them on their own then they may not last for very long so they might they might wear out within about 30 minutes which probably isn't very much use for a solar cell that you put on your roof you don't want to be replacing that every 30 minutes no so this is where some of the living systems um could come in because in principle they might be able to um to refresh themselves and and have that longer lifetime that you need for viable systems but so that that that is unless you want to jump up and down off your off your roof like some kind of deranged santa claus and that that's not going to but are there any other biological systems that you could use to harness absolutely so um there are so it's not just plants and cyanobacteria that perform photosynthesis and there's also a type of microbe called halobacteria which lives in very high salt environments now it's not actually about it's not actually a bacterium it's just called halobacteria and this is quite an interesting species because it's rather pretty purple color apart from anything else and the purple color is actually the thing that gives it its interesting properties so this type of organism um like most cells it's got its boundary of the organism is a membrane and an envelope okay so membrane is a very thin layer and embedded in that membrane are these molecules called bacteriorhodopsin i think we have a nice picture and video somewhere yes fantastic so you can see um this little video of the protein bacteria of adoption and this structure is very small so this is about five nanometers wide which means that you could fit that thousands of times across a human hair so obviously we can't see that structure if we look at it at the human scale it just looks like that purple material that you saw on the right but this is a really interesting protein because what it does is it absorbs sunlight and when it absorbs a little bit of solar energy it can move a charged particle from one side of a membrane to another and if you're moving a charged particle you can build up a voltage so this is a really clever way that nature has of turning that sunlight very directly into a tiny little voltage so we can in principle harvest that uh use that in photovoltaics and actually a patent was filed in 2015 for a technology that does exactly this so it uses bacteria of adoption to move charge from point a to point b and that movement of an electric charge creates a voltage that you can in principle use so it's really a match of scale it well it is and also efficiency so efficiency is the really important thing for for solar cells generally if you're harvesting sunlight but you lose 90 99 of the energy of the sunlight then you're probably not going to have a viable device so that's something we need to work on generally absolutely remarkable that there are so many biological phenomena that involve electrical effects i'm sorry it's never really crossed my mind before absolutely and the um i mean even the ability to see depends on electrical effects so actually the process by which the eye converts light into an electrical signal that your brain can process is very similar to the operating mechanism of bacteriophodopsin so um the when light falls in the eye you get ultimately an electrical signal using a molecular phenomenon that's very like what bacterioridopsin does and the flow of information from the brain to muscles is also an electrical phenomenon so neurons are the cells that carry information from the brain to the muscles or from the skin back up to the brain and they rely on the movement of charge as well so it's not the case that charge moves from the fingers to the brain that's not what happens instead you have a really long cell and you get a sort of wave sweeping down the cell so in at each point of the cell membrane charge moves across the cell in response to a stimulus and one little patch of the cell membrane um depolarizes so you get a change in voltage in one point and then it kind of sweeps down like like a domino effect so the ions move only across the cell membrane right at a particular part of the neuron and then in the next bit ions move that other tiny distance then in the next bit some more ions move and then at the very end of the neuron you have this voltage change that is going to actuate a muscle or convey information in some way so it's not but it's just important to note that you don't have an ion running all the way from the brain down to the feet because it would take so long to get there that basically life would go at a much slower pace it would take a year or something to raise your hand in the air sometimes my life does but of course electric eels are probably the classic example of electrical effects in biology and the electric eel can actually produce um about 600 volts of discharge to shock its prey that's quite a smack absolutely um so this has been inspiration for batteries um since well many many years centuries um even so and there were papers being presented in the 1770s about the mechanism by which the electric by about the electric eel so um these are a very good source for a source of inspiration for biological batteries and electricity bionic techniques in general um because you have this biological phenomenon and we understand a lot more about it now than we did in the 1770s obviously and we also have a lot of new materials and clever technologies that we can use to mimic what the electric eel does um and 600 volts is as you say quite a punch yeah i mean so basically could i could i wear an electric heel up to my my phone to charge it up possibly but i think you all might have something to say about that probably tell me i'm not on that network pal you're not doing it but i mean are there any are there any battery like devices that use biological components yet or is it are we too far back none actually sort of commercially available so you can't go out and buy a biological battery tomorrow i'm afraid um but there is an example um that we can talk about so this is an example of an electrician bionic technology that i want to share with you um it's the concept known as an enzymatic fuel cell so um the the term enzymatic refers to the biological component that actually is key to this whole process so an enzyme as you may have picked up in school is a biological catalyst it triggers a chemical reaction and in this case the chemical reaction that it triggers produces a flow of electrons and that flow of electrons constitutes a current which we can in principle use so um i have a short video that we can show in just a second of me building a very simple enzymatic fuel cell in the lab would have liked to have done the demonstration right here but obviously it would have taken a bit too long to set up and some of the chemicals i didn't particularly want to bring into a studio um not not particularly but you don't want you don't want to drink them um put it down [Laughter] well um so we'll show a video but before we do that just to say if you're watching this don't try this at home unless you happen to have a fully equipped laboratory in your basement and you're either a fully qualified scientist or being supervised by one so if we can cue the video um i can talk you through it so the first step is to prepare the electrodes and these are the electrodes they're about one centimeter wide in the smallest dimension they're about paper they're paper coated with carbon i've just added some copper tape there and some standard connectors so i can plug them into things so the next step is for me to add a chemical called a mediator this helps the electrons get out into the circuit it's a substance that has a very long complicated chemical name which i won't repeat for you it's abbreviated as pd and i'm just spreading it out on the surface of the electrode to make the best use of that surface area and then i leave it to soak in the next step is to add the enzyme that looks exactly the same as adding the mediator so i didn't film it separately um and the next step is to prepare the fuel so the fuel is glucose and that's going to be broken down by the enzyme which is called glucose oxidase because it oxidizes glucose so if you look at the red arrow you'll see that piece of paper i'm just loading that with a glucose solution so this is glucose just like the sugar you might consume for energy purposes so it can provide energy for an enzymatic fuel cell as well as for you doing exercise or whatever now i have to assemble a sandwich um that's the electrode i modified earlier this is the fuel and now i have the other electrode which in this case has not had any mediator or enzyme or anything added to it could have but hasn't um and now you're going to see the a very important component coming in this is a a clip it doesn't have to be pink but it is in this case and so that is quite important because it holds the sandwich tightly together to make sure that there's some electrical continuity between one side and the other so that is the enzymatic fuel cell made now i need to test it so i'm going to plug it into a box just like this and connect it to a diagnostic instrument and you can see the little green circle at the far at the left of the image that is basically a measurement of voltage and the fact that it's non-zero is telling me that this little enzymatic fuel cell is actually doing something it's producing a voltage so this is a very simple electricity bionic device we're not going to solve the energy crisis with those because they're very small and they're just made out of paper and they produce small voltages and small currents but this demonstration shows us some of the principles of electricity in bionics namely that you can have a biological component that is producing electrons from a uh from a reaction involving a fuel um so this is a really interesting little demonstration that shows some of those key principles i think that was quite thrilling well i mean i mean the first the first light bulbs blew up and the first cars were pretty bad and virtually everything is tiny and but that is there's a there's a it's that little green line look like a sudden little flickering light of hope so but what is the future we've got a lot of work to do in this area so as you say at the moment these technologies are at a very early stage but we need to develop them we need to we need to increase the amount of electricity we're getting out of them we need to increase the efficiency of light conversion into something useful we need to make sure that these devices cost of the sensible amount another in really interesting thing is that we can in principle develop devices that actually suck carbon out of the air like plants so maybe we can actually get that holy grail of a device that harvests solar energy stores it until it's required delivers electricity on demand and sucks carbon out of the air maybe you're not asking for much not asking for much um so i mean that's that's one of the aims of my research program that's the sort of device that we want to build obviously when we're talking about carbon neutrality um we also have to look at all of the materials that go into the device so we have to check that we're not accidentally releasing carbon somewhere along the way because it's not just about the final device and when it's in operation it's about the whole life cycle of the technology so you really have to think about all steps we have to make sure that we eliminate anything that might be slightly toxic and that it's perfectly safe for use out in the wild um and also that it's um in that also it's safe to dispose of at the end of life so some technologies are actually quite difficult to deal with when they come to the end of their life so lithium-ion batteries for example that's actually quite a big topic at the moment how do you recycle these things when you finish using them when they don't produce electricity anymore so that's something we have to look at but the big priority i think at the moment is getting the performance up to the level where it is commercially viable to use electrosynbionic devices so if anyone has a couple of million pounds they'd like to throw at this research please do get in touch i really want to hear from you um don't suppose you've got some lying around susan um do you know i've actually left my i've left my person mother bag sorry catherine yeah but if there is um a billionaire out there and you're just thinking what can i do with my cash should i build a space rocker or should i give it to catherine my money is give it to catherine so and you definitely when i win when i'll win the lottery obviously i'll be giving you a call thank you that's quite all right uh but are there any other um do you know the other technologies the other biotechnologies other biotechnologies many so as i said at the start um there are three things we need to do we need to reduce the carbon emissions we need to suck carbon out of the air and we need to try and mitigate against some of the climate changes that we can't avoid and in fact nature inspired technologies can help us with all of those so anyone who caught the program um yesterday yesterday will have heard a bit about genetic engineering we can in principle use genetic engineering to create microorganisms that will suck carbon out of the air and potentially convert it into a valuable product so you're then moving towards this idea of a circular economy um where essentially you're getting that carbon out of the air and it's going into something useful and biological techniques are at the root of that so you're using microbes using biology to do something that's really helped that's really helpful but that's not all you can also use biology to inspire architecture there's one famous example of a building inspired by termite mounds so termites make these nests and the idea is that if you mimic the structure of that nest in a building you don't have to use air conditioning because there is a passive ventilation mechanism that keeps it cool so if you don't have to use air conditioning then the building stays cooler than it would otherwise yes and consequently you don't have to run up your electricity bill so you're preventing the carbon dioxide emissions and keeping the building cool and also dealing with the fact that the average temperature is warmer so you need cooling more than you otherwise would um you can take inspiration from animals that live in the desert to do that kind of thing but you can also look at how animals living in the desert cope with water scarcity so these animals have ways of making the most of a very small amount of water vapor and collecting that water to use to use to keep themselves alive so maybe we can take inspiration from those creatures and design something that mimics what they do in order to provide water in those scarce regions making the most of this very scarce resource um when in in drought hit scenarios and obviously as the global temperature increases droughts are becoming more common there seems to be a drive now to look at nature for inspiration and not exploitation do you feel very much part of that i think so yeah so um i think that we should probably be looking to nature more than we are at the moment so this whole idea of nature inspired technology is getting more and more attention but probably not enough i think we could um we could be putting a lot more attention um towards this idea that nature has some wonderful ways of doing things and if we just look around ourselves go for walk in the wood look at a natural history program on television we can get inspiration to do these things that otherwise we might spend um hours and hours trying to figure out and still not come to a sensible solution nature's already done the work for us so why not use that so why not learn from the best as you said earlier on don't forget if you have questions please get them onto the chat box function on the youtube and send them in and and i will forward one to catherine and we'll ask but there's actually a few questions coming in uh right now so neil hi neil thanks for joining us um uh is there any extension of you're gonna make me say this aren't you um but bio biovoltaics did i say that yes i'm a scientist but that can be translated into the human body to power say a peacemaker fantastic fantastic question um and actually in some ways that is um an easier objective than building these devices to um power um for example um a big much bigger um yeah because a pacemaker only requires a really tiny amount of energy to keep going so actually there's quite a lot of work on you on building these biological batteries for use inside inside the body partly because they're biologically compatible so the materials might provoke less of a response from the body's immune system so that's a really good question and absolutely yes and i think it's probably easier to easier to build a battery to power a device like a pacemaker than it is to build a biological battery that's going to power a house because the amount of energy involved is just so much smaller having said that of course when you're building something that's going to be implanted into the human body there are certain things you have to be careful of and you have to do the clinical trials and you have to make sure that it's absolutely 100 compatible with the body so there are different challenges but in terms of the technical one of just getting enough volts to power that pacemaker yes it's it's doable i mean however someone has also come in with a question that slightly throws a spammer into the with what's there biological molecules tend to decompose quite quickly how long would biobatteries last excellent question um i think one answer to that is we need to do the research to find out how long we can make them last um as i said with the photosynthetic machinery sometimes they only last for about 30 minutes which is obviously not very practical however there are some molecules that might last longer than others so what we need to do is to find the molecules that will last for a long time maybe make them last longer by re-engineering them and combine them with other things to extend their lifetime but also that our aspect of actually using um living things like microbes within a device could help us to overcome the problem of how long they last because if something is actually living it can regenerate itself as we go as you go along so um a plant for example will be continually growing and regenerating effectively keeping itself alive and fixing the damage that happens just as a result of being alive so perhaps we can we can use that and perhaps we can use some clever tricks to regenerate the molecules but the real answer is we need more research so we absolutely need to investigate this and to systematically look at how long these molecules will last it's actually a topic that seems to be a little under-researched at the moment partly because i think in some areas there's this feeling that if we're not getting a very high voltage we don't need to worry too much about the lifetime because it's not that practical anyway but as we start getting the voltage up um we need these devices to last for um a lot longer so that they're actually going to be practical so excellent question yeah because if they can regenerate themselves and it could last forever rutvik has come in with a question i love this one that's because the photograph that we had earlier what's the latest in gecko skin technology excellent quite excellent question and the can you just remind me the gecko is a funny little lizard yes so a gecko is able to walk up walls and along ceilings because of the microscale and nanoscale structures on its toes so essentially um as it pushes its foot against the the surface there's um a huge surface area much bigger than you'd expect because of the nature of these structures on the toes and those structures actually interact with the molecules in the surface that it's um pushing its foot against um in terms of what's the latest um i can't tell you what the absolute latest is but i can give you a couple of examples so it's going a bit off the theme of climate change but it's nature-inspired they are cute and nasa was actually investigating um this as a technology for reversible adhesives so using um gecko-inspired grippers to get hold of things in space um i'm not sure if they actually try if these things actually were used in space but i know they were investigating them and there are a couple of universities in the us um that have built gecko robots that can actually walk up the side of a skyscraper so there are genuinely some examples of of this um but what the actual latest is i couldn't say i i might be a few years out of date honestly sounds pretty exciting to me though i mean you could get a little robot that could go outside of a building and and deliver your takeaway exactly science is wonderful joshua who is just absolutely charming who's joining for the previous two evenings and has joined us again hello thank you once again joshua um what's the most scalable technology you're aware of with regards to power generation scalable do we mean i don't know if we mean scalable in terms of uh electricity and bionic technologies or scalable generally um i'll take it as being nature-inspired technologies as that's my thing i think um at the moment um i think we're a long way off from scale up so this is something that this is one of those research questions that we have to investigate because um i mean the technology that i that i showed um the the enzymatic fuel cell that isn't very scalable so um you wouldn't want to have a mountain of those in your basement because it's that's just not a great approach but maybe a combination of different technologies will be really scalable so i think the most scalable technology is the one we haven't entirely invented yet or maybe the one that's sketched out on my notepad at home um and hasn't yet been tested which i can't say more about um for because because if i did i wouldn't be able to patient it later and so i can't blow the whistle on that yet yeah but we were the ones with the inside okay so if you're still looking billionaire out there still looking to invest we're still here so um there's another here's a another really fascinating question in the deep sea there are bacteria that produce energy using chemosynthesis as there is no light so is chemosynthesis being used for bio batteries no very nice question um abs i mean i think it could be um so this is a really interesting question because there's some fascinating biology in the deep sea no light really extreme conditions um there are all sorts of fantastic animals living down there um and looking at those and finding out exactly how they use their sources they're they're they're very few sources of energy to stay alive would be really interesting and i think that those things could be used could be used for biological batteries because i mean the enzymatic fuel cell that i showed you is it doesn't use light that's taking the glucose um and essentially um the glucose is being broken down and you're getting the electrons out of that so using some of these chemical reactions that might go on in those deep sea organisms is also a very viable method for um for generating but new kinds of bio battery really really cool suggestion actually really cool suggestion because some of the images are coming now from deep sea dives which much deeper than we've gone before there are some remarkable things living down there absolutely extraordinary um and joshua he's come back in now this is this is a it's more of a thorny question for you but you know let's go um do these technologies have the potential to resolve the climate crisis without necessitating the reorganization of our economic and social systems you're starting for today oh good one thanks for the questions for the question um so i think i'd hesitate i'd like to say yes but i hesitate to say yes because i think that's a very large promise but i think that any technology that allows us to start generating electricity and storing it in a very on-demand way and getting over the problem that renewables are intermittent is an excellent start and it's something that allows us to tackle a significant chunk of our carbon dioxide emissions however as i said earlier this is a very multifaceted problem so it's not just about electricity so we've also got to look at carbon capture and other other technologies and i think the problem is so big that there is no silver bullet i'd love to say that nature inspired technologies are the whole solution and i think they're potentially a very large chunk of the solution if they receive appropriate investment um but i don't think i can say with all conscience that they are the entire solution and i think that some element of economic and social reorganization is inevitable because this really is a colossal problem that affects everything we do so definitely nature inspired technologies can play a big part but they can't be the whole solution you see you did see something there that made me go and it was you said without proper investment and research and most of all many people think it comes from private sector so the public sector is a huge investor as well do you think there's a possibility and i know this got quite a shocking idea to put out there that some of the politicians don't quite understand what you do well i'd be surprised if there are many politicians who've heard the word electrician bionics to be honest with you so would i so i mean um given that i only invented the word quite recently but um i mean i think generally science needs more funding um this is actually a topic that's in the news at the moment i mean we need to fund science and technology in order to make sure that we have the tools to deal with the climate crisis other crises and to actually not only survive but thrive in whatever the new the new um whatever the future holds for us um so i think politicians hopefully if i mean i would like them to take out to say we're going to massively increase funding in the sciences um i'm not too optimistic that that's going to happen but you know i wish they would well we can but dream there's another question that has come in and um i think it goes back to the the experiment we've watched you with uh what would be the benefits of using enzymes for fuel cells over other catalysts good another good question so conventional fuel cells often run at very high temperatures and it feels fairly extreme conditions one of the really nice things about biological systems generally which i should probably have said earlier but didn't is that they run normally at sensible temperatures and the conditions are really quite friendly so you don't need to go to really high temperatures really high pressures those generally aren't very friendly to life so you're normally operating in very benign conditions and that makes it a lot easier to operate these devices and hopefully that would allow us to make devices that are easier to use maybe safer maybe more more practical but the main the main thing is that we can operate them at just room temperature um and it's it doesn't require any extremes of temperature or pressure or anything like that well there's uh there's another question that's coming on that subject um how many how many years away are we from seeing these technologies deployed usually to say five years incidentally to any question i'm not going to say quite five years because i think i think someone would probably tell me that's far too optimistic i think i think the answer is with appropriate investment we could see these technologies coming on stream in time to make a contribution to the whole net zero objective um but i think five years is too quick i wish it could be done in five years um so i think probably for realism i'd say closer to 10 years how many people are working on this right now then roughly good question um so in in my own research group it's it's very small at the moment but there are research groups all around the world looking at this so there are groups in europe groups in the united states um and this idea is is potentially a powerful one there have been a couple of very interesting conferences recently bringing people together who are interested in these hybrid biological and non-biological devices so i think it's growing i think the number of people who are looking at bioinspired technologies for this kind of um problem is increasing um and i think that's the right way for things to go because it's such a powerful approach it certainly is um and you just used what problem there neil has brought in a question which addresses a problem um is there anything in the bio world that can help support the nuclear power industry either in the manufacture of fuel or it's reprocessing decommissioning thank you good question um so that i usually claim that there's something in the natural world that can help with almost any technical problem that um you can come up with um the first one that springs to mind is actually a sort of um is the topic of bioremediation so bio-remediation so using biology to fix environmental problems so for example if you have something an environment that's contaminated you could potentially use re-engineered organisms to deal with deal with that waste hopefully we haven't got any natural environments that are contaminated with nuclear waste but we could potentially use them for use them in that in that way um so there are there is also some some potentially interesting um things to be looked at in terms of organisms that are very resistant to radiation so um i'm not i'm not sure how you would use those because i need to take a bit more time to think of it but there are certain creatures and certain microbes that have much higher tolerances to radiation than others and potentially we could look at those and see if we can use them for some sort of sensing purpose related to decommissioning or something like that i'm sure there's a lot to be done in that sector but i i i'm not sure that but maybe um i think they could potentially help to reprocess it but i'd hesitate to be more definite about that because i haven't looked at this specifically so you can't do that enemy catherine because you know full well if a little microbe eats a lot of um nuclear waste it'll just get gianter and giant and it'll turn into godzilla and eat tokyo and we can't have that no i think i think the people of tokyo would object but they said because it's happened to them too often so can i ask you what i find really fascinating about this is that as i say when i was at school which was a very long time ago there was biology there was physics there was chemistry and they never ever ever met never not even the teachers spoke to each other and um but you seem to be on the cutting edge of a new frontier you literally seem to be someone working across all of these disciplines is this a growing thing absolutely so um i think i first started using the term interdisciplinary when i was writing my application for study at university because i did all three sciences at a level so physics chemistry and biology which was a little unusual um and um that was and that was where i first and that was when i was starting to have this these ideas about bringing together all of the disciplines but over the la over the years since then um it's become a growing thing so there's the field of biophysics using physics to study biology and more and more people are bringing together ideas from different fields and it's quite interesting because in the past everything was getting more sort of specialized and more siloed and over the last maybe 20 years or so those silos have started to break down and researchers are talking to each other collaborating across disciplines and i think we've almost gone full circle because back in the day there was science then we had physics chemistry biology and it's written to all these different things and now i think the boundaries are starting to be blurred so actually if i was asked to come up with a single word that describes what i am what i do i probably say scientist engineer i wouldn't be more specific than that so i think it's you're absolutely right these the divisions between the sciences are blurring and we are getting a more powerful way of thinking as a result of moving between the disciplines and blurring those boundaries there's some wonderful science being done at the interface between the traditional disciplines and i think that going that the idea that we're all in silos has now been thrown out of the window i don't think we can be because some of the problems that we're now facing in the 21st century are so big that we can't just take ideas from one field anymore i mean even if you look at covid the pandemic that requires ideas from all these different from so many different areas to resolve then to and to start moving would you like to see that um that interdisciplinary teaching of science start even earlier uh for in schools i mean usually you mentioned the fact that they silo quite early but is it time that we started to look at size in a far broader way i think i think that would be of something we should move towards in the longer term i think it would be quite difficult to do overnight because um i think obviously everyone's used to teaching in the old way but i think gradually starting to erode those boundaries younger and younger and seeing that all of these different aspects of science are really all part of the same thing so there are people studying the physics of photosynthesis and looking at how quantum physics can describe what's going on inside those chloroplasts and how the electrons are moving and you can't imagine breaking that into physics and biology it is the physics of photosynthesis one thing um so i think the distinction between sciences is not helpful much of the time i think it will have to break down in future um there's a few more questions of commitment that we've just got time to get a few more in how close are we uh from using biotech to get co2 out of the atmosphere instead of just planting trees i've planted four um i've i have a dragon tree in my living room and that's the closest i've got to sort of planting a tree um but i think probably quite close actually so i believe there are some companies that have been set up to look at exactly this so i think we are quite close there are i'm not sure if there if there's anyone actually with um running field tests of this yet but i think we are quite close i'll keep on planting the tree stuff so yeah absolutely um i mean apart from anything else trees are just nice so these are nice i mean not nicer than most politicians actually haven't met any politicians personally for quality i have honestly you go with the tree everything um um what's the another quick one what's the nature inspired technology you're most excited about i'm thrilled about the geckos i'm thrilled with the games well i think it is electric in bionx it is um this idea that we can build new solar cells and new batteries using components from biology however i i have i have to admit i'm excited to some extent by all of the nature inspired technologies that are out there and this is one of the reasons why i set up a course in bioinspired engineering at this university so some of my students might even be on this on in the audience today so the the point is that taking inspiration from nature can help us to solve so many problems that it is exciting just to even if you think about i'm excited about everything except spiders if you don't mind i'll just leave that that's fine um that's why i picked a picture of the cobweb rather than an actual spider because i thought um a spider might be a bit much you don't see me running down the corridor screaming because i've still i'm still miked up it would've been far too loud and now this is i know definitely it's a quick answer to this but let's is it better to have teams of experts who all have their own area of expertise or for individuals to become experts in lots of different areas really good question i've taken i've taken the approach of picking up expertise in several different areas but a lot of people go for the sort of teams of specialists approach so both can work um and i think it it depends exactly what you're trying to do um in some cases you really need a team team of people who are all really specialists in one in one small niche but sometimes being able to take that board of you and have within your own head all these different ideas floating around allows you to bring bring things together in a way that you couldn't if you specialized in one area so either is fine either is fine um but it's going to depend on exactly what you're trying to achieve so really we need a team leader which i think i'm looking at actually um listen have you got a take-home message for us yeah so please leave us with all yes so i think that the one take-home message is that technologies inspired by nature can help us to solve some of the most challenging problems of the 21st century climate change is one of them and i think there's a lot of really exciting work to be done over the next few years to make this a reality and to get to a point where we are making a substantial contribution to the drive to net zero so thank you absolutely and and i'll just like to repeat what i said earlier that if there is a friendly billionaire out there uh with a bit like cash rattling around in his back pocket this is the woman you have to speak to kathleen that was absolutely fascinating thank you so much it's all right we plant you are not harmed at all um thank you very much for joining us here for changing our world conversations with the university of edinburgh we're back again next wednesday at eight o'clock and we will be discussing how to be a good ancestor so uh if i were you guys to tune in to find out how you can leave a better planet and leave a better memory of yourself but once again thank you so much to dr catherine dan thank you to all of you who sent in questions thank you for joining us and join us next week good night you
2021-10-24