Weather prediction. Welcome to the show. Over fifty years ago doctors in the South African city of cape town were the first to perform a radical new operation that revolutionize cardiac medicine human heart transplant. Nowadays the procedure has graham fairly commonplace but theres a problem there simply arent enough. Research as have been racing to develop an artificial alternative and the first could be implanted in humans within three years. Engineers and doctors at the Helmholtz Institute for Biomedical Engineering in aachen are working on a fully implantable artificial heart for humans they hope it will provide an alternative to conventional Organ Transplants inside a few years the plastic and metal devise ways eight hundred grams tests are ongoing. Here through the. Setting different parameters we can simulate a range of circulatory systems i woke up until now has shown that were heading in a very positive direction. Weve tested the heart and it works now were working on improving the device. Here the Research Team simulates Different Levels of stress their heart responds by pumping faster lets take the frequency up to one hundred forty then you can see that it pumps seven and a half liter. Is one of germanys most renowned heart surgeons for years he ran a clinic for cardiac disease care for has performed open heart surgery procedures over thirty thousand times and he agrees that the oxen teams heart is very promising. When we get to the marketing stage im convinced our system will be the best one out there. So good that in practice it will completely replicate the work of a human organ. The team aims to completely replace a human heart with their artificial model. Mimics functions carried out by the human heart the drive mechanism is located between the two chambers the artificial heart is powered with a battery in the middle area the researchers plan to soon develop models that can be charged through induction. Three years ago and his team implanted their device in three calves to find out how the animals reacted to a heart made of plastic and metal everything went well. The next step is to try them out on cheap if those trials are also successful its hoped that often steams heart will be pumping in a human chest by twenty twenty one. Thats an ambitious goal. And another of the projects labs and often. Looks at how the hardest put together. The projects been running since two thousand and five to date Development Costs have run to some fifteen Million Euros but time is of the essence one in four Heart Patients dies while waiting for a suitable donor heart. Doesnt expect the artificial model to run into any controversy. But i think any patient in their right mind would want to keep on living and that it wont matter if they receive a human heart or not official heart im certain of that. In another high tech lab in france the car company is pursuing the same goal their artificial heart weighs nine hundred grams like the german heart the surfaces of the car model that come into contact with blood are covered with tissue from a calf from the sac that surrounds its heart the researchers hope thatll reduce the patient immune response. Many differences and thats. Really. In the patient. Where the human heart is regulated by the Central Nervous system. Model is controlled by pressure sensors microelectronics and electric motors. That way the heart rate can adapt to varying physical demands such as climbing stairs. The comma heart has already been implanted into five people patients who were gravely ill most died within a few weeks though one lived for nine months after the surgery the results provided an important insight. That patients took ownership of the device which is for interest and a tremendous machine to. Serve the patients as. Music has a certain confidence in the device. Back and often the team is already working on the fourth generation of their artificial heart. Its a process of continual miniaturization the researchers expect their model to be suitable for some eighty percent of cardiac patients within the next few years germans with serious heart issues could receive a new lease on life. On facebook we are asked whether you could imagine living with an artificial heart. Kid new responded that he thought the procedure would change the topic of which you no longer be completely human. Id freedom of being on the other hand that we humans are not capable of doing some things far better than nature atoms that were driving our own evolution if such a heart were developed and functional he thinks it would be great news because it would reduce long waiting lists a general organ. And what he hopes the Technology Wont be too expensive and wishes the researchers the best of luck in their attempts thanks for those comments. Modern medicine employs devices and methods that produce huge amounts of data. That can be used to determine patient state has helped so much detail in fact that its now hard to acquire an overview. Thats why computers and software are now playing bigger and bigger roles in medicine. The. One who can account for it off no match for the entire ok im biased but im not. A nurse admits a patient for treatment nothing out of the ordinary except here at the University Hospital frankfurt staff of the help of an advanced computer management system. Its a Pilot Project set up in twenty fifteen. The Biggest Issue was time too many patients were arriving every day. The german hospital sector in general is chronically understaffed. And i talk of the we are under nonstop pressure while at work and being constantly interrupted means that Vital Information can go astray. Exhausted stuff are more likely to forget Important Patient information the writing might also become less legible making it harder for colleagues to interpret it correctly then mistakes with diagnoses and prescriptions occur more frequently than thought to simply cant keep up with new insights in medicine. And title according to projections by two thousand and twenty total medical knowledge will be doubling every seventy three days its impossible for an individual to stay up to date you need digital support. And here that comes in the shape of a new mobile computer system. That works with digital files created for each patient collate their symptoms and other data. The system is able to evaluate the situation by referencing the latest medical findings. And then produces proposals for further examinations and treatment its a mine of information that is this. Actually helpful for younger personnel. Demised. Most of the work in admissions is performed by younger staff who have to cope with a lot of different situations as well as this explosion in medical information. And its those people who need extra support. They have to navigate their way through a growing jungle of information. And when admitting patients they have to be able to make the right decision quickly. From. A patients symptoms could be due to a range of different conditions especially when staff fail to factor in complicating factors and all too often they dont have the time to consult industry publications or their colleagues and comes in some as im sometimes you might start off headed in the wrong direction but guessing this data on the examinations we perform so quickly means we can always make corrections. In addition to possible preliminary findings the system also suggests how to proceed which examinations to carry out and what instructions to give nothing stuff. It can even assess how higher dosage of medication should be. So computers already outperform doctors. These programs are not a substitute for doctors or nurses their task is to provide support to ensure staff have all the data required in a concise form where and when they need it and that includes the patient information relevant guidelines and scientific standards required to make a sound decision. And it still doctors making the decisions at the same time they have to remain wary not to become unduly reliant on computers. But results so far show that the system has reduced the workload and thereby stress levels. Especially on the organizational front. For the nursing staff the centralized patient files maintained by the system are a huge help. We no longer need to look for a file of everythings all with where it should be the new Program Means less waiting time for patients and fewer interruptions the whole process from admission to discharge is far smoother. But isnt digitizing the hospitals entire operation a risky strategy. What happens if theres a power outage what happens to patients who require emergency treatment. The last time we have precautions for power failures we have three systems to ensure an uninterrupted Electrical Supply and we still have an emergency plan for our Information Systems based on the wards of the instance or if we lose power in a network we can still call up and print out patient files. Plus we still have physical files stored in a special folder on each ward we can also work with those and track patient progress with them like in the old days. Documentarians will be free of. The system is still under development but its already put the University Hospital front for among the pioneers of digitize asian. Doctors undeveloped as the light of the findings from this part of project could soon enhanced efficiency and lower stress levels at hospitals and elsewhere to. Speaking of data weve always been a species that likes to weigh and measure things. But this weeks viewer question takes that curiosity to an extreme. Madeleine forgot i had none dez from columbia wants to know. Is it possible to weigh clouds. Well you certainly cant put them on a set of scales but you can still work out how much they weigh by solving two physics related questions. First whats the clouds volume the answer to that is its length multiplied by its breadth times the height data like that can be gathered by radar satellites orbiting the earth. Question two is how much water does the cloud contain. Clouds are condensed water vapor so water content determines the weight of a cloud. Another task for the satellites they can measure the water content of a single cubic meter of cloud. Multiply that by the clouds volume and you have the total weight. That reveals that one single cloud can weigh thousands of tons. Of fairweather clouds may seem to float weight leslie across the sky and airplanes can fly through them without any major resistance. But they have an enormous amounts. Of rain clouds are really heavy up to seven times heavier than the more common liner variety thats because they contain up to seven times as much water and over a human tropical oceans clouds form that contain truth the vast amounts of water and sooner or later the air in them grow so saturated that things get very wet down below. If you have a. Question about science you can submit it on our website if we answer it on the show well send you our d. V. D. Featuring a lighthearted look at albert einsteins most famous theories the most important thing is to never stop asking questions. Lets stick with clouds for the moment even though we can waive them there are still many questions about the physical processes that govern their formation. Research or those are now starting to fill some of those mysteries with the help of a special love or a train. Fare where the clouds look innocent and fluffing enough but can rapidly turn ferocious. On june the first two thousand and sixteen days of heavy rainfall culminated in a flash flood that tore through the town of simba in bavaria seven people lost their lives. Eyewitnesses still have difficulty putting into words what they experienced. We looked on as the water rose within ten minutes and when its needed you dont need to leave the building. We were in the first story above ground if youre too short. In no time at all the shallow stream swelled into a leaf film torrent of water up to five meters deep so how do clouds manage to hold such enormous quantities of water thats one of a range of questions being investigated by researchers at the live nets institute for Tropospheric Research in like the team have a state of the art cloud simulator at their disposal what sets this facility apart is not just its size but how it enables researches to artificially create a cloud. Its and observe their you know workings. So how do you go about country ring up your own clouds. On the set of all the possible there are two ingredients for is to need particulate matter what we call. Those have always been in the atmosphere and always will be thats a vital ingredient for making a cloud the other crucial element is water as well so. When warm moist advice is and reaches cold the lay is a vast higher up in the atmosphere it cools down that means it can store less water vapor droplets of liquid water then start to form in the simulator containing aerosol particles you steadily added to a stream of which although the droplets of water in a cloud a heavier than air rain doesnt necessarily start to fall right away the good so i go in the food and there are two reasons for that the first is that the vapor is rising in an updraft and that has to be offset by the falling speed of the drops so theres a time factor involved as if they had or does not then the drops have to be pretty big because in normal clouds you have updrafts speeds of several meters per second and in storm clouds tens of meters per second thats how fast the drops of water would have to be falling or they have already talked of as well. Thats why hundreds of thousands of liters of water can collect in a cloud before subsequently had to earth would in a dennys. To dissolve the sheer scale of it was just unimaginable. Four hours after it started we were picked up by another culture and i was the last person to make it out of the building that houses. The team in leipzig hope the clouds created in the lap will help improve our understanding of this natural phenomenon here theyve concocted a special brew with aerosol particles. And water to create shifting liberate treacle out to demonstrate the behavior of water droplets in a natural born cloud that researches are now able to monitor exactly how the drug plans evolve. Is good for Singapore Says and theres a series of process as involved first theres an accumulation of water vapor next the droplets freeze another process will be examining in the future. The end of the clone then the frozen droplets still material from droplets that are still liquid and grow in size eventually theyre so big that they fall to earth and on the way down they pick up even more droplets. At the top tonight. With storm clouds drops of rain which sizes of up to nine millimeters in diameter but they can take an altogether different dimensions when the drops remain frozen and turn into hail stones as they rise and fall with the air they incorporate more and more water which turns into more and more ice that process can produce huge hail stones like those seen in a devastating storm that hit munich in one thousand nine hundred four it left three people dead and hundreds injured the town of spin back has erected down since the twenty sixty disaster scientists now know what triggered the storm a combination of high levels of humidity and a lack of wind the storm clouds remained motionless raining incessantly over the valley. Some five and a half million cubic meters of water thundered to the ground in a short period of time enough to fill a Small Reservoir locals are still struggling to deal with the consequences. Like were just getting there was a strange feeling to sink it down pretty frightening but looking back im just glad our survived and im able to move on. The clowns in the simulator are helping to improve insights into the dangers of storms and will hopefully also improve the accuracy of full cost systems. Whats the weather going to be like today its a question we all ask every day when we wake up. Research has helped us refine the science of weather forecasting but there are still too many factors involved and accuracy could soon receive a boost though with a little help from new methods and technology. Just before dawn as a glider airfield near zero rick in switzerland. The final checks are being made for the maiden flight of a new measuring device. But drone designed to investigate a layer of the atmosphere previously neglected by research known as the boundary layer. Weather forecasts are based on two types of data. The current Temperature Humidity and wind at ground level on the one hand. And data gathered by satellites from the upper atmosphere. So meteorologists are well informed about conditions at High Altitude and on the surface but until now data from the lowest one thousand five hundred meters of the atmosphere hasnt been measured even though conditions in this boundary layer are decisive for the development of weather phenomena like thunderstorms or fog until their research is of paid little attention to the zone. The new weather drones data is aimed at changing that and offering fresh insights. Here you can see last nights temperature variation towards morning things have naturally cooled down down here it can be fairly netty at around six and a half to three celsius the cruel thing is that barely two hundred meters above the ground its really quite balmy almost sixteen degrees celsius that means theres an awful lot going on in these lower one and a half kilometers. The drone can help meteorologists build up a much better picture of ongoing weather thats precise measurements make forecasting considerably more accurate to say heres the weather model for this morning at six when we met in which we can see theres no mention of fog thats the model that doesnt incorporate the drone data but things appear completely different if we look at the model compiled with the corresponding drone data here we can see indications of fog which then went on to become even more dense in the early hours of the morning of. The where the drone was developed in switzerland its waterproof and doesnt need line of sight with its pilot. To start a seaman built it complete with emergency parachute is pretty proud of an order just in from the us. But its climb stop as a small start up you kind of get goose pimples when the u. S. Government places an order with you its also highly unusual for the american meteorological offi