Yes it is the new sound seal we can see Laura with this morning from some P.V.C.'s radio is full is life in an hour 5 Live it's breakfast with Sarah pressing Chris Warburton 1st his 5 Live Science with the naked scientists this is a prerecorded program so please don't text or call us. Hello welcome to 5 Live Science I'm Chris Smith from The Naked scientists in the program this week the new solo material that promises to revolutionize renewable electricity generation how hick ups have evolved to help us learn and use 3 d. T.v. Coming to a screen new you Plus if we have diseases that impact on the tablets and will be able to act different molecules and those can be detected in blobs some can be detected in sweat in urine and also in breath how the field of fin omic is set to totally change the way that we do medicine that make it scientists are 5 Live Up 1st this week solar power makes a very important contribution to renewable energy production but the present generation of p.v. Or photo voltaic panels are based on extremely heavy chunks of silicon these are the big blank slabs that you see on the roofs of houses and not only do they cost a lot in energy terms to make and install but also be a hefty recycling cost to pay in a few years time when they need replacing which means that the discovery by Cambridge University scientists of a new panel material known as Perot skite that works as well as silicon but he so thin you can spray it onto a surface is very welcome news Sascha Feldman Proscar it as a new class of crystal in structure that is based on a mixture of organic and inorganic building blocks in terms of its ability to generate electricity Well the basic principle be the same it will to some extent we will still absorb sunlight and the energy that light carries well then generates occurrence that we can use to store electrical energy. But the way this one works slightly different in that usually you would expect for something like Silicon a very precisely engines atomic crystal structure where every atom sits exactly where it's supposed to be that matters because if you absorb light and generate charges you also want to extract those charges and get them out of this material so you don't want them to be stuck at disordered sites. But here we now have actual disorder that we want to be there because it hurts to localize these charges what's the material the proofs got even vented made from so there's quite the mixture of difference I instantly about most pronounced let And I would do it and then also some pro might they serve assemble in through a very disordered and actually dense cape you can think of a mountain and valley kind of structure and this material and the charges will just roll down to the minimum which was the valley and they are they were just accumulates and we get more and more of them and then we extract them very easily so when you say you you get a landscape you get peaks like the mountains and then valleys and dips between them so itself assembles into that sort of architecture into energy terms when the sunlight hits it the charge is all rolled down light rain water going into the valley and you get a puddle there rather like we would tap off a river you can tap off the flow of charges that have collected there exactly that's exactly right and the funny thing is we did not anticipate that this would happen we actually wanted to make a very flat landscape and just found this to assemble in this way but then we found out that as you said it's actually easier to extract from these filter charged particles How do you for want of a better phrase get a pipe into the puddle than to draw off the charge if it's so disorganized how do you know where those puddles are going to be and therefore how do you get at the charge we actually do and so if we just randomly Petter and substrates and then hope that some of these puddles actually aligns with our electrodes at the bottom but due to the fact that these are so incredibly thin which is just 390 meters or so or 1000th of the diameter awful human hair it's quite easy to just somewhere have an electrode sitting because these bottles are still quite small I suppose a massive advantage is given it's so thin compared with a massive slab of silicon we currently put on the roof where you've got arrays of solar panels weighing a ton or so to degenerate a modest amount of electricity this is going to be extremely. Knight So there must be enormous numbers of benefits of not having strong heavy materials no have to recycle enormously having materials etc that come from this yes so you can imagine actually something like flexibility Tronics from this because we work on such thin firms we can just print them like an inkjet printer on top of plastic substrate so to say and you could even integrate them in something like a jacket for example and then your jacket that you were actually powers your phone and the ends of the 3 very impressive such a Feldman and the work that we were discussing there appeared in the journal Nature photonics earlier this week. And next up this should be a very familiar noise. Hiccups are uncomfortable and they always seem to happen at the worst times don't they and this will really a clear explanation for why we even have them but just involuntary spasms of the diaphragm don't seem to have a purpose but new evidence suggests that for babies pickups might actually be helping their brains to develop meaning the adults might get them as a relic from our infancy when they were genuinely useful u.c.l. Scientists have suggested this off to looking at 13 babies who happen to be hiccupping while their brains are being scanned for other reasons what they found were big spikes in the brain activity that they think might help the babies to figure out what parts of their bodies a lot feel Sansom got the full story from lead author Kim Whitehead. So what we've found is that when infants have a hiccup they have a large change in brain activity immediately after the head so that suggests that the information that they received from how the hiccup feel is entering the cortex pot to that right is that them sensing their own hiccup basically their way that we would interpret it yes is that the information from the feel of the diaphragm muscle contracting and potentially the sound that a hiccup makes the Hc noise. Is reaching the brain and being processed by the brain by these young babies and because we have a little sense on their belly is set up we were able to look at the brain activity in real time to see whether this ticket changes the brain activity that was ongoing immediately prior to the HCA did you have to wait a while for them to hiccup because I'm I right the babies are quite big he covers right exactly it will of allies on the fact that babies up big it up as they this was a retrospective analysis we started to become interested in and I realized that some of the babies hiccupped by chance spontaneously during recordings that were being acquired full of the scientific questions and because they hiccup so often so they hiccup about one percent of the day just by chance by recording brain activity from about an hour for a large portion of infants we were kept just like they used these hiccups during our experimental protocol got it so you've got your babies with the sensor on their chest but how do you measure what's going on in their brains. So he's a technique called e.g. And it's on to a lecture and catalogue of free and basically is able to record the ongoing electrical activity in the brain say electrical signals is how brain cells talk to each other but we can look at whether things are happening in the baby or things that the baby generates themselves like a hiccup change that ongoing activity so that e.g. Is completely painless we can record it from the skull or the senses and the great thing about is that it allows us to see brain activity change milli 2nd by milli 2nd spots the level of 1000th of a 2nd so we see it increase a little in brain activity and it's distributed into 3 separate brain waves that look quite distinct and what we've seen from the aspects of a reset is that when the brain processes sensory information it wants to get multiple parts of information say for example it might want to process where in the body that came from and then days later brain waves a still a source of a lot of research interest that Dep attention a about gathering extra sensory information say other things happening at the same time as as this sensory input that we're receiving one of the aspects of this and sui input can be classify in the brain and then what are the consequences of big like spikes in brain activity when you're hiccupping for babies. So we would die by cover late ting brain activity during the Natal patriot with outcome in babies that brain activity is covered with different outcome for example and the milestones at school when an Epi be crazy but that's really just a combination of say with human data it's difficult to prove what is causally related to brain development but based on people who quit animal models of development in an early life they suggest that these big really big brain waves every typical of the ele life periods they help to strengthen sensory networks in the brain at a time when the brain is is just starting to establish the networks that I was talking about that we have a network for to full make to control except trauma and it's useful for the im a chill brain to have a huge brain wave Well lots of brain cells x. Rated at the same time by a sensory stimulus because it helps them to link an experience that happens at the body surface so that the muscles of the body helps to link that with brain pathways and we all need that as we grow up in order to be aware of our surroundings be able to in Texas and see signals so the hiccups might be really good for the developing baby brain we think that they may have a role in the developing baby brain exactly does that mean that if your baby is hiccuping then maybe instead of giving them a like a backpack and trying to stop them maybe it's best to let the hiccups keep coming. Secondly we don't have any evidence that in a healthy And there's anything wrong with him hiccupping and of are that the the that is that they could play a role in brain development so I think that when we see an infant hiccupping we have to think about how we feel when we pick up so it's annoying as can be embarrassing in social situations if you get the hiccups Camille out but maybe the hiccups and offend are different to hiccups in an adult they already much more frequent and it may be that an adult and maybe when we see an infant hiccupping we can think about they take it in a slightly different way. Ahead who study I'm sure went without a cup that's all been published this week in scientific reports listening to 5 Live Science with me Chris Smith still to come scientists create convincing 3 d. T.v. That you don't need dodgy glasses to watch an always on the brink of a revolution in medicine before that though a vaccine that a computer tech to gets defection with the skin bacteria stuff will caucus or a switch courses everything from wind and joint infection through to him to Tycho in pneumonia has been announced by scientists in the us now apart from increasing rates of antibiotic resistance what makes staph infections hard to treat at the moment is the microbes surround themselves with a slimy layer called a biofilm and this protects them from the immune system and from and to microbial drugs to prevent the bugs from being able to do this in the 1st place Jeanette herro looked at what proteins the bacteria produce when they infect and she's turned those proteins into her vaccine Staphylococcus aureus the bacteria that causes a lot of infectious disease patients and what this organism has the ability to do is form which is a unity of bacteria here either tissue or some sort of well a medical device placed in the patient and when that happens they're very difficult to treat with antibiotics so what we start to do was to develop a vaccine to give to people. To attention eat prevent them from getting a staff action is the rationale for this then that one gives the vaccine before they would come into contact with the staff or is and therefore they're protected so that the bacteria never get a chance to form one of these very resistant biofilms That's correct so ideally what would happen is a patient that would be going in for an elective surgery would be a good candidate and is easily sort of seen and then that way there was any potential bacteria that was in the wound it wouldn't get infection. How long does it take for the vaccine to to have an effect on an individual because I could see that working if someone was planning some surgery sometime in advance but obviously many people who come into contact have a brush with stuff or is there might be for instance a trauma victim I've been run over or had had some lacerations or something and there wouldn't be time absolutely so typically this would be most beneficial for someone whose I mean elective surgery because the response to an immunization takes about 14 days that means that there is a potential for a trauma victim to also have some benefit from this if they were given it immediately but ideally we are looking at elective surgeries and what's the nature of the protection when you give the vaccine what does it do to the person's immune system I mean they're protected where previously they weren't for Exene in particular we have and you know about a response to proteins there are reduced when the bacteria are in a free floating and also when there are no I'll form where they are growing as a community and they're protected in the slime matrix so how did you home in on these particular proteins as good targets for this particular therapy with this strain that we isolated out of it and we saw that and we in fact did rabbits and what we were looking for were proteins that were expressed during that infection and then picked those that could be recognized by antibodies that were produced during the infection oak liver so you're looking at both what the bacteria produce and then asking what antibodies does the animal mountain gets to see then you knew what the target was and what the response was and then you said that's what we're going to try to make the body make correct we also proteins that were expressed in many different types of stuff because for its strengths and if this were a clinical situation how much better would this be than going business as usual at the moment we try and treat these infections with antibiotics don't we so how. Much advantage will be conferred by vaccinating over the gold standard therapy as it stands at the moment potentially a lot in the animal models for seeing about 2 thirds the animals are protected against the bacteria we don't know how that's going to translate in humans are multiple different reasons one of them. To infection levels in animals we use a lot of bacteria obviously in the clinic patients when be exposed to that many bacteria so we're hopeful that the vaccine will have a better protective advantage for patients how do you know given that you pick your targets based on an infection in a rabbit that a rabbit responds against staff or eous in the same way that a human immune system would is there a possibility that the targets in a rabbit could be quite different there is a possibility that the rabbit targets could be different there is a lot of other evidence in the scientific literature that indicates that he's proteins are expressed and you know and he was there with stuff or yes do produce antibodies to those particular proteins so there is evidence in the literature these are proteins that are being recognized I human immune response which is very good news and let's hope that she can get into the clinic soon that was Jeanette She's at the University of Maryland Baltimore and the work was published in The Journal infection and immunity vitamin a deficiency is the leading cause of preventable blindness in Kids Worldwide 40 find food is one solution but things like heat u.v. Moisture and prolonged cooking can degrade additives a mineral so they can no longer help but this week scientists in the u.s. Announced the creation of a soluble polymer capsule that can be wrapped around my canoe trip molecules to shield them and prevent degradation it only breaks down and release its cargo when it comes into contact with stomach acid Katie hailer heard how it works from Korea . And the Jew clinic in storage vitamin a can the grade from u.v. Light it can oxidize and of course moisture and heat can also help the gray the molecule and if it's stored in a food it can interact with different things in a food which could potentially accelerate the segregation Our idea was to encapsulate it so shield the molecule from u.v. Light from other things that it's stored with and then similarly while it's cooking it can be shielded from the other cooking ingredients chemically What is this in caps material because it's having to do quite a few jobs at the same time yes the material we're using is a polymer that is solid and when it's in water when it gets really low ph it will dissolve and become fully soluble and so we use this material to form a physical barrier about the micronutrient and some cases it can actually form certain interactions with them like an action to make a very stable and capsule ation if it's solid in water. Conditions and then 8 becomes what liquid or dissolves in high acid conditions those are what you would have in the stomach right correct part of that is the properties of the polymer it's able to repel water because of this sort of physical barrier if you imagine it's a matrix structure so it's sort of a solid wooden volume if you will and throughout it is the micro micronutrient how well does it would what did you a tests reveal about that when we do a boiling test for 2 hours if it's not in capsulated a vitamin is completely the graded in that amount of time whereas the encapsulated vitamin a in our material is able to maintain it's the ability for those 2 hours and even longer so how does this effect how much of these my constituents are actually absorbed in humans we use. Iron as the micronutrient to study its ability not just to be absorbed by the body but actually to be incorporated into the red blood cells which is an indication of elderly and we were able to show that basically our in capsulated product which is very stable and prevents interactions in the case of iron with other foods is able to release in the stomach and be absorbed by the body equivalently to iron that's not in capsulated is danger of interaction with other food so since it is a law or medicines that someone might be taking Yeah that's a very good point I think one of the reasons that we did this type of encapsulation is that we wanted to prevent interaction of the micronutrient for example iron with other foods we have not specifically tested interactions with medicines but we would think that as those not interact I guess one of the next steps is to actually get this into the industrial food chain right so do you know how much it's likely to cost difficult to estimate the cost this early point I know there have been some cost analyses done on fortifying different foods like Boyan which is highly consumed in some of the areas where there is a lot of my career change deficiency and in that example adding the amount of daily recommended intake of certain micronutrient like vitamin a would change the cost of that boy and less than one percent because I guess it would need to be cheaper than the cost of supplements right to make it with while dating for sure are bigger vision is and cooperation with the Gates