Elephants are being kept in line by bees. But first to a story that concerns many of us. Today more than half of the worlds population live in cities. In twenty eighteen tokyo was the worlds most populous city followed by delhi and shanghai. These urban centers are referred to as megacities meaning they have a population of over ten million. For years the nigerian city of lagos has been the worlds Fastest Growing conurbation satellite images show how lagos has been wounded in recent years. The city state of singapore is used to a high population density here high rise buildings make maximum use of the land could singapore be a role model for the future. How can densely populated urban centers solve the living space problem in singapore a swiss team is developing Solutions Together with local universities and a project called the future cities lab. One of the first things you notice here is how heavily built up singapore is but that its also astonishingly green. That verdant sea is largely down to visionary city planning rules here stipulate that any land used for construction has to be at least partially compensated for by green areas in and on the structures the future cities lab is looking at how people in green high rise buildings like these live neighbors know one another how does the vegetation affect the citys climate and house the quality of life here. Future cities lab Research Director thomas shop father lives in a green high rise with his family the interlace is viewed as a successful example of this type of architecture. Its structure doesnt just rear up its also interlaced horizontally. Functional spaces are staggered over various levels communal areas on one the Swimming Pool on another and courtyards on yet others the old garbage you are hitech you sure are an architect the mission is of course to create decent living space in a high density environment and i think the interlace is a very good example of how you can create that high quality of life while not accepting that High Residential density will have negative effects. In the gulf air force. The scientist says that the people who live in the interlace like it and it also provides opportunities to participate in a neighborhood and community. That. A difficult and delicate challenge in a high rise. Buildings in singapore have proven a lot less successful at mastering at. Social scientist Michele Zhang as also part of the future cities lab project shes looking at how green spaces are used and how they contribute to community building. You give me that even if what you think of. This garden is used mostly by the people who live here like this retiree who comes here every day for a workout hes proud to show us the apartment he owns in the block not only does it have a great view he says its area enough that he almost never has to turn on the air conditioning. Like him most people in singapore live in public housing. Places like sky three thousand people live here around the same number as an average village and the idea is reflected in the development which groups blocks of eighty units into villages. The green areas and sky vale are meant for communal use but the projects roof terraces are nearly empty apparently building a community involves more than just providing spaces for it to happen. Its not just a provide a space and a boring. Stair we have to consider what kind of people what they use like to use says base what kind of needs they. Are what kind of activities. Even though the terraces are attractively laid out and could easily Service Areas for interaction they remain empty if certain key conditions arent met. When we did a survey we understand of people concert a very much a. Part Temperature Humidity direct sunlight and the noise if we cannot find a way to improve and then its very difficult for people to go to the upstairs to. The pinnacle is a complex made up of over eight hundred apartments home to about nine thousand residents around the same number as a good sized town. The roof terrace is open to the public you can just stroll around and admire singapore skyline. Fifty floors above rolling traffic a miniature biotope has formed here. Still Big Questions remain even if life can be made pleasant and vertical spaces arent we humans at heart more come. Down on terra firma are plants on a roof really an adequate substitute for green spaces on the ground. Simmons want to go out into nature ground to others specialists have said that time and again. That means that humans are oriented towards green on the ground towards feeling real soil under their feet. That said humans have changed over the millennia. Weve accepted certain influences. So i also think the ground well is like us accepted if the ground were on happens to be up on the twentieth floor of the building. Finding Common Ground between human nature and vertical living a challenge for architects today and in the future. On facebook we asked what are the biggest problems facing your city. Mom and says cairo has so many problems he doesnt even know where to begin. Hilder lives in berlin wave a city of one and a half million that has no proper sewage system. That has lots of water but ninety five percent of it is polluted and theres little political will to change that. Frederick says nairobi struggles with traffic emissions Housing Estates that are filled with smoke as a result of garbage burning and plastic that some bottles everywhere which also clog up drains. The same says khartoum is a quiet city between two rivers which give the place a special charm but one problem is the lack of cleanliness in many areas very serious in concepcion in chile where rush hour traffic is a big problem hed like to see an overhead Railway System to relieve the pressure on the street. Thank you for coming. Most big cities struggle with Traffic Congestion and car emissions could images like these one day be a thing of the past whats needed is an environmentally friendly alternative to gasoline and diesel. Which could come in the form of electric vehicles we meet an engineer whos not only designed his own electric car hes also forging ahead with manufacturing its. There it is again acceleration you could use your drivers license in a car like this you just want to speed up a little but then you look down and its just topped the gas but now im doing over seventy. Thats not good in traffic. Certainly not in town anyway going to shooting signs the ico of the city car it began as a study at Athens Technical University professor an engineer was determined to see his model go into siemens production but established car makers werent interested. Its really annoying for scientists when good concepts theyve developed over a long period just disappear into a bottom drawer so we said not with us i was getting all of that i thought come on you can tell this i wanted a mini porsche or a porsche killer so to speak when anyone can afford. The ego might indeed an oil luxury sports car makers because it can be had for as little as sixteen thousand euros sixty eight thousand less than comparable models because she didnt just build it from scratch he also set up a Tailor Made Production line one big advantage electric cars work with far fewer components than traditional field driven models. Where a Combustion Engine production line and the entire building or be too small. Fewer parts equals fewer potential problems as well as low investment costs for components automation and assembly. Working within the car industrys traditional structures are serious that churns out fewer than one hundred thousand units a year just isnt worth while thats because the initial set up requires such a big investment that you need huge production runs to turn a profit here were showing that producing just ten or twenty thousand cars a year can still be economically viable on one saving using an allen minium frayne instead of the standard integral body that saves the costs of expensive presses for bodywork components be like. Drivers made by a german company. This company couldnt make an electric drive that wont last one hundred years thats whats special about electro mobility something not possible with internal Combustion Technology and weve built a body that will also last that long it looks so good we dont even painted it cant rust it doesnt soften thats the basic plan for a car that can last for a century if thats what you want. To. Go doesnt have metal panels that all made of thermoplastic and im ready to mount so the eco plants doesnt need painting facility. If you can produce a painted surface like this and its also extremely durable it takes four times the normal force to scratch it and then you can hardly see to scratch and because the material itself is colored there is no problem a coating that makes it a wonderful material. But the path from concept to serious production from scientists to car maker was anything but wonderful. I think during the nearly four years since we set up the go mobile there have been six or seven disasters where we could easily have given up. Just said ok thats that. But you know whats really great about that what my team here have been through after youve overcome the problems they all appear wonderful in retrospect was going to shoot is currently building two new production holes soon to be manufacturing an electrically powered berth and further eco models. There goes. And again. And again. Most of the time linking it is an automatic reflex linking helps to fend off germs and protect our eyes from sunlight. It also spreads to follow its which helps ensure that the surface of the i doesnt dry out. All good and well but it does still leave one question. Every few seconds everything goes dark around eleven thousand times a day we should be seeing this but we dont so whats going on in our brain. Wanted to find out the neuroscientist at the German Primate Center in putting in studies perception. That we dont notice the darkness when we blink is odd because the i actually reacts extremely quickly to change. It can perceive a black image lasting just ten milliseconds and the dark face of a blink is much longer about fifteen times longer. So we want to notice it. For this grooms and for the brain one hundred fifty milliseconds are an incredibly long time when you close your eyes during a blink the brain isnt getting any input so it fills up that gap food and gives a look of. As a result you dont notice the one hundred fifty milliseconds of darkness but what fills that gap. To find out shit sick how to watch the brain in real time as it processed visual. But he needed the help of electrodes to. The neuroscientist got the opportunity to carry out a test on epilepsy sufferers who had had electrodes temporarily implanted in their brains to treat that disease. One group had electrodes in their prefrontal cortex is. The prefrontal cortex is in front here traditionally its associated with your higher cognitive functions for example how you concentrate how you retain things in memory those are the functions typically associated with this part of the brain not perception. But we suspected that the region does play a role with this filling in effect such as when you blink. To question much from. The electrodes read just a neural activity while the test subjects look at two images one after another showing lattices of dots. They have to decide whether the dots are oriented vertically horizontally or die acne harder than it sounds as the arrangement of the dots is ambiguous. Picture vertical horizontal or dark no using the green point the subject selects diagonal to the upper right. Second picture. Again diagonal to the upper right. Most of the patients showed a kind of memory effect. The image of the lattice they saw first had a Strong Influence on what they said they saw in the next image in the scene between. Those who chose vertical in the first picture and nearly always chose vertical in the second picture two at that moment the nerve cells in the prefrontal cortex were highly active even though the images arent stored in this part of the brain. Only one patient made decisions at random in her case part of the prefrontal cortex had been surgically removed. The composition she couldnt remember what shed seen in the first image. So we concluded the information from the first image couldnt be merged with the information from the second which is what would normally happen. So it seems the prefrontal cortex is necessary for us to perceive images seen one after the other like the use the separated by a blink. If outlook is read right but if you. Do you have a science question that youve always wanted on say it were happy to help out send it to us as a video text over as well if we answer it on the show will send you a little surprise as a thank you can i just ask. Chuck will as you know mark who from nigeria wants to know what is d. N. A. Its in every cell in the body along molecule that looks like a twisted rope ladder and it contains all the instructions for making a human being. Its rungs are made up of four different Building Blocks you can think of them as letters that can be used to create an infinite number of words what we call genes that endless variety and the d. N. A. Is what makes each and every one of us unique. Some sections of d. N. A. Are like the different departments in a company that keep business ticking over listen for instance borders to the cells manufacturing facilities to make and deliver more of this or that product. The instructions in coded in d. N. A. Are used to make a vast array of proteins and they control every aspect of metabolism and the body. D. N. A. Is found in every species on earth. Thats made it a powerful tool for determining the course that evolution has taken since law. First began. The development of the tree of life as similar to that of a real tree whose branches continuously split and i urge. Researchers used to determine how species were related by comparing their physical characteristics for example by looking at whether an animal had wings or not however that can be misleading. But comparing d. N. A. Can help clear up mistakes because it provides a much more accurate map of degrees of kinship between species. Some ancient human d. N. A. Has survived in fossilized bones and teeth for over one hundred thousand years that gave researchers the idea to use the molecule as a way to save other kinds of data. When d. N. A. Is dried it looks as in conspicuous as flour but a single gram of it could contain as much information as a trillion c. D. s a medium that takes up a little space and doesnt require any power. Researchers have already packed artificial molecules of d. N. A. In tiny glass balls for saving and reading data a First Step Towards making the technology a reality. Do you have a question or a comment visit our website or drop us a line on twitter or facebook. Speaking of d. N. A. A colony of bees has a queen bee male drones and female workers whether a female becomes a queen or a worker is determined by the food she gets as another not her d. N. A. Nature does have many surprises in store. Owners so surprising the unusual role buz play in the south African Conservation project. In the middle of the South African bush right next to Kruger National park zoo all of jests robin cook and brownie. Have set up fifty beehives. To conservationists attesting whether honeybees can protect selected trees inside the park from the parks largest residents elephants. Just like people elephants dont like getting stung they have an acute sense of smell and hearing so one hint of a bee hive and theyre all. And the reason were doing that is that in our protected areas here in south africa weve got a build up of elephant densities and concern over the impact that they may be having on our large tree species and so were trying to fight. Ways that we can mitigate the effect that elephants have on trees and they are by placing honeybees in these trees we hoping that we can find a new method to actually protect the trees from elephant in fact. While elephant populations are in serious decline in other parts of africa their numbers are growing in south africa here in nature reserves a fenced in and equipped with also official ritual holds protected and well provided for the big animals have flourished so much so that theyve become a problem the elephant stripped trees and shrubs naked often up brushing them in the process and destroying the habitat other animals and plants in the park rely on elephants are particularly partial to one of the parks largest trees the marina really trees are a highly sought after tree by elephants and thats because theyve got a lot of forage for the elephants and were seeing a lot of impact on these trees and for example in the study site here weve seen a decline of around thirty five percent of the militarys sense of being in the system so im really trees are very important in our ecosystems they provide a lot of food for species that provide habitat and so we know them as a keystone species. The elephants often flatten them religion just so they can get to the leaves but so fall them really is with bees living in them remain largely untouched out of fifty trees only one was damaged during the past year. Cook speed project is a new approach in Park Management in the past a large number of elephants was simply culled nearly seven hundred thousand was shot dead in Kruger National park to keep the population stable and protect the vegetation so when it comes to managing the effects that elephants have been launched theres been a mindset shift from controlling the elephant numbers themselves as previously thought to mitigating the effects that they actually have on the trees. So you could have courses on a large scale where you could try and manage a different distribution. Of actually managing the facts or managing the large trees and cells protecting the large trees themselves. With the beehives. Hoping to control the elephants movements by keeping the moving when the animals stay in one place too long they can inflict extensive damage but above all the conservationists say bees are the perfect way of keeping elephants away from trees when one of the big animals has ripped off that bark they can fall prey to other assailants like tom minds in the villages around the par