The Great British Make Off

If you stick a microphone into the water in some parts of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, alongside the snapping sounds of prawns, you might hear munching and squeaking noises. The animals responsible are dugongs, also known as “sea cows”. These are marine mammals; they weigh in at over a quarter of a tonne, and, like their land-dwelling counterparts, they also eat grass - in this case seagrass.

But, apart from being an endangered species worthy of watching in their own right, dugongs are also a very useful indicator of the health of their local marine habitat; and Amanda Hodgson, at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia, has just won a $250,000 Google Impact Challenge award for her work using drones and artificial intelligence to count dugongs all over the world. She told Chris Smith why this matters…

Amanda - Dugongs feed exclusively on seagrass and they actually occur throughout the whole Indo -Pacific. But unfortunately they're vulnerable to extinction largely because their seagrass habitat is disappearing and that's something that we should all be very concerned about because we all need seagrass. Seagrass feeds 3 billion people and also is extremely good at storing carbon. People don’t realise just how vital seagrass is because it plays a part in a lot of species life cycles so even things like prawns which we a lot of us love to eat, seagrass is essential. So without seagrass we wouldn't have prawns.

Chris - So we could try really hard to save dugongs but if we don't save the seagrass then we’ve got no dugongs anyway?

Amanda - That's exactly right yeah. So really our idea is basically to be getting people's attention on dugongs because dugongs are an excellent barometer for seagrass health so if you don’t have seagrass you don’t have dugongs. So you know, if your dugongs have disappeared, you should start worrying about the seagrass.

Chris - So how are you approaching this, and how are you going to tackle a problem that’s not just one little geography, this is a worldwide problem?

Amanda - Yeah it's really difficult because the best way for us to monitor dugongs is to do aerial surveys; that, traditionally, has meant putting a team of five people in a very small plane flying very low and very slow over hundreds of kilometres. Quite risky for that team and very expensive and it requires significant expertise and all of those things don't occur in most of the countries where dugongs occur. So, to overcome that problem, we have developed methods for using drones instead of planes to do that. So just basically using drones to take aerial photography of the ocean and then counting dugong images.

Chris - Have drones got the range though? How big are these drones?

Amanda -  So I originally have trialled some pretty high end drones - the same drones that the military uses - and they work very well; they have the range and the endurance, but they’re not within their research budget of most people! So with large scale surveys we really need some new, cheap drones to be developed that can have the same capabilities. But we’re also developing methods to do more small-scale surveys, and in a lot of areas actually dugongs occur in quite small pockets; so using drones that are off-the-shelf - that people in developing countries can afford and have access to. And were developing methods to use those. So that’s really simple and user-friendly.

Chris - So how will it work then? You will deploy some drones to a geography; they’ll do the aerial survey, take photos, and what can you extract from the photos, ah that’s the dugong?

Amanda - So that's the tricky bit! Originally we were having to just review the images ourselves, which takes a long time. So what we've done is developed a dugong detector which uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to pick thd dugongs out of the images automatically; and so that has reduced the time it takes to view the images by 95 per cent.

Chris - How do you know you’ve not spotted the same one multiple times as the sort of “Where's Wally” of the dugong world? Say it keeps popping up all over the place: how do you know you're not just double counting?

Amanda - Well that's all part of the survey design so we have to make sure when we design the survey that we're designing in a way that we are unlikely to come back and see the same animal again, and we actually usually sampling of an area rather than covering the entire area. So we maybe survey 10 per cent of that area we're interested in, and then we extract from that an estimate of how many dugongs there are.

Chris - And have you got a sort of "backend" for all of this so all the data coalesces, so that then you can bring together all of the different sampling sites around the world so you get a more global picture?

Amanda - Well that's exactly our mission at the moment. Our vision is to create a dugong detector online hub, which would support people doing surveys all over the world so they would have access to a tool that would help them design their survey and choose the appropriate drone. And then they would download the dugong detector, which would process all the images for them. And we're going to expand the dugong detectors so that it also classifies images according to the environment that you can see, the images including the seagrass you can see there. Then they can upload all of their data from the dugong detector to an interactive map on the hub and they'll be able to create their maps but also to a global database.

Chris - So it's got benefit for keeping eyes and tabs on dugong numbers and how they're getting on in the environment, but then it's a proxy marker for probably the environmental health in those regions isn't it?

Amanda - Yeah absolutely. So if you’re able to do some surveys regularly and you know the dugongs  have always been in this area but suddenly disappeared then that's a warning basically you need to go and check what's happening with the seagrass.

Chris - And it does that mean then that you can spot areas that are either very good, and so you can then ask why are those areas so good, and equally you can spot areas which clearly show a downward trend and you can ask well what's different and why are they showing a downward trend and you can begin to tailor your interventions a bit more?

Amanda - That's exactly right. Ultimately it gives local authorities in their areas the ability to know what are the areas we really need to protect and what are the areas we really need to focus on to mitigate any impacts on the dugongs and the seagrass...

Neonicotinoids are the world's most popular pesticides; and they're often added to seeds so that, as plants grow, they're protected from insect attack. But the chemicals also get into the plant's nectar, meaning that harmless insects, like pollinating honey- and bumble bees, are inadvertently exposed too. This affects the bees' foraging behaviour; but what about their behaviour when they get home, inside their nest? No one knew, but now, speaking with Chris Smith, Harvard scientist James Crall has developed a way to tag individually an entire nest of bumble bees so he can follow what happens to their behaviour when they're exposed to neonicotinoids, and it's not good news...

James - Neonicotinoids mimic chemicals that work in the insect’s central nervous system and they were developed in the late 80s and came into the market in the 90s are now really widespread. They are the most common group of insecticides used across the globe and over the past few years we've realized more and more these compounds, even at low levels, they're still having negative impacts on bees. So what we were interested in understanding is a little bit more of why that might be happening. And in the past 10 years or so we've got a really great understanding now, of the ways that these compounds affect foraging behaviour. But what's going on inside of the nest, all of this important behaviour within colonies has really been kind of a black box, and so what we wanted to do in our work is understand what these compounds are doing to that social life of the colony within nests.

Chris - Is that easy to do?

James - Yes and no. So it's easy if you're willing to have a few angry bees in the face. It is easy enough to open up a colony and look inside of it. One of the challenges of watching individual bees is it's really hard to scale up in a few different important ways. So one is of course, it is hard to focus on 100 different things at once, so if there are 100 bees in a colony it’s really really hard to understand what every one of those is doing at the same time. It's also really hard to do it for a long time period. And it's also really hard to do across multiple colonies and so what we wanted to do in our work is get some automatic tools that let us do that work without having to look by eye. What we do is outfit every bee in the colony with a special little paper backpack, sort of like a very simple QR code that we've made really simple so we can make it really small, and just glue it to the back of a bee. That lets us look inside of the nest with a camera and identify the location and movements and interactions uniquely identified workers, automatically, without having to look by eye.

Chris - So basically all the bees are tagged in a computer via a camera, and can watch where individual bees go, and what they do and presumably then you can compare bees that are exposed to pesticides and those that aren't and you can ask that crucial question: Does this make a difference to how they behave?

James - That's exactly right. So one of the first things that we wanted to do with this technology of being able to look inside of a nest and follow what individual workers were doing, is we pull out individual workers, feed them different amounts of a really common neonicotinoid pesticide called imidacloprid, and we can feed different amounts to workers that have been brought out of the colony and made a little bit hungry. So they're more likely to eat a little artificial sugar, and then we can put a controlled amount of this compound in there. And so within the same colony we can feed different bees different amounts of the pesticide. And because we know that individual behaviour of every bee in the colony, what we can look at is the changes in behavior within individuals. So is a specific worker acting differently and behaving differently than it was after we give them a little bit of this pesticide.

Chris - And is the exposure what we would dub field relevant. In other words if these were bees in the wild and they were foraging in an area where a farmer had used some of this particular type of neonicotinoid, would the exposure that you’re giving to them be equivalent to what they would probably encounter naturally?

James - Yeah that's a great and really important question for this kind of work. The concentrations we are looking at are in the range that we expect to see in nectar and pollen in plants that have been treated months before, as seeds, with these compounds.

Chris - And when you do this, do you see a change in the way that the bees behave?

James - Yes we do. So we see a couple different things change, so one thing is that workers within the nest move away from the nest centres. So they seem to be a little further away from where a lot of the centre of action of the nest is. They're also less active and they also interact less with nest mates.

Chris - And do you think this makes a difference though? Because some of these changes they sound quite subtle. Does it make a difference to the fitness of the nest?

James - Yeah we think it is likely to have important ties to colony function in the long run, even though we didn't directly look at that in this study. There is now a lot of other really great studies and great work showing that even these same concentrations that we studied here, can negatively impact the colony growth. And so we think these changes in behavior, for example bees spend less time nursing and doing other kinds of nest care. All of those are really important for the growth of a colony. So this work suggests that we might be disrupting a lot of these other important behaviours within the nest and not just foraging.

Chris - So what should we do about this then? It sounds to me like we have pretty incontrovertible evidence that these compounds, that are being routinely used, are very disruptive to at least some species of insect. So can we justify continuing to use them?

James - I think that's a really important question, and I think at the very least we certainly need to be having a very serious conversation about the role of these compounds in our food systems. We know for sure that these compounds can have negative impacts but there are still huge open questions in terms of different species, how they vary over time and place. So I think we need to be thinking very very hard about the benefits that we get from using these compounds and what the clear risks are.

One recent major development in the world of manufacturing is additive manufacturing, or 3D printing. The Manufacturing Technology Centre in Coventry has a team at the cutting edge, and David Wimpenny - the technology manager - spoke to Chris Smith about how additive manufacturing is a real game changer...

David - It's so different than conventional manufacturing methods. As Mike already said, we’re used to making parts by injection moulding, where the shape of a part is controlled by tooling, or by taking a block of material machining away to form the shape. Both those techniques have drawbacks in terms of the waste of material that's formed, the geometrical flexibility, and the need to have fixed tooling. 

Additive is quite a simple technique. You're just making objects by depositing layer upon layer of material on top of another. It allows unlimited flexibility in terms of the part geometry. And of course another advantage, you can print parts on demand, you don’t need to have the lead time and time to separate a mould tool, for example, so it's really a game changer. You can imagine a part that's being formed where across each layer can be different distribution of materials, and layer by layer that distribution can change. There is no process that I can think of that allows that flexibility and the potential that brings with it.

Chris - I was going to pick up on the point you made about making these things to order. Of course, when we engineered or made things in the past, it was so expensive to make prototypes that actually often things were very very slow to develop but if you can 3D print things you can try lots of different ideas very very cheaply.

David - Absolutely, your lead time between thinking of an idea and be able to bring it into production is very short. Now we have a whole raft of new companies where you got an entrepreneur that's maybe even sat in his bedroom designing something and the next day could potentially be asking your company to print it, and doesn't even have the printing equipment itself. The printing equipment can be based anywhere in the world. So this is flexibility we've never seen in manufacturing before. And, of course, another advantage is that we can print things that are customized to individual people. printing things like customized implants for surgery for hip surgery and also many people who've got dental work will have implants made for them especially by 3D printing that match specifically what they need. So it's that flexibility we dont get with conventional manufacturing.

Chris - People are often familiar with 3D printers using plastic, and things like that, but actually Rolls Royce hit the headlines a couple of years ago when they flew apart in an engine which was the biggest flying 3D printed part. They printed a whole chunk of jet engine and they used obviously metal for that so tell us a bit about how we can use different materials in a 3D printing environment to make very specialist components.

David - Some of these materials, particularly in the aerospace industry, titanium alloy components, are very commonly used. But it’s quite a difficult material to process, it’s hard to machine and it’s also very expensive. If you’re using these more exotic materials, you don’t really want to waste that material and so additive manufacturing offers the potential. It’s not just complex shapes but also not to waste the material, you can add and also print the material exactly where you want it.

Chris - So how does it actually work? If I wanted to make a very complicated bit of engine out of a very costly material, how do I do it?

David - Yeah, that’s a good question. So normally we take a powder a fine powder, we lay it down in the very thin layer and then we use a laser or an electron beam to selectively melt that powder to form a slice through the object. And then this process is repeated layer upon layer upon layer to effectively form the entire component. It starts as a powder and ends up as a solid metal object.

Chris - Structurally, has it got good integrity? My reason for asking this is that I have been fortunate to go to Rolls-Royce precision casting facility up in Derby, and they grow parts for their jet engines out of single crystals of the metal. So when they make the cast they pour it into a very hot mold and then they start this little crystallization process at one end of the object and it spreads through the entire thing they’re making. And that gives it enormous strength. If youre just fusing tiny little bits on each time you get the same single crystal, same strength that you would get?

David - We’re struggling with the crystal at the moment, that's one area where this still some work to do. But one thing we do get, compared to conventional forgings, is that we can get really fine microstructure. The material itself has better properties than you get with some of the conventional manufacturing techniques and certainly better than castings where we're used to quite large defects, in some cases for certain complex parts.

You are getting a better, what we call, metallurgy from the materials you're using but we're still struggling to get the quality you get from a single crystal but, of course, in the future it may not be utilising metals at all.  We might be using ceramics advanced ceramics for for these high temperature, high corrosion, areas of a gas turbine. As we increase the temperature, we get more efficient engines.  Ceramics are very hard to form conventionally so additive is yet another method to form these difficult to manufacture materials.

Chris - I've not heard anyone talking about 3D printing ceramic materials before. So if you say they're hard to work with, why are they hard to work with, and how will we do this?

David - Typically, they're very brittle, they're difficult to shape. And with additive manufacturing, we can take apart materials in the form of powders, and shape them. It also makes them less sensitive to cracking during processing. So I've got colleagues working at the moment on using machines where we lay down a layer of fine ceramic material, and we print a binder using an inkjet print head. That forms what we call a green component, effectively a loosely bonded ceramic component. That can get be heated and fired in a furnace to make a fully dense component. That revolutionises the shape of parts that can be made by ceramics. There's also potential to mix ceramics that are very hard to mix using conventional bulk processes. It could potentially revolutionise the ceramics industry, but ceramics is still lagging behind the plastics and metalic additive manufacturing processes because they've been around longer and more money has been dedicated to them. But ceramics is the next thing coming through and we're starting to see really important developments. 

Chris - So what kind of industries would you be talking to then? I can imagine medical - implant makers might find a use for ceramics because people are worried about the wear parts of metals from say a hip replacement, but what else?

David - Anything where you've got high temperatures and a corrosive environment, ceramics are a big bonus. There are applications at very high temperatures, again in aero engines, particularly space applications. The rockets used in sending space craft into space require very very high temperature materials, and often the current materials we've got can't reliably last long enough but with ceramics you have that extra heat resistance.

Innovation is important for making new products, but also for developing new methods of making things we already have, in a more efficient and environmentally sound way. Mark Pickford is from the printing company Seacourt, based in Oxford, who are winning awards for the environmental turnaround that they’re bringing to the industry, and he spoke to Chris Smith about how the company works...

Mark - Fundamentally we’re a printing company so we’re producing everything from stationery, letterheads, business cards all the way through to corporate brochures annual reports, sustainability reports and we also manage a lot of work in terms of large formats. So we're producing large format for events: pop up stands and that kind of thing.

Chris - And why is the printing industry potentially a naughty player when it comes to the environment>

Mark - Well 90 percent of printing that your listeners will be seeing on an everyday basis is produced by the lithographic process. It's a process that uses lots of water. Chemicals are added to the water to make the water more usable and those chemicals are very high in volatile organic compounds. As well as the industry is run on printing presses - very high users of electricity, we generate a lot of waste and it's something that we've kind of as a business decided that we needed to take responsibility for.

Chris - So basically the embodied energy and the embodied water in turning out something as trivial as a newspaper or even a sheet of printed paper is huge and you want to try and change that?

Mark - Yeah absolutely

Chris - How are you trying to address that.?

Mark - We decided about 20 years ago to completely change the way that we did our business to take the environment really at its core. And the first thing we looked at was the actual process itself. And so we converted going from the standard lithographic process to a waterless offset process which basically eliminates the use of water. We've saved 8 million plus litres of water since we converted. More importantly, or as importantly certainly, we've completely taken out the the chemicals that are added to the water to make it more usable for the process.

Chris - And to be clear that water previously, given that it carried that toxic cargo, you couldn't just tip that down the drain, that would have had to have been remediated in some way.

Mark - So you've got not only the contamination but you also then have the power and the energy that you use to require it to get it back to a normal usable process so it's far reaching.

Chris -  Now if this is so good because I mean it sounds wonderful not to make all this contaminated water not to use these other nasty chemicals. Why isn't anyone doing this?

Mark -  A few years ago it was going to be the next big thing. But the trouble is to get a printing company to convert to a completely different process it can be financially ruinous, we were very lucky that when we decided to go down this route that we were at a point where we wanted to develop the company, we were at a size where we could be flexible. It requires completely changing the process, the machinery the training of all your staff, the environment of the actual factory itself. So it's a very difficult process to suddenly go from one to the other.

Chris - So the capital outlay is very very big so that would be an impediment to smaller businesses.

Mark - Yeah and into larger companies you know the printing industry like many industries, margins are very tight. You know there aren't great deals of money to invest on not producing anything for a month or two months while you convert to a completely different process.

Chris -  So you've had to put up a lot of money to convert your process but now you've done that. Are you still competitive in the market can you still churn out print copy at a price that means you can compete.

Mark -  Yes we can. We have overheads that are slightly higher than another printing company but the industry itself is on a race to the bottom in terms of pricing. So we would always argue that we are financially sustainable which is just as important as the environment if you like for business. We certainly aren't the cheapest in the country and we would never want to be but we are very competitive and we couldn't survive as a company in this market if we weren't competitive.

Chris -  It's a sort of position that the industry the world over finds itself in isn't it whether the planet pays the price. Where do you end up - at the moment we're all hooked on oil because it's cheap and it's there and it means we can make stuff cheap we make loads of plastic for instance it does the job we want and at the moment while the planet pays the price we're comfortable to live with that. Actually it means we've got to be brave and daring spend some money and live with slightly higher production costs but then the planet doesn't pay the price ultimately and that's the sort of direction that you're taking isn't it.

Mark - Absolutely absolutely.

Chris - So you've sourced out the water problem. What other initiatives or innovations are you looking to introduce in the future.

Mark - There's many things that we've done already which is: zero waste to landfill since 2009, even our teabags and sandwiches are dealt with by a team of worms - red tiger worms.

Chris - They eat teabags? I thought teabags were a bit of a problem.

Mark - No, no they seem to do absolutely fine on that. I don't think they like garlic or onions. So we have to be a bit selective about what we leave behind but we've been running on 100 percent renewable energy for many years now. The whole process of the business is all about sustainability. We've looked at all of our staff. Anything to do with the business and how they're engaged with the business, how they get work, go through carbon offsetting schemes. We always believe that mitigation is far more important than offsetting so we've mitigated as much as we possibly can and then what we cannot mitigate, we offset through schemes in the Brazilian basin and that involves local communities in the production of acai berries. So we have a social, economic and environmental benefit to the planet which we've called Planet positive printing whereby whatever we produce actually has a net benefit to the environment rather than a negative impact on the environment.

Chris - And did you notice mark we put you on the green microphone?

Mark - I did notice that and thank you very much. I was going to bagsy it.