Welcome to tomorrow today coming up on the show. Picking up the pieces how vultures protect the environment. How does intelligence work. Going underground storing energy in compressed. These all mighty creatures used to be a much more frequent sites. So what changed conservationists say vultures all over the world are now threatened with extinction. Including in europe where there are hardly any vultures seen in the wild with the exception of one place. Vultures are still a common sight in the spanish pyrenees mountains these fascinating birds once played an Important Role in the ecosystem across the whole of europe by getting rid of rotting carcass its. Today they cant rely as soley on their own scavenging skills to find enough to eat antony Market Leader and jordi can dude are working to protect a vulture populations canoe drives up here every saturday to feed them when we see a boat or a. Puppy i am happy. Antony maga leader is an ecologist he works for the vulture conservation project here in Northern Spain as a scientific adviser he studies the birds from a hideout. Canoed meanwhile distributes pieces of meat for the vultures. The feeding station in the Conservation Area is a stroke of luck for Market Leader and his research. By feeling that its broadly theyre the best so you dont get to see together they are there for but to species. Each of the four european vultures species likes to feast on a different part of a carcass. Gryphon vultures amsa nereus vultures like the soft tissue. Bearded vultures eat the bones. The relatively small egyptian vulture waits until the others are done and eats the leftovers including blood on the ground. Vultures play a vital role as scavengers as natures cleanup crew they help stop diseases spreading from rotting animal carcasses into the ground and water. Incredibly vultures can safely ingest highly dangerous pathogens such as anthrax bacteria. Its all thanks to their digestive systems their stomach acid is so acidic it can kill even the most ferocious infections in the remains. Moreover humans have over a thousand types of bacteria in their guts but motors have only seventy six. These include however ones like clostridium bottom line im fatal to humans but tolerated by the vultures. The bacteria help break down the nutrients left in the carrion. Across europe its become difficult for vultures to find food in the wake of the b. S. E. Crisis livestock producers are a blind by e. U. Law to dispose of the carcasses of grazing animals these days though farmers in spain can under certain circumstances leave dead livestock in the field. The vulture conservation project and the abandoned village of best you is open to the public jordi canoe to talks to visitors about the significance of vultures for ecosystems especially in remote regions like this one. Big. Garbage man of the landscape. Or that one tends to go if they can in all the. Dead but not. For. Disposing of slaughter waste usually costs money. So vultures can be useful creatures but they have one major weakness medicine and carcasses can cause kidney failure and vultures especially antiinflammatories. Certain drugs can kill vultures in a matter of hours. Until the mugger lida is worried because pain is home to ninety five percent of europes vulture population and twenty fourteen the country approved one of these drugs. For the treatment of farm animals. In that lucy in twenty four we found. That it was intoxicated by. This and all that and with a similar effect that they often are for the additional withing that their potential effect on their coffee is had two and a problem for a less biased population. In europe six thousand tons of drugs are used in the veterinary medicine sector every year traces of these drugs end up in the environment with potentially deadly consequences for vulture populations. Mughal leda is planning to make the effects of dye cliff and the focus of his next Research Project he cant understand why a drug known to cause acute kidney failure and vultures is approved to treat livestock when there are harmless alternatives. Jordi canoed has to make sure the meat he distributes as vulture feed contains no traces of medication his supplier is a local butcher whos happy to find a taker for surplus meat he hasnt sold. You know. If it. Can newt and his assistants distribute around six hundred kilos of meat. Even this amount of meat isnt enough for the entire local vulture population but its a start for a mountainous region like the pier in a race where vultures arent going to find much carrion because they still have a purpose to fulfill in the local ecosystem. Researches want to bring vultures back to areas where theyve been eradicated we asked you on facebook what do you think about animal relocation. Scepter andrea says species in indonesia and reintroduced after areas are deforested and if they are its through organizations and not leaders. Of them can say as if the animals are relocated then its important they have the right habitat and can adapt to rest. And peace and yes come thinks its a good thing he says due to poaching kenya imports rhinos from south africa to boost the population. Of your question this week takes us out into the cosmos to a celestial body we simply couldnt live without. They must jay jr wants to know. How was the sun created. Its been burning away for over four and a half billion years and its not even halfway through its projected lifespan. One in which Human History is just the blink of an eye. But while we may be just a transitory moment in cosmic terms we are at least able to study the life cycle of the sun. Our galaxy is home to billions of other stars like it. Space telescopes have given astronomers a closer look at how stars evolve. Our own son was born from a cloud of gas and dust over the course of millions of years. Its a magical process reproduced here on a computer. This cloud of dust contains regions of dense a gas like pearls on a necklace. The astral embryos that emerge there continue growing until they have sufficient mass to ignite the sun. If you have a science question go to a website details science and send it in if we answer it on the show youll get a d. V. D. Featuring an amusing and informative look at other einsteins most famous theories the most important thing is to never stop asking questions. Curry other fees states by Mother Nature. Has certain animals that group together to look for food or protect them so. Against predators. Researchers call it collective intelligence or swarm intelligence and its greater than the sum of its parts. But how does it work. In cousin has had a big Swimming Pool built but today its reserved for a school of sticklebacks parts of the puller illuminated other parts are unlit shamed. The tiny fish always manage to stay in the dark areas avoiding the areas in the light thats a matter of survival for sticklebacks sunlight reflects off their skin making them visible to predators but when ian cousin puts a single fish in the pool it fails to locate the shadowy part it seems the sticklebacks can only do that as a swarm. One of the most fascinating things about swarms is that we exhibit collective intelligence the group can often solve problems that no individual within the group. Where does that collective intelligence come from how does the school develop capabilities that individual fish dont have these are questions that have puzzled research as for a long time they watched the swimming fish over and over again but they found the decisive clue in an old russian book. There were some Great Britain work in the fiftys and sixtys in russia is a guy called dmitri radical who was the first person to actually realize that the interactions among these individuals could produce Emergent Properties and he tracked the motion of this by projecting sydney film on a wall and tracking which individual goes with a pencil and he speculated that in future this is going to become increasingly important to understand how and why. Fish form schools. In cousin and his colleagues took on the idea and refined it with the help of modern technology. Their research has created bar codes to attach to the fishs dorsal fin. Each fish will get one of these individual markers so it can be clearly identified to any time. Then the fish are released into the big pool as expected the fish move from shadow to shadow. The camera footage of the Schools Movement is then analyzed using software that can show the path of each individual fish right at the start the researches make a seemingly undramatic finding the fish swim more slowly when they reach a dark area in cousin studies how the changes in speed affect the schools overall behavior. Once weve tracked them most and we can then look at the accelerations that the individuals exert influence the social influence that exists between these different individuals and we can visualize these as connections almost like springs or elastic connections between the individuals and this allows us to understand then how the collective how this network of communication helps the the group solve problems what we find is that the social interactions. Its almost like a spring an invisible spring between the individuals and so if two individuals are moving together and one its a dark region and slows down the other remains going fast the spring its title the last it gets tighter and tighter begins to start exerting a force that turns this individual towards the dark region even though it doesnt know its that. The spring represents one of the ground rules of a swarm always keep the same distance from your nearest neighbors. When one fish slows down and lags behind initially the distance grows the spring stretches. The restoring force makes the fish swim into the shadow. The amazing thing here is that evolution has found very very simple rules the rules of the simplest possible that the organisms could use and even though the individuals are not aware that theyre solving the problem as a collective they are. Lucky for us swarms of animals dont often attack people like they do in Alfred Hitchcocks movie the birds. But united they do act as a kind of super organism one that potentially has a lot of power in. The skulls of this next animal collective have astounded researchers. Behavioral scientist Christopher Klein has been out collecting leaves for an experiment hes conducting with a small scale collective from the animal kingdom. He uses a hole punch to cut them into little more sorts for his guinea pigs or in this case. Can carry over twenty times the body weight here and has the scientists built a special Branch Construction so they can pick up the leaves and take them to the nest. The point of the experiment is to find out how the arms find their way ideally the shortest distance individually the arms wouldnt have a claim. For blood sodomizes go leafs around the sorting string in case of only functioning in a group of five but one of them on. Your name will still be there a quarter of an hour later. It will just go around in circles not knowing what to do even cries when to make us less so to witness. The arms communicate by pheromones chemical trails that they leave behind while searching for leaves. That all over the bridge. The pheromones evaporate fairly quickly the ants use that circumstance to work out the shortest route the longer the distance the greater the dissipation and the weaker the sun. The always follow the strongest and that by reinforcing the shortest route. The general rule is follow you i read a receptive in the wild skinful networks with trails reaching up to two hundred meters long. Kristoff client wants to know how they build those networks and maintain them. This group of needs less than half an hour to cut down and transport a handful of leaves. The research has have integrated a variety of obstacles into that route such as pipes and boxes. One time the outs dont eat the leaves they use them to grow from the food that the nests and habitants actually never. Kristoff line item a surprise to see the complexity of the system first along from sherman if we tend to think of swarms of some modernist groups. But if you take a closer look you find all kinds of exciting phenomena. These huge groups are fascinating compositions so here goes no theyre not all alike. Is in the head to a genitive in the group is only present and has a functional significance. In any video i dont this is the next step in small behavior. Out of these groups evolved to search for most and what advantages to these substructures how for collectives. So his book to and from college before. He shows us what he means with the hope of these little obstacles he places in the path. Some immediately get to work setting them aside in order to keep up the pace of the harvest. Klein i don identifies and marks these great clearance monkeys. He discovers something remarkable of the thousands of ants belonging to the colony only six or so seem to be tossed with clearing away obstacles which they do swiftly and with a minimum folks. But exactly what determines which counts do the job and how they know theyve been selected remains a mystery. In the future humans could get all the energy from renewable sources like sun and wind. Us we can only capture that kind of green energy when Mother Nature place along. Thats why scientists are looking for better ways to store energy so its available when we need it. These two researchers say they have found the way to the future and the age of Renewal Energy sources. In a former mining tunnels under a mountain in the chino region of switzerland they have developed a new method of storing energy compressed air. Do the mirror and think the tans our idea requires a pressure chamber. And we were granted access to this tunnel so the thought. It was the perfect solution. Using the mountain as a pressure reservoir to store all the energy. You know. This is how it works using surplus electricity air is compressed in a cavity the pressure reservoir the compressed air can be released as required to power an electric generator. The world needs new options for storing energy wind farms depend on weather conditions as do solar power farms. Power fluctuations can currently be covered in part by pumped storage plants but the new Technology Creators say their method is superior. As if we are twenty to thirty percent cheaper than pumped storage hydro electricity and we dont need to encroach on nature by building huge dams all reservoirs. Its all inside the mountain. So in addition to the economic factor its also an advantage in environmental terms. And theres indeed barely any evidence of the compressed air Energy Storage above the surface and few intrusions on nature lower down. So we have a five meter concrete plug that can withstand the pressure in the cabin on the steel door keeps everything hermetically sealed. So the mountain is sealed tight the bag is yes we have a continuous water supply from the mountain so no air can escape. The real innovation in the heart of the system is this heat accumulator it raises efficiency from fifty to over seventy percent. As the air is compressed heat is generated that can be stored in the accumulator. Releasing the compressed. Air via the generator lowers the temperature the heat from the accumulator prevents the generator from freezing over. The researchers have now put the entire facility through its paces and say it works and we were able to test the heat to cumulate or ensure the cabin is sealed and basically checked the whole system. So we are pretty confident that it is indeed technically feasible. Dawlish. The researchers now want to build a pilot facility they hope it will show whether a compressed air power plant can function efficiently it can actually point the way toward a new age of energy. From all from the world of research and Technology Head to our website and get in touch on twitter or facebook wed love to hear from you. Thats all for today next week were off to the countryside he said his want to optimize the creation of fertilizer from animal waste but how do they do it and what advantages does it have for agriculture join us next week to find out. Theyre black and living in germany. Shes reminded what that means on a daily basis presenter like this. And ill tell. You no different than the way. She travelled across germany to meet other black people and to hear their stories. Its that. I grew up in a white family in a white neighborhood it was definitely a challenge. She decided to put me up for adoption. The main thing was to keep your head down and your mouth shut of course of the face like this i could never completely disappear if you see all these stereotypes about africa it hurts you. You do something for your country but youre still. The black young man with the. Afro germany starting december tenth d. W. This is a fifteen year old girl. Being gang raped. As teacher is beating a boy for talking back and class. For the rest of the class watches. And here is toddlers being hit by his mother. Breaking a glass. His child sleeps in the streets because her family through iraq. Hear. Online bullying. Pushes a teenager over the edge. Just because you can see violence against children doesnt mean it isnt there make the invisible visible of us might violence against children disappear