These almighty 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 serves. Today they cant rely as soley on their own scavenging skills to find enough to eat and soon the Market Leader and jordi canoed are working to protect the vulture populations commute drives up here every saturday to feed them. We see george. Anthony 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. In. The feeding station in the Conservation Area is a stroke of luck for Market Leader and his research. I think is probably the best site to see to get the default but to species. Each of the four european vultures species likes to feast on a different part of a carcass. Gryphon vultures and scenarios 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 mulcher is have only seventy six. These include however ones like clostridium bottom line im fetal to humans but tolerated by the vultures. The bacteria help break down the nutrients left in the carry on. Across europe its become difficult for vultures to find food in the wake of the b. S. E. Crisis livestock producers are obliged 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 at 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. Because they are the garbage men of the landscape. Or that one tends to go if they can in all the. Dead whats not to. Disposing of slaughter always 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 inflammatories. Certain drugs can kill vultures in a matter of hours. Antony mug a leader is worried because spain is home to ninety five percent of europes vulture population and twenty fourteen the country approved one of these drugs dont go for a knock for the treatment of farm animals. And lucy in twenty four we found out before while china was intoxicated by saying 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. A problem for this 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 a knock 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. Sure he can newt has to make sure the meat he distributes says 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. Only a fickle. Canoed 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 might appear in news where vultures arent going to find much carrion because they still have a purpose to fulfill in the local ecosystem. The. Researchers 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 sri introduced up to areas are deforested and if they are its through open as asians and not leaders. Of them can say this is the animals are relocated then its important they have the right habitat and can adapt to rest. And peace and yes come things its a good thing he says due to poaching kenya imports rhinos from south africa to boost the population. Of you a question this week takes us out into the cosmos to a celestial body we simply couldnt live without. A most jane. Junior from lusaka 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 denser gas like pearls on necklace. The astral embryos that emerge there continue growing until they have sufficient must to ignite the sun spire. If you have a science question go tell website detail that you dont cover such science and send it in if we answer it on the show youll get our d. V. D. Featuring an amusing and informative look at other instance most famous the emmys the most important thing is to never stop asking questions. Curry other fees states by Mother Nature. S. S. And animals that group together to look for food or protect themselves against predators. Researchers call it collective intelligence all 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 first school of sticklebacks parts of the puller illuminated other parts of me shane. 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 frustrating things worse is that the exhibit collective intelligence the group can often solve problems 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 researches for a long time they watched the swimming fish over and over again. But they found the decisive clue in an old russian folk. Song groundbreaking work in the fiftys and sixtys in russia was a guy called me to radical who was the first person to actually realize that the interactions among these individuals could produce Emergent Properties and he tracks the motion of fifths by projecting sydney film on a wall and tracking where it all goes with a pencil and he speculates that in future this is going to become increasingly important to understand how and why form schools. The end 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 era least 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 or strokes brings a realistic 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 and. Visible spring between the individuals and so if two individuals are moving together and one hits the dog region and slows down the other remains going fast the spring its time for you lost it gets tighter and tighter up against the soft exerts a force that turns the cinder good will towards the dog region even though it doesnt know its there. This spring represents one of the ground rules of the swarm always keep the same distance from your nearest neighbors. When one fish slows down and lags behind initially the distance grows the spring start gives. The restoring force makes the fish swim into the shadow. The amazing thing here is that evolution has flown very very simple rules the rules of the simplest possible 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 did Alfred Hitchcocks movie the birds. But united they do act as a kind of super organism one that potentially has a lot of power. The stills 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 morsels for his guinea pigs or in this case. He forgot to arms can carry over twenty times that body weight here in his laboratory the scientists built a special Branch Construction so they can pick up the leaves and take them to the next. The point of the experiment is to find out how the arms find their way ideally by the shortest distance individually the ants wouldnt have a claim. For the outside of mr leafs around so an extreme case of only functioning in a group if i put one of them on the table they will still be there a quarter of an hour later its just it will just go around in circles not knowing what to do comprise wants to make us us was so to witness. The outs communicate by pheromones chemical trails that they leave behind while searching for leaves here 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 dissipate and the weaker the scent. The always follow the strongest scent that by reinforcing the shortest route. The general rule is follow your own to receptors in the wild leaf cutter 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 researchers have integrated a variety of obstacles into that route such as pipes and boxes. Once home the out stone eat the leaves they use them to grow fungus i own the food that the nests and habitants actually never. Kristoff try not to damage surprised to see the complexity of the system first along from sherman as we tend to think of swarms of some modernist groups as well but if you take a closer look you find all kinds of exciting phenomena. And these huge groups are fascinating compositions so here goes theyre not all alike. Is in the three hundred genitive in the group is only present and has a functional significance. In any video i dont want this is there as the next step in this one behavior. Of these groups evolved to subside warms and what advantages to these substructures how for collectives. So he took the world from qualities. He shows us what he means with the hope of these little blue 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 workers. I just noticed 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 of folks. Thats 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 plays 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 Renewable Energy sources. In a former mining tunnel under a mountain in the chino region of switzerland they have developed a new method of storing energy compressed air. Due to me of into the town and our idea requires a pressure chamber. And we were granted access to this tunnel so that the store. It was the perfect solution. Using the mountain as a pressure reservoir to store all the energy. That. 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 new zealand. 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 it was even more 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 all that can withstand the pressure in the cabin on the steel door keeps everything hermetically sealed that so the mountain is sealed tight the back of 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. If we were able to test the heat to accumulate or ensure the carbon is sealed so 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 compressed air power plant can function efficiently and can actually point the way toward a new age of energy. From the world of research and technology go to our website all get in touch on twitter and facebook wed love to hear from you. Thats all for today. Next time dougs help in conservation efforts with a fine sense of smell then learning to nose out hedgehogs that will give scientists crucial information on these endangered prickly animals join us for that until. Glib. Blah blah blah blah. Blah. Blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah. Blah blah. Blah blah. Tell the truth now do you know berlin well lets go through the city on berlins most famous bus for each block enjoy a vibrant urban life. Journey of discovery with new ideas for visitors to our life the bond. Culture. The most traditional. Any time. Check in with. Toure. Of germany state by state on d. W. Dot com. We make up over three watches over half the fifth and up next to five we ought to seven seven percent. Again want to shape the continents future to. Be part of it and join african youngsters as they share their stories their dreams and their challenges. The seventy seven percent. Platform for africa thats charging. This as a fifteen year old girl. Being gang raped. As teacher is beating a boy for talking by compliance. By the rest of the class watches. And cheering toddlers being killed by his mother. Breaking up lots. Of child sleeps in the streets because her family threw her. Here. Online bowling. Pushes a teenager over the edge. Just because you can see violence against children doesnt mean others and there are the invisible visible of us my violence against children is. This is g. W. News live from berlin years of fighting in syrias Eastern Region may be drawing to a close syrian state t. V. Says a deal has been reached to evacuate fighters and civilians from eastern does last rebel held town the first fighters have already begun leaving. Also coming up. Another hint of a concern