a radical new operation that revolutionized cardiac medicine a human heart transplant. nowadays the procedure has grown fairly commonplace but there's a problem there simply aren't enough donors research and have been racing to develop an artificial alternative and the first could be implanted in humans within three years. engineers and doctors at the helm holtz institute for biomedical engineering and often are working on a fully implantable artificial heart for humans they hope it will provide an alternative to conventional organ transplants inside a few years the plastic and metal devise ways eight hundred grams tests are ongoing . your third by setting different parameters we can simulate a range of circulatory systems i work up until now has shown that we're heading in a very positive direction. we've tested the heart and it works now we're working on improving the device of us. here the research team simulates different levels of stress their heart responds by pumping faster let's take the frequency up to one hundred forty then you can see that it comes seven and a half letus. is one of germany's most renowned heart surgeons for years he ran a clinic for cardiac disease. or has performed open heart surgery procedures over thirty thousand times and he agrees that the heart is very promising. to get to the marketing stage i'm convinced our system will be the best one out. in practice it will completely replicate the work of a human organ. aims to completely replace a human heart with artificial model. functions carried out by the human heart the drive mechanism is located between the two chambers the artificial heart is powered with a battery in the middle area the researchers plan to assume develop models that can be charged through induction. three years ago and his team implanted their device in three calves to find out how the animals reacted to a heart made of plastic and metal everything went well. the next step is to try them out on sheep if those trials are also successful it's hoped that often steams heart will be pumping in a human chest by twenty twenty one. that is an ambitious goal. and another of the projects labs and often. looks at how the heart is put together . the project's been running since two thousand and five to date development costs have run to some fifteen million euros but time is of the essence. patients waiting for a suitable donor heart. doesn't expect. the artificial model to run into any controversy. but i think any patient in their right mind would want to keep on living and that it won't matter if they receive a human heart or not official heart i'm certain of that. in another high tech lab in france the karma company is pursuing the same goal their artificial heart weighs nine hundred grams unlike the german heart the surfaces of the car model that come into contact with blood are covered with tissue from a calf from the sac that surrounds its heart the researchers hope that'll reduce the patient immune response in comparison to. the many differences and that's the beauty of this device because it really takes over to function of normal. in a patient that has a sick heart. where the human heart is regulated by the central nervous system karmas model is controlled by pressure sensors microelectronics and electric motors . that way the heart rate can adapt to varying physical demands such as climbing stairs. the comma heart has already been implanted into five people patients who were gravely ill most died within a few weeks the one lived for nine months after the surgery the results provided an important insight. that patients took ownership of the device which is very interesting it's remains a machine it's like when you get a pacemaker. serve the patient says. music has a certain confidence in the device. back in aachen the team is already working on the fourth generation of their artificial heart. it's a process of continual miniaturization the researchers expect their model to be suitable for some eighty percent of cardiac. within the next few years germans with serious heart issues could receive a new lease on life. on facebook we are asked whether you could imagine living with an artificial heart. graphene kid new responded that he thought the procedure would change that afterwards you no longer be completely human. i'd freedom of being on the other hand wrote that we humans are not capable of doing some things far better than nature atoms that we're driving our own evolution if such a heart were developed and functional he thinks it would be great news because it would reduce long waiting lists and general organs and what he what he would hopes the technology will be too expensive and which is the research is the best of luck in their attempts thanks for those comments. modern medicine employs devices and methods that produce huge amounts of data that can be used to determine patient state of health so much data in fact that it's now hard to acquire an overview. that's why computers and software are now playing a bigger and bigger role in medicine. when you can plan for it off no match for impact on time ok i'm biased but i'm not in. a nurse admits a patient for treatment nothing out of the ordinary except here at the university hospital frankfurt stop of the help of an advanced computer management system. it's a pilot project set up in twenty fifteen. the biggest issue was time too many patients were arriving every day. the german hospital sector in general is chronically on. stuffed. and i'll talk of the we're under nonstop pressure while at work and being constantly interrupted means that vital information can go astray in exhaustive stuff i'm more likely to forget important patient information the writing might also become a sledge about making it harder for colleagues to interpret it correctly then mistakes with diagnoses and prescriptions occur more frequently than doctor simply can't keep up with new insights in medicine. and this title according to projections by two thousand and twenty total medical knowledge will be doubling every seventy three days it's impossible for an individual to stay up to date and you need digital support to get out on the streets. and here that comes in the shape of a new mobile computer system. that works with digital files created for each patient collate their symptoms and other data. the system is able to evaluate the situation by referencing the latest medical findings. it then produces proposals for further examinations and treatment it's a mine of information that is especially helpful for younger personnel. most of the work in admissions is performed by younger staff who have to cope with a lot of different situations as well as this explosion in medical information. and it's those people who need extra support. they have to navigate their way through a growing jungle of information. and when admitting patients they have to be able to make the right decision quickly. once he had heard from. a patient symptoms could be due to a range of different conditions especially when stuff failed to factor in complicating factors and all too often they don't have the time to consult industry publications or their colleagues that comes in from a sign that sometimes you might start off headed in the wrong direction but getting this data on the examinations we perform so quickly means we can always make corrections. in addition to possible preliminary findings system also suggests how to proceed which examinations to carry out and what instructions to give nursing staff. it can even assess how higher dosage of medication should be. so computers already outperform doctors. these programs are not a substitute for doctors or nurses their task is to provide support to ensure staff have all the data required in a concise form where and when they need it and that includes the patient information relevant guidelines and scientific standards required to make a sound decision. and it still doctors making the decisions at the same time they have to remain wary not to become unduly reliant on computers. but results so far show that the system has reduced the workload and thereby stress levels. especially on the organizational front. for the nursing staff the centralized patient files maintained by the system are a huge help. we no longer need to look for a file everything's always where it should be the new program means less waiting time for patients and fewer interruptions the whole process from admission to discharge is far smoother. but isn't digitizing the hospital's entire operations a risky strategy. what happens if there's a power outage what happens to patients who require emergency treatment. we have precautions for power failures we have three systems to ensure an uninterrupted electrical supply and we still have an emergency plan for our information systems based on the wards. and if we lose power in a network we can still call up and print out patient files. plus we still have physical files stored in a special folder on each ward we can also work with those and track patient progress with them like in the old days. before. the system is still under development but it's already put the university hospital frank for among the pioneers of digitized nation. doctors and developers the light of the findings from as part of project could soon enhanced efficiency and lower stress levels at hospitals and elsewhere to. speaking of data we've always been a species that likes to. weigh and measure things. but this week's viewer question takes that curiosity to an extreme. madeleine veg out i had none dez from columbia wants to know. is it possible to weigh clouds. well you certainly can't put them on a set of scales but you can still work out how much they weigh by solving two physics related questions. first what's the clouds volume the answer to that is its length multiplied by its breadth times the height data like that can be gathered by radar satellites orbiting the earth. question two is how much water does the cloud contain. clouds are condensed water vapor so water content determines the weight of a cloud. another task for the satellites they can measure the water content of a single cubic meter of cloud. multiply that by the clouds volume and you have the total weight. that reveals that one single cloud can weigh thousands of tons. of fair weather clouds may seem to float weightless lee across the sky and airplanes can fly through them without any major resistance. but they have an enormous mounds. dark rain clouds are really heavy up to seven times heavier than the more common lighter variety that's because they contain up to seven times as much water and over a human tropical oceans clouds form that contain truly vast amounts of water and sooner or later the air in them grow so saturated that things get very wet down below. if you have a question about science you can submit it on our website if we answer it on the show we'll send you on d.v.d. featuring a lighthearted look at albert einstein's most famous theories the most important thing is to never stop asking questions. let's stick with clouds for the moment even though we can wave them there are still many questions about the physical processes that govern their formation. research or those are now starting to solve some of those mysteries with the help of a special laboratory. fairweather clouds look innocent and fluffing enough but can regulate ferocious. on june the first two thousand and sixteen days of heavy rainfall culminated in a flash flood that tool's through the town of simba in bavaria seven people lost their lives. eyewitnesses still have difficulty putting into words what they experienced. we looked on as the water rose within ten minutes when it's needed you don't think you need to leave the building. we were in the first story above ground if you're. in no time at all as shallow streams swelled into a lethal torrent of water up to five meters deep so how do clouds manage to hold such enormous quantities of water that's one of a range of questions being investigated by researchers at the live nets institute tropospheric research in like the team have a state of the art cloud simulator. what sets this facility apart is not just its size but how it enables research is to artificially create clouds and observe the head you know workings. so how do you go about country ring up your own clouds. out of all the possible there are two ingredients first you need particulate matter what we call era sols those have always been in the atmosphere and always will be that's a vital ingredient for making a cloud the other crucial element is water. when warm moist and rice is and reaches colder lay is a vast higher up in the atmosphere it cools down that means it can store less water vapor droplets of liquid water then start to form in the simulator containing aerosol particles is steadily added to a stream of at which although the droplets of water in a cloud a heavier than air rain doesn't necessarily stop to fall right away the good so i go in the city and there are two reasons for that the first is that the vapor is rising as it's in an updraft and that has to be offset by the falling speed of the drops so there's a time factor involved as if they had or does not have the drops have to be pretty big because in normal clouds you have updrafts speeds of several meters per second and then storm clouds tens of meters per second that's how fast the drops of water would have to be falling or they've already thought of as well. that's why hundreds of thousands of liters of water can collect in a cloud before subsequently heading that's would in a day. do this all the sheer scale of it was just unimaginable. four hours after it started we were picked up by helicopter and i was the last person to make it out of the building. the team in let's say hope the clowns created. in the lab will help improve our understanding of this natural phenomenon here they've concocted a special brew with aerosol particles and water to create a shifting laboratory clout to demonstrate the behavior of water droplets in a natural born cloud their research as a now able to monitor exactly how the drugs evolve. is good for singapore says and there's a series of processes involved first there's an accumulation of water vapor next the droplets freeze another process will be examining in the future. it's the end of then the frozen droplets still material from droplets that are still liquid and grow in size eventually they're so big because they fall to earth and on the way down they pick up even more droplets. at the top tonight. with storm clouds drops of rain reach sizes of up to nine millimeters in diameter but they can take on altogether different dimensions when the drops remain frozen and turn into hail stones as they rise and fall with the air they incorporate more and more water which turns into more and more ice that process can produce huge hail stones like those seen in a devastating storm that hit munich in one thousand nine hundred four it left three people dead and hundreds injured the town of sinbad has erected down since the twenty six disaster scientists now know what triggered the storm a combination of high levels of humidity and a lack of wind the storm clouds remained motionless raining incessantly over the valley. some five and a half million cubic meters of water thundered to the ground in a short period of time enough to fill a small reservoir locals are still struggling to deal with the consequences. like they were just getting there was a strange feeling pretty frightening. but looking back i'm just glad i survived and i'm able to move on. the form in the form. the clowns in the simulator are helping to improve insights into the dangers of storms and will hopefully also improve the accuracy of forecast systems. what's the weather going to be like today it's a question we all ask every day when we wake up. research has helped us refine the science of weather forecasting but there are still too many factors involved and accuracy could soon receive a boost though with a little help from new methods and technology. just before dawn as a glider airfield near zero rick in switzerland. the final checks are being made for the maiden flight of a new measuring device. that drone designed to investigate a layer of the atmosphere previously neglected by research known as the boundary layer. weather forecasts are based on two types of data. the current temperature humidity and wind at ground level on the one hand. bandaids are gathered by satellites from the upper atmosphere. so meteorologists are well informed about conditions at high altitude and on the surface but until now data from the lowest one thousand five hundred meters of the atmosphere hasn't been measured even though conditions in this boundary layer a decisive for the development of weather phenomena like thunderstorms of fog until the resurgence of paid little attention to the zone. the new weather drones data is aimed at changing that and offering fresh insights. here you can see last night's temperature variation towards morning things have naturally cooled down down here it can be fairly netty at around six and a half degrees celsius the cruel thing is that barely two hundred meters above the ground it's really quite balmy almost sixteen degrees celsius that means there's an awful lot going on in these lower one and a half kilometers. the drone can help meteorologists build up a much better picture of ongoing whether it's precise measurements make forecasting considerably more accurate. here's the weather model for this morning at six when we met in which we can see there's no mention of fog that's the model that doesn't incorporate the drone data but things appear completely different if we look at the model compiled with the corresponding drone data here we can see indications of fog which then went on to become even more dense in the early hours of the morning of. the where the drone was developed in switzerland it's waterproof and doesn't need line of sight with its pilot. the stars of seamen built it complete with emergency parachute is pretty proud of an order just in from the us. but it's climb stop as a small start up you kind of get goose pimples when the u.s. government places an order with you it's also highly unusual for the american meteorological office. to stay on the safe side it had to put the requirement out to tender for six weeks on its web page that gave any company worldwide offering similar technology the chance to bid for the contract but none did that means we can say we're truly unique. the next prototype is also unique a fully automated drone books it doesn't need a drone pilot on location any more. automation allows a total of twenty drones spread out across the region to collect data in parallel. and the fleet can be set in motion by a person in the control room inside a gallon. is most i think i'd like to get to the point where we can leave home at nine in the morning on a sunny summer's day under a bright blue sky and be able to say where it'll be pouring down at three in the afternoon we need to solve the problem and we can solve it with better data. the new drones born of the spirit of innovation mean the outlook for weather forecasting is bright indeed. you'll find more stories from the world of science on our website and write to us on twitter and facebook we love hearing from you that's it for now next week we'll be heading into the woods which scientists who are trying to find out more about the key role played by fungus in forest ecosystems and have reached some at numbing conclusions join us for that and more on tomorrow today see you then. the be. the book. the book. the book. the best. place. sunscreen. one of the most powerful economies. ever want. to be successful. the sacrifice is to keep up with the rest of. the country that's hosting this year's winter olympics. south korea. the boeing. the fast pace of life in the digital the british the lowdown on the way of showing new developments and providing useful information. and interviews with the makers and users. shifts in forty five minutes following the book. the beast. pollution. isn't it time for goodness go at africa people and projects that are changing our environment for the better it's up to us to make a difference or let's inspire each other to. the political environment magazine. on d w. n about the moments that. it's all about the stones instead. it's all about george chance to discover the world from different perspectives. join us and use fired by distinctive instagram hours at g.w. stories to talk to each week on instagram. that is a child of the positive things me. was infected at birth. move she probably won't live to the age of five. the program dream aims to prevent the mother to child transmission of the virus. hiv positive women give birth to hiv negative baby's. mother the project is a hugely effective strategy in the battle against. more than one thousand eight percent of these children up on health it the german aids foundation is supporting dream in mozambique you can do something team give the baby a future with that and. make a donation safe a life. stocks in tokyo and hong kong have been taking a nosedive after the u.s. dow jones suffered its worst day in over six years on monday the global selloff began on friday on the back of investor concerns that higher inflation and interest rates could impact the u.s. economy. germany's biggest political parties have extended their coalition talks for a second time the negotiations between chancellor angela merkel's conservatives and the social democrats were supposed to be.

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