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 i'm fatal to humans but tolerated by the vultures. the bacteria help break down the nutrients left and the carrion. across europe it's 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 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. 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 europe's vulture population and in twenty fourteen the country approved one of these drugs. for the treatment of farm animals. and. twenty four we found out before while. 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 coffin is how to 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 can't understand why a drug known to cause acute kidney failure in vulture's is approved to treat livestock when there are harmless alternatives. of you a question this week takes us out into the cosmos to a celestial body we simply couldn't live without. they must jay jr wants to know. how was the sun created. it's been burning away for over four and a half billion years and it's 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. all galaxy is home to below just contains regions of denser 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 our website details for you dot com slash science and send it in if we answer it on the show you'll get our d.v.d. featuring an amusing and informative look at albert einstein's most famous theories the most important thing is to never stop asking questions. currie other fees stage by mother nature. has certain animals that group together to look for food or protect themselves against predators. the. researchers call it collective intelligence or small intelligence and it's greater than the sum of its parts. but how does it work. in cousin has had a big swimming pool built but today it's reserved for a school of sticklebacks parts of the puller illuminated other parts are in the shamed. the tiny fish always manage to stay in the dark areas avoiding the areas in the light that's 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 parts it seems the sticklebacks can only do that as a swarm. one of the most fascinating things worse walls is that exhibit collective intelligence the group can often solve problems but no individual within the group . where does that collective intelligence come from how does the school develop capabilities that individual fish don't 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 book. there was some groundbreaking work in the fifty's and sixty's 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 when to each individual goes with a pencil and he speculated that in future this is going to become increasingly important to understand how and why this form schools. in cousin and his colleagues took on the idea and refined it with the help of modern technology. the research has created bar codes to attach to the fish's 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 moved from shadow to shadow. the camera footage of the school's movement is then analyzed using software that can show the path of each individual fish right at the start the research is making seemingly undramatic finding the fish when more slowly when they reach a dark area in cousin studies how the changes in speed affect the school's overall behavior. once we've 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 it's almost like a spring an invisible spring between the individuals and sort of two individuals and weaving together and one it's a dark region and slows down the other remains going fast the spring it's title the last it gets to. right and tighter against the soft exerts a force that turns this individual towards the dark region even though it doesn't know it's 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 of the organisms could use and even though the individuals are not aware that they're solving the problem as a collective they are. lucky for us swarms of animals don't often attack people like they do in alfred hitchcock's movie the birds. but united they do act as a kind of super organism one that potentially has a lot of power. the skills of this next animal collective have astounded researchers. behavioral scientist christophe klein has been out collecting leaves for an experiment he's 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 can carry over twenty times the body weight here in his laboratory the scientist has built a special bridge 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 the shortest distance individually the arms wouldn't have a claim. for the right side of my business is going to cut around string in case of only functioning in a group if i put one of them on the table 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 wants 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 news that circumstance to work out the shortest route the longer the distance the greater the dissipation and the weaker the scent. the always follow the strongest scent that by reinforcing the shortest route. the general rule is follow you only to receptus 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 researchers have integrated a variety of obstacles into that route such as pipes and boxes. one time the outs don't eat the leaves they use them to pray for. the food that the nests and habitants actually never. kristoff line item is surprised to see the complexity of the system first along from sherman as 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 they're not all alike. isn't if you had two or genitive in the group is only present and has a functional significance. in any video i don't this is the next step in swarm behavior. how do these groups evolve to subside forms and what advantages to these substructures how far collectives. so his book work from quality from. 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 idea 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 of folks. but exactly what determines which counts do the job and how they know they've 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. that's why scientists are looking for better ways to store energy so it's 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 tichina 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. it was the perfect solution. using the mountain as a pressure reservoir to store all the energy you could 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 pump 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 don't need to encroach on nature by building huge dams or reservoirs. it's all inside the mountain. so in addition to the economic factor it's also an advantage in environmental terms. and there's indeed barely any evidence of the compressed air energy storage above the surface and if you intrusions on nature lower down. so we have a five metre concrete plug withstand the pressure in the cabin on the steel door keeps everything hermetically sealed. so the mountain is sealed tight the back of yes we have a continuous water supply from the mountain so no. 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 that he to cumulate and 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 every. a mother like two billion other mothers around the world i have one wish the best for my child. but in a society in which breastfeeding is often frowned upon and it's well for me to abound with profits is more important than my baby's well being how do i know how to make the right decision. starting december ninth on d w. your children like chocolate. you can't live without your smartphone. do you buy your tomatoes in the supermarket. as we go about our daily lives human rights oh often the last thing on our own minds. invisible hand is. slavery in the twenty first century. starting december second on d w. this is d w news live from the united states issues