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10 Episodes 2009 - 2009
Episode 1
30 mins
Liz and Dallas look at a technique being developed at Southampton University for identifying people in CCTV footage by studying how they walk. Jem makes a vortex cannon which can knock over a brick wall using air pressure. Liz meets controversial genetic engineer Craig Venter. Dr Yan Wong shows how a fried egg can be cooked in a paper "frying pan".
Episode 2
29 mins
Liz cooks cockroaches and other insects for Dallas, Jem and Yan, as a food source that produces less methane during its lifetime than mammals such as cows and sheep. Jem produces and tests a jet backpack which uses the power of two fire-engine hoses to keep him aloft. Yan demonstrates how to inflate a balloon made from a long bin-bag by blowing *near* to its entrance rather than simply blowing into the mouth of the balloon. Dallas investigates whether any "Goldilocks planets" exist - those which have just the right conditions to support life.
Episode 3
31 mins
Jem develops a backpack which allows him to climb up the 100-foot aluminium-clad BBC building in White City, using a pair of vacuum cleaners attached to two suction pads on his hands. Dr Yan demonstrates how strong the force of friction can be by interleaving the pages of two books and then challenging people to pull the books apart. Liz watches a new submarine rescue system being tested at the bottom of the North Sea off the coast of Norway. Dallas looks at the very long life of waste plastic in the ocean and visits University College, Dublin to see their research into biodegradable plastic, made from waste plastic which is broken down with bacteria.
Episode 4
Dallas looks at the psychological power of "priming". People who have counted real money, rather than pieces of paper, are more hungry and less willing to help someone who has dropped a pile of books. They are also able to tolerate their hands in cold water for longer. Jem builds a helium balloon which takes a plastic astronaut doll up to 100,000 feet and then free-falls back to earth. The doll reaches speeds of over 600 mph - this is a re-creation of the "flight" by space pioneer Joe Kittinger in 1960. Liz investigates the observation that cows prefer to stand along a north-south axis, maybe because they are sensitive to the Earth's magnetic field. Dr Yan demonstrates that fireworks will explode underwater because they include their own supply of oxygen in the form of potassium nitrate.
Episode 5
Dallas looks at the details of thrill seeking, Jem concocts a contraption to thwart a sound weapon, Yan shows a group why one's voice changes after inhaling different gases, and Liz investigates the benefits of fear.
Episode 6
Liz uses Dallas and Jem as guinea pigs to investigate whether brain training exercises really can improve a person's spatial awareness and verbal reasoning test scores. Dallas visits the Mojave Desert in the USA to look at development of rockets which could deliver payloads into space for a fraction of NASA's costs. Dr Yan shows how a microwave oven can be used to melt a glass bottle. Jem looks at how helicopters fly.
Episode 7
Liz investigates the origin of language in early humans. Jem looks at regenerative braking as a way of avoiding the wastage of energy caused by conventional frictional brakes on a car. Dallas meets Dame Ellen MacArthur and endures a storm during a yacht race round the Isle of Wight, in order to look at prediction of weather. Jem uses a Wimshurst machine to demonstrate lightning and the St Elmo's fire coronal discharge that indicates that it is imminent. Dr Yan demonstrates the stroboscopic effect that causes wagon wheels to appear to run backwards in cinema and TV films.
Episode 8
Dallas looks at distant galaxies to find out why some stars spin around a central point even though there is insufficient gravitational force to keep them in orbit. Liz examines the nature-versus-nurture argument: she studies the way that boy babies and girl babies are treated differently by parents, and then she studies monkeys which seem to exhibit gender preferences for either "male" toys (trucks, helicopters) or "female" toys (dolls). Dr Yan demonstrates how gyroscopic forces can cause a person to spin on an revolving office chair. Jem builds a microwave oven "ray-gun" which can induce sufficient voltage in a dipole aerial to power a model helicopter and then meets the scientists who are developing an array of similar (but much smaller) dipoles which can extract power from infra-red radiation from the sun.
Episode 9
Episode 10