Original subtitles

[narrator] On this episode of How Tech Works.

In the Scottish Highlands, a master swordsmith

shares the tools of his trade.

And, in a secret location, a car body created

from pressed hemp.

[intro music]

Hi there, my name is Dr. Basil Singer.

And for the next half hour,

you won’t want to be anywhere but right here

as we check out incredible tech stories from around the globe.

[narrator] Today on How Tech Works,

we’re going batty, literally,

over the sonar capabilities of these tiny creatures.

Plus, how often do you get to meet a professor

in skateboarding?

But first, we’ve got a story

that takes us all the way to the highlands of Scotland,

and takes a long, hard look at swords.

Yup, swords.

I want you to meet Rob Miller,

a man who is single-handedly

keeping the ancient tradition of sword making alive.

[bagpipes playing]

[narrator] The Scottish Highlands.

They once echoed with battle cries,

and the clang of clashing swords.

Today it's a much more peaceful place.

But if you listen closely... [clanging in the distance]

the sounds of centuries past can still be heard.

[clanging continues]

Rob Miller is one of a dying breed,

a swordsmith,

still crafting blades using ancient techniques.

[Rob] What, initially really pulled me into this

was this idea about fire and hammer - forge work.

All this kind of very primal energy

that goes into making a sword.

[grinding]

[narrator] At his workshop on the Isle of Skye,

Rob turns raw steel into polished pieces of craft work.

For 21 years it’s been his trade,

but there was never an apprenticeship.

[upbeat music]

[Rob] This idea had always stayed with me.

You know, I’d like to make a sword, so I did some research.

I started routing around the old bookshops.

Pre-Internet days, you know,

getting as much information as I possibly could.

And I ended up just teaching myself in my spare time,

just bashing away.

[grinding]

[narrator] No matter the blade,

it all starts as a sheet of steel

that Rob cuts into shape.

Next...

it’s time to forge.

[Rob] On a molecular level,

when you introduce the steel into the fire,

it’ll start to open up the lattice within it.

And... it starts to move around toward a molten state.

[narrator] Next fire and hammer are used

to form a super-dense blade edge and tip.

[hammering] [Rob] What the...

hammer blows do is, they compact that steel down

into very dense crystalline structures

along the edges particularly.

So, you’re looking at a way of refining that steel,

and hardening it, and breaking it down,

and re-breaking and repacking it again and again and again,

until you’ve got this very fine crystalline edge.

[narrator] Once work-hardened,

the blade is ready to be ground.

[dramatic music]

[Rob] Grinding’s just refining the shape,

removing as much stock as you can afford to

without compromising the integrity of the blade at all.

So you want this to be as light as possible,

because the guy who lasts longest in battle

without getting tired, wins basically.

You know it kind of breaks down to that.

[music continues] [narrator] These days,

Rob makes swords for collectors, not warriors.

But most are exact replicas of those used in battle.

Historically, each culture had its own unique style.

Each sword was designed for a particular way of fighting.

[Rob] What we’re looking at here is...

a very typical Scottish weapon called a Claymore...

a large two-handed sword

used predominantly for really devastating blows.

to get into the armor, and the joints in between.

Crack stuff open.

So if you take this as an example

of the larger, more bludgeoning instrument, and then...

something like this, which is your typical,

medieval single-hand sword,

much faster, much lighter, more flexibility,

and along with that,

strength and the integrity that you really need

when you’re going into battle.

[narrator] Back at the forge, the two most important steps,

hardening and tempering, now begin.

[Rob] You reintroduce the steel into the fire,

bring it up to a bright cherry red, generally.

And there’s a particular peak when the steel will be ready.

The lattice within that steel will be open to being shocked.

[sizzles] Plunging a red-hot bar

of steel into oil you’ll get a flare up of flames and smoke,

and it’ll shock the steel into hardening very quickly.

You'll end up with, in effect, something more like glass.

So, if you took a hammer to that steel afterwards,

you could tap it, and it would shatter.

[narrator] With the shock therapy over,

the blade goes into the forge one last time for tempering.

[Rob] Tempering is about creating a compromise

between that hardness and the flexibility

that you’re looking for without losing

too much of a cutting edge.

So it’s always about this compromise.

[narrator] Finally, strength and flexibility are in balance.

The blade gets ground down once more

to remove the surface scale,

and then is polished to a shine.

All that’s left now are the finishing touches.

With many months going into some blades,

this is always an anxious moment.

[soft reflective music] [Rob] I’m one of these people

that are never 100% pleased with anything,

and I probably never ever will be.

But that’s part of the driving force to go on...

doing this, you know, to be creative.

But there are times, there are moments

when I can look upon a piece and say:

"That’s a job well done!" You know, I like that.

[narrator] Beautiful and powerful.

Though Rob’s swords will never see a battlefield,

they’re keeping a long legacy in Scotland alive.

[Rob] It’s interesting to think that at some point

in the history of our people

and our families individually and collectively,

somebody would have stood up with a sword

to defend the rights of that family to continue.

And that as a direct or indirect result of the sword,

we are alive today.

[soft reflective music]

Now from the ancient past, we fast forward to the future

of car manufacturing, featuring... cannabis.

Yeah, I know. Cannabis and cars...

don’t really go together that well.

And nor should they.

But in Alberta in Canada,

there’s a movement to take the industrial form of cannabis,

called hemp, and use it to build a car chassis.

Sound weird?

Oh, yes, of course it does.

But it’s stronger than anything on the road today. Have a look.

[narrator] Nathan Armstrong is driving some major changes

in the car industry.

[Nathan] Kind of pushing the boundaries as far as what

manufacturing and what design and what products can be.

[narrator] As a man who designs cars,

he’s challenged himself to do the unthinkable.

He’s going to grow one out of hemp.

[Nathan] There’s no pesticides. All hemp is organic.

It’s all non-GMO.

There are no known pathogens that attack the hemp plant.

It regulates its own weeds. So really it’s the perfect crop.

[narrator] It’s called Kestrel,

an electric car that Nathan hopes

will be Canada’s first bio-composite car.

Making a car out of hemp isn’t exactly a new idea.

[Nathan] Turn of the century, Henry Ford,

the very first model T had a hemp body

And the plan was actually to run the vehicle on hemp.

[narrator] Back then, they didn't roll with Ford’s idea.

But to Nathan,

it’s exactly what the car industry needs now.

[Nathan] I think the market’s ready for it this time.

[fast upbeat music] [narrator] It all starts here

at a top secret location in rural Alberta

where biologists are growing the perfect hemp.

[man] It is the largest pilot facility of its kind

in the world.

We’re growing cars, we’re growing houses,

we’re growing clothes.

We're growing a lot of different things.

And it all starts with processing in this facility.

[narrator] Hemp is different from cannabis

because it doesn’t contain THC, the chemical that gets you high.

Probably you’d have to smoke so much

you’d get sick long before you got high.

Industrial hemp is an amazing plant

that produces a higher volume of fiber

than any other crop grown in Canada.

Can you imagine that this plant in three, four weeks

will be three meters tall...

and we will harvest...

about ten tons of dry fiber per hectare.

[narrator] Spinning that fiber into car parts

is where John Wolodko fits in.

His mission:

find the right recipe of hemp and resin

to handle the rigors of the road.

[John] This is the backbone of any sort of structure

that we are going to create.

We then use composite manufacturing processes

that will infuse resin or polymer into the system.

Here is an example of a part that was partly infused.

So it shows basically the mat and the infusion line.

[narrator] Today Nathan is here to check the latest combination.

[John] What we have here is a set up

that basically bends the specimen.

We’re testing a hemp hybrid material.

So this incorporates a little bit of synthetic fibers.

[narrator] The material goes in

and slowly the machine starts putting on the pressure.

-[John] It's 192 pounds. -[Nathan] That's incredible.

[narrator] Even with the weight of a fully-grown man

bearing down on this one, it's just starting to crack.

-[John] Quite plastic, isn’t it? -[Nathan] That was incredible!

You can see. It didn’t even splinter.

[Nathan] It's important for a car.

You don’t want it just breaking,

You want it to absorb energy slowly.

[narrator] Tests aren’t always so smooth.

[John] There’s been some doozies.

But there’s been big improvement the last couple of years.

[narrator] With a few recipes perfected,

they’re starting to cook up actual car parts.

This is the front face shift for the car, done in 100% hemp.

You can see here this is one of our first attempts.

So on this one...

we didn’t quite get quite enough resin,

so we have a lot of dry spots throughout.

Although this part isn’t made of hemp,

it’s made of fiberglass.

And it’s what the Kestral hood will look like.

[narrator] It’s proof that they’re on the right track.

You know what, it’s so durable, let me show you something.

It has a lot of resiliency that...

you can walk on it.

What’s unique about this, is you've got the spring back.

So it’s quite tough.

We won’t get damaged in a hail storm.

We can’t get door dings. Nobody can scratch it.

Kids can’t break it.

[narrator] Nathan dreams of growing more than a car.

He wants to grow an entire industry

right there in Canada.

[Nathan] I think ten years from now we have...

ten thousand people employed in Canada doing...

work that was based on the work we're doing now

that would be just fantastic. And I don't think...

there’s really anything better than that.

There's loads more How Tech Works coming your way.

[theme music]

Hello, and welcome back to How Tech Works.

I'm Basil Singer.

Now our next story is about... bats.

As in those tiny, flying creatures of the night.

Now you may know that a bat's shape-shifting ears

give it one of the most sophisticated sonar systems

in the world.

What you may not know, is that a group of scientists

want to build robot ears with the very same powers.

[narrator] Dan Riskin is just the reporter for the job.

[narrator] It's a hectic morning

at Shandong University's international laboratory.

[beeping]

Researchers are trying to solve a mystery.

[adventurous music]

[Rolf] The shape of these ears looks deceptively simple.

They have something that most other bat species don’t have,

and that is that they move about five times per second.

And while they move they change their shape.

[narrator] These are the ears of a horseshoe bat.

And the mystery physicist Rolf Mueller and his team

want to crack,

is exactly how they use those shape-shifting ears

to navigate through the dark of night at 40km an hour,

never hitting a single object,

and gobbling up tiny insect prey.

[Rolf] Bats have developed this amazing skill

to navigate in the dark just using their ears.

So there is a lot of intelligence in these ears

that enables it.

So if you can pull this intelligence out

and understand how they do that,

then you can apply that for technical purposes.

[narrator] For Rolf, that technical purpose

is building a bat-inspired robot.

[Rolf] The goal is to replicate the sonar system of the bats.

So we have a little artificial bat that could go out

in just the same environment the bat goes into,

and then be able to do the things that the bat can do.

[narrator] A robot that mimics a bat's sonar system

is something every defense department in the world

would drool over.

[Rolf] If we could come close to the bats,

it really would be a quantum leap

in terms of the sensory capabilities.

[narrator] Back in the lab,

three high-speed cameras and an ultra-sonic microphone

are set to catch this bat's super-fast moves

and high-frequency shouts.

His ears are painted to help track the movement.

[energetic music] [beeping]

[narrator] Normally, this move takes half a second.

But slowed down, you can see how much the ear moves

in the blink of an eye.

And right here...

[beep]

is the moment the bat echolocates.

It happens simultaneously while the ear is moving.

What this means

is that instead of waiting for soundwaves to come back to them,

the ears are constantly in motion,

seeking out the sound.

This is a sensing paradigm

that is similar to when you run into the surf...

on an ocean beach.

You sense the wave while you’re running into them.

We believe the bats are doing something similar.

They are sensing the incoming echoes

while their ears are wiggling around

in the incoming wave field.

[narrator] This could be part of the reason

that bats are so good at echolocating.

One thing's for sure, it's an important clue.

And it's not the only clue that Rolf discovered.

[Rolf] We have digital models

of about 1000...

ear and nose baffle samples, digital models,

from about 100 different bat species.

[narrator] Using a CT scanner,

he's captured hundreds of bat ears.

and then, with the help of 3D software,

he's come up with the average bat ear.

[Rolf] The average bat ear, despite all the complexity

in the individual species, is surprisingly simple.

It's just a cone.

If you take a piece of paper, and you form a cone,

and then cut it at an oblique angle,

that’s the average ear.

[narrator] Based on this average template,

Rolf created his first prototype robotic bat ear.

[Rolf] The robotic is about... shape change.

Here we start from our average building block.

Now we introduce shape features

from that original.

But instead of being static, not changing,

we introduce shape change.

So the robot ear allows us to evaluate

how these features act...

when the ear is also changing its shape.

[narrator] It's a baby step in the right direction.

But there are still more questions than answers

to what on the surface seems like a relatively simple system.

[rapid beeping]

[Rolf] The basic principle of biosonar

is really ridiculously simple.

You produce a sound.

They do it the same way as we produce speech.

There are objects in the environment.

They reflect the sound.

Echoes of the sound come back.

They're picked up by the ears,

listened to by the ears just like we listen to sound.

By analyzing these echoes, the bat knows what to do.

And that’s the point where we’re are -

not quite there yet.

[narrator] And we probably won't be there for several years.

Which means that a bat's face

is still the most sophisticated sonar system in the world.

[beeping continues]

Our last story

will really knock the socks off anyone

who's ever considered Mathematics to be boring.

You're about to meet a professor and inventor

who is taking equations to a whole new level...

with skateboards!

I bring you The Skateboard Professor!

[upbeat music]

[narrator] When he was in primary school,

Joe Kniss dreamt be could fly.

I got some crazy idea that I could have a hover board.

I actually convinced my friends

that I was getting one for Christmas.

[narrator] Instead, he settled for skateboards.

[Joe] I like the flow to them: the swerve and the weave.

They’re very finicky, but very dynamic.

And you’re only sort of loosely attached to it.

[narrator] Skateboards actually teach many lessons.

-Yeah! -[Joe] You're in the moment.

If you don't pay attention for a second, you hit a rock

and you fall off, and you get a lesson about paying attention.

So, it definitely is very, very in the moment.

It’s therapeutic for me. It is my release.

[narrator] Now, Joe's a professor,

teaching Computer Science... Maths.

I had this desperate need to make my job fun.

And Mathematics is incredibly hard to teach.

I had this real need to connect the things that I miss...

with the job that I have to do,

and make it make all make sense.

[narrator] He's not a big fan of computer mice or joysticks.

Joe's solution?

Hook the skateboard up to the computer.

And since that would be hard to roll on pavement,

create an indoor virtual space.

He calls it The Dome.

[Joe] The dome is a hemisphere that we project onto.

Well, here it is!

And we can literally immerse ourselves

in anything you can imagine.

And the dome is perfect.

It wraps around.

It allows your eyes to comfortably look around

and really get a sense of space

without the need for three-dimensional glasses

or extra devices.

[[narrator] To get around in virtual space,

a skateboard is the perfect set of wheels.

The guts of the board are simple.

[Joe] We felt like natural feel.

Real skateboard action was very important.

So what we’ve done...

is underneath this piece of plywood,

we’ve placed our force sensors at all four corners.

We’ve got a battery pack and Bluetooth transmitter.

And...

we can tell exactly how you’re balanced on the board,

where your weight’s shifted.

And on top of the board, we’ve mounted our skateboard

tethered in the center by this spring

that brings us back to a neutral position.

[narrator] And if you can ride a skateboard,

obviously you can fly through asteroids.

I'm using some gestures here to control how I fly.

So... we’re free-will particle,

and we can fly through this space at will.

[narrator] But the skateboard rig

is not the hover board of Joe's dreams.

It was obvious, like, this skateboard needs to fly.

We realized we need a robot.

[narrator] So Joe and his team came up with the Hex-Dex.

It's kind of a flight simulator for skateboards.

This is Stuey, Hex-Dex one...

its platform.

We can put whatever we want on it.

Here’s what it does. Matthew, can you give me a hand?

We can go all six degrees of freedom.

We can go side to side, front to back, up and down.

We can tilt this way.

We can tilt this way. We can even twist.

Those are little infrared LEDs,

this is an infrared camera.

And using some mathematics,

we can tell exactly what position the deck is in,

given how we see those LEDs over there.

This also includes accelerometers, and gyroscopes

to tell us about how we're moving up...

on top of the deck.

In addition, this middle layer of the deck you see here,

has force sensors on it to tell you how much you weigh,

where your balance is, are you falling?

So that the deck can perhaps move and catch you.

Or punish you and buck you off.

[upbeat music] Everything about this project

has been a demonstration of how to do demonstration.

[narrator] They put the Hex-Dex through all sorts of paces.

But they've never flown it in the dome before.

[Joe] Never in here. No, it’s the first time.

[narrator] The relocated board is a bit testy.

[Joe] It better dance this time.

[fast music] [clunking]

[hissing]

And then, it locked up.

[narrator] But eventually, they get it up and running.

[Joe] I made it squishy this time.

See how much more dynamic it is?

[narrator] Then it's Joe's turn

to fly through the asteroid belt.

He wants to play it safe.

[Joe] It’s a little jumpy.

So let's respect our noggins.

[music continues] Put my helmet on.

[banging]

Here we are...

in the rings of Saturn. [laughs]

Basically this thing is responding to my moves.

And then, as we accelerate,

we get more feedback from the deck.

[narrator] Joe's hopeful

that his inventions will take on a life of their own,

and that people will come up with original uses.

[Joe] We’re interested in ways of interacting or...

game play that isn’t just, you know,

shoot the bad guys or race the car.

We want to go beyond that. I mean that's so last century.

And as soon as I get a super conductor

and a power source strong enough,

I’m going to make the real one.

You've been watching How Tech Works.

I'm Basil singer, and I'll see you next time.

[ending music]