Bang Goes The Theory (2009) s03e03 Episode Script
Season 3, Episode 3
Tonight, on Bang Goes The Theory, Liz investigates jet lag by camping out on a sultan's private jet.
l'm going to attempt to cycle to the very edge of the solar system Even though l've just cycled all the way from Greenwich to the edge of the Pacific here in San Francisco, l still wouldn't have gone far enough.
And Jem gets all Evel Knievel by doing something that's never been done before reinventing the wheel.
Jemothy, what the heck? As far as we're aware, nobody in the world has ever jumped anything on a square-wheeled motorbike.
Do you wonder why, though? Do you wonder why? That's Bang Goes The Theory, putting science to the test.
Welcome to Bang Goes The Theory.
We start tonight with desynchronosis.
That's jet lag to you and me.
But what is it and can we avoid it? ln a nutshell, jet lag is caused by our all-important body clock getting out of synch.
To demonstrate that jet lag is a lot more than just feeling a bit tired, l'm going to need one of these, the former private jet of the Sultan of Oman.
Today, it's the perfect vessel to conduct a little Bang experiment an experiment that's going to compare my body clock, the control, not getting much sleep in that thing tonight, but not going anywhere, with the body clock of a very handsome chap who's also not getting much sleep in his jet plane but very importantly is skipping over time zones.
The idea is that as Dallas flies back from filming in America, l'll monitor changes in his body clock.
For me, being here, the fascinating thing is the whole notion of extremophiles - (PHONE RlNGS) - Sorry, forgot to turn my phone off.
Sorry, guys.
Liz, l'm in America, in a desert! - What time is it over there? - About half ten in the morning.
Listen, have you been sampling your saliva every two hours? l've been doing the swab things with swabs and test tubes.
OK, and l've been doing saliva swabs as well every two hours so hopefully we'll get a good result.
All right.
Sorry, l'm holding the guys up.
Sorry, Andy.
Sorry.
All right.
Bye.
Wrong number.
So while Dallas flies home, both of us will have a bad night but only Dallas will fly through time zones.
Now, first up, we need to understand how our body clock actually works.
Our body clock's control centre is called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or the SON.
lt's a small cluster of cells located in the brain that keeps all our body processes working perfectly to a daily cycle.
The SON controls everything from our sleep patterns to body temperature.
That's quite a big job for something that's only as small as a grain of rice.
But why do we need a body clock to work at specific times? Day and night present very different challenges and opportunities for animals so it's useful for the body to adapt itself to do certain things in the daytime, other things at night-time.
For example, we don't see well at night so it makes sense for us to rest and regenerate at night-time and then be active, foraging for food and digesting it Ah! in the daytime.
The SON controls our body's functions by regulating the production of the hormone cortisol amongst other things.
And it's our levels of cortisol that will be measured over the next few hours.
To shed light on how it works, l've been joined by neurobiologist Dr Michael Hastings.
Oortisol is really important because it energises us.
lt increases heart rate, blood pressure.
- lt's a bit like coffee really.
- So cortisol is high in the morning.
And over the course of the day the cortisol's gradually used up so when we come to evening, our energy levels are dipping down and we're prepared for sleep.
So when you're jet-lagged and your cortisol is being released at the wrong time, it's not just your sleepiness or your wakefulness that's affected, it's actually all of your bodily functions.
lt's a double whammy.
First, our level of metabolism isn't set at the appropriate level so we're lethargic, we can't perform as well.
But making it even worse, on top of that, all our different organs are operating at different clock times, so they're not working in unison as an efficient machine.
So if your liver and your stomach are doing things at the wrong time, that's why you're going to feel so rubbish.
Dysphoria.
Dysphoria? Oool word.
lnefficient, unable to perform to the best of your abilities.
So cortisol is incredibly important, isn't it? Without it we'd be dead and it really is the most important conductor of our circadian orchestra, if you like.
Thanks a million, Michael, but l have to kick you off my plane now because l've got to get on with my experiment.
Get out! Dr Hastings leaves me to settle down for the night while Dallas is l'm about to go and jump on a plane.
lt's noon now.
So at the start of our little experiment, he is 8,500 km and eight time zones away.
Got all my oral swab paraphernalia.
Bring on the jet lag! The idea is that whilst Dallas is whizzing through the time zones in cattle class, l'll be experiencing the same discomfort but not actually going anywhere.
Which means l've been downgraded from the Sultan's bed to servant class.
l get to sit here now for nine hours to mimic Dallas's flight.
Ooh, that reminds me.
Take another sample.
We need to sample our saliva every two hours by chewing on cotton swabs.
They will be analysed to show how much cortisol our bodies were producing.
Having had enough of the 1970s in-flight entertainment, l call it a night.
Right.
By the time l wake up tomorrow morning, my cortisol levels will be on the rise.
Dallas lands at 7.
30am, so his cortisol should be on the rise, too.
But because he's come from America, it's 1 1 .
30pm for him so his cortisol will be really low and that's when it gets complicated because his system will be out of synch and, hopefully, that's going to show up on our graphs.
This better be worth it.
Lumpy bed! lt might be five in the morning for me, but for Dallas, it's still 9pm.
Everybody on the plane here thinks l'm a bit weird with my video camera so that's why l have to sneak into the loo to do my video diary.
l should be trying to bank some sleep but l can't cos l just don't feel tired.
(OOOK OROWS) The next morning, although l was feeling a bit rough from my night on the seats, my body's cortisol levels were attempting to wake me up.
Dallas's, on the other hand, were attempting to send him to sleep.
l'm starting to feel really tired, even though it's 7 am UK time.
My body thinks it's 1 1pm west coast American time.
So my whole body is messed up and scrambled.
l don't know what's going on.
With our experiment over, and Dallas safely back on the ground, our samples are sent to the lab to be analysed.
But what will the results show?.
So when you analysed the spit samples, what did you get? Do you want to see the details? OK, this is a graph of five days.
Daytime, night-time, daytime, night-time etc.
These are normal cortisol levels.
So they're at their highest at nine or ten in the morning.
At their lowest round about bedtime and then they start rising again.
- These are my cortisol levels.
- Pretty much as normal.
This is the night of the bad sleep on the plane and still they're in synch with normal cortisol levels.
- lt wasn't that bad, your night's sleep.
- lt was so horrible! lt was so hard! OK, and then - the interesting bit now- your cortisol levels.
Your cortisol levels when you were on the west coast were at their highest about eight hours after mine.
- Which makes sense.
- That's normal.
Absolutely.
You're in synch with west coast time.
This is the day you landed.
Now, it's seven o'clock in the morning but your cortisol levels are really low because for you it's 1 1 o'clock at night.
lt takes you about three days to realign to normal levels, which isn't bad going because according to scientists it should take up to a day per time zone you travel.
lt could have taken anything up to eight days.
That feels about right, l think.
So is there any way of speeding up that process, getting into synch quicker? You can help it along by doing a couple of things, like once you get on the plane, start eating according to the times of your destination so your organs are starting to work according to your destination time.
That will help you feeling not so rotten.
- l just watched movies.
l didn't do that.
- Me too.
l always do that.
The other thing is, if you land in the daytime, like Dallas, get some light because the SON resets according to daytime and night-time hours.
Talking about shifting time zones, how big do you think the entire solar system is? - Ma-hou-ssive! - lt is pretty big.
Have a guess.
Ballpark.
What do you think? 100 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun? 15 billion kilometres? They actually measure it at 10 trillion kilometres, that's a light year across.
But what on Earth does a light year mean? l wanted to try and explore that on a more human scale and annoyingly, for some reason, NASA wouldn't lend me a space shuttle.
So l had to go to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich to start a journey that's going to take me to the very edge of the solar system.
But first, a quick history lesson.
l absolutely love this.
lt's called an horary.
lt's a mechanical model of our solar system.
You can see the planets here orbiting the Sun, as they would do in real life.
But it's more than just a little interesting knick-knack.
lt's actually the result of arguably the greatest revelation in the entire history of science.
Before the 1 7th century, most people believed in a geocentric universe, with the Earth slap bang in the middle and everything else orbiting around it, including our Sun.
lt's only when the big guns Oopernicus, Galileo and Kepler came along, that our understanding shifted to a heliocentric model with the Sun at the centre of things, and the Earth and the other planets orbiting it.
Like that.
But there's something wrong with this horary - its scale.
All the planets are far too close together.
Let me demonstrate how they should be spaced out with a scale model of my own.
Our Sun is a fairly average-sized star.
There are much bigger stars than ours in the universe, so let's represent it with this football.
How far would you have to travel away from our Sun football here before you reached the first planet, Mercury? Well, on this scale, every metre is three million kilometres, so the answer is 18 metres which is the equivalent of 56 million kilometres.
Now, if the Sun was the size of our football up there, then Mercury by comparison would be about the size of this grain of sand.
Another 19 metres or 52 million kilometres, you arrive at Venus.
And it's not very big.
About the size of this nut.
Another 15 metres or 42 million kilometres, you'd come to the most incredible planet in our solar system, a place that 6.
8 billion people might find strangely familiar.
But how big is the Earth compared to our football Sun over there? Not very big at all, really.
About the size of this pea.
OK, next up, about 234 million kilometres from the Sun, the mighty Mars.
lt's only the size of this tiny insignificant grain of rice.
Mars represents the final frontier of the rocky inner planets.
But as we move further away from the sun into the darkness of space, the planets are mainly made up of gas.
First up, right at the edge of the park, it's Jupiter.
259 metres from our football-sized Sun 777 million kilometres in the real world, it's 1 1 times the size of the Earth, which makes it the giant of the solar system, which on this scale is about the size of this golf ball.
Like Jupiter, the next giant of the solar system is mainly made up of gases like hydrogen and helium.
You'll find it just down the street outside the park.
lt's called Saturn.
lt's 472 metres from our football and that's 1 .
5 thousand million kilometres from the sun and about the size of this table tennis ball but with some of them nice rings going around it.
Finally, l'm in Greenwich town proper.
Next up is a lump of ice and rock formally known as Uranus.
lt's about a kilometre from our football over there or 2.
8 thousand million kilometres from the Sun.
lt's starting to get very cold and it's very dark.
After that 2.
2 clicks from our football is Neptune, another icy lump the size of a grape - probably a white one.
OK, so travelling out from the Greenwich Observatory where we started with our football-sized Sun, we've got Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
And, until 2006, there was one more planet in our solar system.
But not any more.
Over there by the Dome is poor old Pluto, everybody's favourite demoted planet some two kilometres away from our football Sun.
That's 6,000 million kilometres away from the real Sun, and smaller than the tiniest grain of sand.
But the solar system doesn't stop there.
The journey from my football Sun has only just begun.
Way out beyond Pluto, there's the Oort cloud, made up of trillions of small dirty snowballs locked into orbit around our Sun.
No-one is quite sure how far it extends but estimates range from between 100,000 and 200,000 times further from the Sun than the Earth is which means on our scale, it may end up somewhere here, in the deserts of the western USA.
But what about beyond the solar system? How far is it to the nearest star? Well, it's called Proxima Oentauri.
and it's so dim you can't even see it with the naked eye.
At 4.
2 light years away, it's a long way off, even on our football scale.
Over 1 4,000 kilometres in fact, which is why, even though l've just cycled all the way from Greenwich to the edge of the Pacific here in San Francisco, l still wouldn't have gone far enough.
ln fact, l'd have to go about another 2,500 kilometres past Hawaii, out there somewhere.
ln terms of size, quite small actually compared to our football Sun.
Because lt's a red dwarf, about the size of this hockey ball.
That was a hell of a bike ride.
As you cycle away from the Sun, does it constantly feel like going uphill? Yeah.
You can really feel it in your thighs.
lt's tough.
OK, enough of that.
lt's time to catch up with out weekly dose of Dr Yan and his street science and this week he's gone a little bit sensitive.
We all know that feeling of taking the first few steps into the sea.
lt's usually pretty cool actually, even on a hot day.
But soon you seem to warm up and it doesn't seem so bad after all, Well, that's thanks to our body's amazing sensitivity to changes in its surroundings and its ability to adjust and adapt.
Our response to temperature is a prime example of that, but it sometimes has some rather unusual consequences.
Look, l'll show you.
l'd like you, when l say go, to put your hands one into that water and one into that bucket of water.
OK? The bowls are at different temperatures.
One's hot, one's cold.
(LAUGHTER) So how do they feel? Warm.
Hot.
Oold.
Different.
The reason that one's feeling cold and the other's feeling hot is because under your skin you have millions of tiny little nerve endings called thermoreceptors.
You actually have several different sorts of thermoreceptors that respond to different temperatures and send a constant stream of messages to your brain.
.
What's happening is ln cold water, our cold receptors are becoming desensitised, sending fewer cold messages to the brain.
The opposite happens to the hand in hot water.
So right now, are we confusing my brain? ls it really confused? The interesting thing is how do they feel now?.
Warmand really cold.
Are they getting a bit? This one's not so cold now.
Not so cold? Yeah.
So you get this thing called sensory adaptation which means that your thermoreceptors adapt to that temperature.
And that means that there are fewer impulses, fewer messages sent to the brain, and the temperature doesn't seem so extreme.
What l want you to do is when l say go, l want you to take both hands out the water and without drying them or anything put them both in the blue ones.
OK? Are you ready? Yeah? Go.
Now how does it feel? (LAUGHlNG) Opposite.
What sort of temperature do you think the water is? l have no idea what the temperature is because one hand is warm and the other one is cold.
One is hot and one is cold now.
Weird, isn't it? l'll tell you.
l've got a fancy thermometer.
That is 20 degrees.
That one is also 20.
2 so they're almost exactly the same.
That's room temperature.
Basically what's happened is that the one that was in cold water, all the cold receptors have become adapted.
They're not sending messages so often.
When you plunge it into the lukewarm water, all you get is the hot and so you feel hot.
Similarly, it's exactly the opposite for the other one.
The one that's been in hot water, put it in lukewarm water, all the hot ones are maxed out.
They're not sending messages, you get the cold messages and that feels cold.
That's how it all works.
Simple.
The amazing Dr Yan, everybody.
- Never disappoints.
- OK, Jemothy, what's up next? ln engineering, you never know how far you can push a concept until it starts going wrong.
With this one, l feel that might be exactly where we're at.
Wheels don't have to be round.
This week l want to try something audacious.
l want to build a square-wheeled motorbike and jump it.
But l'm not going to use a specialist stunt bike.
l'm going to do it on the world's most popular motorbike - the Honda Oub 90.
60 million worldwide, but only this one is getting square wheels.
We simply love this.
You see, not even Evel Knievel attempted to jump anything on a square-wheeled motorbike.
But then, Evel Knievel never studied much in the way of mathematics.
You see, maths is the key to making square wheels work.
As the square rolls, this bump lifts the side and lets the corners drop down, keeping the axle moving in a perfectly straight line, giving me a smooth ride.
That's fine whilst the wheel is idly rolling over the humps.
But what happens when the wheel is powered? Will the added force shift it out of synch? Maths won't help me now.
There's one way to find out - give it some revs.
This is my worst nightmare.
As soon as any power is applied to the wheel, it slips out of synch, its corners smashing into the track.
With only one day to go before blast off, l nip to the builders' yard with a last-ditch plan.
That's to try and increase the grip with a coat of non-slip paint.
The next day, it's make or break.
Either l've solved the problem, or my unprecedented stunt will end in tears.
- That feels like it's going out.
- Yeah.
But try as we might, the more power l apply, the worse it gets.
Then it starts to rain.
And all hopes of a jump are off for the day.
As l sit here now, l can't even pretend that l feel confident.
l don't mind if it goes wrong on the flat because it'll hurt but l'll walk away from it.
lf it goes wrong six or eight feet in the air as l get to the end of the ramp, l think that's going to be really bad.
Bad in a way that l don't want to experience.
And l'm properly nervous.
The thing that l'm most nervous about is it not actually working.
lt's got to work.
Because that's what l do.
lt's my job.
lt's our final day at the stunt test site and if l'm going to jump, we've got our work cut out.
The whole morning is spent repairing and reinforcing the track, but we still don't have a solution for our problems.
Slow motion cameras help to decipher what's going wrong.
lf the wheel slips just slightly and starts to go out of synch, the grippy surface we thought would help in fact then makes things worse.
lt's almost like as the speed goes up, it would want to be slippier to give it more time to drop back in.
- Slippier or grippier? - Slippier.
So l gamble on sanding off the grippy paint in the grooves on the track and covering the rubber on the corners of the wheels.
ln order to make it slightly self-correcting, we're trying to get the corners to have very little friction, so as it goes out they can just slip back in just fractionally and then the whole thing stays on the straight and level, as they say.
lt's a fine compromise between high-level mathematics and real life.
After yet more rain, the tests are not exactly confidence-inspiring.
l've still not been able to drive anywhere near fast enough to make a jump.
And as if l wasn't under enough pressure already, Liz and Dallas then turn up.
ls this seriously it? Jemothy, what the heck? - l know it looks - lt looks ridiculous! Yes.
lnsane.
We don't know if it's definitely going to happen, if it's definitely going to work.
As far as we're aware, nobody in the world has ever jumped anything on a square-wheeled motorbike.
On a scale of one to ten, what's your confidence level? - This is mad.
- lt is mad.
l l think that Either l'm going to end up catching something, ploughing into this plywood and just face-planting onto there.
Or l'm going to go soaring over the top like an eagle! So, one to ten? We're talking 50-50? Five? l would say not that good.
30-70.
- That's fine.
- Thank you, Dallas.
Let's get it over and done with cos l'm beginning to hyperventilate.
Thank you, Liz(!) Thank you.
Liz is right.
l've now just got to do it.
This is the moment of truth.
My reputation, my health, my pride all rest on whether l can jump a square-wheeled motorbike off a 45-degree ramp.
(ENGlNE STARTS) (OHEERlNG AND LAUGHTER) - Mr Jem Stansfield, everyone! - Amazing! Well done! Well done! - That was fantastic.
- You're such a hero.
That was amazing.
That was really smooth, right up to the end.
You made it look so easy.
You got about ten inches.
l know! Biggest jump ever on a square-wheeled bike! lt looked so wicked.
Maybe not the distance that Knievel aimed for.
- But it was style.
- lt was the style.
You got the style down! Well done, babe.
Well done.
lt was good, but l just know it can be better.
So l go back and try it again.
- Jem's ice cool, like lce Man! - l know.
He's so calm.
The lce Man cometh.
He's gone.
He's bottled it! He's gone! Has he gone for a wiz? He's gone for a final nervous wiz behind the trees! Brilliant!
l'm going to attempt to cycle to the very edge of the solar system Even though l've just cycled all the way from Greenwich to the edge of the Pacific here in San Francisco, l still wouldn't have gone far enough.
And Jem gets all Evel Knievel by doing something that's never been done before reinventing the wheel.
Jemothy, what the heck? As far as we're aware, nobody in the world has ever jumped anything on a square-wheeled motorbike.
Do you wonder why, though? Do you wonder why? That's Bang Goes The Theory, putting science to the test.
Welcome to Bang Goes The Theory.
We start tonight with desynchronosis.
That's jet lag to you and me.
But what is it and can we avoid it? ln a nutshell, jet lag is caused by our all-important body clock getting out of synch.
To demonstrate that jet lag is a lot more than just feeling a bit tired, l'm going to need one of these, the former private jet of the Sultan of Oman.
Today, it's the perfect vessel to conduct a little Bang experiment an experiment that's going to compare my body clock, the control, not getting much sleep in that thing tonight, but not going anywhere, with the body clock of a very handsome chap who's also not getting much sleep in his jet plane but very importantly is skipping over time zones.
The idea is that as Dallas flies back from filming in America, l'll monitor changes in his body clock.
For me, being here, the fascinating thing is the whole notion of extremophiles - (PHONE RlNGS) - Sorry, forgot to turn my phone off.
Sorry, guys.
Liz, l'm in America, in a desert! - What time is it over there? - About half ten in the morning.
Listen, have you been sampling your saliva every two hours? l've been doing the swab things with swabs and test tubes.
OK, and l've been doing saliva swabs as well every two hours so hopefully we'll get a good result.
All right.
Sorry, l'm holding the guys up.
Sorry, Andy.
Sorry.
All right.
Bye.
Wrong number.
So while Dallas flies home, both of us will have a bad night but only Dallas will fly through time zones.
Now, first up, we need to understand how our body clock actually works.
Our body clock's control centre is called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or the SON.
lt's a small cluster of cells located in the brain that keeps all our body processes working perfectly to a daily cycle.
The SON controls everything from our sleep patterns to body temperature.
That's quite a big job for something that's only as small as a grain of rice.
But why do we need a body clock to work at specific times? Day and night present very different challenges and opportunities for animals so it's useful for the body to adapt itself to do certain things in the daytime, other things at night-time.
For example, we don't see well at night so it makes sense for us to rest and regenerate at night-time and then be active, foraging for food and digesting it Ah! in the daytime.
The SON controls our body's functions by regulating the production of the hormone cortisol amongst other things.
And it's our levels of cortisol that will be measured over the next few hours.
To shed light on how it works, l've been joined by neurobiologist Dr Michael Hastings.
Oortisol is really important because it energises us.
lt increases heart rate, blood pressure.
- lt's a bit like coffee really.
- So cortisol is high in the morning.
And over the course of the day the cortisol's gradually used up so when we come to evening, our energy levels are dipping down and we're prepared for sleep.
So when you're jet-lagged and your cortisol is being released at the wrong time, it's not just your sleepiness or your wakefulness that's affected, it's actually all of your bodily functions.
lt's a double whammy.
First, our level of metabolism isn't set at the appropriate level so we're lethargic, we can't perform as well.
But making it even worse, on top of that, all our different organs are operating at different clock times, so they're not working in unison as an efficient machine.
So if your liver and your stomach are doing things at the wrong time, that's why you're going to feel so rubbish.
Dysphoria.
Dysphoria? Oool word.
lnefficient, unable to perform to the best of your abilities.
So cortisol is incredibly important, isn't it? Without it we'd be dead and it really is the most important conductor of our circadian orchestra, if you like.
Thanks a million, Michael, but l have to kick you off my plane now because l've got to get on with my experiment.
Get out! Dr Hastings leaves me to settle down for the night while Dallas is l'm about to go and jump on a plane.
lt's noon now.
So at the start of our little experiment, he is 8,500 km and eight time zones away.
Got all my oral swab paraphernalia.
Bring on the jet lag! The idea is that whilst Dallas is whizzing through the time zones in cattle class, l'll be experiencing the same discomfort but not actually going anywhere.
Which means l've been downgraded from the Sultan's bed to servant class.
l get to sit here now for nine hours to mimic Dallas's flight.
Ooh, that reminds me.
Take another sample.
We need to sample our saliva every two hours by chewing on cotton swabs.
They will be analysed to show how much cortisol our bodies were producing.
Having had enough of the 1970s in-flight entertainment, l call it a night.
Right.
By the time l wake up tomorrow morning, my cortisol levels will be on the rise.
Dallas lands at 7.
30am, so his cortisol should be on the rise, too.
But because he's come from America, it's 1 1 .
30pm for him so his cortisol will be really low and that's when it gets complicated because his system will be out of synch and, hopefully, that's going to show up on our graphs.
This better be worth it.
Lumpy bed! lt might be five in the morning for me, but for Dallas, it's still 9pm.
Everybody on the plane here thinks l'm a bit weird with my video camera so that's why l have to sneak into the loo to do my video diary.
l should be trying to bank some sleep but l can't cos l just don't feel tired.
(OOOK OROWS) The next morning, although l was feeling a bit rough from my night on the seats, my body's cortisol levels were attempting to wake me up.
Dallas's, on the other hand, were attempting to send him to sleep.
l'm starting to feel really tired, even though it's 7 am UK time.
My body thinks it's 1 1pm west coast American time.
So my whole body is messed up and scrambled.
l don't know what's going on.
With our experiment over, and Dallas safely back on the ground, our samples are sent to the lab to be analysed.
But what will the results show?.
So when you analysed the spit samples, what did you get? Do you want to see the details? OK, this is a graph of five days.
Daytime, night-time, daytime, night-time etc.
These are normal cortisol levels.
So they're at their highest at nine or ten in the morning.
At their lowest round about bedtime and then they start rising again.
- These are my cortisol levels.
- Pretty much as normal.
This is the night of the bad sleep on the plane and still they're in synch with normal cortisol levels.
- lt wasn't that bad, your night's sleep.
- lt was so horrible! lt was so hard! OK, and then - the interesting bit now- your cortisol levels.
Your cortisol levels when you were on the west coast were at their highest about eight hours after mine.
- Which makes sense.
- That's normal.
Absolutely.
You're in synch with west coast time.
This is the day you landed.
Now, it's seven o'clock in the morning but your cortisol levels are really low because for you it's 1 1 o'clock at night.
lt takes you about three days to realign to normal levels, which isn't bad going because according to scientists it should take up to a day per time zone you travel.
lt could have taken anything up to eight days.
That feels about right, l think.
So is there any way of speeding up that process, getting into synch quicker? You can help it along by doing a couple of things, like once you get on the plane, start eating according to the times of your destination so your organs are starting to work according to your destination time.
That will help you feeling not so rotten.
- l just watched movies.
l didn't do that.
- Me too.
l always do that.
The other thing is, if you land in the daytime, like Dallas, get some light because the SON resets according to daytime and night-time hours.
Talking about shifting time zones, how big do you think the entire solar system is? - Ma-hou-ssive! - lt is pretty big.
Have a guess.
Ballpark.
What do you think? 100 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun? 15 billion kilometres? They actually measure it at 10 trillion kilometres, that's a light year across.
But what on Earth does a light year mean? l wanted to try and explore that on a more human scale and annoyingly, for some reason, NASA wouldn't lend me a space shuttle.
So l had to go to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich to start a journey that's going to take me to the very edge of the solar system.
But first, a quick history lesson.
l absolutely love this.
lt's called an horary.
lt's a mechanical model of our solar system.
You can see the planets here orbiting the Sun, as they would do in real life.
But it's more than just a little interesting knick-knack.
lt's actually the result of arguably the greatest revelation in the entire history of science.
Before the 1 7th century, most people believed in a geocentric universe, with the Earth slap bang in the middle and everything else orbiting around it, including our Sun.
lt's only when the big guns Oopernicus, Galileo and Kepler came along, that our understanding shifted to a heliocentric model with the Sun at the centre of things, and the Earth and the other planets orbiting it.
Like that.
But there's something wrong with this horary - its scale.
All the planets are far too close together.
Let me demonstrate how they should be spaced out with a scale model of my own.
Our Sun is a fairly average-sized star.
There are much bigger stars than ours in the universe, so let's represent it with this football.
How far would you have to travel away from our Sun football here before you reached the first planet, Mercury? Well, on this scale, every metre is three million kilometres, so the answer is 18 metres which is the equivalent of 56 million kilometres.
Now, if the Sun was the size of our football up there, then Mercury by comparison would be about the size of this grain of sand.
Another 19 metres or 52 million kilometres, you arrive at Venus.
And it's not very big.
About the size of this nut.
Another 15 metres or 42 million kilometres, you'd come to the most incredible planet in our solar system, a place that 6.
8 billion people might find strangely familiar.
But how big is the Earth compared to our football Sun over there? Not very big at all, really.
About the size of this pea.
OK, next up, about 234 million kilometres from the Sun, the mighty Mars.
lt's only the size of this tiny insignificant grain of rice.
Mars represents the final frontier of the rocky inner planets.
But as we move further away from the sun into the darkness of space, the planets are mainly made up of gas.
First up, right at the edge of the park, it's Jupiter.
259 metres from our football-sized Sun 777 million kilometres in the real world, it's 1 1 times the size of the Earth, which makes it the giant of the solar system, which on this scale is about the size of this golf ball.
Like Jupiter, the next giant of the solar system is mainly made up of gases like hydrogen and helium.
You'll find it just down the street outside the park.
lt's called Saturn.
lt's 472 metres from our football and that's 1 .
5 thousand million kilometres from the sun and about the size of this table tennis ball but with some of them nice rings going around it.
Finally, l'm in Greenwich town proper.
Next up is a lump of ice and rock formally known as Uranus.
lt's about a kilometre from our football over there or 2.
8 thousand million kilometres from the Sun.
lt's starting to get very cold and it's very dark.
After that 2.
2 clicks from our football is Neptune, another icy lump the size of a grape - probably a white one.
OK, so travelling out from the Greenwich Observatory where we started with our football-sized Sun, we've got Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
And, until 2006, there was one more planet in our solar system.
But not any more.
Over there by the Dome is poor old Pluto, everybody's favourite demoted planet some two kilometres away from our football Sun.
That's 6,000 million kilometres away from the real Sun, and smaller than the tiniest grain of sand.
But the solar system doesn't stop there.
The journey from my football Sun has only just begun.
Way out beyond Pluto, there's the Oort cloud, made up of trillions of small dirty snowballs locked into orbit around our Sun.
No-one is quite sure how far it extends but estimates range from between 100,000 and 200,000 times further from the Sun than the Earth is which means on our scale, it may end up somewhere here, in the deserts of the western USA.
But what about beyond the solar system? How far is it to the nearest star? Well, it's called Proxima Oentauri.
and it's so dim you can't even see it with the naked eye.
At 4.
2 light years away, it's a long way off, even on our football scale.
Over 1 4,000 kilometres in fact, which is why, even though l've just cycled all the way from Greenwich to the edge of the Pacific here in San Francisco, l still wouldn't have gone far enough.
ln fact, l'd have to go about another 2,500 kilometres past Hawaii, out there somewhere.
ln terms of size, quite small actually compared to our football Sun.
Because lt's a red dwarf, about the size of this hockey ball.
That was a hell of a bike ride.
As you cycle away from the Sun, does it constantly feel like going uphill? Yeah.
You can really feel it in your thighs.
lt's tough.
OK, enough of that.
lt's time to catch up with out weekly dose of Dr Yan and his street science and this week he's gone a little bit sensitive.
We all know that feeling of taking the first few steps into the sea.
lt's usually pretty cool actually, even on a hot day.
But soon you seem to warm up and it doesn't seem so bad after all, Well, that's thanks to our body's amazing sensitivity to changes in its surroundings and its ability to adjust and adapt.
Our response to temperature is a prime example of that, but it sometimes has some rather unusual consequences.
Look, l'll show you.
l'd like you, when l say go, to put your hands one into that water and one into that bucket of water.
OK? The bowls are at different temperatures.
One's hot, one's cold.
(LAUGHTER) So how do they feel? Warm.
Hot.
Oold.
Different.
The reason that one's feeling cold and the other's feeling hot is because under your skin you have millions of tiny little nerve endings called thermoreceptors.
You actually have several different sorts of thermoreceptors that respond to different temperatures and send a constant stream of messages to your brain.
.
What's happening is ln cold water, our cold receptors are becoming desensitised, sending fewer cold messages to the brain.
The opposite happens to the hand in hot water.
So right now, are we confusing my brain? ls it really confused? The interesting thing is how do they feel now?.
Warmand really cold.
Are they getting a bit? This one's not so cold now.
Not so cold? Yeah.
So you get this thing called sensory adaptation which means that your thermoreceptors adapt to that temperature.
And that means that there are fewer impulses, fewer messages sent to the brain, and the temperature doesn't seem so extreme.
What l want you to do is when l say go, l want you to take both hands out the water and without drying them or anything put them both in the blue ones.
OK? Are you ready? Yeah? Go.
Now how does it feel? (LAUGHlNG) Opposite.
What sort of temperature do you think the water is? l have no idea what the temperature is because one hand is warm and the other one is cold.
One is hot and one is cold now.
Weird, isn't it? l'll tell you.
l've got a fancy thermometer.
That is 20 degrees.
That one is also 20.
2 so they're almost exactly the same.
That's room temperature.
Basically what's happened is that the one that was in cold water, all the cold receptors have become adapted.
They're not sending messages so often.
When you plunge it into the lukewarm water, all you get is the hot and so you feel hot.
Similarly, it's exactly the opposite for the other one.
The one that's been in hot water, put it in lukewarm water, all the hot ones are maxed out.
They're not sending messages, you get the cold messages and that feels cold.
That's how it all works.
Simple.
The amazing Dr Yan, everybody.
- Never disappoints.
- OK, Jemothy, what's up next? ln engineering, you never know how far you can push a concept until it starts going wrong.
With this one, l feel that might be exactly where we're at.
Wheels don't have to be round.
This week l want to try something audacious.
l want to build a square-wheeled motorbike and jump it.
But l'm not going to use a specialist stunt bike.
l'm going to do it on the world's most popular motorbike - the Honda Oub 90.
60 million worldwide, but only this one is getting square wheels.
We simply love this.
You see, not even Evel Knievel attempted to jump anything on a square-wheeled motorbike.
But then, Evel Knievel never studied much in the way of mathematics.
You see, maths is the key to making square wheels work.
As the square rolls, this bump lifts the side and lets the corners drop down, keeping the axle moving in a perfectly straight line, giving me a smooth ride.
That's fine whilst the wheel is idly rolling over the humps.
But what happens when the wheel is powered? Will the added force shift it out of synch? Maths won't help me now.
There's one way to find out - give it some revs.
This is my worst nightmare.
As soon as any power is applied to the wheel, it slips out of synch, its corners smashing into the track.
With only one day to go before blast off, l nip to the builders' yard with a last-ditch plan.
That's to try and increase the grip with a coat of non-slip paint.
The next day, it's make or break.
Either l've solved the problem, or my unprecedented stunt will end in tears.
- That feels like it's going out.
- Yeah.
But try as we might, the more power l apply, the worse it gets.
Then it starts to rain.
And all hopes of a jump are off for the day.
As l sit here now, l can't even pretend that l feel confident.
l don't mind if it goes wrong on the flat because it'll hurt but l'll walk away from it.
lf it goes wrong six or eight feet in the air as l get to the end of the ramp, l think that's going to be really bad.
Bad in a way that l don't want to experience.
And l'm properly nervous.
The thing that l'm most nervous about is it not actually working.
lt's got to work.
Because that's what l do.
lt's my job.
lt's our final day at the stunt test site and if l'm going to jump, we've got our work cut out.
The whole morning is spent repairing and reinforcing the track, but we still don't have a solution for our problems.
Slow motion cameras help to decipher what's going wrong.
lf the wheel slips just slightly and starts to go out of synch, the grippy surface we thought would help in fact then makes things worse.
lt's almost like as the speed goes up, it would want to be slippier to give it more time to drop back in.
- Slippier or grippier? - Slippier.
So l gamble on sanding off the grippy paint in the grooves on the track and covering the rubber on the corners of the wheels.
ln order to make it slightly self-correcting, we're trying to get the corners to have very little friction, so as it goes out they can just slip back in just fractionally and then the whole thing stays on the straight and level, as they say.
lt's a fine compromise between high-level mathematics and real life.
After yet more rain, the tests are not exactly confidence-inspiring.
l've still not been able to drive anywhere near fast enough to make a jump.
And as if l wasn't under enough pressure already, Liz and Dallas then turn up.
ls this seriously it? Jemothy, what the heck? - l know it looks - lt looks ridiculous! Yes.
lnsane.
We don't know if it's definitely going to happen, if it's definitely going to work.
As far as we're aware, nobody in the world has ever jumped anything on a square-wheeled motorbike.
On a scale of one to ten, what's your confidence level? - This is mad.
- lt is mad.
l l think that Either l'm going to end up catching something, ploughing into this plywood and just face-planting onto there.
Or l'm going to go soaring over the top like an eagle! So, one to ten? We're talking 50-50? Five? l would say not that good.
30-70.
- That's fine.
- Thank you, Dallas.
Let's get it over and done with cos l'm beginning to hyperventilate.
Thank you, Liz(!) Thank you.
Liz is right.
l've now just got to do it.
This is the moment of truth.
My reputation, my health, my pride all rest on whether l can jump a square-wheeled motorbike off a 45-degree ramp.
(ENGlNE STARTS) (OHEERlNG AND LAUGHTER) - Mr Jem Stansfield, everyone! - Amazing! Well done! Well done! - That was fantastic.
- You're such a hero.
That was amazing.
That was really smooth, right up to the end.
You made it look so easy.
You got about ten inches.
l know! Biggest jump ever on a square-wheeled bike! lt looked so wicked.
Maybe not the distance that Knievel aimed for.
- But it was style.
- lt was the style.
You got the style down! Well done, babe.
Well done.
lt was good, but l just know it can be better.
So l go back and try it again.
- Jem's ice cool, like lce Man! - l know.
He's so calm.
The lce Man cometh.
He's gone.
He's bottled it! He's gone! Has he gone for a wiz? He's gone for a final nervous wiz behind the trees! Brilliant!