Wallace and Gromit's World of Invention (2010) s01e01 Episode Script
Nature Knows Best
Ooh! Ha-ha! Ooh! Ha-ha-ha-ha! Mm-mm Ah ah! Ooh! Ooh-ooh-ooh! Hello, viewers, and welcome to my World Of Invention, the show that irons the jeans of genius and keeps you connected with kinetics.
Someone once said, "Necessity is the mother of invention.
" Well, not necessarily.
Today, we're looking at inventions with another mother altogether Mother Nature.
And we'll be seeing how she's provided inspiration for many a delightful discovery such as the robot which thinks it's a Venus flytrap.
8 dead flies makes it work for about 12 days.
And my science correspondent, Mr Jem, proves a dab hand at breathing underwater, thanks to an artificial gill.
I'm doing it - breathing air that's just been pumped out of water.
And we'll be meeting Mr Theo Jansen, a man who makes perambulating pets out of plastic tubing.
Oh, yes! He does, you know! But first, some Ssh! Quiet, Kevin.
Some machines you might think rather fishy.
Over to you, Ashley, m'dear.
Why, thank you.
Now, I'm sure you'll agree, Wallace, that Mother Nature is the best inventor of them all.
She's been perfecting designs for about, ooh four billion years or so.
Whether it's a super-extendable tongue for catching bugs, or incredible elastic tendons for extra jumping power, or one bizarrely long finger for getting a bit of grub, Mother Nature is the ultimate engineer.
So a German technology company has decided to make the most of nature's great talent for original design.
The team here at Festo is turning marine biology into machinery.
And their inspiration comes from this spectacular sea creature the manta ray.
We studied manta rays, because they are very energy-efficient, they are agile and they can manoeuvre very easily.
So how do they turn the grace and agility of the beautiful manta ray into hi-tech engineering? Well, they've copied the internal structure of the manta ray's fin to come up with this - A fin-gripper.
It's so flexible, you can use it to make a robotic hand that's so sensitive it can pick up easily bruised fruit and veg.
But tomatoes are just the start.
The Festo engineers have come up with a far more dramatic use of this fin technology.
Meet the radio-controlled manta ray airship.
We have here the so-called "fin ray" structure.
We move it up, turn it and then move down.
Turn it and move up.
And it's like birds are flying or even if a manta ray is swimming in the water, it's the same behaviour.
With its ray-like wings and tail fin, the Airray can twist and turn just as nature intended.
And this is not just some executive toy.
It's proof that with some natural inspiration, we can create flying machines without noisy, gas-guzzling engines or big, swirling propellers.
The Airray just needs helium to give it buoyancy.
But controlling its three fins does require an extra set of hands.
We couldn't get away with that in air-traffic control.
But perhaps air-traffic control itself may one day be a thing of the past.
Studying penguins underwater has inspired the new technology that these flying penguins are testing.
It lets them move without bumping into each other or their surroundings.
But even a mechanical penguin is happier in the water.
And the artificial fin technology lets them move smoothly and silently, providing the perfect vehicle to observe marine life with minimum disturbance.
But in the meantime, how nice would it be to have a couple of low-flying penguins gently following you around? Ooh.
And Rainer and Günther, they can come, too.
Ah, that all went swimmingly.
Anyway, here's a young lad who brings a new meaning to the old saying "time flies".
Yes, Wallace, time flies.
And sometimes, flies can be time.
Let me explain.
Take this clock, for example.
You never need to change the batteries or plug it in, because it gets its energy from eating these things.
Yes, design student James Auger is creating bizarre clocks and strange lamps with an appetite for insects.
So where did James's ideas for these come from? We started looking at nature, specifically carnivorous plants.
They've got various methods for attracting flying insects and then capturing them, eventually consuming them to create energy.
It's in those organisms that we looked for inspiration.
The insect-munching plants that inspire James's furniture live in soil that's short of nitrogen.
And they have to top up their diet with a bug or two.
This is the flypaper clock.
It's been inspired by the Drosera family of plants.
This plant has got a shiny surface, and flies are attracted to the plant because they think they can get a drink.
But actually, the shininess is sticky, so when the flies land on the plant, they get stuck there and they're consumed.
So we have a sheet of flypaper, which is revolving around two rollers one at the top and one at the bottom.
Flies get stuck to the flypaper, pass over the blade, which scrapes them off.
They fall into the fuel cell, and this generates electricity to turn a small motor powering the rollers and the clock.
But how does he turn a fly into a buzz of electricity? The solution comes from inventive minds at Bristol Robotics Laboratory.
We want robots to be able to get their own energy from the environment.
Now, animals have already cracked this problem, because animals eat stuff.
And they turn that stuff - we call it biomass - into energy.
We want to get robots to turn biomass into electricity.
A robot powered by flies? That might just take off! So, let's meet the fly-powered EcoBot.
And it's all thanks to something very clever called a microbial fuel cell.
This is a microbial fuel cell.
What we use is bacteria and food.
And the bacteria munch away on the food.
And we steal the electricity - the electrons inside of the bacteria, some of them.
We manage to steal those, and then those electrons - that electricity - is what powers the robot.
8 dead flies in the microbial fuel cells makes it work for about 12 days.
And thanks to Professor Melhuish, maybe one day this will be an amazing renewable energy source.
Insects might be powering more than robots and clocks in the future, because, after all, there's never any shortage of flies.
Oh, yes! You know, we've been thinking a lot about green energy, haven't we, lad? Or should I say "greens" energy? May I proudly present my jumbo generator! Ha-ha-ha-ha! Kevin here takes the sprouts in one end and after a few moments Thank you, Kevin.
He can produce enough gas to run the entire studio.
Ooh! That's wind power for you! Speaking of which, let's meet a man who uses wind in an unusual but rather more tasteful way.
He's this week's Inventor of the Week.
Come with me, Wallace, to a windswept beach in Holland because this is home to an incredible creature that only needs a slight breeze to spring into life.
My name is Theo Jansen.
We're here in Ypenburg in Holland, where I work every day and here I try to make new forms of life, which keeps me busy 24 hours a day.
And I want to put those out on the beaches where they can live in the future.
And they don't have to eat, because they get their energy from the wind.
Theo has been making his creatures for over 20 years and he's evolving such clever designs that, one day, he hopes they'll be able to leave home and live permanently in the Dutch sand dunes.
Incredibly, his animal-like creatures are only made from PVC.
He's worked out how these simple plastic pipes, used for covering electric wires in every Dutch home, can, in fact, become a curved foot, a leg bone and a flexible, hard-wearing joint.
But inventing wind-powered creatures was never going to be plain sailing.
And in 1991, he discovered the first of many problems.
The first challenge I had was walking.
The first leg was very complicated.
And they had to be steered by a very complicated system.
Then the second generation came, and what I did is I combined the wheel with legs.
He came up with a way to build a rotating hip bone and worked out all the different lengths of PVC legs he'd need to turn a spinning hip bone into the perfect low-powered footstep.
This circular movement is transformed to a complex movement down here.
As soon as it has put its foot on the ground, you see, it draws a straight line, and that means that the animal stays on the same level.
Getting them to walk smoothly was the first step, but his animals still needed their creator to get them going.
He had to pull his first creatures up into the wind before they could scuttle back up the beach.
But Theo didn't want to always have to pull his offspring up the beach.
So the next generation got a propeller.
And then, to give them more running power, he borrowed nature's best wind design ever and gave them wings.
But, you might say, what if the wind stops blowing? Won't he have to come to their rescue? Well, he's thought of that, too.
They can now capture and store wind in a stomach of plastic bottles.
The wings are not connected directly to the feet any more, but to pumps, and the pumps pump air in lemonade bottles.
You could say this is "pressed wind" in there, and they can use this energy for situations in situations that the wind has fallen away on the beach and the tide would come up they still have energy in their stomach to reach the dunes and save their lives.
Incredible stuff! But before his beach-dwellers can live free without their creator at hand, they have another problem - they're not too keen on taking a dip in the sea.
Big waves versus a light plastic body it's not going to end well.
So his new family have a clever water-detection system a tube to pick up signs of water, and PVC-built sensors that spring into action and send his water-shy creatures back up the beach.
Here you go.
It feels the water.
In the future, this will be very important for the beach animals to survive.
Through hours of experimenting, and trial and error, Theo's designs are becoming more and more independent.
What I found about this experience of making new forms of life, is that you discover all the problems which the real Creator must have had creating this world.
These animals will survive on their own.
Just like you raise your children, and then there comes a day that you can kick them out of the door, and then they live their own lives.
Hopefully, at the end of my life, they will survive a lot better than they do now.
Then I could die quietly, knowing that I will live on for the beaches, on the beaches.
# Bom-bom-bom, bom-bom-bom # Bom-bom-bom Curiosity Corner.
# Oh, welcome to Curiosity Corner.
Oh, dear! Looks like a power outage.
Not to worry.
This calls for power sproutage.
Load her up, lad! Ah, there! That's better.
So, now, let's shine the spotlight on the humble termite and some rather clever creature construction.
And clever's the word, Wallace , because from the humble termite we can learn a lot about how to build our own houses.
Termites live deep underground, with up to two million of them living in one intricately designed nest all centred around a huge queen who, can you believe it, can live for 45 years! But they do get a rather bad press.
Mention the word "termite" to anyone from, say, Texas Howdy! It's enough to strike terror into their hearts.
For here, these miniature critters in less than five months can eat you out of house and home.
But here's the curious thing.
Termites don't just destroy houses.
They build them, too.
Termite mounds.
These 8 metre-high towers are built out of nothing but sand and termite spit.
And it seems that these amazing structures can teach us something about building.
Not the use of spit, but something else - air conditioning.
What you see here is a natural air-conditioning system.
These termites have designed the structure with a labyrinth of tunnels, allowing old or stale or warm air out, and new fresh air in.
The hot air from the nest rises up and escapes out of the chimney.
It's such impressive natural engineering that we've already started to build termite-inspired buildings, like Portcullis House in London, next to the Houses of Parliament.
It's full of MPs' offices, so no wonder it needs 14 tall chimneys to get rid of all their hot air.
And termites have also inspired this shopping centre in Harare in Zimbabwe.
They manage to keep the insides nice and cool, even when it's 40 degrees outside a whopping 90% energy saving.
Our termite-inspired buildings let air blow in through holes in the walls, but termite mounds don't need these large holes.
In fact, their ventilation system is far more clever.
OK, counting down, guys Construction engineer Rupert Soar is part of a team unearthing just how smart those termites are at building.
One, go! In 2004, he went to Namibia to discover exactly how their towers were put together.
We started by filling termite mounds with plaster of Paris or gypsum, which is the white material used for leg plaster casts.
A couple of minutes, and that will be set.
Then we built this enormous scanning machine, a huge structure that we put over the top of the mound.
Then that cut away 1 mm of the mound at a time, taking 1 mm slices.
Then we literally photographed each of those slices, looking down, seeing the structure.
We take all those thousands of individual photographs and reconstruct those into a full model of the inside of a termite mound.
And they discovered the insides are incredibly complex.
A network of fine tubes soaks up the energy of the passing wind.
The flow of the wind pushes air through the porous soil, allowing the nest atmosphere to mix with fresh air from the outside world.
It's a gentle ventilation system for a cool, fresh home without any draughts blowing through.
And Rupert and his colleagues are sure that we can copy these building techniques for incredible energy-efficient houses of our own.
What we want to do now is take all that digital information we've got from the termite mounds, and then start to use the computer to grow skins and even whole walls for buildings themselves.
We can use bricks like these that soak up energy from the wind and keep our houses fresh and cool.
Houses that could look a bit like these.
Looks interesting.
Just not sure where you'd put the bookshelves.
But then, I guess termites aren't bookworms.
Hm, yeah, clever little critters, aren't they? You know, people often ask me, what are your top? Hey! Hey, what's going on? Kevin, keep your nose out of my particulars.
Oh! Oh.
Um anyway, my top five animal-inspired contraptions.
Let's see what my archive librarian, Goronwy, has got for us.
Righto, Mr Wallace.
Yes, for this week's contraption countdown, I've got five inventions inspired by the animal kingdom.
At number five, it's these boxfish.
Amazingly, it's from these fish that we got the idea for boxes! If it wasn't for them, we'd have nothing to put things in and the world would be a much untidier place.
And what? Oh! That's completely wrong! I'm sorry.
I see.
Boxfish have contributed to the design of motorcars.
Have they really? Well done, boxfish.
At number four, who can guess what animal inspired this invention? All right, I'll give you a clue.
It's an elephant.
Oh! I've given it away now.
Yes, they say elephants never forget.
And I'm pretty certain that real elephant won't forget this mechanical jumbo in a hurry.
Ho-ho-ho! In third place, it's this fantastic aquatic robot, built by Professor Huosheng Hu.
It looks like a fish.
It moves like a fish.
And it comes with chips.
Microchips, of course! Ha-ha! New technology - old joke! At number two, I'm not saying that the wheel was invented by this sausage dog.
No, the wheel has been around for ages.
In fact, the wheel has always been a- round, when you think about it! Ha-ha-ha! And Hotspur here, who was born with paralysed back legs in 1936, just goes to show what human ingenuity and doggedness can achieve.
And here's animal-inspired invention number one.
Now, if you were inside a shark's skin, it used to mean you'd just been eaten by one.
But not any more.
A well-known swimwear company has designed a swimming costume modelled on the skin of a shark, which lets swimmers go a lot faster.
Or you could just do what I do and put a real shark in the pool! That'd make them go faster.
Ho-ho.
Brilliant! Well, here's another item inspired by our fishy friends - artificial gills.
But don't hold your breath.
They never got off the drawing board.
Oh, thanks, lad.
Mmm! Over to you, Mr Jem.
Thank you, Mr Wallace.
About 400 million years ago, primitive life made the ultimate journey.
It crawled out of the sea to begin a whole new chapter of existence on dry land.
Which is why it sometimes seems a bit odd that human beings now take every opportunity to get back in.
But our dreams of deep-sea adventures are always suffocated by one big problem.
Our lungs are great at absorbing oxygen from the air.
But we're just not designed to take it straight from water.
Of course, being a pretty good inventor, nature solved all these problems eons ago, by giving fish gills.
Fish make it look so easy.
Their gills filter oxygen that's dissolved in the water.
Compared to fish, we're a bit of a damp squib.
But, like so many things in nature, building an artificial version is something that's had inventors stumped for generations.
Early divers used long tubes from the surface to pump air down to the sea floor.
God knows how that felt! Then in 1943, legendary marine explorer Jacques Cousteau perfected his aqualung.
Divers could now take the air down with them and swim around freely.
Of course, when the tank runs empty, we've got to come up to the surface.
To stay down forever, we need a way to mimic the fish and use the air that's dissolved in the water to breathe.
And, believe it or not, this might not be as far off as you might think.
Alan Bodner, from Haifa, northern Israel, has spent the last nine years trying to get his underwater breathing invention off the drawing board.
He's trying to extract breathable air straight from the water, so, one day, divers could stay underwater for as long as they want.
I knew that there was oxygen in the water and the fish used this for breathing.
So the only thing was how we can take this oxygen out and breathe it.
Fish are smarter than we are, in this sense.
They can leave the oxygen in liquid form and just breathe it like that.
We have to first convert the liquid oxygen into gas, because our lungs need gas oxygen.
- What's the ultimate aim for the system? - The aim right now is for submarine and underwater habitats.
Maybe in the future, we'll be able to make it small enough also for individual divers.
Maybe in the future we'll all live underwater.
So, for any of you who fancy living underwater, here's how Alan's invention works.
If you've ever opened a bottle of pop, you've probably seen the system work already.
You see, fizzy drinks are made by dissolving gas into water.
But the amount of gas water can hold depends on the pressure it's under.
These are under a fair bit of pressure.
If I release the pressure, the water won't be able to hold as much gas and it'll come out as bubbles, like this.
And that's exactly what Alan's doing.
He's reducing the pressure of the water, and so the dissolved gas is able to bubble out.
Then he needs to collect the bubbles and he needs to collect them quickly, because we need a lot of air.
So he makes a whirlpool.
You see there? All the bubbles migrate to the centre of the whirlpool.
The relatively dense water is flung to the outside, the relatively light bubbles migrate to the centre.
Alan then puts a pipe into that column of gas in the centre, sucks it out for a fella to breathe.
In Alan's prototype machine, water is pumped through this pipe into this plastic drum, where it gets put into a spin, which creates the whirlpool I was talking about.
This is attached to a vacuum pump that sucks out that oxygen-rich gas and delivers it as a nice breathable mixture out of this pipe here.
This lean, mean, marine machine collects enough air from this swimming pool to keep someone breathing for 20 minutes.
To prove this is more than just fish- ful thinking, he's putting his own lungs on the line and becoming a human guinea pig.
Soon, Alan's amazing machine has sucked a tankful of air straight from the water.
I guess this is the moment of truth.
I think that more people have walked on the Moon than breathed air that we extracted from the water.
Let's see it.
I'm so intrigued now.
Wow! Hi, there! First up - Yeah, OK? - Yeah.
I'm just smiling.
This is important - I do.
- Yeah? Good with that? Right.
OK, next big question.
Yes, I do feel like a fish.
You feel like a fish in a fish tank, maybe.
OK, and finally - Sure.
Come on.
- Really? The thing is, people have been wanting to do this, and now, finally, I'm doing it, breathing air that's just being pumped out of water.
Alan's invention works.
But clearly, there's no way a diver can carry one of these on their back just yet.
Our dreams of being able to swim around like a fish are still on the drawing board.
But maybe, one day, we'll never need to come up for air.
Alan? Alan! Oh, Mr Jem! All that floundering around.
Still, I won't carp on.
Oh, hold him steady, lad.
Er finally Oh, no, he's after me buns! Kevin.
Bad boy! Sit! Stay! Oh, Kevin.
That's blown it! Yes, well, um that's it for this time.
Next week, we'll be Oh, Gromit! Gromit, have you got 50p for the meter? If you've enjoyed our show, grab your mouse and log on to our World Of Invention website You'll find a fantastic competition, details of our roadshow, as well as lots of ways to get you inventing.
Pull your finger out and get clicking.
Someone once said, "Necessity is the mother of invention.
" Well, not necessarily.
Today, we're looking at inventions with another mother altogether Mother Nature.
And we'll be seeing how she's provided inspiration for many a delightful discovery such as the robot which thinks it's a Venus flytrap.
8 dead flies makes it work for about 12 days.
And my science correspondent, Mr Jem, proves a dab hand at breathing underwater, thanks to an artificial gill.
I'm doing it - breathing air that's just been pumped out of water.
And we'll be meeting Mr Theo Jansen, a man who makes perambulating pets out of plastic tubing.
Oh, yes! He does, you know! But first, some Ssh! Quiet, Kevin.
Some machines you might think rather fishy.
Over to you, Ashley, m'dear.
Why, thank you.
Now, I'm sure you'll agree, Wallace, that Mother Nature is the best inventor of them all.
She's been perfecting designs for about, ooh four billion years or so.
Whether it's a super-extendable tongue for catching bugs, or incredible elastic tendons for extra jumping power, or one bizarrely long finger for getting a bit of grub, Mother Nature is the ultimate engineer.
So a German technology company has decided to make the most of nature's great talent for original design.
The team here at Festo is turning marine biology into machinery.
And their inspiration comes from this spectacular sea creature the manta ray.
We studied manta rays, because they are very energy-efficient, they are agile and they can manoeuvre very easily.
So how do they turn the grace and agility of the beautiful manta ray into hi-tech engineering? Well, they've copied the internal structure of the manta ray's fin to come up with this - A fin-gripper.
It's so flexible, you can use it to make a robotic hand that's so sensitive it can pick up easily bruised fruit and veg.
But tomatoes are just the start.
The Festo engineers have come up with a far more dramatic use of this fin technology.
Meet the radio-controlled manta ray airship.
We have here the so-called "fin ray" structure.
We move it up, turn it and then move down.
Turn it and move up.
And it's like birds are flying or even if a manta ray is swimming in the water, it's the same behaviour.
With its ray-like wings and tail fin, the Airray can twist and turn just as nature intended.
And this is not just some executive toy.
It's proof that with some natural inspiration, we can create flying machines without noisy, gas-guzzling engines or big, swirling propellers.
The Airray just needs helium to give it buoyancy.
But controlling its three fins does require an extra set of hands.
We couldn't get away with that in air-traffic control.
But perhaps air-traffic control itself may one day be a thing of the past.
Studying penguins underwater has inspired the new technology that these flying penguins are testing.
It lets them move without bumping into each other or their surroundings.
But even a mechanical penguin is happier in the water.
And the artificial fin technology lets them move smoothly and silently, providing the perfect vehicle to observe marine life with minimum disturbance.
But in the meantime, how nice would it be to have a couple of low-flying penguins gently following you around? Ooh.
And Rainer and Günther, they can come, too.
Ah, that all went swimmingly.
Anyway, here's a young lad who brings a new meaning to the old saying "time flies".
Yes, Wallace, time flies.
And sometimes, flies can be time.
Let me explain.
Take this clock, for example.
You never need to change the batteries or plug it in, because it gets its energy from eating these things.
Yes, design student James Auger is creating bizarre clocks and strange lamps with an appetite for insects.
So where did James's ideas for these come from? We started looking at nature, specifically carnivorous plants.
They've got various methods for attracting flying insects and then capturing them, eventually consuming them to create energy.
It's in those organisms that we looked for inspiration.
The insect-munching plants that inspire James's furniture live in soil that's short of nitrogen.
And they have to top up their diet with a bug or two.
This is the flypaper clock.
It's been inspired by the Drosera family of plants.
This plant has got a shiny surface, and flies are attracted to the plant because they think they can get a drink.
But actually, the shininess is sticky, so when the flies land on the plant, they get stuck there and they're consumed.
So we have a sheet of flypaper, which is revolving around two rollers one at the top and one at the bottom.
Flies get stuck to the flypaper, pass over the blade, which scrapes them off.
They fall into the fuel cell, and this generates electricity to turn a small motor powering the rollers and the clock.
But how does he turn a fly into a buzz of electricity? The solution comes from inventive minds at Bristol Robotics Laboratory.
We want robots to be able to get their own energy from the environment.
Now, animals have already cracked this problem, because animals eat stuff.
And they turn that stuff - we call it biomass - into energy.
We want to get robots to turn biomass into electricity.
A robot powered by flies? That might just take off! So, let's meet the fly-powered EcoBot.
And it's all thanks to something very clever called a microbial fuel cell.
This is a microbial fuel cell.
What we use is bacteria and food.
And the bacteria munch away on the food.
And we steal the electricity - the electrons inside of the bacteria, some of them.
We manage to steal those, and then those electrons - that electricity - is what powers the robot.
8 dead flies in the microbial fuel cells makes it work for about 12 days.
And thanks to Professor Melhuish, maybe one day this will be an amazing renewable energy source.
Insects might be powering more than robots and clocks in the future, because, after all, there's never any shortage of flies.
Oh, yes! You know, we've been thinking a lot about green energy, haven't we, lad? Or should I say "greens" energy? May I proudly present my jumbo generator! Ha-ha-ha-ha! Kevin here takes the sprouts in one end and after a few moments Thank you, Kevin.
He can produce enough gas to run the entire studio.
Ooh! That's wind power for you! Speaking of which, let's meet a man who uses wind in an unusual but rather more tasteful way.
He's this week's Inventor of the Week.
Come with me, Wallace, to a windswept beach in Holland because this is home to an incredible creature that only needs a slight breeze to spring into life.
My name is Theo Jansen.
We're here in Ypenburg in Holland, where I work every day and here I try to make new forms of life, which keeps me busy 24 hours a day.
And I want to put those out on the beaches where they can live in the future.
And they don't have to eat, because they get their energy from the wind.
Theo has been making his creatures for over 20 years and he's evolving such clever designs that, one day, he hopes they'll be able to leave home and live permanently in the Dutch sand dunes.
Incredibly, his animal-like creatures are only made from PVC.
He's worked out how these simple plastic pipes, used for covering electric wires in every Dutch home, can, in fact, become a curved foot, a leg bone and a flexible, hard-wearing joint.
But inventing wind-powered creatures was never going to be plain sailing.
And in 1991, he discovered the first of many problems.
The first challenge I had was walking.
The first leg was very complicated.
And they had to be steered by a very complicated system.
Then the second generation came, and what I did is I combined the wheel with legs.
He came up with a way to build a rotating hip bone and worked out all the different lengths of PVC legs he'd need to turn a spinning hip bone into the perfect low-powered footstep.
This circular movement is transformed to a complex movement down here.
As soon as it has put its foot on the ground, you see, it draws a straight line, and that means that the animal stays on the same level.
Getting them to walk smoothly was the first step, but his animals still needed their creator to get them going.
He had to pull his first creatures up into the wind before they could scuttle back up the beach.
But Theo didn't want to always have to pull his offspring up the beach.
So the next generation got a propeller.
And then, to give them more running power, he borrowed nature's best wind design ever and gave them wings.
But, you might say, what if the wind stops blowing? Won't he have to come to their rescue? Well, he's thought of that, too.
They can now capture and store wind in a stomach of plastic bottles.
The wings are not connected directly to the feet any more, but to pumps, and the pumps pump air in lemonade bottles.
You could say this is "pressed wind" in there, and they can use this energy for situations in situations that the wind has fallen away on the beach and the tide would come up they still have energy in their stomach to reach the dunes and save their lives.
Incredible stuff! But before his beach-dwellers can live free without their creator at hand, they have another problem - they're not too keen on taking a dip in the sea.
Big waves versus a light plastic body it's not going to end well.
So his new family have a clever water-detection system a tube to pick up signs of water, and PVC-built sensors that spring into action and send his water-shy creatures back up the beach.
Here you go.
It feels the water.
In the future, this will be very important for the beach animals to survive.
Through hours of experimenting, and trial and error, Theo's designs are becoming more and more independent.
What I found about this experience of making new forms of life, is that you discover all the problems which the real Creator must have had creating this world.
These animals will survive on their own.
Just like you raise your children, and then there comes a day that you can kick them out of the door, and then they live their own lives.
Hopefully, at the end of my life, they will survive a lot better than they do now.
Then I could die quietly, knowing that I will live on for the beaches, on the beaches.
# Bom-bom-bom, bom-bom-bom # Bom-bom-bom Curiosity Corner.
# Oh, welcome to Curiosity Corner.
Oh, dear! Looks like a power outage.
Not to worry.
This calls for power sproutage.
Load her up, lad! Ah, there! That's better.
So, now, let's shine the spotlight on the humble termite and some rather clever creature construction.
And clever's the word, Wallace , because from the humble termite we can learn a lot about how to build our own houses.
Termites live deep underground, with up to two million of them living in one intricately designed nest all centred around a huge queen who, can you believe it, can live for 45 years! But they do get a rather bad press.
Mention the word "termite" to anyone from, say, Texas Howdy! It's enough to strike terror into their hearts.
For here, these miniature critters in less than five months can eat you out of house and home.
But here's the curious thing.
Termites don't just destroy houses.
They build them, too.
Termite mounds.
These 8 metre-high towers are built out of nothing but sand and termite spit.
And it seems that these amazing structures can teach us something about building.
Not the use of spit, but something else - air conditioning.
What you see here is a natural air-conditioning system.
These termites have designed the structure with a labyrinth of tunnels, allowing old or stale or warm air out, and new fresh air in.
The hot air from the nest rises up and escapes out of the chimney.
It's such impressive natural engineering that we've already started to build termite-inspired buildings, like Portcullis House in London, next to the Houses of Parliament.
It's full of MPs' offices, so no wonder it needs 14 tall chimneys to get rid of all their hot air.
And termites have also inspired this shopping centre in Harare in Zimbabwe.
They manage to keep the insides nice and cool, even when it's 40 degrees outside a whopping 90% energy saving.
Our termite-inspired buildings let air blow in through holes in the walls, but termite mounds don't need these large holes.
In fact, their ventilation system is far more clever.
OK, counting down, guys Construction engineer Rupert Soar is part of a team unearthing just how smart those termites are at building.
One, go! In 2004, he went to Namibia to discover exactly how their towers were put together.
We started by filling termite mounds with plaster of Paris or gypsum, which is the white material used for leg plaster casts.
A couple of minutes, and that will be set.
Then we built this enormous scanning machine, a huge structure that we put over the top of the mound.
Then that cut away 1 mm of the mound at a time, taking 1 mm slices.
Then we literally photographed each of those slices, looking down, seeing the structure.
We take all those thousands of individual photographs and reconstruct those into a full model of the inside of a termite mound.
And they discovered the insides are incredibly complex.
A network of fine tubes soaks up the energy of the passing wind.
The flow of the wind pushes air through the porous soil, allowing the nest atmosphere to mix with fresh air from the outside world.
It's a gentle ventilation system for a cool, fresh home without any draughts blowing through.
And Rupert and his colleagues are sure that we can copy these building techniques for incredible energy-efficient houses of our own.
What we want to do now is take all that digital information we've got from the termite mounds, and then start to use the computer to grow skins and even whole walls for buildings themselves.
We can use bricks like these that soak up energy from the wind and keep our houses fresh and cool.
Houses that could look a bit like these.
Looks interesting.
Just not sure where you'd put the bookshelves.
But then, I guess termites aren't bookworms.
Hm, yeah, clever little critters, aren't they? You know, people often ask me, what are your top? Hey! Hey, what's going on? Kevin, keep your nose out of my particulars.
Oh! Oh.
Um anyway, my top five animal-inspired contraptions.
Let's see what my archive librarian, Goronwy, has got for us.
Righto, Mr Wallace.
Yes, for this week's contraption countdown, I've got five inventions inspired by the animal kingdom.
At number five, it's these boxfish.
Amazingly, it's from these fish that we got the idea for boxes! If it wasn't for them, we'd have nothing to put things in and the world would be a much untidier place.
And what? Oh! That's completely wrong! I'm sorry.
I see.
Boxfish have contributed to the design of motorcars.
Have they really? Well done, boxfish.
At number four, who can guess what animal inspired this invention? All right, I'll give you a clue.
It's an elephant.
Oh! I've given it away now.
Yes, they say elephants never forget.
And I'm pretty certain that real elephant won't forget this mechanical jumbo in a hurry.
Ho-ho-ho! In third place, it's this fantastic aquatic robot, built by Professor Huosheng Hu.
It looks like a fish.
It moves like a fish.
And it comes with chips.
Microchips, of course! Ha-ha! New technology - old joke! At number two, I'm not saying that the wheel was invented by this sausage dog.
No, the wheel has been around for ages.
In fact, the wheel has always been a- round, when you think about it! Ha-ha-ha! And Hotspur here, who was born with paralysed back legs in 1936, just goes to show what human ingenuity and doggedness can achieve.
And here's animal-inspired invention number one.
Now, if you were inside a shark's skin, it used to mean you'd just been eaten by one.
But not any more.
A well-known swimwear company has designed a swimming costume modelled on the skin of a shark, which lets swimmers go a lot faster.
Or you could just do what I do and put a real shark in the pool! That'd make them go faster.
Ho-ho.
Brilliant! Well, here's another item inspired by our fishy friends - artificial gills.
But don't hold your breath.
They never got off the drawing board.
Oh, thanks, lad.
Mmm! Over to you, Mr Jem.
Thank you, Mr Wallace.
About 400 million years ago, primitive life made the ultimate journey.
It crawled out of the sea to begin a whole new chapter of existence on dry land.
Which is why it sometimes seems a bit odd that human beings now take every opportunity to get back in.
But our dreams of deep-sea adventures are always suffocated by one big problem.
Our lungs are great at absorbing oxygen from the air.
But we're just not designed to take it straight from water.
Of course, being a pretty good inventor, nature solved all these problems eons ago, by giving fish gills.
Fish make it look so easy.
Their gills filter oxygen that's dissolved in the water.
Compared to fish, we're a bit of a damp squib.
But, like so many things in nature, building an artificial version is something that's had inventors stumped for generations.
Early divers used long tubes from the surface to pump air down to the sea floor.
God knows how that felt! Then in 1943, legendary marine explorer Jacques Cousteau perfected his aqualung.
Divers could now take the air down with them and swim around freely.
Of course, when the tank runs empty, we've got to come up to the surface.
To stay down forever, we need a way to mimic the fish and use the air that's dissolved in the water to breathe.
And, believe it or not, this might not be as far off as you might think.
Alan Bodner, from Haifa, northern Israel, has spent the last nine years trying to get his underwater breathing invention off the drawing board.
He's trying to extract breathable air straight from the water, so, one day, divers could stay underwater for as long as they want.
I knew that there was oxygen in the water and the fish used this for breathing.
So the only thing was how we can take this oxygen out and breathe it.
Fish are smarter than we are, in this sense.
They can leave the oxygen in liquid form and just breathe it like that.
We have to first convert the liquid oxygen into gas, because our lungs need gas oxygen.
- What's the ultimate aim for the system? - The aim right now is for submarine and underwater habitats.
Maybe in the future, we'll be able to make it small enough also for individual divers.
Maybe in the future we'll all live underwater.
So, for any of you who fancy living underwater, here's how Alan's invention works.
If you've ever opened a bottle of pop, you've probably seen the system work already.
You see, fizzy drinks are made by dissolving gas into water.
But the amount of gas water can hold depends on the pressure it's under.
These are under a fair bit of pressure.
If I release the pressure, the water won't be able to hold as much gas and it'll come out as bubbles, like this.
And that's exactly what Alan's doing.
He's reducing the pressure of the water, and so the dissolved gas is able to bubble out.
Then he needs to collect the bubbles and he needs to collect them quickly, because we need a lot of air.
So he makes a whirlpool.
You see there? All the bubbles migrate to the centre of the whirlpool.
The relatively dense water is flung to the outside, the relatively light bubbles migrate to the centre.
Alan then puts a pipe into that column of gas in the centre, sucks it out for a fella to breathe.
In Alan's prototype machine, water is pumped through this pipe into this plastic drum, where it gets put into a spin, which creates the whirlpool I was talking about.
This is attached to a vacuum pump that sucks out that oxygen-rich gas and delivers it as a nice breathable mixture out of this pipe here.
This lean, mean, marine machine collects enough air from this swimming pool to keep someone breathing for 20 minutes.
To prove this is more than just fish- ful thinking, he's putting his own lungs on the line and becoming a human guinea pig.
Soon, Alan's amazing machine has sucked a tankful of air straight from the water.
I guess this is the moment of truth.
I think that more people have walked on the Moon than breathed air that we extracted from the water.
Let's see it.
I'm so intrigued now.
Wow! Hi, there! First up - Yeah, OK? - Yeah.
I'm just smiling.
This is important - I do.
- Yeah? Good with that? Right.
OK, next big question.
Yes, I do feel like a fish.
You feel like a fish in a fish tank, maybe.
OK, and finally - Sure.
Come on.
- Really? The thing is, people have been wanting to do this, and now, finally, I'm doing it, breathing air that's just being pumped out of water.
Alan's invention works.
But clearly, there's no way a diver can carry one of these on their back just yet.
Our dreams of being able to swim around like a fish are still on the drawing board.
But maybe, one day, we'll never need to come up for air.
Alan? Alan! Oh, Mr Jem! All that floundering around.
Still, I won't carp on.
Oh, hold him steady, lad.
Er finally Oh, no, he's after me buns! Kevin.
Bad boy! Sit! Stay! Oh, Kevin.
That's blown it! Yes, well, um that's it for this time.
Next week, we'll be Oh, Gromit! Gromit, have you got 50p for the meter? If you've enjoyed our show, grab your mouse and log on to our World Of Invention website You'll find a fantastic competition, details of our roadshow, as well as lots of ways to get you inventing.
Pull your finger out and get clicking.