[Music] our lives depend on a handful of natural resources [Applause] but they're not the ones you think they are forget oil coal and gas today we depend on a new set of super elements with obscure names like indium and rhenium their properties are so bizarre they may as well be alien technology it's not scratched on it hotter hotter no problem whatsoever these super elements are driving innovation everything from smartphones to mri scanners that's the magic stuff but there's a problem they're rare and they're already running out [Music] the stuff that makes smartphones work could be gone in a decade the mineral we rely on to feed the world is mostly found in just one country we are reaching the limits of what our planet can provide we can't rely on recycling to rescue us to fix the future we might have to mine in space we'll be able to do it in the next 10 or 20 years so in my lifetime we could be mining space yeah so what are these super elements why do we need them so badly and what can we do to save them [Music] there is one object that contains more super elements than almost any other the smartphone a billion were sold last year [Music] they're our phones our cameras our sat nails our notebooks our diaries you can watch a film on them you can book a flight on them you can check your bank balance on them you can even film a whole bbc documentary on them but for a material scientist like me it's what's inside these smartphones that's so impressive to prove just how good super elements have made our phones we're gonna film this program on one [Music] there's a lot of amazing stuff in a smartphone but i'm gonna reveal what i think is the single most important ingredient in our phones it's in every single smartphone it's essential to how they work and yet i'll guarantee you've never heard of it [Music] first i've got to get into one and that's surprisingly difficult so i've equipped myself with a range of precision tools the question is which one will get me inside the phone they're not really designed to be taken apart though this however will really do the trick [Music] um [Music] now there we go microphone look at all these little processors doing all the processing of your speech there's loads of different metals inside silver copper and platinum to start with but that's not all that's what i'm after there that's gold there's 300 times more gold in a kilo of smartphones than a kilo of gold ore [Music] your average smartphone contains over half the elements on the planet there's lithium and comalt in the battery lanthium and yttrium in the screen terbium and dysprosium make the microphone there's even arsenic in the silicon ship each element has a unique role to play making our phones slimmer smarter and more powerful [Music] but one stands out from the rest a rare metal with a magical property to understand how critical it is cast your mind back to what phones used to look like bricks covered in buttons the phones got smaller and smarter and some of them could even connect to the internet but they still needed a keyboard and that limited their powers then some clever scientists discovered the superpowers of an element called indium and here it is indian now one of the tricks for understanding this metal is to have a bite because it's so soft you can chew it not a good substitute for chewing gum but nevertheless an amazing thing but not as amazing at what i'm about to show you if i take indium and i do this watch what happens amazingly it can turn into a liquid but that's just the start of indium's weird and wonderful properties now if i take this liquid they always better paint a line on this piece of paper i've got a light bulb here and there's two wires connecting it to this power source and if when there's a circuit then the light comes on now the question is will this liquid metal i've just created conduct electricity and the answer is yes brilliant so we have a soft metal that can turn into a liquid that conducts electricity not bad but it has one more astonishing property the thing that makes it an absolutely vital part of every smartphone mix it with tin and oxygen and you get indium tin oxide a transparent electrical conductor and that's how you make the touchscreen [Music] they appear so simple even a toddler can master them but touch screens are revolutionary before touch screens it was hard for smartphones to be as complex as computers because you had to fit lots of tiny buttons into a small space but with a touchscreen your finger is a keyboard and a mouse in one and so the whole screen is able to control something as complex as a computer and i can just scroll around like this the screen itself is a conductor and so is human skin it works like magic ten years ago apple exploited indium's incredible properties to create the first touch screen phone you could control with your finger and we are calling it iphone the smartphone as we know it was born [Music] an entire new industry was created but although the touchscreen had solved one problem it had created a new one demand for indium and it's not that easy to get hold of [Music] in nature indium is found tightly bound to other metals most commonly zinc [Music] to coax it out of zinc ore you have to dissolve the rock in acid then bake the acid in a furnace then mix a precise cocktail of other chemicals to finally extract a minuscule amount of pure indium [Music] touchscreen technology has become critical to our economy the app industry alone earns more money than the hollywood box office but if you do the maths you find a problem there's only a tiny sprinkling of indium in every smartphone approximately 0. 02 grams but we buy a billion smartphones a year that's a big number if we add in all the other uses of indium like tablets other flat screen devices and all the other electronics that use indium we get a number of 700 tons of indium that we need every year but in 2008 the us geological survey estimated that there were 16 000 tons available now if that was right at the rate of 700 tons per year we would be running out of indium in the next decade then again maybe not because as it gets scarce the price goes up and that encourages companies to go out looking for more the problem is that takes time and it's a bottleneck that could be the stuff of nightmares imagine young people of the future unable to have phones unthinkable [Music] indium isn't the only element that has superpowers [Music] in fact i think we're living through a revolution we're uncovering the superpowers of ever more rare and unusual ingredients and they have changed virtually all aspects of our lives [Music] they've even helped make our holidays more affordable the first time i went on a flight it was 1977 i was eight years old i was with my family we were on holiday to the greek island of crete it was great it was the first time i experienced a really genuinely sunny beach holiday but the flights cost my parents a small fortune i mean flying anywhere in those days was really expensive now i can fly to crete for less than the cost of a tank of petrol lots of factors have contributed to cheaper air travel changes in government taxes more competition between airlines but a big part of it is down to this material rhenium i know it looks really dull but it's one of the rarest most expensive elements on the planet this piece alone is worth a hundred pounds rhenium is a relatively recent addition to the periodic table it was discovered in 1925 by the brilliant german chemist ida nodak the new element was incredibly tough and durable but it also had a superpower that would one day lead to cheaper air travel for all of us to demonstrate what rhenium can do i've invited a group of volunteers to bring an object that's very precious to them up to the roof of this tall building all right now tell me about this ring and that's from new york in tiffany's whoa yeah did someone special give it to you yeah hey dad oh i'm going to dangle the ring off the roof over the water and then burn the wire with a blow torch are you getting nervous about this ring because i'm doing it five stories out he's going red hot getting white hot carrying stop it tell me stop in tell me stop it oh my god no problem whatsoever isn't that amazing rhenium superpower is heat resistance this stuff is phenomenal you could plunge it into molten steel and it wouldn't melt you could chuck it into a volcano and pull it out unscathed it's like alien technology and its powers haven't gone unnoticed over 70 percent of the rhenium mined each year is used to make jet engines [Music] much of it ends up in derby at the home of rolls-royce [Music] they make the most high-tech aircraft engines in the world [Music] and at the heart of each engine lies a disc of small but extraordinary turbine blades this little blade has to withstand extreme temperature and stress and no ordinary metal is up to the job it's made a special alloy with over 10 different elements but one of those is named in the industry as magic dust and that's rhenium aircraft engines work by sucking in air compressing it and then exploding it with fuel to create a ferocious gas jet [Music] the jet hits the disc of turbine blades head on heating them to over a thousand degrees and spinning them at 10 000 revolutions per minute the blades turn the compressors generating thrust no ordinary material could withstand such an extreme environment but the turbine blades take these conditions in their stride rhenium's astonishing properties allow engines to operate at extremely high temperatures and that means you get maximum thrust for minimum fuel rhenium saves each plane millions of pounds per year in fuel and some of that saving filters down to us fuel efficiency is one of the main reasons why flights are cheaper today than when i was a kid i mean rhenium has helped cut emissions and make flights more affordable it's not a dull boring metal it's super hero properties make it extremely precious so where do we get this material with such extraordinary properties the rubbish more precisely it's a waste product from copper mining they used to just chuck it away chile has most of the world's copper so they also produce most of the world's rhenium but it's such a rare element a ton of copper ore contains just half a gram of rhenium all the rhenium mined in a year would fit in your living room [Music] by exploiting rhenium superpowers planes burn less fuel and that's better for us and the planet but by solving one problem we've created another we've got used to cheaper air travel we love it as the price falls demand rises so although our planes are fuel efficient we're still burning a lot of fuel and no matter how advanced we make our jet engines they rely on an ancient principle burning fuel to release energy our cave dwelling ancestors first learned how to exploit fire and we've been burning stuff ever since more and more and more of it to meet our energy needs it's polluting and it's causing climate change if there's one process that's desperately in need of a super element it's the production of energy the answer could lie in magnets not just any magnets magnets made from a super element to demonstrate their phenomenal strength i need some volunteers and an audience so i've taken over a corner at the at bristol science center i'm going to see if i can amaze them with my super magnets first up an ordinary magnet i need a volunteer to do a tug of war with me what's your name brian brianna nice to meet you put on your fridge a freak magnet okay ready three two one okay no problem the special neodymium next a magnet made from a super element [Music] yes no chance it's one strong magnet how strong though now the ultimate test will it hold my weight what do you think i've reached the limit of the little magnet strength you guys but if we use larger super magnets we've got like a wild animal in this box right we can even defy gravity oh yeah it's good idea okay hand and how we doing you're levitating man how does that feel yeah okay the super element in these magnets is called neodymium [Applause] [Music] it makes the strongest permanent magnets known and if you're wondering what this all has to do with generating electricity it's simple if you spin a magnet inside a coil of wire you generate an electric current michael faraday first discovered this in 1831. [Music] and ever since we've been burning stuff to drive the turbines that make the magnets spin oil coal gas you name it to try to reduce the amount of stuff we burn we've come up with new ways to spin the magnets like wind turbines this is the uk's largest onshore wind farm the 215 turbines generate enough electricity to power 300 000 homes but keeping the mighty blades turning can be a problem these complex machines are prone to breaking down we're out here it's a wild and the weather can be extreme it's quite extreme today and um having a simple thing that you don't need to come out and repair that is a big deal right that's right and as you as you know we're increasingly putting our wind turbines offshore and so where we can we can make things more reliable where we can stop things from failing in the first place means that we don't need to stop the turbines to go and fix them the weakest link is the gearbox a complex set of cogs that steps up the slow rotational speed of the blades so it's fast enough to generate maximum electricity the gearbox has to be replaced more frequently than any other part of the turbine so how are new materials revolutionizing the design of turbines then so in that generator we're now starting to use some of the neodymium magnets and those are magnets which are really compact dense sources of the magnetic field they're able to produce the field in a compact way they're able to do it in a very efficient way and they're actually which is really important they're able to do it in a really reliable way neodymium magnets are so powerful they can generate an enormous electrical current even at slow rotational speeds this means the turbine blades can drive the generator directly there's no need for a gearbox the turbine is more efficient and less prone to breakdown i've got this neodymium magnet here so what we're saying is that in the future wind turbine is going to have a big hunk of this up there right in fact quite a few hunks a big wind turbine might use 100 of these in just one part of the machine wind turbines create clean energy without the need to burn stuff but once again solving one problem leads to another it's not always windy so we need a way to store surplus energy from the windy days the answer could lie in another super element lithium [Music] this is lithium first discovered in 1817 is the third element of the periodic table and it has unique electrochemical properties that make it great for batteries and when it comes to energy storage this stuff is a game changer [Applause] in the nevada desert construction of the world's largest factory is nearing completion it will make just one thing lithium batteries for tesla electric cars lithium is light so you can make a powerful battery that doesn't wear a ton the same technology is now being developed to store energy from renewable power plants it could solve our energy crisis but it's a potential new bottleneck because we're gonna need an awful lot of lithium half of the world's lithium is found in just one place the saladi uni salt flats in bolivia the problem is getting it out mining here is politically and environmentally controversial but at least with lithium we can see the problem coming [Music] shortages of other super elements have taken us completely by surprise none more so than helium [Music] helium is famous for making balloons much more fun but believe it or not helium is in short supply and it's become far more important than you might think so using helium for balloons is no laughing matter [Music] up until the 1980s helium stocks were mainly a concern for people who owned airships or space rockets then along came a new innovation the mri scanner mri can see inside our bodies with clarity like never before and without the need for harmful x-rays it revolutionized the diagnosis of a range of conditions from brain injuries to cancer and it relies on the extraordinary properties of helium helium is weird starters it can become colder than almost anything else in the universe lancaster university is one of the few places with the right kit to make it that cold now we've got our helium in this tube it's at -269 degrees centigrade and that temperature is a liquid that's obviously a very cold temperature but i'm about to make it colder still and by doing so welcome you into the very very weird world of helium come on now when helium gets really cold strange things start to happen first it boils ferociously not what you'd expect from something really cold it's getting colder and colder wait for this there wait wait there you see that it went from boiling to absolute still it is now no longer governed by the classical rules of physics it's now governed by quantum mechanics it's a superfluid and they're very very weird let me show you what they can do superfluid helium can flow through solid materials i've got some more liquid helium here in a container and it's kept in there by that stopper at the bottom that red stuff i can make it pass through the solid stopper [Music] as i move it down towards the superfluid it's getting colder and colder and it's going to turn into a superfluid itself watch the stopper as i lower it towards the superfluid [Music] there you see it's it's dripping through a solid material that's one of the strange properties of superfluids they can flow through solid materials it just seems wrong i mean it goes against all the kind of normal laws of physics that we kind of take for granted it's just bonkers [Music] a superfluid is a liquid that flows without friction think of a cup of tea once you stop stirring the circulation slows because of friction but a cup of superfluid would continue circulating until the end of time and superfluids can transfer their magic powers to other materials bathed in super fluid helium some electrical conductors become superconductors so just as a superfluid can pass through a material with no resistance so electricity can travel through a superconductor with no resistance and that means no electricity gets lost superconducting wires deliver far more electrical energy than ordinary wires and that's what mri machines rely on to generate the powerful pulses of energy that i use to make images of our bodies each machine needs around 2 000 liters of liquid helium to keep it running considering that we give it away to children you'd imagine that there's loads of it around but helium is scarce it's produced incredibly slowly from the radioactive decay of rocks deep underground over millions of years the tiny trickle of gas builds up into large reservoirs algeria qatar and russia have some and in 2016 a new reservoir was discovered in tanzania but most of the world's helium comes from just one place america's midwest america's great plains sit on top of a vast natural helium store for years the americans stockpiled it in a huge storage facility in texas during the second world war it was a strategic gas in airships later it was used in the space race but after that they started selling it off cheaply and now the world's largest helium reserve is almost empty and to make matters worse it's really hard to recycle one of helium's more obvious but less exotic properties is that it's incredibly light that's why helium balloons float in air but it also makes it incredibly difficult to recycle helium because once you let go of it well it just keeps going up and up and up of course eventually the skin will pop but the helium will keep going up and up to the edge of the atmosphere into space and be gone forever mind you not all super elements are rare some are plentiful but they're only found in a few places and the countries that own them aren't always willing to share one of these materials is wanted by almost every nation because its superhero strength is nothing short of miraculous this is a magic ball what's magic about it you might ask well it's shiny and it's smooth and it's very spherical but what's really extraordinary is that it's virtually indestructible now to a material scientist like me that's a red rag to a ball i can't resist trying to destroy it [Music] [Music] right i'm gonna have to escalate this [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so incredible there's not a mark on it it's absolutely pristine this material is called tungsten carbide it's a compound of tungsten and carbon and it's very unusual because it's not brittle and yet it's incredibly hard and that's very unusual in material something that won't scratch but won't break even on the most extreme forces ever wondered how you drill through steel or cut a railway tunnel through solid rock you do it with tools made from tungsten carbide the military used loads of tungsten to armor their tanks no other material is tough enough but over 80 percent of the world's tungsten is produced by just one nation china they've been selling it for decades then in 2010 they restricted sending shock waves around the world but a solution has been found in a field in devon [Music] in 2015 the diggers moved into the first metal mine to open in the uk for 40 years they're digging for tungsten [Applause] [Music] cornwall and this part of devon are all very rich in metals cornwall in particular is known for its tin and copper production historically the thing that's unique perhaps about tungsten compared to other metals is that there's not a lot of mines producing it especially in the western world that's incredibly impressive it's just what strikes you just how big the operation is so where is the where is the tungsten ore here then so the the tungsten oil is contained within a granite or body which is the white material you can see here in front of you and within the granite you've got hundreds of thousands of these quartz veins so this is a lump of quartz from one of those veins correct every gray kind of stripe in the rock is a vein and within those veins you've got quartz matrix and then within it is your wolframite and that's your tungsten oil so wow so there it is that's the magic stuff correct and how how rare is it to find courts in kind of this vein like structure with wolf from right in it in the world how rare is that it's relatively rare to find it in this kind of quantity uh this is a pretty big mine by world standards um certainly one of the biggest deposits in the world but this is by far the largest concentration of it in the british isles these huge diggers shift over ten thousand tons of oar a day there's enough tungsten here to secure supply for at least a decade this is a 125 tonne excavator loading a hundred tonne dunk truck with category one ore so this is the best quality ore and so you have enough dump trucks so that when one is full and off there's another dump truck to take its place how long does it take from digging it out here to refining it and then coming out as a product if we took that straight into the crusher and it was immediately crushed i think to get through the whole of the processing plant i think is about 50 minutes 50 minutes wow that's efficient yeah the ore is crushed and then fed into the processing plant no chemicals are used to extract the tungsten it's so heavy they can separate it using gravity the crushed oar is washed filtered and shaken until the dark finished product separates out there we go wow this is it so this will be about 55 60 tungsten this wow it's really heavy yeah very heavy incredible each of these one-ton sacks is worth 16 000 pounds [Music] tungsten is a super element because it can withstand virtually anything there's nothing else quite like this stuff and now for the ultimate test let's find out how strong this ball really is could it withstand this industrial roller or this industrial roller or this industrial roller or this 20-ton industrial roller let's see shall we just to show how effective this roller is first let's try a cricket ball ah yeah no longer a ball more a puck now now the tungsten carbide ball [Music] [Music] ah wood's destroyed the ball totally unscathed that's amazing absolutely unscathed wait wait okay look that's what's happened it's made a massive hole in the concrete it's not scratched on it it's absolutely completely pristine we have a stable supply of tungsten for the time being but demand is rising as it is for all our super elements for one simple reason when i was born there were 3.
5 billion people on the planet now there are seven billion the human population has doubled in my lifetime and all those people are buying and using ever more complex stuff and that's requiring us to dig up more and more minerals to keep up with demand [Music] all our super elements come out of the earth we're really good at finding them so far we haven't run out of anything but there is only one earth and sooner or later we're going to reach the limits of what it can provide it's the ultimate bottleneck if that happens we can kiss goodbye to our high-tech world so what can we do to fix the future [Music] we could start by learning some lessons from nature there is one super element that nature needs in abundance and in nature it never seems to run out it's called phosphorus so they just look like little bits of wax that you might get i'm back with my audience in bristol to demonstrate a stunning property of phosphorus that explains why it's so important for living things okay i'm gonna go for it now you all ready for this watch what happens when i burn a tiny bit in a big jar of oxygen [Music] [Music] i give you phosphorus everybody [Applause] the phosphorus glows because it's highly reactive with oxygen the reaction creates molecules of phosphorus bound to oxygen and these molecules are the building blocks of life they form the backbone of our dna and the dna of all living things [Music] phosphorus is one of nature's super elements plants get it from the soil and return it to the soil when they die but when farmers harvest crops they often have to replenish the phosphorus artificially with fertilizer the fertilizer is made from phosphorous rich rocks but there aren't many of them and we've dug most of them up already 75 percent of the rock that's left is in just one country morocco you might not like to think about it but poo makes excellent fertilizer when we eat plants and animals we eat the phosphate they contain and by and large that passes straight through us so that means that sewage is chock full of phosphate fertilizer and the poo from the people of nottingham is as good as any other in the world at this sewage treatment plant in stoke bardot human waste is something to be prized and revered all right it's the bbc here we'd like to talk about your poo okay [Music] although full of phosphorus you can't just spread human poo on fields it smells pretty bad and it's full of deadly pathogens like all sewage treatment works the main job of this plant is to turn the bad stuff into something a bit more pleasant but here they take it one step further [Music] the first stage of the treatment process is to remove the the big bits the rag things like that and also the grit blue paper do you mean that right so let's get in the video no no no no no no no okay so yeah loop yeah we'll be trapped um on the screen and all the stuff that people throw down the toilet that they probably shouldn't wipes whites baby wipes yeah exactly it flows into a big tank solid matter the fecal matter essentially settles to the bottom of the tank does that always settle because there are i don't know how to put this well there are floaters out there and they're sinkers and the time they get here are they all sinkers basically so they're pretty much all sinkers yeah so you don't it's rare to see the fecal matter float but you will get a sort of a film of fat uh we call it scum yeah but i'm getting used to getting them getting the whiff it may be smelly but this is not waste it's a treasure trove of magic ingredients at this site they turn sewage into concentrated phosphorus fertilizer and no chemicals are involved it's all done by bacteria and as the as the sewage flows through it's becoming progressively uh more treated so by the end here as it flows over this weir it is by then a mix of treated sewage but with the bacteria still in it there are um bacteria called phosphate accumulating organisms that will take up phosphorus beyond their normal metabolic requirement as an energy stool so they're storing it inside their cellular body and then they're going that way they're heading off somewhere is that right that's right so then they go into the settlement tanks the bacteria settle to the bottom we pump away a portion of that sludge to those big concrete tanks you can see over there the phosphorous rich bacterial sludge is spun in these centrifuges to remove the liquid leaving behind what i'm told is called sludge cake so this is basically human manure right yeah this rich compost is perfectly safe to be spread directly onto agricultural land but it's bulky and heavy and so it's expensive to transport the real magic comes from the liquid that was spun off in the centrifuge it's distilled into a powder called struvite a concentrated source of phosphorus easy to bag up and transport the perfect fertilizer this is it this is it so this is struvite or magnesium ammonium phosphate mineral phosphate fertilizer it's ingenious isn't it people flush their loos they think that's just waste and actually you've recovered very valuable stuff yeah yeah yeah no it's great isn't it yeah where there's much there's brass instead of digging phosphorus out of the ground we can recycle it the way nature does and that way we'll never run out so could recycling save all our super elements if only it were that simple which brings me back to smartphones the problem with recycling comes from their incredibly sophisticated design some of you are probably watching this program on a phone we filmed it on a phone even the seemingly simple things that your phone does are really amazing for instance your phone knows which way up it is doesn't it that seems really simple but actually there's a tiny machine inside the phone working that out it's called an accelerometer and it's got moving parts that are smaller than the hair of a flea and it detects the force of gravity that's just incredible isn't it our phones are so smart but their lives are short the average lifespan of a phone is just two years has anyone here ever wondered exactly what happens to your phones if you send them off for recycling well they get reconditioned if they're in good nick and resold but if not they share the same grisly fate i'm gonna wear ear defenders old phones are shredded in industrial machines far bigger than this blender every day thousands of phones in the uk alone and their lives in this way and so almost all the precious indium used to make touchscreens ends up in landfill well that's pretty impressive in the end i'm afraid to say ends up as dust sad end don't you think and it's the same story for most super elements helium is so light it evades capture the rhenium in jet engines is baked into an alloy with other metals that are hard to separate out so yes we need to get much much better at recycling but it's never going to be a perfect solution ultimately we're going to need new sources of supply and there's one option that could solve all our problems i'm going to just let you guys have a look at these find some new rocks all super elements come from rocks but these ones are particularly special they're packed full of them hold the star trekian using a sci-fi looking x-ray gun we can find out exactly what's in them yeah nine seconds okay so what we're getting here is iron coming out cobalt nickel who mentioned that and uranium both used in radioactive reactors and we've counted six different elements and the list is still rising bismuth calcium titanium arsenic yitrium there's a catch spotted they come from outer space these rocks are meteorites most of the elements on our planet originated in space they were forged in the big bang or in the hearts of stars they became incorporated into our planet as it formed 4. 5 billion years ago and they found their way into the other planets and moons of our solar system as well as countless billions of asteroids there's almost an infinite supply of all the elements we could ever wish for in space and the idea of extraterrestrial mining isn't as crazy as you might think this is the surface of mars actually it's a warehouse in stevenage this accurate replica of the martian surface is where space hardware destined for the red planet is put through its paces so welcome to our mars yard this is where we test all of our rovers that we're developing to go to the surface of mars they're going to launch in 2020 land in early 2021 and then drive around on the surface and take samples from a variety of different locations so you're going to pick up rocks on mars the ultimate plan for this is to drill underneath the surface collect a sample see what elements are there what minerals could it potentially have supported life is one of the big questions how feasible is it to go to another planet or to an asteroid and mine it there's lots of things that need to be developed to get us to that point but this is one of those things we're starting along that road now from this stevenage warehouse airbus designed and built the rosetta spacecraft that landed a probe on a comet in 2014.
