 Hello everybody, welcome to Geek Show. If we're going to kick the gig off, I would say that this gig is kind of comedy and I say kind of comedy in that I know that I'm funny but I can't guarantee anyone else. So it's a thing where if you want to be down the front that would be amazing but also even if you don't want to be down the front we need you to make quite a lot of noise. I'll do that, what I'll do now is I'll do that like a compare. What we need is for you to make quite a lot of noise, make some noise! Ladies and gentlemen would you please welcome to the stage your host of Geek Show off? It's me, Steve Gawd. Thank you very much indeed. This is tremendously exciting, it's tremendously exciting but let's be honest it's also a little bit awkward. We're in a field in the middle of wherever this field is I just got on the truck. Did anyone else come, did anyone else get the shuttle bus to the site? There's a lovely bit where there's an unmarked truck and you stop and they go get on the truck and my first thought was no happy story starts everybody get on the unmarked truck. So that was a bit frightening. Hello everyone, hello. What we're gonna do now is a thing that I do called Geek Show off and the point of Geek Show off is it's little bits of me and then it's longer bits of people who are really clever talking about whatever it is that they like. So they're gonna talk about things that obsessed them, things that they do in their everyday lives and I go all over the country doing gigs like this. I am what is technically known as a science comedian. Can I get an ooh? That was exactly the right level of ooh that is required for science comedian let me tell you why in 2012 the independent on Sunday named me as one of Britain's top five science comedians. Can I get a bigger ooh? There are currently six science comedians in Britain. It's quite a sad claim to fame to have there. Sadly that one right that fact has not yet made it onto my Wikipedia page. I've had a Wikipedia page for two weeks. Give me a cheer if you've got a Wikipedia page. Really? I thought this place would be full of them. People hacking in from the other side of the world pretending to be someone else giving themselves a Wikipedia page. You could all do that. No I've had a Wikipedia page for two weeks. It is currently where I am learning just how awful human beings are because it's this amazing seething bag of passive aggression. There are only two lines in my Wikipedia page and people are fighting over every single word. Last week my Wikipedia page began Steve Cross is a comedian. It now begins Steve Cross is a self-described comedian. Genuinely. Can look any of you who are editors. Can you go and take that out because it is so harsh. Right so we've got we've got some families in the room. Hello kids. Hello. Hello. Now I should say I don't normally compare gigs for children. Normally I compare gigs in like sweaty pub basements and things. So this is a little bit of a challenge for me because 95% of the stuff that I would normally do I can't do. And the first time I ever I ever compared a gig with children in the room was last year at the Green Man Festival. And I didn't know what to do. It's like my job to get you all really excited so that when I bring on the people that know about science and technology and engineering and all those amazing things that you're going to cheer them like crazy. So what I did at that gig was that I asked all the children in the audience what their favorite things were. And then if they weren't clapping and cheering enough I would just shout their favorite things at them. Because the best way to get any child really happy and really interested in what you're doing is just to go. Hey Olivia. Ponies. See it doesn't work at all. But what I wanted to share with you is what the kids of 2013 are into. And kids of 2014 if you're into these things I want to know about it. So I asked all these kids what's your favorite thing in the whole world. And I would go to the edge of the stage and I would lean down and I go what's your favorite thing. So the first kid I went up to I said what's your favorite thing. And he looked at me. And first of all he pushed his glasses up. Because that's what we do when we're thinking. Glasses are like nerd cigarettes. They just give you a chance to do a thing while you think and it's brilliant. And he looked at me and he said light bulbs. Now that I can see the point of that because that's really cheap parenting. He wants toys. What are we going to do? Well I just changed all the light bulbs. Shall we tell him that light bulbs are toys. And that was quite fun. No then the next kid I went up to I said what's your favorite thing in the world. I looked at him. And he looked at me. And he looked deep into my eyes. And he looked all the way down to the bottom of my soul. And he actually said darkness. So I went. So he went darkness and comedy. That is a kid who is really annoyed that the show that we're doing at 8 30 where I will be properly drunk and sweary is adults only. So that's all very exciting. Kids in the room. Kids in the room. Kids in the room. Kids in the room. Are any of you are any of you into science? Do you do science at school? Yes? No? I wanted to tell you a story about when I was a child and I'm only telling this story in order to watch your parents wince the whole way through and try and tell you never to do this. So when I was at school I was the kid that was good at science and I was also the kid that really knew he was good at science. And I was also the kid who hadn't really developed any of the social skills that would prevent this from being annoying. To give you an idea of the kind of things that we used to do. We had a physics practical. You had to take lots of measurements by changing one variable. I mean standard physics stuff. What my friend and I did was we did the first measurement. We did the last measurement. We drew a line that joined them up. And then we just made up the other points. Being slightly off because we're not perfect. We wanted to send the message. It's not like we've made it up. We've scattered the points a little bit. We got busted and the teacher came over and he said listen Steve Duncan there is no place in this world for theoretical physicists. To put this story in more perspective Duncan who I did that with is the professor of theoretical physics at Cornell University now. It's absurd. Anyway the other things that we used to do was science experiments that you weren't supposed to do. One of our experiments was called what happens if you put a spoon full of yoghurt into a desk every day. I would describe this experiment for you properly as a scientific experiment. Method. A desk was taken. It wasn't. It was there in the beginning. We didn't bring in a special desk. Into the desk was placed one heaped teaspoon. It's important to be accurate when you're doing science. Was it a level teaspoon? It's a heaped teaspoon of natural yoghurt each day. Observations. Day one nothing. Day two nothing. Day three the desk smells. Day four the desk smells really bad. Day five the desk is not there anymore. Apparently they took it away and burned it. It was the only way to deal with it. It all soaked in. It was incredibly disgusting. Anyway that's enough about me. I'm gonna bring on some people who know some stuff about some stuff. Give me a cheer if you like people who know some stuff about some stuff. You're an amazing audience. I have to say this you're really spread out and we're in a giant tent. Normally both of those are the death of joy but you're so joyful. It's brilliant. Oh this is a lovely festival isn't it? It's a lovely festival. Everyone's really nice. And there's so many brilliant people here. All come together. Not doing the things you normally do. Not shopping in the shops you normally shop on. Maplins share price has gone down 5% just today. Right I'm gonna bring on some people that know some stuff about stuff. Ladies and gentlemen are you ready to meet your first geek show off of the today? Oh it's got to be more than that. They're not getting paid you know. They're only doing this for love and attention so you have to show them love and attention. Ladies and gentlemen are you ready to meet your first geek show off today? Would you please welcome to the stage Sarah Wiseman. Hey everybody. Thank you very much. It's great to see you all here. Thank you. I know we're competing against some really some really awesome talks. So my name is Sarah Wiseman and I am a PhD student at UCL. And the thing that I study is errors. Things going wrong right. So I have to say upfront that any errors that do occur during this set are both intentional and very well choreographed okay just to be prepared. So let's talk about errors right. But Sarah I hear you cry. Why should we listen to you. You don't even have your PhD yet. Well firstly that's a really mean thing for you to be bringing up right now okay. PhDs are hard and I'm trying really I'm trying okay. I'll hand it in in four weeks okay. Who are you my supervisor. Just get off my back all right. And secondly I don't actually need a PhD to be honest with you because I actually have something that's better right. As academics we're all striving to be cited by our peers. We're all striving to have people read our papers and write about them. But screw that. That's not for me. That's not for me at all. What I'm aiming for is is far better. It's far bigger. Which is why my name appeared in a national newspaper recently. Sarah Wiseman University College London. Here we go. That's far better than getting my academic peers to cite me okay. This is a national newspaper. And what's more. What's more is no longer. Am I just a lowly PhD scientist. Oh no. Now I'm a scientist. And not only have I now been lifted to the ranks of being a scientist. I'm actually a daily male accredited scientist. Thank you very much. Thank you. Appropriate reaction I think. And as such this new position I come up with gems such as customers who make mistakes are not idiots. Wow. That's mind blowing. It's only taken me three or four years to come to that conclusion. Okay. That's a real insight. You're not going to get that on wonders of the universe or anything. That is knowledge. Right. Okay. So as you can get from this I like talking about errors. So let's start thinking about why errors matter. Okay. So I'm going to ask you a question. What do you think bar charts and NHS patient safety records have in common? The answer is I'm about to try and make a joke using both of them. Okay. So strap in and get ready. Now I am going to show you some data from this has been taken legitimately from the NHS. Right. This is not made up in any way. This is stuff that has naturally occurred in the NHS. Okay. So the graph I'm about to show you is a graph showing you a subset of patients that were admitted to geriatric care in the last few years. Okay. Geriatric care being care for elderly people. Right. Can anyone see any mistakes in this? No one on this graph is over the age of 19. So that's a bit off and I'm not just talking about the fact I've forgotten to label the X axis. I know that. Okay. I know that you all saw that too. But I know it too. Okay. And it's not just happening at this end of the spectrum. It's happening at the other end of the spectrum. So this is going to be a graph of all the people admitted to adolescent psychiatric care. No one on this graph is under the age of 30. Now I don't know about you. Right. But I do know some immature people. But no one is so immature that medically speaking the NHS will treat them as a child. Now what is going on here? What's happening? Well, either these people, these medical workers that are entering this data into medical records are making some errors. They're slipping up when they enter this data. Or, which I think is more likely, this is proof that Benjamin Button syndrome exists. Okay. And the thing is it's not just happening with age. It's also happening with gender. So I'm about to show you a graph of all the men in the past few years who were pregnant. This is male admissions to obstetrics, gynecology and midwife episodes. Okay. Again, is someone making an error when they're entering the data into records? Or is it proof that this type of film is more of a documentary than we could ever realize? Now, okay, those, those, those graphs were kind of stupid and they were funny, right? The errors resulted in kind of stupid statistics coming out. And that was kind of amusing. But unfortunately, sometimes errors that happen in the medical domain, they're not so funny, right? When people enter some data, it can mean that a patient gets seriously harmed or even killed. And so as a result of this, we are trying, as researchers into technology, to understand what happens when people make these types of errors. Why are these errors happening? Now, I'm a scientist and the way that I research things is that I stick people in a laboratory and I get them to do stuff. Okay. And this is hard to do when you're studying error, like for, for two reasons. Now, one reason that you can't study error in a lab is that when you get people in into a laboratory situation, everything becomes quite artificial and fake. And so it's hard to take the results from the lab and generalize them to the real world. It's called ecological validity. And so that means that studying errors in a lab is quite hard. The second reason it's quite hard is that it actually just makes you a really bad person because essentially I'm bringing someone into a room sitting with them and waiting for them to fail. And that's just bad for your soul, you know. But luckily, luckily, I don't need to do everything in a laboratory. I can get some data from the real world. And that is what I and my fellow researchers at UCL are doing. We're taking to Twitter to get real examples of error. So what we're doing is asking people to switch from the primary use of Twitter, which is getting incredibly and legitimately I rate about baking competitions. And we're asking them to instead help us with our research. And so all we're doing is asking people to, every time they make an error, is to tweet about it and tag it with hashtag error diary. It's as straightforward as that. And then that simple thing will allow our website error diary.org to go through all of Twitter and collect these examples of errors, which creates this amazing database of slips and mistakes. Now, I'm going to talk about slips and mistakes briefly. As an error researcher, I'm actually quite a bad friend. So the other day, my friend, he, well, a few months ago, he ended up breaking up with his girlfriend. Now, it's the normal story, right? His girlfriend had gone out one night and had kissed someone else. And he was, yeah, thank you. He was distraught. He was as distraught as you were. And it was a really, you know, it's a terrible thing. You know, he was really upset about it. And he was like, oh, but Sarah, she said that I made a mistake. She made a mistake, you know, that she wouldn't do it again. And I was like, no, no, no, look, don't forgive her. You need to break up with her, you know? Because what she's just done is label a slip error as a mistake. And if she can make that sort of mix up with error terminology, who knows what else she is capable of. Okay, that didn't go down too well. So what I'm going to do is help you be better friend than I am. I'm going to just give you a bit of a definition between slips and mistakes. So slips, these are things that you plan completely correctly in your mind, but then for whatever reason when you execute it, it goes horribly wrong. So an example of that is the classic Freudian slip, where you say one thing, you mean one thing, but you say your mother. I thought I was going to have to pause for a longer time. Now a mistake error, on the other hand, is where you execute the plan perfectly well, but the plan that you made to begin with was wrong. So an example of a mistake error is when you incorrectly lecture your friend about error terminology while they're going through severe emotional trauma like I did just there. So those are examples of some slips and mistakes. Let's look at some more examples of error using error diary. Now one of my favorite, favorite errors that we collect on error diary is it's just so beautiful, just so subtle. So what we're normally trying to do is collect examples of error diary. Sometimes we get examples of error dairies coming into things and that is just so beautiful because either it means that cows are tweeting from the workplace or it means that some people are making hilarious meta errors about error and I just think that's beautiful. That's my favorite error that we collect. I don't care what else it says. If it says error diary, I'm happy. Error diary, I'm happy. Did I just make an error when I was trying to say error diary? I think I did. Intentional. I meant to do that. Now let's look at some actual examples of errors that we collect. Okay so they range from the mundane. So things like people trying to use their PIN code for their ATM cash machine and trying to put, trying to put it into their burglar alarm. Okay that is a fairly straightforward error and it's something while we're learning about error terminology that is called an associative action slip. Okay so they range from the mundane like this to the kind of silly. An example of someone forgetting to remove the cocktail stick before eating into a burger. That is an example of an omission error, an omission slip. They range from the mundane to the silly to the really really silly. This is an example of someone hurting themselves whilst air drumming to the 80s pop rock hit Africa by Toto. That is an example of a sharing too much on Twitter slip. Okay before I go on I'm just going to point out that all of these errors, they were just, these ones just came from my sister which is a, a brilliant way to get around the ethics of showing these tweets in a show like this and b, a brilliant way to make fun of my sister. So tick-tick it's a win-win situation. Now the reason that we collect these slips is because the things that make people accidentally enter their PIN into a burger alarm or make them try and use their Oyster card to get into their house, these, the causes of those errors are exactly the same as the causes of error that make a nurse or a doctor program the wrong number into an infusion pump or make a slip up when they're referring to patients in a ward. And so if we can understand this massive database of everyday slips and mistakes then maybe we can kind of extrapolate from them, learn from them and take that knowledge and apply it to designing interfaces or designing processes in hospitals and we can design them so that they're less error prone and so that we support the workers more and help them avoid error from happening. So I mean I'm going to ask you guys to help out with the research and I just have a simple request. The next time that you guys make a slip or a mistake in the real world and you're really embarrassed but no one's around to see it then please tweet about it and then just add the tag error diary and then we can collect it and then we can all have a massive laugh at your expense and also like for science or something. So that's been my set. Thank you so much for listening. If you're interested in any other types of information about error I've got a lot more to say. My Twitter handle is oops oh no error themed so please like getting getting contact. Let's have a chat about things. Thank you so much for listening everyone thanks. Sarah Wise ladies and gentlemen! Sarah mentioned that she works for UCL. I also work for UCL. Do you like the t-shirts? I had a meeting with a very senior man and the very senior man said we would like the university to merchandise more like an American university. So my brain went oh a specific American university. That was great. Did anyone else think half way through that though? If they're collecting their data off you tweeting you can just lie. You could ruin it forever. You could have Sarah's data saying that 80% of the errors that the British public makes are related in some way to Toto's Africa. That would be a paper. That would get in nature just so that they could get the social media clicks from it. It would be brilliant. Right we have another act. Is our next act already Ross? We just double-checking this because the thing about EMF camp is there's so much going on. We've got people literally arriving and then running on to the stage. Are you all set? Okay brilliant. Ladies and gentlemen are you ready to meet your second geek show off this afternoon? Please welcome to the stage Cindy Regalato! Public Lab is an organization, public laboratory for open technology and science. We do open source accessible tools for environmental monitoring and today I'm going to share with you one of those tools. Next slide. I don't know if you can see very well. So aerial photography. There are many ways of getting air photos. One of them is DIY and balloon mapping is another way. So you fill up a huge balloon with helium and you send it up. There are different ways to attach your camera to your balloon. I don't know if you can see the slide very well but here we have a sort of contraption, peek-a-vit and here's a bottle. You put little wings in your bottle and you put the camera inside and that protects your camera as you send it up 1000 feet up in the air and then you write your address in one of the wings just in case your kite line or balloon line gets cut off and your balloon flies to India or somewhere they can maybe mail you back your camera or at least your SD card with your valuable pictures. But today I'm going to show you kite mapping or just a little bit of kite mapping. This kite here is a DIY kite and I know a lot of you guys are makers and doers so I'm going to share with you. This is Barney. Everybody meet Barney is a kite map, sorry, it's a Tyvek kite. It's a Delta kite, really huge. It flies on all sorts of winds. It's material that is I guess easy to get, accessible. It's easy to fold as well so then what's really nice and easy about it is you can quickly wrap it up, put it in your backpack, the spars come apart, put it in your bag and go off and travel with it. So one of the questions that I get a lot is when do we use kites, when do we use balloons? I think this is self-explanatory. Also probably balloons are easier if you're going to do urban mapping, if you're going to do more outdoors like out wilderness, forests, oceans, you want to use kites. One of the problems of using kites and balloons on like drones is that you have to watch out for power lines but recently these people have been mapping slums in Nairobi. You know what they do? So power lines, right? And there they have the reel. Do you have a reel somewhere? I can show I have one here. Oh, there we go. Okay, so this is a reel, you're attached to a kite or your balloon. So oh my god, power line. Oh, whoops. And they just throw it over the power line and then catch it on the other side. I wouldn't recommend that because you could lose your kite or your balloon but people are amazing, people are ingenious. One of the things I really want to highlight about the way that we in public lab do environmental monitoring and develop tools for monitoring environment, learning about our environment and exploring is that we want to design around inclusion. So all of the materials are affordable, locally sourced, accessible and very cheap. We also engage people in a way that we consider that everyone has an expertise. So while some people want to do the software part where it involves actually working with the data or developing the software better or further so that we can make different kinds of maps or get different kinds of stuff out of our maps, other people just want to do the actual mapping, other people want to do the campaigns, other people want to do the promotion. Oh my god, I cut myself. So I just want to show you a few pictures. We've had lots of fun doing kite mapping all around the world. So public lab community, the kite mapping is actually something that has been done by over 3,000 people all around the world. So this kite here has been in Italy and, well, I'm not going to brag, an EMF of course. So it's been really fun. And now we're going to give you a demonstration of how we attach the camera to the kite. So you won. Okay, I'll take over since we've had a bit of a bloodbath. This is called a picavet and you saw it. You can still see it on the picture behind me. It is simply a platform to hold the camera underneath the kite. When we do kite mapping, a lot of people wonder, well, if the camera is attached to the kite, it's going to wobble all over the place. It's going to be really, there's a lot of turbulence. We don't actually attach the camera directly to the kite. We attach the camera to a platform that is attached to the kite line, about 50 meters below where the kite flies. So this means that you have less turbulence. If you just attach the camera with a string, you still get a lot of turbulence and you still get a lot of blurry pictures. So we use something called a picavet, which is this platform. If you can see it in front of me here, you can see that this platform has a lot of strings going to various loops that are attached to a piece of wood. Imagine there's a line attached here, and this line is moving. You can see that the platform is more or less, of course it's still moving, but it's more stable than if the camera was attached directly to the line. It's called a picavet, and if you Google that, it's really simple. There are all sorts of animations to show how to string up. All you need is a piece of wood. You cut it into a shape so you can attach the camera with rubber bands, elastics, and then I've just attached metal loops, these kind of screw loops that you get at the hardware store. But if you want a really fancy picavet, you use actual pulleys because then you get even less friction. Okay, Cindy's going to demonstrate how we attach the camera. Okay, so we've just got the camera attached to a small pad of paper and paper towels just to make it nice and even and a little bit shock-absorbent. Then she's used these quite heavy-duty elastic bands and we've got a little piece of just a nail that's pushed into the wood to hold the elastic bands in place. We put in four elastic bands all the way across, and as you'll see in a moment, you then have to adjust the elastic bands so that the lens can come out and you can take pictures. Otherwise, of course, your elastic bands prevent the camera from opening up properly, but it's really secure. And on top of it all, we've also got this line here, which is a security line, which we attach directly to the kite line. So in case something were to fail with the picavet, the camera will just slide down the kite line and you can still retrieve it. Then what Cindy is doing here now is adjusting the elastic bands so that the lens can come out. I don't know how well you can see this. I'm going to hold it up in the air. So you can see the camera is just attached to the bottom of the platform. If I turn the camera on, the lens can come out nice and freely, take pictures, and this is automatically set to continuous picture taking. So you actually, rather than controlling what pictures you're taking, you're taking a mass of pictures and then sifting through them afterwards to take the nice ones that are not blurry or not overexposed and so on. The actual kite mapping, there are other ways, like I said, of attaching the camera. We wanted to share this one with you. And what you do with the photos after depends. You can use the online software map knitter. You bring down your picture, you select, you load them, you don't need geo-referencing because you use a base layer in the background of the program to align your picture. So you see, oh, there's a road here. That road looks like this road, so you align it. And then you stitch the pictures together, you export your map in multiple formats, and off you go, and then you can annotate your map. The map has been used in all sorts of forms. Originally, this was prototyped for the BP oil spill in 2010 to map, to get public data for the damage of the wetlands and the shorelands and how that wasn't really being made public or talked about. And the people whose livelihoods were being affected couldn't really see a good picture of the extent of the damage. So that was really good. People have been using it for all sorts of things, like, for example, conflict resolution in Israel, so making maps together between Palestinians and Israelis, which maybe right now would be really useful, but maybe not very possible, but to talk about the sharing of spaces and co-creation of spaces also being used for disaster relief, environmental health, plant health and farming, et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah. Another application is for demonstrations. If you have got a large gathering of people, often the media doesn't quite know or the journalists don't know how many people were there. Cindy and I have given workshops at these journalism festivals, and people are starting to use it for that. It's a really cheap alternative. I don't remember if you mentioned it, Cindy, but this Tyvek, the material costs for this kite, it's less than two pounds. And the rig, of course, costs about 12 pounds, I believe. And not the rig, I mean the real. The rig costs nothing. It's just a piece of wood. And the camera, you can get cameras like this for like 25 pounds. So all in all, it's a pretty cheap alternative. And the last thing I'll say is you can see these are the spars for the kite. You saw me unfolding the kite. It folds up nicely. Yeah, I can put it in my backpack. You literally have a very easily portable system for taking really high quality pictures that you can then upload and share with people. The good news is we have a first aider outside. Hello. It's nice to see people suffering for their art a little bit. You know, they mean it when they keep going as the blood sprays everywhere. That was incredible, incredible. We've got one more geek to show off to you. He's currently running outside, sorting Cindy out, so I can introduce him a little bit. His name's Ross. He works for at Bristol, which is a big science center in Bristol. Have you got to do your slides? Okay. And Ross is kind of the big star of their YouTube channel. So there's kids all over the country watching Ross blow things up, freeze things, blow some more things up. I'm not saying it's repetitive. It's not. Ladies and gentlemen, are you ready for your final geek show off of the afternoon? I know the energy levels are falling. It's too long since lunch. We need more. Don't worry. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage Ross Exeter! Oh, EMF. I wasn't sure whether to call you EMF or to call you Bletchley, but we're all from a mix of different places. So are you guys all having a good day? Yes. Glad to hear it. I've only been here for a couple of hours, but I'm already absolutely loving it. When I was setting up my tent earlier on, I had lots of very friendly people all helping me out. Everyone's very, very nice. So I'm enjoying myself very much so far. So my name is Ross, and today I'm going to be talking to you about various animals, because what I want to tell you all about is something known as intelligent design. No, no, no. Because it's a load of nonsense, essentially. And so we're going to be taking a look at the evolution of various animals. So some people would have you believe that we are the best that some deities, some man, elephants, spaghetti monster, whatever you choose. We are the best that they could come up with. And as animals go, we are naff. We are really bad. I mean, we're kind of these pink fleshy creatures, which are these strange appendages coming off of us. And when you think of beautiful animals, really amazing animals, you think of things like the Siberian tiger, very majestic, wandering through the snow. You might think of a bird of paradise, which do these amazing dances, moving their wings around. And I can't do dance moves as best as that. And the best that we've come up with recently is just twerking. And it's just embarrassing compared to something like this. Kittens. You can't go wrong with a happy kitten. And no, no, I can't do it. There's no way that I can compare to something as cute as that. Tropical fish are just absolutely beautiful with all of these vibrant colors that are there. Even some insects, you'd be considered beautiful. So this is a spider. How cool is that? How funky is that? We resemble something a little more like this. This is the naked mole rat, which basically just looks like a wrinkly sausage with legs and teeth. And again, there's a much closer resemblance there than with the kitten. So if we wanted to take the best bits from all of these different animals to make and design our own animal, I wonder what it would look like. I wonder what bits and pieces that we could use if we had free reign to just completely start from scratch. Because it's not just our looks that might let us down in the animal kingdom. We have absolutely terrible memories. We forget things all the time. Did you know, for example, that 6% of all skydiving fatalities are because of people who forget to pull the ripcord? Just embarrassing. We have an S-shaped spine, which is very good for supporting about 70% of our body weight. It allows us to walk around and strut on stages like this. But it gives us terrible back pain. Our eyes are essentially installed inside out with the nerves from the retina going onto the inside of the eye instead of back towards our brain. So they kind of come out and then in like that. And it gives us this really pointless blind spot in each of our eyes. So let's think about some predators. So if you want to look at some of the most powerful and incredible animals, let's see if we can make a predator. We're going to start off with the fastest animal of all the ch... Oh, yes, this is what we're going to be thinking about today. So inspired by the sci-fi channel, we're going to be combining all of these various things. We're going to start with the cheetah. So the cheetah can go from 0 to 60 in about three seconds. It reaches a top speed of 75 miles an hour, which is much, much faster than Usain Bolt who can do 27 miles an hour. That's much faster. I can do about four miles an hour. That's my top speed. So this could easily catch me out there in the wilderness. So this is going to be our starting point, the majestic cheetah. We're then going to move on to jaws. Now I'm not thinking of sharks, jaws or something like that. I'm thinking of the Nile Crocodile, because this guy has one of the most powerful jaws in the animal kingdom. Our bite force, if you imagine biting the chunk out of an apple, that's about 120 pounds per square inch, 120 psi. This guy can do 5,000 psi. It's incredibly powerful. So as soon as the cheetah has caught you, it's going to now clamp down using the jaws of a saltwater crocodile. Where are we going to go to next? Well, this is the Manta Shrimp. And this is actually my favorite animal in the collection, because this guy lives in all sorts of reefs down at the bottom of the sea underneath the water. And it's a shrimp, but it looks like it was made in the 70s. It's got this wonderful tie dye effect all over it. And one of the most remarkable things about this animal is its eyes. So let's zoom in and take a closer look. So these are its eyes. Now, each one of these can move independently in any direction for 70 degrees all around. So see them both moving around in different directions. Now, we can see that there's three areas, and the third middle one kind of goes across the middle like a band. So we have two eyes, which give us binocular vision, allow us to perceive depth and judge how far away things are. Each one of the Manta Shrimp's eyes has trinocular vision. Our eyes also contain things called color receptors. So there are rods which detect movement and kind of blacks and whites and grays and things like that. When you're in a dark room, so like late at night in a dark room, your eyes slowly start to adjust to using the rods in your eyes. And there are cone cells which help us to detect color. We have three types of cone cells. So we've got red, blue, and green. And using all of those, we can see every single color of the rainbow, thousands and thousands of colors, everything from beige to taupe. But the Manta Shrimp has not three cone cells, not four, not five, but 16 different kinds of cone cells. This guy can see colors that we can't even imagine into ultraviolet and infrared light. This guy can see your hopes, your dreams, even your internet history. It is absolutely terrifying. So this is what we're going to be using to see our prey. Then we move on to the grizzly bear. Now the scariest thing about the grizzly bear is not its gigantic teeth that we can see here. It's its nose. It has one of the most powerful noses in the animal kingdom. Now a bloodhound can smell you pretty well, but the grizzly bear has a nose that's seven times stronger and millions and millions of times stronger than ours. We can detect about 10,000 different kinds of smell. But the grizzly bear could smell you from 18 miles away. So you could be 18 miles away from this guy and he would still be able to smell you. And not only that, but he can smell you across time. This is just insane. Can you imagine that? So if it picks up your scent, it can tell how far away you've been, where you were, and exactly how it's going to track you and hunt you down using the sense of smell. So even if it can't see you, its nose is going to do the job of tracking you. This is the great gray owl. It's also known as the Phantom of the North, such a cool name. This is silent death on wings because it has the best ears of the animal kingdom. In fact, its entire face acts like a gigantic ear. So we have our outer ears, which help to pick up the sound and divert it into our inner ears. But his entire face is shaped like a parabolic dish and it focuses that sound and all of the feathers that cover its face is known as a rough. And that focuses the sound to each of its ears. So we have two ears on either side of our head and this allows us to pick up what direction sound is coming from. So depending on if the sound is coming from over there, it's going to hit my left ear before it hits my right. My brain is pretty clever. It's able to figure out the timing between those two things and tell me a rough idea of where it is. But it's useless if something's coming at you from dead on or dead behind because it's hitting both of your ears at the same time. So the owl has overcome this by having asymmetrical ears. One is ever so slightly higher and forward, the other one is ever so slightly lower. So how effective is the ears of a great gray owl? Well, it can detect a beetle hidden in the grass about 100 yards away, just scurrying around. It can hear the squeak of a mouse half a mile away. That's just incredible. And then it swoops down from the trees, landing on its prey, catching it with its talons. So the next time you see an owl kind of bobbing its head around like this, it looks very cute. But what it's doing there is honing in on its prey to get an exact lock so it can swoop down and get a meal. This is the star-nosed mole. And it looks kind of a cross between Wolverine with some claws here and a plushy toy that's just been squeezed really hard. So we've got all of its insides coming out of its face. But its nose is absolutely incredible. So it's able to kind of... It's a combination of touch and taste simultaneously. And it's the fastest eating animal in the world because this nose has about 20 of these tentacles all around it. And they're covered in these tiny, tiny little dots called Ima's organs. And using these Ima's organs as it's feeling around underneath the ground, its eyesight is incredibly poor, it's practically blind. And it just uses its nose to feel around underneath the ground. And it's looking for a meal. But as it feels something, in a tenth of a second it decides whether to eat it or not. So it's going along mud, mud, mud, mud, worm, mud, mud, mud, mud, worm, mud, mud, mud, mud, mud, worm. And it does it incredibly quickly, even as it's underwater. It's so fast that it ejects these little air bubbles into the water so that it can taste what's underneath the water before it then burrows back down underneath the ground. Absolutely incredible. And we're going to return to the Mantar Shrimp because this has another feature, which is even cooler than its eyes. Because once our predator has smelled you or heard you or sought you out, we need to give it a weapon. And this creature has the best weapon in the entire animal kingdom. So you might be able to see just around here, it's got these little raptorial appendages which go a little bit like this. Because even though this guy looks very peaceful, very harmonious, and like I said, it's like he's been designed in the 70s. So you might imagine him kind of coming along and splitting up some parts. No, man, we just want to live in peace. Just be like me, just embrace the colors all around. No, no, no, no, no, no. This guy, aquariums don't have these because they kill everything else in the tank. So it goes along, and instead of breaking up the fight, it just goes, one, two, three, death, one, two, three, death. And these raptorial appendages fling out, smashing whatever's in front of it. They accelerate at 23 meters per second. That's the same speed as a bullet coming from a 22 caliber rifle. And it hits its target with 1,500 newtons of force to give you some idea of just how much that is. If we were able to throw a ball like a baseball with one tenth of that force, we could throw that ball into orbit. As it moves these raptorial appendages forwards, it's going so fast that it instantly boils the water in front of it, creating a shockwave. And that shockwave is powerful enough to kill its prey anyway. So it accelerates forward. This shockwave then creates something called a cavitation bubble, which is a bit like a vacuum as the water gets pushed out in front of it. As the vacuum then collapses back down one of these tiny bubbles, it creates temperatures of thousands of degrees Kelvin. It's much hotter than even the surface of the sun. As the bubbles then collapse, they emit light in a strange process that no one really understands. We call it sonoluminescence. This is pretty terrifying. So we've learned about all of these different ways that animals can catch their prey or even beat it up when it finds it. But would you guys like to see the perfect animal? If we combined all of these different things, into a single creature to terrify us for the rest of our lives, would you guys like to see it? Here we go. So if there was such a thing as intelligent design, we would live in a world that would be dominated by creatures like this, and it would be absolutely terrifying. Ivan Ross, thank you all very much. Ross Hexton, ladies and gentlemen, don't have nightmares. Those of you who've enjoyed the show, we're going to be back at 8.30 tonight, doing another geek show off where I will be properly hammered by the time it starts. So that's going to be quite exciting. Thank you. You've been an amazing audience. Can I have a round of applause for everyone that you've seen so far? See you at 8.30.