 So I'm pleased to welcome our third and final Grand Challenge team to the stage this evening. Their Grand Challenge is entitled Living Fluids, Understanding Collective Behavior for Bio-Inspired Engineering and on behalf of the Executive Leadership Team, the presenters are Ulbiki Matisse from the Research School of Biology and Michael Schatz from the Search School of Physics and Engineering. Thank you, Margaret. Good evening everyone. I'm Michael Schatz, I'm a physicist and I'll start this presentation on behalf of our Grand Challenge team on Living Fluids and we'll be talking about Living Fluids, Collective Behavior and Bio-Inspired Engineering. So perhaps I should start defining what are we talking about, what are living fluids. Normally by living fluids we call fluids which are essential for life, such as blood. But recently, in recent times we also have another meaning to this word. We are talking about systems made of large groups of active and interacting elements and there are numerous examples around us like flocks of birds, swarms of insects, swarms of fish. Sometimes we talk about spreading opinions in the society. That's also living fluids. We have many interacting elements in that system, stock markets, material flows. You take a glass of water, there are microorganisms in there. We in our physics laboratory, we performed experiments with water. I'm doing physics of fluids. If we take distilled water, we have one result. We have water from Lake Burley-Griffin, it's a completely different substance. We cannot use the same equations of hydrodynamics to describe its behavior because it's obviously populated by organic matter and by living organisms. So it's just a matter of the concentration of these microorganisms, active elements within the fluid to completely change properties of such fluid. As physicists we say that any living fluid in that sense is a system strongly alternative to living fluid. What does it mean? It means that systems at certain equilibrium describe by certain laws. For example, second law, semi-dynamics, which is not strictly speaking applicable to living fluids. So we have to study these new systems again. And perhaps this is the reason why this new field of living fluids is emerging as we speak. For any research field to form, we need three basic elements. We need concepts and methodologies. We need object of studies and we need tools. Object of studies are already mentioned. But we have to have something which we can handle, something which we can use in our laboratories and do reproducible thousands of experiments to repeat again and again, going back to our theoretical models, check results in the experiments and then we understand this object better and then we can apply our conclusions to other systems. For this reason the object has been spelled recently as a bacteria. Believe it or not, we live in the era of bacterial evolution. And why bacteria? For the problem of living fluids, this is intrinsically a scientific problem which is a multi-scale problem. We have to deal with a large range of scales from the size of the element to at least 1,000 times bigger, better, 10,000, that's even more. If we're dealing with bacteria typical size of 1 to 2 microns, in the drop of bacterial suspension, we're dealing with 10,000 elements. That gives us some reliable statistics. Can we do this with birds? I'm not talking about humans or financial markets. That's dangerous to experiment with. Tools, that's another great thing we need to have to form the field. And the recent progress in microscopy, in computer simulations and of course in genetic engineering, microbiology gave us tools which we couldn't dream about before, 10 years ago. So it's not coincidental that right now this field is emerging. Why bacteria? Independently of our requests for the large statistics. Bacteria is emerging as a central topic in many areas again, in the history of science, because they are active, they are able of many things which we never thought about. And what is interesting, the bacteria, there are plenty of bacteria around us. On the human body there are 39 trillion bacterial cells. And only 30 trillion human cells. So we as humans actually, more material than humans in that sense. So we have to take them seriously. But what is, yeah they're small, but they make it by numbers. We have to treat them with respect they deserve. And also bacteria is a resource, it's a resource of energy, it's a resource of materials, it's a resource of new ideas. And why? We're talking about living fluids and bacteria. Because living fluids, by definition, the properties of living fluids cannot be predicted and cannot be understood from the properties of the elements which constitute the fluid. We have to understand them as a group. And that's what we are. We cannot understand many things. You can see this bacteria, this is a drop of bacteria rotating coherently together. That's an example of collective motion. I will get back to this video. Collective memory. Each individual microorganism doesn't have much memory. They have brand new features. But collectively they have memory. And they remember what happened to them. Collective decision making. Bacteria possess amazing properties. They want, for example, a virulent attack only if they have numbers two weeks. And they tell each other about the numbers. How do they know about this? They communicate within the group. And this mechanism and the system Julie is going to talk about is called quantum sensing. That's a very important, that's a hard topic these days. We need to understand how virulent they attack because sometimes they resist antibiotics and we don't want that. But they can do many interesting things. We are talking about collective intelligence and we all think that intelligence has to do with brains. Many scientists these days don't think so. These brainless animals in large groups they show signatures of collective intelligence. And this is something that we can learn. We can learn other systems from studying bacteria not because we are just interested in bacteria. So what is this challenge about? This challenge is about understanding operational principles of living fluids for the development of new technologies, materials and environment. Because living fluids are us the inside and outside. Why? What for? There is another growing field which is clearly a field of the 21st century. It's called by inspired engineering. By inspired engineering, as names suggest, applied knowledge learned from the by systems to engineering, to applications in society, in the technologies. And there are many areas in by inspired engineering. One of them is biomimicry like the illustration here. This robotic arm really was inspired by the elephant trunk. But there are other things like self-organization for non-assembly and non-materials. Self-organization, as I mentioned, several of these areas are part of the research proposal on living fluids we are talking about today. This field is growing. This field started just recently. It started maybe a few years ago. This background dates back, I don't know, 16th century living books discovered the first material with this microscope. It's flat. Now it started growing. Centres for by inspired engineering, collective behavior, living fluids, start emerging. We have this institute at Harvard University five years ago. Can now institute for science and technology a large amount of this institute. By inspired materials coordinated by NASA in the U.S. In Munich, we have a research center which supports several large programs related to this proposal. So this is a really active research area which we want to be part of. Why here at the INU? The answer is quite simple. We have a very unique combination here on the campus to make this happen. We have expertise in medical research. We have expertise in plant biology, genetics, data visualization, medicine. This is full of arts, by the way. Physics of fluids, imaging and optics, nanofabrication. To make this happen, we don't need to go anywhere. We can do everything on the campus. We already started collaborations. The challenge will greatly help to enhance this collaboration and move forward. Let's get back to science. Self-organization is a fascinating object. Every time we see flock of birds or swarm of ants like shown here, we don't often see that. But they do self-organize. They self-organize quite similarly. It's very important to understand what is the mechanism behind? What drives them to do this circular motion, for example? I get back to this material flow in the drop of material suspension. You see, it starts as a fairly disordered motion. But very soon, they coordinate the emotion and it's a wound-like vortex. As a physicist, when I see this vortex, and actually, that's fascinating when I first read it, I couldn't believe my eyes a few years ago. When this motion starts, this liquid, this living fluid drops its viscosity by a factor of 10. This is superfluid, what we think is called superfluid, which is an effect which is observed at ultra-low temperatures close to the absolute zero. This is at the room temperature. First question we ask, can we do this without living fluids? Can we replace these little micro-organisms with artificial particles? Why we're confident we can do it? Because we were starting in turbulence, and turbulence is a strongly disordered flow. This is an example of that. If we wait a little bit, we see that this disorder and this chaos turns into the ordered motion. What is special about this ordered motion? It's the highest energy state. It's a wound vortex. The dissipation is the lowest that you can get. We are thinking about applying this method of converting chaos into orders of energy extraction, not just in bacterial flows. That's one of the projects, but the other one on the life-scale for the bow extraction from, say, coastal surface waves. We'll pass it on, because physicists are excited, but biologists have even better ideas of what we can do with bacteria and our understanding of collective behavior. Thank you. My name is Roliko Matizos. I'm from the Research School of Biology and I'm interested in the same kind of problems that Michael just talked about in physics. So, this is a plant, this is a weak plant, and it's just been pulled up from the soil. You just see some roots covered in a bit of dirt, right? Not very significant, you might say, but this little bit of dirt around the root is actually what underpins much of our crop production. And if you look closely, you can see that the plant just as a husk is really made up not just of the plant, but of lots and lots of microbes, lots and lots of bacteria that are sticking to the cells of the plants. And just like the microbiome in us, the plant microbiome is responsible for a lot of functions that the plant need to survive in their environment. And these ones are not just random bacteria that are occupying the surface of the root. They're very selective bacteria. The plant has selected these bacteria to come to the surface and provide certain functions for them. And I'll give you one example for how important this can be. This is a symbiosis we study in the lab. This is a root system of a legume like a pea or a bean or a lentil that you might be eating. If you look at the roots, they've got these little nodules attached to them. And if you look inside those nodules, they're inhabited by bacteria, by a very specific bacteria. And in this case, these bacteria carry out a very specific function. They convert atmospheric nitrogen out all the time into a form that living organisms can use. Ammonia. Here. This reaction underpins all the nitrogen input into biological systems. Half the nitrogen that is in your body is derived from this reaction by these bacteria inside nodules that have entered the food chain. The other half of the nitrogen in your body comes from synthetic nitrogen fertilizer that the farmers are throwing on the fields. That's about 100 million tons of nitrogen fertilizer. Most of them get washed out into waterways that pollute the great barrier for example. So really, we want all of that nitrogen to come from biological nitrogen fixation. The problem is that very few plants can form this interaction and make use of these bacteria. Most plants that we eat can't do that and that's why we need fertilizer. To demonstrate that here's a soybean plant that can interact with nitrogen fixing bacteria and here's the same one that has a very small mutation that stops it from making that interaction. So you can see the effect of these bacteria for the plants in the absence of nitrogen fertilizer. But it's not easy to engineer functional symbioses of plants with bacteria. There are things that have to happen. The first thing is that a plant that is surrounded by random selections of bacteria first actually orchestrates the bacterial behavior in the soil. It actively makes bacteria move towards the roots and it also selects these bacteria. The next thing that has to happen is that the bacteria have to organize themselves to become useful. The bacteria are not just randomly bumbling about in the soil, they talk to each other and that Michael already mentioned. They can coordinate their behavior, they can coordinate their movement, they can coordinate infection of the plant, they can all coordinate behaviors that are essential for nitrogen fixation and other functions. And if this doesn't happen, the bacteria are not useful for the plant and not useful for us. But one thing that has always been missing out of this equation is that we've always looked at these systems under very ideal conditions. We look at a real root growing in a real soil in Australia and if you think about the reality of soil fluid dynamics which obviously influences the motility and behavior of bacteria, you can see that this soil doesn't have very much fluid much of the time. And then the next day it rains and suddenly you've got too much. So we can't really predict the coordinated behavior of bacteria in a lot of environments that are in extreme conditions. So what can we do? For example, one example of applications would be to extend nitrogen fixing symbiosis to plants that can't form them. So we have to understand a very complex problem and that is how does bacterial behavior how is that coordinated by plant signals and by fluid dynamics of physics of the soil in the water. We can influence that chemical signals that can influence the behavior of the bacteria and one aspect of that is targeted manipulation of signals and targeted movement of signals into the soil by small vehicles that can move micro vehicles that can move in the soil and selectively change the fluid around roots into superfluous and we'll set our hand back to Michael. That's a fascinating idea when we first heard about it we thought, okay, micro vehicles can we help with these micro vehicles because we need to deliver this chemical signal from here and then we started thinking, yes, we are working on more or less the same phenomena. We were starting how little particles move in the disordered material or disordered flow internals for example and you can see on the first graph there's just a circle of particles at this right here and as you unexpected behaves exactly like Brownian particle it executes random walk. It doesn't have any relativity in it. We watch it for a long time and nothing happens. But then when we started the underlying fabric of the flow which drives this motion we figured out that we can design this particle and we can shape the particle to make it move along not exactly the straight line actually it's no longer Brownian walk it's a direct motion. These days fabricating these little micro vehicles is not a problem. With non-fabrication, micro-fabrication we can make them big numbers in no time. So after we heard about the idea from Uli about using this for the long biology we are now seriously working on this project. So this is just one example of the ideas which are emerging as a result of our college discussions in preparation for this grand challenge. So building bridges is an important thing especially in this university and it will probably bring more fruits. But I'm not saying that we understood everything about self-organization we have nothing else to do just what we thought so one of my colleagues discovered in the lab another example of self-organization and we have sleepless nights we will have two. Thank you very much. Thank you. Could I invite the team also to come to the front of the stadium and can I now open the floor for questions. There must be one question some question. Thank you there's one there. It's a really fascinating talk. I'm Deborah and again I declare my conflict of influence as being part of tip number two. I'm genuinely fascinated in self-organizing systems and I've actually used some underneath analytical analysis in my own research. So my question is self-organizing systems as I'm sure you are well aware are driven by sensitive dependence on initial conditions so they can be quite hard to predict like the weather. So how do you deal mathematically with those kinds of I'm sure you have a fantastic answer for that. Yes, initial conditions are only important if we are interested in the deterministic trajectory. We're talking statistics here. That's why we need tens of thousands of trajectories and we watch them with repeat experiments many, many times and we don't care about initial conditions. What we do care about are the boundary conditions. That's very important because boundary conditions determine how this little creature will self-organize. If they mean free path, if they can if their memory is long enough to go without turning right or left and reach the boundary, the boundary will go down and that's a very important part of this equation with the self-organization. And actually the video I showed you relies on exactly that principle. We exploit their finite memory in long correlation time of the flow under this day rough. I have a question about the outputs of the field of research that you're proposing. Obviously if you're looking at nitrogen fixation you could be looking at food security kinds of outputs. Do you have any other kinds of outputs that you might like to talk about? One of the other possible outcomes of this project will be that, like we you'll see this fascinating celebration of the new fruits and if you're supposing that you put a turbine in that you may be able to generate some kind of material and this will give you possible power for micro pumps which can precisely control how much volume for micro fruits. You want to inject it into new health applications and you may want to pump out some of the fruits out of the body and pumping some medicals and medicines as well as possible outcomes that we're looking at. I'm just going to go a little bit on the application, so I'm an engineer but I look a lot at blood and my focus is to look at how the reactivations of blood so we all know blood is everywhere but the most reactivations of blood is platelets. You can actually trigger them in a way that it can be it could be a way to seal up the wound in a much efficient fashion so by working with Kate and the team we'll be able to understand how platelets are organized within the body. May I have just one more to answer your question micro pumps this flow about me you can put a turbine and it will pump fluid sometimes we think it's what this little bacteria can do for us but in medical applications we need sometimes nanoliders to make it or microliters an hour we don't need much flow but we need precision and only micro pumps and micro motors can do this and this is a good potential candidate for developing these micro motors and micro pumps. Hello Igor Spreven, Romanian who you presented thank you it's really fascinating science my question is probably no doubt the similar research is conducted in the industrial laboratories right because really great potential potential great commercial how you structure your work with industrial laboratories is there any competition what's your role what's your relative position in potential competition in this area so I think why is this that you cannot five years ago I was there when they started they looked at Biomins 5 engineering from a very broad sense I think from our group we look at specifically on collective behaviour and how collective behaviour transcends itself from the physical principle to the engineering devices we can make to the translational so that's how we are different and that's how we think we'll be better. Any final questions I'm conscious of the time we are a little over if not please join with me in thanking your question