Instant Genius - How future materials will help save the planet

Episode Date: April 27, 2025

Everywhere we look we’re surrounded by materials of all kinds – from the fabrics we use to make our clothing, to the bricks and mortar we use to build our homes and places of work, to the complex transistors and circuits we use to build our digital devices. Life as we known it simply wouldn’t be possible without them. But what will the materials of the future look like? In this episode, we catch up with Mark Miodownik, professor of materials and society based at University College London, best-selling author and veteran presenter of many BBC television and radio science documentaries. He tells us how the advent of materials such as paper, bronze and ceramics transformed early humans into a truly technological species, how nano-machines are already showing promising results in several areas of medicine, and how we may one day be living in buildings that can generate their own electricity and repair themselves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals, because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio, and focal. Streaming has made music more accessible than ever, but true listening is about more than ease. It's about quality.

British audio experts name audio, alongside French acoustic specialist focal, Combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius and bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you'll hear a world-leading scientist and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, Commissioner.

editor, the BBC Science Focus. Everywhere we look, we're surrounded by materials of all kinds. From the fabrics we use to make our clothing, to the bricks and mortar we use to build our homes and places of work, to the complex transistors and circuits we use to build our digital devices. Life as we know it simply wouldn't be possible without them. But what will the materials of the future look like? In this episode, we catch up with Mark Mirdovnik,

Professor of Materials and Society based at University College London, best-selling author and veteran presenter of many BBC television and radio science documentaries. He tells us how the advent of materials such as paper, bronze and sphramics transformed early humans into a truly technological species, how nanomachines are already showing promising results in several areas of medicine, and how we may one day be living in buildings that can generate their own electricity and repair themselves. So you're a material scientist. So a lot of people perhaps don't know what this is.

You know, you can study of GCSE in physics, biology, chemistry, but not material science. So what exactly, as far as I know? No, you're right. It is kind of annoying that because materials are everywhere. Like, I mean, just look around you. You're wearing them. You're sitting on them. You're standing on them.

You know, all of our tech is made of materials. All of our houses are transport, our road. Imagine taking all those materials away and we're left shivering naked. I mean, we're not human as we would really recognize ourselves. We wouldn't survive. So materials, you know, comes before physics chemistry. It's like much more ancient, you know, like we, in fact, the ages of civilization are named after materials.

You know, it's the Stone Age, you know, in the Copper Age and the Bronze Age and the Iron Age and so on. So it's baffling to me that the first thing you learn in school in the science world is not material science. It's totally baffling. So let's stick with this history thing a bit then. So going way back, like, as you mentioned, our ancestors were in a way sort of fantastic material scientists. So we've got sort of pottery, like you say, ironwork, bronze work, paper, glass.

Like the list is pretty much endless. But can we sort of nail down some specific points in time where significant change really happened? Yeah, well, so you've got the ancient times. And let's say the Stone Age, you know, you can go back a million years and find stone tool. So like, and this is the kind of flint, you know, the ability to kind of make stones into cutting tools is kind of in the archaeological record. You can see it very clearly. But the stuff you can't see that's disappeared, it was probably there too. So for instance, it's kind of clear that our common ancestors, which are sort of monkeys and apes, you know, they already understand wood.

They already use wood in a way to kind of modulate their environment. And we must have been doing that too. And the idea that we weren't doing that seems fanciful. So we were kind of using wood for shelter, using wood to make fire, which is a big moment in time because that then makes the possibility of the next jump happen, which is that maybe fire is just controlled to cook food, first of all, and that turns out to give you much more calories. It's not just more taste.

And there's a big explosion in the human brain around that time. And that's thought to be due to the fact there's many more calories in, so you can dedicate a lot more energy to thinking. You don't have to search for food as much because you're getting more calories. So those things are happening in the material world. And then there's this moment, this incredible moment, which we're not sure exactly when it happened. But, you know, this is like, you know, 15, 20,000 years ago where someone somewhere, and, you know, there's evidence that it's in the Middle East, puts a kind of weird colored stone in the fire,

like a copper sort of greeny blue stone. And next day or next week, they're looking at the fire and they find the metal copper in there. So they've transformed a stone into a metal. And before that, metals are not in their lives. There are a few that come from space. Meteorites do land and we know that they use them as kind of jewelry and stuff. But once you realize that the rocks all around you have hidden kind of material. in them and they are insanely useful, then this opens up, you know, the kind of technological

bounty that happens. So we get the copperade because metals are the best tool material. They're better than stone because you can keep reshaping them and remodding them and, you know, remelting them. And with a stone, they're great, but once you've broken it, you've broken it. So imagine you go to the, you know, the wood with a stone axe, which they did, and you're felling trees to make shelters, which we know they did, and you're making string and rope, which we know they did. But then you suddenly have a copper knife or a copper axe, and you are much more powerful, you're much more versatile. And I'm afraid it was also a better military. It was actually a better. And that's the drive to make it even better was the Bronze Age, because it turns out

copper is great. You can mould it and you can sharpen it and you, you know, it's a very versatile tool material. But if you add tiny amounts of things like zinc or arsenic, you get bronze and they worked out how to do this. And then you get something that's 10 times stronger. And so there's a massive kind of just expansion. And the Bronze Age is a very, you know, you can see it in the archaeological literature. It really allows things like the pyramids to be built, right?

So you have copper and bronze tools. You have massive cities hewn out of rocks. How do you shape rocks without metal tools? You just can't. So, you know, this idea of a permanent city, permanent roads, and the Romans, you know, and all of, you know, the Chinese, you know, incredible versatility in building these enormous civilisation, this comes out of metal tools. And it's really impressive.

Along the way, of course, you know, they're using fire to take clay and make it into ceramics. And what's amazing about that is not just, you know, you can drink out of these things like cups, like I've got one in my hand. But you can have containers. Now, it's very hard to underestimate the importance of containers, because if you want to survive winters or you want to survive droughts, or you want to survive periods of time where you're without food or water, you need to store.

And you need to store in places that are not, that rats and other vermin and things are not going to get into. And that turned out to be a big problem to solve. And in the end, you know, these ancient cultures like the Greeks, You made these enormous amphora, you know, the store, first of all of oil. Well, olive oil, why olive oil? Because it was absolutely the most important material in their lives. Like it was the thing that gave them light in the evenings because they had oil lamps.

It gave them food. It was a currency to pay their taxes in. So all sorts of things happen when you can make a big container and store things like olive oil. And then, yeah, then of course, once you work out that there are so many materials you can make. then of course our ancestors being clever people no less clever than us right we sort of like to think ourselves as clever than them it's just we have we're building on their on their their achievements and so we've inherited all these amazing materials like paper invented by the chinese or the compass magnetic compass invented by the chinese allowing you to navigate an incredible magic material and that's

where the word magnet comes from magic oh i didn't know that yes so like it's just it's such a brilliant subject this because it really explains how it is that we came from sort of naked apes to what we are today, which is these material loving people and making people. So let's fast forward then to the current time. And one material that's in the news often, or class of materials, is rare earth elements. So what are they and why are they so important? Coming back to the rocks, so what do the rocks hold, I mean, basically, everything in your life is made either from rocks or from natural materials like trees. And that's the two things we get our materials from. And the rocks, you know, we live on a planet with lots of rocks. And they hold about 100 elements we've worked out.

So the chemistry comes along much later than material science. And chemistry sort of says, okay, look, actually, what is everything made of? It's made of atoms. And so rocks are made of atoms? Yes. metals are made of atoms, yes, your clothes are made of atoms, yes. Well, it's kind of a big mind-blowing moment in my primary school education. I seem to remember that. It's suddenly, oh my God, my body is made of atoms. Yes. And which type of atoms?

Are they mark atoms? No, they're carbon atoms, their hydrogen atoms. So working out what's the ingredients of all of these things. It turns out there's about a hundred of these types of atom, and we arrange them in something called the Pirate table, which either tyrannizes people at school or a la. I mean, it's quite confusing. actually. But let's take those 100 atoms and start thinking about which ones are most valuable

to us. Well, of course you've got gold and that's a currency and it has lots of technological advantages. And you think like iron or copper we talked about in terms of our evolution of our, you know, tools. But now we have electronics. And so the electronic atoms, what are they? Well, it turns out lithiums, one of them, really important for batteries, cobalt. And they're these rare Earth atoms. A, they're misnamed. They're not rare. There's actually a lot of them in the Earth's crust, but they're kind of hard to get hold of. They're not everywhere. So they tend to be mined in particular places like China or Australia or Canada. They turn out to be things like neodymium. Now, wow, you may never have heard this atom neodymium, but it's got a very interesting magnetic properties. Like if you want to make the strongest permanent magnets around, you have to have neodemium. It's, you may have. It's, you may never have heard this atom neodemium. It's, but it's got a very interesting magnetic properties. It's, it's It's the one. And so great. We want to make some, why do we need magnets?

Well, it turns out if you want to get electricity from the wind, you have to have a wind turbine. What's it doing? It's rotating a coil of wire around a neodynium magnet. And if you want to get the most efficiency of that system, you need a lot of a neodymium. And so this rare earth element is important. And then, okay, now we want to make the transition

from petrol cars to electric cars. Guess what? We need an electric motor. How do you make an electric motor really efficient? you need a neodymium magnet in it. These rare earth elements, and it's not just neodymium, are peppered into the technology of what we see as the kind of green transition technologies.

And you can't do without them, solar cells, you know, wind turbines, electric cars, our phones, you know, we need them. And if we want to live in that world, which we do. So presumably they're a sort of finite limited resource. Well, hmm, now is that true? I think there's sort of two futures that we can envisage. One is that, so we're going to have 10 billion people by 2050. And let's say everyone wants an electric car and renewable energy and phones and laptops and so on, right, headphones.

Then we need all this neodymium. And probably there's enough for everyone in the Earth's crust, right? But the problem is that to get it, you have to use a lot of energy. And at the moment, that energy is fossil fuel energy. And that means that you have to heat the planet, basically. in order to get the stuff out. There is actually, if we're going to go down to net zero and not stop doing that, then this stuff is not going to be so easy to get hold about a cheap enough price.

So it really is down to the price. If you're willing to pay a lot of money, like people offer gold, then you can dig a lot of rock up and get a lot of gold out. But it's incredibly inefficient. And if you want to do that for Neodeon and all the other rare earths and for the lithium and all the other things, it turns out that we'll just, we'll boil the planet. So it's more the energy and the pollution. So the other thing I haven't mentioned in mining is that actually when you mine rock,

you have to, you know, imagine taking a whole mountain just crushing it up. That's essentially what mining is. You then have to kind of take what is a tiny proportion of that to get your neodea amount. The rest of it, what do you do with? Turns out you have to wash it and you have to constantly sort of put it somewhere. And of course there are people who live around there who rely on all the water and their water gets kind of polluted by this process. And if you don't do something about it, you can really poison them all.

You poison if you're not careful, all the wildlife and all the biodiversity. So the more you ramp up mining, turns out the more you impact the health of the planet and the community. So even if you have kind of renewable energy, it's not the whole story. And that's why recycling these materials and conserving them is much better if we can do it and still provide 10 billion people with the stuff they want to live in. I mean, that feels like a given. Why should we, in a rich country, be more privileged than someone else? So that's the task at hand.

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This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. With over 100 years of combined expertise, Name and Focal have been bringing music to listeners just as the artist intended. Since day one, this mantra has shaped every innovation in hi-fi design, technology and acoustic engineering, balancing craftsmanship and tradition with pioneering thinking. Name Audio pushes cutting-edge technology to ensure digital precision whilst sustaining Pratt, pace, rhythm and timing, the elusive quality that makes music feel alive and gives it emotional texture. Today, in partnership with French acoustic specialist focal,

name audio creates systems that deliver exceptional sound and unforgettable listening experiences at home. Try it for yourself at a focal powered by name boutique. Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. So sort of sticking with energy then, obviously it's one of the biggest problems facing the human race at the moment. So what role can material science play in this? So things like solar cells, what sort of advances can we look forward to in this sort of area?

Yeah, so I mean at the moment, one of the big moves towards renewable energy is use of solar cells. And we only have to harvest 1% of the light coming from the sun to meet all our energy needs. So think of that. 1%. That doesn't seem so hard. And we completely can go off fossil fuels. Well, not quite complete. There's a few other things that need to be put in place.

But essentially in terms of energy. So, wow, how do they work? They sound like magic. Turns out there are these sheets of silicon. And then there are silicon chips, basically, on a vast scale, like on a kind of building-sized scale. You've seen these solar farms that cover acres and hectares. And that's getting hold of this element called silicon, which is very plentiful. But in order to get it to actually do this trip where when light hits it, it converts the light into electricity, you have to do all sorts of very sophisticated.

manufacturing. And that's the same manufacturing that has to happen to make a silicon chip that is the brain of your phone and the brain of your computer and drives the whole internet. Like we rely on silicon chips completely. So we're very good at it. It works really well, but we can't make them cheap enough yet to compete with cheap oil everywhere. And I think that's one of the big challenges. And people say, well, let's make a cheaper version. Like, can't we make a cheaper version? Well, actually, it's really like you need a billion dollar plant to these things. So it's not a, it's not a cheap operation. But there are cheaper solar materials coming along, and they're called perovskites. And they're not just silicon chips, which are

stiff, you know, these big board-like things. You see black board-like things you see. These are flexible things. You could wear these, right? You can weave them into your clothes. You can weave them. So this is very exciting. And this is one of the big areas where a breakthrough in material science has already happened. I mean, these materials exist. And they are very efficient, or at least is almost as efficient as silicon. They have their own problems in terms of like a durability is one of them, and they have elements in them that are quite difficult to get hold of as well. But I think this is a big area, which you'll see huge improvement in the next decade, definitely.

Yeah, so I think one interesting idea here is architecture. So can you envisage a time we'll be able to build a building that generates its own electricity? Yeah, I think that's coming. think that's that's kind of like it's obviously possible because trees do it right you're going to trees 100 meters high right and they do it so we can do it like we're not we're clever enough to do it it's not whether we can do it or not it's whether we can afford it or not like it's an at the moment very expensive thing to do and the question is can we do it and be competitive with other building methods and I think we can do it and it all depends on us realizing that when you invest in a

building, you should be also kind of investing in it, harvesting its own energy so we're sustainable and we can, you know, it can last the test of time and support us. But there's, there's other, it's not just harvesting energy for electricity we can do. There's these things called them photochromic materials, and they are materials that change color with heat. And so we can already do this. You can already make the roof of a building white and reflective of light in the summer. And then in the winter, that same roof changes to to dark and absorbs energy. So all the light that hits on it, you can absorb into the building and you can, you don't

need so much electricity to heat it. So imagine a world and it's like it's not impossible. Imagine a world where, you know, you have a terrace of houses or some high rise in your city. And in the winter, it changes colour like the autumn trees. That's a great future that we could look forward to. So we've kind of touched on it there, but a big field of research. research at the moment is smart materials. So can you tell us a bit about what we mean by saying the phrase smart material? Yeah, smart materials is this idea that a material, well, it basically

means that we haven't got materials that are as smart as that now. As soon as we have them, we no longer call them smart, we just take them for granted. So in a way, glass is a smart material, right? Let light through. Hooray, we can have a window without the wind coming in. Oh, now we don't think of it as a smart material, but it is a smart material. It's a, you know, very smart material. Ditto solar cells, right? Oh, we can harvest electricity from the sun. Hooray! Now we just think of it as a solar cell.

Yeah. So smart materials tend to be these things that do things we haven't seen before. And actually, the things that are coming are self-repair. So materials that can heal themselves when they get damaged, they already exist. There are paints now that you can put on cars that when they're scratched, overnight, the scratch is healed. Wow. And we are working in many other labs around the world, working on more sophisticated versions. of that. So the idea is that the smart materials of the future, we call them animate materials

because they're kind of intelligent and they have the ability to move and change. These animate materials will make a bridge out of one of these and if it gets hit by a big storm as a result, climate change for instance, instead of us having to physically go, put scaffolding up, inspect the damage, you know, apply for funding, be refused, apply, refuse to apply. I wait until 20 years later where it's crumbling and everyone's in outright. Instead of that, which is what we currently do, this bridge will heal itself. It knows it's cracked.

And over time, maybe it'll take a few months, maybe it'll take a year, but over time it will heal itself. And these technologies exist already. They're just not breaks. They're quite limited in their kind of healing capacity and they are expensive. So another area is nanomaterials

that a lot of people get excited about. So what's going on there, you know? Yeah, well, we talked about atoms, like everything's made of atoms. And, okay, so they kind of sound like these magic ingredients. But actually, what material science shows you is that's not the only thing you need to make something as marvelous as a smartphone or as marvelous as a skyscraper or a jet engine, whatever. These are marvelous things.

But they're not just about choosing the right atoms. Turns out you can just choose the right atoms. And the way they're assembled inside the material, either makes them amazing and they can harvest light or they can resist very high stresses. or they can't, they're weak. And so what material science over the years has worked out is that when you look inside, let's say, a metal, what you find actually is it's made of crystals.

And it's just like the crystals on your, you know, on a ring, like just like a diamond crystal. Like that's what's inside a metal. So that was like, blows our mind number one. And then the crystals themselves have internal structures. And you keep zooming in, keep zooming in. All these structures make a difference. the strength. They all make a difference to the electronic properties. They all make a difference

to the magnetic properties. If you change them, you can do these smart things. You can make these incredible properties. But if you get it wrong, the whole thing falls apart. So it's not just the atoms, it's how they're arranged. And there's this particular scale, which is about like 10 atoms big, called the nanoscale. And that scale has a very specific property, which is that at that scale, those atoms seem to kind of operate as if they have, um, some power to self-assemble themselves. Like they, you don't have to put them where they need to be.

They will arrange themselves into the right properties. And so there's a, there's this nanoscale which everyone's very excited about because basically it means if you break something at nanoscale, it will self-heal. And you can make things that make themselves. But also, it has weird properties.

Like there's just load of properties that involve plasma states and quantum states that allow you to do weird color change, is that in a solution which allow you then to give someone a diagnostic for a disease, which literally is just take some saliva and mix it with this nanoparticle inside the solution and it will tell you whether you've got a particular disease or not. And so those kind of tricks at the nanoscale and controlling the nanoparticles are really opening up a lot of diagnostics in medicine, for instance. Yeah, so I think sort of sticking with that, anyone around my age would have seen the movie

inner space where they shrink a pilot down and he goes into somebody's body. But how, you know, is that realistic? Can we make these little nanobots? Obviously, we won't shrink ourselves, but can we make little medical nanobots? I mean, we're already doing it. You know, the vaccines now, you know, they're essentially little bots. You know, they're bots that are, have a particular function in a cell and they go, and you put them in, you inject them in, and off they go to the cell and that they do their thing. They kind of initiate this response, this immune response. So we are putting nanoparticles in or nanomachines.

And machines is probably the right word. I mean, I know that sounds weird, but we think of a machine at our scale as something with wheels or cogs or things that, you know, but molecules are so complex that they are really little machine. They do things. They can move from one place to the other. they can unlock a membrane pore and open it to another machine. So the idea of that something being a mechanism inside a cell,

well, cells, yeah, they are these complex fluid machines. And so us understanding that, the nanoscale, is opening up a lot of opportunities, also dangers. I mean, I think with a lot of power comes a lot of responsibility. And I think this is where all these debates about whether nanotechnology is safe should be taken seriously in my view. I feel like, you know, we often in science kind of stumble in to some very powerful technique or way of doing things and we rush ahead, you know, because what's on offer to

save, you know, things like, you know, curing some cancers, you know, targeted drugs at the cancer is all this nanotechnology stuff. And yet, you know, you want to, obviously you want to move ahead with a cancer treatment, but you also want to understand what the risks are too, right? So I think it's a very exciting area, but I think it's so powerful, we should be also quite careful. Yeah, so let's stick with medicine then. So another really fascinating thing is bioprinting.

So how does that work and, you know, how far along are we? Yeah, so 3D printing, people may not be aware of that, but essentially the idea is that, well, it's not an idea, it's a technology. So you basically take a material and, imagine you use 3D print you want to the 3D printer a toothbrush you know what does that mean to 3D print it Well, imagine a toothbrush And imagine you're going to just print the bottom of it first.

So you just print a material like a bit of plastic, a blob of plastic in the shape of the bottom of your toothbrush. And then you shift it up and you print the next bit and the next bit and the next bit and the next bit and the next bit. And then finally you get to near the brush end, right? And you need to print a different material there in the shape of these little bristles. So you print those and you print those.

Pretty soon you've got a toothbrush. And we can do that now in the lab. We can do it in our lab. So that works. So then people got to thinking, okay, I can print a toothbrush, I can print a plug, I can print a door handle, these are totally trivial things. But could we print an organ? Like, could we print cells? And then because they're a person's cell, so I take cells from your body or my body, and I take stem cells, for instance, and I say, look, I've got a kidney problem and I want to have a new kidney.

Okay, well, can we get your cell, stem cells, and can we make them into a kidney cell? answer we can. It turns out it's actually in the lab. What you do is you kind of create an environment called a scaffold, which is like a tiny set of kind of like almost like a porous mesh. And the cells, you take them out of your body, you put them in this mesh, you give it the right conditions of humidity and temperature and you give it a bit of food. And these cells will proliferate. And if you get it all right, you'll get a little kidney called a sort of organelle. And then, okay, but, hold on a minute, can you, I can't possibly be possible. put into my body and work?

Answer, no, it can't yet. But actually, baby steps have worked. So you can print someone's earlobe and implant that into their ear. So imagine you have a deformed ear or you have an injury and you lose your ear. We're already doing that, right? 3D printing someone's ear

in the shape of their actual ear. So that's the beauty of this technology. Like everyone's different shape, different size. So you have a nose, you want a 3D print a nose, sort of no problem. 3D print an ear lobe, no problem. And the question is, how far can we go down that road?

Big open question. But my feeling is that we can go probably quite a long way down that road. So implants of, we already know about hip implants. They work really well. And they've really transformed people's lives. You go from not being able to walk and immobile or two. There are two million hip implants every year.

And they just release people into, from immobile state and painful state into back into normal. So can we do the same with, things like people who need a new organ or a new part of an organ or just a new cheekbone answer the cheekbone's doable now and is happening

the earlobes are happening the organs they've got to be plumbed in they've got to work straight away in the body much trickier much trickier but definitely loads of work going on that area so you mentioned their hip replacements

which are you know like you say pretty common these days but what about other things that we can do to help because the population's aging, you know, sort of globally, really. So what can we do to sort of extend our healthy lifespan? Yeah, well, I think there is the kind of the failure of major organs, which at the moment is dealt with with transplants, but that's not going to work on a major scale because we won't have enough.

But there's also the kind of breakage of bones and the, you know, just the aging of that infrastructure of your body, let's say, so you get scuratic arteries. And those technologies kind of diagnostics tools to work out what's wrong and what's kind of in the sense decaying in your body. They're very, very advanced. So we can look forward to sort of knowing more about what is going wrong. And the question is, can we then do anything about it? In the case of the structural bits, the bones, the hips, you know, the shoulders, great. In things like the collagen of your knees, right, these are areas where I think you're going to get a lot of progress in the next 10 years.

there's a huge amount of work going on there. Those kind of improvements are going well. And then another technology I think will be key is that you're going to need some sort of exoskeleton as a kind of additive technology. And at the moment, people's exoskeleton is a walking stick or a kind of frame and it's unsightly, it's not ideal, it's difficult in stairs.

You know, it doesn't have a lot of social capital. people don't want to walk around with a walking stick. So our idea is what you need is a fabric that you wear underneath your clothes. That is the equivalent of that. That stiffens around your legs. When you need to make a step, it will stiffen and strengthen that muscle, give it support. But then when you're swinging your leg to do the next step, it then gives you the ability to do that. So imagine, it's a bit like a lycra garment.

It knows you're about to make a step. So it will stiffen and then relax, stiffen and then relax, stiffen and relax. And how will they be powered? Well, probably at the beginning, small batteries and then hopefully harvest energy from your own body. So I think those kind of technologies, those sort of wearable tech, are really coming to help with older age and more mobility. Yeah, so we've discussed an awful lot there. So sort of by way of summary, how optimistic are you that material scientists can solve these problems? We can solve them. I, you know, go a long way to solving them. I think the thing

that's holding us back is just funding and, and the equality of who benefits. So I think at the moment, a lot of tech money is going into AI and AI will help us make new materials, no doubt, about it. So in some ways, it will accelerate this and be a benefit of humanity. But so much money is going into AI to advance that field, that it's coming out. Of course, there's only a certain amount of investment money around. Right. So it's, it's displacing money that would go into these tech. And you can't, it doesn't matter how good your computation is, you actually need physical

materials. Like, you know, like you can't AI yourself from being hungry. Like you can't AI yourself from being sheltered from the world. You can't AI yourself. You actually need physical materials to get you around. better bikes, better cars, better scooters, better clothes, better health check. And those funding are all drying up, unfortunately, because everyone is so excited about the money-making opportunities of AI.

It's not intelligence, it's not our ability to do it, I don't think. It's just that we lack funds. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Professor Mark Miodovnik. If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform. If you'd like to see our presenters and guests in person,

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