The Power of Invisible Worlds

“We often think there is a clear dividing line between those who seek the spiritual and those that seek science, but science is just as much involved with hidden forces and things we cannot see with the naked eye alone, as those of us looking inward. The point is how you look, and as I always say, when we look with love, it's the best torch to take with you as you venture into the dark of the unknown.”
— Mickie Kent

In my previous post "How Big Is Your Love?" I touched upon science and the "unseen", notably over the search for dark matter that still goes on. It's evidence that the existence of something cannot always be proved with sight alone.

For example, it was a scientist, not a photographer, who first showed us a world we had never seen before, by developing high speed cameras to reveal a hitherto hidden reality. Harold Edgerton, a professor of electrical engineering, even developed a camera that could photograph the first moments of an atomic explosion, with exposures of 100 millionth of a second. He first used strobes to study electrical motors, but very quickly extended their use to photographing everyday objects. With those kinds of images which we see today that capture to the second movement or explosions not visible to the naked eye, it opened a window to us that had previously moved quickly for us to see.

Scientists have constantly tried to shine a light into these hidden worlds all around us that we usually can't see - including some we have only just become aware of. In getting to grip with these hidden forces, they have explored invisible worlds to help us tune up our own senses to allow us to see, hear and feel things which are normally beyond us. And they have unearthed an astonishing cornucopia of wonders.

From the ecosystem of microbes and liquids with gravity-defying powers to taking the plunge into the nanosphere where things are not always what they seem.

The brave new world of the nano

Twenty years ago it looked like nanotechnology could change our lives. We were promised an era of atomic machines, crafted from individual atoms. Instead all we got was PR stunts, and the closest thing to a nanobot was an animated Atomic Man. But now, nanotech is getting real. Today scientists are looking for practical applications and many of them have turned to nature for inspiration.

Delving into the nanoworld to see what tricks we can steal from nature - from an amazing new way of beating some of our biggest killers to the question of are we ever going to be invisible - going small in science seems to unleash great benefits. But does "nanotechnology" actually have a specific definition?

Experts in the field of biotech, biomedical materials and regenerative medicine, say its something we can think of in a couple of ways. It's a particular size scale - so you could think of it as being a thousand folds smaller than a human hair, for example. But it's also about how different materials act differently once they're at the nanoscale.

This seems especially true for regenerative frameworks, essentially scaffolding for tissue and bones too rebuild themselves. The idea is that if you've had, for example, a fracture that can't heal or a knee had got damaged, or maybe you've had a heart attack and part of your heart has died, you want to be able to help the body regenerate itself, because it won't always heal spontaneously. Thus, the sort of things researchers in this field have been doing is to think about the kind of things we have in nature - such as the tissues in your body, which are cells surrounded by a nanoscale mesh of tissue which has lots of different things like proteins and fibres - and make materials to help our bodies heal quicker.

One such example is the production of a gel-type structure called hydragel - a water-swollen network of material - held together by nanoscale building blocks, little zippers that hold the material together which you can hold cells to put into the body. Depending on how it is designed, the belief is this will trigger the cells of the body to perform whatever necessary action it wasn't previously performing to heal. Scientists can add lots of features; it is described a sort of blank slate that you can tailor to the task at hand.

It is still a long from the clinic, but the aim is thereby, onto something as tiny as a drop of gel, at the very smallest level, for researchers to be able to encode information that will make the body's own cells grow back - cartilage in the knee, or wherever necessary. Starting as a liquid, it is injecting into the requisite area of the body, with the ability to fill a complex space, and within about five minutes become a gel, fill the volume and help in regeneration.

In other nano-developments, scientists are manipulating nature to make materials stronger and more resistant. For example, scientists have created a surface structure inspired by the lotus leaf. Intricate patterns engineered at the nanoscale mimic the natural structure and achieve the same hydrophobic effect. In short, drop some water on it, and it bounces off. Spoons coated with the same stuff can repel water, or materials can be self-cleaning as the droplets of water rather than being soaked into the fabric, roll about over it to collect the dust on the surface.

Some believe that the technology can do even more ground-breaking stuff by creating new advanced materials. Copying natural nanotechniques is one thing, but some researchers are in effect learning how to play God, by tweaking nature's building methods to create entirely new stuff. For example, the iridescent colours in butterfly wings and berries are based on the special way their nanostructures reflect light.

Scientists have made their own versions, to create the same beautiful iridescence you see in the natural world. The complex structures that make these colours could be exploited to make inks that never fade. Or tag banknotes with patterns that are impossible to forge. It's easy to make; you provide the right conditions and it makes itself. And that provides a powerful paradigm for working at nanoscale - we can copy nature's self-assembly mechanisms and tweak them to create entirely new synthetic materials.

A miracle material that will change the world?

Scientists say an intriguingly named material known as graphene could revolutionise technology and make the internet 100 times faster. It's been hailed as the miracle material of the 21st Century, but what is graphene and why is it so important?

Theoretically possible since the 1940s, graphene was discovered – and produced – by Konstantin Novoselov and Andre Geim at the University of Manchester in 2004. Both scientists won the Nobel Prize in 2010 for their pioneering work, and since then the race has been on to make graphene a commercially viable industrial material.

Almost a decade later that race is well under way, and along the way scientists are discovering even more miracle properties of graphene, uncovering an array of possibilities that could change the world around us.

Two hundred times stronger than steel, graphene sheets are described as 'chicken wire made of carbon atoms'. It's a near-transparent sheet of carbon graphite molecules just one atom in thickness.

Graphene does have problems with its on-off state if it is to replace silicon in transistors, but a team of scientists at the University of Manchester made a significant breakthrough, demonstrating that graphene can be made magnetic, and that this magnetism switched on and off at the press of a button.

With magnetic materials so integral to electronic gadgets using hard disks, memory chips and sensors - all use miniature magnetic components - this opens the doors for new magnetic devices that are atomically thin and can be easily controlled externally with the application of ordinary electric fields.

Scientists say that graphene-related patents suggest the wonder material could soon be used in smartphones, electric vehicles, aircraft, medical diagnostic devices, sports equipment, renewable energy systems and buildings, with a key to revolutionise telecommunications. Researchers have already demonstrated incredible speeds over 100 times the current speed of the internet backbone in transmitting information.

At present, optical switches, which route information over optical cables, respond at a rate of a few picoseconds – around a trillionth of a second. With graphene, it's believed this can be improved to one hundred femtoseconds, which is almost 100 times quicker than at present.

This tendency for self-organisation is also being exploited to create other advanced materials. Carbon nanotubes were discovered 20 years ago in samples of soot. Each cylindrical lattice of atoms is extremely strong and light, but on their own they're of limited use.

Carbon is one of the lightest elements, and when structured in a hexagonal way of connecting to itself, the bonds that hold the carbon together are really strong intermolecular bonds, so you have strength at a molecular level with extremely light elements. The dream of stringing them together to make a useful fibre has eluded nano-engineers for a long time, but now scientists are perfecting a new technique to spin nanotubes into a useful fibre.

For a long time carbon nanotubes were lab curiosities, beautiful, but invisible and impractical, but now a scientists can produce a thread of carbon nanotubes into an exotic material, super fine and super strong, with a practical purpose in areas such as engineering. The properties of the material far eclipse materials like silk or steel, or Kevlar or even carbon fibre composites; this stuff is lighter, stronger, more flexible.

This means that the next generation of bridges, cars - even planes - could well be made of this stuff. It's also a great conductor, and carbon could potentially replace high-cost copper wires as a much cheaper, and lighter solution. Theoretically it sounds like the most wonderful structure around, and if it becomes a working reality, proponents say its potential is limitless.

The theory of "self-assembly", where if you create the right kind of environment - whether it be the right temperature, materials, mixtures etc. - they will fold themselves into these useful shapes also makes this technology very appealing. Pioneers in biomedical engineering say that much of chemistry is about self-assembling, and DNA is a very famous example of nanoscale self-assembly. The applications for such technology can be applied in biology, material science and many areas of developing science.

For instance, in cancer therapy there is research in using nanotechonology to target tumours, by designing materials to be able to do that as accurately as possible, without needing conventional surgery. Investigation into such exciting technologies shows there are worlds invisible to the eye, but that once discovered can be used in ways that previously were not possible. It's a real glimpse into the future thanks to the invisible worlds at work around us.

Hiding in the world of invisible fields

Shining a spotlight on large, unseen worlds, has also meant that scientists have looked at invisibility itself. Ask most people what superpower they'd most like to have, top of the list has got to be invisibility. Ever since Plato, we have been telling each other tales of how cool it would be to disappear in the crowd. But the idea has remained resolutely in the realm of science-fiction, and our fantasies of doing incredible things whilst invisible - like opening doors unseen - have remained just fantasy.

However, some believe that science fact might have finally arrived for invisibility - just not in the way we might have expected it. Creating metals invisible to microwaves, and shields that bend light around objects as advanced camouflage are some of the concepts being put forward, and if these developments manage to escape the laboratory out into the real world, then it will mean changes in all our lives.

The refractive index

In his book about an invisible man, HG Wells used the refractive index, which is the amount or speed at which light is bent as it goes into a different medium - for example water. Thus, if you have a medium with a very similar refractive index to water, it will appear invisible because it wouldn't bend the light. A polymer that came out of the florist industry for absorbing lots of water - good for putting into flower vases to keep them hydrated - can do exactly that.

Scientists believe invisibility in real life will happen, as there are already existing prototypes of invisibility shields, for example, which do what they say on the label. Basically, light is diverted around an object to make it appear invisible to the human eye - and there are materials that can do that called "metamaterials" - but as of 2013 these invisibility shields cannot be made big enough to cover a person, pioneers in this field have managed to make microwaves invisible. However the technology is increasingly fast as our understanding grows.

It's reasonable to say that being able to achieve an invisibility of sorts on one part of the scale, means it is only a matter of time until we can create shields for larger masses. On the electromagnetic spectrum, from microwaves, being able to move up to infra-red, which is heat and the same type of electromagnetic radiation but a bit smaller wavelength, doesn't seem impossible. Then we have visible light, which we see, and then ultraviolet, which we can't, X-ray and gamma ray - and if the science community can achieve invisibility of sorts back at the other end of the scale with microwaves, then moving it up to the visible doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility.

The electromagnetic spectrum is the range of all possible frequencies of electromagnetic radiation, not to be confused with the "electromagnetic spectrum" of an object, which means the characteristic distribution of electromagnetic radiation emitted or absorbed by that particular object.

When we talk of unseen worlds, and we look at the electromagnetic spectrum, we only see the small bit visible to us. Look at the diagram above and see just how much is out of the line of vision of our naked eye and it is incredible. There are some animals that see in the infra-red such as snakes, which is the sort of invisible light that is basically heat, and in the ultraviolet that we can't see, bees can see in that. Plants use ultraviolet pigments to guide bees in; it's a type of way the plant can communicate with the bee to direct it to the pollen - and so the fields we can't see have all sorts of advantages for those creatures that can. Just because we can't see something, doesn't mean it's not there.

In terms of using technology to help us delve into invisible world and what we see or don't see around us, a piece of old 1950s technology was the Geiger counter to detect radiation, for example, while many other gadgets to detect electromagnetic fields to our very own brainwaves have all been developed to get us closer to the invisible worlds around us - which sometimes affect us without us knowing.

The secret world of electricity that fights crime

The dark underworld of crime is another place where nothing is as it seems, for instance, and the fight against crime has taken forensic science into many hidden worlds, from fingerprints to DNA. But could any criminal have ever imagined that the noise from a fridge could put them behind bars?

Each time you use your phone, you're leaving a trail of potentially incriminating information behind you. Theoretically, the record of our calls can be used to pinpoint exactly where we are, and now it can even be ascertained when a specific, potentially incriminating, conversation was made. This is something an itemised phone bill can't do - and it's all down to the electric hum from your fridge, or your cooker, or hi-fi system - in fact anything connected to the mains.

It all comes down to the power of electricity. In Britain, the huge plants that power millions of homes can, as well as its massive power generation, is also doing some rather subtle - a code is being generated and it is going down every cable into every home and office. Although these titans of engineering boom out their power to us, they also whisper their secret code down the wires - a unique code that is part of all our lives. It provides a faint audio fingerprint and a connection between our phones and Britain's National Electricity Grid. This fingerprint comes from the way our AC, or alternating current, is generated.

The electrical current should alternate at exactly 50 times a second, 50 hertz - but crucially it doesn't. It oscillates, goes up and down, depending on who is using what electricity.

Imagine it like a huge pool of energy, where the minute you touch it anywhere it changes the entire thing. Electricity is constantly equilibrating itself, and it has a particular frequency - so you change one bit in Scotland and it will have an effect all the way through the land. Whether you're putting your kettle on, or whether some massive factory is starting up, and this pattern - just an accidental outcome from the National Grid really is a kind of code, because it has a unique shape at every moment in time.

That code is now being used to precisely date a phone call. Invisible and inaudible, electrical appliances are coded with a fingerprint of the alternating current, which is in the room and some will leak into a phone conversation leaving a tell-tale trace of exactly when it was made. Both the police and professional sound recording analysts have been recording the National Grid's hum for many years. By comparing their archive of the data with the hum of the phone call in question, they can pinpoint exactly when it was made. It has been used in crime cases to help solve the crimes, with murder convictions being secured on the basis of this technology.

Physics can often be reduced down to a series of fields, or different forces, and we can't see them obviously, but we can see their effect, like gravity and magnetism, for example. We live on a giant magnet, and magnets have been around for a long time. But the latest neodymium magnets are ceramic rather than metal, and they are so strong for their weight and size, they are getting into everything - in fact, electric car technology in a way relies on such magnets.

Is the magnet a mini model of all things?

And they're useful for other stuff, too, the latest use is to clean up oil slicks. Traditional clean up methods include running a line around it and essentially scooping it up off the top, but now there are ways to clean up oil spills using magnetism using a foam-like material which can suck up the oil when sprinkled on top of it in the water. Then the little magnetic particles in the foam means it can be easily scooped up from the water using a magnet.

Another idea using magnets to clean up oil slicks, instead of absorbing the oil, some have had the idea of making the oil itself magnetic, or at least respond to a magnet. These types of ferrofluids, liquids with tiny little magnets so small that they have bonded to the water, and thus like iron filings you may have played with as a child in school, it affects the water to make an invisible field visible. The theory is if we could turn an oil slick into a ferrofluid, then it may be possible to confine the liquid with the use of magnets.

Some say the attraction-repulsion of magnets is the way the entire universe works, but scientifically it's fascinating how these invisible fields and energies can be used to heal and make our world better.

Discovering the dangers of the unseen

The world of the very tiny harbours some real nasties, too however, and chief amongst these is the virus. The smallpox virus alone ended half a billion human lives before it was eradicated 50 years ago. And pandemics are still the stuff of nightmares. We are fighting back, and some are looking to discover new ways of tackling these viral invaders.

Viruses are tiny natural invasion machines. They sneak into the cells of living organisms and use those cells as a breeding ground to make more viruses. And that makes the host ill. But now scientists are taking everything they know about how a virus works and using it to beat the virus at its own game.

A cell is basically a chemical factory; depending on the genetic material inside it, it will produce different things. The body's immune system recognises the shape of a virus' outer shell, and to disable them, it produces antibodies that latch on to this shell, preventing it from attacking healthy cells. Vaccines work by training the body to produce those same antibodies, which ultimately gives us immunity to the disease.

Traditionally, vaccines are made from inactive versions of the real virus, so they can stimulate the production of the right antibodies without actually infecting our cells. But those traditional vaccines are far from perfect, because it involves the live virus, the production of these vaccines is a dangerous process. And in the body they can break down quickly, so the immune response they provide can be weak and ineffective.

So, a team of British scientists set out to make an entirely new vaccine, a synthetic vaccine designed to mimic the real virus to trigger an immune response, but without any risk of infection. To create a synthetic vaccine, the team's first step was to use one of the world's most powerful microscopes - a synchrotron - able to reveal the atomic structure of the crucial outer shell of the virus for the very first time.

A normal microscope uses visible lights, but this powerful one uses X-rays. Electrons are accelerated through a ring, and as they bend to go around them emit intense pulses of X-ray radiation. And it's these powerful X-rays that allow scientists to see right down into the structure of matter, and to image even the smallest virus particles, atom by atom.

Using the structure of a virus revealed by the synchrotron, the scientific team designed a vaccine with the same outer shell as the original target virus, but without the infectious material inside. It will become the synthetic vaccine, and the next step is to take this blueprint and grow the vaccine in the lab. The only way to know if the synthetic vaccine is going to works is to match it with the real virus to the last atom. To be certain of that, the British team have used a synchrotron.

Once designed, as far as the body is concerned the synthetic and the real is indistinguishable, apart from the fact that the synthetic one holds an empty cavity within it, while the virus would contain the genome of the virus, which is what causes the infection. These scientists have for the very first time developed a safe, synthetic vaccine for a dangerous virus - a new type of vaccine and a whole new weapon in the fight against disease.

It's also astonishing that as well as allowing for a cleaner way to produce vaccines, the speed with which we can now build vaccines has increased. It also males it much safer to make, and there is no danger of it ever becoming active. It is really useful technology, that can be deployed very quickly - which could mean the saving of lives in a pandemic.

Previously, we had to second guess to an extent, which flu would be the one to dominate that year, as it takes about nine months to create a new vaccine. This is the normal period of time from the first sort of diagnosis to getting a vaccine into the clinic for patient use. With this new technology, scientists think they could do it in three weeks, if they knew what the virus was. This would also mean we don't have to take the gamble of stockpiling lots of vaccines that we might not use, because the thing to remember about viruses is that they mutate, which makes it very difficult to deal with them safely in any way with 100% certainty.

Viruses are always changing, for example, the bird flu virus has lots of different forms and it could mutate into a form which will spread between humans, and that's potentially an enormous thing to happen. But until that mutation happens, we won't know exactly what the new virus will look like. With this new method, we can identify the new virus very quickly, create a vaccine and get it shipped out, and in effect, nip a pandemic in the bud before it starts.

What is intriguing is how all this is now achievable because we can see further and more into worlds which were once invisible to us, but surround our lives. In healthcare, the applications are just massive - in regenerating tissue, detecting disease earlier as an advanced diagnostic tool, in the drugs that will help heal us, and if pharma medicine is not your thing, they will also be in all the personalised medicine, where you decide what you take tailor made to your specific physical, genealogical requirements.

One hundred years ago, not everyone was convinced there were atoms or not, and now look at where we have come. It's a real rapid rise in technology, and the level at which we can manipulate individual atoms brings greater understanding that there are invisible worlds out there for us to explore. In our own lives, it can also make us bring factor in on how we view the world around us.

We are beginning to understand and utilise the power of the unseen for the greater good, and what does that remind us of? Why love, of course. These technologies discussed here don't just show our developing prowess at the control we are wielding over the tiniest blocks of life, it shows us that there are in fact worlds out there invisible to the naked eye, and unless we know how to look for it, we won't even know they are there.

Yours in love,