Impact of Crowds on Football Performance

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This is the Royal Society's annual jambe Inide science, we are standing with due reverence on the shoulders of giants to showcase a little of that showcase. We're going to learn why scientists are making lightning in a dedicated lab To explore the future of robotics and to squeeze in a little World Cup science too. First though, I am standing in front of, well, a lot of skulls. There's big skulls, there's small skulls, there's definitely some chameleon skulls and there's a scanner. Beside me is Laura Porro Associate professor of Cell and Development Biology at University College London. Laura, what's the link between the scanners and the skulls? So our exhibit showcases how we capture three D shape of both modern and fossil animals. And so the scanner that we have here, it's a surface scanner, uses structured light, and we can use that to capture the external shape of an object Okay so why do we want to do that? Why is that important? The first is to have a digital record of those specimens. Now hopefully, in an ideal world, nothing happens, but in reality, specimens over time deteriorate, they can be damaged. Sometimes things unfortunately happen in the museums like the twenty eighteen at the Brazilian National Museum. And so by creating this digital replica, we have a twin that can essentially be preserved forever. The second is that we can use those three D data for a variety of different science applications so we can test function, we can reconstruct fossil skulls or animals in three D. We can do digital dissections without having to ever cut into a precious real specimen And so there are lots of different applications that we can apply to these to learn more about modern biodiversity and also the evolution of life. And the third thing is we can share these data freely. They can use education, outreach like you see today and amongst researchers all over the world. Presumably if I was a chameleon skull researcher and I'd presume such things exist Previously I would have had to have traveled to see the collection the world's collection of chameleon skulls, I've had traveveled around museums, open drawers, gone to lots of different places and still not got the full range of chameleon skulls. but your hope is to make a virtual rearch facility for everyone. Well and actually, those online repositories already exist. where scientists can go. and scientists, educators can get all of these freely available data. And so like you say, it lowers our carbon footprint. It also increases the quality of science and education as well. Now this is great. you've got a surface scanner here, but what if I wanted to see more like the internal structures of organisms too. I join Dr. Fernando Alvarez and Dr. Alice Levy at the University of Southampton who take this project one step further So we're next to this must be sort of four meters by five meters by another four meters. a really, really big black box inside a bigger room. What is this? One of the largest scanners, CT scanners in the UK. and it's meant to be able to scan things that are very big but also discount things that are very, very small. Would you like to see the inside? Yeah. So what if we got here? What is a CT scanner? There's lots of stuff on some mechanical arms and lenses and things. What actually happens? So during a CT scan, what we do is that we illuminate the object with a beam of light But it's a kind of light that we cannot see with eyes So the wavelength of this light is within what we call the x ray range. It means that this kind of light can penetrate through objects as opposed to just bouncing off them. So this x ray beam is not like a laser, but more like a torch Alice, I feel like this is big enough that you could scan a cow if you wanted to. But you don't scan cows, you scan things quite a lot smaller. This project is on Sea chins, where we're trying to scan at least one representative genus of sea urchin in the world that has been travelling back way to the Triassic period And the way in which I use this is essentially by creating a giant tower of sea urchins plastic tube. and just pack it with fossils until it reaches, you know at least halfway up this And soam a genus is higher level than species. Yes. How many genuses of urchins have you got So yeah, the number of genera of sea urchins is somewhere around the region of about eight hundred, eight hundred and fifty. They have got an extensive fossil record that's really well preserved, which is the whole reason I'm using sea urchins is because they're essentially a really good model system for studying macro evolutionary patterns Do you have any for us to see? Yes, absolutely. let's have a look So this one I have here is lisocideris Zanthi And it is an extant species, so it means that it is still around here today It's actually my favourite specimen because it's just gorgeous So what we're looking at is kind of like a circle, but it's these things called tubules, which are where the spines attach on a sea urchin The spines aren't on this because they attach to the sea urchin via soft tissue. So when it dies and the soft tissue decays, then naturally the spines will kind of fall off. It looks like a sort of knobbly ping pong ball. When you've made your tower of sea urchins? Put them in the CT scan What happens next? How long does it take what you get out? I would say for a tower of Sa chins, I was looking at about four to five hours But If I was to scan one C chin in the X rayio versa that we're going to go see, then that can take quite a long time because that's a really high quality scan of something actually microscopic were going to see other one then and So this machine about half the height, half the width. Notice that this room is a lot colder than the one that we were before. that's because this machine requires a certain level of air humidity. to work properly. And so this is for extremely small. Extremely small merchgins, yes So I have in my hand here a microscope slide. if you'll be able to tell There is a something very small in iturly. And before you went and got, how many of these were just sort of sitting around in drawers that no one had opened for twenty years So I was reading some interesting statistics the other day that at least in the UK, only about one percent of all museum collections are actually on display to the public. But at the end of this Once you've done this, your gift to the world will be an urchin museum. Anyone in the world can go to this having previously you'd had to go all around the world, anyone in the world could just sit there see every urion they want so I think that there needs to be better dissemination of the fact that scientists are making these free amazing models that they've gone and spent an awfully long time digitally dissecting so that you can study anatomy on these levels that you otherwise wouldn't get to do. And I think that the digital version of this is really important Eespecially when you have institutions that can't afford to necessarily do physical dissections in a lab or in a school Anyone with an internet connection and a computer can access these models and learn about anatomy through virtual dissection Thanks, Alice and Fernando. Now I am over at the next stand and there is bigig robot arm putting blocks into other blocks, a bit like a toddler would, I guess. And I'm here with Inmar Posner, prorofessor of Applied Artificial intelligence at Oxford University and it's It's very impressive that his robots are doing things that toddlers are able to do, but why haven't I got a robotic butler yet? That's a really, really good question. So we've seen a lot of progress in sort the recent decades in terms of what robotics has achieved and what robots can do And we've all seen the videos of humanoid robots doing sort of martial arts and humanoid robots running marathons and so on. But it turns out that acting and interacting with a physical world is really, really quite difficult One of the things that I think people will be quite confused about is I can now go on my computer and I can discuss phhilosophy with a robot It can pass the turing test for whatever that was worth. You know this is a proper high level conversation. and you're telling me it's difficult to pick up a banana. Yeah. You mentioned the turing test. and the turing test was incredibly valuable. This is the test. If you can converse with a robot and not know whether it's a robot or a human, then you might as well accept it as intelligence. Correct At the time, that is very much what we conceive intelligence to be. And what you are experiencing there is a shift in our own perception of what it means to be intelligent. becausecause with those models, you can absolutely discuss philosophy, but they will also make things up and sound very convincing in doing it. And is this particularly important when we're dealing here with actual physical robots in the real world? Has this been a stumbling block So it has been a stumbling block. There's a selection of them. This remains hard at different levels, but while you know nothing bad happens when you're Conversation goes slightly off the rails If you actually put that on a physical robot bad things happen. so it's a lot less lenient when it comes to that Should we go over and to go at this? Job So I'm putting on some VR goggles and in front of me I have a three D printed version of the robot arms that are also in front of me. So the idea is I can move these three D printed robot arms and the real robot arms will I do what I do and stack blocks, ideally Okay, I see I see. so I can actually go in And oh, no, not okay, that wasn't ideal. It's quite hard work. This wouldn't be how I would conduct my robot apocalypse, but I think I am getting to the stage where I can stack yes And I hold my robot arms aloft in triumph One way for me to get my robo butler is to film lots and lots and lots of humans doing tasks and much like Chat GPT derive what it is to do tasks of people doing that? Yeah. so that in fact is one of the dominant paradigms in how people in robot learning are trying to do this, including many commercial entities right now. So what do they literally people in kitchens shopping and folding literally have people teleopperating robots doing everyday household tasks, abbsolutely. And that's a perfectly valid approach. If you believe you can get enough data to do this, But you know, other approaches exist. So you might try and say What if we get a robot to actually uncover or imbue it with the basic working principles of how the world works and enable it to generalize what it needs to do based on those. And now that's a very much aspirational goal, but it's a fundamentally different way of thinking. We we're saying we've moved from the era of prediction, we really need to move into an era of explanation. But we have those principles, We're standing in the Royal Society, Isaac Lon was here Unless you're sending these things at closest speed of light, we know exactly how matter moves. Absolutely. and that connection is actually very, very pertinent. We know a lot about physics. I wouldn't say we know all of physics, but we know a lot about physics and enough to be able to imbue some of these systems with physical knowledge. So there's then the question of how do we best build that into the system? And one way of doing that is via what people now have done for a while called world models. So think about this as a mental simulation of how the world works. o. If you ever passed your driving test, think of the moment before the test when you close your eyes and you' imagining what it looks like to go around roundabout and to turn right or something. And with robots, we ideally would do exactly or a very similar sort of thing. So we give them mental model You can think of it as a learned simulator, and that ideally will be grounded in the laws of physics as we know them. And often with that, you could say, okay, well if you can map whatever you see in the real world into this mental model What we call the real to SI gap then you can actually tryry different things and see whether what you know is good enough, but that comes with its own challenges. But that in fact is very much the kind of thing that my lab is working the humor It's be a profas A burst pipe, A dead water heater, the AC calling it quits. 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CompAed medications are not FDA approved eligibility required and determined by licensed provider. individual results may vary your website for details Look, we are upstairs now. I've just walked past a massive bust of Faraday and appropriately I'm in a room that looks like it's got some Fantastic electrical apparatus including two really big Tesla coils I'm here with Daniel Michard from Cardiff University Lightning Laboratory. What are these for So ye here we have some Tesa coils. They produce a kind of an arc that looks like lightning and we just brought them here to demonstrate to the public and inspire a few people with some lightning shaped arcs. Let's hear those lightning things in action. So this is a pretty impressive electrical display. There's a Tesla coil arcing purple electrical lightning towards a grounding rod and it's making a very electrical sound. But earlier this week, we saw an even more impressive electrical display at Dan's lab, the Lightning Lab in Cardiff What is lightning In its simplest form, it's electricity and it's the charges in the sky trying to neutralize themselves with the planet below. We're currently in very hot weather at the moment and you often get thunderstorms at the end of hot weather. So when the cooler weather comes in, you get that mix of hot weather and cold weather and that kind of forces ice crystals in clouds to rub against each other and positive charges normally find their way to the tops of clouds and negative at the bottom and lightning is cloud system trying to neutralize those charges between clouds, cloud to cloud lightning or to ground. So cloud to ground lightning. When we see lightning What are we seeing? So you're seeing the air explode. Air is an insulator. It doesn't like to conduct electricity, but if there's enough electricity It will flow through it, but it will go through it explosively. So The lightning you see out in the real world is the air exploding as that electricity travels from, say, cloud to ground and the thunder that you hear is the sound of the explosion as the air explodes. And does the lightning start does it happen instantaneously? Does it start at the top? Do it start at the bottom So lightning, it will start in the clouds and it will fork its way down through the sky But it will also all that what we call streamers from the ground. So it will connect ten to hundreds of meters above ground so you will get kind of lightning like stream is going up and it will connect above the earth. so it doesn't actually strike down to Earth, it connects above those streamers Sometimes people feel charge in the air around thunderstorms or sometimes people hair might stick up That's the Eth responding to lightning. That is the earth producing streamers. Those streamers are too fast for the human eye to see, so you wouldn't normally see it. What you do see is the fork coming down and then it connecting and flickering. Why do we study here So it's important to study lightning because well, there's a couple of things First thing is that lightning rates are predicted to increase. There's obviously a lot more hot weather There's more likelihood of storms, not just in the UK, but worldwide and some countries, especially with more extreme weather systems are seeing a greatly increased lightning and there's a lot of impact around that particularly things like wildfire initiation and Also lightning puts out a lot of nitrogen, oxide and nitrogen dioxide and also ozone And it puts that out into the atmosphere and that can change the way that the climate behaves and so on. But also we need to make sure that our infrastructure is safe and we have an increasing amount of infrastructure such as aircraft and power systems power lines and especially in the UK with the increase in wind turbines and things like that, we need to make sure that All of that infrastructure is safe. and Things like planes continue flying and power continues to be supplied, uninterrupted. So we're inside the lightning lab here. but yeah, this is the lightning chamber So this is where all the lightning happens And the important things here are this what we call the lightning rig So we have this metal bar protruding down. this is our lightning electrode And there's a gap here of about thirty centimeters to a large plate. and This plate is about half meter by half meter and the arc will connect between this electrode here when we fire it It's very hard to characterize lightning. It kind of is incredibly destructive. We can't really put a lot of sensors or diagnostics in the way of the arc because it'll just blow them up. So there's a couple of other things. We have a camera here, which is our stills camera which is about two to three meters away from the arc that we just used to today or a picture. and behind you in the box which is very well shielded is our high speed camera and this is where we get a lot of our high speed footage from. We can't be anywhere in this room when the lightning goes off because it's incredibly destructive, it'll blind you and it'll deafen you and it could potentially stop your heart because of the amount of electricity going through. So we have to be on the other side of the building What are you working on at the moment? So yeah, right now, a lot of our research historically has been with the aerospace industry and we've still got a few of those projects going for future aircraft We've also been looking into how lightning impacts trees, particularly in the African tropics because lightning rates are not well. What do you need to find out? Well, as lightning rates increase, you need to know whether trees will survive or not whether lightning will kill off a lot of the forests that may may have survived otherwise I mean, there's also other aspects of that in terms of wildfire risk. There is increasing number of lightning initiated wildfires How do you test with trees in here? I mean, it's a big room, but you're not getting a sort of have rainforest. We have tested trees we can show you a picture of one. U but no, we do do also do work out in field research sites. So we have we did have two research sites in Africa And we're now trying to negotiate a research site in Florida where there's a lot of lightning. So we do go out into the field to do research as well Can I see it Yeah, sure you can. We've got it set up at the moment to do a strike. so let's go to the control room get it going We've exited all humans from that area. It still says charge of power off So at home, your normal domestic electricity power supply, it's about thirteen amps and we measure lightning in amps thirteen amps if you accidentally plugged yourself in, that's enough to give you a very nasty shock, mayaybe even kill you and but lightning is much, much more powerful. So lightning is around thirty thousand amps. But here for you, today we're going to go to one hundred thousand amps. so that's about three times your average strike. bit more of a rarer lightning strike We have the system set now to charge to one hundred thousand amps. We're just going to switch it on now. It doesn't take very long. you can see this red bar rising slowly. we're about fifty percent. eighty percent and then we're about one hundred percent Would you like the red red button. Oh, a nice green, not the red button the red button. Rdtones everything off. Okay there's a nice green button here. fire. giveive me count for three. Three, two, one bloy me Here you go little bit of a jump to there. but Thanks D, Michchard. now from one sort of electric atmosphere to another. He's up and running It's been brillily It's been absolutely sensational in the second halfbelievable. This is Slly. This is Hry. What a story. What a story Don't worry, we are not here to talk about the tactics for the last sixteen. We have no interest in football coming home or who has the best right foot or left foot or forehead. No, we are of course interested in football because of science. because when the world gets together en masse to watch football, science can get together to watch the world Each week we've be making our own selection of a squad of the all time great football science. Up frront, we already have a nimble striker in a paper on how big European games cause car accidents in Asia. In midfield, we have a study on how exposure to Muslim footballers lowers racist tweets. Now I am looking for a goalie Today, who should we find wandering the corridors of the Rural society? But James Gallagher, science and health correspondent, presenter of our sisters show Inside Health, and for our purposes boy and talent scout, to me, the science manager. I can polish good ms. You can, you can. So James, as my minion, would you like to kick off? What have you found first? It's a really nice bit of opportunistic science and you don't get to say that very often around the COVID pandemic But During COVID What happened to all those stadiums, those football stadis, they were suddenly empty. matches being played behind closed doors. And they closed midway through, didn't they? Yeah, And it created this perfect opportunity because you've got part of a season with crowds other the football games and part of it without That sounds to me It's very much like a little bit of a scientific experiment where you can assess how big an impact does the crowd have on a football team's performance. Of course, because so we know okay so home advantage is this is what it's all about. Well established and there could be lots of reasons why do and you do do better as a home team, don't you? Yeah, absolutely. On average you get about ner point three nine per points per game more played at home than you would do away. So if you play three matches, that's roughly the equivalent of converting one loss into a draw. That's the difference the home crowd. Okays for you. That's huge. And so I'm going to be a scientist and I'm going to give some hypotheses. And one hypothesis is you just know the grass for some reason. This is your home grass. you know what happens. know you know what it's like Nother the hypothesis is you haven't had to travel The third hypothesis is you've just got that crowd behind you with those great chance and there's more of them and they bore you on