Stripping down science, the naked scientists.

The Naked Scientists. Hello and welcome to this special pre-recorded edition of the naked scientists with me,

Mira Senti Lingam and me Dave Ansel. This week we're looking back at the year's highlights

from the world of engineering. Over the past year Mira and I have roamed the UK meeting engineers and scientists from

across the country who are working on great pieces of engineering, both old and new, to bring

us some of the technologies of the future.

So this week we bring you the best of what our travels have found, including turbines that harness

energy from our rivers and the technology allowing mining companies to purify minerals such as copper

from the millions of tons of ore mined each year.

Plus the equipment that allows pharmaceutical companies to make billions of drug tablets with precise chemical

components on a daily basis and we go back thousands of years to an ancient form of

engineering still in use today.

I'm working on blacksmithing to bring you the science behind this ancient craft.

The or endure it is, the softer it goes, now when I hammer it, it's going to be easier to handle.

Iron's got this really, really unique property that at about 700 Celsius it transforms from being one crystal structure to another.

So just using the skill of a blacksmith, Gordon's managed to control the atomic structure of a piece of iron, really amazing skills.

Plus, we've got a special new engineering insight for this week looking into the design of the famous dam

busters bouncing Bomb.

Then we had to design how to fit it underneath a plane.

We had to design how to make it spin, and that was one of the things that Bonswellis found was really important that this thing had to spin.

And we had to figure out how to release it at the right time, at the right height.

And actually we had to make ourselves a target.

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