And the Hello, welcome to this week's naked scientists, with me Chris Smith and also with

Ginny Smith. This week we're looking at the buildings of

tomorrow including why in the future we'll be building with more bamboo and we'll

talk to the company who can print you a new house.

Plus, a new way of modeling the ecosystems of the entire planet,

and what can the blood of a 115-year-old woman

tell us about living to a ripe old age.

The Naked Scientists Podcast is powered by UKfast.co.uk. First this week scientists from Cambridge have unveiled a new way to model using a computer

how Earth's different ecosystems that means the networks of plants and animals that depend on each other, actually work.

This should enable researchers to understand better how human activities are likely to influence the world around us.

And how to better conserve what we've got.

Mike Harfoot is one of the creators of the system.

He's based at the snappily named United Nations Environment Program World Conservation Monitoring Center and also at

Microsoft Research in Cambridge and is with us now. Hello Mike. Hello Chris, thank you for having us.

You're welcome. First of all, one question, one word, why?

Yeah, so I think you can separate that into two components really.

So you hit the nail on the head in your introduction, so till now, or essentially at the present,

we have a very limited ability to be able to predict the future of I guess the living earth and therefore to understand the consequences of the human actions in the present and how they might affect the biological world in the future.

Another component of that is more of an academic one, but really it's interesting to know

is it at all possible? Can we predict the biological world and what parts of it can and can't we predict.

How have you got about doing this?

We've taken a relatively novel approach in that we're trying to model every different type of

...