Create the Future

If you’ve ever stared up at the night sky with curiosity and a sense of wonder, then this week’s episode of the Create the Future podcast is for you.This month, two huge engineering achievements are being celebrated. The first is the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 13 mission, where engineers rescued astronauts from sudden disaster; the second is the 30th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, which forever changed our perception of the universe in terms of both science and, through its stunning astronomical images, art.In this episode of Create the Future, we speak to someone whose career has combined all of this: former astronaut, engineer, and artist Nicole Stott. We speak to Nicole about her experiences in spaceflight and what it takes to become an astronaut, how living on the International Space Station compares with life in quarantine, and what it was like to paint the first watercolour, in orbit, at 17,500 miles per hour.New episodes of ‘Create the Future: An Engineering Podcast’ every other Tuesday. www.qeprize.org/podcastsFollow @qeprize on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Whether you're streaming your favourite TV show, video conferencing with colleagues, posting a photo of your food on Instagram, or helping to build a to a global, community-driven supercomputer – you need the internet.Throughout history there have been several feats of engineering that have forever changed the way that we communicate, and how we see our world – inventions such as the printing press, the telegraph, and the steam engine all fundamentally altered daily human life. One of the most recent of these life-changing innovations is the internet. With around 4.5 billion people online in 2020, few other innovations can compare to the internet’s sheer ubiquity, speed, and global impact.This ‘network of networks’ is pervasive; it's created a degree of global connectivity that would not have been thought possible 50 years ago. With just a few clicks, we can work with people thousands of miles away, keep up to date with local or global news, monitor core infrastructure, and learn a variety of new skills. There’s also a lot of pet videos to watch.The internet is now weaved through nearly every aspect of modern life and yet, despite this familiarity we have with it, for most people there are still a lot of unknowns. How does an email actually travel from place to place? Is access to information a human right or is it owned by corporations? Is fake news here to stay? Can we make an internet in space?In this episode of Create the Future, we answer those questions with one of the internet’s creators: QEPrize Winner, Chief Internet Evangelist, and trademark three-piece suit wearer, Vint Cerf. We explore his work creating the fundamental protocols of the internet, unpack what it means to evangelise the internet, and discuss the biggest challenges that face the internet’s future.New episodes of ‘Create the Future: An Engineering Podcast’ every other Tuesday. www.qeprize.org/podcastsFollow @qeprize on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If you’ve ever heard of Schrödinger’s cat, watched Avengers: Endgame, or binge-watched The Big Bang Theory, then a branch of physics called quantum mechanics may sound familiar. Quantum mechanics (or quantum theory) is one of two theories in physics that work to describe the fundamental properties of the universe, the other being Einstein’s theory of relativity.Science fiction has wrapped quantum mechanics, which focuses on the atomic level, with an intimidating veil of esoterica and counterintuitivity – teleportation, things being in two places at once, particles also existing as waves, and so on. But the fact is a lot of the things we rely on every day wouldn’t exist without it. Smartphones, MRI scans, GPS, and even the structure of the internet rely on fundamental universal principles that it explains.However, there has been much debate about whether the principles of physics and chemistry that underpin inanimate objects could also apply to biological systems. Enter quantum biology, a currently speculative field focused on studying biological systems through the lens of quantum mechanics. In the next decade or so, it could help to improve our understanding of a whole swathe of biological phenomena – DNA mutations, photosynthesis, and even the migration patterns of birds.In this episode of Create the Future, we talk to someone well-versed in the intersectional study of quantum biology: QEPrize Judge Professor Jim Al-Khalili. We speak to Jim about his work and what he describes as the 'dawn of quantum bioengineering’. We also explore how Einstein's theory of relativity affects GPS, the relationship between science and engineering, and the important roles that both play in society.New episodes of ‘Create the Future: An Engineering Podcast’ every other Tuesday. www.qeprize.org/podcastsFollow @qeprize on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bringing a touch of Hollywood glamour to Create the Future this week, we interview two visual effects (VFX) engineers whose companies have, between them, received Oscar nominations for visual effects on the Lion King, Gladiator, Life of Pi, the most recent Jungle Book, and won an Oscar for the hugely successful World War 1 movie, 1917. Unlike special effects – explosions, animatronics, and atmospheric conditions created on set – visual effects are added to a scene digitally during post-production. Visual effects have created some of the most iconic scenes in modern cinema – the liquid metal terminator in Terminator 2, the dragons in Game of Thrones, and the magic in Harry Potter. But good visual effects are more than just visual entertainment; they add to the story that the creatives are trying to tell. Often, when they’re done well enough, we don’t notice them at all.In this episode, we explore the crucial role of visual effects in storytelling across cinema, television, and advertising with Roy Trosh, Vice President of Global Systems Architecture at Technicolour, and David Spilsbury, Chief Technology Officer for advertising at the Moving Picture Company (MPC) in Soho London. We learn about their journeys into engineering, explore how to make a swimming pool in space, and discover why and how VFX engineers ‘chase the sun’.New episodes of ‘Create the Future: An Engineering Podcast’ every other Tuesday. www.qeprize.org/podcastsFollow @qeprize on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Earthquakes provide a complex challenge for engineers; they are difficult to predict, difficult to withstand and, subsequently, difficult to recover from. But that’s not all – as seen by the 2004 Indian Ocean and 2011 Tōhoku earthquakes, these events can also trigger unforeseen secondary disasters such as tsunamis and nuclear meltdowns, increasing the scale of the disaster several fold.According to the United States Geological Survey, in an average year an estimated several million earthquakes occur around the world. Thankfully, most of these go undetected because they are in remote areas or are too small to register. However, 18 of these are typically major earthquakes that reach over magnitude 7 on the Richter scale. As a sense of scale, the 8.9 magnitude earthquake that hit Japan in 2011 was so intense that it altered the distribution of the Earth's mass. As a result, it caused the earth to rotate slightly faster and has fractionally shortened the length of each day.So how do you design our infrastructure to resist that? How do you determine the specific impact that an earthquake will have from region to region? While it was once a narrower discipline, earthquake engineering today combines several engineering fields with elements of sociology, political science, and finance in order to predict and mitigate the effects of these disasters.In this episode of Create the Future, we speak with seismic expert Ziggy Lubkowski about the impact of earthquakes around the world, the origins of ‘flexible’ buildings, and how we can build more resilient structures in the future.New episodes of ‘Create the Future: An Engineering Podcast’ every other Tuesday. www.qeprize.org/podcastsFollow @qeprize on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Opened over a century ago, the Panama Canal is widely considered to be one of the greatest feats in engineering history, and a contender for the ‘eighth wonder of the world’. Not only did its construction produce the biggest earth dam in the world at the time, but it also, consequently, produced the largest artificial lake.The Panama Canal allows ships to travel from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean through a 48-mile-long shipping route, saving over 15,000 kilometres around the South American continent. That’s the distance from London to Queensland.Acting as a water elevator, the canal lifts ships up and down by 26 meters through a mountain range. In 2019 alone, the Panama Canal transported several thousand vessels and a quarter of a million metric tonnes of goods.1In this episode of Create the Future, we speak with QEPrize Judge Ilya Espino de Marotta about the history of the Panama Canal and her key role in its expansion as the appointed Executive Vice President for Engineering, the first woman in history to hold the position. We also hear about Ilya’s entry into – and career in – engineering, her thoughts on becoming a judge for the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, and her decision to wear a pink hard hat at work.New episodes of ‘Create the Future: An Engineering Podcast’ every other Tuesday. www.qeprize.org/podcastsFollow @qeprize on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today we take our navigation for granted. Just a few moments using our phone and we’ve got our quickest route home, the scenic drive to work, and directions to the nearest coffee shop. But have you ever stopped to wonder how it actually works, or who made it?For a special sixth episode of the Create the Future podcast, we spoke to the winners of the 2019 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering after they received the award from HRH The Prince of Wales, about their work developing the Global Positioning System – GPS.Today, it is estimated that four billion people around the world use GPS. It provides an accessible service for all and a powerful tool that engineers can integrate with their own applications for free. It can help to track disease outbreaks, guide self-driving tractors, prevent shark attacks, and even improve the performance of sports teams. New applications for GPS continue to revolutionise entire industries, and its annual economic value has been estimated to be $80 billion for the USA alone.In this episode, Dr Bradford Parkinson, Richard Schwartz, Hugo Fruehauf, and Anna Marie Spilker, on behalf of her late husband, Professor James Spilker, Jr, recount stories of how they started working on GPS, their individual contributions to the project, the highlights and challenges of the colossal innovation, as well as their thoughts on its future applications.To read more about the winners, and the history of GPS, visit: qeprize.org/news/origins-of-gpsNew episodes of ‘Create the Future: An Engineering Podcast’ every other Tuesday. www.qeprize.org/podcastsFollow @qeprize on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From swimsuits and coffee cups to quantum computers and medicines, materials science – the “middle of the Venn diagram between chemistry, engineering, and physics” – enables all the products, substances, and general ‘stuff’ with which we interact every day.But what makes for a good material? What makes a material ‘smart’, for that matter? And, while new, more advanced materials can help to power industries far into the future, at what cost do we make them more complex, and less degradable?Joining us in our ‘materials’ episode of Create the Future are materials experts Anna Ploszajski, materials scientist and research fellow at the Institute of Making at University College London; and Tim Minshall, Professor of Innovation and Head of the Institute for Manufacturing at the University of Cambridge.New episodes of ‘Create the Future: An Engineering Podcast’ every other Tuesday. www.qeprize.org/podcastsFollow @qeprize on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The fourth episode of the Create the Future podcast focuses on artificial intelligence, a topic often found at the centre of modern ethical discourse, and one that frequents both the cinema screens of Hollywood, and the pages of science fiction.Joined by experts Dame Wendy Hall, professor of computer science at the University of Southampton; and Azeem Azhar, technology entrepreneur and producer of the Exponential View newsletter and podcast, we talk about the benefits of AI, as well as its ethical issues, its future, and why we should proceed with caution in its development.New episodes of ‘Create the Future: An Engineering Podcast’ every other Tuesday. www.qeprize.org/podcastsFollow @qeprize on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, we explore the origin and potential impact of smart cities. We look back on the technological and economic successes of the 2012 Olympic Games; debate the use of people’s data to improve city infrastructure; and highlight the need to ensure that smart city technology is developed to be inclusive, not a commodity. Joining us in this conversation are Dr Larissa Suzuki, senior product manager for automatic machine learning at ORACLE; and Andrew Comer, director of the cities business unit at BuroHappold Engineering.New episodes of ‘Create the Future: An Engineering Podcast’ every other Tuesday. www.qeprize.org/podcastsFollow @qeprize on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing, we talk with Apollo engineer Dr David Baker and then traverse the surface of Mars with Airbus ExoMars rover engineer Abbie Hutty.New episodes of ‘Create the Future: An Engineering Podcast’ every other Tuesday. www.qeprize.org/podcastsFollow @qeprize on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this inaugural episode we talk with Lord Browne of Madingley, engineer, business leader and Chairman of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Foundation, about the profound impact that engineering has, and continues to have, on the world around us.New episodes of ‘Create the Future: An Engineering Podcast’ every other Tuesday. www.qeprize.org/podcastsFollow @qeprize on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.