How we discovered 'impossible' material that both conducts electrity – and doesn't

Current + lack of current = a headache for phycists Geralt/pixabay

Metals, which conduct electricity, and insulators, which don’t, are polar opposites. At least that’s what we’ve believed until now. But we have discovered that a well-known insulator can simultaneously act like a conductor in certain measurements. We don’t yet know the reason for this mysterious behaviour but it is likely due to new and exciting quantum effects.

The finding is surprising because electrons in insulators, such as glass, are largely stuck in one place, yielding high resistance to the flow of electricity. On the other hand, electrons in conducting materials such as metals flow freely over long distances. So how can you possibly get electrons behaving in both ways in a single material?

One way is to have a sandwich comprising a surface that is conducting juxtaposed with a bulk that is insulating. A category of materials known as topological insulators has recently been discovered to have this property. But what we found is a material in which the bulk itself behaves both as a metal and an insulator.

Crystal clear?

The material we explored is a well-known insulator that has been studied since the 1960s and has been of interest more recently due to its potential topological insulating behaviour: samarium hexaboride.

The samarium hexaboride crystal we used in the experiment. Geetha Balakrishnan, Author provided

We made the discovery by applying a magnetic field and looking for undulations in sample properties such as the resistance and magnetisation – a property known as “quantum oscillations”.

Such quantum oscillations are inherently a property of metals, where they map out a construction known as the “Fermi surface", which roughly represents the geometry traced by the orbits of electrons in the material. In this way, they reveal details about the movement of electrons – which is why the measurement is typically used to better understand the properties of conducting materials.

So it came as a shock when we placed a small sample of the insulating material on a cantilever in a magnetic field, and saw rapid wiggles on the screen indicating that the electrons were travelling long distances characteristic of a metal.

“You do realise, this is impossible,” was my colleague’s first response when I told him the news. The next surprise was when we cooled down the material further, close to absolute zero (which is zero Kelvin, or -273 deg C). We then found that not only was the material defying predictions of insulating behaviour, it was also severely violating the rules for conventional metals.

Explaining the inexplicable

How can we resolve the apparent contradiction inherent in a material that is both a metal and an insulator? One possibility is that, contrary to current understanding, electrons in certain insulators can somehow behave as if they were in a metal.

This behaviour may involve the strange properties of quantum mechanics. According to quantum mechanics, particles can occupy two states at the same time.

Spooky cat. Robert Couse-Baker/Flicr, CC BY-SA

That is why the famous Schrödinger’s Cat can be both dead and alive. Schrödinger’s cat is a thought experiment in which a poor cat is put in a box with a flask of poison and a radioactive source. If an internal monitor detects radioactivity, the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. But as long as we don’t check the monitor, we have to consider the cat both dead and alive.

In this way, the strange behaviour of our material could be explained by the fact that we’ve discovered a new quantum state that fluctuates between being a metal and an insulator.

It could also be that we have discovered a new quantum phase of matter. Quantum physics can result in trillions of electrons in materials acting collectively to exhibit dramatically different properties from what they do individually. Our discovery of a material that is neither a conventional metal nor a conventional insulator could be such an “emergent” quantum phase of matter.

An exciting outcome of our finding is that many creative theoretical proposals are being invented to potentially explain our baffling results. In order to understand the new physics underlying our discovery, we plan to do more experiments on high-quality crystals to distinguish between predictions of the various theories.

Whichever the explanation turns out to be, decades of conventional wisdom regarding the fundamental dichotomy between metals and insulators are likely about to be turned on their head.

Science says a 17-mile stage might be the Tour de France's toughest test

Keeping it together. Staying out the wind. the TTT at the Giro d'Italia. Aukje de Vrijer, CC BY

The Tour de France has been rolling for more than a week now and has finally made it to France in a brutal few days that has seen 220km stages, major crashes, cobbles, steep ramps and broken bones for two race leaders. But perhaps the biggest challenge lies just around the corner in an intriguing Stage 9, where the riders have to cover what looks like a trifling 28km.

The problem is that those 28km come in a lumpy team time trial from Vannes to Plumelec, and include a 2km finish at a 6.2% incline. Normally, that wouldn’t set the heart racing for the main contenders, but this will be an exciting test. Each team must bring five riders to the line together before the clock stops; with Tours sometimes decided by seconds, cooperation is now required for the riders to win.

Playing hide and seek

That teamwork is essential in a team time trial was made painfully clear in the recent team time trial at the Dauphiné Liberé, a week-long stage race that is a traditional warm-up event for the three-week romp around France. In a stage comparable to the Stage 9 Tour route, several teams lost one or two riders early in the time trial as the road rose and fell. This is a huge risk, or a huge error, depending on whether it was planned or not.

Simply put, the more riders you have, the less time each of them needs to cycle in the front position, the position where aerodynamic drag is experienced most and most power must be expended to maintain a competitive speed. In a previous article for The Conversation, I have outlined the benefits of drafting – but these benefits are amplified in the team time trial.

Preparing for pain. But will they stil be together at the end? E. Dronkert, CC BY

Drafting behind your fellow team member can lead to at least a 15% reduction in required power output compared to the front rider while cycling at the same velocity. Having a rider behind you is of benefit too as it removes the void which acts as a drag to the rear. All this means that drafting is crucial for the team time trial – and riders need to optimise their aerodynamics by riding closely together. At the same time, they will need to share the load of riding in the front position and distribute the team’s energy optimally over the race. That is a tough call to make. Each bump in the road will suit different riders best.

Aero heroes

Aerodynamics do not only play a role in drafting, they also play a role in how to optimally pace yourself during a time trial. In scientific literature, a lot has been written on pacing a time trial, but that has mostly focused on individual performance. Much less is known about how to pace a team time trial.

So, let’s put you in the skinsuit and aero helmet for a moment. When you are cycling in front position, you can imagine yourself cycling through a big bowl of table-tennis balls: the air molecules. Now imagine that you would like to accelerate and cycle twice as fast through this big bowl of balls: you will hit twice as many balls per second, but also, you will hit them with twice the impact force per ball. This means that the air frictional resistance is four times as large (twice as many balls x hitting them twice as hard).

Using some more biomechanics, the power that is needed to overcome this air-frictional resistance (that has become four times as large) while cycling at a velocity (that has become twice as large) is now eight (4x2) times as large compared the power required to cycle at the original velocity. It sounds exhausting – and it is.

In fact, it means that it requires relatively more power to accelerate above average velocity than it would save to decelerate below average velocity. The below image helps to understand why riding to beat cycling’s world hour record, for example, calls for an evenly paced race rather than variable pace.

Faster is harder. Florentina Hettinga, Author provided

Risk strategy

Individual time trials have been seen in the Tour de France since 1934 and are a fairly straightforward test of one rider’s ability against another (assuming the weather doesn’t sharply change during the stage). Team time trials, however, demand more debate because the format can clearly favour the strong team, while handicapping strong individual riders who are supported by relatively weaker team mates. We have seen that drafting is crucial, and we have seen that were it possible, an even-paced strategy with each rider taking equal shifts in front would be optimal. As we have hinted at above though, not all riders are equal.

This is a sub-optimal aerodynamic configuration. waltarrrrr, CC BY-NC-ND

They are not equally strong, so teams need to think about how to structure the strategy as the team rolls through their turns on the front. Also, not all riders are equally large, and teams need to think about how to position them: better for a small rider to cycle behind a large rider rather than vice versa. And lastly, remember that the time of the fifth rider over line is the time that counts for the win. That offers the possibility of sacrificing riders. They might burn off the weakest riders in the early stages, or keep the weaker climbers as fresh as possible for the final ramp. It can be a huge risk. The Dauphiné Liberé team time trial saw most, if not all, teams arrive at the finish with the bare minimum – and all it takes is a late puncture to bring that strategy crashing down.

The complexity of pacing, strategy, aerodynamics, power and gradient may seem hidden at first glance as the teams glide past in sleek formation, but with so many factors at play, there are so many aspects that can go wrong. It’s unlikely anyone will win have won the Tour once Sunday’s team time trial is over, but don’t be surprised if a couple of contenders have seen their chances slip away.

Here be dragons: the supermassive black hole that's growing impossibly fast

There may be more and bigger black holes out there than we thought. Do we need a map? ESO/wikimedia, CC BY-SA

“Here be dragons” was a phrase once used on ancient maps, often accompanied by mythical sketches, to highlight an unexplored or potentially dangerous area. Astronomers might want to borrow this warning to label the centre of galaxies, which contain supermassive black holes.

There’s a lot we don’t know about these monsters – and scientists have just found one that even defies the laws that are meant to govern its growth. By growing to a huge mass at an exceptionally fast rate, this black hole indicates that there could be more – and bigger – supermassive black holes out there than we previously thought.

No mythical creatures

These proverbial “dragons” of astronomy are no mere myth. We have many lines of evidence supporting their existence. These range from infra-red observations of very distant galaxies and quasars to infer their masses, through to observations of our very own Milky Way.

The animation below shows the orbits of stars near the centre of the Milky Way. They were observed over more than a decade to be orbiting around a dark, unseen object.

Motion of stars around a black hole / ESO

By applying simple orbital physics, we know that this dark object must have a large mass to cause these orbits by its gravitational pull – perhaps more than 4m solar masses. However it must take up a tiny amount of space as it doesn’t “hit” the orbiting stars. Only a black hole can really fit the bill as an explanation for what this unseen object can be.

Disturbingly though, this is just a middle-of-the-road mass range for supermassive black holes. Discoveries of black holes having ten billion solar masses are being made in other galaxies.

Growing a supermassive black hole

Unlike your average black hole, supermassive black holes are not simply the product of the death of a star – they are more massive than any star could produce on its own. So where do they come from?

There are a number of theories. Arguably the main one is that they must have been “born” in the younger moments of the universe from the earliest star clusters. From there, they need to grow rapidly to gain the amount of mass they have.

In part, this can be explained by accretion of gas and in-falling materials from the galaxy. Indeed, recent observations by the European Southern Observatory suggest that the Milky Way’s own supermassive black hole once had such a dinner.

But the growth of these supermassive black holes are probably not entirely due to accreting material from their own galaxy. If two galaxies were to collide with each other, their black holes gain a new source of food to fuel their growth. They might also merge with one another to create an even bigger black hole.

In this manner, the growth of black holes is understood to be intimately tied to the growth of their parent galaxy. Indeed, the mass of a supermassive black hole appears to be tightly correlated with how fast stars orbit inside of the host galaxy.

At an even deeper level, the black hole can act as a kind of thermostat for star formation inside its host galaxy. Energy and/or momentum that is generated by the black hole can cause star formation to stop in its host galaxy. This is because the energy heats up the gas inside a galaxy so that stars may not form as readily.

Lennox Globe by B F Da Costa Karrigara/wikimedia commons, CC BY-SA

CID-947: the rebel

But in a new study published in Science, astronomers report the discovery of a supermassive black hole that seems to break the synchronisation of galaxy growth with black hole growth.

Using Keck telescope in Hawaii, the authors found a galaxy with an atypically large supermassive black hole in its centre (CID-947). Its ratio of black hole mass to stellar mass is enormous – almost an order of magnitude bigger than what might otherwise be expected.

With a mass of 7 billion solar masses, this supermassive black hole compares favourably to some of the most massive known. Here is where it gets really interesting. Using a measurement known as redshift, which is tells us how far away – and thereby how old – a galaxy is, the team could see that this supermassive black hole must have grown exceptionally fast. Most models predict black hole masses in the range of millions of solar masses, rather than billions, for a galaxy of this age.

Meanwhile, the galaxy is still in the process of forming stars, its black hole has not (yet) caused this to stop. The study concludes that CID-947’s black hole is in the final stages of forming and we are witnessing the cessation of accretion on to it.

This is significant, as CID-947 can be interpreted as an early version of the most (extremely) massive galaxies in the present day universe. That is because if we have humongous galaxies in the universe today, then they must have come from something massive in the earlier universe. Importantly, they’re in place at early times and have not yet shut down their host galaxy star formation – meaning they could well grow even bigger with time.

In other words: there may be more (and bigger) “dragons” than we thought lurking out there. As we are exploring bigger and bigger parts of the universe, maybe a map with clear warning signs is in order?

Trusting hackers with your security? You'd better be able to sort the whitehats from the blackhats

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To think that men are so foolish that they take care to avoid what mischiefs may be done them by polecats or foxes, but are content, nay, think it safety, to be devoured by lions.

English philosopher John Locke’s words from 1689 describe the way in which fear for their own security may irrationally drive citizens to accept the absolute authority of the state. His words may bring to mind the NSA surveillance scandal, or more recently the devastating hack of cybersecurity firm Hacking Team.

The controversial “security” firm – parlance for hackers for hire – had its servers compromised, company files stolen and social media and email accounts hijacked. Some attribute the attack to activists aiming to expose the firm’s dealings with authoritarian regimes – the 400Gb file the attackers posted online contains details that apparently support the concerns of Reporters Without Borders and the University of Toronto’s CitizenLab.

Other believe the attack originates from a competing firm. In any case, what it demonstrates is that hackers today – as much as the well-funded government intelligence agencies – can affect national and international politics, to foster or to disregard human rights and ultimately to shape the development of democracy.

Striking the balance

Communication technology has become both a valuable asset needing protection and the means of attack. A balance must be struck between the rights of citizens – privacy, freedom of speech and information – and the requirements of the state to keep them safe and to secure itself against outside and inside threats.

The debate over the use of encryption is a case in point: on one hand encryption shields its users from intrusive surveillance, protecting their privacy. On the other, by thwarting the surveillance of law enforcement, encryption limits the state’s ability to protect its citizens. Striking a balance between individual rights and security is not a simple matter – Hobbes and Locke debated the problem centuries ago and it has been debated ever since. But the attack on Hacking Team reveals something more.

The new lords of the internet wild west

The term “hacker”, aside from suggesting a high level of technical expertise, fails to take into account the wide range of aims and motivations moving these experts, for example hacktivism, crime, or terrorism. Hackers are not just tech-savvy experts – they are the new makers, capable of shaping debate and consequently the path societies take. Look at their role in the events of the Arab Spring, those fighting regulation of intellectual property and copyright, and groups like the Syrian Electronic Army (or Hacking Team) that support governments’ intelligence activities.

The old rules, old sources of power don’t necessarily apply on the internet. security by Kirill__M\shutterstock.com

More worryingly this hack, like the many others before it, reveals the unregulated grey area in which hackers operate. Hacking Team, based in Italy, has always denied accusations that it works with authoritarian governments, including those for which European Union member states are under arms embargos, such as Sudan. But will the details now revealed lead to any action against the firm? Were its actions illegal under national or international law? It’s just not clear.

What is clear is the regulatory vacuum and lack of any effective restraints on the activities of hackers and cybersecurity firms, and the inability to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate uses of hacking expertise. Indeed, many working in the field cross from being “blackhat” (illegal) to “whitehat” (legal) operators. The distance between the two is often paper thin.

Bringing light to the shadows

Hackers prefer acting in the shadows, affording them anonymity and room for manoeuvre. Governments and intelligence services may favour a similar approach, allowing them to operate outside various constraints. But in the long run, information societies – especially democratic ones – cannot afford the risks of allowing this activity to remain in the shadows. As Locke pointed out, left to their own devices, the apparent saviour has the potential to become the next lion.

There have been attempts to regulate cybersecurity firms: the Wassenaar Arrangement, for example, defines rules controlling the export of surveillance software to specific countries. Very recently, the US Bureau of Industry and Security recently defined new rules based on the Wassenaar Arrangement. Although this showed a few significant drawbacks, the new rules are so broad that while forbidding collaboration with blacklisted counties they could restrict the legitimate use of tools used to improve computer security.

Such shortcomings are common when lawmakers attempt to regulate areas with which they are unfamiliar, overlooking their novelties and peculiarities. This has exacerbated the policy vacuum. The same can be seen in the application of the right to be forgotten in Europe, and the regulation of cyber-warfare.

The internet is the new realm with vital importance for all of us – and hackers are the masters of it, with the potential to bring about radical change, reshape the political status quo and redefine our understanding of political power. Until this is understood in the context of the current information revolution, any attempt to legislate and regulate the role of the hacker is doomed to failure.

Why are pandas so chilled? The clue is in the bamboo

Nah I'm staying here, have already walked 20 metres today. Fuwen Wei, Author provided

It has long been a mystery how giant pandas, which have a gut ideal for digesting meat, can survive eating almost exclusively bamboo. Now our research has found that they can cope with this low-quality diet because they have an extremely slow metabolic rate. This may also explain why they are so inactive and have comparatively small organs for their body size.

Hoops and hurdles

There are few animals on the planet as iconic as the giant panda. Its role as the logo for the World Wide Fund for nature, the perilous nature of its existence in the wild and the fact that it has been exported worldwide as a symbol of Chinese political friendship for decades, continue to sustain its status.

Despite this phenomenal popularity, its political importance and threatened conservation status make it extremely difficult to do research on pandas. There are many, and justified, hurdles to jump to do scientific work on animals in general, but they are even higher when it comes to pandas.

I’m just going to sit here and smell the bamboo. (Wei Wei), Author provided

For this reason, there are many fundamental measurements that have been made on other species but that are lacking for pandas. However, we are slowly starting to fill in these gaps.

Gut of a lion …

One bit of biology that many of us are familiar with is that the panda is a carnivore that became a vegetarian. The mammalian order Carnivora includes several families of animals including the canids (wolves, dogs and foxes), felids (cats), mustelids (weasels and so on), pinnipeds (seals, walruses and sea-lions) and ursids (bears). All these groups apart from the bears subsist by killing and eating other animals.

Because meat is easily digested these animals have short digestive tracts. Apart from the polar bear, many bears include various amounts of vegetable material into their diets. The panda has taken this to the extreme: eating almost exclusively bamboo.

Although pandas have many adaptations for eating bamboo (like an extra “thumb” to help hold the shoots) these do not include a long digestive tract. The panda also has the guts of a lion: ideal for digesting meat, but very inefficient for digesting bamboo. So they have to eat lots of it, perhaps as much as 10-20kgs per day. Scientists have long speculated that to survive on such a low-quality food pandas must have a low rate of metabolism.

However, until now nobody had managed to measure exactly how much energy they use. To do this, we used a technique called the doubly-labelled water method, which measures the rate at which animals eliminate stable isotopes from their bodies. We did this for five captive pandas at Beijing zoo and three wild pandas living in the Foping nature reserve.

We found that the pandas' metabolic rate is exceptionally low. Corrected for their body weight of about 92kg (203lbs), it is substantially lower than almost all other mammals. In fact, the rate is closer to what would be predicted for a 90kg reptile.

… mobility of a sloth?

How they achieve such low rates of energy use was the focus of the second part of our paper, published in the journal Science. Much of the energy that our bodies use is burned up in relatively few organs, including the brains, kidneys, heart and liver. Using historical autopsy data we found that pandas have small organs for their body size.

Their brains are only 82% of the expected size, their kidneys only 74.5% and their livers a remarkable 62.8% of the expected size for a 90kg mammal. Plus if you ever went to see a panda in a zoo you will know that they are not the most active of animals. Indeed using GPS loggers we found that in the wild pandas move on average at just 26.9 metres per hour.

A key physiological system involved in regulating our metabolism is the thyroid hormone system. We suspected that pandas might have something unusual going on with their thyroid hormones – a hunch that turned out to be correct.

Pandas have very low levels of the main thyroid hormones T4 and T3. We were able to trace these low hormone levels to a unique mutation in the panda genome, which affects a critical gene involved in thyroid hormone synthesis. People who have low thyroid hormone levels often complain that they feel cold. This is potentially because their lowered metabolic rate is insufficient to keep them warm.

I’m cool and I know it. Yonggang Nie, Author provided

So how does the panda manage to keep warm? Despite living in semitropical habitats, it does have a really thick fur coat. This serves to trap what little heat their metabolism produces inside their bodies. A direct consequence of this is that their surface temperature (measured using a thermal imaging camera) is about 10°C (50°F) cooler than the surface of other black and white animals like the zebra. Pandas, it seems, are literally cool.

Incidentally, I also had a cool experience while carrying out this research. One day at the zoo I got distracted while feeding one of the pandas, and he reached through the bars and took a swipe at me to get the bamboo. However, he missed and ended up taking a small chunk out of my rather expensive leather jacket instead. This may seem annoying, but I chose to view it like a badge of honour. If someone asks how I damaged my coat I could in all honesty say that I got it in a “close encounter with a giant panda”.

The secret of the world's smelliest bloom

What the smell is that? Karen Mardahl, CC BY-SA

By happy coincidence and far from its native home in western Sumatra, titum arum, the world’s smelliest bloom, flowered at both ends of the UK – Paignton Zoo in Devon and at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh. It’s a rare event, but not to be outdone, over in New York, Cornell University’s titan arum has also been showing off.

While in a recent study researchers identified the enzyme that plays a key role in producing the sweet fragrance found in roses, titum arum – or Amorphophallus titanum to give it its Latin name – is famed for a very different type of smell: that of rotting flesh. As one witness in Edinburgh put it: “At its peak in the glasshouse it actually made our eyes water.”

So what is this amazing plant, and why is it so smelly?

We have the Victorians to thank

The Victorian age was great for exploring. It was deep in present-day Tanzania in November 1871 that the American journalist Henry Morton Stanley uttered his famous (alleged) words: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” A few years later in the rain-forests of Sumatra in 1878, a slightly less momentous, but much more unpleasant discovery was made, when a botanist from Florence named Odoardo Beccari probably became the first Westerner to observe the smelliest plant in the world. He sent some seeds and tubers back home – from where some seeds made their way to Kew Gardens – and it was there that Amorphophallus titanum flowered for the first time in the West in 1889. It actually has a British relative, Arum maculatum, perhaps better known as cuckoo pint.

Not quite so stinky. Leonora Enking, CC BY-SA

Cultivating Amorphophallus titanium isn’t a job for the impatient. It flowers irregularly, every few years. The plant has a vast underground tuber, which can weigh up to 75kg and produces a huge leaf, which can grow up to six metres tall. Sometimes it instead produces a huge inflorescence, stretching up to three metres high, with very small individual male and female flowers at the base, surrounded by a kind of giant green petal called a spathe. On average this only happens around every ten years. But when it does, you certainly know about it, and they say that you can smell it from half a mile away.

Time lapse

A master of disguise

Its rotting flesh smell gives titum arum other alternative names such as the corpse flower or carrion plant. Its smell is designed to attract insects such as flies and carrion beetles, which normally feed on decaying flesh, which will help pollinate it. The spathe is green on the outside but the flower head is red, so it looks like meat. This plant is really cunning – as it blooms it gives out quite a lot of heat, up to 36°C, which encourages the molecules to spread out by helping them vapourise, and also confirms the impression of “warm meat”. The insects crawl over the spathe to leave their eggs in what they believe to be rotten meat, in the process transferring pollen – and this pollinates the plant.

‘Rotting meat, dead animals, and a hint of vomit’

Some years ago, scientists at Kew Gardens identified the molecules responsible for these awful smells. The main ones are called dimethyl disulphide (DMDS) and dimethyl trisulphide (DMTS); they’ve been known in the laboratory for years, and yes, they do smell disgusting.

In small amounts

In small amounts, molecules such DMDS and DMTS are an “off-flavour” in beer (DMDS is a byproduct of the fermentation process). The scientists looked at various species of the genus Amorphophallus (Araceae, the Arum family), including the titan arum, and found that most made DMDS and DMTS. Some also use other molecules, organic acids like the ones found on “sweaty skin”, as well as indole, a molecule partly responsible for the smell of human faeces. It’s not the only type of plant to smell like this. Scientists who examined the South African stinkhorn fungus (Clathrus archeri) discovered that it was producing dimethyl disulphide, just like a sample of rotten meat (and a dead rat).

‘Dead horse arum’ Swallowtail Garden Seeds, CC BY

Another arum (Helicodiceros muscivorus) is known as known as “dead-horse arum” (you can guess why). It is found in Sardinia and Corsica. It uses dimethyl sulfide (DMS) as well as DMDS and DMTS to attract blowflies. Dimethyl sulphide is a molecule we’ve all smelt, it is part of the sulphur cycle and is responsible for the “smell of the seaside”. Dimethyl sulphide is also the molecule that pigs and dogs look for when they detect black truffles underground in some parts of France. DMDS and DMTS are associated with the smell of Italian white truffles.

So Amorphophallus titanum isn’t what most people have in mind when they “say it with flowers”. These use a cornucopia of molecules with amazing smells to lighten our day and reach the emotions that words cannot.

BBC micro:bit aims to turn children from digital consumers into digital creators

Good things come in small packages, but are all small packages a good thing? BBC

The way computing is taught in schools is going through its greatest upheaval since the subject was first introduced at the turn of the century. After considerable lobbying by the industry, professional societies, universities and schools, the national curriculum has been re-oriented towards establishing computing as the “fourth science” for schools.

Out go interminable lessons on how to use specific word processor or spreadsheet applications. In comes more rigorous teaching about the scientific principles of technology and how to put it to use creatively – to be taught, importantly, by example rather than by rote.

Plugged in to this change of tack is the recently announced BBC micro:bit, a tiny, inexpensive pocket-sized computing device. The BBC plans to give away a million of these devices free to every Year 7 child (11 to 12-year-old) in the country this autumn, to encourage children to become a generation of digital creators.

Conceived by the BBC, the micro:bit has been developed by organizations including ARM, Microsoft, Freescale, Nordic Semiconductor, Element 14, Samsung and Lancaster University.

One of the goals of this initiative is to create a greater number of students that go into computer science and related fields of study with a better understanding of technology, transforming the UK from a nation of digital consumers into a creative powerhouse. To place this in context, a recent House of Lords select committee report suggested some 35% of current jobs in the UK could be lost to automation over the next 20 years. In my personal opinion, that’s an understatement. The strategy for the nation here is made clear: to create new jobs through digital innovation. This will only be possible if today’s children are adequately skilled and motivated to rise to this challenge.

This is an ambitious strategy, and one that requires an equally ambitious approach to delivering it. The response to this call to arms has been quite simply staggering. Not from the government, but from enthusiasts, volunteers and evangelists. To name but a few such organisations picking up the challenge: Computing at Schools support almost 20,000 teachers throughout over 600 regional UK hubs, Code Club organise after school programming clubs throughout the UK and Teen Tech who expose teenagers to the wide range of career possibilities in science, engineering and technology.

The BBC’s first foray into computers was more than 30 years ago. Stuart Brady

Not the BBC’s first computer

But we’ve been here before. It’s hard not to draw a parallel to the Model B, a computer released by the BBC in the 1980s for the same reason – to forge a new technologically-savvy generation of future students, innovators and entrepreneurs. The BBC Model B typified the computer of its day, a modestly-specified desktop machine with integrated keyboard that could connect to a home television. At just 4cm by 5cm, the micro:bit is a very 21st-century computer: compact, with built-in sensors and wireless communication, and an ARM Cortex M0 processor around 18 times more powerful than its forerunner.

Packed full: what the Micro:bit comes with. BBC

The micro:bit supports Bluetooth Low Energy, which means it can interact wirelessly with other nearby devices such as mobile phones and tablets. This pitches it more as part of the emerging internet of things, made up of small low-powered devices that can provide services or data to other, more powerful devices such as smartphones.

It has a simple display of 25 LEDs arranged in a 5x5 matrix, just enough for simple graphics and text, and it is also equipped with an electronic compass and three-axis accelerometer so it can detect its orientation, and standard connectors that provide an easy way for children to integrate the micro:bit into their own creative electronics projects. It’s not a motivational toy – it’s a computing case study, a simple demonstrator for how complex computers can be used.

Building a community, not just a device

Running the code simulator on a tablet. BBC

The device is only part of the package. The micro:bit can be programmed through the web, in a variety of programming languages tailored for different levels of ability. It will support highly visual drag-and-drop languages ideal for beginners, Microsoft’s Touch Develop, Python and JavaScript for intermediate users, and C++ for older, experienced programmers. The accompanying website also provides teachers access to pre-written learning resources and also a platform to create and share their teaching materials with other teachers, or to publish their pupil’s work if appropriate to inspire others.

After the initial 1m units are delivered, the devices will be available for commercial purchase with proceeds directed to a not-for-profit foundation. All the micro:bit hardware and software will be open-sourced, allowing others to build on the foundations laid.

The micro:bit is aimed at fostering an ecosystem to support digital creativity, balancing motivation and education while reducing the barrier to entry for both children and teachers. Will it be successful, inspiring fond memories in a generation like the Model B? We’ll see.