The result of this blend of information technology, combined with bio and nanotechnology, is to be a simple life form capable of metabolism and growth. These artificial cells could then be used as drawing boards for other organisms or, for example, as tiny, chemical plants for producing pharmaceuticals.

The ambitious project demands top-flight precision technology. All the antennas must have exactly the same characteristics. Only then can they be combined to form an enormous, super-eye with resolution sharp enough to detect the universe's very first celestial bodies. Astrophysicists want to use ALMA to investigate how the stars and galaxies came to exist. They also say it could help unlock the secrets of how life came into being as well.

Large deposits of copper, zinc, silver and gold and manganese nodules are located deep beneath the waves. Industry is hoping to earn billions by exploiting these rich sources of increasingly scarce commodities. In order to prevent irreversible damage being done to the fascinating world of the ocean floor, researchers are investigating these habitats in hopes of establishing regulations that will allow for sustainable mining and prove acceptable to environmentalists and entrepreneurs alike.

The trouble is that many consumers only discover this when they've gotten home and bite into the apple. Researchers in Switzerland have now developed and infra-red measuring device that allows both fruit vendors and customers to find the bad apples while they're still in the bunch.

DW-TV: Dr. Gabriele Schönherr, telescopes seem to get bigger and bigger. ALMA is an area of many dozen different single telescopes. How much bigger will you want to be? Will you ever come to an end?

Gabriele Schönherr: No, never. I mean, astronomers will always need bigger and larger telescopes just because you need a larger collecting area and you need a larger baseline and radio astronomy for better resolutions for images.

And what are the biggest telescopes you have today?

Well, it depends on which range you ask. In the optical it would be a single mirror of 8.4 meters but the planning of 40 meter mirror out of different segments right now.

And if you look at radio astronomy?

Well, there the trick is to combine different telescopes like with ALMA and you can in principle do that just limited by the Earth radius and not even that because there have been experiments where you were combining also satellites to the Earth bound radio stations.

So, there actually is no end. You'll always get bigger and bigger of-course.

With ALMA you can actually look back in time towards the big bang and you get to times as twelve billion years back. Which range would you actually use to go back even further, towards the birth of our universe?

Light wouldn't be enough anymore. You would need to go to gravitational waves, because there's a certain point where the universe got visible. But you can see the echo of the big bang in radio astronomy.

That sounds complicated, then.

Yeah. It is. It's do-able.

You are actually working with a project called LOFAR and the detectors or the telescopes you have look very different because they are very simple. How do they actually work?

Yean, I mean, you see here another next generation radio telescope like ALMA. Maybe you wouldn't believe it, it looks so simple. It's just one meter forty high antenna stations but the trick is that you combine all these different antenna fields, thousands of antenna, all over Europe in a computer, you digitalize the data, and you need one of the best super computers right now in order to combine it, so the real thing is the computer power behind it.

Amazing. Thanks a lot for the talk.

Interview: Ingolf Baur