Afghan Robotics Team and Reducing Infant Mortality | Innovation Celebration, Ep. 9

[Applause] [Music] hello and welcome to innovation celebration the show where we celebrate recent advancements in science and technology the people and ideas that make them possible and the ways in which they advance human flourishing i'm angelico worth and i'm thomas walker and i want to pick up on the story that really gets to the ideas that makes them possible part of that which i don't think we've covered as much as the other parts so much so um this is the story the 10 members of the afghan robotics team which is a team of young girls between 12 and 18 or young women between 12 and 18 in afghanistan who work on robotics projects and this was founded by uh a woman called roya mabu uh living in a remote part of afghanistan and in her parents basement um these girls got together and started building robotics projects using scrap metal and you know whatever they could find lying around basically incredibly resourceful curious people in in a country where a culture where um you know women taking an interest in that kind of thing is frowned upon to say the least and also one where resources are not plentiful so yeah impressive resourcefulness and innovativeness from these people um in 2017 they traveled twice to kabul uh crossing taliban controlled territories to do so um in order to apply for u.s visas to attend the washington first global challenge it's a robotics competition in dc uh and they were refused both times and no good reason was given so that caused a bit of a public outcry in a campaign and ultimately some people managed to convince the the u.s state department to overturn the decision and grant them those visas so they traveled to washington for the com for the competition um but unfortunately their robotics gear you know the customs people were like what the hell is this you're coming from afghanistan you've got pieces of you know equipment you know you can see what it might have looked like so that got confiscated off them so they had to start from scratch after arriving so with two weeks to go they built their everyone else had months didn't they yeah everyone else had had months yeah they're building robots to in a comp for a competition so they built theirs in two weeks from scratch um and scoop the silver medal with it which is you know just incredibly impressive uh and after doing that um they traveled perseverance on their end yeah and then they traveled on to europe and uh competed in the international robotex competition estonia and won the entrepreneur challenge reward there as well competed in istanbul as well and then traveled back to afghanistan unfortunately after they got back to afghanistan team captain's father was killed in the suicide attack so that just gives an indication of you know how dangerous the environment they were living in in back home so they were keen to get out of that again and they spent a lot of 2018 and 2019 in canada uh and traveled into the us again there on that trip so doing more research you know getting more access to um resources but then they're back in afghanistan when the kova 19 situation came along and um as that was happening the afghan government was looking for people who can supply cheaper more portable ventilators for kobe 19 patients obviously afghanistan has poor resources you know a lot of people are away from hospital facilities uh or you know getting things to people is difficult especially you know 50 000 ventilators not easy to come by so the robotics team was one of six groups who responded to that request from the afghan government and uh they came up with a design for a cheap 500 portable battery-powered ventilator well in situation in afghanistan not withstanding having medical equipment be cheaper just makes it more accessible to people across the board yeah obviously poverty is rife uh and um but yeah it's just difficult to to get anything anywhere with particularly with your conflict going on in in some of those regions um so they they built this to an mit blueprint but used parts from a toyota corolla to assemble it um and their design actually got approved by the akko ministry of health so they you know that actually got approved to be put into production and used so um yeah that was the situation prior to you know the recent taliban takeover following the the us and allied withdrawal from afghanistan obviously that seems to have happened quicker than some people expected it to although others might say that was somewhat predictable but the charity that worked with them originally um to help them come over to to the west and um to get help get set up was the digital citizens fund dcf um new york based 513c uh who specifically focus on helping women in parts of the world where you know women don't really have opportunities where gender inequality is extreme you know predominantly the middle east for obvious cultural reasons um you know just women aren't allowed to choose their own career in some of these places so you know they work with women in those areas trying to get them the kind of access to opportunities that they take for granted elsewhere in the world and um and so when the taliban started taking over again obviously the taliban with their hard line is islamism you know um basically don't give women rights at all no you can give someone they also they don't respect the rights of women at all they also um deny the rights of others well not just women yeah yeah they deny the rights of pretty much everyone but i mean i think the worst thing to be in in in a hardline you know taliban state is a woman or particularly a woman with an interest in science who wants to build a career and innovate so um the the so the dcf was was keen to try and get them out of there and they they worked with the qatar minister of foreign affairs um qatar is where a lot of the evacuees from afghanistan have ended up going through um to try and get them out into qatar and they managed to get ten outs um although i should say ten managed to get out i'll come on to that in a minute um some are still there um but uh a number of them are successfully out now and um five of those have since gone on to mexico so they the ones who got out have all been offered scholarships to go to different places some in the u.s some in europe and elsewhere but five of them took up an offer from mexico and one of them fatima kadarin i think i'm saying her name right after arriving mexico said we are happy to be here from now on we will have the opportunities for many more achievements in our lives the kinds of opportunities they just didn't have back in afghanistan so um you know from an american or or even a british point of view you know mexico may not seem like the safest easiest place to live but it's a phenomenal upgrade from what they were used to it's a place where they can choose what they do with their lives where they can have access to resources and and you know it must be a phenomenal change for them you know um the the limitations they were operating under gave them clearly a certain you know their response to that gave them a resourcefulness and an ability to think outside the box and i hope that they're able to take advantage of the resources they'll have access to now i mean i imagine they will yeah i mean i'm always a little concerned in a sense because i think sometimes educational institutions limit people's creativity and curiosity and you know these people have just overcome horrific circumstances really by developing more creativity and curiosity so i hope that they're able to continue growing that um where they are now and i'm pretty sure they will you know i i think that's just that's part of who they are now um i also want to read out a little quote from dcf board member elizabeth schaefer brown who told nbc news that ultimately the girls rescued themselves if it were not for their hard work and courage to pursue an education which brought them in contact with the world they would still be trapped we need to continue to support them and others like them so you know it was it was their efforts to try and get hold get access to education which is say women just won't have now in a taliban regime that you know brought them in contact with the people who've done it were able to help rescue them uh yeah so that's a moral we can take away for all of our lives really is you know the more you more you put yourself out there and make connections with people the more opportunities you'll have but trying to do that in an environment where being seen to be a woman trying to get into science potentially marks you for death is just incredible bravery and driving across taliban controlled regions you know it reminds you of malala in pakistan was it 2012 that that happened yeah and the work she's done since just the bravery um in defending the everybody's right to choose their own path in life is really impressive and it's nice to see people recognizing them and help helping them to you know the dcf helping them get out and the university is offering them scholarships and the bravery and intelligence and perseverance that these girls have shown is impressive enough in its own right and the accomplishments they've already managed at such a young age without even going to college um it's all impressive and that is impressive and we definitely want to celebrate it but we also want to celebrate the people that are helping them and helping them get to a better place yeah i just want to finish up by saying that you know for innovation to happen like cheap ventilators and and robot designs you you need a a society that's free enough for everybody to be able to choose what they want to do um you know it's i mean if you deny women the right to do that then you cut off 50 of your potential innovation yeah and you know resourcefulness that's not just innovation in the sort of sense we talk about that's every productive endeavor that anyone can get into art and you know science politics just everything that somebody can do constructively you know you're just limiting half of your potential and um see that's just moronic aside from the the you know the denial of rights of those people to to live happy fulfilling lives uh which you know these ten will now have but so many people who are still in afghanistan won't and um so you know it's it's a two-sided thing it's partly you know the most important part is that human beings need to be able to flourish they need freedom to be able to live their lives and even if these ten don't produce any other you know technologies that help people or help society the fact that they're able to live their lives is worth it by itself and you know but clearly the kind of people they are they will they will do amazing things with their lives whatever the line of work they end up going into and i'm quite excited to see i'm pretty sure we'll see some more interesting innovations coming out of them in in the coming years but you know fundamentally for the kind of things that we talk about on the show to happen you have to have a free society and that's why the vast majority of what we talk about comes out of the u.s western europe and in countries like that and it's very nice to be able to cover a story that came out somewhere like afghanistan but you know it's just not possible in the kind of society that they have there unless you have just this degree of bravery and resourcefulness and unfortunately more so now the taliban have taken over in afghanistan again yeah um tragedy really yes but out of the tragedy we can appreciate certain bright spots such as this young team of robotics creators i couldn't think of the word for it sorry but i'm going to move on now and we're going to talk about a step forward and a problem that humans have been trying to solve really for centuries and have made enormous leaps forward and but haven't fully solved which is that of infant mortality and the specific advancement has to do with testing sugars from breast milk to treat bacterial infections so the bacterial infections that we're talking about here are from group b streptococcus bacteria which we call gbs for short because streptococcus is a mouthful and these bacteria infect fetuses and newborns and i think they actually infect the mother first and the um her reproductive tract and then gets passed to the newborn that way and it can cause all manner of blood infections it can cause meningitis which can in serious instances cause a baby partial or total hearing loss yeah and is it's worth noting that sort of before the advent of medical technology infant mortality was crazy like you'll often hear me play things like you know people only live to 28 when we were you know pre-technological civilization but what was actually the case is people lived to their 60s and 70s but then so many people died in childhood that it excuse them the average right now but you know it was even until a couple centuries ago it was you know if you had ten kids and you might expect two or three to survive yeah and as i said we've made great strides in that but gbs can still cause stillbirths to this day which is you know absolutely devastating for a couple who are hoping to have a baby um and then on top of it a problem that some of us may be aware of is that these bacteria have become resistant to antibiotics because the standard treatment we think of these days where you know we're lucky to have antibiotics but a lot of bacteria have started developing resistance to them including gbs and to give you an idea of the scope of this problem today it's estimated that about two thousand babies die in the u.s from this i'm sorry two thousand babies get this um bacteria this infection in the u.s and of those four to six percent die from it four to six percent four two six not forty six four two six um and to give you a reference of all the people who get covered in the us about two to three percent die and obviously estimates aren't perfect with these numbers but it and and fatality rate from covered various by country but yeah i think that's that's more of the confirmed cases or the cases that go to hospital because there's so many more because i've heard a you know 0.5 mortality rate for kobe 19 when it's properly considered right yeah that's just off of confirmed cases off the data that we you know we have firmly um and on a worldwide scale the world health organization estimates that gbs infections cause 150 000 stillbirths every year so just as a proportion of infections this is more deadly than known cocaine then covered yes that's why i was giving those numbers as a comparison yeah it does that rate does vary a little bit by country but in the us yes i imagine it's higher in countries with poorer infrastructure probably yeah i don't have the rates for gbs for other countries but in coveted for covert it is yeah again it does depend like you said on having an accurate count of the actual cases but of the confirmed cases yeah um so this but like i said they've been doing some research on on some possible treatments that circumvent the antibiotic resistance issue um and who they are specifically uh is a group working at vanderbilt university this research their most recent research i'll explain it's been in two stages but their most recent research was presented at the fall 2021 meeting of the american chemical society a non-profit organization that brings together scientists working on chemical issues um and it was presented by a graduate student named rebecca moore and she is working under dr stephen townsend and jennifer gaddy as i said they're all vanderbilt university which is a private university that is named after cornelius vanderbilt who is a rail and shipping magnate who gave this school at seed money and you're smiling because you like vanderbilt yeah it's created the new york central railroad i'm just i'm a real geek so yeah it's particularly interesting to me um but on to the actual innovation that they presented um so they've been studying human milk oligosaccharides or hmos for short because that's also a mouthful and hmos are short strings of sugar molecules that you find abundantly in breast milk and so they had found previously in a paper that they published in 2017 that in a like petri dish type situation i don't know if it was actually in a petri dish but you know in a outside of the human body situation um these hmos seem to be killing off the gbs it seemed and so they started to dig into that more and in this new round of research they've tested it in mice they've tested it in certain tissues in humans specifically the immune cells and placentas and the gestational membranes which are the sacs that grow around the fetus and in all of these cases it has either completely knocked out the gbs or significantly reduced it um to the point where it wouldn't cause an infection and that would be a problem which leads us to wonder why is this happening yeah how does that work exactly you wouldn't think at least i wouldn't think that sugars would be able to bring down bacteria because typically sugars act as food for bacteria and for us yes um and so it seems to work in two ways which one it works by preventing the pathogens from adhering to the tissues in the first place and two it seems to basically feed the good bacteria so some of you guys might know that we every living organism well every large organism has a microbiome in them which is basically just an organism and then like an ecosystem inside your body of tiny like bacteria and a lot of them are what we call good bacteria because they perform perform some function that helps you and and normally in a healthy person there's this balance going on of the good bacteria and bacteria from other sources that could be bad such as this gbs this is why antibiotics can also be a problem this is why people take probiotics so people take probiotics to help encourage that good bacteria for example in your digestive system when you take antibiotics they do their job they kill everything and so this can lead to an experience that i've personally had where i took antibiotics for an infection and i it solved that infection it was an infected bug bite i cleared up but i ended up having another infection as a result of it because it knocked out all the antibiotics knocked out all the good bacteria that have been keeping my system in check so another reason to be seeking out a an alternative such as these hmos um which they seem to be um helping the good bacteria outcompete the bad bacteria so they tested this again in a petri dish situation where without interference they put the good bacteria and the gbs together and the gbs were releasing lactic acid that was weakening the good bacteria and the gbs were taking over basically and but when they added these hmos then what was happening is the good bacteria was feeding on the hmos and they were able to withstand the lactic acid from the gbs so it's sort of similar to if any of you garden the same concept as um fertilizing your flowers so that the weeds don't take over yeah and so yes they're still working on this and they've obviously this has really promising um future applications specifically for preventing and treating infections in fetuses and babies um one thing that they're specifically still working on is trying to isolate which of the hmos is actually having this effect because there are over 200 that are unique to humans and and some of them have not had this effect when they're isolated by themselves so it's only some of them that are having this effect and by isolating it we can be able to replicate it in a lab so that women who can't or don't want to breastfeed can still we can still treat babies with that also when the babies are still in the mother and don't have access to breast milk and also there's some potential to even use this as an antibiotic replacement in adults for treating bacterial infect infections but we have to know specifically what it is so that's one of the things they're working on now so very interesting yes there um if we move along to our honorable mentions um i want to start with another robotics topic like well not actually my main the sort of robotics connection that really was about the ideas more than robots um but i did have two robotics topics last week um this one's a bit stranger um elon musk everybody's favorite clown slash businessman um unveiled his plans for um the tesla bot which is a a sort of domestic robot using the ai developed for tesla's autonomous cars and i'll talk about ai a little in a moment but he didn't actually unveil a robot he unveiled a man dressed as a robot um who did some strange dances and movements and yeah he kind of promised us the real thing next year so um you know it's it's typical elon musk you know press release situation of you know what what's he going for here but um the interesting thing is he's trying to create what what to my mind is is somewhere between irobot and c-3po a kind of domestic servitor who does your shopping takes out the trash you know maybe cleans up around the house um but you know this isn't like a military robot or anything he's deliberately designed it to be weak and slow so the in the event of the robot takeover i robot style robot takeover that he seems to envisage it won't be able to resist you um you you i think you had something that this i was just going to say this this whole concept reminds me of um in the steampunk novel i'm reading in the first series the finishing school series by gail carriger they have these a robot that's sort of similar they're they call them mechanicals and they basically do the same thing they're roughly human-sized they'll you know bring you tea and clean your house and they actually don't go get your shopping because they can't leave your house in this scenario but the point is the idea has been around in fiction in a number of ways for a while um so it's kind of cool to see somebody actually planning to bring something like that out in the next you know year or two yeah and this has the kind of cool sleek look of the you know 2004 irobot movie robots um but the dexterity of c3 very waddling along and not really being able to do very much and um the thing is elon musk has a worry that ai is going to take over the world and ai is just not there at all and you know um it's still something that you know it it has a limited ability to learn from its environment and and develop but it's still something that only does what it's programmed you can't have an original thoughts it can't you know develop morals or something like that you know it's um it's still a tool that's going to be used how it's going to be used so um i don't think that's a serious concern at this point i think you know the possibility of being hacked and used you know by bad people is certainly something to consider but i think his reasons for making them slow and weak um is a little bit questionable i can just see them getting pushed over by people when they're on their way to the shops and things like that you know but um i i don't think making making a little stronger might not be the worst thing but um you know he's very much designing these for domestic applications and um another word on mask himself like he benefits inordinately from government favors because particularly through tesla which just wouldn't be a viable business if it wasn't for the amount of subsidies and you know grants and infrastructure it receives overseas and you know he's kind of you gained a massive chunk of the car market against competitors who don't have that advantage uh and likewise in spacex you know a lot of that's riding on the back of government contracts at the same time i am very i have a lot of respect for him as someone who has a vision of a world he wants to live in and just goes about creating it and he developed paypal originally but then used the the proceeds from that as any kind of good entrepreneur does to favor his values and and he wants to live in a world that has electric cars you know accessible space flight and and fancy robots and he's just doing all of that and you know and so he's definitely someone without whom we wouldn't live in as cooler ones as we do you know and it's not just about being cool and exciting you know i think access to space is really important for our future um you know improving efficiency of vehicles and things like that is a very good thing and on this particular innovation this tesla about you know not having to spend so much time on the drudgery of household chores yeah i mean um there's sort of a debate about labor saving devices and and to what extent you know it depends how you use them like again any tool like you know if you use if you just let a machine do everything and you just sit down and watch tv all day then that's not a good thing to happen it's better if you walk into the shops and stuff but you know a proactive minded person would use that time to exercise in a different way go somewhere interesting read create learn yeah i think honey you're also in our context when i'm in england with you we walk to the shops a lot but most americans drive to the grocery store yes that's true yeah we just have a totally different urban geography here um and there's a lot of you know i mean driverless cars which is where this ai came from you know might change that if if you don't have a 4x4 sitting on your drive and you just you know get an app to bring you a car when you need to go somewhere maybe american cities might move a bit more towards that kind of walkable you know more healthy for the human body you know way of being than than they currently are but yeah certainly in this country walking to the shops is this sort of part of daily life but um but no it you know it's an old debate and i think labor saving devices generally are a good thing it's just like any technology you need to have the right attitude to how you use it and you know i i am someone who tries to you know maintain my ability to do mental arithmetic and to use a paper map to find something and things like that and i'll use the technology when it's useful to me but i'll also try and you know keep my own faculties sharp for when i meet them as well because it's just you know some technology might not always be there but i think by and large this is a very good thing um to have if it you know goes to plan obviously his timetables slip a lot but so do everybody's and you know when you're creating cutting-edge technologies i think it's a given that you know the fact is happening at all is something to be grateful for and you know if it doesn't hit the you know expected release date that's just you know means it's being done properly right okay so moving on from that i've got another um well i've mentioned before on this show how much i love biotechnology and that sort of integration of two different fields and this is an even bigger integration of even more fields and it's really cool um so there are a group of researchers who are just you know broadly stated they are using the way that elephant trunks move to inspire better robotics and i'll dig into that but that's basically what it is so we will not have this much robust in our episodes normally robotics are cool and they they definitely improve human life so one of the researchers one of the several people involved in this project um mikhail milne milinkovic sorry um who is a professor of physics of biology at the university of geneva in switzerland so his job already is the physics of biology yeah professor of physics of biology so that's the physics of how biology works yes of how animals move and how things work like that so he explains the problem thus classical robots are extremely good for performing a specific task for which they've been designed if you want that robot to do something a little different it will fail miserably um which has certainly been the case historically i think some are starting to get a bit better but they're still usually pretty limited in what they can do they can only be programmed to do you know probably a couple of things at this point but so many things or just physically limited by the yeah yeah not so much but yeah yeah and you were talking about boston boston dynamics making some significant improvements in that area but this is another way of going about it and so in contrast milinkovic is looking at elephant trunks which are really versatile they can pick up a single blade of grass or they can pick up something that weighs 600 pounds um with the same trunk and they do this thing where they call they form um pseudo joints you know a trunk is sort of one long thing but it can um act for a while as though it has an elbow or a wrist so you sort of form a a point of stiffness to yeah um so it's really quite cool and so malinkovic and his team have utilized technology from the movie industry so there's another integration there uh wherein this is the same technology that was used for gollum in the lord of the rings and the navies in the avatar movie where they put um sensors on the trunks of in this case it was two african elephants normally it would be an actor um and then they uses motion capture motion capture yes and then using infrared cameras as to capture the movement as the animals are moving or the actors are moving um and then they can build this whole 3d model based off of what they've picked up and so in this case they use two african elephants picking up a variety of objects with these sensors attached to their trunks and so they've released a paper with all of their findings which is now going to be used um with their partners um these are working with university in italy the team there is led by lucia bakay and another team in israel they're also working with a private 3d printing company called photocentric so two parts of this have really already been done one part has yet to be done so the first part is the studying in the models of the elephant trunks that milinkovic and his team did and the other part that's been done is looking at well in all of these things that elephants are able to do what exactly is it about their skin that facilitates this and some materials science scientists have worked with this 3d printing company to create a new material that mimics those useful properties that can be 3d printed so then the other researchers are going to try to use this technology to create robots that have more flexible and versatile arms and yeah like that and uh that can be used you know to do a variety of tasks in in industries and factories um and you know helping lift older people for example or disabled people um they will probably be able to help with search and rescue efforts a lot better just having more uh versatility there and i think it was becca who mentioned um that a lot of these technologies can also be commercialized like that material might be useful for other things and they do plan to put it on the market at some point so a lot of cool things going on with a lot of different people with different specializations working together so i just love the fact that we've gone from elon musk's you know irobot you know race car driver looking designed for a robot to you know the bendy arms which conjures up the image of the sort of lost in space like you know box with a dome on the roof with rubber tubes flapping around if that's actually what robots end up looking like i mean think more of the grace of an elephant trunk i want as many flashing lights on this thing as possible i'm not putting you in charge of the robot designed here i would say danger will robinson just randomly but okay so i i yeah i want to talk as soon as moving to the medical field now and i want to um talk about something that actually came off in something you talked about last week because you were talking about prosthetics that are controlled by uh magnetic implants in people's limbs and you mentioned in the course of that the you know um things that you're implanting into somebody's body need to be coated to prevent bacterial buildup on them and chalmers university which is another private university this one's in sweden um has developed a new way of reducing that so what happens sometimes when you embed a piece of technology in somebody's body like that example uh or like your heart monitors and you know breathing stuff like this and you all the stuff that we put into our bodies for some reason or another and it stays there for decades sometimes and um you get what's called a biofilm building up on on the device sometimes and that's because but you know these devices are on you know unusual textures defined in human you know they're metallic or plastic or whatever and yeah they're either they're a different temperature and you know fluids and things so you they become an ideal environment for bacteria to build up on their surfaces um and form these biofilms and so they've been trying to find ways to discourage that because that could lead to infections obviously as well as potentially impairing the the function of you know this very small fine technology so what they've done is they've used graphene covered with azinic acid which is an acid that's extracted from lichens um vicans are cool too because lichens aren't actually one organism they're a symbiotic relationship between fungi and algae so just to help anyone who made the same mistake i did and spent their entire life mispronouncing lichens as lichens this is not lycans from underworld this is not werewolves this is the you know uh gui as you say fungus and algae living together um i don't see them on trees yeah i don't know if that's a uk us thing or if i've just been saying it wrong my whole time my whole life but lichens is is it sounds right to me now um specifically from frutico's lycam um which this aznic acid has come from there was previous research that indicated the um acetic acid has bactericidal properties i it kills bacteria in this particular case it prevents them from forming nucleic acids so they can't synthesize rna so that means that they can't produce protein in their cells so they just die off because they can't grow so um you know it's not like throwing an a um anti um what you're just talking about what's going on in my head for a moment um yes antibiotic into your system where it's going to go around and kill everything it's just you know where the coating is that you it prevents that buildup so you don't have that risk that you were describing of wiping out all your good bacteria at the same time so more of it becoming resistant yeah so um yeah exactly so i think that's another you know great innovation that's come out of private research there uh out of sweden which is another of those you know countries where innovation is a lot easier than it is in some places um you know sweden has quite a lax uh regulatory environment for these kinds of things and and and and their corporate freedoms are quite impressive compared to most european countries very high tax country but otherwise it's a very free country it's another place where this kind of um innovation happens quite a lot compared to many places so i thought that was definitely something worth celebrating because it will um you know when somebody's in a medical situation where they need implants in their bodies then they really don't want to be getting bacterial infections on top of that right probably already vulnerable in many cases okay so today i'm going to wrap up with another cool topic uh which is it has to do with sharks and drones so um basically just as a broad overview what it is is that there has been some research involving drones that shows that sharks are closer to people than we realize more often than we realize and they don't care they're not interested in people they mostly just ignore them so more specifically this research is being done by a man named chris lowe who's a marine biologist and the director of the shark lab at california state university long beach again what a job title director of the shark lab um what's the best line from austin powers i just want freaking sharks with freaking laser beams attached to their heads is that what he produces no no no no no he studies shark behavior uh with a particular interest in great whites and their behavior around people um and so i want to talk a little bit about the benefits of having drones involved in this research so before if you wanted to get a bird's eye view of what sharks were doing you'd have to get on a plane or helicopter and low used to do this but it's very expensive versus the average drone is you know a couple hundred dollars and you know the average middle-class person can buy one many people do in fact own a drone yes like that one um and granted these probably have some nice cameras hooked up to them so they might be a little bit more expensive than the average drone but we're still way way cheaper than getting on a plane and you can get so much more footage that way and in fact lowe has hundreds of hours of footage that he's coming through for this research which is not completely concluded the other cool thing about drones being involved is again the average citizen can buy one which allows people to be in this sense um citizen scientists which is uh if you're not familiar with the concept it's basically just the idea of average people who you know don't have degrees in science or anything but are interested in some aspect of science whether it's butterflies or sharks or i think you can do it with something astronomy related to okay yeah yeah nasa has a citizen science program so if you have a telescope and things like yeah you can yeah yeah and so whatever area of science you're interested in and it's totally voluntary um but you can help collect data and help actual scientists in a lot of cases they will actually use your data and that's the case for low if if you have data or not data but footage from a drone of sharks or especially sharks around people he will take your your footage and use it he hastens to add you should be a licensed drone pilot but um he has had people uh send in footage of sharks near people and he has included it in his research and but why this is relevant to most people who are not interested in sharks is that sharks being around people on beaches when they are seen often leads to the beach being closed which besides just not being fun can also have some negative effects for the economy especially if it's closed for a long period of time because then or if it closes frequently because then people don't go to the beach the business businesses you know on the beach or around the beach don't make as much money and we have this economic harm but really there hasn't been a strong scientific backing for that there is actually that danger and now lowe's research is pointing to evidence against it actually because as i was saying you know over and over again he's just seeing these sharks near people and unless they're being chased they don't care they're not interested in people yeah i mean i think people's perception of sharks comes from four jaws movies and deep lucy and what's the other one with them i don't know it's just all these movies where sharks attack people it is where people's conceptions of shark behavior come from it's like eight people a year die from shark attacks yeah it's a very very low number yeah yeah most sharks unless you're chasing them harassing them i think the phrase he used is that they they treat people like flotsam they really don't care um that you're around so not being not having to close beaches when there are sharks around would be cool um but there's another effect that i wanted to talk about related to this that i think extends to technology more broadly which is it's a little bit freaky to realize how often sharks are close to people when we didn't know that before and i think it leads to this perception and that technology in general and having phones on our cameras flip that having cameras on our phones that we have with us all the time we can just whip out and record or take pictures whenever has led to this perception that we're in a much more dangerous world than we were in 40 50 years ago and there's you know it does depend on where you live and there there are some things that are different than they were 40 50 years ago but overall crime in most countries hasn't increased what's increased is your awareness of it because of technology yeah if anything it's gone down a lot i kind of have you know two examples of this really like one one is the i had a friend who shared a video of you know people turn up in a van and start breaking into a shop in london he's like london never used to be this dangerous when i was young in the 1970s it's like there was more than just right now it's more dangerous than the 1970s just that no everybody could whip out a smartphone and you had the same thing with the you know the blm riots last year and it's like people acting like that's a completely new phenomenon like the 1992 rights didn't happen or the 1960s and 70s ones it's just there's so much less you know nowadays just anything that happens a fire an explosion a terrorist attack you know any kind of incident is just immediately on facebook live and everyone sees it and it's all over the news and it just you know stuff just went under the radar before yeah it feels more immediate and more prevalent because you see it and often the way social media works because people react to that kind of thing obviously you know it's it's um scary it's sad people react to it so then you see more the way that the social media algorithms work so it's being put in your face a lot more than it would have you know 50 years ago you might see 50 years ago if there's you know a terrorist attack on in another on another continent maybe you see it in the newspaper and that's it and but nowadays that's not at all the case but there are some benefits to this even though it has this kind of psychological downside where if you're not actively looking for good news like listening to this podcast you tend to see a lot more of the bad news but the plus side is that when we're more aware of these things we have more information we can deal with them better the case of crime is a really easy one if we can catch somebody on camera we can apprehend the criminal and deal with it from there but going back to drones and sharks in this case we know more about shark behavior we know how it impacts people which is very little and we can adjust how we deal with sharks and beaches accordingly and i'm gonna borrow lowe's uh bottom line here to finish this off he says the bottom line is there is no doubt that drones have given people a different perspective because they get to see the sharks around people and see that the sharks aren't attacking so benefit in this case i think that's wonderful really yeah so to recap quickly um i started us off by talking about the afghan girl afghan robotics teams escaped from afghanistan and then you talked about reducing infant mortality caused by bacterial infections yes and then in our honorable mentions you talked about the tesla that elon musk has announced i talked about the really fascinating um effort to use elephant trunks the way they moved to inspire better robotics and then you talked about the graphene based coding for implants to reduce infections and i finished off by talking about sharks and drones thank you so much for joining us on innovation celebration thank you [Music] [Music] you

Channel: ◢ Objective Standard Institute

Views: 102

Keywords: innovationcelebration, thomaswalker, angelicaweth, Afghanistan, robotics, newborns, fetuses, infantmortality, baterialinfections, drones, teslabot

Id: 3z7H0StACCE

Length: 44min 50sec (2690 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 07 2021