Health and Whisky - BBC Click

[Music] this week new ways to measure your vital signs in intensive care or just to save you a trip to the doctor [Music] hey welcome to click hope you're well hope you're coping okay with the not going out the not seeing people the homeschooling and that long wait for the vaccine there's a heck of a lot going on at the moment isn't that lara looks like you've been keeping busy you've been decorating look i have i hope you like them i've got to keep myself busy and locked out absolutely no they look lovely tell you what's the most exciting thing to happen in the livington household for months now of course we are being encouraged to stay at home as much as possible except in particular circumstances and that includes if you need medical attention that said at the moment in the uk most gp appointments are happening remotely so that may be by telephone or online but of course there are some examinations that really need to take place in person so i've been looking at some of the technology that aims to be able to help you do them yourself health tracking devices are not new especially those used to monitor chronic conditions but the pandemic has encouraged the rise of innovative new kit or sometimes all you need is your smartphone this app from binary uses the camera built into your smartphone tablet or laptop to measure your vital signs in under a minute just by looking at your face so be nice actually analyzing the tiny color changes that are happening in your cheeks and forehead and those tiny color changes actually provide a clear indication regarding the blood flow behind your skin and by analyzing the blood flow then we're able to analyze and to understand what is your heart rate what is your oxygen saturation what is your respiration rate and a lot of different body signs over a hundred million scans have already been done and thousands of doctors have been trialling the tool whilst it applies for wide scale approvals but to get a second opinion and one from an actual doctor i drafted in claire gerard gp and former chair of the royal college of general practitioners lisa under your skin you've got millions of very small blood vessels and what this technology will be doing no doubt is actually pinning one of those down and picking up these various indices another smartphone based solution could be this lmd's tiny device can track your blood pressure just by holding your finger down on it its sensors track the pressure that you're putting on along with what the vessels look like under the skin but the eventual aim is to have this built into mobile phones when you measure your blood pressure with a normal cuff around your arm what that does is squeeze and compress the arm against the pressure of the blood we do exactly the same except we use the arteries here in the tip of the finger and when you put your finger on the device like that it tells you on the screen to push harder or softer it did take quite a few goes to get a reading but the company is improving its set of simple games to help you focus on getting it right and clinical trials are underway you've mentioned how beneficial this could be to people who know they need to be taking their blood pressure readings but how about to healthy people it would be very very useful to picking up people that we don't normally see in our surgery to that till they run into problems sometimes your phone may need a bit of help though this smartphone connected device aims to help you when you're having a remote doctor's appointment now it comes with attachments that help you look inside your ear or inside your throat even a stethoscope plus simpler functions like being able to take your temperature an app helps you record your findings and send them to a doctor or if your healthcare provider is signed up you can do live video calls where they take control heart is awesome let's go to spot you right wrestling across a lot of schools around the us and europe is starting to use title as a mini clinic we have visiting nurses services that are using title and so it's not always at the home level it's also at the community level taito care has been clinically validated by universities and hospitals in the u.s and israel it's also been trialled by the uk's national health service but not everyone's convinced that parents should be buying their own three hundred dollar device what do you think of a device like this which actually takes on some of the physical elements of what a doctor would generally need to do i think that if you're a worried parent number one you probably wouldn't have one if you're anxious where you're looking for all the bits in the midst of being unwell i think you won't find as much usage where it might be useful is if we're trying to monitor a patient at home so if i've seen a patient say on a friday morning and i'm a little bit concerned is this child unwell or not unwell i might give lend a patient's parents that machine and then have much more detail about the the patient's condition but moving forward do you think that these things are still going to stay with us there'll be as much enthusiasm in the future covid has has really done a paradigm shift saying that i don't ever think it will get beyond 60 percent of consultations will start and finish online i think there'll still be a large number of patients that see their doctor face to face for all sorts of reasons all around the world medical staff are having the toughest time trying to deal with the virus that attacks the body in new ways patients on ventilators need to be heavily sedated whilst a lot of machinery is used to monitor their vitals to allow doctors to respond appropriately at the right time well paul carter has this report from madrid where medics have been showing us how they've taken some existing technology and used it in new ways to help improve survival rates like many countries around the world spain's intensive care units are dealing with high numbers of cases of covid19 at two hospitals in madrid they're making use of a system that can help monitor critically ill patients the mdoloris monitors a person's autonomic nervous system which unconsciously regulates body processes including breathing blood pressure and heart rate it enables doctors to see at a glance the levels of pain or distress a patient may be in while sedated this is the intensive care department of puerto rico hospital right now in this room we have 11 covet 19 patients the systems are really easily applied for the pain monitor it's just two stickers that are going to register the activity the electrical activity of the heart and they are attached by this really simple cable to the monitor it gives you mainly two numbers there's one number that correlates with the immediate pain of the patient and then there's a second number that's a medium of the different pain scores that the machine has recorded for the last three minutes it has helped us because it's really simple to interpret you you walk into the room and you exactly know if your patient is in pain or not and it makes it easier to adjust the pain medication because we are always in fear that our patients might suffer pain but we also need to realize that it's very important for them to not be overdosed on opioids doctors say pain levels would normally be measured by assessing a number of measurements separately while the system in use here allows for greater detail the challenge for doctors is finding the right balance between keeping a patient comfortable while still enabling their nervous system to help the body fight back against the effects of the virus at the severe stages of the disease when artificial respiration is needed it is necessary to heavily sedate and even paralyze the patient the key is to anesthetize the patient this doesn't mean to switch their brain off but to reduce brain activity and that is why this technology is so important because it allows us to control the amount of sedation and analgesia avoiding both overdosing and underdosing this system doesn't replace the role of drugs and other types of therapies available to treat the sickest of patients rather it's an additional tool in the arsenal available to intensive care doctors as we continue to learn more about treating this illness [Music] hello and welcome to the week in tech it was the week that facebook news the social media giant's personalized news tool launched in the uk following a u.s rollout last year german drone firm wing copter said it will start delivering coronavirus vaccines by air with pilots launching in southeast asia and africa in the coming months and google stopped work on its virtual painting app tilt brush launched in 2016 this will live on as an open source project ford's electric scooter arms spin unveiled a new three-wheeled model a fleet of up to 300 scooters will be piloted in idaho this spring complete with controls that let vehicles be moved from afar and even wheeled to users on demand the makers of humanoid droid sophia the robot say this and three other models are going into mass production hello everyone sophia can imitate human gestures and uses ai for general reasoning and went viral when unveiled by hanson robotics in 2016. and finally the hip bones connected to the 3d printer scientists in australia have made an ink that can 3d print bone-like structures with living cells the ceramic based fluid must be squeezed into a gel bath with cells to set and could mend damaged bones during surgery now that's what i call bona fide e science last monday was burns night when scots everywhere celebrate the birth life and poetry of their national bard robert burns yeah he wrote amongst other things this [Music] old lang syne of course traditionally sung on new year's eve hog monet if you're in scotland and in scotland right now is our very own nick quick hello nick look at you well hello there how's it going you're right yes i'm in bonnie scotland and of course i am wearing traditional garb yeah keep that well under wraps if you wouldn't mind sir listen where are you well i'm in the one place mania scott hole dear to their heart the whiskey distillery i can't talk into some of that later on but anyway as it is barnes night um it's the one time in the year where it's socially acceptable to drink whiskey with your dinner i see how was your birth night well it was pretty bizarre to be honest um it went virtual for the first and hopefully the last time and obviously there's a lot of people up here with a lot of time with their hands so one phd student from glasgow decided to train an ai to write poetry in the style of the great bard himself okay can we hear a bit of that now but hang us our the angle and shale plays and sense wheel mounted on his grey mare wheel harrowed at last and bent at the neck his fears ceaseless his madness refused to relent wow tech meets tradition speaking of which spencer you've been testing some whiskey that was blended by an artificial intelligence yeah that's right and this is being made in the traditional home of whiskey sweden what okay look sweden is actually very new to whiskey making a couple of hours north of stockholm in the town of yavnay i found angela dorazio now she's mcmara whiskey's master blender although i prefer her other title cno chief nose officer she's going to explain how her latest gold award-winning whiskey was given a helping hand well all knows a computer the sealing process that you see behind me that is where we where we start that is something that gives us the the clear stuff that looks like water that is very strong it's about 70 percent of alcohol the taste of the new made spirit has a malty character then you also get a taste from the the stuff that ferments it so the yeast that we're using is the same yeast that everybody bakes with in sweden sweet uh sweet cakes and we get a very fruity light kind of fruity aromatic tone from the yeast after distillation the liquid is aged for years in oak casks where it absorbs the flavor from the wood slowly slowly the alcohol evaporates from this living material that oak is and you get the taste of the oak you get the color of the oak but the next part of angela's job where she decides how to blend the contents of different casks together became the subject of a machine learning experiment when i make a blend i have an idea of what i will use and then i test blend it so i might take a base of first fillex bourbon and then i'll take a few samples of something else so i'll do a complexity of tastes and aromas in this blend and then i'll do i can see okay i used lit too much of that new american oak i can see in this blend i will have to use a little less of that and this process can take days and weeks so tech startup four kind offered to create software to see if a computer could do the blending job instead all the info about angela's previous recipes cask information tasting notes reviews and awards were fed into the algorithm to see if it could come up with a new blend that was also worthy of a prize the ai program then gave me very many recipe suggestions which in the beginning were very strange and very odd and not at all something that i would like to use for example it it said that you know you use very little from 500 casks and that is like not the thing that you would do so we narrowed down the possibilities while we went along and i got 100 recipes and i looked at them and i said no and then i got 100 more and then i got 100 more and then in the end i singled out five recipes that i thought were nice the result is a whiskey called intelligence what else and it did win two awards in the us so is it any good well i'm not really into whiskey so i had a bottle sent to someone with a much better sense of it all than me me dad he got the taste buds i kept the hair well the color is certainly whisky color [Laughter] intelligence is not meant to taste like any other whiskey in particular but i did ask dad how it compared to his favorite scottish single malt definitely a more concentrated flavor whereas this one fuller are full of flavor yeah but it's enjoyable it's you couldn't drink much of it i don't think at the moment there are no plans to make another batch good news for human master blenders i feel bad news for me dad though as he won't get any more whiskey to try for a while back home i'm at the glen turret the oldest distillery in scotland a title fiercely defended and here they certainly like to do things the old-fashioned way [Music] it's the last remaining scottish distillery to rouse mash by hand levers are pooled and pipes are manually positioned to fill the hand-crafted wooden washbacks you see the passion that goes into the blood sweat and tears that goes into making our whiskey and you feel it you can almost smell it in the whiskey cutting a process affecting the alcohol percentage and spirit clarity is done by eye brian knows when the time is just right the spirit safe is so ancient the workers don't even know how old it is they hazard a guess of half a century or so and when it comes to casks they're individually nosed sniffed before selected an instinct fine-tuned over decades and most importantly they've got two cats in residence so there's no moose loose about this hoos as if sweden wasn't enough imagine the reaction when i told the manager here about silicon valley concocting the drinks and labs it goes against all the grains in my body i have to say to do that i mean i think there's a lot of romance in it that's for sure but once you come to a place like this and you look around here and you open these casts and you smell them i mean can you replicate that in a laboratory i certainly don't think so well james clayton has been to visit the team in california reducing the sacred aging process down to a handful of days [Music] welcome to bespoken spirits one of a number of small startups on a mission to revolutionize the spirits industry and meet martin and stew the founders of the company a couple different samples and we're looking at some of the attributes of aroma this has more of that fur for all than than than this one does so this one is going to have a more nutty taste than this one does another one might have higher amounts of vanillin than another one which means it's going to have a higher smell or taste of vanilla so you can be that exact exactly and then those are the things that we can engineer in each subsequent iteration of our recipe whiskey making is a bit of a science but here they've taken that to a whole new level here's steve explaining the process from start to finish we have three main elements that we use in creating those recipes the first is the source spirit itself the second element we use is the wood and here what we do is we operate with what we call micro staves which are small pieces of wood and each micro stave is roughly 125 000 the size of a barrel and we'll start by building a mixture of micro staves so we can mix and match these micro staves to get the recipes that we want and it's kind of like the spices in a recipe if you will and once we have that micro stave mixture selected we then choose how we're going to toast and char those microscopes we then take it and the source spirit and we put them together in our machine which we call the activator and we control the environment within the the machine to precisely influence when and how the chemical reactions occur we have over 17 billion combinations we can use in creating our recipes and it typically takes three to five days to get the end result that we're looking for some of the process uses technology that they say is market sensitive that they wouldn't show me but they claim that the spirits that they make things like whiskey and rum are just as good as the real thing we've got three different samples of our bespoken products here this was our original flagship product the first product we made the first to win industry awards okay this is a japanese style whiskey in the sense that it's more floral and aromatic fruity whereas this is more of a classic bourbon style whiskey vanilla caramel woody notes etc all right i'll try i'll try this right getting nuts from this is that is that a thing is it nutty is it again we're not making synthetic spirits here we're just controlling the traditional elements in the traditional process in a very precise way to get precise results and thereby unlock so much more power of craft to the distillery today on the mosquito we are going to be doing the last class review okay so i'm clearly not a spirits expert but josh peters is he's a respected whiskey expert and writes the whiskey jug blog he believes this kind of technology can make some good spirits but when it comes to replicating the aging process it's not quite there i have yet to have a whiskey from one of these that i thought tasted like a true oak aged spirit i've had some great rums though things like rums um un-aged products end up tasting very good but anything that requires that barrel aging i've yet to have anything that actually replicates or or comes even close to it they'll probably do very well in things like cocktails you're going to make some really cool and interesting things with them but i don't think that they're gonna be replacing the the the liquid that i want to at the end of the day pour into a glass and drink on its own companies like bespoke and spirits don't actually need to convince everyone they're on to a winner they're looking for a fraction of a multi-billion dollar industry if they can convince just one percent of people who drink spirits that this is the future they'll be cheering to that that was james clayton in silicon valley i'd imagine that report has annoyed a lot of people let's go back to nick in scotland who is not there right now oh no what have we done where is he right does anybody have a straw oh that's it i don't know when we're gonna see nick again maybe next burns night or the morning after anyway that is it from us for now as ever you can keep up with the team on social media find us on youtube instagram facebook and twitter at bbclick thanks for watching we'll see you soon bye bye [Music] you

Channel: BBC Click

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Id: IkaIuPDsiZc

Length: 24min 27sec (1467 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 03 2021