Only I Can

Only I Can:: What about Zika fever?

Only I Can — Tue, 08 Aug 2017 17:08:26 +0900

Summery

What about Zika fever? And how to treat them

Script

Zika fever: our newest dread disease. What is it? Where'd it come from?

What do we do about it? Well for most adults, it's a relatively mild disease -- a little fever, a little headache, joint pain, maybe a rash.

In fact, most people who get it don't even know they've had it. But the more we find out about the Zika virus the more terrifying it becomes.

For example, doctors have noticed an uptick of something called Guillain-Barré syndrome in recent outbreaks.

In Guillain-Barré, your immune system attacks your nerve cells it can partially or even totally paralyze you.

Fortunately, that's quite rare, and most people recover. But if you're pregnant when you're infected you're at risk of something terrible. Indeed, a child with a deformed head.

Here's a normal baby. Here's that infant with what's called microcephaly. a brain in a head that's too small. And there's no known cure.

It was actually doctors in northeastern Brazil who first noticed, just a year ago, after a Zika outbreak, that there was a peak in the incidence of microcephaly.

It took medical doctors another year to be sure that it was caused by the Zika virus, but they're now sure.

And if you're a "bring on the evidence" type, check out this publication.

So where did it come from, and how did it get here? And it is here. Like many of our viruses, it came out of Africa, specifically the Zika forest in Uganda.

Researchers at the nearby Yellow Fever Research Institute identified an unknown virus in a monkey in the Zika forest which is how it got its name.

The first human cases of Zika fever surfaced a few years later in Uganda-Tanzania.

The virus then spread through West Africa and east through equatorial Asia -- Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Indonesia.

But it was still mostly in monkeys and, of course, mosquitoes.

In fact in the 60 years between the time it was first identified in 1947 and 2007 there were only 13 reported cases of human Zika fever.

And then something extraordinary happened on the tiny Micronesian Yap islands. There was an outbreak that affected fully 75 percent of the population.

How did it get there? By air. Today we have two billion commercial airline passengers.

An infected passenger can board a plane, fly halfway around the world before developing symptoms -- if they develop symptoms at all.

Then when they land, the local mosquitoes begin to bite them and spread the fever. Zika fever then next surfaced in 2013 in French Polynesia.

By December of that year, it was being transmitted locally by the mosquitoes. That led to an explosive outbreak in which almost 30,000 people were affected.

From there it radiated around the Pacific. There were outbreaks in the Cook Islands, in New Caledonia, in Vanuatu, in the Solomon Islands

And almost all the way around to the coast of South America and Easter Island.

And then, in early 2015, there was an upsurge of cases of a dengue-like syndrome in the city of Natal in northeastern Brazil.

The virus wasn't dengue, it was Zika, and it spread rapidly -- Recife down the coast, a big metropolitan center, soon became the epicenter.

Well people have speculated that it was 2014 World Cup soccer fans that brought the virus into the country.

But others have speculated that perhaps it was Pacific Islanders participating in championship canoe races that were held in Rio that year that brought it in.

Well today, this is only a year later.

The virus is being locally transmitted by mosquitoes virtually throughout South America, Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean Islands Until this year,

the many thousands of cases that have been diagnosed in the US were contracted elsewhere.

But as of this summer, it's being transmitted locally in Miami. It's here.

So what do we do about it? Well, preventing infection is either about protecting people or about eliminating the mosquitoes.

Let's focus on people first. You can get vaccinated. You can not travel to Zika areas. Or you can cover up and apply insect repellent.

Getting vaccinated is not an option, because there isn't a vaccine yet and there probably won't be for a couple of years.

Staying home isn't a foolproof protection either because we now know that it can be sexually transmitted. Covering up and applying insect repellent does work ...

until you forget.

(Laughter) So that leaves the mosquitoes, and here's how we control them now: spraying insecticides.

The protective gear is necessary because these are toxic chemicals that kill people as well as bugs.

Although it does take quite a lot more to kill a person than to kill a bug. These are pictures from Brazil and Nicaragua.

But it looks the same in Miami, Florida. And we of course can spray insecticides from planes.

Last summer, mosquito control officials in Dorchester County, South Carolina, authorized spraying of Naled, an insecticide, early one morning, as recommended by the manufacturer.

Later that day, a beekeeper told reporters that her bee yard looked like it had been nuked. Oops.

Bees are the good guys. The citizens of Florida protested, but spraying continued.

Unfortunately, so did the increase in the number of Zika fever cases. That's because insecticides aren't very effective.

So are there any approaches that are perhaps more effective than spraying but with less downsides than toxic chemicals?

I'm a huge fan of biological controls, and I share that view with Rachel Carson, author of "Silent Spring," the book that is credited with starting the environmental movement.

In this book she tells the story, as an example, of how a very nasty insect pest of livestock was eliminated in the last century.

No one knows that extraordinary story today.

So Jack Block and I, when we were writing an editorial about the mosquito problem today, retold that story.

And in capsule form, it's that pupae -- that's the immature form of the insect -- were irradiated until they were sterile,

grown to adulthood and then released from planes all over the Southwest, the Southeast and down into Mexico and into Central America literally by the hundreds of millions from little airplanes,

eventually eliminating that terrible insect pest for most of the Western Hemisphere.

Our real purpose in writing this editorial was to introduce readers to how we can do that today -- not with radiation but with our knowledge of genetics. Let me explain.

This is the bad guy: Aedes aegypti. It's the most common insect vector of diseases, not just Zika but dengue, Chikungunya, West Nile virus and that ancient plague, yellow fever.

It's an urban mosquito, and it's the female that does the dirty work.

She bites to get a blood meal to feed her offspring.

Males don't bite; they don't even have the mouth parts to bite.

A little British company called Oxitec genetically modified that mosquito so that when it mates with a wild female, its eggs don't develop to adulthood.

Let me show you. This is the normal reproductive cycle. Oxitec designed the mosquito so that when the male mates with the wild female the eggs don't develop.

Sounds impossible? Well let me show you just diagrammatically how they do it. Now this represents the nucleus of a mosquito cell,

and that tangle in the middle represents its genome, the sum total of its genes.

Scientists added a single gene that codes for a protein represented by this orange ball that feeds back on itself to keep cranking out more of that protein.

The extra copies, however, go and gum up the mosquitoes' genes, killing the organism. To keep it alive in the laboratory they use a compound called tetracycline.

Tetracycline shuts off that gene and allows normal development.

They added another little wrinkle so that they could study what happens.

And that is they added a gene that makes the insect glow under UV light so that when they released it they could follow exactly how far it went how long it lived and all of the kinds of data for a good scientific study.

Now this is the pupal stage, and at this stage the females are larger than the males.

That allows them to sort them into the males and the females and they allow only the males to grow to adulthood.

And let me remind you that males don't bite.

From there it's pretty simple. They take beakers full of male mosquitoes, load them into milk cartons, and drive around the city, releasing them guided by GPS.

Here's the mayor of a city releasing the first batch of what they call the "friendly Aedes." Now I wish I could tell you this is an American city, but it's not.

It's Piracicaba, Brazil. The amazing thing is that in just a year it brought down the cases of dengue by 91 percent.

That's better than any insecticide spraying can do.

So why aren't we using this remarkable biological control in the US?

That's because it's a GMO: a genetically modified organism.

Notice the subtitle here says if the FDA would let them they could do the same thing here, when Zika arrives.

And of course it has arrived. So now I have to tell you the short form of the long, torturous story of GM regulation in the US In the US,

there are three agencies that regulate genetically modified organisms: the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the USDA, US Department of Agriculture.

Took these folks two years to decide that it would be the FDA that would regulate the genetically modified mosquito.

And they would do it as a new animal drug, if that makes any sense.

Took them another five years going back and forth and back and forth to convince the FDA that this would not harm people, and it would not harm the environment.

They finally gave them, this summer, permission to run a little test in the Florida Keys, where they had been invited years earlier when they Keys had an outbreak of dengue.

Would that it were that easy. When the local residents heard that there would be genetically modified mosquitoes tested in their community some of them began to organize protests.

They even organized a petition on the internet with this cuddly logo,

which eventually accumulated some 160,000 signatures And they demanded a referendum which will be conducted in just a couple of weeks about whether the trials would be permitted at all.

Well it's Miami that really needs these better ways of controlling insects.

And there the attitudes are changing. In fact, very recently a bipartisan group of more than 60 legislators wrote to HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell asking that she,

at the Federal level, expedite access for Florida to this new technology.

So the bottom line is this: biological control of harmful insects can be both more effective and very much more environmentally friendly than using insecticides, which are toxic chemicals.

That was true in Rachel Carson's time; it's true today.

What's different is that we have enormously more information about genetics than we had then,

And therefore more ability to use that information to affect these biological controls.

And I hope that what I've done is aroused your curiosity enough to start your own inquiry -- not into just GM mosquitoes but to the other genetically modified organisms that are so controversial today.

I think if you do that, and you dig down through all of the misinformation, and the marketing on the part of the organic food industry and the Greenpeaces and find the science, the accurate science, you'll be surprised and pleased.

Thank you.

Only I Can Ted:: How computers learn to recognize objects instantly

Only I Can — Mon, 07 Aug 2017 16:38:08 +0900

summery

Ten years ago, researchers thought that getting a computer to tell

the difference between a cat and a dog would be almost impossible.

Today, computer vision systems do it with greater than 99 percent accuracy.

How? Joseph Redmon works on the YOLO (You Only Look Once) system,

an open-source method of object detection that can identify objects in images and video

from zebras to stop signs -- with lightning-quick speed.

In a remarkable live demo, Redmon shows off this important step forward for applications like self-driving cars,

robotics and even cancer detection.

script

Ten years ago, computer vision researchers thought that getting a computer to tell

the difference between a cat and a dog would be almost impossible,

even with the significant advance in the state of artificial intelligence.

Now we can do it at a level greater than 99 percent accuracy.

This is called image classification -- give it an image, put a label to that image

-- and computers know thousands of other categories as well.

I'm a graduate student at the University of Washington, and I work on a project called Darknet,

which is a neural network framework for training and testing computer vision models.

So let's just see what Darknet thinks of this image that we have.

When we run our classifier on this image, we see we don't just get a prediction of dog or cat,

we actually get specific breed predictions.

That's the level of granularity we have now. And it's correct. My dog is in fact a malamute.

So we've made amazing strides in image classification,

but what happens when we run our classifier on an image that looks like this?

Well ... We see that the classifier comes back with a pretty similar prediction.

And it's correct, there is a malamute in the image, but just given this label,

we don't actually know that much about what's going on in the image.

We need something more powerful.

I work on a problem called object detection, where we look at an image and try to find all of the objects,

put bounding boxes around them and say what those objects are. So here's what happens when we run a detector on this image.

Now, with this kind of result, we can do a lot more with our computer vision algorithms.

We see that it knows that there's a cat and a dog. It knows their relative locations, their size.

It may even know some extra information. There's a book sitting in the background. And if you want to build a system on top of computer vision,

say a self-driving vehicle or a robotic system, this is the kind of information that you want.

You want something so that you can interact with the physical world.

Now, when I started working on object detection, it took 20 seconds to process a single image.

And to get a feel for why speed is so important in this domain, here's an example of an object detector that takes two seconds to process an image.

So this is 10 times faster than the 20-seconds-per-image detector,

and you can see that by the time it makes predictions, the entire state of the world has changed, and this wouldn't be very useful for an application.

If we speed this up by another factor of 10, this is a detector running at five frames per second.

This is a lot better, but for example, if there's any significant movement, I wouldn't want a system like this driving my car.

This is our detection system running in real time on my laptop.

So it smoothly tracks me as I move around the frame, and it's robust to a wide variety of changes in size, pose, forward, backward.

This is great. This is what we really need if we're going to build systems on top of computer vision.

So in just a few years, we've gone from 20 seconds per image to 20 milliseconds per image, a thousand times faster.

How did we get there? Well, in the past, object detection systems would take an image like this

and split it into a bunch of regions and then run a classifier on each of these regions,

and high scores for that classifier would be considered detections in the image.

But this involved running a classifier thousands of times over an image, thousands of neural network evaluations to produce detection.

Instead, we trained a single network to do all of detection for us.

It produces all of the bounding boxes and class probabilities simultaneously.

With our system, instead of looking at an image thousands of times to produce detection, you only look once,

and that's why we call it the YOLO method of object detection. So with this speed,

we're not just limited to images; we can process video in real time. And now, instead of just seeing that cat and dog, we can see them move around and interact with each other.

This is a detector that we trained on 80 different classes in Microsoft's COCO dataset.

It has all sorts of things like spoon and fork, bowl, common objects like that.

It has a variety of more exotic things: animals, cars, zebras, giraffes. And now we're going to do something fun.

We're just going to go out into the audience and see what kind of things we can detect.

Does anyone want a stuffed animal? There are some teddy bears out there. And we can turn down our threshold for detection a little bit,

so we can find more of you guys out in the audience. Let's see if we can get these stop signs.

We find some backpacks. Let's just zoom in a little bit. And this is great. And all of the processing is happening in real time on the laptop.

And it's important to remember that this is a general purpose object detection system, so we can train this for any image domain.

The same code that we use to find stop signs or pedestrians, bicycles in a self-driving vehicle, can be used to find cancer cells in a tissue biopsy.

And there are researchers around the globe already using this technology for advances in things like medicine, robotics.

This morning, I read a paper where they were taking a census of animals in Nairobi National Park with YOLO as part of this detection system.

And that's because Darknet is open source and in the public domain, free for anyone to use.

But we wanted to make detection even more accessible and usable, so through a combination of model optimization,

network binarization and approximation, we actually have object detection running on a phone.

And I'm really excited because now we have a pretty powerful solution to this low-level computer vision problem,

and anyone can take it and build something with it.

So now the rest is up to all of you and people around the world with access to this software,

and I can't wait to see what people will build with this technology.

Only i Can TED) What six years in captivity taught me about fear and faith

Only I Can — Thu, 03 Aug 2017 11:08:46 +0900

summery

In 2002, the Colombian guerilla movement known as the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia)

kidnapped Ingrid Betancourt in the middle of her presidential campaign.

For the next six years, Betancourt was held hostage in jungle prison camps where she was ravaged by

malaria, fleas, hunger and human cruelty until her rescue by the Colombian government.

In this deeply personal talk, the politician turned writer explains what it's like to live in a perpetual state of fear

And how her faith sustained her.

script

The first time I felt fear I was 41 years old. People have always said I was brave.

When I was little, I'd climb the highest tree, and I'd approach any animal fearlessly.

I liked challenges. My father used to say, "Good steel can withstand any temperature."

And when I entered into Colombian politics,

I thought I'd be able to withstand any temperature. I wanted to end corruption.

I wanted to cut ties between politicians and drug traffickers. The first time I was elected,

it was because I called out, by name, corrupt and untouchable politicians. I also called out the president for his ties to the cartels.

That's when the threats started.

I had to send my very young children out of the country one morning, hidden, all the way to the airport, in the French ambassador's armored car.

Days later, I was the victim of an attack, but emerged unharmed.

The following year, the Colombian people elected me with the highest number of votes.

I thought people applauded me because I was brave. I, too, thought I was brave. But I wasn't. I had simply never before experienced true fear.

That changed on February 23, 2002. At the time, I was a presidential candidate in Colombia promoting my campaign agenda,

when I was detained by a group of armed men. They were wearing uniforms with military garments.

I looked at their boots. they were rubber. And I knew that the Colombian army wore leather boots.

I knew that these were FARC guerrillas.

From that point on, everything happened very quickly. The commando leader ordered us to stop the vehicle.

Meanwhile, one of his men stepped on an antipersonnel mine and flew through the air.

He landed, sitting upright, right in front of me. We made eye contact and it was then that the young man understood.

His rubber boot with his leg still in it had landed far away.

He started screaming like crazy. And the truth is, I felt -- as I feel right now,

because I'm reliving these emotions -- I felt at that moment that something inside of me was breaking and that I was being infected with his fear.

My mind went blank and couldn't think it was paralyzed.

When I finally reacted, I said to myself, "They're going to kill me, and I didn't say goodbye to my children."

As they took me into the deepest depths of the jungle, the FARC soldiers announced that if the government didn't negotiate,

they'd kill me. And I knew that the government wouldn't negotiate.

From that point on, I went to sleep in fear every night, cold sweats, shaking, stomach ache, insomnia.

But worse than that was what was happening to my mind, because my memory was being erased.

all the phone numbers, addresses, names of very dear people, even significant life events.

And so, I began to doubt myself, to doubt my mental health.

And with doubt came desperation, and with desperation came depression.

I was suffering notorious behavioral changes and it wasn't just paranoia in moments of panic.

It was distrust, it was hatred, and it was also the urge to kill.

This, I realized when they had me chained by the neck to a tree. They kept me outside that day, during a tropical downpour.

I remember feeling an urgent need to use the bathroom.

"Whatever you have to do, you'll do in front of me, bitch," the guard screamed at me.

And I decided at that moment to kill him. And for days, I was planning, trying to find the right moment,

the right way to do it, filled with hatred, filled with fear. Then suddenly, I rose up, snapped out of it and thought.

"I'm not going to become one of them. I'm not going to become an assassin. I still have enough freedom to decide who I want to be."

That's when I learned that fear brought me face to face with myself.

It forced me to align my energies, to align my meridians. I learned that facing fear could become a pathway to growth.

A lot of emotions arise when I talk about all of this, but when I think back, I'm able to identify the steps I took to do it.

I want to share three of them with you.

The first was to be guided by principles.

Because I realized that in the midst of panic and mental block, if I followed my principles, I acted correctly.

I remember the first night in a concentration camp that the guerrillas had built in the middle of the jungle,

with 12-foot-high bars, barbed wire, lookouts in the four corners and armed men pointing guns at us 24 hours a day.

That morning, the first morning, some men arrived, yelling: "Count off! Count off!" My fellow hostages woke up, startled,

And began to identify themselves in numbered sequence.

But when it was my turn, I said, "Ingrid Betancourt. If you want to know if I'm here, call me by my name."

The guards' fury was nothing compared to that of the other hostages,

Because, obviously they were scared -- we were all scared -- and they were afraid that,

because of me, they would be punished.

But for me, beyond fear was the need to defend my identity, to not let them turn me into a thing or a number.

That was one of the principles: to defend what I considered to be human dignity.

But make no mistake: the guerrillas had it all very well analyzed -- they had been kidnapping for years,

And they had developed a technique to break us, to defeat us, to divide us.

And so, the second step was to learn how to build supportive trust, to learn how to unite.

The jungle is like a different planet. It's a world of shadows, of rain, with the hum of millions of bugs.

majiña ants, bullet ants. I didn't stop scratching a single day while I was in the jungle.

And of course, there were tarantulas, scorpions, anacondas ...

I once came face to face with a 24-foot long anaconda that could have swallowed me in one bite. Jaguars ...

But I want to tell you that none of these animals did us as much harm as the human beings.

The guerrillas terrorized us. They spread rumors. Among the hostages, they sparked betrayals, jealousy, resentment, mistrust.

The first time I escaped for a long time was with Lucho.

Lucho had been a hostage for two years longer than I had.

We decided to tie ourselves up with ropes to have the strength to lower ourselves into that dark water full of piranhas and alligators.

What we did was, during the day, we would hide in the mangroves.

And at night, we would leave, get in the water, and we would swim and let the current carry us.

That went on for several days. But Lucho became sick. He was diabetic, and he fell into a diabetic coma. So the guerrillas captured us.

But after having lived through that with Lucho, after having faced fear together, united, not punishment, not violence.

Nothing could ever again divide us.

What's certain is, all the guerrillas' manipulation was so damaging to us that even today,

among some of the hostages from back then, tensions linger, passed down from all that poison that the guerrillas created.

The third step is very important to me, and it's a gift that I want to give to you.

The third step is to learn how to develop faith. I want to explain it like this.

Jhon Frank Pinchao was a police officer who had been a hostage for more than eight years.

He was famous for being the biggest scaredy-cat of us all. But Pincho -- I called him "Pincho" -- Pincho decided that he wanted to escape.

And he asked me to help him. By that point, I basically had a master's degree in escape attempts.

So we got started but we had a delay, because first, Pincho had to learn how to swim.

And we had to carry out all these preparations in total secrecy.

Anyway, when we finally had everything ready, Pincho came up to me one afternoon and said,

"Ingrid, suppose I'm in the jungle, and I go around and around in circles, and I can't find the way out. What do I do?"

"Pincho, you grab a phone, and you call the man upstairs."

"Ingrid, you know I don't believe in God." "God doesn't care. He'll still help you."

It rained all night that night. The following morning, the camp woke up to a big commotion,

Because Pincho had fled. They made us dismantle the camp, and we started marching.

During the march, the head guerrillas told us that Pincho had died, and that they had found his remains eaten by an anaconda.

Seventeen days passed -- and believe me, I counted them, because they were torture for me.

But on the seventeenth day, the news exploded from the radio.

Pincho was free and obviously alive. And this was the first thing he said:

"I know my fellow hostages are listening. Ingrid, I did what you told me.

I called the man upstairs, and he sent me the patrol that rescued me from the jungle."

That was an extraordinary moment, because ... obviously fear is contagious.

But faith is, too. Faith isn't rational or emotional. Faith is an exercise of the will.

It's the discipline of the will. It's what allows us to transform everything that we are -- our weaknesses,

our frailties, into strength, into power. It's truly a transformation.

It's what gives us the strength to stand up in the face of fear look above it, and see beyond it.

I hope you remember that,

because I know we all need to connect with that strength we have inside of us for the times when there's a storm raging around our boat.

Many, many, many, many years passed before I could return to my house. But when they took us, handcuffed, into the helicopter that finally took us out of the jungle, everything happened as quickly as when they kidnapped me. In an instant, I saw the guerrilla commander at my feet, gagged, and the rescue leader, yelling:

"We're the Colombian army! You are free!"

The shriek that came out of all of us when we regained our freedom, continues to vibrate in me to this day.

Now, I know they can divide all of us, they can manipulate us all with fear.

The "No" vote on the peace referendum in Colombia; Brexit; the idea of a wall between Mexico and the United States;

Islamic terrorism -- they're all examples of using fear politically to divide and recruit us.

We all feel fear. But we can all avoid being recruited using the resources we have -- our principles,

unity, faith. Yes, fear is part of the human condition, as well as being necessary for survival.

But above all, it's the guide by which each of us builds our identity, our personality.

It's true, I was 41 years old the first time I felt fear, and feeling fear was not my decision.

But it was my decision what to do with that fear. You can survive crawling along, fearful.

But you can also rise above the fear, rise up, spread your wings, and soar, fly high, high, high, high, until you reach the stars, where all of us want to go.

Thank you

Only i Can TED) Meet Spot, the robot dog that can run, hop and open doors

Only I Can — Tue, 01 Aug 2017 13:33:23 +0900

summery

That science fiction future where robots can do what people and animals do may be closer than you think.

Marc Raibert, founder of Boston Dynamics, is developing advanced robots that can gallop like a cheetah,

negotiate 10 inches of snow, walk upright on two legs and even open doors and deliver packages.

Join Raibert for a live demo of SpotMini, a nimble robot that maps the space around it, handles objects, climbs stairs,

and could soon be helping you out around the house.

script

That's SpotMini. He'll be back in a little while.

I love building robots.

And my long-term goal is to build robots that can do what people and animals do.

And there's three things in particular that we're interested in.

One is balance and dynamic mobility, the second one is mobile manipulation, and the third one is mobile perception.

So, dynamic mobility and balance

I'm going to do a demo for you. I'm standing here, balancing. I can see you're not very impressed. OK, how about now?

How about now?

Those simple capabilities mean that people can go almost anywhere on earth, on any kind of terrain. We want to capture that for robots.

What about manipulation? I'm holding this clicker in my hand.

I'm not even looking at it, and I can manipulate it without any problem.

But even more important, I can move my body while I hold the manipulator, the clicker, and stabilize and coordinate my body, and I can even walk around.

And that means I can move around in the world and expand the range of my arms and my hands and really be able to handle almost anything.

So that's mobile manipulation. And all of you can do this.

Third is perception. I'm looking at a room with over 1,000 people in it, and my amazing visual system can see every one of you're all stable in space,

even when I move my head, even when I move around.

That kind of mobile perception is really important for robots that are going to move and act out in the world.

I'm going to give you a little status report on where we are in developing robots toward these ends.

The first three robots are all dynamically stabilized robots.

This one goes back a little over 10 years ago "BigDog."

It's got a gyroscope that helps stabilize it. It's got sensors and a control computer.

Here's a Cheetah robot that's running with a galloping gait,

where it recycles its energy, it bounces on the ground, and it's computing all the time in order to keep itself stabilized and propelled.

And here's a bigger robot that's got such good locomotion using its legs,

that it can go in deep snow. This is about 10 inches deep, and it doesn't really have any trouble.

This is Spot, a new generation of robot -- just slightly older than the one that came out onstage.

And we've been asking the question -- you've all heard about drone delivery.

Can we deliver packages to your houses with drones? Well, what about plain old legged-robot delivery?

So we've been taking our robot to our employees' homes to see whether we could get in the various access ways.

And believe me, in the Boston area, there's every manner of stairway twists and turns.

So it's a real challenge. But we're doing very well, about 70 percent of the way.

And here's mobile manipulation, where we've put an arm on the robot, and it's finding its way through the door.

Now, one of the important things about making autonomous robots is to make them not do just exactly what you say,

but make them deal with the uncertainty of what happens in the real world.

So we have Steve there, one of the engineers, giving the robot a hard time.

And the fact that the programming still tolerates all that disturbance. it does what it's supposed to.

Here's another example, where Eric is tugging on the robot as it goes up the stairs.

And believe me, getting it to do what it's supposed to do in those circumstances is a real challenge,

but the result is something that's going to generalize and make robots much more autonomous than they would be otherwise.

This is Atlas, a humanoid robot.

It's a third-generation humanoid that we've been building. I'll tell you a little bit about the hardware design later.

And we've been saying: How close to human levels of performance and speed could we get in an ordinary task, like moving boxes around on a conveyor?

We're getting up to about two-thirds of the speed that a human operates on average.

And this robot is using both hands, it's using its body, it's stepping,

so it's really an example of dynamic stability, mobile manipulation and mobile perception.

We actually have two Atlases.

Now, everything doesn't go exactly the way it's supposed to.

And here's our latest robot, called "Handle." Handle is interesting,

because it's sort of half like an animal, and it's half something else with these leg-like things and wheels.

It's got its arms on in kind of a funny way, but it really does some remarkable things.

It can carry 100 pounds. It's probably going to lift more than that, but so far we've done 100.

It's got some pretty good rough-terrain capability, even though it has wheels. And Handle loves to put on a show.

I'm going to give you a little bit of robot religion.

A lot of people think that a robot is a machine where there's a computer that's telling it what to do,

and the computer is listening through its sensors.

But that's really only half of the story.

The real story is that the computer is on one side, making suggestions to the robot, and on the other side are the physics of the world.

And that physics involves gravity, friction, bouncing into things.

In order to have a successful robot, my religion is that you have to do a holistic design, where you're designing the software,

the hardware and the behavior all at one time, and all these parts really intermesh and cooperate with each other.

And when you get the perfect design, you get a real harmony between all those parts interacting with each other.

So it's half software and half hardware, plus the behavior.

We've done some work lately on the hardware, where we tried to go the picture on the left is a conventional design,

where you have parts that are all bolted together, conductors, tubes, connectors. And on the right is a more integrated thing.

it's supposed to look like an anatomy drawing. Using the miracle of 3-D printing,

we're starting to build parts of robots that look a lot more like the anatomy of an animal.

So that's an upper-leg part that has hydraulic pathways -- actuators, filters -- all embedded, all printed as one piece,

and the whole structure is developed with a knowledge of what the loads and behavior are going to be,

which is available from data recorded from robots and simulations and things like that.

So it's a data-driven hardware design. And using processes like that, not only the upper leg but some other things,

we've gotten our robots to go from big, behemoth, bulky, slow, bad robots,

that one on the right, weighing almost 400 pounds -- down to the one in the middle which was just in the video, weighs about 190 pounds,

just a little bit more than me, and we have a new one, which is working but I'm not going to show it to you yet, on the left,

which weighs just 165 pounds, with all the same strength and capabilities.

So these things are really getting better very quickly.

So it's time for Spot to come back out, and we're going to demonstrate a little bit of mobility, dexterity and perception. This is Seth Davis, who's my robot wrangler today, and he's giving Spot some general direction by steering it around, but all the coordination of the legs and the sensors is done by the robot's computers on board. The robot can walk with a number of different gaits; it's got a gyro, or a solid-state gyro, an IMU on board. Obviously, it's got a battery, and things like that. One of the cool things about a legged robot is, it's omnidirectional. In addition to going forward, it can go sideways, it can turn in place. And this robot is a little bit of a show-off. It loves to use its dynamic gaits, like running --

And it's got one more.

Now if it were really a show-off, it would be hopping on one foot, but, you know.

Now, Spot has a set of cameras here, stereo cameras, and we have a feed up in the center.

It's kind of dark out in the audience, but it's going to use those cameras in order to look at the terrain right in front of it,

while it goes over these obstacles back here.

For this demo, Seth is steering, but the robot's doing all its own terrain planning.

This is a terrain map, where the data from the cameras is being developed in real time, showing the red spots,

which are where it doesn't want to step, and the green spots are the good places.

And here it's treating them like stepping-stones.

So it's trying to stay up on the blocks, and it adjusts its stride, and there's a ton of planning that has to go into an operation like that,

and it does all that planning in real time, where it adjusts the steps a little bit longer or a little bit shorter.

Now we're going to change it into a different mode,

where it's just going to treat the blocks like terrain and decide whether to step up or down as it goes.

So this is using dynamic balance and mobile perception, because it has to coordinate what it sees along with how it's moving.

The other thing Spot has is a robot arm.

Some of you may see that as a head and a neck, but believe me, it's an arm. Seth is driving it around.

He's actually driving the hand and the body is following.

So the two are coordinated in the way I was talking about before in the way people can do that.

In fact, one of the cool things Spot can do we call,

"chicken-head mode," and it keeps its head in one place in space, and it moves its body all around.

There's a variation of this that's called "twerking" --

but we're not going to use that today.

So, Spot: I'm feeling a little thirsty.

Could you get me a soda? For this demo, Seth is not doing any driving.

We have a LIDAR on the back of the robot, and it's using these props we've put on the stage to localize itself.

It's gone over to that location.

Now it's using a camera that's in its hand to find the cup, picks it up -- and again,

Seth's not driving. We've planned out a path for it to go it looked like it was going off the path and now Seth's going to take over control again,

because I'm a little bit chicken about having it do this by itself. Thank you, Spot.

So, Spot: How do you feel about having just finished your TED performance?

Me, too!

Thank you all, and thanks to the team at Boston Dynamics, who did all the hard work behind this.

Helen Walters: Marc, come back in the middle. Thank you so much. Come over here, I have questions.

So, you mentioned the UPS and the package delivery. What are the other applications that you see for your robots?

Marc Raibert: You know, I think that robots that have the capabilities I've been talking about are going to be incredibly useful.

About a year ago, I went to Fukushima to see what the situation was there,

and there's just a huge need for machines that can go into some of the dirty places and help remediate that.

I think it won't be too long until we have robots like this in our homes, and one of the big needs is to take care of the aging and invalids.

I think that it won't be too long till we're using robots to help take care of our parents,

or probably more likely, have our children help take care of us. And there's a bunch of other things.

I think the sky's the limit. Many of the ideas we haven't thought of yet, and people like you will help us think of new applications.

HW: So what about the dark side? What about the military? Are they interested?

MR: Sure, the military has been a big funder of robotics. I don't think the military is the dark side myself,

but I think, as with all advanced technology, it can be used for all kinds of things.

HW: Awesome. Thank you so much.

MR: OK, you're welcome.

Thank you.

Only i Can TED) You smell with your body, not just your nose(eng script)

Only I Can — Fri, 28 Jul 2017 14:30:37 +0900

summery

Do your kidneys have a sense of smell?

Turns out, the same tiny scent detectors found in your nose are also found in some pretty unexpected places

-- like your muscles, kidneys and even your lungs.

In this quick talk (filled with weird facts), physiologist Jennifer Pluznick explains why they're there and what they do.

script

Here's a question for you:

how many different scents do you think you can smell,

and maybe even identify with accuracy? 100? 300? 1,000?

One study estimates that humans can detect up to one trillion different odors. A trillion.

It's hard to imagine, but your nose has the molecular machinery to make it happen.

Olfactory receptors -- tiny scent detectors -- are packed into your nose,

each one patiently waiting to be activated by the odor, or ligand,

that it's been assigned to detect.

It turns out we humans, like all vertebrates, have lots of olfactory receptors.

In fact, more of our DNA is devoted to genes for different olfactory receptors than for any other type of protein.

Why is that? Could olfactory receptors be doing something else in addition to allowing us to smell?

In 1991, Linda Buck and Richard Axel uncovered the molecular identity of olfactory receptors -- work which ultimately led to a Nobel Prize.

At the time, we all assumed that these receptors were only found in the nose.

However, about a year or so later, a report emerged of an olfactory receptor expressed in a tissue other than the nose.

And then another such report emerged, and another.

We now know that these receptors are found all over the body,

including in some pretty unexpected places -- in muscle, in kidneys, lungs and blood vessels.

But what are they doing there?

Well, we know that olfactory receptors act as sensitive chemical sensors in the nose -- that's how they mediate our sense of smell.

It turns out they also act as sensitive chemical sensors in many other parts of the body.

Now, I'm not saying that your liver can detect the aroma of your morning coffee as you walk into the kitchen.

Rather, after you drink your morning coffee,

your liver might use an olfactory receptor to chemically detect the change in concentration of a chemical floating through your bloodstream.

Many cell types and tissues in the body use chemical sensors,

or chemosensors, to keep track of the concentration of hormones, metabolites and other molecules,

and some of these chemosensors are olfactory receptors.

If you are a pancreas or a kidney and you need a specialized chemical sensor that will allow you to keep track of a specific molecule,

why reinvent the wheel?

One of the first examples of an olfactory receptor found outside the nose showed that human sperm express an olfactory receptor,

and that sperm with this receptor will seek out the chemical that the receptor responds to -- the receptor's ligand.

That is, the sperm will swim toward the ligand.

This has intriguing implications.

Are sperm aided in finding the egg by sniffing out the area with the highest ligand concentration?

I like this example because it clearly demonstrates that an olfactory receptor's primary job is to be a chemical sensor,

but depending on the context, it can influence how you perceive a smell, or in which direction sperm will swim,

and as it turns out, a huge variety of other processes.

Olfactory receptors have been implicated in muscle cell migration,

in helping the lung to sense and respond to inhaled chemicals, hand and wound healing.

Similarly, taste receptors once thought to be found only in the tongue, are now known to be expressed in cells and tissues throughout the body.

Even more surprisingly, a recent study found that the light receptors in our eyes also play a role in our blood vessels.

In my lab, we work on trying to understand the roles of olfactory receptors and taste receptors in the context of the kidney.

The kidney is a central control center for homeostasis.

And to us, it makes sense that a homeostatic control center would be a logical place to employ chemical sensors.

We've identified a number of different olfactory and taste receptors in the kidney,

one of which, olfactory receptor 78, is known to be expressed in cells and tissues that are important in the regulation of blood pressure.

When this receptor is deleted in mice, their blood pressure is low.

Surprisingly, this receptor was found to respond to chemicals called short-chain fatty acids that are produced by the bacteria that reside in your gut -- your gut microbiota.

After being produced by your gut microbiota,

these chemicals are absorbed into your bloodstream where they can then interact with receptors like olfactory receptor 78,

meaning that the changes in metabolism of your gut microbiota may influence your blood pressure.

Although we've identified a number of different olfactory and taste receptors in the kidney,

we've only just begun to tease out their different functions and to figure out which chemicals each of them responds to.

Similar investigations lie ahead for many other organs and tissues -- only a small minority of receptors has been studied to date.

This is exciting stuff. It's revolutionizing our understanding of the scope of influence for one of the five senses.

And it has the potential to change our understanding of some aspects of human physiology.

It's still early, but I think we've picked up on the scent of something we're following.