37498 So, 2014 was a big year for me. Do you ever have that, just like a big year, like a banner year? For me, it went like this: October 3, I lost my second pregnancy. And then October 8, my dad died of cancer. And then on November 25, my husband Aaron died after three years with stage-four glioblastoma, which is just a fancy word for brain cancer. So, I'm fun. People love to invite me out all the time. Packed social life. Usually, when I talk about this period of my life, the reaction I get is essentially: "I can't -- I can't imagine." But I do think you can. I think you can. And I think that you should because, someday, it's going to happen to you. Maybe not these specific losses in this specific order or at this speed, but like I said, I'm very fun and the research that I have seen will stun you: everyone you love has a 100 percent chance of dying. And that's why you came to TED. So, since all of this loss happened, I've made it a career to talk about death and loss, not just my own, because it's pretty easy to recap, but the losses and tragedies that other people have experienced. It's a niche, I have to say. It's a small niche, and I wish I made more money, but ... I've written some very uplifting books, host a very uplifting podcast, I started a little nonprofit. I'm just trying to do what I can to make more people comfortable with the uncomfortable, and grief is so uncomfortable. It's so uncomfortable, especially if it's someone else's grief. So part of that work is this group that I started with my friend Moe, who is also a widow; we call it the Hot Young Widows Club. And it's real, we have membership cards and T-shirts. And when your person dies, your husband, wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, literally don't care if you were married, your friends and your family are just going to look around through friends of friends of friends of friends until they find someone who's gone through something similar, and then they'll push you towards each other so you can talk amongst yourselves and not get your sad on other people. So that's what we do. It's just a series of small groups, where men, women, gay, straight, married, partnered, can talk about their dead person, and say the things that the other people in their lives aren't ready or willing to hear yet. Huge range of conversations. Like, "My husband died two weeks ago, I can't stop thinking about sex, is that normal?" Yeah. "What if it's one of the Property Brothers?" Less normal, but I'll accept it. Things like, "Look, when I'm out in public and I see old people holding hands, couples who have clearly been together for decades, and then I look at them and I imagine all of the things they've been through together, the good things, the bad things, the arguments they've had over who should take out the trash ... I just find my heart filled with rage." And that example is personal to me. Most of the conversations that we have in the group can and will just stay amongst ourselves, but there are things that we talk about that the rest of the world -- the world that is grief-adjacent but not yet grief-stricken -- could really benefit from hearing. And if you can't tell, I'm only interested in / capable of unscientific studies, so what I did was go to The Hot Young Widows Club and say, "Hello, friends, remember when your person died?" They did. "Do you remember all the things people said to you?" "Oh, yeah." "Which ones did you hate the most?" I got a lot of comments, lot of answers, people say a lot of things, but two rose to the top pretty quickly. "Moving on." Now, since 2014, I will tell you I have remarried a very handsome man named Matthew, we have four children in our blended family, we live in the suburbs of Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. We have a rescue dog. I drive a minivan, like the kind where doors open and I don't even touch them. Like, by any "mezhure," life is good. I've also never said "mezhure," I've never once said it that way. I don't know where that came from. I've never heard anyone else say it that way. It looks like it should be said that way, and that's why the English language is trash, so ... So impressed with anyone who, like, speaks it in addition to a language that makes sense -- good job. But by any measure ... By any measure, life is really, really good, but I haven't "moved on." I haven't moved on, and I hate that phrase so much, and I understand why other people do. Because what it says is that Aaron's life and death and love are just moments that I can leave behind me -- and that I probably should. And when I talk about Aaron, I slip so easily into the present tense, and I've always thought that made me weird. And then I noticed that everybody does it. And it's not because we are in denial or because we're forgetful, it's because the people we love, who we've lost, are still so present for us. So, when I say, "Oh, Aaron is ..." It's because Aaron still is. And it's not in the way that he was before, which was much better, and it's not in the way that churchy people try to tell me that he would be. It's just that he's indelible, and so he is present for me. Here, he's present for me in the work that I do, in the child that we had together, in these three other children I'm raising, who never met him, who share none of his DNA, but who are only in my life because I had Aaron and because I lost Aaron. He's present in my marriage to Matthew, because Aaron's life and love and death made me the person that Matthew wanted to marry. So I've not moved on from Aaron, I've moved forward with him. We spread Aaron's ashes in his favorite river in Minnesota, and when the bag was empty -- because when you're cremated, you fit into a plastic bag -- there were still ashes stuck to my fingers. And I could have just put my hands in the water and rinsed them, but instead, I licked my hands clean, because I was so afraid of losing more than I had already lost, and I was so desperate to make sure that he would always be a part of me. But of course he would be. Because when you watch your person fill himself with poison for three years, just so he can stay alive a little bit longer with you, that stays with you. When you watch him fade from the healthy person he was the night you met to nothing, that stays with you. When you watch your son, who isn't even two years old yet, walk up to his father's bed on the last day of his life, like he knows what's coming in a few hours, and say, "I love you. All done. Bye, bye." That stays with you. Just like when you fall in love, finally, like really fall in love with someone who gets you and sees you and you even see, "Oh, my God, I've been wrong this entire time. Love is not a contest or a reality show -- it's so quiet, it's this invisible thread of calm that connects the two of us even when everything is chaos, when things are falling apart, even when he's gone." That stays with you. We used to do this thing -- because my hands are always freezing and he's so warm, where I would take my ice-cold hands and shove them up his shirt ... press them against his hot bod. And he hated it so much, but he loved me, and after he died, I laid in bed with Aaron and I put my hands underneath him and I felt his warmth. And I can't even tell you if my hands were cold, but I can tell you that I knew it was the last time I would ever do that. And that that memory is always going to be sad. That memory will always hurt. Even when I'm 600 years old and I'm just a hologram. Just like the memory of meeting him is always going to make me laugh. Grief doesn't happen in this vacuum, it happens alongside of and mixed in with all of these other emotions. So, I met Matthew, my current husband -- who doesn't love that title, but it's so accurate. I met Matthew, and ... there was this audible sigh of relief among the people who love me, like, "It's over! She did it. She got a happy ending, we can all go home. And we did good." And that narrative is so appealing even to me, and I thought maybe I had gotten that, too, but I didn't. I got another chapter. And it's such a good chapter -- I love you, honey -- it's such a good chapter. But especially at the beginning, it was like an alternate universe, or one of those old "choose your own adventure" books from the '80s where there are two parallel plot lines. So I opened my heart to Matthew, and my brain was like, "Would you like to think about Aaron? Like, the past, the present, future, just get in there," and I did. And all of a sudden, those two plots were unfurling at once, and falling in love with Matthew really helped me realize the enormity of what I lost when Aaron died. And just as importantly, it helped me realize that my love for Aaron and my grief for Aaron, and my love for Matthew, are not opposing forces. They are just strands to the same thread. They're the same stuff. I'm ... what would my parents say? I'm not special. They had four kids, they were like ... frankly. But I'm not, I'm not special. I know that, I'm fully aware that all day, every day, all around the world, terrible things are happening. All the time. Like I said, fun person. But terrible things are happening, people are experiencing deeply formative and traumatic losses every day. And as part of my job, this weird podcast that I have, I sometimes talk to people about the worst thing that's ever happened to them. And sometimes, that's the loss of someone they love, sometimes days ago or weeks ago, years ago, even decades ago. And these people that I interview, they haven't closed themselves around this loss and made it the center of their lives. They've lived, their worlds have kept spinning. But they're talking to me, a total stranger, about the person they love who has died, because these are the experiences that mark us and make us just as much as the joyful ones. And just as permanently. Long after you get your last sympathy card or your last hot dish. Like, we don't look at the people around us experiencing life's joys and wonders and tell them to "move on," do we? We don't send a card that's like, "Congratulations on your beautiful baby," and then, five years later, think like, "Another birthday party? Get over it." Yeah, we get it, he's five. Wow. But grief is kind of one of those things, like, falling in love or having a baby or watching "The Wire" on HBO, where you don't get it until you get it, until you do it. And once you do it, once it's your love or your baby, once it's your grief and your front row at the funeral, you get it. You understand what you're experiencing is not a moment in time, it's not a bone that will reset, but that you've been touched by something chronic. It's not fatal, but sometimes grief feels like it could be. And if we can't prevent it in one another, what can we do? What can we do other than try to remind one another that some things can't be fixed, and not all wounds are meant to heal? We need each other to remember, to help each other remember, that grief is this multitasking emotion. That you can and will be sad, and happy; you'll be grieving, and able to love in the same year or week, the same breath. We need to remember that a grieving person is going to laugh again and smile again. If they're lucky, they'll even find love again. But yes, absolutely, they're going to move forward. But that doesn't mean that they've moved on. Thank you. 39331 So, on the day after the Brexit vote, in June 2016, when Britain woke up to the shock of discovering that we're leaving the European Union, my editor at the "Observer" newspaper in the UK asked me to go back to South Wales, where I grew up, and to write a report. And so I went to a town called Ebbw Vale. Here it is. It's in the South Wales Valleys, which is this quite special place. So it's had this very, sort of rich, working-class culture, and it's famous for its Welsh male voice choirs and rugby and its coal. But when I was a teenager, the coal mines and the steelworks closed, and the entire area was devastated. And I went there because it had one of the highest "Leave" votes in the country. Sixty-two percent of the people here voted to leave the European Union. And I wanted to know why. When I got there, I was just a bit taken aback, because the last time I went to Ebbw Vale, it looked like this. And now, it looks like this. This is a new 33-million-pound college of further education that was mostly funded by the European Union. And this is the new sports center that's at the middle of 350-million-pound regeneration project that's being funded by the European Union. And this is the new 77-million-pound road-improvement scheme, and there's a new train line, a new railway station, and they're all being funded by the European Union. And it's not as if any of this is a secret, because there's big signs like this everywhere. [EU Funds: Investing in Wales] I had this sort of weird sense of unreality, walking around the town. And it came to a head when I met this young man in front of the sports center. And he told me that he had voted to leave, because the European Union had done nothing for him. He was fed up with it. And all around town, people told me the same thing. They said that they wanted to take back control, which was one of the slogans in the campaign. And they told me that they were most fed up with the immigrants and with the refugees. They'd had enough. Which was odd. Because walking around, I didn't meet any immigrants or refugees. I met one Polish woman who told me she was practically the only foreigner in town. And when I checked the figures, I discovered that Ebbw Vale actually has one of the lowest rates of immigration in the country. And so I was just a bit baffled, because I couldn't really understand where people were getting their information from. Because it was the right-wing tabloid newspapers which printed all these stories about immigration. And this is a very much left-wing Labour stronghold. But then after the article came out, this woman got in touch with me. And she was from Ebbw Vale, and she told me about all this stuff that she'd seen on Facebook. I was like, "What stuff?" And she said it was all this quite scary stuff about immigration, and especially about Turkey. So I tried to find it. But there was nothing there. Because there's no archive of ads that people had seen or what had been pushed into their news feeds. No trace of anything, gone completely dark. And this referendum that will have this profound effect forever on Britain -- it's already had a profound effect: the Japanese car manufacturers that came to Wales and the north east to replace the mining jobs -- they are already going because of Brexit. And this entire referendum took place in darkness, because it took place on Facebook. And what happens on Facebook stays on Facebook, because only you see your news feed, and then it vanishes, so it's impossible to research anything. So we have no idea who saw what ads or what impact they had, or what data was used to target these people. Or even who placed the ads, or how much money was spent, or even what nationality they were. But Facebook does. Facebook has these answers, and it's refused to give them to us. Our parliament has asked Mark Zuckerberg multiple times to come to Britain and to give us these answers. And every single time, he's refused. And you have to wonder why. Because what I and other journalists have uncovered is that multiple crimes took place during the referendum. And they took place on Facebook. It's because in Britain, we limit the amount of money that you can spend in an election. And it's because in the 19th century, people would walk around with literally wheelbarrows of cash and just buy voters. So we passed these strict laws to stop that from happening. But those laws don't work anymore. This referendum took place almost entirely online. And you can spend any amount of money on Facebook or on Google or on YouTube ads and nobody will know, because they're black boxes. And this is what happened. We've actually got no idea of the full extent of it. But we do know that in the last days before the Brexit vote, the official "Vote Leave" campaign laundered nearly three quarters of a million pounds through another campaign entity that our electoral commission has ruled was illegal, and it's referred it to the police. And with this illegal cash, "Vote Leave" unleashed a fire hose of disinformation. Ads like this. [Turkey's 76m people joining the EU] This is a lie, it's a total lie. Turkey is not joining the European Union. There's not even any discussions of it joining the European Union. And most of us, we never saw these ads, because we were not the target of them. "Vote Leave" identified a tiny sliver of people who it identified as persuadable, and they saw them. And the only reason we are seeing these now is because parliament forced Facebook to hand them over. And maybe you think, "Well, it was just a bit of overspending. It's a few lies." But this was the biggest electoral fraud in Britain for 100 years. In a once-in-a-generation vote that hinged upon just one percent of the electorate. And it was just one of the crimes that took place in the referendum. There was another group, which was headed by this man, Nigel Farage, the one to the right of Trump. And his group, "Leave.EU" -- it also broke the law. It broke British electoral laws and British data laws, and it's also being referred to the police. And this man, Arron Banks, he funded this campaign. And in a completely separate case, he's being referred to our National Crime Agency, our equivalent of the FBI, because our electoral commission has concluded they don't know where his money came from. Or if it was even British. And I'm not even going to go into the lies that Arron Banks has told about his covert relationship with the Russian government. Or the weird timing of Nigel Farage's meetings with Julian Assange and with Trump's buddy, Roger Stone, now indicted, immediately before two massive WikiLeaks dumps, both of which happened to benefit Donald Trump. But I will tell you that Brexit and Trump were intimately entwined. This man told me that Brexit was the petri dish for Trump. And we know it's the same people, the same companies, the same data, the same techniques, the same use of hate and fear. This is what they were posting on Facebook. And I don't even want to call this a lie, [Immigration without assimilation equals invasion] because it feels more like a hate crime to me. I don't have to tell you that hate and fear are being sown online all across the world. Not just in Britain and America, but in France and in Hungary and Brazil and Myanmar and New Zealand. And we know there is this dark undertow which is connecting us all globally. And it is flowing via the technology platforms. But we only see a tiny amount of what's going on on the surface. And I only found out anything about this dark underbelly because I started looking into Trump's relationship to Farage, into a company called Cambridge Analytica. And I spent months tracking down an ex-employee, Christopher Wiley. And he told me how this company, that worked for both Trump and Brexit, had profiled people politically in order to understand their individual fears, to better target them with Facebook ads. And it did this by illicitly harvesting the profiles of 87 million people from Facebook. It took an entire year's work to get Christopher on the record. And I had to turn myself from a feature writer into an investigative reporter to do it. And he was extraordinarily brave, because the company is owned by Robert Mercer, the billionaire who bankrolled Trump, and he threatened to sue us multiple times, to stop us from publishing. But we finally got there, and we were one day ahead of publication. We got another legal threat. Not from Cambridge Analytica this time, but from Facebook. It told us that if we publish, they would sue us. We did it anyway. Facebook, you were on the wrong side of history in that. And you were on the wrong side of history in this -- in refusing to give us the answers that we need. And that is why I am here. To address you directly, the gods of Silicon Valley. and Sheryl Sandberg and Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Jack Dorsey, and your employees and your investors, too. Because 100 years ago, the biggest danger in the South Wales coal mines was gas. Silent and deadly and invisible. It's why they sent the canaries down first to check the air. And in this massive, global, online experiment that we are all living through, we in Britain are the canary. We are what happens to a western democracy when a hundred years of electoral laws are disrupted by technology. Our democracy is broken, our laws don't work anymore, and it's not me saying this, it's our parliament published a report saying this. This technology that you have invented has been amazing. But now, it's a crime scene. And you have the evidence. And it is not enough to say that you will do better in the future. Because to have any hope of stopping this from happening again, we have to know the truth. And maybe you think, "Well, it was just a few ads. And people are smarter than that, right?" To which I would say, "Good luck with that." Because what the Brexit vote demonstrates is that liberal democracy is broken. And you broke it. This is not democracy -- spreading lies in darkness, paid for with illegal cash, from God knows where. It's subversion, and you are accessories to it. Our parliament has been the first in the world to try to hold you to account, and it's failed. You are literally beyond the reach of British law -- not just British laws, this is nine parliaments, nine countries are represented here, who Mark Zuckerberg refused to come and give evidence to. And what you don't seem to understand is that this is bigger than you. And it's bigger than any of us. And it is not about left or right or "Leave" or "Remain" or Trump or not. It's about whether it's actually possible to have a free and fair election ever again. Because as it stands, I don't think it is. And so my question to you is, is this what you want? Is this how you want history to remember you: as the handmaidens to authoritarianism that is on the rise all across the world? Because you set out to connect people. And you are refusing to acknowledge that the same technology is now driving us apart. And my question to everybody else is, is this what we want: to let them get away with it, and to sit back and play with our phones, as this darkness falls? The history of the South Wales Valleys is of a fight for rights. And this is not a drill -- it's a point of inflection. Democracy is not guaranteed, and it is not inevitable, and we have to fight and we have to win and we cannot let these tech companies have this unchecked power. It's up to us -- you, me and all of us. We are the ones who have to take back control. 42604 It may seem like we're all standing on solid earth right now, but we're not. The rocks and the dirt underneath us are crisscrossed by tiny little fractures and empty spaces. And these empty spaces are filled with astronomical quantities of microbes, such as these ones. The deepest that we found microbes so far into the earth is five kilometers down. So like, if you pointed yourself at the ground and took off running into the ground, you could run an entire 5K race and microbes would line your whole path. So you may not have ever thought about these microbes that are deep inside earth's crust, but you probably thought about the microbes living in our guts. If you add up the gut microbiomes of all the people and all the animals on the planet, collectively, this weighs about 100,000 tons. This is a huge biome that we carry in our bellies every single day. We should all be proud. But it pales in comparison to the number of microbes that are covering the entire surface of the earth, like in our soils, our rivers and our oceans. Collectively, these weigh about two billion tons. But it turns out that the majority of microbes on earth aren't even in oceans or our guts or sewage treatment plants. Most of them are actually inside the earth's crust. So collectively, these weigh 40 billion tons. This is one of the biggest biomes on the planet, and we didn't even know it existed until a few decades ago. So the possibilities for what life is like down there, or what it might do for humans, are limitless. This is a map showing a red dot for every place where we've gotten pretty good deep subsurface samples with modern microbiological methods, and you may be impressed that we're getting a pretty good global coverage, but actually, if you remember that these are the only places that we have samples from, it looks a little worse. If we were all in an alien spaceship, trying to reconstruct a map of the globe from only these samples, we'd never be able to do it. So people sometimes say to me, "Yeah, there's a lot of microbes in the subsurface, but ... aren't they just kind of dormant?" This is a good point. Relative to a ficus plant or the measles or my kid's guinea pigs, these microbes probably aren't doing much of anything at all. We know that they have to be slow, because there's so many of them. If they all started dividing at the rate of E. coli, then they would double the entire weight of the earth, rocks included, over a single night. In fact, many of them probably haven't even undergone a single cell division since the time of ancient Egypt. Which is just crazy. Like, how do you wrap your head around things that are so long-lived? But I thought of an analogy that I really love, but it's weird and it's complicated. So I hope that you can all go there with me. Alright, let's try it. It's like trying to figure out the life cycle of a tree ... if you only lived for a day. So like if human life span was only a day, and we lived in winter, then you would go your entire life without ever seeing a tree with a leaf on it. And there would be so many human generations that would pass by within a single winter that you may not even have access to a history book that says anything other than the fact that trees are always lifeless sticks that don't do anything. Of course, this is ridiculous. We know that trees are just waiting for summer so they can reactivate. But if the human life span were significantly shorter than that of trees, we might be completely oblivious to this totally mundane fact. So when we say that these deep subsurface microbes are just dormant, are we like people who die after a day, trying to figure out how trees work? What if these deep subsurface organisms are just waiting for their version of summer, but our lives are too short for us to see it? If you take E. coli and seal it up in a test tube, with no food or nutrients, and leave it there for months to years, most of the cells die off, of course, because they're starving. But a few of the cells survive. If you take these old surviving cells and compete them, also under starvation conditions, against a new, fast-growing culture of E. coli, the grizzled old tough guys beat out the squeaky clean upstarts every single time. So this is evidence there's actually an evolutionary payoff to being extraordinarily slow. So it's possible that maybe we should not equate being slow with being unimportant. Maybe these out-of-sight, out-of-mind microbes could actually be helpful to humanity. OK, so as far as we know, there are two ways to do subsurface living. The first is to wait for food to trickle down from the surface world, like trying to eat the leftovers of a picnic that happened 1,000 years ago. Which is a crazy way to live, but shockingly seems to work out for a lot of microbes in earth. The other possibility is for a microbe to just say, "Nah, I don't need the surface world. I'm good down here." For microbes that go this route, they have to get everything that they need in order to survive from inside the earth. Some things are actually easier for them to get. They're more abundant inside the earth, like water or nutrients, like nitrogen and iron and phosphorus, or places to live. These are things that we literally kill each other to get ahold of up at the surface world. But in the subsurface, the problem is finding enough energy. Up at the surface, plants can chemically knit together carbon dioxide molecules into yummy sugars as fast as the sun's photons hit their leaves. But in the subsurface, of course, there's no sunlight, so this ecosystem has to solve the problem of who is going to make the food for everybody else. The subsurface needs something that's like a plant but it breathes rocks. Luckily, such a thing exists, and it's called a chemolithoautotroph. Which is a microbe that uses chemicals -- "chemo," from rocks -- "litho," to make food -- "autotroph." And they can do this with a ton of different elements. They can do this with sulphur, iron, manganese, nitrogen, carbon, some of them can use pure electrons, straight up. Like, if you cut the end off of an electrical cord, they could breathe it like a snorkel. These chemolithoautotrophs take the energy that they get from these processes and use it to make food, like plants do. But we know that plants do more than just make food. They also make a waste product, oxygen, which we are 100 percent dependent upon. But the waste product that these chemolithoautotrophs make is often in the form of minerals, like rust or pyrite, like fool's gold, or carminites, like limestone. So what we have are microbes that are really, really slow, like rocks, that get their energy from rocks, that make as their waste product other rocks. So am I talking about biology, or am I talking about geology? This stuff really blurs the lines. So if I'm going to do this thing, and I'm going to be a biologist who studies microbes that kind of act like rocks, then I should probably start studying geology. And what's the coolest part of geology? Volcanoes. This is looking inside the crater of Poás Volcano in Costa Rica. Many volcanoes on earth arise because an oceanic tectonic plate crashes into a continental plate. As this oceanic plate subducts or gets moved underneath this continental plate, things like water and carbon dioxide and other materials get squeezed out of it, like ringing a wet washcloth. So in this way, subduction zones are like portals into the deep earth, where materials are exchanged between the surface and the subsurface world. So I was recently invited by some of my colleagues in Costa Rica to come and work with them on some of the volcanoes. And of course I said yes, because, I mean, Costa Rica is beautiful, but also because it sits on top of one of these subduction zones. We wanted to ask the very specific question: Why is it that the carbon dioxide that comes out of this deeply buried oceanic tectonic plate is only coming out of the volcanoes? Why don't we see it distributed throughout the entire subduction zone? Do the microbes have something to do with that? So this is a picture of me inside Poás Volcano, along with my colleague Donato Giovannelli. That lake that we're standing next to is made of pure battery acid. I know this because we were measuring the pH when this picture was taken. And at some point while we were working inside the crater, I turned to my Costa Rican colleague Carlos Ramírez and I said, "Alright, if this thing starts erupting right now, what's our exit strategy?" And he said, "Oh, yeah, great question, it's totally easy. Just turn around and enjoy the view." "Because it will be your last." And it may sound like he was being overly dramatic, but 54 days after I was standing next to that lake, this happened. Audience: Oh! Freaking terrifying, right? This was the biggest eruption this volcano had had in 60-some-odd years, and not long after this video ends, the camera that was taking the video is obliterated and the entire lake that we had been sampling vaporizes completely. But I also want to be clear that we were pretty sure this was not going to happen on the day that we were actually in the volcano, because Costa Rica monitors its volcanoes very carefully through the OVSICORI Institute, and we had scientists from that institute with us on that day. But the fact that it erupted illustrates perfectly that if you want to look for where carbon dioxide gas is coming out of this oceanic plate, then you should look no further than the volcanoes themselves. But if you go to Costa Rica, you may notice that in addition to these volcanoes there are tons of cozy little hot springs all over the place. Some of the water in these hot springs is actually bubbling up from this deeply buried oceanic plate. And our hypothesis was that there should be carbon dioxide bubbling up with it, but something deep underground was filtering it out. So we spent two weeks driving all around Costa Rica, sampling every hot spring we could find -- it was awful, let me tell you. And then we spent the next two years measuring and analyzing data. And if you're not a scientist, I'll just let you know that the big discoveries don't really happen when you're at a beautiful hot spring or on a public stage; they happen when you're hunched over a messy computer or you're troubleshooting a difficult instrument, or you're Skyping your colleagues because you are completely confused about your data. Scientific discoveries, kind of like deep subsurface microbes, can be very, very slow. But in our case, this really paid off this one time. We discovered that literally tons of carbon dioxide were coming out of this deeply buried oceanic plate. And the thing that was keeping them underground and keeping it from being released out into the atmosphere was that deep underground, underneath all the adorable sloths and toucans of Costa Rica, were chemolithoautotrophs. These microbes and the chemical processes that were happening around them were converting this carbon dioxide into carbonate mineral and locking it up underground. Which makes you wonder: If these subsurface processes are so good at sucking up all the carbon dioxide coming from below them, could they also help us with a little carbon problem we've got going on up at the surface? Humans are releasing enough carbon dioxide into our atmosphere that we are decreasing the ability of our planet to support life as we know it. And scientists and engineers and entrepreneurs are working on methods to pull carbon dioxide out of these point sources, so that they're not released into the atmosphere. And they need to put it somewhere. So for this reason, we need to keep studying places where this carbon might be stored, possibly in the subsurface, to know what's going to happen to it when it goes there. Will these deep subsurface microbes be a problem because they're too slow to actually keep anything down there? Or will they be helpful because they'll help convert this stuff to solid carbonate minerals? If we can make such a big breakthrough just from one study that we did in Costa Rica, then imagine what else is waiting to be discovered down there. This new field of geo-bio-chemistry, or deep subsurface biology, or whatever you want to call it, is going to have huge implications, not just for mitigating climate change, but possibly for understanding how life and earth have coevolved, or finding new products that are useful for industrial or medical applications. Maybe even predicting earthquakes or finding life outside our planet. It could even help us understand the origin of life itself. Fortunately, I don't have to do this by myself. I have amazing colleagues all over the world who are cracking into the mysteries of this deep subsurface world. And it may seem like life buried deep within the earth's crust is so far away from our daily experiences that it's kind of irrelevant. But the truth is that this weird, slow life may actually have the answers to some of the greatest mysteries of life on earth. Thank you. 45614 Today, actually, is a very special day for me, because it is my birthday. And so, thanks to all of you for joining the party. But every time you throw a party, there's someone there to spoil it. Right? And I'm a physicist, and this time I brought another physicist along to do so. His name is Albert Einstein -- also Albert -- and he's the one who said that the person who has not made his great contributions to science by the age of 30 will never do so. Now, you don't need to check Wikipedia that I'm beyond 30. So, effectively, what he is telling me, and us, is that when it comes to my science, I'm deadwood. Well, luckily, I had my share of luck within my career. Around age 28, I became very interested in networks, and a few years later, we managed to publish a few key papers that reported the discovery of scale-free networks and really gave birth to a new discipline that we call network science today. And if you really care about it, you can get a PhD now in network science in Budapest, in Boston, and you can study it all over the world. A few years later, when I moved to Harvard first as a sabbatical, I became interested in another type of network: that time, the networks within ourselves, how the genes and the proteins and the metabolites link to each other and how they connect to disease. And that interest led to a major explosion within medicine, including the Network Medicine Division at Harvard, that has more than 300 researchers who are using this perspective to treat patients and develop new cures. And a few years ago, I thought that I would take this idea of networks and the expertise we had in networks in a different area, that is, to understand success. And why did we do that? Well, we thought that, to some degree, our success is determined by the networks we're part of -- that our networks can push us forward, they can pull us back. And I was curious if we could use the knowledge and big data and expertise where we develop the networks to really quantify how these things happen. This is a result from that. What you see here is a network of galleries in museums that connect to each other. And through this map that we mapped out last year, we are able to predict very accurately the success of an artist if you give me the first five exhibits that he or she had in their career. Well, as we thought about success, we realized that success is not only about networks; there are so many other dimensions to that. And one of the things we need for success, obviously, is performance. So let's define what's the difference between performance and success. Well, performance is what you do: how fast you run, what kind of paintings you paint, what kind of papers you publish. However, in our working definition, success is about what the community notices from what you did, from your performance: How does it acknowledge it, and how does it reward you for it? In other terms, your performance is about you, but your success is about all of us. And this was a very important shift for us, because the moment we defined success as being a collective measure that the community provides to us, it became measurable, because if it's in the community, there are multiple data points about that. So we go to school, we exercise, we practice, because we believe that performance leads to success. But the way we actually started to explore, we realized that performance and success are very, very different animals when it comes to the mathematics of the problem. And let me illustrate that. So what you see here is the fastest man on earth, Usain Bolt. And of course, he wins most of the competitions that he enters. And we know he's the fastest on earth because we have a chronometer to measure his speed. Well, what is interesting about him is that when he wins, he doesn't do so by really significantly outrunning his competition. He's running at most a percent faster than the one who loses the race. And not only does he run only one percent faster than the second one, but he doesn't run 10 times faster than I do -- and I'm not a good runner, trust me on that. And every time we are able to measure performance, we notice something very interesting; that is, performance is bounded. What it means is that there are no huge variations in human performance. It varies only in a narrow range, and we do need the chronometer to measure the differences. This is not to say that we cannot see the good from the best ones, but the best ones are very hard to distinguish. And the problem with that is that most of us work in areas where we do not have a chronometer to gauge our performance. Alright, performance is bounded, there are no huge differences between us when it comes to our performance. How about success? Well, let's switch to a different topic, like books. One measure of success for writers is how many people read your work. And so when my previous book came out in 2009, I was in Europe talking with my editor, and I was interested: Who is the competition? And I had some fabulous ones. That week -- Dan Brown came out with "The Lost Symbol," and "The Last Song" also came out, Nicholas Sparks. And when you just look at the list, you realize, you know, performance-wise, there's hardly any difference between these books or mine. Right? So maybe if Nicholas Sparks's team works a little harder, he could easily be number one, because it's almost by accident who ended up at the top. So I said, let's look at the numbers -- I'm a data person, right? So let's see what were the sales for Nicholas Sparks. And it turns out that that opening weekend, Nicholas Sparks sold more than a hundred thousand copies, which is an amazing number. You can actually get to the top of the "New York Times" best-seller list by selling 10,000 copies a week, so he tenfold overcame what he needed to be number one. Yet he wasn't number one. Why? Because there was Dan Brown, who sold 1.2 million copies that weekend. And the reason I like this number is because it shows that, really, when it comes to success, it's unbounded, that the best doesn't only get slightly more than the second best but gets orders of magnitude more, because success is a collective measure. We give it to them, rather than we earn it through our performance. So one of things we realized is that performance, what we do, is bounded, but success, which is collective, is unbounded, which makes you wonder: How do you get these huge differences in success when you have such tiny differences in performance? And recently, I published a book that I devoted to that very question. And they didn't give me enough time to go over all of that, so I'm going to go back to the question of, alright, you have success; when should that appear? So let's go back to the party spoiler and ask ourselves: Why did Einstein make this ridiculous statement, that only before 30 you could actually be creative? Well, because he looked around himself and he saw all these fabulous physicists that created quantum mechanics and modern physics, and they were all in their 20s and early 30s when they did so. And it's not only him. It's not only observational bias, because there's actually a whole field of genius research that has documented the fact that, if we look at the people we admire from the past and then look at what age they made their biggest contribution, whether that's music, whether that's science, whether that's engineering, most of them tend to do so in their 20s, 30s, early 40s at most. But there's a problem with this genius research. Well, first of all, it created the impression to us that creativity equals youth, which is painful, right? And it also has an observational bias, because it only looks at geniuses and doesn't look at ordinary scientists and doesn't look at all of us and ask, is it really true that creativity vanishes as we age? So that's exactly what we tried to do, and this is important for that to actually have references. So let's look at an ordinary scientist like myself, and let's look at my career. So what you see here is all the papers that I've published from my very first paper, in 1989; I was still in Romania when I did so, till kind of this year. And vertically, you see the impact of the paper, that is, how many citations, how many other papers have been written that cited that work. And when you look at that, you see that my career has roughly three different stages. I had the first 10 years where I had to work a lot and I don't achieve much. No one seems to care about what I do, right? There's hardly any impact. That time, I was doing material science, and then I kind of discovered for myself networks and then started publishing in networks. And that led from one high-impact paper to the other one. And it really felt good. That was that stage of my career. So the question is, what happens right now? And we don't know, because there hasn't been enough time passed yet to actually figure out how much impact those papers will get; it takes time to acquire. Well, when you look at the data, it seems to be that Einstein, the genius research, is right, and I'm at that stage of my career. So we said, OK, let's figure out how does this really happen, first in science. And in order not to have the selection bias, to look only at geniuses, we ended up reconstructing the career of every single scientist from 1900 till today and finding for all scientists what was their personal best, whether they got the Nobel Prize or they never did, or no one knows what they did, even their personal best. And that's what you see in this slide. Each line is a career, and when you have a light blue dot on the top of that career, it says that was their personal best. And the question is, when did they actually make their biggest discovery? To quantify that, we look at what's the probability that you make your biggest discovery, let's say, one, two, three or 10 years into your career? We're looking at what we call "academic age." Your academic age starts when you publish your first papers. I know some of you are still babies. So let's look at the probability that you publish your highest-impact paper. And what you see is, indeed, the genius research is right. Most scientists tend to publish their highest-impact paper in the first 10, 15 years in their career, and it tanks after that. It tanks so fast that I'm about -- I'm exactly 30 years into my career, and the chance that I will publish a paper that would have a higher impact than anything that I did before is less than one percent. I am in that stage of my career, according to this data. But there's a problem with that. We're not doing controls properly. So the control would be, what would a scientist look like who makes random contribution to science? Or what is the productivity of the scientist? When do they write papers? So we measured the productivity, and amazingly, the productivity, your likelihood of writing a paper in year one, 10 or 20 in your career, is indistinguishable from the likelihood of having the impact in that part of your career. And to make a long story short, after lots of statistical tests, there's only one explanation for that, that really, the way we scientists work is that every single paper we write, every project we do, has exactly the same chance of being our personal best. That is, discovery is like a lottery ticket. And the more lottery tickets we buy, the higher our chances. And it happens to be so that most scientists buy most of their lottery tickets in the first 10, 15 years of their career, and after that, their productivity decreases. They're not buying any more lottery tickets. So it looks as if they would not be creative. In reality, they stopped trying. So when we actually put the data together, the conclusion is very simple: success can come at any time. It could be your very first or very last paper of your career. It's totally random in the space of the projects. It is the productivity that changes. Let me illustrate that. Here is Frank Wilczek, who got the Nobel Prize in Physics for the very first paper he ever wrote in his career as a graduate student. More interesting is John Fenn, who, at age 70, was forcefully retired by Yale University. They shut his lab down, and at that moment, he moved to Virginia Commonwealth University, opened another lab, and it is there, at age 72, that he published a paper for which, 15 years later, he got the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. And you think, OK, well, science is special, but what about other areas where we need to be creative? So let me take another typical example: entrepreneurship. Silicon Valley, the land of the youth, right? And indeed, when you look at it, you realize that the biggest awards, the TechCrunch Awards and other awards, are all going to people whose average age is late 20s, very early 30s. You look at who the VCs give the money to, some of the biggest VC firms -- all people in their early 30s. Which, of course, we know; there is this ethos in Silicon Valley that youth equals success. Not when you look at the data, because it's not only about forming a company -- forming a company is like productivity, trying, trying, trying -- when you look at which of these individuals actually put out a successful company, a successful exit. And recently, some of our colleagues looked at exactly that question. And it turns out that yes, those in the 20s and 30s put out a huge number of companies, form lots of companies, but most of them go bust. And when you look at the successful exits, what you see in this particular plot, the older you are, the more likely that you will actually hit the stock market or the sell the company successfully. This is so strong, actually, that if you are in the 50s, you are twice as likely to actually have a successful exit than if you are in your 30s. So in the end, what is it that we see, actually? What we see is that creativity has no age. Productivity does, right? Which is telling me that at the end of the day, if you keep trying -- you could still succeed and succeed over and over. So my conclusion is very simple: I am off the stage, back in my lab. Thank you. 45973 First of all, thank you for your attention. There's nothing quite like being in a room full of people like this, where all of you are giving your attention to me. It's a powerful feeling, to get attention. I'm an actor, so I'm a bit of an expert on, well, nothing, really. But I do know what it feels like to get attention -- I've been lucky in my life to get a lot more than my fair share of attention. And I'm grateful for that, because like I said, it's a powerful feeling. But there's another powerful feeling that I've also been lucky to experience a lot as an actor. And it's funny, it's sort of the opposite feeling, because it doesn't come from getting attention. It comes from paying attention. When I'm acting, I get so focused that I'm only paying attention to one thing. Like when I'm on set and we're about to shoot and the first AD calls out "Rolling!" And then I hear "speed," "marker," "set," and then the director calls "Action!" I've heard that sequence so many times, like, it's become this Pavlovian magic spell for me. "Rolling," "speed," "marker," "set" and "action." Something happens to me, I can't even help it. My attention ... narrows. And everything else in the world, anything else that might be bothering me or might grab my attention, it all goes away, and I'm just ... there. And that feeling, that is what I love, that, to me, is creativity. And that's the biggest reason I'm so grateful that I get to be an actor. So, there's these two powerful feelings. There's getting attention and paying attention. Of course, in the last decade or so, new technology has allowed more and more people to have this powerful feeling of getting attention. For any kind of creative expression, not just acting. It could be writing or photography or drawing, music -- everything. The channels of distribution have been democratized, and that's a good thing. But I do think there's an unintended consequence for anybody on the planet with an urge to be creative -- myself included, because I'm not immune to this. I think that our creativity is becoming more and more of a means to an end -- and that end is to get attention. And so I feel compelled to speak up because in my experience, the more I go after that powerful feeling of paying attention, the happier I am. But the more I go after the powerful feeling of getting attention, the unhappier I am. And -- thanks. So this is something that goes way back for me. I think the first time I can remember using my acting to get attention, I was eight years old at summer camp. And I'd been going on auditions for about a year by then, and I'd been lucky to get some small parts in TV shows and commercials, and I bragged about it a lot, that summer at camp. And at first, it worked. The other kids gave me a bunch of extra attention, because I had been on "Family Ties." That's a picture of me on "Family Ties." Then, the tide turned -- I think I took it too far with the bragging. And then, the other kids started to make fun of me. I remember there was this one girl I had a crush on, Rocky. Her name was Rachel, she went by Rocky. And she was beautiful, and she could sing, and I was smitten with her, and I was standing there, bragging. And she turned to me and she called me a show-off. Which I 100 percent deserved. But you know, it still really hurt. And ever since that summer, I've had a certain hesitance to seek attention for my acting. Sometimes, people would ask me, "Wait a minute, if you don't like the attention, then why are you an actor?" And I'd be like, "Because that's not what acting's about, man, it's about the art." And they'd be like, "OK, OK, dude." And then Twitter came out. And I got totally hooked on it, just like everybody else, which made me into a complete hypocrite. Because at that point, I was absolutely using my acting to get attention. I mean, what, did I think I was just getting all these followers because of my brilliant tweets? I actually did think that -- I was like -- "They don't just like me because they saw me in 'Batman,' they like what I have to say, I've got a way with words." And then in no time at all, it started having an impact on my dearly beloved creative process. It still does. I try not to let it. But you know, I'd be sitting there, like, reading a script. And instead of thinking, "How can I personally identify with this character?" Or "How is the audience going to relate to this story?" I'm like, "What are people going to say about this movie on Twitter?" And "What will I say back that will be good and snarky enough to get a lot of retweets, but not too harsh, because people love to get offended, and I don't want to get canceled?" These are the thoughts that enter my mind when I'm supposed to be reading a script, trying to be an artist. And I'm not here to tell you that technology is the enemy of creativity. I don't think that. I think tech is just a tool. It has the potential to foster unprecedented human creativity. Like, I even started an online community called HITRECORD, where people all over the world collaborate on all kinds of creative projects, so I don't think that social media or smartphones or any technology is problematic in and of itself. But ... if we're going to talk about the perils of creativity becoming a means to get attention, then we have to talk about the attention-driven business model of today's big social media companies, right? This will be familiar territory for some of you, but it's a really relevant question here: How does a social media platform like, for example, Instagram, make money? It's not selling a photo-sharing service -- that part's free. So what is it selling? It's selling attention. It's selling the attention of its users to advertisers. And there's a lot of discussion right now about how much attention we're all giving to things like Instagram, but my question is: How is Instagram getting so much attention? We get it for them. Anytime somebody posts on Instagram, they get a certain amount of attention from their followers, whether they have a few followers or a few million followers. And the more attention you're able to get, the more attention Instagram is able to sell. So it's in Instagram's interest for you to get as much attention as possible. And so it trains you to want that attention, to crave it, to feel stressed out when you're not getting enough of it. Instagram gets its users addicted to the powerful feeling of getting attention. And I know we all joke, like, "Oh my God, I'm so addicted to my phone," but this is a real addiction. There's a whole science to it. If you're curious, I recommend the work of Jaron Lanier, Tristan Harris, Nir Eyal. But here's what I can tell you. Being addicted to getting attention is just like being addicted to anything else. It's never enough. You start out and you're thinking, "If only I had 1,000 followers, that would feel amazing." But then you're like, "Well, once I get to 10,000 followers," and, "Once I get to 100 -- Once I get to a million followers, then I'll feel amazing." So I have 4.2 million followers on Twitter -- it's never made me feel amazing. I'm not going to tell you how many I have on Instagram, because I feel genuine shame about how low the number is, because I joined Instagram after "Batman" came out. And I search other actors, and I see that their number is higher than mine, and it makes me feel terrible about myself. Because the follower count makes everybody feel terrible about themselves. That feeling of inadequacy is what drives you to post, so you can get more attention, and then that attention that you get is what these companies sell, that's how they make their money. So there is no amount of attention you can get where you feel like you've arrived, and you're like, "Ah, I'm good now." And of course, there are a lot of actors who are more famous than I am, have more followers than I do, but I bet you they would tell you the same thing. If your creativity is driven by a desire to get attention, you're never going to be creatively fulfilled. But I do have some good news. There is this other powerful feeling. Something else you can do with your attention besides letting a giant tech company control it and sell it. This is that feeling I was talking about, why I love acting so much -- it's being able to pay attention to just one thing. Turns out there's actually some science behind this too. Psychologists and neuroscientists -- they study a phenomenon they call flow, which is this thing that happens in the human brain when someone pays attention to just one thing, like something creative, and manages not to get distracted by anything else. And some say the more regularly you do this, the happier you'll be. Now I'm not a psychologist or a neuroscientist. But I can tell you, for me, that is very true. It's not always easy, it's hard. To really pay attention like this takes practice, everybody does it their own way. But if there's one thing I can share that I think helps me focus and really pay attention, it's this: I try not to see other creative people as my competitors. I try to find collaborators. Like, if I'm acting in a scene, if I start seeing the other actors as my competitors, and I'm like, "God, they're going to get more attention than I am, people are going to be talking about their performance more than mine" -- I've lost my focus. And I'm probably going to suck in that scene. But when I see the other actors as collaborators, then it becomes almost easy to focus, because I'm just paying attention to them. And I don't have to think about what I'm doing -- I react to what they're doing, they react to what I'm doing, and we can kind of keep each other in it together. But I don't want you to think it's only actors on a set that can collaborate in this way. I could be in whatever kind of creative situation. It could be professional, could be just for fun. I could be collaborating with people I'm not even in the same room with. In fact, some of my favorite things I've ever made, I made with people that I never physically met. And by the way, this, to me, is the beauty of the internet. If we could just stop competing for attention, then the internet becomes a great place to find collaborators. And once I'm collaborating with other people, whether they're on set, or online, wherever, that makes it so much easier for me to find that flow, because we're all just paying attention to the one thing that we're making together. And I fell like I'm part of something larger than myself, and we all sort of shield each other from anything else that might otherwise grab our attention, and we can all just be there. At least that's what works for me. Sometimes. Sometimes -- it doesn't always work. Sometimes, I still totally get wrapped up in that addictive cycle of wanting to get attention. I mean, like, even right now, can I honestly say there's not some part of me here who's like, "Hey, everybody, look at me, I'm giving a TED Talk!" There is -- there's, you know, some part. But I can also honestly say that this whole creative process of writing and giving this talk, it's been a huge opportunity for me to focus and really pay attention to something I care a lot about. So regardless of how much attention I do or don't get as a result, I'm happy I did it. And I'm grateful to all of you for letting me. So thank you, that's it, you can give your attention to someone else now. Thanks again. 46528 So this is the first time I've told this story in public, the personal aspects of it. Yogi Berra was a world-famous baseball player who said, "If you come to a fork in the road, take it." Researchers had been, for more than a century, studying the immune system as a way to fight cancer, and cancer vaccines have, unfortunately, been disappointing. They've only worked in cancers caused by viruses, like cervical cancer or liver cancer. So cancer researchers basically gave up on the idea of using the immune system to fight cancer. And the immune system, in any case, did not evolve to fight cancer; it evolved to fight pathogens invading from the outside. So its job is to kill bacteria and viruses. And the reason the immune system has trouble with most cancers is that it doesn't invade from the outside; it evolves from its own cells. And so either the immune system does not recognize the cancer as a problem, or it attacks a cancer and also our normal cells, leading to autoimmune diseases like colitis or multiple sclerosis. So how do you get around that? Our answer turned out to be synthetic immune systems that are designed to recognize and kill cancer cells. That's right -- I said a synthetic immune system. You do that with genetic engineering and synthetic biology. We did it with the naturally occurring parts of the immune system, called B cells and T cells. These were our building blocks. T cells have evolved to kill cells infected with viruses, and B cells are the cells that make antibodies that are secreted and then bind to kill bacteria. Well, what if you combined these two functions in a way that was designed to repurpose them to fight cancer? We realized it would be possible to insert the genes for antibodies from B cells into T cells. So how do you do that? Well, we used an HIV virus as a Trojan horse to get past the T cells' immune system. The result is a chimera, a fantastic fire-breathing creature from Greek mythology, with a lion's head, a goat's body and a serpent's tail. So we decided that the paradoxical thing that we had created with our B-cell antibodies, our T cells carrier and the HIV Trojan horse should be called "Chimeric Antigen Receptor T cells," or CAR T cells. The virus also inserts genetic information to activate the T cells and program them into their killing mode. So when CAR T cells are injected into somebody with cancer, what happens when those CAR T cells see and bind to their tumor target? They act like supercharged killer T cells on steroids. They start this crash-defense buildup system in the body and literally divide and multiply by the millions, where they then attack and kill the tumor. All of this means that CAR T cells are the first living drug in medicine. CAR T cells break the mold. Unlike normal drugs that you take -- they do their job and get metabolized, and then you have to take them again -- CAR T cells stay alive and on the job for years. We have had CAR T cells stay in the bodies of our cancer patients now for more than eight years. And these designer cancer T cells, CAR T cells, have a calculated half-life of more than 17 years. So one infusion can do the job; they stay on patrol for the rest of your life. This is the beginning of a new paradigm in medicine. Now, there was one major challenge to these T-cell infusions. The only source of T cells that will work in a patient are your own T cells, unless you happen to have an identical twin. So for most of us, we're out of luck. So what we did was to make CAR T cells. We had to learn to grow the patient's own T cells. And we developed a robust platform for this in the 1990s. Then in 1997, we first tested CAR T cells in patients with advanced HIV-AIDS. And we found that those CAR T cells survived in the patients for more than a decade. And it improved their immune system and decreased their viruses, but it didn't cure them. So we went back to the laboratory, and over the next decade made improvements to the CAR T cell design. And by 2010, we began treating leukemia patients. And our team treated three patients with advanced chronic lymphocytic leukemia in 2012. It's a form of incurable leukemia that afflicts approximately 20,000 adults every year in the United States. The first patient that we treated was a retired Marine sergeant and a prison corrections officer. He had only weeks to live and had, in fact, already paid for his funeral. The cells were infused, and within days, he had high fevers. He developed multiple organ failures, was transferred to the ICU and was comatose. We thought he would die, and, in fact, he was given last rites. But then, another fork in the road happened. So, around 28 days after the CAR T cell infusion, he woke up, and the physicians finally examined him, and the cancer was gone. The big masses that had been there had melted. Bone marrow biopsies found no evidence of leukemia, and that year, in our first three patients we treated, two of three have had durable remissions now for eight years, and one had a partial remission. The CAR T cells had attacked the leukemia in these patients and had dissolved between 2.9 and 7.7 pounds of tumor in each patient. Their bodies had become veritable bioreactors for these CAR T cells, producing millions and millions of CAR T cells in the bone marrow, blood and tumor masses. And we discovered that these CAR T cells can punch far above their weight class, to use a boxing analogy. Just one CAR T cell can kill 1,000 tumor cells. That's right -- it's a ratio of one to a thousand. The CAR T cell and its daughter progeny cells can divide and divide and divide in the body until the last tumor cell is gone. There's no precedent for this in cancer medicine. The first two patients who had full remission remain today leukemia-free, and we think they are cured. These are people who had run out of options, and by all traditional methods they had, they were like modern-day Lazarus cases. All I can say is: thank goodness for those forks in the road. Our next step was to get permission to treat children with acute leukemia, the most common form of cancer in kids. The first patient we enrolled on the trial was Emily Whitehead, and at that time, she was six years old. She had gone through a series of chemotherapy and radiation treatments over several years, and her leukemia had always come back. In fact, it had come back three times. When we first saw her, Emily was very ill. Her official diagnosis was advanced, incurable leukemia. Cancer had invaded her bone marrow, her liver, her spleen. And when we infused her with the CAR T cells in the spring of April 2012, over the next few days, she did not get better. She got worse, and in fact, much worse. As our prison corrections officer had in 2010, she, in 2012, was admitted to the ICU, and this was the scariest fork in the whole road of this story. By day three, she was comatose and on life support for kidney failure, lung failure and coma. Her fever was as high as 106 degrees Fahrenheit for three days. And we didn't know what was causing those fevers. We did all the standard blood tests for infections, and we could not find an infectious cause for her fever. But we did find something very unusual in her blood that had never been seen before in medicine. She had elevated levels of a protein called interleukin-6, or IL-6, in her blood. It was, in fact, more than a thousandfold above the normal levels. And here's where yet another fork in the road came in. By sheer coincidence, one of my daughters has a form of pediatric arthritis. And as a result, I had been following as a cancer doc, experimental therapies for arthritis for my daughter, in case she would need them. And it so happened that just months before Emily was admitted to the hospital, a new therapy had been approved by the FDA to treat elevated levels of interleukin-6. And it was approved for the arthritis that my daughter had. It's called tocilizumab. And, in fact, it had just been added to the pharmacy at Emily's hospital, for arthritis. So when we found Emily had these very high levels of IL-6, I called her doctors in the ICU and said, "Why don't you treat her with this arthritis drug?" They said I was a cowboy for suggesting that. And since her fever and low blood pressure had not responded to any other therapy, her doctor quickly asked permission to the institutional review board, her parents, and everybody, of course, said yes. And they tried it, and the results were nothing short of striking. Within hours after treatment with tocilizumab, Emily began to improve very rapidly. Twenty-three days after her treatment, she was declared cancer-free. And today, she's 12 years old and still in remission. So we now call this violent reaction of the high fevers and coma, following CAR T cells, cytokine release syndrome, or CRS. We've found that it occurs in nearly all patients who respond to the therapy. But it does not happen in those patients who fail to respond. So paradoxically, our patients now hope for these high fevers after therapy, which feels like "the worst flu in their life," when they get CAR T-cell therapies. They hope for this reaction because they know it's part of the twisting and turning path back to health. Unfortunately, not every patient recovers. Patients who do not get CRS are often those who are not cured. So there's a strong link now between CRS and the ability of the immune system to eradicate leukemia. That's why last summer, when the FDA approved CAR T cells for leukemia, they also co-approved the use of tocilizumab to block the IL-6 effects and the accompanying CRS in these patients. That was a very unusual event in medical history. Emily's doctors have now completed further trials and reported that 27 out of 30 patients, the first 30 we treated, or 90 percent, had a complete remission after CAR T cells, within a month. A 90 percent complete remission rate in patients with advanced cancer is unheard of in more than 50 years of cancer research. In fact, companies often declare success in a cancer trial if 15 percent of the patients had a complete response rate. A remarkable study appeared in the "New England Journal of Medicine" in 2013. An international study has since confirmed those results. And that led to the approval by the FDA for pediatric and young adult leukemia in August of 2017. So as a first-ever approval of a cell and gene therapy, CAR T-cell therapy has also been tested now in adults with refractory lymphoma. This disease afflicts about 20,000 a year in the United States. The results were equally impressive and have been durable to date. And six months ago, the FDA approved the therapy of this advanced lymphoma with CAR T cells. So now there are many labs and physicians and scientists around the world who have tested CAR T cells across many different diseases, and understandably, we're all thrilled with the rapid pace of advancement. We're so grateful to see patients who were formerly terminal return to healthy lives, as Emily has. We're thrilled to see long remissions that may, in fact, be a cure. At the same time, we're also concerned about the financial cost. It can cost up to 150,000 dollars to make the CAR T cells for each patient. And when you add in the cost of treating CRS and other complications, the cost can reach one million dollars per patient. We must remember that the cost of failure, though, is even worse. The current noncurative therapies for cancer are also expensive and, in addition, the patient dies. So, of course, we'd like to see research done now to make this more efficient and increase affordability to all patients. Fortunately, this is a new and evolving field, and as with many other new therapies and services, prices will come down as industry learns to do things more efficiently. When I think about all the forks in the road that have led to CAR T-cell therapy, there is one thing that strikes me as very important. We're reminded that discoveries of this magnitude don't happen overnight. CAR T-cell therapies came to us after a 30-year journey, along a road full of setbacks and surprises. In all this world of instant gratification and 24/7, on-demand results, scientists require persistence, vision and patience to rise above all that. They can see that the fork in the road is not always a dilemma or a detour; sometimes, even though we may not know it at the time, the fork is the way home. Thank you very much. 49440 So I had this very interesting experience five years ago. You know, me and my husband, we were out grocery shopping, as we do every other day, but this time, we found this fancy, you know, I'm talking fair-trade, I'm talking organic, I'm talking Kenyan, single-origin coffee that we splurged and got. And that was when the problem started already. You know, my husband, he deemed this coffee blend superior to our regular and much cheaper coffee, which made me imagine a life based solely on fancy coffee and I saw our household budget explode. And worse ... I also feared that this investment would be in vain. That we wouldn't be able to notice this difference after all. Unfortunately, especially for my husband, he had momentarily forgotten that he's married to a neuroscientist with a specialty in food science. So without further ado, I mean, I just put him to the test. I set up an experiment where I first blindfolded my husband. Then I brewed the two types of coffee and I told him that I would serve them to him one at a time. Now, with clear certainty, my husband, he described the first cup of coffee as more raw and bitter. You know, a coffee that would be ideal for the mornings with the sole purpose of terrorizing the body awake by its alarming taste. The second cup of coffee, on the other hand, was both fruity and delightful. You know, coffee that one can enjoy in the evening and relax. Little did my husband know, however, that I hadn't actually given him the two types of coffee. I had given him the exact same cup of coffee twice. And obviously, it wasn't this one cup of coffee that had suddenly gone from horrible to fantastic. No, this taste difference was a product of my husband's own mind. Of his bias in favor of the fancy coffee that made him experience taste differences that just weren't there. Alright, so, having saved our household budget, and finishing on a very good laugh, me especially -- I then started wondering just how we could have received two such different responses from a single cup of coffee. Why would my husband make such a bold statement at the risk of being publicly mocked for the rest of his life? The striking answer is that I think you would have done the same. And that's the biggest challenge in my field of science, assessing what's reality behind these answers that we receive. Because how are we going to make food tastier if we cannot rely on what people actually say they like? To understand, let's first have a look at how we actually sense food. When I drink a cup of coffee, I detect this cup of coffee by receptors on my body, information which is then turned into activated neurons in my brain. Wavelengths of light are converted to colors. Molecules in the liquid are detected by receptors in my mouth, and categorized as one of five basic tastes. That's salty, sour, bitter, sweet and umami. Molecules in the air are detected by receptors in my nose and converted to odors. And ditto for touch, for temperature, for sound and more. All this information is detected by my receptors and converted into signals between neurons in my brain. Information which is then woven together and integrated, so that my brain recognizes that yes, I just had a cup of coffee, and yes, I liked it. And only then, after all this neuron heavy lifting, do we consciously experience this cup of coffee. And this is now where we have a very common misconception. People tend to think that what we experience consciously must then be an absolute true reflection of reality. But as you just heard, there are many stages of neural interpretation in between the physical item and the conscious experience of it. Which means that sometimes, this conscious experience is not really reflecting that reality at all. Like what happened to my husband. That's because some physical stimuli may just be so weak that they just can't break that barrier to enter our conscious mind, while the information that does may get twisted on its way there by our hidden biases. And people, they have a lot of biases. Yes, if you're sitting there right now, thinking ... you could probably have done better than my husband, you could probably have assessed those coffees correctly, then you're actually suffering from a bias. A bias called the bias blind spot. Our tendency to see ourselves as less biased than other people. And yeah, we can even be biased about the biases that we're biased about. Not trying to make this any easier. A bias that we know in the food industry is the courtesy bias. This is a bias where we give an opinion which is considered socially acceptable, but it's certainly not our own opinion, right? And I'm challenged by this as a food researcher, because when people say they like my new sugar-reduced milkshake, do they now? Or are they saying they like it because they know I'm listening and they want to please me? Or maybe they just to seem fit and healthy in my ears. I wouldn't know. But worse, they wouldn't even know themselves. Even trained food assessors, and that's people who have been explicitly taught to disentangle the sense of smell and the sense of taste, may still be biased to evaluate products sweeter if they contain vanilla. Why? Well, it's certainly not because vanilla actually tastes sweet. It's because even these professionals are human, and have eaten lot of desserts, like us, and have therefore learned to associate sweetness and vanilla. So taste and smell and other sensory information is inextricably entangled in our conscious mind. So on one hand, we can actually use this. We can use these conscious experiences, use this data, exploit it by adding vanilla instead of sugar to sweeten our products. But on the other hand, with these conscious evaluations, I still wouldn't know whether people actually liked that sugar-reduced milkshake. So how do we get around this problem? How do we actually assess what's reality behind these conscious food evaluations? The key is to remove the barrier of the conscious mind and instead target the information in the brain directly. And it turns out our brain holds a lot of fascinating secrets. Our brain constantly receives sensory information from our entire body, most of which we don't even become aware of, like the taste information that I constantly receive from my gastrointestinal tract. And my brain will also act on all this sensory information. It will alter my behavior without my knowledge, and it can increase the diameter of my pupils if I experience something I really like. And increase my sweat production ever so slightly if that emotion was intense. And with brain scans, we can now assess this information in the brain. Specifically, I have used a brain-scanning technique called electroencephalography, or "EEG" in short, which involves wearing a cap studded with electrodes, 128 in my case. Each electrode then measures the electrical activity of the brain with precision down to the millisecond. The problem is, however, it's not just the brain that's electrically active, it's also the rest of the body as well as the environment that contains a lot of electrical activity all the time. To do my research, I therefore need to minimize all this noise. So I ask my participants to do a number of things here. First off, I ask them to rest their head in a chin rest, to avoid too much muscle movement. I also ask them to, meanwhile, stare at the center of a computer monitor to avoid too much eye movements and eye blinks. And I can't even have swallowing, so I ask my participants to stick the tongue out of their mouth over a glass bowl, and then I constantly let taste stimuli onto the tongue, which then drip off into this bowl. And then, just to complete this wonderful picture, I also provide my participants with a bib, available in either pink or blue, as they please. Looks like a normal eating experience, right? No, obviously not. And worse, I can't even control what my participants are thinking about, so I need to repeat this taste procedure multiple times. Maybe the first time, they're thinking about the free lunch that I provide for participating, or maybe the second time, they're thinking about Christmas coming up and what to get for Mom this year, you know. But common for each response is the response to the taste. So I repeat this taste procedure multiple times. Sixty, in fact. And then I average the responses, because responses unrelated to taste will average out. And using this method, we and other labs, have investigated how long a time it takes from "food lands on our tongue" until our brain has figured out which taste it's experiencing. Turns out this occurs within the first already 100 milliseconds, that's about half a second before we even become aware of it. And next up, we also investigated the taste difference between sugar and artificial sweeteners that in our setup taste extremely similar. In fact, they tasted so similar that half my participants could only barely tell the taste apart, while the other half simply couldn't. But amazingly, if we looked across the entire group of participants, we saw that their brains definitely could tell the taste apart. So with EEG and other brain-scanning devices and other physiological measures -- sweat and pupil size -- we have new gateways to our brain. Gateways that will help us remove the barrier of the conscious mind to see through the biases of people and possibly even capture subconscious taste differences. And that's because we can now measure people's very first response to food before they've become conscious of it, and before they've started rationalizing why they like it or not. We can measure people's facial expressions, we can measure where they're looking, we can measure their sweat response, we can measure their brain response. And with all these measures, we are going to be able to create tastier foods, because we can measure whether people actually like that sugar-reduced milkshake. And we can create healthier foods without compromising taste, because we can measure the response to different sweeteners and find the sweetener that gives the response that's more similar to the response from sugar. And furthermore, we can just help create healthier foods, because we can help understand how we actually sense food in the first place. Which we know surprisingly little about. For example, we know that there are those five basic tastes, but we strongly suspect that there are more, and in fact, using our EEG setup, we found evidence that fat, besides being sensed by its texture and smell, is also tasted. Meaning that fat could be this new sixth basic taste. And if we figure out how our brain recognizes fat and sugar, and I'm just dreaming here, but could we then one day create a milkshake with zero calories that tastes just like the real deal? Or maybe we figure out that we can't, because we subconsciously detect calories via our receptors in our gastrointestinal tract. The future will show. Our conscious experience of food is just the tip of the iceberg of our total sensation of food. And by studying this total sensation, conscious and subconscious alike, I truly believe that we can make tastier and healthier foods for all. Thank you. 50853 The story that I'm going to tell you today, for me, began back in 2006. That was when I first heard about an outbreak of mysterious illness that was happening in the Amazon rainforest of Peru. The people that were getting sick from this illness, they had horrifying symptoms, nightmarish. They had unbelievable headaches, they couldn't eat or drink. Some of them were even hallucinating -- confused and aggressive. The most tragic part of all was that many of the victims were children. And of all of those that got sick, none survived. It turned out that what was killing people was a virus, but it wasn't Ebola, it wasn't Zika, it wasn't even some new virus never before seen by science. These people were dying of an ancient killer, one that we've known about for centuries. They were dying of rabies. And what all of them had in common was that as they slept, they'd all been bitten by the only mammal that lives exclusively on a diet of blood: the vampire bat. These sorts of outbreaks that jump from bats into people, they've become more and more common in the last couple of decades. In 2003, it was SARS. It showed up in Chinese animal markets and spread globally. That virus, like the one from Peru, was eventually traced back to bats, which have probably harbored it, undetected, for centuries. Then, 10 years later, we see Ebola showing up in West Africa, and that surprised just about everybody because, according to the science at the time, Ebola wasn't really supposed to be in West Africa. That ended up causing the largest and most widespread Ebola outbreak in history. So there's a disturbing trend here, right? Deadly viruses are appearing in places where we can't really expect them, and as a global health community, we're caught on our heels. We're constantly chasing after the next viral emergency in this perpetual cycle, always trying to extinguish epidemics after they've already started. So with new diseases appearing every year, now is really the time that we need to start thinking about what we can do about it. If we just wait for the next Ebola to happen, we might not be so lucky next time. We might face a different virus, one that's more deadly, one that spreads better among people, or maybe one that just completely outwits our vaccines, leaving us defenseless. So can we anticipate pandemics? Can we stop them? Those are really hard questions to answer, and the reason is that the pandemics -- the ones that spread globally, the ones that we really want to anticipate -- they're actually really rare events. And for us as a species that is a good thing -- that's why we're all here. But from a scientific standpoint, it's a little bit of a problem. That's because if something happens just once or twice, that's really not enough to find any patterns. Patterns that could tell us when or where the next pandemic might strike. So what do we do? Well, I think one of the solutions we may have is to study some viruses that routinely jump from wild animals into people, or into our pets, or our livestock, even if they're not the same viruses that we think are going to cause pandemics. If we can use those everyday killer viruses to work out some of the patterns of what drives that initial, crucial jump from one species to the next, and, potentially, how we might stop it, then we're going to end up better prepared for those viruses that jump between species more rarely but pose a greater threat of pandemics. Now, rabies, as terrible as it is, turns out to be a pretty nice virus in this case. You see, rabies is a scary, deadly virus. It has 100 percent fatality. That means if you get infected with rabies and you don't get treated early, there's nothing that can be done. There is no cure. You will die. And rabies is not just a problem of the past either. Even today, rabies still kills 50 to 60,000 people every year. Just put that number in some perspective. Imagine the whole West African Ebola outbreak -- about two-and-a-half years; you condense all the people that died in that outbreak into just a single year. That's pretty bad. But then, you multiply it by four, and that's what happens with rabies every single year. So what sets rabies apart from a virus like Ebola is that when people get it, they tend not to spread it onward. That means that every single time a person gets rabies, it's because they were bitten by a rabid animal, and usually, that's a dog or a bat. But it also means that those jumps between species, which are so important to understand, but so rare for most viruses, for rabies, they're actually happening by the thousands. So in a way, rabies is almost like the fruit fly or the lab mouse of deadly viruses. This is a virus that we can use and study to find patterns and potentially test out new solutions. And so, when I first heard about that outbreak of rabies in the Peruvian Amazon, it struck me as something potentially powerful because this was a virus that was jumping from bats into other animals often enough that we might be able to anticipate it ... Maybe even stop it. So as a first-year graduate student with a vague memory of my high school Spanish class, I jumped onto a plane and flew off to Peru, looking for vampire bats. And the first couple of years of this project were really tough. I had no shortage of ambitious plans to rid Latin America of rabies, but at the same time, there seemed to be an equally endless supply of mudslides and flat tires, power outages, stomach bugs all stopping me. But that was kind of par for the course, working in South America, and to me, it was part of the adventure. But what kept me going was the knowledge that for the first time, the work that I was doing might actually have some real impact on people's lives in the short term. And that struck me the most when we actually went out to the Amazon and were trying to catch vampire bats. You see, all we had to do was show up at a village and ask around. "Who's been getting bitten by a bat lately?" And people raised their hands, because in these communities, getting bitten by a bat is an everyday occurrence, happens every day. And so all we had to do was go to the right house, open up a net and show up at night, and wait until the bats tried to fly in and feed on human blood. So to me, seeing a child with a bite wound on his head or blood stains on his sheets, that was more than enough motivation to get past whatever logistical or physical headache I happened to be feeling on that day. Since we were working all night long, though, I had plenty of time to think about how I might actually solve this problem, and it stood out to me that there were two burning questions. The first was that we know that people are bitten all the time, but rabies outbreaks aren't happening all the time -- every couple of years, maybe even every decade, you get a rabies outbreak. So if we could somehow anticipate when and where the next outbreak would be, that would be a real opportunity, meaning we could vaccinate people ahead of time, before anybody starts dying. But the other side of that coin is that vaccination is really just a Band-Aid. It's kind of a strategy of damage control. Of course it's lifesaving and important and we have to do it, but at the end of the day, no matter how many cows, how many people we vaccinate, we're still going to have exactly the same amount of rabies up there in the bats. The actual risk of getting bitten hasn't changed at all. So my second question was this: Could we somehow cut the virus off at its source? If we could somehow reduce the amount of rabies in the bats themselves, then that would be a real game changer. We'd been talking about shifting from a strategy of damage control to one based on prevention. So, how do we begin to do that? Well, the first thing we needed to understand was how this virus actually works in its natural host -- in the bats. And that is a tall order for any infectious disease, particularly one in a reclusive species like bats, but we had to start somewhere. So the way we started was looking at some historical data. When and where had these outbreaks happened in the past? And it became clear that rabies was a virus that just had to be on the move. It couldn't sit still. The virus might circulate in one area for a year, maybe two, but unless it found a new group of bats to infect somewhere else, it was pretty much bound to go extinct. So with that, we solved one key part of the rabies transmission challenge. We knew we were dealing with a virus on the move, but we still couldn't say where it was going. Essentially, what I wanted was more of a Google Maps-style prediction, which is, "What's the destination of the virus? What's the route it's going to take to get there? How fast will it move?" To do that, I turned to the genomes of rabies. You see, rabies, like many other viruses, has a tiny little genome, but one that evolves really, really quickly. So quickly that by the time the virus has moved from one point to the next, it's going to have picked up a couple of new mutations. And so all we have to do is kind of connect the dots across an evolutionary tree, and that's going to tell us where the virus has been in the past and how it spread across the landscape. So, I went out and I collected cow brains, because that's where you get rabies viruses. And from genome sequences that we got from the viruses in those cow brains, I was able to work out that this is a virus that spreads between 10 and 20 miles each year. OK, so that means we do now have the speed limit of the virus, but still missing that other key part of where is it going in the first place. For that, I needed to think a little bit more like a bat, because rabies is a virus -- it doesn't move by itself, it has to be moved around by its bat host, so I needed to think about how far to fly and how often to fly. My imagination didn't get me all that far with this and neither did little digital trackers that we first tried putting on bats. We just couldn't get the information we needed. So instead, we turned to the mating patterns of bats. We could look at certain parts of the bat genome, and they were telling us that some groups of bats were mating with each other and others were more isolated. And the virus was basically following the trail laid out by the bat genomes. Yet one of those trails stood out as being a little bit surprising -- hard to believe. That was one that seemed to cross straight over the Peruvian Andes, crossing from the Amazon to the Pacific coast, and that was kind of hard to believe, as I said, because the Andes are really tall -- about 22,000 feet, and that's way too high for a vampire to fly. Yet -- when we looked more closely, we saw, in the northern part of Peru, a network of valley systems that was not quite too tall for the bats on either side to be mating with each other. And we looked a little bit more closely -- sure enough, there's rabies spreading through those valleys, just about 10 miles each year. Basically, exactly as our evolutionary models had predicated it would be. What I didn't tell you is that that's actually kind of an important thing because rabies had never been seen before on the western slopes of the Andes, or on the whole Pacific coast of South America, so we were actually witnessing, in real time, a historical first invasion into a pretty big part of South America, which raises the key question: "What are we going to do about that?" Well, the obvious short-term thing we can do is tell people: you need to vaccinate yourselves, vaccinate your animals; rabies is coming. But in the longer term, it would be even more powerful if we could use that new information to stop the virus from arriving altogether. Of course, we can't just tell bats, "Don't fly today," but maybe we could stop the virus from hitching a ride along with the bat. And that brings us to the key lesson that we have learned from rabies-management programs all around the world, whether it's dogs, foxes, skunks, raccoons, North America, Africa, Europe. It's that vaccinating the animal source is the only thing that stops rabies. So, can we vaccinate bats? You hear about vaccinating dogs and cats all the time, but you don't hear too much about vaccinating bats. It might sound like a crazy question, but the good news is that we actually already have edible rabies vaccines that are specially designed for bats. And what's even better is that these vaccines can actually spread from bat to bat. All you have to do is smear it on one and let the bats' habit of grooming each other take care of the rest of the work for you. So that means, at the very least, we don't have to be out there vaccinating millions of bats one by one with tiny little syringes. But just because we have that tool doesn't mean we know how to use it. Now we have a whole laundry list of questions. How many bats do we need to vaccinate? What time of the year do we need to be vaccinating? How many times a year do we need to be vaccinating? All of these are questions that are really fundamental to rolling out any sort of vaccination campaign, but they're questions that we can't answer in the laboratory. So instead, we're taking a slightly more colorful approach. We're using real wild bats, but fake vaccines. We use edible gels that make bat hair glow and UV powders that spread between bats when they bump into each other, and that's letting us study how well a real vaccine might spread in these wild colonies of bats. We're still in the earliest phases of this work, but our results so far are incredibly encouraging. They're suggesting that using the vaccines that we already have, we could potentially drastically reduce the size of rabies outbreaks. And that matters, because as you remember, rabies is a virus that always has to be on the move, and so every time we reduce the size of an outbreak, we're also reducing the chance that the virus makes it onto the next colony. We're breaking a link in the chain of transmission. And so every time we do that, we're bringing the virus one step closer to extinction. And so the thought, for me, of a world in the not-too-distant future where we're actually talking about getting rid of rabies altogether, that is incredibly encouraging and exciting. So let me return to the original question. Can we prevent pandemics? Well, there is no silver-bullet solution to this problem, but my experiences with rabies have left me pretty optimistic about it. I think we're not too far from a future where we're going to have genomics to forecast outbreaks and we're going to have clever new technologies, like edible, self-spreading vaccines, that can get rid of these viruses at their source before they have a chance to jump into people. So when it comes to fighting pandemics, the holy grail is just to get one step ahead. And if you ask me, I think one of the ways that we can do that is using some of the problems that we already have now, like rabies -- sort of the way an astronaut might use a flight simulator, figuring out what works and what doesn't, and building up our tool set so that when the stakes are high, we're not flying blind. Thank you. 51101 When I waltzed off to high school with my new Nokia phone, I thought I just had the new, coolest replacement for my old pink princess walkie-talkie. Except now, my friends and I could text or talk to each other wherever we were, instead of pretending, when we were running around each other's backyards. Now, I'll be honest. Back then, I didn't think a lot about how these devices were made. They tended to show up on Christmas morning, so maybe they were made by the elves in Santa's workshop. Let me ask you a question. Who do you think the real elves that make these devices are? If I ask a lot of the people I know, they would say it's the hoodie-wearing software engineers in Silicon Valley, hacking away at code. But a lot has to happen to these devices before they're ready for any kind of code. These devices start at the atomic level. So if you ask me, the real elves are the chemists. That's right, I said the chemists. Chemistry is the hero of electronic communications. And my goal today is to convince you to agree with me. OK, let's start simple, and take a look inside these insanely addictive devices. Because without chemistry, what is an information superhighway that we love, would just be a really expensive, shiny paperweight. Chemistry enables all of these layers. Let's start at the display. How do you think we get those bright, vivid colors that we love so much? Well, I'll tell you. There's organic polymers embedded within the display, that can take electricity and turn it into the blue, red and green that we enjoy in our pictures. What if we move down to the battery? Now there's some intense research. How do we take the chemical principles of traditional batteries and pair it with new, high surface area electrodes, so we can pack more charge in a smaller footprint of space, so that we could power our devices all day long, while we're taking selfies, without having to recharge our batteries or sit tethered to an electrical outlet? What if we go to the adhesives that bind it all together, so that it could withstand our frequent usage? After all, as a millennial, I have to take my phone out at least 200 times a day to check it, and in the process, drop it two to three times. But what are the real brains of these devices? What makes them work the way that we love them so much? Well that all has to do with electrical components and circuitry that are tethered to a printed circuit board. Or maybe you prefer a biological metaphor -- the motherboard, you might have heard of that. Now, the printed circuit board doesn't really get talked about a lot. And I'll be honest, I don't know why that is. Maybe it's because it's the least sexy layer and it's hidden beneath all of those other sleek-looking layers. But it's time to finally give this Clark Kent layer the Superman-worthy praise it deserves. And so I ask you a question. What do you think a printed circuit board is? Well, consider a metaphor. Think about the city that you live in. You have all these points of interest that you want to get to: your home, your work, restaurants, a couple of Starbucks on every block. And so we build roads that connect them all together. That's what a printed circuit board is. Except, instead of having things like restaurants, we have transistors on chips, capacitors, resistors, all of these electrical components that need to find a way to talk to each other. And so what are our roads? Well, we build tiny copper wires. So the next question is, how do we make these tiny copper wires? They're really small. Could it be that we go to the hardware store, pick up a spool of copper wire, get some wire cutters, a little clip-clip, saw it all up and then, bam -- we have our printed circuit board? No way. These wires are way too small for that. And so we have to rely on our friend: chemistry. Now, the chemical process to make these tiny copper wires is seemingly simple. We start with a solution of positively charged copper spheres. We then add to it an insulating printed circuit board. And we feed those positively charged spheres negatively charged electrons by adding formaldehyde to the mix. So you might remember formaldehyde. Really distinct odor, used to preserve frogs in biology class. Well it turns out it can do a lot more than just that. And it's a really key component to making these tiny copper wires. You see, the electrons on formaldehyde have a drive. They want to jump over to those positively charged copper spheres. And that's all because of a process known as redox chemistry. And when that happens, we can take these positively charged copper spheres and turn them into bright, shiny, metallic and conductive copper. And once we have conductive copper, now we're cooking with gas. And we can get all of those electrical components to talk to each other. So thank you once again to chemistry. And let's take a thought and think about how far we've come with chemistry. Clearly, in electronic communications, size matters. So let's think about how we can shrink down our devices, so that we can go from our 1990s Zack Morris cell phone to something a little bit more sleek, like the phones of today that can fit in our pockets. Although, let's be real here: absolutely nothing can fit into ladies' pants pockets, if you can find a pair of pants that has pockets. And I don't think chemistry can help us with that problem. But more important than shrinking the actual device, how do we shrink the circuitry inside of it, and shrink it by 100 times, so that we can take the circuitry from the micron scale all the way down to the nanometer scale? Because, let's face it, right now we all want more powerful and faster phones. Well, more power and faster requires more circuitry. So how do we do this? It's not like we have some magic electromagnetic shrink ray, like professor Wayne Szalinski used in "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" to shrink his children. On accident, of course. Or do we? Well, actually, in the field, there's a process that's pretty similar to that. And it's name is photolithography. In photolithography, we take electromagnetic radiation, or what we tend to call light, and we use it to shrink down some of that circuitry, so that we could cram more of it into a really small space. Now, how does this work? Well, we start with a substrate that has a light-sensitive film on it. We then cover it with a mask that has a pattern on top of it of fine lines and features that are going to make the phone work the way that we want it to. We then expose a bright light and shine it through this mask, which creates a shadow of that pattern on the surface. Now, anywhere that the light can get through the mask, it's going to cause a chemical reaction to occur. And that's going to burn the image of that pattern into the substrate. So the question you're probably asking is, how do we go from a burned image to clean fine lines and features? And for that, we have to use a chemical solution called the developer. Now the developer is special. What it can do is take all of the nonexposed areas and remove them selectively, leaving behind clean fine lines and features, and making our miniaturized devices work. So, we've used chemistry now to build up our devices, and we've used it to shrink down our devices. So I've probably convinced you that chemistry is the true hero, and we could wrap it up there. Hold on, we're not done. Not so fast. Because we're all human. And as a human, I always want more. And so now I want to think about how to use chemistry to extract more out of a device. Right now, we're being told that we want something called 5G, or the promised fifth generation of wireless. Now, you might have heard of 5G in commercials that are starting to appear. Or maybe some of you even experienced it in the 2018 winter Olympics. What I'm most excited about for 5G is that, when I'm late, running out of the house to catch a plane, I can download movies onto my device in 40 seconds as opposed to 40 minutes. But once true 5G is here, it's going to be a lot more than how many movies we can put on our device. So the question is, why is true 5G not here? And I'll let you in on a little secret. It's pretty easy to answer. It's just plain hard to do. You see, if you use those traditional materials and copper to build 5G devices, the signal can't make it to its final destination. Traditionally, we use really rough insulating layers to support copper wires. Think about Velcro fasteners. It's the roughness of the two pieces that make them stick together. That's pretty important if you want to have a device that's going to last longer than it takes you to rip it out of the box and start installing all of your apps on it. But this roughness causes a problem. You see, at the high speeds for 5G the signal has to travel close to that roughness. And it makes it get lost before it reaches its final destination. Think about a mountain range. And you have a complex system of roads that goes up and over it, and you're trying to get to the other side. Don't you agree with me that it would probably take a really long time, and you would probably get lost, if you had to go up and down all of the mountains, as opposed to if you just drilled a flat tunnel that could go straight on through? Well it's the same thing in our 5G devices. If we could remove this roughness, then we can send the 5G signal straight on through uninterrupted. Sounds pretty good, right? But hold on. Didn't I just tell you that we needed that roughness to keep the device together? And if we remove it, we're in a situation where now the copper isn't going to stick to that underlying substrate. Think about building a house of Lego blocks, with all of the nooks and crannies that latch together, as opposed to smooth building blocks. Which of the two is going to have more structural integrity when the two-year-old comes ripping through the living room, trying to play Godzilla and knock everything down? But what if we put glue on those smooth blocks? And that's what the industry is waiting for. They're waiting for the chemists to design new, smooth surfaces with increased inherent adhesion for some of those copper wires. And when we solve this problem, and we will solve the problem, and we'll work with physicists and engineers to solve all of the challenges of 5G, well then the number of applications is going to skyrocket. So yeah, we'll have things like self-driving cars, because now our data networks can handle the speeds and the amount of information required to make that work. But let's start to use imagination. I can imagine going into a restaurant with a friend that has a peanut allergy, taking out my phone, waving it over the food and having the food tell us a really important answer to a question -- deadly or safe to consume? Or maybe our devices will get so good at processing information about us, that they'll become like our personal trainers. And they'll know the most efficient way for us to burn calories. I know come November, when I'm trying to burn off some of these pregnancy pounds, I would love a device that could tell me how to do that. I really don't know another way of saying it, except chemistry is just cool. And it enables all of these electronic devices. So the next time you send a text or take a selfie, think about all those atoms that are hard at work and the innovation that came before them. Who knows, maybe even some of you listening to this talk, perhaps even on your mobile device, will decide that you too want to play sidekick to Captain Chemistry, the true hero of electronic devices. Thank you for your attention, and thank you chemistry. 52268 It was a fantastic new pink suit with big buttons and shoulder pads. It was 1997, and I was the new boss of Griffin's Foods, an iconic cookie and snacks company in New Zealand. It was my first time as the leader of a company, and I was on the stage to give a big speech about our ambitious new goals. I knew exactly what my call to action was, which was "One in every four times a Kiwi eats a snack, it will be one of ours." I emphasized that we knew how to measure our results and that our future was in our control. Embarrassingly enough, I finished up with "If not this, what? If not us, who? And if not now, when?" I got this huge round of applause and I was really, really pleased with myself. I wanted so much to be a good leader. I wanted to be followed by a devoted team, I wanted to be right. In short, I wanted to be a hero. A hero selling chips and biscuits in a pink suit. What happened after that speech? Nothing. All of that applause did not lead to action. Nothing changed. Not because they didn't like me or the message. The problem was that no one knew what they were expected to do. And most importantly, they didn't know that I needed them. Now, you may think that this is a classic hero speech, where I'm going to tell you that I overcame that obstacle and triumphed. Actually, I'm going to tell you that in a world as complex and interconnected as the one we live in, the idea that one person has the answer is ludicrous. It's not only ineffective, it's dangerous, because it leads us to believe that it's been solved by that hero, and we have no role. We don't need heroes. We need radical interdependence, which is just another way of saying we need each other. Even though other people can be really difficult, sometimes. I spent decades trying to work out how to be a good leader. I've lived in seven countries and five continents. And in recent years, I've spent a lot of time with the B Corp community, originally as a corporate participant and more recently as an ambassador. Now, B Corps are a group of companies who believe in business as a force for good. There's a tough certification with about 250 questions about your social and environmental performance. You must legally declare your intention to serve the community as well as your shareholders and you must sign the declaration of interdependence. Now one of the things that inspires me the most about the companies in this movement is that they see themselves as part of a whole system. It's sort of as if they imagine themselves on a big, flowing river of activity, where, if they are, for example, soft drinks manufacturers, they understand that upstream from them, there's water and sugar, and farmers that grow that sugar, and plastic and metal and glass, all of which flows into this thing that we call a company which has financial results. And the flowing continues with consequences. Some of them intended, like refreshment and hydration, and some unintended, like garbage and obesity. Spending time with leaders in this space has led me to see that true collaboration is possible, but it's subtle and it's complex. And the leaders in this space are doing a few things very differently from traditional heroic leaders. They set goals differently, they announce those goals differently and they have a very different relationship with other people. Let's begin with the first difference. A hero sets a goal that can be individually delivered and neatly measured. You can recognize a heroic goal -- they use terms like "revenue" and "market share" and are often competitive. I mean, remember pink-suit day? Interdependent leaders, on the other hand, start with a goal that's really important, but is actually impossible to achieve by one company or one person alone. I want to give you an example from the clothing industry, which produces 92 million tons of waste a year. Patagonia and Eileen Fisher are clothing manufacturers, both of them B Corps, both of them deeply committed to reducing waste. They don't see that their responsibility ends when a customer buys their clothes. Patagonia encourages you not to buy new clothes from them, and will repair your old clothes for free. Eileen Fisher will pay you when you bring back your clothes, and either sell them on or turn them into other clothes. While these two companies are competitive in some ways, they work together and with others in the industry to solve shared problems. They take responsibility for things that happen upstream as well. Around the world, there are around 300 million people who work from home in this industry, most of them women, many of them in very difficult circumstances with poor lighting, sewing on buttons and doing detailed stitching. Until 2014, there was no protection for these workers. A group of companies got together with a not-for-profit called Nest to create a set of standards that's now been adopted by the whole industry. Once you've seen problems like this, you can't unsee them, so you have to ask others to help you to solve them. These folks take interdependence as a given, and said to me, "We don't compete on human rights." The second big difference for collaborators is their willingness to declare their goals before they have a plan. Now the hero only reveals their carefully crafted goal when the path to achieve it is clear. In fact, the role of the hero announcement is to set the stage for the big win. Hero announcements are full of triumph. Interdependent leaders, on the other hand, want other people to help them, so their announcements are often an invitation for co-creation, and sometimes, they're a call for help. At the North American division of the French food company Danone, I announced that we wanted to become a B Corp. And unlike pink-suit day, I had no plan to get there. I remember the day really clearly. Everybody in the room gasped, because they knew we didn't have a plan. But they also knew that we had seen our role in the river that is the food system, and we wanted to make a change. Making that declaration without a plan meant that so many young people in our company stepped up to help us, and B Corps around us all rallied around. And the day we became a B Corp wasn't just a self-congratulatory moment of a hero company -- it was more like a community celebration. Now when you gave goals that you can't achieve alone, and you've told everyone about them, inevitably, you'll end up at the third big difference, which is how you see other people, inside your company and outside. Heroes see everyone as a competitor or a follower. Heroes don't want input, because they want to control everything because they want the credit. And you can see this in a typical hero meeting. Heroes like making speeches. People lean back in their chairs, maybe impressed but not engaged. Interdependent leaders, on the other hand, understand that they need other people. They know that meetings are not just mindless calendar fillers. These are the most precious things you have. It's where people collaborate and communicate and share ideas. People lean forward in meetings like this, wondering where they might fit in. When I was in Shanghai in China, where I lived for six years, running the Kraft Foods business, selling, amongst other things, Oreo cookies, we had a problem with hero culture. We kept on launching new products that failed. And we would find out afterwards that everyone in the company knew they were going to fail, they just didn't feel free to tell us. So we changed the way we ran our innovation and planning meetings in two important ways. First of all, language went back to Chinese. Because even though everyone spoke great English, when I was in the room and the meeting was in English, they focused on me. And I was the foreigner, and I was the boss and I apparently had that intimidating hero look. The second thing is we asked every single person in the meeting their opinion. And our understanding of the subtleties of the differences between American taste and Chinese taste, in this case, really improved, and our new product success rate radically turned around and we launched a lot of winners, including the now famous green-tea-flavored Oreos. Hero culture sneaks in everywhere. At Danone, we had a lot of great stuff happening in one part of the world, and we wanted it to spread to another part of the world. But when you put a person in business gear up in front of a group of people with PowerPoint, they have the urge to become sort of heroic. And they make everything look super shiny and they don't tell the truth. And it's not compelling and it's not even interesting. So, we changed it and we created these full-day marketplaces, kind of like a big bazaar. And everybody was dressed up in costume, some people a little, some people a lot. And sellers had to man their stalls and sell their ideas as persuasively as possible, and people who were convinced bought them with fake check books. Creating just a bit of silliness with the environment and a hat or a scarf drops people's guard and causes ideas to spread like wildfire. There's no recipe here, but time together has to be carefully curated and created so that people know that their time is valuable and important, and they can bring their best selves to the table. Hero culture is present right here in TED. This whole process makes it look like I think I'm a hero. So just in case there's any doubt about the point that I'm trying to make, I want to apply these ideas in an area in which I have zero credibility and zero experience. I'm originally South African, and I'm deeply passionate about wildlife conservation, most particularly rhinos. Those majestic creatures with big horns. Every day, three rhinos are killed, because there are people who think that those horns are valuable, even though they're just made of the same stuff as hair and fingernails. It breaks my heart. Like all good recovering heroes, I did everything I could to reduce this goal to something that I could do by myself. But clearly, stopping rhino poaching is a goal way too big for me. So I'm immediately in interdependence land. I'm declaring my goal on this stage. I found other people as passionate as I am and I've asked if I could join them. And after today, there may be more. And we're now in the complex but inspiring process of learning how to work together. My dream is that one day, someone will stand on this stage and tell you how radical interdependence saved my beloved rhinos. Why does hero culture persist, and why don't we work together more? Well, I don't know why everyone else does it, but I can tell you why I did it. Interdependence is a lot harder than being a hero. It requires us to be open and transparent and vulnerable, and that's not what traditional leaders have been trained to do. I thought being a hero would keep me safe. I thought that in the elevation and separation that comes from heroic leadership, that I would be untouchable. This is an illusion. The joy and success that comes from interdependence and vulnerability is worth the effort and the risk. And if we're going to solve the challenges that the world is facing today, we have no alternative, so we had better start getting good at it. Thank you. 54706 I have to admit that it's a lot of fun when people ask me what I do for my job, because I tell them I literally rub things together. This sounds ridiculous, just rubbing things together. But it has a technical name: tribology. T-r-i-b-o-l-o-g-y, from the ancient Greek word "tribos," which means "to rub." It's a funny-sounding word you've probably never heard before, but I promise you, discovering it changes your experience with the physical world. Tribology has given me amazing projects. I've worked on materials that fly, and I've worked on dog food -- a combination that doesn't sound like one person has any business doing in the span of just a couple years, until you start to view the world through a tribological lens. And I think you'll be surprised at how significant a little bit of tribology can be in alleviating some very large problems. Tribology is the study of friction, wear and lubrication. You have all experienced all three of these things. Remember the last time you tried to move a heavy object across the floor, and you could just feel something resisting you? That would be friction. Friction is the force that opposes motion. Wear is the loss or transfer of material. It's the reason you have to replace your favorite shoes, because eventually the soles disappear. Lubricants are used to reduce friction and wear. They loosen up those stubborn rusted bolts that just otherwise will not budge. But tribology is also defined as the science of interacting surfaces in relative motion. So, interacting surfaces in relative motion: there are a lot of those in the world. As you're sitting there right now, are you wiggling your foot at all or maybe shifting around in your seat? Because guess what? Tribology is happening. Even the smallest shift in your seat involves two surfaces moving relative to each other. And your tribological interaction for the shift will be different than the person next to you. This is because the clothes you're wearing change the friction between you and the seat. If you're wearing silk, it's a little easier to squirm around in the seat than if you're wearing wool. That's because the friction is lower for silk. If you're moving your ankle or wiggling your ankle at all, did it make a popping sound? You've had that, right? You get up, you move around, and some joint cracks or pops. Thank you for that sound, tribology. That sound can come from the fluid that lubricates your joints just moving around. You're essentially releasing gas bubbles in that fluid. That sound can also come from the tendons simply moving over each other. Pretty common in the ankle, so any of my fellow foot-wigglers out there may suddenly find themselves curious about the tribology of tendons. But how does one become a tribologist like me? It starts when you're a kid, of course. I was a ballerina growing up. I reached the level where I was dancing on my toes, or "en pointe." Now, when you're dancing en pointe, you're wearing those amazing shoes, but they can be slippery on the stage. The last thing you want to do when you're trying to dance on your toes is to slip and fall. So we had boxes of stuff called rosin. We would step into the rosin, put a light coating on our shoes. Rosin comes from tree sap and, in its powdered form, makes things less slippery. You learned real fast as a dancer how much was the right amount to put on your shoes, because if you didn't put enough on, you were probably going to slip due to the low friction between your shoe and the stage. Best case scenario, you're the clumsy ballerina on stage, but the worst case scenario would be an injury. Already, I was optimizing and manipulating friction. You see, I was destined to be a tribologist. But you were also a junior tribologist. When you used crayons or colored pencils, you knew that the harder you pressed, the darker the color. You also knew this meant you were going to have to sharpen that crayon or colored pencil more frequently, because it was wearing down faster. Now let's talk about those enticing shiny waxed floors that you just had to slide across. You knew if you put on a pair of socks, you were going to get a really good slide across that floor. Good luck trying to do that barefoot. Master manipulators of friction. All kids are tribologists. What about us as adults? At some point today, you brushed your teeth. I hope. This is tribology in action. The toothpaste and toothbrush are working to remove or wear the plaque from your teeth. For the record, my dad is a dentist. Never thought my career was going to circle back to the family business. But one day, we found ourselves speaking the same language when I was tasked with developing a test to investigate plaque removal. Sounded simple enough, until I started to look at it as a tribologist, and then it became incredibly complex. You have hard materials -- those would be your teeth -- soft materials like your gums, the toothpaste, the toothbrush. There's lubrication -- the form of saliva and water -- the dynamics of the person doing the brushing and more. I promise if we put diamonds in your toothpaste, you're going to remove that plaque. Probably going to remove your teeth as well. So there's a fine balance to be had between wearing the plaque away and not damaging your teeth and gums. We're brushing our teeth because we ate. Eating is another routine thing we all do. Seems simple enough. But it's another field of tribology, and it's not so simple. You have the food, which will break and wear while you're eating, and that food is interacting with your teeth, your tongue, your saliva, your throat. And all of those interactions are going to influence your experience of eating. I think you can all recall a moment where you tried something new and you just found yourself going, "Well, it tastes alright. I really don't like that texture." Tribologists are looking at lubricity, the coefficient of friction, as ways to connect mouth feel and texture to what you're experiencing, so that if we're changing the formulations of what we're eating and drinking so the sugar content or fat content are different, how does that change mouth feel? How do we quantify that? This is what tribologists are looking to solve. And while my colleagues were in one corner of this lab looking at the fat content of yogurt, I was in another corner studying dog food. That lab smelled really good, by the way, let me tell you. We all brush our teeth on a regular basis. How many of us brush our pets' teeth? Animals as adults commonly get periodontal disease, so we really should be brushing their teeth, and more pet owners are starting to do this. I know my best friend is really great at brushing her cat's teeth, somehow. Good luck trying to do that with my cat. So what pet food suppliers are trying to do is incorporate plaque removal in things like treats. If you have a dog, you may have observed that you give a dog a treat, and it magically seems to disappear after just one bite. So the added challenge here is: How do you remove plaque when you have one bite? I developed a benchtop test to study this problem, and to do so, I had to mimic the oral system of dogs: their teeth, plaque, saliva. And I used friction and wear measurements to study the effectiveness of that treat on removing plaque. If you're sitting there right now thinking about the last time you didn't brush your dog's teeth, you're very welcome. But what's the big deal with tribology? Let me give you one more example. No matter where you are right now, you got to this location somehow. Maybe you walked or rode your bike, but for most people in this room, you probably came in a car. Just think about all the tribological systems in a car. You have your personal interactions with the car, the car's interactions with the road and everything under the hood and in the drivetrain. Some routine maintenance is directly connected to tribology. You know how many miles your tires are recommended for using before you replace them. You regularly check the treads on those tires. You're actively monitoring the wear of your tires. Tribology is the study of wear and friction, and with tires, friction can be the difference between a safe arrival and a car accident. This is because the friction between your tires and the road will influence your acceleration, your deceleration and your stopping distance. As a driver, you instinctively already know how important friction is, because you know that when the roads are wet, they're more dangerous because they're slippery. This is because the water is reducing the friction between your tires and the road. You may recall that friction is the force that opposes motion, so water reducing that force means it's now easier for you to move, hence it's more slippery when the roads are wet. Something else to consider is that overcoming friction takes energy, so you're losing energy to friction. This is one way your tires can influence your fuel efficiency. And, in fact, did you know that about one-third of the fuel that you put into your internal combustion engine vehicle will be spent overcoming friction? One-third. Tribology research has helped us reduce friction and therefore increase fuel efficiency and reduce emissions. Holmberg and Erdemir have actually done some great studies showing the impact tribology research can have on reducing our energy consumption. And they found that, looking over the span of 20 years, we had the opportunity to reduce the energy consumption of passenger vehicles up to 60 percent. When you think about all the cars in the world, that's a lot of energy we can save. It's part of the nearly nine percent of our current global energy consumption that the authors identified tribology can help us save. That's a significant amount of energy. So when you look at the numbers, tribology can do some amazing things. My colleagues have identified up to 20 quads of energy we can save across the US alone. To put this in perspective: one quad of energy is roughly equivalent to 180 million barrels of oil, and tribology can help us save 20 times that. This is through new materials, new lubricants, novel component design, doing things like making wind turbines more efficient and reliable. This happened just by putting 31 people in a room who viewed the world through a tribology lens. Imagine the opportunities that will reveal themselves as more of us start to see tribology all around. My favorite projects right now are in aerospace applications. I love reducing wear and friction in these challenging environments. I can make materials and parts that will reduce the friction in moving components and engines so that they have less force opposing their motion. Less force to move means they require less power, so you can use a smaller actuator, which would weigh less, which saves fuel. I can also help make parts that last longer through lower wear. This will reduce material waste and also means we're manufacturing the parts less frequently, so we're saving energy in manufacturing. I encourage you to start seeing tribology in the world around you and to think about how you would improve those interacting surfaces you experience. Even the smallest improvements really add up. Tribology may be a funny-sounding word, but it has a huge impact on our world. Thank you. 55061 Poet Ali: Hi. Audience: Hi. PA: I want to ask you guys a question. How many languages do you speak? This is not a rhetorical question. I actually want you to think of a number. For some of you, it's pretty easy. Inside your head, you're like, "It's one. You're speaking it, buddy. I'm done." Others of you maybe are wondering if the language an ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend taught you, where you learned all the cusswords, if it counts -- go ahead and count it. When I asked myself the question, I came up with four, arguably five, if I've been drinking. But on closer examination, I came up with 83 -- 83 languages, and I got tired and I stopped counting. And it forced me to revisit this definition that we have of language. The first entry said, "The method of human communication, either spoken or written, consisting of the use of words in a structured or conventional way." The definition at the bottom refers to specialized fields, like medicine, science, tech. We know they have their own vernacular, their own jargon. But what most interested me was that definition right in the center there: "the system of communication used by a particular community or country." And I'm not interested in altering this definition. I'm interested in applying it to everything we do, because I believe that we speak far more languages than we realize. And for the rest of our time together, I'm going to attempt to speak in one language that is native to every single human being in this room. But that changes things a little bit, because then it's no longer a presentation. It becomes a conversation, and in any conversation, there must be some sort of interaction. And for any interaction to happen, there has to be a degree of willingness on both parties. And I think if we just are willing, we will see the magic that can happen with just a little bit of willingness. So I've chosen a relatively low-risk common denominator that can kind of gauge if we're all willing. If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands. Now you're talking! Thank you so much. Please be seated. Now, if that felt a little bit awkward, I promise there was no joke being had at your expense. I simply asked the Spanish-speaking audience to stand up, look at a person that was sitting close to them and laugh. And I know that wasn't nice, and I'm sorry, but in that moment, some of us felt something. You see, we're often aware of what language does when we speak somebody's language, what it does to connect, what it does to bind. But we often forget what it does when you can't speak that language, what it does to isolate, what it does to exclude. And I want us to hold on as we journey through our little walk of languages here. I said in Farsi, "I'd like to translate this idea of 'taarof' in the Persian culture," which, really -- it has no equivalent in the English lexicon. The best definition would be something like an extreme grace or an extreme humility. But that doesn't quite get the job done. So I'll give you an example. If two gentlemen were walking by each other, it'd be very common for the first one to say, (In Farsi: I am indebted to you), which means, "I am indebted to you." The other gentlemen would respond back, (In Farsi: I open my shirt for you) which means, "I open my shirt for you." The first guy would respond back, (In Farsi: I am your servant) which means, "I am your servant." And then the second guy would respond back to him, (In Farsi: I am the dirt beneath your feet) which literally means, "I am the dirt beneath your feet." Here's an exhibit for you guys, in case you didn't get the picture. And I share that with you, because with new languages come new concepts that didn't exist before. And the other thing is, sometimes we think language is about understanding the meaning of a word, but I believe language is about making a word meaningful for yourself. If I were to flash this series of words on the screen, some of you, you'd know exactly what it is right away. Others of you, you might struggle a little bit. And I could probably draw a pretty clear-cut line right around the age of 35 and older, 35 and younger. And for those of us that are in the know, we know that's text-speak, or SMS language. It's a series of characters meant to convey the most amount of meaning with the least amount of characters, which sounds pretty similar to our definition of languages: "system of communication used by a community." Now, anyone who's ever got into an argument via text can make a case for how it's maybe not the best method of communication, but what if I told you that what you saw earlier was a modern-day love letter? If you follow along: "For the time being, I love you lots, because you positively bring out all the best in me, and I laugh out loud, in other words, let's me know what's up. 'Cause you are a cutie in my opinion, and as far as I know to see you, if you're not seeing someone, would make happy. For your information, I'll be right there forever. In any case, keep in touch, no response necessary, all my best wishes, don't know, don't care if anyone sees this. Don't go there, see you later, bye for now, hugs and kisses, you only live once." Kind of a modern-day Romeo or Juliet. In that moment, if you laughed, you spoke another language that needs no explanation: laughter. It's one of the most common languages in the world. We don't have to explain it to each other, it's just something we all feel, and that's why things like laughter and things like music are so prevalent, because they seem to somehow transcend explanation and convey a profound amount of meaning. Every language we learn is a portal by which we can access another language. The more you know, the more you can speak. And it's something common that we all do. We take any new concept, and we filter it through an already existing access of reality within us. And that's why languages are so important, because they give us access to new worlds, not just people. It's not just about seeing or hearing, it's about feeling, experiencing, sharing. And despite these languages that we've covered, I really don't think we've covered one of the most profound languages, and that's the language of experience. That's why when you're talking with someone, if they've shared something you've shared, you don't need to explain it much. Or that's why, when you're sharing a story and you finish, and the people you're talking to don't quite get it, the first thing we all say is, "Guess you had to be there." I guess you had to be here this week to know what this is about. It's kind of hard to explain, isn't it? And for the sake of our research, I'm going to close by asking that you participate one more time in this language of experience. I'm going to filter through some languages, and if I'm speaking your language, I'm going to ask that you just stand and you stay standing. You don't need to ask permission, just let me know that you see me, and I can also see you if you speak this language of experience. Do you speak this language? When I was growing up in primary school, at the end of the year, we would have these parties, and we'd vote on whether we wanted to celebrate at an amusement park or a water park. And I would really hope the party wasn't at a water park, because then I'd have to be in a bathing suit. I don't know about you, but sometimes when I approach a dressing room, my sweat glands start activating on their own, because I know the garment is not going to look on me like it did on that mannequin. Or how about this? When I would go to family functions or family gatherings, every time I wanted a second plate -- and I usually did -- it was a whole exercise in cost-benefit analysis, my relatives looking at me like, "I don't know. Do you really need that? Looks like you're doing OK there, bud." Did my cheeks have a big "Pinch me" sign that I didn't see? And if you're squirming or you're laughing or you stood up, or you're beginning to stand, you're speaking the language that I endearingly call "the language of growing up a fat kid." And any body-image issue is a dialect of that language. I want you to stay standing. Again, if I'm speaking your language, please go ahead and stand. Imagine two bills in my hand. One is the phone bill, and one is the electric bill. Eeny, meeny, miny, mo, pay one off, let the other one go, which means, "I might not have enough to pay both at the current moment." You've got to be resourceful. You've got to figure it out. And if you're standing, you know the language of barely making ends meet, of financial struggle. And if you've been lucky enough to speak that language, you understand that there is no motivator of greatness like deficiency. Not having resources, not having looks, not having finances can often be the barren soil from which the most productive seeds are painstakingly plowed and harvested. I'm going to ask if you speak this language. The second you recognize it, feel free to stand. When we heard the diagnosis, I thought, "Not that word. Anything but that word. I hate that word." And then you ask a series of questions: "Are you sure?" "Has it spread?" "How long?" "Doctor, how long?" And a series of answers determines a person's life. And when my dad was hungry, we'd all rush to the dinner table to eat, because that's what we did before. We ate together, so we were going to continue doing that. And I didn't understand why we were losing this battle, because I was taught if you fight and if you have the right spirit, you're supposed to win. And we weren't winning. For any of you that stood up, you know very well that I'm speaking the language of watching a loved one battle cancer. Any terminal illness is a derivative of that language. I'm going to speak one last language. Oh -- no, no, I'm listening. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no no, no no, me and you, right here, yup. No, I'm with ya. I'm with ya! Or, imagine the lights are all off and a blue light is just shining in your face as you're laying on the bed. And I know some of you, like me, have dropped that phone right on your face. Or this one, right? Passenger seat freaking out, like, "Can you watch the road?" And for anybody that stood up, you speak the language that I like to call "the language of disconnection." It's been called the language of connection, but I like to call it the language of disconnection. I don't mean disconnection, I mean disconnection, human disconnection, disconnected from each other, from where we are, from our own thoughts, so we can occupy another space. If you're not standing, you probably know what it's like to feel left out. You probably -- you know what it's like when everybody's a part of something, and you're not. You know what it's like being the minority. And now that I'm speaking your language, I'm going to ask you to stand, since we're speaking the same language. Because I believe that language of being the minority is one of the most important languages you can ever speak in your life, because how you feel in that position of compromise will directly determine how you act in that position of power. Thank you for participating. If you'd take a seat, I want to speak one last language. This one, you don't need to stand. I just want to see if you recognize it. Most the girls in the world are complainin' about it. Most the poems in the world been written about it. Most the music on the radio be hittin' about it, kickin' about it, or rippin' about it. Most the verses in the game people spittin' about it, most the songs in the world, people talkin' about it. Most the broken hearts I know are walkin' without it, started to doubt it, or lost without it. Most the shadows in the dark have forgotten about it. Everybody in the world would be trippin' without it. Every boy and every girl will be dead without it, struggle without it, nothing without it. Most the pages that are filled are filled about it. The tears that are spilled are spilled about it. The people that have felt it are real about it. A life without it, you'd be lost. When I'm in it and I feel it, I be shoutin' about it. Everybody in the whole world knowin' about it. I'm hurt and broke down and be flowin' about it, goin' about it wrong 'cause I didn't allow it. Can the wound or scar heal without it? Can't the way that you feel be concealed about it? Everybody has their own ideal about it, dream about it, appeal about it. So what's the deal about it? Are you 'bout it to know that life is a dream and unreal without it? But I'm just a writer. What can I reveal about it? Why is it that the most spoken-about language in the world is the one we have the toughest time speaking or expressing? No matter how many books, how many seminars, how many life-coaching sessions we go to, we just can't get enough of it. And I ask you now: Is that number that you had at the beginning, has that changed? And I challenge you, when you see someone, to ask yourself: What languages do we share? And if you don't come up with anything, ask yourself: What languages could we share? And if you still don't come up with anything, ask yourself: What languages can I learn? And now matter how inconsequential or insignificant that conversation seems at the moment, I promise you it will serve you in the future. My name is Poet Ali. Thank you. 56901 Ever since I can remember, African elephants have filled me with a sense of complete awe. They are the largest land mammal alive today on planet Earth, weighing up to seven tons, standing three and a half meters tall at the shoulder. They can eat up to 400 kilos of food in a day, and they disperse vital plant seeds across thousands of kilometers during their 50-to-60-year life span. Central to their compassionate and complex society are the matriarchs. These female, strong leaders nurture the young and navigate their way through the challenges of the African bush to find food, water and security. Their societies are so complex, we're yet to still fully tease apart how they communicate, how they verbalize to each other, how their dialects work. And we don't really understand yet how they navigate the landscape, remembering the safest places to cross a river. I'm pretty sure that like me, most of you in this room have a similar positive emotional response to these most magnificent of all animals. It's really hard not to have watched a documentary, learned about their intelligence or, if you've been lucky, to see them for yourselves on safari in the wild. But I wonder how many of you have been truly, utterly terrified by them. I was lucky to be brought up in Southern Africa by two teacher parents who had long holidays but very short budgets. And so we used to take our old Ford Cortina Estate, and with my sister, we'd pile in the back, take our tents and go camping in the different game reserves in Southern Africa. It really was heaven for a young, budding zoologist like myself. But I remember even at that young age that I found the tall electric fences blocking off the game parks quite divisive. Sure, they were keeping elephants out of the communities, but they also kept communities out of their wild spaces. It really was quite a challenge to me at that young age. It was only when I moved to Kenya at the age of 14, when I got to connect to the vast, wild open spaces of East Africa. And it is here now that I feel truly, instinctively, really at home. I spent many, many happy years studying elephant behavior in a tent, in Samburu National Reserve, under the guideship of professor Fritz Vollrath and Iain Douglas-Hamilton, studying for my PhD and understanding the complexities of elephant societies. But now, in my role as head of the human-elephant coexistence program for Save the Elephants, we're seeing so much change happening so fast that it's urged a change in some of our research programs. No longer can we just sit and understand elephant societies or study just how to stop the ivory trade, which is horrific and still ongoing. We're having to change our resources more and more to look at this rising problem of human-elephant conflict, as people and pachyderms compete for space and resources. It was only as recently as the 1970s that we used to have 1.2 million elephants roaming across Africa. Today, we're edging closer to only having 400,000 left. And at the same time period, the human population has quadrupled, and the land is being fragmented at such a pace that it's really hard to keep up with. Too often, these migrating elephants end up stuck inside communities, looking for food and water but ending up breaking open water tanks, breaking pipes and, of course, breaking into food stores for food. It's really a huge challenge. Can you imagine the terror of an elephant literally ripping the roof off your mud hut in the middle of the night and having to hold your children away as the trunk reaches in, looking for food in the pitch dark? These elephants also trample and eat crops, and this is traditionally eroding away that tolerance that people used to have for elephants. And sadly, we're losing these animals by the day and, in some countries, by the hour -- to not only ivory poaching but this rapid rise in human-elephant conflict as they compete for space and resources. It's a massive challenge. I mean, how do you keep seven-ton pachyderms, that often come in groups of 10 or 12, out of these very small rural farms when you're dealing with people who are living on the very edge of poverty? They don't have big budgets. How do you resolve this issue? Well, one issue is, you can just start to build electric fences, and this is happening across Africa, we're seeing this more and more. But they are dividing up areas and blocking corridors. And I'm telling you, these elephants don't think much of it either, particularly if they're blocking a really special water hole where they need water, or if there's a very attractive female on the other side. It doesn't take long to knock down one of these poles. And as soon as there's a gap in the fence, they go back, talk to their mates and suddenly they're all through, and now you have 12 elephants on the community side of the fence. And now you're really in trouble. People keep trying to come up with new designs for electric fences. Well, these elephants don't think much of those either. So rather than having these hard-line, straight, electric, really divisive migratory-blocking fences, there must be other ways to look at this challenge. I'm much more interested in holistic and natural methods to keep elephants and people apart where necessary. Simply talking to people, talking to rural pastoralists in northern Kenya who have so much knowledge about the bush, we discovered this story that they had that elephants would not feed on trees that had wild beehives in them. Now this was an interesting story. As the elephants were foraging on the tree, they would break branches and perhaps break open a wild beehive. And those bees would fly out of their natural nests and sting the elephants. Now if the elephants got stung, perhaps they would remember that this tree was dangerous and they wouldn't come back to that same site. It seems impossible that they could be stung through their thick skin -- elephant skin is around two centimeters thick. But it seems that they sting them around the watery areas, around the eyes, behind the ears, in the mouth, up the trunk. You can imagine they would remember that very quickly. And it's not really one sting that they're scared of. African bees have a phenomenal ability: when they sting in one site, they release a pheromone that triggers the rest of the bees to come and sting the same site. So it's not one beesting that they're scared of -- it's perhaps thousands of beestings, coming to sting in the same area -- that they're afraid of. And of course, a good matriarch would always keep her young away from such a threat. Young calves have much thinner skins, and it's potential that they could be stung through their thinner skins. So for my PhD, I had this unusual challenge of trying to work out how African elephants and African bees would interact, when the theory was that they wouldn't interact at all. How was I going to study this? Well, what I did was I took the sound of disturbed African honey bees, and I played it back to elephants resting under trees through a wireless speaker system, so I could understand how they would react as if there were wild bees in the area. And it turns out that they react quite dramatically to the sound of African wild bees. Here we are, playing the bee sounds back to this amazing group of elephants. You can see the ears going up, going out, they're turning their heads from side to side, one elephant is flicking her trunk to try and smell. There's another elephant that kicks one of calves on the ground to tell it to get up as if there is a threat. And one elephant triggers a retreat, and soon the whole family of elephants are running after her across the savannah in a cloud of dust. (Sound of bees buzzing) Now I've done this experiment many, many times, and the elephants almost always flee. Not only do they run away, but they dust themselves as they're running, as if to knock bees out of the air. And we placed infrasonic microphones around the elephants as we did these experiments. And it turns out they're communicating to each other in infrasonic rumbles to warn each other of the threat of bees and to stay away from the area. So these behavioral discoveries really helped us understand how elephants would react should they hear or see bee sounds. This led me to invent a novel design for a beehive fence, which we are now building around small, one-to-two-acre farms on the most vulnerable frontline areas of Africa where humans and elephants are competing for space. These beehive fences are very, very simple. We use 12 beehives and 12 dummy hives to protect one acre of farmland. Now a dummy hive is simply a piece of plywood which we cut into squares, paint yellow and hang in between the hives. We're basically tricking the elephants into thinking there are more beehives than there really are. And of course, it literally halves the cost of the fence. So there's a hive and a dummy hive and a beehive and now dummy hive, every 10 meters around the outside boundary. They're held up by posts with a shade roof to protect the bees, and they're interconnected with a simple piece of plain wire, which goes all the way around, connecting the hives. So if an elephant tries to enter the farm, he will avoid the beehive at all cost, but he might try and push through between the hive and the dummy hive, causing all the beehives to swing as the wire hits his chest. And as we know from our research work, this will cause the elephants to flee and run away -- and hopefully remember not to come back to that risky area. The bees swarm out of the hive, and they really scare the elephants away. These beehive fences we're studying using things like camera traps to help us understand how elephants are responding to them at night time, which is when most of the crop raiding occurs. And we found in our study farms that we're keeping up to 80 percent of elephants outside of the boundaries of these farms. And the bees and the beehive fences are also pollinating the fields. So we're having a great reduction both in elephant crop raids and a boost in yield through the pollination services that the bees are giving to the crops themselves. The strength of the beehive fences is really important -- the colonies have to be very strong. So we're trying to help farmers grow pollinator-friendly crops to boost their hives, boost the strength of their bees and, of course, produce the most amazing honey. This honey is so valuable as an extra livelihood income for the farmers. It's a healthy alternative to sugar, and in our community, it's a very valuable present to give a mother-in-law, which makes it almost priceless. We now bottle up this honey, and we've called this wild beautiful honey Elephant-Friendly Honey. It is a fun name, but it also attracts attention to our project and helps people understand what we're trying to do to save elephants. We're working now with so many women in over 60 human-elephant conflict sites in 19 countries in Africa and Asia to build these beehive fences, working very, very closely with so many farmers but particularly now with women farmers, helping them to live better in harmony with elephants. One of the things we're trying to do is develop a toolbox of options to live in better harmony with these massive pachyderms. One of those issues is to try and get farmers, and women in particular, to think different about what they're planting inside their farms as well. So we're looking at planting crops that elephants don't particularly want to eat, like chillies, ginger, Moringa, sunflowers. And of course, the bees and the beehive fences love these crops too, because they have beautiful flowers. One of these plants is a spiky plant called sisal -- you may know this here as jute. And this amazing plant can be stripped down and turned into a weaving product. We're working with these amazing women now who live daily with the challenges of elephants to use this plant to weave into baskets to provide an alternative income for them. We've just started construction only three weeks ago on a women's enterprise center where we're going to be working with these women not only as expert beekeepers but as amazing basket weavers; they're going to be processing chili oils, sunflower oils, making lip balms and honey, and we're somewhere on our way to helping these participating farmers live with better eco-generating projects that live and work better with living with elephants. So whether it's matriarchs or mothers or researchers like myself, I do see more women coming to the forefront now to think differently and more boldly about the challenges that we face. With more innovation, and perhaps with some more empathy towards each other, I do believe we can move from a state of conflict with elephants to true coexistence. Thank you. 57418 It's a microorganism about a hair's width in size. They live everywhere on earth -- saltwater, freshwater, everywhere -- and this one is out looking for food. I remember the first time I saw this thing, I was like eight years old and it completely blew me away. I mean, here is this incredible little creature, it's hunting, swimming, going about its life, but its whole universe fits within a drop of pond water. Paul McEuen: So this little rotifer shows us something really amazing. It says that you can build a machine that is functional, complex, smart, but all in a tiny little package, one so small that it's impossible to see it. Now, the engineer in me is just blown away by this thing, that anyone could make such a creature. But right behind that wonder, I have to admit, is a bit of envy. I mean, nature can do it. Why can't we? Why can't we build tiny robots? Well, I'm not the only one to have this idea. In fact, in the last, oh, few years, researchers around the world have taken up the task of trying to build robots that are so small that they can't be seen. And what we're going to tell you about today is an effort at Cornell University and now at the University of Pennsylvania to try to build tiny robots. OK, so that's the goal. But how do we do it? How do we go about building tiny robots? Well, Pablo Picasso, of all people, gives us our first clue. Picasso said -- ["Good artists copy, great artists steal."] "Good artists copy. Great artists steal." OK. But steal from what? Well, believe it or not, most of the technology you need to build a tiny robot already exists. The semiconductor industry has been getting better and better at making tinier and tinier devices, so at this point they could put something like a million transistors into the size of a package that is occupied by, say, a single-celled paramecium. And it's not just electronics. They can also build little sensors, LEDs, whole communication packages that are too small to be seen. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to steal that technology. Here's a robot. Robot's got two parts, as it turns out. It's got a head, and it's got legs. [Steal these: Brains] We're going to call this a legless robot, which may sound exotic, but they're pretty cool all by themselves. In fact, most of you have a legless robot with you right now. Your smartphone is the world's most successful legless robot. In just 15 years, it has taken over the entire planet. And why not? It's such a beautiful little machine. It's incredibly intelligent, it's got great communication skills, and it's all in a package that you can hold in your hand. So we would like to be able to build something like this, only down at the cellular scale, the size of a paramecium. And here it is. This is our cell-sized smartphone. It even kind of looks like a smartphone, only it's about 10,000 times smaller. We call it an OWIC. [Optical Wireless Integrated Circuits] OK, we're not advertisers, all right? But it's pretty cool all by itself. In fact, this OWIC has a number of parts. So up near the top, there are these cool little solar cells that you shine light on the device and it wakes up a little circuit that's there in the middle. And that circuit can drive a little tiny LED that can blink at you and allows the OWIC to communicate with you. So unlike your cell phone, the OWIC communicates with light, sort of like a tiny firefly. Now, one thing that's pretty cool about these OWICs is we don't make them one at a time, soldering all the pieces together. We make them in massive parallel. For example, about a million of these OWICs can fit on a single four-inch wafer. And just like your phone has different apps, you can have different kinds of OWICs. There can be ones that, say, measure voltage, some that measure temperature, or just have a little light that can blink at you to tell you that it's there. So that's pretty cool, these tiny little devices. And I'd like to tell you about them in a little more detail. But first, I have to tell you about something else. I'm going to tell you a few things about pennies that you might not know. So this one is a little bit older penny. It's got a picture of the Lincoln Memorial on the back. But the first thing you might not know, that if you zoom in, you'll find in the center of this thing you can actually see Abraham Lincoln, just like in the real Lincoln Memorial not so far from here. What I'm sure you don't know, that if you zoom in even further -- you'll see that there's actually an OWIC on Abe Lincoln's chest. But the cool thing is, you could stare at this all day long and you would never see it. It's invisible to the naked eye. These OWICs are so small, and we make them in such parallel fashion, that each OWIC costs actually less than a penny. In fact, the most expensive thing in this demo is that little sticker that says "OWIC." That cost about eight cents. Now, we're very excited about these things for all sorts of reasons. For example, we can use them as little tiny secure smart tags, more identifying than a fingerprint. We're actually putting them inside of other medical instruments to give other information, and even starting to think about putting them in the brain to listen to neurons one at a time. In fact, there's only one thing wrong with these OWICs: it's not a robot. It's just a head. And I think we'll all agree that half a robot really isn't a robot at all. Without the legs, we've got basically nothing. MM: OK, so you need the legs, too, if you want to build a robot. Now, here it turns out you can't just steal some preexisting technology. If you want legs for your tiny robot, you need actuators, parts that move. They have to satisfy a lot of different requirements. They need to be low voltage. They need to be low power, too. But most importantly, they have to be small. If you want to build a cell-sized robot, you need cell-sized legs. Now, nobody knows how to build that. There was no preexisting technology that meets all of those demands. To make our legs for our tiny robots, we had to make something new. So here's what we built. This is one of our actuators, and I'm applying a voltage to it. When I do, you can see the actuator respond by curling up. Now, this might not look like much, but if we were to put a red blood cell up on the screen, it'd be about that big, so these are unbelievably tiny curls. They're unbelievably small, and yet this device can just bend and unbend, no problem, nothing breaks. So how do we do it? Well, the actuator is made from a layer of platinum just a dozen atoms or so thick. Now it turns out, if you take platinum and put it in water and apply a voltage to it, atoms from the water will attach or remove themselves from the surface of the platinum, depending on how much voltage you use. This creates a force, and you can use that force for voltage-controlled actuation. The key here was to make everything ultrathin. Then your actuator is flexible enough to bend to these small sizes without breaking, and it can use the forces that come about from just attaching or removing a single layer of atoms. Now, we don't have to build these one at a time, either. In fact, just like the OWICs, we can build them massively in parallel as well. So here's a couple thousand or so actuators, and all I'm doing is applying a voltage, and they all wave, looking like nothing more than the legs of a future robot army. So now we've got the brains and we've got the brawn. We've got the smarts and the actuators. The OWICs are the brains. They give us sensors, they give us power supplies, and they give us a two-way communication system via light. The platinum layers are the muscle. They're what's going to move the robot around. Now we can take those two pieces, put them together and start to build our tiny, tiny robots. The first thing we wanted to build was something really simple. This robot walks around under user control. In the middle are some solar cells and some wiring attached to it. That's the OWIC. They're connected to a set of legs which have a platinum layer and these rigid panels that we put on top that tell the legs how to fold up, which shape they should take. The idea is that by shooting a laser at the different solar cells, you can choose which leg you want to move and make the robot walk around. Now, of course, we don't build those one at a time, either. We build them massively in parallel as well. We can build something like one million robots on a single four-inch wafer. So, for example, this image on the left, this is a chip, and this chip has something like 10,000 robots on it. Now, in our world, the macro world, this thing looks like it might be a new microprocessor or something. But if you take that chip and you put it under a microscope, what you're going to see are thousands and thousands of tiny robots. Now, these robots are still stuck down. They're still attached to the surface that we built them on. In order for them to walk around, we have to release them. We wanted to show you how we do that live, how we release the robot army, but the process involves highly dangerous chemicals, like, really nasty stuff, and we're like a mile from the White House right now? Yeah. They wouldn't let us do it. So -- so we're going to show you a movie instead. What you're looking at here are the final stages of robot deployment. We're using chemicals to etch the substrate out from underneath the robots. When it dissolves, the robots are free to fold up into their final shapes. Now, you can see here, the yield's about 90 percent, so almost every one of those 10,000 robots we build, that's a robot that we can deploy and control later. And we can take those robots and we can put them places as well. So if you look at the movie on the left, that's some robots in water. I'm going to come along with a pipette, and I can vacuum them all up. Now when you inject the robots back out of that pipette, they're just fine. In fact, these robots are so small, they're small enough to pass through the thinnest hypodermic needle you can buy. Yeah, so if you wanted to, you could inject yourself full of robots. I think they're into it. On the right is a robot that we put in some pond water. I want you to wait for just one second. You see that? That was no shark. That was a paramecium. So that's the world that these things live in. OK, so this is all well and good, but you might be wondering at this point, "Well, do they walk?" Right? That's what they're supposed to do. They better. So let's find out. So here's the robot and here are its solar cells in the middle. Those are those little rectangles. I want you to look at the solar cell closest to the top of the slide. See that little white dot? That's a laser spot. Now watch what happens when we start switching that laser between different solar cells on the robot. Off it goes! Off goes the robot marching around the microworld. Now, one of the things that's cool about this movie is: I'm actually piloting the robot in this movie. In fact, for six months, my job was to shoot lasers at tiny cell-sized robots to pilot them around the microworld. This was actually my job. As far as I could tell, that is the coolest job in the world. It was just the feeling of total excitement, like you're doing the impossible. It's a feeling of wonder like that first time I looked through a microscope as a kid staring at that rotifer. Now, I'm a dad, I have a son of my own, and he's about three years old. But one day, he's going to look through a microscope like that one. And I often wonder: What is he going to see? Instead of just watching the microworld, we as humans can now build technology to shape it, to interact with it, to engineer it. In 30 years, when my son is my age, what will we do with that ability? Will microrobots live in our bloodstream, as common as bacteria? Will they live on our crops and get rid of pests? Will they tell us when we have infections, or will they fight cancer cell by cell? PM: And one cool part is, you're going to be able to participate in this revolution. Ten years or so from now, when you buy your new iPhone 15x Moto or whatever it's called -- it may come with a little jar with a few thousand tiny robots in it that you can control by an app on your cell phone. So if you want to ride a paramecium, go for it. If you want to -- I don't know -- DJ the world's smallest robot dance party, make it happen. And I, for one, am very excited about that day coming. MM: Thank you. 60872 I want to lead here by talking a little bit about my credentials to bring this up with you, because, quite honestly, you really, really should not listen to any old person with an opinion about COVID-19. So I've been working in global health for about 20 years, and my specific technical specialty is in health systems and what happens when health systems experience severe shocks. I've also worked in global health journalism; I've written about global health and biosecurity for newspapers and web outlets, and I published a book a few years back about the major global health threats facing us as a planet. I have supported and led epidemiology efforts that range from evaluating Ebola treatment centers to looking at transmission of tuberculosis in health facilities and doing avian influenza preparedness. I have a master's degree in International Health. I'm not a physician. I'm not a nurse. My specialty isn't patient care or taking care of individual people. My specialty is looking at populations and health systems, what happens when diseases move on the large level. If we're ranking sources of global health expertise on a scale of one to 10, one is some random person ranting on Facebook and 10 is the World Health Organization, I'd say you can probably put me at like a seven or an eight. So keep that in mind as I talk to you. I'll start with the basics here, because I think that's gotten lost in some of the media noise around COVID-19. So, COVID-19 is a coronavirus. Coronaviruses are a specific subset of virus, and they have some unique characteristics as viruses. They use RNA instead of DNA as their genetic material, and they're covered in spikes on the surface of the virus. They use those spikes to invade cells. Those spikes are the corona in coronavirus. COVID-19 is known as a novel coronavirus because, until December, we'd only heard of six coronaviruses. COVID-19 is the seventh. It's new to us. It just had its gene sequencing, it just got its name. That's why it's novel. If you remember SARS, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome, those were coronaviruses. And they're both called respiratory syndromes, because that's what coronaviruses do -- they go for your lungs. They don't make you puke, they don't make you bleed from the eyeballs, they don't make you hemorrhage. They head for your lungs. COVID-19 is no different. It causes a range of respiratory symptoms that go from stuff like a dry cough and a fever all the way out to fatal viral pneumonia. And that range of symptoms is one of the reasons it's actually been so hard to track this outbreak. Plenty of people get COVID-19 but so gently, their symptoms are so mild, they don't even go to a health care provider. They don't register in the system. Children, in particular, have it very easy with COVID-19, which is something we should all be grateful for. Coronaviruses are zoonotic, which means that they transmit from animals to people. Some coronaviruses, like COVID-19, also transmit person to person. The person-to-person ones travel faster and travel farther, just like COVID-19. Zoonotic illnesses are really hard to get rid of, because they have an animal reservoir. One example is avian influenza, where we can abolish it in farmed animals, in turkeys, in ducks, but it keeps coming back every year because it's brought to us by wild birds. You don't hear a lot about it because avian influenza doesn't transmit person-to-person, but we have outbreaks in poultry farms every year all over the world. COVID-19 most likely skipped from animals into people at a wild animal market in Wuhan, China. Now for the less basic parts. This is not the last major outbreak we're ever going to see. There's going to be more outbreaks, and there's going to be more epidemics. That's not a maybe. That's a given. And it's a result of the way that we, as human beings, are interacting with our planet. Human choices are driving us into a position where we're going to see more outbreaks. Part of that is about climate change and the way a warming climate makes the world more hospitable to viruses and bacteria. But it's also about the way we're pushing into the last wild spaces on our planet. When we burn and plow the Amazon rain forest so that we can have cheap land for ranching, when the last of the African bush gets converted to farms, when wild animals in China are hunted to extinction, human beings come into contact with wildlife populations that they've never come into contact with before, and those populations have new kinds of diseases: bacteria, viruses, stuff we're not ready for. Bats, in particular, have a knack for hosting illnesses that can infect people, but they're not the only animals that do it. So as long as we keep making our remote places less remote, the outbreaks are going to keep coming. We can't stop the outbreaks with quarantine or travel restrictions. That's everybody's first impulse: "Let's stop the people from moving. Let's stop this outbreak from happening." But the fact is, it's really hard to get a good quarantine in place. It's really hard to set up travel restrictions. Even the countries that have made serious investments in public health, like the US and South Korea, can't get that kind of restriction in place fast enough to actually stop an outbreak instantly. There's logistical reasons for that, and there's medical reasons. If you look at COVID-19 right now, it seems like it could have a period where you're infected and show no symptoms that's as long as 24 days. So people are walking around with this virus showing no signs. They're not going to get quarantined. Nobody knows they need quarantining. There's also some real costs to quarantine and to travel restrictions. Humans are social animals, and they resist when you try to hold them into place and when you try to separate them. We saw in the Ebola outbreak that as soon as you put a quarantine in place, people start trying to evade it. Individual patients, if they know there's a strict quarantine protocol, may not go for health care, because they're afraid of the medical system or they can't afford care and they don't want to be separated from their family and friends. Politicians, government officials, when they know that they're going to get quarantined if they talk about outbreaks and cases, may conceal real information for fear of triggering a quarantine protocol. And, of course, these kinds of evasions and dishonesty are exactly what makes it so difficult to track a disease outbreak. We can get better at quarantines and travel restrictions, and we should, but they're not our only option, and they're not our best option for dealing with these situations. The real way for the long haul to make outbreaks less serious is to build the global health system to support core health care functions in every country in the world so that all countries, even poor ones, are able to rapidly identify and treat new infectious diseases as they emerge. China's taken a lot of criticism for its response to COVID-19. But the fact is, what if COVID-19 had emerged in Chad, which has three and a half doctors for every hundred thousand people? What if it had emerged in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which just released its last Ebola patient from treatment? The truth is, countries like this don't have the resources to respond to an infectious disease -- not to treat people and not to report on it fast enough to help the rest of the world. I led an evaluation of Ebola treatment centers in Sierra Leone, and the fact is that local doctors in Sierra Leone identified the Ebola crisis very quickly, first as a dangerous, contagious hemorrhagic virus and then as Ebola itself. But, having identified it, they didn't have the resources to respond. They didn't have enough doctors, they didn't have enough hospital beds and they didn't have enough information about how to treat Ebola or how to implement infection control. Eleven doctors died in Sierra Leone of Ebola. The country only had 120 when the crisis started. By way of contrast, Dallas Baylor Medical Center has more than a thousand physicians on staff. These are the kinds of inequities that kill people. First, they kill the poor people when the outbreaks start, and then they kill people all over the world when the outbreaks spread. If we really want to slow down these outbreaks and minimize their impact, we need to make sure that every country in the world has the capacity to identify new diseases, treat them and report about them so they can share information. COVID-19 is going to be a huge burden on health systems. COVID-19 has also revealed some real weaknesses in our global health supply chains. Just-in-time-ordering, lean systems are great when things are going well, but in a time of crisis, what it means is we don't have any reserves. If a hospital -- or a country -- runs out of face masks or personal protective equipment, there's no big warehouse full of boxes that we can go to to get more. You have to order more from the supplier, you have to wait for them to produce it and you have to wait for them to ship it, generally from China. That's a time lag at a time when it's most important to move quickly. If we'd been perfectly prepared for COVID-19, China would have identified the outbreak faster. They would have been ready to provide care to infected people without having to build new buildings. They would have shared honest information with citizens so that we didn't see these crazy rumors spreading on social media in China. And they would have shared information with global health authorities so that they could start reporting to national health systems and getting ready for when the virus spread. National health systems would then have been able to stockpile the protective equipment they needed and train health care providers on treatment and infection control. We'd have science-based protocols for what to do when things happen, like cruise ships have infected patients. And we'd have real information going out to people everywhere, so we wouldn't see embarrassing, shameful incidents of xenophobia, like Asian-looking people getting attacked on the street in Philadelphia. But even with all of that in place, we would still have outbreaks. The choices we're making about how we occupy this planet make that inevitable. As far as we have an expert consensus on COVID-19, it's this: here in the US, and globally, it's going to get worse before it gets better. We're seeing cases of human transmission that aren't from returning travel, that are just happening in the community, and we're seeing people infected with COVID-19 when we don't even know where the infection came from. Those are signs of an outbreak that's getting worse, not an outbreak that's under control. It's depressing, but it's not surprising. Global health experts, when they talk about the scenario of new viruses, this is one of the scenarios that they look at. We all hoped we'd get off easy, but when experts talk about viral planning, this is the kind of situation and the way they expect the virus to move. I want to close here with some personal advice. Wash your hands. Wash your hands a lot. I know you already wash your hands a lot because you're not disgusting, but wash your hands even more. Set up cues and routines in your life to get you to wash your hands. Wash your hands every time you enter and leave a building. Wash your hands when you go into a meeting and when you come out of a meeting. Get rituals that are based around handwashing. Sanitize your phone. You touch that phone with your dirty, unwashed hands all the time. I know you take it into the bathroom with you. So sanitize your phone and consider not using it as often in public. Maybe TikTok and Instagram can be home things only. Don't touch your face. Don't rub your eyes. Don't bite your fingernails. Don't wipe your nose on the back of your hand. I mean, don't do that anyway because, gross. Don't wear a face mask. Face masks are for sick people and health care providers. If you're sick, your face mask holds in all your coughing and sneezing and protects the people around you. And if you're a health care provider, your face mask is one tool in a set of tools called personal protective equipment that you're trained to use so that you can give patient care and not get sick yourself. If you're a regular healthy person wearing a face mask, it's just making your face sweaty. Leave the face masks in stores for the doctors and the nurses and the sick people. If you think you have symptoms of COVID-19, stay home, call your doctor for advice. If you're diagnosed with COVID-19, remember it's generally very mild. And if you're a smoker, right now is the best possible time to quit smoking. I mean, if you're a smoker, right now is always the best possible time to quit smoking, but if you're a smoker and you're worried about COVID-19, I guarantee that quitting is absolutely the best thing you can do to protect yourself from the worst impacts of COVID-19. COVID-19 is scary stuff, at a time when pretty much all of our news feels like scary stuff. And there's a lot of bad but appealing options for dealing with it: panic, xenophobia, agoraphobia, authoritarianism, oversimplified lies that make us think that hate and fury and loneliness are the solution to outbreaks. But they're not. They just make us less prepared. There's also a boring but useful set of options that we can use in response to outbreaks, things like improving health care here and everywhere; investing in health infrastructure and disease surveillance so that we know when the new diseases come; building health systems all over the world; looking at strengthening our supply chains so they're ready for emergencies; and better education, so we're capable of talking about disease outbreaks and the mathematics of risk without just blind panic. We need to be guided by equity here, because in this situation, like so many, equity is actually in our own self-interest. So thank you so much for listening to me today, and can I be the first one to tell you: wash your hands when you leave the theater. 62628 I never thought that I would be giving my TED Talk somewhere like this. But, like half of humanity, I've spent the last four weeks under lockdown due to the global pandemic created by COVID-19. I am extremely fortunate that during this time I've been able to come here to these woods near my home in southern England. These woods have always inspired me, and as humanity now tries to think about how we can find the inspiration to retake control of our actions so that terrible things don't come down the road without us taking action to avert them, I thought this is a good place for us to talk. And I'd like to begin that story six years ago, when I had first joined the United Nations. Now, I firmly believe that the UN is of unparalleled importance in the world right now to promote collaboration and cooperation. But what they don't tell you when you join is that this essential work is delivered mainly in the form of extremely boring meetings -- extremely long, boring meetings. Now, you may feel that you have attended some long, boring meetings in your life, and I'm sure you have. But these UN meetings are next-level, and everyone who works there approaches them with a level of calm normally only achieved by Zen masters. But myself, I wasn't ready for that. I joined expecting drama and tension and breakthrough. What I wasn't ready for was a process that seemed to move at the speed of a glacier, at the speed that a glacier used to move at. Now, in the middle of one of these long meetings, I was handed a note. And it was handed to me by my friend and colleague and coauthor, Christiana Figueres. Christiana was the Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and as such, had overall responsibility for the UN reaching what would become the Paris Agreement. I was running political strategy for her. So when she handed me this note, I assumed that it would contain detailed political instructions about how we were going to get out of this nightmare quagmire that we seemed to be trapped in. I took the note and looked at it. It said, "Painful. But let's approach with love!" Now, I love this note for lots of reasons. I love the way the little tendrils are coming out from the word "painful." It was a really good visual depiction of how I felt at that moment. But I particularly love it because as I looked at it, I realized that it was a political instruction, and that if we were going to be successful, this was how we were going to do it. So let me explain that. What I'd been feeling in those meetings was actually about control. I had moved my life from Brooklyn in New York to Bonn in Germany with the extremely reluctant support of my wife. My children were now in a school where they couldn't speak the language, and I thought the deal for all this disruption to my world was that I would have some degree of control over what was going to happen. I felt for years that the climate crisis is the defining challenge of our generation, and here I was, ready to play my part and do something for humanity. But I put my hands on the levers of control that I'd been given and pulled them, and nothing happened. I realized the things I could control were menial day-to-day things. "Do I ride my bike to work?" and "Where do I have lunch?", whereas the things that were going to determine whether we were going to be successful were issues like, "Will Russia wreck the negotiations?" "Will China take responsibility for their emissions?" "Will the US help poorer countries deal with their burden of climate change?" The differential felt so huge, I could see no way I could bridge the two. It felt futile. I began to feel that I'd made a mistake. I began to get depressed. But even in that moment, I realized that what I was feeling had a lot of similarities to what I'd felt when I first found out about the climate crisis years before. I'd spent many of my most formative years as a Buddhist monk in my early 20s, but I left the monastic life, because even then, 20 years ago, I felt that the climate crisis was already a quickly unfolding emergency and I wanted to do my part. But once I'd left and I rejoined the world, I looked at what I could control. It was the few tons of my own emissions and that of my immediate family, which political party I voted for every few years, whether I went on a march or two. And then I looked at the issues that would determine the outcome, and they were big geopolitical negotiations, massive infrastructure spending plans, what everybody else did. The differential again felt so huge that I couldn't see any way that I could bridge it. I kept trying to take action, but it didn't really stick. It felt futile. Now, we know that this can be a common experience for many people, and maybe you have had this experience. When faced with an enormous challenge that we don't feel we have any agency or control over, our mind can do a little trick to protect us. We don't like to feel like we're out of control facing big forces, so our mind will tell us, "Maybe it's not that important. Maybe it's not happening in the way that people say, anyway." Or, it plays down our own role. "There's nothing that you individually can do, so why try?" But there's something odd going on here. Is it really true that humans will only take sustained and dedicated action on an issue of paramount importance when they feel they have a high degree of control? Look at these pictures. These people are caregivers and nurses who have been helping humanity face the coronavirus COVID-19 as it has swept around the world as a pandemic in the last few months. Are these people able to prevent the spread of the disease? No. Are they able to prevent their patients from dying? Some, they will have been able to prevent, but others, it will have been beyond their control. Does that make their contribution futile and meaningless? Actually, it's offensive even to suggest that. What they are doing is caring for their fellow human beings at their moment of greatest vulnerability. And that work has huge meaning, to the point where I only have to show you those pictures for it to become evident that the courage and humanity those people are demonstrating makes their work some of the most meaningful things that can be done as human beings, even though they can't control the outcome. Now, that's interesting, because it shows us that humans are capable of taking dedicated and sustained action, even when they can't control the outcome. But it leaves us with another challenge. With the climate crisis, the action that we take is separated from the impact of it, whereas what is happening with these images is these nurses are being sustained not by the lofty goal of changing the world but by the day-to-day satisfaction of caring for another human being through their moments of weakness. With the climate crisis, we have this huge separation. It used to be that we were separated by time. The impacts of the climate crisis were supposed to be way off in the future. But right now, the future has come to meet us. Continents are on fire. Cities are going underwater. Countries are going underwater. Hundreds of thousands of people are on the move as a result of climate change. But even if those impacts are no longer separated from us by time, they're still separated from us in a way that makes it difficult to feel that direct connection. They happen somewhere else to somebody else or to us in a different way than we're used to experiencing it. So even though that story of the nurse demonstrates something to us about human nature, we're going to have find a different way of dealing with the climate crisis in a sustained manner. There is a way that we can do this, a powerful combination of a deep and supporting attitude that when combined with consistent action can enable whole societies to take dedicated action in a sustained way towards a shared goal. It's been used to great effect throughout history. So let me give you a historical story to explain it. Right now, I am standing in the woods near my home in southern England. And these particular woods are not far from London. Eighty years ago, that city was under attack. In the late 1930s, the people of Britain would do anything to avoid facing the reality that Hitler would stop at nothing to conquer Europe. Fresh with memories from the First World War, they were terrified of Nazi aggression and would do anything to avoid facing that reality. In the end, the reality broke through. Churchill is remembered for many things, and not all of them positive, but what he did in those early days of the war was he changed the story the people of Britain told themselves about what they were doing and what was to come. Where previously there had been trepidation and nervousness and fear, there came a calm resolve, an island alone, a greatest hour, a greatest generation, a country that would fight them on the beaches and in the hills and in the streets, a country that would never surrender. That change from fear and trepidation to facing the reality, whatever it was and however dark it was, had nothing to do with the likelihood of winning the war. There was no news from the front that battles were going better or even at that point that a powerful new ally had joined the fight and changed the odds in their favor. It was simply a choice. A deep, determined, stubborn form of optimism emerged, not avoiding or denying the darkness that was pressing in but refusing to be cowed by it. That stubborn optimism is powerful. It is not dependent on assuming that the outcome is going to be good or having a form of wishful thinking about the future. However, what it does is it animates action and infuses it with meaning. We know that from that time, despite the risk and despite the challenge, it was a meaningful time full of purpose, and multiple accounts have confirmed that actions that ranged from pilots in the Battle of Britain to the simple act of pulling potatoes from the soil became infused with meaning. They were animated towards a shared purpose and a shared outcome. We have seen that throughout history. This coupling of a deep and determined stubborn optimism with action, when the optimism leads to a determined action, then they can become self-sustaining: without the stubborn optimism, the action doesn't sustain itself; without the action, the stubborn optimism is just an attitude. The two together can transform an entire issue and change the world. We saw this at multiple other times. We saw it when Rosa Parks refused to get up from the bus. We saw it in Gandhi's long salt marches to the beach. We saw it when the suffragettes said that "Courage calls to courage everywhere." And we saw it when Kennedy said that within 10 years, he would put a man on the moon. That electrified a generation and focused them on a shared goal against a dark and frightening adversary, even though they didn't know how they would achieve it. In each of these cases, a realistic and gritty but determined, stubborn optimism was not the result of success. It was the cause of it. That is also how the transformation happened on the road to the Paris Agreement. Those challenging, difficult, pessimistic meetings transformed as more and more people decided that this was our moment to dig in and determine that we would not drop the ball on our watch, and we would deliver the outcome that we knew was possible. More and more people transformed themselves to that perspective and began to work, and in the end, that worked its way up into a wave of momentum that crashed over us and delivered many of those challenging issues with a better outcome than we could possibly have imagined. And even now, years later and with a climate denier in the White House, much that was put in motion in those days is still unfolding, and we have everything to play for in the coming months and years on dealing with the climate crisis. So right now, we are coming through one of the most challenging periods in the lives of most of us. The global pandemic has been frightening, whether personal tragedy has been involved or not. But it has also shaken our belief that we are powerless in the face of great change. In the space of a few weeks, we mobilized to the point where half of humanity took drastic action to protect the most vulnerable. If we're capable of that, maybe we have not yet tested the limits of what humanity can do when it rises to meet a shared challenge. We now need to move beyond this narrative of powerlessness, because make no mistake -- the climate crisis will be orders of magnitude worse than the pandemic if we do not take the action that we can still take to avert the tragedy that we see coming towards us. We can no longer afford the luxury of feeling powerless. The truth is that future generations will look back at this precise moment with awe as we stand at the crossroads between a regenerative future and one where we have thrown it all away. And the truth is that a lot is going pretty well for us in this transition. Costs for clean energy are coming down. Cities are transforming. Land is being regenerated. People are on the streets calling for change with a verve and tenacity we have not seen for a generation. Genuine success is possible in this transition, and genuine failure is possible, too, which makes this the most exciting time to be alive. We can take a decision right now that we will approach this challenge with a stubborn form of gritty, realistic and determined optimism and do everything within our power to ensure that we shape the path as we come out of this pandemic towards a regenerative future. We can all decide that we will be hopeful beacons for humanity even if there are dark days ahead, and we can decide that we will be responsible, we will reduce our own emissions by at least 50 percent in the next 10 years, and we will take action to engage with governments and corporations to ensure they do what is necessary coming out of the pandemic to rebuild the world that we want them to. Right now, all of these things are possible. So let's go back to that boring meeting room where I'm looking at that note from Christiana. And looking at it took me back to some of the most transformative experiences of my life. One of the many things I learned as a monk is that a bright mind and a joyful heart is both the path and the goal in life. This stubborn optimism is a form of applied love. It is both the world we want to create and the way in which we can create that world. And it is a choice for all of us. Choosing to face this moment with stubborn optimism can fill our lives with meaning and purpose, and in doing so, we can put a hand on the arc of history and bend it towards the future that we choose. Yes, living now feels out of control. It feels frightening and scary and new. But let's not falter at this most crucial of transitions that is coming at us right now. Let's face it with stubborn and determined optimism. Yes, seeing the changes in the world right now can be painful. But let's approach it with love. Thank you. 37498 39331 42604 45614 45973 46528 49440 50853 51101 52268 54706 55061 56901 57418 60872 62628