Technologies of the Future
Alright, I guess we can go ahead and start. So a quick introduction, we're going to be talking about the future Technologies of tomorrow Today, and it's by Corey. me and Ziad, and I hope you guys enjoy. Alright Corey, take it away. Hi everybody, just to give you a further introduction into myself, I'm a sophomore here at SMC, my second year, and I am actually a civil engineering major and of course my video decided to freeze right at that time but, yeah so a lot of my technologies are specifically geared towards civil engineering, a field that I'm personally interested in. The first one if you have heard of it at all is geographic information systems. Now this isn't a- Quinton you can go to the next slide. GIS and geographic information systems, they're
not specific to one exact model, there is no one GIS. There are a variety of different software tools that a lot of industry professionals use in a variety of different fields. Further below you can see in the slide we're talking about geological surveying meteorological predictions, so like forecasting weather patterns. But I think the most important use of it is typically in public policy decision-making. This is deciding where a hospital might be built based on population density using this geographic tool that takes data and analyzes it in a way that can be represented best for human beings. So largely they're used to supplement problem solving processes. Any sort of data that can be publicly made available
could be used in a GIS software system a GIS software platform, and you will be able to gather data in a way that best helps inform a decision making process. Quinton, we can go on to the next slide. And just so everybody knows, after the presentation is concluded I have saved links to a bunch of different sites that I used to research for this presentation if you're interested at all just let me know and I can send those out to you following the presentation. [Participant] Thank you so much I'd love that. [Host] Yeah, no problem. So the second one that we have here is building information modeling. This was a new one to me when I started researching for this presentation. This is essentially another software model similar
to if any of you have used CAD, we've got examples on the slides right there but instead of modeling say one object, you're modeling a larger system in architecture, an architectural system essentially. This is a way for civil engineers to fabricate and design infrastructure and buildings on a software model. Now this might seem like a simple innovation, but given that drafting by hand was both a time-consuming and very labor intensive process in previous generations, the fact that anybody, even you or me today if we had a BIM software model like a platform to use, we could go on it today and we could design a city. If any of you have maybe played, I don't know CIV 6 or Tropico or any sort of video game that's based on modeling a city or an empire, this is essentially the same thing except much much much more subject matter.
The tools that would be available in a BIM software model are extensive. If you've ever used SolidWorks for example, which I don't know if any of you have taken Engineering 11, but it would actually be a good way to get an introduction into CAD of computer aided design but yeah, I mean it's SolidWorks but on a more grand scale. We can go on to the next one. The next one is not a software model like the previous two but a physical material that
in the upcoming generations is probably going to be critical to a lot of our construction and design projects in the world at large. Next slide Quinton. So 3D graphing, and we do have a video here if anybody-- maybe we could get a few thumbs up I don't know maybe like four or five would tell me that the majority of you want to see. But 3D graphing is, if you've ever heard of graphing it's like the slide says it's a single-layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice. This specific arrangement of the carbon atoms
given that you're all part of the STEM program, you know what graphene is. It has incredible thermal and electronic properties. Graphene if I'm not mistaken is typically used in the microsized chips that we have in all of our electronics, we're talking about laptops, cell phones, etc. Now the important part about 3D graphene is it's a recent development. A lot of the research for
this specific slide came from the 2017 study that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology did. The way that graphene is arranged it offers to anybody using it, 10 times the strength of steel to 5% of Steel's density. This is similar to that old saying that people had where "spider silk is stronger than steel". The problem with spider silk is obviously you wouldn't be able to use it on any sort of scale for any sort of project, but you would be able to utilize of 3D graphene. I mean we're talking about immense potential for use. It could be used in anything from spaceship systems to consumer products today. In fact,
while researching this slide I came across a architect who was building an entire house based off of 3D graphene, just basically to show and showcase its properties. But 3D graphene could essentially provide for a number of needs for people today. Now I saw a lot of thumbs up for watching the video. Quinton I don't know if the sound will play but if you want to try playing the video then maybe we can take a look. You might have to reshare and then like enable sound. Okay I'll tell you, we can push on now and we can continue with the rest and then we can
circle back at the end of the presentation. That way if it takes like 10 minutes to make work, people can head on out if they want to or keep waiting. Does that sound okay with everybody? Alright, we can move on then Quinton, I don't have anything else.
Okay hello everybody, my name is Ziad, I'm a bio major so the majority of my slides will be talking about innovations in the medical field and biological fields. So the first technology I want to share is mRNA technology, something you guys have probably heard about during COVID-19. it was used to produce the COVID-19 vaccine most of you guys have so let's talk about it.
So the technology is definitely not new, it was developed in the 60s and it was only able to be delivered into cells in the 1970s. so I mean that's a pretty long time if you think about the way technology goes about. And the first time we've seen it actually being used in a practical sense to actually treat something was during COVID-19, so the technology has been building up over the years till we finally perfected it for COVID-19, and it was a perfect opportunity to bring it to market. So not only can it treat
infectious diseases such as COVID-19, but it can also treat diseases like cancer by use of the spike protein. And the platform is so flexible that they're now doing human testing of an HIV vaccine for using the mRNA platform. It can treat also- [Participant] I was just saying that one's world-changing, that's a long time coming and it's crazy that they're finally making an HIV vaccine. [Host] Yeah well they finally perfected the
technology to make it. Not only HIV, and cancer, and covid-19, but in the future, you're probably going to see malaria, tuberculosis, diseases such as cystic fibrosis, rabies, and influenza. So I mean mRNA can be used to target basically any pathogen by use of the spike protein. If you just put in the code for the particular protein it will stimulate the immune response to create those antibodies. Basically for the future of this technology because of COVID-19, I do think the amount of funding that was put into this technology was something we've never seen before so that's why I think this technology will only continue to progress in the future. Alright, next slide. So my next slide is about organ bioprinting.
It's probably something you've seen in the news in recent times. Next slide. So the reason I chose this is because just in the United States alone, there are 106,075 men, women, and children who are on the organ transplant waiting list as of June this year, and that's kind of crazy if you think about it because there are on average only 6,000 organs via living donors per year and we only get 8,000 donors per year based on things from accidents that people who actually donate them after they're dead. So previous slide. And then also every day 17 people die waiting for an organ transplant according to
the Health Resource and Services Administration, and every ninth person another person gets added to the wait list. And the the interesting thing is if you look at the statistics from the Health and Resource Services Administration is that like more than 90% of the people on the transplant list need a kidney and the other 10% is composed of people who need a heart. And my second point is heart transplants have a 40% rejection rate and kidney transplant kidney rejection rates are 25%. So what that means is if you take a transplant from one person to another, these are the rates that it will fail. But with the 3D bioprinting technology that's
not a factor because the way it works is that they use your cells to cultivate the other cells will which they'll use to feed into the 3D printer to make the models, so there's basically a 100% chance that it will not fail based on just your body rejecting it, your body won't reject it. So that's why I think this will be a good technology for the future that people should look out for. Alright my third technology is Neuralink, something that really interested me. Next slide. Alright so first of all we got to talk about who came up with the idea so so two professors came up with idea: Pendra Mossini and Rand Jay Nudo. They
introduced the idea of Neuralink and founded the company, but it was only until later that a person called Elon Musk bought the bought the company [Participant] Can I weigh in on this one? I just want to say there's so much more BMI stuff in the history of it goes so much farther before Neuralink, like there's so much more to brain machine interfaces than just Neuralink and you could buy a DIY kit to program stuff that uses your brain waves as input today. [Host] Okay, thank you for the addition. Alright, so how does it work? So Neuralink it plants a surgically implanted mesh into the brain using a needle. After releasing the mesh into the brain
it wraps around the brain ultimately to merge with the brain. Tests with mice have shown successful results and I think they already started human trials just a couple months ago. And the reason why I chose Neuralink is because of the the proprietary chip that they have can read double the amount of neurons that the previous technologies did. Alright let's see, so the diseases that it can cure or treat. So nearly
one billion people on planet Earth suffer from neurological disorders such as Alzheimer's Parkinson's, and the biggest one most people don't talk about is strokes. So Michael J Fox, a well-known actor, suffers from Parkinson's disease and he uses Neuralink to help him from suffering from it. So when would we see this technology in the mainstream with people actually getting paid to work on it, not just one company? So it's stated by the company that this device can be used by people without medical need in approximately 10 to 12 years. So people who don't have medical diseases, they won't need they won't need permission from the FDA to use this device yeah. Human trials have already started, yeah that's about it. It looks like it's my turn now. So for anybody who doesn't know me, my name is Quinton and I'm an astrophysics/physics major at SMC. So the topics I'm going to be talking about today
will be tailored toward my major. Alright, so the first one I'm going to be talking about is quantum computing which is an interesting topic because it's still a new technology, There hasn't been much progress for it yet and there haven't been a lot of applications for it yet. However, if we can get it to work correctly, if we can improve it well enough, it could have a serious amount of benefits if we can perfect it. So in the picture you have here is what a quantum computer looks like right now: a bunch of wires. It looks like something pretty complicated and there's a lot of technology behind it to make it work. so I'm going to talk a little bit about why quantum computing is so important to look into nowadays. And basically, we're reaching a point right now where a computer or computer
components are being minimized to a scale so small that if they were minimized any further they would break the law of physics. And without going into quantum physics too much, the reason for that is that basically, once you get down to a Quantum level of particles or to a level where the particles are so small, like smaller than an atom, the laws of physics kind of break down. And so that's why if we were to minimize those computer components more we wouldn't really be able to understand how they would work, and so the computer wouldn't work. And so that's why perfecting quantum computing is so important and that's because if we want to progress further in our technology and the computers we have, we need to understand quantum physics a little better. The chart that you guys see on the left talks about how the efficiency of a quantum computer can be exponentially increased if you add qubits to it. And qubits are basically the same thing as bits. And for those that aren't too familiar with computers, bits are basically,
the pieces of information that a computer uses to kind of carry out its command. And qubits are basically the same thing as a bit, except that there's a little q in front which corresponds to quantum physics. The difference between the two is that while bits, they either give you zero or one, so they can either be one of the two values, qubits can have either value so qubit is kind of like a probability you don't know if it's going to be one or zero until You observe it. Which you might have heard in quantum physics,
if you look at a particle, once you observe it, it will take on a certain state, but before you observe it the state is impossible to predict. And so basically the reason behind this, the low error rate and high error rate, is that even if you add more qubits to the computer, it's not really going to make it any more powerful if you don't understand how quantum physics work. If you build a computer based on the regular laws of physics, adding more qubits is not going to make it any more powerful. But if you have a low error rate, if you can perfect the
understanding of quantum physics, and you add more bits to the computer, it'll make it more powerful just like any other computer. So we have to understand how quantum physics works in order for quantum computers to work. Onto my next slide. As I was saying earlier, quantum computing has a lot of potential, and despite the difficulty in increasing the efficiency of it, there can be a lot of breakthroughs or there have been a lot of breakthroughs that have already been made in the field. And you can see that on the right like I was saying earlier, you need to add
more qubits to make a quantum computer more powerful, but you need to understand quantum physics in order to do that. So back in 2010 there weren't a lot of qubits that we could put in a quantum computer for it to work but as we understand quantum physics more we can add more qubits and that progress kind of follows a linear path, or it's expected to follow a linear path. So as time goes on we should be able to make quantum computers more powerful Back to what I was saying, essentially we're nowhere near the point of making quantum computers useful, but sometime in the somewhat near future according to the graph maybe like in the 2050s, we should be able to actually use quantum computers for practical uses. Alright and so for my last two slides, I'll be talking a little bit about the
technologies that have been researched in the International Space Station, and the reason why the International Space Station is so important for progressing technology. It's in space and the main importance of that is that since it's in space, there's pretty much no gravity on the International Space Station so researching things like biological processes changes in human bodies, they work a little bit differently when they're not subjected to gravity and so we can use the research in micro gravity environment to cure diseases. For example, to study aging processes in human cells, to study the blood flow in circulatory systems, to understand how organs work a little better, and just to facilitate research for so many different topics other than just regular biological processes and things that I mentioned earlier. And so one of those examples that I'm going to be talking about is a protein crystalization and specifically how we can use that in microgravity environments to cure diseases. Just to give a little bit of an introduction about what protein crystallization
is and why it's important. So basically, certain enzymes or proteins, because enzymes are proteins, they can be used as biomarkers to determine if humans have a certain health condition or disease. So if they're present in the body we can figure out if somebody has a specific disease or health condition such as genetic disorders like muscular dystrophy, cancer, or if they're prone to a heart attack, or if they have lot of liver disease, etc.
Essentially the way that we can study these proteins to understand them better and to figure out how we can cure those diseases that they're associated with is that we can crystallize them in certain chemical processes, and this is important in the microgravity environment because the crystals grow slower and they grow more orderly which also causes them to grow larger and in more complex shapes. And since they grow more complex, when we study them it can be a little bit more precise since the shapes of the protein crystals are more complex. Go on to my next slide. We can pretty much eradicate all the diseases that I have listed right here so things like salmonella, which affects more than 90 million people every year, believe It or not. Stuff like cystic fibrosis, heart attacks, and liver disease like I mentioned earlier, DMD which is a type of genetic disorder, for muscular dystrophy like I mentioned earlier, and then we can also help figure out how to reverse damage DNA. And as some of you may know, damaged
DNA results in a lot of health complications like cancer and other DNA-related conditions. And so onto my next slide, I had a video to show you guys here but it looks like it didn't format so I apologize for that but it basically described how we can study these crystals and understand how they cure the diseases that they're associated with a little bit better. So onto my next slide I'm going to be talking about tissue chips in a microgravity environment and the study of these kind of works similarly to how you would study protein crystals for example. And the reason for that being is that they're also in microgravity environments and like I mentioned, the biological processes that happen inside of these tissue chips which I will describe in just a moment, they occur more slowly so it's easier to study them. So just to give a quick description of tissue chips, they're just like these small little vessels so as you see in the picture on the right, they're like these small little like polymer material cards where you can inject things like human cells into them and you can also inject other things to test the interaction between those cells and solutions of certain mixtures. For example, blood, diseases like cancer,
or drugs. So the scientists or the researchers on the ISS they study the interactions on these in a microgravity environment and it's very similar to the concept of studying protein crystallization. The interactions between the cells and the solutions can be researched more thoroughly because they they occur more slowly they develop in a more organized fashion and they can also be stored for longer in microgravity conditions. I guess the main idea of
studying it in microgravity is that since it's in microgravity, the process isn't influenced as much by the force of gravity, and as you know forces are what makes things move it, causes motion. So if the force of gravity is lacking, the process is going to develop more slowly. So it looks like that's all I had to talk about today but thank you guys all for attending and if you have any questions you can always email us about the topics that we talked about. Thank you guys for attending. Ziad I see your mouth moving but I think you're muted. If you were trying to talk to us. [Ziad] I was muted the whole time, oh my god. I said I just posted the link to the mentor workshop sign-in sheet and I'm saying go ahead fill out so you can get credit for it because I think when you're part of the STEM program you do need two of them a semester. So fill it out and if anyone doesn't have any questions, thank you guys for coming in.
2024-02-11 01:32
