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PODCAST

The Future of Everything

Stanford Engineering

Host Russ Altman, a professor of bioengineering, genetics, and medicine at Stanford, is your guide to the latest science and engineering breakthroughs. Join Russ and his guests as they explore cutting-edge advances that are shaping the future of everything from AI to health and renewable energy. Along the way, “The Future of Everything” delves into ethical implications to give listeners a well-rounded understanding of how new technologies and discoveries will impact society. Whether you’re a

science medicine

All Episodes

00:27:40

Riitta Katila: How diversity drives innovation

The Future of Everything ·

2021/02/19

When Riitta Katila looks at old photos or movies about the space program of the 1960s, she sees one common thread among the people depicted there — homogeneity. The engineers and technicians who first put humans on the moon were, almost without exception, white and male.While society has come a long way in the decades since, Katila, who is an expert in technology strategy and organizational learning, says there’s still a long way to go. She notes that companies need innovation not only to reach the

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00:27:54

David Miller: How light could transform computing

The Future of Everything ·

2021/02/10

As the silicon chip embarks upon its second half-century of dominance in computing and communications, the field is confronting fundamental boundaries that threaten to halt that progress in its tracks.The transistor cannot get much better or smaller and the copper wires that connect them cannot carry much more data than they do now. But, says electrical engineer David Miller, an alternative technology that uses light instead of electricity has the potential to transmit vastly more data than present

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00:27:51

Jin Hyung Lee: How can we systematically cure brain...

The Future of Everything ·

2021/02/05

In recent decades, medical and biological science have advanced by leaps and bounds using technologies that allow us to peer into the brain in myriad new and insightful ways — MRI, CT, PET, EEG, etc.However, Stanford electrical engineer Jin Hyung Lee says, we are still missing critical insights that could lead to a cure for currently incurable brain diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, epilepsy and others.Even in diagnosis, we still rely on “diagnosis of exclusion,” where tests are used to

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00:27:53

Mark Schnitzer: How to better understand the brain

The Future of Everything ·

2021/01/29

Stanford’s Mark Schnitzer says several of the more exciting recent advances in his field of applied physics have come through developing new imaging technologies that peer into the brain as never before. What’s more, Schnitzer says the insights gained have put the world closer to solving long-vexing brain diseases, like Parkinson’s and others, where the circuitry of the brain seems to be malfunctioning.Schnitzer says that these new imaging methods are helping medical science discern the specific

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00:27:54

Mutale Nkonde: How to get more truth from social media

The Future of Everything ·

2021/01/23

The old maxim holds that a lie spreads much faster than a truth, but it has taken the global reach and lightning speed of social media to lay it bare before the world.One problem of the age of misinformation, says sociologist and former journalist Mutale Nkonde, a fellow at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (PACS), is that the artificial intelligence algorithms used to profile users and disseminate information to them, whether truthful or not, are inherently biased against

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00:27:52

Karen Liu: How robots perceive the physical world

The Future of Everything ·

2021/01/15

Stanford’s Karen Liu is a computer scientist who works in robotics. She hopes that someday machines might take on caregiving roles, like helping medical patients get dressed and undressed each day. That quest has provided her a special insight into just what a monumental challenge such seemingly simple tasks are. After all, she points out, it takes a human child several years to learn to dress themselves — imagine what it takes to teach a robot to help a person who is frail or physically

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00:27:50

Jef Caers: How better mineral exploration makes...

The Future of Everything ·

2021/01/08

It has been said that batteries hold the key to a sustainable future.But so-called “clean energy” does not come without environmental costs. For instance, says Stanford geoscientist Jef Caers, the batteries in a single Tesla contain some 4.5 kilograms — about 10 pounds — of cobalt, in addition to plenty of lithium and nickel, too. With some 300 million cars in the U.S. right now, a full transition to electric vehicles would be impossible without new resources. But, finding new deposits and getting

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00:27:47

Evan Reed: How to discover a magic material

The Future of Everything ·

2020/12/10

Evan Reed and a team of scientists recently identified a promising solid material that could replace highly flammable liquid electrolytes in lithium-ion batteries.The trick? Reed didn’t discover the material the old-fashioned way, using trial and error to narrow down a list of candidates. Instead, he used computers to do the legwork for him. He says that until recent advances in computer science, the seemingly never-ending search for new materials was more like a quest for unicorns. Breakthrough

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00:27:47

Renée DiResta: How to beat bad information

The Future of Everything ·

2020/11/18

Renée DiResta is research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, a multi-disciplinary center that focuses on abuses of information technology, particularly social media. She’s an expert in the role technology platforms and their “curatorial” algorithms play in the rise and spread of misinformation and disinformation.Fresh off an intense period keeping watch over the 2020 U.S. elections for disinformation as part of the Election Integrity Partnership, DiResta says the campaign became one of

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00:28:01

Will Tarpeh: How to take the waste out of wastewater

The Future of Everything ·

2020/11/13

Once the bathwater is drained, the toilet flushed or the laundry done, few give a passing thought to the wastewater that leaves our homes. But chemical engineer Will Tarpeh might change your mind, if you give him the chance.Tarpeh says that that water is a literal mine of valuable chemicals. Chemicals like nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium make great fertilizers. Lithium can be used in lithium ion batteries. And even pharmaceuticals could be recovered and reused. In fact, Tarpeh points out that if

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00:27:53

Kwabena Boahen: How to build a super-efficient...

The Future of Everything ·

2020/11/09

Bioengineer Kwabena Boahen builds highly efficient “neuromorphic” supercomputers modeled on the human brain. He hopes they will drive the artificial intelligence future. He uses an analogy when describing the goal of his work: “It’s LA versus Manhattan.” Boahen means structurally. Today’s chips are two dimensional — flat and spread out, like LA. Tomorrow’s chips will be stacked, like the floors of the skyscrapers on a New York block. In this analogy, the humans are the electrons shuffling data back

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00:27:45

Daphne Koller: How machine learning is transforming...

The Future of Everything ·

2020/11/02

In a world where a drug takes years and billions of dollars to develop, just one in 20 candidates makes it to market. Daphne Koller is betting artificial intelligence can change that dynamic.Twenty years ago, when she first started using artificial intelligence to venture into medicine and biology, Koller was stymied by a lack of data. There wasn’t enough of it and what there was, was often not well suited to the problems she wanted to solve. Fast-forward 20 years, however, and both the quantity and

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00:27:54

Markus Covert: How to build a computer model of a cell

The Future of Everything ·

2020/10/19

When Stanford bioengineer Markus Covert first decided to create a computer model able to simulate the behavior of a single cell, he was held back by more than an incomplete understanding of how a cell functions, but also by a lack of computer power. His early models would take more than 10 hours to churn through a single simulation and that was when using a supercomputer capable of billions of calculations per second.Nevertheless, in his quest toward what had been deemed "a grand challenge of the

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00:27:46

Rafael Pelayo: How to get a good night’s sleep

The Future of Everything ·

2020/09/23

COVID-19 is changing how many scientists, like Stanford sleep expert Rafael Pelayo, MD, view their field. First off, the shift to telemedicine is providing Pelayo, author of the new book How to Sleep, an unprecedented glimpse into the sleep environments of his patients. “I’m making house calls for the first time,” he says.Second, surprisingly, some of his patients, unburdened of long commutes, say they are sleeping and dreaming more than ever. But, others are not so fortunate, reporting increased

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00:27:51

Marietje Schaake: Can democracy survive in a digital...

The Future of Everything ·

2020/09/21

Marietje Schaake was a Member of the European Parliament from 2009 to 2019 and now serves as the international policy director at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center and international policy fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. As she has watched democracy evolve in the age of instantaneous global communication and hyperconnected social media, she has grown concerned about the resilience of democracy as technology disrupts the status quo. While the

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00:27:50

Andrew Huberman: How stress affects the mind — and...

The Future of Everything ·

2020/09/18

Andrew Huberman is a Stanford neurobiologist and ophthalmologist keenly interested in the biology of stress and ways to manage stress.He’s developed and tested a number of stress-relieving techniques — from specific patterns of breathing to visual tools — and uses virtual reality to help humans control their stress in adaptive ways. He is also testing how people can access better sleep using stress-relief tools. Much of this work is done in collaboration with David Spiegel, MD, associate chair of

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00:27:32

Manu Prakash: How to beat a pandemic on a budget

The Future of Everything ·

2020/08/26

Manu Prakash was in France when COVID-19 took hold throughout the world. There, the Stanford bioengineer, famous for “frugal science” like his $1 field microscope made of paper, witnessed the challenges a relatively well-resourced nation experienced holding back the disease. His head was soon filled with visions of the nightmare awaiting developing nations, given that a COVID-19 test in developing countries can cost as much as $400.In a flurry, Prakash jotted down an engineering manifesto of sorts

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00:27:31

Byron Reeves: What our screens tell us about us

The Future of Everything ·

2020/08/15

With the emergence of touchscreen smartphones, tablets and watches, so much of our lives is spent on our devices that in many ways we are what appears on screen. This “mediatization,” as Byron Reeves, a professor of communication at Stanford University, puts it, sparked a remarkable and unprecedented study of the way we live today.In a series of field studies, Reeves has recorded screen time of his subjects one frame every five seconds for days on end — with promises of absolute privacy, of course

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00:28:01

Newsha Ajami: How engineers restored hope for our...

The Future of Everything ·

2020/08/12

There was a time when all great cities were built near water. Whether for agriculture, aesthetics, energy or just plain drinking, water was a life-affirming, life-sustaining resource. But with the advent of advanced engineering in the form of dams, pumps and pipes, cities like Los Angeles thrived in places with very little fresh water. Now, global climate change is leaving many of those cities in danger of running dry.But there is hope on the horizon, says Newsha Ajami, senior research engineer at

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00:28:00

Susan Holmes: How statistics are reshaping our...

The Future of Everything ·

2020/08/03

In recent years, biologists have learned that the vaginal microbiome — the make-up of the bacteria in the vagina — during pregnancy may be the best predictor of pre-term birth. It is a valuable finding that could reshape obstetrics. What is perhaps more revelatory about this emerging knowledge is that biologists have learned it from a surprising source: statistics.Stanford’s Susan Holmes is one such statistician in the rapidly evolving science of using statistics to understand biology. Holmes is now

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