Stanford Radio

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman:

E178 | What makes a surgeon great?

A professor of surgery discusses what we can learn by using sensors and video to examine and quantify every moment of a surgery.

Conducting a surgery is one of the most complex tasks an individual can do — but how do you recognize the difference between the highly skilled surgeons performing at the top of their game and those still honing their techniques? With the help of wearable sensors, motion tracking and video, physicians can now watch surgeons in action, quantify their movements, and determine how highly skilled physicians accomplish the unique choreography of surgery.

In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, Carla Pugh, a professor of surgery at Stanford, discusses what we learn when we measure physicians’ movements, and how studying the movements of skilled surgeons can shorten the learning curve for their less experienced colleagues. Dr. Pugh joins bioengineer and host Russ Altman to explore the future of surgery. Listen and subscribe here.

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman:

E179 | How social media can help gauge societal health

Hundreds of millions of people use social media in the U.S. A computational social scientist explains how to harness the technology to measure mental and physical well-being.

Are U.S. adults happy? Sad? Depressed? One can answer these questions by calling thousands of people and surveying their psychological state, a strategy that’s both costly and time-consuming. But with the help of machine learning and artificial intelligence, you can also measure a population’s well-being by turning to social media platforms and tracking what millions of people are talking about.

In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, computational social scientist Johannes Eichstaedt and host, bioengineer Russ Altman, discuss how social media can be used to gauge a population’s psychological state, including how events like COVID-19 have impacted well-being. They also discuss how social media has the potential to work as an early warning system for public health crises to help cities and counties deploy resources where they’re most needed. Listen and subscribe here.

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman:

E177 | What happens when computers can write like humans

An increasing amount of written communication is being created by artificial intelligence. A professor of communication discusses the implications.

Start an email with “I hope” and before you can type the next word, the program will suggest you complete it with “all is well.” You may not have realized it, but this is AI-generated text. In the past several years, this technology has advanced beyond completing sentences in emails: It can now respond to others’ emails, and write essays, hip-hop songs, public health messages, and much more. What’s more, it can sometimes be even more effective than humans at conveying certain messages. In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, Jeff Hancock, a professor of communication at Stanford, explores this phenomenon and its positive and negative implications for how we communicate and how we understand our interactions with one another and the world. Learn more with Hancock and host Stanford Professor Russ Altman. Listen and subscribe here.

CEO Peter Collis with Ethos talks about the importance of helping families get simple and ethical life insurance.

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman:

E176 | The impact of income gaps on children’s health

A pediatrics professor explains how COVID-19 put a spotlight on how income disparities affect health — and how innovations in telehealth might help overcome some of the challenges.

The world has made remarkable gains in pediatric medicine and public health over the past several generations. The average American child of the 21st century has access to clean water and milk, fully functioning sewage systems, and antibiotics, vaccines, and other medicines. Result: Child mortality rates have declined dramatically over the past century. At the same time, a widening income gap in the United States has led to vastly different prevalence rates for health conditions between low- and high-income families, says Stanford pediatrician Lisa Chamberlain. And COVID-19, she says, has put a spotlight on many of the health challenges associated with these wealth disparities. In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, Chamberlain joins host Professor Russ Altman to discusses these issues, and how telehealth might help overcome some of the burgeoning challenges in pediatric health. Listen and subscribe here.

Author John David talks about how to change human behavior in his book, "Radical Business: How to Transform Your Organization in the Age of Global Crisis"

The Legacy of retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer is discussed by Stanford Law School Dean Jenny Martinez, who clerked for Breyer.

Originally aired on SiriusXM on March 12, 2022.

Stanford researcher Roberta Katz discusses her new book, “Gen Z, Explained: The Art of Living in a Digital Age,” and what we can learn from the generation born in the mid-1990s.

Originally aired on SiriusXM on March 12, 2022.

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman:

E175 | The crucial role of data compression

The total size of digital file types is expanding exponentially. So are the challenges of storing them. An electrical engineer discusses new approaches to tackling the issue.

It may not be immediately obvious, but there are huge financial, environmental and security costs associated with storing all the selfies, videos, documents and other digital assets the world is generating. One way to address this issue is by developing better compression algorithms that can represent the data more succinctly. Another is by creating new ways of storing the information itself, including, potentially, within biological molecules.

In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, Stanford electrical engineer Tsachy Weissman discusses with host Professor Russ Altman the challenges associated with storing our ever-growing mountains of digital data – and how they can be addressed. Listen and subscribe here.

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman:

E174 | Regenerating and rejuvenating human tissues

A bioengineer discusses how biomaterials created in a lab can help the human body regenerate or rejuvenate tissues, or provide 3D disease models to inform drug discovery.

Children have an amazing capacity for healing after injury. Break a leg, the bone grows back; cut a finger, the skin heals. But as we age, most tissues no longer heal easily, and tissue loss is unavoidable due to aging, degenerative diseases such as arthritis, and cancer.

In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, Fan Yang and host and fellow bioengineer Russ Altman, discuss how biomaterials created in a lab can be injected into wound sites to enable tissue regeneration or rejuvenation by modulating stem cells, vasculature, or immune responses.

They also discuss the potential of exploiting such biomaterials to create 3D cancer models to facilitate discovery of novel drugs with reduced time and cost. Listen and subscribe here.