The Future of Everything

Our guest on this episode of Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything podcast, Elaine Treharne, is an English professor and an authority on ancient manuscripts. She's using modern tools like machine learning to unlock the secrets hidden inside these aged pages. Despite frequent predictions of the demise of physical writing, she says, books will never go away. Physical writing, she believes, is a perfectly human manifestation of our humanity—an effort by transient beings to create something eternal.

All this and more as Treharne and our host Russ Altman discuss the future of books, writing and reading on this episode of The Future of Everything.

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On this episode of Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything podcast, robotics expert Oussama Khatib takes us on a deep dive into the vagaries of creating robots that swim. His most recent project is OceanOneK, a 200-pound, humanoid robot with stereoscopic vision and opposable thumbs that can travel nearly a thousand meters below the surface. When the pressure was on, Khatib had to redesign everything he thought he knew about robots, he says, beginning with a new glass-like shell good to 6,000 PSI.

Listen as Khatib and host Russ Altman plumb the depths of underwater robots on this installment of The Future of Everything.

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On this episode of Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything podcast, Stanford infectious disease expert Desiree LaBeaud talks trash, literally. She says carelessly discarded plastics can collect water, providing a perfect nursery to mosquitoes that then spread dengue, chikungunya, Zika, yellow fever and other killer diseases worldwide. Plastic trash has become a public health nightmare as LaBeaud tells host Russ Altman and listeners of The Future of Everything. Reducing it is now a critical component of life-saving disease prevention strategies.

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Civil and environmental engineer Alexandria Boehm joins Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast to discuss how a new form of epidemiology is using the tools of engineering to test wastewater to track COVID-19’s true spread. The wastewater that enters a treatment facility is really just one big biological sample, Boehm says. Testing it is far more accurate than COVID-19 case data, and it is useful for tracking other diseases in our communities, as well.

Listen in to this episode of The Future of Everything, as Boehm and host Russ Altman explore the great promise of wastewater epidemiology.

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On this episode of Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything podcast, Stanford bioengineer Jan Liphardt talks about the challenge of getting good medical recommendations and diagnoses while guaranteeing that a patient's health secrets remain private. Computing on encrypted data is the way, he says. Tune in as health data expert Liphardt and host Russ Altman discuss the future of health privacy.

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Stanford pediatrics professor Anisha Patel tells us how engaging a local community about their health concerns can lead to impactful discoveries and interventions. She recounts how a visit to a middle school helped her team realize that simple access to drinking water was a problem in schools across the nation. Patel also shares how similar interactions during the COVID pandemic created a system of free lunches at public schools that helped ensure food security for children throughout the country. On this episode of The Future of Everything, Patel and host Russ Altman discuss the future of community health. 

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To better understand the inner workings of glacier — which are often many kilometers in depth — researchers are using ice-penetrating radar, which sends radio waves through the ice, to create maps of what it looks like inside.

In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, Stanford radio glaciologist Dustin (Dusty) Schroeder explains how this technique works and how the data it generates can help us understand the implications of climate change here on Earth. Together with host, bioengineer Russ Altman, Schroeder also discusses how he and his team are using this technology to investigate the habitability of moons and planets in our solar system – and whether there might be life already there. Listen and subscribe here.

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When we think of synchrony, we often think of positive things, like ice skaters gliding in tandem. But if there’s too much synchrony in the brain – when neurons fire simultaneously – it can be a problem.

In fact, abnormal neural synchrony underlies many neurological conditions, including Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy, and dystonia. In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, Stanford professor of neurosurgery Peter Tass joins host, Stanford bioengineer Russ Altman, to discuss how vibrational therapies, such as a glove that applies vibrations to an individual’s fingertips, can help patients with neurological conditions by helping the neurons break and unlearn synchronicity. Listen and subscribe here.

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Primary care medicine represents 52% of all care delivered in the United States, but when it comes to AI innovation, it’s been largely left behind.

In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, Stanford physician Steven Lin, explains how AI could improve healthcare logistics, optimize patient care, and significantly lower costs by reducing the clerical burdens that cost the U.S. healthcare system billions of dollars a year and keep physicians from spending more time with their patients. Learn more with Lin and host, bioengineer and fellow physician, Russ Altman. Listen and subscribe here.

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Take a look around your neighborhood and you’ll see a few things you like -- and, most likely, a few you don’t. Maybe you need a crosswalk near the senior home. Or garbage keeps getting dumped on the sidewalk.

Now imagine if you and others in your community could document what you saw, collect those data, identify and agree on issues to prioritize, and then find feasible solutions for them?

In this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, Stanford faculty member Abby King, professor of epidemiology and population health and of medicine, explains how this scenario is possible, starting with a mobile app called the Our Voice Discovery Tool. King and host, bioengineer Russ Altman, also discuss how this by-the-people type of citizen science can help improve the well-being and health of communities in the U.S. and around the world. Listen and subscribe here.

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