This is a download from BFM 89.9, the Business Station. BFM 89.9, other Business Station. My name is Rich Bradbury, this is Matt's Blain here on BFM. Video game brains, chili pepper processors, oil rigs and moon missions.
If you're not connecting the dots, don't worry. There aren't any. Matt Armitage is here to tell us why science is slick. Where are we starting with today's tapestry of wonders?
Oh, Matthew. Hi, Rich. Well, I thought we could go behavioural rather than strictly science-y to start with. All right.
Some people may have seen a new campaign launched by New Zealand's Tourism Department to tackle the trend of social media uniformity. The campaign is called Do Something New. Now that might sound like it's daring travellers to take these ever more extreme shots. It's not.
It's actually tackling that idea of emulating influences and snapping these same repetitive and hack-mead shots that seem to spread like a virus from social influencer feeds. We see the same shots posed in the same way. You're sitting on some cliff top with your legs dangling or you're lounging in the same pools, running across lavender fields with your arms outstretched. You know that kind of thing.
And this is serious? Well, it's a serious point, but it's a tongue-in-cheek execution. So the campaign is fronted by a series of really funny video clips there on YouTube if you want to go and check them out. They're fronted by a Kiwi comedian called Tom Sainsbury and he's cast as a kind of part ranger-come cop and he's a member of the social observation squad.
And his job is to chase down offenders who recuse the being under the social influence and repeating these shots that we've seen a million times. There were reports a couple of years ago that there were cues of people up to an hour long to take photos on the edge of Roy's Peak, which is a lovely cliff top above Lake Wanaka. The shots are supposed to convey peace and isolation. Yet behind each shot, there are crowds of people waiting for their turn to take exactly the same shot.
It's turned into this kind of 21st century version of that shot in front of the Taj Mahal. So they're saying there's more to New Zealand than just a few photo opportunities. Yeah, it's this irony of social media and demonstrating your best self that best self is based on somebody else's feed. So discovering something new is one way to make your post unique for you to make sure that you're having experiences that are worth sharing.
And that's surely got to be the real point of things like social media. So beyond the idea of rediscovering your individuality, there's a wider conservation point here too, isn't there? Well, yeah, I mean, I think that's probably the more important point, crowds of people descending on a location for nothing more than a selfie can seriously upset fragile local ecosystems, especially when influences have ventured off the beaten track into areas that aren't publicly accessible. One series of cliff top pools, I think again in New Zealand, was only accessible across land owned by a farmer.
And the beautiful site quickly became littered with food and drink containers from people taking these endless shots. In the end, local authorities may have to take the expensive step of hiring security to stop people damaging these locations just for something as trivial as a social media post. So, you know, make your feed your own and go and find something new to do. That's Uncle Matt's tip of the day, especially for the kids.
Now, where should we go next? Well, let's take the obvious step from boring social media influencers to monkey brains. What do you think the link is between open world game platforms and a Macax visual cortex? Well, I don't see directly link something to do with virtual reality, maybe.
Close. You and the listeners might be surprised to learn that it's actually a graphics card, a GPU. Yeah, exactly. A team at the University of Sussex found that commercial graphics cards may be like the one that they're currently using to play coffee talk or cyberpunk could run brain simulations as fast, or even faster than some of our best supercomputers.
The team used a Macax visual cortex as their model. They ran the same simulation, which contained about four million synapses on one of Nvidia's commercial cards, and they did the same simulations on supercomputers by IBM and Jureka. Now, the IBM machine, which the researchers admitted was a few years old, took around 12 minutes to run the simulation, whereas the Nvidia card ran that same simulation in around eight minutes. And that Jureka machine?
Well, that took around half a minute. I mean, that was extremely fast. But before we get wrapped up in that, that Jureka machine costs tens of millions of dollars, and it needs a dedicated team to run and look after it. The graphics card set up, including the computer or the server it ran on, costs just a few thousand dollars.
This opens up enormous potential for neurological research in general for conditions like Alzheimer's. Teams can potentially be running multiple simulations in-house, which means they can do it at their own pace. They don't have to book space on a supercomputer, and of course, that lowers their cost. What is it about the GPUs then?
I make them suited to this role. Well, it's actually that 3D modeling and rendering that you find in so many games. The cards have been designed to run many processes in parallel so that they can create those rich and diverse digital worlds that people are playing in. Whereas a lot of supercomputers would actually be modeling all four million synapses simultaneously for the duration of the sim.
The GPU just processes the bits that are being used the same as it would do in an open world platform. The rest of the simulation lies dormant when it's not being viewed. Does that create limitations? Well, it creates a few.
I mean, the nature of the GPU means that it starts from scratch each time. The best supercomputers also model what's called synaptic plasticity. Now, this is the process of different connections between our synapses getting weaker or stronger. An example of that would be things like developing and reinforcing new skills.
But it's that plasticity that slows the models down because the computers can model the synaptic flows themselves very quickly. But as the information, the knowledge, the data, as that accumulates and adapts, it has to be retrieved from where it's been stored on the memory banks. And that process of retrieving information is something that so far machines do much less well than living creatures. The Sussex team think that they may be able to develop a hybrid model that fuses both approaches so that when the data needs to be retrieved, the modeling will actually slow down so that the information can be pulled from those memory stores.
But for simpler parts of the simulation, it can rattle at high speed across the GPU. Not bad for a monkey brain. Yeah, you're pretty good for a monkey brain. In that first story about New Zealand, we touched on fragile ecosystems.
Do you have any other environmental stories? Well, there's a bit of a conservation theme going on with a few of the stories today. But obviously, since Joe Biden became the US President, there's been a renewed focus on exactly what his climate and environmental policies are going to be. He's reaffirmed the US's commitments to the Paris Climate Agreement, and he's cancelled the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline.
He's made favorable moves towards green and renewable energy development and infrastructure projects. And he's done that as a way to stimulate the economy as well as to reduce emissions. But he has also been accused of having these historic and cozy ties with the fossil fuel industry. But then, you know, he's probably old enough that he was standing there when the first buckets of coal came out of the earth.
And possibly he was even there when the dinosaurs lay down to make the oil in the first place. Yeah, all right, all right. I'm not hearing a story yet, though, Matt. Well, it's oil rigs.
There are thousands, yes, thousands of oil and gas platforms dotted across the world's oceans. And these cities at sea, they have very finite lifespans. Either the deposits, they're drilling the wells are depleted after a few years, or the harshness of ocean environments means they have to be rebuilt or replaced. Now, you might think that as we move to a future of renewable energy, the call from environmentalists would be to remove these platforms.
However, there is a growing movement that's campaigning to have a lot of them preserved. Because when the platforms are decommissioned, the wells are capped, and oil companies are faced with either removing the entire structure or maintaining the subsea components and removing all the bits that people wanted to round on. Of course, this is extremely expensive. But by removing only the higher levels of these components by preserving the undersea portions and preserving them as artificial reefs, they can save millions of dollars.
You're not worried a little bit that this might be seen, or might be greenwash? Well, it seems to be one of those rare occasions where the economic goals of fossil fuel industries and marine conservationists are actually in alignment. I got this from a great BBC Future article. It's called The New Use for Abandoned Oil Ricks.
It's by Isabella Geretson. Now, artificial reefs created from oil platforms, they've been around for a long time, and they've been credited with helping fish stocks off California, for example, to bounce back from the effects of overfishing. And this evidence that they may actually make better nurseries for some species, the natural reefs. Now, part of that is due to their height.
These undersea structures are often around 150 metres tall. I think one of the tallest ones off the California coast is over 300 metres tall, and often these are located in places where the seafloor is quite featureless. And that makes them ideal breeding grounds, hiding places, and feeding spots for all kinds of marine creatures. And, you know, for a lot of fish to go from deep water to shallow water, they have to migrate hundreds or thousands of miles.
The rigs offer the benefits of both in one space. They're kind of a man-made shelf in the deep. Yeah, but still, isn't there a risk of pollution from the platform themselves? Well, schemes in states like California require the oil companies to split their cost savings with the state and other agencies.
These funds are then used to maintain these artificial reefs and to keep them healthy. A company called Blue Latitudes, which is run by a pair of marine scientists. They're spearheading efforts to turn this into a global movement and export this model internationally. And to help replenish the marine environment off the coasts of say West Africa and Southeast Asia, as well as a lot of other places around the world.
So yes, you know, there are fears that helping to reduce the cost of decommissioning might encourage energy companies to drill more wells or to allow them to operate wells that otherwise might only be marginally profitable. But companies like Blue Latitude argue that their mission is not to reward polluters, it's to protect the marine habitats that those polluters have created as this kind of byproduct. Got it. Okay, when we come back, expanding the spectrum of visible light and energy making chili peppers right here on Latsblain on BFM 89.9.
Balanced Frank Medium BFM 89.9. BFM 89.9 of the Business Station. Welcome back to Matt's Blain on Rich Bradbury over there somewhere in the ether is of course the Matt from Matt's Blain and before the break we were talking about oil platforms. So let's stick with oil.
Chili oil, in fact, Matt. Well, just to answer that earlier question, I am ether 100% ether. But yeah, going back to the chilies, yes, this is a remarkable story about chilies holding the key to improving the energy performance of solar panels. So not only as you said, oil, but still about energy and sustainability.
Silicon based solar panels have become increasingly efficient over the past couple of decades. But we still haven't found that key to capturing and unlocking all the energy potential of the Sun. I actually came up with a start-up and a solution. And I've decided it's always best to go with the company first and the idea second, that way it's easier to pivot.
But yeah, in this case, the idea itself was a pivot. I proposed a giant space pulley system. The idea being that we wrap large cables around the Sun and our planet and attach the ends to comets. And that would then pull the planet and our star closer together.
So we actually got quite far with the discussions. We even agreed on a name, my pulley. But at the last minute, the people I was talking to decided to launch Space Force instead, which I think is a way we had an idea. But moving on from the crackpots, one technology that actual scientists have come up with, something that works better than silicon for solar panels, is lead based panels because the lead absorbs heat more efficiently than the silicon does.
But isn't there an issue with energy conversion with lead? Well, yeah. So according to the piece that I referenced at New Scientist, the solution is to add a little bit of external heat. And you do that in the form of capsaicin, the fun little compound that gives chilies their kick.
And I actually wrote that out phonetically because it's so hard to say. A team at East China Normal University in Shanghai added the compound to lead based solar cells. And they improved the energy conversion of the cells by around 15%. Now, in case you think it sounds strange that the team at the normal university would randomly add a compound like this, it's actually part of a greater movement to make the next generation of biomaterials as natural and sustainable as possible.
So researchers around the world are doing similar things. They're adding natural organic compounds to existing and breakthrough technologies. They're trying to move away from extractive materials that are harmful to produce, and just as importantly limited in supply. Because as long as you can grow chile, you can have capsaicin.
Although you might not have imagined a time when you'd be fighting over chilies at the wet market with a solar panel supplier. Okay, going back to the science, rather than your fantasy about wet market fight clubs, what is it about the compound that makes it so effective? Well, this is a really cool part. And it's one of the reasons that scientists are experimenting because they don't actually know.
It's not like switching on a super collider and thinking there's maybe an X% chance that you'll conjure a black hole into existence and end the world as we know it. Adding a bit of chili extract to a solar cell isn't going to bring humanity to its knees and usher in the apocalypse. The team in Shanghai had a hunch that capsaicin might work because of its proven ability to free up electrons, and those electrons can then carry a charge. So they figured it might be a good way to boost the conversion rate of the cells.
The current theory is that the chemical reacts with the lead ions in the cell, doing just that as New Scientist puts it, freeing up more electrons to conduct current. Personally, I'm hoping that someone finds a way to use my my extract as a power source, and then the world will be my breakfast. That's a vision that some people will love and everyone else will of course hate. On the subject of vision, I think you have a story about contact lenses that give you super sight.
Yes, now I don't think this is the first time that we've mentioned on the show, the ads that you used to get maybe still do on the back pages of comics for X-ray specs, glasses that could help you see through solid objects. I don't know if you bought them, I mean I did as a kid, but anyone who bought them was always disappointed. They were basically just pinhole glasses with a mesh over the hole. So what you see is a partially diffracted image that creates this optical illusion.
It looks like you're seeing the bones of someone's hand, for example, because the glasses create a diffuse halo around that shaded solid center. But this idea of super sight has been a mainstay of science fiction and superhero fiction. Superman has his heat vision, and Geordie Lefordian star trek the next generation was blind but had a visor that allowed him to see all kinds of electromagnetic radiation. While we're stuck with the visible light spectrum.
I know it's terrible though. There are some animal species that do see beyond that. So some species of rats and bats can see ultraviolet light too. And about a decade ago, scientists found evidence that reindeer in the Arctic have developed the ability to see in the UV spectrum as well.
On the one hand, it allows them to avoid the snow blindness that we typically experience in snow landscapes, because snow reflects up to 90%. I think of the sun's ultraviolet rays, whereas unsnoreland normal land typically reflects very little ultraviolet radiation. So snow blindness is actually the way that our eyes protect their photoreceptors against damage from the energy of that UV light. So the scientists found that many of the reindeer's food sources, things like lichens, actually absorb a lot of UV.
So being able to see in that light frequency, it's thought actually helps them to see those food sources because those sources at the UV end of the spectrum will appear black against the whiteness of the snow. Is that what these lenses do? Yeah, sorry, I get carried away with reindeer. My center syndrome kicks into action.
Yeah, so being able to see UV would enhance our sight. It would reveal things that are hidden, things that absorb UV. UV imaging is already used to detect some skin conditions, and it's used to identify problems in things like electrical wiring systems. But it tends to be one of those either or situations.
We can either see visible light, or we can use UV imaging devices, and then we just see in the UV spectrum. What we don't have a hybrid system is that let us see both at the same time, like reindeer. So scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where they do get a fair bit of snow, have come up with a system that allows the user to see both. You mentioned it being a contact lens or glasses?
Well, that's the goal. At the moment, it's kind of a table-sized array of lenses. The current system consists of a lens coated with nano crystals that light up when they're exposed to UV light. The additional lenses then concentrate and focus those rays so that they become a clear image.
And that image then appears to be green. So essentially, you get a green overlay on top of what you see naturally. That way, there are no UV rays damaging your own photoreceptors. The next step in that process is to shrink it down into something that's wearable.
Now, we mentioned this in another science-of-slic story, I think this time last year. And there are already contact lenses in development that measure ultraviolet exposure. They turn a different color when you've reached your daily dosage. So it means that this kind of technology is not outside the realms of feasibility in terms of shrinking it down into that wearable state.
Could they maybe add that X-ray element? I mean, I don't know if I'd really want to walk around seeing everyone's skeleton and internal organs. It'd be a bit like looking at the aliens in Mars attacks. But the team is hoping that they can add a similar filter that would allow the wearer to see infrared light so that maybe in the future, we won't need complicated cameras and night vision equipment to enhance our vision in different light settings.
A simple pair of specs might give us all that heat vision that secretly we've always wanted. I think we've got time to add a sneak a little one in. Yeah, I'm going to go back to Space Force in a roundabout way. So the Trump administration made a commitment to send astronauts back to the moon by 2024.
We've mentioned that on the show, I don't know, probably a hundred times. However, the primary means of achieving that goal, a new NASA rocket called the Space Launch System, is massively behind schedule. I think the first flight was originally planned for 2020, but it looks unlikely that that's going to happen before 2022. And that's not enough time to put that moon mission together.
So it seems that the former vice president, Mike Pence, was aware of the slow progress. And when he announced the new program, he essentially added a by any means necessary caveat, meaning that if NASA didn't deliver, he would look at private space companies that could and could get astronauts to the moon and construct those moon bases or start constructing those moon bases from 2024. So what's going to happen now? Well, for all their faults, the Trump government, Pence, especially, really seemed to care about space travel.
The Bush and Obama administrations weren't really invested in the idea of exploring the cosmos, which I guess is one of the reasons NASA's budget kind of withered, and the agency started to fall behind in terms of manned spaceflight. The US doesn't have the means, the equipment for a moon mission 50 years after we first went there. It tells you a lot about shifting priorities from manned spaceflight to unmanned probes. But there is that new investor class, the Musk's and the Bezos's and Richard Branson's, who are passionate about manned spaceflight and exploration.
So we kind of left waiting to see just how much Biden cares about space then? Well, very much so. And even if he chooses to pursue those same goals as the previous administration, there are still decisions to be made about the direction of NASA. Do they continue with that SLS rocket program, knowing that it may cost more and be delayed further in the future?
Do they forge new partnerships with the commercial space operations whose rockets are reusable and their launches are much cheaper? And of course, the most important question of all, will Malaysian school boys, Zysen Kang's Luna toilet ever be tested on the moon? Thanks very much for that, Matt. Of course, you have been tuned in to episode 157 of Matt Slain, this is science's slick, all about game brains.
You can find Matt on Instagram, he's at CulturePop and at CultureMap. You can also head over to culturepop.com where he's got transcripts of these shows, articles with rhythm, and of course, information on the business and consulting side of what CulturePop does. And if you miss this show or any part of it, you can always download the podcast. It's available wherever you listen to your podcast from, or get it on the BFM app.
It's available at the Apple App Store or Google Play, for BFM 89.9. I'm Richard Brambury. Thank you for listening to this podcast. To find more great interviews, go to bfm.my or find us on iTunes, BFM 89.9, the Business Station.