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listening to Computer America. Hello, and welcome everyone into the Computer America Show.
We are the nation's longest running nationally syndicated radio talk show on computers and
technology term podcast. Everyone, welcome into the program. I hope that you're
doing well today and you are ready for today's program, because we have the
one, the only, mister Ralph Bond. He'll be joining us here in
just a moment. He is, of course, our science and Tech Trends
correspondent, and he has a four stories as as is tradition, and yeah,
you know, all of them are really great. The first one I'm
glad that he dedicated so much to it because the first story has such a
large implication I think for you know, obviously for our day to day lives,
but ladies and gentlemen going into the weekend, I know that there are
places in the southern US that are dealing with like their thirtieth straight day or
something like that of hundred, one hundred and ten degree weather, you know,
absolutely insane. And the way that I understand, you know, climate
change. I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but the abnormal is
going to start getting more normal year over year. So you know, it's
not going to be like, you know, oh, in fifty years of
switch will flip and suddenly we can't live on Earth anymore. It's going to
slowly, you know, kind of raise the heat. So I'm sure people
down there in Texas and California and you know, the Southern States are really
looking forward to substantive Wow, that's a hard word. Good changes towards a
better climate and a better economy. And again it's a win win because everything
from story number one all the way, you know, all the way through
have very cool and fun implications. And cool and fun is exactly how I
would describe our segments with Ralph. So before we get started computer America dot
com, that's we find everything passos future shows, show notes, articles.
Show notes are a big one. Of course, we'll have those, I
said by the time that you hear this. And with that being said,
ladies and gentlemen, let's go ahead and jump right into it with Ralph So
as I said before, science and Tech trans correspondent and of course longtime Computer
America contributor, Ralph, welcome back onto the program. How you doing.
It's great to be back then, and happy Friday, everybody. And when
I say happy Friday, it's because Ben and I every Friday give you technology
and science advancement stories that will, we hope, leave you feeling happy instead
of sad, which is what most of the news cycles out there do.
They're so negative. Wars and problems and disharmony in our government. No leave
that all behind. We're going to talk about everything from robotics, medical technology,
sustainable energy, technology, transportation, advances, space research, physics,
you name it, and we've got four stories to share with you. And
again Ben mentioned in passing the show notes, come out to Computer america dot
com Get the show notes. That's where I put the links, the attributions
who wrote these stories where they come from. Sometimes uplemental information images, all
of it's there for you to dive deeper, because we're just going to give
you a condensed highlights of these four stories. So with that said, we
can dive into the first story if you're ready. I am absolutely ready,
and I was really having fun, you know, kind of reading on reading
this on my own. But you know, it seems to be the past
couple of weeks we have some kind of new battery technology. I think for
the past couple of weeks we talked about it was the silicon eon or something
like that. Either way, lithium ion is what we know and traditionally use,
but there's a lot of research past lithium ion and today is no different.
So story number one, Yeah, and folks talk about being a trends
correspondent for the show. This one is really a very hot trend that's part
happening right now and part promise for the future. So it's kind of a
fun mix. Here's the headline. Toyota touts solid state ev east electronic or
electric vehicles with a nine hundred thirty two mile range and at ten minute charging
time. They hope to achieve this by twenty twenty seven. Again, what
a trend, and you're going to find out Toyota is not alone at all.
In fact, there's some solid state battery evs out there right now,
and we'll get into that again. The show notes have the link. I
even have a supplemental link to dive deeper into the technology if you want to
do that. But here we go with the story. So Toyota says it
has found a technological breakthrough that will allow it to bring solid state batteries to
market for its cars as early as twenty twenty seven, so a few years
off. It's one of several advanced battery technologies that will underscore Toyota's new EV
focus, all EV focus, by the way, as it pivots away from
its former CEOs hybrid centric strategy. And this comes right home to me because
we have a RAV four prime, which is a plug in hybrid kind of
combination of both the technologies. So solid state batteries promise greater energy density,
higher electric range, and faster charging that puts refueling time on par with a
gas powered vehicle. Now let's be clear about that. On par. You're
going to find out, you know, we're talking about ten minutes to fully
recharge. A battery, which compared to the twelve hours it takes mind to
do it on my non superpower charger in the garage. Anyway, give you
a perspective, and here's the deal, folks, researchers, scientists and automakers
have spent decades trying to crack the code on the commercialization of solid state batteries.
It's been a big challenge, but so far now this article's timeout which
came from Did I give the attribution? This came from PC magazine, by
the way, the article and when it was written mid last month, this
statement was relatively basically true. The author said, no evs have them as
of this state. Well, now in just a few weeks all has changed.
The article was published last month, and here are some updates. So
I went out and I used the being ai chat search search capability, and
it came back when I said, what evs or what electronic electric vehicles out
there now have solid state batteries? And here's the answer that came back says,
according to my web search, there is currently only one commercially available electric
car with a solid state battery. It is the dong Feng that's d O
n g Fenge seventy electric sedan which is only available in China and has been
launched as a fleet of fifty taxis, and a little picture of it.
It's a very nondescript, sort of normal looking little sedan car, but it
has the solid state battery. By the way, we're going to explain a
little bit more about what the heck of solid state battery is as compared to
a lithium ion battery. Okay, so here's my add on. I went
back and I asked the AI again about all solid state battery cars. And
this week, on twelfth of July, Chinese electric vehicle automaker Neo Nio has
made a groundbreaking achievement in the EV industry by adding a one hundred fifty kilowatt
hour solid state battery pack to its cars. And there's a little picture of
its attractive little LESSUV type of car. Right. So this is now happening
and more and more and more to come, and the benefits we're going to
get into are just stunning. But timeout, let's do a little explanation of
what a solid state battery is or what they are. A solid state battery
uses solid electrodes and a solid electro light instead of the liquid or polymer gel
electrodes found in lithium ion or lithium polymer batteries. Now in the show notes,
if you want to dive deeper into this, I've got a little more
explanation of solid electrodes and solid electrolytes. You can dive in and get more
geeky if you want to, and I've got links to where the information came
from. We won't do that right now, but again, they differ by
using liquid or polymer gel electrodes found in lithium ion or polymer battery. So
the solid if I could say it, that would be solid electrodes and solid
electro lights. That's the key, and then we're going to get into the
benefits here for why this is so great? Oh oh yeah, here's a
fun thing in the show. Does I love this? That was in the
article in PC magazine. While solid electro lights we're first discovered in the nineteenth
century, what several drawbacks have prevented widespread application. Developments in the late twentieth
and early twenty first century have caused renewed interest in solid state battery technologies,
especially in the context of electric vehicles. Starting in the twenty tenth. So
isn't that something nineteenth century? Yeah? It you know, when it comes
to vehicle technology, and especially like this kind of technology. I mean,
some of the first cars were electric cars. We just try to kind of
circle back around to you know, gasoline and now we're coming back to electric.
You know, the principles are pretty well known. It's just you know,
getting it to work on scale that we meet for cars. That's the
part that they're finally tackling. And it's so good to see. Well,
yeah, and Ben to your point about and that is so true. If
you look at the history of automobiles and electric vehicles, what is it like
in the eighteen nineties or something. I think maybe some electric vehicles are crazy
stuff, turn of the centry and so on. And again the problems that
have to date kind of plagued electric vehicles charging time and in the case of
the one hundred years ago or so, it was, the batteries were just
so limited and so forth. But at least they were playing around with that
idea. Yeah, but here's the deal. Really, the trend, the
breakthrough, the significance of all of these solid state batteries for cars is charging
time and range. Okay, so solid state technology batteries can provide potential solutions
for many problems of liquid ion batteries or liquid lithium ion batteries rather, such
as flammability. We've all heard about that limited voltage, unstable solid electrolyte interface
formation that's very geeky, poor cycling performance, and strength of the batteries.
I'm not hit share what they mean by strength of the batteries, but nonetheless
that's sort of the shopping list of problems that lithium ion batteries you have in
your car today present. And then another thing that I thought was interesting in
the article, they said materials proposed for use as solid electrodes in solid state
batteries include ceramics, oxides, sulfides, phosphates, and solid polymers. None
of these are exotic or weird ingredients. Okay, that's another aspect of this,
and another side note I thought was interesting. Non audible bile or car
related uses of solid state batteries to date include pacemakers and radio frequency identification devices
and variety of wearable portable devices. But they do a little deeper in the
dive. You'll find out right now that very expensive technology for that application,
but it does exist. And then finally, with regard to Toyota, Toyota
says it's found a new material that gets around one of the core issues with
solid state batteries their longevity. Because even my RAV four Prime, which is
a plug in hybrid a Sunday down the road, the batteries are going to
have to be replaced. But Ben, here's what I'm hoping, and I
hope this is true for all the Tesla owners and everybody else, that when
that day comes you've got to swap out the battery that it can be swapped
out with a solid state battery bing wouldn't that be great? And then,
as you can imagine, not only for Toyota, but for the Chinese and
for everybody else that's really starting to get into this, the next challenge will
be mass production. Toyota says it's breakthrough batteries will hit the market in twenty
twenty seven or twenty twenty eight. Consider the fact that the Chinese already have
this and they're putting it on the road now, So salute to the Chinese
on that regard. I guess so this will give Toyota's EVS at that time
period around twenty twenty seven, twenty twenty eight. They claim at that time
those cars will have a seven hundred forty five mile range, what and significantly
greater than any gas powered car today. Of course with a ten minute charging
time. That combination of that that range is so great, Ben, I
couldn't drive seven hundred right well, and you know, and I know that
we're not really close to it, but you know, imagine that in five
or seven years or you know, whenever these thot come out where automatic driving
cars are, you know, you could have cars that are self driving like
taxis and you know, populated cities and they would be able to go out
for the whole day without having to go back and recharge. Stuff like that.
Very exciting. Yeah. And again if you could come back in ten
minutes, be back on the road, Wow, you would just need less
cars. You would need less cars. And that's great. Yeah, good
point. And then to close out here, it says eventually Toyota's plans include
vehicles with a nine hundred thirty two mile range. I mean, I think
that's great, but I mean most normal people, except for specially applications as
you just suggested, that that range is just beyond belief and a less than
ten minute charging time, and in comparison, the best selling EV today,
the Tesla Model Why, has a maximum three hundred and thirty mile range and
a fifteen minute charging time via Tesla supercharger, which is all very very impressive,
especially that charge in time. If that technology were to come to market,
and even just like uh, you know, taxis or robotaxis or anything
like that, Imagine, you know, we ship goods via the highways all
the time between states. Imagine having two people who could take shifts, never
have to leave the cab unless they you know, unless they had to,
and be able to, you know, ship something a thousand miles away all
in one charge. Like, you know, they could take shifts, they
could sleep, they could you know, do where they have to. Yeah,
you know, be able to Like the cost of shipping goods would go
down immensely as well. So yeah, and related to that, just local
municipal bus sort of and that sort of thing too, because as you mentioned,
whether they're autonomous or operator or a combination of human plus autonomous, whatever
the gives may be, the fact that these things take the airport at our
airport, I'm sure yours two and many around the world. You have the
little shuttle things taking out to the parking lot and all that sort of thing,
that this all could be all electric and impractical all electric because of range
and charging time. So yeah, it's a great trend, folks, Hang
onto your hats, it's coming. And also wanted to address point because like,
I never really bothered to go up and go out and look for the
information, so I have it. You know, there's always the conversation of
you have you know, shifting from a gas to an electric car, the
electricity still has to come from somewhere. How much you know, how much
more efficient is it really? Universus gas you put in your car versus gas
or I'm sorry, versus electricity from the grid. And according to Fuel Economy
Dot give if you trust that electric vehicles convert about seventy seven percent of the
electricity from the grid to power out the wheel. So the actual energy it
takes to turn the wheels about, you know, there's about twenty three percent
waste, and you know it's not a perfect system, but compare that to
gasoline, where the energy stored in gasoline converted to and you know, you
can imagine starting stopping poor driving can affect all this kind of thing. About
twelve to thirty percent of the energy and gasoline is converted to power at the
wheel, so you're getting you know, anywhere from two to five times as
much efficiency for your gap. You know, I'm sorry for your electricity in
just going electric versus gas cars so very economical already. It is just a
matter of solid state batteries are going to make it an absolute no brainer,
an absolute no brainy. Yeah, oh yeah. And again I'm hopeful.
Talk of the personal trend that I hope happens for me and my family is
the day to swap out my battery. Can I retrofit with a solid state
I'm hoping that's the case. I haven't seen anybody address this yet, but
that would be a question I would ask any of these engineers for any of
these car companies at the very least, you know. And I was just
having this conversation with my wife about, you know, getting a car in
the future, and she's still a little on the fence about you know,
even though three hundred miles is a very far distance, you know, there's
still range range anxiety out there about going full electric versus hybrid, which I'm
sure I came up with your family too, Ralph. When you got you
know, when you got your Toyota M nine hundred miles, no one would
have range anxiety at that point. That is, you know, there there
is literally no benefit to gas versus um, you know, versus electric cars.
It's a very little benefit if there is any. Oh yeah, yeah,
that's a great point. And again, folks, if you're if you're
right now today, if you have range anxiety and you can't afford or can't
access an all solid state battery car that we've been talking about once right now
on the road or in China, plug in hybrid friends, it's where you
have a battery that takes our car. We've been getting like anywhere from forty
to fifty miles of pure EV every day until it switches over to a hybrid
mode, which is a combo course of the other battery and the gas engine.
So that's a great solution for right now, right this minute, which
and we'll see the most yeah, which most Americans drive less than forty miles
a day. Sorry, it totally totally does a job. But either way
of solid state batteries, there's so many applications, and like you said,
it's already in pacemakers and medical technology and you know a few other applications,
not just cars. But I'm sure if slid state is possible, you're going
to see benefits across the really across the industries. So there you go.
Start number one. Great, you know, great implications and love it level,
love it. Story number two, let's go ahead and get a little
bit more. Um well, I like, I don't want to say realist,
because twenty twenty eight is right around the corner, but this is something
that's happening now, and honestly it looks like a bath toy, but it's
doing something so much more. Yes, story number two is fun. Well,
well, of course we have we must have artificial intelligence play a role
in here. And we'll see it's got a couple of stories this week with
that headline. This AI powered robot fish explores mysterious organisms and I added and
gathers DNA samples under the sea. And this comes from an absolutely joyful website
called Wonderful Engineering dot com and they kind of reposted a Reuter's news story.
So there's a double layer link and there's a link of course in the show
notes and the video you're showing the audience right now, which is really fun
and cool too. So here's the story. There's an amazing new fish like
robot called Bell that is exploring the ocean and gathering important information without causing any
disturbance to marine life. This robot has the potential to revolutionize the way we
study underwater creatures and environments and understand the impact of factors like overfishing and climate
change. Now. Robert katz Schumann, assistant professor of Robotics at et Zurich
of Course in Switzerland, he noted, in reference to using the robot to
explore sensitive coral reefs, See, that's hard for scientists to really get down
there because coral reefs are so sensitive, he said. He said, those
areas are particularly vulnerable to propeller based systems that would just sort of shred through
the corals or go and scare the fish away. That's the problem. So
this is what this robot was really designed for, highly delicate and sensitive marine
situations underwater. So Bell is designed, as the video wonderfully shows, to
mimic a fish and seamlessly blend into its surroundings thanks to its here's the key.
Thanks to its size lent movements, it uses artificial intelligence to navigate underwater
autonomously. But that's not all. I can also collect DNA samples and capture
high resolution videos. Now we're going to explain in a moment, how is
it silent. Well, here's the deal. Bella's lightweight and compact, measuring
less than a meter in length, weighing about ten kilograms that's about twenty two
pounds when out of the water. Now, it uses a silicon or silicone
fin with two water filled cavities, which allows it to move quietly and naturally
in coral environments deep beneath the surface. And a fellow named Leon Guggenheim,
a mechanical engineering student at ETH Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.
He noted, these water filled cavities are filled and emptied with water through a
pump system that moves the fin back and forth, because you have a cavity
on one side which creates an overpressure and a cavity on the other side that
creates a vacuum, and that bends the fin in one direction and conversely the
other direction right to get the flapping most cool fish isn't that something that's very
And the silence, the quiet, that's the thing that's so great. And
Bell can operate autonomously for two hours before its batteries need to be recharged.
Put a solid state battery in the thing. It could swim. Yeah,
yes, that's right. And when this is cool too, when the robot
completes a session. But remember it's autonomous, it's AI driven. It's going
to do its thing. You deploy it, it goes and does its thing.
When it's done, it swims to the surface, sends us a GPS
signal, and then we go pick it up again, Guggenheim said. Now
news outlets have reported that this robot could soon become an invaluable tool for marine
biologists. They could use Bell to study and protect the health and biodiversity of
different reef ecosystems, ensuring the conservation of marine wildlife, and with ells help,
scientists can gather crucial data while minimizing any disruption to underwater habitat. So
I just thought this was clever. I thought the silent motion, the way
they do it with the water filled cavities at alternating a vacuum and filling and
expelling the water and so forth. It's just I thought it was a boy.
There's the video you're showing right now that looks like a fish. The
movement is so fluid and so natural. It's just amazing to me. And
it does look like those bath toys by my one year old grandchildren have these
little wind up toys that look just like that, and they put them in
the pool and they swim around for a few minutes and yeah, that's exactly
like that. Yeah, they satrely do. But and the video also shows
a little glimpse on how they kind of extract the DNA from the thing,
because you know, it's swing through the water, it has little cavities and
it's it actually takes samples of the water that they can then pull out a
little tanks that are on the drone. So very very cool, and again
the fact that it looks like a fish. Um, I do worry a
little bit that. You know, I don't know how common predation on drones
is, but you know, I'm wondering if if they made it big enough,
because you know, twenty two pounds that's a big fish. I'm hoping
that nothing's going to try to attack the drone. I'm not saying that it'll
hurt the drone. I'm more worried that it might hurt the attacker. But
still it's very natural, very natural. Yeah, yeah, I'm I'm imagining
rolf, you know, because we already have like a booies out there and
stuff like that. If we could have some kind of like docking station thing
where we just have like a research boobie out there, they go out,
collect monitor, comeback, charge, and just do it all over again.
Yeah, so many possibilities, but still looking out for our little fishy friends
is really important. So you know, being able to get constant real time
data is important. And this fish is, like you said, with the
with the kind of pump system that they're using, looks just like a fish.
You know, doesn't sound like a little propeller. It's perfect things were
something and will nugget. Oh yeah, go ahead. Well no, I
was just saying in the AI navigation like, it's not just swimming in circles.
It can actually navigate its surrounding. So even better. Yeah, in
that something and another thing, not to take it to the dark side,
but this thing could be also for surveillance. This could be for underwater monitoring
or surveillance security situations. This is for natural science research, which is lofty
and good, but let's be honest, this could be repurposed for other other
needs. Well, you know, there there are so many situations that we've
heard of where UM boats will dump you know, waste, they'll dump a
cargo overboard, they'll just kind of throw nets and stuff like that. I
mean, there's so many cases where you want eyes and ears on something.
But you know, something like this, you could monitor underwater, you know,
autonomously without having to you know, constantly you have a person out there.
So there's good applications, bad applications, but still very very cool research
from Zurich. It's very very innovative. So that's story number two, story
number three, and yes, you know a little it's it's intriguing. It's
clearly showing kind of the limitations of AI, but at the same time it's
showing the promise of AI because it seems like two years ago. You know,
we were talking a bit about machine learning for years, but AI really
broke onto the scene with you know, chat, GPT and you know the
other things that uh, you know kind of worked our way into our daily
lives now. AI is just leaps and bounds every single it seems like month
we're talking about a new innovation that they're really working on. So story number
three really goes to show that while still primitive, they're doing more and more
complex things. Well, and that's a scary but cool. It is scary
but cool. And this is a really good example of a glistening in the
eye, early early indication of a key trend that could just turn the whole
semiconductor world upside down and inside out. And you know, possibly you could
say in a positive way. But here's the headline. This comes from Quartz
magazine. Very interesting, I've just got onto these guys. Headline is it
only took five hours for an artificial intelligence model to design a functional CPU central
processing unit, or a brain chip as a popular term is right for your
computers and other devices and so on. So the implications of this are just
astonishing, so little background here. Artificial intelligence is stretching the human limits of
computer design with a new AI model now creating a complete central processing unit brain
chip in just under five hours, compared to the four years it takes Intel,
for example, to build one. And this is a very generalized timeframe
they're using in this article. By the way, because I long time listeners
know, I work for Intel for almost fourteen years, and one of the
things I did was I worked with the research part of the company, not
as a scientist, but as a person who took it to the technical press.
And I remember the first time they brought me in and said, we've
got this processor that has something called HyperThreading and two cores, and I said,
what two processors in one and the ability to divide and conquer now?
Or what at sixteen cores and the crazy stuff many many years later. So
yes, I know from personal experience, not personally directly, but just from
being associated with the research side of Intel up here in Hillsboro, Oregon,
that it took a great deal of time to develop and test and qa the
design for a CPU. So that said, here's the deal. This achievement,
what we're talking about today AI design a central processing unit in less than
five hours was discussed in a research paper. Now our show notes have a
link for you there, dated June twenty seven, so late last month,
and authored by here the Chinese again nineteen Chinese computer process or researchers from five
technology colleges in China. The researchers say their approach is bound to set the
stage for the creation of self evolving machines. What let that sink in,
I just involving machines. I just opened the research paper off. Unfortunately for
everyone out there, it runs Linux. It runs Linux. So that's right,
we're going to get into that. No, no, it was a
joke, but please go ahead. No. Yeah, in fact, a
little preview here, there's gonna be a lot of reality checks which the researchers
completely acknowledge that what they're talking about is a CPU that's would be twenty some
odd years previous technology to where we are now. So nobody's trying to say
that this is equal to your latest greatest AMD or Intel brain chip, right,
so qualifier there. So their researchers say their approaches bound us at the
stage for the creation of self evolving machines forever, change the legacy CPU design
flow, and reform the global semiconductor industry. Interesting, now, the CPU
these researchers, these nineteen researchers put together, which runs on an AI instruction
set named RISK and I presume ben they mean five, the Roman numeral five
risk five three two one A can successfully run Linux operating system kernel five point
one five And that's part of the reality check you just alluded to. According
to the researchers, it can perform comparably against a nineteen ninety one human design
Intel eighty four eighty six SX CPU. And again I had a little comment.
We've been saying that this is just the beginning, so we're not talking
about designing CPUs comparable to today's speedsters. And it's also important to note that
Ralph, you knows very well that when they design CPUs, it's up to
really like the software engineers and the software designers to then take full advantage of
that CPU. So you can't just take you know, a word processor or
even an operating system and say, okay, well it works on this CPU,
so we'll just throw it onto this CPU and see how it works,
you know, and compare the differences. No, like, you know,
the the developers hook it into the CPU and take advantage of the resources that
they have, So you can't just say, you know, compare one to
one when the software was designed for that CPU, but obviously not for this
new AI generated CPU. It's just not a good comparison to you know,
do power that way, but you can see where you know they're trying to
do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And again in the theme of
their honesty and their recognition that what we've done is we've created an AI based
process or a generated that would be from nineteen ninety one class okay. And
so what they do say though in their paper is the ultimate goal is to
beat the latest human design CPU. That's they really want to try to see
if they can develop this enough to the point where it could be comparable to
the latest greatest processors from AMD, Intel and everybody else while shaping the future
of computer. And then they have a quote from the paper. Our approach
reduces the design cycle by about a thousand times because the manual programming and verification
process I can tell you from my years it didn't tell that verification process is
non trivial. So the manual programming and verification process of traditional CPU design,
which consumes more than sixty to eighty percent of the design time and resources,
is completely eliminated they contend with their new AI based system. So pretty interesting.
They also said a little They said that that it takes humans about four
thousand, five hundred sixty hours or one hundred and ninety days to complete the
entire design of a traditional CPU such as the Intel. And they said K
for eighty six, that's a mistake. They mean the forty six eighty four
eighty six, which was announced by the way in Spring Condex on April the
tenth, nineteen eighty nine. And that's something. And the new AI generated
CPU of the paper states achieves an accuracy of ninety nine point ninety nine percent
for validation tests. That's impressive. While the physical design of the chip uses
scripts at sixty five nanometers technology to generate the layout for fabrication. Now more
reality checks here. The RISK five three two one A chip comes with a
frequency of three hundred mega hurts as compared to Intel's human made basically the latest
stuff of three point six gigahertz process or making it slower needless to say,
a process in computer commands. So again we're talking about something that's just the
beginning. Let's see how far they can push this. And a side note,
Today's Core I nine thirteen nine hundred K has a base frequency of three
point five kg hurts and a boost for a frequency of up to five point
three gigaherds. So when we're talking three hundred megahurts, it's laughably less speed.
But the implications are interesting. And to wrap it up here, the
researchers admit this. They're they're very clear about this, saying CPUs made using
AI model to perform worse than recent processors such as the Intel Core I seven
thirty nine thirty K, and they planned to boost the performance. Here's where
they're going. They plan to boost the performance of what they call it the
world's first automatically designed CPU by deploying more elaborate, elaborated augmented algorithms. So
right, you know, at the beginning there there there are so many caveats
that I'm surprised that they even release this paper. But um, you know,
like like one thing is it took five hours, Ralph, I guarantee
you they are. You know you you you've prompted AI before. You kind
of start with a prompt, you know, and you say, you know
you do this, you can refine it, you can you know, say
give me a story that does this with this, and then like as it
goes on, you add ad ad ad ad, and I guarantee like from
giving the prompt. Giving it five hours and spitting out a result is very
different than spending probably over a year developing that prompt and developing its input so
that it can give you a reasonably good output. So even though it took
them five hours, it really probably took them, you know, hundreds or
thousands of hours to even get to this point. Uh, not just that
five but I see what you mean. Yeah, yeah, you know,
to develop that, to develop that input accurately, you know, to to
really refine it. So you know, that's one thing I'm kind of looking
forward to, Ralph. If they kind of get this working. Um,
clearly you know they're gonna I'm sure by this point the schematics for old CPUs
are probably out there and it probably has access to the information. I'm curious,
Rolf, if they can use this, if they get it working well
enough, if we can feed at what Intel is doing right now, or
what AMD is doing right now or whoever, and you know, say,
hey, is there a way that we can improve this? And that's where
it gets kind of exciting in the short term, because we can you know,
maybe the AI will be able to say, oh, well let's try
this, and you know, we might get another breakthrough that is, you
know, pretty exciting rather than just a new CPU from the ground up that
an AI generated who knows, but but still very impressive and you know,
kudos to them they this, you know, like so much research that do
you bring on the show, Ralph, which is perfectly you know, good,
Um, this is step one of step fifty. But it's an important
step one. So yeah, right, and target with the trends part of
my corresponded job. Absolutely, so that story number three, Story number four,
let's go ahead and talk about this. Um. Yeah, you know,
starting before you traditionally save for um medical technology and today this week is
no different. And Medical Express what do they have? Yeah, this is
great Again. The source for this story is medical express dot com website and
in this case the story is based on a publication from the National Institute of
Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, so a very very prestigious group. Here the headline
is delivering oxygen to tumors. Really it's more specific, delivering oxygen to cancer
tumors may be a key in overcoming radiation therapy resistance. Radiation therapy resistance.
Now, cancer tumors, cancer cells have a radiation therapy resistance issue that these
folks are hoping to overcome. That's the essential thing of what's going on.
So let's get into this story. For most of our tissues and cells in
our body, of course, a lack of oxygen hypoxia, that's hypoxia,
is bad news. Well. Yeah, it's like if I didn't use my
CPAP machine at night they tested They tested me and said, Ralph, you
were not breathing for well over a minute or more and your brain is going
to get fried. And I said, yeah, my wife can tell you
that. So hypoxia, lacquer of oxygen for tissues and cells is obviously not
a good thing. Cancer cells, this I thought was fascinating. Cancer cells,
on the other hand, can thrive in these hypoxic conditions, which render
tumors less susceptible to anti cancer treatments, including radiation. That corollary there is
really I don't profess to fully understand the linkage there. Well, but it's
interesting. Yeah. The I mean, what immediately jumps to mind is if
there's no oxygen you know, going there, there's just less you know,
kind of not transition, there's less like transaction between other cell there's there's less
oxygen, less blood flu less movement of fluids and things like that. So
when you get your radiation treatment and you don't have that exchange that's happening as
much as other cells, so it's more resistant. You know, Ralphie,
you're just not doing as many you're not moving as much, you know,
medication, oxygen, blood an exactly, So that's harder to get there.
Right. Yeah, So again, this new research may offer a way to
break through cancer's hypoxia induced defenses. Just fascinating, I thought. So.
A team of researchers at Thomas Jefferson University and Drexel University. This team has
devised a strategy strategy pardon me, that combines ultrasound with microL bubbles to deliver
oxygen and cancer drugs to tumors. So it's this supercombo of oxygen and cancer
drugs to bombard the cancer's tumors. The results of their study published it published
in an outlet called Pharmaceutics, indicate that the method tested in mice, good
old mice, and rats thank you again, and pigs caused tumors to become
more valuable or pardon me, cause tumors to become more vulnerable to radiation therapy,
resulting in slowed tumor growth and increased survival of the patient. The researchers
suggests that with further development, their approach could be used to enhance the effectiveness
of radiation therapy in the clinic for a variety of cancers. And then it
goes on to say, here, hold on a second. According to John
Eisenbray, PhD, an associate professor of radiology at Thomas Jefferson University, quote,
at the moment, there's very little we can do on the clinical side
to overcome hypoxia. Again, that's the lack of oxygen for radiation therapy,
despite it being well known and a documented limitation. The hope is that a
more localized, more aggressive targeting of hypoxia like we've done here will overcome some
of that. And then finally, Margaret Wheatley, a PhD, a professor
or a biomedical engineering at Drexel University, added quote, Whenever I say we're
delivering oxygen to tumors, a lot of people say, well, that's crazy,
You're going to encourage them to grow. That's a natural lay person for
me too. I've thought that initially as well, giving them asources. Is
that good? Yeah? Yeah, how is that good? Well, it
turns out it's something that cancer doesn't like. But radiation therapy, which prevents
cancer cells from replicating, requires an ample supply of oxygen close by to be
effective, she explained. And again, friends, I don't profess to fully
understand this. I just love it, though, because it's another example of
how the war against cancer is being fought twenty four hour hours a day,
seven days a week around the globe. And we are going to get there
someday. I swear we will. That We'll leave you with an optimistic note
even if I don't fully understand it. No, we absolutely will. And
you know it, really, it's just these little breakthroughs in the treatment.
You know, more effective therapy is just ten percent here, five percent there.
You know, better odds of living another year, you know, little
by little, eventually you know, someone with cancer it's not a death sentence
anymore. It's just something that you have to get treated. So you know,
this is another one. And definitely you know, ultrasonic micro oxygen bubbles.
I didn't see it coming, Ralph, but you know, I never
really do with our segments here. So ladies, gentlemen, if you want
to find out more Computer America, we have a whole section dedicated to Ralph
and his segments and everyone until next time. Every Friday we'll catch it then
bye everyone, have you going