The Swimming Abilities of Dead Trout - DTNS 4921  ## Metadata - Author: [[Daily Tech News Show]] - Full Title: The Swimming Abilities of Dead Trout - DTNS 4921 - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/8e8a611e-7c44-429f-9c12-a07e714cb8b2 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Smart Glasses Notifications** - Meta plans to add displays to their Ray-Ban smart glasses in 2025, showing notifications and virtual assistant responses. - Consider if constant notifications are desirable, as many prefer minimizing distractions. Transcript: Tom Merritt The Financial Times sources say Meta plans to introduce a display to its Ray-Ban smart glasses, quote, as soon as next year. The display would be used to show you notifications and responses from the virtual assistant. So right now you can talk to it and it'll talk back. With this one, it could just show you something. Meta showed off an advanced display called Orion back in September, but that prototype is still considered too expensive to bring to market. This more limited version would be the way that Meta could bring some displays into its headgear. Google and Samsung are also working to make a device using Android XR that would work in a similar way. So it looks like more displays coming to smart glasses in 2025. On Threads, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said glasses will be the next major computing platform. We've already talked a lot about on DTNS, like, do you want to wear your computer on your face? But Nikki, we haven't asked you, would you like to wear your computer on your face? Niki Ackermans So I have notifications disabled on my smartwatch, so I probably wouldn't get an extra device to put them on my face. I'm too distractible. But as usual, I recognize the benefits to that. And I will say, I don't know if maybe I'm not old enough, but this is the first like wearable on your head thing that I've seen out in the wild. I was at a conference recently and I saw someone using these as their everyday glasses. So maybe they're actually one of these that's actually going to work. Or I mean, I guess they are working since we're getting a 2.0 soon. Tom Merritt I have the first version of them. They do look like normal glasses. The second version look even more like normal glasses than the first version. They're even not quite as thick as the first version. I assume that the third version is going to get even more glasses looking. I think one of the reasons people like them, and they really like the version twos quite a bit, is that going they are unobtrusive, right? You can talk to it when you want to. You can press the button to film when you want to, but otherwise they're just glasses. And I wonder if notifications is something no one really wants. Whereas lots of people leave notifications on on their phone. I'm like you. I turn notifications off in as many places as possible. I have as few of them as possible, but not everybody's like that. And if you were to have notifications constantly flipping up in your view, I imagine that would be a detraction. It would be a... Niki Ackermans Yeah. I also note that being on the other side of those and looking at someone where you can see the little camera um feels weird it's like am i always being filmed i don't know uh i didn't really Tom Merritt Like that but i guess you could just ignore it eventually they do have a light that comes on uh they have worked to try to make the light more visible so that you know when someone's taking A photo or taking a video but but yeah uh that, that is a concern for these. Uh, I do think that while it's fun to poke fun at meta and be like, Oh, you're not doing a metaverse. You're doing glasses. Glasses are the next major computing platform. I think this is a step down the road to something that would one day be the metaverse, right? Niki Ackermans If they could put VR metaverse into them, they, they would, I'm sure they're eventually going to work on that. Tom Merritt Yeah. And the way you get there is step by step. So having any kind of display in the glasses, whether it's for notifications or whether it's for something else, I think is useful. I would be curious if it's capable of doing more than just showing you a message. So let's assume you turn notifications off. You're left with, it could show you the answer to your question instead of reading it to you. And maybe you prefer that. That doesn't seem like a killer feature to me, but okay. Can it show me arrows when I'm doing navigation? Niki Ackermans That's what I want. Yeah, navigation or like subtitles on a movie. Live translation would be another application for this um if i'm sure this is a baby step towards integrating other things into the you know the little visualization that you have on Your head um could could be cool is it selling to people who don't normally use glasses i don't know i well it's definitely selling better than a lot of people expected. Tom Merritt And by that respect, it is selling well. I don't know how many people who don't need glasses are buying them. You can put just clear glass in them and wear them that way. But they are. And sunglasses, right? Yeah. And you can get them as sunglasses. So a lot of people would want them that way. But, you know, you're not always going to have sunglasses on. I mean, sure. There are the Corey hearts of the world who wear their sunglasses at night, but, but most of us don't. So, uh, you know, that does limit their usage. I, I do think that Zuckerberg's probably not far off that by the end of next year, when you go into the optometrist, not in all cases, but in a lot of cases, they'll be like, you know, here Are the basic frames. Here are the ones with polarization and anti-glare and here are the smart, smart ones. They'll have a section. They'll have a section. Niki Ackermans Of course. Why not? And it looks like Android's working on this too and Samsung. So let's, let's get at it. Let's see what the competitors are bringing in and, and yeah, maybe for your yearly predictions, you should have thrown glasses in there. Tom Merritt You know, I did that. I did predict that, uh, on the top five, uh, but, but Nikki is looking into the future to our predictions episode at the end of this month. And, uh, it sounds like I won't do that on the predictions. Interesting. Yeah. Niki Ackermans Just a hunch. Tom Merritt Even though you're telling me and there's time for me to change my prediction, by the time the show comes out, I probably will have forgotten. But yeah, I don't think I ended up doing that in our predictions episode, but I probably should. And I will be looking for these sorts of things at CES with an eye toward what's differentiating them. Last year, there were a lot of companies doing them. And so it was fun to be like, oh, there's this company, Xreal. They've got very compelling glasses that are competitive. Meta, of course, gets the marketing boost because it's meta. And they also have to partner with somebody like Luxottica that makes the Ray-Ban brands. I'll be interested to see if Xreal or any of the other smaller makers are pushing the envelope on features. If they're putting displays in these, what do their displays do? What else are they going to have these things do? Because I do think this is an area for a fertile ground, to put it. Niki Ackermans Yeah, you can get creative with this, especially if you've got teams competing against each other. So I say, go ahead. Someone mentioned wearing sunglasses at night. Let's throw night vision in there while we're at it. ([Time 0:08:34](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ebf8b165-91fb-4ba1-9511-3069f7c4b207)) - **Exoskeleton Advancements** - KAIST developed an exoskeleton enabling paraplegics to walk, climb stairs, and navigate obstacles. - It uses sensors to anticipate movements and lenses for object recognition, potentially improving mobility. Transcript: Tom Merritt This next story is actually putting us into Iron Man's universe. The exoskeleton laboratory team at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, or KAIST in Daejeon, has developed a lightweight wearable exoskeleton that helped a paraplegic Patient walk, including climbing a staircase and avoiding obstacles, particularly able to slide in between a narrow space between two benches and sit down. Paraplegic Kim Sung-Hwan, who demonstrated the device, is also part of the KAIST team that developed it. The exoskeleton can actually walk on its own, so it can come to the patient and then help them put it on. It kind of clamps down on them, and then that helps them stand up, and then they latch it in. It's called the Walk-On Suit F1, made of titanium and aluminum, weighs about 50 kilograms, so that's 110 pounds. Sensors on the sides and upper body monitor signals at a thousand times per second to anticipate intended movements. We were looking really hard to figure out exactly how it does it. All we could find is that it somehow uses the balance. So it may just be reading the balance of the person operating it. It also has some lenses on the front to help it identify objects and stairs so it can shift into stair climbing mode when necessary, but certainly not the first exoskeleton ever, but Able to do some interesting things that exoskeletons aren't always able to do. Niki Ackermans Yeah, I thought this one was interesting. It seems like we have a very futuristic DTNS today. Yeah, right. And the fact that this was developed as part of this kind of like exoskeleton Olympiad where they develop these specific challenges, like you said, scooting in between a bench to test These machines. It's pretty neat. I love when the target population for something like this, which is in all essence, like in, you know, a disability aid or a movement aid, that population is actually included in developing The tool. I think that usually tends to make the tool a lot better. So that's really exciting to see. And yeah, an interesting aspect about how it responds to the person's balance with sensors on the inside and sensors on the outside to help them kind of move forward and do all these different Movements. I think it looks like the man that was in that video also had somewhat of a controller. We're not quite sure. Tom Merritt Yeah, there was some remote on the side and we don't know how much that is involved in operating it, whether it's just, you know, pushing it forward or whether it can guide it a little bit. But it definitely has all those sensors to maintain its balance. And that is the other thing in the video, you know, you see him using one of the canes to like, try to knock the thing over before he puts it on to show like it can maintain its own balance really Well. Yeah. Niki Ackermans And another innovation of this was that it comes over and like hitches onto the front of the person. Apparently a lot of the other exoskeletons kind of work from the back. And that I can imagine is really helpful with balance because you can like put your weight on it and move forward and kind of just let it support you in that way. I don't know how that works with comfort, but it's interesting to see a different perspective on that. Tom Merritt Yeah. I did not see anything about how comfortable this is or how long you would want to be in, in one of these. This is very much about the technology for balance and precision. So, you know, a lot of exoskeletons can't climb stairs. This isn't the first one, but there aren't as many that are capable of that. And I think one of the things they were touting is it probably doesn't sound as impressive as it is, you know, the ability to move to the side, to be able to move to the side without falling Over, you know, and then be able to sit down on a bench. In practice, you know, think of how many kinds of seats, theater seats, subway seats, you know, things where you need to be able to do that. You need to like slide into a small space. Niki Ackermans I mean, even in the human body, that's a lot of micro movements and coordinated muscles and sensory feedback that's involved in those kinds of things that you don't think about when You do them. But once you can't do them, it becomes really, really complicated. So I'm assuming a lot of engineering is involved in just being able to do that. And I think they said that they have some kind of integration with AI for detecting objects. I'm sure that comes into this kind of, like you said, different seat height detection. So yeah, cool innovation here from KIST. ([Time 0:15:38](https://share.snipd.com/snip/efa85765-068b-44b7-88f2-d0718919161d)) - **Blue Zone Records** - Saul Justin Newman found many "blue zone" longevity claims are based on poor record-keeping. - Accurate birth and death records are crucial for valid scientific research. Transcript: Tom Merritt Now, probably everybody in the audience knows about the Nobel Prize, the awards given to individuals who work for the benefit and advancement of humankind. But maybe fewer of you know about the Ig Nobel Prize, 10 awards given to unusual scientific research. Dr. Nikki, you thought it was a good time at the end of the year, since we already talked about the Nobel Prize, to look back on the Ig Nobel Prizes. First of all, tell what those are. Niki Ackermans Yeah. So these were awarded back in September. They're, you know, I don't think considering the Nobel Prize episode we did, I don't think I'm in the running for a Nobel Prize, but I think I might be able to one day get an Ig Nobel Prize. Someone just has to nominate me. Yeah. Basically, it's kind of a pun about the Nobel Prize, although the Nobel Prize is somewhat involved. It is an honor that so you get an award. The goal is that first the science makes people laugh and then actually think. That's kind of the main thing. They're all the science has to be legitimate. These are not like science is legitimate. Yeah. These are real publications. And it basically someone either they're self nominated or someone sees this and is like, wow, that's really, you know, they found something out, but it is kind of silly on the face of It. And so they get nominated. I think there were 10,000 nominations this year. All right. Tom Merritt Let's run through some of your favorites. The theme of the 2024 ceremony was Murphy's Law. If anything can go wrong, it will. So that sets the table quite well. Who won for the physics prize? Niki Ackermans Yeah, so I put this one first because it's my favorite. James Liao of Harvard won for demonstrating and explaining the swimming abilities of dead trout. Of dead trout. Tom Merritt Yeah. Niki Ackermans Okay. So this one is great. Basically i was able to show that live fish don't actually need to move their muscles very much um so by putting dead fish in specific stream conditions and using a system that measures Muscle response to simulation called ectromyography ectromyography sorry basically it's the wake of the stream where these trout swim up that propulses their body because it's A specific foil shape. You actually don't almost need to produce any energy. You just reuse the energy of the current. So by using dead fish and making them able to do this, it shows that live fish don't really need that much energy to do it. Wait he was able to have the dead fish swim upstream yeah so in in like an artificial tank but basically they created movement the dead fish didn't move but because of the turbulence in The tank it propulsed them okay all right because of the specific shape of their body kind of like how you see a canoe like stuck in the rapids but it it doesn't it moves like the water's Rushing past it but it's not going anywhere yeah there you go something like that i'm not a physicist but that's about it um and and this is really like silly and funny findings you kind Of see the theme of how these prizes go but now we understand better about hydrodynamics and how you can make things move efficiently in specific water like systems so pretty cool all Right let's move on to the egg nobel i was a nobel prize for chemistry uh yes so this was a team of researchers from the university of amsterdam and they developed a technique to tell about Tell apart drunk worms from sober worms hold on Why? Tom Merritt How does a worm get drunk? How do you know? Niki Ackermans Oh, you just put it in alcohol. Tom Merritt Well, okay. Won't that preserve it? Niki Ackermans Well, I'm sure there's some kind of dilution involved. Do they have little breathalyzers for the worm? Yeah, this is a worm breathalyzer. The goal wasn't really to get the worms drunk as much as so this is really you have to put yourself in the mind of a chemist okay they're interested in how different size polymers are transported Based on their size okay this is done the technique is called chromatography and they just figured well, some polymers are actually active on their own. So what would be a good model for something that's active on its own? A worm. And a worm is basically to a chemist, a giant polymer. So if you have to, you want to figure out if the activity of the worm is messing with how it can be transported in a medium. And how do you mess with the activity of a locomotion? You make something drunk. This is their thought process. So what they did is in a chromatograph, you have basically a geometric array. It's on a microscopic scale, a bunch of little poles, kind of like a maze. And they let these worms pass through this array. And some of the worms, they intoxicated. They gave them a bit of ethanol just so that they would maybe have a slower activity rate. And then they made the worms race each other. So they raced the drunk worms against the sober worms. And surprise, they found that the level of activity of the worms does determine how they're sorted as a polymer in chromatography. So less activity, you're sorted differently than more activity. And then they can translate this to other instances, maybe not worms, but active polymers. Tom Merritt So this was not, let's get half the worms drunk and see who wins the race. This was, let's see how they sort out at the end or is it yeah yeah but the the non-drunk worms did win yeah i would guess they would which is what you would expect but it yeah it's kind of how Niki Ackermans They sort out like is moving erratically or moving slower affecting the way that sorting happens in a chromatic graph okay all right um i'm not sure i 100 understand but i i sort of i get Tom Merritt It and of course like everyone else i'm imagining a little like free free worm beer bar for half the worms they also dyed the worms blue and red for like each team so that they could tell Them so they could tell them apart interesting but now they wouldn't have to now they could look at the sorting and know without having to dye them which is kind of kind of idea. All right, let's go for the Ig Nobel Prize for Medicine. Niki Ackermans This one's great, and I'm really glad I wasn't a participant in this experiment. But a team from the University of Hamburg in Germany did a test on 77 participants to demonstrate that fake medicine with painful side effects is more effective than fake medicine without Painful side effects. Tom Merritt So wait, the medicine's fake, but it can do something to you. And in some cases it hurts. Niki Ackermans So it's basically an expansion on the placebo effect. Let me explain. Tom Merritt Okay. Niki Ackermans So placebo effect being that you take something that you're told it's a medicine, and so you believe you are feeling better, and then you actually do feel better. Tom Merritt Right, right. Niki Ackermans And so in this case, they had participants spray what they called a pain medicine into their nose, although it was a placebo, it was just saline. And one group actually ([Time 0:22:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/39f8a022-ba82-4d74-b81d-ae328c0dc0a4))