if there is any critter on the planet that I love. I can't even say that because as those words were coming out of my mouth, I thought, what about the anglerfish? The anglerfish is so cool, but the hagfish, oh my gosh, the hagfish is cool. Okay, look at it. First of all, it's got this creepy face. It does have a cranium, but it does not have vertebrae yet, but it does have a notochord. And look at how it can tie itself in knots. That actually will help you remember that we don't have vertebrae yet. So let's go back to our cladogram and make sure that we add in our hagfish. The hagfish has a cranium.  And then I just have to tell you, I know I've told you this before and I can't help it. It's like one of the coolest things like ever. This is a hagfish. They make slime. Now, all boys in this video, they decided to go ahead and electrocute this hagfish. The hagfish is not dead and it's not being tortured. It's just anesthetized. And they electrocute it just a little bit and you'll see that when they electrocute it, it kind of makes like glue.  Okay, so here they are. I didn't put the sound on because it's kind of irritating, but here's the little electrocution. Aw, poor little buddy gets electrocuted. You see the glue? There it is. I mean, that's not very much glue. Throw that stuff in some water. Mix, mix, mix.  Now, look, here's their fancy slime slimer. What is that thing? And who are these people? Now, look, the slime glory day of ever slimy. What? No, no, that's not possible. That holy slime. What? And people eat that stuff. What happened to all the water, dog? Show us the water beaker. No water left. The water is gone. The water turned entirely to slime. And yes, indeed, you can eat that. It's an egg white substitute.  And so they have to like do the best they can and the more the critter is, what's the word, disintegrating, decaying because it's dead, then the easier it is for the hagfish to yumpshelize it.  Like this is crazy talk. And the other thing that's really cool about hagfish, you can fish for them, you can go hagfish hunting. And so you take a bucket and you drill some holes in it and then you put like some gnarly, disgusting, rotting death meat into it and then you throw it over the edge of the ocean into the water and let it sink to the bottom. Leave it there for a little while. The hagfish are like, hmm, that smells really yummy.   You have to be really careful because when you reel them in, if you like shake the bucket at all, then they're going to go, oh crap! And what are they going to produce? Slime.  And then what happens to them? They can't breathe anymore and they drown. They drown in their own slime because they can't get any oxygen from the slime. They can't breathe the slime. So it's a sad story. You don't want to suffocate your hagfish. They're also called slime eels. You don't want to suffocate them. So be nice to them if you're going to go fishing for them and maybe they will make some slime for you. I really want some hagfish slime someday. So if anybody goes fishing for hagfish and they want to get some slime out, I want to see it. All right, that was awesome. Now we're going to go. Now we're going to get vertebrae. I think that's our next characteristic that's coming. So let's look at some vertebrates and see, let's flesh out our whatever this thing is, the cladogram a little bit more. It's kind of hard to get cooler than hagfish, but we'll try.


Good morning, I'd like to thank Debbie and the conference planning committee for inviting me to speak today I wish I could be there in person, but I'm happy to participate in this virtual environment My talk today will be on Clamplis cardioplegia Technique that we utilize at Cincinnati Children's Hospital. I have no disclosures I'll be talking about the development of a Clamplis cardioplegia protocol and the use of this technique on six patients between 2016 and 2019. The one thing that all of these patients had in common is that they were all very complex patients who were unable to be cross-clamped with conventional technique The inability to use a cross-clamp, especially if you realize it during the dissection process of a nine-time redo, presents a unique and difficult situation We founded our institution We need to utilize various methods of delivery as well as a rest solution in order to optimize the surgical repair for our patient Clamplis or systemic cardioplegia may not be the most elegant form of cardioplegia in your toolbox But it's great to have when the aortic cannot be cross-clamped or the risks of doing so outweigh the benefits I think you'll all agree that our patients have evolved along with our surgical techniques They're presenting to the cardiaco are sicker than ever before The patients in our practice at Cincinnati Children's Hospital over the last year and a half have been some of the most complex patients I've seen in the 36 years I've been in perfusion Cross-clamping the aorta is not a benign process It can lead to immediate or late aortic dissection or rupture as indicated in the literature Although the documented incidence is relatively low We all know that when it happens it can be catastrophic And the law of the lever states that the tissue near the hinge of the cross clamp is under more stress Than the tissue that's distal to the hinge and this unequal pressure distribution Is what occurs that injures the native aorta or the neo aortas In 2016 a patient presented to our institution whose pathology made it impossible to apply a standard cross-clamp and cardioplegia technique It was necessary to arrest the heart and perform D-pipal thermic circulatory arrest without cross-clamping the aorta The clampless cardioplegia technique had never been attempted at our institution But our lead surgeon had used it at another facility This process has become affectionately referred to at our institution as san quentin cardioplegia And in order to utilize this new technique our team developed a task force to develop a process That included a team of pharmacists cardiac surgeons and perfusionists We created a pharmacy order set and an algorithm for calculating the dose the induction dose of systemic cardioplegia The induction dose is simply 0.02 mil equivalents of kcl times the patient's total circulating volume Which as we all know is circulating blood volume plus the prime volume in the pump That will equate to a serum potassium level of 20 mil equivalents per liter And when you add the patient's existing serum potassium level to this you approximate the 26 mil equivalent per liter concentration that most cardioplegic solutions have today And the final concentration of solution is prepared in one mil equivalent per ml doses and put into 60 ml syringes The epic order set was created and it was created so that you could not pull up the order set by typing in common terms like cardioplegia Or potassium chloride you could only access it by typing clampless cardioplegia And this was a safety mechanism put in place to prevent it from accidentally being ordered for a patient and Prevented a lethal dose of cardioplegia to be given The order can only be placed by an attending cardiac surgeon who has to include the patient circulating blood volume information The prime volume and the requested dose of potassium chloride A verbal order can be placed in emergencies and when the order comes in to pharmacy They verify the dosage and a backup dosage is prepared along with every induction dose in the event that we need to give an additional amount of cardioplegia during the case The dose cannot be picked up But cannot be delivered anywhere in the hospital. It can only be picked up by a perfusion since we are Really aware of what the solution is and how lethal it can be if not given to a patient on bypass The dose is verified again between the primary and backup perfusions in the operating room The primary dose is kept on the pump and the backup dose is stored in the perfusion cart Out of the way, so it won't be accidentally picked up and used on another patient accidentally So the delivery process is typically we will cool the patient to the desired temperature a lot of times It's 18 degrees all ultra filtration is discontinued immediately after Administering the dose in order to not decrease the systemic concentration of potassium chloride And the full dose of systemic cardioplegia is given into the pump manifold After the heart arrest and the kcl as well distributed Deep hypothermic circulatory arrest is usually initiated So I have a set of two slides for each patient that i'm going to present And I want to describe what information is on each slide as i'll have to run through the information fairly quickly in order to meet the Time requirements for this talk The first slide which is this one Describes the patient diagnosis the prior surgical history and the clampless surgical procedure The second slide in each series outlines the cardioplegia dose The fluctuation in potassium concentrations and the dilutional ultra filtration volumes that we Remove to manipulate the final serum potassium concentration As well as the bypass on off and muff time So this is our first patient It was a fourth time redo on a three month old 3.9 kilogram female Who had an original diagnosis of hypoplastic left heart with aortic and mitral atresia Prior surgeries included a norwood with a santo shunt and due to worsening sinosis the santo shunt was revised nine days After the initial norwood and then there was an emergent conversion to a bt shunt with continuing hypoxia and desaturations Which led us to schedule the clampless procedure six days later Which was a revision of a bt shunt to a central shunt And the reason for the clampless procedure on this case was that the surgeon had to sew the proximal end of the central shunt To the ascending neo aorta and there physically wasn't enough room to do that and place a cross clamp So for this procedure, we gave 10 mil equivalents of kcl administered through the manifold to the patient After reaching 18 degrees and this resulted in immediate arrest followed by 18 minutes of depipothermic circulatory arrest Now in this second slide, you'll see that in the upper right hand corner will be the bypass times Circular rest times integrates ruble times the green bars on the left will show cardioplegia Concentrations the fluctuation serum potassium and the dilution ultrafiltration volumes that we removed during the course of bypass on the graph itself the blue columns represent the potassium concentrations and it's graduated to the left vertical axis and the Fluctuation fluctuations in ultrafiltration that were removed is this gold line, which is graduated against the right Vertical access the prior to arrest on this patient the potassium was 2.5 millimoles per liter The blood gas was drawn after Circular rest that showed the potassium increase to 6.5 millimoles per liter Which was a 2.6 increase from the baseline value We utilized dilution ultrafiltration routinely during the entire course of bypass on all of our patients and the routine wash solution that we utilize Is plasma light a with 20 mil equivalents of bicarb and 200 milligrams of calcium chloride added per liter In extreme cases of hyperkalemia and hypernatremia. We utilize normal saline or half normal saline to control those electrolyte levels Duff was started on this patient after the Circulatory arrest period during the rewarming phase We removed 2100 ml of total effluent which was six and a quarter times the patient circulating blood volume during two hours of bypass That resulted in a potassium value of 3.9 millimoles per liter after modified ultrafiltration And the cardioplegia administer during the case will be Visualized by a drop down arrow from the top Our second patient was the first patient after the clampless policy was in place. The patient was a 28 year old 70 kilogram female This patient was also the fourth patient in this series Her original diagnosis was a type 1 trunkus Prior surgeries included eight sternotomies Three neo aortic valve replacements five RV to pa heterographed and oligraft conduit replacements and a trans catheter rpa span The reason for the clampless procedure Was the patient presented with a pulsatile mass and the super sternal notch Due to a large pseudo aneurysm that originated from the distal anastomosis of the previous ascending aortic cortex graft The location of the pseudo aneurysm made it impossible to cross plant the aorta So this was a ninth time reduced sternotomy for resection of the ascending aortic pseudo aneurysm The patient was cooled to 18 degrees and administered 110 mili equivalent of spasm chloride, which caused a full arrest within one minute This was followed by three periods of circa rest and two periods of anigrate cerebral perfusion over the next two hours on bypass An additional half dose of del nido cardioplegia, which is indicated by the yellow area The yellow arrow The half dose was 10 mls per kilo of del nido was administered 122 minutes after the clampless dose The serum potassium rose from 3.8 to greater than 14 millimoles per liter and the post muff Potassium was 4.1 the total potassium delivered on this patient was 125 mil equivalents And we removed almost eight liters of fluid through delusional ultrafiltration Which was almost two times the patient circulating blood volume during 4.2 hours on bypass Patient number three was a nine kilogram one year old male with two prior sternotomy His original diagnosis was a dorv with a v transposition sub pulmonary dsd and an interrupted aortic arch Prior surgeries were a repair an arterial switch repair a dorv with aortic arch repair and direct anastomosis of the interrupted aortic arch This was done at an outside hospital that Resulted in a very short aorta with the coronaries implanted very high on the aortic root And this was a reason for utilizing a clampless cardioplegia solution on this patient because there was no room to apply a clamp The clampless procedure was a third time reduced sternotomy tubular extension of the ascending aorta LPA and mpa plasty rbot work and a bsd enclosure We cooled this patient to 18 degrees At the heart arrested within seconds after the clampless dose with 20 mil equivalents And that was followed by three periods of hypothermic circulatory rest in one period of anagrade cerebral perfusion So on this patient, uh, there were osteal doses of del nido cardioplegia Given after the clampless dose of 25 mls per per kilo total And this was given 66 minutes after the clampless induction followed by 10 mls per kilo a half dose of anagrade del nido two hours later Serum potassium rose from 4.1 to 9.5 And the post muff k was 4.4 with the final serum potassium in the or being 3.3 Prior to transport to the icu the total potassium delivered on this patient was 26 mil equivalents And we removed four liters of effluent, which was five and a quarter times the patient circulating blood volume during five hours on bypass patient number four Was a 69 year old 29 69 kilogram 29 year old female with nine prior sternotomies The original diagnosis was a type one trunkus and the patient was also our second patient in this series The reason for the clampless procedures the patient had endocarditis with vegetations on our aortic valve And there was no clear indication of how far they extended up into the ascending aorta So the surgeon did not want to clamp the aorta and risk embolizing the patient Um, it was a tenth time reduced sternotomy Bental procedure Exposition of handcock RV to pa conduit and reconstruction RPA intravascular scent removal and an rca coronary arterial plastic We cooled this patient to 18 degrees and administered the clampless dose of 110 mil equivalents of kcl causing a full arrest However, there was return of a minor h rel activity within two minutes So then additional half dose which was 60 mil equivalent Was given causing complete and sustained arrest and this was followed by nine periods of depipothermic circulatory arrest So as you can tell from this graph, this was a crazy case for us Uh, the patient received a total of 2.5 doses of clampless cardioplegia Which equaled a total of 280 mil equivalents of kcl There were three osteal and two anograde doses of del nido cardioplegia For a total of an additional 80 mil equivalents of potassium chloride for a grand total of 360 mil equivalents Of potassium chloride given to the patient over almost eight hours of bypass The serum potassium rose from 3.6 to 9.0 after the first one and a half doses of clampless And the highest serum potassium was 11.4 after the second full clampless dose and the first anograde dose of del nido cardioplegia The post muff potassium was 6.9 and the last serum potassium in the operating room prior to transport to the icu was 5.7 millimoles per liter For the delusional ultrafiltration data, we removed a whopping 16 and a half liters of effluent from this case Which equaled four times the patient circulating blood volume And to give you an idea of what the wash solution was that we used on this particular patient because the amount of passing was so excessive The 16 and a half liters included nine liters of normal saline 3.3 liters of half normal saline 5.2 liters of plasma life over a 7.8 hour pump run Patient number five was a frequent flyer with our program and went on to have an abo incompatible transplant Three months later. It was a 6.6 kilogram four-month-old patient with three prior sternotomies The original diagnosis was a complex single ventricle DILV with a d transposition co-arctation of the aorta and the patient also had a hyper coagulable state Prior surgeries included a norwood procedure with a dt shunt The patient had several thrombotic shunt occlusions and e cpr recovery with an av echmo run and multiple spence bt shunt There was an eventual bidirectional blend done with a subsequent cervical av fistula created in response to continued hypoxia In the patient after the bidirectional gland had been completed The reason for the clampless procedure was the surgeon could not clamp the neoreaorta and the clampless cardioplegia was ordered By a verbal order from the surgeon while dissecting 40 minutes prior to initiating bypass So it was really important in this particular Patient that we were able to place a verbal order because we were not planning on doing it at the start of the case The surgical procedure was the third time reduced sternotomy for a failed glen physiology a take down bidirectional gland rpa and sbc reconstruction and the implantation of a right modified bt shunt We cooled this patient to 30 degrees and 16 mill equivalents of kcl was used to arrest the heart There was no additional cardioplegia given besides the clampless dose the serum potassium rose from 2.7 to 14 The post muff serum potassium was 5.4 And the final serum potassium in the o r prior to transport to the icu was 4.9 millimoles per liter Ultra filtration we removed four times the circulating blood volume during three and a half hours on bypass And finally our last patient patient number six was an 80 year old 80 kilogram excuse me 52 year old patient Female patient with five prior sternotomies the original diagnosis was tetralogy of flow And her prior surgeries included a palliation with a waterson shunt at two months of age Which ended up being the main reason she required a clampless procedure This palliation made the order spiff and immobile and it could not be dissected and freed up circumferentially To accommodate a cross clamp The patient had a complete TET repair at four years of age three additional RVOT repairs at 7 10 and 41 years of age and at 51 years of age She had a melody valve placed which six months later nearly completely occluded With vegetations from endocarditis putting her into acute right heart failure with sepsis and hypoxia So her clampless procedure was an emergent six-time reduced sternotomy She was placed on femoral bypass prior to the sternotomy to decompress the heart Cooled the patient to 18 degrees and administered 108 mil equivalents of pacl There was an immediate arrest followed by 31 minutes of depipothermic circulatory arrest The serum potassium on this patient increased two and a quarter times from 4.1 to 9.0 The post-month serum potassium was 5.2 And the final serum potassium in the OR was 4.3 prior to transport From a dilution ultrafiltration standpoint, excuse me We removed 7.7 liters of effluent which was 1.75 times her circulating blood volume during five hours and 41 minutes of bypass So in summary the average increase in serum potassium with our clampless cardioplegia process was 3.1 times the patient's baseline value in the operating room All serum potassium values were within normal ranges at the end of modified ultrafiltration Except for one outlier the 6.9 value This was a patient that received an excessive 360 mil equivalents of kcl during bypass And even this patient's value was within normal ranges prior to leaving the operating room for transport to the icu And none of the patients showed any significant potassium rebound The increase is 24 hours post-op from the baseline values in the operating room So in summary, there are a wide variety of cardioplegia formulations and strategies that are available with really no optimal formula That's well defined for every surgeon in every surgical situation We feel at Cincinnati Children's Hospital that you need to integrate various methods of cardioplegia Delivery as well as different myocardial preservation solutions in order to optimize the surgical repair for our patients This series of patients showed no cardiac functional change by post-op echo and there were no perioperative complications to report The use of this technique has allowed us to successfully operate On patients at our facility that would have been considered inoperable with other more conventional techniques. Thank you very much


So it's a little intimidating having to follow all the great speakers that have been up here so far But I'll do my best now. You're supposed to I took the seminars on how to speak in front of people and they tell you that You know I always have to start with humor So what I want you to do is to think of your favorite joke We are conscious and conscious of what it is first a little bit of the evidence from Neuroscience, you know how we know what the brain does and that the brain it was probably involved in consciousness and then about philosophy especially modern Deniers that the brain causes consciousness and I'm going while I'm talking about that I'm going to draw analogies to creationism because the denial of my field especially of neuroscience the denial that we are really Just those five pounds of meat inside of our skulls is a form of creationism So some little philosophical background before really very recently in modern science. We really have no idea You know what the seed of consciousness was and so the ancient philosophers really classical and medieval philosophers thought that We were really possessed by spirits that we were a physical entity in the physical world Our intellect and our consciousness were Not physical with spiritual Plato said that we are a soul imprisoned in a body There's a ton of philosophical terms that go before the word dualism I'm not going to get into substance dualism versus that kind of dude. It's crazy So I'm just gonna use a couple of basic Plato's time what they thought that the actual thinking was was spiritual that The all is the stuff that we now could really see pretty in a pretty reductionist way that the brain does was actually a spiritual thing Not not physical so calculation perception memory That's classical and up to medieval time and we get to more of the Renaissance time René Descartes You know, obviously consciousness philosopher. I think therefore I am and he he Came up with more of a consciousness dualism So not that he said okay the thinking the memory all that kind of basic stuff at your brain But your consciousness your subjective experience of existing of yourself. That's what's not physical. That's spiritual That is something separate kind of substance. It's just not matter. It's something else That kind of dualism which is the kind of dualism dualism going to be talking about Pretty much for the rest of the talk is referred to as Cartesian dualism after René Descartes So on the track, we have a guy in a row We have some Renaissance looking guy and we get to modern philosophers and we have surfer dude Talk to somebody who is a Cartesian dualist or any kind of dualist they go yeah But there's David Chalmers hard problem. You can't get around that So he separated the easy problem from the hard problem of neuroscience Which is the same thing as intellect versus consciousness the easy problems not that they're technically easy But they're conceptually easy in that yeah, you know, we can see how different parts of the brain are doing different things When you're smelling a rose that's going to the smell part of your brain and when you're seeing something That's going to the visual part of your brain and even emotions and okay Sure different parts of the brain do different stuff and we can break it down But why do we experience what the brain is doing? What is the subjective component to it? Why aren't we just what he calls zombies doing everything that we're doing but just not experiencing it? And he that that's what philosophy called quality a quality is that why is there a quality to something? Why is red red? Why do we experience it that way? What's really interesting is that? Modern Cartesian dualists have started using David Chalmers to defend their position The hard problem, but Chalmers is not a Cartesian dualist. He Completely rejects Cartesian dualism.  It's still a problem of neuroscience. He advocates Can't reduce consciousness to brain function There's something else happening that's fundamental law of nature that we have to figure out and that that's where consciousness is I don't buy it. I don't think he's right But he is trying to figure out a naturalistic way to an explanatory model of dualism But it's really I love it when the Cartesian dualists go we have a David Chalmers thinks you're an ass I like using Randy to defend ESP Deepak Chopra Is the woo master He has sort of an Eastern philosophy of dualism he and others and he's but I think it's been most prominent in the media Absolute anti-materialist Cartesian dualist right materialism cannot explain a lot of stuff including consciousness He mixes in Eastern Businessism with that they some of the Eastern philosophers dualists call Something that substrate consciousness meaning that there's consciousness in the substrate of the universe and we are just expression of that So there's our consciousness always existed and it just manifests in this physical form They go back to the substrate after we die, but the conscious always exists and it's something non-physical or non-material and Also, for whatever reason the Eastern dualists really like to defend their flavor of woo by invoking quantum mechanics Because you know it's pretty safe for them to do that nobody understands So they can throw out those terms and easily confuse a lot of people because that's what they want to do They want to confuse people because that way they can substitute their their belief system for actual for actual science So I'm a neuroscientist, so I'm going to talk about the brain for a bit. It's actually like neuroscience That's the brain by the way So brain anatomy, which is really cool There's a lot of Independent lines of evidence that tell us that consciousness is the brain.  I'm still waiting right for some phenomenon that is a mental phenomenon That is separate from the physical operation of the brain now Deepak Chopra says. Yeah, there's ESP reincarnation and clairvoyance But there isn't anything real, right?  I'm like, they're Disinhibited right?  And it's amazing that the personality changes is the personalities the brain to as much as we don't like to really think that way It's really just the meat talking to itself Different states of consciousness correlate with different brain states now I know for a fact that everyone in this room has experienced an altered state of consciousness at some time in their life It's called dreaming Sleep itself on a stage of sleep when you're dreaming you're still you it's still your brain activity, but it's weird It's your dreaming you your brains functioning differently different bits of your brain are active when you're dreaming And some kids which are active like reality testing when you're awake are Underactive or not active when you're dreaming. So that's why stuff makes sense to you when you're dreaming But then it doesn't make sense to you when you wake up and try to remember your dream So now your reality testing module is engaged. Well, that doesn't make sense. Why did I think that made sense? Well, because you were in an altered state of consciousness and guess what you're that state correlated with a different brain state So if the lines of correlation are triangulating We turn off the brain you turn off the mind as these geologists have a lot of experience You'll turn off the brain if they were The mind does not survive the death of the brain for you to say yeah, but this is all correlation That's technically logically true, but with only one possible answer. It's still pretty good scientific evidence But we can do better than that, right? I can You know specifically turn off a piece of the brain and Turn off a mental function and we can do that now without damper permanently damaging the brain We used to do by injecting drugs in the half one side of the brain or the other we still do that But now we can do it with magnetic Magnetic ways you can induce a magnetic field which will temporarily turn off a part of your brain And guess what that part of your brain no longer functions your consciousness changes We can induce out-of-body experiences at will. Isn't that awesome? They can make you feel like you're floating outside your body just like people do when they have near-death experiences or other sort of Interpreted as paranormal experiences or sometimes using certain pharmacological agents nearly give you that experience Which is another way by by the way of changing brain function So so far the science is pretty conclusive that brain states are mental states The brain is consciousness and there's no evidence pointing the other way But despite that There are people who still deny it Here's just a little projecting a little bit into the future. We're actually engaged in reverse engineering the brain That's what we're trying to do trying to understand how the brain works, but it's kind of reverse engineering and in fact Parallel to neuroscientists figuring out what the different bits of the brain do there are computer scientists say oh, yeah, okay let's get a computer to do that and see what happens and In parallel what we're doing is reverse engineering the brain and then building computer brains at the same time We're still a long way from that But ultimately this will be the ultimate test right of the brain causes consciousness hypothesis when we turn on a hard, you know hardwired Brain a silicon or whatever we're using it in 50 years from now Whenever this is going to be when we turn it on if it's conscious or not pretty much solves the materialism debate The problem is we'll never really know right we may act in every testable way like it is consciousness But we can never be inside its subjective experience right as far as I'm concerned You could all be zombies and I would have how would I know really know if you're I say that your you know Chambers you know David Chambers like zombies But you behave in every way as if you have Quality as if you have consciousness well, that's in our falsifiable hypothesis, right? So I could never really know it's also not a useful scientific notion because it's un-falsified All right, so what is conscious? That's a big problem. I'm really simple answer to what is consciousness Here I'll give you my question on it. They're making this you know chambers may be right charmers may be right that There may be something going on that we haven't figured out yet That would not surprise me. There may be something fundamental going on that maybe is not reductionist Doesn't really reduce the neurons talking to themselves. Okay, that's fine as long as you're still talking about the brain functioning But what I think consciousness is is just the the moment-to-moment functioning of the brain. It's the brain taking in information from the outside introspective what we're talking to itself reflecting on information that it already has processing information And there's a subconscious level where lots of stuff is happening more than you realize It's amazing how much processing is constant going on Belief that needs the service of your consciousness and then some of that is presented to your consciousness Which is that part of the brain just paying attention? That's where it gets a little tricky, but that's we're sort of deconstructing that pretty well With fmri and other stuff that yet as parts of your brain that are attending to Information whether it's coming from the outside or coming from the inside and there's a limited amount of information We can attend to so we kind of select and our brain selects for us with subconscious algorithms what we attend to So that's consciousness It's moment-to-moment and the thing is we're trying to assess our consciousness with our consciousness Right, we can't step outside of it and see what's happening So that's I think why it's so hard to really feel like we understand what it is because you still get to the point Yeah, but what is it that is attending to the information in my brain states? You know what what is that? Some some people say that it's an illusion and that may be an accurate way of describing it that it's really just a Merge I think it's a merger problem. That's how I would describe it She merges from the brains every moment to moment functionality and then some people say that it's just an illusion I don't know that's a helpful term It may be ultimately accurate, but I don't think it helps us really understand what's going on So as you can just see that's not a terribly concise or satisfied and that for the paranormal lessons or or the deniers in the very same way that you know evolution is a very complex Function it takes millions of years to unravel. There's lots of different mechanisms at work There's lots of complexity in terms of how it changes over time. Yeah, you can break it down to some rules But it's just like saying it's an emergent property of the brain function Okay, you could say it's survival in the fence, but it's the same level superficial level of understanding It's really easy to misunderstand evolution It's really difficult to imagine millions of years of evolution and that opens the door for the deniers to evade That inability to really imagine what's going on This is Daniel Dennett most of you guys probably know who that is he is a philosopher and he Doesn't like David Chalmers very much. He thinks that the hard problem is not a problem he agrees with the It's an emergent property of the brain thing and he writes very very persuasively on it. He says well, you know if you take Chalmers easy problem all the things the brain does and you take them all away Chalmers says you're still left with consciousness Dennett says you're left with nothing because consciousness is all the easy problems if you add them all together in real time That's consciousness So he came out with a great analogy about a you know a hundred to 200 years ago There were vitalists who thought that there was a vital force in the life right the life force There's still people around you believe in the life force, right? We call them chiropractors or acupuncturists homeopaths, but there's there's no life force, but before you know, we really understood how life work It was really complicated. It was we knew it was different. You know a person is not a rock But you really couldn't say exactly why it wasn't a rock We didn't really understand all the processes of life that people said okay Well, there must be some life force that it happens things that are alive But the biologists over time slowly explained all the things that life does using energy reproduction Etc. So There was nothing left for vitalism to explain Dennis has the same thing is true about the heart problem once you Inventing this other thing this dualism to say this is it's like a God of the gaps argument It's doing the stuff. We can't explain yet But you know over time we're taking things off the list of things we can't explain until there's nothing left for the dualists To explain there's nothing left for this ghost in the machine to do I think I was pretty persuasive analogy or creationism They're the logic is the same the Intentional strategies are the same so creationism. I think is best understood intellectually logically as evolution denial That's the one thing that ties it together right because they don't have anything to explain. They don't have any positive claims They don't have any positive evidence All they have is just ways to deny evolution and even though there's multiple different types of creationism all the way from young earth And intelligent design never had it at the war. They all had evolution dualism is Exactly the same way in that it's neuroscience denial It's the denial of that that we are chunks of me right because that's not a very pleasing or aesthetic answer Oh, he's not as famous as Deepak Chopra the Sarada Institute is a profit and Organization for intelligent design evolution denial here They got a neurosurgeon to deny neuroscience on their block He and I have been dueling back and forth with our blocks. It's really been a lot of fun I got to tell you creationists and evolution deniers argue I'm going to go over some of the strategies that they use confusing does with how is a Classic strategy question you say is Does a separate question is how does life evolve? How does it work? We can answer the does even if we don't understand everything about the how but creationists will use our current lack of complete understanding of how And then argue that it calls into question of whether our life involved at all All right, so ignore and the dualists do the same thing. We can't explain how the brain causes consciousness We can say that there's no conscious without the brain. We don't know Exactly how to do to create confusion with that argument Correlation is not causation. I alluded to this before you could say that well you can correlate it every way But that's so much correlation. I think they kind of sound Skeptical because they're quoting a logical fallacy, so they must be right You know if the other people using a logical fallacy say, yeah, but you know We know that smoking causes cancer completely to correlation There's no one did the study where you like make people smoke and see if they can't they can't do it It's unethical but the tobacco industry used that fact to deny the correlation between smoking and lung cancer and they're still kind of softly doing it, but they Up until recently they did it hard for there's this factor X that causes both Well, that's what they're doing it correlates in every way it should correlate if the brain causes consciousness That's enough scientifically to say that it probably causes consciousness So enough correlation does add up to causation the the fallacy isn't assuming causation from correlation That's the fallacy. I'm going to quote people other than Michael eggman. They're just so great. He's so many juicy So, you know, what he's saying is you know, we have mass knowledge of neuroscience But we don't understand everything else every everything yet here. He's talking about, you know, there are specific if Materialism right if our materialist dogma is correct Then every single my new brain a mental state must correlate with a brain specifically with a brain state And what he does is very is very Devious and that he says that the correlation between Conscious states and brain states is imperfect There's a gap there in our ability to my newly described brain states. That's where dualism comes into play That's a God of the gaps argument and what all is really defined is the limits of our technology, you know It reminds me of what Dwayne Gish said in a paraphrase Dwayne Gish who was a younger creation who made a career out of debating Naive evolutionary scientists who didn't know what they were getting into and he had a good dish had a great line And I when I heard says like wow That's a good propaganda line He said that the scientists tell us that if you look at the geological record, you can't see evolution happening because it's too slow And if you look at animals that are alive today, you can't see evolution because it's too fast So no matter where you look for it, you can't see evolution. That's a great line. It's PS But for propaganda purposes, that's a great line Yeah, you're using the same thing. Well, how come when we do the seventh MRI study in the EG It doesn't correlate exactly with the these my new changes in consciousness You know because we're using a ground-based Telescope to look at the surface of Mars and you're asking why we're not seeing pedals, you know Well, it's just a limit of our instruments. It correlates to the limit of our instruments, but not beyond that But that's a gap, you know as our instruments improve and the gaps shrink it doesn't matter There'll always be gaps to fill in your particular version of Deep-packed Chopra is just amazing this guy the things he comes out with Hyperactive agency detection just kind of a funny way to say that you perceive Intention in stuff that happens, right? We all you often just say I love this race and stuff happens It's just happens, but it doesn't mean that somebody specifically wanted it to happen or caused it to happen Human beings have what's called a hyperactive agency detection We look for the agent in everything that happens even things that just happen by themselves And Deep-packed Chopra does the same thing he says that if Any examples of learning really or brain plasticity is the brain willing itself to change Or it's consciousness willing the brain to change and therefore there must be some consciousness outside the brain That can affect the brain So when you use this really ridiculous example that if you have somebody trying to learn how to walk on a Type of and they don't intend to learn how to do it They won't learn how to do it But if you intend to learn how to walk on the time when you try you practice you'll get better your brain will change You'll get better walking on the type of Think about that. Yeah, if you practice You'll get better what you're practicing, you know because the brain is plastic You don't need this external a magical consciousness affecting the brain to be intention But that's the eastern mysticism, right?  I'm still trying to figure that out That's a mercy. We hear this all the time from the creationist right evolution a theory in crisis Scientists are Increasingly rejecting evolution. It's on the brink of failure. You know any day now We're going to realize that the creations were right all along Acceptance of my view was right around the corner my opponent's views are crumbling and failing They've been saying this for a hundred years, right? So the history. I think has been on our side Deepak Chopra says you know until the argument is resolved. So as if whether or not the brain causes consciousness is unresolved Not within science and we talk to neuroscience Talk to somebody else The best course for each of us is to assume that our brains can adapt freely to our vision of life meaning that You imagine it it will happen. This is the secret, right? This is just this version of the secret if you wish it to be true if you imagine It's true then matter will change your brain will change the universal change to your spiritual physical intention And I talked about impending acceptance as part of the other thing So the head Deepak Chopra just to reinforce that that the acceptance of the mind field That substrate consciousness goes to the machine whatever as a fundamental level of nature Maybe closer than we think and it will inaugurate enormous advance in human comprehension of consciousness So we're the world is just about to discover that Deepak Chopra is right I didn't even there wasn't the word paradigm in there, but you know right people throughout the world paradigm that they're full This kind of statement were in the midst of a paradigm shift from you being right to me being right Wallace I've debated him for a long time on my podcast if you want to listen to me go at him directly just download the episode This guy's a Buddhist for a Buddhist monk. So he's in the Eastern Quantum who ended the spectrum and he is my example of the other thing that they want to do And that's they want to change the nature of science, right? What Wallace says is that we need to reintroduce subjective observation as a legitimate line of evidence in science, right? Because science is too objective We need to get subjectivity back because then you can just talk to the gurus Who go into their trance and discover the truths of reality and we just listen to them and they'll tell they'll give us the answers And we did what if the substrate consciousness correct science will never be able to figure out we need to listen to these guys You know we need to listen to their meditations because that that needs to be reintroduced into science He's written books, but more than one multiple books basically saying we need to merge Eastern mysticism, which doesn't like that word, but that's what it is. Eastern mysticism with science. That's his goal What's the discovery institute all about you know, what's the wedge doctor? And it's the reintroduction of supernaturalism into science the science what if God You know proofdust into existence this materialist assumptions in the scientific method will never figure that out We have to allow for supernatural explanations in the scientific method Of course, they need to ever get it that you know, it's not a it's just not a cultural choice that we don't allow subjectivity or That we don't want supernaturalism into science science by definition Can rely on those things you can't test a supernatural hypothesis and we know that right because the intelligent Design won't even tell us anything about their intelligent designer Anything you could possibly observe right if you think the hypothesis an intelligent designer created life You know by magic Okay, well what would that life look like whatever What does it look like? That's what it looks like And there's no observation you can make that will falsify that hypothesis. So okay games over. There's no science pee on that point It's not our choice. We're not being the people is kicking them out of the sandbox, right? Like expelled would want you to believe or Ben Stein. That's not the case They said these are the rules, you know, these are the rules You can't change them because they don't work if you change the rules, but they want to change the rules They want to change the rules because under the rules that work they lose The purpose is the same the purpose is not to discover something about the world It's not to enhance our understanding Ourselves of the universe It's to provide cover. That's what it's all about the discovery institute exists to provide intellectual cover for evolution deniers but people who deny evolution for ideological reasons Dualism the former dualism that we're discussing exists to provide intellectual cover for people who want their religion whether it's Buddhism or Easter mysticism or Christian fundamentalism in the case of eggnore who want their religion to invade the halls of science So in order to accomplish that goal, they create this diversion With all these logical fallacies and that's the purpose. It's not the purpose is not to advance human knowledge or understanding It's to turn human understanding back to the Middle Ages, right to turn it to a prescientific error before we knew what the rules were Now we know what the rules are and I'm sorry But by those rules these ideas are now obsolete and they really just have to accept it and get all the It's gonna happen in a lot of cases, but but that's the way it is so from our from the point of view of skeptics, I think it's really Important to understand the actual intellectual strategies that people use to deny modern science It's one thing to say dualism religion or that's a belief system and give it the hand But you know when you really are breaking down and deconstruct it It's very empowering and you can argue against it much more effectively like if they throw David Chalmers at you Now you know what I'm saying back, but also you see the connection. You realize that Anti-science it's pretty much the same thing over and over and over again I mean these guys don't have much of an imagination You know they're throwing the same logical fallacies at us over and over it not only over time But from one topic to the next so if you really understand all the problems with dualism You'll actually be able to then apply those same intellectual tools to the vast majority of the kinds of pseudoscience And paranormal stuff that we encounter. Thanks a lot for your time


What's up everybody Jason here for Jasper's case breaks.com. We just sold out 2021 panini black football This is a six box half case break picker teams number two. So again number one and two are from the same case So this is the six boxes that were remaining And here you go Andrea I got lots of algeritas right is there you go. Good luck Some noise Whoa, what is this? It's this one of those wow force fields Justin Fields that is awesome The fact that his name is Justin Fields, and then it's a force field. Is that a case hit or something because I have no This is on the one of the previous Steve Wright That looks beautiful I'm excited for him to play and then if I think he's gonna be one of the better And a Trevor Lawrence good Lord 14 out of 35 Tylen Wallace little rookie influx Tylen Hill 299 That is for the Green Bay Packers When a Brian and the last one here is a redemption Rookie patch autographs part number 203. Wow Justin Fields box. Look at that Rookie patch autograph redemption Justin Fields Another one for the Bears. What a great box guess Second half wasn't lying. It was gonna be fire Very nice. Randy Moss at 35 Gregory Rousseau Dwayne Eskridge ice one two three color patch to 50 For the Seahawks branded Seahawks were pretty hitless in the first half. So Josh Palmer Three out of five and Elijah Moore two-color patch an autograph to $199 for the Jets David Our third box Juju Smith Schuster Terrell Davis TD Jonathan Taylor for the Colts Indianapolis Colts Jeremy Murrow Another Dwayne Eskridge to 25. I like a lot to see how fans actually like this Is he actually gonna wear number one that's swag right there 24 to 25 look at the back of his bio It's been a long time since the NFL since seen a player with skills that excelled both on sides of the ball Seahawks may have found one of the one of Eskridge Sorry an explosive playmaker on the offense the second runner can also disrupt plays in the secondary Something he did at Western, Michigan Well, honestly to be honest Brandon something like this will suffer more than Metcalf because he's not a rookie Trace Sermon and this kid was also to a really good in college student then he got injured Hopefully he passes back in the NFL two-color patch That's going to raw floors in his 49s Elijah Moore to 75 for the Jets Khalil Mac for the birds Brandon Ayuk Seth Williams for the Broncos Broncos at his mark and Callan Monde little patch autograph 46 out of 50 for the Minnesota Vikings Minnesota Vikings going to Pat Wolf. Well, is this Al-Kharas gonna actually upset this number third overall player in the U.S. Open? Joe Tryon to 10. Are you asking about black? Simi Fajoco to 125 Oh, did he? Well a lot of players Will be bouncing around now especially the later on players But they'll still obviously they produce these cards right in the minute they get drafted. They just start cropping in these photos and start creating cards Pete Warner to 199 for the Saints General down and we have actually a redemption We have rookie signature materials silver card number nine Najee Harris for the Steelers Okay, Sean look at that very nice He could be all around Oliver or he could have some redemptions and some autographs. I don't know We'll guess we'll find out Patty Mahomes number 67 to 75 The hell's that? Kansas City Chiefs Aaron with that one A-Arom Chris Evans Jacob Harris out of 25 two-color patch Rams, it's one of Jonathan Anthony Schwartz Cleveland Browns going to go ahead rookie patch autograph silver card number 208 Travis Etien Jr Unfortunately, he's going to be out for most of the season But still nice hit though for Matthew the Jacks You might be able to get him on the low Although I got some figure-team jerks and I'm going to still chase the Turbo Lawrence guy There you go So much better second half guys As that Travis Etien was there we got Najee Harris And of course I think the first box a nice trace sermon as well. We got like more running backs to anything But the first box Did have that very nice Justin Fields redemption RPA All right, this must be like a case hit or something force field. It looks like a very nice car So there you go guys, really appreciate it. This was break number two. Number three is in the store Remember fresh case on that one and it is already down to three left. So if you guys want to get the next one Jaskiescasebreaks.com


What makes for excellence in heart care? It starts with one of the most amazing teams of heart surgeons and cardiologists that I've seen assembled under one roof and the region's leading technology in a new $40 million facility. This is the nationally recognized Heart and Vascular Institute of Eastern Kentucky at Pikeville Medical Center. Following the shooting in Allen, June 30th, which resulted in the death of several officers and canine Drago, the Floyd County Sheriff's Office was left without a canine officer. In December, that changed when the Sheriff's Department introduced their newest canine officer, Bear.  Without a dog, the people notice it, we notice it, the drug business, people can tell it. So it's a great tool for us, and we feel like we have to have one. But we also have a desire to love for the dog too. We know the dog is a full service for us. It's a very secure and provides a lot of safety for our deputies. And that's a real big goal for me is something that I can give these deputies to give them some safety. And when a dog can go in first before a deputy does and make sure that there's no bad guy in there that gives it clear as a room for them, that's good for me. That's what we want is somewhere that allows it to be safer for the deputies. And a bad guy runs, that's what a dog is for. Canine Bear specializes in apprehension, tracking, and drug sniffing. In addition to the new canine officer, the department has hired several new deputies. This will help us get back to some normalcy, you know, our dogs and put back on our staff, and we're working to get our way up to where we were, you know, pre-tragedy. And, you know, I know the public's been very patient with us to an extent, you know, but they know we're trying to get back. We're trying to get our dogs back in service. We've hired a couple deputies. They're in training, one's in training cap. So I'm still a little short staffed, but we're working there. We're getting people back in service. So with our dogs now and getting more trained deputies, we'll be back at full service here. The department is in the process of training a second canine officer who will join the department in early spring. The second canine will be assigned to Deputy Dustin Newsom, Drago's former handler. Reporting for Mountain Top News, I'm Brianna Robinson.


Hello, everybody. Thank you for coming. My name is Mariette DiCristina, a Mediterranean chief of Scientific American, and it is my great pleasure to introduce you to an insight, a journey of discovery with Ben Poringa. We're going to talk today about some fantastic research and background. Ben, Poringa was the 2016 Nobel laureate in chemistry for the design and synthesis of molecular machines. And we're going to find out what those are. He's also Jacobus van Hoef, distinguished professor of molecular sciences at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. I apologize. I have to look down to make sure I said that correctly. So I thought, always best to start at the beginning, Professor, if we could talk a little bit.  How did that shape your view of the world? Yes. I grew up on a farm indeed in the remote, northeastern part of the country, close to the German border, a very small village. And actually, as a child on a farm, there is so much playground to discover and to invent. Because we were living a little bit remote, so that means that we as children had to find our own way around. And on the farm, there is ample opportunity. And behind our farm, there was wilderness that was really fantastic for us to discover. And we could cross the border. This is what we as scientists do. I started already at that point, I think, because we crossed the border with Germany, which was at that time illegal, I think. But it was so exciting, of course. And my father had a wide interest and was a very inspiring person. So I remember when I was a small child, I went with him to the fields. And we were discussing about how these big plants, wheat and corn, and so can grow from a tiny seed. And it's set you thinking. We were asking questions about the clouds and about the rain. And why do things drop down and not move up and all these things? So I had a wonderful youth there. And then I was so lucky to go to elementary school and later to high school, gymnasium, where I had fantastic teachers. And I vividly remember that one of our teachers, he was really excellent. He was the chemistry and physics teacher. And he set distinct stage for me to go into the natural science area later on at university. And he reminded me recently when I met him, I wish every child at least one good teacher in his or her life. And it makes the difference. Teachers are so inspiring. And it sounds like it started right with your father at the beginning with curiosity and exploring. I think my father could have been a teacher because I think he was a very smart person and very good in school before the war. But at that time, of course, they had no opportunity in those areas. So he became a farmer. But still, my father and mother had a broad interest. And I have nine brothers and sisters, so I had ample opportunity to discuss and to learn because we were keeping each other very sharp. The discussions about everything, about politics, about society, about history, about literature. There were plenty of books in our house. And I think that was a fantastic basis for my future career. So I see the exploring. And of course, scientists are explorers, aren't they? That is true. And right from the very beginning, we're learning about the world and how it works. Did you always know or did you soon know that it would be science for you? Now, I was typically maybe a natural sciences kid because I was pretty good in mathematics and physics and chemistry, et cetera. But then my chemistry teacher at the high school put me on the track to study chemistries, I think, because I was fascinated by the idea to make my own materials, beautiful crystals, enjoy the nice smell, or making something that reacts chemically and makes something that never existed before. And when I went to the university, I got an American professor. And he was typically challenging us. It was amazing. I think I own a lot to him. He challenged us to put the bar very high and to do really new things. And I vividly remember, he put me on an impossible, impossible project. But he said to me, Ben, if you succeed, it will make our American colleagues jealous. This is a nice message for a young kid that is eager to invent. And when I make my first molecule, I was 20 years old. I make my first new molecule. I came to my American professor, Hans Winberg. And he said, nobody in the world made this molecule ever before. I was so excited. It was absolutely useless. But it was like a piece of art, because nobody had made it before. It was exciting. And then I went on my academic studies, did my PhD. I worked at Shell for six and a half years, the big oil company, where I got a flavor for industry and innovation and how to move from fundamental research to a real application. And when you work in a big mode to national, there's ample opportunity to learn, because I worked in the Netherlands. I worked in the UK. I had fantastic colleagues. So there was a good school to learn. So I want to hear more about that. But can we go back to the molecule just for a minute? You were 20 years old and making your first molecule. What was in it? I'm just curious. What were the atoms in there? That was just carbon and hydrogen and oxygen. It was not such a complicated molecule. Although that same molecule later became quite famous in the chemistry world, because it turned out to be the basis for a lot of new catalysts. And catalysts are the machines, the motors for the chemical industry. Every big chemical industry, if you make a drug, a plastic, a fertilizer, the paints in your car, your clothes. I mean, that is all based on catalytic processes in the chemical industry. Like in your body, it's full of catalysts. And these are the enzymes, the proteins, that catalyze the process in your body. And there is a lot of big incentive to develop new catalysts, of course. We can discuss this later. But this molecule turned out to be the basis for a really new catalyst that later have found a way in industry, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry. So I'm still very proud of it. That's very good. I'm not useless.  So let's talk about that. So you were in university. And then you mentioned you were at Shell. Did you go straight into industry? Did you work in academia first? How did that go? No, no. This is a good point. After my PhD, I was having an American mentor. I was set to go to the United States for a postdoc. That's typically when you want to go into such a career. And I had some very nice opportunities to go to Princeton, for instance, or other schools. But then I had to go in the Army, because in the 80s, the Army was still compulsory in the Netherlands. But Shell kept me out of the Army. And I went to the Shell laboratories, but that time was like Bell Labs in America, which was a big corporate research laboratory where they did a lot of fundamental research. Of course, also research towards that process and new products. But to work in such an environment was like being in paradise. This was absolutely fantastic. And I'm sure you had the same studies of people that worked at Bell Labs in those days. Many of these big labs are closed now, unfortunately, because companies shifted their emphasis more to shorter term and applied research. But I think the investments in fundamental research at those days paid off, because we see a lot of new things now that came from those investments research in 30, 40 years ago. We should not forget that. It takes a long time, you know? But it was a great environment for me, coming from the comfort zone of the university to go a bit in the real-life world of how to make a new chemical product, how to make a new chemical process. Because we should not forget it starts all with fundamental research. And then you build on that. So thinking about the fundamental research brings to mind the research that you won the Nobel for. Can we hear about how this brings us to nanoscience?  Absolutely. So when I came back to the university after my Shell period, I built up my own research group, and I wanted to do frontier research with my students. And I focused on two items, catalysis and nanoscience. And let me talk about nanoscience a little bit. Nanoscience is dealing with the materials at the scale of 1 billionth of a meter. 1 billionth of a meter. 1,000 times smaller than the micro technology. Micro technology that we know so well from our chips, technology, the information technology, et cetera. And so why do we work at that level? Because there you see all the processes that deal with molecules, like in your body. Your body, your cells, is one big machinery of molecular components that make it all running, et cetera. It is nanotechnology, pure sound, real nanotechnology. So what we do is we design molecules and machines at the nanoscale, 1 billionth of a meter in size. And I got fascinated by this field, try to build up things bottom up, not top down, like the micro, the computer industry does. They go top down, top down, and top down. And now they reach the level of 20 nanometers, 30 nanometers, coming all the way from micro. But what we do is, in nanotechnology, building bottom up, like modern nature does it, like it is done in your body. Start with atoms and molecules, and build up these tiny machines, the materials of the future. And this is a fascinating field, and it opens up tremendous new opportunities. But let's not forget, it's very fundamental. And we have to learn all the techniques. How to look, for instance, at molecules. How to see something at the nanoscale. Think about micro. Everybody here has looked in a microscope. But that's micro, 1,000 times bigger. You can see a human cell, but you cannot see the components in the cell. So what has happened in this revolution of nanotechnology in the last 20, 30 years, that new microscopes have been invented. For instance, what we do in the lab, we have this microscope that have a needle, just like a needle, and they search on the surface and they can find atoms and molecules. And the tip of the needle is one atom. And we can feel, actually, atoms and molecules. And this is how we know what we have. I think it's so interesting that that's how we get a picture, is feeling our way along. That's how we get these beautiful pictures. Yeah, building our way along. They are beautiful pictures. When people think about bodies as machines in the sense of muscles and so on, could you tell a little bit about the way the molecules are working in the body? Because I think it bears on the future. In your body, for instance, people forget that. But if I lift my arm, there are millions and millions of these tiny nanomotors, these tiny robots in the muscle that walk over highways, called the muscle filaments. And these millions and millions together, they make it possible that you can lift your arm, that your heart beats, that your cells can divide, that we can replicate it. That things are transported in your body. Let me give you one example. There is a tiny motor in your body in the cells. Millions and millions and millions of these tiny motors. A couple of nanometers in size, it's called the ATPA's rotary motor. It rotates, it spins like the motor in your car. And you know this is essential because it produces the fuel in your body. And you know how much it produces in your body? Just tell me. Half your body weight in kilograms every 24 hours. So if this gentleman is 80 kilograms, it produces these tiny nanomotors in his body, produce almost 40 kilograms every 24 hours. It's made and it's recycled. It's made and recycled. Talk about sustainable society of the future. That's what we can learn from these tiny machines. You need many, but realize that I'm not aware of any chemical process that can do that. So this is the perspective that I'm giving. And built on these insights from the human body, we try to make artificial systems. So we designed the first nanomotor. It's two nanometers in size. It rotates under the influence of light. It's a light-driven nanomotor. It took us several years to discover it, but also serendipity. Because in fundamental science, you need playground to play. People forget that. We need that at our universities, our institutes. We need space to discover, to use our imagination and creativity, and to encourage the young students to use their creativity in particular. This motor, we were working on switches, things that were going back and forth, back and forth. And certainly we realized that something was not switching back, but it was moving forward. So serendipity, accidental discoveries, and then try to understand what's going on is really important. But what is maybe even more important is that you have funding for a certain period, because you cannot work. This is very complicated and very expensive research, which takes a long time. And I think the European Research Council very much for this long-time funding. I got significant funding from the European Research Council to build programs for at least five years without restriction and working on very challenging, very demanding, complex problems with the team. I gathered a team of young stars from 15, 16 nationalities, from China and America, from India and Germany. And we had needed their expertise, and we need this long-term perspective to make this all possible. Let me give you one example. Okay, you give me an example, then I'm going to press you a little bit more about the reason. We built a nano-car, a four-wheel drive nano-car. And it took us seven years. And was it not for this funding that I received from Brussels, the European scheme, focusing on excellence? It would not have been possible, because we made mistakes, we had to learn it, how to do it. And you might wonder, why do you build a nano-car? But what we wanted to learn, of course, like your muscles, if we have a motor, can we move something? Can we transport something? And that gives perspective for the future, new industries, innovative technology. So I'd like to wind back a bit to the challenge. You had us learning about switches. Sure. And were they at that point controlled with light? Yes. Is that how you got started? And then this inside of seeing this accident. So what, you know, how did you start looking at the switches at the nano-size? And how did you decide that light would be a good control? And then see this thing turning and then see that there were possibilities? This is a fantastic question, because we started, actually, simply with switching. And we looked at modern nature, as I said before.  They switch back and forth, back and forth with light. And they have to go back and forth, eh? Because otherwise, I would see you only once and then it would be over. A switch has to go in two ways. And they switch with light. And what we really wanted at that stage, we thought, let's go beyond the normal computers and information storage systems. Let's build light computers, light storage, information storage, based on molecules. I mean, the possibilities are tremendous. The amount of data you can store are fiber-casting, are beyond any comprehensive what we can do now. And of course, the speed of light gives you completely different possibilities, yeah? Making light-driven computers, for instance, in the future. That was a bit of a far-reaching goal, the idea. Now, why don't you take the compounds from your eye? These tiny nano molecules that are there already, these switches. But of course, when you take them out of the biological environment, they get destroyed immediately. So we had to design much better ones that are robust, that can switch back and forth many, many times. And we succeeded in that. And we built information storage systems. And we still work on that, you know, and with many teams in the world, work on this kind of things. New approaches for information technology that will go far beyond what we do now. But then, by accident, we found that it was not switching back, but it going forward. And then we had a rotary motor, the first nano motor of this world, as far as we know. As far as we know. Unless nature has done something else, which sometimes it does. No, in nature, in your body, they are there, they are there. So without... I'm just trying to give people a picture, a little bit of the lab environment also. Now, are these big machines that you're using to do the controls, or how to... Just, can you give us a little picture of what that's like? Unfortunately, I don't have pictures here, but my lab, typically, we have chemical labs where we do chemical reactions and make new molecules, et cetera. Then we have all kinds of labs where we have fancy equipment, where we can do images of molecules, you know, like the microscopes I showed. We have, for instance, because we have a lot of techniques to show that we have the real molecules, if all the atoms are precisely in place. So we have, for instance, Röntgen equipment.  Or we use all kinds of other techniques to measure exactly the mass. This is very important, for instance. Or we use electron microscopy. These, to do this kind of research, you need investments, you know, which are really quite big. I mean, every piece of equipment, major piece of equipment to measure and to do these things easily cost one or several millions. And to maintain it and to keep such a lab running. But this is essential, because otherwise you would never be able to look at the nano scale, to build at the nano scale, and to make the technology of the future. Let's look at the future a little bit. So when we were talking, you know, we talked about the motors, but what does it look like in 50 years if we continue exploring this line of research? Yeah. Now, let me first make one other remark, which I wanted to emphasize, and that is, going through this process of frontier research, we go beyond our current horizon to confront our young stars in our laboratory, because that's the most important. Not the equipment, it's the brains of the young people. The boys and girls that work in the laboratories. And we have to train them to be ready for the future. Not for today or tomorrow, but for 10, 20 years from now, because they will make the difference how our society will be, what our news industries will be, but coming back to your question to the future. Now, if you have tiny machines, things that you can control with light, for instance, you can think about self-repair materials. Think about a scratch in your car. Like a scratch here, I have a scratch in my finger. It repairs itself. I don't have to do anything because my body knows how to repair it. But when you have a scratch in your car, you have to go to the garage. But in 10, 15 years from now, because several groups in the world work on this, we will have self-repairing materials. You have to put a piece of cloth, wrap it, you know. You have these tiny pockets that open with light when you have a scratch, and the material flows out and repairs itself. Think about smart windows. These windows don't clean themselves, but in the future, we will have these smart windows that clean themselves. Or we introduce massive solar panels these days. A big problem is how to clean them. And especially when we are going to put them in a Sahara with all the dust. But if you can make the coatings that clean themselves because there are tiny machines that react with the light and they clean themselves and remove the dust, this is the future. Even a bit more distant, we build tiny robots. And of course, this is still a bit science fiction. But look, I will predict that 30, 40, maybe 50 years from now, we will have these tinier soft robots that the doctor, the surgeon of the future, the doctor will inject it in your blood vein. And the surgeon is this tiny robot and it will go through your blood veins, deliver a drug precisely on spot, or remove a tumor cell, or do a repair to your organs. That is, it looks a bit science fiction and I'm bad in prediction, I'm better in invention to discover. But these are opportunities for the future. And it all starts with a beautiful molecule. It starts with fundamental research, with a beautiful molecule, with maybe a bit of a crazy idea, yeah? But these crazy ideas, sometimes we simply stumble about crazy ideas because in science, especially in fundamental science, there are also many dead allies. But you have to be daring because otherwise you never invent and discover something. But some of the questions that we are asking, yeah? Are the wrong questions. But then suddenly we come to questions which are really beautiful questions that we have never thought about. And then suddenly you discover, like we did with our motor, you discover something that might completely change the picture in the future. And that is what you hope for, these breakthrough inventions that will make a real difference. And that is what is fundamental science, what it's all about. And that lays the foundation for innovations that we have no idea of yet. People talk here a lot, and I'm really, I hear a lot of enthusiasm, and I can see that about the fourth industrial revolution. Realize scientists now work on the fifth or sixth industrial revolution. Being at Nanotechnology, which is ahead already quite a lot. Think about the genomics projects around the world. It will dramatically change. And I cannot promise what the innovations will be, but I promise one thing. It will dramatically change the way we do our own industries. There will be dramatic new opportunities and make some of the current processes and products completely obsolete. Think ahead, this will happen. So that's a great pivot to thinking ahead. And I'd love that you raised blind allies or bad allies where things might not have looked good for a little while. Why is it important, do you think, to embrace failure like that? How does that? Yeah, that is also an important point. Failure is so common to science. First of all, we have to get the space in our science and fundamental science. And grant agencies should understand that government should understand that we need space to discover. And that means that there's also space for failures. But it's also important that you make failures because you learn a lot about what you not should do, in which directions it's the wrong direction. And sometimes it's difficult, eh? I find this also difficult with my students. We have to stop and say, okay, this project will lead to nothing because there's always something interesting and you can go on for endless. But sometimes you simply have to say, sorry, we have to disappoint each other. We have to stop because we are on the wrong track. We are simply not smart. Smarter than us. We have to think better. I know you care a lot about the young minds. So what are some of the other things we can do to help support them? So helping them know when to stop is on the way. No, I think we have to give them, of course, space to invent and to create things and to work at the frontiers. I mentioned this before. This is really important to challenge them because what I see in my environment, we get all these bright young minds and if we stimulate them, they come up with absolutely fascinating ideas. But second, we should also encourage them, whatever job they go in the future, to go ahead and think in new terms of what is possibilities in the future. And also we should do a much better job, I think, to link to possible new industries and opportunities. So encourage our students to be entrepreneurial. Startups, yeah? And that failure there is also not bad. You should also, you should start, you know, and of course some small startup companies will not survive, but that's not the problem. The problem is that we should have more entrepreneurs that take these ideas and go into new possibilities and opportunities away from maybe some of the existing businesses that we do now. That is what happened. That is what happened with the information technology. We should not forget, this is my iPhone. You know, it's a bit outdated now because it's five years old. But this, my students cannot imagine a society without these smartphones. It has completely changed our world. But don't forget, it was slightly over 10 years ago that the first iPhone was introduced. And let's not forget that the transistors and the liquid crystal materials for the displays to make the screens were invented by physics and chemistry in the 40s and 50s of the past century. This is, it took 50 years after fundamental discoveries to make a smartphone, 50 years of development work. And of course at those days, we had no idea that we would like to invent a smartphone. The world didn't exist. This kind of communication technology, nobody had an idea. And it dramatically changed our world. And there will be dramatic changes in the future based on new inventions. So the theme of the meeting, last question from me, the theme of the meeting this year is developing a shared future in a fractured world. I think science might have some suggestions for how to do that. Yes, most important is, of course, science has no borders. I mentioned already, I have a team from all over the world. And we have a common language. I, as chemists, can talk with the people in the United States and in China equally well, because we have a common language in science. And that is really important to forward, to bring society to the future, the sustainable society that we urgently need in the future. So eliminate budget, join efforts, work together, come with the expertise, how we can really make the difference. And I think that is the message I would like to bring forward here. And this is an important task of universities, of research institutes, but also together with our partners in industry and our partners in society. And I hope our governments understand this important message. I think that's, I could hardly build on that any further. I think that's a great message. But I mean, just a few thoughts from me. It sounds like we're, we've talked about being open, being open to exploration, being open to failure, being open to embracing new ideas, even when it might be difficult knowing one, maybe to try other new ones, challenging ourselves, maybe failing forward, looking for the next new thing and taking the long view with an open mind. And I think that that is a great, a great message for us at the meeting here. Thank you so much. My pleasure. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. It was really great.


Hey, what's going on guys? Welcome back to another video. So today we've got another store review. Today the store I'm going to be showing you is a one product store and it made over half a million dollars drop ship in just one product. As always, I'm going to show you the product. I've found the product on AliExpress as well which has super fast shipping so you can actually sell this product yourself. You can also see exactly how much profit there was to be made on each sale. I'm going to be showing you the Facebook ads they were running and whilst their store is password protected at the moment, I found some screenshots of it. So we'll be able to see exactly how they had their store set up. I actually really enjoyed doing these videos myself because there's always something to be learned from somebody who has sold a product successfully. So if you guys enjoy these videos as well, make sure you drop a like and if you want to see more of my content, make sure you drop a sub as well. Apart from that, thanks for tuning in. Hope you enjoyed the video. Hope you learned something new and let's jump straight into it. So the store at hand is theminimallamp.com. Like I mentioned in the intro, there's sold one particular product. Let's have a quick look at their sales information. So the total revenue, $667,000, which is pretty good, especially considering the store started in June, 2020. So it's not even one year old at this point. Total traffic, over half a million visits. As you can see from Shopify themselves, revenue data comes directly from them so it can be edited by the seller, it's all legit. Just in case you've never seen this website before, it's called the exchange marketplace. It's basically where people go to sell their Shopify stores. So you can see what the store looks like. You can see how much money they've made. You can see the products and all that sort of good stuff. Let's give you some background information and into this business so we can see exactly how achievable this is. They have two different people working for them on Upwork to do things like order fulfillment and customer service. The owner at this point personally runs the active advertising campaigns on Facebook and Instagram. So this is purely generated from Facebook and Instagram ads, which is what the majority of people who watch my videos do. So super achievable. Founded almost a year ago, which I've touched on and time to run this business approximately 15 hours per week. So not bad considering the amount of money they were able to turn over. What I always like to look at also is the expenses because again, this gives you insight into how achievable the business is and kind of like what's involved in running the business of this particular site. So the Shopify plan is obviously an advanced one. I'm assuming this is to kind of cut down on the fees for processing payments. Employees, $750 a month domain. Shopify apps, $350 a month. And then they're paid marketing, which is about 30K per month. And as it says there, it's not necessary. All depends on obviously how much you want to spend. So the sale includes all the logos, personal support, domain, product photos, social media, they have 15,000 followers. If we take a look at their Facebook page. Something interesting and always worth looking at as well is the sort of posts they put out and then the reactions they get to them. So straight away, I can see they have a custom domain email address, which is something I recommend everybody do. They also have a phone number and they also have a physical address if I'm not mistaken, which is this here. So instantly somebody who comes onto this page can see that this is indeed a legitimate business. If we look at their photos, we can see a like and a love on poor dropship installers. What you'll sometimes tend to see is the angry emoji. And this will be from customers who haven't received their product yet. But when I scrolled through this earlier, all I could see was really positive comments. How legit they are, I don't know, but still to kind of like a normal person who sees this particular page and comes onto it and sees nothing but positivity and good reactions. Then again, it instantly just kind of legitimizes their business. If we take a look at their Instagram page too, we can see they have quite a nice setup. If I had to guess, they didn't take these images themselves. So they've probably just got these off AliExpress or ask their supplier to take some for them. So super easy to set up, super cheap to set up, super quick to set up. They've got a pretty decent logo. 17 posts, 13,000 followers. Looking at the engagement on these posts, they probably paid for those, but it doesn't matter. We can see the results they've produced, which is reflected in how proper and professional their whole business looks from the outside. So next up, let's have a look at their actual Shopify store themselves, let's open these up. We can see again, if I'm not mistaken, this could be the actual debut theme. They have all the fundamentals kind of done correctly. We can see they were selling this product for 130 euros, which tells us they were obviously focusing on a European market. This is some sales snapshots, half a percent conversion rate, which is quite low. I would guess at the price of this particular product, they're probably spending quite a lot on retargeting ads. The average order value is $180, which is obviously very good. Returning customer rate of over 5%, which is also pretty decent as well. So I'll be interested actually to find out why customers are coming back, whether they're buying another lamp, the same product, or potentially there's an upsell in which they're offering. Going through the images then, we can see they've got like a custom font, which kind of reflects the minimalistic and modernistic style of the store and of the product. They have a super easy product page set up with loads of different images of the product itself. A nice kind of cover photo on their home screen. That being said, then let's jump onto AliExpress. So this, if I'm not mistaken, is the exact same product. We'll take a quick look at the video itself so we can see exactly how it works. We can buy this for 60 pounds. As I mentioned in the intro, you can get super fast delivery on this as well. So free shipping to the UK in four to 10 days. I probably would guess this isn't the same supplier they're using, but I wouldn't actually be surprised in fact, looking at the kind of reviews. They obviously are offering pretty decent shipping and this supplier is one of maybe two or three that I found that was able to offer this product with this kind of fast shipping. If we do the math on this then, the lamp is gonna cost us 60 pounds. We could probably negotiate this down, especially once we established a relationship, probably to about 50 pounds. We're selling it, or these guys were selling it, sorry, for, let me see, was it 113 euros? 130 euros, which equates to, if I'm not mistaken, about 110 pounds. So let's say a purchase price, a delivery price, sorry, 50 pounds, a sale price of 100 pounds, that's a nice, high, healthy profit margin of 50 pounds. Even if you have to take into account VAT on this, then you can still make a pretty decent profit margin. What I also like about this product too is if you wanna replicate this business is you obviously have a product which is proven to sell on this one, but then there's lots of different upsell opportunities like this particular product here, which looks cool. If I'm not mistaken, it's the same supplier or very similar, and it's just lots of different things in which you can kind of package together to offer for your customers as an upsell offer or in your email marketing or retouching as to get them to come back and buy a similar but different product. Moving on to the third piece of the puzzle then, we have the ads they were running. Now I could actually only find two results, but let's take a look at both of these. I'm gonna put this one back to the beginning. I've already watched this. Let's see if I can make it a bit bigger for you guys. I don't think this one actually has any sound, which is actually quite surprising. Discretion at the top, creative, stylish, minimal, say 50% today. It's a super sharp to the point. No need to have tons and tons of different bullet points. Simply the product speaks for itself in this instance is what I was trying to say. So a real basic ad, again, I'm pretty sure they didn't fill in this content themselves. They either ask their supplier for it or they may have even been able to find that already on AliExpress or even CJ dropshipping. Let's have a quick look at this one then because I do believe this one has sound. So it's a bit more capturing. In this one, they actually have the link to the product. So clear, cool to action there for them and nice little kind of percentage tag. I definitely think as well, usually generated content for this would be awesome. Find a couple of small time influencers on Instagram and YouTube, reach out to them, especially people, especially streamers. So this is a perfect, perfect product for people who create content like myself. I could put one in that back corner and it would look pretty nice. In fact, I might just do that, but find people like gamers, streamers, Twitch streamers, reach out to them if there's small time and say, hey, we want to send you this really cool lamp. If you record a video of yourself kind of unpacking it and setting it up that we can use as Facebook ads or we can post on our Facebook page, I think you'd have no problem whatsoever finding people who would happily accept a product like this. Yes, it might cost you a couple of hundred quid ordering three or four units in to send out to users but trust me, the return on investment when using user-generated content far outweighs the actual cost of it. And with that being said, guys, I'm going to wrap the video up there. We've covered all three fundamentals that go into a successful Shopify store. We've found the products, we've found the Facebook ads and we've found the actual store itself. Let me know what you think to this store. Is this going to be a product that you potentially look at yourself? I'll be interested to hear that. If you enjoyed the video, please do make sure you drop a like and if you want to see more of my videos, make sure you drop me a sub as well. One final thing though, before you go, if you are looking for a program that comes with my full support and guidance as well as all the content you could possibly need, make sure you check out my eCom Academy. It comes with a free callback service too so if you want to hop on the phone with myself, go through any kind of questions, hesitations you have about joining just to see if it's the right fit for you. Then we can of course do that, no problem whatsoever. Thanks again for watching, hope you enjoyed it, hope you learned something new and I'll see you in the next one.