Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube! Covering AWS re-invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel, along with its ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re-invent 19. This is our third day in Vegas. That's a lot of Vegas. I am joined by my co-host, Justin Moran, the founder and chief analyst at Pivot9. And Justin and I are welcoming back one of our Cube alum joining us next from MongoDB is Sahir Azam, its chief product officer. Welcome back. Thank you so much. I'm happy to be here. So talk to us about what's going on at MongoDB. I know we've had you on the program before we've had MongoDB, but what's sort of the latest and greatest? Yeah, so we're continuing to grow very fast, and especially our cloud product Atlas. We've got two million developers using the platform today, 13,000 customers, many of which are on the amazing AWS platform. And I think people are really embracing the idea of a multi-cloud database service and a data platform that can have the flexibility to work with no matter where they are. Talk about, sorry, Justin, about multi-cloud a little bit more because it is a symptom as one of our CEOs, Dave Vellante calls it. A lot of companies have inherited it. It's more by, whether it's organically or it's by acquisition or developer preference, it's a state in which a lot of businesses are operating, but it's challenging. Yes. So some of the things that you're hearing with respect to customers, how can you help them deal better in that world? Sure, so yeah, we definitely see some of those exact trends. So, you know, for large enterprises, many times they have different use cases and different business units where developers or application owners prefer different cloud providers, oftentimes it's acquisition, but also at a strategic level at the CTO, CIO or even CEO level, you know, there is a forethought strategy that it's going to be a multi-cloud platform world. And now, what we see is many customers are still very much focused on a single cloud provider to get the build up the skills on, but with a close eye to a second or third tier provider in the architecture that they will scale and balance over time. So, I think it's early days, but the trend is definitely rising in what we're seeing.  So, what we're focused on at MongoDB is really decoupling that data layer from the underlying cloud infrastructure providers, such that if you want to leverage the benefits the different services AWS has in their rich ecosystem, but then maybe plum in something from another provider, we make that extremely easy to do with a click of a button and move your data across those cloud providers. Yeah, so talk about the mechanism for doing that a little bit more, because that's really tricky to do. And that's one thing I think people have been concerned about the idea of multi-cloud, is that, well, are you actually running in multiple clouds simultaneously? Or is it more that actually sometimes we just want to move a bit from here to there or use for different applications? There's sort of three trends that we see, you know, and we're a data platform player. So, you know, our use cases are sort of bounded around database technology, data analytics. So, the first is for customers who want high availability across multiple regions within a certain geographies. Let's say you're dealing with personal information of German citizens. In Germany, Amazon has a region in Germany only one and maybe you want Azure or GCP to be a second region for high availability and you need to rely on a secondary provider because there's only one from a particular cloud of choice in that geos. That's sort of one high availability kind of use case. The second is leveraging the benefits of all these different services that the cloud providers themselves are releasing. So, we hear a lot of customers that say, you know, Amazon's my preferred partner for operationalizing my app, we use their services, our database runs there. However, we may want to take some of that data, even if it's for a week, even for a few days, a month and perhaps move it over to another provider to leverage some new analytic service or machine learning or AI algorithm that they might have. Today, that's really challenging to do. So, the idea that you can click a button and create that replica and move that data over very easily is something that people are asking from us. And then the third is geographic reach. So, our database platform Atlas runs in 70 global regions worldwide across AWS, Azure and GCP, which makes it the most widely available database and service on the planet. And one of the interesting use cases for that is, let's say somebody is using a single cloud provider for 99% of their workload, but some they see their app takeoff in Taiwan. You know, maybe another cloud provider has a region in Taiwan, just mix and match and add that region into the architecture very seamlessly. So, those kind of three categories, high availability within Geos, the ability to leverage, you know, the rich service offerings and mix and match and then the geographic reach are the three things we see for multi-cloud at a strategic level beyond the reactive angle of acquiring a company and learning how to have to manage multiple clouds that way. It does sound like it's a bit of a trend that we're hearing, particularly today, I think, Lisa, where enterprises want choice. And that customer choice of being able to choose things that actually suit me rather than necessarily which vendor I'm buying my infrastructure from. That sounds like it's something that we're hearing a lot. Yeah, and we've invested a lot of time engineering effort, working with Amazon, working with Google, working with Microsoft to unify that data layer across the three cloud providers. And I think that's something unique that Mongo is really focused on. But there were so many announcements that came out in Andy Jassy's keynote a couple of days ago. I think I read 23 announcements, Justin, like the first 20 minutes or something at his keynote. So much information, but I'm curious, did anything that they announced surprise you in terms of, hey, customers are living in this multi-cloud world. There's use cases, there's reasons for it. Any shift that Amazon was making or announced this week that you thought, yes, some of these things are becoming a reality. We have to go where the data is. We have to deliver what's best for our customers. I mean, I think Amazon is a very customer-centric company. I don't think I heard any announcement that particularly acknowledged the fact that it's going to be a multi-cloud world. I think there's still the market share leader, they have a rich set of offerings and they're going to continue building on that, which I think makes a lot of sense from the position that they're in. I think some of the announcements that are interesting to us, definitely the idea of having lower cost, higher performance arm hardware and chips for a database vendor, if we can lower the price performance curve for customers on top of that infrastructure, that's exciting for us. And we always think it's interesting in a AWS keynote that's two or three hours long that about a third or half of it is talking about data. We all love data, so the more rich sets of services we can surround and integrate Mongo into the better. So exciting for us. Data seems to be like the next generation of cloud. Data can become a huge asset for any business in any industry, whereas there are companies and times where data was a risk, a vulnerability. What is a great example in your opinion of a MongoDB customer who has done a great job of transforming to where data is now a huge asset and a driver of business differentiation? So one interesting customer example I really like is Axiom, they're a marketing data provider. Data has been the heart of their business for a long time, but traditionally their business would be packaging up and shipping data sets to their end customers in a very custom bespoke manner. What we work with them on is leveraging our cloud platform Atlas, along with some API technologies that we have and a product called Stitch, to make it very easy for them to create custom APIs to allow their end customers to access that data programmatically. And since we manage and run that on their behalf, their development team, their operations team, don't have to worry about the plumbing and managing of all these API layers and all that. They just stamp out these custom APIs, we auto-scale them on top of the rich Mongo database on the back end, and so we've allowed them to really take the data business they were in, but really modernize it by exposing it directly to developers programmatically instead of just shipping data around, which is expensive and cumbersome. So I think that's a really interesting example of sort of a data company transforming itself and kind of innovating in the cloud with some of the technologies we provide, obviously on top of the Amazon platform. Yeah, so you mentioned transforming, that's definitely been a theme of the show. So MongoDB is a different way of actually managing data, so compared to traditional methods. A lot of enterprises still have a lot of investment in RDBMS as more traditional kind of databases. What are you seeing when customers come to MongoDB and start using this different way of storing and managing data? What does that transition for them like? Sure, so I think the thing that MongoDB's inception 11 years ago through now, what drives our adoption, I should say, is really the fact that developers love our platform. The document model, the MongoDB API, is just a much more flexible and natural way for developers to think about writing applications. So when you're building an application, you might be managing a customer object, a product, an account. These are all sort of business objects that get represented in a developer's mind and then in an application, but then if you put that in a relational database, you're chopping that up into rows and tables and then having to rejoin that back together just to make sense of the underlying information you're trying to represent. Mongo gets rid of all of that cognitive dissonance and that's what really unlocks that developer productivity. Now, the interesting thing about MongoDB is as a non-relational database, we have looked at the legacy RDBMS providers and said, what are the things that are really strong about those platforms that we can bring forth and apply to this much more agile and natural data model? So things like data governance and schema, strong transactional guarantees, enterprise management functionality, enterprise security and encryption at a very deep level. These are things that large mission critical application developers and operators really need and they don't typically find them in fast databases, scalable databases like MongoDB. So what we've done is really merged the best of the legacy traditional databases, the things people expect in a rock solid mission critical database, but brought it forward in a model that's much faster for developers to move quickly on. And so the way that represents itself in our business, roughly about a third of our business, any given quarter tends to go from legacy migrations off of some traditional relational database. And the driver for that is modernization. People want to move those apps to the cloud. They don't just want to lift and ship from one relational database to another necessarily. That might have certain cost benefits from one provider to another, but it doesn't unlock that developer agility and that's why they're choosing MongoDB. So on the spirit of transformation, the ability for MongoDB to unlock that developer productivity, one of the things Danny Jassy talked about on Tuesday was one of the four essential pillars of transformation, it's got to come from the top down. It's got to come from that senior executive level that got to drive it down aggressively. As chief product officer, where are your conversations? Are you still in terms of like feedback and customer advisory information? Are you still talking mostly to the developer folks who are the primary users or are you also having those higher level both? Tell us a little bit about that. Now what's interesting about a data technology like Mongo is it's not a top down sort of sell. No CIO, CTO, line of business executive is going to dictate down to their developers, thou shalt use this particular database technology or whatnot. Every development team is going to choose a technology that allows them to move fast meets their requirements. So what we've really done is we focused on engaging with our customers, our sales organization, our marketing organization, our developer relations organization is merging a strategic top down sort of model with those CIOs and business leaders about how MongoDB can transform their business as a data platform, get that sponsorship, get that executive alignment to be a strategic provider but then at the same time really fostering that community that MongoDB has always been known for bottoms up to make sure that more and more of these applications see the power and value of MongoDB. So we have to merge both those motions. If we were just bottoms up, then I think we wouldn't be as strategic as we are in many of these organizations in terms of how transformative as a vendor and a technology provider and partner we are, but at the same time, if we lost our roots with the developers, databases don't get chosen from the top down. They get introduced and put on the list maybe and sponsored into the account but we've got to build and earn that trust with developers directly. So you've had incredible success, incredible growth so far. Thank you. What's next for Mongo? So I think a big part of our journey for the last three or four years has been really adding a second major growth engine to the company by building out our cloud business. So that was our MongoDB Atlas platform built on top of AWS, Azure and GCP and that is the fastest growing part of our business and will clearly be the majority of our business in the future. The next year to two years is really about transitioning from a single data product company to a data platform company. So earlier this year we announced not just the core foundational database features we're always building on top of but also a big step into analytics with our Atlas Data Lake product which allows development teams and analysts to run queries using the Mongo query language they love but on top of S3 where they have mountains and mountains of data stored from all these different sources. And at the same time we've also added things like full text indexing. So instead of standing up and search cluster next to your Mongo database having to worry about copying data just to get full text search in your application we merge that capability directly into the Atlas platform. So a big part of our journey is saying once we have so many customers on the platform how can we add more value and yet still merge that all in a very expressive developer experience with our query language. So they're not dealing with 13 different databases and four copies of their data and integrating and shuttling that all around but it's a very prescriptive experience for them. Wow, so here thank you for sharing all the innovations that are going on at MongoDB with Justin and me on the program today. A lot going on. Yeah, thank you for having me. I really enjoyed the show. Good, we appreciate your time. For my co-host Justin Warren I'm Lisa Martin and you've been watching theCUBE from Vegas baby, AWS re-invent 19. Thanks for watching.


Hey what's up folks, in this project we're building a portable sound effect speaker for our scooter. You can make this portable sound board that you can attach to any bike or scooter. This uses CircuitPython's audio mixing and looping features, so you can have an engine sound looping in the background and use the arcade buttons to mix in honking sound effects. Powered by the Feather RP2040, this uses an I2S amplifier for outputting high quality audio with a mini speaker. You can get the parts to build this project, links are in the description. With CircuitPython, you can easily make audio projects using the built-in audio libraries. With Audio Mixer, you can play multiple audio files together and output high quality audio over I2S. With native USB support, you can drag and drop Wave and MP3 audio files like a USB flash drive. The parts to build the enclosure can be 3D printed in PLA filament and the files are free to download. These quick connect cables make it easy to plug in your favorite arcade buttons. Be sure to check out the learn guide for full step-by-step tutorial on building this project. The microcontroller and amplifier are secured to a 3D printed plate that slides into rails built into the case. These panel mounted arcade buttons press fit and are easy to swap out thanks to the quick connect cables. This rechargeable battery is fitted inside a custom holder that gets housed inside the enclosure. A latching button is mounted to the side cover and snap fits into the enclosure. The speaker is fitted into a cavity on the opposite end with the speaker grill fitting on top. A 3D printed clip is secured to the enclosure and can be attached to the frame of any biker scooter. We hope this is as far as you can check out CircuitPython for your next audio project. Thanks for watching and be sure to subscribe for more projects from Adafruit.


Have you ever gone to bid a cabling job and Ended up helping the client carry things in. Is this the first for you Marv? I came here to do a quote somehow we we find ourselves helping the guy pull everything in that's life That's that's important us Services we offer so me and Marvin are here today bidding jobs Mm-hmm. I came with my little stool I wonder on the office when I want to sit next to my employees He just wanders with his little stool Let's talk. Let's talk. I Don't like to stand over people That actually I don't know if it but it does bother some people I don't think this guy's bothered by his he's got a pretty high tolerance for BS And he puts up with it. Yeah, but we're here for a more serious talk because everyone always asks How do you build stuff? Marvin wrote a script stuff. Yeah, well, yeah, how do we build one? How do we bid to how do you bid it then build it? Right? So I thought this was a script. I actually um So I do we legit are a real company I'm just sometimes impressed with how organized my staff is occasionally I'm like That's why this is usually just in my head But let's get back to the nitty-gritty of it. So first We had a client we met with and this actually comes from suppose you watch it would have been vlog Thursday Not the last episode episode before episode six. Yeah episode. I think no, that's like 56. You're thinking of off-topic Oh, yeah, I'm sorry. I'm not Thursday on Thursday So if you were to watch that video you would have seen our shtick as we called it chamber of commerce And we said we think we closed some deals on so That client meeting that we had and off the cuff at the Chamber of Commerce has led to this They need it's a new build out new building We did a walk-through and I can probably drop a photo here of the whole building that we're bidding on But this is kind of a talk of how we do the bids and how we put it together Because this is something that people get hung up on so if you're starting a business This is really hard and it becomes more fluid Doing the bids as you get better at it because it does there So it didn't take me long to train Marvin on how we do our bids From a sales standpoint, but when you get to these this is a big job when you get to these bigger jobs We kind of have to go over some everything to make sure we didn't miss anything You know That we're using the right equipment and all that stuff for these larger jobs So we have a good idea of what the client wants. They needed 30 cameras They needed a lot of drops a lot of TVs mounted So this is all an infrastructure build specifically the type of job This is Wi-Fi and infrastructure build-out job and it's kind of Once once you kind of understand how long it takes you to do something That's kind of how you can just put it together. So honestly TVs we mount fast So we just for every TV they want mounted it's one hour one hour one hour for each TV. It's really simple So you got to have some understanding of how fast you can get something done And then you can put it in there as a bid we do prefer to charge a flat rate so that flat rate those based on how much you pay your staff per hour and I mean that way you can calculate that part of it And you got to calculate in there a markup in it Subjectively you may want a 20 25 percent markup. I mean that's going to vary with opinions and things like that But it's pretty reasonable on the hardware Now what we do for the client because we don't They don't need every line item detail that generally is actually more information than they need and you so More than they want definitely more than they want and what that means is We give them a per camera installed price So we price out the nvr forum and then we give them a per camera Installed price that's going to be the wiring the pointing the mounting Everything so once you kind of understand and we've done so many of these we know how long it takes for a soft camera We give them a price that way the guy starts with I think I need 30 and we're like, okay That's fine. It seems reasonable for the place. He's putting in if you need more Here's the per camera price if you need less there you can deduct in the per camera price We know this may vary plus or minus five cameras by the time the project comes there But this way we give them the tools to recalculate the price Without Overthinking the whole thing now. We also made sure when this is in the bit as well This is 30 cameras. So we have a 48 port POE switch that means we did tell them There is a point at which one and when he if he does go over 48 cameras that has to that and this comes back and forth They do a little bit of talking with the client a little bit of how we put the bits together and then I Come over here and sit down and decide we should record it of why we have two of us going over to case Because sometimes you double add an excel spreadsheet together Sometimes you copy and paste and then look at the grand total and go holy cow. It seems really good It's not he doubled it. Yeah, right, but he was auditing he figured it out and it's It's like that and what couldn't we do though when I it's nice to have someone I have a much more technical background and Marv has more of a sales background But kind of between us either me or one of the other technicians Just kind of review the sales bid to make sure it's feasible and that is there and it things like okay We know there's a 48 port switch and there's 30 cameras that need power So we're good up until 48 cameras things like that and make sure that We always just choose because the price difference is small We generally go with the higher wattage switches because why not the price difference is only like a 150 more I think it was if that even if that it was so minor Yeah, the unified ones just go with the higher wattage switch and don't worry about it But you know it's kind of getting the scope of work correct and making sure it's on there But then giving them enough detail so if they have to make small adjustments You're not chasing paper all the time and readjusting how much is it for one more camera? How much is it to have one more drop so we have our per drop Based on the type of drop so we have like all the drops that go for all their data lines broke down to price And here's our drop price on that and away you go This gives the client enough that they can make little adjustments to the final is still understand the bid But not giving it and we've seen a lot of IT guys do this They come up with these four-page bids for a job like this They have every little thing like hey the jack the mud plate They try to measure how much cable they're gonna use in detail And I'm like really just come up with it if we look at the building And you know centrally we're gonna put it and you know about where they're gonna put them Even if they move a little bit you can guesstimate the cable and go okay The average run will be this far and when you know that you don't have to do this whole cable figuring out thing You can come up with a flat rate the cabling is not cheap But it's not the most expensive labor still always the most expensive on all these jobs I mean the cameras do have a lot of cost to them and the NVR server itself has a cost to it But a lot of this is some of the labor that goes into climbing up And this is place gonna require a man lift the 35 40 foot 40 foot ceiling 40 foot ceilings easily Yeah, 40 50 foot ceilings they have that one scape that he said is three stories Yeah, so it's at least three stories tall at least three stories tall So because the building we already know that's gonna be in there That's definitely a factor of doing it. So this is a little bit of insight in how we do the bids It's not like a two-in-death process and then what we're gonna do the final follow-up So, you know, we meet the guy at the chamber He says, hey, I want to do this thing So we went and met with him at his office and then if we met with him at his office Or the new building out really not even off the office. He's been built yet. This is a raw building Yeah, there was there were still trenches in the floor where we're electric and stuff is going to be run Yeah, so not all that's done. So then from there, we're gonna get him the camera quote And the other quotes that go with this like first line to Wi-Fi We'll present it to him have a talk with them say, you know Is there any questions you have about this and then we'll have a few touch points would follow it up Now we already are aware that this was bid by at least one other company previously We aren't privy to that information right now I like when they do share it, but you can't ever be that lucky. It's a game of poker and the guy Likes that we're local versus inter company. So we have that advantage. We hope our prices are within the range of theirs But this is something else too, especially if you're starting out.   That's one of the things I try to tell people especially starting out They they all the time feel I'm gonna start a computer company I'm just gonna do it for half of what my competitor does and like, okay You have to get paid what you're worth That's just it and it I mean you can have better prices or whatever But you also get known as the cheap computer guy And if you get to a point where then it's like well, I need this done right So I'm not gonna call the cheap computer guy. I'm gonna call the guy that does it right, you know And so I think Tom agrees and you know, like we bet we would much rather be the the company that does it right Yes, then the ones that are the best price. Yeah, we can be both great Yeah We our prices are competitive and when you come up with your prices for what you're charging per drop when it comes to Network wiring and cabling and things like that when you're bidding some of those. It's a Important aspect to think about that you're within market price So you got to kind of know what your market price is and I was actually told we were doing work for school And it's funny because the newer IT people in school think our price is very reasonable because where he used to live out Of state they charge more per drop but we actually know our rate is a little bit higher than a couple other guys in the area and We were told that by a few people like we're a rates a little higher But they really like our work and are real happy with us But they just want to let us know and I said, thank you and they said well you match. I said no I Knew where they were going with it. Yeah, and we know we didn't manage price But I don't think we're only I think we're 15% higher than one of our competitors So we're not it's what to me that's within reason and for the quality of work They that we give I don't I don't feel as our 15% higher because I've seen the quality at work and kind of Half acidness that they do is what I can describe. There's just it's just it's not as neat and clean as our work That's that's an important thing. We really push on there And that's also why we showcase when we have some more project files and videos on there a project showcase I got to do more of them I've been busy and haven't focused a lot on that aspect of it because I don't always get time to go out to the Job site because I'm actually not the one pulling the cable Corey is I do have another one that's sitting on my desk I'm hoping to get published today But this is a really important aspect of course This is like a more of the number one questions I guess how do you bid the jobs and people are looking for this automatic secret sauce to it and literally I got a Google Docs spreadsheet She pulled up here That we put things in we have really easy templates for that there's not anything about them that's special I've got a couple of formulas in it is all it is Yeah, a couple of this column plus that column times that column and yeah quantities on there and prices and all that's gonna be Related there and I've talked about before it's almost we kind of take these in free form So you look at some of the big stuff that we do It's really simplistic And that's not on accident. I went showed someone I said here's a here's a bid for I think it was for $29,000 and it fits on a single page. Yeah, and people like you can't get job without I'm like that jobs already paid What are you talking about like yeah, I this I'm not joking like this is how it works with us And the clients seem to appreciate these simplicity if they would need to know how many mud rings We use a certain nickel and diamonds or one probably not a client at one because they're Drug-and-driving nuts going I want to know the exact brand of cable that's going You know some of those people once they start doing that and then what they do it is they just want to throw it all And Google and price it out. They try to nitpick it apart and charge you like that. I'm like whatever That can be a pain, but I've been wrong about clients We had a client that nitpicked like that that one hospital we did all their IT guy was a little they paid us Very well, and we're happy, but he was very picky about He scoped out with their scope of work well had specific brands He wanted us to use and they actually end up just buying the product and having us do the labor Which I was fine with because then I didn't have to think about it We just used all the product they wanted a job turned out nice and I was I went in very skeptical But I stuck to the guns on this is how much my guys get so to speak. This is the labor charge So I will we are flexible and things like that, but for the most part the majority of businesses go look I don't know about this wiring stuff. This is what you guys do. Tell me how much it is I'm gonna need Wi-Fi coverage for the building. I need 30 cameras that these angles covered Boom give me a price and break it out price per camera They don't need to know every little doodad that went into that camera. They don't honestly care It isn't a business owner myself I mean the plow guy comes in and wants to tell me every little detail. Thank you dude But just tell me how much show you for plowing to park a lot Yeah, I know it probably you're justifying why you're here, but I think your price is reasonable have a wonderful day Here's money. Yeah, I really gotta I other things need to know how many pounds of salt you dumped Yeah, I mean the bill the bill was like $212 last month. I mean that's fine. That's great I paid it so great. It was worth it to not slip and fall in the parking lot pretty much Thanks so much. I was salting and everything and there was probably some more details I missed but I'm happy the parking lots cleared and I paid the money and how much tire tread was used Yeah, and some people go over for that I mean there's there are those clients that want it but I find my best clients are often the ones that You you keep it very concise. You'd be very clear. You keep every honest But you they don't need every tiny little detail to make these projects work So hopefully this is helpful and an understanding of it process I know everyone's looking for the secret or the formula or I just plug in the numbers to this magical thing And it just kicks out the sale and the client signs it and I do the job It's really not there is it other complexities. The secret is this is a little bit of complex It is kind of a there's gonna be some follow-up calls with client trying to make sure we win them over If he's got questions about it now, this is also where our video marketing comes in He you know the question well, okay, you sent this but what about that camera system? No problem I got a video ready and we fire it off to you I actually because we have the cameras installed at our office when the clients wanted to come and see it for himself So he comes stood in the lobby Recorded himself on camera walked over to the other side of the you know The counter and watched himself on camera and listened and seen it He goes alright. I'm sold that looks great and then we installed that was the guy for the the landscaping place Yeah, yeah, he's seen it. Yeah, right down street. Yeah They seen it. They were sold on it. We could prove it We and we have videos that demos that we've sent to people Well, I was like basically how to use the unify software it helps on the training But it's also a good pre-sale tool because they see how nice the software is on these unifies and they go Okay, I like that. No, it's not the only thing we sell this bid is actually going to get more complicated very quickly because He wants a other camera system bid on here as well So we also know he might he might once he sees this bid and we tell him that this is the cheaper version He may decide that because he was thought yeah Well, the challenges with this bid is 30 30 days of storage with 1080 cameras 30 cameras No problem when you go to 4k you are quadruple the resolution and therefore quadruple just about the story Do you need a lot more storage to sort of high-end 4k is even to look at some of the other cameras? And I think it's because he sees the buzzwords and then that's cool We can do those and we have schools and places that are using super high-risk cameras. No problem They do cost a lot more. Yeah, I mean I think the camera prices by themselves are more than our installed camera I was gonna say that that mistaken double price may have been the right price if he wants to go So this is kind of behind the scenes this is what this is what I'm not making videos people I'm making a video doing this Well, particularly one stone two birds with stone and we're actually kind of wrapping up the bid here You know, we looked at it We go here we go here Marvin wanted to confirm a couple things and I'm like Hey, let me grab the camera and you know go over this and it's I guess it wouldn't when you see how short the bids are It's just way easier. That's that's the goal a lot of times I think is making sure it's concise and readable so they understand what they're buying from you Don't ever convoluted your product offerings God that's just because business owners. We don't like that We don't want just tell me what you do.  I'll do my best to reply to all of you And if you need a system bid let us know we do this this yeah, we will do this for you We'll do this for you happen to be a customer watching.  Yeah, you'll know right look at that We this is this is Tom's happy the bid is done I want to go back to making videos and I yeah, I love doing to work. This is the part that I won't lie This is drudgery for a little bit for me. This is one of the reason we have a Marvin here Marvin's handling it well, though I can't juggle see you


Epigenetics is the study of changes in gene expression that do not involve alterations to the underlying DNA sequence. These changes can occur through mechanisms such as DNA methylation, histone modifications, and non-coding RNA production. Epigenetic changes have been observed in many types of cancer, and they can lead to abnormal cell growth and proliferation, as well as increased resistance to chemotherapeutic drugs. In recent years, researchers have begun to explore the potential of epigenetic therapies for treating cancer. This includes targeted treatments that aim to restore normal epigenetic patterns in cancerous cells, as well as broader approaches that seek to manipulate the tumor microenvironment to promote anti-tumor immunity. Despite some successes, these approaches have yet to produce significant improvements in patient outcomes. One possible explanation for this is that current epigenetic therapies lack the ability to target specific components of the tumor microenvironment, leading to unintended side effects and poor efficacy. To address this issue, researchers have developed novel epigenetic-based drug delivery systems that can selectively target and deliver therapeutic agents to the tongue. This article was authored by Jiusin Zhang, Li Huang, Guangbo Gu, and others.


Everybody forced here ribbon a box of 2021 playbook football hobby for Kevin F Let's get that Trevor Lawrence That's the block Kevin Quad shield book Yes, I think yes, exactly. I know it's coming here. I know it's got to Yes, the weight is right For why is this this is weird? Here Jersey card Mike Williams to 149 Mike will Jordy Nelson Jersey auto number to 75 Jordy Nelson white lightning Redemption Bay signatures gold Matt Ryan. Oh boy Higgins and chat Matt Ryan redemption Bay signatures gold Used to play football Matt Ryan To 25 a semi fohoco RPA book green ink I didn't know they sound a different ink in playbook Did he just like take it under his on his own terms? It's got like he's got like 12 different gel pens or something Nice semi good box here Matt Ryan gold redemption to thank you again Kevin get these out to you


that if I go into this account the clearing account what it actually did was go in and out of this clearing account so within this clearing account you've got these transactions it created a sales receipt and expense and then a deposit and it basically increases and decreased the clearing account as part of the transaction but ultimately did put it into the checking account which does remove one added step on our end if the deposit you know comes in perfectly to the to the exact dollar amount because now it should be in our in our checking account over here so if I go on to my my checking account if I go into my bank feeds and go into my banking checking if the if the deposit that hits my checking account matches exactly what that journal entry did then notice it'll just match up here and it'll record a match so when I record the deposit on the bank feed side of things no new transaction will happen it's just basically helping with with the bank reconciliation we're just saying okay we found that it matches out to to the deposit that was put in there by the journal entry process that was done through the bank feed Shopify app connection alright so let's take a look at the income statement if I go to the income statement and I'm running it for 2023 because that's when we put the information in and now we've got the Shopify sales so if I go into the Shopify sales we've got our detail here I'm gonna hit the drop-down on the Shopify sales and it created in essence a sales receipt but it's a group sales receipt so the sales receipt is the form typically used for a cashed based type of sale that you would use in a cash register but note the customer is not each customer it's just one lump sum customer that was used to create that sales receipt so if I go back on over and exit then the we've got that we've got the the Shopify shipping income so it broke out the shipping income that we charged for us and once again it did that here with the sales receipt form going back on over and exit so instead of just having a journal entry it did kind of a similar thing we did with a journal entry with the sales receipt it's got the Shopify selling fees which it did put under the categorization of cost of goods sold so if I go into the selling fees and hit the drop down here now we've got the selling fees that it broke out individually per that data that we saw that's pulling in for all the the different sales transactions that happened let's X out of that and then we've got the the shipping selling fees here and then that is it now if I go back on over to the first tab and we go to our app transactions notice we were in the for review then we added it so now it's in the reviewed section and you can see kind of the detail which will link to what it did here as well so I can go into this one this is the the sales receipt that it generated you can see what it built it built a sales receipt which is typically the form used for a cash based sales that like a cash register situation that we just saw sales receipt and I'll close that back out here's the expense form that was generated so expense form like a check form decrease in the checking account but it's putting it into the the clearing account that it made up here specifically for this expense form so we have those items and then we've got the deposit form which is of course the form typically used to increase the checking account so we made the deposit here not with the bank feeds but with the integration of the of the app and then if I go back on over to the first tab then we went to the banking and we can connect this out which will just not record anything new because it's already in the checking account it'll just verify helping us with like our reconciliation process so it looks like you know they're doing a similar process that we did with the journal entry grouping everything together with this integration which is kind of what is recommended obviously it works quite well if you have a if you have a situation where your payment structure is tied directly to the Shopify store in this case that the other payment processors just like we saw with the journal entry methods will add another wrinkle you know into the system that will have to deal with you possibly can kind of work around with that system they've recorded the transactions not with like a normal journal entry but rather they use the forms like the deposit forms expense forms and sales receipt forms but they made group deposit forms sales for red that are combining sales together so the general concept is much the same we saw with the journal entry method so now that the general idea then would be whether with the methods that you want to use would be do you want to just do the simple method where you integrate the bank account do you want to then use a journal entry method which has a lot of manual work to it of course do you want to use an integration possibly the QuickBooks integration here which is still a new type of integration but it does look like they're trying to do in essence what a lot of people recommend for the best practices of the third-party app integrations or applications like an like an a2x type of system but even as you're doing these integrations you've got to think about what's actually happening which is similar to what we did with the journal entry it's pulling in the information in a summary kind of format it's not pulling in all of the information in terms of every sales type of transaction and you would think that the QuickBooks system here looks to be set up the way the QuickBooks system is set up for the particular apps that Shopify Amazon and eBay and it's trying to trying to make it as simple as possible which means you might have less options than maybe you would have with a third-party integration so so if you need to do more customization or do something different maybe the third-party integrations might give you more to do with that but obviously you would think the QuickBooks having it in in-house here would be it's kind of nice because then you don't have a third-party you don't have the payment for the third-party you don't have to deal with a third-party application so we'll have to see what QuickBooks does with it going forward but there would be a similar process if you used a third-party app usually most people recommend an app that does kind of a similar thing as we saw here pulling the information in in like a group format basically making a journal entry format and using a clearing account system as we saw with the manual method


So, this describes the direct shear test which we are going to talk about the direct shear test or the shear box test sometimes also known as box shear test. As the name suggests, we take a box and we try to keep the sample inside and shear it. So, this is the setup, this is how it looks like. There are some modern avatars of this setup also, but this is a classical setup where you have a box which I was talking about. This box can be connected to a shaft with a load cell through which the shearing is done. There is a hanger assembly which you are seeing on which the normal stresses or the loading is applied which transmits the normal stress on the sample. This box can be utilized for doing drain and undrained test both. Now, see what happens is because of this motor assembly, if I keep the sample inside this box, there will be a relative slip of one portion of sample on the bottom portion of sample. How much strains I have applied to the sample can be measured with the help of horizontal gauge and vertical strain gauges. This shows how the sample preparation is done. You take some soil sample. Most of the videos on the YouTube are incorrect, so please do not follow them much. So, this is the box. You must have seen that there are two halves of this box. See it again. Yeah, you can weigh the soil and look at this. The way this guy has mounted the upper half on the lower half of the box. This box are usually 6 by 6 centimeter and sample thickness is about 3, 3 and a half centimeter. There are advanced testing setups which are available in the market where the box size would be 10 centimeter by 10 centimeter. But the thickness of the sample is kept as 25 mm or 35 mm depending upon your requirements. So, this is the cleavage through which the shearing takes place because this is one half and this is the upper half of the sample. So, this is the sample preparation. Normally direct shear box test setup is used for granular material not for cohesive soils. Yeah, this is what I would like to explain to you. We have a top plate and bottom plate and if you look at the grooves, these grooves remain perpendicular to the direction of movement of the direct shear box assembly for a better grip. If you keep them like this, there will be a slippage. So, this is a top plate on which I can keep a load plate. This ball helps in transmitting the load which is coming from the vertical load loading assembly onto the system. This is how the box is placed and what you have seen is that the box is free to slip on the wheels. So, when you will do this test, I am sure you will understand it better. Now, this is how the lateral stresses which are going to come on the sample which is the shear stress can be determined. This is the vertical strain gauge which is fixed on the top of the sample to understand during shearing how much volume reduction the system is going to undergo. Now, what this guy is doing is trying to set the rate of strain for the sample so that you can simulate either a slow test or a fast test. This is the application of the normal stress on the sample and now the test is running and you get response of the sample. I will discuss about the typical test results and the philosophy behind this and how to decipher the information which is used. So, this is the normal loading and of course, the analysis of the results, fine. So, in short, this is the container you can say or the box in which depending upon the type of test we are doing, I can place a drainage layer. So, this is what is known as a porous stone or a perforated steel plate and this is for the drain test. In most of the problems in this course, you have to understand what type of conditions are being simulated because answer cannot be unique. So, you have to assume a situation and you have to justify what is that you are trying to do as a designer. So, when we talk about geotechnical engineering to applications, these are the philosophies or the quantification of the material properties. Now, how I am going to derive this parameter itself is a philosophy, clear? So, this is actually I am trying to emphasize on and if I replace it by a solid steel plate, I am not allowing any drainage to occur, this becomes the undrained test. So, this is how the boundary conditions can be changed. This is the you can say one half of the sample. This is the cleavage plane along which the shearing is going to take place. This is the another half of the sample. We call this as the plane of shearing. On the top of this also, I can put a porous stone or a perforated plate. This is sandwiched between a steel plate. So, this is the steel plate to give the rigidity and then on the top of this is kept the loading cap and this is how the normal stress sigma is applied. The whole assembly as per my testing conditions can go into a water bath. So, I can fill up the water in this system. So, this becomes the water bath. As I said the typical dimensions are 6 by 6 centimeters or 10 by 10 centimeter. So, the size of the sample is going to be 10 by 10 on 6 by 6 and usually the thickness is approximately 25 to 35 mm depending upon your requirements. Now, if I take an element somewhere here alright and if I zoom it, what I am interested in is I am interested in finding out what is the state of stress here. So, this is a plane at which sigma is acting and then there is a shear stress which might act once I have mounted it on the direct shear box assembly and if I shear it. So, normally top portion of the sample shears with respect to the bottom portion clear the top portion moves. So, this is where the shear stress comes in picture. Now, what I want to do is I want to measure the vertical deformation by putting a dial gauge or this is the error of electronics or you can put some LVDTs or you can put some sensors to find out how much the deflection is and I would also like to know what is the horizontal deformation undergone by the sample. So, this is the delta H. So, this is the vertical dial gauge and this is the horizontal dial gauge. So, essentially we try to measure vertical strains, vertical deformations, axial deformations are axial strains by keeping a certain value of normal stress and changing the value of shear stress and how this is changed as you have seen in the video tau is changed by constant rate of shearing and that is why these type of tests are known as sorry strain control test. So, this is the whole thing which is as strain control test clear because the way you are straining the sample is in your control. So, a known amount of rate of stress the shearing is given to the sample and normally this is depending upon the gearbox assembly I can go for 0.125 millimetre per minute or 0.010125 millimetre per minute it depends upon what is that you are trying to do. So, this is going to be a fast test this is going to be a slow test when you do these experiments in the lab you will realize it better. Now I am more interested in analyzing the results the first type of result which we get from this analysis or this type of testing would be stress in KPA versus normal stress in KPA sorry let us not go to the normal stress right now let us talk about only the axial strain the delta H which I have shown over here if L is the length of the sample the strain would be axial strain would be delta H upon L the second type of response with which I will be interested in is how during shearing epsilon A is your axial strain. So, if I say that this is compression which I am getting from delta V so this is a delta V axis alright if delta V is positive it is compression however if delta V is negative this is what is known as dilation now what happens is starting from this point static condition there is no shearing going on on the sample what you have done is you prepare the sample kept it in the direct shear box setup applied the sigma value no shearing fine there might be some compression particularly if the soil is dry if soil is saturated there will be less compression and if compression occurs the densities are going to change now we are going to plot the response of the material once the shearing starts not before that but if you are very eager to observe the vertical deformations or the strains in the sample you can compute. So, the moment shearing starts as you strain the sample what happens is this is how the response would look like this is one state of the sands normally this is the typical response for dense sands there is a hump followed by a residual portion so if you keep on shearing it it will become it will attain a asymptote so this is the dense sands response we call this as the residual strength shear strength this is the peak shear strength on the same plot if I superimpose the loose sands this is how the loose sands would look like I hope you remember the denseness and the looseness of the material would depend upon rd the relative density of the sands alright and relative density is a function of emacs emin and the wide ratio at which the sample has been prepared in case of the loose sands shearing does not result into a hump we do not get a peak but when we deal with the sands which are dense the typical response is you get a peak followed by a residual what is the philosophy of this relationship why do you want to study this I hope you can easily understand that epsilon a is nothing but the amount of strain the system undergoes when it comes under shearing loading correct earthquake somewhere here in between what you are observing is that the response of the loose and and the dense and almost becomes unique this is what is known as a critical volume condition sometimes people also define this as a control I think this is critical volume no constant volume if you plot the deformation versus strain relationships what you will observe is the loose sands when you shear them are going to get compressed however what is going to happen to the dense sands dense sands will dilate and they would show like this the response so this is for the dense sands this is for the loose sands hope you can understand dilation occurs when the wide ratio is minimum that is the dense state of the material clear compression will occur when the material starts from E max alright when you are shearing the material starting from a very high wide ratio the material gets compressed compression takes over ultimately a state of constant volume comes when you share a material from a very dense state alright what it does it defies the confining stress and it dilates now this is what is known as on a scale of E if I plot because E is related to the compression and dilation this becomes E critical this value becomes E critical sometimes we also define this as ECV wide ratio corresponding to constant volume this is a typical response now the question is why did we do all these things what we are going to get out of it now comes the job of the designer so if I ask you a question which response out of the two we are going to consider for designing a system this one or this one you are getting a peak strength you are not getting a peak strength over here so this type of questions designers have to answer particularly when you are designing systems for earthquake resistant structures I will never go for a material which shows me very high strength I want to under performer I use the word under performer correct but then at least it is certain that it will perform under expectations no doubts but it is not very very unrealistic and not very dubious and ultimately it is going to give me some value of the strength which is constant for further straining not like this material where it shows peak very early but then later on it shows a great drop in the strength so the whole idea of designing the systems is how much shear strength I can mobilize I have used the word today first time mobilization please remember this word how much shear strength I could mobilize out of this material under shearing process corresponding to its dense and loose states seeing the response like this where most of the structures which are going to be sitting on these type of deposits when the earthquake comes you can realize what is going to happen the whole system will get densified compression or if the material happens to be in extremely dense state the dilation will occur both the situations are going to be dangerous for you that means what I should be doing is I should be defining the range in which I should be compacting the material for more stable conditions and that happens to be approximately 10% plus minus of E critical value ECB value so this is the range in which I should be doing most of the constructions why because this is the very stable state the deformations are not going to be extreme which are going to cause detrimental effect to the structures which are sitting on the top of them so this much information I could decode by doing simple test so this is the peak shear strength I will define is as peak and this is the residual tau r.


Our current estimates from the Pew Research Center are 11 million. They represent about one-quarter of all the migrants in the U.S., so there's about 44-45 million in the United States. And 11 million are what we call unauthorized migrants. The number reached as high as about 12.2 million in 2007. Our estimates show it dropped about a million after the recession by 2009. And since then it's been stable with a little bit of a downward drift, but we estimate about 11 million right now. The basic logic of it is actually pretty simple. We have data from our censuses and surveys. There's a big survey that the federal government does called the American Community Survey that's used to estimate the total foreign born population. We make an estimate of how many people are residing legally in the United States as immigrants using principally data on people admitted to the United States. And basically we subtract the total minus the number in the country legally, and that difference is the number in the country without authorization. There's a little bit more to it than that, but that's the basic logic of the approach. When we generate the estimate we put what we call a margin of error around it, and it's based on the idea that it's from a sample. Our margin of error is that it could be 150,000 higher or lower. There are other kinds of potential errors in the estimate, and it could probably be as much as a million higher and maybe half a million lower, in my opinion. But our margin of error is 150,000. First let me be clear, Mexico is about half of the total. We just aren't sure it's over half anymore. So we estimate about five and a half million unauthorized Mexicans in the country. The next biggest country we estimate is El Salvador at 700,000. So Mexico is still by far the largest number. What has happened, though, is that the Mexico number used to be close to 7 million, and it's dropped considerably in the last seven years. I think there's a number of factors. The job situation in the United States, which has always been the primary factor drawing Mexicans to the United States, after the Great Recession we had in 2007, 2008 and 2009, there were no jobs for Mexicans. A lot of the Mexicans in the country at that point went home, particularly the ones who had recently arrived. And the number coming from Mexico has dropped considerably. It's lower than it's been in the last 20 years. And that's due to, first, the lack of jobs. And second, I think the enforcement at the border has made it more expensive and more difficult for Mexicans to come to the United States. And in northern Mexico, there's a lot of drug-related violence, so it's dangerous in Mexico, not just to cross the border, but just to get to the border. And I think those are the big factors of one other. Mexico's undergone a tremendous drop in fertility in the last 50 years. In 1970, the average Mexican woman had seven children, and now it's dropped to a little over two. And it takes a while demographically for that to work its way through the population, but what it means is that in the age group of the late teens to early 20s, there's not nearly as many Mexicans as there were 20 years ago. So there's not as many potential migrants either. So I think all of those factors are working together. Well, in the United States, I think the big holes in the estimation process have to do with how good our surveys are. How many people are left out of the surveys? We've been able to make estimates, and we're fairly confident of them, but it would be nice to have better information on survey undercount, survey coverage of both legal and unauthorized. The other thing I think would be very helpful is more direct data collection from people who are known to be unauthorized immigrants about their characteristics. It doesn't necessarily have to be a universal survey, but it would be helpful for those of us who are modeling what unauthorized immigrants look like to have more data collected from unauthorized immigrants directly. The experience I've had is that as we've been able to get more and better data on the immigrant population and how many are in the country, how many immigrants are in the country, not how many are undocumented are in the country, demographers have been able to improve the methodology to separately estimate legal and unauthorized immigrants. When I started doing this, which was 35 years ago now, there was a very wide range of estimates. People were estimating 6 to 12 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States, and at the time there were probably only 2 million in the country. So as we've had more data and better data, the estimates have gone up, but the range of estimates has narrowed, and we've finally reached the point where the high estimates and the low estimates are converging. So I think better data on immigrants and better data that researchers can use can improve the discourse about how many immigrants are in the country.


Onw eich bod yn fwy oeddiad, fel y clywed ar y gwaith, eich sefyllfa yn ei fod yn ddiddordeb yn ei ddiddordeb. Rwy'n ddiddordeb yn ddiddordeb. Rwy'n ddiddordeb, eich ddiddordeb yn ddiddordeb. Rwy'n ddiddordeb yn ddiddordeb yn ei ddiddordeb a'n rhaid i chi bobl ydym ni, ac oedd iawn i'r digon yw eu tawch a'n fyddo i'r gwneud. ond mae'r cyfnod yw'r cyfnod, rydyn ni'n gweithio'r gweithio gyda'r ysgol, ac yw'r cyfnod. Felly yw'r gweithio'r gweithio ar y cysylltu o'r ddwylliant, rydyn ni'n gweithio'r ysgol, yw'r cyfnod o'r ddwylliant, a'r cyfnod o'r rhaid. Yn amlwg yma, Mark Miodownik, mae'r cyfnoddau cyfnoddau. Yn amlwg yma yw'r cyfnod o'r ddwylliant, a'r cyfnodd awr oderio'n cyfeirio'n gyfnod o'r cyfnodd. Yn amlwg yma, mae'n gweithio'r cyfnodd a'r cyfnodd ar beth sy'n cael rhaid i'w ddwylliant. Felly mae'n ffordd graddog ar gyfer y cyfnodd yw'r cyffredin sy'n gweithio'r cyfnodd. Fe gaf eu brydiau, y bwyddon o'r cyfnodd, y mor bobysiau, gynnwys ymhyf sydd wedi'i broses bwydden nhw, in the next century or so and I'm really wondering what everyone else thinks about these kind of topics and what our speakers think about these and I kind of just want to kick off by saying a few things one of which is that this is bio so we heard wonderfully about all these different bio systems today from our speakers, starfish cells, geckos, beetles, plants, bacteria and I think like you you know we all marveled at them so that there's the bio we had today and we had the inspiration, the sheer beauty in some senses right which is nothing to be ashamed of I mean it's part of I think I'm probably sure that a lot of us are doing this because that we're attracted by the sheer beauty of nature but it has to be more than that and I suppose the other inspiration which we've heard about today is things like a creative spark an idea that's just that's it it's just the idea and off you go in a different direction doesn't have to be a replica of the biological system and we saw Ray just throwing out you know here's a biological system I'm fascinated by someone so hopefully someone will get inspired by that and I think that is the purpose of these meetings and I think that's the purpose of science in general so all those things are great and also I think there's a cultural significance as Neil alluded to earlier that you know things like photosynthesis all of these things we are biological organisms of ourselves we live on our planet I think it's important just as it's important to study history and literature and music it's important to study the natural world just for its own sake as we are it but then the title of this meeting is new technologies by inspired new technologies so we have a duty to look ahead look at what's going to be inspired by them and I really would like to provoke my fellow panellist to have a go at that however kind of speculative you think it is because that's it's this is the time you're experts in your field we've got a global audience it'd be great to hear your thoughts about that but I'll just throw out a few things one of which is you know we have some big problems we have a big problem about global warming I feel like you know if we're going to have a society dedicated to science and by inspiration we really need to be thinking about how that's going to be do something about that we also have a problem with waste and this may be not matter to some people because essentially we've got lots of big holes in the ground which we currently put all of our waste and there is plenty more holes in the ground that we could put it into and it's probably not an immediate problem but I just feel like it really it's terrible for the scientific and engineering community that we've created all these wonderful technologies and then they end up floating in the Pacific Ocean and the people who see that and the organisms that get affected by that you know it just tells you that we haven't really thought it through that we're not as good as we think we are and I feel like that is a terrible advert for our community and we really really need to do something about it so it may not be an economic imperative and it may not be a social imperative I think it's a cultural imperative to get to do something about plastic waste in the oceans anyway there's a couple of ideas I wonder if I can hand over what we're going to do is give each one of our panellists five minutes to have a kind of bit of a rant perhaps or a discuss and then we'll bring it together and we'll open up to the audience for further questions so we've got Patricia Basaru from CNRS we've got Mark Kokoski from Stanmaw and we've got George Whitesides from Harvard you've heard them all before but here's five more minutes shall I hand over to you Mark first? Sure and actually there's one or two slides on the laptop there just to illustrate the points I want to talk about so I want to go back to the opening comment that sort of kicked off today's events which is that biological structures and processes have been refined over millions of years and so why should we not take advantage of what nature has discovered in our own technology? Well yes exactly and in fact the more we learn the more inspired we become and I must say already very much inspired by many of the talks I've heard today I have all kinds of ideas but I'm also very daunted because everything is just extremely complex and in particular I look at some of the processes and structures that were talked about by Yrw Deng by Patricia Basaru and by others they're actually much more complicated than the adhesive structure of the gecko and that's already too complicated for me to fabricate correctly so I have to make crude approximations so I'm also very much in the market for new techniques, new technologies and the slide up here behind me is we learned that some people that we've collaborated with had received one of the new two-photon stereolithography machines, nanoscribe and we became very excited because the resolution of that machine at least in theory is down to around 350 nanometers and so we made up a CAD model of what we thought look you know if we could only make it this is what we really would like to make we kind of know what shape we want, if it would look like this and if you go to the next slide you'll see what happened it actually clicks through a couple of times well let's see what do I want, page down? aha, allright, well there was our first approach we took our CAD file, we had the software decomposed into slices and there was result remember this is what we were trying to make this is what we got and we realized that there were all kinds of problems basically when you're trying to push the limits of a machine you can't just let it decompose your computer aided design files you have to take it in hand and drive the laser yourself started to get a bit better but it was taking an entire day just to make this little array and they still don't look quite right and then we realized that you know what we really only need the laser we don't need to solidify the whole structure we only need to solidify the outer shell sort of the exoskeleton of this structure to solidify it and then we can put the whole thing in batch irradiated under UV light and it started to get a little better and indeed the geometry is looking actually quite promising now but there's still a problem which is to make a little batch of 10 by 10 of the, not even I think maybe 8 by 8 of these things is taking hours more or less an entire day and of course I don't need a fraction of a square millimeter I need hundreds of thousands, I want square centimeters so that's the thing, that's the question I want to leave with the question to everybody which is that we need processes that if you think about what's going on in nature we have things growing and differentiating cell by cell in parallel and making these wonderfully complex and sophisticated structures and if you think about what's going on with the gecko that's just beta, the adhesive structure is not living tissue, it's just beta keratin like a fingernail or like hair so what's happening is that cells on the gecko's toes are excreting or secreting as material and it's starting to clump together and clump together until you form a sedal strock and it's doing this every month because they molt and that's what I want I want a process where I can start to program some of these wonderful geometries that I'm hearing about with a range of length scales let's say from 10 nanometers up to 10 centimeters without incurring enormous cost and having to go to a completely new set of machinery each time I try to add another level of complexity thank you I feel like it needed that Patricia so I'm not going to do anything propose anything to clean the ocean but unfortunately I would say that after this day I realized that we didn't get much about synthetic biology I mean the way it's normally or at least classically understood and I think that for many cases so far synthetic biology is basically a smart way to do nice chemistry so to produce for instance drugs by using bacteria I would do your job for you and make kind of let's say precursor for drugs for instance or producing all your stuff like that so I think we didn't hear much about that but I think it's the way that synthetic biology is done so far but I think nail was somehow showing that at least some can be done by playing with retinal molecules but I would say that going back to what I was talking this morning about I was trying to explain to you that it's possible to build up systems and the system based on membrane and machineries which can produce something so I think that is something which is also one of the possibility for synthetic biology in the future so I don't know what will be done eventually but I think that in many cases I mean for instance I think an interesting example some time ago people were building up DNA origami for instance and when I saw these people being up DNA origami I was wondering what can we do with that and it was maybe 10 years ago and I thought it was kind of an interesting game but I didn't see the purpose and I think that right now we see many more applications of DNA origami and it was difficult to predict before so my point would be that now even though the system based on membrane and machinery encapsulated in vesicles is still very basic I think it's difficult to predict right now which will be done in 10 years I mean we don't know what we can do with that and I think that just by trying to by copying and being inspired by cells for instance maybe we can just build something that we have no idea about before I think and so based on that I mean also I wanted also to maybe to share some ideas with you about some question which I think are interesting and also can maybe bring to new system and I think maybe I can use my slide yes exactly so I think that what I was showing to use this morning that at least you need to have in cell in many cases you need co-operativity between proteins to produce some action so for instance I was talking about producing a vesicle so you need a sequential action of proteins to produce a vesicle same for motility so you need a sequential action of different protein and they have to work co-operatively for that and I would say that one of the important questions I think right now that we should address is probably how you can manage to get the time and space localisation of the protein so basically how in a cell you can have the right protein at the right time and doing his right job and if you talk to biologist and we tell you it's normal to get the ligand there at the right time but I think it's not it's a chicken and egg problem so I think that it might be very possible to use this in vitro system in vivo system to evaluate what is a relative contribution of biochemistry in one hand on the other hand what is a relative contribution of physical parameter like membrane shape membrane tension, viscosity and also the role of cell shape and size so I was telling you this morning that Petrashfield is trying to do this to reconstitute the decision machinery and for that he has to adjust also the size and the shape of the cavity so I think this kind of question is interesting and on top of that I think if we can do that using both in vivo and in vitro we can also find out about feedback mechanism and I'm pretty sure there is also interesting system about that how the shape feedbacks about recruitment of protein and so on and I think on top of that if you had a set of skeleton and so on you end up with a very rich very rich very rich problem something also about this problem of time and space is a signaling and I think that signaling in cells or at least in system biology is often seen as a sequence of reaction and I think the special aspect is also often missing and I think it will be also interesting using some in vitro system maybe to understand better that so I think ok so what I'm trying to do now is trying to use a very simple what I find a kind of simple system to address this question both within vitro and vivo and is to constitute this kind of structure you can see here which is called philopodia that you can see at the level at the edge of cell which is used by cells for sensing the environment and as you can see on the left sketch you can see this is a combination of different type of proteins actin and membrane and now to understand how this process is basically nucleated, initiated at the membrane level and how the proteins are sequentially recruited depending on the shape and the feedback between shape and recruitment and so on and how you can build up this system which is complex but not as complex as a full cell I think it can give us already some idea about how space and time can just play a role so this is a sum that I propose to you So let me start by disagreeing with our Chairman and agreeing with our Chairman I agree absolutely with big problems like CO2 and energy and water but on the other hand think of urban garbage dumps as just ways in which our society is storing valuable rear metals and things like that for a slightly later time and make the same case about nuclear waste disposal dumps so you know one man's trash is another man's will of livelihood What's really struck me about today is that if you look at the range of problems that can be mimicked or understood in biology we've just, just, just barely scratched the surface we've had a fascinating series of talks but they've talked about a very small fraction of the things that one could in principle find in biological systems and that's very encouraging because it says that it's all there but there are two other things that I think are encouraging one is that if you think about biology it's intrinsically in the words of our friends in physics a low energy phenomenon and this does not require the large Hadron glider or cryoscopic temperatures or anything of that sort at least with current life as we know it and what that means is that a lot of the questions the really most profound questions in this area can be addressed without complicated stuff and one of the, one of the I think mandates of this meeting was to think about the question of whether this was an area in which developing world science might have something to contribute and I would argue that this almost uniquely is an area in which there is the potential for smart people and you have to be smart clever experimentalists to do something anywhere in the world in competition with what's being done in Europe and the United States in fact maybe ahead for the reason that we get all tangled up in expensive instrumentation but let's just think for a moment about what we haven't talked about that's interesting one subject is information the way that information is handled in biology is really I think quite different from the way that information is handled in most of our world we tend to think about information from the point of view of Mr Shannon and if you think about Mr Shannon he came to that by being asked the question of how do you pump bits down in aluminum wire to get the most error free message transmission he was working for the telephone system on a very practical problem so we now have a statistical mechanics of information that actually is perhaps completely inappropriate for biology and the wonderful wonderful thing about biology is that it is essentially completely concerned with function so that if one is looking for new functions and new solutions to new functions one plausibly looks to biology and it's hard to find anything that's more permeating in our society than information so where are we going to get new ideas about information and I think one way is going to be from biology and in particular one area of great interest which I'll come to in a moment is the stability of networks so information is one thing a second is energy in the words of our chairman and I remind everyone of something that I think you all know which is the largest methods the largest batteries and the most widespread method of storing energy on the planet is as a concentration gradient across a 2 nanometer thick wall otherwise known as the cell wall and these concentration gradients are sodium potassium or protons and that storage is what drives ATP synthesis which drives cell and it's interesting that we all know about it and after decades of trying no one can really come up with anything synthetically that even vaguely resembles it so it's a completely misunderstood process no, not misunderstood it's understood in a certain sense but not in another but it leads to another very interesting subject which is large molecular machines and of course the molecular machine that converts the sodium potassium gradient into ATP is one of the most amazingly complicated things that you can find as is the ribosome, as is many other things how do we think about these machines is it all there for a purpose or is it just baggage that's hung on from some other part of things I don't think we have any real motion why are these the size and complexity they are and how do they get together fascinating, fascinating, deep to me question and then a question that I ask my students to their vast annoyance it's one of many things I do to their vast annoyance think about two systems that are dissipative and out of equilibrium one is the cell which we've been talking about today the second is a candle flame and they do the same thing they both burn a reduced hydrocarbon fuel with oxygen and make CO2 in water but in the case of a candle flame basically it makes some light and mostly heat in the case of a cell it makes everything we know how are they different and one of the ways in which they are different is that there is a capture and reuse of free energy in a cell which is unimaginably more complex than there is in flame but both of them are complex kinetic networks and these are enough examples I could go on at some considerable length but I just want to close with one last thought and this is again both for us and for the rest of the world in a sense and that is that one of the questions that one can ask about new areas is there something fundamentally new here and I periodically talk with my friends who are physicists I have friends who are physicists and they say shorting our equation we've got it the pathway from H2 or proton plus an electron to Beethoven is completely deterministic we just need to know a few of the details along the way and this touches on the word emergent which we brought up somewhere along the way because in principle that remark may or may not be correct but in practice it's certainly not correct so what is there in biology that we need to think about that's fundamentally new and I would argue that nowhere in science at this point do we have any idea about how to handle large dissipative interlocked networks of anything and in the sense that the world was revolutionized by quantum mechanics and understanding at least empirically how things that were very small are very different than things that are mesoscale I would argue that the ability to begin to even think about understanding the cell leads us into understanding climate leads us into understanding mega cities what do you do with 50 million people in one place what do you do with all of these constructs that have the characteristic that we can admire them from afar but we actually can't manipulate them very well right now so I think in looking at the cell we see something that we don't see with many small systems which is classical chemistry and physics but being played out in a new arena which is one in which there are many parts dynamic out of equilibrium not understood so I actually think this is a marvelous area both for the potential for science for new function for the solution of problems and to integrate in some way science globally and I applaud our sponsors at the Royal Society who picked this out of what I'm sure was a flood of very interesting possible prospects but I think this was an exceptionally good choice and the first step in a thousand miles thank you so I guess there's probably a lot of questions we haven't got too much time so I'm going to forego the pleasure of just coming back to you on some of the things I thought and let the audience really speak because I feel like you need to have a chance to talk about some of these things that our panellists have brought up are there questions from the audience that are immediate? that's one over there on the multi-scale structure can you think of a way to let them assemble themselves and build from the bottom up I don't want to use that but I think we've got an expert of self assembly in this battle that may have something to say about that I mean yes of course that's the sort of thing I'm thinking of and there is work on self assembling structures I'm not able to assemble anything terribly complicated or useful from my perspective yet but that's not to discount it as potentially an important future direction question there this is sort of a general question from the things that have been said today I was thinking particularly about the cockroach example cockroaches can feed on sewage and so they're basically able to recycle sewage into these amazing structures that you described earlier the legs with 230 muscles and so on is it possible that perhaps one day we might be able to create machines that we find useful that can do the same thing that can consume sewage and create them related to the question that's just come up and these amazing structures to for our use if you like I think it's an interesting thought I mean of course we already have sewage treatment plants and we already have all kinds of work on biological remediation of groundwater pollution and so on apart from methane or maybe the ability to concentrate rare metals or something like that terribly sophisticated is coming out of those processes yet let me hand it over to some of the other panelists and see how they'd like to enlarge on it I would only point out that we are the product of sewage production and so the part of digestion which really works is what we call sewage it's the microbiome so there's a lot there that obviously can be done You guys all work in this area you're not just in awe of biology's ability to use all of it stuff again and again and again I mean isn't that just inspirational of the most and the fact that we are so far away from that despite George's comment earlier about these being presents for huge generation we've left them lots of presents haven't we nuclear reactors that have got nucleotides that are going to last for 100,000 years they're going to love that maybe they will find a good use for it but haven't we been a bit proflicate as a generation and have been leaving them lots of problems that are sought out I want to respond to one thing as you brought the point up that occurred to me is that whenever I try to think about what we might do at a national level I get very depressed and when I think at a local level I feel much more optimistic San Francisco has declared that it will become a carbon neutral city and it's pretty close to being there it's also decided it will be a zero waste stream city it's not so close to that but it's much closer than it used to be and things like urban mining are practiced today and the idea of 100% reuse of whatever is on that parcel of land and I'm just making the observation that it seems that I'm seeing more progress at a local level than I am at some larger scale nothing more to add there's another question there I wanted to say is it possible that you mentioned the idea of perhaps one day there might be soft robots walking down London streets like Starfish but bigger trucks is it possible that those soft robots might be the very things which we need to clean up our seas one day Yes they certainly float the issue with cleaning up junk in the sea is a very intriguing one there is one thing to remember about organic matter that is it doesn't last for very long so I do think that these gyres in the South Pacific they're certainly unsightly and they're certainly not a good idea on the other hand, unlike rare isotopes which are with us for several hundred thousand years they're with us for maybe a hundred years and so every time you have a large leak from the sea floor from an undersea oil bed you probably produce more organic junk I'm not denigrating the importance of these but I think they're a hundred year problem not a hundred thousand year problem There's another question there again Very general question How should we go about actually developing new science should we be driven by motivation or should we be driven by curiosity so touching upon the DNA origami so it was first developed not with any motivation per se but more out of curiosity What's the way to go? Good question Over to you three It's a big question for a long time I would say that usually it's good to probably to do both my impression is there are things we cannot just imagine from the beginning I mean you have to do science without very unapplied goals from the beginning you have to continue to do that but we were talking about many problems we have to do with ecology and so on you have problems to solve so of course you have to use a technology or imagine new technology based on your expertise to try to solve the problem so I think you have to do both at the same time I mean there is no good solution for that I think but I'm pretty sure that doing things by curiosity or at least for understanding problems is always bringing new technology Is there the right ratio now? Is there too much curiosity and not enough applied or what would you say? You've got a certain amount of money to spend Exactly I think that probably by making too much apply from the beginning you cannot do everything and the money is limited so of course you somehow cut on the curiosity and if you do only curiosity also you have some urgent problem to solve so I think that the balance is usually not what politics thinks I mean personally I'm always amazed with the global warming problem as scientists and engineers we understand how big this problem is we can see it coming and we're not all downing tools on our curiosity driven research and just getting on with you and are we why aren't we? I mean this was a war and it did happen in the war people just stopped making whatever they were making and they went on to do things that were for the war it's not happening with global warming for the science community, why not? Too much I think there is too many too much financial interest not to take it seriously so far so it's a very short term view but it's a I mean I don't know a war is immediate so you see it and you die if you don't do anything so I think that so far in the history I have the impression that nothing has been done with a long term vision and this is the same for nuclear waste and so on I mean we know and we still don't do anything but I don't know you can probably react to that maybe Denise has some idea about it but I think that in the history not much has been done on a very careful plan even though if you know catastrophe is coming which we did but no that's not tomorrow it's an interesting point about this and the world is not quite as bleak as perhaps one makes it out to be to me one of the most surprising things that's happened in technology in the last period of time has been the enormously rapid growth of solar silicon primarily because of the utilization of capital in China and if you'd asked me ten years ago if I thought that renewables would be a big deal I would have said sure but not in my lifetime if you look now silicon is probably you know it's headed toward maybe 15% and with 15% from wind at least in some parts of the world you're up to 30 that's truly remarkable the United States has peaked in its hydrocarbon consumption that is we'll go down from here for variety of reasons so there's actually been on global scale things some pretty remarkable things have happened but and you say this is the result of innovation yes maybe but innovation comes in different forms there's innovation in science and technology which is what we tend to think about there's innovation in process and then there's information in business models and most of what's happened with solar because it's a global problem has had to have been an innovation in global in a business model and it may or may not make sense from the long term financial perspective you know it's not completely bleak we have made progress and given the fact that I think people have only begun to wake up to this problem in the last 15 years maybe 20 years it's not rapid enough but it's rapid are there any final questions is there any from our world audience questions or are they all in despair having a fear there's a question there yeah I just wondered if the panel could comment on current technologies we have quite perfect structures and systems like silicon based structures and nature tends to cope with irregularity defects fuzziness and I think is that something we need to come to terms with it's an essential part of Darwinian you have to have replication be error prone otherwise you don't spin off a variety of variants which allow the circumstances to determine which is the fittest so we don't know how to use that Florian's work is an effort to try to harness the power of that but we're still I think figuring out how to do it is there that's it I think we've run out of time thank you very much I think it's just down to me really to say thank you very much again to all our brilliant speakers who have done a fantastic job today thank you to the Royal Society for hosting this and thank you Dennis and your team well just to round the meeting up on behalf of the organisers first huge thanks to the staff here at the Royal Society to Stefan and his team for organising the first ever meeting of this kind worldwide so thank you all for the efforts you've put into organising this let's hope it's the beginning of the Royal Society really reaching out in this kind of way to people around the world the second thing I want to say is that I'm going to go briefly back to the reason for this meeting which is of course the first publication of a refereed journal of science in the world 350 years ago and it was a very interesting submission to the first editor of philosophical transactions I referred in the morning session to the architect of the bottom up approach which was Descartes and his treatise on the fetus saying effectively it's all in the sperm notice not the egg but that was the misogyny of that of course he was absorbing that from his contemporaries and that you could as it were mathematically reconstruct the whole organism from that. His arch rival the top down integrationist was Benedict de Spinoza who sent a submission to the Royal Society in 1665 and it began it was a letter to Henry Eldenburg the first editor and indeed the first secretary of the Royal Society and it began Concipiamosiamsi placket it was all in latin of course imagine if you will a little worm inside the blood this little worm would be able to understand the motions of its surrounding particles and how they develop but this little worm would not understand how those motions are constrained by the whole this of course is the top down view and we need both of course philosophical transactions never published Benedict de Spinoza's letter in his lifetime but if you look at the cover of the journal which is publishing this sequence and its first issue of interface focus you will find Benedict de Spinoza's Latin letter which is kept here in the archives on the first issue of interface focus and so that brings us finally to tell the world that that's where the articles are all going to appear in fact they're already online and you'll be able to enjoy the complete set very soon in a published form so and it remains for me to say once again thanks to the stellar group of speakers to some extraordinary questions from around the world and in the audience here in London and to the world to Bangalore to Sao Paolo and all the others who've been listening and watching online thank you all


But a checklist of features isn't the only thing that makes a truck feel special. What you do with it is how it becomes part of the family, or maybe a part of you.