The Future of Everything

Bad science is a big problem for society, says guest Jonathan Osborne , an expert in science education, but we don’t have to surrender to it. Beating bad science requires young people to learn three skills, Osborne says. First is an ability to size up conflicts of interest. Second, to evaluate a source’s qualifications. And third, to more rigorously question those who go against consensus. The who...

The Future of computer chip design: delve into a revolutionary approach to chip design.  A re-run of a conversation Russ had in 2021 with Priyanka Raina , an assistant professor of electrical engineering. Priya is an expert in computer chip design. Whether or not you realize it, chips are everywhere and power everything from your toaster to your car. Priya discusses the slowing pace of progress in...

Today we're rerunning a conversation Russ had in 2020 with Mykel Kochenderfer , a professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University. Mykel's research has impacted anyone who has been on a plane recently for any kind of travel. His research led to the creation of a program known as the Airborne Collision Avoidance System, or ACAS X , which as he explains in more detail, is a critical...

Guest David Rehkopf is an expert in population health who says that where we live is one of the strongest influences on how long we live. While we know diet and health care are important, it has been tough to tease out what about these places allows people to live longer and healthier lives. By examining environmentally induced changes in DNA, we may be able to more quickly and more accurately qua...

As anyone with chronic disease knows, access to health care doesn’t always equate with equitable health care outcomes, says guest Alyce Adams , an expert in innovations in health policy. Too often, care delivery breaks down along racial and socioeconomic lines. Our focus should be on better outcomes for all people, she says. Adams now develops interventions to help communities and health systems i...

We’re on the cusp of another election season. As people across the country educate themselves on the issues and candidates on this year’s ballot, one question they will have to ask themselves is, how do I tell fact from fiction? In early 2022, my guest Johan Ugander shared his research to better understand the ways information spreads online. We’re re-running this episode today, and I hope you’ll...

Delve into the possibilities of silicon photonics as a game-changer in chip manufacturing. This is a re-run of a show that Russ did with David Miller back in 2021. David is an electrical engineer, and works in the field of photonics. As he shares in this conversation, there’s great potential for the field of photonics to help solve the problems posed by an increasing demand for computing power. Si...

Chaitan Khosla is a chemical engineer who says that the world’s most advanced drug factories are not behemoths of the industrial age, but microscopic bacteria. These tiny creatures have evolved enzymatic assembly lines that ingest raw materials and churn out valuable other molecules, like life-saving antibiotics. By engineering new microbes, we hope to create next-generation drugs, Khosla tells ho...

Explore the frontiers of 3D printing in healthcare and its potential to revolutionize personalized medicine, reshape prosthetics, and reimagine drug delivery systems. In this episode we're re-sharing a conversation Russ had in 2021 with Joseph DeSimone , a professor of chemical engineering at Stanford University. This one is about health, and Joe tells us how 3D printing is transforming healthcare...

Neuroscientist Kalanit Grill-Spector studies the physiology of human vision and says that the ways computers and people see are in some ways similar, but in other ways quite different. In fact, she says, rapid advances in computational modeling, such as deep neural networks, applied to brain data and new imaging technologies, like quantitative MRI and diffusion MRI, are revolutionizing our underst...

Guest Debra Kaysen is a psychologist specializing in treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) who says that promising new cognitive and behavioral therapies are, quite literally, giving people “their lives back.” These therapies work without drugs to help patients manage their disease and its symptoms and, perhaps, even cure PTSD. We’re providing tools to change how they think, Kaysen te...

Hi everyone, Russ here, we’re running a best-of episode this week to re-share a conversation I had in 2021 with Karen Liu, an associate professor of computer science here at Stanford Engineering. The conversation is relevant today because, as we all know, AI is having a moment, and robotics is an important part of that. Karen and her lab have a goal of enabling robots to contribute in caregiving r...

Guest Bill Mitch says it’s no secret the world is running short of fresh water. As a civil and environmental engineer, he sees wastewater as a potential solution, if only we can eliminate the impurities. Mitch designs systems to remove toxic chemicals from wastewater to enable its reuse as a drinking water supply. It’s not easy, but it costs half as much as desalinating seawater, Mitch tells host...

Guest Matteo Cargnello approaches the challenge of greenhouse gases from a different perspective. He doesn’t study how harmful chemicals got in the skies, or even the consequences. Instead, Cargnello is using his skills as a chemical engineer to turn them into other benign or useful chemicals. So far, he’s turned greenhouse gases into valuable industrial chemicals, polymers, renewable fuels, and e...

This episode of The Future of Everything podcast with Srabanti Chowdhury first ran in 2022. We’re sharing it again to offer a glimpse into research being done to identify new materials for semiconductors that could lead to smaller, faster, more powerful and more energy efficient electronics. Since we recorded this episode, the CHIPS and Science Act was signed into law, creating a $280 billion doll...

Deborah Cullinan ’s job is to integrate arts of every form across campus. She says art has the power to heal and may be the answer to many of our present-day societal problems, such as growing political polarization and social isolation borne by the pandemic. Art advances equity, improves health, and enhances well-being for all, she says. Everyone should see themselves as artists—engineers, physic...

Helen Bronte-Stewart is a neurologist and an expert in movement disorders, like Parkinson’s. She says new approaches, such as closed-loop deep-brain stimulation, and new digital health technologies that chart subtle changes in movement are reshaping the field, leading to new understandings and new treatments for this once-untreatable disease. To modulate behavior, you first have to measure it, Bro...

Our guest, Christopher Manning , is a computational linguist. He builds computer models that understand and generate language using math. Words are the key component of human intelligence, he says, and why generative AI, like ChatGPT, has caused such a stir. We used to hope a model might produce one coherent sentence and suddenly ChatGPT is composing five-paragraph stories and doing mathematical p...

This episode of The Future of Everything podcast with Mehran Sahami first ran in 2019. We’re sharing it again to offer a glimpse into the ways our faculty are thinking about computer science education, an increasingly popular and impactful field of study. Earlier this week, Sahami and another of his colleagues, Chris Piech, launched the third offering of Code In Place , a free online course that o...

Kathleen Eisenhardt is an expert in strategy and organizational behavior. She studies corporate decision making. She says the most creative companies are like jazz bands. Bound by a few simple rules, they are able to innovate continually. Other companies are like orchestras, tied to rigid scores and complex rules; they find it hard to improvise. If innovation is your metric, Eisenhardt says, havin...

While DNA may be the blueprint of life, proteins are the workhorses, says Polly Fordyce , a bioengineer, explaining how one of her favorites, kinesin, “walks” in 8-nanometer steps transporting chemical cargo through the body. More remarkable still, Fordyce says, kinesin is just one among thousands of “incredible” proteins that make life happen, as she tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stan...

Rising temperatures and rainfall from climate change will have a surprising effect on human health, says biologist Erin Mordecai , an expert in diseases borne by mosquitoes, ticks and other living creatures. Such conditions are perfect breeding grounds for parasites that will bring deadly diseases to the U.S. and other places once thought out of reach. Hope may rest in mathematical models to guide...

When we’re sick, the time between onset and diagnosis is critical, sometimes life-saving. It turns out the human immune system is pretty good at knowing what’s making us sick. In fact, it’s telling us all the time, but only now is science tuning in to what nature has to say, explains Purvesh Khatri . The immune system is a “perfect diagnostic,” he tells host Russ Altman in this episode of Stanford...

When one has a medical procedure in America, it is often an algorithm that figures out how much of the cost will be reimbursed. That leads to a lot of unfairness, worse health outcomes for many and a group of insurers who learn to game the system, says guest Sherri Rose , a statistician and health policy researcher who studies the causes of such inequities. Rose is using artificial intelligence to...

With the advent of wearable devices and omnipresent monitoring of heart, lungs, blood and more, scientists can now gather unprecedented amounts of personal medical data. Just ask guest Michael Snyder , referred to as “medicine’s most-measured man.” He is the author of Genomics and Personalized Medicine: What Everyone Needs to Know and has collected billions of bytes of his own biodata. Snyder says...