Yanis Ben Amor (see full page) describes the three strategies that the Tropical Laboratory Initiative employed to improve access to diagnostic tests and treatment of malaria, tuberculosis, and typhoid in the developing world. \

Nicola Pugno (full profile here) takes us to the latest findings of his research, also acclaimed by Nature, about super materials inspired by spiders, geckos, lotus leaves, graphene.

Dressed in a leather jacket and black roll neck, Daniel Libeskind holds an air of affability that complements his passionate and lucid discussion about the importance of architecture in healing and rebuilding communities.  Born into a Jewish family in Poland, he experienced life under the totalitarian Soviets before emigrating to New York, a narrative that makes him ideally suited to be the man who produced new visions for Germany and Poland after the fall of the Berlin wall through to the Freedom Tower which rose from  the shadows of the World Trade Centre in New York City. Speaking of the broken apart streets of Berlin, he described the gaps as “a light that stabs one in the heart”.

His redesign of the Military History Museum in Dresden saw a sleek geometric arrowhead penetrate the rigid facade , erupting from the face of the building to point like compass arrow toward the source of the bombs that flattened the ancient city.  Both an attempt to reconcile the past and to make a break from  it (the museum was alternatively host to both Nazi and Soviet self-histories) , the strange angles created new and strange spaces inside – war horses (and dogs, and bees) – walk single file along a sharp edge, while missiles of different sizes slide down a steeply cantered wall.  Walking through the museum, you eventually arrive at the elevated tip of the glass-lined arrow, and see not streets pockmarked by bombs, but a new and vibrant Dresden rising.

Dialogue and counterpoint are both imp0rtant to Libeskind, and he describes residential tower Zlota 44  in Warsaw as a rebuke to dictatorship, as it stands impudent like a raised middle finger before a tower built in the imposing fascist style, “a gift from Stalin” to the city.

On the same day Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin opened its doors, a new wound was torn open when terrorists attacked the World Trade Centre, and once again he was tasked with helping a city heal. He worked to reflect the ideals of the city into the new buildings – democracy, history, liberty, and hope for the future. Rather than pack the space with new towers, Libeskind created a new open social space, something he felt as a local that the area desperately needed. The footprint of the tower was turned into a reflecting pond, and below ground, the retaining slurry wall that had been exposed like the bone in a deep cut was left unpatched as part of the museum space.

His work, signature as it is in its sharp and jutting glass against traditional stonework, could be easily written off as the work of an egotist wunderkind, playing with the city as a toybox.  And yet, it’s clear that he really does envision architecture as an active part of local culture – breaking with history being just as important as paying tribute to it – but that most of all, the city should serve the ones who live in it now and tomorrow.

@SciencePunk

Despite improvement in recent years, one and half billion people do not have access to drugs according to Denis Broun, Executive Director of UNITAID.

Imagine you live in a remote part of Africa. In his talk Breaking the Wall of Inaccessible Drugs, Dr Broun, said there are “four dimensions of access when it comes to pharmaceuticals”.

Back in Africa, you have a fever and need treatment. “People who live in these remote villages do not have access”, explain Dr Broun. The nearest pharmacy could be a few hours walk away.

Once you finally arrive, the pharmacy might not have the correct drugs or they could be out of stock. This is a huge problem especially for patients taking medicines for long-term diseases. In developing countries, “more than 20% living with HIV, had a moment where they could not take their drugs”.

There are a lot of initiatives happening to tackle availability. These include better systems for ordering and improved supply changes. Dr Broun added: “There are things that are happening but it is not perfect yet”.

You don’t give up and find a fully-stocked shop but medicine costs. “Most of the time they have to buy drugs with their own money”. Many people even have to sell items such as a cow

Even at this point, you have obstacles in your path as the pill you swallowed may not work. “We still have ineffective products on the market”. Dr Broun said these drugs are often old and useless against the type of disease (e.g. malaria) people have.

There are a lot of improvements in the types of pharmaceuticals on the market. Dr Broun said “the pipeline is very full”. There are many new medicines in development and being used for malaria, HIV and TB. This includes products for children and pregnant women.

In summary, to get the drugs you need, you’ve trekked for hours, risked ineffective medicine and sold your cow. All of these problems are currently being tackled by organisations such as UNITAID.

Quality is the next wall to fall according to Dr Broun. “This is probably one of the next issues that need to be addressed urgently”.

Regulations and the “stamp” of quality are not adequate in some countries where you can pay money to enable drugs to be sold on the market.

@mhdelaney

“I almost didn’t make it today,” Yanis Ben Amor told the Falling Walls audience during the day’s fourth and final session, “and it was all because of access.” He was stuck in New York – a city bedeviled by hurricane Sandy and a subsequent snow storm – and while many people faced pressing problems of life and death in the aftermath of the storms, Ben Amor was frustrated.

As the Director of the Tropical Laboratory Initiative at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, Ben Amor is deeply involved in the effort to minimize the disastrous effects of diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, and typhoid in the developing world. Through his work in rural Ghana, he’s seen access challenges up close. “If you wake up with a fever and want to get it checked out,” he said, “you would need to walk five to ten kilometers down a red clay road to get to a clinic. In tropical sub-Saharan Africa, it’s an irritating journey under any circumstances, and downright torturous if you’re in dire need of medical attention.

Ben Amor described three strategies his team has employed to improve access to diagnostic tests and treatment. Simple diagnostic tools have been stocked in each and every clinic, eliminating the need to always run samples to the lab. Using mobile phones – which in some places are more accessible than fresh water – the team has been able to minimize the turnaround time from medical test to diagnosis by an order of magnitude. Finally, the use of community health workers – local citizens trained in basic medical procedures – essentially brings the health lab to the people rather than the other way around.

To Ben Amor, making access to medical treatment a basic human right isn’t too much to ask. “If it’s possible to fly me halfway around the world just in time for a conference in Berlin,” he said, “then it should be possible to give diagnostics and treatment to the underserved.”

@jjmarlow

From the moment he springs onto the stage, Tomás Saraceno‘s  demeanour marks him out as an artist. Dressed in jeans and a hoodie, and wearing a scruffy beard, he stands in contrast to the parade of smartly-dressed academics that have so far made up the Falling Walls conference.  Saraceno jokes that he has “about 400 slides” to get through in his 15 minute slot, yet it soon becomes clear that he really is going to try and get through them all.

Images whizz by as Saraceno hammers through his portfolio, and we’re flashed photos of abstract sculptures in metal, glass, plastic, some with people crawling over them, some floating in endless space. He rambles haphazardly through an idea to connect a fan’s rotating blade with a camera shutter, to connect the wind speed with the film speed of the animation produced. Before we have time to digest that, Saraceno whisks us to the Bolivian salt flats after a recent rain, where people wander across a giant mirror, suspended between two blue skies. Then we’re in Italy, where gallery visitors clamber over a giant plastic bubble that emerges from a room below. Visitors entering that room break the pressure seal, sending those above tumbling down on a rapidly deflating balloon. This becomes a recurring theme in Saraceno’s work – playing with our sense of space and interconnectedness, where the structures around us react and move just as we do.

But there’s precious little time to stop and think about this as we’re thrown through a cavalcade of images, designs, mock-ups, and ideas in a visual stream-of-consciousness.  The bulging plastic bubble detaches from his artworks and takes to the sky, a floating city above tropical islands, a fever dream of architectural freedom. The city becomes a word, the idea of a city, and now people all over the world are stitching scraps of plastic together into a giant balloon that floats above them, a patchwork community in the sky. There’s another balloon, shaped like a giant condom, sent over the African states like a totem of responsible promiscuity, a confounding invasion by the airborne wing of the Western sexual and reproductive health outreach unit.

More shapes loom over stark landscapes, lattices of molecules break off from the world and drift in space, people cocooned in plastic bubbles and black web. Saraceno’s voice is little more than a staccato of Latin syllables that ricochet like tiny pebbles between the grasping fingers of my mind as we’re plunged into more webs, spiderwebs now. Black strands stretched in geometric patterns through gallery space intergalactic spiders black widows boxes parcels spiders in plastic boxes weaving gossamer clouds of web on the cusp of perception. Saraceno slices the web into fragments with a laser, cutting vertical sections that are computed and tomographed and reconstructed until finally the black widow’s web emerges two years later, full form, creeping through the brilliant white of an exhibition space.

The slides go blank but Saraceno cruises onward, holding us all within his reverie, trapped as we are like the tiny flies in the white silk cocoons of his mind, and there are space spiders, microgravity webs, stars and planets caught in tapestry of his imagination.

And then it’s over, firmly and assuredly over, and still I can’t figure out how Saraceno plucked such a decisive finish from such swirling ideas and but it is over, and we are clapping, and it was incredible. Just don’t ask me what it was about.

 @SciencePunk

One of the last frontiers on Planet Earth is the deep sea according to Professor Peter Herzig in his talk Breaking the Wall of the Dark Side of the Oceans.

Venturing down the deep dark depths of the ocean could allow us to harvest vast amounts of energy. Prof Herzig, who is Executive Director of GEOMAR in Germany, said there is about twice as much potential fossil fuel in the deep sea than oil and gas deposits being exploited around the world.

Mining this fuel could also help reduce the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. “We have developed a procedure to exchange the natural gas in those sub sea floor deposits with carbon dioxide”, explains Prof Herzig. This is by swapping the methane sequestered with three molecules of carbon dioxide.

The group in Kiel explore the deep sea in manned submarines and remote operated vehicles (ROVs). At a depth of between 3,500 and 6,000 metres, they are searching for “smokers” which come in three types: white, grey and black.

These smokers are shooting mineral-rich water at a temperature in excess of 350 degrees Centigrade into the sea. The team collect samples of the ore deposited.

Prof Herzig said that in order to estimate the mineral content of the sea floor, drilling is needed. He added: “The big challenge is to mine those ores in a sustainable environmentally friendly way”.

Speaking of the potential of the ocean floor, Prof Herzig said “Marine minerals will play a role and there will be some activity by the German government”. Japan is now mining these without the option of adding carbon dioxide at the same time. However, he warns that “we shouldn’t open this pot of fossil energy without combining it with storage of carbon dioxide”.

@mhdelaney

You’ve got your cup of coffee, your briefcase, and a full tank of gas, and you pull out of your neighborhood to begin the drive to work. At first, everything seems normal, but just before turning right onto the highway, your car makes an executive decision: you’re turning left, whether you like it or not.

This is one of Ina Schieferdecker’s visions of the future; she’s the Director of ICT for the Smart Cities initiative at Fraunhofer FOKUS and a champion of Smart Cities. Information is more accessible and more distributable than ever before, and by compiling it in intelligent ways, we can put it to work for us. So if traffic comes to a standstill a few miles down the road, GPS trackers on affected cars will reveal the problem, sending a signal to upstream cars. Hence your unexpected – but ultimately time-saving – left turn.

Such real-time, crowd-sources applications are being increasingly relevant, as more than half of the human population lives in urban environments. “We are about to enter the century of cities,” said Schieferdecker, “and cities around the world face common challenges.” Traffic, crowding, and natural disasters are problems from Berlin to Beijing to Buenos Aires, and using information in intelligent ways can help communities around the world use best practices and improve lives.

“We need open data,” urged Schieferdecker, “in order to allow the interpretation of that data by everyone.” Such data, when put to the people, could lead to innovative and changes – just look at the smartphone app industry – but unexpected cultural challenges could also result. “We are not ready to cope with this amount of data,” she noted, “and governments would need to turn from withholding data to publicizing it.”

@jj_marlow

Professor Per Møller investigates how flavours can influence the choice of food we eat. In his talk Breaking the Wall of Bad Taste he says “opening the wall up to any taste is indeed possible”.

The taste of food is a highly complicated interaction between taste sensation from the tongue, smell from the noise, how it feels and our perception of hot spices. Prof Møller, based in the University of Copenhagen, said “when all this comes together in the brain, we refer to it as flavour”.

Sugar is my big weakness so I was delighted to hear that I can now blame my genes. “You have an inborn acceptance mechanism for sweet and fatty food”. Prof Møller explained this is due to our need to accept our mother’s milk when born.

We are also born with a dislike of bitter foods as a protection mechanism from the many plants in nature that are poisonous. My aversion to dark chocolate has now been revealed.

So the question on everyone’s lips: Which diet works? “Non-intentional learning becomes important to understand if we want to change what we eat” says Prof Møller.

You can learn to like foods even from the womb. Experiments have shown that if a mother eats a certain food and their baby smells it after birth, they will move towards it. The control group of babies moved away from the strange smelling cotton bud.

Learning to like foods has also been shown in breastfeeding babies and toddlers. Prof Møller spoke about a few unfortunate toddlers that were given artichoke purée, a flavour they had never come across before.

They didn’t eat much at first but after feeding them with this lovely green mixture a few times, they began to eat more. It seems if you want to change your diet, the recipe is to keep trying the food with a new flavour!

After this talk, I recommend you keep hassling your children over their greens. You now have a scientist to blame and knowledge that they will eventually love them.

@mhdelaney

Aaron Kaplan is rather in awe of being invited to the Falling Walls conference for what he calls his “hobby project”.  But not all of us can boast a hobby that connects hundreds of thousands of people to the internet in a democratic, decentralised fashion. He is the founder of Funk Feuer, a peer-to-peer mesh that creates a cheap, robust, and distributed communications network.

Long before Senator Ted Stevens achieved meme fame with his description of the internet as a “series of tubes”, Bertolt Brecht opined that radio was used purely for distribution, and envisioned that if it could broadcast as well as receive, people could use this “vast network of pipes” to communicate with each other. Despite the internet fulfilling that two-way communication dream, it is still “frighteningly centralised” according to Kaplan.

Typically all users are connected through a small number of internet service providers, leading to a choke point that governments are happy to squeeze during popular protest, as Egyptian authorities did during the Arab Spring uprising (and, it should be pointed out, the British government wanted to following the London riots) Kaplan shows how the initial network in Austria spread to Slovenia and Serbia, eventually encompassing 600 devices spread over 240 rooftops (Funk Feuer relies on line-of-sight connectivity).

Each node learns which other nodes it can “see” and reports that list to querying routers, daisy-chaining lines of communication that maintain independent, fault tolerant paths across vast distances. Because the nodes are in constant communication, they can even be placed on moving objects such as cars and planes. But there’s more to Funk Feuer than circumventing government control of the internet.

The hilly, rural farmlands of Catalonia, where traditional internet infrastructure is economically unfeasible, is now home to 18,000 mesh nodes. Athens has 5,000 nodes, and boasts so many services that the internet is superfluous. The Athens team even had to build Woogle – “wireless google” – to help users navigate their way through to the service they needed.

More recently, it was Funk Feuer’s mesh networks that brought connectivity back to the decimated regions of the US east coast after Sandy struck.  The low power routers, working off batteries or photovoltaic cells, kept working even after flooded generators disabled the GSM network. Not bad for a hobby project.

@SciencePunk