We invent. My company invents all kinds of new technology in lots of different areas. And we do that for a couple of reasons. We invent for fun -- invention is a lot of fun to do -- and we also invent for profit. The two are related because the profit actually takes long enough that if it isn't fun, you wouldn't have the time to do it. So we do this fun and profit-oriented inventing for most of what we do, but we also have a program where we invent for humanity -- where we take some of our best inventors, and we say, "Are there problems where we have a good idea for solving a problem the world has?" -- and to solve it in the way we try to solve problems, which is with dramatic, crazy, out-of-the-box solutions. Bill Gates is one of those smartest guys of ours that work on these problems and he also funds this work, so thank you. So I'm going to briefly discuss a couple of problems that we have and a couple of problems where we've got some solutions underway.
我们是发明家。 我们的公司发明 各式各样的新科技, 它们涉及各个领域。 我们发明是有目的的。 首先是为乐趣。 发明是一件很有意思的事儿。 其次是利益。 这两者是相互关联的 因为利益的攫取总是很耗时,假若过程不好玩 人们也不会抽时间来做。 所以我们所做的 大部分发明 是趣味和利益相结合的, 另外我们还有一些发明计划服务于人道主义 我们召集最好的发明家 问他们,“有没有什么好办法 来解决世界上存在的那些问题?” 然后用我们的方式来解决 也就是这种戏剧性的,看似疯狂的 非凡创意。 比尔盖茨是我们当中最聪明的一个 他就致力于这样的工作 而且他也是这份工作的赞助人,我在此感谢您。 现在我要简要汇报下 我们当下所要面对的问题 以及那些我们已经想到 一些解决方案的问题。
Vaccination is one of the key techniques in public health, a fantastic thing. But in the developing world a lot of vaccines spoil before they're administered, and that's because they need to be kept cold. Almost all vaccines need to be kept at refrigerator temperatures. They go bad very quickly if you don't, and if you don't have stable power grid, this doesn't happen, so kids die. It's not just the loss of the vaccine that matters; it's the fact that those kids don't get vaccinated. This is one of the ways that vaccines are carried: These are Styrofoam chests. These are being carried by people, but they're also put on the backs of pickup trucks. We've got a different solution. Now, one of these Styrofoam chests will last for about four hours with ice in it.
疫苗是一种 公共医疗的重要科技, 非常精彩的发明。 但是在发展中国家很多疫苗 在被使用前就坏掉了。 这是因为疫苗需要冷藏。 几乎所有的疫苗都要以冷藏温度保存。 如果温度不够低,疫苗很快就会坏掉。 而如果没有稳定的电力供应,就不能维持低温, 最终儿童会死掉。 这里不光光是损失了疫苗的问题 重要的是孩子们没办法注射疫苗。 这是其中一种 携带疫苗的方法。 这些是聚苯乙烯泡沫箱。由人来携带, 或是用卡车装运。 我们想了另外一个解决办法 现在,一个聚苯乙烯泡沫箱 可以在装有冰的情况下维持四小时的低温。
And we thought, well, that's not really good enough. So we made this thing. This lasts six months with no power; absolutely zero power, because it loses less than a half a watt. Now, this is our second generations prototype. The third generation prototype is, right now, in Uganda being tested. Now, the reason we were able to come up with this is two key ideas: One is that this is similar to a cryogenic Dewar, something you'd keep liquid nitrogen or liquid helium in. They have incredible insulation, so let's put some incredible insulation here. The other idea is kind of interesting, which is, you can't reach inside anymore. Because if you open it up and reach inside, you'd let the heat in, the game would be over. So the inside of this thing actually looks like a Coke machine. It vends out little individual vials. So a simple idea, which we hope is going to change the way vaccines are distributed in Africa and around the world.
那么我们想,这样,也许并不够好。 所以我们做了这个。 它可以在无能源的情况下维持运作六个月, 绝对的零能源 因为它的能耗超低 连半瓦都不到。 现在这个是我们的二代产品 第三代雏形目前 正在乌干达接受测试。 我们能够想到这样的方法 主要是因为两点 首先这与低温真空瓶的原理相似 你可以把液态氮或液态氦放在里面。 他们有神奇的隔热作用 所以,我们把一些神奇的隔热物放到里面。 另外一点十分有趣 那就是,你不能再把手伸到瓶子里 因为一旦你把瓶子打开把手伸进去 热量也随之进入到瓶子里,瓶子的作用就失去了 所以从这点看,这东西事实上就像是一个可乐售卖机。 将小瓶逐个售出。 这是一个简单的想法 我们希望这个想法可以改变疫苗 在非洲和全球的分送方式。
We'll move on to malaria. Malaria is one of the great public health problems. Esther Duflo talked a little bit about this. Two hundred million people a year. Every 43 seconds a child in Africa dies; 27 will die during my talk. And there's no way for us here in this country to grasp really what that means to the people involved. Another comment of Esther's was that we react when there's a tragedy like Haiti, but that tragedy is ongoing. So what can we do about it? Well, there are a lot of things people have tried for many years for solving malaria. You can spray; the problem is there are environmental issues. You can try to treat people and create awareness. That's great, except the places that have malaria really bad, they don't have health care systems. A vaccine would be a terrific thing, only they don't work yet. People have tried for a long time. There are a couple of interesting candidates. It's a very difficult thing to make a vaccine for. You can distribute bed nets, and bed nets are very effective if you use them. You don't always use them for that. People fish with them. They don't always get to everyone. And bed nets have an effect on the epidemic, but you're never going to make it extinct with bed nets.
我们接下来说说疟疾 疟疾是重大的公共健康问题之一。 埃斯特·迪弗洛也提到过疟疾。 每年有2亿5千万人感染该病。 每43秒就有一个非洲的小孩死于该病。 在我讲话的这点时间就有27个人会死亡。 我们身处在这个国家,我们没有办法 真正理解到这些数字对患病的人来说到底意味着什么。 埃斯特讲到的另一点是 我们会对 像发生在海地那样的灾难作出反应, 但疟疾是一场持续的灾难。 那么我们可以对此做些什么呢? 人们已经花了好多年时间 尝试找出解决疟疾的方法。 你可以用喷雾,但这牵涉到环境污染的问题。 你可以尝试治疗病人并且让他们建立预防疾病的意识。 这确实很好,只是在那些疟疾肆虐最严重的地方 通常都没有医疗保健系统。 疫苗原本会是一个非常好的东西, 但现在还没找到有效的疫苗。 人们已经尝试了很久。当中有一些很有潜质的候选疫苗。 疟疾是一种很难找到与之对抗的疫苗的疾病。 你可以分发蚊帐, 如果人们使用蚊帐的话,这会是一个很有效的方式。 但人们并不把蚊帐用于预防疟疾。人们用蚊帐来捕鱼 而且不是所有人都能有蚊帐。 而且蚊帐 虽然说是预防疾病流行的有效方式 但它们并不能使疾病消失。
Now, malaria is an incredibly complicated disease. We could spend hours going over this. It's got this sort of soap opera-like lifestyle; they have sex, they burrow into your liver, they tunnel into your blood cells ... it's an incredibly complicated disease, but that's actually one of the things we find interesting about it and why we work on malaria: There's a lot of potential ways in. One of those ways might be better diagnosis. So we hope this year to prototype each of these devices. One does an automatic malaria diagnosis in the same way that a diabetic's glucose meter works: You take a drop of blood, you put it in there and it automatically tells you. Today, you need to do a complicated laboratory procedure, create a bunch of microscope slides and have a trained person examine it.
所以说,疟疾是 一种极其复杂的疾病 我们可以花数小时来讨论这个疾病。 该病的病菌有着肥皂剧般的生活方式。 它们会交配。它们会在你的肝里挖洞。 它们会打通通道进入你的血液细胞。 疟疾是一种极其复杂的疾病, 而这正是我们对其感兴趣的其中一个原因 也是为什么我们在研究疟疾。 现在有很多防治该病的方法。 其中一个可能会是迅速诊断仪。 所以我们希望能在今年 能够作出所有这些设备的雏形。 其中一个可以自动诊断疟疾 这与糖尿病葡萄糖计量器的工作原理是相同的。 你取出一滴血 放在机器里,就可以自动告诉你诊断结果。 但是现在,你需要做一个繁复的实验室检验 制作出一堆显微镜载玻片 还需要受过训练的人去做检验。
The other thing is, you know, it would be even better if you didn't have to draw the blood. And if you look through the eye, or you look at the vessels on the white of the eye, in fact, you may be able to do this directly, without drawing any blood at all, or through your nail beds. Because if you actually look through your fingernails, you can see blood vessels, and once you see blood vessels, we think we can see the malaria. We can see it because of this molecule called hemozoin. It's produced by the malaria parasite and it's a very interesting crystalline substance. Interesting, anyway, if you're a solid-state physicist. There's a lot of cool stuff we can do with it.
大家知道,另外一点就是 如果不需要抽血就更好了。 如果你通过观察眼睛 或者观察白眼球部分的血管, 事实上,你可以这么做 这就可以直接作出诊断而不需要抽取任何的血, 又或者可以通过甲床来作出诊断。 因为事实上你可以通过你的指甲看到血管。 一旦能看到血管,我们认为就有可能看到疟疾。 我们可以看出来是因为这种 叫作疟原虫色素的分子。 它是由疟原虫产生的。 这是一种十分有趣的结晶质, 不论怎样,如果你是一个固体物理学家,你就会觉得它有趣。 我们可以用它做很多很酷的事情。
This is our femtosecond laser lab. So this creates pulses of light that last a femtosecond. That's really, really, really short. This is a pulse of light that's only about one wavelength of light long, so it's a whole bunch of photons all coming and hitting simultaneously. It creates a very high peak power and it lets you do all kinds of interesting things; in particular, it lets you find hemozoin. So here's an image of red blood cells, and now we can actually map where the hemozoin and where the malaria parasites are inside those red blood cells. And using both this technique and other optical techniques, we think we can make those diagnostics. We also have another hemozoin-oriented therapy for malaria: a way, in acute cases, to actually take the malaria parasite and filter it out of the blood system. Sort of like doing dialysis, but for relieving the parasite load.
这是我们的飞秒级激光实验室。 这可以发射出持续一飞秒的 光脉冲。 那是非常非常非常短的时间。 这是一束只有大概 一光波波长的脉冲。 所以事实上就是一整束光子 同时发出并相互撞击。 从而产生一个非常高的峰值功率。 可以让你做各种有趣的事情。 特别是可以让你发现疟原虫色素。 大家可以看到血红细胞的图像。 现在我们事实上可以画出 疟原虫色素和疟原虫 在这些血红细胞里的分布。 通过使用这两项技术 以及其他光学技术, 我们认为可以作出诊断。 我们还有另外一个针对疟原虫色素 的疟疾治疗方法 一个在急症发生时 可以实质地找到疟原虫并将其过滤出血液系统的方法 类似于是在做透析, 但目的是减少疟原虫在血液中的数量。
This is our thousand-core supercomputer. We're kind of software guys, and so nearly any problem that you pose, we like to try to solve with some software. One of the problems that you have if you're trying to eradicate malaria or reduce it is you don't know what's the most effective thing to do. Okay, we heard about bed nets earlier. You spend a certain amount per bed net. Or you could spray. You can give drug administration. There's all these different interventions but they have different kinds of effectiveness. How can you tell? So we've created, using our supercomputer, the world's best computer model of malaria, which we'll show you now.
这是我们的千核超级电脑。 我们都是些搞软件的家伙, 所以面对你提出的几乎任何问题, 我们都喜欢尝试用一些软件去解决。 如果你想要消除或者减少疟疾 会遇到的其中一个问题是 你不知道什么方法是最有效的。 是的,我们之前谈到了蚊帐。 每床蚊帐都要花钱购买。 或者你可以用喷雾。 你可以给他们药物。 有很多种不同的方法。 但这些方法的效果也不一样。 那你怎样才能知道呢? 所以,我们用超级电脑制作出, 全球最好的疟疾计算模式, 我们现在就给大家展示一下。
We picked Madagascar. We have every road, every village, every, almost, square inch of Madagascar. We have all of the precipitation data and the temperature data. That's very important because the humidity and precipitation tell you whether you've got standing pools of water for the mosquitoes to breed. So that sets the stage on which you do this. You then have to introduce the mosquitoes, and you have to model that and how they come and go. Ultimately, it gives you this. This is malaria spreading across Madagascar. And this is this latter part of the rainy season. We're going to the dry season now. It nearly goes away in the dry season, because there's no place for the mosquitoes to breed. And then, of course, the next year it comes roaring back. By doing these kinds of simulations, we want to eradicate or control malaria thousands of times in software before we actually have to do it in real life; to be able to simulate both the economic trade-offs -- how many bed nets versus how much spraying? -- or the social trade-offs -- what happens if unrest breaks out?
我们选择马达加斯加。 我们收集了马达加斯加的每条路, 每条村庄, 几乎是该国的每一平方米的数据。 我们还收集了所有的降雨量 以及气温的数据。 这是很重要的信息,因为湿度和降雨量 可以告诉你哪里 积水成池,成为蚊子滋生的温床。 这样就设定好做这一步的程序。 然后要往程序里引入蚊子, 并且在程序里建立蚊子 来去的模式。 最后,电脑程序会给出这样的结果。 这是在马达加斯加 散播的疟疾。 这表示雨季的后期。 我们现在看一下旱季的情况。 蚊子在旱季几乎绝迹。 因为没有地方让蚊子繁育。 当然,到了第二年,一切又卷土重来。 通过做这些模拟实验, 我们希望能够消灭或者控制疟疾 当然在真正运用到现实生活之前, 我们会用软件做成千上万次的模拟。 为了模拟经济上的权衡—— 也就是对比蚊帐和喷雾的花费 ——以及社会上的权衡—— 也就是如果发生动乱该怎么办?
We also try to study our foe. This is a high-speed camera view of a mosquito. And, in a moment, we're going to see a view of the airflow. Here, we're trying to visualize the airflow around the wings of the mosquito with little particles we're illuminating with a laser. By understanding how mosquitoes fly, we hope to understand how to make them not fly. Now, one of the ways you can make them not fly is with DDT. This is a real ad. This is one of those things you just can't make up. Once upon a time, this was the primary technique, and, in fact, many countries got rid of malaria through DDT. The United States did. In 1935, there were 150,000 cases a year of malaria in the United States, but DDT and a massive public health effort managed to squelch it.
我们也尝试研究我们的“敌人” 这是高速摄像机 下的蚊子。 很快 我们就会看到空气的流动。 在这里,我们想要利用 激光照射出一些小粒子 从而看到蚊子翅膀附近的空气流动。 通过研究蚊子的飞行方式 我们希望能够找出禁止他们飞的方法。 当今,其中一种禁止蚊子飞的方法 是使用农药DDT 这是一个真实的广告。 这是那些你没有办法编造的东西之一。 这曾经是基本的技术, 而且事实上,很多国家就是用DDT消灭了疟疾。 美国就是这么做的。 在1935年,美国每年 有15万疟疾病例, 但是通过使用DDT和大量的公共健康投入 美国终于遏止了疾病的继续蔓延。
So we thought, "Well, we've done all these things that are focused on the Plasmodium, the parasite involved. What can we do to the mosquito? Well, let's try to kill it with consumer electronics." Now, that sounds silly, but each of these devices has something interesting in it that maybe you could use. Your Blu-ray player has a very cheap blue laser. Your laser printer has a mirror galvanometer that's used to steer a laser beam very accurately; that's what makes those little dots on the page. And, of course, there's signal processing and digital cameras. So what if we could put all that together to shoot them out of the sky with lasers?
所以我们在想 我们已经针对疟原虫,也就是引起疟疾的寄生虫, 做了这么多的事情。 我们可以对蚊子做些什么呢? 那么,让我们来试试用日常电器来杀死它们。 现在这听上去或者很傻, 但这里的每一个仪器 里面都有一些有趣的,或许可以加以利用的东西。 你的蓝光播放器里 有非常便宜的蓝色激光。 你的激光打印机里有一个镜式电流计 用它可以很准确地控制激光光束。 这正是为什么要在这里讲到这些小器材的原因。 当然,还有信号处理器 以及数码相机, 那么如果我们把这些东西组合起来 用它们向天空发射激光会怎样呢?
(Laughter)
(笑声)
(Applause)
(鼓掌)
Now, in our company, this is what we call "the pinky-suck moment."
现在,在我们公司,我们称之为 “粉红的倒霉一刻”
(Laughter)
(笑声)
What if we could do that? Now, just suspend disbelief for a moment, and let's think of what could happen if we could do that. Well, we could protect very high-value targets like clinics. Clinics are full of people that have malaria. They're sick, and so they're less able to defend themselves from the mosquitoes. You really want to protect them. Of course, if you do that, you could also protect your backyard. And farmers could protect their crops that they want to sell to Whole Foods because our photons are 100 percent organic. (Laughter) They're completely natural.
我们能做到的话会怎样呢? 现在,请暂时收起怀疑, 一起来想象一下 如果我们真能做到会发生什么事情。 看,我们可以保护像诊所那样的高价值目标。 诊所里充满了患疟疾的病人。 他们都生病了,所以他们抵御蚊子的能力也降低了。 你真的希望能保护他们。 当然,如果能做到这一点, 你同时也保护了你的后院。 农民也可以保护他们那些打算 卖到全食(Whole Foods)超市的庄稼 因为我们的光子 是百分之一百的有机物。 它们是纯天然的。
Now, it actually gets better than this. You could, if you're really smart, you could shine a nonlethal laser on the bug before you zap it, and you could listen to the wing beat frequency and you could measure the size. And then you could decide: "Is this an insect I want to kill, or an insect I don't want to kill?" Moore's law made computing cheap; so cheap we can weigh the life of an individual insect and decide thumbs up or thumbs down. (Laughter) Now, it turns out we only kill the female mosquitoes. They're the only ones that are dangerous. Mosquitoes only drink blood to lay eggs. Mosquitoes actually live ... their day-to-day nutrition comes from nectar, from flowers -- in fact, in the lab, we feed ours raisins -- but the female needs the blood meal. So, this sounds really crazy, right? Would you like to see it?
其实我们能做的还能更好。 如果你真的很聪明,你可以 在你杀死这些虫子之前 向它射出一束不具杀伤力的激光, 你可以仔细听它扇动翅膀的频率, 可以估计它的大小。 然后你可以决定 这到底是一只我要杀死 还是不想杀死的虫子? 摩尔定律使计算机的使用成本降低 低至我们可以用计算机测量 个体昆虫的重量 从而决定是否该 按下(杀虫的)按钮。 事实上,我们只需要杀死雌性的蚊子。 只有它们是有危险的。 蚊子只有在吸血后 才能产卵。 事实上,蚊子生存必需品—它们每天的营养 来源于花蜜。 事实上,在实验室里,我们用葡萄来喂它们 但是雌性的蚊子需要吸血。 怎样,这听起来很疯狂,是吗? 你想要看吗?
Audience: Yeah!
(观众:想)
Nathan Myhrvold: Okay, so our legal department prepared a disclaimer, and here it is. (Laughter) Now, after thinking about this a little bit we thought, you know, it probably would be simpler to do this with a nonlethal laser. So, Eric Johanson, who built the device, actually, with parts from eBay; and Pablos Holman over here, he's got mosquitoes in the tank. We have the device over here. And we're going to show you, instead of the kill laser, which will be a very brief, instantaneous pulse, we're going to have a green laser pointer that's going to stay on the mosquito for, actually, quite a long period of time; otherwise, you can't see it very well. Take it away Eric.
好的,为此我们的法律部门准备了一份免责声明。 就是这份。 (笑声) 然后,对此稍作考虑之后, 我们想,可能用非致命性的激光 来做这件事会更简单。 所以,艾里克·乔纳森,他做了这个仪器 事实上,有的部件是在eBAY上买回来的。 还有在那边的帕布罗斯·霍尔曼 他把蚊子养在这个箱子里。 我们的仪器在这里。 我们将要向大家展示。 我们不用杀伤性激光, 那是一种短暂,即时的脉冲 而是用一种绿色激光指针 这个指针会在蚊子身上停留颇长的一段时间 否则你不能看得很清楚 把它拿开,艾里克。
Eric Johanson: What we have here is a tank on the other side of the stage. And we have ... this computer screen can actually see the mosquitoes as they fly around. And Pablos, if he stirs up our mosquitoes a little bit we can see them flying around. Now, that's a fairly straightforward image processing routine, and let me show you how it works. Here you can see that the insects are being tracked as they're flying around, which is kind of fun. Next we can actually light them up with a laser. (Laughter) Now, this is a low powered laser, and we can actually pick up a wing-beat frequency. So you may be able to hear some mosquitoes flying around.
艾里克·乔纳森:我们现在可以看到 在讲台的另一边有一个箱子。 我们还有这个电脑屏幕 可以看到蚊子在里面飞行的真实情况。 还有帕布罗斯,如果他稍稍搅动一下 我们就可以看到蚊子在里面飞来飞去。 接下来是一个很直接的常见的图像处理过程。 请让我告诉大家是怎样操作的。 在这里你可以看到这些虫子 在飞来飞去的时候被跟踪定位 这其实挺有趣。 然后我们其实可以用激光照亮它们 现在我们要用的是低功率激光 我们事实上是要测量翅膀扇动的频率。 所以你可能会听到有些蚊子在周围飞
NM: That's a mosquito wing beat you're hearing.
内森·梅尔沃德:大家现在听到的是蚊子的翅膀扇动
EJ: Finally, let's see what this looks like. There you can see mosquitoes as they fly around, being lit up. This is slowed way down so that you have an opportunity to see what's happening. Here we have it running at high-speed mode. So this system that was built for TED is here to illustrate that it is technically possible to actually deploy a system like this, and we're looking very hard at how to make it highly cost-effective to use in places like Africa and other parts of the world.
艾里克·乔纳森:最后,我们来看看结果. 由于有激光照射,大家可以看到蚊子在飞来飞去. 这是放慢版 以让大家有机会看清楚在发生的事情。 这是用高速模式播放的效果。 这是我们专门为TED设计的演示系统 这证明了要开发这样的一个系统在技术上是可行的。 我们正在非常努力地大幅降低其使用成本 使其能够在非洲和世界上的其他国家使用。
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NM: So it wouldn't be any fun to show you that without showing you what actually happens when we hit 'em. (Laughter) (Laughter) This is very satisfying. (Laughter) This is one of the first ones we did. The energy's a little bit high here. (Laughter) We'll loop around here in just a second, and you'll see another one. Here's another one. Bang. An interesting thing is, we kill them all the time; we've never actually gotten the wings to shut off in midair. The wing motor is very resilient. I mean, here we're blowing wings off but the wing motor keeps all the way down.
内森·梅尔沃德:如果不向大家演示我们用激光 射击它们时会发生什么事情,这次演示就一点都不有趣了。 (笑声) (笑声) 这使人感到非常满足。 (笑声) 这是我们做出的首批产品的其中之一 这里的能量有点过高了。 (笑声) 我们会在这里稍作环绕,你会看到另一只。 这是另一只。砰。 有趣的是,我们总是把它们杀死 我们从未真正在半空中烧掉它们的翅膀。 翅膀的动力是很持久的 我的意思是,在这里,我们可以把翅膀吹掉 但在翅膀掉下来的过程中,依然能转动。
So, that's what I have. Thanks very much.
以上就是我要呈现给大家的。非常感谢。
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