Rescue of soccer team in Thailand Cave

In July 2018, the world held its breath as an international team of cave divers endeavored to rescue 12 boys and their soccer coach stranded deep in a flooded cave in Thailand. Follow the harrowing operation and discover the scientific ingenuity that made the rescue possible. Hear how rescuers explored every option—from pumping water, to drilling a new exit, to ultimately cave diving with the children through the treacherous, flooded passages. (Premiered November 14, 2018)

Follow the harrowing operation to rescue 12 boys stranded in a flooded cave in Thailand.

Thai Cave Rescue

NOVA Wonders Can We Build a Brain? Hero

Artificially intelligent machines are taking over. They’re influencing our everyday lives in profound and often invisible ways. They can read handwriting, interpret emotions, play games, and even act as personal assistants. They are in our phones, our cars, our doctors’ offices, our banks, our web searches…the list goes on and is rapidly growing ever longer. But how does today’s A.I. actually work—and is it truly intelligent? And for that matter, what is intelligence? The world’s brightest computer programmers are trying to build brighter machines by reverse-engineering the brain and by inventing completely new kinds of computers, with exponentially greater speed and processing power. NOVA Wonders looks at how far we’ve come and where machines are headed as their software becomes ever more…cerebral. How close are we from a world in which computers take over—from diagnosing cancer to driving our cars to targeting weapons? If we place more and more of our lives under the control of these artificial brains, what are we putting at risk?

How does today’s artificial intelligence actually work—and is it truly intelligent?

Can We Build a Brain?

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A two-year analysis of nearly a quarter of a million Twitter users reveals how Americans’ social lives are taking a toll on their sleep schedules.

Scientists Track “Social Jet Lag” Sleeping Habits With Twitter Data

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Tech & Engineering

Koch Foundation

Draper

<div class="rich-text">When Meena Sankaran was a child growing up in Mumbai, India, her family didn’t have consistent access to water in their home, and what they did have wasn’t always safe to drink. She was often sick—with typhoid, malaria, jaundice, mumps, and pneumonia, all before she was 17. If these illnesses weren’t directly water-related, the lack of clean water didn’t help her recovery.“My immune system just got used to it,” Sankaran says.Sankaran is one of the lucky ones. The <a href="http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/586371495104964514/pdf/115133-WP-P152203-PUBLIC-17-5-2017-12-28-1-WaterlifeCaseApril.pdf">World Bank estimates</a> that almost a quarter of all communicable diseases in India are due to unsafe water and the lack of safe hygiene practices, with more than 500 children under the age of five dying each day from diarrhea.Sankaran spent 20 years getting an engineering degree in the U.S. and working in the tech industry before using her personal experiences to launch a startup in 2016 called KETOS, a water management company that uses AI to monitor and test quality.</div>
 

 
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 <div class="rich-text">The company has two products: KETOS Wave, a device that sits in a water pipe and can detect more than 20 parameters like flow, pressure, usage, and volume that feed into a machine learning algorithm that can identify possible leaks and track use. So if water volume goes down in a way that the algorithm parsing the data doesn’t expect, Wave can notify the user of the likely leak with a mobile app, which also has the ability to remotely shut the water off.The company’s other product is KETOS Shield, which can measure and detect 20 different dangerous contaminants like lead, copper, nitrates, arsenic, and chlorine. Measuring these toxins doesn’t utilize AI, but Shield combines routine chemical testing with factors that can contribute to fluctuations—such as the time of year, or the temperature—in a machine learning algorithm that predicts chemical spikes before they happen.While the 140 deployments to date are mainly with municipal and agricultural clients in the U.S. and Mexico, Sankaran also wants to do something for her homeland. That led KETOS to offer water solutions across India as part of the government’s <a href="https://www.smartvillagesinitiative.org/">Smart Village Initiative</a>. In 2017, the company deployed its technology in 25 villages. None of the villages had a way to monitor quality, and several could go days without getting water at all. Sankaran said they were able to improve that supply by up to two hours a day in most cases.
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 src="/wgbh/nova/media/images/IMG_7090.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption>Meena Sankaran (second from left), is the founder of the tech startup KETOS, a water management company that uses AI. In 2017, KETOS deployed its technology to 25 villages in Sankaran&#x27;s homeland, India. Image credit: KETOS<div class="credit"></div></figcaption>
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 Not that there haven’t been hiccups. Saravana Sarru is a resident of Kuppam, the first village in the State of Andhra Pradesh that KETOS worked in, and ended up working as a liaison on the ground for many of the other villages. In some of them, the rainy season interfered with the devices sending information back to those monitoring the water, a problem that was solved by relying on a mesh network, a type of network that made internet connectivity more reliable. Even with the initial issues, Sarru said that all the communities have been excited by the potential to have more control over their water source.“It’s very new to India,” Sarru says.KETOS is planning a project in Majuli, the world’s largest river island, which has major problems with arsenic contamination. They are actively partnering with an Indian NGO to recruit local women as field support personnel, giving them jobs that are also empowering villagers to take care of their own water. Thousands of other villages have expressed interest, but the recent elections have halted the project.“We are slowly but surely pressing forward,” Sankaran says. “India takes time.”But the country has no time to spare in finding new ways to better monitor and improve water management. More <a href="https://washmatters.wateraid.org/publications/the-water-gap-state-of-the-worlds-water">than 163 million Indians</a> don’t have access to clean water, the highest number of any country in the world, and more than 600 million face acute water shortages. Nearly two dozen cities could run out of groundwater by next year, including megacities like Bangalore and New Delhi.</div>
 

 
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 <div class="rich-text"><h2>A Global Problem</h2>Across the rest of the world, over 2 billion people are living in areas of water scarcity, <a href="http://www.unwater.org/water-facts/scarcity/">according to the United Nations</a>, and that number could grow to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/19/water-shortages-could-affect-5bn-people-by-2050-un-report-warns">5 billion by 2050</a>. Nearly a million people die each year from water, sanitation, and hygiene-related diseases that would be reduced with access to clean water.The U.S. has one of the safest overall systems but still has serious issues to contend with in the coming decades. America’s drinking water is delivered through more than a million miles of pipes, most of which were laid in the early to the mid-20th century with a lifespan of 75 to 100 years. This past-retirement age system contributes to an estimated 240,000 water main breaks each year—and some two trillion gallons of water lost annually. The government will need to spend a trillion dollars maintaining and expanding services for a growing population over the next 25 years, according to the American Water Works Association.These old pipes also create water quality problems. While the bigger public drinking water systems have the ability to test water frequently, smaller municipal systems that still serve millions of Americans in more rural areas don’t necessarily have the budget or expertise to do the same amount of testing. AI-powered tools like KETOS could help bridge the gap, and identify problems that otherwise might remain invisible for years.“We are desperately in need of better monitoring,” says Peter Gleick, a climate and water scientist who co-founded the Pacific Institute. “It’s a problem, even here in the U.S.”By far the most public water crisis has been unfolding in Flint, Michigan, where over 100,000 citizens have been exposed to dangerous levels of lead leaching from their pipes due to insufficient treatment. The state has struggled for five years to make it right. AI might be part of the solution to finally helping Flint: Volunteer researchers <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/01/how-machine-learning-found-flints-lead-pipes/578692/">developed a machine learning algorithm</a> to predict which homes are most likely to have lead pipes that need to be changed out.Implementing this inspection system has proven difficult, however. Some residents whose pipes were not prioritized by the algorithm have complained, feeding into the general atmosphere of <a href="http://bit.ly/2IPETgm">distrust in politicians and policymakers</a> that still simmers in Flint five years after the crisis started. Roughly one-quarter of the water pipes in the city have yet to be inspected, and even when that’s done and any remaining lead pipes have been replaced, an unknown number of damaged pipes within homes will remain, ensuring that Flint’s struggle for safe drinking water will drag on for years to come.
 <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="Sequence 01.00_38_26_19.Still001.jpg" class="richtext-image full-width" height="450" width="800"
 src="/wgbh/nova/media/images/Sequence_01.00_38_26_19.Still001.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption>Activists and residents gather at a water treatment plant in Flint, Mich. to commemorate the 5-year anniversary of the Flint water crisis. Image credit: Jason Vlahos, WKAR<div class="credit"></div></figcaption>
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 The problem isn’t unique to Flint, however. There are an estimated <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lead-in-americas-water-systems-is-a-national-problem/">6.1 million lead pipes across the country</a>. Flint is the only city that has so far been able to prove a causal link between its water and elevated lead levels, but a <a href="https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-lead-testing/">Reuters’ investigation</a> found 3,000 areas in the U.S. with lead poisoning rates that were at least double those that were seen in Flint during the height of that crisis. Most spots have what the report calls a “lead legacy” made up of old pipes, abandoned industrial waste, and peeling paint that could all be contributing to elevated lead levels.“We’ve known for a long time that there are certain water problems that require a lot of data and observations to get a hand on,” Gleick says. “If AI can help sort through that data, it would be enormous step forward in better management of our limited water resources.&quot;Sankaran’s work in India got KETOS more business but she said that’s not the point. She wants to see a focus on using new tools, like the ones she’s developed, to make the world a better place.“You have to question yourself about what’s the benefit of all these advancements in technology if you can’t improve the quality life at a basic level,” Sankaran says.</div>
 

 
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Around the world, aging and inadequate water systems are a huge public health problem. Now, researchers are using artificial intelligence to help conserve and monitor the quality of drinking water.

Thirsty for solutions, water managers are putting AI-powered tools to work

<div class="rich-text">Even in the realm of robotics, slow and steady wins the race.Sort of.That at least seems to be the case for SlothBot, a new solar-powered robot designed to monitor long-term changes in the environment, such as the weather, by lingering in forest canopies for months at a time. The job it’s built for is one that requires a lot of waiting around—but luckily, SlothBot lopes along at the pace of… well, a sloth, and moves only when absolutely necessary, a strategy that’s great for conserving energy.</div>
 

 
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 <div class="rich-text">The brainchild of a team of engineers led by Magnus Egerstedt at Georgia Tech, SlothBot was announced in a <a href="https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8642808">paper</a> published in April in the journal IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, before making an on-screen debut at the International Conference on Robots and Automation in Montreal on May 21. It works by wheeling itself along a series of cables, and can even switch from one wire to another—a skill the researchers hope will eventually translate to the trees. Though the robot has yet to be put to work in the forests it’s intended for, the researchers already have plans to test it in the Atlanta Botanical Garden in the near future.</div>
 

 
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 <div class="rich-text">“In robotics, it seems we are always pushing for faster, more agile and more extreme robots,&quot; Egerstedt <a href="https://www.news.gatech.edu/2019/05/30/slothbot-takes-leisurely-approach-environmental-monitoring">said in a statement</a>. &quot;But there are many applications where there is no need to be fast. You just have to be out there persistently over long periods of time, observing what&#x27;s going on.”To be clear, the current SlothBot, which consists of two motorized, wheel-based components connected by a hinge, bears only a passing resemblance to the actual sloth—a drowsy, tree-dwelling mammal that spends its days lounging in the jungle canopies of South and Central America.But what machine and animal have in common is arguably the hallmark of the sloth’s existence: extraordinary energy efficiency. Subsisting mostly on leaves and twigs, a wild sloth spends up to 20 hours a day slumbering, and may expend <a href="https://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=139231&amp;org=NSF">as few as 100 or so calories</a> in any given day—about the equivalent of four large carrots. SlothBot is powered by sunlight instead of roughage, but its wheels give it an energetic advantage: Unlike drones, which use up a lot of fuel hovering and zipping from landing site to landing site, SlothBot can dangle from a tree or wire when it’s not working, and simply amble into a sunny spot when it needs to recharge.That’s a huge plus when it comes to collecting environmental data, which often spans observation periods of months or more. Drones deployed for that amount of time don’t come cheap.
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 src="/wgbh/nova/media/images/iStock-888112696.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption>Even real sloths are old hat at hanging on cables. Image Credit: silvia cozzi, iStock<div class="credit"></div></figcaption>
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 “The thing that costs energy more than anything else is movement,&quot; Egerstedt said in the statement. &quot;Moving is much more expensive than sensing or thinking. For environmental robots, you should only move when you absolutely have to.”Eventually, the researchers hope to put SlothBot to work in the field in a cacao plantation in Costa Rica—where it could eventually come face to face with an actual sloth. On these farms, wild sloths have made something of a playground out of the <a href="https://news.wisc.edu/down-on-the-cacao-farm-sloths-thrive-at-chocolate-source/">cables workers install to shuttle cacao crop</a>. The wiry network could also provide the perfect platform for SlothBot to explore its surroundings, and potentially even gather data on the sloths themselves.</div>
 

 
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Like its namesake, a new sloth-inspired robot is highly energy efficient, allowing it to collect data over very long periods of time.

SlothBot wants you to slow down and monitor the environment

Tega is a robot that uses artificial intelligence to read and respond to kid&#x27;s emotions while they learn.
This robot might look like a Furby. But, using artificial intelligence, it can learn to understand a child’s emotional state to better engage them during a lesson.
This Cute Robot Uses Sophisticated AI to Help Teach KidsPublished: June 6, 2019Tega: Hi, My name is Tega. It’s nice to meet youOnscreen: This robot is learning to read human emotions to help teach kids.Tega: I’ll tell you two stories and you tell me your version of those two stories.Tega: (reading aloud) “Was it you?” He said, spying Possum.Sophia: I like how his eyes sort of change. I’d rather read with the robot. I like how he’s kind of acting it out.Onscreen: Tega does more than read stories. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) to read non-verbal cues, like a smile and adapt its response over timeRana El Kaliouby: It’s not enough for our AI for have IQ.I’m a big believer that our AI systems need to have EQ as well.Onscreen: E = EMOTIONALTega: Possum emerged from his home…Rana El Kaliouby: They need to understand humans.Tega: What is the of the meaning of emerge? … Oh come on, don’t be shy. Tell me what you think.Sophia: To come in? Or go out?Tega: Uh huh .. emerge means come out, or come into viewHae Won Park: Tega is using the camera on his forehead to assess the child’s facial expressions. Tega can detect if the child is looking at the tablet where the storybook is shown, or at the robot and from that it can detect the engagement of the child.Hae Won Park: If the child was disengaged, it’s probably something the robot did wasn’t engaging enough for the child so the robot will learn to try something different.Tega: Clifford can see the cat. Can you?Gigi: YeahTega: You can too!!Rana El Kaliouby: These non-verbal signals can act as early predictors for learning outcomes. If a child is consistently not paying attention … and you can interject early on, then you are increasing the likelihood for future successOnscreen: Tega is a product of a collaboration between MIT and emotion AI company AffectivaRana El Kaliouby: We build artificial emotional intelligence -- basically algorithms that understand all things human. We are the social and emotional brain of [Tega].Rana El Kaliouby: We use machine learning and deep learning to train algorithms to understand if people are happy or surprised or confused or tiredOnscreen: Deep learning A.I. works by letting tega study lots of examples.Rana El Kaliouby: We give the algorithm hundreds of thousands of examples of people smiling. Hundreds of thousands of examples of people smirking.And then the algorithm determines the difference between these two states so the next time we show it an example of a face, the algorithm kicks in and says, “aha I see a smile!”Or, “I see a smirk!”Onscreen: Tega uses those distinctions to inform it’s decision about how to engage the childRana El Kaliouby: If it truly understands these different states, it can adapt in real-time to make for a much more engaging, and much more effective, learning experience.Sophia: (reading aloud) He came out to see what all the racket was...Onscreen: Developers say Tega isn’t meant to replace interaction with humans, but make time spent with learning tools more effectiveRana El Kaliouby: The relationship with these social robots, especially for kids is more like a peer-to-peer kind of relationship. It’s more like your friend, or your companion, less so as an adult figure.Onscreen: Researchers surveyed children who interacted with Tega and asked where they’d place the robot among their existing relationships.Hae Won Park: They will actually acknowledge a robot being very different from the relationships they currently have. That the robot is not a person, but a very different thing. It’s not a pet, it’s not a teacherOnscreen: Tega is a prototype. Before it’s ready to market widely, developers plan to further test Tega in classrooms.

Tega is a robot that uses artificial intelligence to read and respond to kid&#x27;s emotions while they learn.

This Cute Robot Uses Sophisticated AI to Help Teach Kids

<div class="rich-text">Artificial intelligence (AI) has already mastered trouncing humans at <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/google-alphazero-artificial-intelligence/">games like Chess and Go</a>. But a new DeepMind algorithm now seems capable of shelving its competitive streak for something far more challenging: cooperation.According to a <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/364/6443/859">study</a> published today in the journal Science, DeepMind researchers have designed automated “agents” to team up with machines and humans alike to play a version of the video game Quake III Arena modeled on capture the flag.</div>
 

 
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 <div class="rich-text">In the arena of artificial intelligence, this constitutes a major breakthrough. Never before has a computer been proficient enough at complex social interactions—like predicting how others will behave—to navigate and win at multiplayer games. DeepMind has dubbed the triumph a “<a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/364/6443/859">human-level performance</a>.” But of course, even the most complex games remain a far cry from real life.In the game, each of two groups of players tries to capture as many of the other team’s flags as possible. After starting out at base camps at opposite ends of a map, players dart around an intricate maze of obstacles, attempting to steal the other side’s flag and bring it back to their side of the map. If a player is tagged by an opponent, they’re forced back to base to “respawn” and begin the hunt from scratch.Over the course of 450,000 games—comparable to four years of game play—pairs of AI agents taught themselves to maneuver through the maze while tagging and evading opponents. The AIs had access only to the same rules a human player would, and each learned independently from its own experience. At first, the agents made choices at random, but through a brute force trial and error technique, each began to file away tips and tricks that would increase its rate of success.</div>
 

 
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 <div class="rich-text">The researchers then tested their freshly trained AI agents in a tournament that included 40 human players. In some cases, people were matched with AI partners; in others, they tried to beat them. But none of the human participants knew whether their teammates or opponents were human or machine.Unlike people, however, AIs are able to process information and reaction almost instantaneously during gameplay—so DeepMind incorporated a 267-millisecond delay into the program. But this tweak didn’t fully level the playing field.On average, AI-AI and human-AI duos captured more flags than human-human pairs. And when human players reported which teammates they preferred, the majority of them were machines.However, in a separate test, two professional game testers were <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/robotics/artificial-intelligence/deep-mind-gets-software-agents-to-work-together-to-beat-a-multiplayer-video-game">able to best AI agents</a> after 6 hours of training on an advanced map, Philip E. Ross reports for IEEE Spectrum.Since wrapping up the Quake III Arena project, DeepMind’s engineers have already designed a second system that has now mastered multiplayer settings on Starcraft II, a strategy game set in space. But the team has their sights set on far more. Eventually, they plan to introduce their AIs to challenges that dwarf wins in the world of gaming—like self-driving cars or robot-guided surgeries.“Games have always been a benchmark for AI,” OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, who was not involved in the study, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/science/deep-mind-artificial-intelligence.html">told Cade Metz at The New York Times</a>. “If you can’t solve games, you can’t expect to solve anything else.”But AI <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/google-alphazero-artificial-intelligence/">still has a lot to learn, and it’ll be a long time before they’re ready for more advanced (and higher stakes) applications, Jaderberg</a> <a href="https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/05/artificial-intelligence-learns-teamwork-deadly-game-capture-flag">told Edd Gent at Science</a>.Even the agents racking up points in Quake III Arena aren’t really collaborating like humans do, Mark Riedl, an artificial intelligence expert at Georgia Tech College of Computing who was not involved in the study, told Metz. Each responds individually to the conditions it observes in the game, while human players can check in with each other over messages or through actual conversation.On a real battlefield, AI would still be stumped—and that’s unlikely to change anytime soon.</div>
 

 
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Machines, it seems, can cooperate. But mastery of a video game won’t necessarily translate to other applications.

DeepMind AI agents team up to trounce humans at video games

<div class="rich-text">Even blindfolded, most people could probably tell if someone tossed a football into their lap.A quick brush of the fingertips would expose the football’s oblong shape and trademark laces; a gentle squeeze would reveal its inflated interior and dimpled, leathery texture. Especially sensitive hands might even pick out where the ball’s seams came together, or the subtle, embossed lettering spelling out “Wilson” on its flank.Even when our other senses fail, the tactile information fed to our brains remains a powerful tool to navigate our surroundings. It’s hard to imagine life—or approximations thereof—without it.</div>
 

 
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 <div class="rich-text">But in spite of the ubiquity of touch, researchers still don’t have a good grasp on how to replicate these processes in machines. Though today’s robots have found <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/let-snake-inspired-robot-be-your-hero-today/">homes in hospitals and on search and rescue teams</a>, they lack the sensitivity and dexterity required to handle everyday objects. And while many recent advances have equipped robots with sophisticated tools to crunch visual data from their surroundings, the same can’t be said for intel gleaned from touch.Now, a team of researchers from MIT has unveiled an invention that may finally be capturing a bit of that much-needed human touch: <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1234-z">an electronic glove</a> equipped with nearly 550 pressure sensors that, when worn, can learn to identify individual objects and estimate their weights through tactile information alone.In its current iteration, the glove captures only pressure—just one of many types of tactile information human hands are sensitive to—and isn’t yet ready for applications outside the laboratory. But the product is easy and economical to manufacture, carrying a wallet-friendly price tag of only $10 per glove, and could someday inform the design of prosthetics, surgical tools, and more.“The technology that these authors developed is really impressive…especially the number of sensors they were able to integrate,” says <a href="https://www.bu.edu/eng/profile/sheila-russo-phd/">Sheila Russo</a>, a roboticist and engineer at Boston University who was not involved in the study. “[The glove] has a lot of potential for different applications in robotics, but also for studying how the human hand actually behaves.”<div style="padding-bottom: 56.25%;" class="responsive-object">
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Much of what researchers have learned about human movement and touch comes, unsurprisingly, from simply watching people move and touch objects. But when push quite literally comes to shove, visual information can only go so far. The moment something is touched, a subtle, complex dialogue is initiated between hand and brain, enabling us to respond in real time to an object’s weight, temperature, texture, and more.To capture a slice of this sensory conversation, study author <a href="http://people.csail.mit.edu/subras/">Subramanian Sundaram</a>, a roboticist and engineer at MIT, built a glove to mimic the “hardware” of the human hand. In an approximation of the millions of microscopic receptors speckle the surface of our skin, Sundaram and his team constructed a flexible, knitted glove outfitted with a tapestry of 64 electrically conductive threads. Each of the 548 points at which the threads overlapped created a sensor that could register when force was applied, allowing the researchers to generate an intricate series of pressure maps that monitored what the entire glove “felt” in real time.The researchers next donned the glove and interacted with 26 objects with a range of weights, textures, and sizes for three to five minutes at a time. Most of the props—a spoon, a stapler, scissors, a mug—were commonplace. Others, like a heavy stone cat and a horned melon, were a bit more idiosyncratic.<div style="padding-bottom: 56.25%;" class="responsive-object">
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Sundaram and his colleagues then fed their newly acquired repository of data to a deep learning algorithm that, once trained, attempted to identify the objects through measurements taken during a second round of exploration. Though the system had an easier time distinguishing objects on the heavier end of the spectrum, like a tea box and the stone cat, its overall accuracy in the trial was about 75 percent. In a second set of tests, the researchers showed a separate glove-algorithm combo could predict the weights of objects it hadn’t yet encountered.</div>
 

 
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 <div class="rich-text">“This is really an impressive feat,” says <a href="https://www.seas.harvard.edu/directory/oararomi">Oluwaseun Araromi</a>, a roboticist and mechanical engineer at Harvard University who was not involved in the study. “Getting such a large array of sensing data...really increases the resolution. This could help us understand how the brain is using [tactile] information to provide the kind of feedback it’s giving us.”As the system learned, it even started to pick up on features related to the contours of certain objects, like the spikes of the horned melon, or the edges of a stapler. This kind of elementary pattern recognition, Sundaram says, echoes some of what’s known of the hand-brain interface in humans—though, for now, the glove can’t capture other contextual clues, such as an object’s temperature or pliancy.Incorporating other sensors that can capture this information will be a key next step, Sundaram says. Ideally, future versions of the glove, which is currently tethered by the cables of its conductive threads, will also be wireless and slightly less cumbersome.As development on the glove progresses, though, the list of potential applications is only growing. Wearable sensing devices would likely have markets in personal health care and sports. Similar technology could also aid medical robots or devices that need to perform tricky procedures—for instance, by mapping out the amount of force that needs to be applied to more delicate tissues, Russo says. Additionally, a system that collects and processes tactile information could enhance rehabilitation or assistance devices for stroke patients, or others who have suffered damage to their sense of touch, Araromi says.
 <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="002248 2.jpg" class="richtext-image full-width" height="600" width="800"
 src="/wgbh/nova/media/images/002248.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption>The glove interacting with a horned melon (kiwano). Image Credit: Courtesy of Subramanian Sundaram, MIT<div class="credit"></div></figcaption>
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 Further off in the future, high-tech tactile sensing could even enable prosthetic and robotic hands to approach the subtle control the human body effortlessly achieves. These kinds of applications are probably some of the furthest off, Sundaram says, but data collected by the glove might already hint at possible design shortcuts. In a final analysis, the team mapped out which parts of the hand were most likely to be used together—such as the tips of the thumb and index finger, which often pair up to grasp objects. Zeroing in on these anatomical partnerships could help prosthetics engineers strategically place pressure sensors where they’re most needed, Sundaram says.Regardless of what’s next for the glove, Sundaram hopes the fact that it’s cheap and easily built will make it a widely used tool. That kind of ubiquity, he says, will help generate the volume and variety of data that’s needed to better understand touch in humans and machines alike.“We wanted to make something that a lot of people could use,” he says. “It’s not only about sharing know-how...Part of our success [hinges on] how well we can get other people to use this device, too.”</div>
 

 
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A glove studded with a network of sensors can identify objects through touch alone. It might be a big step toward designing better prosthetics.

This electronic glove gets a grip on human touch

<div class="rich-text">Even before <a href="https://www.biology.pitt.edu/person/rebekah-dedrick">Rebekah Dedrick</a> unpacked the samples, the countdown had already begun.Some 4,000 miles from her lab in Pittsburgh, at the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, a 15-year-old girl with cystic fibrosis was battling a life-threatening infection. After receiving a double lung transplant, the young patient had been put on a regimen of immunosuppressive drugs, and an obstinate bacterium called Mycobacterium abscessus had taken hold. The microbes proved resistant to every antibiotic the girl’s doctors tried, and were now spreading throughout her body.In a last-ditch effort, the London medical team shipped tubes teeming with bacteria isolated from the patient to Dedrick and her colleagues, microbiologists at the University of Pittsburgh. The samples came with an urgent—and radical—request: Identify a swarm of viruses that could be injected into the girl’s body to kill the drug-resistant bacteria.</div>
 

 
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 <div class="rich-text">It was risky move. This virus-based technique, called phage therapy, had never been used against the genus Mycobacterium—a group that includes the bacteria that cause tuberculosis and leprosy—making the method entirely experimental. But as Dedrick and her colleagues <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-019-0437-z">report</a> today in the journal Nature Medicine, their gamble seems to have paid off: A year after the first-ever use of genetically engineered phages against a Mycobacterium microbe in the clinic, the patient is alive and well.So far, the procedure has only been conducted on a single patient, and will require vetting and refinement through clinical trials before it has the chance to enter mainstream medical use. With these caveats in mind, however, “this study is foundational for the future of this field,” says <a href="https://www.mtech.edu/clsps/biology/marisa-pedulla.html">Marisa Pedulla</a>, a phage researcher at Montana Tech who was not involved in the study. “All future studies with mycobacteria and phages will cite this key work.”Though it remains controversial in most parts of the world, phage therapy isn’t a new idea. Since the early 1900s, scientists have been aware that microbes have their own assailants, in the form of viruses that hijack the molecular machinery inside bacterial cells for their own reproductive purposes. Because they invade and destroy their hosts, these “bacteria-eating” viruses—bacteriophages, or phages for short—can be cataclysmic forces of change for microbes, reshaping entire populations through periodic massacre.Phages, however, are also notoriously picky: A strain that infect one species (or even subspecies) will often snub another type of bacterium that deviates even slightly from their preferred host. Combined with these viruses’ lethal modus operandi, this precision is exactly what gives phages such potential as a treatment. Unlike antibiotics, which operate fairly indiscriminately, phages could, in theory, annihilate the sole culprit behind an infection while leaving everything else intact; then, with their targets depleted, phages would be hastily cleared from the body.Though the practice remains controversial and mostly experimental, phage therapy hasn’t been without its victories: In 2016, experimental phage therapy was <a href="https://health.ucsd.edu/news/releases/Pages/2017-04-25-novel-phage-therapy-saves-patient-with-multidrug-resistant-bacterial-infection.aspx">successfully used</a> as an emergency treatment for a drug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii infection.
 <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="shutterstock_124999364.jpg" class="richtext-image full-width" height="600" width="800"
 src="/wgbh/nova/media/images/shutterstock_124999364.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption>Phages carry genetic material, but can&#x27;t replicate on their own. To make more of themselves, they infect bacterial cells, often killing them in the process. Image Credit: Shutterstock<div class="credit"></div></figcaption>
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 This was the hope that motivated the London medical team when they first approached Dedrick and her advisor, <a href="https://www.biology.pitt.edu/person/graham-hatfull">Graham Hatfull</a>, in the fall of 2017. Hatfull’s lab at the University of Pittsburgh had spent the past decade stockpiling a repository of more than 10,000 different types of phage active against mycobacteria, most collected over the years by high school and undergraduate students in the Science Education Alliance Phage Hunters Advancing Genomics and Evolutionary Science (<a href="https://seaphages.org/">SEA-PHAGES</a>) program. If the phage the doctors needed existed, their best chances of finding it were here.There was just one catch. While all of Hatfull’s banked phages were known to infect a non-infectious cousin of Mycobacterium abscessus, none had actually been tested on M. abscessus itself. Given just how finicky phages can be, this left Dedrick and her colleagues with a lot of unknown candidates.Undaunted, the team broke the phages down into dozens of genetically distinct groups and began to test representatives one by one. For weeks on end, the researchers worked day and night, smearing phage after phage onto opaque films of M. abscessus. All the while, the clock in London continued to tick. “It was a blur,” Dedrick recalls. “We were working as hard and fast as we could.”Each morning, Dedrick and her colleagues scoured the plates for the telltale translucent spots where the viruses had successfully massacred the microbes below—but over and over, the bacteria continued to grow.</div>
 

 
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 <div class="rich-text">Until one day, they didn’t. In January of 2018, Dedrick was astounded to find a phage named Muddy had produced a small but unmistakable clearing in the otherwise thick lawn of M. abscessus. “When we saw Muddy for the first time, we were like, ‘Oh my gosh, we actually found something that infects this,’” Dedrick says. “We’d had so many let downs before that.”But just as bacteria can evolve resistance to antibiotics, so, too, can they become immune to their viral assailants—and using just one phage would be too risky for such a dire case. In the months that followed, the researchers went on to identify two more phages, ZoeJ and BPs, that, with some genetic tinkering, also infected the patient’s M. abscessus strain. The three active phages were then purified, slurried into a cocktail, and shipped overseas.In the meantime, however, several months had passed, and the patient had worsened. After multiplying in her newly transplanted lungs, the bacteria had spread to infect the surgical wound site, her liver, and more than 20 other locations on her skin. None of the dozens of antibiotics administered had made much of a difference, and her chances of survival dwindled to 1 percent.“This was clearly a very serious case,” says <a href="https://www.cudoctors.com/Find_A_Doctor/Profile/20877">Stacey Martiniano</a>, a clinician at the University of Colorado School of Medicine who specializes in pediatric pulmonology, and was not involved in the study. “Not a lot of cystic fibrosis patients get this sick with M. abscessus...but all of us in research, as well as caregivers, have seen patients in these situations where we’re seeing the limitations of our antibiotics. It’s what led [these doctors] to try whatever they possibly could.”With all other options exhausted and no precedent to guide them, the medical team in London deployed their final weapon. A small dose of the viral concoction was applied as a salve to infected areas on the patient’s skin, while the rest was injected with an IV in an attempt to drive the bacteria from her organs.Nine days later, the patient was discharged from the hospital.
 <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="Phage figure.jpg" class="richtext-image full-width" height="449" width="800"
 src="/wgbh/nova/media/images/Phage_figure.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption>The Muddy, BPs, and ZoeJ phages, respectively, which were successfully used in combination as phage therapy for a 15-year-old patient in London in 2018. Image Credit: Courtesy of Rebekah Dedrick, Graham Hatfull Lab, University of Pittsburgh<div class="credit"></div></figcaption>
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 That was a year ago. In the months since, with continued phage therapy, the patient’s wounds and infections have healed, her weight has gone up, and she’s recovered function in her liver and lungs. The phages, it seems, did their job.“This illustrates something very important—that it is possible to administer phage safely and have a good clinical outcome,” Hatfull says. “That hasn’t been shown before for these types of infections. That means there’s hope...in a sense, we’ve demonstrated that this can work.”It wasn’t a cure, though—not exactly. While much of the M. abscessus was cleared from the patient’s system, her phage therapy is ongoing, Dedrick says. It’s not yet clear when enough will be enough.And with just one patient in the pipeline, there’s no telling what the future of this treatment will be, or even if it will be effective or safe for other individuals. “Case studies are really important and exciting—they’re a way to bring to light rare treatments and cases and bring researchers together,” Martiniano says. “But we need other research strategies, like clinical trials.”Those are hopefully to come, Hatfull says. One challenge is that this particular treatment is not generalizable—even among M. abscessus infections. The same precision that makes phage therapy such a powerful tool might also be its greatest weakness: A given virus might be useful against only a small number of bacterial strains. This stringency could necessitate rejiggering the viral cocktail for each individual patient, as well as costly maintenance of phage banks worldwide to meet changing demands.While this “personalized medicine” approach has its benefits, many patients won’t be able to afford the time it takes to sift through a vast library of phages, isolate viruses, and ready them for treatment, says <a href="https://sites.sph.harvard.edu/rubin-lab/people/chidi-akusobi/">Chidiebere Akusobi</a>, an infectious disease researcher studying M. abscessus at Harvard University who was not involved in the study. “Individualized treatment takes time to individualize,” Akusobi says. “The patient was probably lucky to still be alive while her cocktail was being generated.”The downside of timing isn’t just a hypothetical. Over the course of the study, the researchers encountered another patient carrying a genetically distinct strain of M. abscessus. But none of the phages they tested could hack it against the bacteria, and the second patient died.
 <figure class="richtext-image full-width"><img alt="Run 2018-08-09 WTsmeg.jpg" class="richtext-image full-width" height="617" width="800"
 src="/wgbh/nova/media/images/Run_2018-08-09_WTsmeg.width-800.jpg"/><figcaption>An agar plate coated with Mycobacterium smegmatis, a cousin of Mycobacterium abscessus. Each row of spots shows a different type of phage, becoming more diluted from left to right. Clear spots show where the phage killed the bacteria below. Image Credit: Courtesy of Rebekah Dedrick, Graham Hatfull Lab, University of Pittsburgh<div class="credit"></div></figcaption>
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 Even if they’re identified in time to treat a patient, phages aren’t foolproof. Bacteria are a constantly moving target, and can still evolve resistance against phages (and pretty much any other treatment, for that matter). And though they mean no harm to human cells, phages—like any other virus—can still invoke the wrath of the immune system. Because this patient didn’t seem to have serious side effects, it doesn’t seem like that was the case here, Akusobi says, but it should come as no surprise that “injecting large amounts of foreign particles into a body can be dangerous for some.”Implementing phage therapy on a larger scale will also require closing huge gaps in knowledge. Phages vastly outnumber any other biological entity on Earth (estimates of their numbers worldwide run around 10 nonillion—that’s 1 with 31 zeros), and scientists don’t yet have a sense for the diversity that’s out there. Even the few phages that researchers have banked remain mostly enigmatic, says <a href="https://bsc.ua.edu/profiles/asma-hatoum-aslan/">Asma Hatoum-Aslan</a>, a phage researcher at the University of Alabama who was not involved in the study. This uncertainty makes every injection of phages into a human body a near-literal shot in the dark.Regardless, the new study is “very exciting and important,” says Hatoum-Aslan, who remains optimistic about the future of phage therapy. Though the procedure in the study will require further refinement, this early success hints that methods like these could someday enhance, complement, or follow antibiotic treatment for these microbes and more.And for now, even a single victory is still, well, a victory—especially for the patient. “Just seeing her before treatment, and now after...I could see the improvement with my own eyes,” Dedrick says. “That just makes me really proud.”</div>
 

 
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So-called phage therapy isn’t yet mainstream, but in some cases it might be the only option for antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections.

To save a girl’s life, researchers injected her with genetically engineered viruses

In Jordan, households receive water once a week. Can women tackle the country&#x27;s water shortage by learning a new trade?
Many Muslim women are not permitted to be home alone with a male who is not a family member, making it tough to schedule home repairs. Now, in Jordan, billions of gallons of already-scarce water is being lost to leaky pipes. In an effort to take matters into their own hands, many Muslim Jordanian women are learning to do their own plumbing.
To Save Water, Women in Jordan Learn to PlumbPublished: April 30, 2019Dama Shdefat: Here in Jordan, we get water once a week, so we use and store as much as we can in one day.Onscreen: But there’s a novel way women are tackling Jordan’s water shortage. They’re learning a new trade, plumbing.Shdefat: When I told my family about the training, they laughed because they thought I was joking.Onscreen: Many Muslim women are not permitted to be home alone with a male who is not a family member. This delays repairs, and billions of gallons of water are lost through leaky pipes.Shdefat: If we women learn this job, we will be better at it than men, because we are always learning better than men.

In Jordan, households receive water once a week. Can women tackle the country&#x27;s water shortage by learning a new trade?

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