Hercules, the strongest man alive with a mighty heart to match.
Orpheus, charmer of nature and master of music.
Castor and Pollux, the twin tricksters hatched from an egg.
The Boreads, sons of the North Wind who could hurtle through the air.
For untold times these heroes had roamed ancient Greece, creating new legends wherever they went.
But none of their adventures was so great as when they joined forces for the sake of a young man named Jason.
Years before, Jason’s uncle Pelias had ruthlessly usurped the throne of Thessaly from Jason’s grandfather.
When Jason returned to his father’s stolen court, the cowardly king set him a seemingly impossible task: cross the teeming seas to Colchis, and steal the golden fleece of a flying ram under King Aeetes’ nose.
If Jason retrieved the Fleece, Pelias promised to relinquish the throne.
Touched by his heroic mission, the Gods spread Jason’s call for help, and soon he had assembled a not-so-motley crew.
These heroes, alongside countless sailors, soothsayers, and rebel demigods, named themselves the Argonauts after their sturdy ship.
But the path ahead was marked with untold terrors– enough to test even the fiercest heroes.
Their first stop was Lemnos, an isle of women who had killed all the island’s men.
As punishment, Aphrodite had cursed them with a sickening stench– but that didn’t stop Jason fathering twins with the queen.
The rest of the crew also found themselves embroiled in new romances; until Hercules chastised them for not behaving like heroes.
Eventually, they sailed on to the Mount of Bears, an island where a group of ancient, six-armed monsters lived alongside the peaceful Doliones.
While the clan welcomed the Argonauts with open arms, the monsters surged down from the mountains and hurled rocks at the docked ship.
Hercules held them off single-handedly, before his comrades joined the fray.
Bolstered by their victory, the triumphant heroes sailed onward– only to be blown back to the island several stormy nights later.
In the tempest, the Doliones thought these new arrivals invaders.
The Argonauts were similarly unaware of their surroundings, and fought blunderingly in the dark, slaying wave after wave of foe.
But the morning light revealed a horrible truth: their victims were none other than their previous hosts.
Yet again, Jason had allowed the crew to be distracted, this time at a terrible cost.
Ashamed at his conduct, he resolved to focus only on the Fleece, but even this haste proved ruinous.
When Hercules’ squire was abducted by a water nymph, Jason sailed on– oblivious to the absence of his most powerful crewmate.
The remaining Argonauts continued their quest, until stopping at the sight of an old man surrounded by a swirl of harpies.
This was Phineas, a seer cursed by Zeus to endure old age, blindness, and endless torture for giving away his prophecies.
Moved by his plight, the wind brothers set upon the flock, providing Phineas with a brief respite from his punishment.
In return, the seer told them how to overcome the terrifying trial that lay ahead: the Symplegades, a pair clashing rocks that reduced ships to splinters.
But first, the Argonauts would have to maneuver past the mouth of hell, around the island of the bloodthirsty Amazons, and under psychedelic skies.
These adventures cost the crew both in men and morale– and some feared they might be losing their minds.
Upon reaching the clashing rocks, the exhausted crew quaked with fear.
But Phineas’ advice rang in their heads.
The Argonauts released a single dove and sped through in its wake to emerge unscathed.
With this narrow escape, the Argonauts finally had Colchis in their sights.
Yet while Jason rested and celebrated with his crew, he could feel his time among them was drawing to a close.
As the fleece gleamed in his mind, he knew he would have to retrieve it alone.
But he could not guess that this final task would have the most horrible price of all.
I became an inventor by accident.
I was out of the air force in 1956.
No, no, that's not true: I went in in 1956, came out in 1959, was working at the University of Washington, and I came up with an idea, from reading a magazine article, for a new kind of a phonograph tone arm.
Now, that was before cassette tapes, C.D.s, DVDs -- any of the cool stuff we've got now.
And it was an arm that, instead of hinging and pivoting as it went across the record, went straight: a radial, linear tracking tone arm.
And it was the hardest invention I ever made, but it got me started, and I got really lucky after that.
And without giving you too much of a tirade, I want to talk to you about an invention I brought with me today: my 44th invention.
No, that's not true either.
Golly, I'm just totally losing it.
My 44th patent; about the 15th invention.
I call this hypersonic sound.
I'm going to play it for you in a couple minutes, but I want to make an analogy before I do to this.
I usually show this hypersonic sound and people will say, That's really cool, but what's it good for?
And I say, What is the light bulb good for?
Sound, light: I'm going to draw the analogy.
When Edison invented the light bulb, pretty much looked like this.
Hasn't changed that much.
Light came out of it in every direction.
Before the light bulb was invented, people had figured out how to put a reflector behind it, focus it a little bit; put lenses in front of it, focus it a little bit better.
Ultimately we figured out how to make things like lasers that were totally focused.
Now, think about where the world would be today if we had the light bulb, but you couldn't focus light; if when you turned one on it just went wherever it wanted to.
That's the way loudspeakers pretty much are.
You turn on the loudspeaker, and after almost 80 years of having those gadgets, the sound just kind of goes where it wants.
Even when you're standing in front of a megaphone, it's pretty much every direction.
A little bit of differential, but not much.
If the light bulb was the way the speaker is, and you couldn't focus or sharpen the edges or define it, we wouldn't have that, or movies in general, or computers, or T.V. sets, or C.D.s, or DVDs -- and just go down the list of what the importance is of being able to focus light.
Now, after almost 80 years of having sound, I thought it was about time that we figure out a way to put sound where you want to.
I have a couple of units.
That guy there was made for a demo I did yesterday early in the day for a big car maker in Detroit who wants to put them in a car -- small version, over your head -- so that you can actually get binaural sound in a car.
What if I could aim sound the way I aim light?
I got this waterfall I recorded in my back yard.
Now, you're not going to hear a thing unless it hits you.
Maybe if I hit the side wall it will bounce around the room.
(Applause) The sound is being made right next to your ears.
Is that cool?
(Applause) Because I have some limited time, I'll cut it off for a second, and tell you about how it works and what it's good for.
Course, like light, it's great to be able to put sound to highlight a clothing rack, or the cornflakes, or the toothpaste, or a talking plaque in a movie theater lobby.
Sony's got an idea -- Sony's our biggest customers right now.
They tried this back in the '60s and were too smart, and so they gave up.
But they want to use it -- seriously.
There's a mix an inventor has to have.
You have to be kind of smart, and though I did not graduate from college doesn't mean I'm stupid, because you cannot be stupid and do very much in the world today.
Too many other smart people out there.
So.
I just happened to get my education in a little different way.
I'm not at all against education.
I think it's wonderful; I think sometimes people, when they get educated, lose it: they get so smart they're unwilling to look at things that they know better than.
And we're living in a great time right now, because almost everything's being explored anew.
I have this little slogan that I use a lot, which is: virtually nothing -- and I mean this honestly -- has been invented yet.
We're just starting.
We're just starting to really discover the laws of nature and science and physics.
And this is, I hope, a little piece of it.
Sony's got this vision back -- to get myself on track -- that when you stand in the checkout line in the supermarket, you're going to watch a new T.V. channel.
They know that when you watch T.V. at home, because there are so many choices you can change channels, miss their commercials.
A hundred and fifty-one million people every day stand in the line at the supermarket.
Now, they've tried this a couple years ago and it failed, because the checker gets tired of hearing the same message every 20 minutes, and reaches out, turns off the sound.
And, you know, if the sound isn't there, the sale typically isn't made.
For instance, like, when you're on an airplane, they show the movie, you get to watch it for free; when you want to hear the sound, you pay.
And so ABC and Sony have devised this new thing where when you step in the line in the supermarket -- initially it'll be Safeways.
It is Safeways; they're trying this in three parts of the country right now -- you'll be watching TV.
And hopefully they'll be sensitive that they don't want to offend you with just one more outlet.
But what's great about it, from the tests that have been done, is, if you don't want to hear it, you take about one step to the side and you don't hear it.
So, we create silence as much as we create sound.
ATMs that talk to you; nobody else hears it.
Sit in bed, two in the morning, watch TV; your spouse, or someone, is next to you, asleep; doesn't hear it, doesn't wake up.
We're also working on noise canceling things like snoring, noise from automobiles.
I have been really lucky with this technology: all of a sudden as it is ready, the world is ready to accept it.
They have literally beat a path to our door.
We've been selling it since about last September, October, and it's been immensely gratifying.
If you're interested in what it costs -- I'm not selling them today -- but this unit, with the electronics and everything, if you buy one, is around a thousand bucks.
We expect by this time next year, it'll be hundreds, a few hundred bucks, to buy it.
It's not any more pricey than regular electronics.
Now, when I played it for you, you didn't hear the thunderous bass.
This unit that I played goes from about 200 hertz to above the range of hearing.
It's actually emitting ultrasound -- low-level ultrasound -- that's about 100,000 vibrations per second.
And the sound that you're hearing, unlike a regular speaker on which all the sound is made on the face, is made out in front of it, in the air.
The air is not linear, as we've always been taught.
You turn up the volume just a little bit -- I'm talking about a little over 80 decibels -- and all of a sudden the air begins to corrupt signals you propagate.
Here's why: the speed of sound is not a constant.
It's fairly slow.
It changes with temperature and with barometric pressure.
Now, imagine, if you will, without getting too technical, I'm making a little sine wave here in the air.
Well, if I turn up the amplitude too much, I'm having an effect on the pressure, which means during the making of that sine wave, the speed at which it is propagating is shifting.
All of audio as we know it is an attempt to be more and more perfectly linear.
Linearity means higher quality sound.
Hypersonic sound is exactly the opposite: it's 100 percent based on non-linearity.
An effect happens in the air, it's a corrupting effect of the sound -- the ultrasound in this case -- that's emitted, but it's so predictable that you can produce very precise audio out of that effect.
Now, the question is, where's the sound made?
Instead of being made on the face of the cone, it's made at literally billions of little independent points along this narrow column in the air, and so when I aim it towards you, what you hear is made right next to your ears.
I said we can shorten the column, we can spread it out to cover the couch.
I can put it so that one ear hears one speaker, the other ear hears the other.
That's true binaural sound.
When you listen to stereo on your home system, your both ears hear both speakers.
Turn on the left speaker sometime and notice you're hearing it also in your right ear.
So, the stage is more restricted -- the sound stage that's supposed to spread out in front of you.
Because the sound is made in the air along this column, it does not follow the inverse square law, which says it drops off about two thirds every time you double the distance: 6dB every time you go from one meter, for instance, to two meters.
That means you go to a rock concert or a symphony, and the guy in the front row gets the same level as the guy in the back row, now, all of a sudden.
Isn't that terrific?
So, we've been, as I say, very successful, very lucky, in having companies catch the vision of this, from cars -- car makers who want to put a stereo system in the front for the kids, and a separate system in the back -- oh, no, the kids aren't driving today.
(Laughter) I was seeing if you were listening.
Actually, I haven't had breakfast yet.
A stereo system in the front for mom and dad, and maybe there's a little DVD player in the back for the kids, and the parents don't want to be bothered with that, or their rap music or whatever.
So, again, this idea of being able to put sound anywhere you want to is really starting to catch on.
It also works for transmitting and communicating data.
It also works five times better underwater.
We've got the military -- have just deployed some of these into Iraq, where you can put fake troop movements quarter of a mile away on a hillside.
(Laughter) Or you can whisper in the ear of a supposed terrorist some Biblical verse.
(Laughter) I'm serious.
And they have these infrared devices that can look at their countenance, and see a fraction of a degree Kelvin in temperature shift from 100 yards away when they play this thing.
And so, another way of hopefully determining who's friendly and who isn't.
We make a version with this which puts out 155 decibels.
Pain is 120.
So it allows you to go nearly a mile away and communicate with people, and there can be a public beach just off to the side, and they don't even know it's turned on.
We sell those to the military presently for about 70,000 dollars, and they're buying them as fast as we can make them.
We put it on a turret with a camera, so that when they shoot at you, you're over there, and it's there.
I have a bunch of other inventions.
I invented a plasma antenna, to shift gears.
Looked up at the ceiling of my office one day -- I was working on a ground-penetrating radar project -- and my physicist CEO came in and said, "We have a real problem.
We're using very short wavelengths.
We've got a problem with the antenna ringing.
When you run very short wavelengths, like a tuning fork the antenna resonates, and there's more energy coming out of the antenna than there is the backscatter from the ground that we're trying to analyze, taking too much processing."
I says, "Why don't we make an antenna that only exists when you want it?
Turn it on; turn it off.
That's a fluorescent tube refined."
I just sold that for a million and a half dollars, cash.
I took it back to the Pentagon after it got declassified, when the patent issued, and told the people back there about it, and they laughed, and then I took them back a demo and they bought.
(Laughter) Any of you ever wore a Jabber headphone -- the little cell headphones?
That's my invention.
I sold that for seven million dollars.
Big mistake: it just sold for 80 million dollars two years ago.
I actually drew that up on a little crummy Mac computer in my attic at my house, and one of the many designs which they have now is still the same design I drew way back when.
So, I've been really lucky as an inventor.
I'm the happiest guy you're ever going to meet.
And my dad died before he realized anybody in the family would maybe, hopefully, make something out of themselves.
You've been a great audience.
I know I've jumped all over the place.
I usually figure out what my talk is when I get up in front of a group.
Let me give you, in the last minute, one more quick demo of this guy, for those of you that haven't heard it.
Can never tell if it's on.
If you haven't heard it, raise your hand.
Getting it over there?
Get the cameraman.
Yeah, there you go.
I've got a Coke can opening that's right in your head; that's really cool.
Thank you once again.
Appreciate it very much.
Everything is covered in invisible ecosystems made of tiny lifeforms: bacteria, viruses and fungi.
Our desks, our computers, our pencils, our buildings all harbor resident microbial landscapes.
As we design these things, we could be thinking about designing these invisible worlds, and also thinking about how they interact with our personal ecosystems.
Our bodies are home to trillions of microbes, and these creatures define who we are.
The microbes in your gut can influence your weight and your moods.
The microbes on your skin can help boost your immune system.
The microbes in your mouth can freshen your breath, or not, and the key thing is that our personal ecosystems interact with ecosystems on everything we touch.
So, for example, when you touch a pencil, microbial exchange happens.
If we can design the invisible ecosystems in our surroundings, this opens a path to influencing our health in unprecedented ways.
I get asked all of the time from people, "Is it possible to really design microbial ecosystems?"
And I believe the answer is yes.
I think we're doing it right now, but we're doing it unconsciously.
I'm going to share data with you from one aspect of my research focused on architecture that demonstrates how, through both conscious and unconscious design, we're impacting these invisible worlds.
This is the Lillis Business Complex at the University of Oregon, and I worked with a team of architects and biologists to sample over 300 rooms in this building.
We wanted to get something like a fossil record of the building, and to do this, we sampled dust.
From the dust, we pulled out bacterial cells, broke them open, and compared their gene sequences.
This means that people in my group were doing a lot of vacuuming during this project.
This is a picture of Tim, who, right when I snapped this picture, reminded me, he said, "Jessica, the last lab group I worked in I was doing fieldwork in the Costa Rican rainforest, and things have changed dramatically for me."
So I'm going to show you now first what we found in the offices, and we're going to look at the data through a visualization tool that I've been working on in partnership with Autodesk.
The way that you look at this data is, first, look around the outside of the circle.
You'll see broad bacterial groups, and if you look at the shape of this pink lobe, it tells you something about the relative abundance of each group.
So at 12 o'clock, you'll see that offices have a lot of alphaproteobacteria, and at one o'clock you'll see that bacilli are relatively rare.
Let's take a look at what's going on in different space types in this building.
If you look inside the restrooms, they all have really similar ecosystems, and if you were to look inside the classrooms, those also have similar ecosystems.
But if you look across these space types, you can see that they're fundamentally different from one another.
I like to think of bathrooms like a tropical rainforest.
I told Tim, "If you could just see the microbes, it's kind of like being in Costa Rica.
Kind of."
And I also like to think of offices as being a temperate grassland.
This perspective is a really powerful one for designers, because you can bring on principles of ecology, and a really important principle of ecology is dispersal, the way organisms move around.
We know that microbes are dispersed around by people and by air.
So the very first thing we wanted to do in this building was look at the air system.
Mechanical engineers design air handling units to make sure that people are comfortable, that the air flow and temperature is just right.
They do this using principles of physics and chemistry, but they could also be using biology.
If you look at the microbes in one of the air handling units in this building, you'll see that they're all very similar to one another.
And if you compare this to the microbes in a different air handling unit, you'll see that they're fundamentally different.
The rooms in this building are like islands in an archipelago, and what that means is that mechanical engineers are like eco-engineers, and they have the ability to structure biomes in this building the way that they want to.
Another facet of how microbes get around is by people, and designers often cluster rooms together to facilitate interactions among people, or the sharing of ideas, like in labs and in offices.
Given that microbes travel around with people, you might expect to see rooms that are close together have really similar biomes.
And that is exactly what we found.
If you look at classrooms right adjacent to one another, they have very similar ecosystems, but if you go to an office that is a farther walking distance away, the ecosystem is fundamentally different.
And when I see the power that dispersal has on these biogeographic patterns, it makes me think that it's possible to tackle really challenging problems, like hospital-acquired infections.
I believe this has got to be, in part, a building ecology problem.
All right, I'm going to tell you one more story about this building.
I am collaborating with Charlie Brown.
He's an architect, and Charlie is deeply concerned about global climate change.
He's dedicated his life to sustainable design.
When he met me and realized that it was possible for him to study in a quantitative way how his design choices impacted the ecology and biology of this building, he got really excited, because it added a new dimension to what he did.
He went from thinking just about energy to also starting to think about human health.
He helped design some of the air handling systems in this building and the way it was ventilated.
So what I'm first going to show you is air that we sampled outside of the building.
What you're looking at is a signature of bacterial communities in the outdoor air, and how they vary over time.
Next I'm going to show you what happened when we experimentally manipulated classrooms.
We blocked them off at night so that they got no ventilation.
A lot of buildings are operated this way, probably where you work, and companies do this to save money on their energy bill.
What we found is that these rooms remained relatively stagnant until Saturday, when we opened the vents up again.
When you walked into those rooms, they smelled really bad, and our data suggests that it had something to do with leaving behind the airborne bacterial soup from people the day before.
Contrast this to rooms that were designed using a sustainable passive design strategy where air came in from the outside through louvers.
In these rooms, the air tracked the outdoor air relatively well, and when Charlie saw this, he got really excited.
He felt like he had made a good choice with the design process because it was both energy efficient and it washed away the building's resident microbial landscape.
The examples that I just gave you are about architecture, but they're relevant to the design of anything.
Imagine designing with the kinds of microbes that we want in a plane or on a phone.
There's a new microbe, I just discovered it.
It's called BLIS, and it's been shown to both ward off pathogens and give you good breath.
Wouldn't it be awesome if we all had BLIS on our phones?
A conscious approach to design, I'm calling it bioinformed design, and I think it's possible.
Thank you.
(Applause)