Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
I’ve been doing this podcast for a long time now (four and half years, give or take an episode), and it never fails. The best, most original parts of the show are always suggested by you, the listeners. So, hats off to long-time WTP fan Gabor Kovacs, who not only sends along great story ideas from time to time, but also hosts Electrical Language, his own indie music podcast. Gabor sent me an email earlier this week, and told me to look into Embrace, a low-cost incubator made from phase change materials. The idea, as you can see, is to create a kind of sleeping bag for a low-birth-weight or premature baby. The bag is designed to hold a constant, warm temperature for four hour stretches. This can greatly improve the chances for the baby’s survival. Twenty million low-birth-weight babies are born each year, mostly in rural areas in the developing world that don’t have access to high-end incubators. Hence, the hope that the Embrace could help. We catch up with Linus Liang, one of the co-founders of the non-profit. Listen in to find out how the technology works, and how the field testing is going in India.
Our other big story this week also overlaps the boundaries of tech, science and public health. Researchers in Thailand have reported an AIDS vaccine trial which seems to show, for the first time ever, the prevention of infection. The results are modest, but it is spurring hope for a more effective vaccine to combat HIV/AIDS. I would be remiss if I didn’t include news like this in the podcast, in my humble opinion.
Then, on to worms…Scottish worms to be precise. Scientists are, wait for it, doing a worm census in Scotland. Why? Well, it turns out that those little earth engineers just might be able to tell us the effects of climate change on our environment. We speak with one of the Roy Neilson, one of the scientists involved in The Great Scottish Worm Count.
And we end with a cell phone symphony in Mumbai that was “conducted” by German soundartist Hans Koch and “performed” by, well, the audience. We couldn’t make this stuff up if we tried, could we?
Remember, we’re on Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed.
Discussion
One comment for “Tech Podcast 260: Promising AIDS vaccine, Embrace thermoregulator, and Scottish worms”