Drone delivery to expedite online shopping, medical relief

Relatively Quarky: New brain tumor identification technology, Tumor Paint, fluoresces hope for cancer patients

In 1888, William Williams Keen, the man who is considered to be the first neurosurgeon in the United States, successfully remove a malignant brain tumor.
Unsurprisingly, this moment is a watershed moment in the history of modern surgery. You can imagine that 125 years later, there would be many more radical and advanced methods of brain tumor removal.
However, the most significant change in surgical procedure may have just occurred.Since its invention, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has been giving surgeons an unprecedented level of detail into the structure of the human brain.

Relatively Quarky: Meditation offers beneficial neurological effects, relieves stress

If you walk up to the third floor of Buck on your average weekday night, you may find a group of students sitting in deeply reflective silence in a room toward the northeast corner. This is not a secret cult that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once took part in, nor is it an eccentric psychonaut club for hippie liberal arts students. It’s just your average mindfulness meditation class.
For those who are not familiar, meditation is simply an act of quiet, contemplation or introspective focus on a specific area of attention such as breath or a “deep feeling of universal love and compassion.” Meditation has been part of eastern religious practice for almost three millennia, yet only recently has it garnered enough attention to be studied extensively by western scientists.
For any experienced practitioner of meditation, the personal benefits are obvious: increased focus, serenity and insight into the subjective experience of the mind, and perhaps even an experience of enlightenment. However, with recent advancements in neuroimaging and genomics technology scientists are now able to measure the physiological changes that the human mind and body experiences during meditation.

Relatively Quarky

Drone delivery to expedite online shopping, medical relief

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

David Miller

Columnist

December 5, 2013

This year’s Black Friday seemed relatively normal. Nothing too out of the ordinary. It still had the compulsive shoppers who were barbarically fighting over that last coffeemaker on sale for ten dollars, and the cruel parents who dragged their poor children with them to Walmart to save on that outdated television that’s hardly worth the sale. All the tell tale signs of an average American Black Friday were there. However, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos made an announcement this past weekend that may change the way Americans shop in the near future.

Bezos introduced Amazon Prime Air, a drone delivery system for the online mega-retailer, in an interview with Charlie Rose on 60 Minutes. The autonomous drones will be able to deliver packages to customers within 30 minutes of ordering. They will be flown from Amazon’s various fulfillment centers, massive warehouses that resemble Santa’s workshop and will be able to deliver almost 90 percent of goods purchased through Amazon.

It hopes to send out its first fleet of drones four or five years from now, though Amazon is focusing on delivery to urbanized areas. So for all of you who uncontrollably order new boots during orgo lecture or three pounds of exotic tea before a snowy weekend, you may have to wait a bit longer until you see a 30 minute delivery to Smith Union come to fruition.

To some, the idea of an army of autonomous drones delivering seemingly unnecessary material goods in response to consumers’ need for instant gratification seems almost dystopian. However, the beneficial implications of drone-based delivery are beginning to take form.

Andreas Raptopoulos, an inventor and entrepreneur from San Fransisco, recently gave a TED talk unveiling his vision for a drone-based delivery system of critical supplies to developing countries. He notes that there are one billion people who do not have access to all-season roads. This fact alone severely impedes economic development and prevents access to many critical goods for healthcare services.

He gives the example of a sick child in a Mali maternity ward who is in need of a particular vaccine. Current telecommunication advancements allow the ward to notify health officials almost immediately. However, it may take days or even weeks until the medicine arrives. Raptopoulos and his team at Matternet think they have found a solution: a network of delivery drones.

Matternet has been running trials in Haiti to deliver supplies to a medical camp and hopes to one day extend the delivery reach to an entire network across Sub-Saharan Africa.
Though a drone delivery network across Africa can sound like the science fiction fantasy of a Peace Corps volunteer, the implementation of such a network is much more efficient and realistic than one might think. The drones are incredibly sturdy in various weather conditions and cost less than a dollar to fly over vast distances.

Popular culture imagines drones as malevolent Terminator-like war machines, but they carry an enormous potential to change the world for the better. A few decades from now we will be able to provide victims of natural disasters almost immediately with critical supplies necessary for their survival.

On the other side of the spectrum, imagine what could be done with drone delivery in highly congested cities such as Manhattan. The efficiency of transportation via flying devices versus the carbon footprint of trucks may lead to a revolution in transportation over the next few decades. In the next century, we may even see the first prototypes of the long awaited transportation from the Jetsons.

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