One student from the U.S.A. improved EKG heart monitoring methods to be able to detect the development of a dangerous heart condition in athletes, another from Kuwait used the Xbox Kinect and some computer programs to allow sign language to speech translation, and a student from India made us all laugh our faces off while giving his talk on the composting of coconut shells in India. Seriously... his presentation must have been 15 minutes and 10 of those minutes were just the audience killing ourselves laughing. His ideas will help reduce the breeding of malaria-ridden mosquitoes and apparently also help his uncle save money.
So great.
The overarching thing that I am really learning from this forum so far is the interdisciplinary nature of modern science. Many people come together from many different places and in very diverse fields to achieve great things. One of the lectures we had earlier in the forum was on the generation of cancer-seeking antibodies, and when someone inquired about the academic demographic of the team working on the project, the response was something along the lines of: biochemists, microbiologists, chemists, material engineers, physicists, computer scientists, and many more. I'm starting to get inspired by it and I'm formulating in my mind a presentation that I may give to the students at UFV when I get home.
