Episode 25: Ben and Stephen nerd out about the proxy medical research they are helping with using Folding@home. Steve got clearance to use the testbed recently! Ben talks about what Williams F1 is up to currently and their innovations to bring carbon fiber parts to mass production. Stephen shares an update on the America Makes face mask competition. Ben declares that the Canadians have unlocked the full power of 5-axis machining. Lastly, Stephen hopes Australia is okay.
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Transcript:
Benjamin Moses: Hello everybody, and welcome to the Tech Times podcast, where we discuss the latest manufacturing technology research and news. I'm Benjamin Moses, the director of manufacturing technology, and I'm here with -
Stephen LaMarca: Stephen LaMarca, technology analyst.
Benjamin Moses: Steve, how you doing man? How was your week?
Stephen LaMarca: I am doing great.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah?
Stephen LaMarca: It's been a good week so far, nice and productive, not too busy.
Benjamin Moses: Yep. Yep. Good, and these past couple of weeks, I heard you got a new computer and they recommended you look into some Folding@home.
Stephen LaMarca: Yeah. I actually ... after I set up the computer and hooked it up to my TV and whatnot, got the right programs on it, been playing with Autodesk's Fusion 360 and whatnot, playing a lot of video games or computer games on it, but when I shut it down at the end of the night or before I even shut it down, if I shut it down at all, when I'm just admiring it, if you would, because it does look good.
Benjamin Moses: Sure.
Stephen LaMarca: I think, "Man, what could I be doing with this computer while I'm asleep, or
while I'm working, or doing something other than playing on the computer?" And right after I set up the thing, I get an email from Corsair. That's who makes the computer, and they're like, "Hey, by the way, if you're looking to spend some of your computing power on your fresh new PC somewhere, we've got a team for Folding@home," and I'm sure you can explain Folding@home better than I can, but I remember ... and we've talked about this before. Folding@home with me goes as far back as the PS3 -
Benjamin Moses: The good one.
Stephen LaMarca: And when Folding@home discontinued support with the Sony PlayStation, it kind of dropped off for me, but Ben, I'm sure you can do it best.
Benjamin Moses: Sure.
Stephen LaMarca: Explain, what is Folding@home?
Benjamin Moses: I will try my best. So Folding@home is research. This is the core of it. What they're doing is trying to understand protein molecules for certain diseases. It's a group of researchers, and what they want to do ... and analyzing proteins is actually very, very difficult. It requires an intense amount, a significant amount of computing power. So what this group of researchers decided to do a long time ago, like you mentioned, the PlayStation 3 is eons ago. What they decided to do instead of centralizing the breakdown of the protein, they said, "Let me send these small packets to all over the entire universe." So these individual packets can be analyzed at people's computer. So what they do is they break down the entire project into smaller bite sized projects. Those get distributed to people's computers all over the world, basically, and your computer, in like you mentioned, your downtime while the computer is idle, it can analyze these proteins. So the type of things that they're researching, like breast cancer, kidney cancer, and recently, of course, they're looking at the coronavirus, so breaking down the proteins within the coronavirus.
Stephen LaMarca: Right. I know on mine, I have specifically selected it to target all work units, as they call them, all projects associated with COVID-19.
Benjamin Moses: Okay.
Stephen LaMarca: And as far as I understand it ... and I'm just reiterating this, so hopefully you can clarify and confirm for me. The way I understand it is you hook up your computer, with its vast processing power to the internet, you connect it to some research institute. Back in the day, I think it was Stanford University.
Benjamin Moses: Sure.
Stephen LaMarca: Is it someone else now or is it still -
Benjamin Moses: They've bounced back and forth. Washington University is doing something.
Stephen LaMarca: Got you. You're right. You said that, but you connect your computer to the internet through Folding@home, and the university that Folding@home's working with sends your computer over the internet some work units, which I assume, which I think are protein folding simulations. It's not so much protein folding, because protein folding happens all the time and diseases don't come of it. Specifically, our DNA is made up of multiple different proteins, but what causes bad things is the misfolding of protein, and the university projects that Folding@home sends your computer to do are simulations of the protein misfolding, and it takes multiple snapshots of the process of the protein misfolding, and then takes some data out of that and sends it back to the university.
Benjamin Moses: Yes.
Stephen LaMarca: Is that how it works?
Benjamin Moses: That is a very succinct way to summarize the proteins that are being analyzed, yeah, but it's a little simpler than that on the user's perspective. So -
Stephen LaMarca: Right, you just click start.
Benjamin Moses: I just download the program, and then I just say, "Okay, start. Start folding," and that's it. So you can get more detailed. You can say, "I want to attack or support a specific virus, a specific project," or you can say, "Just fold whatever comes at me," and magic happens.
Stephen LaMarca: Right.
Benjamin Moses: And also there's ... we'll make it competitive, let's say. There's teams that you can join. So you can put all of your efforts into combined. So you do get scored. You do get work units based on how many things you analyze, and I thought that was interesting. Linus Tech Tips was a big one that started promoting his own team. There's a bunch of other groups that ... what they're doing is trying to get as many people together as they can to start Folding@home. Speaking of which, do you have any of your stats on hand?
Stephen LaMarca: I do. I do. It's actually on my TV right now, so -
Benjamin Moses: Before you get into that, we'll talk about ... I just want to mention that the Folding@home has grown significantly in the past half a year, six months or so. So now if you look at all of the data that's being analyzed, the Folding@home network is the fastest supercomputer in the world. It tops everyone else's super computer for amount of throughput that is processed at any given moment.
Stephen LaMarca: Right.
Benjamin Moses: So just keep that in mind.
Stephen LaMarca: Right.
Benjamin Moses: This one article that I got from Science Alert mentions it's faster than the top 500 supercomputers combined. So -
Stephen LaMarca: Well, yeah, because it is those top five.
Benjamin Moses: Yes.
Stephen LaMarca: I mean just looking at some of the stats now that are overall stats.
Benjamin Moses: Right.
Stephen LaMarca: So my rank is 210,857 out of 2,688,702 computers in total.
Benjamin Moses: Correct.
Stephen LaMarca: Almost 2.7 million computers. That's essentially saying that Folding@home has a super computer with 2.7 million cores, and each of those cores, because modern computers have multiple cores, has probably a handful of cores in it with an insane amount of threads. Yeah. It's insanely powerful.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah. That doesn't include the people that are kind of cheating with their home servers with multiple cores, but yeah, that's awesome. So I've been running it for quite a while. This shows ... actually, it doesn't show how long I've been on. So I'm at a rank of 6,842.
Stephen LaMarca: Whoa, you're up there.
Benjamin Moses: I cheat a little bit. So technically I have two computers at home that run it. So one computer is idle a lot. I let that run on a light load. So within Folding@home, you can run a light, medium, and heavy load. So that machine does best under a light load, and that does some of my home server stuff like managing the network and stuff, but I've got a better rig that I do more intense video editing and some gaming and stuff. That I run on a heavy load, and that's only at night because I use it during the day. Actually, since I'm a teacher now, because my daughter can't go to school, that's the computer she uses for her education.
Stephen LaMarca: Awesome.
Benjamin Moses: Apparently I've processed 11,000 work units, whatever that means. I feel great, though.
Stephen LaMarca: Got you. 11,000, wow. Yeah. I'm only at 120.
Benjamin Moses: You got a ways to go.
Stephen LaMarca: That's not counting my PS3 from back on the day, which I have no idea, but it probably wasn't that ... at the time, the PS3 was insanely powerful.
Benjamin Moses: It was.
Stephen LaMarca: It was one of the most powerful computers that you could get to do this, which is why it came from the factory out of the box with Folding@home already on it, but I think ... and I hope we covered it a little bit, but I think the most difficult thing Folding@home is somebody ... you tell somebody, "Oh man, I've got this score on Folding@home and I've done so much research for this institute to help battle coronavirus or whatever," and then they're like, "Okay, so what's Folding@home? Are you just doing your laundry?" And you don't know how to ... I don't know how to answer that.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah. It's tough to -
Stephen LaMarca: I don't know how to tell people what it is.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah.
Stephen LaMarca: It just does stuff. I'm doing good things.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah. You're contributing your computer time to research. That's all you're doing, but I feel happy running it. I mean I got my electricity bill twice already, and I haven't noticed a blip in my electricity bill from running full throttle on both of these computers.
Stephen LaMarca: Oh, that's good.
Benjamin Moses: That's all right. It feels like there's very little impact to my contribution to the world. So if you're not doing this at home, you should.
Stephen LaMarca: Yeah, absolutely. I agree.
Benjamin Moses: Should we talk about some test bed stuff?
Stephen LaMarca: Yeah, let me ... I actually have a pretty substantial test bed update. So as you know, and as I've talked about for the past 17 podcasts ... not really, but it feels like it, we've been out of the office and thus have had no access to the test bed. The test bed has been shut down because we can't physically be there, and when the pandemic started, when the quarantine started, we were not ... shame on us, but AMT was not yet at lights out manufacturing yet. So the test bed's officially been shut down, but it's not just us. A lot of people who've been running tests beds, especially related to MTConnect, have been shut down. So in the world of MTConnect, one of the providers of streaming MTConnect data that anybody can tap into if they have an open web browser connected to the internet has been Mazak, and from what I understand, they've had to shut down their test bed and their stream of MTConnect data. So Russ and Sharub saw this and were like, "Okay, while we can't get our test bed up and running, we can get granted permission from Doug to go into the office for at least a day or at least a couple hours in the day to run some programs on our test bed, record that data stream, and then run that data stream on our MTConnect server stack, that's powered by Raspberry PIs, in a loop, so people from all over that are connected to the internet, can tap into our MTConnect data stream loop and have simulated MTConnect data rolling."
Benjamin Moses: Yeah, that's right. That's awesome.
Stephen LaMarca: So that's what Sharub and I did last week, I think on Tuesday. We were in all day. We ran the shortest program that I had voted to the Pocket NC, which funny enough still went 40 minutes, because the last time I uploaded a G-code program to the Pocket NC was when Elena was helping on the test bed, and Sam Steele was as well. So there were five access programs that I remember sitting late one night at the test bed waiting for this part to be finished machined, and that was a three hour program. Sharub fortunately was there to remind me, "You know, we're air cutting right now, so you could just move like all of the feed over to 300% and just max out the machine. We're not going to crash it," and he was right. So we cut a three hour program down to 40 minutes, which was really nice. It was a breath of fresh air, because I thought we were going to be there for awhile. Another positive thing that's not related to the whole stream thing, but running that program, that air cut was really great for me in the test bed, because the last time I ran that program, we actually had a work piece in there and we actually had a tool in there, and that was before I got the B table fixed.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah.
Stephen LaMarca: So the last time I ran that program, the B table had stalled and it kind of screwed up the part that Sam and I were trying to make. So running this air cut at a 300% feed override -
Benjamin Moses: It's a little fast.
Stephen LaMarca: But we didn't run into any issues.
Benjamin Moses: Awesome.
Stephen LaMarca: The B table functioned perfectly.
Benjamin Moses: Good.
Stephen LaMarca: So I know I've said this before. I'll say it again, the Pocket NC is officially fixed, and even though we can't use the test bed right now, we could start machining stuff.
Benjamin Moses: Awesome. Did you get any good data off the robot arm also?
Stephen LaMarca: Yeah. So sadly we couldn't run both machines simultaneously.
Benjamin Moses: Sure.
Stephen LaMarca: Just to prove to Sharub that I could, I did, but Sharub, because he was recording MTConnect, He could only record data streaming off of one device at a time. So we did the Pocket NC first, sat around for 40 minutes while it was running the program at super speed, and then when that finished up, we closed that recording and then he was like, "Go ahead on the robot," and I just did some motions, move the robot around, and he got some data of the robot moving as well and that was that, but -
Benjamin Moses: That's awesome. I'm glad that the test bed -
Stephen LaMarca: Now we've got the MTConnect Institute with the help of the AMT test bed is a streaming simulated MTConnect data to anybody who wants it.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah.
Stephen LaMarca: Which I imagine isn't that many right now, but it's there and we did it.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah, you'd be surprised, because I mean a lot of people are trying to set up applications or have specific questions on what the data looks like, and having this available, one, you could see the data, or in this case, there's a skin over it so you can digest it a little easier, but if you want to go back to the actual XML code, you can, and interrogate the page. Also, if you wanted to point applications to that data, you can digest the data in that application too.
Stephen LaMarca: Right.
Benjamin Moses: So this does help a lot.
Stephen LaMarca: Yeah, and it really just gives me Sharub the warm and fuzzies, because our little association in this big powerful industry was able to do such a thing.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah.
Stephen LaMarca: We were able to pick up the slack and -
Benjamin Moses: Right, essential employees for a day.
Stephen LaMarca: Yeah. We really were, and it felt good.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah, we'll have Russ on, actually, maybe in a couple episodes to talk a little bit more about that. I think -
Stephen LaMarca: That'd be awesome. Yeah, he could do this project much better justice than I just did.
Benjamin Moses: Yep. Awesome. So let's get into some articles. I'm glad we can talk about Folding@home and some testbed stuff. I got an article from New Atlas, and they're interviewing William's Advanced Engineering. So they're basically a consulting firm out there. It looks like they split ways on their Formula One side, based on this article -
Stephen LaMarca: But they are related ... at least were related to William's F1?
Benjamin Moses: Yeah, exactly. They were related to William's F1.
Stephen LaMarca: Awesome.
Benjamin Moses: It looks like they're repositioning some with Formula E and some of the projects actually there aligns better with their project, the Formula E. So they talk about a bunch of different things, and their interview was with their managing director. Let's see, what's his name? Craig Wilson, and he goes over a bunch of different projects. One is their new batteries that they're kind of excited about, but I don't really care. They talk about their hydrogen powertrain for large mining equipment. That's kind of interesting. Also, a hybrid powertrain for [inaudible 00:17:15] applications. He said there hasn't been as much demand up until recently, and there's a need [inaudible 00:17:20] on that. What I did find interesting was their improved cycle time for composite layups. With all their experience in Formula One and Transition to Formula E, they go through tons and tons of composites, and what they're trying to do is actually just improve the manufacturability by increasing throughput by decreasing the cycle times. They have a couple of parts that are around 90 seconds from layup to finished goods. What they're doing is somewhat of a traditional process of doing a hand layup, but instead of the autoclave, they're actually pressing the material. So they have, I guess, hydraulic presses or electric presses that are pushing down. So they have, I guess, dyes that are -
Stephen LaMarca: And you can -
Benjamin Moses: - pushing them apart.
Stephen LaMarca: What are they laying, carbon?
Benjamin Moses: Carbon fiber layup, yep.
Stephen LaMarca: And you can do that with a press?
Benjamin Moses: Yes. Yes. You can do that with the press. It's pretty ... there's a couple other companies that are experimenting with that, some startups that are doing that. So what they're doing is instead of putting in an autoclave and using pressure to push into the form, they basically have forming dyes that push it, and then you can heat up the forming dyes to accelerate the resin curing process.
Stephen LaMarca: So an autoclave ... just to get really basic and remedial, 005 with you real fast ... an autoclave would shape something and harden it just from using temperature and pressure?
Benjamin Moses: Exactly. So an autoclave is a giant vessel, a big bottle, right?
Stephen LaMarca: Right.
Benjamin Moses: You put in something that has a form in it. So if I have a bowl, I have a female form, and then I put in my pre-preg or my carbon on top of that, and -
Stephen LaMarca: Which is still soft and flexible.
Benjamin Moses: It's still ... correct, and I close the door to the big bottle and I pressurize it. I start cranking the pressure way up to a thousand PSI. That forces the carbon layup into that female cavity.
Stephen LaMarca: Okay.
Benjamin Moses: And then I apply a temperature. It's already at a certain temperature because I've pressurized it, but I increase the temperature a little bit more. That allows the resin to cure. So the forming comes from the pressurization and then the curing comes from the temperature.
Stephen LaMarca: So it's like ... oh man, this is kind of farfetched, but you're kind of like baking it on .
Benjamin Moses: Yeah, that's half of it, you're baking it. So if I'm making cupcakes, the temperature allows the dough to cook, but if I want it to take a specific form, I need to pressurize it to force it in that form.
Stephen LaMarca: Got you. So it's similar to how they put on [inaudible 00:20:02] coats and stuff like that?
Benjamin Moses: Yeah. Correct.
Stephen LaMarca: Okay.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah. So I thought it was really interesting that I think going forward, there's a lot more drive to get the cycle times faster to reduce costs, and that's one of the biggest things. One, you have the cost of the autoclave itself. I mean you have big, heavy machinery that you've had to pay for. So you've got your upfront costs that you've got to amortize over your parts, and then you've got the processing time. So if you're able to reduce the time to get into the oven and match something more to like a forming process. So this would match very similar to an automotive forming process for your fenders and things like that.
Stephen LaMarca: Right.
Benjamin Moses: So I thought that was really interesting that these guys are getting into that, and with a lot more companies getting into ... so you have [inaudible 00:20:48] with their carbon fiber wheels that are really, really expensive, but showed a direction that Ford could do on their high end Mustangs, that they've got carbon fiber wheels also on a $70,000 car. That's not that expensive wheels. I mean, yeah, it's pretty expensive, but -
Stephen LaMarca: It's still a 10th of the price of the [inaudible 00:21:09] -
Benjamin Moses: Yeah, exactly. So it's only a matter of time that you're going to see significant more carbon fiber applications in -
Stephen LaMarca: That's wild.
Benjamin Moses: Especially when you look at the hundred thousand dollar-ish cars. Not the cars I'm looking at, but of course the high end, super ... actually, we won't say high end super cars, but expensive sports cars that'll see significant more carbon fiber applications.
Stephen LaMarca: Yeah. How wild is it that the past few podcasts we've spoken about ... now we've spoken about carbon fiber going into mass production and in becoming ... the use of carbon fiber in mass production being less and less expensive.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah.
Stephen LaMarca: And we did last episode, or I think the episode before, generative design and additive being used to get really organic but lightweight and strong suspension geometries. We're going to have so much Formula One technology in cars in the near future, and yet we're going to [inaudible 00:22:12].
Benjamin Moses: In one of our earlier podcasts, we talked about what is our dream car weight. I think this is a paradigm shift of what the bottom threshold for car weight could be. We've got achievements, like you said, through generative design that could lead to printing parts lighter, or if generative design would go different routes of different subtractive manufacturing techniques, but also implementation of carbon fiber into the cars too. So one ton vehicles, you're going to start shifting below that as your average weight of your car drops.
Stephen LaMarca: Right.
Benjamin Moses: Now speaking of additive, you had an article from America Makes?
Stephen LaMarca: Yes, I do have ... not from America Makes, but America Makes has a really cool competition going on right now, and I'm sorry, I'm still distracted by cars.
Benjamin Moses: I miss driving my car.
Stephen LaMarca: Every time, but it's wild how far technology has come, because I think one of the coolest muscle cars from ... my favorite muscle car from the 1970s is the Oldsmobile Cutlass 442 with the W30 package.
Benjamin Moses: Oh, man.
Stephen LaMarca: It had something like close to 500 cubic inches of engine.
Benjamin Moses: That's a lot of displacement.
Stephen LaMarca: It was absurd. Absurd amount of displacement.
Benjamin Moses: Yep.
Stephen LaMarca: And my car, which was built in 2014, is known as one of the slowest sports cars on the market. It decimates the Oldsmobile 442 in the from zero to 60 and the quarter mile. That's like a 500 horsepower muscle car. Anyway, all right. So my article from Business Journal is highlighting America Makes unveils and top face mask contest designs. So America Makes has this face mask design contest going on about just who can design the most efficient, the easiest to produce, the coolest face mask amidst to this pandemic that we have going on, and American Makes is based out of Youngstown, Ohio. They've got some serious competitors. Some of the organizations that are providing entries are Alliance PCB solutions, South Carolina, Carnegie Mellon University, NIST of course is getting in on this, but they've got to follow ... they can't just go in all willy nilly and design some random mask. They've actually got some pretty serious requirements that they need to follow to make these masks, but the products, the masks themselves that they're producing for this competition are really cool and impressive, not only in performance, but the way they look and hopefully the comfort as well. Some of them are really wild looking designs.
Benjamin Moses: Sure.
Stephen LaMarca: Kind of look like four barrel carburetors and stuff for somebodies face and velocity stacks, but it's just a nice highlight on a really awesome competition that America Makes has going on right now.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah, and I'm super excited for the efforts for getting PPE equipment to the medical workers. What they did is in addition to that competition, they set up this whole infrastructure where if you're a medical worker or a hospital, you can enter your needs into this database. If you're a manufacturer, you can enter your capabilities, or if you're a designer you can enter in your designs, and what they've been working with is the FDA and some of the other medical groups to get these new designs or these requirements fast tracked and processed through to say potentially fit for use, but also connecting manufacturers with medical people so they can get equipment that they need. So their matchmaking process and their connection to the government to get these designs approved for some limited use was very, very useful for the medical workers. That's awesome.
Stephen LaMarca: How wild is it that in the near future, hospitals, along with their multimillion dollar MRI and CT scanning machines, along with the technicians that operate them, hospitals are probably ... in the next few years, probably going to have multimillion dollar super fast additive machinery with a technician on site that has to make a medical solution for an individual patient within a couple of hours.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah. I mean it would be great. I mean they're already doing some of that for implants and joint replacements and that type of stuff.
Stephen LaMarca: Yeah.
Benjamin Moses: So maybe. We'll see. I just hope it's not -
Stephen LaMarca: It's the real ... not the real, but it's showing how to be a real hero in this pandemic.
Benjamin Moses: Sure, sure.
Stephen LaMarca: What have you got?
Benjamin Moses: The article I've got is a little more old school, subtractive manufacturing. It's an article from Canadian Metal Works, my favorite metal works of all Canadian. They talk
about -
Stephen LaMarca: They're a great publication.
Benjamin Moses: They're underrated. They're really good, and they talk about five-axis control. So do you know the full power of your five-axis control? So it's the dilemma I've always faced, and one of the great reasons why we've got a five axis machine in our test bed is the increased capability of being able to do something with five axis. So in your traditional machining operations, even if the requirement is only to do three axis, being able to debur or break edges and things like that in machine before having to do a separate setup or manually do that while other machines are running is surprisingly useful, but the article goes over some interesting needs and challenges as you're doing some five-axis machining. One is vector programming. So now not only do you not have ... or not just the position of the machine. So now you've got to include directions. So vectors, position, and direction and length. So I think it's useful that if you're transitioning to five axis you don't have just points. Now you've got to include another set of data in your location. So I thought that was useful in talking about that, but also when you have to do compensation for your tool. Now you've got to compensate in a much different set of vectors, also. Something to keep in mind also. So the pictures that they show are ball end mills, which is probably most of your applications if you've got a five-axis, but they talk about the different positions that are in contact with the part, and also doing different compensations. So as you're machining with the ball end mill or other tools, you have different contact angles that are engaged. So they talk about compensating in different directions, and one of the other tools is specific the manufacturer and this application. In the article they're using [inaudible 00:29:45] controls, and they talk about when they're tools for contouring. So it's important that when you get into a five axis machining, those are a couple of interesting transition points that are different from traditional three axis, and it's important to keep in mind too. So if you want that nice, smooth contoured surface, your vector programming's pretty important. Also your compensation. You've got these fairly unique parts or fairly unique tools that you've got to compensate for in not only position, but also direction that are valuable, and if you're doing true five axis machining, your part is probably going to be pretty expensive. So you don't want to mess that up as you're machining it. So definitely want to utilize your machine to the full capability for getting complex parts, but putting simple parts on there, just so you don't have to debur and break edges, there's value in that too. So I thought that was a pretty good article. Thought I would pass it along.
Stephen LaMarca: No, that's really great. I mean I actually am looking forward to reading that one.
Benjamin Moses: Yep. I'd love to end the podcast with one of your articles. I think you've got a good one we can end with.
Stephen LaMarca: Oh yeah. I mean I don't know ... I'll be honest, I don't know how good it is, but let me queue it up here. I really just thought it was funny. So from Design World, or at least Design World actually had a meta article. They have this article that's nine examples of what additive manufacturing is doing to fight COVID-19, and one of their examples is could ... or one of the articles that they feature poses a question, could coding services with copper kill the COVID-19 virus?
Benjamin Moses: Oh, no.
Stephen LaMarca: And I'm not a doctor, obviously, and I really haven't worked too much with copper, but I've unfortunately seen enough 3:00 AM infomercials informing me of how good copper is for your body and just what a healthy thing it is to embrace in your life, but I don't know, man. There's a lot of companies trying to sell you copper socks, and there's that lady, Kathy, with the copper pan and whatnot, but this article is some research being done out of Australia. Some research institute is claiming the antimicrobial properties of copper by plating stuff like door handles and bathroom faucets, I guess, could help limit that, and we don't see much of this now. And I say that only because in the past, a lot of door handles and knobs and stuff were made of brass, and I think you don't see it as much anymore is because styles have changed over time. We embrace these days, stainless steel all of the things, especially in the kitchen, but we like the modern look of stainless steel, as for in the 20th century, the mid 20th century, brass was everywhere, at least in buildings and in the household, and I think one of the great things of brass is brass is antimicrobial. It's not fast acting, but if somebody with a dirty hand touches a door knob that's brass, in I think it's something like four to eight hours, whatever bacteria was left on mat brass door knob is dead. Brass kills stuff like that, and I think this research institute out of Australia claims the same thing out of copper, as do a lot of 3:00 AM infomercials, but -
Benjamin Moses: I wonder if that was sponsored by the Copper Institute of Australia.
Stephen LaMarca: Oh, man.
Benjamin Moses: It's interesting you bring that up, because my friend works for a company that does a lot of finite element contract work and he sent over an article that Australia's getting into more advanced drones. So they have a contract with Boeing and they're getting into offensive style type drones. I was like, "Wow, Australia's taking the lead on this," and at the same time, Australia wants to sell me copper plated door handles so I don't spread the coronavirus.
Stephen LaMarca: I mean somebody needs to check in on Australia. They had that fire earlier this year.
Benjamin Moses: Yeah.
Stephen LaMarca: But what you're saying about the drones, I put that in Tech Trends Weekly last week. Australia has an AI powered drone.
Benjamin Moses: Yep.
Stephen LaMarca: And let's think about where that could go for a second. Everybody's ... hopefully you've watched the movie Terminator and Terminator Two. The rest of them, I'm not sure are good.
Benjamin Moses: Don't watch the other ones.
Stephen LaMarca: But It doesn't take a genius to think that it probably isn't a good idea if we give some AI powered killing machine the green light to launch brimstones down upon unsuspecting terrorists. I mean it probably wouldn't be that bad of an idea, but at the same time, something doesn't sit well.
Benjamin Moses: No.
Stephen LaMarca: It's very Skynet.
Benjamin Moses: It seems strange. I mean just removing humans from the decision making process on something that significant, it's tough. By the way, what's your favorite Terminator movie? Is it T2?
Stephen LaMarca: Mine is Terminator Two.
Benjamin Moses: I really liked Terminator Salvation, the one with Christian Bale.
Stephen LaMarca: Really?
Benjamin Moses: I just liked the grittiness of it and the war, and I like Christian Bale. T2 is really, really good still, it's hard to beat that, but Terminator Salvation ... that might be an unpopular opinion, but I liked Terminator Salvation.
Stephen LaMarca: Fair enough. No, I'll go back and watch it. I don't ever think I saw it. It's just the first two were just so good.
Benjamin Moses: So good.
Stephen LaMarca: That even if Salvation and some of the other more current movies were well above average, they weren't excellent the way the first and the second were.
Benjamin Moses: Correct. Correct. It set the bar too high.
Stephen LaMarca: Yeah, they really did.
Benjamin Moses: All right, man.
Stephen LaMarca: Awesome.
Benjamin Moses: Thanks Steve. Where can they find more info on us?
Stephen LaMarca: They'll find more information in description below if they want to check in on your LinkedIn account or I'll throw in a link too, if anybody wants to subscribe to the AMT Tech Trends Weekly Update.
Benjamin Moses: Yep. That'd be awesome. Yeah, and also if you go to AMTnews.org, you can find all the info about us too.
Stephen LaMarca: That's where it is.
Benjamin Moses: Bye everybody.
