Tiny batteries for tiny robots that could deliver drugs inside our bodies

Tiny batteries for tiny robots that could deliver drugs inside our bodies
Engineers at MIT have developed a miniature battery that can power cell-sized, autonomous robots for drug delivery within the human body, as well as for other purposes such as detecting leaks in gas pipelines. The batteries measure 0.1 mm in length and 0.002mm in thickness each - that’s about the same thickness as a human hair. The battery captures oxygen from the air and uses it to oxidize zinc, generating a current with a potential of up to 1 volt. This output is sufficient to power small circuits, sensors, or actuators. Professor Michael Strano, who led the team behind the work, is on the show.

Listener comments and questions
Gareth and Ania read out some of your comments, answer some of your questions and accept your criticisms dear subscriber.

The programme is presented by Gareth Mitchell and the studio expert is Ania Lichtarowicz.

More on this week's stories:
MIT Engineers design tiny batteries for cell sized robots 

Transcript

00:00:00 Gareth Mitchell 

Hello from London. This is the Somewhere on Earth podcast and it is Tuesday the 3rd of September. 

00:00:14 Gareth Mitchell 

And with us today for a bit of experting, is our esteemed editor Ania Lichtarowicz. Yes, indeed. Ania nice to have you on this side of the glass, as it were. How are things? 

00:00:25 Ania Lichtarowicz 

They are good. It's nice to be here. We are all well. 

00:00:28 Gareth Mitchell 

Good to hear it. So just before we jump into the main part of the podcast then, there's 

00:00:33 Gareth Mitchell 

a bit of interest around like ID cards in Poland and why people are kind of blocking their personal ID numbers. What the heck is going on? 

00:00:41 Ania Lichtarowicz 

So yeah, there's quite a lot of interest in this and I'm quite interested in this because my husband has a personal identification number, as do my children. It's called a Pesel and everybody who is a Polish citizen or a resident, temporary or permanent, has one of these national ID numbers. 

00:00:59 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Now the country's digital ministry is asking people to go online and to block their numbers because since November 2023, all financial institutions have to check your Pesel status as part of any application process. So if you want a loan, if you want a mortgage, 

00:01:19 Ania Lichtarowicz  

even bank transfers of sums above the minimum wage, that's €3000, need to have this further financial 

00:01:28 Ania Lichtarowicz 

check and so the Polish digital ministry wants everyone to block their Pesel because they say it's the easiest way to reduce the risk of cyber fraud. Now 4.5 million people have already done this, it's not going to impact anything like your voting rights. So you can still register to vote. You can request official documents even if the number is blocked. 

00:01:49 Ania Lichtarowicz 

However, if you do need to make a financial application to borrow some money, for instance, or to make a big bank transfer for a big transaction, you can change it back, the status of it, you can unblock it at any point. 

00:02:03 Ania Lichtarowicz 

And the way you do this is either on the government website via an app called MobiWakka, which translates to mCITIZEN. That's the mCITIZEN app. Or you can do it in a government office. They are, obviously the digital ministry is encouraging people to do it on the app. So if you are in Poland just 

00:02:23 Ania Lichtarowicz 

do check that out. Have a look. Because, uh, yeah, it could mean that if anybody is trying to defraud you or if there's been some kind of data leak and that number is out there, it will give you another wall of protection. 

00:02:37 Gareth Mitchell 

That's a fascinating glimpse. Thank you Ania. And I like your personal and family insight into that too. 

00:02:41 Gareth Mitchell 

All right, let's jump in. 

00:02:49 Gareth Mitchell 

And coming up today. 

00:02:53 Gareth Mitchell 

We're looking at batteries that are the width of a human hair today. Yes, we'll be finding out how they make such tiny power packs and why we need them. Also in this podcast, reactions to our Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy special with the excellent Eli Crosby remember him. 

00:03:08 Gareth Mitchell 

And we'll get some reaction to that. And at that massive Windows Internet outage from a few weeks ago. Indeed, yes, we are hearing your comments as we delve into the mail bag. And this isn't the 1980s anymore, maybe I should say delving into our inbox and the socials.  Much more up-to-date. All right, it's all going on here on the Somewhere on Earth podcast. 

00:03:38 Gareth Mitchell 

First then, to some big ideas in the very small world of micro and even nano robotics. We're talking about machines so small they can move around the very cells within our body to do repairs or deliver drugs to very specific places. We've talked about tiny robotics before, but I must admit I've never really stopped to think about how these things actually get the power 

00:03:59 Gareth Mitchell 

they need. Well step forward Michael Strano and colleagues at MIT. Michael is the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT, and he's led the research just published, 

00:04:10 Gareth Mitchell 

into a battery the width of a human hair. And for those that love all things units related, here we go, a micron, because you might need this to get through this interview, right? A micron, just to remind everybody, is a thousandth of a millimetre and a nanometer is a thousandth the size of that. Here's Michael. 

00:04:32 Michael Strano 

The battery itself is a thin layer that can be as small as the size of of a cell, so 10 microns by 10 microns, and as thick as you want. It can be from a nanometer thickness to a micron. It's meant to hold energy to power a very small what we call a micro robot, which is a  device the size of a living human cell that can perform different functions. 

00:04:58 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. So I think I've read one set of dimensions that said that in a particular configuration, a battery can be 0.1 millimeters long and something like nought point nought, nought 2mm thick. So. 

00:05:09 Michael Strano 

Right for your listeners, if they want to think about the thickness of their hair. So if they look at the cross section of their hair, imagine a device that's about that thick. So the battery can go inside of that. 

00:05:22 Gareth Mitchell 

And the idea is to power these tiny robots, so people should abandon any thoughts of robots that look like anything you might see in a car factory, for instance. These are very different. The size of a cell, you were saying? 

00:05:32 Michael Strano 

Well, the goal is to bring sensors and electronics and motion to regions that are not accessible now. So imagine if you wanted to detect or do surgery inside the human body or inside of a pipeline or a piping system. Think about all of the applications where you'd like to get tools inside of a small space, so that's the goal of this area called Microrobotics. 

00:06:01 Gareth Mitchell 

Because the way I often think about these kinds of very small robots is that they take energy from the environment. They're so small that they can, for instance, just take a little bit of heat energy or something like that. That would be enough to power them. So why are you going to the trouble of developing a whole, I nearly said whole big battery, but a whole battery. 

00:06:21 Michael Strano 

It's a misconception that you can make a robot very small and just and just take power the same way you can with the children's toy. There's a threshold or a limit below which energy becomes very, very punishing. So meaning that there's just not enough energy to do the types of things that you want. 

00:06:40 Michael Strano 

This is not intuitive. You really have to do the math, but when a robot gets around the size of the thickness of your hair and smaller engineers like like myself, we find there's not enough energy to to do anything. I mean, all of a sudden imagine an electric car that can only have 5% of its charge. Or a gasoline engine that only has maybe 100 milliliters. You have to start to think about 

00:07:08 Michael Strano 

what can you do with a very small amount of energy. So that that has limited what engineers like myself can do? It's the opposite of what you think. If you have a children's toy, you take for granted you can plug it in. There's a rechargeable battery, there's plenty of energy to do what you want. Below a certain size, the opposite is true. You never have enough energy. And that falls right out of the math. 

00:07:30 Gareth Mitchell 

Incredible. And it shows that you really are working at the frontiers of what's possible in tiny robotics and indeed small energy storage. This battery itself, you called it a zinc air battery. So clearly zinc comes into it. I think there's a bit of platinum in there as well. So tell us a little bit about the makeup of the battery. 

00:07:51 Michael Strano 

Well, we decided to use zinc because it's actually a nutrient in the human body. There's a portion of the field that's thinking very much about medicine. Think about it. It's been a long standing goal. Could you make a robotic device that could go inside the body? 

00:08:07 Michael Strano 

And address medical problems there. I'll explain for your listeners, the concept of an air battery because it's not intuitive and they're not commercial yet. But there are researchers working on a battery like you would have in your phone or in your laptop that takes some of its energy from the environment. So if your  

00:08:27 Michael Strano 

battery can breathe air it means some of the chemical energy comes from the environment and that means the battery can hold more energy than a regular battery can. That's called an air breathing battery. It uses oxygen as part of the chemical energy, so it's a clever idea. 

00:08:45 Michael Strano 

The field hasn't gotten large batteries to work like that yet, but there's a big advantage, right? Because instead of being limited by all the energy inside of a battery, you can offload some of the energy requirement to the surroundings. 

00:09:01 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. So there's stuff out there in the surroundings already that you can just pull together with a bit of chemistry within the battery and a combination of metals and then pull some energy out of it. Is that it? 

00:09:10 Michael Strano 

 So that's how our zinc micro battery works. It uses oxygen and water from the surroundings to partly power the battery. The other part comes from the zinc, and that means we can pack more energy into a very small volume. That's absolutely critical for this kind of problem. You never have enough energy to do what you want, so it's critically important to get as much energy into the device as possible. 

00:09:37 Gareth Mitchell 

How far have you managed to get with this research? So is this a lab demo that you have there at MIT, or are we talking about something that you've modeled on the computer? Where are we at? 

00:09:46 Michael Strano 

My lab, and if I can be presumptuous I'll speak for the whole field, we've made modest progress. I would say we're making the Legos, the building blocks that go into robots. So where the field is, there are researchers that have made grippers. They've made little tiny legs that can move and crawl. 

00:10:07 Michael Strano 

We've made a battery. Others have made sensors. So we're building the parts and it's an exciting part of the field. Now it's an exciting time because we're just starting to assemble those together to make very simple robots, things that can detect and measure, remember that they've measured something,  

00:10:27 Michael Strano 

can flow or move in a flow stream, and so you're seeing the start of a field, but I think that's where we are now. We're building the different Legos that can be put together to make a device. 

00:10:39 Gareth Mitchell 

Because when I think of a robot, you think of a device that interacts with the world in some way, you know, it might have an actuator as engineers call it. In other words, like a little motor that makes things move, it can sense its environment. You know, it can convert one thing from another thing, the kind of things that robots do at the macro, if you like, real world scale. It sounds as if you're achieving similar functions, but at this cellular level, this micro or even maybe nano levels is incredible. 

00:11:07 Michael Strano 

Yes, so actuation. That's a fancy word for a device that moves. You can think of your arm, it takes glucose and it turns it into motion. So engineers call that an actuator, it causes an action. 

00:11:21 Michael Strano 

And so in the micro robotics field, we've made small parts that can move. They can take in voltage or a fuel and they can move. Actuation turns out to to be very hard. Gripping is hard even for macro robotics. I asked my colleagues at MIT what the progress is in robots that that can do manipulation tests. So they say we're still a few years out from a robot that can fold a towel. These are very complex tasks if you think of your human hand,  

00:11:50 Michael Strano 

is a very sophisticated device, so it's even worse at the micro scale. However, we've made progress. We can make small micro things grab and release and this is work of my colleagues and the battery that we've demonstrated can provide the energy for things like that. 

00:12:09 Gareth Mitchell 

And it shows how crucial this is then, so it's all very well having one of these micro robots that, for instance, can move a molecule around within the body. But if it can't get any power, you don't have a robot, do you? So this work really matters. 

00:12:23 Michael Strano 

It's really central. So and I've said before, you can build a robot around a core energy    source but without that energy source, you're really stuck. There's two kinds of robots that you can think of. We're working on devices that have their own energy. They bring their energy along with them. There's another concept that I call a marionette. Your listeners may be familiar with puppets that are manipulated 

00:12:49 Michael Strano 

on a string. So in the literature in the field we also have people working on these marionette kind of robots where you have a small device, but it's tethered in some way. It gets energy and it gets the thinking from outside of the robot. 

00:13:05 Michael Strano 

And those are a bit more sophisticated. If you can find a way to get to sort of beam power to the device and control it, maybe with a magnetic field or by moving light around, you can do a bit more, and that's very promising research. But there are a whole set of problems where you can't get that 

00:13:24 Michael Strano 

tether, you can't beam that energy in effectively. So the field is going to need both, and it's going to be useful to have a robot that that can bring its own energy to the environment where you want to accomplish your task. 

00:13:38 Gareth Mitchell 

So what kind of tasks do you have in mind then?  What kind of uses? 

00:13:41 Michael Strano 

We are like others in the field. We're looking at the human body. So can you do surgical tests in the human body without having to cut open tissue? This could make surgery dramatically cheaper. Safer for humans. You could go through different orifices in medicine, they're called luminal spaces. 

00:14:03 Michael Strano 

And we're also looking at monitoring infrastructure for the environment. Think of gas pipelines. Right now in the United States and around the world we pump natural gas through a pipeline, but that methane, primarily methane, leaks out and it's a very potent  

greenhouse gas. It's a worse greenhouse gas than CO2, than carbon dioxide, so we would like to be able to put little robotic probes that can just flow through the pipeline, miles and miles of pipeline and the tech leaks. So we've made some progress towards that. 

00:14:37 Michael Strano 

And your listeners can think of these tasks where, can you get electronics into a very small space? Can you get it into machinery to diagnose if something's working or not? So the idea is to get something small enough to go into a crack or crevice and then sense report, actuate and maybe do something, maybe retrieve. So these are the kind of things that we're thinking about. 

00:15:05 Gareth Mitchell 

Michael Strano there with a lot to think about. So Ania Lichtarowicz. It's a lot to think about there, isn't there? What an exciting story. 

00:15:12 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Yes, this is very, very exciting Gareth. I mean, imagine surgery, especially explorative surgery, being a thing of the past. I'm thinking of these kind of quite mundane routine but very unpleasant procedures, so endoscopies and colonoscopies, having a tube stuck down your throat into your stomach to check that you haven't got ulcers, for instance, or cancer. A colonoscopy, well, that is, you know, the other side of your body isn't it,  

00:15:41 Ania Lichtarowicz 

with a tube and a camera going up, basically through your bum and into your intestine to again check the health of that. Very important for things like polyps which are these little things that grow inside your intestine and can cause cancer. So it's important to make sure that if there are any little ones that they get removed. 

00:16:01 Ania Lichtarowicz 

It's also great for delivering drugs to the right part of the body, so you reduce the amount of drug you need. It's a more effective treatment, but also you have fewer side effects. However, can you hear my however coming Gareth? 

00:16:13 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, here it comes. 

00:16:15 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Yeah, there are ethical concerns. They need to be addressed, and certainly Michael and his team at MIT are doing this. Have you ever been for an MRI scan, Gareth? 

00:16:23 Gareth Mitchell 

I have. They're very noisy, aren't they? MRIs. 

00:16:26 Ania Lichtarowicz 

They are incredibly noisy. You have to wear headphones, but there is also a very long questionnaire before you go in to answer. So questions that are asked on there are things like do you have a pacemaker or have you ever had a capsule endoscopy. So that's actually when you swallow a rather large tablet which goes through your entire digestive tract, taking thousands and thousands of photos along the way. Now this is important  

00:16:50 Ania Lichtarowicz 

because the MRI itself, the scan itself, can have an impact on the pacemaker. So those are checked before you go in and after you've come out to make sure that it's all working properly. And the capsule, now that should come out through your digestive system. So it should come out in your faeces. But if it hasn't, that could cause actually very serious damage to your digestive tract during an MRI scan. 

00:17:13 Ania Lichtarowicz 

So, you know, we're not quite sure how these robots will respond and react, so it's incredibly important that they are always tracked. The doctor needs to know where they are in the body. Number one, to know that it's got to the right part to deliver a drug, for instance. But also, you know, they've got to be able to be retrieved  

00:17:34 Ania Lichtarowicz 

at any time as well, so they need to keep an eye as to where they are. We don't know what side effects these robots could have and what would happen if they're lost. So could they cause damage later, is certainly a question that needs to be addressed before they come anywhere near us. 

00:17:49 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, I think that's so important as well. It's great and I love doing this on podcasts to talk about the really exciting aspects of the research, to think about how forward thinking it all is. But at the same time, a little bit of a, but, you know, in fact, that however, I think is important to have with some of these stories and just putting those into context. 

00:18:13 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Absolutely. 

00:18:22 Gareth Mitchell 

All right. Thank you, Ania. And I think it's great that we can get so excited about these genuinely, really amazing technology stories, but it's just good to get those little kind of yes  buts at the end, bit of context and a bit of a reality check as well. So Ania, thank you. And speaking of reality checks should we hear from our lovely listeners, Ania? 

00:18:44 Ania Lichtarowicz 

I think we should. We haven't heard from them for a while. 

00:18:47 Gareth Mitchell 

Should we do that? 

00:18:48 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Hmm. 

00:18:48 Gareth Mitchell 

Absolutely. Let's hear then from Jason Snowdon, who says I really enjoyed the latest podcast. This is a while back, but the latest podcast as it was back then, about Eli Crosley and Duchenne UK. It would be good to hear more about the issue with actuators and exoskeletons. I remember not long enough ago I realised the Iron Man suit would not work as shown in films. I wonder if neutral, or sorry, I wonder if neural implant is the way to go. 

00:19:18 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Hmm. 

00:19:18 Gareth Mitchell 

So, Jason, there, it's interesting, isn't it, whether kind of neural enhancement perhaps needs to get more of a look in rather than all the exoskeleton stuff which tends to get a lot of attention, doesn't it? Because I suppose these things are very visual and they get a lot of coverage on the telly because they're visual. Of course, there already are neural implants, and you could probably argue that something like a retinal implant or some kind of help with your hearing, one of those kinds of implants is, you know, it is going into the brain effectively or parts of the brain. 

00:19:54 Gareth Mitchell 

But Jason really asking a very good question there about neural enhancement as well as the physical enhancement. 

00:20:01 Ania Lichtarowicz 

I always have a slight reservation though with this, Gareth, because I can't think of my mum's hearing aids, you know? And, you know, she bought them two years ago, and obviously the company she bought them from were pushing, saying, oh, you need new ones. You know, these ones now do this, and these ones now do this. 

00:20:14 Ania Lichtarowicz 

And you do wonder at how quickly the technology improves. And it's one thing saying, OK, I'll upgrade my hearing aids, which are external and just yes, you have to spend quite a bit of money, but it doesn't really impact you physically. Having a neural impact, what are you going to do? Change it after two years? It's going to be um...a. 

00:20:35 Ania Lichtarowicz 

And also, we also have to remember that the Iron Man suit from Marvel probably wasn't going to work. I've just seen the latest Marvel and certainly some of the things that were happening in there are never gonna happen in real life, but 

00:20:49 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, not for a while. 

00:20:50 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Not for a while, indeedee. 

00:20:53 Gareth Mitchell 

No, sure. All right, but thank you for that one, Jason. Good one, Flloyd Kennedy heard us talking about the aftermath of that Crowdstrike outage and this was back, was it earlier in August. I think there was this whole shenanigans where Windows based systems around the world, I'm sure you remember it must have happened to you dear listener, or quite possibly did, or at least you were affected by it. They got the blue screen of death and it caused all kinds of disruption and 

00:21:25 Gareth Mitchell 

when we talked about it, I think it was either later that week or a week later, but Microsoft had just done like an initial report into all this, but so it wasn't as if we did particularly extensive coverage, but it was good to just get that check in with Microsoft's initial response to the whole issue. And Flloyd says full marks to Gareth for his constraint in the report of the Crowdstrike mishap, and extra full marks to Ania for the balanced volume throughout. So balanced volume, says Flloyd, so full marks to you Ania. I assume, meaning just the sound levels. 

00:22:02 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Well, I have to say, it's the sound levels. I think that was Keziah that week. I think it was from what I remember not me and I apologise to people because I know when I edit the show that I do have a tendency to put really loud levels of music on it. But that's my independent radio background where obviously we were taught that a jingle kind of wakes everybody up. 

00:22:08 Gareth Mitchell 

OK. A bit too much. 

00:22:26 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. OK. Oh, my goodness. What was that? So it's it, I I fully admit that my style of editing is a bit, how can one put it, perhaps for a very young audience? That's definitely something that, yeah, it's a bit of my bad. So I have taken that into account. I'm trying to claw it back so, but do keep telling me if I'm, you know, if I’ve not done it right. 

00:22:51 Gareth Mitchell 

Oh, OK. Well, that's very gracious of you Ania to attribute that praise as it should be to Keziah who was doing those lovely sound levels that Flloyd praised us over. And I must admit if it was me, I'd probably just take the praise,but no, not really. I'm very honest and and actually on 

00:23:08 Gareth Mitchell 

the subject of sound levels, a friend of mine who listens said that he found some of the music beds a bit loud and his perspective was quite interesting because he wears hearing aids. So not only did he find it a bit like oh, it was a bit difficult to hear the speech over the music. I think he actually struggled with it a bit, just for people who wear hearing aids, 

00:23:28 Gareth Mitchell 

that if the music beds are too loud, it's quite difficult for them. So it was a interesting perspective. So thank you for that. And look, I, I make other podcasts and do bits of mixing myself. So this isn't just about you Ania and you're mixing, but indeed mine. You know, I'm learning from that too because I'm sure I have a tendency as well to bump the music up a little bit. 

00:23:45 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Absolutely. 

00:23:49 Gareth Mitchell 

And it's tricky, you've got to, it's very hard to know. Oh I won't get too far into the weeds here but I will often do a rough cut of a podcast and I'll mix the music and then come back to it a bit later and think, oh, you know, the music's like a bit too quiet and then I'll go and bump the music up again and then listen to it later and think, oh, it's too high now. It's very,  it's very difficult. So I do take my hat off to people like Keziah who’s our, you know, professional sound engineer. One of them over at Lancon's Team Farner who just seemed to have that instinct for what works when people download their stuff and listen to it. 

00:24:25 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Indeed, Keziah and the lovely Dylan, who's done quite a few recently, and Cal and Stevie before them. So we are very grateful to them and I will keep drawing it back, I promise. 

00:24:38 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. Ohh there we are. Right. So Flloyd, thank you very much indeed for that. And Flloyd then goes back to the subject of the Crowdstrike outage and says how anyone is even surprised that a tech glitch could bring down major elements of the Internet is beyond me. So yes, I think that's a good point, especially this kind of semi monopoly. Can you have a semi monopoly? Anyway, there's quasi monopolistic situation where so much of the world's commerce systems, and indeed you know personal computers are pretty much using the same software, so it's that kind of single point of failure, isn't it? Which is not right. 

00:25:16 Ania Lichtarowicz 

It is, it is. I mean, I think quite a few people were saying, well, if it was on Linux, it wouldn't have happened, but something could have happened to that as well. So, and I love the way Pete described it I think in the show, which is, you know, that some of it's held together by pieces of string while others other bits of it are, you know built very robustly so it is a bit of a mishmash out there isn't it? 

00:25:37 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, it sure is. Another subject. A couple of listeners agreeing about how annoying it is that some services that we have to use these days force you to save to the cloud rather than just having your documents locally on your laptop or on your PC or whatever. 

00:25:51 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Hmm. I just want my documents on my things. Yeah. That's what I want it on. I don't want it in the cloud. It's, you know, something always goes wrong. All this automatic saving etc etc. I have dyslexia. It really confuses me. I just prefer it that way that it's on my space, not someone else's. 

00:26:16 Gareth Mitchell 

You know where you are with it? Yeah, well, maybe the best of both worlds, because quite a few years ago now, one of our listeners back in the Digital Planet days sent me an invite, an invitation, not an invite,  

00:26:28 Gareth Mitchell 

An invitation to Dropbox, which nobody had heard of at the time. And I looked into it and thought, oh, this is handy and it does give you that best of both world situations. So you just have your normal file structure on your hard drive, on your actual machine sitting in front of you. But it's all synchronized to a parallel online folder 

00:26:48 Gareth Mitchell 

through the cloud in Dropbox. And of course since then loads of other services have come in doing a similar thing, and you know through the Microsoft 365 kind of office suite you can do all that kind of stuff in OneDrive. So there are lots of ways of doing it. So that would be a happy medium to me that you just,  

00:27:02 Gareth Mitchell 

yeah, you've got it on your hard drive, but then everything synchronizes. So then when you close your laptop and go and start work on another computer, everything's just synchronized onto that computer. So that's what I think about that, for what it's worth, which probably isn't very much. 

00:27:11 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Yeah. Now let's move on to a bit of a complaint. 

00:27:20 Gareth Mitchell 

Oh yes. Do you want to read this one out for me? 

00:27:20 Ania Lichtarowicz 

So this is, uh, yes I will read this one out. This came into our emails hello@omewhereonearth.co   So hello team from Alex in central Kenya. I've been following you around from the good old days of DP to the sad ending of The Gareth and Billcast to here. 

00:27:36 Ania Lichtarowicz 

I like how you highlight tech stories that would otherwise fly under over through, beyond whatever radar there is. However, I am disappointed in the unexpected Ads which pop up when an expert is in the middle of a sentence. I believe you can do better. Overall, great work, guys. And wouldn't we like to have Bill in here. So we'll get your questions into Bill. We'll try and get him into a show, but let me quickly, Gareth, explain the adverts. 

00:28:04 Ania Lichtarowicz 

So as many of you know, we have left the safe haven of the BBC and we have to finance this podcast and one way is through these unexpected ads that are added by our podcasting platform. That's our hosting platform. And that's all done by AI. Now it's very difficult to try and change it. You can change it a little bit, but these adverts are put in automatically 

00:28:28 Ania Lichtarowicz 

and they also change so the subscription version we take them off there, obviously because you guys are very kindly paying ten U.S. dollars a month to listen to the extra bits and you shouldn't have adverts in those. But you know it does change where these adverts go. And I can check and I can have a look and I do try and make sure that they are  

00:28:50 Ania Lichtarowicz 

in a place where it isn't mid-sentence, but sometimes you just cannot change them, so I do apologise if they do interrupt your listening. But we do have to have financial support from somewhere. Good journalism costs, and I hope we're doing some good journalism and that's the way in this big wide world outside public broadcasting. 

00:29:09 Gareth Mitchell 

Yes, if only we had a, you know, publicly funded licence fee to keep us on air, but alas not. So the adverts it is. I I have mixed feelings when I hear them. So you know, when I'm playing the podcast back and one of these Ads crashes in, usually it seems to be at the end of one of my intros. And then just before the start of the item it's like 

00:29:30 Gareth Mitchell 

Year, well, thanks for completely screwing up the kind of mood that I sat there and my beautifully honed intro dear AI. So it's a bit mixed feelings, but then I'm also thinking good,  that's making us some money. So that makes me happier.  

00:29:42 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Not very much, but yeah, every download helps. 

00:29:49 Gareth Mitchell 

It does. And then my other mixed feeling is that with all this talk of artificial intelligence and machine learning, there is still a place for humanoid life forms like Ania, for instance, who  can sit there and edit and use their human judgment and their artistic temperament to craft audio in a way that is sympathetic, that is seamless, that is beautiful, and evidently AI hasn't learned to do that yet, so you're safe for the time being, Ania, that's all I'm saying. 

00:30:17 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Oh, thanks. Although I am tempted to just put out one episode that's been completely edited by AI and see what everyone thinks. 

00:30:24 Gareth Mitchell 

Will that be depressing if Flloyd writes and saying oh it was a beautifully mixed episode this time it was so slick. Everything really worked, Ania well done, it's your best work.  

00:30:33 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Let's not risk it then. 

00:30:35 Gareth Mitchell  

Maybe not. Oh goodness. Right there we are. Is that quite enough for now then producer Ania. 

00:30:40 Ania Lichtarowicz 

I think so, yeah. Listen, let's just get on to, let's get on to the podcast extra. I'm not going to say anything, I don't think in that podcast extra because we're going to have nanotechnology, biotechnology, molecular biology, growing plants. I believe spinach that sends emails or detects explosives. 

00:30:59 Gareth Mitchell 

And no ads. 

00:31:00 Ania Lichtarowicz 

And no ads. Wahahay, worth it just for that. 

00:31:02 Gareth Mitchell 

What's not to love? So see you over there for the subscription. If you're coming over for that. Otherwise, we'll see you next time. And thank you from the whole team here. I'm sure you know us by now. I'm Gareth. She's Ania. We have production manager Liz Tuohy, and we’re usually at Lansons Team Farner, but we're not today, but we will be again, all right. Speak to you soon folks. Take care. Bye bye.