Image source: CNN
Typically, I do not enjoy ted talks due to the long drawn out lectures on change that usually take place. But when I was looking for one that would catch my attention, I instantly went for the cute dog video that also related to an importance in our world. Who doesn’t love dogs right?
I personally enjoy learning about topics of progression in the world, especially of detecting and helping understand diseases. I like how James Logan started his ted talk off by saying ” malaria is still one of the biggest killers in the planet”, he follows this by staying numbers relating to how many people, even younger girls under the age of two, dying from this. It starts off by immediately engaging your attention with the cold hard truth.
A heavy start can help really engage people’s attention, but then he continues by him really focuses on the sense of our nose. ” get your nose right into the armpit of those around you”, this is him preparing to talk about the way that they are going to switch the talk to engage in a possible solution with the use of dogs. He introduces different smells and what they smell like and compares them to the familiar things we recognize.
‘The smell’ in a positive way to diagnose people, the world best sensors already exist; animals. He showed different experiments in order to see if infected people are more attractive to mosquitos, indicating they were just able to smell. Malaria who were infected were highly more attractive. This is right on the stage where they are infectious.
They are training dogs to be able to identify this scent that will allow people to be identified before they become increasingly more sick. Overall, I feel this ted talk was not lectured like, he engaged his audience and made jokes while still relating to his topic in order to make those listening feel apart of a great discovery.
I thought this Ted Talk sounded really interesting, as I love dogs and I find this type of science really intriguing. I know that dogs already have the ability to sniff other diseases. In fact, many service dogs are trained to smell and detect when a person is going to have an epileptic seizure. Therefore, dogs could perhaps be trained to smell and detect malaria in humans as well.
Wow this sounds really cool, I didn’t know dogs could do that before. Its really interesting to think about how much of the world we have yet to discover, there is so much out there that we don’t know about. this sounds like a very interesting ted talk and i liked your description of it.
This sounds like a really interesting TED Talk, publicizing new information on a potentially life-saving scientific development.