William Li: Can we eat to starve cancer?

About this talk

William Li presents a new way to think about treating cancer and other diseases: anti-angiogenesis, preventing the growth of blood vessels that feed a tumor. The crucial first (and best) step: Eating cancer-fighting foods that cut off the supply lines and beat cancer at its own game.





Good afternoon. There's a medical revolution happening all around us, and it's one that's going to help us conquer some of society's most dreaded conditions, including cancer. And the revolution is called angiogenesis, and it's based on the process that our bodies use to grow blood vessels.

So why should we care about blood vessels? Well, the human body is literally packed with them, 60,000 miles worth in a typical adult. End to end, that would form a line that would circle the earth twice. The smallest blood vessels are called capillaries. We've got 19 billion of them in our bodies. And these are the vessels of life, and, as I'll show you, they can also be the vessels of death. Now the remarkable thing about blood vessels is that they have this ability to adapt to whatever environment they're growing in. For example, in the liver they form channels to detoxify the blood. In the lung, they line air sacs for gas exchange. In muscle, they corkscrew so that muscles can contract without cutting off circulation. And in nerves, they course along like power lines, keeping those nerves alive. And we get most of these blood vessels when we're actually still in the womb. And what that means is that, as adults, blood vessels don't normally grow, except in a few special circumstances. In women, blood vessels grow every month to build the lining of the uterus. During pregnancy, they form the placenta, which connects mom and baby. And after injury, blood vessels actually have to grow under the scab in order to heal a wound. And this is actually what it looks like. Hundreds of blood vessels all growing to the center of the wound.

So the body has the ability to regulate the amount of blood vessels that are present at any given time. And it does this through an elaborate and elegant system of checks and balances, stimulators and inhibitors of angiogenesis, such that, when we need a brief burst of blood vessels, the body can do this by releasing stimulators, proteins called angiogenic factors that act as natural fertilizer and stimulate new blood vessels to sprout. And when those excess vessels are no longer needed, the body prunes them back to baseline using naturally occurring inhibitors of angiogenesis. Now there are other situations where we start beneath the baseline, and we need to grow more blood vessels just to get back to normal levels. For example, after an injury. And a body can do that too, but only to that normal level, that set point.

But what we now know is, for a number of diseases, there are defects in the system, where the body can't prune back extra blood vessels or can't prune grow enough new ones in the right place at the right time. And in these situations, angiogenesis is out of balance. And when angiogenesis is out of balance, a myriad of diseases result. For example, insufficient angiogenesis, not enough blood vessels, leads to wounds that don't heal, heart attacks, legs without circulation, death from stroke, nerve damage. And on the other end, excessive angiogenesis, too many blood vessels, drives disease. And we see this in cancer, blindness, arthritis, obesity, Alzheimer's disease. In total, there are more than 70 major diseases, effecting more than a billion people worldwide, that all look on the surface to be different from one another, but all actually share abnormal angiogenesis as their common denominator. And this realization is allowing us to reconceptualize the way that we actually approach these diseases by controlling angiogenesis.

Now I'm going to to focus on cancer because angiogenesis is a hallmark of cancer, every type of cancer. So here we go. This is a tumor, dark, gray, ominous mass growing inside a brain. And under the microscope, you can see hundreds of these brown staining blood vessels, capillaries that are feeding cancer cells, bringing oxygen and nutrients. But cancers don't start out like this. And, in fact, cancers don't start out with a blood supply. They start out as small, microscopic nests of cells That can only grow to one half a cubic millimeter in size. That's the tip of a ballpoint pen. Then they can't get any larger because they don't have a blood supply, so they don't have enough oxygen or nutrients.

And in fact, we're probably forming these microscopic cancers all the time in our body. Autopsy studies from people who died in car accidents have shown that about 40 percent of women between the ages of 40 and 50 actually have microscopic cancers in their breasts. About 50 percent of men in their 50s and 60s have microscopic prostate cancers. And virtually 100 percent of us, by the time we reach our 70s, will have microscopic cancers growing in our thyroid. Yet, without a blood supply, most of these cancers will never become dangerous. Dr. Judah Folkman, who was my mentor, and who was the pioneer of the angiogenesis field, once called this "cancer without disease."

So the body's ability to balance angiogenesis, when it's working properly, prevents blood vessels from feeding cancers. And this turns out to be one of our most important defense mechanisms against cancer. In fact, if you actually block angiogenesis and prevent blood vessels from ever reaching cancer cells, tumors simply can't grow up. But once angiogenesis occurs, cancers can grow exponentially. And this is actually how a cancer goes from being harmless to deadly. Cancer cells mutate and they gain the ability to release lots of those angiogenic factors, natural fertilizer, that tip the balance in favor of blood vessels invading the cancer. And once those vessels invade the cancer, it can expand, it can invade local tissues. And the same vessels that are feeding tumors, allow cancer cells to exit into the circulation as metastases. And, unfortunately, this late stage of cancer is the one at which it's most likely to be diagnosed, when angiogenesis is already turned on, and cancer cells are growing like wild.

So, if angiogenesis is a tipping point between a harmless cancer and a harmful one, then one major part of the angiogenesis revolution is a new approach to treating cancer by cutting off the blood supply. We call this antiangiogenic therapy, and it's completely different from chemotherapy because it electively aims at the blood vessels that are feeding the cancers. And we can do this because tumor blood vessels are unlike normal, healthy vessels we see in other places of the body. They're abnormal; they're very poorly constructed; and, because of that, they're highly vulnerable to treatments that target them. In effect, when we give cancer patients antiangiogenic therapy -- here, an experimental drug for a glioma, which is a type of brain tumor -- you can see that there are dramatic changes that occur when the tumor is being starved. Here's a woman with a breast cancer being treated with the antiangiogenic drug called Avastin, which is FDA approved. And you can see that the halo of blood flow disappears after treatment.

Well, I've just shown you two very different types of cancer that both responded to antiangiogenic therapy. So, a few years ago, I asked myself, "Can we take this one step further, and treat other cancers, even in other species?" So here is a nine year-old boxer named Milo who had a very agressive tumor called a malignant neurofibroma growing on his shoulder. It invaded into his lungs. His veterinarian only gave him three months to live. So we created a cocktail of antiangiogenic drugs that could be mixed into his dog food as well as an antiangiogenic cream that could be applied on the surface of the tumor. And within a few weeks of treatment, we were able to slow down that cancer's growth such that we were ultimately able to extend milo's survival to six times what the veterinarian had initially predicted, all with a very good quality of life.

And we subsequently treated more than 600 dogs. We have about a 60 percent response rate and improved survival for these pets that were about to be euthanized. So let me show you a couple of even more interesting examples. This is 20 year old dolphin living in Florida, and she had these lesions in her mouth that, over the course of three years, developed into invasive squamous cell cancers. So we created an antiangiogenic paste. We had it painted on top of the cancer three times a week. And over the course of seven months, the cancers completely disappeared, and the biopsies came back as normal.

Here's a cancer growing on the lip of a quarter horse named Guiness. It's a very, very deadly type of cancer called an angiosarcoma. It had already spread to his lymph nodes, so we used an antiangiogenic skin cream for the lip and an oral cocktail, so we could treat from the inside as well as the outside. And over the course of six months, he experienced a complete remission. And here he is six years later, Guiness, with his very happy owner.

(Applause)

Now, obviously, antiangiogenic therapy could be used for a wide range of cancers. And, in fact, the first pioneering treatments, for people, as well as dogs, are already becoming available. There's 12 different drugs, 11 different cancer types, but the real question is: How well do these work in practice? So here's actually the patient survival data from eight different types of cancer. And the bars represent survival time taken from the era in which there was only chemotherapy, or surgery, or radiation available. But starting in 2004, when antiangiogenic therapies first became available, well you can see that there has been a 70 to 100 percent improvement in survival for people with kidney cancer, multiple myeloma, colorectal cancer, and gastrointestinal stromal tumors. That's impressive. But for for other tumors and cancer types, the improvements have only been modest.

So I started asking myself, "Why haven't we been able to do better?" And the answer, to me, is obvious; we're treating cancer too late in the game, when it's already established, and, oftentimes, it's already spread or metastasized. And as a doctor, I know that, once a disease progresses to an advanced stage, achieving a cure can be difficult, if not impossible. So I went back to the biology of angiogenesis and started thinking: Could the answer to cancer be preventing angiogenesis, beating cancer at its own game so the cancers could never become dangerous? This could help healthy people as well as people who've already beaten cancer once or twice and want to find a way to keep it from coming back. So to look for a way to prevent angiogenesis in cancer, I went back to look at cancer's causes. And what really intrigued me was when I saw that diet accounts for 30 to 35 percent of environmentally caused cancers.

Now, the obvious thing is to think about what we could remove from our diet, what what to strip out, take away. But I actually took a completely opposite approach and began asking: What could we be adding to our diet that's naturally antiangiogenic, that could boost the body's defense system and beat back those blood vessels that are feeding cancers? In other words, can we eat to starve cancer? Well, the answer's yes. And I'm going to show you how. And our search for this has taken us to the market, the farm and to the spice cabinet because what we've discovered is that mother nature has laced a large number of foods and beverages and herbs with naturally occurring inhibitors of angiogenesis.

So here's a test system we developed. At the center is a ring from which hundreds of blood vessels are growing out in a star burst fashion. And we can used this system to test dietary factors at concentrations that are obtainable by eating. So let me show you what happens when we put in an extract from red grapes. The active ingredient's resveratrol. It's also found in red wine. This inhibits abnormal angiogenesis by 60 percent. Here's what happens when we add an extract from strawberries. It potently inhibits angiogenesis. And extract from soy beans. And here is a growing list of our antiangiogenic foods and beverages that we're interested in studying. And for each food type, we believe there is different potencies within different strains and varietals. And we want to measure this because, well, while you're eating a strawberry or drinking tea, why not select the one that's most potent for preventing cancer.

So here are four different teas that we've tested. They're all common ones, Chinese jasmine, Japanese sencha, Earl Grey and a special blend that we prepared. And you can see clearly that the teas vary in their potency from less potent to more potent. But what's very cool is when we actually combined the two less potent teas together, the combination, the blend, is more potent than either one alone. This means there's food synergy.

Here's some more data from our testing. Now, in the lab, we simulate tumor angiogenesis represented here in a black bar. And using this system, we can test the potency of cancer drugs. So the shorter the bar, less angiogenesis, that's good. And here are some common drugs that have been associated with reducing the risk of cancer in people. Statins, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and a few others, they inhibit angiogenesis too. And here are the dietary factors going head to head against these drugs. You can see, they clearly hold their own and, in some cases, they're more potent than the actual drugs. Soy, parsley, garlic, grapes, berries, I could go home and cook a tasty meal using these ingredients. So imagine if we could create the world's first rating system in which we could score foods according to their antiangiogenic cancer-preventative properties. And that's what we're doing right now.

Now, I've shown you a bunch of lab data, and so the real question is: What is the evidence in people that eating certain foods can reduce angiogenesis in cancer? Well, the best example I know is a study of 79,000 men, followed over 20 years, in which it was found that men whom consumed cooked tomatoes two to three times a week had up to a 50 percent reduction in their risk of developing prostate cancer. Now, we know that tomatoes are a good source of lycopene, and lycopene is antiangiogenic. But what's even more interesting from this study is that those men who did develop prostate cancer, those who ate more servings of tomato sauce actually had fewer blood vessels feeding their cancer. So this human study is a prime example of how antiangiogenic substances present in food and consumed at practical levels can impact on cancer. And we're now studying the role of a healthy diet with Dean Ornish and UCSF and Tufts University on the role of this healthy diet on markers of angiogenesis that we can find in the bloodstream.

Now, obviously, what I've shared with you has some far-ranging implications even beyond cancer research. Because if we're right, it could impact on consumer education, food services, public health and even the insurance industry. And, in fact, some insurance companies are already beginning to think along these lines. Check out this ad from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota. And for many people around the world, dietary cancer prevention may be the only practical solution because not everybody can afford expensive end-stage cancer treatments, but everybody could benefit from a healthy diet based on local, sustainable, antiangiogenic crops.

Now, finally, I've talked to you about food, and I've talked to you about cancer, so there's just one more disease that I have to tell you about and that's obesity. Because it turns out that adipose tissue, fat, is highly angiogenesis dependent. And, like a tumor, fat grows when blood vessels grow. So the question is: Can we shrink fat be cutting off its blood supply? So the top curve shows the body weight of a genetically obese mouse that eats nonstop, until it turns fat like this furry tennis ball. And the bottom curve is the weight of a normal mouse.

If you take the obese mouse and give it an angiogenesis inhibitor, it loses weight. Stop the treatment, gains the weight back. Restart the treatment, loses the weight again. Stop the treatment, it gains the weight back. And, in fact, you can cycle the weight up and down simply by inhibiting angiogenesis. So this approach that we're taking for cancer prevention may also have an application for obesity. The really, truly interesting thing about this is that we can't take these obese mice and make them lose more weight than what the normal mouse's weight is supposed to be. In other words, we can't create supermodel mice. (Laughter) And this speaks to the roll of angiogenesis in regulating healthy set points.

Albert Szent-Gyorgi once said that, "Discovery consists of seeing what everyone has seen, and thinking what no one has thought." I hope I've convinced you that, for diseases like cancer, obesity and other conditions, that there may be a great power in attacking their common denominator, angiogenesis. And that's what I think the world needs now. Thank you.

(Applause)

June Cohen: So these drugs aren't exactly -- they're not exactly in mainstream cancer treatments right now. For anyone out here who has cancer, what would you recommend? Do you recommend pursuing these treatments now, for most cancer patients?

William Li: So there are antiangiogenic treatments that are FDA approved. And if you're a cancer patient or working for one or advocating for one, you should ask about them. And there are many clinical trials. The Andrew [unclear] Foundation is following almost 300 companies, and there's about 100 more drugs in that pipeline. So consider the approved ones, look for clinical trials, but then between what the doctor can do for you, we need to start asking what can we do for ourselves. And this is one of the themes that I'm talking about is we can empower ourselves to do the things that doctors can't do for us, which is to use knowledge and take action. And if mother nature has given us some clues, we think that there might be a new future in the value of what we eat. And what we eat is really our chemotherapy three times a day.

JC: Right. And along those lines, for people who might have risk factors for cancer, would you recommend pursuing any treatments sort of prophylactically or simple pursuing the right diet with lots of tomato sauce?

WL: Well, you know, there's an abundant epidemiological evidence. And I think in the information age, it doesn't take long to go to a credible source like Pubmed, the National Library of Medicine, to look for epidemiological studies for cancer risk reduction based on diet and based on common medications. And that's certainly something that anybody can look into.

JC: Okay. Well, thank you so much.

(Applause)

Viktor Frankl: Why to believe in others

Why you should listen to him:

Viktor E. Frankl was Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Vienna Medical School. He spent three years during World War II in concentration camps, including Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and Dachau, where he formulated many of his key ideas. Logotherapy, his psychotherapeutic school, is founded on the belief that striving to find meaning in life is the most powerful motivation for human beings.

Frankl wrote 39 books, which were published in 38 languages. His best-known, Man's Search for Meaning, gives a firsthand account of his experiences during the Holocaust, and describes the psychotherapeutic method he pioneered. The Library of Congress called it one of "the ten most influential books in America." Frankl lectured on five continents.
"Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human. "


Viktor Frankl

Dan Meyer: Math class needs a makeover

About this talk

Today's math curriculum is teaching students to expect -- and excel at -- paint-by-numbers classwork, robbing kids of a skill more important than solving problems: formulating them. At TEDxNYED, Dan Meyer shows classroom-tested math exercises that prompt students to stop and think.

Transcript

Can I ask you to please recall a time when you really loved something, a movie, an album, a song or a book, and you recommended it wholeheartedly to someone you also really liked, and you anticipated that reaction, you waited for it, and it came back, and the person hated it. So, by way of introduction, that is the exact same state in which I spent every working day of the last six years. I teach high school math. I sell a product to a market that doesn't want it, but is forced by law to buy it. I mean, that's kind of -- it's just a losing proposition.

So there's a useful stereotype about students that I see, a useful stereotype about you all. I could give you guys an algebra-two final exam, and I would expect no higher than a 25 percent pass rate. And both of these facts say less about you or my students than they do about what we call math education in the U.S. today.

To start with, I'd like to break math down into two categories. One is computation. This is the stuff you've forgotten. For example, factoring quadratics with leading coefficients greater than one. This stuff is also really easy to relearn, provided you have a really strong grounding in reasoning, math reasoning. We'll call it the application of math processes to the world around us. This is hard to teach. This is what we would love students to retain, even if they don't go into mathematical fields. This is also something that, the way we teach it in the U.S. all but ensures they won't retain it. So, I'm going to talk about why that is, why that's such a calamity for society, what we can do about it, and, to close with, why this is an amazing time to be a math teacher.

So first, five symptons that you're doing math reasoning wrong in your classroom. One is a lack of initiative; your students don't self-start. You finish your lecture block and immediately you have five hands going up asking you to re-explain the entire thing at their desks. Students lack perserverance. They lack retention; you find yourself re-explaining concepts three months later, wholesale. There's an aversion to word problems, which describes 99 percent of my students. And then the other one percent are eagerly looking for the formula to apply in that situation. This is really destructive.

David Milch, creator of "Deadwood" and other amazing TV shows, has a really good description for this. He swore off creating contemporary drama, shows set in the present day, because he saw that when people fill mind with four hours a day of, for example, "Two and a Half Men," no disrespect, it shapes the neural pathways, he said, in such a way that they expect simple problems. He called it, "an impatience with irresolution." You're impatient with things that don't resolve quickly. You expect sitcom-sized problems that wrap up in 22 minutes, three commercial breaks and a laugh track. And I'll put it to all of you, what you already know, that no problem worth solving is that simple. I am very concerned about this, because I'm going to retire in a world that my students will run. I'm doing bad things to my own future and well-being when I teach this way. I'm here to tell you that the way our textbooks, particularly, mass-adopted textbooks, teach math reasoning and patient problem solving, it's functionally equivalent to turning on "Two and a Half Men" and calling it a day.

(Laughter)

In all seriousness, here's an example a physics textbook. It applies equally to math. Notice first of all here that you have exactly three pieces of information there, each of which will figure into a formula somewhere, eventually, which the student will then compute. I believe in real life. And ask yourself, what problem have you solved, ever, that was worth solving, where you knew all of the given information in advance, or you didn't have a surplus of information, and you had to filter it out, or you didn't have insufficient information, and you had to go find some. I'm sure we all agree that no problem worth solving is like that. And the textbook, I think, knows how it's hamstringing students. Because, watch this, this is the practice problem set. When it comes time to do the actually problem set, we have problems like this right here where we're just swapping out numbers and tweaking the context a little bit. And if the student still doesn't recognize the stamp this was molded from, it helpfully explains to you what sample problem you can return to to find the formula. You could literally, I mean this, pass this particular unit without knowing any physics, just knowing how to decode a textbook. That's a shame.

So I can diagnose the problem a little more specifically in math. Here's a really cool problem. I like this. It's about defining steepness and slope using a ski lift. But what you have here is actually four separate layers. And I'm curious which of you can see the four separate layers, and, particularly, how when their compressed together and presented to the student all at once, how that creates this impatient problem solving. I'll define them here. You have the visual. You also have the mathematical structure, talking about grids, measurements, labels, points, axes, that sort of thing. You have substeps, which all lead to what we really want to talk about, which section is the steepest.

So I hope you can see. I really hope you can see how, what we're doing here is taking a compelling question, a compelling answer, but we're paving a smooth, straight path from one to the other, and congratulating our students for how well they can step over the small cracks in the way. That's all we're doing here. So I want put to you, if we can separate these in a different way and build them up with students, we can have everything we're looking for in terms of patient problem solving.

So right here, I start with a visual, and I immediately ask the question: Which section is the steepest? And this starts conversation because the visual is created in such a way where you can defend two answers. So you get people arguing against each other, friend versus friend, in pairs, journaling, whatever. And then eventually we realize it's getting annoying to talk about the skier in the lower left-hand side of the screen or the skier just above the mid line. And we realize how great would it be if we just had some A, B, C, and D labels to talk about them more easily. And then when as we start to define what does steepness mean, we realize, it'd be nice to have some measurements to really narrow it down, specifically what that means. And then and only then, we throw down that mathematical structure. The math serves the conversation. The conversation doesn't serve the math. And at that point, I'll put it to you that nine out of 10 classes are good to go on the whole slope, steepness thing. But if you need to, your students can then develop those substeps together.

Do you guys see how this, right here, compared to that -- which one creates that patient problem solving, that math reasoning? It's been obvious in my practice, to me. And I'll yield the floor here for a second to Einstein, who, I believe, has paid his dues. He talked about the formulation of a problem being so incredibly important, and yet in my practice, in the U.S. here, we just give problems to students; we don't involve them in the formulation of the problem.

So 90 percent of what I do with my five hours of prep time per week is to take fairly compelling elements of problems like this from my textbook and rebuild them in a way that supports math reasoning and patient problem solving. And here's how it works. I like this question. It's about a water tank. The question is: How long will it take you to fill it up? Okay? First things first, we eliminate all the substeps. Students have to develop those. They have to formulate those. And then notice that all the information written on there is stuff you'll need. None of it's a distractor, so we lose that. Students need to decide, all right, well, does the height matter? Does the size of it matter? Does the color of the valve matter? What matters here? Such an underrepresented question in math curriculum. So now we have a water tank. How long will it take you to fill it up, and that's it.

And because this is the 21st century, and we would love to talk about the real world on its own terms, not in terms of line art or clip art that you so often see in textbooks, we go out, and we take a picture of it. So now we have the real deal. How long will it take it to fill it up? And, even better, is we take a video, a video of someone filling it up. And if's filling up slowly, agonizingly slowly. It's tedious. Students are looking at their watches, rolling their eyes, and they're all wondering at some point or another, "Man, how long is it going to take to fill up?" (Laughter) That's how you know you've baited the hook, right.

And that question, off this right here, is really fun for me, because, like the intro, I teach kids, because of my inexperience, I teach the kids that are the most remedial, all right. And I've got kids who will not join a conversation about math because someone else has the formula, someone else knows how to work the formula better than me. So I won't talk about it. But here, every is on a level playing field of intuition. Everyone's filled something up with water before, so I get kids answering the question, how long will it take. I've got kids who are mathematically and conversationally intimidated joining the conversation. We put names on the board, attach them to guesses, and kids have bought in here. And then we follow the process I've described. And the best part here, or one of the better parts is that we don't get our answer from the answer key in the back of the teacher's edition. We, instead, just watch the end of the movie. (Laughter) And that's terrifying, all right. Because the theoretical models that always work out in the answer key in the back of a teacher's edition, that's great, but it's scary to talk about sources of error when the theoretical does not match up with the practical. But those conversations have been so valuable, among the most valuable.

So I'm here to report some really fun games with students who come pre-installed with these viruses day one of the class. These are the kids who now, one semester in, I can put something on the board, totally new, totally foreign, and they'll have a conversation about it for three or four minutes more than they would have at the start of the year, which is just so fun. We're no longer averse to word problems, because we've redefined what a word problem is. We're no longer intimidated by math, because we're slowly redefining what math is. This has been a lot of fun.

I encourage math teachers I talk to to use multimedia, because it brings the real world into your classroom in high resolution and full color, to encourage student intuition for that level playing field, to ask the shortest question you possibly can and let those more specific questions come out in conversation, to let students build the problem, because Einstein said so, and to finally, in total, just be less helpful, because the textbook is helping you in all the wrong ways. It's buying you out of your obligation for patient problem solving and math reasoning, to be less helpful.

And why this is an amazing time to be a math teacher right now is because we have the tools to create this high-quality curriculum in our front pocket. It's ubiquitous and fairly cheap. And the tools to distribute it freely, under open licenses has also never been cheaper or more ubiquitous. I put a video series on my blog not so long ago, and it got 6,000 views in two weeks. I get emails still from teachers in countries I've never visited saying, "Wow, yeah. We had a good conversation about that. Oh, and by the way, here's how I made your stuff better," which, wow. I put this problem on my blog recently. In a grocery store, which line do you get into, the one that has one cart and 19 items or the one with four carts and three, five, two and one items. And the linear modeling involved in that was some good stuff for my classroom, but it eventually got me on "Good Morning America" a few weeks later, which is just bizarre, right.

And from all of this, I can only conclude that people, not just students, are really hungry for this. Math makes sense of the world. Math is the vocabulary for your own intuition. So I just encourage you, whatever your stake is in education, whether you're a student, parent, teacher, policy maker, whatever, insist on better math curriculum. We need more patient problem solvers. Thank you.

Richard Feynman talks about light

Inconceivable nature of nature.


Feynman 'Fun to Imagine' 1: Jiggling Atoms

Part 01: String theory

String theory how it came into play in the realm of physics and meaning.

String Theory, M-theory, Parallel Worlds

Dr. Michio Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at City College of New York, discusses string theory, m-theory, and parrallel worlds with Dr. Brian Greene, professor at Columbia University, and Dr. Lisa Randall, professor at Harvard University.

Air date: December 26th, 2006, Explorations

Michio Kaku on String Theory 1

Theoretical Physicist, Author, Professor Michio Kaku talks about String Theory

Dr. Michio Kaku: SCI FI or SCI FACT

Is telepathy possible? How about teleportation or starships? In this lecture, Dr. Michio Kaku (a frequent host on science shows for the Discovery Channel, PBS, and author of the best selling book "Physics of the Impossible") talks about many popular technologies in science fiction from a physics perspective, and what it would take to make many of these technologies a reality.

SCI FI or SCI FACT is part of a major lecture series at ASU on science presented by Beyond, the Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science. A center at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Beyond seeks to create new and exciting ideas that push the boundaries of research and to answer foundational questions in science, and explore their philosophical ramifications what might be called the big questions

To learn more about other great programs, institutes, and events at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at ASU, go to http://clas.asu.edu

For more about the Beyond Center, go to http://beyond.asu.edu







INVISIBILITY, TELEPORTATION, and DEATH STARS:
In part 2 of his lecture, Dr. Michio Kaku (a frequent host on science shows for the Discovery Channel, PBS, and author of the best selling book "Physics of the Impossible") talks about new scientific research that suggest technologies such as invisibility, teleportation, and even Death Stars are possibilities using future technologies.

SCI FI or SCI FACT is part of a major lecture series at ASU on science presented by Beyond, the Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science. A center at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Beyond seeks to create new and exciting ideas that push the boundaries of research and to answer foundational questions in science, and explore their philosophical ramifications what might be called the big questions

To learn more about other great programs, institutes, and events at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at ASU, go to http://clas.asu.edu

For more about the Beyond Center, go to http://beyond.asu.edu






TELEPATHY and STARSHIPS:
In part 3 of his lecture, Dr. Michio Kaku (a frequent host on science shows for the Discovery Channel, PBS, and author of the best selling book "Physics of the Impossible") talks about new scientific research that suggest concepts such as telepathy and starships are possibilities using future technologies.

SCI FI or SCI FACT is part of a major lecture series at ASU on science presented by Beyond, the Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science. A center at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Beyond seeks to create new and exciting ideas that push the boundaries of research and to answer foundational questions in science, and explore their philosophical ramifications what might be called the big questions

To learn more about other great programs, institutes, and events at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at ASU, go to http://clas.asu.edu

For more about the Beyond Center, go to http://beyond.asu.edu




ROBOTS and WORMHOLES:
In part 4 of his lecture, Dr. Michio Kaku (a frequent host on science shows for the Discovery Channel, PBS, and author of the best selling book "Physics of the Impossible") concludes his lecture with a talk about new scientific research that talks about the state of the art of robotics and dimensional travel.

SCI FI or SCI FACT is part of a major lecture series at ASU on science presented by Beyond, the Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science. A center at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Beyond seeks to create new and exciting ideas that push the boundaries of research and to answer foundational questions in science, and explore their philosophical ramifications what might be called the big questions

To learn more about other great programs, institutes, and events at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at ASU, go to http://clas.asu.edu

For more about the Beyond Center, go to http://beyond.asu.edu

ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES(2 OF 15)

FULL LENGTH FILM FROM 1991.