[00:00] In the 1960s, NASA’s engineers were&nbsp; building the Apollo spacecraft. But&nbsp;&nbsp; To solve it, they brought in some&nbsp; unexpected help: expert weavers.
[00:12] Engineers and weavers sound like an&nbsp; odd collab – and we'll get back to&nbsp;&nbsp; it in more detail soon! - but it turns&nbsp; out that lots of perplexing problems can&nbsp;&nbsp; Like, linguists teamed up with geneticists&nbsp; to study the relationship between language&nbsp;&nbsp;
[00:31] and genes in various groups of people to help&nbsp; figure out where in Africa homo sapiens arose,&nbsp;&nbsp; Experts in fluid dynamics teamed up with&nbsp; world class surfers to figure out that&nbsp;&nbsp;
[00:43] you need wind blowing in from offshore&nbsp; to produce the very best barrel waves. Experts in epidemiology teamed up with experts&nbsp; in sewage management to test lots and lots of&nbsp;&nbsp; poop for viruses all at once in order to create&nbsp; an early warning system for the spread of COVID.
[00:57] expert in partying to study his DNA&nbsp; in order to learn that some people&nbsp;&nbsp; have genetic mutations that allow them to&nbsp; detoxify alcohol much faster than others.
[01:09] And the value of teamwork isn't just anecdotal:&nbsp; one study of nearly 18 million scientific papers&nbsp;&nbsp; found that when researchers from unusual&nbsp; combinations of fields work together,&nbsp;&nbsp; their research tends to be more impactful,&nbsp; at least in terms of how often it's cited.
[01:24] And big scientific breakthroughs, like&nbsp; the ones that are awarded Nobel Prizes,&nbsp;&nbsp; are particularly likely to bring together&nbsp; different fields and research methods. But getting experts from very different fields to&nbsp; work together to solve problems isn’t always easy;&nbsp;&nbsp;
[01:38] we don't necessarily know what expertise&nbsp; might be needed for a given problem. often have very different cultures and&nbsp; methodologies – and even vocabularies! And then there's the issue of not always giving&nbsp; all contributors the respect and credit they&nbsp;&nbsp;
[01:54] deserve: for example, the weaving experts&nbsp; helped get us to the moon by enabling NASA&nbsp;&nbsp; to shrink the size of the Apollo Guidance computer&nbsp; so that it could actually be launched into space. They did this by meticulously weaving&nbsp; the hardwired binary computer memory&nbsp;&nbsp;
[02:08] by hand by passing a needle attached to&nbsp; a wire back and forth either through or&nbsp;&nbsp; around the tiny rings in the core memory&nbsp; module; when they went through the ring,&nbsp;&nbsp; And despite their ingenious deployment&nbsp; of skill and their critical role in the&nbsp;&nbsp;
[02:25] success of the moon landings,&nbsp; they were almost completely&nbsp;&nbsp; ignored by NASA and the press as Americans&nbsp; celebrated the successful mission. It wasn’t until very recently that at least&nbsp; some of the weavers were appropriately honored.
[02:39] So it’s not a given that we can&nbsp; always get the right experts to&nbsp;&nbsp; But when we do manage to bring strong&nbsp; threads of knowledge together, we can&nbsp;&nbsp; weave solutions to some of the biggest&nbsp; problems on Earth. Or even the moon.
[02:56] for Ecosystem Studies and the Kramer&nbsp; lab at the University of South Florida. For them, partnerships like I just described are&nbsp; an absolute must in order to get anything done.
[03:09] focuses on predicting when and where&nbsp; new diseases are likely to appear. But doing that requires working with not only&nbsp; virologists who have expertise in how viruses&nbsp;&nbsp;
[03:22] animals behave, computer scientists who&nbsp; can design AI models to better understand&nbsp;&nbsp; like Dr. Kramer who can take all the data&nbsp; and build predictive simulations with it.
[03:37] It's called transdisciplinary research, and&nbsp; it is a huge part of how important modern,&nbsp;&nbsp; cutting-edge science like their work&nbsp; gets done. Thanks Dr. Han and Dr. Kramer!