Look Up at the Stars, Not Down at Your Feet

Students from across Cumbria listened to Professor Danielle George from Manchester University talk about her experiences in science and engineering, specifically radio frequency engineering. She started her talk with, “The fundamental question for scientists are why and how; it is the basis of all questions and investigations.”

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Her job is to engineer and create tools for scientific purpose, linking the engineering/technology with science. This actually entails creating technology that will be launched into space or used, such as helping create ideas of satellites or even robots!

Additionally, she discussed the prospect of travelling to Proxima B, which is a planet that has never yet been explored by humans. The planet, which is thousands of miles away, is unreachable by the current ships that NASA can build, so they have engineered satellites that can process data of the planet.

Back to the beginning of the talk, she told the students the shocking fact that we have generated more data in the past 14 years than we had from the Big Bang to 2003. Furthermore, she mentioned that we could recreate sounds from when the earth was first created, the literal sound of the Big Bang. They did this purely from the data of space 13.8 billion years ago.

She told us about the robot, Valkyrie, that can learn as it goes along, meaning that the robot can be sent to Mars by NASA to learn more about the planet. They can collect this data from Mars to add to the data collected from space.

Then, to the surprise of the audience, Danielle George brought out a miniature version of Valkyrie. The robot was called ‘Now’ and could learn from what was spoken to it and from what it could see. She could ask it for its name and it would answer, but when she asked a student to come down to ask the robot to sit down, it ignored her and would not listen to instructions.

After one of the technicians told the robot to lay down on its belly, it listened to the instructions and learned how to lie down. One of the slides on the PowerPoint asked the question, “Can a robot replace Ed Sheeran?”. Many would argue no, some would argue maybe, but of course scientists would argue yes! Danielle then made the robots she had set up previously conduct the tune of Shape of You, and eventually- after many minutes of no reply- Now started to dance. Many of the audience members were thrilled to see a small cute robot dance to a very popular tune of 2017.

She ended her informative speech with the words, “Remember to look up at the stars, not down at your feet”.