 Good evening, everyone. So everyone having a good time? Lots of smiles. I'd like you to stop having a good time I'd like you to put on your serious face, and I can look at this lady She's sick. She's rocked up to ED. The doctors don't know what's wrong with her. They're gonna take a blood test They're gonna send it up to the pathology lab a couple of hours Maybe they'll have the results a couple of hours is a really long time if someone's really ill Now at the same time if we wanted to just find her blood sugar levels We could rock up with little portable device And a matter of minutes have the result now What about if we had a similar tool at triage when she came in we could find out in a matter of minutes If she was about to say have a heart attack or we could have a desktop one that could tell us if a cancer patient was in remission Now imagine if those tools are cheap They're wide ranging everywhere from GP clinics to raw flying doctor service Now if we could do that we could actually change how We treat people in hospitals and how we treat people in remote countries, sorry remote areas and even developing countries Now if we're gonna do this we need an automated tool to detect disease and generally what we do is we want to find a Certain protein maybe that's at elevated levels when you have a certain disease Problem is if that proteins in blood or in urinary and saliva. There's lots of other stuff in there So scientists have come up with a way which appeals to me because I'm a physicist to isolate it Isolate this protein that stick a magnet on it Now if we can find the magnet we can find the protein we can have a good idea of what's wrong with this person Of course proteins are small so we need small magnets, but chemists can make small magnets These are a hundred nanometers. We can go 20 25 times smaller if need be but small magnets need small sensors Now the current sensors are kind of like electronic compass needles Imagine the needle and it moves slightly and then we detect that electronically when a particle comes along What we are doing at the school of physics and this is research which is now funded by the Australian Research Council and the US Air Force is To look at vibrating compass needles, and these are nanoscale compass needles If we can do this and actually make these work then it's going to overcome limitations of current detector technologies We can make smaller sensors. We can make faster sensors And these are going to be faster because the needles are going at around about a billion times a second To test this out. We're making devices. We're measuring and measuring them in the lab And we're running simulations on supercomputers. So a lot of the work is really physicsy We're trying to understand the devices test them and optimize them And if they're as good as sensitive and as fast as we think they will be I've got a good chance and not only Contributing to point of care diagnostics, but also making cheaper tools for medical research So think about the vibrating nano compass and hopefully helping out with diagnostics, and I'll thank you for your valuable time