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- [00:01]
Capital One Sponsor
This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping using self reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks. It doesn't just help buyers find a car they love, it helps schedule a test drive, get pre approved for financing and and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.
- [00:38]
Podcast Host (Elise Hu)
This episode is sponsored by Grow Therapy. When life feels overwhelming, talking to the right person can create profound shifts in how we navigate challenges. Therapy isn't just about crisis management. It's about building emotional intelligence and resilience. But finding a therapist shouldn't add to your stress. GrowTherapy makes this process actually manageable. They connect you with thousands of licensed therapists across the US offering both virtual and in person sessions. You can search by insurance specialty and treatment approach to find someone who genuinely fits your needs. If it's not the right match, switching is straightforward. No subscriptions or long term commitments. Whether you're dealing with work anxiety, relationship dynamics or life transitions, quality mental health care should be accessible on your schedule. Schedule Evenings, weekends, whatever works for you. Whatever challenges you're facing, Grow Therapy is here to help. Sessions average about $21 with insurance and some pay as little as zero depending on their plan. Visit growththerapy.comted today to get started. That's growtherapy.comted growtherapy.com Ted availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan. This episode is sponsored by Stripe. Has your company ever wanted to test a new pricing model but couldn't? You're not alone. With AI and technology changing nearly every industry, the need for speed in updating new monetization models is essential. Stripe Billing helps you bill and manage your customers however you want. From simple recurring billing to usage based billing and sales negotiated contract Millions of businesses worldwide rely on Stripe to grow their businesses their way. From the latest AI leaders scaling every second to centenarian household names launching exciting new revenue streams, Stripe Billing is built to handle them all because your business needs should dictate your billing system, not the other way around. Learn how Stripe Billing can power any business or monetization model you can think of. @swepe.com billing you're listening to TED Talks Daily where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Rheology is the branch of physics that studies the deformation and flow of materials, both solids and liquids. And while this may be one of the lesser known scientific fields of study, according to chemical engineer Sean Farrington, it has the potential to completely transform how we understand and diagnose cardiovascular disease. In his talk, Shawn sheds light on why this field is so powerful and why it's time for engineers and medical professionals to work together to integrate this emerging science into routine care.
- [03:36]
Sean Farrington
When I was a kid, my uncle would tell me these great stories about his aerospace engineering career. He used to tell me all about the machinery and the designs that he built throughout his life, and always said he picked the perfect career for himself because of all the cool stuff he was able to build. Once he told me about working in the nose cone of an Apollo rocket, fixing some sensitive piece of equipment just a few days before its launch. I was enamored by this. Listening to his stories had me daydreaming about all the innovative technology that I could build. And it's what inspired me to become an engineer, too. Since going down this path, I've learned there's more to engineering than just the amazing stuff we build. There's also a vital responsibility in the work, sometimes with the ability to save human life. Put simply, when engineers mess up, people die. And this is what my PhD advisor warned me about when I started working with him four years ago. When I decided to follow the path of chemical engineering, I could have never imagined I'd be doing my PhD in a field of study called rheology. But rheology was interesting to me enough, so I spend a few years of my life understanding it. Rheology is the study of flow and deformation of materials. It's mainly a method to measure the viscosity or thickness of a material so that it works for its intended function. Rheology is best used for materials that are neither liquid nor solid, but some combination of both. The concepts of reality are easiest to understand when we compare across different products, because it is essential to almost every consumer product on the market, whether that's a lotion that evenly coats your hands, or a motor oil that lubricates at all operating temperatures, or cement that won't harden before making it to the job site. And there's so many other examples across many industries. So why don't I take you over to the rheology lab where I can demonstrate this for you? First off, everybody has their favorite peanut butter, unless you're allergic. And maybe you prefer the one that will stick to the bread, or you prefer the one that can't support itself and just slides right off. But how about shampoo? So the purpose of shampoo is to squeeze from the bottle and sit on your hand so that you can sufficiently measure out a drop that cleans your hair. But how about when that shampoo gets a little low? Right? And now you fill it up with water so that you can save that last little drop. And now it no longer stays in the palm of your hand, completely ruining one of its core functions. Now, for my favorite example, it'll be the last one. That's ketchup, because ketchup, there's such a huge difference in the texture between those popular brands. For this one, we'll do a little bit of an experiment. We have one ketchup in each beaker, and when I flip them, we're going to watch closely to see which one drains faster. Okay. We can see there's clearly one ketchup that's much thicker than the other, and that happens to be the one that's my preference. So all of these materials are a part of a class of materials called non Newtonian fluids. And rheology is used to measure the different flow properties of each of these materials so that they can be made reproducibly and with the most desired texture for their application. Maybe by now you see the value of ralogy for product manufacturing, but why should your blood flow like ketchup? Well, one application of ralogy that I'm most interested in is in medical diagnostics. You see, our blood, it doesn't flow like water how you might imagine. Rather, it flows a bit close to ketchup. And that's because blood is a non Newtonian fluid, just like all the materials in my demonstration. Specifically, it's a shear thinning fluid, and it does this because it's necessary for healthy blood flow. If your blood's viscosity is too high, there's a higher chance of developing something like a clot or potentially an aneurysm. Measuring this information would allow physicians another method to detect for cardiovascular disease. Yet it's not being used because rheology is this niche technical engineering field largely unknown to the public. But I bet everyone here can think of at least one person in their lives who has or had a heart condition. Some studies show that up to 46% of people over the age of 40 have some form of coronary atherosclerosis, which is a chronic condition where plaque builds up in your arteries and narrows them, reducing the flow. One quarter of deaths in the United States are caused by heart disease. And one major challenge within these diseases is to detect them early so that medication and treatment have enough time to take effect. Blood pressure is a metric commonly used by physicians to inform their decisions for medications and treatment of cardiovascular disease. And blood pressure pressure monitoring has been going on for over 300 years. Now. Imagine the past 300 years. If physicians didn't know about blood pressure monitoring, there would be countless unnecessary suffering. This is the stage that blood railgy is at. Though blood's viscosity has been studied for over 100 years and blood raologists have shown significant evidence correlating it to cardiovascular disease, it's still not widely used as a diagnostic tool. Spreading awareness about ralogy is necessary so that it becomes known as commonly as blood pressure monitoring. Blood radiology is one of those areas where physicians can work together with the engineers so that we can proactively create solutions that put this knowledge into practice. Some of my work as a PhD student is to help simplify the rail logical measurement. While I'm studying the rheology of blood and its use for cardiovascular disease diagnosis, I'm also building a small microfluidic chip. My goal in this work is to measure the same ralogical information in a small, cheap, portable device that we're currently able to do in a bulky, stationary, half a million dollar machine. This could simplify the radiological measurement, making it more accessible for many doctors. And some physicians have begun to use blood radiology to augment their patient care and they've seen positive results so far. But just like the blood pressure monitor, we'll all be better off when the public has a greater awareness of this technology so that we can help improve cardiovascular disease. That's why I'm asking you to just have a conversation with someone in your life about this science. And if you're in the medical community, I want you to take a closer look at blood railg dive into this science and see how you might be able to use it in your field. There's so much valuable information in blood radiology that tells us about our health. If we can just get over its obscurity, we might be able to help solve some of our most pressing modern medical issues. If we just spread a little awareness, we could save lives.
- [13:21]
Podcast Host (Elise Hu)
That was Sean Farrington at TEDx Wilmington in Delaware, USA in 2025. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at ted.com curationguidelines and that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact checked by the TED research team and produced and edited by our team Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Greene, Lucy Little and Tansika Songmarnivong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Faizy Bogan. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Ballarezo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.
- [14:09]
Capital One Sponsor
This episode is brought to you by Capital One Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping using self reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks. It doesn't just help buyers find a car they love, it helps schedule a test drive, get pre approved for financing and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.
- [14:43]
Medikaite Sponsor
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- [15:39]
Podcast Host (Elise Hu)
Ladder, you've had your moment. You're linear and one dimensional. Ambition doesn't just go up anymore, it zigs and zags and squiggles. We're CEOs, executives, founders. We're advising companies, launching side hustles, taking breaks, defining our next act ambition on our terms. The possibilities are endless. Chief Lead On Join us@chief.com.