Offers up more amazing city views. Its routine made spectacular. Now you wont know it from my accent, but i spent a lot of time here as a kid. My aussie grandfather helped build the Sydney Harbour bridge, and my aussie mom helped build the opera house. I know, i know, the goatee. It was a phase. Cut me some slack. The point is i grew up eating things like this and worshiping these folks. My hope is that the aussie cred will buy me some forgiveness for what comes next. Ashlee this country, which punches far above its weight in so many areas, has underachieved terribly when it comes to technology. For years, talented aussie coders have escaped to Silicon Valley to make their living, and recent Australian Government policies have underfunded science and tech. As my pap would say, aussie tech is crook. Ashlee there are signs though that australia has turned on and started to retain some of its homegrown tech talent. This then is an odyssey to find the countrys rising stars. My journey goes from the beaches of sydney to the artsy cosmopolitan streets of melbourne. Along the way, i get lost in a cave with only glow worms to guide me, go fishing with an internet playboy, and make friends with some dinosaurs, all on this episode of hello world. [dial tone] ashlee Silicon Valley may be home to some of the biggest tech giants in the world, but it is being challenged like never before. Crazy tech geniuses have popped up all over the planet, making things that will blow your mind. My name is ashlee vance. I am an author, a journalist, and i am on a quest to find the most innovative tech creations and meet the beautiful freaks behind them. Hello world. Ashlee check any survey of the best places to live, and you will find sydney near the top. Ashlee it is a sprawling, gorgeous city of about 4 million goodspirited people who love to be outdoors, to party, and to enjoy life, but there is a strong case to be made that sydneysiders may be too content, at least when it comes to the the citys tech scene. While Big Companies like google and microsoft have offices here, sydney can only point to a couple of smash startups that have made it big overseas. That famous aussie pluck has gone missing. There is, however, a tech in revolution building. And it is being led by young, ambitious scientists. They have left their fancy University Labs and migrated to sydneys tech underground, and no one proves this point more than the free radical i will meet first. Ashlee ok, this spot does not exactly ooze tech. It is an artists warehouse in a sydney suburb, but move deeper through the creative commune, and you will find a makeshift science lab, and this guy, one of its founders, a transhumanist, polyamorous bio hacker. You all know the type. Meow welcome to bio foundry, australias first open access molecular biology lab. Ashlee sinister as it can sometimes sound, biohacking has turned into an exciting new field. It is doityourself meddling with dna on the cheap to tweak nature, and this is australias first bio hacker lab, open to anyone willing to pay a membership fee. Meow lets get into it. Ashlee and the name of this biohacking pioneer . Meow meow. Do you prefer to be mr. Meow . Meow mr. Meow meow. No, meow meow is fine. Ashlee meow hit up generous friends for a lot of this scientific gear. He hopes the lab will inspire people of all stripes to give biotech a try. It is about pulling people in with handson experiments, like extracting dna from a strawberry. Meow if you stir where the alcohol touches the strawberry, you should be able to pull out some stringy stuff. That is the dna. That is the instructions to make a strawberry. This is the first step in a bio hacker lab. Pretty much anything we will do with microbiology, we will need to get that dna out. The flavor genes, the pigment genes, we can take theses genes out and put them in other things. You might be able to make an apple that tastes like a strawberry. You might want to take the pigment genes out and make a new type of paint. Ashlee so you are going to take the most Interesting Properties of some organism, extract it out, and chuck it into Something Else and give it some new superpowers. Meow thats it. Make everything glow. [laughter] ashlee a molecular biologist by training, meow has put the lab to work on real projects, ranging from antimold paint and takehome std tests to phosphorescent alcohol. Cool. Meow [beep] straight it is. [laughter] ashlee meow insisted that my next tutorial take place in nature. We set out for the newnes state forest, located in the famed Blue Mountains about five hours west of sydney. It is there that we hope to find the tiny creature at the heart of meows makeeverythingfeellikearave dreams. Meow we are about to go to the glowworm tunnels. It used to be a railway tunnel they used in mining, and now it is being decommissioned, and the glow worms have come back and reinhabited the tunnel. Ashlee i have waited this long, and now i have to ask you, how did you get the name meow meow . Meow i wanted to change my name since i was like 15. My friends and i just set down and we wrote down a huge list of names, and then we picked the one that sounded the best. [laughter] ashlee what is your full name now . Meow meow ludodisco gamma meow meow. Ashlee with the formalities out of the way, the time had come to meet one of australias lesserknown biological attractions. Meow glow worms are nocturnal, and they are generally less and sensitive to red wavelengths of light than they are white or blue light. Ashlee i guess to see them best, we have got to turn this off. Meow talks a lot about a lot of things. Sometimes he is hyping a mango that has been altered to do your laundry. And other times he is promoting hallucinogenated orgies. To each his own, but without question, meows biohacking enthusiasm has worked, with labs modeled on this spot popping up all around the country. Prepare yourself, australia, for the phosphorescent revolution has begun. Ashlee up next, i head to melbourne to meet the man who kicked off australias Online Retail boom. Kogan we do about three times more revenue per employee than amazon. Ashlee putting all things phosphorescent behind me, it was time to leave sydney and head south to the bustling city of melbourne. Melbourne lacks the surf culture of sydney but has plenty going on. In a sportmad country, melbourne is considered the athletic capital thanks to its massive venues for cricket, rugby, and tennis. It is also something of a cultural capital. The elegant city gives off a european charm with its huge greek and italian communities, a tram systems, and it takes great pride in its lane ways, which are alleys packed full of street graffiti, and worldclass restaurants, one after the other. If you are looking to eat your way through australia, this is a good place to start. The artsy, upandcomer vibe to melbourne has had an impact on its tech scene. People here have needed to think a bit different to get attention, and it has paid off. There is an argument to be made that melbourne may be australias most promising tech hub, at least in terms of raw creativity. Ashlee the undisputed king of melbournes tech scene bears this thesis out. He is ruslan kogan, the founder and ceo of kogan. Com, an Online Retailer that has changed the way australians shop. Kogan we do about three times more revenue per employee than amazon. Ashlee he is a rich, flamboyant, controversial workaholic who finds an escape now and again at the melbourne pier. Kogan all right, lets go catch some snapper. Ashlee ok. You mustve been around like eight years old when you moved here from belarus . Kogan six years old, communism is falling apart. My parents decided to leave, which i am so thankful for, and came here with 90 in their pockets. Ashlee kogan grew up in melbournes housing projects and showed an entrepreneurs spirit right from the start. As a kid, he ran a golf ball cleaning business, a car wash, and then a Tech Consulting operation. By the time he was 23, kogan had become consumed with another quest mans eternal hunt for an affordable flatscreen tv. Kogan i thought i cannot afford it from the shops, but i let me email some factories. I thought i would tell them that i want to order 100,000 tvs, and they will get back to me and then i will ask for a sample, and that sample was going to be my tv, but when they started replying with all of their quotes, i saw very quickly that there is a brilliant Market Opportunity here. Ashlee the big idea kogan hit on was to go direct to chinese manufacturers to buy tvs for a fraction of the going price. To get the first batch of tvs, kogan maxed out a few credit cards and had to borrow money from his friends. You are on this lark to get a cheap tv, and it turns into this business idea . Kogan yeah. Ashlee australians have been slow to hop online, and local retailers had largely ignored the web. Kogan dragged the entire country online and helped ignite an internet retail boom. Today, kogan sells about 250 million of products per year, and ruslan wants to expand the brand overseas and make kogan a household name. Should we check if we still have bait . Kogan lets have a look. Not a single bite. [laughter] ashlee what do you think, should we keep trying or should we drink beer . Thanks, man. People keep telling me they feel like australia was a little bit late to the tech business, but now it is turning this corner. I cant tell if i am getting spun, or if there really is a corner that is being turned. Kogan look, we went through a time in australia where our Business Leaders and politicians were talking about how bad Online Retail is because it is going to cost a lot of jobs in the retail industry. Luckily, we are at a point now where they are starting to realize that innovation is the future. There is only a certain amount of stuff you can dig out of the ground. Our brainpower and our ideas are an unlimited resource, and if you can harness that one, then you are going to be a very rich nation. Ashlee up next, i will meet with some other melbourne locals who also think different and have their own takes on what is next for tech down under. Ashlee if you are a hip city on the move, what you need is a giant ferris wheel. The melbourne star opened in 2008 and is said to be the southern hemispheres only giant observation wheel, whatever that means. As far as Big Technology and big science goes, melbourne can lay claim to some stunning achievements. Scientists here did pioneering work on in vitro fertilization, heart valve replacement, and cochlear implants, and the big science journey into our bodies continues on at a place known as the australian synchrotron. Ashlee the synchrotron cost 150 million to build and opened in 2007 in this melbourne suburb. The building basically functions like a giant xray machine slash microscope. It propels electrons at incredible speeds and then manipulates them with Magnetic Fields to produce a brilliant form of light known as synchrotron light. This light can end up being a million times brighter than the sun, and can be tweaked by the building to peer into a wide variety of objects. So far, the synchrotron has been used to examine plants and animals in fine detail and to peer through the layers of objects, like old paintings. Soon, it may be used to treat diseases, too. How are you doing . Nice to meet you. Andrew peele is a physicist and the director of the synchrotron. He agreed to give me what is known as the greg norman tour of the place. That is a sweet ride. Andrew come aboard. Ashlee thank you. Andrew some of these beam lines that we are driving past are researchers using these to do things like trying to cure cancer, different forms of disease. A lot of it is a bit like imagining a lock in a key. If you can understand the locks and keys, you can turn the diseases on and off. You can stop cancer in its track. Ashlee recent antiscience Australian Governments have threatened to slash funding for labs like this, and as a result, many top scientists have left the country. But in 2015, the synchrotron lucked out and received 500 million in funding over the next 10 years. The hope is that this facility can make money on its own by doing commercial work. Yay, science. To get a closer look at this machine, i spoke with daniel hauserman, a scientist here who is looking at how the synchrotron can diagnose and treat cancer. Daniel we use xray beams that are a billion times brighter than you would in a hospital. So in a hospital, you get a chest xray. If you do a second with our beam here, you burn. Ashlee you are done. Daniel you smoke. There is a hole in your chest. Ashlee ok. Because of its unique construction, the australian synchrotron can make large beams 50 centimeters wide, or about the width of the human body. This means the machine could be ideal for turbocharged radiotherapy of tumors. Daniel we found you can deliver doses which are 1000 times higher ashlee but more targeted. Daniel more targeted and less damage to the healthy tissue. Ashlee ok. Daniel so you could say 1000 grade could kill a human being if it was delivered in a single, short, broad area. When you make it in micro beams, it doesnt. It actually destroys tumors much better and spares healthy tissues. Ashlee it is not ready for human trials yet, but daniel thinks people may soon be able to make an appointment and have this building go to work on your innards. Daniel it will be several years before we can apply it actually to a patient. If anyone watches your show and then calls us and says, i want to bring you my granddad because they cant treat his cancer. Unfortunately we would say, sorry, we cant do it now, but maybe in three to five years. Ashlee his optimistic notes reflect just how hard australian scientists must work these days to justify their jobs and provide the government with a hint that these types of facilities may one day pay for themselves. Ashlee but you know what is more fun than antiscience bureaucrats . That would be dinosaurs. [dinosaur roars] ashlee welcome to jurassic warehouse. Sonny this is a stegosaur. Stegosaur is for the Jurassic World exhibition. This is our trex. She tends to steal the show and dominate the workshop. Ashlee i keep thinking one of these things is going to eat me. Sonny yeah. [laughter] ashlee Sonny Tilders hails from melbourne and cofounded creature technologies. Since its birth in 2006, the company has specialized in making giant robotic animals, and has ended up as one of the biggest animatronics companies around. The creature team is made up of movie special effects artists who needed work during down periods. And their first project was a live show called walking with dinosaurs that ended up as the highest grossing touring event in the world in 2010. They have been in high demand ever since, making rideable dragons, a fullsize king kong, and cuddlier creations, like these giant stuffed animals for the sochi olympics. Vladimir putin still likes to cuddle the bunny rabbit on the right. Sonny we did not know where this was going to go. We thought it would all go back to film and tv. But it grew out of this one show, and we realized that there was something in this to bring that sort of filmlevel animatronics to a live audience. Nerissa this is the indominus rex. At the moment, we are skinning the creature, and the girls are putting in the scales. Ashlee each one of these creatures takes about a year to create. Every detail of the anatomy is built from scratch, including the eyeballs, the hydraulic skeleton, and the lifelike fabric skin. Sonny so it is very similar to a real creature. It has got bones. It has got muscles. It has got skin. How they work together, that is the trick really. Ashlee to make the creature seem more lifelike, the companys Coders Program nuanced movement routines, but i am not here to watch a computer play with dinosaurs. I am here to take a dino out for a spin. So, this is a voodoo rig. So i am actually controlling the neck of this dinosaur now. Ashlee this is all homegrown. This is all homegrown. Ashlee how long did it take you to make that . We built these for our first live show 10 years ago, and this is our rusty workshop model. Want to have a go . Ok. He is designed to be intuitive and smooth, and so you can take him through his whole range and he will go where you want to take him. Ashlee you have your own little pet dinosaur. Yeah, it is a lot of fun. Ashlee there were a couple of new creations coming to life in the creature workshop that we were not allowed to show you. Secrecy remains paramount in the vicious world of animatronics. It is safe to say though that the next time a dinosaur, giant plush bear, or say, an alien greets you at an amusement park, that it came from this place on the other side of the world. [waves crashing] ashlee australia has done well for itself in recent years. Ashlee its mines have churned out Natural Resources that china has welcomed with open wallets. There is the whole ugg boot thing, and the local soap operas have kept the rest of the world wellstocked with attractive entertainment. As for tech, it remains a mixed story. Meow meow, for example, has decided to form a startup in San Francisco because it proved easier to raise money there. That said, australia still teems with welleducated and motivated engineers, coders, and scientists. There are plenty of Success Stories now for these youngsters to follow. There is also an undeniable urge for australians to make a go of it at home and prove what they are capable of. And if you fail, the worst thing that can happen is that you end up here looking for another dash of courage in a beer. Ashlee coming up next on hello world, i head to england to learn about the start of the computing revolution. Greetings to everyone watching hello world. Ashlee and to get all gussied up with the worlds most advanced hairdryer. Yousef welcome to this special leave Holiday Edition of Bloomberg Markets middle east. Ahead this hour, value added tax. We look at the implications for economies and businesses. Earnings season just wrapped up across the region. We look at the winners and losers. Companies continued to be plagued by the effects of weak oil prices. How crude could fare for the rest of the year. Biggest story still playing out
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