Asumi Shuda

PVNet 3-D Printers Set On Overdrive To Make Protective Face Shields
• Local nonprofit makes a difference for First Reponders with 3-D printed face shields
Since the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in America back in March, healthcare workers have been on the frontlines to save lives from this disease in every waking hour. Yet, due to the overwhelming numbers of patients who have tested positive, the resources and equipment available to protect these workers from contracting the virus themselves has lessened.
Seeing this ever-demanding issue, PVNet founder and owner Ted Vegvari has stepped up to create reusable, 3-D printed face shields.
“All masks have been donated at no cost to healthcare workers, firemen, police officers, doctors, dentists, all of the above,” Vegvari said. “Sometimes, nurses and other healthcare workers would come into PVNet to pick up almost 100 of our face shields, and they are in tears.”
Vegvari began this project back in February, when he and his staff had to make a decision as the extent of COVID-19 became obvious: to either shut down their business to avoid losing more money or to attempt to persevere through the challenges that would come due to the virus. He ultimately chose the latter and, furthermore, decided to invest PVNet money into creating face shields for at-risk essential workers.
“At that moment, we made the decision to support essential workers of all types,” Vegvari said. “For instance, you would not think of police officers as healthcare workers, but, in reality, they are the first to arrive at the scene of people in medical distress, making them at a very high risk of contracting the virus.”
Vegvari’s mission with this project came with understanding and empathizing with the reality of the countless essential workers in the country. Despite the pandemic, these essential workers must continue to provide their services to the general public. Vegvari’s worry for these individuals is how exposed they are to the virus in their everyday life, especially when faced with people who are not following safety measures.
“If you are an essential worker, you have to go and help all of the individuals in need of your services, including those who are ignoring safety guidelines,” Vegvari said. “And, of course, all of these essential workers then could possibly bring the virus back home.”
These circumstances have given Vegvari and his team of volunteers a purpose to support these workers through face shields. One particular volunteer who, according to Vegvari, has been essential to the process is Jennifer Kao, who spearheads the outreach and scheduling effort of the project. Kao spends eight to 10 hours a day working on getting the word out for the project, such as sending emails and making phone calls. She also works with Vegvari on operating the GoFundMe, which covers approximately 20 percent of the project’s fees, with the other 80 percent out of pocket.
“Occasionally, Jennifer would have an assistant to help her out for about four to five weeks, but there is still a burden on her to manage all of that for eight to 10 hours per day,” Vegvari said. “Without her, simply put, people would not be able to find us.”
Along with Kao, there is a team of volunteers that create the face shields themselves, made up of primarily healthcare workers and college students.
One is Mei Mei Giang, a volunteer who works as an anesthesiologist. Mae comes in about five days a week, including weekends, for about four hours per day to coordinate the fabrication process.
Other volunteers include Audrey Elroi, a long-term member of the team, Kathy Barry, the head nurse of Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District (PVPUSD), Paula Borstel, an anatomy and chemistry teacher in PVPUSD, Garrett Potvin, a former intern at PVNet and currently an engineer who primarily works on the fabrication management of the 3-D printers, and Jack McDowell, a former NASA engineer who designed the two most recent versions of the face shields, one of them having hinges to flip when not in use.
“They are all an innovative bunch, to say the least,” Vegvari said.
To date, Vegvari and his team have made almost 10,000 shields in the past seven months, with approximately 1,000 shields distributed each week. At a given time, about 9,000 individuals are wearing Vegvari’s face shields.
However, this feat was not easy. In order to produce this number of face shields every week, Vegvari’s 3-D printers run 24/7 at maximum speed, which can cause substantial damage to their equipment and their financial status.
“[The work we are doing with the 3-D printers] is like turning your car on and leaving it running at full speed on the highway,” Vegvari said. “Because of this, parts [of the printer] sometimes fail or break, which is when Garrett steps in to fix them.”
Of course, this project has not been easy on PVNet. Due to the reduced number of students enrolling at PVNet due to the pandemic, along with 80 percent of the project’s budget coming from the team’s own pockets, there has been a significant financial loss.
Regardless, Vegvari hopes that he can get increased support from the Palos Verdes community to allow him to continue creating these face shields to protect the essential workers fighting every day.

Students Scanning The Brain Are Finding New Ways To Think About It
• Student research project involves brain scans and detail interpretations and analyses.In the Palos Verdes Promenade shopping mall there are groups of students studying at Starbucks, shoppers peaking into furniture shops and cars struggling to park in its triple-deck parking lot. And, at the PVNet Technology Center on the second floor, there are inventions being brainstormed and discoveries being made.
One ongoing program in the facility that attracted the attention of many is the Brain Entrainment Scientific Research course. The course was based on the psychological concept of “learned helplessness,” which is where a living thing is conditioned to feel powerless in the face of an obstacle or task due to experiencing a recurring event of failure or trauma. A famous example of this concept involves the procedure of keeping wild elephants in captivity.
“Once upon a time, a baby elephant would be tied to a tree trunk and trained to believe that it cannot escape,” clinical psychologist Dr. Carol Francis said. “Thus, once the elephant matures into an adult and is tied with a chain within close proximity to a tree trunk, it would automatically assume that it cannot leave said tree trunk.”
This phenomenon illustrates the mental captivity humans feel in certain situations that seem difficult to deal with; in other words, many learn to become helpless. This behavior branches into mental disorders like depression, anxiety and trauma reactions.
“[For a long time,] we believed that we were somewhat kidnapped by our minds and that we had to live cooperatively with how it thinks and fears,” Francis said. “However, we now know that we can actually impact how our brain functions.”
With this new knowledge now in mind, there have been studies regarding how to combat this psychological battle of learned helplessness. The ongoing program at PVNet, however, is the first study that involves a neurologic device called the BrainTap, which Francis has utilized on her patients for the last 30 years.
Once activated, the BrainTap alters the brain waves and patterns of its user, which results in said user’s thoughts being changed; in essence, it helps an individual overcome their own “learned helplessness.”
“[The BrainTap] inscribes the brain with the type of thoughts that may be beneficial to people,” Francis said.
This form of “brain entrainment” was experimented on individuals through a series of pre-tests that measured the degree of the subject’s feeling of “learned helplessness” through anxiety, depression and self-esteem as well as his or her mental and physical health.
Such measurements were also based on the person’s brain waves. The six high school students, as well as one graduate student, involved then presented their subjects with a task that was entirely impossible to do and recorded their reactions of feeling helpless at such a request. Throughout the experiment, the team also measured the subjects’ body systems such as heart rate and breathing pace.
After these pre-tests, the subjects were each given the BrainTap device with 700 protocols and were required to use at least one option for 22 minutes as well as a 60-second questionnaire for the 14 days that followed. At the end of these 14 days, the individuals took a post-test with the same materials as the pre-test to measure a possible improvement in the subjects’ “learned helplessness” levels.
“We just finished collecting the data [for our study,] and we are going to confirm and analyze this data on March 14,” Francis said.
This project began with Francis bringing the BrainTap and its possible usage for a study to PVNet founder and owner Ted Vegvari, to which Vegvari suggested involving students with all levels of experience as well to provide the youth in his facility an opportunity to understand the world of professional science and technology.
This suggestion aligns with Vegvari’s desire for his students at PVNet: to gain real experiences that are comparable to an adult professional in the field of science.
“It is a lot better [for the kids] to explore and find things that they are interested in [on their own],” Vegvari said.
Two of the main challenges that came with this study were the amount of dedication the test subjects had for their assignments and the amount of time the student interns invested in the project. Because there are not a lot of methods that can completely control human test subjects, there was some discrepancy in the data in terms of the accuracy of the individuals’ usage of the BrainTap.
Additionally, because the team entirely consisted of students with other responsibilities from school and other extracurriculars, not many had a lot of time to thoroughly carry out the experiment.
“Experiments involving humans is a lot harder than those involving amoebas or other organisms,” Francis said. “It is a lot harder to control humans, and it was difficult to have every test subject complete the 22-minute usage daily throughout the study.”
Regardless, this study on brain entrainment is one that could create new possibilities for science, for humans, for society as a whole. When an individual’s perspective can make up his or her world, the BrainTap may create a world with new innovations, new discoveries, new relationships––all just from saying, “I will try.”
“I think that ‘learned helplessness’ is the cornerstone to every difficulty that a person faces,” Francis said. “I hope that the BrainTap verifies what it has been claiming all along and that it can help users change the trajectory of their life.”

Miraleste Host Robotics Tournament
• Miraleste Intermediate School host annual VEX Robotics Tournament last week.
Participants of VEX Robotics had another successful day on Saturday, Feb. 1, in a VEX Robotics Competition called Tower Takeover.
The event lasted from 8 in the morning to 4 in the afternoon in Miraleste Intermediate School’s gym. With 34 teams and 200 competitors from across Los Angeles participating, the gym was packed with excitement, technology, and artificial intelligence.
The teams compete in seven matches and get ranked based on their resulting scores.
The first-place team consisted of members from the Science Academy who had a strong robot and a consistent track record with competing.
The second-place team was from Washington Irving Middle School in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
The third-place team was from Miraleste Middle School, where the head of the program, Campbell Nimick, teaches and instructs the school’s robotics teams.
Nimick has been running the program for the past eight years and works to provide students with experience in the STEM field as well as life lessons that students can take with them to high school and beyond.
Because many students go into high school without any interest or passion in a certain field, Nimick wants to provide a program that gives insight into the professional and technological field of STEM and give participants a springboard into a possible career path.
Additionally, he hopes to teach skills on collaboration, camaraderie, and leadership through VEX Robotics.
“I want to expose these students to the reality of STEM in case it sparks any interest in pursuing the field in the future,” Nimick said. “Through the teams, the kids are essentially forced to work with people. We want to teach our kids lessons they would not learn in the classroom, things that would help them become better workers, professionals, and team players.”