This TED Talk features roboticist Catherine Moore, recorded live at TED-2018.

My story starts in the northern Galapagos Islands, under 50 feet of water, and a big school of sharks.

I'd been scuba diving with a group of friends for about a week, and it had been glorious.

Manta rays, whale sharks, penguins, and, of course, hammerhead sharks.

Today's dive was particularly tricky.

The surge was terrible.

You had to have your camera rig tight in and your arm out

because the surge kept throwing you into the rocks

while you're scanning up for that beautiful photograph.

It was going okay until not okay.

Something was terribly, terribly wrong.

I pulled my hand back,

and I had long black sea urchin spines all the way through my gloves,

which meant all the way through my hand.

Now, this is bad.

I mean, obviously, when you have something all the way through your hand,

it's kind of bad anyway.

But in this case,

sea urchins have a venom on them,

that if you've ever tangled with them,

you know that a sea urchin spine in you gives you horrible painful inflammation.

But that wasn't even topmost in my mind at this point.

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