Spectrum

Bruce Ames Sr Scientist at CHORI, and Prof Emeritus of Biochem and Molecular Bio, at UC Berkeley. Rhonda Patrick Ph.D. biomedical science, postdoc at CHORI in Dr. Ames lab. The effects of micronutrients on metabolism, inflammation, DNA damage, and aging.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. [inaudible] [inaudible]. Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show [00:00:30] on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hi there. My name is Renee Rao and I'll be hosting today's show this week on spectrum. We present part two of our two interviews with Bruce Ames and Rhonda Patrick. Dr Ames is a senior scientist at Children's Hospital, Oakland Research Institute, director of their [00:01:00] nutrition and metabolism center and a professor emeritus of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California Berkeley. Rhonda Patrick has a phd in biomedical science. Dr. Patrick is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Children's Hospital, Oakland Research Institute and Dr Ames lab. She currently conducts clinical trials looking at the effects of nutrients on metabolism, inflammation, DNA damage and aging. In February of 2014 she published [00:01:30] a paper in the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology Journal on how vitamin D regulates serotonin synthesis and how this relates to autism. In part one Bruce and Rondo described his triage theory for micronutrients in humans and their importance in health and aging. In part two they discussed public health risk factors, research funding models, and the future work they wish to do. Here is part two of Brad Swift's interview with Dr Ames [00:02:00] and Patrick. Speaker 4: Is there a discussion going on in public health community about this sort of important that Rhonda, that one, Speaker 5: I think that people are becoming more aware of the importance of micronutrient deficiencies in the u s population. We've got now these national health and examination surveys that people are doing, examining the levels of these essential vitamins and minerals. 70% of the populations not getting enough vitamin D, 45% [00:02:30] population is not getting enough magnesium, 60% not getting enough vitamin K, 25% is not getting enough vitamin CS, 60% not getting enough vitamin E and on and on, 90% not getting enough calcium testing. It's very difficult to get. So I think that with these surveys that are really coming out with these striking numbers on these micronutrient deficiencies in the population, I'm in the really widespread and with triage, the numbers that tell you may be wrong because the thinking short term instead of long term, really what you want to know Speaker 6: [00:03:00] is what level [inaudible] indeed to keep a maximum lifespan. And our paper discussed all at and uh, but I must say the nutrition community hasn't embraced it yet, but they will because we're showing it's true and we may need even more of certain things. But again, you don't want to overdo it. Okay. Speaker 4: So talk a little bit about risk factors in general. In health, a lot of people, as you were saying, are very obsessed with chemicals or so maybe their risk assessment is [00:03:30] misdirected. What do you think are the big health issues, the big health risks? Speaker 6: I think obesity is like smoking. Smoking is eight or 10 years off your life. Each cigarette takes 10 minutes off your life. I mean, it's a disaster and smoking levels are going down and down because people understand. Finally, there's still a lot of people smoke, but obesity is just as bad years of expensive diabetes and the costs can be used. [00:04:00] Whatever you look at out timers of brain dysfunction of all sites is higher in the obese and there's been several studies of the Diet of the obese and it's horrible. I mean it's sugar, it's comfort food and they're not eating fruits and vegetables and the not eating berries and nuts and not eating fish. And so it's doing the main and the country is painful. Speaker 5: I think that the biggest risk in becoming unhealthy and increasing your [00:04:30] risk of age related diseases, inflammatory diseases comes down to micronutrient intake and people are not getting enough of that. And we know that we quantified it, we know they're not getting enough. And so I think that people like to focus on a lot of what not eat, don't eat sugar and that's right. You shouldn't eat a lot of sugar. I mean there's a lot of bad effects on, you know, constantly having insulin signaling activated. You can become insulin resistant in type two diabetic and these things are important. But I think you also need to realize you need to focus on what you're not getting as opposed to only focusing on what you should not [00:05:00] be getting. Yeah, Speaker 6: a colleague, lowest scold, and I wrote over a hundred papers trying to put risk in perspective. That part to been in pesticide is really uninteresting. Organic food and regular food doesn't matter. It's makes you feel good, but you're really not either improving the environment or helping your health. Now that you're not allowed to say that, things like that in Berkeley. But anyway, it's your diet. You should be worried about getting a good balanced time. So if you put out a thousand [00:05:30] hypothetical risks, you're lost space. Nobody knows what's important anymore and that's where we're getting. Don't smoke and eat a good diet. You're way ahead of the game and exercise and exercise. Right.Speaker 4: And in talking about the current situation with funding, when you think back Bruce, in the early days of your career and the opportunities that were there for getting funding vastly Speaker 6: different. [00:06:00] Well, there was much less money in the system, but I always was able to get funded my whole career and I've always done reasonably well. But now it's a little discouraging when I think I have big ideas that are gonna really cut health care costs and we have big ideas on obesity and I just can't get any of this funded [inaudible] but now if you're an all original, it's hopeless putting it at grant, [00:06:30] I just have given up on it. Speaker 5: Well the ANA, the NIH doesn't like to fund. Speaker 6: Yeah. If you're thinking differently than everybody else you do and they're only funding eight or 9% of grants, you just can't get funded. I didn't want to work on a 1% so I'm funding it out of my own pocket with, I made some money from a biotech company of one my students and that's what's supporting my lamb and few rich people who saw potential gave me some money. But it's really tough [00:07:00] now getting enough money to do this. That's an interesting model. Self funding. Well, Rhonda is trying to do that with a, she has a blog and people supporting her in, Speaker 5: I'm trying to do some crowdfunding where instead of going to the government and then all these national institute of cancer, aging, whatever, which essentially uses taxpayer dollar anyways to fund research. I'm just going to the people, that's what I'm trying to do. My ultimate goal is to go to the people, tell them about this research I'm doing and [00:07:30] my ideas how we're going to do it and have them fund it. People are willing to give money to make advances in science. They just need to know about it. What did you tell him what your app is? So, so I have an app called found my fitness, which is the name of my platform where I basically break down science and nutrition and fitness to people and I explained to them mechanisms. I explained to them context, you know, because it's really hard to keep up with all these press releases and you're bombarded with and some of them are accurate and some aren't and most of the time you just have no idea what is going on. Speaker 5: It's very [00:08:00] difficult to sort of navigate through all that mess. So I have developed a platform called found my fitness where I'm trying to basically educate people by explaining and breaking down the science behind a lot of these different types of website. And it's an app, it's a website that's also an app can download on your iPhone called found my fitness. And I have short videos, youtube videos that I do where I talk about particular science topics or health nutrition topics. I also have a podcast where I talk about them. I'm interviewing other scientists in the field and things like that. And also I've got a news community site [00:08:30] where people can interact posts, new news, science stories or nutrition stories, whatever it is and people comment. So we're kind of building in community where people can interact and ask questions and Speaker 6: Rhonda makes a video every once in a while and puts it up on her website and she has people supporting at least some of this and she hopes to finally get enough money coming in. We'll support her research. Speaker 5: No, I think we're heading that way. I think that scientists are going to have to findSpeaker 6: new creative ways to fund their research. Uh, particularly if they have creative ideas [00:09:00] is, Bruce mentioned it because it's so competitive to get that less than 10% funding. The NIH doesn't really fun, really creative and risky, but it's, you need somebody who gets it. If when you put out a new idea, right, and if it's against conventional wisdom, which I'd like to do with the occasion arises, then it's almost impossible anyway. Speaker 4: Even with your reputation. Speaker 6: Yeah, it's hard. I've just given [00:09:30] up writing grants now. It's a huge amount of work and when they keep on getting turned down, even though I think these are wonderful ideas, luckily I can keep a basal level supporting the lab. I found a rich fellow who had an autistic grandkid guy named Jorgensen and he supported Rhonda and he supported her for a year and she was able to do all these things. Yeah, my age, I want to have [00:10:00] a lot of big ideas and I just like to get them out there anyway. We shouldn't complain. We're doing okay. Right. It's a very fulfilling job. There's nothing more fulfilling than doing science in my opinion. Yes. Speaker 7: You're listening to spectrum and k a Alex Berkley. Today's guests are Dr. Bruce Ames and Dr Rhonda Patrick of Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute. [00:10:30] Oh, Speaker 4: the ames test. When you came up with that, was that, what was the process involved with?Speaker 6: Well, how do you devise that? Well, I was always half a geneticist and half a bio chemist and I thought you Taishan is really important. And nobody was testing new substances out there to see if there were mutagens. And so I thought it'd be nice to develop a simple, easy test in bacteria for doing that. That [00:11:00] was cheap and quick. And then I became interested in the relation of carcinogens to mutagens and so I was trying to convince people at the active forms of carcinogens were muted. There were other people in that area too, but I was an early enthusiastic for that idea and anyway, it's just came from my knowledge of two different fields, but that's a long time ago. I'm more excited about the brain now. The current stuff Speaker 4: doing obviously is it's more [00:11:30] exciting. Yeah. Do you both spend time paying attention to other areas of science? Speaker 6: I read an enormous amount and every 10 or 15 years I seem to change my feel of and follow off something that seems a little hotter than the other things and I've been reasonably successful at that, so that's what I liked to do. I am constantly Speaker 5: about all the latest research coming out. I mean, that's like pretty much all I do is I'm very excited about the new [00:12:00] field of epigenetics, where we're connecting what we eat, our lifestyle, how much stress we are under, how much exercise we do, how much sleep we get, how this is actually changing, methylation patterns, acetylation patterns. In our DNA and how that can change gene expression, turn on genes, turn off genes. I mean how this all relates to the way we age, how it relates to behavior, how it relates to us passing on behaviors to our children, grandchildren, you know, this is a field that's to me really exciting and something that I've spend quite a bit of time reading about. So for both of [00:12:30] you, what have been in the course of your career, the technologies, Speaker 6: the discoveries that have impacted your work the most? Well obviously understanding DNA and all the things it does was a huge advance for biology. And I was always half a geneticist, so I was hopping up and down when that Watson Crick paper came out and I gave it in the Journal club to all these distinguished biochemists and they said very speculative. [00:13:00] I said I was young script. I said, you guys be quiet. This is the paper of the century. And it made a huge difference. And there's been one advance after another. A lot of technical advances, little companies spring up, making your life easier and all of that. So it's been fun going through this. Speaker 5: I think, you know, in terms of my own research, which got me to where I'm at now, a lot of the, the technological advances in making transgenic mouse models, [00:13:30] knocking out certain genes, being able to manipulate, doing, inserting viral vectors with a specific gene and with a certain promoter on it and targeting it to a certain tissue so you can, you know, look specifically at what it's doing in that tissue or knock it out and what it's doing and that tissue. That for me is a, been a very useful technology that's helped me learn a lot. In addition, I like to do a lot of imaging. So these fluorescent proteins that we can, you know, you use to tag on, look at other proteins where they're located both tissue wise and also intracellularly inside the cell. Doing [00:14:00] that in real time. So there's now live cell imaging we can do and see things dynamically. Like for example, looking at Mitochondria and how they move and what they're doing in real time. Like that for me is also been really a useful technology and helping me understand Mitochondria. And how they function, dysfunction can occur. So I think a, those, those have been really important technologies for me. Speaker 6: And then computers change biology. Google made a huge difference. You can put two odd facts into Google and outcome Molly's paper. You'd spend years in a library [00:14:30] trying to figure all this stuff out. So Google really made theoretical biology possible. And I think this whole paper that Rhonda did, she couldn't have done it without Google. That's was the technology that opened it all up. This is so much literature and nobody can read all this and remember it all that we need the search. And so is this kind of a boom in theoretical biology? Well, [00:15:00] I wouldn't say there's a boom yet, but there's so much information out there that people haven't put together. Speaker 5: Yeah, people have been generating data over the years. There's tons of data out there and there's a lot of well done research that people haven't put together, connected the dots and made big picture understanding of complex things. So I think that there is an opening for that. And I do think that people will start to do that more and they are starting to do it more and more. Speaker 6: So in the past there really wasn't a theoretical biology that was certainly Darwin was [00:15:30] theoretical you could say and lots of people had big ideas in the unified fields, but it was rare. Speaker 5: I think we have more of an advantage in that we can provide mechanisms a little easier because we can read all this data. You know people like Darwin, they were doing theoretical work but they were also making observations. So what we're doing now is we're looking at observations other people have made and putting those together. Speaker 8: [00:16:00] [inaudible] and [inaudible] is a public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley. This is part two of a two part interview with Bruce Ames and Rhonda Patrick. Speaker 6: Are there, are other scientists active in the longevity field whose work you admire that you would love to collaborate with? [00:16:30] Well or associated with? Always collaborates. So science is both very collegial and very competitive. You think somebody might get their first. But one of the tricks I like in my lab is we have half a dozen really good people with different expertise and we sit around a table and discuss things and it's no one person can know all medicine. And so [00:17:00] anyways, that helps. Yeah. And it might be collaborating with this guy now because both of you contribute something that the other person doesn't have a technique or whatever. And in three years we might be competing with them, but that's why it's good to keep good relations with everybody. But business is the same way companies compete and collaborate. Yeah. Speaker 5: I, I personally am in terms of the field of longevity. Uh, I admire the work of Elizabeth Blackburn [00:17:30] who discovered, uh, won the Nobel prize for be playing a role in discovering the enzyme telomerase Speaker 6: that was done at Berkeley, by the way. Speaker 5: Yeah. And she's now a professor at UCLA. So I would be really excited to set up a collaboration with her. Speaker 6: Well, what are the lab's research plans going forward now? Uh, well, other than Ryan Reinders next two papers. Yeah. Rhonda has these papers to get out. And I'd like to get the whole business [00:18:00] of tuning up our metabolism on firmer ground, convince nutrition people who are expert in one particular environment or most people studied B six for their whole lives or study Niacin for their whole lives or magnesium. And I buy it at the experts in a particular field to think about triage and what protein do we measure that tells you you're short a not getting enough, the vulnerable ones and get that idea [00:18:30] out and do a few examples and convince people that RDA should be based on long term effects rather than short term. And then Rhonda and I were talking the other day and we both got excited about drugs. This money to be made. Speaker 6: So pharmaceutical companies compete on getting new and better drugs and they can be billion dollar drugs but nutrition, nobody can make money out of it. And so there, [00:19:00] do you want to do a clinical trial on Vitamin d the way you do with the drug? Food and drug wants a double blind randomized controlled clinical trial. That's the gold standard for drugs. But it's not for nutrition is nutrition. You have to measure if 20% of the population is low on vitamin D, you don't want to do a study where you don't measure who's low and who's high because otherwise it's designed to fail. So you have to measure [00:19:30] things. Now, vitamin D actually many more deficient, but a lot of vitamins, 10% of lower 20% is low and you can't just lump them in with all the people have enough and do a randomized on one clinical trial and think it's going to mean something without measuring something. Speaker 6: Rhonda has one of her videos on our website to [inaudible] all these doctors who saved the vitamins are useless. They're all based on clinical trials that are designed for drugs [00:20:00] and they don't measure anything. So you have to know who should deficient and then taking that amount of value and makes you sufficient. I think, uh, some interesting re ongoing research in our lab is also the cornea bar. Yeah. So yeah, Joyce mechanical amp is directing a project on the Corey bar. We were deciding how do you get vitamins and minerals into the poor and we made a little bar, which is kind of all the components of a Mediterranean diet that people [00:20:30] aren't getting enough vitamins and all the vitamins and minerals and fish oil and vitamin D and soluble fiber and insoluble fiber and plant polyphenols and we can raise everybody's HDL in a couple of weeks and this is the mass of people aren't eating, they think they're eating good tide aren't and obese people or have their metabolism all fouled up and you were even learning how to make progress there. So Speaker 5: cool thing about it is that you can take a population [00:21:00] of people that eats very unhealthy and they are obese, meaning they have a BMI of 30 or above and you can give them this nutritional bar that has a variety of micronutrients. It has essential fatty acids and some polyphenols fiber and give it to them twice a day on top of their crappy diet. You don't tell them to change your diet at all. It's like keep doing what you're doing, but here, eat those twice a day on top of what you're doing and you can see that, you know after a few weeks that these changes start to occur where their HDLs raise or LDS lower. I mean there's, there's a lot of positive effects, you know, lower c reactive protein. So [00:21:30] I think this is really groundbreaking research because it's, it says, look, you can take someone who's eating a terrible diet completely, probably micronutrient division in many essential vitamins and minerals and such are eating a bunch of sugar and crap and processed foods and on and on and on and yet you can give them this nutritional bar that has a combination of micronutrients in it and you can quantify changes that are positive. Speaker 5: I think that's a really exciting ongoing project in our lab, Speaker 6: Bruce Ames and Rhonda Patrick, thanks very much [00:22:00] for being on spectrum. It's a pleasure. Absolutely a pleasure. Thanks for having us. Speaker 7: Aw. [inaudible] to learn more about the work aims and Patrick's are doing. Visit their websites. Bruce seems.org and found my fitness.com spectrum shows are archived on iTunes yet we've created this simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/k a Alex spectrum Speaker 3: [00:22:30] and now a calendar of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Rick Kreisky joins me to present the calendar on Sunday July 13th the bay area meetup, random acts of science will host an event to do science with paper papers, one of the most commonly available materials with a variety of science applications. Everything from the dynamics of classic paper airplanes launching paper rockets and building structures in [00:23:00] Origami will be discussed. The group will also learn about fibers and paper and how to create their own homemade paper. Raw materials will be provided, but attendees are also welcome to bring their own. The event will be held July 13th from two to 3:00 PM outside the genetics and plant biology building on the UC Berkeley campus. It is free and open to anyone interested in coming basics. The Bay area art science, interdisciplinary collaborative sessions. [00:23:30] We'll have their fifth event on Monday the 14th from six 30 to 10:00 PM at the ODC theater, three one five three 17th street in San Francisco. Speaker 3: The theme is monsters. Professor John Haffer. Nick, we'll introduce the audience to a peracetic fly that turns European honey bees into zombies, author and translator, Eric Butler. We'll explain how literature and film have made the Vampire [00:24:00] a native of Eastern Europe into a naturalized American with a preference for the Golden State Marine biologist David McGuire. Well, disentangle the media fueled myth of the shark from its true nature and Kyle Taylor, senior scientist for the gluing plant project will show off plants that glow in the dark. Admission will be on a sliding scale from absolutely nothing. Up to 20 bucks. Visit basics.com for more info. [00:24:30] That's B double a s I c s.com. On Saturday, July 19th you see Berkeley molecular and cell biology Professor Kathleen Collins will host the latest iteration of the monthly lecture series. Signs that cow Professor Collins will discuss the connections between the seemingly incontrovertible fact of human aging. A fascinating enzyme known as telomerase and malignant cancers. Speaker 3: While cancer cells can grow indefinitely [00:25:00] all normally functioning human tissues will eventually die out. This is because with each success of cell division, the protective cap or a telomere at the end of each chromosome is gradually degraded while the enzyme to limb arrays or pairs this damage in embryos. It is not fully active in adult human tissues. Perhaps to prevent the uncontrollable growth of cancer cells. Professor Collins will discuss telomeres and telomerase function and how they affect the balance of human aging [00:25:30] and immortality. The free public talk will be held July 19th in room one 59 of Mulford Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. The lecture will begin at 11:00 AM sharp science need is a monthly science happy hour for adults 21 and over the pairs. Lightning talks with interactive stations on the back patio of the El Rio bar at three one five eight mission street in San Francisco. Speaker 3: [00:26:00] The theme for July Science Neat is backyard science and we'll feature the science of things right here in the bay area from plants to plankton and beetles. Two bikes. Admission is $4 and the event will be on Tuesday, July 22nd from six 30 to 8:30 PM and now a few of our favorite science stories. Rick's back to present the news. The rocky planets that are closest to our son generally have an iron core [00:26:30] that makes up about a third of their mass that is surrounded by rock that makes up the other two thirds. Mercury is an exception and is the other way around. With a massive iron core that takes up about percent of the planet's mass. This has been difficult to explain. If mercury had been built up by collisions the way that Venus and earth and Mars where we'd expect it to have a similar composition in a letter published in nature geoscience on July six Eric s [00:27:00] fog and Andreas Roofer of Arizona State University report their simulations that suggests that collisions may have stripped away Mercury's mantle, some moon and planet sized rocks would bounce off of each other, sometimes knocking one body out of its orbit while the impactor and the leftover debris coalesced into a planet. Speaker 3: This model is consistent with Mercury's high abundance of [inaudible] elements that have been observed recently by NASA's messenger spacecraft [00:27:30] in their so called hit and run model. Mercury is missing metal would end up coalescing onto Venus or in your report compiled by UC Berkeley. Scientist has definitively linkedin gene that has helped Tibetan populations thrive in high altitude environments to hit or too little known human ancestor. The Denisovans, the Denisovans along with any thoughts when extinct around 40 to 50,000 years ago about the time that modern human began to ascend [00:28:00] and Aaliyah is a version of a gene in this case and unusually of the gene e p a s one which regulates hemoglobin production has been common among Tibetans since their move several thousand years ago. John Habit areas at around 15,000 feet of elevation. Well, most people have Leos that caused them to develop thick blood at these high elevations, which can later lead to cardiovascular problems. The tobacco wheel raises hemoglobin levels only slightly allowing possessors [00:28:30] to avoid negative side effects. So the report, which will later republished in the journal Nature details the unique presence of the advantageous aliyah. Among Tibetans and conclusively matches it with the genome of the Denisovans. This is significant because as principle author, Rasmus Nielsen, UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology writes, it shows very clearly and directly that humans evolved and adapted to new environments by getting their genes from another species. Nielsen added that there are many other [00:29:00] potential species to explore as sources of human DNA Speaker 8: [inaudible].Speaker 4: This show marks the end of our production of spectrum. I want to thank Rick Karnofsky, Renee, Rau, and Alex Simon for their help in producing spectrum. I want to extend a blanket thank you to all the guests who took the time to appear on spectrum over the three years we have been on Calex to Sandra Lenna, [00:29:30] Erin and Lorraine. Thanks for your guidance and help to Joe, Peter and Greg. Thanks for your technical assistance and encouragement to listeners. Thanks for tuning in and Speaker 7: stay tuned to Calico [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dr. Ames is a Senior Scientist at Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute, director of their Nutrition & Metabolism Center, and a Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, at the University of California, Berkeley. Rhonda Patrick has a Ph.D. in biomedical science. Dr. Patrick is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute with Dr. Ames. Bruce Ames Sr Scientist at CHORI, and Prof Emeritus of Biochem and Molecular Bio, at UC Berkeley. Rhonda Patrick Ph.D. biomedical science, postdoc at CHORI in Dr. Ames lab. The effects of micronutrients on metabolism, inflammation, DNA damage, and aging.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Mm mm mm Speaker 3: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x [00:00:30] Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news [inaudible]. Speaker 4: Good afternoon. My name is Rick Karnofsky. I'm the host of today's show. This week on spectrum we present part one of a two part interview with our guests, Bruce Ames and Rhonda Patrick. Dr Ames is a senior scientist at Children's Hospital, [00:01:00] Oakland Research Institute, director of their nutrition and metabolism center and a professor Ameritas of biochemistry and molecular biology at UC Berkeley. Rhonda Patrick has a phd in biomedical science. Dr. Patrick is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Children's Hospital, Oakland Research Institute in Dr Ames. His lab, she currently conducts clinical trials looking at the effects of [00:01:30] micronutrients on metabolism, inflammation, DNA damage and aging. Here's Brad swift and interviewing doctors, aims and Patrick Bruce Speaker 5: Ames and Rhonda Patrick, welcome to spectrum. Thank you very much. Sue, can you help us understand the term micronutrient and briefly explain what they do? Sure. Speaker 6: About 40 substances you need in your diet and [00:02:00] you get it from eating a really well balanced style, get them more about eight or 10 of them are essential amino acids. So they're required for making your all your protein. And then there are about 30 vitamins and minerals, roughly 15 minerals in 15 five minutes. So you need the minerals, you need iron and zinc and calcium and magnesium and all these things, you know, and the vitamins [00:02:30] and minerals are coenzymes. So you have 20,000 genes in your body that make proteins, which are enzymes that do bio or Kimiko transformations. And some of them require coenzymes, maybe a quarter of them. So some require magnesium and they don't work unless there's a magnesium attached to the particular pace in the enzyme. And some of them require vitamin B six which is something called [00:03:00] paradoxal, goes through a coenzyme paradox of phosphate. Speaker 6: And that's an a few hundred and enzymes and they make your neurotransmitters and other things. And if you don't get any one of these 40 substances, you'd die. But how much we need is, I think there's a lot of guesswork in there and we have a new idea I can talk about later that shakes a lot up puppet. And so when your research, you're trying to measure these [00:03:30] micronutrients obviously, well people can measure them in various ways. Somebody can just measure in blood and say, ah, you have enough vitamin D or you don't have enough vitamin D. But some, for example, calcium and magnesium marine, your bones, but they're also used for all kinds of enzymes and if you get low, the tissue might get low, but you keep your plasma up because you're taking it out of the bone. So just measuring [00:04:00] plasma isn't useful in that case. Speaker 6: But anyway, there, uh, each one is a little different. Do you want to talk about the triage theory? Okay, I could talk to about that. Now. Some years ago we kept on finding when we had human cells in culture or mice, that when we left out various vitamins and minerals or didn't have enough, we got DNA damage. I'm an expert in DNA damage and we're interested in how [00:04:30] to prevent DNA damage. We sat leads to cancer and so I kept on wondering why is nature doing this when you're not getting enough of magnesium or iron or zinc, you getting DNA damage and then one day it hit me. I, that's just what nature wants to do. Through all of evolution, we'd been running out of vitamins and minerals. The minerals aren't spread evenly through the soil. The red soils with a lot of iron and the souls that have very little iron. Speaker 6: [00:05:00] Selenium is a required mineral, but there's soils with too much saline and we get poisoned. And then the areas where it, you don't have enough selenium so you get poisoned. So it's a little tricky. Back in 2006 I had this idea that nature must do a rationing when you start getting low on any vitamin or mineral, and how would you ration it? The proteins that are essential for survival get it first and the ones that are preventing [00:05:30] some insidious damage that shows up as cancer in 10 years or calcification in the arteries. That's the [inaudible] papers, those proteins lucid. And I call this triage ship. It's a French word for dividing up those wounded soldiers that the doctors can make a difference on. So anyway, I publish this with what data? That wasn't the literature, but it wasn't completely satisfactory. We didn't, hadn't really nailed it, but it was an idea. Speaker 6: And then Joyce McCain [00:06:00] in my lab wrote two beautiful reviews, one on selenium and one on vitaminK , and they both fit beautifully. And people who work in these fields had shown that the clotting factors get it first because you don't get your blood clotting and you cut yourself every week or two, you'd just bleed to death. But the price you pay is you don't make the protein that prevents calcification of the arteries so [00:06:30] people can die of calcification the arteries. But that takes 10 years. So when nature has to face keeping alive now so you can reproduce or you're getting calcification arteries in 10 years, it does this tradeoff. And also you don't have enough vitamin K. My ptosis doesn't work quite as accurately. So you'll lose the chromosome here or there and you get cancer in 10 years. But again, it's the trade off between short term survival and longterm health. Speaker 6: It all [00:07:00] makes perfect sense. It was a very plausible theory. That's why I came out with it. But it's true for vitaminK and the mechanism used in vitaminK is different than the mechanism and sleeping. So each system has developed a different mechanism for doing this racially. And so that changes our view of vitamins and minerals base. You're paying a price every time. You're a little low on one with them. So it's the disease of aging. So basically when you should have any vitamin or mineral, [00:07:30] it accelerates your aging in some way. You can accelerate some kind of insidious damage. And we're talking about huge numbers of people. 70% of the population is low in vitamin D and we're talking about magnesium, what we said the third 45% 45% these are big numbers and they're cheap boldly saying Speaker 7: [inaudible]Speaker 8: [00:08:00] you are listening to spectrum on a l x, Berkeley. Today's guests are Dr. Bruce Ames and Dr Rhonda Patrick Speaker 9: with the micronutrients and the activity of DNA, RNA. Talk about the effect there, the impact, is there more to talk about that? Absolutely. So there are many different micronutrients [00:08:30] that are required for functions in your body that involve DNA replication involved DNA repair, preventing DNA damage. Things are all very important because we're making 100 billion new cells every day to make a new cell, we have to replicate the entire genome of that cell to make the daughter cell. And that requires a whole holster of enzymes. So if you don't have enough magnesium for those DNA polymerase to work properly, when ends up happening is that their fidelity is [00:09:00] lessen, meaning they don't work as well and they're gonna likely make more errors in that DNA replication that they're performing. And if they can't repair that error, then when ends up happening is that you can get every rotation and depending on whether that mutation has any functional consequences, sort of random, but the more times as occurs, then the more chances you're having of getting a mutation that can, you know, something that's not good and can either cause cell death or it can also [00:09:30] be something that causes dysregulation of the way your genes are expressed. Speaker 9: So it's very important to make sure you have the right co factors such as magnesium for DNA replication, also in your mitochondria and your mitochondrial DNA. When you make new Mitochondria, this is called mitochondrial biogenesis. It's an important mechanism to boost the number of mitochondria per cell. And this can occur during things like exercise when your mitochondria also have their own genome and they have to replicate this genome. Well guess what? Those mitochondrial [00:10:00] DNA were preliminaries. This also require magnesium. And so if there's not enough magnesium around, you're not making your mitochondria as optimal as you could be in Mitochondria. Play an important role in every single process in your body, including, you know, neuronal function. So that's really important to make sure that your Mitochondria Hobby. Also, this is very relevant for things like aging. These micronutrients like vitamin D gets converted into a steroid hormone that regulates the expression of over a thousand genes in [00:10:30] your body and some of those genes are involved in DNA repair and also in preventing DNA damage. So these micronutrients are extremely important for a variety of different physiological properties that are going on in your body every single day. Things that you can't see when you look in the mirror, we're talking about something that's not an acute deficiency that's going to lead to a clinical symptom like scurvy. Speaker 6: We think bad nutrition is the main thing, accelerating all these degenerative diseases of aging and contributing to these huge medical costs and [00:11:00] all of that. And it's something you can do something about because they're all very cheap minerals that are cheap. So the sourcing of the minerals and vitamins, it's not crucial at this point you think? I don't think so. Yeah. Getting them is the the really the key factor think and I think to really reform people's diet, we're going to need the numbers and we're working to try and show that there's some vulnerable protein that goes first when you're short of McNeese. I [00:11:30] mean you should measure that and then you'll know you're not getting enough and all the consequences or you're disabling all your DNA repair fronts. I'm so whatever. Speaker 9: It is ideal to try and get as many of these micronutrients essential vitamins and minerals that you can from your diet. For example, I personally make a smoothie for breakfast every morning, which consists of Kale, spinach, Swiss carrots, tomato, avocado, berries, and I'm getting a broad spectrum of vegetables and fruits [00:12:00] just from that one smoothie. And I think in addition to these essential vitamins and minerals that we know are in these various plants and fruits, I think there's also a lot of micronutrients in there that we have yet to discover that also may be doing important things. However, it's extremely difficult for people to get all of these micronutrients from their diet. And I think in that instance, supplementation can help fill those nutritional gaps. And we've actually shown that Speaker 6: in general, people in nutrition don't like the idea of pills, but people [00:12:30] are learning about all this. But you shouldn't overdo it. Mae West said too much of a good thing is wonderful, but she was saying about sex, not micronutrients, and particularly for minerals in minerals, there's a sweet spot. Too much can hurt you into little canary, Speaker 5: and that's what you're hoping these next generation devices would help people understand where they are situated within, right? The class of vitamins and minerals. What are they up in? What are they down? Speaker 6: So this may be a decades [00:13:00] worth of science to do this, but we're trying to frame the ideas and say, look, this is where we're going. And it isn't drugs that are gonna help you. It's getting your diet tuned up, your metabolism [inaudible] Speaker 9: your doctor can look at a few different nutrients and vitamin D is one test that they do. But there's a couple of companies that are out there right now such as something called wellness effects. They're measuring a variety of different micronutrients in people's blood, including omega [00:13:30] three fatty acids, vitamin D, magnesium, potassium, calcium. So looking at all these different vitamins and minerals and people are quantifying. It's called the quantified self movement where people are getting their vitamins and minerals and essential fatty acids measured. They're making dietary changes. If they find out they're low in vitamin D or they're low in mega three or they have low magnesium, they're making dietary changes and then about three months later they go back and they'd quantify the levels again so they can physically measure and quantify this, this change that they're making in their diet. And I think really that's the direction [00:14:00] to go. Speaker 6: Yeah, and analytical methods of Guinea. So wonderful that you can do it on a finger prick of blood. I have two entrepreneurs, scientist friends. One of them has put a machine in every hospital in China and he measures couple of dozen proteins of medical importance and the Chinese are subsidizing this. They think it's going to save money. And another friend of mine from Boulder, first one is built routed. The second one is Larry Gold. And he developed [00:14:30] an alternative to monoclonal antibodies and he can measure 1500 different proteins in one fingerprint compliant. I mean, it's fantastic and he's working to get them all right now it's a discovery system, but we're going to discover what protein tells you. You're low in magnesium and what protein tells you you're low in vitaminK or protein tells you low in paradox and then it's all going to go to your iPhone and you'll get the diagnosis. Speaker 6: We'll cut out the doctors [00:15:00] because they don't know much about Olis anyway, and they're too expensive. So it's not drugs you need for all of this. It's tuning up limit tap of the drugs that youthful. I'm not saying that not and for some things that are absolutely essential, but this area of getting your metabolism tuned up, see, people are worried about a pot Papillion a pesticide and it's all irrelevant. We, we published a hundred papers on that in that era, just saying, look, it's all a distraction from the important thing and important thing [00:15:30] is all these bad diets where eating and obesity isn't just calories in, exercise out a beach. People are starving and what this starving for vitamins and minerals because they're eating sugar and carbohydrate and every possible disease of aging is accelerated and hippies and plus huge costs, years of expensive diabetes and heart disease and cancer, you name it, it's been linked to obesity. So I think it's a big [00:16:00] opportunity to tune people up. Speaker 8: Spectrum is a public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley [00:16:30] is this part one of a two part interview with Bruce Ames and Rhonda Patrick. Speaker 9: So Rhonda, the recent paper you published on vitamin D explain that. So vitamin D gets converted into a steroid hormone in your body and the steroid hormone can regulate this expression [00:17:00] of between 900 and a thousand different genes. And the way it does that is that there's a little telltale sequence in your gene and it's basically a six nucleotide sequence repeat that's separated by three nucleotides. And this nucleotide sequence itself can determine whether or not vitamin D will turn on a gene or turn off aging. And so vitamin D can do both of these where it turns on genes and turns off genes. Well, what we found is that there's two different genes that encode for Tryptophan hydroxylase, [00:17:30] which is the rate limiting enzyme that converts trip to fan into Serotonin. There's one that's in the brain called Tryptophan hydroxylase too, and there's one that's outside of the blood brain barrier in tissues like Mosley got also in your t cells and your Peniel gland and placenta tissue if you're woman, and this is called Tryptophan hydroxylase one and what we found is that both of these genes have what's called a vitamin D response element that tell a sequence I was telling you about. Speaker 9: However, they had [00:18:00] completely opposite vitamin D response elements. One, the one in your brain had an activation sequence turn on and the one in the gut had a repression sequence. The turnoff sequence, which suggested that vitamin D hormone was controlling the expression of these two different genes in opposite directions. Vitamin D's important to turn on Tryptophan hydroxylase and two and your brain so you can make serotonin and it's important to turn it off and your gut to blunt the production of Serotonin in your gut. Serotonin in your gut. Too Much of it causes GI inflammation. [00:18:30] This was a really cool finding because there was a recent paper where they found that autistic individuals, 90% of them had some abnormal tryptophan metabolism and they didn't really identify what it was, but sort of like an Aha moment where it was like trick to fan metabolism. Well, chuck did fan, you need to make Serotonin, and so I started doing some reading and sure enough, there's a whole literature connecting Serotonin to autism. Speaker 9: Serotonin is made in your brain. It's an important neurotransmitter, but during early, early brain development, [00:19:00] it is a brain morphogenic meaning it actually is a growth factor that guides the neuronal proliferation, the development, the migration of neurons to different regions in the brain. It plays an essential role in shaping the structure and the wiring of the early developing brain. And so not having enough serotonin in early, early brain development in Utero can lead to very aberrant brain morphological and functional consequences. You know, this was kind of like, wow, well what if you're not getting enough vitamin D during that critical [00:19:30] period, which is important to activate that gene that converts Tryptophan into Serotonin? Is it possible then that you wouldn't be making enough serotonin in that early brain and therefore you wouldn't have a normal brain development? Also, the Serotonin in the gut can cause a lot of GI inflammation and also quite a few autistics have high GI inflammation. Speaker 9: Also, they have high levels of Serotonin in their blood. There's something that we call the Serotonin anomaly where they've measured brain levels of Serotonin autistics from SMRI and have also measured blood levels [00:20:00] of Serotonin. And there was sort of this weird dichotomy where autistics had high levels of Serotonin in their blood, but they had low levels in their brain and so it was like, well, why is that? Why would they have high levels in their blood, the low levels in the brain and we think we found a mechanism why if you're low in vitamin D, your vitamin D won't be turning on the one in your brain and you won't be making enough Serotonin in your brain and it won't be repressing the one you've got and you'll be making too much and you've got this sort of a a really cool finding. We also in our paper discuss how estrogen can [00:20:30] activate Tryptofan hydroxylase to in the brain pretty much the same way vitamin D does also a steroid hormone and the sequences, the receptors bind to a somewhat similar under dug out of the literature that people showed. Estrogen can turn Speaker 6: on the Messenger RNA for the brain enzyme making serotonin in girls, but it's not doing it in boys, which explains why five times as many boys get autism as girls. [00:21:00] Anyway, she worked out all this mechanism. We kept on explaining one thing after another render would come in every week, hopping up and down. Look what I found and look what I found and I think she walks on water, but she did this wonderful scholarship, which is a good metaphor, but she used to be a surfing instructor when she was incentive. Speaker 9: It's pretty exciting. It was largely theoretical work where we did find a underlying mechanism to connect these dots. So we're hoping now that people in the field are going to continue on and look even deeper. Speaker 6: So [00:21:30] what we think we know is how to prevent autism. But what we are not sure of is whether you can give vitamin D to people who have autism and help some of the symptoms. Uh, biggest people need to do clinical trials on all of this and they haven't done them right. But now that we have the mechanism, you can do them right. The trouble is drug companies aren't going to make money with vitamin D and they know that. And so [00:22:00] they're trying to develop a new drug. But we're hoping that these biochemicals trip to fain and vitamin D and nowhere to tone and and may get threes, which are all seem to be involved, which you can find out by reading Ramdas paper that that is going to at least give him mechanisms so we can do more focused clinical trials. Speaker 8: [inaudible] [00:22:30] to learn more about the work and Patrick are doing visit their websites, Bruce ames.org and found my fitness.com Speaker 7: oh Speaker 6: papers take a lot of polishing. Basically we're going into all these fields [00:23:00] that we don't know an awful lot about us and that requires a lot of double checking and sending it to experts and getting criticism. Speaker 9: First you have to learn everything and then you'd have to put, make the connections together and then you have to write it and then there's a whole process. It's very, it's a lot of work. Personally, my favorite part of it is the creative part where you just make all the connections and you find things and you start fitting things together and it's like, oh yeah, you know, it's just, it's almost like awesome rush, but then once you've make all those connections and you do that creative work, then you really have to [00:23:30] do all the tedious, hard digging and working diligence. Yes and that it's not as much fun. Then once you have a good theory Speaker 6: you assume no. Is it explaining new things that you didn't expect and right away this idea explains so many things and it was all really lying on the ground and round it just picked it up and put it together. Speaker 9: People like Bruce and I who liked to make those connections. I think that we play an important role in science as well. Like this paper that we published recently, [00:24:00] while we didn't physically do any experiments, we didn't test our theoretical work. We made a very interesting connection with a mechanism for other people to test. And I think that every once in awhile science needs that because there's so much data out there and now with Google we have access to all this data. So I think that taking people that are familiar with the fields and can put things together like pieces of a puzzle, I think that also advanced the science in a very creative way. Speaker 6: Biology's so complicated that there hasn't been much room for people [00:24:30] who just sit in their office and do theoretical work. And we do a lot of experimental work in lab and Rhonda is carrying on an experimental problem while she's doing all this. But I like to get it in between fields. I was always half a geneticist and half a biochemist and it was wonderful because I saw all these problems. The geneticists turned up and the biochemists didn't know existed and the geneticists didn't know how to tackle this was before Watson and crick and all of that. Uh, I'm pretty [00:25:00] old anyway. I think science is so competitive, but if you know two fields in this an interface, you have a big advantage on everybody else and we like to have people in the lab with many different expertise and put things together. Speaker 10: [inaudible]Speaker 4: you can tune into the rest of Brad's interview with Bruce Ames and Rhonda Patrick [00:25:30] two weeks from now. Speaker 7: [inaudible]Speaker 4: irregular feature of spectrum is a calendar of the science and technology related events happening in the bay area over the next two weeks. On Thursday, July 10th the bay area skeptics will host a free lecture by Glenn Branch. The deputy director of the National Center for Science Education Branch will present untold stories from the scopes trial. [00:26:00] If you thought that you knew everything about the scopes monkey trial. Thank you again to commemorate the 89th anniversary of this seminal episode in the long contentious history of evolution. Education in the United States branch will tell the story of the scopes trial as it has never been told before. Focusing on obscure under appreciated and amusing details. The event will be at the La Pena Cultural Center, three one zero five Shattuck avenue in Berkeley [00:26:30] and it will start@seventhirtypleasevisitwwwdotbaskeptics.org for more info and here's the new story we think you'll find interesting in a paper published in nature neuroscience on June eight University of Minnesota researchers at B Steiner and a David Reddish report that they have made behavioral and neuro physiological observations of regret [00:27:00] in rats to regret is to recognize that taking an alternative action would have produced a more valued outcome than the action one took. Speaker 4: The research team created a circular runway with four spokes and feeding machines at the end of each spoke that contained different flavors of food pellets. The feeding was preceded by a tone that indicated how long the rat would wait at a particular machine for food if the rat left one of these restaurants with waiting time below [00:27:30] its threshold only. Do you find an even longer waiting time at the next spoke? The team hypothesized that the rat may regret the choice. Indeed, the rats that fit this description were more likely than control rats to look toward the spoke. They just left and electrodes indicated that neurons in the orbital frontal cortex fired at the same time. Science news talk to cold Spring Harbor Neuro scientist Alex Vaughan about the paper. He [00:28:00] said, the researchers did a great job of designing a task that can discriminate between the regret of making a poor decision and the disappointment that results when one is punished despite making all the right choices. Speaker 8: [inaudible] spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. [00:28:30] We have created a symbolic for you. The link is tiny, url.com/calix spectrum. Speaker 7: Oh Speaker 3: [inaudible]. The music [00:29:00] heard during the show was written and produced by Alex diamond. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Email address is Doug KLX. Hey, young com. Speaker 8: [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mathias Craig, Co-Founder and Exec. Dir. of Blue Energy. Blue Energy is a not for profit, NGO working in Caribbean coastal communities of Eastern Nicaragua to help connect them to energy, clean water, sanitation and other services. Blueenergygroup.orgTranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. [inaudible] [inaudible]. Speaker 3: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k l x Berkeley, a biweekly [00:00:30] 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of loads Speaker 1: [inaudible] and news. Speaker 4: Hi listeners, my name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show this week on spectrum. We present part two of two with our guests, Mathias Craig Co, founder and executive director of Blue Energy. Blue Energy is a nonprofit nongovernmental organization working among the Caribbean coastal communities of [00:01:00] eastern Nicaragua to help connect them to energy, clean water, sanitation, and other essential services. Monte has, Craig is an engineer by training from UC Berkeley and MIT. He talks about what he and blue energy have learned about adapting and localizing technology through projects they undertake with remote isolated communities. Monte has also talks about the future of applied technologies and blue energy in developing areas. Here is part two. [00:01:30] As you work with the technologies that you choose from, how much are you changing those technologies? Are you able to feed back to the people who are actually manufacturing and designing those things? Speaker 1: When we started the organization, we thought of ourselves as sort of a technology creator. When we started working with small scale wind power locally manufactured small scale wind turbines, you know, we were early pioneers in that working with the earliest pioneers like Hugh Pigott, as I had mentioned in another group up in [00:02:00] Colorado, went by the name other power. We really saw ourselves as the primary design. We spent a lot of time. We did design workshops, we did a lot of cad drawings and we were really deep into the technology when we thought that technology was going to be 80% of what we could contribute. What we learned a number of years later was that that's not where we can add the most value. There's a lot of people around the world that can work on technology that had better setups and more experience, more resources to throw at the problem, and we needed to leverage [00:02:30] that. Speaker 1: That was one key realization. Now, on the other end of the spectrum though, we know that just taking technology from around the world and plugging it in never works. It's a lot of romance about that, but the reality is there's tweaking. There's adaptation that has to take place generally not with a cell phone, not with a pencil against her self-contained units, but with systems. These are systems, not products generally and for that you need adaptation and so we started thinking ourselves as technology [00:03:00] tweakers or packers, hackers or we use the word localize a lot to mean not inventing, but how do you take something that is successful somewhere else in a completely different context or if you get lucky, you find something that's operating in a relatively similar context and you say, okay, what needs to change for that to be effective where we are? Speaker 1: We have a ton of examples of this and we found we're very good at this and it's a place where we can add a tremendous amount of value. One example is you have [00:03:30] the mayor's office in Bluefields, which is where we're, we're operationally headquartered there on the Caribbean coast has a lot of requests for latrines to be installed for the communities. It's very poor sanitation in the area. They want to comply with that request. Right now there's thousands of latrine designs out there. How does a severely under-resourced government office figure out which one is going to be appropriate for the local context? The answer is they can't and it's just paralysis there and that's an example of where [00:04:00] we've built very strong partnerships and where we can add a ton of value. We can do that study, we can look at the designs, we can go visit a design in Honduras and check it out and say, oh, this design Central America.Speaker 1: Certain cultural similarities. Certain cultural differences can be very different environment, so let's try it out, but it seems promising. Let's test it for a year and let's study. Let's study the the decomposition of the waste. Is it working? Is it not working? And we did a pilot a few years ago looking at a solar latrine where [00:04:30] you you use passive solar heating, sort of greenhouse effect to help decompose the waste faster. We thought it was very promising. It didn't work in Bluefields because very high humidity, the rainiest part of the country and it didn't work like in the highlands of Honduras, but we saved a ton of money by studying that for a year rather than going out and building a thousand units because there was demand for latrines, so we did a lot of work on that. We've done that now with the water filters, with the well [00:05:00] drilling techniques and technology done that with cookstoves biodigesters everywhere in the technology portfolio. Speaker 1: I'd say we've had a hand in localizing the technology, adapting it and seeing what's going to work and then helping to roll it out slowly. At the end of last year we built our first latrines and built 55 latrines. We'd been studying and working on the trains for over two years. And one of the key elements of being able to do that technology localization are [00:05:30] the students and the international fellows that come work with us on the ground for either short term programs in the summer summer fellows that come in or longer term fellows that come for three months, six months or a year and work with us on adapting the technology. So behind that latrine program of two years, they was, you know, over half dozen students that did research that contributed to their schoolwork on campus and pushed the design forward. [00:06:00] So that's part of our global leadership program. They get the benefit of learning what real technology design is like in the field and learn about that social element that they don't hear about in class generally. Speaker 1: And what we get is we get to move along sort of the r and d side of things. And do you have a good relationship with local governments? Is that one of the things you try to cultivate? Yes, and I think that's something that sets us apart from a lot of nonprofit organizations in development, [00:06:30] generally speaking, but also in Nicaragua's, we've chosen to engage the government directly. The government in some form is what is going to be there and is representative of the people's will in some form. There's always challenges and just like we have in this country about how representative is it, et Cetera, but at the end of the day, it's the ultimate authority in the region and so if you choose to go around it and not engage it as many organizations do, we feel that you severely [00:07:00] limit the potential for your longterm impact. So we engage directly.Speaker 1: It's not always easy and we engage at different levels. We engage the national government. We have an office in Managua and the capital city where we're in constant contact with the ministries, with all levels of national governments. We engage there over on the coast. We engage with the regional government. We engage with the indigenous and creole territorial governments. It's a semi-autonomous region. [00:07:30] It's a very complex governance structure in the country, but we engage at all those levels. To discover what their plans are, to help build capacity where we can, you know, we learn and we teach. And then in the best cases to coordinate, you know, we've done a project with the Ministry of Health. We work with the Ministry of Health, the local nurse. We designed an energy system, install it, the Ministry of Health puts in the vaccine freezer and fills it with medicine and we both train the nurse. Well now that is a very [00:08:00] challenging collaboration to manage, but it leads to very big impact if you're willing to do it the right way. Speaker 1: You know, one of our strongest partners is the municipal office of Bluefields, the municipal government, the mayor and his staff where we're collaborating on a number of initiatives both within the city of Bluefields and the surrounding communities around water and sanitation, around building a biodigester for the slaughter house so that all that animal waste will cease to be dumped into the river untreated [00:08:30] and will actually become a useful byproduct of methane for cooking. And how many may oriel administrations have you dealt with in the Bluefield? There's been sort of three that we've worked with. Nicaragua is a highly polarized country, politically even more so than the United States. You know, we like to think where the extreme example, but not even close. When you look at the world that Greg was highly political and highly polarized. And when I say highly political, meaning that many [00:09:00] government functions and the services that they deliver are dictated by political affiliations. Speaker 1: So the risk of engaging as we do is that you end up on one side or the other and we're on the side of civil society. We want to help strengthen Nicaragua and strengthen the population of Nicaragua regardless of political affiliations. And so in our internal policies, that's very clear. We work with different political parties and in fact we play a very big facilitator [00:09:30] role convening people who would never meet on their own. If we can get the PLC and the Sandinistas to sit down on a table and think about a water and sanitation issue where they politically cannot meet by themselves. We have broker meetings between u s government officials who can't officially sit down or meet directly with with sanity, still government officials because of US policy, but they can be in a meeting talking to us and that can be overheard. Conversations that can be very productive. Speaker 4: [00:10:00] Spectrum is public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley. Our guest is Monte Craig Blue Energy Blue Energy is a nonprofit working along the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. Speaker 1: Are there technologies out there that you'd love to use, are introduced that you just can't really approach? [00:10:30] Oh absolutely. There's a very clear answer to that. For me, it's mobile payments outside of blue energy. Last year I was part of a Fulbright nexus program, a relatively new program. They launched looking at issues of entrepreneurship, climate change and energy in the Americas. So with 20 of us scholars last year and one of the topics I was investigating was pay as you go solar micro grids or home solutions as a new way of opening up access to electricity [00:11:00] to more remote populations in a cost effective way. And it's very powerful, but it hinges on a few technologies. One is the mobile phone. That's going pretty well already. It's exploding worldwide. Nicaragua has pretty good coverage on a population basis, on a geography basis. That's not great in particular in the region we work in because it's isolated and low population density, so not a strong incentive for the network providers, but it's still coming. Speaker 1: It's coming and every year is, oh, there's one more cell tower. The communities are getting connected [00:11:30] piece by piece, so that's great. Now if you can layer this concept of mobile payments on top of the cell phone network, it allows you to think of lots of creative ways of delivering your services more cost effectively. For example, if you designed the communal energy system, you can envision a system where somebody has a cell phone, they have a payment application on the cell phone, they make a small payment, you know, a couple of cents. They can pre buy a certain amount of energy and then you have a remote control meter [00:12:00] on their charge controller in their home that you can activate through the cell phone network. So they pre-buy, you receive your money digitally, you turn on their system and provide them x number of units of energy that they pre-bought and when it runs out it goes off the operates. Speaker 1: Just like the cell phone and most of the world, they don't have plans, monthly plans, you pre-buy credit, you use them when you're out of credit, you can't make a call. You could do the exact same thing with energy. If you had this mechanism and in a place like the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua where the cost of making a payment [00:12:30] is often as much or more than the payment because you have to take a long boat ride and if it's rainy you could take your days and you have to buy fuel and if you could just do that over your cell phone, you reduce the transaction costs tremendously, which opens up just a ton of new solutions. You know, microfinance, which is taken off all around the world. One of the biggest challenges on the Korean coast in Nicaragua is in microfinance. What people are doing is they're making micropayments over a long period of time, 12 months, 18 months, multiple years in some cases. Speaker 1: [00:13:00] But if paying a dollar costs you $2 to make the payment, it all breaks down. If you could make a $1 payment for a couple pennies on your mobile phone, and that's not to mention the traceability, you get digital records of all transactions in a place where it's very hard to collect information. You can also envision it as a mechanism to push back a lot of information to the user. For example, they could remind them to perform maintenance on their batteries rather than sending [00:13:30] a technician out there to check the batteries. Very easier to train somebody how to check the batteries. The problem is they forget to do it, so if you could send them a text every couple months, check the water level on your batteries could have powerful implications in terms of the cost effectiveness of the life cycle of that system for very cheap. That's the one, it's just to me that would revolutionize how we work and I think that the barrier is mobile payments are starting to take off around the world, particularly in east Africa, parts of Southeast Asia [00:14:00] where the underpinning technology platform is strong enough of the cell phone network and government regulation or non regulation is incentivizing in one way or another.Speaker 1: The creation of those payment systems. There are a few starting to pop up in Central America, but central and Latin America is very far behind the innovation that's been happening in Africa and in Nicaragua in particular. It's just getting off the ground as one initiative and Pesto in the capital city of Managua, [00:14:30] but it's not clear when or how they're going to expand to a more national network. If that's not something that blue energy will create. It's something we can advocate for and speak about, but ultimately we're sort of waiting for that next wave of innovation and technology to come out there so that we can build our services on top of it. Do you have any insights or challenges for engineers out there building technologies that you could potentially use? Like the latrines and solar [00:15:00] and wind? Absolutely. I mean, I think that engineers, especially at fancy institutions like Berkeley, Stanford, and MIT, are often sort of skewed towards thinking about flashy, shiny, new high tech things, which are very fun and exciting and can have an impact on their own, right? Speaker 1: But if you're thinking about engineering and technology for the developing world, it is my belief now that you can have a much bigger impact [00:15:30] by looking at simpler technologies and making incremental gains on those. It's not a sexy, right? I mean, studying latrine for multiple years, you're like, how complicated is a latrine? Right? It doesn't have a ton of moving parts. It's from an engineering perspective, it's a little boring, frankly, but there is surprisingly a ton of work to localize the technology to have it create impact and people's first reaction is, hmm, that sounds kind of boring. Second reaction is we ought to be able to figure that out quickly, but that's not true. You know, haven't latrines been figured out? [00:16:00] Aren't there already latrine designs? Absolutely. And there's latrines that work very well in specific contexts and the challenge is not to go and vent a brand new latrine if you're doing that good for you and maybe you'll invent the best one ever. Speaker 1: But for the majority of engineers out there, we don't need all of them going out there and renting a new latrine. Most of them, I believe could be most productive if they want to work in the development space to think about the process of localizing technology that already exists fundamentally in other [00:16:30] places and doing the tweaking. When you're in the field and you're working with people and you've seen the impact it's creating, it's very exciting and that's what the summer fellows we receive from. We have a partnership here with UC Berkeley, with the cal energy core, four of their fellows come and work with Berliner g every summer. You can ask them. It's a very rewarding experience and a very exciting experience that doesn't look very exciting on paper. Studying latrines for example, but you get out in the field see the impact. Make the progress and learn the social dimensions which ultimately [00:17:00] are the most critical, so I think a lot of the opportunity for creating impact if you're a young engineer is be willing to get your hands dirty, get out there in the field, understand that it takes time and focus on making a real meaningful contribution that's well documented and that builds on the previous person's work and that is prepared to interconnect with the next person who's going to come down. Speaker 1: If you can achieve that, that's how you have a huge impact over time. You're not going come in in six weeks [00:17:30] and sign some brand new thing that's going to solve the water and sanitation problem in the developing world. Those solutions don't exist. Speaker 5: [inaudible] you are listening to the spectrum KLX Berkeley Co founder and executive director of Blue Energy Matiaz Craig is our guest. Blue energy facilitates sustainable development in eastern Nicaragua. Speaker 1: [00:18:00] Have you learned things about sustainability in your experience in Nicaragua that might reflect back on the developed world? I think that is one of the most critical things that I've learned in the last 10 years is that this really is a two way street. It's very arrogant for people from the quote unquote developed world to go into a poor community in the developing world. See, for example, that they don't have a sanitation solution and say, oh, [00:18:30] what they need. Obviously here is this kind of latrine, like you're an instant expert. Like they've never thought of this before and you're an expert. Why? Because you come from the developed world and you can lecture them and train them on sustainability and what do you really know about sustainability? Last 10 years have been very humbling. We in the United States, for example, as a country, don't live anywhere near sustainably, right? Speaker 1: We're consuming resources just left and right. And one approach is to say, oh my gosh, I don't want to [00:19:00] be a hypocrite, so I'm not going to go help. And some people take that path. I know I'm not sustainable, so I'm not going to go help people be sustainable, but I don't think that's very productive. I think what is most productive is to engage in that process out there in the field with an explicit intent of thinking. What can you learn from that experience and how can you take that back to where you come from. That is now an explicit part of our model where we have really two initiatives. We have the community development side, which is the physical work that [00:19:30] gets done in Nicaragua and we have what we call the global leadership program, which is bringing people in in part to contribute to the community development work, but the longterm impact of the global leadership program is to build more awareness in those people who are going to go back to their home countries and be leaders in their community around issues of sustainability for example, and climate change and all these other critical topics because their greatest sort of point of leverage is back in their own community, right? Speaker 1: [00:20:00] They can come contribute some in the field, learn something, but if they go on to be a mayor of their town, for example, like that's going to be a huge impact where a business leader in their community with a more heightened sense of awareness of these critical issues like sustainability work on greening initiatives in their town back in the developed world where we're burning through most of the world's resources. Right? I know that. I know I can have a much bigger impact by cutting my electricity consumption in half than I can by installing [00:20:30] a 50 watt solar panel in a remote community. From a global perspective, obviously locally, that 50 watt panel has a huge impact, so I think we have to approach this as a give and take. We can contribute in the field if we do it in an appropriate longterm way, and that we need to be open to that learning experience in the field and take that back in the developed world. Speaker 1: I think that's vital. What are the future plans for blue energy? We made [00:21:00] a critical decision a couple of years ago that for our community development work, we're going to stay geographically concentrated. We're gonna stay focused on Nicaragua with a strong emphasis on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. We feel that there is a tremendous amount of work to be done there and we have 10 years of experience building relationships, understanding that the culture and society, the key ingredients we feel to actually having a meaningful impact and those are things that we've invested heavily in and we feel [00:21:30] that they don't scale very well and so we feel that if we were to expand geographically, we would have to change our model and work in a different way that would be less impactful. We'd have bigger numbers and less impact. We feel strongly that we can have the most impact by staying focused in this geography until every person on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua has access to basic sanitation, clean water and electricity. Speaker 1: Why would we go work anywhere else? Was the question we finally asked ourselves then. Oh, right now [00:22:00] the way that we have an explicit model for creating impact beyond Nicaragua, it's through the global leadership program and there's different components to that. One I mentioned earlier was bringing in international people to work in Nicaragua, take that transformational experience back home with them and be agents of change in their own lives, in their own communities all around the world. The second component is the institution to institution strengthening. That's when we work with a local government office and train them on it tools [00:22:30] so that they can be more effective in their work. Or we work with another development partner and share technology, so it's a way to have an impact beyond any border, but it's not us going out and physically doing another project. And then the third one is sort of based on the practical action, which is one of the organizations I mentioned earlier that has been an inspiration to me is doing a better job of documenting case studies and the learning and publishing that experience documents that can be shared globally. Speaker 1: We are often [00:23:00] requested people say, oh, I see you worked on, you know this bio sand filter. Can you tell me how it's gone? Well, right now that's a long conversation and we do that, but it's not very resource efficient. If we had really well written out, documented case studies of our experience, what worked, what didn't and why and publish that for the global community, I think that could have a big impact and how can people get involved in blue energy? Well, the first thing we need is to grow our support base financial support base. The number [00:23:30] one thing that people can do to help blue energy is to contribute financially to the organization because honestly we feel we have a model that's working very well. We have a very committed, dedicated staff and what we need to do is do more of what we're doing. Speaker 1: The second thing is if you are a student or young professional who is looking to compliment traditional classroom education with experiential learning and personal learning and growth opportunities, you should take a look at our global leadership program. [00:24:00] There is a program fee associated with that that helps us run a professional program that is financially self-sustainable and helps fund the project work that you actually do in the field that has local impact. The primary opportunity for that if you're a current student is during the summer and if you're a young professional, we have longer term fellowship opportunities that range from three months to a year. Some of them requiring a two year commitment, but that's an opportunity to really get out there and go through the full cycle, you know, help develop, project, execute, analyze [00:24:30] it. At the end you get an opportunity to see the full picture and that's an opportunity for professional and personal growth that people again have leveraged for all sorts of future opportunities. Speaker 1: And then the third thing is technology partnerships. Organizations that we can partner with that are champions of a particular technology, like the water filter for example, that we use. We learned that from an organization in Canada called cost c. A. W. S. T. They issue new plans every year. [00:25:00] We share back our design iterations with them so that it can be incorporated into the evolution of the plans. We're always looking for organizations like that. Just the caveat is we're looking for people that have a longterm commitment and are into design iteration. We're not necessarily looking for the flashiest new gadget that somebody just conceived of. We're looking more for long term technology partnerships. Matiaz Craig, thanks very much for being on spectrum. Thanks very much for having me. It was a pleasure. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 5: [00:25:30] To learn more about blue energy, visit their website. The URL is blue energy group.org spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. We've created a simple link for you to get there. The link is tiny url.com/k a l [00:26:00] x spectrum. Speaker 4: Now several science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks in honor of its 40th anniversary. The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center is sponsoring a series of lectures describing the research behind four Nobel prizes. The laureates are also longtime users of the national energy research. Scientific Computing Center is super computing resources. The last two lectures are being [00:26:30] held at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in June. These lectures are free. Tuesday, June 3rd mapping the universe. The Speaker is George Smoot of UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley lab. He won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2006 for his work on the cosmic background explorer. The lecture will be in the building 66 auditorium, Tuesday, June 3rd noon to 1:30 PM then on Wednesday, June 11 [00:27:00] data computation and the fate of the universe Speaker as salt Perlmutter of UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. He won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. This lecture will be in Lawrence Berkeley lab building 50 auditorium, Wednesday, June 11th noon to 1:30 PM now we'll follow up on a previous spectrum news story. Speaker 4: [00:27:30] The Berkeley News Center reports scientists working together on Kelp Watch 2014 announced today that the west coast shoreline shows no signs of ocean born radiation from Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster. Following their analysis of the first collection of Kelp samples along the western US coastline Kelp Watch 2014 is a project that uses coastal kelp beds as detectors of radioactive seawater arriving from Fukushima [00:28:00] via the North Pacific current. It is a collaborative effort led by Steven Manley, marine biology professor at California State University, Long Beach and Kai vetter, head of applied nuclear physics at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a nuclear engineering professor at the University of California Berkeley. The new results are from samples primarily collected from February 24th through March 14th our data does not show the presence of Fukushima radio isotopes [00:28:30] in west coast, giant kelp or bull kelp. Manly said these results should reassure the public that our coastline is safe and that we are monitoring it for these materials. At the same time, these results provide us with a baseline for which we can compare samples gathered later in the year. Information about the procedures and results including the results of the first samples analysis are available to the public at the website. Kelp watch.berkeley.edu the researchers [00:29:00] will continually update the website for public viewing as more samples arrive and are analyzed, including samples from Canada. The second of the three 2014 sampling periods is scheduled to begin in early July. Speaker 4: The Muse occurred during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Speaker 6: Thank you for listening to spectrum. [00:29:30] If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l x@yahoo.com us in two weeks Speaker 7: at the same time. [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mathias Craig, Co-Founder and Exec. Dir. of Blue Energy. Blue Energy is a not for profit, NGO working in Caribbean coastal communities of Eastern Nicaragua to help connect them to energy, clean water, sanitation and other services. Blueenergygroup.orgTranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l ex Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar [00:00:30] of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hi and good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. This week on spectrum. We present part one of two with our guest Monte as Craig Co founder and executive director of Blue Energy. Blue Energy is a nonprofit nongovernmental organization working among the Caribbean coastal communities of eastern Nicaragua to help connect them to energy, clean water, sanitation, and other essential services. Matiaz Craig is an engineer by training right here at UC Berkeley. [00:01:00] He talks about what he and blue energy have learned about applying and localizing technology through projects that they undertake with remote isolated communities. Give a listen to part one. Monte has. Craig, welcome to spectrum. Thank you for having me. How were you initially drawn to technology? Speaker 1: It started really early for me. I was a tinkerer. I always thought that I would be an inventor when I was young. So I think the, the attraction came, came super early and [00:01:30] then when I studied here at UC Berkeley in civil and environmental engineering, I started getting exposed to technology. Just sort of took it from there. Speaker 3: When was it that you started down this path of connecting technology with sustainability and equitable development? Speaker 1: So I started thinking about that again while I was here at UC Berkeley, I had the opportunity to take a number of classes in the energy and resource group with Professor Richard Norgaard and Dan Cayman, which was really inspirational [00:02:00] for me. And I started to see renewable energy in particular as an opportunity to use technology in a green, sustainable way. And also I liked the international element of it, but this is a global issue around the environment and also around issues of energy and water. And it was easy to see how they could fit together. I think it really started here. And then in graduate school I was at MIT and I had the opportunity to take a class called entrepreneurship in the developing world with Professor Alex Pentland [00:02:30] over in the media lab and that was my first sort of insight into how I might combine those things. Practically speaking in an organization, Speaker 3: when you first started trying to couple those things, energy generation, sustainability, what was the status quo of things? Speaker 1: What was the landscape like? What year was it? I started thinking about renewable energy and wind power back in 1999 when I was a student here at Berkeley. It [00:03:00] was a class project in 2002 at MIT and we launched in Nicaragua in 2004 I think the landscape for small wind in particular, which was what drew my interest initially, it was pretty sparse out there. There weren't many organizations doing small scale wind for development. There have been some small scale wind turbine manufacturers in Europe and in the United States for a number of decades on a commercial scale, but they weren't really thinking about emerging markets and how wind [00:03:30] might contribute to rural electrification in those places. And we formed some nice partnerships, one with Hugh Pigott from Scotland who was the original inventor of the wind turbine design that we were using and worked with him for a number of years to add our own contribution to the design and evolve it. Speaker 1: And were there other groups in the field that you kind of model yourself after? We didn't really have any models for the small scale wind, but there were some organizations that I looked up to and kept track of [00:04:00] in terms of community development, the how to implement technology in community situations in the developing world in particular, one group was called it DG. It was intermediate technology development group. It's now called practical action. They've been around since the 60s promoting how do you do responsible development in communities, deploying technology, but thinking about all the other dimensions around that work. And then another group I have a lot of respect for is out of Portland, Oregon, green empowerment. They've worked a lot with practical action as well. [00:04:30] It's a holistic view on how to use technology to create impact, but with a recognition of all the other components that have to go into that work. Speaker 1: And what was the learning curve like for you and your organization in the early years? Very steep. When we launched the organization, we had a lot of passion, a lot of commitment, a lot of ideas, but we did not have formal business training. Our level of experience in the field, we had some historical experience in Nicaragua, but trying [00:05:00] to launch your organization at work there is quite different than visiting. So I'd say the learning curve was extremely steep. That's been one of the most rewarding parts of this job for the last 10 years is every day I feel like I'm learning something new. And I think in the beginning of the organization we didn't have a very solid structure or a very big organization in terms of number of people. And we've had a lot of turnover over the years. And that's where I think the learning curve remains fairly steep for the institution because you have to [00:05:30] figure out how do you bridge those changes within the organization and how do you document your learning so that you don't have to constantly re learn the same lessons and you get to move on to the next lesson. Speaker 1: When we launched the organization, we had no money, no experience, no major backers, no big team, and we really built it from scratch. And I think there's a lot of learning along the way there. What were the biggest challenges in the early days? Well, the challenges have evolved a lot over the 10 years. [00:06:00] In the early days, I would say the biggest challenge was cash. You know, cash flow for an organization is always a critical issue. And I think in the early days when we had actually no financing, that was a huge issue because we weren't able to pay salaries. It was a struggle to scrape together a little bit of money to buy materials. You know that's okay early on. In fact it can be quite healthy for an organization to start that way because it forces you to be very efficient and to think three times about doing anything before you do it. Speaker 1: [00:06:30] Finding the talent that you need to tackle something as complex as infrastructure in the kind of region that we're in is very challenging and so you can sometimes attract the talent, but then how do you retain it? And it's not only a money issue, it's not only being able to pay people a fair wage, but it's a very dynamic context, a very dynamic environment. And people come and go. You know, if you invest a lot in training, which is a core part of our philosophy, build local capacity, but then that person moves on, [00:07:00] moves to the u s or you train them well enough that they can be employed in the capitol city and has a bit of a brain drain there. So you can't think of, okay, we're just going to invest a lot in this handful of employees. You fifth think, how are we systematically going to continuously train people that we onboard, retain them as long as we can and maybe help them move on to new bright careers. But I think that turnover issues is a big one. Speaker 2: You were listening to spectrum [00:07:30] on KALX Berkeley Co founder and executive director of Blue Energy. All Monte has, Craig is our guests. What's your current Speaker 1: assess for going into a new community? How do you do that? I would say we do it very slowly and thoughtfully. Our approaches. We want to pick communities where we think there's a tremendous amount of need, but where there's also we say in Spanish that the contract parties, the, the commitment [00:08:00] from the people we're going to work with, that the solutions that we're providing and building with them are things that they actually want to commit to and invest in. Early on in the organization, it was a bit throwing darts at a board and to where you're going to start, but in the last five, six years it's become much more systematic and we spend a lot of time visiting with communities. Generally how it starts is one of the leaders from the community comes and finds us. Now we have enough of a presence, enough of a reputation [00:08:30] on the coast that we're a known entity and somebody, you know, the leader of a community comes, says, oh, I saw this water project in this other community. Speaker 1: We would like that as well and we don't just jump at that. We say, okay, duly noted. Thank you for coming. And then when we're out doing, say maintenance or a service visit in another community, we will stop by that community and have a look and start having the meetings. And it's a long process of getting understand the community at first, sort of informally. And then if we think there's an opportunity actually [00:09:00] going into a project development phase where we're starting to look at what the specific needs are, what are the solutions that we could provide, how might they match? And then doing things like understanding the power dynamics in the community. Okay, this one person came and solicited the service and they said they were the leader, but what does that mean? Are they an elected leader? Who Do they represent? Or the head of the fishing cooperative or the head of the church or the head of the communal board. Speaker 1: So we're very cognizant of the fact that communities aren't monolithic and the community [00:09:30] doesn't come speak to you. Somebody does with an agenda and you want to understand who are they representing and you want to understand if they're a minority voice, what do other people think in the community? Who makes decisions? How do they make decisions, understand all of that before you get into a project. Because infrastructure projects to be successful really require longterm relationships. They aren't widgets, they're not selling them pencils and just transactional. They walk away with a pencil, everything's [00:10:00] fine. If you're putting in a water system or an energy system requires operation and maintenance, maybe upgrades in the future, you want to connect those services to economic opportunity to ways to improve health, to support education. There's a lot of moving parts and you want to make sure that the people you're going to work with will stay committed and that the solution will actually provide some benefit and not be just a neat gadget out there on the field for six months and then not work. Speaker 1: So I think [00:10:30] it's very deliberate. We typically add only a couple of new communities per year and then we continue to work with the communities we've historically worked with. Our philosophy is to add new services, to look for new ways to leverage what we've done in the past. If we did a solar lamp program in the past, maybe now they're ready for a larger solar system. Now that they've seen solar and they've worked with it for awhile. So we look at how can we sort of keep moving up the ladder in terms of providing better and better services with more impact. [00:11:00] So within that meeting with them, you know, assessing what the community's like, what's the dynamic around what sort of technologies you'll use and how much education is involved in all that. Different technologies require different levels of involvement, different levels of commitment. Some of them are simpler. Speaker 1: For example, if you're doing a solar lantern project, you don't have to have the buy in of the entire community in a longterm plan necessarily to do a fairly [00:11:30] self contained technology such as that versus if you're doing a solar powered water pumping storage distribution system for a new pilot farm where you might have a lot of stake holders, a lot of moving parts. So we definitely look at how cohesive is the community. You know, some communities are communities by name only because on a map they have one name but it's 50 families that don't really talk or work together on things. Other communities are very tightly knit, [00:12:00] are very into communal goals. And that has a tremendous effect on what solutions we perceive as being viable. Not necessarily ones that we'll do, but even within the sort of the viable range. Because solar water pumping micro farm project requires a lot of coordination. Speaker 1: So if it's a community that's very fractured and very individualistic, that kind of project probably isn't going to work. So that might not be on the table today. So we're always thinking in time horizons to you might see that, oh there could be [00:12:30] an opportunity for that two, three years from now. So it's very much not a cookie cutter approach we put in as much if not more time on the community engagement side of things as we do on the technology. And that's reflected in our staff. You know, how we allocate our time and effort and a lot of that's based on the history of your experience of doing this. And when it hasn't worked. Absolutely. When we started the organization and my brother and I and other members of the organization early on, we know from history going back [00:13:00] before the organization at our mother's work in these communities that the social dimensions are critical. Speaker 1: The technical solution alone will never work. You have to understand people and communities to make that pairing. But I used to think it would be about 80% technology and 20% social, which I thought was a huge improvement over a lot of development initiatives, which are 99% technology, 1% social and almost always fail. So I thought, oh, very progressive and forward looking at us to think 80 20 now I know it's the other way around. [00:13:30] I mean now I say I don't think technology is ever more than 10 or maybe 20% of a solution both in terms of budget but time and the challenges you face and what you have to overcome. You know, you come in with certain ideas about what people need and the right way of doing things. But often those aren't very well informed and they often aren't very well rooted in the reality of the local context. Speaker 1: And I'll give you one example. When we started, we thought communal solutions are the best. So we're going to do community based [00:14:00] solutions versus home scale solutions. So we went in and in the communities we worked in the beginning we just implemented community based solutions. But as I just mentioned earlier, in some of those communities, there isn't a strong social cohesion and the community actually doesn't really want to work together on issues. Well if you come in with a community based solution, it's not going to work very well, but you feel that that's the way it should be. So you start to let go a little by little about your preconceived notions about the way things ought to be and [00:14:30] how they should go. And you start to listen more and listen and observe and adapt your solutions and your methodologies to the reality of what's out there. Speaker 1: And will you often start with a gateway technology, like you were describing the home solar lantern idea or do you sometimes go all in and say this community is ripe for a big project? I would say now we have the full spectrum there. I'd say most communities we are looking for a simpler solution and gateway or beachhead, you know a way to get in there because [00:15:00] we know that if you implement a relatively simple technology to start with, the main value that you're getting is that interaction. You're getting to know the community, but without project do they meet their end of the bargain? You know, are they actually contributing? Like they said they would. If things go badly, you don't lose much. Right? So it's a cheap way to have some immediate impact and get to know and understand the communities better over time and then sort of move up that ladder of complexity where you can have even greater impact. Speaker 1: Some [00:15:30] communities though are very well organized and it looks like all the ingredients are there for successful engagement. It's just they've never had the opportunity. So in those ones, sometimes you skip ahead and you think, okay, maybe we can start with a more complicated system. The main cases that I can think of in my head where we've seen that is where one of the few other development organizations on the coast, because there really aren't many, has already been working in that community and you can leverage the [00:16:00] progress that they've made. And we have some great examples north of Bluefields where probably our strongest partner [inaudible] has been working for over 25 years. Really, really strong community engagement training on the basics of improved farming techniques, financial literacy, just doing great work. So if you go into a community that they've been working with and you start to plan a bigger project, those committee members have already benefited from 10 years of training. And so we notice a huge difference there. [00:16:30] And so for those communities we can think about jumping ahead. Speaker 3: Mm [inaudible] spectrum is a public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley. Our guest is Matiaz Craig Blue Energy. When you start working with a community and you're having success and you've been with them for a number of years, is there a point at which you walk away or the flip side of that, [00:17:00] if it fails, do you say, this isn't going to work? We have to move on. Speaker 1: Our approach with the communities again is the vision is longterm engagement because we know that the challenges that they're facing are very deeply rooted. I mean, these are decades, centuries old barriers that they're facing. You don't solve that in a quarter. You don't solve that in a fiscal year. It's a longterm relationship. Our approach is more continue to build the relationship and think about entering and exiting particular solutions. You might try [00:17:30] a solution and then it turns out that solution in this community doesn't work. It doesn't mean the community is broken. It doesn't mean that they're not worth working with. It means that that's not the right approach. So yeah, there's definitely times where we've entered in, as I mentioned earlier, with the communal approach. It's just pushing this boulder up hill year after and you're trying to build this community association. And it's not working. And we've made some tough decisions in our past where you say, okay, we tried that for a couple of years, we invested a lot. Speaker 1: It [00:18:00] did not work. You go take out that equipment but you don't abandon the community. So now based on what we've learned, what is a better solution? And that's an interactive conversation community. And it's a tough conversation when you go in to take out a technology, sometimes you have to clear the table, acknowledge your mistakes, go back to that conversation about what might work and then reenter with a new solution. And so we certainly have done that. The amount of engagement and commitment to any particular community [00:18:30] in any particular year has a lot to do with funding. These communities are often very difficult to reach. Remember, there's almost no roads on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, almost no civil infrastructure of any kind. So it's a major commitment to get out there and work with these communities. And it has a lot to do with our funding. Speaker 1: So one community we might work with do a number of projects. Then there might be a little, if there's no funding and then we might re-engage, we stay in conversation with them, but we're not out there doing site visits and as frequently if there isn't a budget for it, but I [00:19:00] don't think that we've ever said, no, we're not going to work with this community anymore on anything. We've never reached that point, but certainly solutions have evolved over time. Are there any of these communities, would you consider them indigenous people? Absolutely. I think that's one of the most interesting things about Nicaragua that's often not known outside of the country is that Nicaragua was colonized by the Spanish and the British at the same time and you have two fundamentally different histories on the Pacific [00:19:30] side and on the Caribbean side of the country you have much more homogenous population on the Pacific. Speaker 1: The Spanish, we're sort of building a new empire, a new society, and their approach towards indigenous populations was particularly aggressive and resulted in almost total elimination of indigenous populations. Whereas on the Caribbean coast, the British just had a very different approach. They didn't want to build a large British colony. On the Caribbean coast, they were more interested in the geographic and strategic importance [00:20:00] of that territory. So they wanted control over it. They actually promoted certain indigenous groups on the coast to work for them. So the mosquito Indians were sort of chosen as the most sophisticated, the largest population. So they were given uniforms and armed and the Bible was translated into mosquito. Of course there was a lot of brutality and everything, but it wasn't an extermination policy as it was on the Pacific. And so you have a very different ethnographic history on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua has historically been largely indigenous. Speaker 1: [00:20:30] And then since the time of the British colonization, afro descendant populations that that were brought over during the slave trade and some that different waves. And it's a very complex story. I can't really do it justice here. But on the indigenous side, there's believe seven or more indigenous groups on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, we interact primarily with three of them. So a lot of the communities we work in are indigenous communities. And then we also work with creole, which is one of the Afro [00:21:00] descendant groups. And Garifuna communities, which is a different effort to send an it group that are descended from escaped slaves. It's a very complex ethnographic history on the Caribbean coast, very ethnically diverse, multicultural, and that's part of the beauty of it and there's a certain strength in that. It's also part of the challenge because each of those communities has very different worldviews. Speaker 1: Is there linguistic diversity within the cultural diversity? Still [00:21:30] there is a lot of linguistic diversity and in fact linguistic diversity is what is the pre blue energy story. That's what brings us to Nicaragua in the first place because our mother collector involved is a linguist who specializes in indigenous languages of the Americas in particular and she works on language documentation and revitalization and that's the work that actually brought her to Nicaragua in the early eighties and had [00:22:00] her working out on the Caribbean coast with the Rama people, which is one of the indigenous groups to the south of Bluefields with a language that was really unwritten and was dying out. Native Speakers where there was only a handful left to very old. And so our mother has spent, you know, it's been an ongoing project. It was very intensive during the 80s but it still continues on to this day, continuous generation of new content where she wrote a dictionary, she wrote the syntax and then she's been creating pedagogical materials, [00:22:30] books about the birds and the plants and things that are important to people there. Speaker 1: So that's deeply ingrained in our fabric, both as people, but also I think in the organization of blue energy where we came in thinking more about technical solutions, but we have this history and this, this very important understanding that comes from her work. Really dealing with people and culture. The technologies that you're using, how many of them are you manufacturing locally and how many [00:23:00] do you have to import? So when we first started, we really came in with the idea that local manufacturing was central to what we wanted to do and that it was intrinsically good. We were focused again on the small scale wind turbines that we were committed to manufacturing right there in Bluefields. I think one of the key learnings that we've had is that local manufacturing certainly does have pros. You do get to create more local employment. You do get to build more local technical capacity. Speaker 1: [00:23:30] Those remain true, but that you also have to look at the opportunity cost. If there's a very high precision part, for example, if your machine that needs to be built, if you can't meet the quality standards locally to be able to consistently produce that part within those specifications, but you continue with the local production anyways. What's you're doing is you're creating a future cost. Your maintenance services will need to be greater in the coming years. And in an environment like the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua [00:24:00] where maintenance can be very expensive because it's hard to get places, it's hard to train people to do certain kinds of technical work. You might actually be creating a quite large future cost. And so I think we got more realistic and a deeper understanding of what the pros and the cons of local manufacturing where. And one of the things we came to realize with the small scale wind turbines we were producing was that given sort of the fractured market on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, [00:24:30] we couldn't produce a high enough volume of the units to justify the kinds of investments in setting up the manufacturing and managing quality control that would be required to guarantee that every unit coming off the assembly line was in top shape and wasn't creating future problems for the organization. Speaker 1: That in addition to some other issues of there being a lower wind resource than we had expected and the price of solar coming down dramatically in the last 10 years. And essentially in most cases out competing [00:25:00] small scale wind except in the best wind sites. We decided in 2011 to actually cease producing small scale wind turbines. And at that time we also took just a deep look at all the different technologies that we were working with. So what we have today is it's a mix. You know, we don't try to manufacture solar panels, we don't try to manufacture inverters. Let's buy a high quality internationally available inverter. And let's put our focus [00:25:30] on other things where we could have a greater impact. So on the electricity side, most of the components are off the shelf. And then what we do is we do the design, the need assessment, how many inverters do you need, what size, what size, solar panels, what kind of solar panels? Speaker 1: Right? We do that work, assemble it all, and then we do some local building of components like the structural house of the system. For example, for other technologies like [00:26:00] the Bio sans water filter, like the cookstove, the designs that we're working with, there's a huge gain for local manufacturer. From a technical standpoint, they're very easy to manufacture, so they don't compare to trying to build a solar panel or a wind turbine. So when you do an analysis there, you realize that makes perfect sense to manufacturer the water filter locally in Bluefields. And so we do that. We have a shop space where we manufacture all those water filters locally. Cookstove similar issue. [00:26:30] It's largely built from locally sourced materials, different kinds of mud and rock and things that we've worked hard to identify in the region that we can optimize and so again it wouldn't make sense to try to bring that in from China or Speaker 4: even the capital city. Makes sense to manufacture that locally. Speaker 2: [inaudible] to learn more about blue energy, visit their website, blue energy group.org in part two Mathias [00:27:00] discusses adapting technologies, technologies he would like to work with and the future of blue energy. Now Rick [inaudible] present some of the science and technology events happening locally Speaker 4: over the next two weeks on May 20th Science Festival Director Kashara Hari Well Interview Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, authors of freakonomics superfreakonomics and now think like a freak as part of a Commonwealth club program [00:27:30] at the Castro theater four to nine Castro street at market in San Francisco. The new book aims to help show how to use economics to analyze the decisions we make, the plans we create and even the morals we choose. Tickets. Start at $10 for more information, visit Commonwealth club.org carry the one radio are hosting a free event on Thursday May 29th doors at six 30 show at seven [00:28:00] to produce the program. Sound off at Genentech Hall on the ucs F Mission Bay campus, 616th street in San Francisco. Sound off, we'll feature Dr Kiki Sanford, who we'll interview three scientists. First, UC Berkeley is Dr. Frederick. Loosen well, discuss communication, sound processing. Then ucsfs. Dr. John Howard explores the role of auditory feedback in speech. Speaker 4: Finally, UC Berkeley's [00:28:30] Aaron brand studies the love songs from jumping spiders. rsvp@soundoffthateventbrite.com here's Rick Kaneski with a news story in a paper published in science on May 12th Amy Ogan, Benjamin East Smith and Brooke middly of the Polar Science Center at the University of Washington report that a marine ice sheet claps is potentially underway for the Thwaites [00:29:00] glacier basin in west Antarctica. The ice sheet has been long considered to be prone to instability. The team has applied a numerical model to predict glacier melt and they found that it is already melting. At a rate that is likely too fast to stop. The team predicts runaway collapse of the shelf and somewhere between 200 and 900 years in nature and news is summary of the paper. Andrew Shepherd of the University of Leeds called it a seminal work saying [00:29:30] that it is the first to really demonstrate what people have suspected, that the Thwaites glacier has a bigger threat to future sea level. Then Pine Island music occurred during the show was written and produced. Alex Simon, Speaker 3: thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email or email address is spectrum@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Archaeologist Dr Diana Pickworth. She is presently a Visiting Scholar in the UC Berkeley Near Eastern Studies Department. Formerly Assoc Prof of Mesopotamian Art and Archaeology and Museum Studies at the University of ‘Aden in the Republic of Yemen.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. [inaudible]. Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k [00:00:30] a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hey, good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show this week on spectrum. Our guest is archaeologist Dr Diana. Pick worth. She is presently a visiting scholar in the UC Berkeley Near Eastern studies department. Dr Pick worth is completing the work related to the publication of two volumes [00:01:00] on excavations carried out by a university of California team at the site of Nineveh in northern Iraq. Formerly she was an associate professor of Mesopotamian art and archeology and museum studies at the University of a sudden in the Republic of Yemen. Diana pick worth is an elected fellow of the explorers club and a member of the American School of Oriental Research. Here is that interview. Hi, this is Brad Swift. In today's spectrum interview, Rick Karnofsky [00:01:30] joins me, Rick [inaudible] and today's guest is Diana. Pick worth Diana, welcome to spectrum. Speaker 1: I'm honored and delighted to be here. Speaker 3: Diana would you begin by talking about archeology and how it got started and how it's blossomed into its multifaceted current state. Speaker 1: There's no doubt that the enlightenment in the 19th century sparked a huge interest [00:02:00] in the eastern part of the Ottoman Empire. And so during this period, the European countries, England, France, Germany, Austria, and Italy, we're sending consoles and ambassadors to visit the Parshah and Istanbul. What happened was these countries became competitive in their desire, both the land and knowledge. And this was fueled somewhat by [00:02:30] Darwin's research and in 1830 his work on the Beagle and subsequently his publication of origin of species spoked enormous questions about the Bible. And it was this desire to understand the truth about the Bible. It had been viewed up until that point is a given that it was correct [00:03:00] and it challenged the world view at the time. And avast and I think changing Manoj and so layered from England, Botha from foams moved east of Istanbul into northern Iraq. And what we see is these two men really pitching at each other to stake a claim for that country to excavate in there tells that they [00:03:30] both discovered in the appetite risk space on and is that how the Fertile Crescent got started? Speaker 1: That whole idea of Fertile Crescent, that was a little later, but the Fertile Crescent represents an area where settlement could first begin and so the ice Asya hat is really a points on a map. It's a way of looking at how [00:04:00] geography, rainfall, and natural geographic circumstances create a circumstance where humankind can prosper and it can farm in what is called dry farming. And so what we find, it's an all running up from about the middle of their Dead Sea on the Palestinian literal all the way up in a circle across the top of what [00:04:30] is today, northern Syria and northern Iraq. Those sites date from as early as 9,000 BC and there's no doubt that's where we are. We all finding humankind's first farming and settlement currently. Then what's notable about the transition from the 19th or the 20th century in terms of archeology? I think on the one hand a tremendous continuity so [00:05:00] that those sites that would claimed in the 19th century tend to still be excavated by the same country. Speaker 1: There's an unspoken but still I think quite rigorous concept that a site is handed on. The perspective has become much more global so that we have people excavating in the Middle East, from South Africa, [00:05:30] from South America, from the United States, and these teams in most we would call the new world are essentially funded or sponsored by their universities. That still remains in the European countries. A tradition of sponsorship by the government and this makes a huge difference. They are able to continue with a very shore knowledge of funding [00:06:00] year after year. You talked a little bit about the Fertile Crescent. What are other examples of old settlements? What's the oldest settlement? I think in photo Cresson, certainly one of the most remarkable sites is Choteau here. And this was excavated by the University of California by Ruth Traynham and has some of the earliest illustrative material and [00:06:30] war paintings in that area. And representative, uh, no doubt of the earliest farming settlements. And it's a dense occupation. Surprisingly, there are dense a little later we see sites that we defined by this ceramic heritage, so at this point we have new written documentation but how suna and hello laugh of these very early pottery sites that are named [00:07:00] essentially from the first site, but we find a spread of occupation across the area. Further east, I'm a hindered Daro 2,900 BC is in what is modern day Pakistan and without doubt one of the earliest settlements Speaker 4: [inaudible]Speaker 5: you were listening to spectrum on k a l experts like archaeologist, [00:07:30] Diana [inaudible] is our guest. Speaker 1: How closely does archaeological training in universities track with the real world application of archeology? I think in many cases very well. One of the requirements of an archeologist above all others I think is flexibility and sturdy resilience, but there are three aspects we're trained theoretically [00:08:00] and this I think is where to refer back to your earlier question. There is a change from 19th century archeology today. We're trained to pose a theoretical question to come up with a hypothesis that we will try to test on the ground. I think an area background knowledge is essential training varies in this regard. For example, [00:08:30] in Germany, archeologists are expected to work all over the world whereas we tend to direct our training two area studies say that my area Mesopotamia and Arabian studies really requires a basis of language study under knowledge of the history of the area and so one becomes a specialist in a particular area. Speaker 1: The practical training [00:09:00] is fairly consistent. I think we begin in in the states, the students are sent in the summers to excavations and throughout their graduate career it's hope they'll have an opportunity to really work in different types of sites and all of us begin or hope to with a semester in a field archeology school so that ones practicing perhaps in a situation where one can't cause too much [00:09:30] damage within the United States field of study, how much might one drift from their graduate area into another area of the world as they start their career? That's an interesting question. In my experience, people do really tend to stay within their area of specialization. We're talking about as much as maybe six to eight years of a language study. The geography and the history of an area [00:10:00] becomes embedded in one's training and in one's doctoral dissertation, so I personally don't think there is such a broad shift. Speaker 1: I think theoretically once capable, there's absolutely no doubt and we find also that students who find themselves not to have strong language studies tend to move into pre history. If you're working in pre history, then really one can go anywhere. It doesn't matter. [00:10:30] There are loopholes in the system, some of the technical methods that are being applied to dating things. Does that mess up the history of it all, the timing, the dating, a lot of the earlier work, does it get overturned in terms of how old is this settlement? I think DNA has made an enormous, perhaps the most significant difference and whole groups of people have been shown to not be native to where [00:11:00] they have claimed in their own written literature that they've always left that spin. I think a delightful surprise, very interesting surprise. Certainly high and duel found that everyone going to the Polynesian islands was going in 150 degrees opposite direction from what he had anticipated. Speaker 1: So we do find that as time passes, the studies can be refined, but I would say it's rather a question [00:11:30] of refinement than are there just totally wrong assumptions. Can I call it it all about what proportion of work is done on newly found settlements, settlements that might've been found in the past couple years versus settlements that we've known about for some time? I think the introduction of Google and satellite imagery has made a vast difference to what we can do most recently in [00:12:00] a northeast Iraq in what is now the Kurdish settlement. Recent work by Harvard has discovered an enormous number of settlements and all of the previous research before they went into the field was done using satellite imagery and so that was unavailable until quite recently. It saves money. There's no doubt with satellite imagery. We can sit in an office in Berkeley and look at the satellite [00:12:30] sites surrounding a large site. We can see a pattern perhaps of movement along a track through mountain ranges from settlement, so that's enormously expanded. What we can do in the office before we go into the field. [inaudible] Speaker 6: spectrum is a public affairs show on KALX Berkeley. Our guest is archeologist in Diana. [00:13:00] She is a visiting scholar of the Near Eastern studies department. Speaker 1: Can you start to talk about some of your own work in Iraq? I first went to Iraq as a graduate student at UC Berkeley. I was invited by Professor David Stronach who is the director of the excavation for our first season. There were six graduate students and it was a relatively short season [00:13:30] to explore the site and decide how an excavation would be approached and what would it be involved. I was very determined to go. I had spent most my undergraduate time studying art history and museum studies, but as time went on I became more and more interested in archeology and really love living in the Middle East. I had lived in the Middle East a long time before. I have [00:14:00] a degree in education. And so I had worked as a governess in the Middle East in Yemen, and I was very keen to go back and the first day I climbed up onto Keon check, which is the tail of Nineveh. Speaker 1: I just knew that I'd found what I wanted to do and it was so wonderful and I liked it very much indeed. And I've been there ever since. Okay. And is there any prospect of going back to Nineveh [00:14:30] presently knew? No. Saul is extremely dangerous at the moment, and so unfortunately that's not a possibility. Certainly we've been invited back and I know that I could go back if it ever becomes a safe to do. So what's happened to the tail is hard to know. The other sad aspect is that there has been an enormous growth in the size of Mosul, the city adjacent on the other side of the [00:15:00] Tigris river. Your time in Nineveh. What was the big accomplishment that you thought you folks had achieved? I think in the three years that we were there assessing everything. Today as we write up the reports, it's incredibly encouraging. Speaker 1: We chose about six different areas of exploration that would represent aspects of the long duration at the site. It's an extremely [00:15:30] old city. And so one exploration on the side of the tail was a step trench down and this has been aided by erosion from water so that we were able to get down to 2,500 BC, um, without digging down through it. We could go in from the side. So there was a component that was of a very early period. The Small [00:16:00] Eminence just south of the sail or the citadel of the city where the royal family lived was also explored. And we expose there a really beautiful elite house, you could say, an administrative house and the surrounding area of that. We also worked up on the northern Northwestern corner by the sin gate. And inside of that we found a very fine [00:16:30] industrial area so that we were able to demonstrate that there was pottery making on the site as well as some metalla Jay, I think. Speaker 1: And then on the wall on the southeast corner, David [inaudible] excavated the [inaudible] gate to Housey. Uh, no gate had really been fully excavated by a Western team, although some of the other gates had been partially [00:17:00] excavated by the Iraqis. And that was where we found the evidence of the destruction of the city, which was extremely exciting. After Iraq, you moved back to Yemen? Yes, I had always studied Yemen. I have roped both my masters degree and my phd on the material culture of Saudi Arabia. And so I had written on the stone [00:17:30] statuary of the mortuary temples and it's very fascinating. A great deal of the material had been moved to Europe, so that had one tried to estimate how much there was there. It would have been easy to say very little, very little at all, but long detailed research program made it very clear that it wasn't, that there was very little, it was that it had been so widely dispersed. Speaker 1: [00:18:00] And so I eventually visited maybe as many as 25 museums and brought it all together again, which proved to be very interesting. And I was able to do a lot of dating from that. And then my doctoral dissertation, which I wrote here at Berkeley, was on the gemstones and stamps, seals of South Arabia and that I used to demonstrate the connection between these South Arabians, small kingdoms [00:18:30] and the greater empire, tight polity of a neo, Syria or other later Syrian period. And so what one found was that this trading network connected all the way across the Arabian peninsula up to Gaza and then on into the Assyrian Kingdom. And so there are in the British Museum at Gates that were sent by the king of Saba from Maarib to Gaza [00:19:00] and then on to Nimruz. And these were buried underneath the temple and they're signed with the king's name. So we knew that they had to been used in that way. So I had an enormous interest in Yemen and stayed there and taught in the university, essentially in Aiden, continue to work there until rather recently. Speaker 6: This is spectrum [00:19:30] k, Aleks, Berkeley archaeologist and visiting scholar at UC Berkeley. Diana, pick work. Sorry. Speaker 1: What advice would you give to people who are considering getting into archeology? I think an undergraduate degree in a hard science is really important in the long term and I think that was advice that perhaps [00:20:00] was less prophet earlier. I think there was more stress on art history and I think students today a well-served with incredibly sturdy technological skills, computer skills and science backgrounds and I think to avoid that is to invite a short career. I really do. I think the training of a hard science is also useful. I [00:20:30] think it makes for a strict discipline, critical thinking, theoretical background in thinking on analytical studies is really useful, very, very useful. And then field training this, no doubt. I think that field training prior to going into the field for the first time at least exposes warm to some of the surprises that will arrive. Speaker 1: I think for most archeologists [00:21:00] you have to think on your feet and so unless one is well-prepared and has made detailed studies of what one's going to do, then it's vital to err on the side of caution when you put the first spade in because otherwise it's destroyed and gone. And so those types of preparations, which are easily available. Field schools are available everywhere. So that prepares, I think an archaeologist for the field work aspect. [00:21:30] But Sonia, small part, the fieldwork is such a small part of the overall, it's like a blip in the middle in a way. There's a long lead in of preparation and research and location choice. Then that's the excavation and then an incredibly lengthy period of um, producing the data and getting it out. And the computers help that most excavations today. It's all of the data is going straight [00:22:00] into the computer and can be sent back to the university, which was an advantage, an enormous advantage. Speaker 1: How do you see archeology going forward? What is its future? What I find is that as one area closes, another will open rather recently, the northern Iraq area of what is now Kurdistan has opened up. It became rather safe up there for awhile. [00:22:30] So that an ability to move say from Syria into that area was seized by many archeologists. So that many teams have been in the field, I would say for the last five years in northeast Iraq. And Kurdistan, I googled to check for you where everyone is digging at the moment. And so there's sort of a narrow tight band of Middle Eastern scholars in Israel and down into [00:23:00] Jordan and that's a huge concentration. And then upon the northeastern potting Kurdistan and we've seen an opening up in Saudi Arabia, so wonderful materialists coming out of the tame excavation, which is led by the Germans, uh, by iHuman. That's been very, very exciting. And they are expanding. There's also been a lot of expansion by more than just [00:23:30] the British into the Emirates and say we have a lot of excavations at the moment and Kuwait behind [inaudible] Ku, Wayne and down into Dubai. So when one door closes, another opens and there are people in Oman as well. No one stays home. It's not appealing. We like to be in the field. Speaker 1: Is there anything we haven't asked you about that you want to mention? [00:24:00] Maybe China. There's an enormous ongoing excavations in China at the moment. It's definitely overturning and changing their own knowledge of their own history. And I find that fascinating. And as a northern southern divide about where the origins of China's more recent civilizations came from and so it's been fascinating for me to watch that. As I said [00:24:30] earlier, I think that we're very flexible people and I suppose that would be where I would move if I could never go back to the Middle East. Diana, pick worth. Thanks very much for being on spectrum. Thank you. I've enjoyed myself. Thank you. Speaker 6: Spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. We have created a simple link for you. The link is tiny [00:25:00] URL [inaudible] dot com slash KALX at spectrum. Speaker 3: Now a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Rick Karnofsky joins me when the calendar on May 7th from seven to 9:00 PM UC Berkeley, professor of psychology and neuroscience, Matt Walker. We'll be it. Ask a scientist at the summer street food park, four to eight 11th street in San Francisco. [00:25:30] They'll discuss research showing that sleep is a highly active process that is essential for many cognitive functions including learning, memory, creativity and brain plasticity. The event is free, although you can purchase stuff to eat from the food trucks there. Visit, ask a scientist S f.com for more info. Why are many body problems in physics so difficult? A quantum information [00:26:00] perspective determining the physical behavior of systems composed of several particles is in general very hard. The reason is that the number of possible combinations of states increases exponentially with the number of particles for quantum systems. The situation is even worse in his talk. Ignacio Ciroc will explain this phenomenon in detail and we'll review several approaches to assessing this difficulty and to overcoming it under certain conditions. [00:26:30] NASCIO Ciroc has been director of the theory division at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum optics since December, 2001 this lecture is Monday May 12th at 4:00 PM in [inaudible] Hall, [inaudible] Auditorium on the UC Berkeley campus. This event is free. Speaker 7: Counter culture labs is hosting a few free talks at the pseudo room. Hackerspace two one 41 Broadway in Oakland over the next few weeks. [00:27:00] On May 9th at 7:00 PM we'll hear from Ben Novak, who is it? Paleo geneticist working on using clone cells from cryo-preserved museum specimens and genome editing in an attempt to revive the passenger pigeon from extinction. Then on May 15th at 7:00 PM they will host Anthony Evans who was on the glowing plant project. This project raised a half million dollars on Kickstarter to add firefly DNA to [00:27:30] plants to make them glow. He'll discuss the process, how they've handled the public perception of GMOs and why open source science matters. For more information on these in future events, visit counterculture labs.org Speaker 3: now, Rick Karnofsky with an interesting news story, Speaker 7: nature news reports on an article by Gary Frost and Jimmy Bell from the Imperial College, London and [00:28:00] others that dietary fiber may act on the brain to curb appetite in a paper published in nature communications. On April 29th the team discussed how fiber that is fermented in the colon creates colonic acetate and using radioactively tagged Acetate and pet scans. They showed that colonic acetate crosses the blood brain barrier and it's taken up by the brain of rats. They also showed that acetate [00:28:30] administration is associated with activation of Acetol Coa, a carboxylase, and changes in the expression profiles of regulatory neuropeptides that favor appetite suppression. These observations suggest that Acetate as a direct role in the central appetite regulation. Speaker 4: Mm, thanks to Rick Karnofsky [00:29:00] for help with the interview calendar and with the news music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email, Speaker 8: email addresses spectrum, dedicate a lx@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at the same [00:29:30] time. [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Cathryn Carson is an Assoc Prof of History, and the Ops Lead of the Social Sciences D- Lab at UC Berkeley. Fernando Perez is a research scientist at the Henry H. Wheeler Jr. Brain Imaging Center at U.C. Berkeley. Berkeley Institute for Data Science.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Mm MM. Speaker 3: Uh Huh [inaudible]. Speaker 4: [00:00:30] We'll come to spectrum the science and technology show on Katie l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events. Speaker 3: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Hello and good afternoon. My name is Renee Rao and I'll be hosting today's show this week [00:01:00] on spectrum present part two of our two part series on big data at cal. The Berkeley Institute for data science bids is only four months old. Two people involved with shaping the institute are Catherine Carson and Fernando Perez. They are today's guest Catherine Carson is an associate professor of history and associate dean of social sciences and the operational lead of the social sciences data lab at UC Berkeley for Nana Perez is a research scientist at the Henry H. Wheeler [00:01:30] Jr Brain imaging center at UC Berkeley. He created the iPod iPhone project while he was a graduate student in 2001 and continues to lead the project today. In part two they talk about teaching data science. Brad Swift conducts the interview Speaker 5: on the teaching side of things. Does data science just fold into the domains in the fields and some faculty embrace it, others don't. How does the teaching of data science move [00:02:00] forward at an undergraduate level? Yeah, there there've been some really interesting institutional experiments in the last year or two here at Berkeley. Thinking about last semester, fall of 2013 stat one 57 which was reproducible collaborative data science pitched at statistics majors simply because you have to start with the size that can fit in a classroom [00:02:30] and training students in the practices of scientific collaboration around open source production of software tools or to look at what was Josh Bloom's course, so that's astro four 50 it's listed as special topics in astrophysics just because Josh happens to be a professor in the astronomy department and so you have to list it somewhere. The course is actually called Python for science Speaker 6: [00:03:00] and it's a course that Josh has run for the last, I think this is, this was its fourth iteration and that course is a completely interdisciplinary course that it's open to students in any field. The examples really do not privilege and the homework sets do not privilege astronomy in any way and we see students. I liked her a fair bit in that course as a guest lecture and we see students from all departments participating. This last semester it was packed to the gills. We actually had problems because we couldn't find a room large enough to accommodate. So word of mouth is working. In terms of students finding these [00:03:30] courses, Speaker 5: it's happening. I wouldn't say it's working in part because it's very difficult to get visibility across this campus landscape. I am sure there are innovations going on that even the pis and bids aren't aware of and one of the things we want to do is stimulate more innovation in places like the the professional schools. We'll be training students who need to be able to use these tools as well. What do they have in mind or there [00:04:00] are other formats of instruction beyond traditional semester courses. What would intensive training stretched out over a much shorter time look like? What gaps are there in the undergraduate or graduate curriculum that can effectively be filled in that way? The Python bootcamp is another example of this that's been going on for Speaker 6: for about four years. Josh and I teach a a bootcamp on also python for data science that is immediately before the beginning of the fall semester. Literally the weekend before [00:04:30] and it's kind of, it's a prerequisite for the semester long course, but it's three days of intensive hands-on scientific bite on basically programming and data analysis and computing for three days. We typically try to get a large auditorium and we got 150 to 200 people. A combination of undergrads, Grad Students, postdocs, folks from LVL campus faculty and also a few folks from industry. We always leave, leave a few slots available for people from outside the university to come and that one a has been very popular at [00:05:00] tends to, it's intense to have very good attendance be, it serves as an on ramp for the course because we advertise the in the semester course during the bootcamp and that one has been fairly successful so far and I think it has worked well. Speaker 6: We see issues with it too. That would be that we would like to address three days is probably not enough. Um, it means because it's a single environment, it means that we have to have examples that are a little bit above that can accommodate everyone, but it means they're not particularly interesting for any one group. It would be, I think it would be great to have [00:05:30] things of this nature that might be a little bit better focused at the life sciences and the social sciences that the physical sciences, so that the examples are more relevant for a given community that may be better targeted at the undergraduate and the graduate level so that you can kind of select a little bit in tune the requirements or the methodological base a little bit better to the audience. But so far we've had to kind of bootstrapping with what we have. Speaker 6: There's another interesting course on campus offered by the ice school by Raymond Lecture at the high school called working with open data [00:06:00] that is very much aimed at folks who are the constituency of the high school that have an intersection of technical background with a broader interdisciplinary kind of skills that are the hallmark of the high school and they work with openly available data sets that are existing on the Internet to create basically interesting analysis projects out of them and that's of course that that I've seen come up with some very, very successful and compelling projects at the end of the semester Speaker 7: about the teaching and preparation in universities. In [00:06:30] the course of doing interviews on spectrum, a number of people have said that really the only way to tackle sciences interdisciplinary, the big issues of science is with an interdisciplinary approach, but that that's not being taught in universities as the way to do science. Sarah way to break that down using data science as a vehicle. Speaker 5: I can speak about that as a science and technology studies scholar. The practice of interdisciplinarity, what makes it actually work is one of the [00:07:00] the most challenging social questions that can be asked of contemporary science and adding into that the fact that scientists get trained inside this existing institution that we've inherited from let's roughly say the Middle Ages with a set of disciplines that have been in their current form since roughly the late 19th century. That is the interface where I expect in the next oh two to five decades major transformations in research universities. [00:07:30] We don't yet know what an institution or research institution will look like that does not take disciplines as it sort of zero order ground level approximation to the way to encapsulate truth. But we do see, and I think bids is like data science in general and an example of this. We do see continual pressure to open up the existing disciplines and figure out how to do connections across them. It's [00:08:00] not been particularly easy for Berkeley to do that in part because of the structure of academic planning at our institution and in part because we have such disciplinary strengths here, but I think the invitation for the future that that word keeps coming back invitation. The invitation for the future for us is to understand what we mean by practicing interdisciplinarity and then figure out how to hack the institution so that it learns how to do it better. [inaudible] Speaker 8: [inaudible] [00:08:30] you're listening to structure fun. K A, l ex Berkeley Fasten Kirsten and Fernando Perez are our guests. They're part of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science for Bids [inaudible] Oh, Speaker 6: it seems that data science has an almost unlimited [00:09:00] application. Are there, are you feeling limits? I don't know about limits specifically because I think in principle almost any discipline can have some of its information and whatever the concepts and constructs of that discipline can probably be represented in a way that is amicable to quantitative analysis of some sort. In that regard, probably almost any discipline can have a data science aspect to it. I think it's important not to sort of [00:09:30] over fetishize it so that we don't lose sight of the fact that there's other aspects of intellectual work in all disciplines that are still important. That theory still has a role. That model building still has a role that, uh, knowing what questions to ask, it's still important that hypotheses still matter. I'm not so sure that it's so much an issue of drawing arbitrary limits around it, but rather of being knowledgeable and critical users of the tools and the approaches that are offered. Speaker 6: Because in terms of domain [00:10:00] applications, I actually recently saw at the strata conference, which is one of these more industry oriented big data conferences that took place a few weeks ago in Silicon Valley. It's in Santa Clara. One of the best talks that I saw at the conference was an analysis half the poem, if I told him that Gertrude Stein wrote about Picasso After Picasso painted this very famous portrait of her. And that poem has a very, very repetitive rhythmic structure. It has very few words and it's a long poem with a very peculiar linguistic structure. And [00:10:30] this hardest, I, I'm blanking on his name right now, but he's an artist who works kind of at the intersection of digital arts in, in linguistics wrote basically a custom one off visual analysis and visualization tool to work on the structure of this poem to visualize it, to turn it into music. Speaker 6: And it was a beautiful talk. It was a beautiful and very interesting talk and this was kind of the exact opposite of this was tiny data. This was one poem and in fact during the Q and a they asked him and he said, well I've tried to use the tool [00:11:00] on a few other things and there's a few songs in hip hop that it works well with, but it's almost, it's almost custom made for this one poem, right? So this was sort of tiny data, completely non generalizable and yet I thought it was fascinating and beautiful talk. So that's kind of an example that I would have never have thought of as as data science. Any examples of misapplication? Speaker 5: I think we can admit that data science is a buzzword that is [00:11:30] exactly through, it's almost indefinable nature creates space for people to do methodologically problematic and in many cases also uninteresting work. Just throwing data into an analysis without asking is this the right analysis will get you stupid or misleading answers. It's the garbage in out principle. So yeah, like any intellectual tool in the toolkit, [00:12:00] there are misleading conclusions that can be drawn and one of the powers that Berkeley brings to this effort in data science is a focus on the methodology, the intelligent development of methodology along with just building things that look like tools on their own. I think that's going to be the place with the sweet spot for universities because of the emphasis on rigor and stringency and reasoning [00:12:30] along with just getting out results that look good and are attractive Speaker 7: with data science. Are there infrastructure challenges that are worth talking about either in industry or at an academic institution? Because I know that computing power now through Amazon, Google organizations like that are enormous and so industry is sort of giving up the idea of having their own [00:13:00] computational capacity and they're using cloud virtual universities I would think are following suit. Speaker 6: Yes, there is work being done already on campus in that regard. We've had some intersection with those teams. The university right now, uh, we've had since last year a new CIO on campus, Larry Conrad, who's been spearheading an effort to sort of reimagine what the research computing infrastructure for campus should look like. [00:13:30] Considering these questions precisely of what is happening in industry, what are the models that are successfully being used at other institutions to provide larger scales off competitional resources across all disciplines and beyond the disciplines that have been traditionally the ones that have super computers. Well, there's a long history of departments, again, like physics, like competition, fluid dynamics, teams like quantum chemistry teams that have had either their own clusters or that have large budgets who have access to the supercomputing centers at [00:14:00] the doe labs and things of that nature. But as we've been saying today, all of a sudden those needs are exploding across all disciplines and the usage patterns are changing and that often what is the bottleneck is maybe not the amount of raw compute power, but the ability to operate over a very large data sets, so maybe storage is the issue or maybe throughput biologists often end up buying computers that look really weird. Speaker 6: Too many supercomputing centers because they, the actual things that they need are skewed in a different way and so there are certainly [00:14:30] challenges in that regard when we do know that Berkeley is right now at least in the midst of making a very concerted and serious attempt at at least taking a step forward on this problem. Speaker 7: A lot of data is derived from personal information. Are there privacy concerns that you have [inaudible] Speaker 5: they're all quite definitely in so many different ways that the input of experts who have thought about questions of consent, of privacy, [00:15:00] of the challenges around keeping de identified data d identified when it is possible through analytics to understand what patterns are emerging from them that is going to be so key. Especially to working with social data. And so one of the still open questions for all of us working with data that is about people is how to develop the practices that will do the protections necessary [00:15:30] in order to avoid the kinds of catastrophic misuses and violations of privacy that many of us do. Fear will be coming our way as so much data becomes available so fast with so many invitations to just make use of it and worry about the consequences later. That's not the responsible way forward. And I would like to see bids and Berkeley take on that challenge as part of its very deliberate agenda. Speaker 8: [00:16:00] Okay. Spectrum is a public affairs show on k a l ex Berkeley. Our guests are Cathryn Carson and Fernando Perez. In the next segment they talk about institutional reactions to bids. Oh, Speaker 7: are there any impediments that you've run into within the bids process [00:16:30] of getting up and running? Cause it's been going since, uh, Speaker 5: it's not been going on that long as it, it's only December of 2013. Pretty recent, but I'm sure there's gotta be some institutional pushback or no, it's, it's been incredible actually how much support the institution has given. What bids is though, is a laboratory for the kind of collaboration that we're trying to instantiate. And so you have 13 brilliant Co-pi eyes each with their own vision and figuring out where [00:17:00] the intersection is and how to get the different sets of expertise and investments where they, where those intersections lie and how to get them aligned. I mean, that's, that's one of the fascinating challenges in front of beds as a laboratory in the small, for the process at large that we're trying to do Speaker 7: on the tools and programming side. How would you break up what languages are providing, what kind of capability, [00:17:30] and are there new languages that are ascendent and other languages that are languages that are losing their grip? I'm sort of curious. It's a, it's another trivia questions that I think might have some interest for people. No, I think there's, there's clearly an ascendance. I think naturally the expansion of the surface of people interested in these problems Speaker 6: is naturally driving the growth and importance of high level languages that are immediately usable by domain scientists. We're not full time programmers [00:18:00] and professional programmers. Traditionally a lot of the high end computing had been done in languages like c, c plus plus for trend and some Java that are languages that tend to be more the purview of, of people who do lots of software development. And a lot of that did happen in departments like physics and chemistry and computer science, but not so much in other disciplines. And so we're seeing the rise of open source languages like Python and r that are immediately applicable and easy to use for data analysis where a few commands [00:18:30] can load a file, compute some statistics on it, produce a few visualizations, and you can do that in five lines of code, not having to write a hundred or 500 lines of c plus plus. Speaker 6: Right. And so the languages like that are, they're not new. Both I think are came out in the late eighties early nineties python came out in 1991 but they're seeing a huge amount of growth in recent years for this reason. There's also a growth of either new tools to extend these languages [00:19:00] or new languages as well. Tools for example, that connect these languages to databases or extensions to these languages to couple them to databases in better ways so that people don't have to only write raw sequel, which SQL is not the classic language for interacting with databases, so extensions to couple existing languages to database back ends. A lot of work is being done in that direction and there are some novel languages. For example, there's a team at MIT that about two years ago started [00:19:30] a project for a new language called Julia that is aimed at numerical computing, but it's sort of re-imagining. Speaker 6: What would you do if you wanted to create a language like python with the strengths of language like python or Ruby or r, but if you were doing that today with the lessons of the last 20 years, that would be good for numerical computing, but it would be easy to use for domain scientists. That would be high level, that would be interactive, that would feel like a scripting tool, but that would also give you very high performance. [00:20:00] If you had the the last 20 years of lessons and the advances in some of the underlying technology and improved compiler machinery that we have today, how would you go about that problem? And I think the Giulia team at MIT is making rapid progress and it has caught the intention of people in the statistics community of people in the numerical analysis and algorithms community. Some prominent people have become very interested in how to become active participants in its development. Speaker 6: So we're seeing both mature tools like python and are growing in their strength and and their importance. At the latest Strada Conference, [00:20:30] for example, there was a an analysis of kind of the the abstracts submitted that had r and python in their names versus things like excel or sequel or Java and Python and are clearly dominating that space, but also these, these kinds of more novels, sort of research level languages that whose futures still not clear because they're very, very young, but at least they're exploring sort of the frontier of what will we do in the next five or 10 years. And is this an area that's ripe for a commercial software creators who develop [00:21:00] a tool that would be specific to data science and sort of the same way that Mat lab is kind of specific now it's kind of a generic tool for mathematics. Obviously my answer here is extremely biased, but I'm, I sort of think that the space for a, the window to create a proprietary data science language is closed already. Speaker 6: I think the community simply would not adopt a new one. There are some existing successful ones such as mat lab, IDL, which is smaller than Madlib. It is widely used in the astronomy and astrophysics. [00:21:30] And Physics Communities Mathematica, which is a project that came out of the mathematics and physics world and that is very, very sophisticated and interesting. Maple, which is also a mathematics language. Those are successful existing proprietary languages. I think the mood has changed to these are products that came out in the eighties and the nineties. I think the, the window for that, uh, as a purely proprietary offer has closed. I think what we're going to see is the continued growth and the rise potential. You have new entrants that are fundamentally [00:22:00] open source, but yet that maintain, as I said earlier, a healthy dialogue with industry because it doesn't mean, for example, in the art world there are companies that build very successful commercial products around are there is a product called r studio that is a development environment for analysis in our, and that's a company, there's a company called I think revolution analytics. Speaker 6: I think they built some sort of sort of large scale backend high-performance version of our, I don't know the details, I don't use it, but I've seen their website. I think they're a large company that builds kind of our for the enterprise. So I think [00:22:30] that's what we're going to see moving forward at the base. People want the base technology, the base language to be open source. And I think for us as universities and for me as a scientist, I think that's a Tenet I'm not willing to compromise on because I do not want a result that I obtain or result that I published or a tool that I educate my students with to have a black box that I'm legally prevented from opening and to tell my student, well, this is a result about nature, but you can't understand how it was achieved because you are legally prevented from opening the box. [00:23:00] I think that is fundamentally unacceptable. But what is, I think a perfectly sensible way forward, is to have these base layers that are open on top of which domain specific tools can be created by industry that add value for specific problems, for specific domains that may be add performance, whatever. Catherine Carson and Fernando Perez. Thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Thanks for having us here. Thanks much. Speaker 8: [inaudible]Speaker 9: [00:23:30] all spectrums. Past shows are archived on iTunes university. We've created a simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/k Speaker 1: a l x Speaker 8: spectrum Speaker 1: Rick Curtis Skin. I will present a few of the science and technology events [00:24:00] happening locally over the next two weeks. Speaker 10: Counter culture, labs and pseudo room present gravitational waves, results and implications with Bicep to collaborator Jamie Tolan at the pseudo room, hackerspace to one 41 Broadway in Oakland on Sunday, April 27th at 7:00 PM recently, scientists from the Bicep to experiment recorded their data findings demonstrating [00:24:30] evidence of gravitational waves that may imply cosmic inflation. The bicep to experiment is an international collaboration of research and technology from many institutions including a team at Stanford University work. Jamie Tolan works. Jamie will discuss the results of the bicep two experiment and its scientific contribution to current theories that attempt to explain the why, what and how of our universe. The event will be free. Speaker 1: On April 30th UCLA professor [00:25:00] of geography, Jared diamond will give this year's Horace m Albright Lecture in conversation. Diamond is best known for his Pulitzer Prize winning book, guns, germs and steel and this lecture he will discuss his newest book, the world until yesterday, what we can learn from traditional societies. The book is about how traditional peoples differ from members of modern industrial societies and their reactions to danger. He will then produce B in a question answer session with the audience doors open at 6:00 PM [00:25:30] the event is free and open to the public on a first come first served basis will be held Wednesday, April 30th from seven to 8:30 PM in the International House Auditorium at two two nine nine Piedmont Avenue Berkeley. Speaker 10: The theme of Mays science at the theater is science remix. Joined Berkeley lab scientists at the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts in Richmond, California on May 1st at 7:00 PM they'll discuss how discovery [00:26:00] happens. Help you show what science means to you and reveal why science can be as personal as you want it to be. Light refreshments will be served, but bring your imagination and participate at this free event. Speaker 1: A feature spectrum is to present new stories about science that we find particularly interesting. Rick Carnesi joins me in presenting the news. Speaker 10: Nature News reported on April 13th that a team of scientists from [00:26:30] Caltech have estimated that Mars's atmosphere was probably never thick enough to keep temperatures on the planet surface above freezing for very long. Edwin kite now at Princeton used from the Mars reconnaissance orbiter to catalog more than 300 craters and an 84,000 square kilometer area near the planets equator. The sizes of the creators were compared to computer models with varying atmospheres. Dance [00:27:00] or atmospheres would have broken up small objects as they do on earth, but the high frequency of smaller craters on Mars suggest the upper limit of atmospheric pressure on Mars was only one or two bar. This most likely means a temperatures on Mars have typically been below freezing. Did the team notes that their findings do allow the possibility of scenarios of Mars having a slightly thicker atmosphere at times. Do you perhaps to volcanic activity or gas is released by the large impact events and these could have [00:27:30] made Mars warmer for decades or centuries at a time, allowing water to flow. Then Speaker 1: science daily reports one of the first social science experiments to rest on. Big Data has been published in plus one. A chair of investigators from Simon Fraser University analyzed when humans start to experience and age-related decline in cognitive motor skills. The researchers analyze the digital performances of over 3000 starcraft two players, age 16 to 44 starcraft two is a ruthless intergalactic computer [00:28:00] game that players often undertake to win serious money. Their performance records, which can be easily accessed, represent thousands of hours worth of strategic real time. Cognitive based moves performed at various skill levels using complex statistical modeling. Researchers distilled meaning from this colossal compilation of information about how players responded to their opponents and more importantly, how long they took to react after around 24 years of age, players show slowing and a measure of cognitive speed that is known to be important for performance. [00:28:30] Explains Joe Thompson lead author of the study. This cognitive performance decline is present even at higher levels of skill, but there's a silver lining in this earlier than expected slippery slope into old age. Thompson says older players, those slower seem to compensate by employing simpler strategies and using the games interface more efficiently. The younger players enabling them to retain their skill despite cognitive motor speed losses. These findings says Thompson suggests that our cognitive motor capabilities are not stable across our adulthood, but are constantly [00:29:00] in flux and that our day to day performance is a result of the constant interplay between change and adaptation. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 11: and music heard during this show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Today's interview was edited by Rene Rau. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email or email [00:29:30] address is spectrum dot kalx@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same tone. [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Cathryn Carson is an Assoc Prof of History, and the Ops Lead of the Social Sciences D- Lab at UC Berkeley. Fernando Perez is a research scientist at the Henry H. Wheeler Jr. Brain Imaging Center at U.C. Berkeley. Berkeley Institute for Data Science.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. [inaudible] [inaudible]. Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science [00:00:30] and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hi, good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show this week on spectrum we present part one of our two part series on big data at cal. The Berkeley Institute for Data Science or bids is only [00:01:00] four months old. Two people involved with shaping the institute are Catherine Carson and Fernando Perez and they are our guests. Catherine Carson is an associate professor of history and associate dean of social sciences and the operational lead of the social sciences data lab at UC Berkeley. Fernando Perez is a research scientist at the Henry H. Wheeler Jr Brain imaging center at UC Berkeley. He created the ipython project while a graduate student in 2001 [00:01:30] and continues to lead the project here is part one, Catherine Carson and Fernando Perez. Welcome to spectrum. Thanks for having us and I wanted to get from both of you a little bit of a short summary about the work you're doing now that you just sort of your activity that predates your interest in data science. Speaker 4: Data Science is kind of an Ale defined term I think and it's still an open question precisely what it is, but in a certain sense all of my research has been probably under the umbrella [00:02:00] of what we call today data science since the start. I did my phd in particle physics but it was computational in particle physics and I was doing data analysis in that case of models that were competitionally created. So I've sort of been doing this really since I was a graduate student. What has changed over time is the breadth of disciplines that are interested in these kinds of problems in these kinds of tools and that have these kinds of questions. In physics. This has been kind of a common way of working on writing for a long time. Sort of the deep intersection [00:02:30] between computational tools and large data sets, whether they were created by models or collected experimentally is something that has a long history in physics. Speaker 4: How long the first computers were created to solve differential equations, to plot the trajectories of ballistic missiles. I was one of the very first tasks that's computers were created for so almost since the dawn of coats and so it's really only recently though that the size of the data sets has really jumped. Yes, the size has grown very, [00:03:00] very large in the last couple of decades, especially in the last decade, but I think it's important to not get too hung up on the issue of size because I think when we talk about data science, I like to define it rather in the context of data that is large for the traditional framework tools and conceptual kind of structure of a given discipline rather than it's raw absolute size because yes, in physics for example, we have some of the largest data sets in existence, things like what the LHC creates [00:03:30] for the Higgs Boson. Those data sets are just absolute, absurdly large, but in a given discipline, five megabytes of data might be a lot depending on what it is that you're trying to ask. And so I think it's more, it's much, much more important to think of data that has grown larger than a given discipline was used in manipulating and that therefore poses interesting challenges for that given domain rather than being completely focused on the raw size of the data. Speaker 1: I approached this from an angle that's actually complimentary to Fernando in part because [00:04:00] my job as the interim director of the social sciences data laboratory is not to do data science but to provide the infrastructure, the setting for researchers across the social sciences here who are doing that for themselves. And exactly in the social sciences you see a nice exemplification of the challenge of larger sizes of data than were previously used and new kinds of data as well. So the social sciences are starting to pick up say on [00:04:30] sensor data that has been placed in environmental settings in order to monitor human behavior. And social scientists can then use that in order to design tests around it or to develop ways of interpreting it to answer research questions that are not necessarily anticipated by the folks who put the sensors in place or accessing data that comes out of human interactions online, which is created for entirely different purposes [00:05:00] but makes it possible for social scientists to understand things about human social networks. Speaker 1: So the challenges of building capacity for disciplines to move into new scales of data sets and new kinds of data sets. So one of the ones that I've been seeing as I've been building up d lab and that we've jointly been seeing as we tried to help scope out what the task of the Berkeley Institute for data science is going to be. How about the emergence [00:05:30] of data science? Do you have a sense of the timeline when you started to take note of its feasibility for social sciences? Irrespective of physics, which has a longer history. One of the places that's been driving the conversations in social sciences, actually the funding regime in that the existing beautifully curated data sets that we have from the post World War Two period survey data, principally administrative data on top of that, [00:06:00] those are extremely expensive to produce and to curate and maintain. Speaker 1: And as the social sciences in the last only five to 10 years have been weighing the portfolio of data sources that are supported by funding agencies. We've been forced to confront the fact that the maintenance of the post World War Two regime of surveying may not be feasible into the future and that we're going to have to be shifting to other kinds of data that are generated [00:06:30] for other purposes and repurposing and reusing it, finding new ways to, to cut it and slice it in order to answer new kinds of questions that weren't also accessible to the old surveys. So one way to approach it is through the infrastructure that's needed to generate the data that we're looking at. Another way is simply to look at the infrastructure on campus. One of the launching impetuses for the social sciences data laboratory was in fact the budget cuts of 2009 [00:07:00] here on campus. When we acknowledged that if we were going to support cutting edge methodologically innovative social science on this campus, that we were going to need to find ways to repurpose existing assets and redirect them towards whatever this new frontier in social science is going to be. Speaker 5: You were listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley, Catherine Carson and Fernando Perez, our guests. [00:07:30] They are part of the Berkeley Institute for data science known as big [inaudible]. Speaker 4: Fernando, you sort of gave us a generalized definition of data science. Do you want to give it another go just in case you evoke something else? Sure. I want to leave that question slightly on answer because I feel that to some extent, one of the challenges we have as an intellectual effort that we're trying to tackle at the Brooklyn [00:08:00] instead for data science is precisely working on what this field is. Right. I don't want to presuppose that we have a final answer on this question, but at least we, we do know that we have some elements to frame the question and I think it's mostly about an intersection. It's about an intersection of things that were being done already on their own, but that were being done often in isolation. So it's the intersection of methodological work whereby that, I mean things like statistical theory, applied mathematics, computer science, [00:08:30] algorithm development, all of the computational and theoretical mathematical machinery that has been done traditionally, the questions arising from domain disciplines that may have models that may have data sets, that may have sensors that may have a telescope or that may have a gene sequencing array and where are they have their own theoretical models of their organisms or galaxies or whatever it is and where that data can be inscribed and the fact that tools need to be built. Speaker 4: Does data doesn't get analyzed by blackboards? Those data gets analyzed by software, but this is software that is deeply woven [00:09:00] into the fabric of these other two spaces, right? It's software that has to be written with the knowledge of the questions and the discipline and the domain and also with the knowledge of the methodology, the theory. It's that intersection of this triad of things of concrete representation in computational machinery, abstract ideas and methodologies and domain questions that in many ways creates something new when the work has to be done simultaneously with enough depth and enough rigor on all [00:09:30] of these three directions and precisely that intersection is where now the bottleneck is proving to be because you can have the ideas, you can have the questions, you can have the data, you can have the the fear m's, but if you can't put it all together into working concrete tools that you can use efficiently and with a reasonably rapid turnaround, you will not be able to move forward. You will not be able to answer the questions you want to answer about your given discipline and so that embodiment of that intersection is I think where the challenge is opposed. Maybe there is something new called [00:10:00] data science. I'd actually like to suggest that Speaker 1: the indefinable character of data science is actually not a negative because it's an intersection in a way that we're all still very much struggling. How to define it. I won't underplay that exactly in that it's an intersection. It points to the fact that it's not an intellectual thing that we're trying to get our heads around. It's a platform for activity for doing kinds of research that are either enabled or hindered by the [00:10:30] existing institutional and social structures that the research is getting done in, and so if you think of it less as a kind of concept or an intellectual construct and more of a space where people come together, either a physical space or a methodological sharing space, you realize that the indefinable ness is a way of inviting people in rather than drawing clear boundaries around it and saying, we know what this is. It is x and not Speaker 4: why [00:11:00] Berkeley Institute for data science is that where it comes in this invitation, this collection of people and the intersection. That's sort of the goal of it. Speaker 1: That's what we've been asked to build it as not as uh, an institute in the traditional sense of there are folks inside and outside, but in the sense of a meeting point and a crossing site for folks across campus. That's [00:11:30] something that's been put in front of us by the two foundations who have invested in a significant sum of money in us. That's the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Alfred p Sloan Foundation. And it's also become an inspiring vision for those of us who have been engaged in the process over the last year and a half of envisioning what it might be. It's an attempt to address the doing of data science as an intersectional area within a research university that has existing structures [00:12:00] and silos and boundaries within it. Speaker 4: And to some extent you try to deconstruct the silos and leverage the work done by one group, share it with another, you know, the concrete mechanisms are things that we're still very much working on it and we will see how it unfolds. There's even a physical element that reflects this idea of being at a crossroads, which is that the university was willing to commit to [inaudible] the physical space of one room in the main doe library, which is not only physically [00:12:30] at the center of the university and that is very important because it does mean that it is quite literally at the crossroads. It is one central point where many of us walk by frequently, so it's a space that is inviting in that sense too to encounters, to stopping by to having easy collaboration rather than being in some far edge corner of the campus. Speaker 4: But also intellectually the library is traditionally the store of the cultural and scientific memory of an institution. And so building this space in the library is a way of signaling [00:13:00] to our community that it is meant to be a point of encounter and how specifically those encounters will be embodied and what concrete mechanisms of sharing tools, sharing coach, showing data, having lecture series, having joint projects. We're in the process of imagining all of that and we're absolutely certain that we'll make some mistakes along the way, but that is very much the intent is to have something which is by design about as openly and as explicitly collaborative as we can make it and I think [00:13:30] in that sense we are picking up on many of the lessons that Catherine and her team at the d lab have already learned because the d lab has been in operation here in Barrows Hall for about a year and has already done many things in that direction and that at least I personally see them as things in the spirit of what bids is attempting to do at the scale of the entire institution. D Lab has been kind of blazing that trail already for the last year in the context of the social sciences and to the point where their impact has actually spread beyond the social sciences because so many of the things that they were doing or were [00:14:00] found to have very thirsty customers for the particular brand of lemonade that they were selling here at the lab. And their impact has already spread beyond the social sciences. But we hope to take a lot of these lessons and build them with a broader scope. Speaker 1: And in the same way BYD sits at the center of other existing organizations, entities, programs on campus, which are also deeply engaged in data science. And some of them are research centers, others of them are the data science masters program in the School of information where [00:14:30] there is a strong and deliberate attempt to think through how in a intelligent way to train people for outside the university doing data science. So all of these centers of excellence on campus have the potential to get networked in, in a much more synergistic way with the existence of bids with is not encompassing by any means. All of the great work that's getting done in teaching research around data science on this campus Speaker 6: [00:15:00] spectrum is a public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley. Our guests are Cathryn Carson and Fernando Perez. In the next segment they talk about challenges in Berkeley Institute for Data Science Phase Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 3: and it seems that that eScience does happen best in teams and multidisciplinary [00:15:30] teams or is that not really the case? Speaker 1: I think we've been working on that assumption in part because it seems too much to ask of any individual to do all the things at once. At the same time, we do have many specimens of individuals who cross the boundaries of the three areas that Fernando was sketching out as domain area expertise, hacking skills and methodological competence. [00:16:00] And it's interesting to think through the intersectional individuals as well. But that said, the default assumption I think is going to have to be that teamwork collaboration and actually all of the social engineering to make that possible is going to be necessary for data science to flourish. And again, that's one of the challenges of working in a research university setting where teamwork is sometimes prized and sometimes deprecated. Speaker 4: That goes back to the incentive people building tools don't necessarily get much attention, [00:16:30] prestige from that. How do you defeat that on an institutional level within the institute or just the community? Ask us in five years if we had any success. That's one of the central challenges that we have and it's not only here at Berkeley, this is actually, there's kind of an ongoing worldwide conversation happening about this every few days. There's another article where this issue keeps being brought up again and again and it's raising in volume. The business of creating tools is becoming actually an increasing [00:17:00] part of the job of people doing science. And so for example, even young faculty who are on the tenure track are finding themselves kind of pushed against the wall because they're finding themselves writing a lot of tools and building a lot of software and having to do it collaboratively and having to engage others and picking up all of these skills and this being an important central part of their work. Speaker 4: But they feel that if their tenure committee is only going to look at their publication record and [00:17:30] 80% of their actual time went into building these things, they are effectively being shortchanged for their effort. And this is a difficult conversation. What are we going to do about it? We have a bunch of ideas. We are going to try many things. I think it's a conversation that has to happen at many levels. Some agencies are beginning, the NSF recently changed the terms of its biosketch requirements for example. And now the section that used to be called relevant publications is called relevant publications and other research outcomes. And in parentheses they explained such as software [00:18:00] projects, et cetera. So this is beginning to change the community that cure rates. For example, large data sets. That's a community that has very similar concerns. It turns out that working on a rich and complex data set may be a Labor that requires years of intensive work and that'd be maybe for a full time endeavor for someone. Speaker 4: And yet those people may end up actually getting little credit for it because maybe they weren't the ones who did use that data set to answer a specific question. But if they're left in the dust, no one will do that job. Right. And so [00:18:30] we need to acknowledge that these tasks are actually becoming a central part of the intellectual effort of research. And maybe one point that is worth mentioning in this context of incentives and careers is that we as the institution of academic science in a broad sense, are facing the challenge today that these career paths and these kinds of intersectional problems and data science are right now extremely highly valued by industry. [00:19:00] What we're seeing today with this problem is genuinely of a different scale and different enough to merit attention and consideration in its own right. Because what's happening is the people who have this intersection of skills and talents and competencies are extraordinarily well regarded by the industry right now, especially here in the bay area. Speaker 4: I know the companies that are trying to hire and I know that people were going there and the good ones can effectively name their price if they can name their price to go into contexts that are not [00:19:30] boring. A lot of the problems that industry has right now with data are actually genuinely interesting problems and they often have datasets that we in academia actually have no access to because it turns out that these days the amount of data that is being generated by web activity, by Apps, by personal devices that create an upload data is actually spectacular. And some of those data sets are really rich and complex and material for interesting work. And Industry also has the resources, the computational resources, the backend, the engineering expertise [00:20:00] to do interesting work on those problems. And so we as an academic institution are facing the challenge that we are making it very difficult for these people to find a space at the university. Yet they are critical to the success of modern data driven research and discovery and yet across the street they are being courted by an industry that isn't just offering them money to do boring work. It's actually offering them respect, yes, compensation, but also respect and intellectual space and a community that values their work and that's something [00:20:30] that is genuinely an issue for us to consider. Speaker 4: Is there a way to cross pollinate between the academic side and industry and work together on building a toolkit? Absolutely. We've had great success in that regard in the last decade with the space that I'm most embedded in, which is the space of open source scientific computing tools in python. We have a licensing model for most of the tools in our space that [00:21:00] is open source but allows for a very easy industry we use and what we find is that that has enabled a very healthy two way dialogue between industry and academia in this context. Yes, industry users, our tools, and they often use them in a proprietary context, but they use them for their own problems and for building their own domain specific products and whatever, but when they want to contribute to the base tool, the base layer if you will, it's much [00:21:30] easier for them. Speaker 4: They simply make the improvements out in the open or they just donate resources. They donate money. Microsoft research last year made $100,000 donation to the python project, which was strictly a donation. This was not a grant to develop any specific feature. This was a blanket, hey, we use your tools and they help what we build and so we would like to support you and we've had a very productive relationship with them in the past, but it's by, not by no means the only one you're at Berkeley. The amp lab was two co-directors are actually part of the team [00:22:00] that is working on bids, a young story and Mike Franklin, the AMPLab has a very large set of tools for data analytics at scale that is now widely used at Twitter and Facebook and many other places. They have industry oriented conferences around their tools. Now they have an annual conference they run twice per year. Large bootcamps, large fractions of their attendees come from industry because industry is using all of these tools and the am Platt has currently more of its funding [00:22:30] comes from industry than it comes from sources like the NSF. And so I think there are, there are actually very, very clear and unambiguous examples of models where the open source work that is coming out of our research universities can have a highly productive and valuable dialogue with the industry. Speaker 3: It seems like long term he would have a real uphill battle to create enough competent people with data trained to [00:23:00] quench both industry and academia so that there would be a, a calming of the flow out of academia. Speaker 4: As we've said a couple of times in our discussions, this is a problem. Uh, it's a very, very challenging set of problems that we've signed up for it, but we feel that it's a problem worth failing on in the sense that we, we know the challenges is, is a steep one. But at the same time, the questions are important enough to be worth making the effort. Speaker 6: [inaudible] [00:23:30] don't miss part two of this interview in two weeks and on the next edition of spectrum spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. We've created a simple link for the link is tiny url.com/kalx specter. Now, if you're the science and technology events happen, Speaker 3: I mean locally over the next two weeks, [00:24:00] enabling a sustainable energy infrastructure is the title of David Color's presentation. On Wednesday, April 9th David Color is the faculty director of [inaudible] for Energy and the chair of computer science at UC Berkeley. He was selected in scientific American top 50 researchers and technology review 10 technologies that will change the world. His research addresses networks of small embedded wireless devices, planetary scale Internet services, parallel computer architecture, [00:24:30] parallel programming languages, and high-performance communications. This event is free and will be held in Satara Dye Hall Beneteau Auditorium. Wednesday, April 9th at noon. Cal Day is April 12th 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM 357 events for details. Go to the website, cal day.berkeley.edu a lunar eclipse Monday April 14th at 11:00 PM [00:25:00] look through astronomical telescopes at the Lawrence Hall of science to observe the first total lunar eclipse for the bay area since 2011 this is for the night owls among us UC students, staff and faculty are admitted. Speaker 3: Free. General admissions is $10 drought and deluge how applied hydro informatics are becoming standard operating data for all Californians is the title of Joshua Vere's presentation. On Wednesday, [00:25:30] April 16th Joshua veers joined the citrus leadership as the director at UC Merced said in August, 2013 prior to this, Dr Veers has been serving in a research capacity at UC Davis for 10 years since receiving his phd in ecology. This event is free and will be held in Soutar Dye Hall and Beneteau Auditorium Wednesday, April 16th at noon. A feature of spectrum is to present news stories we find interesting here are to. [00:26:00] This story relates to today's interview on big data. On Tuesday, April 1st a workshop titled Big Data Values and governance was held at UC Berkeley. The workshop was hosted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the UC Berkeley School of Information and the Berkeley Center for law and technology. The day long workshop examined policy and governance questions raised by the use of large and complex data sets and sophisticated analytics to [00:26:30] fuel decision making across all sectors of the economy, academia and government for panels. Speaker 3: Each an hour and a half long framed the issues of values and governance. A webcast. This workshop will be available from the ice school webpage by today or early next week. That's ice school.berkeley.edu vast gene expression map yields neurological and environmental stress insights. Dan Kraits [00:27:00] writing for the Lawrence Berkeley Lab News Center reports a consortium of scientists led by Susan Cell Knicker of Berkeley's labs. Life Sciences Division has conducted the largest survey yet of how information and code it in an animal genome is processed in different organs, stages of development and environmental conditions. Their findings paint a new picture of how genes function in the nervous system and in response to environmental stress. The scientists [00:27:30] studied the fruit fly, an important model organism in genetics research in all organisms. The information encoded in genomes is transcribed into RNA molecules that are either translated into proteins or utilized to perform functions in the cell. The collection of RNA molecules expressed in a cell is known as its transcriptome, which can be thought of as the readout of the genome. Speaker 3: While the genome is essentially [00:28:00] the same in every cell in our bodies, the transcriptome is different in each cell type and consistently changing cells in cardiac tissue are radically different from those in the gut or the brain. For example, Ben Brown of Berkeley Labs said, our study indicates that the total information output of an animal transcriptome is heavily weighted by the needs of the developing nervous system. The scientists also discovered a much broader [00:28:30] response to stress than previously recognized exposure to heavy metals like cadmium resulted in the activation of known stress response pathways that prevent damage to DNA and proteins. It also revealed several new genes of completely unknown function. Speaker 7: You can [inaudible]. Hmm. Speaker 3: The music or during the show [00:29:00] was [inaudible] Speaker 5: produced by Alex Simon. Today's interview with [inaudible] Rao about the show. Please send them to us spectrum [00:29:30] dot kalx@yahoo.com same time. [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Steve Blank, lecturer Haas School of Business UCB. He has been a entrepreneur in Silicon Valley since the 1970s. He has been teaching and developing curriculum for entrepreneurship training. Built a method for high tech startups, the Lean LaunchPad.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. Okay. Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a [00:00:30] biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hello and good afternoon. My name is Renee Rao and I'll be hosting today's show. Today we present part two of two interviews with Steve Blank. I lecture at the High School of business at UC Berkeley. Steve has been a serial entrepreneur in silicon valley since the late 1970s in the early two thousands he retired from the day to day involvement [00:01:00] of running a company. He has been teaching entrepreneurship training ever since. By 2011 he was said to have devised a scientific method for launching high tech startups, dubbed the lean launchpad. The National Science Foundation caught wind of this and asked Steve to build a variation for teaching scientists and engineers how to launch startups. In 2013 Steve partnered with UCLA and the NSF to offer the lean launch pad class for life science and healthcare. In part two, Steve Talks about getting [00:01:30] the NSF lean launch pad classes going, the evolution of startup companies and innovation, and now Brad swift continued his interview with Steve Blank. Speaker 4: Okay. Speaker 5: In your experience with these scientists and teaching them, are these people self selected? They're the ones who are anxious and eager and there are other scientists maybe back in the lab are reluctant afraid of the process. Speaker 4: So just the personality of it. Yeah, so this goes back to the comment I made earlier about entrepreneurs being artists. It was the implicit comment [00:02:00] I just kind of both through in the beginning, but as important is that you can't assign entrepreneurship as a job, right? If you really think about them, you can't split up a room and say, those of you on the left, you're going to be musicians. And those are you on the right, you're working on the assembly line like, Oh yeah, WTI. I mean, it doesn't work. It doesn't work like that. All right. Entrepreneurship is a calling. Just like art, just like music, just like writing is something you have to passionately want to do, but much like art, we've learned something [00:02:30] a couple hundred years ago that very early on in people's lives in elementary school and junior high school in high school, we want to have our depreciation. Speaker 4: They're not intensive classes, but their exposure to art that people might not know their artists. They might not know they have a passion to paint or to sculpt or to write or to entertain. I will contend because entrepreneurship is an art. We actually need those type of classes early on because scientists didn't understand [00:03:00] that not was their passion to invent and create. They might actually have an equal passion to wait a minute, I actually want to take this thing all the way through when I want to see what happens. If hundreds of thousands of people were being affected by this medicine, not just, here's my paper in the latest publication. It doesn't mean everybody could do that, but it means we've not yet gotten the culture to where we could say, well is this something that kind of excites you? And I think we're getting better to understand what it takes to do that. Speaker 4: Would you have any [00:03:30] idea what that would look like? The kind of exposure that you would be talking about in grammar school or Middle School? Sure. It turns out one of the unintended consequences of teaching the scientists that National Science Foundation is, remember their professors, almost all of them tenured running labs and universities across the country. And so here they take this class from the national science foundation and about half or two thirds of them now go back to their own universities, pissed cause they go, how come we're not teaching this? And so what happens is the National Science Foundation asked [00:04:00] me and Jerry Angle, who was the head of entrepreneurship at Haas, why don't you guys put on a course through a nonprofit called NCIA to teach educators in the United States who want to learn how to teach this class. And so we teach the lean launchpad for educators. We teach now 300 educators a year. Speaker 4: One of the outgrowths of that class was entrepreneur educators from middle school and high school started showing up and I went, you're not really teaching this to kids. They went, [00:04:30] oh Steve, you should see our class. And I went, oh my gosh, this is better than I'm doing. So they'd taken the same theory and they modified the language. So it was age appropriate. And so the two schools that had some great programs were Hawkin school outside of Cleveland and Dunn's school here in California. And in fact they're going to hold their own version of the educator class in June of 2014 for middle school and high school educators who were interested in teaching this type of entrepreneurial education. So I think it's starting to be transformative. I think we [00:05:00] have found the process to engage people early and not treated like we're teaching accounting to do, treating it like we're teaching art. Speaker 4: And again, we're still experiment thing. I wish I could tell you we got it now. I don't think so. I think we're learning, but the speed at which we're learning through it makes me smile. That's great. It is great. The Passion of the educators really is exciting. And Are you able to teach us remotely so that scientists from around the country don't have to come to you and sort of stop what they're doing? I was teaching the class [00:05:30] remotely. It's now taught in person in multiple regions. So that's how we solved that problem. But my lectures were recorded and not only were they recorded, they were recorded with really interesting animation. So instead of just watching me was a talking head. These are broken up into two minute clips and it's basically how to start a company and it's on you udacity.com so if you want to see the lean launch pad class in the lectures, it's on your udacity.com it's called the p two 45 but by accident we made these lectures public to not only the [00:06:00] national science foundation scientists, but we opened it up to everybody. Speaker 4: And surprisingly there is now over a quarter million people have taken the class. I've had people stop me at conferences and have told me that the Arabic translation, which I didn't even know existed, it's the standard in the Middle East. I had people from Dubai and Saudi Arabia in Lebanon literally within 10 feet go, oh well we recognize you. And I went, who are you turning over, Mr Blank, you worthy? I went, what's going on? I laugh not because it's me, but because [00:06:30] this is the power of the democratization of entrepreneurship. I have to tell you a funny story is that I grew up with the entrepreneur cluster was silicon valley and something in the last five years that I've gotten to travel with both Berkeley and Stanford and National Science Foundation to different countries to talk and teach about entrepreneurship. And my wife and I happened to be on vacation in Prague and when I really knew the world had changed as my wife had said, you know Steve, we're kind of tired of eating hotel food. Speaker 4: I wonder if there were ending entrepreneurs and Proc, I didn't want to, I [00:07:00] don't know. You know, let me go tweet and any entrepreneurs and Prague, you know, looking for a good check. Brie hall and hour and a half later we're having dinner with 55 entrepreneurs and Prague television is there and they said, Steve, you don't understand. Here's why. Here's an entrepreneur community everywhere. The only thing we still have unique in the bay area is that entrepreneurship and innovation. We've become a company town. That is our product. Much like Hollywood used to be movies in Detroit used to be cars in Pittsburgh steel. [00:07:30] While obviously there are people who do other stuff, teach in restaurants, put the business. The business to the bay area really is entrepreneurship and innovation. While we tell stories about the entrepreneurs, the unheralded part of that ecosystem is that we have equally insane financial people. Speaker 4: Why Silicon Valley happened was that the venture capitalist in the 1970s in Boston when it wasn't clear whether it was going to be Boston or Silicon Valley to be the center of entrepreneurship, the venture capitalist in Boston continued to act [00:08:00] like bankers, venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. They decided to act like pirates and the pirates want and so what really differentiates the observational make with an entrepreneurship is everywhere in the world. Entrepreneurial clusters only happen when all these things, these components, primarily entrepreneurs, but a heavy dose of risk capital capable of writing not only small checks but large checks and doubling and tripling down on startups. That's why you have the Facebooks and the googles and the twitters [00:08:30] around here. You also have a culture let's people know and understand. In the 1950s and sixties people came to San Francisco and Berkeley to live an alternate personal lifestyle, but they were hitting 30 miles south to have an alternate business lifestyle around Stanford and it was this kind of magic combination of great weather, the ability to do things in both business and your personal life that you couldn't anywhere else. These cultural phenomenons actually were and under appreciated until a very smart professor at Berkeley [inaudible] [00:09:00] wrote a book called regional advantage that actually described a lot of these things and open my eyes about why this region actually won. Speaker 1: You're listening to spectrum on k a Alex Berkeley. Steve Blank is our guest. He's a former entrepreneur and current lecturer at the High School of business. And the next segment he talks about how startups has changed since he first began in Silicon Valley in the 1970s Speaker 4: is entrepreneurship then changed as a result [00:09:30] of that. What really happened was the harmonic conversion of a really interesting set of events. One is, is that if you think back on how startups worked in the, in the golden age of Silicon Valley in the seventies and eighties to build a startup required millions if not tens of millions of dollars, not to run it, but just to start it, you needed to buy computers, either mainframes or mini computers and then workstations. You needed to license millions of dollars of expensive software. The only venture people were either in [00:10:00] Boston or silicon valley and they lived on sand hill road and nowhere else, and therefore it was kind of a formal process and the cost of entry was literally millions or tens of millions of dollars. There was no other way to get computing. There was no other way to get money. The second is, we had no theory about startups. Speaker 4: That is, there were no management tools at all. But what happened starting out of the rubble actually of the last Internet bubble, things change in technology in a way. I don't think people outside the technology business appreciate it off. Probably the biggest [00:10:30] one was actually generated by Amazon. It turns out Amazon created something called Amazon web services. And if you're a consumer, all you know is Amazon maybe for kindle and for sure for their books or their website. But if you're a programmer, Amazon has become the computing utility. You no longer have to buy computers from your laptop. You literally log in to hundreds of millions of dollars of computers and you have access to the world's largest computing resource ever assembled [00:11:00] for pennies, for pennies, and you don't need any storage. You're storing it all and online and all the computing. So number one, Amazon web services truly turned computing hardware and software into a pennies per gigabyte and MIPS, et Cetera, in a way that was unbelievable 10 years earlier. Speaker 4: Two is that changed the cost of entry of an early stage venture. You no longer needed millions of dollars. In fact, if you were smart entrepreneur, you could start on your credit card and if you didn't have your credit card, maybe some friends and family, [00:11:30] and that started a very different wave because it changed venture capital. It used to be there were either doctors or dentists or other reform of venture capital firms like Kleiner Perkins and Mayfield and sequoia. But the fact is that now after a ton of entrepreneurs could start on their credit cards, they still didn't need $20 million. Maybe eventually they did, but they could just take $100,000 or half a million dollars and get pretty far. And that created a new class of super angels or angel investors [00:12:00] that just never existed before. Kind of this intermediate level. And so venture capital changed. And also with that change, it changed where they could be located. Speaker 4: You no longer had to be located to be a investor in New York, Boston, or San Diego. Th that amount of capital could be available in the London or Helsinki or Estonia or Jordan, Beijing. Third is, and I will take credit for some of this, the invention of a new way to look and how to build these startups. It used to be that if you were building [00:12:30] a physical product, you would do something called the functional Spec or you'd get requirements from a customer. You build a specification and then you'd make an early version of the product called Alpha test, maybe a less buggy version called Beta test, which foist on some poor unsuspecting customers and then you'd have a party at something called first customer ship and that process was called waterfall development and from beginning to end typically took years and insight in the software business and Toyota had it even [00:13:00] earlier is that we could build products differently, we could build products incrementally and iteratively and that's called agile engineering and for startups, how you want to build your products is agily and iteratively because almost always what you believe on day one are all the customer features that they need. Speaker 4: It's a pretty safe bet. You're not a visionary, you're actually hallucinating and that most of the features you would historically have built in go unused on needed and unwanted. But if [00:13:30] in fact you could actually test intermediate versions of the product iteratively and rapidly on those customers with a formal process which I invented called customer development, those two hand in hand change the speed and trajectory of how startups get built. And so now you see these startups coming out of nowhere and getting acquired in three years, but they have tens of millions of customer. Where did that come from? Well, in the old days we'd still be writing the software, building the hardware. Speaker 6: Aw, it's [00:14:00] a public affairs show, k, a l X. Berkeley. Our guest is Steve Link a lecture at UC Berkeley's Haas School of business. The next segment, Steve Talks about his current work, trying to understand how innovation drives some companies and fails in others. Speaker 4: If I can, the unintended consequence of all this stuff. Remember this whole lean startup stuff has become a movement by itself. Harvard business review contacts me and says, Steve, [00:14:30] every large corporation is now desperately struggling how to deal with continuous disruption in the 21st century. That is all the rules that worked in the 20th century, you know, be number one in market share, you know, like be number one and two, I mean all the Jack Welsh rules, you follow those who be out of business in seven years. Why, you know, globalization in China Inc Internet has made consumers flighty very little brand loyalty. Pricing is almost transparent. Cost of starting a new business is infinitely lower. All of the things [00:15:00] that made you strong in the 20th century as a corporation are no longer true. Some of them are obviously, but not really. And so every large corporation are trying to relearn a set of rules and guess where they're looking for, they're looking at startups of how do we be as innovative as apple as that. Speaker 4: That is, the models are now silicon valley and other technology companies. And so my article, the lean startup changes everything became the cover of the Harvard Business Review and May, 2013 what was interesting is that I started [00:15:30] getting calls from executives whose titles I had never heard of before. It turns out almost every large company is now appointing a VP of corporate innovation. I had never heard of it. You know what's that? And when you go talk to them, and I've talked to a bunch of them, now you find out that they're all struggling to solve this continuous disruption problem by trying to build innovation inside the DNA of large corporations in the u s and overseas and the first sign of companies [00:16:00] trying to do that is appointing somebody typically as a corporate staff person to have some kind of internal incubator. I could politely say, that's a nice first step put it really doesn't solve the problem. Speaker 4: It actually just points out what the problem is and can I digress for another 10 seconds? It turns out that the problem that corporations are having is not a tactical organizational problem. The things I described, the globalization, the effect of the [00:16:30] Internet, et Cetera, are just strategic problems that every corporation is facing. The last time companies faced something, this major was in the 1920s, uh, u s corporations grew from small mom and pop businesses from the 1870s to 1920s and they kind of came up with a form of organization called functional organizations, meaning you had a head of sales, a head of marketing, a head of manufacturing, but by function that was the only way companies were organized. But by 1920, some [00:17:00] u s corporations spans from New York to San Francisco. And so there was a geography problem here. You had a head of sales tryna run multiple geography. Speaker 4: It wasn't even the same time zone. And some companies like dupont had a different problem while they also had geography problems. Dupont made everything from explosives to paint. But you only had one marketing group and one manufacture. How do, how do you manage that? And for about five or six years for corporations, dupont, General Motors, Sears and standard oil, understood. They had a strategy [00:17:30] problem and attacked it by playing with the structure of the company, meaning how the company was organized and they all finally decided that they were going to organize in a radically different form called divisions. Instead of just having functions, they would actually break up like for example, General Motors into the Buick Division and ultimate build division or whatever, or for dupont explosives divisions and the paint division and on top of a thin layer of corporate staff, but now have a company organized by divisions first changed in [00:18:00] 50 years and how companies were organized. Speaker 4: Fast forward 40 years later, the third form of corporate organization to emerged called Matrix organizations where you start with a functional organization, but now all of a sudden we would have specific projects pop up, gee, I want to work on the new fad six fighter. Well, I have an engineering group, but let me put together a team that could pull out of engineering and pull out a product management and put together for our temporary amount of time and then they'll go back into their functions and then be pulled out again. But that's it. Those are the only three forms [00:18:30] of corporate organization. I'll contend that we're facing a common strategy problem that is not solvable by just pasting on vps of innovation. I believe it's solvable by rethinking on the highest possible level is do we need a fourth form of corporate organization? And I gotta tell you I got the answer, but I'm not going to tell you now. Okay.Speaker 5: Is this sort of then turning all the operations research that's been done over the past? You know, since World War II, [00:19:00] that was when it seemed to be salient. Is it on its ear now? Is this, Speaker 4: so if you really think about what we built for the last 150 years is corporations were the epitome of operational efficiency through operations research, the output of business schools. I mean all our stuff has had to be continuous execution, driving to the lowest cost provider and outsourcing and all that stuff. That's great. But you're going out of business and in fact, companies that do that, [00:19:30] I will contend have a much shorter lifespan that companies that now do continuous innovation. That is, if you think about the difference between Amazon and Netflix and apple, when jobs was alive versus standard US companies, the distinction was they were continuously innovating, ruined Leslie, innovating, and it was not some department that was innovating. It's a big idea. It was the entire company was innovating, yet they were making obscene profits. So clearly there are some models of some companies who [00:20:00] have figured out and in fact HP in the 70s and eighties had figured out how to do and then they lost the formula. I think we now actually have a theory, a strategy of how to do that and some really specific tactics. How, I know we could do this in detail for u s corporations and corporations worldwide, but I want to start at the u s and we're going to be talking and writing about that in the next year. Speaker 5: Great. So that's what you're actively working. Speaker 4: Oh, actively working. And I'm Hank Chesboro who have inventor of open innovation here at Haas business school and with Alexander Osterwalder [00:20:30] and venture of the business model canvas. All have been part of some of these discussions. You know, I just get smarter by hanging out with much smarter people. And I'm not the only one who's thinking about that. There are lots of very smart people trying to crack the code and at the same time, companies are raising their hand and the symptom of raising their hand is they're appointing vps of innovation and her likes saying, yeah, you know, here's what we are. Oops, it doesn't quite work. And finance has different rules and but wait a minute, I'm trying to be innovative, but the HR manual doesn't allow me to hire people. No, [00:21:00] no. Legal says I can't use our brand here. So what you're really finding is that it's not an org problem. Speaker 4: It's not anybody's trying to be mean. Is that what we're missing is the CEO and board conversation is, oh my gosh, maybe we need to get innovation in every part of the company, not by exception. That's the idea I'll telegraph for now. And how do you do that without affecting current profits? And it's quite possible because again, there are these experiments of companies that are insanely from a profitable, who've done this. [00:21:30] Now can we just make a teachable and doable by other corporations? And the answer is yes, we're going to go do that. Do you see that pace of technology accelerating? Absolutely. I think we're in the golden age of both technology and entrepreneurship. You ain't seen anything yet. I'm still constantly amazed sitting here smiling. When you say that is why I still love to teach is that, you know, I get to see my students come up with things. Speaker 4: You hear the 400th hotel automation package or the whatever, but you know, and then you see something, again, drones are three d printing [00:22:00] or you could do white with your phone, you're gonna make a turn on or you're a password through. It's just things that are unimaginable. And then you watch the next generation of Steve Jobs that said, you know, the current version silicon valley is you go on much. Who single handedly is val to obsolete the automobile industry? And at the same time just wrecking havoc in this space launch industry, single individual who had, by the way, zero qualifications to do any of those. Congratulations. Welcome to entrepreneurship. He had the will to be disruptive [00:22:30] and he understood that the technology was about at the edge of being able to do what he did. That's how we got the iPod and the iPhone or else in a perfect world and Nokia would still have 89% market share. If I was General Motors and Ford, I'd be really concerned. Steve Blank, thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Great. Thanks for having me. Speaker 6: You'd like more insight into Steve Blank's ideas. Go to his website, Steve blank.com [00:23:00] as Steve mentioned, the Lean launch pad course is available. I knew udacity.com to learn more about the NSF mean launchpad curriculum, search for NSF [inaudible] your local to the bay area. Go to [inaudible] dot com if you're interested in startup appreciation materials for educators, go to n c I n aa.org/l l p. Stretching shows [00:23:30] are archived on iTunes yet it gives created a simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/calex spectrum and now a few some technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Brad Swift joins me for the calendar. Speaker 3: California's coastal waters are home to one of the four richest temperate marine biota is in the world. The California Academy of Sciences will be holding [00:24:00] a series of lectures and events to explore this incredible diversity of life. They look, explain what makes this region so productive and why it needs to be protected on Saturday, March 22nd from nine to 11:00 AM a variety of Speakers will consider the impacts of human activity on the local marine ecosystems and the establishment and efficacy of marine protected areas. They will also discuss how diversity is monitored in California's oceans and which areas will need to be most closely scrutinized for future impact. For more information on the [00:24:30] March 22nd event. Please visit cal academy.org Speaker 5: on Monday, March 31st University of Maryland professor of human development, Nathan Fox will give a lecture on his recent studies on whether experiences shaped the brain and neural circuitry for emerging cognitive and social behaviors over the first years of life. Something that many developmental scientists take for granted. Foxes study the Bucharest early intervention project [00:25:00] is the first randomized trial of a family intervention for children who experienced significant psychosocial neglect early in their lives. A group of infants living in institutions in Romania were recruited and randomized to be taken out of the institution and placed into family foster care homes or to remain in the institution. He then followed up with the children several times over the next eight years and examine the lasting [00:25:30] effects of the deprivation and which, if any interventions were successful in assuaging the harmful effects, the free public talk will be held on March 31st from 12 to 1:30 PM on the UC Berkeley campus in room 31 50 of Tolman hall Speaker 3: on Wednesday per second. You see Berkeley's department of Environmental Science Policy and management will present a speech by Chris Mooney, a journalist who's written several books on the resistance that many [00:26:00] Americans have to accepting scientific conclusions. His lecture will be titled The Science of why we don't believe in science and we'll examine the reasons behind Americans disinterest in scientific solutions to the world's problems. The free public lecture will be held on Wednesday, April 2nd at 7:00 PM in the International House Auditorium of UC Berkeley. Here at spectrum, we like to present new stories we find particularly interesting. Brad Swift joins me in presenting the news. Speaker 5: UC Berkeley Professor, Dr. Richard Kramer [00:26:30] and his research team have been able to temporarily restore light sensitivity to mice, missing a majority of their rods and cones in healthy mammals. The eyes detect light with specialized photo receptor cells or rods and cones and then transmit a signal to their optic nerve cells which eventually communicate with the brain. Dr. Kramer and his team explored the effects of a similarly light-sensitive molecule known as d n a Q in healthy mice and mice [00:27:00] with a degenerative disease that caused them to lose nearly all their rods and cones. After dosing, the mice with d n a Q, the mice were exposed to lights and their optic nerve activity was measured via electrode arrays. The diseased mice showed strong light sensitivity. The team next examined a small number of animals in light and dark conditions to test whether the sensitivity conferred any perception of the light. In the diseased mice, [00:27:30] the injected mice were better able to form an association between a light stimuli and electric shock than those in the control group. While millions of humans suffer from similar degenerative retinal conditions, definitive conclusions on the broader therapeutic and deleterious effects of the molecule. D n a Q are still years away. Speaker 3: In a recent study published in the journal bio materials, UC Berkeley researchers were able to eliminate the transmission rep [00:28:00] of a common infection. Staphylococcus Aureus is a bacterium that commonly infects patients who've had surgeries involving prosthetic joints and artificial heart, bowels, staff, or aces. Ability to adhere to medical advices is key to experience as once introduced to the body. It can cause severe illness. UC Berkeley Bio and mechanical engineering, Professor Mohammad [inaudible] fraud and others in his lab examined how the clusters of staff warriors were able to adhere so well to certain Yana surfaces as well as the type of surfaces [00:28:30] that increased or decreased the bacteria's ability to clean. They quickly found that while staff [inaudible] can adhere to a variety of flattened curves services, it does seem to have a preference for certain structures including a tubular pillar where the bacteria was able to partially embed itself within holes in the structure. Professor, my fraud expressed hope that the improved understanding of these preferences could allow the design of medical devices built to attenuate bacterial adhesion while escaping the need to chemically damaged the bacteria to prevent transmission Speaker 7: [00:29:00] [inaudible]. Speaker 5: The music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum to a k a l ex@yahoo.com Trina's in two weeks at the same time. [inaudible] Speaker 8: [00:29:30] [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Steve Blank, lecturer Haas School of Business UCB. He has been a entrepreneur in Silicon Valley since the 1970s. He has been teaching and developing curriculum for entrepreneurship training. Built a method for high tech startups, the Lean LaunchPad.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 3: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a [00:00:30] l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews, featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news [inaudible]. Speaker 4: Hi, and good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Today we present part one of two interviews with Steve Blank, a lecturer at the Haas School of business at UC Berkeley. Steve has been a serial entrepreneur in silicon valley since the late 1970s [00:01:00] see if you recognize any of these companies. He was involved with Xylog convergent technologies, MIPS, computer, ardent, super Mack, rocket science games and epiphany. In 1999 Steve Retired from day to day involvement in running a company since 2002 he has been teaching and developing curriculum for entrepreneurship training. By 2011 he was said to have devised [00:01:30] the scientific method for launching high tech startups, dubbed the Lean launch pad. In part one Steve Talks about his beginnings, the culture of Silicon Valley, the intersection of science, technology, finance, and business. Steve Blank, welcome to spectrum. Oh, thanks for having me. I wanted to find out from you how it is you got started as an entrepreneur. What attracted you to that? Speaker 5: He's probably the military. I, uh, spent four years in the air [00:02:00] force during Vietnam and a year and a half in Southeast Asia. And then when I came back to the United States, I worked on a B, 52 bombers in the strategic air command. And I finally years later understood the difference between working in a crisis organization, which was in a war zone where almost anything was acceptable to get the job done versus an execution organization that was dealing with mistakes. Men dropping a 20 megaton nuclear weapon where you process and procedure was actually imperative. And it turned [00:02:30] out I was much better in the organizations that required creativity and agility and tenacity and resilience. And I never understood that I was getting the world's best training for entrepreneurship. I went back to school in Ann Arbor and managed to get thrown out the second time in my life out of University of Michigan. Speaker 5: I call that the best school I was ever thrown out of a Michigan state was the next best school where it was a premed. And then, um, I was sent out to silicon valley. I was working as a field service engineer and what I didn't realize two years later was 16% [00:03:00] startup to bring up a computer system in a place called San Jose. And San Jose was so unknown that my admin got us tickets for San Jose, Puerto Rico until I said, I think it's not out of the country. I came out there to do a job to install a process control system. I thought it was some kind of joke is that there were 45 pages of advertisements in the newspaper at the time for scientists, engineers, et cetera. And I flew back and quit, got a job at my first startup in Silicon Valley [00:03:30] and subsequently I did eight of them in 21 years. Speaker 5: What were some of the ones that stand out out of the eight? You know, I had some great successes. There were four IPOs out of the eight, I'd say one or two. I had something to do with the others. I was just kinda standing there when the safe fell on the guy in front of me and the money dropped down and I got to pick it up. But honestly, in hindsight, and I can now say this only in hindsight, I learned the most from some of the failures though I wouldn't tell you why I wanted to learn that at the time, but failing [00:04:00] and failing hard when it was absolutely clear it was your fault and no one else's forced me to go through the stages of denial and then blame others and then whatever. And then acceptance and then ultimately kind of some real learning about how to build early stage ventures. Speaker 5: You know, I blew my Nixon last company, I was on the cover of wired magazine and 90 days after the cover I realized my company was going out of business and eventually did. And I called my mother who was a Russian immigrant and every time I spoke to my mother I [00:04:30] had to pause because English wasn't her first language. And you know, I'd say something and pause and then she'd say something back and pause. And whenever I said, mom, I lost 35 million hours, pause. And then she said, where'd you put it? I said, no, no, no mom, I'm calling you to tell you none of them was 30 I didn't even get the next sentence out. Cause then she went, oh my gosh, she wants $35 million. We can't even change your name. It's already plank. And then she started thinking about it and she said, and the country we came from [00:05:00] is gone. Speaker 5: There's no fast to go. I said, no, no mom though. What I'm trying to tell you is that the people gave me $35 million, just give me another $12 million to do the next startup. And it was in comprehensible because what I find when I talked to foreign visitors to silicon valley or to any entrepreneurial cluster, you know, we have a special name for failed entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. Do you know what it is? Experienced? It's a big idea in the u s around entrepreneurial clusters, failure equals experience. [00:05:30] People don't ask you if you change your name or have to leave town or you're going to go bankrupt, et cetera. The first thing your best friend will ask you is, so what's your next startup? That's an amazing part of this culture that we've built here and that's what happened to me. My last startup, I returned $1 billion each to those two investors and it's not a story about me, it's a story about the ecosystem that we live in that's both supremely American and supremely capitalists, but also Sir Pulliam clustered in just [00:06:00] a few locations in the United States where there are clear reasons why one succeeded to some fail. Speaker 5: You know, when I retired from my last one, I decided that after eight startups in 21 years, my company was about to go public and my kids were seven and eight years old at the time and luckily we had children when I was in my late thirties and so therefore I got to watch people I admired incredibly at work, watch how they dealt with their families. And what was surprising [00:06:30] is that most of them had feet of clay when it came to home. They basically focused 100% of their efforts at work and as their kids grew up, their kids hated them. I kind of remember that in the back of my head, and so when I had the opportunity to retire, I said, I want to watch my kids grow up. And so I did. And that's a preambled answer your question. That's at the end. Speaker 5: For the first time in my life, my head wasn't down completely inside trying to execute in a single company. I had a chance to reflect on [00:07:00] the 21 years and believe it or not, I started to write my memoirs and I got, you know what I realize now in hindsight, it was actually an emotional catharsis of kind of purging. What did I learn? And I asked, it was 80 pages into it writing. He was a vignette and I would write lessons learned from each of those experiences and what I realized truly the hair was standing up and back of my neck. On page 80 there was a pattern I had never recognized in my career and I realized no one else had recognized [00:07:30] it either and either I was very wrong or there might be some truth and here was the pattern in silicon valley since the beginning we had treated startups like they were smaller versions of large companies. Speaker 5: Everything a large company did. The investment wisdom was, well they write business plans, you write business plans, they organize sales, marketing and Bizdev and you do that. They write our income statement, balance sheet and cashflow and do five year plans and then you do that too. Never noticing that. In fact that distinction, and no one had ever said this [00:08:00] before, what large companies do is execute known business models and the emphasis is on execution, on process. What a known business model means is we know who our customer is, we know how to sell it, we know who competitors are. We know what pride in an existing company it's existing cause somebody in the dim past figured that stuff out. But what a startup is doing is not executing. You think you're executing. That's what they told you to go do, but reality you failed most of the time because you were actually searching [00:08:30] for something. Speaker 5: You were just guessing in front of my students here at Berkeley and at Stanford I used the word, you have a series of hypotheses that are untested, but that's a fancy word for you're just guessing. And so the real insight was somebody needed to come up with a set of tools for startups that were different than the tools that were being taught on how to run and manage existing corporations. And that tool set in distinction at the turn of the century didn't exist. That is 1999 [00:09:00] there was not even a language to describe what I just said and I decided to embark on building the equivalent of the management stack that large corporations have for founders and early stage ventures. Speaker 6: Mm, Speaker 7: [00:09:30] yeah. Speaker 8: You are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Steve Blank is our guest. He is an entrepreneur and lecturer at the hospital of business. In the next segment of your talks about collaborating with the National Science Foundation Speaker 9: [inaudible].Speaker 4: [00:10:00] So when you're advising scientists and engineers who think they might be interested in trying to do a startup, what do you tell them they need to know about business and business people? Okay. Speaker 5: It's funny you mentioned scientists and engineers because I didn't know too many years in my career. I mean I sold to them as customers, [00:10:30] but in the last three or four years I got to know some of the top scientists in the u s for a very funny experience. Can I tell you what happened? It turned out that this methodology, I've been talking about how to build startups efficiently with customer development and agile engineering and one other piece called the business model canvas. This theory ended up being called the lean startup. One of my students, Eric Reese and I had actually invested in his company and then actually made him sit for my class at Berkeley because his cofounder, [00:11:00] the lost my money last time I invested. I said, no, no, sit through my class. And of course his co founder was slow to get it, but Eric got it in a second, but came the first practitioner of customer development, the first lean startup practitioner in the world. Speaker 5: Eric got it so much he became the Johnny Appleseed of the idea. In fact, it was actually Ericson side, the customer development. Then agile development went together and he named it the lean startup. But even though we had this theory, the practice was really kind of hard. It was like liking the furniture and Ikea until you got the pieces at home [00:11:30] and then realized it was Kinda hard to assemble. So I decided to do is take the pieces and teach entrepreneurs in a way they have never been taught before on how to start a company. Now this requires a two minutes sidebar. Can I give you? It turns out one of the other thing that I've been involved with is entrepreneurial education as I teach here at Haas, but I also teach at Stanford at UCF and a Columbia, but entrepreneurship used to be kind of a province, mostly of business schools and we used [00:12:00] to teach entrepreneurs just like they were accountants. Speaker 5: No one ever noticed that accountants don't run startups. It's a big idea. No one ever noticed. That's the g. We don't teach artists that way and we don't teach brain surgeons that way. That is sit in the class, read these cases like you were in the law school and somehow you'll get smarter and know how to be an operating CEO of an early stage venture. Now with this, you have to understand that when I was an entrepreneur, rapacious was applied word to describe my behavior and my friends who knew me as an entrepreneur [00:12:30] would laugh when they realized that was an educator and say, Steve, you were born entrepreneur. You knew you can't teach entrepreneurship. You can't be taught. You were born that way. Now since I was teaching entrepreneurship, this set of somewhat of a conundrum in my head, and I pondered this for a couple of years until I realized it's the question everybody asks, but it was the wrong question. Speaker 5: Of course you could teach entrepreneurship. The question is that we've never asked is who can you teach it to and that once you frame the question that way you start [00:13:00] slapping your forehead because you realize that founders of companies, they're not like accountants or MBAs. I mean they were engineers, they might be by training and background, but founders, visionaries, they're closer to artists than anybody else in the world and we now know how to teach artists for the last 500 years since the renaissance. How do we teach artists what we teach them theory, but then we immerse them in experiential practice until they're blue in the face or the hands fall off or they never want to look at another [00:13:30] brusher instrument or write another novel again in their life. We just beat them to death as apprentices, but we get their hands dirty or brain surgeons. Speaker 5: You have, they go to school, but there's no way you'd ever want to go to a doctor who hadn't cracked open chest or skulls or whatever or a surgeon, but we were teaching entrepreneurship like somehow you could read it from the book. My class at Stanford was one of the first experiential, hands-on, immersive float body experience and I mean immersive is that basically [00:14:00] we train our teams in theory that they're going to frame hypotheses with something called the business model canvas from a very smart guide named Alexander Osterwalder. They were going to test those hypotheses by getting outside the building outside the university, outside their lab, outside of anywhere and talk. I bought eyeball to 10 to 15 customers a week. People they've never met and start validating or invalidating those hypotheses and they were going to in parallel build as much of the product as [00:14:30] they can with this iterative and incremental development using agile engineering, whether it was hardware or software or medical device, it doesn't matter. Speaker 5: I want you to start building this thing and also be testing that. Now, this worked pretty well for 20 and 22 year olds students with hoodies and flip flops. But it was open question. If this would work with scientists and engineers, and about three years ago I was driving on campus and I got a call and then went like this, hi Steve, you don't know me. My name is heirarchical lick. I'm the head of the National Science Foundation [00:15:00] SBR program. We're from the U s government. We're calling you because we need your help. And because I was still a little bit of a jerk, I said, the government got my help during Vietnam. I'm not giving it an anymore. And he went, no, no, no, no. We're talking about your class. I went, how do you know about my class? They said, well, you've clogged every session of it. Speaker 5: And I just tend to open source everything I do, which is a luxury I have, not being a tenured professor, you know, I, I think giving back to our community is one of the things that silicon valley excels [00:15:30] at. And I was mentored and tutored by people who gave back. And so therefore since I can't do it, I give back by open sourcing almost everything I do. If I learn it and my slides are out there and I write about it and I teach them. And so I was sharing the experiences of teaching this first class. I didn't realize there were 25 people at the National Science Foundation following every class session. And I didn't even know who the National Science Foundation was. And I had to explain what Steve, we give away $7 billion [00:16:00] a year. We're the group that funds all basic science in universities in the u s where we're on number two to the National Institute of Health, which is the largest funder of medical and research in the u s and that's great. Speaker 5: So why are you calling? We want you to do this class for the government. I said, for the government, and I thought, you guys just fund bigger. He said, no, we're, we're under a mandate from theU s congress. All research organizations is that if any scientist wants to commercialize their basic research, we have programs called the spr and STTR programs that [00:16:30] give anywhere from $500,000 in the first phase or up to three quarters of a million dollars in phase two or more for scientists who want to build companies. Well, why are you calling me? And they're all nicely said, well thank God Congress doesn't actually ask how well those teams are doing. And I said, what do you mean? He said, well, we're essentially giving away cars without requiring drivers Ed and you can imagine the results. And I said, okay, but what did you see in what I'm doing? Speaker 5: He said, Steve, you've invented the scientific [00:17:00] method for entrepreneurship. We want you to teach scientists. They already know the scientific method. Our insight here is they'll get what you're doing in a second. You just need to teach them how to do it outside the building. And so within 90 days I've got a bunch of my VC friends, John Fiber and Jim Horton follow and a Jerry angle and a bunch of others. And we put together a class for the national science foundation as a prototype. They got 25 teams headed up by principal investigators in material science and robotics and computer science and fluidics and teams [00:17:30] of three from around the country. And we put them through this 10 week process and we trained scientists how to get outside the building and test hypotheses. And the results were spectacular. So much so that the NSF made it a permanent program. Speaker 5: I trained professors from Georgia tech and university of Michigan who then went off to train 15 other universities. It's now the third largest accelerator in the world. We just passed 300 teams of her best scientists. Well, let me exhale and tell you the next step, which really got interesting. This worked for [00:18:00] National Science Foundation, but I had said that this would never work for life sciences because life sciences therapeutics, cancer, dry. I mean, you know, you get a paper and sell nature and science and maybe 15 years later, you know, something happens and she, you know, what's the problem? If you cure cancer, you don't have a problem finding customers. But at the same time I've been saying this, you CSF, which is probably the leading biotech university in the world here in San Francisco, was chasing me to actually put on this class for them. And I kept saying, no, you don't [00:18:30] understand. Speaker 5: I say it doesn't work. And they said, Steve, we are the experts in this. We say it does. And finally they called my bluff and said, well, why don't you get out of the building with us and talk to some of the leading venture capitalists in this area who basically educated me that said, look, the traditional model of drug companies for Pharma has broken down. They're now looking for partnerships, Obamacare and the new healthcare laws have changed how reimbursement works. Digital health is an emerging field, you know, medical devices. Those economics have changed. So we decided [00:19:00] to hold the class for life sciences, which is really a misnomer. It was a class for four very distinct fields for therapeutics, diagnostics, devices, and digital health. How to use CSF in October, 2013 is an experiment. First we didn't know if anyone would be interested because I know like the NSF, we weren't going to pay the teams. Speaker 5: We were going to make them pay nominal tuition and GCSF and we were going after clinicians and researchers and they have day jobs. Well, surprisingly we had 78 teams apply for 25 slots and we took 26 [00:19:30] teams including Colbert Harris, who was the head of surgery of ucs, f y Kerrison, the inventor of fetal surgery. Two teams didn't even tell Genentech they were sneaking out at night taking the class as well. And the results, I have to tell you, I still smile when I talk about this, exceeded everybody's wildest expectations such that we went back to Washington, took the results to the National Institute of Health and something tells me that in 2014 the National Institute of Health will probably be the next major government organization to adopt [00:20:00] this class in this process. Again, none of this guarantees success and these are all gonna turn into winners. What it does is actually allow teams to fail fast, allows us to be incredibly effective about the amount of cash we spent because we could figure out where the mistakes are rather than just insisting that we're right, but we now have a process that we've actually tested. Speaker 5: Well, I got a call from the National Science Foundation about six months ago that said, Steve, we thought we tell you we need to stop the experiment. And I thought, why? [00:20:30] What do you mean? Well, we got some data back on the effectiveness of the class. He said, well, we didn't believe the numbers. You know us. We told you we've been running this SBI our program for 30 years and what happens to the teams who want to get funded after? It's kind of a double blind review. People don't know who they are. They review their proposals and they on average got funded 18% of the time. Teams that actually have taken this class get funded 60% of the time. I thought we might've improved effectiveness 10 20% but this is a 300% [00:21:00] now let's be clear. It wasn't. That was some liquidity event mode as they went public. Speaker 5: It was just a good precursor on a march to how much did they know about customers and channels and partners and product market fit, et Cetera, and for the first time somebody had actually instrumented the process. So much so that the national science foundation now requires anybody applying for a grant. It's no longer an option to get out of the building and talk to 30 customers before they could even show up at the conference to get funded. That was kind of the science side and that's still going on and [00:21:30] I'm kind of proud that we might've made a dent in how the government thinks for national science foundation stuff, commercialization and how the National Institute of Health might be thinking of what's called translational medicine, but running those are 127 clinicians and researchers through the f program was really kind of amazing. Speaker 2: [inaudible] [inaudible] [00:22:00] [inaudible] Speaker 8: spectrum is a public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley. Our guest is Steve Blank electrode at UC Berkeley's Haas School of business. In the next segment, he goes into more detail about the lean startup, also known as the lean launchpad Speaker 2: [00:22:30] [inaudible] [inaudible] Speaker 4: with your launchpad startup launchpad. Is that, Speaker 5: well, there's two things. The class is called the lean launchpad lean launch and the software [00:23:00] we built for the National Science Foundation and now we use in classes and for corporations it's called launchpad central. We've basically built software that for the first time allows us to manage and view the innovation process as we go. Think of it as salesforce.com which is sales automation tool for salespeople. We now have a tool for the first time for entrepreneurs and the people working with them and managing them and trying to keep track of them and we just crossed 3000 teams who are using the software and I [00:23:30] use it in everything I teach and dude, Speaker 4: how long does the class take for a scientist or engineer who might be trying to think about, well, what's the time sink here? Yeah, Speaker 5: there's a shock to the system version, which I taught at cal tech and now teach twice a year at Columbia, which is days, 10 hours a day. But the ones that we teach from national science foundation, one I teach at Stanford and Berkeley, Stanford, it's a quarter at Berkeley semester from the NSF. It depends. It's about an eight to 10 week class. You could do this over a period of time. There's no magic. [00:24:00] There is kind of the magic and quantity to people you talk to and it's just a law of numbers. You talk to 10 people, I doubt you're going to find any real insight in that data. It talked to a thousand people. You know, you're probably, if you still haven't found the repeatable pattern, probably 20 [inaudible] too many or Tenex, too many a hundred just seem to be kind of a good centroid. And what you're really looking for is what we call product market fit. Speaker 5: And there are other pieces of the business model that are important. But the first two things you're writing at is, are you building something [00:24:30] that people care about? Am I care about? I don't mean say, oh, that's nice. I mean is when you show it to them, do they grab it out of your hands or grab you by the collar and say you're not leaving until I can have this. Oh, and by the way, if you built the right thing or your ideas and the right place, you will find those people. That's not a sign of a public offering, but it's at least a sign that you're on the right track. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 3: [00:25:00] [inaudible] Speaker 8: be sure to catch part two of this interview with Steve Blank in two weeks on spectrum. [00:25:30] In that interview, Steve Talks more about the lean launch pad, the challenge of innovation, Speaker 10: modern commerce, the evolution of entrepreneurship and the pace of technology. Steve's website is a trove of information and resources. Go to Steve Blank, all one word.com Steve Aalto, I mentioned the lean launchpad course available Speaker 2: on you, Udacity. That's you. [00:26:00] udacity.com Speaker 8: spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. We have created a simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/k a l ex spectrum Speaker 2: [00:26:30] [inaudible]. Speaker 10: Now a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Naoshima joins me for the calendar. Speaker 1: Dr Claire Kremen. Our previous guest on spectrum is a professor in the Environmental Science Policy and management department at UCB. She is the CO director of the center [00:27:00] for diversified farming systems and a co faculty director of the Berkeley Food Institute. Claire [inaudible] will be giving a talk on Monday, March 10th at 3:00 PM in Morgan Hall Lounge. She will be talking about pollinators as a poster child for diversified farming systems. Dr Kremlin's research on pollinators has attracted national news coverage and is of great importance to California agriculture. The talk will be followed by a reception with snacks and drinks. Again, this will be Monday, March 10th at 3:00 PM in Morgan Hall Lounge. Speaker 6: [00:27:30] Okay. Speaker 4: The science of cal lecture for March will be delivered by Dr Troy Leonberger. The topic is genetics. The lecture is Saturday, March 15th at 11:00 AM in room one 59 of Mulford Hall. Now a single news story presented by Neha Shah Speaker 1: just over a week ago. You see Berkeley's own. Jennifer Doudna, a professor of several biology and chemistry classes at cal, was awarded [00:28:00] the lorry prize in the biomedical sciences for her work on revealing the structure of RNA and its roles in gene therapy. Doudna will receive the Lurie metal and $100,000 award this May in Washington DC. The Lurie Prize is awarded by the foundation for the National Institutes of health and this is its second year of annually recognizing young scientists in the biomedical field. Doudna was originally intrigued by the 1980 breakthrough that RNA could serve as enzymes. In contrast to the previously accepted notion that RNA was [00:28:30] exclusively for protein production. Downness is work today with RNA deals specifically with a protein known as cas nine which can target and cut parts of the DNA of invading viruses. Doudna and her collaborators made use of this knowledge of cast nine to develop a technique to edit genes which will hopefully lead to strides in human gene therapy. Dowden is delighted by her recent recognition and confident in the future of RNA research and the medical developments that will follow Speaker 6: [inaudible].Speaker 10: [00:29:00] The music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Speaker 7: Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them. Speaker 9: All [00:29:30] right. Email address is spectrum to klx@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dr. Josephine Yuen is the Ex Dir of E3S Center a collaboration of UCB, MIT, Stanford and UTEP. She is a Physical Chemist, Ph.D. from Cornell. She explains the e3s Center goals, Community College program, and focus on getting the research right.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible] [inaudible]. [inaudible]. Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum [00:00:30] the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hi and good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Our guest is Dr Josephine u n. She is the executive director of the [inaudible] center, a collaboration of UC Berkeley, MIT, Stanford, [00:01:00] and the University of Texas at El Paso. Dr [inaudible] is a physical chemist by training with a phd from Cornell University and she was also a postdoctoral fellow at the Argonne National Laboratory. She became a member of technical staff in bell laboratories and eventually held director level positions in product development, product management, manufacturing and supply line management. More recently, she was the CEO of try form x INC which develops and manufactures precision polymer [00:01:30] optics for the communications consumer products and medical industries. After spending 30 years in industry, she was a program director at the National Science Foundation. Today she talks with me about the [inaudible] center here at Berkeley, Josephine Ewen. Welcome to spectrum. Speaker 1: Thank you.Speaker 3: What is the origin story of e three s? How did it all get started? Speaker 1: Well, let's first understand what e three s stands for. It's [00:02:00] an acronym and this acronym for a center does headquarted in UC Berkeley and it's the center for energy efficient electronics science. Our story really began at the National Science Foundation. The National Science Foundation has several programs that fund centers intended to bring researchers from many institutions together to solve difficult problems [00:02:30] and one of those programs is the science and Technology Center program. Way Back and I believe most probably was 2008 there was a solicitation asking technical community and that is universities. Did you submit proposals for a new science and technology center? This type of solicitation comes out once every three years or so and so in two and nine professor [00:03:00] [inaudible] off the east department submitted a proposal that brings together researchers from various institutions, namely UC Berkeley, MIT, and Stanford to propose a new center, a new center that will do research necessary to come up with an alternative to the current day trend system. Speaker 1: No, you may want to ask, why do we need that? After all, transistors are everywhere and [00:03:30] it's in every aspects of our life. The reason we need an alternative is that we need an nutrient system or any kind of electronic components that would draw significantly less energy. Pol consumption in electronic devices have been dropping by virtue of the fact that through miniature isolation, the electronic industry has made great gains, not only in power consumption but in the cost of the device, [00:04:00] but unfortunately, miniaturization has hit a brick wall. It no longer is delivering the benefits it has delivered 10 plus years ago and you can see it by the very fact that the operating voltage of those devices in the past 10 plus years ago when the line was shrinks, you can see a big drop in the operating voltage, but in the last 10 years it's more or less flattened out and [00:04:30] even though the line was has shrunk further, we see that the operating voltage is around a vote, maybe slightly less than a vote now in the state of the art devices, but really we want to get to a device that can operate in the millivolt range and that is what the centers set out to do and we're doing the research necessary to get there. [inaudible] Speaker 3: I wanted to have [00:05:00] you talk about the themes of research at e three s and what made choosing themes and appealing method for your organization? Speaker 1: The center is researching different scientific concepts to achieve different device approaches. No one knows what is the best approach at this point. The current c Moss transistor is ubiquitous. There's no reason to believe is replacing will be [00:05:30] equally ubiquitous. The replacement may be a different solution for different application. That's why our research portfolio includes four themes. Not all four themes address the transistor. If you think of a integrated circuit, it's really a network of switches and the wires that connect us, which is three of the themes, address a different [00:06:00] type of switch while one theme address, how do you have more efficient wires or lower power consumption wires? Today's wars are copper wires, metal to wires, but we are doing research to have the communication between switches being done optically Speaker 3: and just for the record, what are the four themes? Speaker 1: The first theme is Nano Electronics. [00:06:30] The second theme is Nano mechanics. The third theme is nanophotonics and the fourth theme is Nano magnetics and you can see the first, second and fourth addresses. How do you get a different type of switch? While the third theme addresses the interconnection, namely the use of light for the interconnection amongst the switches [00:07:00] that we also call optical interconnect. Speaker 3: How interdisciplinary is the center? Do you have a sense of that in terms of the investigators and the researchers? Speaker 1: The center is highly into disciplinary disciplines involved. Our electrical engineering, chemistry material science and Physics Speaker 4: [inaudible]Speaker 3: [00:07:30] you are listening to spectrum of public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley public. Our guest is Josephine n. She is the executive director of the three s center. In the next segment she details the e three s community college outreach group. [inaudible]. An [00:08:00] interesting part of the e three s center is the program you've developed with community colleges. Do you want to explain how that program began and what its goals are? Speaker 1: A science and technology center is expected to educate besides do research and the education is not only have graduate students, so in I'll propose which NSF we decided to focus [00:08:30] on community college students. The reason we decided to do that is because in California we have the largest community college system in the country and many women and underrepresented minority start their post high school education. In community colleges. Our needs to increase its output of workers in this fuse [00:09:00] state utilizes science and technology disciplines and in order to do that we have to be able to encourage and groom participants from populations that are typically underrepresented in the technical world and this really based on that consideration that we say less focus on encouraging students, helping students from community colleges [00:09:30] develop a career in science and engineering. Speaker 3: What can you tell me about how the program is working and how people participate in it? From the community college side, Speaker 1: we have a program on campus called the transfer to excellence and this program while started by the East Rehab Center has now expanded to include other centers. This has been made possible because in addition to [00:10:00] the east area centers grind, the National Science Foundation also gave us an additional three years grant to expand the community college program and that has allowed the program to place students not only in the [inaudible] center but also to other centers on campus. Namely coins, the deals with Nana mechanics and also [inaudible] that deals with [00:10:30] synthetic bio fuse. The students from community college come on campus in the summer for nine weeks to do research, the first weakest bootcamp with the learn some of the basics to prepare them to go into the labs and then for the other eight weeks they work in the lab on individual projects and at the end, in the last week of the internship, they have to [00:11:00] present their work both in terms of giving talks and also in the form of posters in a poster session and that typically takes place at the beginning of August. And how large is that program? Last summer we hosted approximately 15 students. Speaker 3: Does that sort of what your target is for each summer? Speaker 1: Yes. Between 12 to 15 is off target [inaudible]. Speaker 3: And how do people [00:11:30] in community colleges get involved in it? How do they get selected or how do they apply? Speaker 1: In the fall we go through what we consider our recruitment face. We Post the information about the program on the website of our center. The staff of the center also goes out on campus to recruit. We host workshops to share information about a program and also to provide pointers to potential [00:12:00] applicants, how best to prepare the application. We also have webinars with, again, the purpose of encouraging and guiding potential applicants and how to apply and we also work with various community college or Nay stations to promote the program. For example, we ran a workshop in a Mesa conference. Is it statewide? [00:12:30] Yes. We're very proud to say that we have brought students from Mount Shasta down to south of San Diego from the bay area to the central valley Speaker 3: and I suppose the hope is that the students will then go to four year colleges get degrees. Are you tracking at all their progress in that effort? Speaker 1: Yes. Clearly the number one goal of this program [00:13:00] is to use research to deepen the interests of these students in science and engineering and you can ensure that they will get a good career in science engineering. Minimally a four year degree is necessary, so helping the students to transfer to a four year institution is number one goal. In addition, we want to excite them enough that they would even set this sites to go to graduate [00:13:30] school. The program provides one on one advising on the transfer process, particularly to UC Berkeley but also to four year institution in general and this advising is done by tap advices, which is the transfer alliance projects. There's part of UC Berkeley's campus, 87% of our 2012 class has transferred [00:14:00] to to what you see last fall. Most of them came to UC Berkeley, but others went to other ucs as well and I believe one of them actually transferred to Columbia Speaker 3: and for students that are in community colleges it might be listening. The best way to find out about it is to go on your website. Speaker 1: Yes. That's the best way to find out about the program and is also through our website which is www.ethrees-center.org [00:14:30] this website not only provides information but it just through this website you do your online application, Speaker 3: the community college students that are coming, what are their science requirements? Speaker 1: The program takes students the summer before they apply to transfer to a four year institution. By then we expect the students [00:15:00] to have completed two calculus courses and three signs or engineering courses including one laboratory course. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 5: From is a science and technology show on KALX Berkeley. We are talking with Josephine. You went [00:15:30] in the next segment she talks about the hope of research migrating from the lab to Congress. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 3: the center's focus now is on research. Is there at some point if you're successful with your research, a capability to implement and build something that would be a prototype of sorts. Speaker 1: [00:16:00] We are very much in the science face of our center. As a matter of fact, we are very much encouraged by our funder to really focus on understanding the science as opposed to just using empirical methods to achieve device demonstration. Part of the center's strategic plan costs for at the end of our sentence life, which we expect to be 10 years. We will be [00:16:30] able to have one technology, namely our science will be mature enough that we have a technology that can be commercialized. On the other hand, we are expected along the way to be able to really understand how realistic our approaches so we will be expected to have certain types of prototype demonstration in the second five years [00:17:00] of our center. Also each theme we expect that I'll research may have some near term applications and actually as a example in theme three which is the Nanophotonics we expect that I'll work in photo detectors can have near term applications. Speaker 3: So in a sense kind of spinning off some of the early successes within the center or do you have to move it out of the center to other [00:17:30] players? Speaker 1: They have different ways of transferring the knowledge that we gained through our research. The center has industry partners. This industry partners are leaders in the electronics industry. They have recognized the neat off the center and we should clearly we see them s one of the avenues to transfer technology that Nia term along the term [00:18:00] technologies that may come after center, but as you know, they also many other venues including potentially some of our students taking technologies and creating companies [inaudible] Speaker 3: so the industry partners also are able to feed back to you, give you some reflection on your research. Speaker 1: The feedback will enable the center to conduct this research to be practical and useful Speaker 3: [00:18:30] with the publications. Are there any restrictions on who you can publish with? Are you seeking out open source journals? Speaker 1: The Sentis research results are publish through peer review journals. Many of these journals, one could argue is not open source because you need a subscription to get to them. However, the journals allow the authors to post the papers on [00:19:00] their own website. I'll send to identifies on our website, our list of publications and through the authors own website, the public can gain access to those papers. Speaker 3: Are there other centers or other research groups that are doing very similar work that you pay close attention to? Speaker 1: Yes, there is a center in Notre Dame that [00:19:30] is partially funded by DARPA and another government agency. That center involves not only Notre Dame, Bifido is headquartered there, but it also has members from many of the academic institutions. The name of the center is leased. The center has similar goals as us. We are not the only people that recognized the problem the semiconductor industry is facing, [00:20:00] so there are many efforts and many researchers around the world working on different approaches to solving the problem. We are one of several centers. We believe we differentiate ourselves in part because we have really put a strong emphasis on establishing the science and understanding what has prevented an easy solution. Speaker 3: In your personal [00:20:30] story, you've spent some time on both sides of the granting process being with the NSF. What does it like seeing both sides of the process?Speaker 1: I was the SPI, our program officer at the National Science Foundation before coming to UC Berkeley at the Star Center. A programs officer's job is to figure out what area to fund. And in conjunction with review panels, recommend [00:21:00] which particular proposals you fund. And then after the award, the program office is job is to advise, guide, oversee the delivery of results and ensure that the grantee is in compliance with the program requirements. But when you are grantee, your job is to deliver on what you promise. So a lot of the focus is on results delivery [00:21:30] while a programs office job is to facilitate guide help, but not directly involved with the results delivery [inaudible] which do you prefer? My background prior to going to national science foundation was in private industry. So I have a very strong operating background. So to a certain extent, one can argue that given the number of years I've spent [00:22:00] operating or delivering results, that comes to me more naturally. Speaker 6: Josephine n, thank you very much for coming on spectrum. Speaker 1: Thank you for having me. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 5: for more details [00:22:30] on the [inaudible] center and their educational program, which covers pre college undergraduate, graduate and postdoc opportunities. Go to the e three s website, which is e three s-center.org spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university and we have created a simple link to help you get there. The link is tiny url.com/kalx [00:23:00] spectrum Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 5: We hope you can get out to a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two years. Two weeks. Speaker 6: Renee Rao and chase Jacabowski present the calendar this Monday, February 24th come check out the next edition of nerd night. East Bay featuring lectures such as explosions, [00:23:30] back drafts and sprinklers, how Hollywood gets fire science wrong by Joel Sipe. Then listen to Brian Dote from sweet Mary's coffee and he'll show us how a cherry becomes black gold in his lecture home coffee roasting on the with tools you probably already have and last Vincent tank way will teach us about hyper velocity launchers in his lecture. Hyper velocity launchers, how to launch a projectile at 10 meters per second. That's right. 10 meters per second. Once again, nerd night takes [00:24:00] place. February 24th at the new parkway cinema in Oakland. Doors Open at 7:00 PM on Monday, March 3rd Dr. Edward Stone of Caltech will be giving a talk about the voyager spacecraft missions into interstellar space launched in 1977 to explore Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The two voyager spacecrafts continue their journeys as they search for the Helio pause. Speaker 6: The heliopause is a boundary between the solar wind and the local interstellar medium. [00:24:30] Recently in August, 2012 voyager one seem to be finally entering into the heliopause. The spacecraft reported finding depleted low energy particles originating from inside the heliosphere as well as low energy cosmic rays from nearby regions of the Milky Way. These in subsequent observations of the heliopause are revealing new aspects of the complex interaction of our son with a local interstellar medium to hear a complete history and learn where the voyager is. Now. Join Dr. Stone on [00:25:00] March 3rd at 4:15 PM in [inaudible] room number one on my name, March 3rd at 7:30 PM hello fellow Dr Jacqueline. Ferritin will speak in the planetarium of the California Academy of Sciences. At the close of 2013 the Italian stars with planets orbiting them toppled more than 1000 the majority of these so-called exoplanets have not actually been seen, but rather inferred from their effect on their host stars through pain seeking technical methods and tremendous telescope [00:25:30] 10 handful of indirectly image and these giant planets have shown fascinating diversity in their sizes, temperatures, weather, and relationships to their parents. Speaker 6: Sends over the past several years, an entirely new and mysterious breed of planets has emerged. As genres have discovered a collection of orphans. Planets that are moving through the galaxy, seemingly unattached to a star in this talk fairly will highlight how we discovered these seemingly impossible objects and review how these strange, exotic planets may be key [00:26:00] players in our understanding of planet formation and evolution. Her talk will be held seven 30 on Monday night, March 3rd go to cal academy.org to reserve tickets. A feature of spectrum is to present new stories we find interesting. Tracy Jakubowski and Renee Rao present our news, the deal. Cal reports a new project from UC Berkeley. Researchers may soon allow the power of ocean waves to join solar and wind power as a commercialized source of energy. [00:26:30] The project is led by Marcus Lehman, a visiting graduate student in the Mechanical Engineering Department and supervised by razor alum and assistant professor of mechanical engineering and principal investigator of the research. Speaker 6: The project focuses on building a prototype of a sea floor carpet that can generate electricity by mimicking the properties of the muddy sea floor. Therefore, the group is designing a c floor carpet waive dampening system that will harness the energy of waves passing over it. Theoretically, the [00:27:00] energy generated by 10 meters of sea floor carpet will be roughly equivalent to the energy conducted by a stadium sized soccer field completely covered by solar panels. As more and more people move to live near coastlines, the researchers expect wave power to be a top contender as the next big renewable resource, especially because waves have very high energy density. The cost of building devices to harness wave power is high. LM said, the ocean is a difficult place to work and our devices have to be sturdy enough to combat [00:27:30] the oceans, corrosive and harsh environments, but there's an increasing need for clean and as socially acceptable forms of generating power. Speaker 6: We're working hard with scientists and engineers to make this happen and it's only a matter of time. A recent study published in the Open Access Journal microbiome examine the GI tract of premature infants in the neonatal intensive care unit or NICU. The lead author of the study, Brandon Brooks, a graduate student in the plant and microbial biology department at UC Berkeley, collaborated [00:28:00] with researchers university of Pittsburgh to swab the most touched surfaces at the NICU, as well as collect samples from two premature babies. In a small pilot study, they discovered the microbial environment of the baby's GI tracks was strikingly similar to that of the NICU, which was particularly interesting given that the premature babies were treated with antibiotics and should have had a very limited diversity of micro organisms within their GI tract. Well, most of the micro organisms were opportunistic. A few contain genes that conferred resistance [00:28:30] to antibiotics and disinfectant that was used within the NICU. The study provided an important insight into how the pathogenic, as well as nonpathogenic organisms are able to move from even the most sterile of environments to our bodies. Speaker 4: [inaudible] [inaudible] Speaker 7: the music heard during the show was written and produced by [00:29:00] Alex Simon Speaker 8: [inaudible].Speaker 7: Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email or email address, spectrum dev, QA, and lex@yahoo.com genus in two weeks time. [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Michel Maharbiz & Daniel Cohen. Michel is an Assoc Prof with EECS-UCB. His research is building micro/nano interfaces to cells and organisms: bio-derived fabrication methods. Daniel received his PhD from UCB and UCSF Dept of Bioengineering in 2013.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k [00:00:30] a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Hello and good afternoon. My name is Chase Jakubowski and I'm the host of today's show. Today we present the final of our two interviews with Michelle Ma Harbas and Daniel Cohen. Michelle is an associate professor with the Department of Electrical Engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley. His [00:01:00] current research interests include building micro nano interfaces to cells and organisms and exploring the bio derive fabrication methods. Daniel Cohen received his phd from the Joint UC Berkeley U CSF Department of Bioengineering Program in 2013 together they have been working on the fronts project funded by the National Science Foundation. Fronts is an acronym for flexible, resorbable, organic nanomaterial therapeutic systems. In this part [00:01:30] two of our interview, we discussed the current limits of instrumenting the human body, the ethics that swirl about bioengineering and the entrepreneurial urges of engineers. Here's part two. Yeah. Speaker 3: What sort of limits do you think there might be with these kinds of interfaces? Do you foresee any limitations on the technology or is it off we go, we don't have Saturday that work well in the body right now we don't have a sense of what to do with a lot of the data. It's not clear what you'd put in and out [00:02:00] getting the thing in. You're not going to do that on your own for most implants to put designs and so I think the limitations are huge, especially for electrical stimulation. There are very few safe ways of stimulating with DC fields inside the body. You need very special materials, short time periods. From an engineering perspective there are enormous challenges. Then people aren't going to be running around doing this anytime soon, but I think the data deluge is probably the biggest one we'll wind up with cause we'll eventually solve the technology side and then it's what do you do with all of this stuff? Speaker 3: [00:02:30] I think there are an enormous engineering challenges, but I think of course for us it's exciting because we are engineers. I think that people see something like this and immediately we're very good at linear extrapolation, right? So, oh that means in five years we'll all look like terminator or something. So I think there's a lot of work to be done, as Daniel said, in building things that robustly survive in the body for very long periods of time, if that's what's required. You know we were talking about resorbable stuff, but you're talking about adding therapeutics or things that have a therapeutic function that are electrical in nature at some level. A lot of the there is, you actually want Speaker 4: [00:03:00] them to last a long time in there and do their business and that's a very, very big open challenge. I would also say if you wanted to put on the futurist hat, you know in the end you're also limited by the substrate, right? You have a certain genetic code in your cells are predisposed to do certain things. So you know you're working with those base materials and what those cells are doing. And so I think there's a lot of future for this type of instrumentation, but you know, we're not going to look like the Borg anytime soon. I don't think. Are there any challenges that we haven't really gotten [00:03:30] to in developing these electronics so that they interact with biological systems in specifically technical stuff, environmental stuff, even legal and ethical things. Are there questions you guys wrestle with? We've had a lot of these cars, agent Daniel smiling because we've had conversations by often, not just with Daniel, with Peter [inaudible], who's another student that just graduated from the group. Speaker 4: It does neuro. It started back when we were doing some of the bug work. I think for this project, I'm pretty comfortable. You know, we're working on very fundamental things. [00:04:00] I don't know that I could address them in intelligently today, but I think that there are interesting ethical concerns, societal concerns as we instrument ourselves more and more and they've been discussed. I mean, this is something that if you're interested in this topic, you can find quite a bit of discussion on the web or in various talks. When I started instrumenting my body to some extent. Where's the line, for example, between traditional FDA approved devices and consumer gadgets that you buy with your iPhone, where should that data go? You know, what are you going to do with it? Who's gonna do what with it? Is [00:04:30] it all yours? You know, there's an interesting argument that came, a friend of mine, David Lieberman, who's doesn't do this kind of work, but he's very interested in sensors and he's recently been interested in genetic screening and he brings up the fact that a lot of this extra information sometimes isn't very actionable and so it just adds noise. Speaker 4: But from our perspective, I think what we're doing is pretty exciting and I think it has a chance to help people and it's early days, Speaker 3: there's a lot more transparency than there used to be too. So the maker movement and just people are much more interested in trying things on themselves, [00:05:00] not cutting their arms up in, but instrumenting, looking at heart rate, looking at salinity of the skin, just different things that various startup companies are playing with and that you can look up schematics for on the Internet and so there's more of a culture of what you can get out of it. The enhancement side I think is somewhat behind right now because it's not even clear what we're doing with any of these. So ethically we haven't run into that issue quite yet. Speaker 4: And in terms of the group that fronts contains all the different disciplines [00:05:30] that are working on it, it's a rather interdisciplinary project. Do you feel that your training taught you how to do interdisciplinary work or did you learn it on the job? I think I've always been in interdisciplinary environment in my work. I think it's always been accepted. I think it's been encouraged. I think that's the name of the game. Interestingly enough, I was just having a conversation with Edward Lee from our department two days ago where I was joking. I said the days of monastic academia are largely ending or, but interestingly enough, a lot of us choose academia [00:06:00] because we want to go live in a monastery. So it's say it's a very interesting sort of thing these days. I think certainly in a place like Berkeley, you want to make sure you're deep in your competence to, you're making contributions in a meaningful and deep way, but the nature of everything is very interdisciplinary.Speaker 4: Do you ever feel like, Oh, if I'd had more of this or more of that, if I'd had more exposure than I would just be so much more comfortable in this invited more money. No, I'm kidding. Now we're well funded. You know, you've only have so much time to spend in your field and to get competency. It's hard to do everything [00:06:30] and know everything. You can't really, you can't, but you should know who to talk to. Right. Interdisciplinary stuff is not trained and it's not easy to train someone in per se. It's a mindset and the environment is important. And in undergraduate work, you tend to be a specialist in something. And in Grad school you're expected to completely specialize, but I think you really miss out on a lot. So what's Nice, at least in Berkeley is it's very easy to transition across. Labs, talk to different people, set up collaborations, but at the end of the day, you're not going to be an expert in those things, [00:07:00] but you're going to know who to talk to and that creates a very nice network that is very innovative at the end of the day. Speaker 4: So sub specialty in a way, or you're familiar with it, you can do the work if you need to, but you know people who really know that and that's the most important part. You put a good team together and that's where most of the innovations today are coming from. Not from single disciplines. Yeah, I think Berkeley is great for this. You have the freedom to go and you have brilliant people around that can inform and willing to participate with visibility and guide and mentor. I mean it's the freedom to do this and the mentors [00:07:30] to do it. I think all the top American institutions do this. But in engineering that's the modern approach. Speaker 5: Mm MM. Speaker 6: Spectrum is a public affair show on k a l ex Berkeley. Our guests are Michelle Maha [inaudible] and Daniel Cohen of UC Berkeley. They went to build a smart badge for wounds. In the next segment they talk about multidisciplinary work and [00:08:00] science fiction. Speaker 4: Well, you started a company, you took research out of the lab and started a company and then sold it. And what did you learn from that process? Is there something, it's fun. Do you have an Aha moment of like, is this how to do it kind of a thing? No, no. I have a great deal of respect for people who make it their business to make money in the private sector in, in technology. I mean, of course these days that's a trivial thing to [00:08:30] say, right? Cause in the bay area, that's what we live off of. But I was fortunate enough that I met a number of individuals that were already in the private sector and we're interested in commercializing and I wanted to go off and be an idealist professor. We developed out the this company and the day came where I decided to go be a professor and they said, you know, if you stay, we'll give you a bigger piece of the pie. Speaker 4: And I said, no, I'm going to go. I literally said, no, I want to go off and you know, do all these other crazy things and if this company has more than 50% market [00:09:00] share on this little narrow part of a, that'll be good enough for me. Right. It's a very famous last words. And that would have is when it was sold, I was happy with what, but my wife will never forgive me. Right. And so she's like, yeah, what are you, how do you feel now? No, I find the whole process of thinking about how what you're working on in academia might be commercializable to be very sanguine about it. I find it fascinating. I think that that process, understanding that a lot of what you do is not relevant to that field of endeavor. Working with people, valuing academics, sometimes people tend to [00:09:30] under value the contributions of the non technical people, which is silly is ridiculous actually. Speaker 4: And so valuing all of the components at a great time doing that. And I've done this a couple times and we have lots of little things bubbling. My cofounder of Cork, Tara Neurotech, I'm co founder of a company called tweedle tech, which builds hardware for games. I went often for a year, worked at a startup in San Francisco and energy startups. So I'm a big fan of this type of thing. I think it actually for engineers in certain fields, it's very useful because it calibrates you to reality to be honest with you on [inaudible], something you [00:10:00] can help mentor people with and you see that as a, a role for you. I mean, there's always a role, but I'm always very modest about it because I certainly haven't made $100 million out of any of these companies. Right. You have to be humble, humble, or I mean, and also there's an opinion of, for every person that thinks about this, there's a very um, neat quote I read, I think it was Eric Lander who said that we live our lives prospectively, but then we reconstruct our history is retrospectively, right? Speaker 4: So effectively we pick and choose and create a narrative, right? And so [00:10:30] for all of this stuff, like let's mentor how to have a great startup, the people mentoring or giving you a story, they are doing a pattern fit to whatever they experienced to tell the story, how they feel comfortable telling it. Right? And there's a billion different versions of this narrative. How is it you should transition your company or your idea to a company. But it's a lot of fun. That's the main thing I would say. Anybody out there that's interested in, I think it can be a lot of fun. It's very humbling and it forces you to change directions constantly and reevaluate what you're doing. And it works. A set of mental muscles [00:11:00] that are very different, I think in some cases from the academic ones. So it's, it's overall, just very good. Speaker 4: Michelle, you commented that science fiction was a source of inspiration. Sure. Dune. Is that the key one I was going to ask, are there any stories or themes that stick out? Oh, there's tons, but I mean, I, I have to say maybe this will be disappointed to people that like thinking about cyborgs and putting stuff, but honestly it's, I mean the, I think the single piece of science fiction that impacted me the most was doing, when I read it in [00:11:30] early high school or high school, what are doing his blown up and continues to blow my mind. Like I just, every 10 years I read and it just makes me happy. Yeah. I'm a big fan of all of the, I certainly love all the traditional stuff and more recently for me in the late eighties all this cyber punky kind of stuff. I'm trying to think of something more recent that I've read. Oh, and then Vernor Vinge would probably be the last big phase of my science fiction Aha moment. I Speaker 3: love [inaudible] stuff. I consider science fiction to be particularly hard. Sai FYS, [00:12:00] they take the last three data points and they take a ruler and they extrapolate it out to infinity. Right? And so you read it and you particularly very good hard science fiction. It just feels like, oh, I'll definitely turn out this way. Right? It must turn out this way. If there's no doubt, how can I ever, right. We're all gonna upload ourselves or whatever. Right? And that's the beauty of the really good one that I'm a big fan, Daniel, for you, any allure of science fiction? You were waxing wonderfully about Frankenstein and I actually only just read Frankenstein for the first [00:12:30] time in the last year and it's amazing. Everyone should read it and it perfectly captures the mindset of being a scientist, especially a graduate student. But I grew up with drastic park. I also read Dune periodically and the golden compass and things that aren't even traditional Scifi things where any sort of alternate reality where people have to come up with a way of how something would be done. Speaker 3: Authors tend to be very good at coming up with strange things. And that was more the fun part. So there wasn't any direct inspiration, [00:13:00] but there's this synthesis and putting together a different ideas. And so that's where you get a lot of the ethical discussion too. I mean ethical education and especially for bioengineering, most of it probably comes from the media and [inaudible] really mean we all know these concepts now, not because we were formally taught them, but because it's in a movie somewhere or we read about some world where people are engineered or something like that. So you get a pretty good perspective actually. And then you go to Grad school thinking you're going to build those things out that it [00:13:30] takes a little bit longer. So you figured out in Grad School. So that's my problem. I haven't figured it out. I, I'm aware of the problem I can't solve. Speaker 3: I'm still subject to it. But uh, I also just enjoy reading all over the place. These ideas came from old science papers. I have to say. Daniel is amazing in that regard. Daniel shows up and he's like, ah, I was just reading a 13th century manual for rhinoplasty. Where do you even, how do you, what's, you know, like it's awesome. And then he's, and you're right, like was it 13th century, 16th century? [00:14:00] And there's all these digresses like, look, he figured out right away I'll do this. So I have to stay voracious. Appetite in reading is a big plus if you want to join my group. And as the Internet, what's unleashing your ability to find these old documents? It certainly helps with things like the databases. So Frankenstein was recently just fully released. In fact, facsimile with Mary Shelley's own handwriting and the preface and everything, but also just library libraries. Speaker 3: So some of the earliest medical engineering books are from the, actually the late 17 hundreds it [00:14:30] was already starting in those you only find in the library in manuscript form and you can just go pick them up. The hard library is still actually quite useful for this, but the Internet certainly a great place to get lost. Also, just reading papers from different fields and looking through the bibliographies. That's really just a good way to backtrack and find where these things really started. And even with the history of bioelectricity, most people cite back to one particular person and it turns out that there's a second person before him and then there's this story. It's just fun to bounce all [00:15:00] over the place. And I think that's something that at least in bioengineering you do a ton of because there's no one discipline, no one knows what bioengineering means. Speaker 3: You go all over the place. And so for any of this stuff and interdisciplinary stuff, that's really one way to find out is just started reading tons of things including science. And so the history of science comes to life absolutely with a lot of these pioneering efforts and it's exceptionally humbling too. So if you look at the materials they used in the first rhinoplasties to help seal people's noses off after they'd [00:15:30] been chopped off and duals that material on a microscopic level. But then electron microscope is very, very similar to cutting edge medical technology today that we use for similar treatment. And they had no idea what they were doing, they just knew what worked. It is pretty humbling when you come across things like that. And it also puts a lot of stuff in perspective and there's a lot of stuff that's been lost as well. So when you come across it from either a different field or it just hasn't been looked at in a while, that's always exciting. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 7: [00:16:00] You're listening to spectrum a science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley. We are talking with Michelle [inaudible] and Daniel Cohen bear research in the electric field that is generated by wounds and mammals. In the next segment they talk more about ethics and their work Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 4: Do you want to talk a little bit [00:16:30] more about your insect work that dated this? No bugs, but now we can talk about the, like the bugs is a, I say this is sort of my peewee Herman idea. You know, peewee Herman could never unfortunately ever not be peewee Herman. He tried very hard. I felt like the bugs is my peewee Herman curse. The brief version is we demonstrated that you can put very small electronics with neural in your muscular stimulators into insects and control their flight remotely via signal sent to the transmitter on the electronic package. And that would then control what signals [00:17:00] were sent to the insect. So what we do now is we have these incredibly small atronix weighs less than 200 milligrams such that these grasshoppers can carry it happily. We have these new systems that bias the way the insect receives certain information and we use that to affect how it's flying. Speaker 4: So we're still very interested in that. I find it a very interesting area. To me it's one of these places where you can most acutely demonstrate how much electronics has actually miniaturized. People have very visceral reaction [00:17:30] to the work because it takes these insects and incredibly small electronics that most people really don't think about usually and builds this sort of compound construct, right? That does something, the thing that isn't doing what an insect normally wants to do but isn't really a robot in the traditional sense of being made out of plastic and metal. For me, that's really why I do it. And I think it's right at that bleeding of what you can show you can do. And one of the side things that interests me profoundly is sort of the ethics of this. And most people like their initial reaction is either, oh [00:18:00] that's horrible. Speaker 4: How could you do that to an insect or at an insect? I swapped them against the wall all the time. Right. So there's usually, cause we like to be in quickly. So it's an interesting question. So let's say we get very good at putting these little packages on it such that almost anybody can do it as a hobby. Would you find it permissible to have, just like you have the San Francisco chapter of the RC helicopter flying hobby, would you find it permissible to have the San Francisco chapter of the Cyborg insect? Where do you go find yourself a grasshopper and you slap some stuff on its back or inside [00:18:30] it and use little pins to make holes to the right nerves and you let it go and then you start doing stuff. Our, what we normally consider to be animals, fair game, a spare part. Are they machines? Speaker 4: Are they not machines? I think this is fascinating. I think that we don't have very good ethical tools. In my opinion. I'm not an ethicist. I'm certainly not a philosopher, but I don't think we have very good ethical tools for dealing with this issue in the way we usually think about stuff. What is the argument against doing that? You usually fall back to things having to do with minimizing suffering and so on, but if you really spend some time [00:19:00] thinking about it, it's a lot of those become very murky very quickly with things like insects, things that are to our interpretation from our frame of reference are very distant from our cognitive function. It's the old argument that bad to hurt a dog, fine. Is it bad to hurt a fly? Is it bad to hurt a bacteria where, where in the spectrum of things do you fall? I think that this insect work really tickles that, whatever that is really struggle. I've had very interesting conversations after my talks and is that part of any of the engineering training? Speaker 3: Well, all [00:19:30] graduate students do ethical training and this sort of stuff is disgusting. It's more or less field dependent, but especially in bioengineering, you do a full seminar at the beginning where everything from this to genetics I adjustment and children and things like that, it's discussed. So that doesn't mean there are good tools for it, but everyone's very aware of it and I think maybe more effort should be made to derive those tools. But it's something people are working on at least. When you refer to a tools, are you talking of procedures and protocols, halls? Speaker 4: [00:20:00] What are you imagining as a tool in the ethics realm? I was thinking methods, algorithms, heuristics to think about this and come to conclusions. So for example, what I think of a tool I think of philosophical, philosophical tools, right? Thinking about what should I use as a basis for making a judgment? Should I just work to minimize singer style work to minimize suffering? That should be it. Is there something more complex or show you something else? So that's what I meant by tools. But of course there's another interpretation which is simply teaching students. They are in fact functional tools you use to determine ethical kind of in a narrower sentence, [00:20:30] right? Of for example, don't drop data points, you know? Right. If you have 43 data points in 42 of them look like you want the 43rd one doesn't, you should not get rid of the 43rd one. That kind of stuff. Sure. I mean I think we're very good at teaching that to the extent that it's well understood. I think it's just trickierSpeaker 3: when you do any animal work or bioengineering work where you have this utilitarian calculus, which is pretty much what most engineering revolves around. You're taught that you need to improve society. You have this idea that utility [00:21:00] is a valuable way of thinking about things, but it leaves too many questions open for bioengineering type stuff where utility comes at the cost of working on some living system that everyone is very aware of and very careful with and we have all sorts of protocols and procedures when we work with any living things, but it's still something that is very difficult to pin down when you talk to different people. And how they think about it. The consensus varies. Yes, sure, sure. Everyone has a good sense of like we're all sort of aligned, but where [00:21:30] you might draw the line or what types of experiments you personally might want to do is very different. Speaker 3: So some people fully support the idea of medical research but would never do it themselves for the reason that they don't want to work on the living system. And some people like myself say, if you are gonna work on a living system, you should do it. The courtesy of being in the room with it and at least seeing what you're doing. So there are different standards, but there's no formal approach to that. Yeah, there are lots of opinions. I mean, I think even in our larger super [00:22:00] set of people that work on this effort, there's lots of different comfort levels. The different researchers that run the whole gamut. Even calling it a living system, I think some people would say, well, it's out. Let me system. It's a, it's an animal. It's an organism. Your de de emphasizing its identity by calling it living, stuff like that. I mean, I think these things are all very interesting and we're all in the middle of it. It's an interesting area. Michelle [inaudible] and Daniel Cohen. Thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Thank you very much. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 7: [00:22:30] spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. We have created a simple link to get you there. The link is [00:23:00] tiny, url.com backslash and Kaa LX spectrum. We hope you can get out to a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Rick Kornacki joins me Speaker 8: presenting the calendar this Sunday. The ninth call, HUD ash is hosting a Darwin Day celebration Brunch at the Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin avenue from 11:00 AM until 1:00 PM [00:23:30] eat bagels and lox while hearing about looking for Darwin's footprints in the world of zombies, ucs f professor John Halfer. Nick is also the interim director of the Tiburon Center for Environmental Studies and trustee and president of the California Academy of Sciences as an entomologist professor, half or nick, studies of the Zombie fly and its relationship to bees. He will also discuss how Darwin's ideas were influenced by his knowledge of the insect [00:24:00] world. The event is $10 per person and more information is available@coladash.org Speaker 1: as average temperatures continue to rise due to human changes to the composition of the atmosphere, cases of extreme weather are very likely to occur. On February 12th come join expert Michael F Wainer, a senior staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and learn about the science of climate change, current areas of research and some possible implications [00:24:30] for the future. Tickets are free for UC Berkeley Students, faculty and staff, and $10 to the public. Once again, this event will take place on February 12th from 1230 to 1:30 PM at the freight and salvage in Berkeley. The Bay area skeptics present Kernan Coleman for a personal recollection. He has titled Escaping. We've Vale a journey out of magical thinking, a telling of his 10 year journey out of magical thinking, alternative [00:25:00] medicine, new age, and fear-based denialism and learn how the woo woo bill still affects them even though he knows better. This takes place February 13th at La Penea Lounge 31 oh five Shattuck avenue in Berkeley, seven 30 to 9:00 PM admission is free on February 15th the science of cow lecture will be given by Professor Marty Hearst and his entitled Natural Search User Interfaces. Speaker 1: What does the future hold for search user [00:25:30] interfaces? Can there be a natural user interface social rather than solo usage of information technology? More integration of massive quantities of user behavior and large scale knowledge basis. Marty Hurst is a professor in the school of Information at UC Berkeley with an affiliate appointment and the computer science division. She wrote the first book on search user interfaces. The lecture will be presented Saturday, February 15th and Stanley Hall Room One oh five at 11:00 AM [00:26:00] Stanley Hall is on the east side of the UC Berkeley campus. A feature of spectrum is to present new stories we find interesting. Rick Curnutt ski and I present our news. Speaker 8: Science now reviewed an article appearing in January 2nd proceeding of the National Academy of Science that suggests the black death left a mark on the human genome. Me. Hi, Natalia from Rad bough university and colleagues analyze the genomes from three populations. [00:26:30] The first population consisted of a hundred Romanians of European descent, Speaker 8: the second of a hundred Roma or gypsies that had migrated to the same region from India a thousand years ago. The third population was 500 people from Northwestern India, where the Roma were originally found. Genetically. The Roma are still quite similar to the Northwestern Indians, but 20 jeans have differences that could be explained by the environmental pressures the Europeans [00:27:00] and aroma have shared over the last millennia. Some jeans controlled skin pigmentation and others control immunological responses. The team found one such set of differences on chromosome four they code for proteins that latch onto bacteria initiating a defensive response. They showed the genes, help respond to the bacteria that caused the black death and speculate that it was this evolutionary pressure shared by the people living in the same area at the [00:27:30] same time. To exhibit these genomic differences, Speaker 1: researchers from the California State University Long Beach and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have launched Kelp, watched 2014 a scientific campaign designed to determine the extent of radioactive contamination of the state's Kelp forest from Japan's damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant initiated by long beach biology professor Steven Manley and the Berkeley labs head of applied nuclear physics, Kai vetter. The project were ally on [00:28:00] samples of giant Kelp and bulk help from along the California and Mexico coast lines. The project includes the participation of 19 academic and government institutions. These participants will sample kelp from the entire west coast as far north as del Norte, Tay County, and as far south as Baja California. Sampling will take place several times in 2014 and processed kelp samples will be sent to the Lawrence Berkeley national labs. Low background facility for detailed radionucleotide analysis. As data [00:28:30] becomes available, it will be posted for public access. Professor Manley says at the present time, this initiative is unfunded by any state or federal agency with time and costs being donated by participants. So those interested in taking part in the project can contact Manley at California State University. Long Beach Speaker 5: [inaudible].Speaker 6: [00:29:00] The music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us at eight nine days. Speaker 9: Hey, email address is spectrum dot k a l x@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same [00:29:30] time. [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Michel Maharbiz & Daniel Cohen. Michel is an Assoc Prof with EECS-UCB. His research is building micro/nano interfaces to cells and organisms: bio-derived fabrication methods. Daniel received his PhD from UCB and UCSF Dept of Bioengineering in 2013.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute [00:00:30] program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hi and good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Today we are presenting part one of two interviews with Michelle and Harb is and Daniel Cohen. Michelle is an associate professor with the Department of Electrical Engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley and the Co director of the Berkeley Sensor and actuator center. [00:01:00] His current research interests include building micro and nano interfaces to cells and organisms and exploring bio derived fabrication methods. Daniel Cohen received his phd from the Joint UC Berkeley and UCLA Department of bioengineering program in 2013 his phd advisor was Michelle Ma harvests. Together they have been working on the fronts project and NSF f Free Grant [00:01:30] F re stands for emerging frontiers and research and innovation fronts is the acronym for flexible, resorbable, organic and nanomaterial therapeutic systems. In part one of our interview, we discuss how they came to the challenge of measuring and understanding the so-called wound field. Here's part one, Michelle [inaudible] and Daniel cone. Welcome to spectrum. Thank you. Thanks. How was it that [00:02:00] electrical fields generated by wounds was discovered? So I think Daniel should take this one cause he's the, he's the group historian on this topic. In fact, he gave us a little dissertation during this thesis talk Speaker 4: in the day when electricity was sort of still a parlor trick. There was a lot of work being done to try to figure out where it was coming from. There was a lot of mysticism associated with it. And this is in the mid to late 17 hundreds and so Galvani is a name most people have heard. Galvanism was a term [00:02:30] coined for his work and what he found was all the work with frog legs. So he used to dissect frogs and could show that if you had dissimilar metals in contact with different parts of the muscle and the nerves, the legs with twitch and amputate the frog leg. So his conclusion was that electricity had something to do with life and their living things were made alive by having this spark of life. And this was a really super controversial idea because for a long time there had been a philosophical debate raging about vitalism versus mechanism, which is the idea that all living things are special because of some intrinsic vital force versus the idea [00:03:00] that physical principles explain life. Speaker 4: So the vitalist really liked this idea that electricity is the spark that makes living things special. There's a lot of dispute about this, but eventually Volta who is right after him and who the vault is named after showed that it was really just the movement of ions and things in salt solutions, but it was a little too late and the mystical aspect of this had come along. So the problem then was that this idea prevailed into the early 18 hundreds and so Galvani his nephew Aldini started doing [00:03:30] these experiments in England where he was given permission to take executed criminals and basically play with the corpses and he was able to create a corpus that would go like this. And raise an arm or wink an eye at an audience. And this was the idea of the reanimated corpse. So people were having a lot of fun with this, but it wasn't clear that it wasn't mystical. Speaker 4: And so this is the long answer to the question, but that's the backdrop where the science starts to come in. So the first thing is Frankenstein gets published out of this, and everybody's getting into the whole vitalism idea [00:04:00] at this point. And Frankenstein was written as a part of a horror story competition. It was almost a joke. But the funny thing is Frankenstein. Well, how would you say Frankenstein? The monster came to life to lightning? Like that's a line. It wasn't a Hollywood fabrication and everyone assumed that. But Mary Shelley never wrote anything about lightning or electricity. She in fact, wrote the technology was too dangerous to describe in texts for the average person. But in her preface, she explains that the whole origin of this idea, and this is where the answer to the question comes from, was that [00:04:30] she had writer's block when she was writing the story and she overheard her husband Percy Shelley and Lord Byron having an argument about work done by Erasmus, Darwin and Erasmus. Speaker 4: Darwin was a big natural philosopher or scientist at the time who was a big vitalist. So he's really into the idea of the spark of life and also this idea of spontaneous generation that where does life come from when you have a compost heap, fruit flies appear. There was an idea that be composing garbage produced life, and that was part of spontaneous generation. And he did a lot of experiments where he'd seal things like wet flour into a bell jar [00:05:00] and to show that organisms came out in a sealed environment and they just didn't know about microorganisms and things like that. So he did a famous experiment where he dehydrated some species called Vermicelli all. Sorry, I made the mistake. I'm about to talk about 40 cello, which is a little organism. And when he added water again, they came back to life. Now, Lord Byron and Percy Shelley didn't understand any of this, and the conversation that Mary Shelley eavesdropped on was one where they said that Erasmus Darwin had taken Vermicelli Pasta, put it inside the Bell Jar, sealed [00:05:30] it, and through some magic of his own allowed it to twitch. Speaker 4: So he had essentially given life to pasta. Now Mary Shelley wrote that she didn't believe any of this was actually really what happened. But this idea of animating the inanimate gave her the idea for Frankenstein. Then she writes the one line that links it to electricity, which is, and if any technology would have done this, it would probably have been galvanism, which is this idea of applying electricity to something. And so that's where this whole idea of life and electricity came from. By that point, the scientists had finally [00:06:00] caught up with all the mysticism and started to do more serious experiments, and that's when Carlo met Tucci in 18 and 30 something found that when you cut yourself, there's some sort of electrical signal at the injury source. And that was his main contribution that was called the wound current or the wound field and then after him was the guy who really formalized the whole thing, which was do Bob Raymond, who was a German electrophysiologist who found that if you have any sort of injury, he could actually measure a current flowing at the side of the injury. Speaker 4: He could show that that changed over time. He cut his own thumb and [00:06:30] measured the current flow and they didn't have an explanation for why it happened, but they knew that it had something to do with the electric chemistry there. This was the birth of electrophysiology and then he went off and did all these things with action potentials in neurons, which is why almost no one's heard about this injury side and the fact that electricity's everywhere in the body normally and it's not mystical, it's electrochemical. We're much more familiar with the neural stuff and this other stuff on the wound side sort of languished until maybe the late 19 hundreds because it was rare. It was weird. It wasn't clearly important [00:07:00] and a lot of the players involved were so caught up in all sorts of other things that we tend to forget about this. So that was the whole long winded history of where the wound field came from. But it's a good story. It is a good story. Yeah. Speaker 5: [inaudible] you are listening to spectrum KALX Berkeley. Our guests are Michael ml harvest and and Daniel Colon. They're both bioengineers in the next segment they talk about the genesis of the fronts [00:07:30] project. Speaker 6: Michelle, when you approached the NSF yeah. For a grant for this idea, how long had you been thinking about it? The smart bandage idea, how far down stream were you with the idea? We had been toying with the idea for quite some time and there's a bit of background to this as well. So my group amongst other things builds flexible electrode systems. [00:08:00] You can call them for neuroscience in your engineering, and most of those systems are intended to record electrical signals across many different points across many electrodes usually honor in the brain. And so we had this basic technology lying around. This is sort of a competence that the group has had for quite awhile. The other thing that was beginning to intrigue us, and I have to credit Daniel for sort of beginning of the discussions and kind of pushing this along in the early years, so Daniel and I have like a tube man club of sitting around thinking of crazy things and [00:08:30] one of the things that Daniel had been interested in was the idea of resorbing or having so some of the materials disappear as they do their job in the body and this is a notion that's become very popular recently actually over the last couple of years in into community in the engineering community in general. Speaker 6: Which brings us to another question I had, which is the difference between resorptionSpeaker 4: and absorption. Absorption might imply that you're taking the components up and they're becoming part of the body. Resorption is really just a very strange [00:09:00] semantic term. That means something like the body's breaking it down or it's breaking down in some form and it's not really the same as that material winding up elsewhere in your tissues. It may just get excreted or it may go somewhere else. So really we use it when we don't really know what's going on. Yeah, we had been looking at this general area and then I think the last piece of the puzzle, I think in our minds looking at the extant literature, the idea that we could take meaningful electrical data from a wound began to really interest us. And so the [00:09:30] two parts of this really are one, can you use portable, resorbable systems? Something like a bandage, you know, something that that isn't going to require you to walk around with a handcart. Speaker 4: Can you use systems like this to measure electrical signals that are relevant to wounds? And then the other question is if you can do that, and if you have, you know, you learn about this, and by the way, we're not the first people to try to do this. There are a number of people that have been measuring electrical signals in the wounds as Daniel set for quite some time. If you can do this, is there a value to [00:10:00] trying to control or modulate that electrical information or those fields or those currents in the wound? Is there a therapeutic value? Perhaps there are scientific value. Is there something you can learn about the way the body works or tissue works? Both of those are open questions and you know we can delve into each of those, but those are really kind of how we think about them separately a little bit. Speaker 4: The flip side is that when we do a lot of this kind of design for medical things, you will want to know what's already happening and how the body handles its own injuries. And this field doesn't just arise passively. So they had no way of knowing [00:10:30] this when it was first discovered. But when you get this electric field, there is a navigational effect for incoming cells to the injury. So it actually helps guide things in like a lighthouse to the wound site. And so a lot of my phd work was showing how you can steer ourselves with a controlled electric field so you can really hurt them like sheep based on how the electric field goes. And that means that that was a source of this bio inspired part of it, which is we're not adding something that's not already there. We're taking something that's already there and we're modulating it to maybe improve. Speaker 4: [00:11:00] So evolutionary tools or things that the body has, it just happened to work well enough for us to survive as a species. It doesn't mean it's optimized and this field tends to go away very quickly. Nobody really knows whether extending the duration of the field would improve the healing or if we could shape it. Maybe you can control how scar tissue forms and things like that. So there's this idea of looking at how the body already heals itself and then figuring out where you might start to control it. And electricity is one of the areas that's really been under utilized in medical technology for the sort of thing. Yeah. I think for those of your audience [00:11:30] that are sort of tech junkies, if you will, the resurgence of this type of thing. Occurrent Lee I think arises because we've gotten very good at building very low power, very small electronics, and there's been a whole slew of new polymers and sort of new flexible substrates that are also conductive or can hold conductors. And so those two things together rekindled interest and trying to build gadgets that sit Speaker 6: on the skin. Or in the NSF case, we're not only doing the skin, but we're trying to develop a tool longterm [00:12:00] for surgeons to do something inside the body. So it'd be nice to be able to leave something that will help you heal, but then it'll be resorts so you don't have to reopen. Right. Speaker 5: Spectrum is a public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley. Our guests are Michelle. My heart is in Daniel Cohen of UC Berkeley. They want to build a smart bandage for wounds. In the next segment, they talk about the focus of their research. Speaker 6: [00:12:30] So in your approach to the NSF, was there some sort of focus, there's a technological focus and an application focus? The technological focus for the NSF was to point out that there was a lot of fundamental engineering science that had to be done to produce the type of systems that could do this. You know, we're looking at resorbable batteries are real parts wise, how you would build these systems, what polymers you'd use, what the rates of resorption. There's a lot of just fundamental stuff going on. If you posit that there'll be value to [00:13:00] these kinds of things. That's one focus as the other focus. I would say application wise we're looking at two things. The most ambitious is that you could develop systems that a surgeon could use for internal wounds. So the dream is a surgeon is, for example, let's say you have to resect the part of your intestine. Speaker 6: You then have to fuse the two parts that are left behind. There are methods for doing this and there's still research going on into what we know. The clinical methodology for this. It would be very useful if you could leave behind something that [00:13:30] could tell you, if nothing else, the state of how that is healing but would then go away because you're certainly not going to go back and open somebody's abdomen to take out a little piece of sensor that was doing something to intestine. Right? That'd be a not a good idea, and so that idea, that dream that you could leave behind, very small, very thin things that could take data if nothing else. Take data is really what was one of the applications. The other one is surface wounds. There are lots of surface wounds caused by illness. For example, advanced diabetes produces a [00:14:00] lot of problems in the extremities and wounds that are chronic that don't heal very well. Speaker 6: There's just a lot of ongoing interest in surface wounds and not just the technologies for understanding how they may be healing, but in things that maybe could help heal those surface wounds. Those are our full side view welders. I think of them as there are specific things we want to show we can do with our partners at UCLA, but there's also an entire wealth of engineering science that has to be done to build the fundamental. So the NSF was okay with that broad [00:14:30] a portfolio of research. Well, so that's sort of what their mandate is to go broad like that. Cause that seems like you're, you're doing stuff. Speaker 4: I think their main concern here is that they specifically discourage healthcare applications as NIH can fund those. But the difference is that what engineers have found for a long time now is that we don't actually know how to engineer biology. So any technology brings quantification Speaker 6: and an engineering mindset to solving this, like tissue engineering, growing organs. We don't have a lot of engineering for that. But if we start [00:15:00] to monitor everything we can, that chemical signals mechanical, electrical, we build up a set of stimulus and response type rules. We understand how to perturb these systems. So in the same way that you might build a bridge according to a manual of how you build a bridge and how you look at the loads in it and the ways of building a bridge, we might someday build organs. So if that's the pitch, that's much more fundamental science and that's really where it has a medical application. But we can't do it without science and engineering principles that just don't exist right now. There's two points I should mention. First of all, the key is this work [00:15:30] is really looking at the fundamentals of the engineering and the science. Speaker 6: We certainly have our foot into clinical side because I think it informs some of this, right? So that what you're doing is relevant so that someday you could go down that path so you're not in isolation because if you're not assuming that you're headed in this great direction. Exactly. And then you find clinical guys saying less clinically. Right. So the other were very good. And the second thing is that, um, we're funded under a slightly broader grant mechanism than usual. So we have a, what's called an NSF. Every, I think this is emerging frontiers and research and innovation I think [00:16:00] is what it is and these are sort of headline or marquee type thing. So we're very lucky that we were awarded one of these and so I think the NSF has really looking for this broad, far reaching hard-hitting effort. I think there's a good point to mention that this project is really a big collaboration between a number of us and I'd like to mention who they are because some of the material work has done by very talented people in the department on a rds and the Vec Subramanian are two professors in the ECS department and they're very well known for flexible printed systems and [00:16:30] the materials that go into them and we work also with Shovel Roy at UCF and Mike Harrison and Mike is a sort of brilliant pediatric surgeon and shovel. Speaker 6: Roy's well known for the technologies he builds at the interface with clinical need. It's really the fact that all these people come together that we're building all of these tools. Speaker 7: [inaudible]Speaker 3: spectrum is a science and technology show on KALX Berkeley. We are talking with Michelle Mull Harvest Daniel Cohen. [00:17:00] They are researching the electrical field that is generated by wounds in mammals. Their hope is to collect meaningful data from sensors embedded in bandages placed on wounds. Speaker 6: If you approached interpreting and analyzing the electrical field data that you're getting out of the wounds in an animal right now we're being very cautious. We started a first few experiments with rodents over the last six months. What we've [00:17:30] built is a, is a series of systems. You can think of them as insulators with lots of little electrodes all over them. An array of of little electrodes. They're on order of a centimeter or less in terms of you can think of a postage stamp, maybe a bit smaller. We have different varieties of them. Some are stiff, some are very flexible. You can think of it as contact lenses or transparency paper, that kind of thing. And these arrays are connected to electrical sensing equipment. There's a miniaturize a little board that runs everything [00:18:00] and sends data to a block and all this data is collected and what we're currently looking at as a variety of different signals on both open wounds. Speaker 6: So if I, for example, cut the skin and on pressure wounds, pressure wounds or something that people that don't see clinics very often or hospitals aren't familiar with but in fact are huge, huge problem in hospitals right now. Then we lay these arrays over the tissue and we measure a variety of different things. One thing we measure what's known as electrical impedance between different [00:18:30] points on the array and you can think of electrical impedance as how much resistance to an electric current that tissue might produce. It's not a steady current, it's a time bearing current, so we sort of wiggle the current on and off, on and off negative, positive, negative, a sinusoidal and how quickly that current responds and how much of it there is. That allows us to calculate the impedance and there's a lot you can tell from that. You can tell whether things are very wet and conductive. Speaker 6: You can tell whether the tissue is tight knit, so that doesn't let things through a oily. You can tell whether there [00:19:00] might be changes in from one tissue to another. You can infer things about what tissues are might be underneath. The other thing we measure is actually electric potential when the wounds are immediately after they're made. We try to look at what kind of potentials arise and how they're changing. So right now that's in terms of measurement. That's really what we're looking at it. And another thing I should point out as we do these measurements as a function of frequency across a wide range of frequency spectrum up to hundreds of kilohertz. And that's sort of the rapidity with which we wiggle the signal because different components in the tissue [00:19:30] will respond differently at different legal frequencies. Once we have that complete plot, we can look at the difference between them and by to see whether we can build models that tell us, oh well we've, you see this type of distribution. Speaker 6: There's a in tech skin for example. So the dream, in this case, you put your bandaid on and your doctor checks his eye, his or her iPhone every 12 to 24 hours and just gets a different little map of how it's working without ever having to remove the dressing. How are you doing in understanding what those signals mean in terms of healing? [00:20:00] But we just had a meeting, they're doing great. They've basically collected a great deal of data on the latest set of wounds they did and now they're in fact proposing models and seeing how the data fits. They're fitting their models to the data to try to use those fits as ways of discriminating different types of tissues. So we're in the middle of it right now. I couldn't tell you much. We're still putting all that story together for publication. So, and are you able to leverage the work that other people are doing? Oh, absolutely. Sure. Well, I mean you always do that. Like I said, nothing is in a vacuum, right? So absolutely. We follow [00:20:30] the literature and, and we build off of what other people have found and try to add our own contributions. That's, that's how it works. Maybe these ideas came from discoveries from the 18 hundreds and then later on in the 1980s onwards, a bunch of really good developmental biologists have really pioneered a lot of this and gone down as, as showing that Speaker 4: even in an embryo you can detect changes in electrical potential at the surface of the embryo where limbs will form and things like that. So there's a huge amount of stuff out there that gave us the idea for the original thing, but we're barely scratching the surface. [00:21:00] We were technologist, right? We're engineers. So part of one thing and figure it out. Yeah. So the idea of trying to analyze the wound field data, do you have to solve that problem first before you can take on anything else? Like trying to instigate the healing? Yeah. Yeah, I would say so. You would never put this in the body without knowing, knowing that a real lot works. But on the surface it's a different healing mechanism than say a fracture, but it's still the idea that we don't necessarily know what the cause and [00:21:30] effect is yet. So we have to show that getting a field out relates to some state that we can say the wound is in and that we can intelligently put a field back in that actually helps. So we need some metric of success. And without that metric, that number that says the wound is doing better or worse, we're not confident saying that our stimulation is helping. So that's why getting this data first is really important. Speaker 6: The parameter space is fairly large, right? To number of things you could possibly change. Some of the effects are very subtle. And so just willy nilly going [00:22:00] in there and saying, oh, I applied some fields, you know, likely not gonna be very useful. And then there's another subtlety, which is that there are probably clinical contexts in which this is of limited utility, even if it works. And so that is, uh, something we spend a lot of time thinking about. So let me give you an example. Let's say I told you I can make that little cut on your knees heal 5% faster with a $15 bandaid. I'm pretty sure you're not going to buy a $15 [inaudible] except maybe once for the novelty of it. You know it tickles. But [00:22:30] there are contexts where, and Daniel alluded to this earlier, for example, scar formation is a big deal, right? Speaker 6: How a scar forms and the trajectory of the wound healing for certain load-bearing wounds of really big deal, right? Think of your abdomen if you had to go in there and hurt those muscles or hernia. And there are many things like this and so if, and I want to be very careful to say if if it was founded, electrical interventions can affect that type of healing in a way that produces a useful outcome, right? Much better scar developments so that your load bearing properties are [00:23:00] maybe not as good as the original, but a lot better than just letting it sit around with a dressing. That'll be a very big deal. But that's a very big space, right? Speaker 4: And that's why we split it into this in Vivo work on monitoring the surface and wound properties and in vitro work where we have cells and tissues and culture where we can directly stimulate them in culture in a very controlled environment and watch exactly how they respond to different shapes of fields and types of fields and come up with a way of describing how they behave. That doesn't require the Nvivo work. So we have two parallel tracks [00:23:30] right now and hopefully we can put them together. Speaker 5: [inaudible] be sure to catch part two of this interview with Michelle Maha Urbis and Daniel Cohen on the next spectrum in two weeks. In that interview, Michelle and Daniel talk about the limitations of sensors on or in humans, the ethics of sensing and inputs into living systems and moving research discoveries Speaker 8: into startup companies. Spectrum shows are [00:24:00] archived on iTunes university. We've created a simple link to get you there. The link is tiny url.com/k a l ex spectrum. We hope you can get out to a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Renee Rao and Rick Karnofsky present the calendar Speaker 9: nerd night east space first show of 2014 will be happening January 27th the show features three great Speakers. [00:24:30] First nerd night, San Francisco alum, Bradley boy tech. We'll guide you through how scientists organize and present some of the vast amounts of data available today. Then the Chabot space centers, Benjamin [inaudible] will discuss the most likely places to find life off of planet earth. Of course, finally KQ Eighties Lisa Allah Ferris will tell you what you need to know about Obamacare. The show will be held this Monday, the 27th at the new Parkway Theater in Oakland. Doors open at seven to get tickets for the HR event. [00:25:00] Go to East Bay nerd night, spelled n I t e.com this February 2nd the California Academy of Sciences will host a lecture on the Ice Age Fonda of the bay area. There's a good chance that wherever you happen to be sitting or standing is a spot where Colombian mamis giants laws direwolves, saber tooth cats and other megafauna. Also Rome during the ice age. Learn about the real giants of San Francisco and how you can embark upon [00:25:30] a local journey to see evidence of these extraordinary extinct animals. The lecture will be held@theacademyonfebruarysecondfromninefortyfiveamtotwelvepmticketsareavailableonlineatcalacademy.orgSpeaker 8: February's East Bay Science cafe. We'll be on Wednesday the fifth from seven to 9:00 PM at Cafe Val Paris, CEO 1403 Solano in Albany, Dr. Harry Green. We'll discuss his book [00:26:00] tracks and shadows field biology as art green, a herpetologist at Cornell blends personal memoir with natural history. He'll discuss the nuts and bolts of field research and teaching how he sees science aiding and in conservation and appreciation of nature, as well as give many tales about his favorite subject. Snakes. For more information about this free event, visit the cafes page on the website of the Berkeley Natural History Museum at BN [00:26:30] h m. Dot berkeley.edu/about/science cafe dot PHP. A feature of spectrum is to present news stories we find interesting. Rick Karnofsky and Rene Rao present our news in a letter published in January 15th nature. James us or would a locomotor biomechanist at the Royal Veterinary College at the University of London and colleagues explain why Birds Migrate In v-shaped [00:27:00] formations. The team fitted several northern bald ibis is with gps trackers and accelerometers to measure wing movement. They found that the birds positioned themselves in optimum positions that agree with their aerodynamic models. Further the birds flap in phase with one another when in such permissions instead of the antifreeze flapping, they performed when following immediately behind each other. This in phase flapping maximizes lifted the plot [00:27:30] and is surprising as a team noted. The aerodynamic accomplishments were previously not thought possible for birds because of the complex flight dynamics and sensory feedback that would be required to perform such a feat. Speaker 9: The tenuous place in the human family tree of artifice guest room, it is a 4.4 million year old African primate has recently been solidified. Fossil remains Ardipithecus Ramidus or rd as a species is known first discovered by UC Berkeley [00:28:00] Professor Tim White and his team in Ethiopia in the 1990s and have proven a consternation to classify ever sense rd displays an unusual mixture of human and ape traits. Fossils reveals small human like teeth and upper pelvis adapted to bipedal motion, but a disproportionately small brain and grasping large toes, best suited for climbing trees. Scientists split over whether rd was our distant relative, essentially an ape that retained a few human features from along a common ancestor [00:28:30] or our close cousin, possibly even an ancestor. Recently Tim white among many others coauthored a paper with Arizona State Universities, William Kimball in which they successfully linked the rd to Australopithecus and thereby to humans. The team examine the basis of rd skulls and found surprising similarities to human and Australopithecines skulls indicating that those had already been may have been small. It was far more similar to a hominids than an apes Speaker 7: in in Speaker 9: [00:29:00] the music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to spectrum. We are happy to hear from listeners. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l ex hate yahoo.com. [00:29:30] Join us in two weeks at this same Speaker 10: hi [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard Norgaard Prof Emeritus of Energy and Resources at UC Berkeley. Among the founders of ecological economics, his research addresses how environmental problems challenge scientific understanding and the policy process. Part two of two.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly [00:00:30] 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hi there and good afternoon. My name is Renee Rao and I'll be hosting today's show today. We present part two of our interview with Richard Norgaard, professor emeritus of the energy resources group at UC Berkeley. He's among the founders of the field of ecological economics. His recent research addresses how environmental problems challenged scientific understanding [00:01:00] and the policy process, how ecologists and economists understand systems differently and how globalization affects environmental governance. In part two of the interview Norgaard talks about interdisciplinary problem solving. He also shares his thoughts on sustainability co-evolution and confronting a change in climate. Speaker 4: You've been very interested in them multi-disciplinary collaborative research model. Yeah, this is true. I've had very interesting experiences working in groups with people who think very differently [00:01:30] and I don't know when it starts. I guess probably the first project was a Ford Foundation funded project where eight or nine of us from different disciplines were set up as an Alaska pipeline team in 1970 the summer of 70 and we spent the summer talking to pipeline engineers to state officials, federal officials, scientists in the area, wildlife management people, native Americans, the Eskimo [00:02:00] about what's going on and as a team we tried to assess what's really the potential of [inaudible] Bay oil field for the state of Alaska and what are the myths, how do we break those myths and try to come up with a better understanding. Shortly after I came to Berkeley, Robert Vandenbosch from biological control entomology came into my office and said, we need an economist to work on pesticide use, and I didn't know anything about pesticide use other than what I'd read in silence swing by Rachel Carson and I [00:02:30] had an incredible experience working with Vandenbosch, Carl Huffaker, many, many anthropologists, but rather quickly. Speaker 4: Also just because there weren't other economists doing it. Found myself on a presidential advisory committee working with the council on environmental quality on pesticide policy, a working on on 19 University National Science Foundation Integrated Pest Management Project. And you get out in the field, you talked to farmers, [00:03:00] end up talking to the pesticide industry people and you learn a lot and you try to assemble it and try to change how things are working. So early in my career I got very involved with these interdisciplinary activities, but the, the strongest experience was just joining the knowledges, being on national academy committees with the former president of Stanford University whose names Donald Kennedy, a tremendous scientist that was able to work across [00:03:30] scientific fields with other people. But I was seen scientists involved in collective understanding or using their judgment together to try to say, this is what science can say and this is what society probably should do given what we know. Speaker 4: But it was a judgment process. It wasn't that there was a great big computer model that put all of our understanding together. And have you seen that process improving over time? I think there's more people participating in processes [00:04:00] like that. And the intergovernmental panel on climate change is certainly a massive experiment along those lines. And the Millennium Ecosystem assessment was one of these, we're doing it more. What we're not doing is actually teaching undergraduate students and graduate students that this is how science works when it really comes to understanding complex systems. It's a matter of getting in a room together and talking a lot and bringing your knowledges together. [00:04:30] And then that raises new questions that we can go back and study and do deeper research in small teams of maybe interdisciplinary or maybe it's strictly disciplinary, but it's that does my knowledge fit together with this other person's knowledge? Speaker 4: And if not, what does it mean? And if it does, great, you know, science does not come together. And if it did, who would know, who would be smart enough to know and how would we know that person knew? And so there's a great problem, you got to do it together [00:05:00] and we're not teaching that yet. I think the energy and resources group does, but it's not quite as explicit or as open as it should be. And is that what makes that program so distinctive? Well, I tried to leave that mark on it and had the advantage of serving on the admissions committee. And certainly one of my criteria was to bring people to the program who had enough experience to have a sense of identity [00:05:30] and a sense of voice, experiential knowledge that they could bring to the group, but also to not just take the most brilliant students we could find on the list that best matched the interest of the professors, but to actually try to select 15 to 22 students who could learn together, who had different understanding, who had different disciplinary backgrounds or experiential knowledge. Speaker 4: And so I literally tried to set it up as a shared learning to the extent I could. There's many people involved [00:06:00] in the, in the decision process, and of course the applicants this themselves have to say, yes, your best intentions are never carried out. But that was certainly an influence I tried to have. And to some extent did. And the book that you're working on now or I've just completed? Well, I just try authored a book, David Schlossberg and John Drysek. I have to say that they basically did most of the writing. We had try edited a handbook in Oxford Handbook on climate change in society [00:06:30] and so we decided we ought to build a write up a shorter book, a 200 page book that would be for lay people are educated obviously, but uh, a broader audience, a much broader audience. And the title of that is climate challenge society, right. And I [inaudible] wordpress. Yes. So I, I can say I contributed to the title climate challenge society and climate challenge in both ways that were having difficulty coming to grips with the concept of climate change. But we're also challenged [00:07:00] by the consequences of climate change and that books currently out. That book came out a couple of months ago. I have no idea how it's selling yet. I'm, I'm hopeful. Speaker 2: [inaudible] spectrums. Brad Swift is interviewing Richard Norgaard and ecological economists. Next segment. He talks about the book that he's currently writing. Speaker 4: [00:07:30] The book I'm writing now as the unusual title economism and the economy scene. And so elaborate on the first term economism. Uh, there's several ways to get into this, but you probably understand the difference between environmentalism and environmental science and that environmentalism is the movement. It draws on environmental science, but not as rigorously as it probably should. It doesn't mind using old [00:08:00] environmental science if that suits its purposes better. But environmentalism also feeds back on environmental science that environmental scientists needed speak to environmental ism environmentalist's and so they will choose words to speak to their public. We don't use the word economism. And the quickest way to say this, the difference between environmentalism and economism is that we don't use the word economism because there isn't any difference between economics and economists. [00:08:30] And they're kind of so tightly bound that we don't see the difference that, but economism is the beliefs we hold as a people. Speaker 4: And those beliefs help keep the economy going there. The ideas that are invoked in political discourse. You can think of it as just like we think of environmentalism as only kind of a religious movement or a movement that brings people their social identity. Economism is similar in that way that our economic beliefs help rationalize where we are in the economy [00:09:00] or economic beliefs. Help rationalize allowing our corporations to use cheap labor abroad or economic beliefs. Sort of explain how the system we're in exists and why it's there. Almost everything in our lives on a daily basis and to understand that we have economism that intertwines with economic sciences. Economists themselves are engaged in this belief system in partly perpetrating it and [00:09:30] partly changing it. So that's the nature of the next book, the second term as econo scene and he wrote a familiar, many of them audience would be familiar with the idea of the Anthropocene, the idea that we're now in a new geological era, an era in which people are the primary drivers of environmental change, and that's controversial among the scientific community, but it's begun to be used quite a bit. Speaker 4: And anthropocene to me is very vague. It doesn't [00:10:00] identify what it is. It's doing the driving. If you use the word econo scene, you should say, Nah, it's the economic system that we're in that's doing the driving and it's the economic system that we need to change. I mean we're not going to transform people. We're going to transform our social organization to solve this problem. And so econo scene to my mind is at least since post World War II is the appropriate term. As you look at the current economic system [00:10:30] you and mentioned earlier that the growth paradigm isn't really sustainable. Sustainability is a buzz word of the moment in so many areas. How can we define that and how do we pursue sustainability? I think we're so far from sustainability that it's very difficult to find and we're in this very difficult to understand very complex big system that has all these different feedbacks. Speaker 4: You know, the idea that we can comprehend sustainability is [00:11:00] like, can we comprehend the full environmental system? I don't think so. I think we have a strong sense that we're in a danger zone and we need to move out of it. And we know what directions we need to go. And that means slowing down the rates of material flows, slowing down the rates of energy use, slowing down the amount of toxic materials we're putting into the environment or pulling out of with the environment and transforming and releasing back into the environment. And [00:11:30] we have certain equity concepts that sort of says that those who are doing more of it should cut back more than those who are doing less of it. And I think as we move in those directions, we will see the system responding and we'll eventually get a better sense of sustainability, but we'll never really understand sustainability. Speaker 4: It's a really important word, but the idea that we can define it and get it all tied down scientifically and do it is now become part of our problem. But the idea that [00:12:00] we need to change and we know which direction to go, I think that's actually very clear within that change. Yeah. Does that relate to your idea of co-evolution? Is that sort of the basis of co-evolutionary thought or [inaudible] okay, so yeah, we haven't really laid that out. This was a thought experiment that I was in my own mind working in Brazil in the late seventies and I was very involved in sort of what's going on in the Amazon, gone onto [00:12:30] an Amazon planning team for Brazilian government and they were trying to optimally plan how things work, how could we develop the Amazon using science? And I was sitting there admits this process saying that's not the way development occurred in Europe. Speaker 4: That's not the way development occurred in the United States. There was a lot of experimentation and a lot of things didn't work and some things did work. Oh, that sounds like evolution at the time I was reading a lot of ecology and evolutionary theory and [00:13:00] was a friend of Paul aeroflex who was one of the cofounders of the idea of co-evolution species are primarily evolving in the context of each other, not to a fixed environment and what does that mean for how we think evolutionarily? And so yes, I began to try to understand or think about change in the human nature interaction in co-evolutionary terms. It's a pattern of thinking that sheds light on our predicament. But it's only [00:13:30] one pattern of thinking. So I don't say this is the answer, but it's very insightful. It's a pattern of thinking that says things are happening by experiment and that we should be experimenting more and be less certain about what we're doing. And what we've really done is set up a global system of everybody doing the same thing and we're not learning very much from it. And it's a very risky experiment. So I think if you understand change as an evolutionary process, you don't do what [00:14:00] we've done in globalizing the economy and trying to push that further and further and further. Speaker 1: Spectrum is a public affairs show on k Alex Burke. Our guest today is professor Richard Norgaard of UC Berkeley. In the next segment, he talks about the need for increasing diversity and experimentation in the world's economies. Speaker 4: [00:14:30] So the idea that industries and enterprises should try to become sustainable becomes an experiment. We're always experimenting. We have sincere corporations that are trying to go green. We have corporations that are greenwashing. Everybody's experimenting. But is the system as a whole set ups and those experiments are giving us the diversity we need from a systems [00:15:00] perspective and we're not doing that. And is that much easier to identify in the biological realm rather than in the technology economic world of manufacturing. And um, if economists were actually going out looking at how the world works more than we do, we, one of the beautiful things about biologists, they go out in the field and say, oh look, that's interesting. Yeah. I kind of spend very little time going out and say, wow, this industry is co-evolving [00:15:30] with that industry. Isn't this interesting? We tend to sit in our offices and smash data rather than actually try to observe. Speaker 4: I'm obviously, it's very difficult to observe economic phenomena today, uh, cause there's just so much of it happening and it's not as visible as it was say in the 19th century when industries were just emerging. Certainly there are applied and practical economists that are born at this. How are firms we configuring, how are they relating [00:16:00] to each other in different ways than the economics profession is the academic economics profession. Yeah. I think if we were to be more field oriented we would see co-evolution and maybe you'd be able to draw on it and learn from that. In terms of trying to alter the economic system and the path that we're currently on, given the ideological polarization, do you see a way that that could happen with the current polarization? I have great difficulties seeing it. [00:16:30] The common element unfortunately is we all need our share of material stuff rather than a discussion about what's the good life and how are we going to go forward. Speaker 4: The forward for both of them is more, it's more at the tension over who gets what. Until we get to a situation where we get beyond the stuff and use of energy to what makes a good life. I don't see that transformation happening, but I'm hopeful that it's creeping up somewhere [00:17:00] that those discussions are going on and that'll emerge somewhere. Certainly there are people talking about those things. I don't see it at the center we have now the two centers we have now two, can we create a world in which nations become less in tangled and we can get more experiments between them and then have some sort of a learning way between those different nations so that we retain our flexibility [00:17:30] and don't put all of our eggs in one basket. I guess that's the experiment I'm looking for and does the approach to climate change and global warming, is that an opportunity for the same kind of experimentation? Speaker 4: It may be the disaster that forces us into action. I don't know if you call that an or not, but a opportunity or disaster. It's certainly testing how well we understand complex systems and change with those systems [00:18:00] and I'm hoping we'll find a way to to make this adjustment, but we're not doing it very well now. It certainly seems that they're trying to stay within the growth paradigm so far in your mind until they abandoned that on some level or completely it's not really gonna pay off by my mind. Then again, growth is kind of tricky. What we don't want is a growth of impacts. We want a decline. We want to simplify the ways in which we're interactive with nature. Minimize the footprint. That's one way [00:18:30] to put it. Minimize the footprint so that's not a matter of growth or no growth, right? You could still have growth in the arts. Speaker 4: We could all cut each other's hair every other day and charge each other and the GDP would look fantastic. GDP is a very deceptive numbers just to measure market activity. If somebody wants to call that growth, that's okay with me, but what we really need to do is simplify and be less intrusive in the natural system. Similarly, looking [00:19:00] longterm and coming up with an experimental framework. The delta program that you were talking about and the delta in general being a mysterious black box that no one quite understands. Do you feel that there's a growing acknowledgement within the policy community that it's going to take years and years and years and a very dynamic approach to solve it? I think that's true. The Delta Reform Act of 2009 [00:19:30] is very supportive of science. It mandates that we use adaptive management. You know, it's acknowledging that we have to change our management as the times change. Speaker 4: It's legislation that says climate change exists and we need to bring climate change into our understanding of how we think of the Delta as right in the legislation. I mean that's unusual, you know, at least in the state of California already in a world in which we are acknowledging the system is changing [00:20:00] and we need to change with it. There's real complications as to how you get responsible public action and responsible private action in a changing world and a predictable world. You can say, if you do this, then this will happen. If you don't do it, you're responsible and changing world responsibility is really hard to assign and we still want responsible government. [00:20:30] We still want responsible managers, we want responsible enterprises, but how do you set up rules which you know need to change. If you know they need to change, then our agencies or private parties allowed to adjust before the rules are changed. You give it to see the problem. Structurally responsibility and a rapidly changing world are in conflict. This means we need a dramatic [00:21:00] increase in trust and that trust has to be based on actual actions that are based in scientific understanding of a changing world. How do we build that trust? It gets back to how do we collectively understand and learn together and live as a community together in a changing world, it's pretty dramatic transformation. Speaker 4: How do you see academic work addressing some of these [00:21:30] societal problems going forward? Is there a role? Of course, and of course academia is constantly changing and where the learning is taking place is constantly changing within academe. I guess I'd like to go back to this. You know, we're not a university where multiversity and Clark Kerr wrote a book on that almost 50 years ago. Yeah. How to become a university again. How to become a model for the experiment. We're actually in of trying to collectively understand [00:22:00] a very complex system. I think universities could play a very strong role in making an effort to actually change the system and the system of learning among students, and we're not even talking about that yet. We're still very much in the fractured disciplinary mode and if anything, maybe with the greater need for corporate funding for rich individuals help even more show going into the [00:22:30] disciplinary mode rather than the collective understanding mode. Richard Norgaard, thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Thank you very much for inviting me. It's great pleasure Speaker 2: spectrum shows are on iTunes here. This kid is simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/k a l ex spectrum. Speaker 5: Now a few of the science of technology events [00:23:00] happening locally over the next two weeks. Vic, could I ski and I present the calendar on Tuesday, January 14th former NASA astronauts and Co founder of the B6 12 foundation. Ed Lou, well discuss protecting earth from asteroids. Why we may not see them coming at the Commonwealth Club of California, five nine five market street in San Francisco. Lou is pointed out that more than a million near Earth Asteroids are larger than the asteroid. That struck Siberia in 1908 [00:23:30] that one was about a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and it was only about 40 meters across, yet it destroyed an area roughly the size of the San Francisco Bay area. Lou will discuss his mission to detect and track the million with the potential to destroy any major city on earth and how his B6 12 foundation plans to build, launch, and operate a deep space telescope with an infrared lens. The first private sector deep space mission [00:24:00] in history and mission will be $20 or $7 for students. For more information, visit Commonwealth club.org Speaker 3: on January 16th Dr Tom Volk will present a talk on the hidden romantic lives of fun guy. Dr [inaudible] is a professor of biology at the University of Wisconsin Lacrosse where he teaches courses on medical mycology, plant microbe interactions, food and industrial in Mycology, organismal biology and Latin and Greek for scientist. [00:24:30] Dr. Buck has also conducted fungal bio diversity studies in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Alaska, and Israel. His free public talk will be held on Thursday, January 16th from seven 30 to 9:30 PM and three 38 Koshland Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. Speaker 5: Basics, the bay area art and science interdisciplinary collaborative sessions is hosting talks center reception with exhibits on our watershed. Over 7 million of us live near the bays, [00:25:00] rivers and creeks that comprise the San Francisco Bay watershed. Professor Jay Lund will highlight and explore the ramifications of the urban bay areas, dependence on water from distant sources, environmental artists, Daniel McCormick and Mary O'Brien. We'll discuss what they term remedial art, surveying some of their watershed sculpture projects and professor Sarah Cohen will introduce us to sea vomit and other species as she spotlights aquatic diversity [00:25:30] in the bay accompanied by a string quartet. The show will be on Saturday, January 18th seven to 9:00 PM with doors at six 30 it's at the ODC theater, 31 five three 17th street in San Francisco. Admission is on a sliding scale so you can attend for free. You should visit Oh d C dance.org to make your reservation Speaker 3: the years first iteration of the monthly lecture series signs that cow will be held on January 18th [00:26:00] Christian Reichardt or researcher at UC Berkeley will speak about his research on cosmic microwave background radiation. Much of it connected in the South Pole. Cosmic background radiation is our most ancient form of detectable lights and carries the imprint of the big bang. It has been a crucial tool and exploring the beginning of our universe. For the past 20 years, scientists had been mapping this radiation using telescopes located in the South Pole. Dr Reichardt will discuss what is already known about the Big Bang, what the latest results from the South Pole could mean and what it's like to work at the bottom of the world. The free public talk will be held [00:26:30] on January 18th in room one 59 of Mulford Hall on the southwest edge of the UC Berkeley campus. The talk will begin promptly at 11:00 AM a feature spectrum is to present new stories we particularly interesting. Rick Karnofsky joins me for the news. Speaker 5: Oxford anthropologist, Robin Dunbar is famous for formulating the so called Dunbar's number. That's the maximum number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships with and it's about 150 [00:27:00] people he's published in the proceedings of National Academy of Sciences. This week. His article coauthored by Jerry Sarah Maki from Alto University in Finland and others reports on a study in which 24 students we're giving it an 18 month sell contract. Throughout the study, participants were given a survey to rank the emotional closeness of friends and family members. Perhaps unsurprisingly, greater emotional closeness rankings correlated with the frequency and duration of [00:27:30] cell phone calls. More surprisingly though was the number of people a person called and how much time they spent on the phone with them remained relatively constant. Even if the particular people they talk to May change. For example, the top three contacts typically get 40 to 50% of the time spent on calls. As new network members are added, some old network members either are replaced or receive your calls. The author's note. This is likely to reflect the consequences of finite resources [00:28:00] such as the time available for communication. That emotional effort required to sustain close relationships and the ability to make emotional investments. Speaker 3: A team of researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have used the inorganic material, vanadium dioxide, to create a micro sized robotic torsional muscle motor. The artificial muscle is a thousand times more powerful than a human muscle of the same size. The device can also hurt all objects 50 times as heavy as itself up to a distance five [00:28:30] times as long as its own link faster than the blink of a human eye within 60 milliseconds. A paper describing the innovative machine and its use of material phase transitions appeared in a recent issue of the journal. Advanced materials, the material and the robotic muscle. Vanadium dioxide is highly prized itself because its properties change with temperature. At low temperatures. It acts as an insulator, but suddenly I 67 degrees Celsius. It becomes a conductor. Additionally, upon warming the crystal instructure, the material will contract in one direction while expanding [00:29:00] in the other two. The multi-functionality of the material makes it a prime candidate for use as an artificial muscle, as well as helping to improve the efficiency in other electronic devices. Okay. Speaker 1: And the music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, [00:29:30] please send them to us. Our email address is [inaudible] spectrum dot k a l x@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this time. Speaker 6: [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard Norgaard Prof Emeritus of Energy and Resources at UC Berkeley. Among the founders of ecological economics, his research addresses how environmental problems challenge scientific understanding and the policy process. Part one of two.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 3: [inaudible]Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum [00:00:30] the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 4: Hi and good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Today we are presenting part one of two interviews with Richard Norgaard, professor emeritus of the energy resources group at UC Berkeley. Richard Norgaard received [00:01:00] his phd in economics from the University of Chicago in 1971 he was among the founders of the field of ecological economics. His research addresses how environmental problems challenged scientific understanding and the public policy process, how ecologists and economists understand systems differently and how globalization affects environmental governance. In today's interview, Norgaard talks about the origins of economic science defines [00:01:30] ecological economics and discusses certainty and uncertainty in science. Here's that interview Richard Norgaard. Welcome to spectrum. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Would you describe how economic theory and the science of economics has been forged over time? Speaker 5: I hesitate to use that word science with economics, but like other patterns of thinking in in scholarly endeavors. It's a mix. There were the physiocrats [00:02:00] who basically were in admiration of physics and said, well, we ought to be able to think of the economy as a bunch of flows and they were on 1750 or so, didn't work out very well in the 19th century. As we knew more about energy, we had people more again from the physical side thinking about value, think about the economy as energy flows and we're still trying to do that well. What we really think of as sort of conventionally economics comes out [00:02:30] of moral philosophy and Adam Smith is sort of asking what makes a good society? How do people behave? And the markets have been around for Millennia. He took another look at markets and said, Gee, this is interesting to people acting in their own interests, make both of them better off. Speaker 5: And this was just a thought experiment. If that's true, then then what? Then what and any expanded that thought experiment, what does it mean [00:03:00] with Spec to the role of markets and the role of government? And that's been the dominant pattern. But what I would say thought experiments, if we look at what's going out out there and say she has it like this, if this this was happening, and then expand that to a more systemic understanding of the economy as a whole is not been by hard data collection and patterns emerging from the data though there is that element to it though, right? Reinforce the [00:03:30] thought. Oh to be sure. Malthus's thought experiment was one of the most important ever and he just thought, well, you know, it looks like agricultural production increases linearly and population increases geometrically and what does that mean? And that meant that you're going to come to the limits and clashes and war and bad behavior and and therefore abstinence would be good. Speaker 5: Late marriage would be good. And he definitely tried to back [00:04:00] that up with data. The data were very poor at the time. But yes, we've always tried to back up our thought experiments with data and sometimes that exchange changes how we think and makes our thinking more elaborate. But when I say we're different from other sciences in that we're less data-driven and more just pattern of thinking driven and then within the profession there are these various schools of thought to be sure we can [00:04:30] do get pressure to align yourself in some way. Where the school of thought, well I wouldn't say so much pressure, I would say it's, it's a desire or human desire for a sense of community and shared thinking and it's much more comfortable working with people who think like you do. And so there's pretty strong lines between people who think markets are most important and people who think power is most important sort of followers of Adam Smith or followers of Carl Marx. Speaker 5: But [00:05:00] yeah, there are times when, I guess you could say you feel the pressure, but it's more just the pressure of a community that and communities are good communities help us think together and dig deeper along a pattern of thinking. But of course they also keep you in the same Rut. And then we, if you become deviant, oh yeah. How are you treated at that point? Well and are you encouraged to be deviant? So anyway, so there are rankings of what's strong economics and what's weak economics. [00:05:30] And on the neoclassical side, the mathematicians have always had bigger Thrones than those who actually go out and study how the markets work. And then those who actually study the, the laws and regulations that determine how markets work. Those are referred to as institutional economists and for many years institutional economists, which are the lowest ranking, they studied the facts, they just studied history. Speaker 5: They weren't [00:06:00] high theorist, but of course it's, it's how, how laws get written that determine how markets work and not the mathematics. Early on in your career you've stepped out of the mainstream. I never was in the mainstream. I, I was out before I was in and I've always been out. I had a very strong experience as an 18 year old, 19 year old as a river guide in the Glen Canyon of the Colorado. And that's now under Lake Powell. And [00:06:30] I was one of a very small number of people who saw this area, but also saw it go under and I became a fairly committed environmentalist and then started thinking, well, I'm you know, 19 years old, I'm a sophomore, junior in college. What do I want to study, what I want to do in life? And I loved biology. I love geology, but nature is not the problem. We are. If we are, then what's the biggest thing? And it was not too difficult to say, well, it's, [00:07:00] it's our economy. It's how we think about our relationship with nature as determined by our economics and economic beliefs. And so I went into economics from the outside knowing that I was always on the outside. I don't recommend it. Speaker 2: [inaudible] you are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. [00:07:30] Richard Norgaard is our guest. He is an ecological economists. In the next segment, he defines it, logical, economic [inaudible]. Speaker 5: And what role do you think ecological economics has to play in shaping and informing policy? Well, we should probably describe ecologically economics a little bit first. And [00:08:00] I like to put it in a little bit in juxtaposition with environmental economics. Environmental Economics is basically a pattern of thinking that says things are left out of the economy or we don't get the opportunity to buy clean air. We don't get the opportunity to buy healthy environments and, and we just need to put everything in the market. And when everything's in the market, the market will be perfect. And so environmental economics is about [00:08:30] making the economy evermore inclusive by bringing more and more things into it. Ecological economics is not just an extension of economics. Ecological economics is a real effort to understand ecological systems and economic systems and try to understand where they may come into clash ecologies, basic premises, everything's connected to everything else. Speaker 5: And a basic premise of at least mainstream economics is that things can be divided [00:09:00] up and made into property and exchanged the one hand. The economic worldview is everything's divisible and ecological worldview. Everything is connected and that's a fundamental tension and human understanding of systems. And so at least to me is that tension that signifies sort of our ultimate limits of how we understand systems that's embedded in ecological economics. So how do you reveal that tension and then try [00:09:30] to have an impact on policy that would affect that tension. In Our world today is not set up that way. Our world today is set up that science brings answers and a better informed society can make better choices. But we also have sort of the idea that that we can have scientists inside of government that can say this is how things are, and then democracy is just about choosing between options. Speaker 5: [00:10:00] If you really see that fundamental tension all the way down and then science can't give answers and science can say, well look at the world as a divisible world. I see this. If I look at the world, isn't there connected world? I see this and it's up to all of us to then sort of get involved in the judgment process and the way policy is set up now it's very much in the context of a legislature that has certain roles and then the agencies that have certain roles and courts [00:10:30] that have certain roles and then policymakers are sort of in this process trying to set up options and pathways that if you follow ecological economics to its logical limits, we all need to be involved in this. And so I push ecological economics to discourse of democracy that we really need to think of democracy as a shared learning system, not as a vote counting system. Speaker 5: It's a process by which we all come to [00:11:00] better understanding and make compromises and that's very different than the way we think of policy and democracy and and science. Now the long step to their, and by no means do all ecological economists think this way. We do get involved in policy, but then it frequently comes into contradiction with sort of the fundamental problems of, of our understanding. Whenever you're in a system that's not where you think the system ought [00:11:30] to be, you're still stuck with these dilemmas of how do you intervene and, and transform the system. And so I myself get involved in and policy sort of positions and you know, you don't understand the nature of the world you're in unless you're engaged with it. You can't just sit back and say, well, I'm not gonna, I'm not going to engage until it's all set up. Right? So to be sure they're economists who don't see the tension and just say ecological economics ought to fit in the [00:12:00] policy process as it is, or ecologically economists who do see the tension and need to work or choose to work with the system to help transform it. Speaker 4: So in a sense, trying to build a consensus across the political world and just the general population as to the ongoing learning experiment that democracy could be. Speaker 5: Yeah, and we're so far from that now. We presumed that the enlightenment, everybody would become more educated. Everybody would be in a better position [00:12:30] to make rational decisions. But we actually created a world in which we have experts in various fields. We have a market system that divides us into very specialized tasks. And so our understanding is very fractured. And so partly the fact that economics is built on a divisible world has been used to create policy as further divided the world. And it's divided the world with through globalization to the point [00:13:00] where very distance from the production process of the materials, the clothes we wear, the food we eat. And so it's very hard to come to common understanding and make decisions collectively so that the system we devised as created serious problems for common understanding.Speaker 4: There seemed to be some people who are recognizing that more often and pushing back or asking for an alternative to that globalization [00:13:30] and division with this to hope, Speaker 5: this gives me hope, this, this division, this specialization, this fracturing of our sense of common understanding. Yeah, I see it in the drive for interdisciplinarity and the drive or you know, trying to understand the full effects of what we do, the and the bringing all the scientists together to understand climate change. As an example, I'm very involved in a process [00:14:00] in the California delta where we're trying to understand a complex system and we have procedures to try to bring in public input, but we still very much stakeholder staked down. We've got our positions and they're sort of a tension between the common understanding and let's just go to court. Let's sue each other. Let's battle it out. Let's you know I'm right, you're wrong. And that gets back to the community. I am mentioned with economists that you want to be in a shared [00:14:30] community, but if you've already got a shared community of laborers or shared community of capitalists or shared community of neoclassical economists, that's where you go back to and environmentalist are in a similar situation. Speaker 6: Spectrum is a public affairs show on KALX Berkeley. Our guest is [00:15:00] professor Richard Norgaard of UC Berkeley. In the next segment he talks about certainty and uncertainty in science. Speaker 5: Would the tension and increasing tension where systems potentially start to fail and common interest then gets galvanized by the failure of really large natural systems. Does the expression of risk management [00:15:30] start to bring people together? I think that's, that's a fair assessment of the situation where in that we have quested for certainty. John Dewey wrote a book on the quest for certainty and in the push for certainty we pretend we're actually reaching that certainty. And yet the very same time we're seeing that the uncertainty rules and sort of the story of climate science, it was always, well we don't know [00:16:00] this, we know none of this. We need to go back and build better and better models. And as we build better and better models, we, we learned how complex the system in is, is. And we can't really build in all the feedbacks of forest fires and uncertain events that are really contingent on particular things coming together particular time. Speaker 5: If we shift to what we don't know, that very powerful drive to be precautious and to come together and to slow the economy down. But that's also [00:16:30] like asking every scientist is say let's stress what we don't know instead of what we do know. And that's hasn't been, well the public hasn't asked that of scientists. Scientists aren't inclined to put all the emphasis in what we don't know. The whole system is sort of set up that science tells us this and then we can make a rational decision. And you know, you can imagine the climate deniers jumping on the scientific community. Well they do every time the scientific [00:17:00] community on climate becomes more specific and modifies what it knew before it gets jumped on. And so the tension is, is difficult. But yes, in the California Delta we're also in a situation where we really have to confess what we don't know and set up management systems to adapt to climate change, to invasive species to sea level rise and how the future's going to be unfolding is really unclear. Speaker 5: [00:17:30] But at the same time we have laws and legislation that say we have to write environmental impact statements and these environmental impact statements have to predict what's going to happen. And so we have a 20,000 plus page environmental impact statement for this Delta project. Is that information or is that just, you know, it's, it's, it's crazy. And so then is it kind of a general misunderstanding of science? Because really the flip side of science is the mystery and the unknown and that's really what drives a [00:18:00] lot of science is the unknown. And so it makes it so exciting. And so is it just that policymakers, general population only look to science for answers and don't want to deal with that whole mysterious side of science. I think, you know the mysterious side gets a little quasi religious sometimes and we tend to shy away from that. Speaker 5: But I think it's also just the way we've been set up in societies. This science has generated [00:18:30] a lot of technology. It's been technology generated out of just parts of what we know that then has consequences when we actually implement the technology. It changes us socially in the environment, but science has delivered lots of hard stuff. And then can we just extend that ability to understand the whole system and the answer does not look good and too says probably not. And that should then drive us to humility. [00:19:00] But when I went in and you get prestige for being a scientist, for coming up with answers, on the other hand, an honest scientist has to say, we're not holding it all together. We're not able to see the whole system and how do we understand the whole system? Who's going to understand the whole system and the level of understanding we have to have now is much greater as we have 7 billion going on, eight to 10 billion people, and [00:19:30] with the technologies we have today, we are intertwined with this system much more deeply and many, many, many, many more ways than humankind has historically. Speaker 5: And this has dramatically increased just the last 60 years. There's been a tenfold increase in economic activity. That's incredible. To have that kind of change and to think that it can continue, which is the paradigm that's, that will continue. It has to [00:20:00] have by the paradigm, but it, of course, that paradigm is has to be false and it's partly perpetrated by false economics or just reading a portion of what economists know, but that's inconceivable. But as we pushed this system harder, we have to understand it better and better and better and we're clearly not understanding it well enough. Now in your work, which tools and methods do you believe are the most important? I think I'm going to go back to those thought experiments. That's where the breakthroughs [00:20:30] come. Ways of reconceiving. What we're doing that gives us new insights that then help us change. Speaker 5: So Adam Smith's thought experiment gave us a much clearer understanding of what markets can do and we formulated a lot of our social organization along Adam Smith's ideas. We need new thought experiments that become equally popular somehow. [00:21:00] That's an issue because with markets we have stakeholders and with stakeholders then you get political power and then that reinforces existing system and how do we get a thought experiment within economics or ecological economics or from anywhere it comes that we'll reconfigure how we think about our relationship with nature to get us out of the system we're in now. Yeah. That's really the tool is I see it. That's what's been powerful in social theory. [00:21:30] The data collection, you know, fancy econometric analyses. Not so much model building and data driven stuff. Model building is good for understanding sort of the limits of how much you can understand and model building can be really good for bringing people from different disciplines together to have a shared project. That's fantastic, but as soon as you actually believe in your model, you're in trouble and that's [00:22:00] yeah, frequently happens. Speaker 3: Be sure to catch her Speaker 4: to have this interview with Richard Norgaard in two weeks. In that interview he talks about interdisciplinary problem solving. Speaker 6: Co-Evolution diversity and sustainability Speaker 4: [00:22:30] spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. We have created a simple link for you to make it easy to find. The link is tiny url.com/k a l X. Speaker 6: [inaudible]. Now Speaker 4: the science and technology events happening locally [00:23:00] over the next two weeks. [inaudible] and I presented Speaker 7: the theme of January seconds after dark explore [inaudible] adult happy hour is sharing. Sharing isn't just about kids and toys. It's at the heart of some of the biggest problems facing all of us. Highlights of the evening include exploratorium social psychologist, Dr Hugh Macdonald, discussing the science of sharing the finer points of interviewing [00:23:30] with StoryCorps and a chance to share feedback on new exhibits about cooperation, competition, and collaborative problem solving. Admission do anyone 18 and over is $15 and is reduced for members visit exploratorium.edu for more information. Speaker 4: The life sciences division of the Berkeley Lab will hold a seminar on the effects that the deep water horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico [00:24:00] had on the resident fish populations. Dr Fernando Galvez from Louisiana State University will speak about his research on the Gulf. Upon hearing about the spill in 2010 Dr Galvez and his team were actually able to take water and tissue samples from seven marsh habitats around the Gulf before and after the oil hit in order to assess the long and short term ecological consequences. He has more recently been investigating the [00:24:30] ability of the native fish to compensate for crude oil linking effects from the molecular level to physiological performance. The free public event will be held January 7th from four to 5:00 PM in room one 41 of the Berkeley lab building at seven one seven potter street in Berkeley. Speaker 7: The programs and policies director of the Oakland based National Center for Science Education. Joshua Rose now [00:25:00] well discuss the predecessor of the NC s e the Salsalito based Science League of America at the free Skype talk hosted by the bay area skeptics at Luphinia Cultural Center three one zero five Shattuck in Berkeley on January 9th at 7:30 PM the Science League was formed by Maynard Shipley, a science communicator and former shoe salesman to educate the public about evolution. More information [00:25:30] is that BA skeptics.org Speaker 4: the Henry Wheeler Center for emerging and neglected diseases. Annual symposium aims to strengthen connections between San Francisco Bay area scientists working on infectious diseases of global health importance and the broader global health research, product development and advocacy communities. The theme for the 2014 symposium is academia and the global health pipeline, [00:26:00] basic science, innovation and translation. The symposium features a dynamic list of invited Speakers from around the world, including scientists from developing countries. Participants include academic researchers from UC Berkeley, UCF, Stanford, UC Davis, as well as representatives from local biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies and global health nonprofits. The event will be held January 10th [00:26:30] from 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM in the lead cost Xing Center Auditorium. The event is free to attend, but you must register online at the center for emerging and neglected diseases website by January 6th to attend the symposium. A feature of spectrum is to present new stories we find interesting. Rick Karnofsky joins me for the news. Speaker 4: The December 23rd issue of nature news reviewed a preprint submitted to archive [00:27:00] by Notre Dame, astrophysicist David Bennett and a large team of collaborators that offers the first suggested report have an extra solar moon, extra solar planets have been found routinely. We now know of over a thousand that are detected by analyzing how it stars. Light, brightens and dims with time, but detecting the moon is exceedingly difficult. The team saw a smeared out brightness as if two objects had magnified the light. [00:27:30] The study is conservative and notes that their observations best fit a model of the moon with a mass smaller than Earth's orbiting the primary planet of a gas giant, but that other models may also fit while they don't fit as well. They have been observed in more systems. These include a lower mass star or brown Dorf orbit by a fast and small planet about the size of Neptune. Speaker 4: The team stresses that their study shows the power of micro Lenzing to survey such systems and helps [00:28:00] for a higher precision measurements from huddle. The UC Berkeley News Center reports that a team of UC Berkeley vision scientists has found that small fragments of Keratin protein in the I play a key role in warding off pathogens. Professor Susan Fleisig, an optometrist at the University of California, Berkeley says, what we know is people virtually never get corneal infections unless they're a contact lens wearer or unless they have very severe injury to the cornea. Professor [00:28:30] Fleisig, along with other UC Berkeley researchers recently discovered the proteins in the eye called Keratins. We're able to ward off bacteria to test this. Researchers introduced normal cells to bacteria, which predictably attacked and killed the defenseless healthy cells. But when small parts of Keratin proteins were added, the normal cells lived. Scientists have made an artificial version of a small part of the Keratin protein and tested it against different diseases. The proteins [00:29:00] destroyed bacteria that can cause struck throat, diarrhea, and staff. Further research is needed before isolated. Keratins can be used to fight bacteria, but it could be a low cost discovery that might change the way we treat and prevent infections. Speaker 2: [inaudible] music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Thanks to Renee Rao for help with the calendar. Thank you [00:29:30] for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email or email. Address is spectrum. Duck klx@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Touch Me was the first BSR “live event”, moderated by Dr. Kiki Sanford UC Davis in collaboration with the Bay Area Science Festival. Guests were Lydia Thé, UC Berkeley. Benajmin Tee, Stanford. Daniel Cordaro UC Berkeley.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible] [inaudible]. Speaker 3: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x [00:00:30] Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 4: Good afternoon. I'm Rick Kaneski, the host of today's show. We have a different kind of program today. This past October, the Berkeley Science Review hosted the live event. Touch me as part of the bay area science festival. We've previously featured both the BSR and [00:01:00] the bay area science fest here. Visit tiny url.com/calyx spectrum to hear these past interviews at the event, Dr Kiki Sanford from this week in science interviewed three bay area scientists about the ways animals and robots navigate the tactile world. Lydia Tay from the Battista lab here at Tao discusses the molecular basis of touch in a star nosed mole. Benjamin t from Stanford talks about [00:01:30] touch sensation for robotics and prosthetics and Daniel Codero from UC Berkeley's Keltner lab reviews, how we communicate emotion through touch. Here's the active scientist, Georgia and sac from the BSR to introduce Dr Kiki Speaker 5: [inaudible].Speaker 6: Hello and welcome to touch me. We are the Berkeley Science Review, say graduate student run [00:02:00] magazine and blog, and we have the mission of presenting science to the public in an exciting and accessible way. So without further ado, I would like to introduce our late show hosts, the amazing Dr Kiki Kiersten Sanford Speaker 5: [inaudible].Speaker 6: I would like to introduce our first guest for the evening. Her name is Lydia Tay and she is a graduate student in Diane about does lab. [00:02:30] She studies the interaction between skin cells and the sensory neurons that are involved in crow chronic itch. So let's talk about some of the basics of touch and how, how it works. Yeah, so all of these, the different sensations we have are mediated by neurons. So these are nerve cells. In the case of [inaudible] sensation or the sensation of touch. Speaker 1: These Speaker 6: neurons, the cell bodies are right outside of our spinal, but then they send Speaker 7: [00:03:00] these long projections out to our skin and also inside in the viscera. And so these incredibly long projections at the tips in our skin have molecular receptors that are responsive to different types of stimulus. And we have lots of different types of touch stimulants, so you have light touch and painful touch. So light touch, like when a feather brushes against your arm, painful touch. When a book falls on your foot, there's also itch and there's also hot and cold. All these different [00:03:30] sensations. And we, it's actually a very complicated system. We actually have lots of different types of neurons that are tuned to respond to these different modalities of touch. And that's actually one of the things that makes it really tricky. So it's not just that there's one kind of neuron, there are lots of kinds and they're all over there. Their projections are all over the body dispersed. Speaker 7: So say in a square inch of the skin on my hand for example, I'm going to have every kind of touch receptor there. Yeah. So you'll have, you know, you'll [00:04:00] have the, if you have, I guess depending on the part of your body you'll have hairs, right? There are neurons that we'll innovate those hairs and then you'll also have those that [inaudible] respond to pain and to cold and hot. And there the innovation, the density depends on the part of your body, so the back is the least intubated spots your if they're, you have like two points of stimulus next to each other on your back. It will be harder to distinguish than it would be say on your fingers. Your fingers are incredibly well tuned. That's [00:04:30] how come people can read Braille. We're very sensitive to texture on our fingertips. Yeah. I've also heard that like that the lips and the face are one of the more represented areas of our Sameta stance. Speaker 7: Matt? A sensory cortex. Yeah, so in this amass sensory cortex, people draw these things called the homonculus where you have [inaudible] the shape of your body is representative of the innervation of these neuron fibers and your lips are gigantic [00:05:00] and your hands are gigantic and then your back is tiny [inaudible] for instance. It's really a funky thing to look at, but that's kind of how our some ass sensation is. That's that's how we feel. The world is mostly through our fingertips on our lips. I guess we find out a little bit about what you do in your laboratory and I know there is an animal that you work with that is just fascinating. So there's a long history in biology of using extreme systems or organisms [00:05:30] to study the question you're interested in. And so since the question we're interested in it is touch, we use an organism that is really good at touch and that's called the star nose mole and it's this really cute mole that lives in Pennsylvania and it has this Oregon. Speaker 7: It is really cute. I think it's just funny to think of it just living in Pennsylvania and winters in Pennsylvania and it lives in these underground tunnels where there's a lot of light. The main way that it farges for food [00:06:00] is using this incredibly sensitive touch. Oregon called the star and it's, it's the star that's located kind of in the middle of its face and it has a bunch of appendages. Each of the appendages has these tiny bumps. Well I remember his Oregon's that are highly innervated with some mass sensory neurons that enables it to do incredible texture discrimination. So tell me a little bit more about the competitive aspect of the star nosed mole. Yeah. So there are these tunnels underground. The star nose mill is not [00:06:30] the only mole that lives there. There are lots of organisms that are using these underground tunnels and they're all competing for the same food. Speaker 7: The little worms I guess. And the fact that the star news mole can identify a worm that quicker and maybe those that are a little bit more difficult to discriminate means that there'll be able to take advantage of food that other moles might overlook. Right. Are they using a, came out of sensation also? Is there or is it only touching the worm that makes the difference? Yeah, so actually [00:07:00] they start by touch. They, they're, they can move their, uh, the appendages on their nose. So they moved there yet it's [inaudible] that's right. And then they touch it and then they actually move the food closer to the mouth. They taste it until like, I know, like do a secondary test to make sure it's actually food and then they eat it. But it's an incredibly quick process. It's amazing. We actually, when, when you look at video, you have to watch it in slow mo to actually see all of that happen. Speaker 7: [00:07:30] You can't see it with the naked eyes. How do you study this in the laboratory? How do you actually investigate that touch and then uh, how they find the food. So there's the behavioral aspect, but there's also the molecular aspect. How are you studying this? Yeah, so that's the aspect that we, I spend most of our efforts on. The great thing about the mole is that it has this incredibly innovated touch Oregon. And so we can look at what molecules are expressed there and if they're using a similar system as [00:08:00] other mammals, we'd expect that. The only difference is that the proteins are involved in touch. Art's simply upregulated. And so we can see what are the highly expressing proteins in these sensory neurons in the mall. They're easier to identify because the mole is like super touch sensitive and then we can take those molecules and test, are they actually important in another organism that is a little bit easier to work with. Speaker 8: [inaudible].Speaker 9: [00:08:30] You are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. This week we have recordings from the Berkeley science reviews. Touch me. Dr Kiki Sanford just talked with Lydia about Tetra reception in the Star News tomorrow. Now she'll discuss [00:09:00] the touch sensation for robots with Stanford's Benjamin T. Speaker 6: I would like to introduce our next guest, Benjamin [inaudible] t who's recently completing his phd in the lab of Gen and bow and he has a master's degree in electrical engineering. He enjoys hiking, artistic Mumbo jumbo, randomly cliche poems amongst other things. Speaker 10: He likes building things and his motto [00:09:30] is make awesome. If we could all give him a warm welcome. Speaker 5: [inaudible]Speaker 10: how did you get into engineering? Uh, it's a difficult question, but I remember it was a pretty naughty kid. I was, yeah. So I used to make a lot of things that was gone. Really big. Spanking for that. Yeah. And, and that got me wondering, well, since I love [00:10:00] to break things, we, I should then how to make things work. And that kind of perhaps subconsciously led me to, to Korea in engineering and science. Awesome. To make things work. Speaker 6: To make things work as opposed to do you still break things to see how they work, how they work? Yeah, I can fix them back now because I have the engineering training. So. So tell me a bit about what you need to be thinking about in creating a material that can act [00:10:30] as a synthetic skin. What kind of factors are you trying to work with and incorporate into that material? Right. It's a great question. So everybody knows the skin is stretchable and the reason stretcher was because he uses organic materials that have fallen state or not so strongly. For example, metallic bonds are very strong. So instead of using metal, we use spiritual materials like rubber, try to tune them to make them really sensitive to pressure. And it's, there's one of my first projects in [inaudible] [00:11:00] that I worked there for five years. So the first project was thinking, well how can we make a piece of rubber, which is, you know, I mentioned the rub is actually pretty strike tough. Speaker 6: Can you make it really sensitive to vibration, for example. Right. How do you take something that could be used as a car tire and how do you make it something that's actually going to react to like I think in one of your projects, a butterfly wing, right? This one of my earliest project. Yeah. Yeah. And then how do you do that? [00:11:30] Right. So, so the week we do that is we create very tiny structures out of this rubber in Vegas. So I can see it. They are about 10 microns or less. So on a simple sending me the square, millions of them. Okay. And the reasoning is when you make really tiny structures on rubber, they become really sensitive. But at the same time they also retain it, the city, which is quite interesting. Yeah. So there's kind of property of scaling with the material that changes its properties. Okay. And then what happens [00:12:00] with the skin that you have created in the lab so far from that point? What does it do? Speaker 10: Well, right now we've usually to saints butterflies for example. Yeah. The real test is, well, can we build a system that can sense pressure and you're trying to see if we can integrate, for example, these kinds of sensors into touch means cell phones for example. I mean it will be impossible to find somebody who doesn't have a touch mean cell formatting. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the steam is powerful because the reason is so ubiquitous is that [00:12:30] humans use touch all the time. Right? And imagine now because electronic devices can understand us through touch, that changes how we interact with digital wall. Right? But right now you touched me into today, don't sense pressure very well. In fact, they learn [inaudible] more statue store. So we hope to integrate this material into touchscreens to allow purchase sensitivity. Speaker 6: Right? Cause right now you have to have your fingertips. It's a, it has to do with properties of your skin touching the screen to allow it to conduct. Yeah. Conduct [00:13:00] electricity. But if you're wearing a pair of gloves, your phone doesn't work to take off your glove and then you have to use to use it. So if your screen would just be touch sensitive, pressure sensitive, yeah. Would be useful. Yeah. So what about industrial robots? Medical robots? Speaker 10: Oh yeah, absolutely. For example, the robot, they fixed new Skywalker's hand and that's actually reality. Now we've certain surgical robots that make pinhole surgeries. Yeah, they're having a hard time now because [00:13:30] it turns out they're doing this penal surgeries actually isn't that easy for a robot because the robot doesn't actually feel inside the body very well. It doesn't know how hot it's pricing. And there has been several cases where these robots actually the imaging who humans, even though the surgery wound is very small. And so for example, you can imagine having this material to be put onto robotic surgeons that can then feel how well or how high the pressing so they don't [00:14:00] post other example accidentally by the doctor, you know, so, so actually twist the animal on Phd. I was, it's making dinner, actually making Lasagna, sizing up some cheese. I actually cut myself, you know, and I realized that, you know, we have focused so much on how we can make the skin or electronic skin so sensitive, but nobody has actually looked at how we can make them heal themselves, as you know, you know? Yeah. When you, when you have a cut, the skin bleeds and it has schools who are complicated process to heal, but in rubber, [00:14:30] how do you do that? It's not that trivial. We actually made a material, there's not only self healing but also conducted. Speaker 6: What's your favorite thing about the work that you currently do? Speaker 10: So I get to break things and make things so, so yeah, besides that, I think the cool part about the work I do is that I have a lot of time to think about what I hope to use these things for what I hope to be. And, and so doing a phd actually gave me a lot of things to a lot of time to think about my next [00:15:00] steps and basically I hope to, to create medical technologies or basically to create great impact. So now I can satisfy my own curiosity, right? So am I able to make impactful people besides just satisfy myself? I think that's, that's why I like what I do. Speaker 8: Okay. Speaker 9: Trim is a public affairs show about science [00:15:30] on k a l x Berkeley. After Dr. King, he talked with Benjamin t, she interviewed Daniel Cordaro about touch as a modality of emotion Speaker 8: [inaudible].Speaker 6: So I'd like to introduce our third and final guest Speaker for the evening. His name is [00:16:00] Daniel Cordaro and he is pursuing a phd with docker Keltner on the subject of identifying emotion in the face, voice and touch. Thank you for coming in and being able to talk this evening. Yeah, Speaker 11: thank you for having me. Speaker 6: You've been traveling around the world for the last five years, going to different countries, different continents, studying emotion and touch and okay, the yawn question across [00:16:30] cultures across the world, around the world, yawns are endemic everywhere, Speaker 11: not only across cultures and across the world, but also across the species. So all of our Malian friends yawn too. So anybody have a dog here? Have you ever yawned with your dog? Yeah, it happens all the time. So a yawn is a universal, not only with humans but also with other species. But that's, that's exactly what I'm looking at is kind of cross cultural differences. How did you get interested in that? [00:17:00] It's a great question. So I came from chemistry, that was my past life and I kinda got hungry for social feedback. It's chemistry. I'm fairly social discipline. You two guesses. No, it's great. I love chemistry. It's a wonderful way to see the world. When you understand the molecular makeup of something a is not just a table, it's something a little bit more nuanced. I don't know if you can tell. I'm kind of an outgoing guy. Speaker 11: Uh, and one day when I was in a [00:17:30] classroom it was watching the professor and instead of watching professor I turned my seat and I watched the class and I had never done that before. And this idea popped into my head is a, as a scientist it was like maybe I can make predictions about the people in this class. Maybe I can tell who's going to pass and who's going to fail the first exam based what I'm seeing in their non-verbals. I'd never done this before and so I just kind of took notes on 20 random people. Random, they weren't random cause I picked them but I didn't know anything about [00:18:00] psychology so I was just kind of winging it and lo and behold, based on behaviors like kind of engagement, leaning forward and nodding. I see some people nodding, thank you. You're encouraging me to continue. And then other people who are like kind of slouch back and drooling with a half empty can of red bull next to their chair. I kind of guessed which students were going to pass and fail the first exam with about 70% accuracy and I was like, wow, that's better than chance. There's something to this. Yeah, there's something to this. And I took the results to people in [00:18:30] the chemistry department. They were like, get back to work. Speaker 11: You're wasting your time here. And then through kind of a series of serendipitous events, I ended up studying this full time a nonverbal communication, worked with a guy in San Francisco, I named Paul Ekman, who really founded this field of nonverbal expression. And I had the privilege to work with him for about two years before transferring over as a full Grad [00:19:00] student at cal right now, study with Dacher Keltner and the Keltner lab studying cross cultural expressions of emotion of which touches one modality. Speaker 6: Yeah. So what does the bro Hug mean? Speaker 11: What does the bro Hug mean? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And there have been studies done in sports for example, like like the Bro touches like head bombs and butt grabs and like high fives and all of this stuff can actually predict a winning season for a basketball team. Yeah, [00:19:30] that's fascinating. It's really cool stuff. Yeah. Speaker 6: Coming back from earlier conversation with Benjamin and also with Lydia, how would you speak to the other disciplines to try and get them thinking about your research? Speaker 11: Right. Yeah. I think it's an amazing question because what we saw is a nice series of scientists starting from the biological and molecular level, then going into kind of the materials level. And then lastly, how do we make this an emotional process, a more human process. So combining the three [00:20:00] could really take us into the next phase of human evolution, which is to create kind of another copy of ourselves. So I'm hoping that you guys can save me a nice space in a human zoo when the the AI takes over. I'll be part responsible for that because they will be emotionally wise. Speaker 6: So emotion, is it self-reported like taking surveys and saying, when this happened, I felt this way, when this happened, I felt that way. Or are you doing MRI work where you're actually looking at the emotion [00:20:30] areas of the brain? Are you, what are you doing? Are you interested in emotion? Speaker 11: Scientists do all of the above. Me Personally, I like the, uh, the nonverbal expression part. So one experiment asks the question, can two people communicate discrete emotions by using only the forearm? So if somebody sticks their forearm through a dark heart and you have no idea who they are, you can't hear them, you can't see them, but you have an arm in front of you and we give you a list of emotions. Can you convey those [00:21:00] emotions by just using their forearms? How does it, how does it turn out in the laboratory? Use your legs like requesting your, what are your results? So the results are pretty amazing. There are some emotions that are incredibly accurate through touch. So emotions like gratitude and sympathy and sadness, these emotions that require closeness with another. Also emotions like anger and aggressive emotion. Disgust and contempt do fairly well in these studies too, but [00:21:30] not without differences in gendered pairs. So there, there are some gender differences to how touch is conveyed to a, even though you can't see who's on the other side of that curtain, 80% of participants can tell just by the feeling on their arm what the gender of their, their paired partner is. So the differences are pretty interesting. When we have two female partners, happiness scores go through the roof. The ability to convey happiness between two female partners is staggering. It's like 60 or 70% [00:22:00] male partners. No Way. Speaker 11: However, men are really good at expressing anger. We see, we see across all of our participants, people can identify anger from a male encoder. And then the last one is when they're trying to encode sympathy. Women do really well with sympathy and men can't do it. When we have, we have two male partners, they can't convey sympathy. So there are some gender differences here too. But by and large, [00:22:30] there's no, there's no benefit to being male or female. Overall, we all convey these emotions very well on average, but there are just certain emotions that, uh, are different by gender pairs. So studying this and going around the world, what have you internalized and what have you, what have you taken out of your research? Personally, personally? Um, I love what I do. I don't feel like I work a day in my life because I get to travel around and decode the human language [00:23:00] of expression. Speaker 11: Uh, everybody in this room, I don't know who you are, but I know that you speak two languages, your native language and the universal human language of emotion through the face, the voice and through touch and understanding that has given me a profound sense of connection with everyone around me. No matter where I go, I'm never alone because I can always speak to the person next to me at least in some way, shape or form. So that's the biggest thing I think I've gotten out of this experience. Friends, you so much for coming this evening. Speaker 5: You enjoyed it [00:23:30] here in the show. You Speaker 4: can hear more from Dr Kiki on this week in science@isdotorgandtheberkeleysciencereviewisonlineatsciencereviewdotberkeley.eduSpeaker 8: [inaudible]Speaker 9: specking shows are archived [00:24:00] on iTunes. You we've cued a simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/ [inaudible] Speaker 4: [inaudible] spectrum. A regular feature of spectrum is a calendar of some of the science and technology related events happening in the bay area over the next two weeks. Here's chase Yakka. Boesky Speaker 12: new star is NASA's newest I on the X-ray sky focusing on x-rays at higher energies than the Shaundra X-ray Observatory. Since launch in June, 2012 [00:24:30] new star has been uncovering black holes hidden deep within gaseous galaxies, including studies of the black hole at the center of our own Milky Way. On December 18th Dr. Lynn Kremen ski of Sonoma State University will be giving a talk about the technological advances that made the new star mission possible and will present several of its latest scientific discoveries. This event will be held at the Randall Museum in San Francisco as 7:30 PM on December 18th visit the San Francisco amateur astronomers [00:25:00] website. For more information on upcoming events. Saturday, December 21st join the Shippo Saturday nights space talk featuring Fareed color with the proliferation of privately designed and built spacecrafts. The possibility of commercial space travel is becoming increasingly viable. In this presentation. You'll gain some insight into the future of space travel and understand how our traditional means of exploration are now history. So join the Shippo space team Saturday, December 21st from seven [00:25:30] 30 to eight 15 at the Chabot space and science center in Oakland or Morris Science Speaker 4: and technology related events. Be sure to check out the year round bay area science festival calendar online at Bay Area Science dot o r g I now here's chase and Rene Rao with science news headlines. Speaker 13: A new study published December 1st and the general nature, you've used it, an estimated half million cubic kilometers of low salinity water are buried beneath the seabed on [00:26:00] continental shelves around the world. The water which could perhaps be used to eke out supplies to the world's virgin and coastal cities has been located off Australia, China, North America, and South Africa. Lead author Dr. Vincent post of the National Center for groundwater research and training and the school of the environment at Flinders university says that groundwater scientists knew a freshwater under the sea floor, but thought it only occurred under rare and special circumstances. Our research shows that fresh and brackish [00:26:30] aquifers below the seabed are actually quite a common phenomenon. Says Dr. Post. He warns, however, that the water resources are nonrenewable, we should use them carefully once gone. They won't be replenished again until the sea drops, which will likely not happen for a very long time. Speaker 12: Science daily reports professor Ken at night and his associates of West Seda universities, Faculty of Science and engineering have discovered a revolutionary new energy conservation principle, [00:27:00] able to yield standalone engines with double or higher the thermal efficiency potential of conventional engines. If the effectiveness of this principle can be confirmed through combustion tests, it will not only open up the doors to new lightweight, high-performance aerospace vehicles, but would also lead to prospects of next generation high-performance engines for automobiles. Currently naive group is working to develop a prototype combustion engine that will harness the benefits of his new energy conservation principles. [00:27:30] Most conventional combustion engines today operate with thermal efficiencies around 30% dropping to as low as 15% when idling or during slow city driving. If the group can develop this new engine with the thermal efficiency of close to 60% for a wide variety of driving conditions, they could unleash a new era of automotive transportation. And even surpass the efficiencies of our most advanced hybrid systems. Speaker 13: A recent study by UC Berkeley researcher John Michael Mongo [00:28:00] has shed light on one of the cockroaches, many disturbing abilities. The insects are famously hard to kill due in part to their astonishingly high escape speeds. The bugs move so quickly that they can no longer use their nervous system to regulate their speed. They instead rely on a mechanical enhancement provided by their antenna. Mongo tested the behavior of the critters and Tana on different surfaces and discovered that the tiny bristles on the antenna are able to stick to rough surfaces and bend in such a way as to rent the roaches from slamming into the walls at high speeds. He confirmed [00:28:30] this hypothesis by lasering off the small hairs on some of the pest and running the trials. Again. This time the antenna no longer bents. Well, a peek into the mechanics of the world's most tenacious pest is certainly interesting in and of itself. Mongo is actually applying what he's learned to help design robots that are better able to function at high speeds. Speaker 12: Okay. Speaker 3: The music [00:29:00] heard during the show was written and produced by Alex diamond. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Email address is Doug K. Alex hit young.com Speaker 5: the same time. [inaudible] Speaker 3: [00:29:30] Huh? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dr. Bea worked with the US Army Corps of Engineers, and Royal Dutch Shell around the world. His research and teaching have focused on risk assessment and management of engineered systems. He is co-founder of Center for Catastrophic Risk Management at UCB.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Mm [inaudible]. Speaker 1: [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Good afternoon and welcome to spectrum. My name is Chase Jakubowski and I'll be the host of today's show. Today we present part two of our two interviews with Robert B professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley. [00:01:00] Dr B served as an engineer for the U S Army Corps of Engineers, Shell oil, shell development and Royal Dutch Shell. His work has taken them to more than 60 locations around the world. Has Engineering work, has focused on marine environments, is research and teaching, have focused on risk assessment and management of engineered systems. He is cofounder of the Center for catastrophic risk management at UC Berkeley in part two. Brett swift asks professor B about the California Delta balancing development and environmental conservation and shoreline retreat. [00:01:30] Is civil engineering misunderstood Speaker 4: or do people simply have a love hate relationship with the built environment? I think a mixture of civil engineering has been changing, so people's preconceived views in many cases are out of date and it's also low of, hey, when the built in art man bite you, it hurts and [00:02:00] hurt, encourages. Hey, there is a big reliance on it though at the same time as well. Yes. Airports, bridges, tunnels, water supply system, sewage supply, large ill NGS. That's our game. We're out of Egypt and Rome. That's where we got our start. And now the new term is infrastructure. Yes. To sort of put all that together into one idea. Yes. [00:02:30] Are there landscapes scale projects out there that people should be aware of and cognizant of? Yeah, that are underway or have recently completed? Yes. One we've been watching carefully is location than the other lunch and it's what's called the water works and the reason we zoom in closely is it's an excellent laboratory test bed for a comparable [00:03:00] problem we face here in California with aren't California Delta infrastructure systems. Speaker 4: Now the Lens, much more comeback, but it deals with an unforgiving test that's the North Sea. And so they've been learning actually over a period of 3000 years. How would it work in a constructive collaborative way with water? We face the same problem here at home. [00:03:30] Often the attention associated with civil engineering projects is due to the tension between environmental degradation and economic gain. Is it possible to have balance when you're doing something on this kind of scale? Answer is yes and it's a term bounce. Nature itself can be extremely destructive to itself. Watch an intense [00:04:00] storm attack, a sensitive reef area in the ocean. The tension and it can be constructive if it's properly managed, is we need to develop these systems, some of which need to make money and at the same time we need to ensure that what is being achieved there is not being degraded, destroyed by unintended consequences [00:04:30] to the environment. Speaker 4: One of the very good things that happened to civil engineering here at Berkeley is we changed our name. We're known as civil and environmental and that's to bring explicit this tension between built works, the natural works, and for God's sakes, remember we have a planet that we've got to live on for a long time. As engineers, we are still [00:05:00] learning how to deal with that tension and particularly when something's on a really large scale, best of intentions going forward, body of knowledge at the time you do the project, how do you know what the environmental impacts are going to be? Those unintended impacts reveal themselves. How do you walk these things back? How do you backtrack from having installed something on a landscape level? That clunky question. [00:05:30] That's one of the reasons for my fascination with the Netherlands, but the way I've worked there for a year, complements of previous employer [inaudible] is Royal Dutch Shell, so I was there learning all the dodge had confronted flooding from the North Sea and essentially the approach was built a big dam wall between you and at [00:06:00] water, you're on the dry site and it's on wet side. They promptly learned that was not good. The in fact heavily polluted areas that they were attempting to occupy and suddenly a new thing started to show in their thinking called give water room so that today they have actually sacrificed areas back to the open ocean [00:06:30] to get water. The room needs to do what it needs today and in the end the entire system has been improved. We've been trying to take some of those hard won lessons back to our California Delta Speaker 5: [inaudible].Speaker 6: You were [00:07:00] listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Brad swift is interviewing Bob Bobby, a civil and environmental engineer at UC Berkeley. In the next segment they talk about the California Delta Speaker 5: [inaudible].Speaker 7: We've talked about the delta a bit. Do you want to expand on the challenges of the Delta and [00:07:30] the downside? Speaker 4: Well, I'll start with the downside. One of the things I used to say in class when I was still teaching here is terror is a fine instructor. Okay. So the downside would be if we had what we call the ultimate catastrophe and it's foreseeable and in fact predictable [00:08:00] in our delta, we would be without an extremely important infrastructure system. For a period of more than five years. That includes fresh supply for small cities like Los Angeles and San Diego and small enterprises like the Central Valley Agricultural Enterprise. So the picture makes Katrina New Orleans look like a place [00:08:30] story. This is big time serious. You'd say hooky bomb. That's a pretty dismal picture. Why? And the answer is back to this risk crepe. The delta infrastructure systems started back in the gold rush days and we want to add some agricultural plans that we built, piles of dirt that I've called disrespectfully [inaudible]. And then we put in transportation [00:09:00] roadways, power supply, electrical power, and then we come up with a bright idea of transporting water from the north side of the delta to the South side of the Gel so we can export orders. Speaker 4: Southern California. Those people need water too. Well, it's all defend it by those same piles or hurt built back in the 1850s it's got art, gas storage under some of those islands and our telecommunications goes through there. [00:09:30] Our railroads go through air, so if you lose critical parts, those piles there, you got big problems. We can foresee it, we can in fact analyze, predict it. We've in fact quantified the risk. They are clearly unacceptable. We've talked to the people who have political insight and power. They are interested to the point of understanding [00:10:00] it and then they turn and ask, well, how do you solve the problem? Well, at this point we say we don't know yet, but we do know it's gonna take a long time to solve perhaps much like the Netherlands, 50 a hundred years. And you can see a Lee blank because there's a two to four year time window. What's this? 50 to a hundred years. Oh, can you tell me about tomorrow's problem? And tomorrow solutions [00:10:30] answer, no, this one's not that. So we've run into her stone wall. Speaker 7: So does it then become something that gets tacked on to all the other things that they want to do with the water? Because there's always a new peripheral canal being proposed. Right? Right. And the north south issue on water's not going away. So for some 50 years solution to happen in California politics, you'd have to have a pretty serious [00:11:00] consensus north and south to the shared interests there. Correct. And there's no dialogue about that really? No. Within the state, no. How about within the civil engineering community? Within the state? No. So everyone wants to ignore the obvious threat to the, so the California economy because basically you're talking about have you applied a cost to the a catastrophic event of the Delta failing? Speaker 4: Oh yeah, we thought that. Or Action Katrina, who Orleans [00:11:30] ultimately has caused the United States in excess of a hundred bill young as ours. Paul that by five or 10 because just the time extent. The population influence though we're talking about hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars. So the economic consequences of doing nothing or horrible and then you'd say, [00:12:00] well, is it possible to fix it? Answer is yes. Well, do you know exactly how? No, we don't. That's going to take time to work through. It also takes key word. You mentioned collaboration. Different interests are involved and we need to learn how to constructively and knowledgeably liberate the signings to say, here's a solution that makes sense to the environmental conscience [00:12:30] in the environment. Here's a sense or a solution makes sense to the social commercial, industrial complex. Hey, we might have a solution here. Let's start experimenting it. We don't have the basis for that lot and consequently it slips back into our busy backgrounds. Much like the San Pedro LPG tanks that are still sitting air. It's in the background and the clock is ticking Speaker 7: and the Dutch model [00:13:00] doesn't help them see how it could evolve. Speaker 4: It doesn't seem to, they sort of have distanced the experience from the Netherlands and saying, well, we could never come to an agreement like that. Of course, as soon as you say that, that's the death coming to an agreement like that. Speaker 7: Well maybe they don't see the impending danger as existential as the Dutch do. Speaker 4: I think that's very true. The Dutch can just walk [00:13:30] outside of their homes. Many of them walk up one of those levees and on the other side they see what's happening. The North Sea is big and mean and ever present and they've got one common enemy, so to speak, and that set ocean and they got to stop the flooding, but yet they can't damage the environment. So they've had to come to grips one with themselves. One more the environment and the long term view. We could do it. We haven't. Speaker 8: Okay. Speaker 6: [00:14:00] Spectrum is a public affairs show on k a l Ex Brooklyn. Brett swift is with our guests, Professor Robert B of UC Berkeley. In the next segment they talked about Shortline retreat and regulation of oil and gas extraction Speaker 5: [inaudible]Speaker 7: [00:14:30] with the sea level rise and with storms becoming more volatile and surges from the oceans becoming real factors on shorelines. How should communities and nations approach the idea retreating from the ocean? Speaker 4: Well, again, thankful to our brothers and sisters and Europe. [00:15:00] They're several decades ahead of us in asking and answering exactly that question. They've developed three strategies. They look at existing locations. They then examine each of the three strategies to see which makes longterm sense. The first strategy is fight. A good example would be United Kingdom, the tims flood [00:15:30] barrier. Yeah, you might like to move London, but to not gonna move it very quick easily. And so the answer comes back we need to defend, but you only defend what you can defend, which means you don't try and defend the entire coast of England. You defend small parts of it that can be adequately defended. That's the fight strategy. The next one is flight. I call it get [00:16:00] out of dodge city. And so they say we need to stay age, a strategic withdrawal so that we withdrawal slowly surrendering back to the environment which needs to be surrendered back to the environment and eventually we're gone. The next one is freeze. What the mean is we'll occupy it until it's destroyed and then we're gone. As we looked at the coast, New York, [00:16:30] New Jersey after Sandy, I wish we had done some of that thinking. I hope we do some of that thinking for our California Delta. Speaker 7: I was thinking about civil engineering as it's applied in different parts of the world where a nation state is in a different stage of development. And how do you see civil engineering interacting in those environments differently and taking in risk management and how it's applied? Speaker 4: Well, I guess each society [00:17:00] has to go through its own learning experiences. You can always look at other society and say, oh they weren't very smart or they certainly could have done it this way, rather they did it. So we all into the after the game quarterbacking sort of Mo seems like each of these countries societies has to go through its own learning experience. [00:17:30] As I said earlier, those risk assessment and management businesses one damn thing after another and this learning transfer of insight forward seems to be as frustrating and difficult. Speaker 7: So offshore. Let's Speaker 4: talk about the challenges inherent in that. What do you think about the debate about the risk? How should that debate be framed? [00:18:00] The risks are higher, which means that likelihoods failure that you engineer into the system, it would be much lower, have to have backups in defense and depth and people who actually know they're doing the question is, will we in fact do it before we have a disaster? Don't tell me you think it's safe. Show me and demonstrate to me is that demand has not happened here in the u s yet. [00:18:30] I'm very concerned. For us, I think the government changed some of the permitting process. Is that window dressing? What does it have some real impact on how people behave in the field? It depends on geographically where you're ant Alaska has been very demanding at the Alaskan state level relative to oil and gas operations and when you see a signature [00:19:00] go home or permit, you can pretty well bet that there's sufficient documentation demonstration to justify that signature. Speaker 4: Other parts of the u s are less diligent and so it depends geographically where you're at and what you're dealing. Well, it's not actually reasonable to expect to be able to appropriately regulate, govern and industry [00:19:30] as powerful as the oil and gas industry was spotting governance. Governance needs to be consistent and when the signature goes on to a form that says, yes, I have the ability to immediately abate the source of a blow out. You have the ability the fire engine is built, it's in this station with trained people. Let's ring the bell and see if that fire engine can run. That hasn't happened yet. I [00:20:00] remain personally very concerned for these Oltra high risk operations we're considering in the United States wars. Does the same spottiness occur with fracking in terms of the application of best practices, everything up and able to learn is, yes. Speaker 4: By the way, franking has been underway for many decades. Industry actually hit this kind of work underway intensely in the 1970s [00:20:30] it says spottiness we're back to. That becomes crucial if the regulation governance and that's both internal governance within the industry and external governance on behalf of the public. If it is demanding, insightful and capable, we're okay, but if it's not, we're not. Okay. The systems that you have to have an interesting ability to slip to the lowest common denominator. [00:21:00] By this point, my career, I've worked in 73 different countries. I've lived in 11 different countries, I've seen a company I have a lot of respect for at Shell, operate internationally, some areas, gold standard, Norwegian sector, North Sea, and then I go to work with them in Angola. It's not a very good standard at all and [00:21:30] that's because the regulatory environment with local and national Franco relative to oil and gas is very poor, so the system seems to adopt the lowest sort of common denominator. Can. Strong industry requires strong governance to this man at the end of that experience. Bobby, thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Very much pleasure for that integration. Speaker 2: [00:22:00] Mm Mm Speaker 9: [inaudible].Speaker 3: If you are interested in a center for catastrophic risk management, visit their website at cc r m. Dot. berkeley.edu Speaker 10: [00:22:30] spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. We have created a simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/ [inaudible] spectrum. Now a few science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Speaker 7: Brad swift joints me to present the calendar. Have you ever been interested in learning Mat lab? If so, [00:23:00] this event is for you. Next Wednesday, December 4th math works is sponsoring a technical seminar. Some of the highlights include exploring the fundamentals of the language writing programs to automate your workflow and leveraging tools for efficient program development. This event will take place Wednesday December 4th from nine to 11:00 AM in 100 Lewis Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. Make sure to register online@mathworks.com click on [00:23:30] events. Speaker 3: Research on mobile micro robots has been ongoing for the last 20 years, but no micro robots have ever matched the 40 body lengths per second speed of the common ants on our picnic tables and front lawns. Next University of Maryland Speaker 7: Mechanical Engineering Professor Sarah Berg Brighter will discuss the challenges behind micro robotic mobility as well as mechanisms and motors they have designed to enable robot mobility at the insect sized scale. The colloquium is [00:24:00] open to all audiences and will take place on December 4th at 4:00 PM in three Oh six soda hall on the UC Berkeley campus. Every Thursday night, a new adventure unfolds at the California Academy of Sciences. December 5th Cal Academy of Sciences presents its holiday themed. Tis the season nightlife featuring class acts such as slide girls and DJ set by Nathan Blazer of geographer. Whether you're dancing underneath snow flurries in the piazza, or [00:24:30] enjoying the screening of back to the moon for good in the planetarium, this nightlife will be one to remember. Tis the season will take place. Thursday, December 5th from six to 10:00 PM at the California Academy of Sciences located in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Remember for this event, you must be 21 years or older, so make sure to bring your ids for alcohol enriched fun. Speaker 7: For more information, go to cal academy.org is the future deterministic [00:25:00] and unalterable or can we shape our future? Marina Corbis suggests the latter. Wednesday, December 12th citrus at UC Berkeley is hosting a talk by executive director of the Institute of the future Marina Corbis. Marina Corpus's research focuses on how social production is changing the face of major industries. In this talk, she will discuss her research along with her insight to our society's future. The talk will take place Wednesday, December 11th [00:25:30] from 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM is the target Dye Hall Beneteau Auditorium on the UC Berkeley campus and now Brad swift joints. Me for the news. UC Berkeley News Center reports the funding of a new institute to help scholars harness big data, the Berkeley Institute for data science to be housed in the campuses. Central Library building is made possible by grants from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Sloan Foundation, which together pledged 37.8 [00:26:00] million over five years to three universities, UC Berkeley, the University of Washington and New York University to foster collaboration in the area of data science. Speaker 7: The goal is to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery with implications for our understanding of the universe, climate and biodiversity research, seismology, neuroscience, human behavior, and many other areas. Saul Perlmutter, UC Berkeley professor of physics [00:26:30] and Nobel laureate will be the director of the campuses. New Institute. David Culler, chair of UC Berkeley is the Department of Electrical Engineering and computer science and one of the co-principal investigators. The data science grant said computing is not just a tool. It has become an integral part of the scientific process. Josh Greenberg, who directs the Sloan Foundation's digital information technology program said this joint project will work to create examples [00:27:00] at the three universities that demonstrate how an institution wide commitment to data scientists can deliver dramatic gains in scientific productivity. Speaker 3: NASA's newest Mars bound mission maven blasted off while faculty, students and staff assembled at the space sciences laboratory to watch their handiwork head to the red planet. More than half of the instruments of board the spacecraft were built at UC Berkeley. After a 10 month trip, it will settle into Mars orbit in September, 2014 where it will study the remains [00:27:30] of the Martian atmosphere. Maven was designed to find out why Mars lost its atmosphere and water. Scientists believe that Mars once had an atmosphere, oceans and rivers, very similar to Earth. From its Martian orbit. The spacecraft will collect evidence to support or refute the reigning theory that the loss of its magnetic field allowed solar, wind, and solar storms to scour the atmosphere way of operating any water not frozen under the surface. The answer to this question will give planetary scientists a hint of [00:28:00] what the future may bring for other planets, including earth. Speaker 8: Okay. Speaker 5: [inaudible] [inaudible] Speaker 8: [00:28:30] the music heard during the show was written by Alex Simon. Speaker 1: [00:29:00] Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l x@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at the same time. Speaker 9: [00:29:30] [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dr. Bea worked with the US Army Corps of Engineers, and Royal Dutch Shell around the world. His research and teaching have focused on risk assessment and management of engineered systems. He is co-founder of Center for Catastrophic Risk Management at UCB.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay [00:00:30] area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hey there and good afternoon. My name is Renee Rao and I'll be hosting today's show. Today. We present part one of two interviews with Robert B. Professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley. Dr B served as an engineer with the U S Army Corps of Engineers, Shell oil, shell development, and Royal Dutch Shell. His work has taken him to more than 60 locations around the [00:01:00] world. His engineering work has focused on marine environments. While his research and teaching have focused on risk assessment and management of engineered systems, he's a cofounder of the center for catastrophic risk management at UC Berkeley. In part one, safety and risk management are discussed. Speaker 1: Bobby, welcome to spectrum. Thank you. Pleasure. You're part of the center for catastrophic risk management. How did that get started and what's the mission? What's the goal? Well, [00:01:30] it started on an airplane coming to California from New Orleans, Louisiana. In November, 2005 on the plate with me was professor Raymond c department, Civil Environmental Engineer. In the early days after Katrina, New Orleans flooding, there were still dragging bodies out, e Eric [00:02:00] and coming, our thinking was, well, why couldn't we help found a group here at Berkeley that would bring together interdisciplinary professionals both in the academic, in Ironman and outside to address catastrophic potential failures, disasters in two frameworks, one after they happen and two before they happen, after [00:02:30] the intent is not blame, shame or hurt, but rather to learn deeply how they happen so that then you can bring it back to prevention mitigation. So we got off the plane, I met with our Dean, Dean Sastry and said, could you tell us how to become a senator here at Berkeley?Speaker 1: I'll never forget it. He got up from his test, walked around to the other side, touch me on the left and right shoulders and said, your center. [00:03:00] That telephone center happened and today the center continues to exist under the leadership of Professor Carlene Roberts and continuing to address a wide variety of accidents that have happened. And once we are working to help not happen. Thank you. Berkeley and the funding is, there is an interesting question. Initially [00:03:30] we thought, well we'll turn to the university for funding. That was not as easy as some of us thought because university was already seriously stretched for funding, just funding itself. So at that point we turned two directions. First Direction principally because of my background was to industry and said, hey and a strength, would you fund research here [00:04:00] and return for your research funding. We'll give you great students with great research backgrounds and research results. Speaker 1: They became excellent funders. We turned to government homeland security for example, or the National Science Foundation. Similar responses. So the funding has come from both industry, commerce and government. Essentially all we had to ask university four [00:04:30] and it's been a precious resource to even ask for it. It has been space and support staff. Are there any of the centers projects that you'd want to talk about? There's I think two. One was a center for catastrophic risk management project at its inception sent bro, PG and e a disaster certainly to the people that were close to land one 32 [00:05:00] that exploded. We followed that disaster from the day it started and carried it all the way through the federal investigations at state investigations and drew from that very, very important lessons, preventative lessons. The other project that has been playing out sort of in sequence with it is in San Pedro, California, the San Pedro, low pressure gas [00:05:30] storage facilities. Speaker 1: It's in a neighborhood and you can see these large gas storage tanks. You can see roads nearby. You can see Walmart in shopping centers and schools and hospitals and homes and you'd say this sounds pretty dangerous. Founded back in the 1950s period. It's pretty old, kind of like Bobby in pre oh and worn out and [00:06:00] it's severed w we call risk creep, which means when they built the tanks and the facilities there, there weren't any people, there was a port to import the gas so forth. But suddenly we've got now densely packed, I'm going to call it political social community infrastructure system, which if you blow out those tanks, we've got big trouble. Houston, well we took on San Pedro in an attempt to help the homeowners that people [00:06:30] actually live there draw or call appropriate attention to the hazard so that they could get appropriate evaluation. Speaker 1: Mid Asian, we haven't been very successful. I think many people say, well, hasn't blown up. It's not gonna blow up. Other people who say, I think I smelled gas and an explosion is not far behind. And then you turn to the state regulation system and say, [00:07:00] well, who's responsible? Answer everybody. Nobody. And at that point it sinks back into the everyday activity of that community and our society. So one horrible experience. We learned a lot of lessons and I'm watching PG and e n r California Public Utilities Commission go through the learning experiences and they're obviously painful. But on the preventative side, art record is looking [00:07:30] pretty dismal. Yeah, that's tough. That's similar to the Chevron fire that was in Richmond and cause you're right, these things get built when they're far away and then developers build right up to them. Same with airports and all sorts of faculty. Speaker 1: Chevron refinery is what our latest investigation and it's got a story behind it because one of the stalwart sponsors at work that's been done by the center for catastrophic [00:08:00] risk management has been Chevron. In fact, they were a member of um, 10 years study that we conducted here concerning how organizations manage very high risk systems successfully. Chevron was one of the successful organizations. So when we saw Richmond go poof, boon, we said something's changed. [00:08:30] They had a sterling record for their operations here. What happened? Well, the story comes that this business of risk assessment management of these complex systems is one damn thing after another. And if you get your attention diverted like, oh, we need to make more money, you start diverting precious human resources working to achieve, say that he them [00:09:00] safety starts to degrade and at that point roasty Pintful only stay rusty so long at that point, poof, boom. Speaker 3: You're listening to spectrum on k a Alex Berkeley. Brad swift is interviewing Bob, be a civil and environmental engineer at UC Berkeley. In the next segment they talk about collaboration. Speaker 4: [00:09:30] Talk about some of the people you've collaborated with and the benefits that flow from Speaker 1: that kind of work. That's been one of the real blessings of my life has been collaboration. One of the things that dealing with complex problems and systems and most afraid of is myself. I'm afraid of myself because I know I'll think about something [00:10:00] in a single boy and I'll think about it from the knowledge I have and then all develop a solution or insight to how something happens. Given that set of intellectual tools and so learned to be afraid of myself and I get very comfortable is when I have people who don't think like me, who will in fact listen to me and then respectfully when I finished they say, [00:10:30] Oh, you're wrong. Here's why. And then of course out rock back and I say, okay, he explains more or less, let's get there. And what I have found in evitable Lee is I end up at a different point than where I started, which tells me the power of collaboration can be extremely strong as long as collaboration is knowledgeable and respectful. If it gets to be ignorance at work and it's disrespectful, you can expect Bob [00:11:00] to become pretty nasty. [inaudible]. Speaker 4: In reflection on your activities in civil engineering and in academia, does civil engineering need to change in some way or is there a subtle change happening that you recognize? Speaker 1: I think there's subtle change having and proud. I think I see it starting to sprout here at Berkeley. The change that's happening is that you struck on with your earlier question concerning collaboration. [00:11:30] So it turns out to be the power of civil engineering collaboration. We've actually got people in engineering working with people in political science, public health business. That is an extremely encouraging sign. As long as we can keep that collaboration going in the right directions. If you do that, do it well. Then this symphony of disasters and accidents, we'll hear that [00:12:00] music go down a lot. You sort of made famous, the civil engineering course one 80 and you're not teaching that anymore, right? That's correct. Did you pass it on to someone you know and give them the blessing? I tried to, yeah. C e one e engineering systems is what it was called, I think was teachable for me because of the experiences. Speaker 1: [00:12:30] I came here after 35 years, 36 years of industry work, and I've been working as laborers since I was 14 went to work as a roofer roofing crew in Florida. I'm not too smart, and so I was able to bring that background experience into the classroom and virtually turned the students loose, said we don't want you to do is first formed into teams. Well a year [00:13:00] at Berkeley, we tend to be what I call a star system student is independent. They gotta be the best in the class working together as something not encouraged. Well, I would say to hell with the star system, we're going to work as a team. So teamwork came in and that's because that hit very strong training through the Harvard Executive Master of Business Administration Program on teamwork and organization and that kind of stuff. So I brought that in and then said, well you have all this [00:13:30] technical stuff. Speaker 1: Get out of Berkeley, go out there and meet the real people, meet some real experts outside of the Berkeley experts and go solve problems. So essentially I turned them loose, but I kept him from hurting themselves. It worked beautifully. Well notice you can't then turn back to normal Berkeley faculty and say, teach it. It's not reasonable because he's not had that [00:14:00] experience. You could think about team teaching, but then you'd say, well ob, we have trouble with enough funding to teach with one person in a class, much less teen teaching. So I sort of agreed with myself to hope somebody remembers and when the university has more resources they could in fact return to these times of real life experience classes. The students that came [00:14:30] through that sort of experiences have made some remarkable contributions already. Good kids. Has anyone approached you about doing any of this online teaching? Speaker 1: Yes, and I steadily said no. The reason is a saying that I was given by a very dear friend and a collaborator, University of Washington, Seattle said a bomb. [00:15:00] Engineers want to believe the planet is not inhabited. We don't like people were antisocial. Go to a party and you can tell it immediately you were in a corner, you know, talking boring shop. Well let, don't want to contribute to e offline internet generation of engineers who do let her work with each other. I have all the liberating intellectual things in the classroom outside of the classroom. So [00:15:30] [inaudible] been very supportive. We need more human contact. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 5: spectrum is a public affairs show on KALX Berkeley. Our guest is professor Bob B of UC Berkeley. In the next segment they speak about safety. Speaker 2: Aw. Speaker 1: Is there anything that I haven't asked you about that you want to talk about? One of the things [00:16:00] that as I leave my career period in my career at Berkeley that makes me sad for Berkeley really got my attention during the Macondo disaster. Many good friends that I still have at DPE that were in fact involved in the causation of the accident kept saying, well, what we did we thought was safe. The thing that makes me say [00:16:30] is we still have a course to teach engineers what the word means and how to quantify it so that then people can look at it and say, this is acceptable. Those people could be from the school football or public hill. This kind of risk management not happening here. That's I had, and I can look forward. I think all of us can two continuing problems in this area because of a lack of appropriate [00:17:00] education. The engineering thinking in many cases is w explicit thinking about uncertainties, variability and is devoid of thinking intensely about the potential effects. Uh, human malfunctions. The engineer goes through a career of saying the weld will be done according to specifications. There's where it pumps up. [00:17:30] The engineers. Education is one a deals with an imaginary world. There is no significant uncertainty. You sorta by code specification or however inspection do away with that and things will be perfectly [inaudible]. Guess what? It's not the human factor, the human factor. Speaker 4: Given that there's always going to be that human factor [00:18:00] at risk management seems to be a quandary of the open-endedness of it. When do you feel you've done enough of it? When do you feel confident that you're ready to say, yes, I'm prepared for all circumstances? No one can know all things yet at the same time, you do as much as you can or what can you afford? Right. It comes down to the money side of it again. Yeah. I Speaker 1: love your question. I got on this while I was here, so I didn't come in here knowing this [00:18:30] one, when I came in to this risk assessment, management got into the depths of it. I had to do a lot of reading and reading. I was doing coming from many different industries and parts of the world said, oh well risk assessment and even a proactive think before predict cause like you were saying. But the falling that is, you can't predict everything, but they never said it. Okay. And the next thing you said was it's reactive [00:19:00] so that when something bad happens, you reflect on it, learn from it, and you manage the consequences. Well, I'm sitting here and by the way, I came here without a phd, but I got one, all of them white. I introduced interactive management and I'm sitting at home trying to think how to do something for a PhD dissertation that's new. Speaker 1: And I said, oh, there's proactive and there's reactive that gotta be interactive. How in the hell can I learn about this? And I end up working [00:19:30] with two pediatric emergency room management teams, a BB team, I call them [inaudible] into hospital Los Angeles, the other San Francisco general mortality rate, same number of beds in air emergency room wards was a factor of 10 higher in San Francisco. So we went and observed them, students with me, and we started interactive management. The baby can't tell you what's wrong with it [00:20:00] and yet the medical team has to be able to diagnose it, invoke corrective action to save the life and the success shows up in mortality. So we got deep into that and that entered interacted management. Hey, story goes on. We're working with commercial aviation, U S air, United Airlines and southwest airlines. U Us air comes to a confidential meeting and says, [00:20:30] well, we found out where we had five fatal accidents five years in a row. Speaker 1: We had given our flight crews instructions. They were to leave the gate on time without exception. Well, the five that had crashes did the checkout on the taxi out. Two of them found that they didn't have enough fuel to make the next airport unless they have tail. Winston. Of course they had headwinds. Well then experience in his interactive [00:21:00] management. The guy shows up at our doorstep here in Maine, sully Sullenberger and he's learning about what we have been learning. He's heard through u s air about this interactive management. Boy Did we carry him through it and boy did. He carry us through perfect example of how you can prepare a very complex hazardous system to succeed [00:21:30] in the face of failure. What they did that morning and he sent me an email that morning before they took off from the Guardian when they took all laws, both engines totally not predictable, did the scan or the alternative airports and what would happen if they didn't have enough flight path to make it turn toward the Hudson and pulled off. That was totally prepared for including design of back water back flow valves through the air intakes into [00:22:00] the Airbus. He knew what he was doing. Look at the flight inclination of the plane coming into the river. Looks like barefoot skiers toes up. Speaker 1: There's the power of the thinking so you do end up measuring safety just to, you said you never sure you got the spit on it or right. Something could happen out of the blue. Somebody walks across the street that's not supposed to. You then have to have the ability to get through [00:22:30] the system quickly and have the correct response. That's part of risk assessment management. Unfortunately, BP never learned it before the conduct so that when it really hit hard, it hit hard. That night they couldn't respond. They froze and they killed 11 people at White. Yeah, I read the report that you did on that and I was like potboiler. [00:23:00] It's really riveting stuff. Yup. Speaker 1: That's an amazing tale. Yeah, it makes me so overwhelming. Go sailing. You say all in the bay, Yo God, you know? Yeah. I'd taken the boat to Mexico taking the channel islands twice. I'm single handed sailor. Oh really? I've lost my ass once. Those exciting tale about [00:23:30] disaster preparation, I guess sailing alone is a good sort of a risk management hands on practice reason. You'd say, come on Bob, you got it. He's somewhat here, man. I've learned. When I say go, I can only sale, which means I can't think about Katrina or beat pea or San Bruno. I've got to focus totally on that boat and sailing. If not, I ask here quick. So it's a relief and that's why you do the [00:24:00] solo rather than have other people on board. Then you get sloppy, sloppy, and et cetera. Yeah, and so most of my sailing is done solo. Speaker 6: No [inaudible]. Speaker 3: If you're interested in the center for catastrophic risk management and it's riveting reports, visit the website, c c r n. Dot berkeley.edu [00:24:30] to listen to any and every past episode of spectrum for free. Visit our archive on iTunes university. The link is tiny url.com/calyx spectrum. Now two of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Cheese, Yucca boss and I presented a calendar Speaker 7: this Tuesday, November 19th the SF ask a scientist's lecture series. [00:25:00] We'll present a talk by a neuroscientist, Adam Gazzaley and magician Robert Strong from ancient conjures to big ticket Las Vegas. Illusionists. Magicians have been expertly manipulating human attention and perception to dazzle and delight us. The team will demonstrate how magicians use our brains as their accomplices in effecting the impossible and explain what scientists can learn about the brain by studying the methods and techniques of magic. The event will take place on Tuesday, November 19th at 7:00 PM in Stanford's geology corner. Auditorium Room [00:25:30] Number One oh five and building number three 20 of Stanford's main quad. Speaker 3: This Wednesday, November 20th the UC Berkeley Archeological Research Facility will host a seminar on indigenous food ways and landscape management. Since 2007 a multidisciplinary research team has been working to implement an Eto archeological approach to explore indigenous landscape management on the central coast of California. This presentation includes results of a study associated with UC Berkeley Graduate Student Rob Casseroles, [00:26:00] dissertation research, which takes a historical ecological approach to integrating major sources of data, including fiery ecology of contemporary landscapes and results of macro botanical analysis of indigenous settlements. The event is open to all audiences and will be held on November 20th from 12 to 1:00 PM in room one oh one of the archaeological research facility on the UC Berkeley campus and now Chase Jakubowski with our new story. Speaker 7: This story is from the UC Berkeley new center. [00:26:30] CRISPR stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats for nearly two decades after Japanese researchers first discovered CRISPR in bacteria in 1987 scientists dismissed it as junk DNA, far from being junk. CRISPR was actually a way of storing the genetic information of an invading virus in the form of Palindromic DNA sequence. The bacteria used this genetic information to target the viral invader by chopping [00:27:00] it up with powerful CRISPR associated enzymes capable of cleaving its DNA molecule, just like a pair of molecular scissors. The mystery of CRISPR was resolved by Jennifer Doudna of the University of California Berkeley, a specialist in RNA about seven years ago. Downer was asked by a university colleague to look into this genetic particularity of bacteria and quickly became fascinated. The more we looked into it, the more it seemed extremely interesting. Professor Doudna [00:27:30] said then in 2011 she met Emmanuelle Carpentier of Ooma University in Sweden at a scientific conference. Speaker 7: Professor Carpentier told professor down a of another kind of CRISPR system that seemed to rely on a single gene called c a s nine both professors collaborated on the project and an August last year published what is now considered the seminal paper showing that cas nine was an enzyme capable of cutting both [00:28:00] strands of DNA double helix at precisely the point dictated by a programmable RNA sequence. In other words, an RNA molecule that could be made to order. It has worked beautifully on plants and animals. Professors Doudna and sharpen ta had found the holy grail of genetic engineering, a method of cutting and stitching DNA accurately and simply anywhere in a complex genome. I'm tremendously excited about the possibility of this discovery having a real impact on people's [00:28:30] lives. Maybe we'll offer the opportunity to do therapeutics that we've not been able to do in the past. Professor Doudna said her team is already working on possible ways of using the cas nine system to disrupt the damaging chromosomes responsible for down syndrome or the extra repetitive sequences of DNA that lead to Huntington's disease. What's exciting is that you can see the potential and it's certainly going to drive a lot of research to try to explore it as a potential human therapeutic tool. Speaker 3: [00:29:00] Mm. Don't forget to tune in next week to your part two professor B's interview. He and Brad Swift will discuss the California Delta and shoreline retreat. Okay. The music heard during this show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. [00:29:30] Our email address is spectrum KALX. Hey, yahoo.com join us in two weeks. [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Chuck Frost, and Erin Fenley of the UCB Energy Office talk about their efforts to drive down electricity use on the Berkeley campus. This program will shift the onus for electricity use on each of the 28 Operating Units on Campus. Mypower.berkeley.eduTranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 3: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, [00:00:30] a biweekly 30 minute program, bringing you interviews, featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 4: Hello and good afternoon. My name is Renee Rao and I'll be hosting today's show. Did you know UC Berkeley has an energy office and an energy incentive program? Our guest on spectrum this week are Chuck Frost, the first ever energy manager of the UC Berkeley campus and Aaron family, the energy office communication specialist. [00:01:00] They talked with Brad swift about the programs the energy office has launched to drive down electricity use on the Berkeley campus. Here's the interview, Speaker 1: Chuck Frost and Aaron Fenley. Welcome to spectrum. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you. You work at the University of California Berkeley Energy Office. How did that come into being? Speaker 5: Well, the university hired a consultant to look at ways to save money on the campus. One of the things they came up with was to reestablish the energy [00:01:30] office. Speaker 1: Yeah. And that was about three or four years ago when bane consulting came in to check out what areas we could save money, um, on campus. And that was everything from payroll to energy management. So we dove in from there and it's part of operational excellence program. Actually through the energy management initiative we have created the energy office. We have also created an extensive outreach program which has its own goals and energy incentive program, which [00:02:00] has financial goals and then an energy policy which provides a framework. Speaker 5: Might there be, while the energy office actually tracks and monitors and assist the campus in reducing energy and we try to improve the building performance also. Is there anything that's really different the way your energy office is doing it that distinguishes you from other places? I think it's the number of dashboards we're using. We've got [00:02:30] almost a hundred installed on the smart meters and then also the incentive program or you could put the bill out into the campus. So the 28 operating units, if they beat their baseline or you will give them money. And this year we're giving them about $170,000 back to the campus, but it can go the other way starting next year and they could owe us two so it can go either way. It's a carrot in a stick. But out of the 28 opportunities this year, 20 received [00:03:00] money and two what Ellis and our goal is really to have no one, no HOAs and put the money back into the campus. Speaker 6: And how is it that you tie into the dashboard? Would the data, where do you collect the data? How do you tie it in? Speaker 5: Each building has a meter that monitors the incoming power to the building and that goes to an obvious is the name of the system. And then the pulse energy pulls off the obvious server to populate the dashboards [00:03:30] and kind of throws the bells and whistles on it. Speaker 6: Now are you able to use the data to reflect on the buildings efficiency its system? Speaker 5: It's actually can be used as a tool to identify when you have problems in the building. It's a, it'll throw up a flag. If you're doing too much energy after it learns you're building, it really knows how you'll drop. However, on a certain day and the weather and things like that, that's the model that is actually forms. It takes a few months to learn the building and actually it really a full seat, you know, a year. [00:04:00] And then once it identifies and learns and models who are building, then you can actually have threshold or limits that will flag your attention. If you have drawing too much or not enough, it can go either way. But that's a good indication. It's a lot better to have sub-metering in a building, but it's, it's very powerful just to have, you know, a smart meter in a building. And is there a move afoot to go to this sub-metering? Absolutely unfortunate. It just comes with a price and so it's very expensive. [00:04:30] But with the technology changing and wireless and things like that are being used a little bit more and I think it's coming down. So probably doable in the future. If you look at all the utilities on campus, we average between 30 and 35 million. That's for water, steam, gas and electricity. Speaker 1: And the electricity itself is about 17 yeah, Speaker 5: that's what he paid last year. Speaker 6: And so year to year as units start to save, you're able to give what back to them Speaker 5: when the, [00:05:00] the main meter at the campus drops down. That that's how we really determine and then we break it down into buildings, how much each of the buildings. But we actually look at the main meter also and then we are showing for the first time in a number of years where we actually did reduce and that an average of 2% creep was what we saw since the 90s Speaker 1: so so we can really avoid that creep by keeping the engineers in buildings. They've been divided into zones to work [00:05:30] in specific areas on the campus in order to understand the buildings, know what's going on there, work with the building managers in order to keep them tuned up so that the creep doesn't happen. Speaker 6: And that's the front line? Yes, it's the building engineers and building managers. Speaker 1: Well through the energy office there are stationary engineers, electrical engineers that are working in the zones with building managers in order to make that work happen. Speaker 5: So even though the skilled trades, Speaker 1: our goal goals a little bit different [00:06:00] than a traditional stationary engineer example where we're looking at kilowatts and BTUs, we want to help in any way we can and improve the building. But our focus is really energy. So we work with the shops but we have a different spin on it. So this past year a lot of the work that was very significant in reducing energy use was through variable fan drives. Yeah. Speaker 5: Both frequency drive. So anytime you can vary the flow on a large motor, whether it's pumping water pumping here you can [00:06:30] actually, once you reduce that substantial savings. So we saw a lot of opportunities and repairing dries, putting in new drives and things like that. Speaker 1: You kind of have more of a consultant role Speaker 5: in a sense. We like to say we're looking and um, some people will call it low hanging fruit. They don't cost a lot of money to invest in, but it could be scheduled changes. You could be heating and cooling at the same time. There's a lot, actually a lot of savings in those two areas and really don't have to spend a lot. You [00:07:00] just have to identify what I'm an example in this building we're in right now, it was a while ago, they actually had a painting project, so they wanted the fans to run 24 seven and it was one of the professors at notice will look at the dashboard and how come the energy use went up and it didn't go back down. So by him asking that question, we investigated and we found out that they had put all the fans in hand. There was no schedule to shut down at night so that that was about a $45,000 [00:07:30] avoidance would have been allowed to run the rest of the year. So those kinds of things, that's what the dashboard really helps a lot of people a lot of highest looking. So you can see what's going on and start asking the questions, why do I have this little blip of power? Why does it jump up like this? And the energy officer will go out and investigate it and sometimes it's just interviewing people. Sometimes it's walking through mechanical rooms and every building has a story. So you have to kind of dig into it. Speaker 7: [inaudible] mm, Speaker 4: [00:08:00] you're all sitting just spectrum on k a Alex Berkley. Our guests today are chuck frost and Aaron finally from the UC Berkeley Energy Office. In the next segment they talk about changing behavior to save energy Speaker 1: and what sort of outreach programs are you operating to try to just drum up support and awareness. We do have a energy management resource center right here in Barrows Hall Room One 92 [00:08:30] and people can stop by and pick up posters and flyers and light switch stickers can get information about saving energy, specifically in labs, residence halls and office spaces. You can also come there or email us@mypoweratberkeley.edu and set up a time to have our student team and we have an amazing student team who conduct surveys in offices, labs. We come in and take a nice observational survey [00:09:00] of what's going on in the spaces, um, leave stickers and materials to help that area find out more about what they can do. People here on campus are already doing so much to save energy, but there hasn't been a single place that we've gone to that we haven't found a few recommendations, uh, to give. So we provide personalized recommendations to that area. Then we post those on our website so they can be downloaded by the whole office or whole lab. And Speaker 5: would someone get involved if they're interested in becoming part of [00:09:30] the student team? Speaker 1: We just hired our student team for the semester, so all of our positions are filled currently. However you can stay in touch with us through our website and through Facebook where I post different internships that are available and they come up each semester. Yeah. Speaker 5: On the maintenance and new building side of things, there's obviously an ongoing maintenance that's required by all the buildings and are you folks involved in specifying improvements that could be [00:10:00] integrated into that maintenance process? We actually try to help with the maintenance too, but again we are looking at, everything we do has to be related to energy savings, so things like just clean filters. We'll save energy because there's less draw on the fans. It's an ongoing challenge, you know with the funding and things like that for an adequate maintenance, but it's improving and it's starting to turn, which is really good. It really needs to campus because of the age does [00:10:30] require a lot of maintenance on the different systems and things like that. And with new construction, do you get involved in decisions that are being made about what to put in the various buildings? That would be the policy that Aaron was mentioning earlier. We actually, with the new energy policy, we tried to insert ourselves pretty early into the design phases of the project. Actually in the very early design conception is where we want to be inserted. So we can talk about that. And are there [00:11:00] other sort of stakeholders, groups like yours that get drawn into that process Speaker 1: about energy efficiency or other things? Oh, other things? Well, I mean you could relate it to accessibility issues in a building. It's a very similar type of thing. You're going to build that in in the beginning too. Campus buildings these days, it's not going to be an afterthought and we want energy efficiency to be seen the same way. Speaker 5: And Are you, you're pretty much limited to off the shelf kind of technology at this point. There's no way for you to really work with anyone on campus [00:11:30] on creating some new technology that might, aren't working with certain groups. The Center for built environment, they're doing a research project right now on personal comfort units, which the focus is right at your desk and not a zone, the whole room. And they actually having some pretty amazing results. They have also a heating and cooling chair. So you actually heat the whole building just there as you need. And so the goal is to try to get people to trade in their heaters [00:12:00] that they've got underneath the desk that they bring in from home and they don't want anybody to know about that draw 1500 watts of power with one of these more efficient, uh, personal comfort units, which draw about 40 watts. So they're actually, I had one in my office and I, I hated to give it up, but they had to use it for the research, but it really works good. It's very interesting some of the work they're doing. Speaker 1: I also worked with some students in computer science in order to help us develop a mobile available [00:12:30] site for our dashboards because right now in pulse dashboards or flash and they don't display on mobile devices or tablets. So some of our computer science students help to develop an html version where we're showcasing about half the buildings that are available on pulse. However, you can access those through your mobile device now. And is it just a matter of time before you get them all hauled? The building's done that way. I certainly hope so. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, it is. An ongoing project. Speaker 5: [00:13:00] There is opportunity for innovation that you're finding within absolutely. The campus people are coming to you with ideas which you encourage them. Yes, definitely. Definitely. Yeah. That's exciting. That's the best part of my job actually is meeting some of the people I'd never get to meet otherwise are doing some really neat research and it's cutting edge and to look at the campus as a lab. It really is because of the diversity in buildings and we've got some buildings that are a hundred years old and [00:13:30] on the behavioral side, what sort of push do you make there and how successful is that? Speaker 1: We have been developing a lot of elements for our behavior change campaign, the my power campaign, reaching out to all of campus saying that everyone has a role to play in reducing energy use. We can all turn the lights off, we can all unplug things when we're done with them. We've put out about 10,000 stickers around [00:14:00] campus reminding people to shut the lights off, reminding people to turn their monitors off and those had been put up through student teams. They've also been put up through our power agent team, which is a group of very committed champions of energy efficiency here on campus. Most of them staff members, a few students. And they are also along with our engineers, some eyes and ears of the buildings on campus and they can keep us updated on things that are happening in those areas where they work and study. Speaker 5: [00:14:30] Oh, I'd like to say that we value anybody's input. And you know, I've had people that are gardeners or browns and I've had custodians and various groups that will say, you know, the light was on and you know, the buildings lights are on and things like that and brought it to her attention. So it's just everybody's health. We can do this. It's going to a group effort. Everybody's working together. Speaker 1: Absolutely. And anyone who wants to report any type of oddities [00:15:00] or anomalies and energy use, sending an email to my power@berkeley.edu gets our whole team's attention and we get back to everyone within 48 hours and get on the problem. So those types of reports have really helped us resolve some issues Speaker 6: other than electricity. You deal with natural gas. Steam is a big part of the campus as well. And how does water fit into that as issues? Speaker 5: Right now we're just focused on electricity, [00:15:30] they initial phase, but we will expand into it, you know, working closely with the sustainability office and, and water is very important in steam and yeah, Speaker 1: our dashboards even have capabilities of showing water usage and steam usage. But right now we're pretty single minded in our focus on energy efficiency and reducing permanently reducing the amount of energy we use on campus. But the campus does have a goal of reducing potable water use to 10% below 2008 levels by 2020 [00:16:00] and you can find out all about that@sustainabilitydotberkeley.eduSpeaker 3: [inaudible]Speaker 8: spectrum is a public affairs show on k a Alex Berkeley. Our guest are chuck frost and Aaron Penley in the UC Berkeley Energy Office. In the next segment they talk about new technologies and surprising collaborations. Speaker 6: And how does the steam system [00:16:30] here interact? It's shared, right? It's across a large group of the buildings or not because not all the buildings are on the steam [inaudible] Speaker 5: on the core, you know you have some remote buildings that have boilers and things like that and so you're not using electricity at all to develop the steam. Oh, that is correct. So it's just all, it's usually natural gas or gas to do that. Speaker 1: But isn't the steam a byproduct of the electricity production? Speaker 5: You're absolutely right. We have a cogent plant that does cause of the [00:17:00] turbine generate steam that we traditionally use and then we have on boilers that are kind of a backup to that now. Speaker 6: So that's then on top of the power you draw from PGNE the cogeneration. Speaker 1: We actually produce that energy and then sell it back to BJ to PGNE and then we buy it back. Speaker 5: We give 10 cents is the number we typically give because it's kind of a blend, an average of what we pay Speaker 6: [inaudible] I'm interested in the new technology that you're looking [00:17:30] at. Speaker 5: I think fault detection has actually been around for awhile with your control systems. You trended in the building and then you traditionally would analyze it, an engineer or somebody would look in and analyze it. So you automate that. And so what is really changed, and I think it's really good for the industry, the HVAC industry, is you've got people like Google and Microsoft and people that were never in the game before. Now I want to start mining the data from the buildings, analyzing that data for a fee and helping [00:18:00] with the fault detection. So it's a game changer at the industry. Probably in the last five years has changed more than it did 25 years before that. It's amazing. So we got new players in the game and wireless as well. Wireless is very big too. Yeah. The technology, Speaker 6: is it proving to be as reliable as copper wire? Speaker 5: I think it is. It's starting to be embraced by everybody. You have different technologies, ones that require repeaters and then you have mo technology, then self networking [00:18:30] and things like that. So even now we've got pilots going on that are pneumatic thermostats that are really wireless electronic thermostats that go back to a server and the pneumatic combined. And so that allows us to get down to the zone level to really control a building and really look for the energy. A zone would be like the room we're in now and then with the new wireless lighting that actually it looks at occupancy, it looks at a temperature. Also you can start pulling and really getting a good profile or [00:19:00] you're building when the energy is and when it's occupied and things like that. So those newer technologies are very promising. Speaker 6: Obviously you're going to drive the use and drive efficiency at cow and it's going to get harder and harder to reduce the use. Your Delta is going to get smaller and smaller. Where do you find new efficiencies? Speaker 5: We like to call it mining for Golden Nuggets and the nuggets are harder and they're deeper to find as you move forward, [00:19:30] that's for sure. But we've been working with a Berkeley national lab and also the Pacific Northwest National Lab and PGNE Energy Center and facility dynamics on ways to train our technicians to, to find those golden nuggets. So we're putting the technicians out in the field as we mentioned in zones in the learn the buildings and then they'll get the deeper look at the buildings once they understand the buildings, get more familiar with it. So that's where we're hoping to continue the process. But it is it, you're absolutely right. It's harder. You keep going in [00:20:00] whether you call a golden eye, gets her low hanging fruit, there's less and less. This orchard has been picked over pretty good. Speaker 6: This is what's the legacy of your data collection and distribution at this point? Speaker 1: Oh, right now we started April, 2011 and we are just now finishing up our first annual report that contains all of our, our data from the initiative since the inception, so that will be released as soon as it is approved. It is in its final [00:20:30] draft stage. Speaker 5: What was the biggest surprise for you when you started this process? I don't know if it was a surprise, but I was just amazed at how much of the small little pockets of research that are going on than it actually looking people coming forward. And I'd never heard of the before the center for built environment and just amazing what they had been doing for 20 years and they were a great group and they really understand building comfort and the looking at new technologies and things like that. So this personal comfort unit and [00:21:00] again David Color and computer science students, that was just an early surprised me. And then it would be looking at energy and buildings and some of the tools they've shown savings with lighting and just the smart apps they were developing and where they could track you through a building. They knew what you liked in lighting and and the environment and they could actually start to modify the building and the interface with the control system at the building over citrus in the Er. It was just amazing to me. It was a surprise. Okay. Speaker 9: And the biggest challenge going forward [00:21:30] in near term Speaker 1: for you guys is what? I think for me it's to keep reminding people that we're not done and we still have to keep remembering to incorporate energy efficiency into our daily actions. One of the most surprising and interesting things in this work has been seeing what people's attitudes towards energy efficiency are and some people believe that they're doing everything that they possibly can and we continually find that there's probably even more that [00:22:00] you could do somehow or another. So continuing to incorporate that into your daily work routine or your daily coming to school routine is very important. Speaker 9: Chuck Frost and Aaron Fendley, thanks very much for being on spectrum. Thank you for having us. Thank you so much and good luck with saving energy. Thank you. Speaker 8: [00:22:30] If you're interested in reducing energy use at cau, visit the website, my power.berkeley.edu there you'll find building dashboards and strategies for taking action. Speaker 3: [inaudible]Speaker 8: spectrum shows are also archived on iTunes university. We've created a simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/cadillacs [00:23:00] spectrum here at spectrum. We like to highlight a few of the sides to technology events happening locally. Over the next few weeks. Brad swift and I Speaker 9: present the calendar. The last few days of the bay area science festival are this weekend tonight in San Francisco, science improv blitz where comics and phd students synthesize laughs for the sake of amusement and learning. This is happening at the south of Market Street Food Park [00:23:30] four 28 11th street from 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM this is a festival event and free discovery days at at and t park. A T and t park will become a science wonder and when Bay Area Science Festival Speaker 4: concludes again with the Free Science Extravaganza last year, more than 30,000 people enjoyed a nonstop program chock full of interactive exhibits, experiments, games, and shows all meant to entertain and inspire [00:24:00] with more than 150 exhibits or something for everyone to unleash their inner scientist. This festival grand finale is Saturday, November 2nd at the home of the San Francisco baseball giants at 24 Willie Mays plaza in San Francisco. It opens at 11:00 AM and runs until 4:00 PM Speaker 9: the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute and Berkeley City College will host a free public talk on verifying greenhouse gas emissions by Dr Inez Fung as part of the lecture series, not on the [00:24:30] test, the pleasures and uses of mathematics. Dr Inez Fung is a contributing author to the assessment reports of the intergovernmental panel on climate change, a scientific body under the auspices of the United Nations. Dr Fung will discuss how we measure and verify claims about emissions related to global warming. Dr Fung is a professor of atmospheric science at UC Berkeley where she has studied climate change for 20 years and has created mathematical models that represent [00:25:00] CO2 sources and sinks around the globe. The event will be held in Berkeley City College Auditorium on Wednesday, November six from 7:00 PM to 8:15 PM RSVP for the free event online@msri.org Speaker 4: the November installation of the monthly lecture series. Science of cow will focus on art inspired by science and mathematics. You see Berkeley Professor Carlos equin will speak about how math and computers [00:25:30] are being used to create new artwork every day. He will also try to answer the nearly insoluble question of whether art or science came. First. Professor sequined began his career at bell labs as part of the group that created the first solid state image sensor compatible with American broadcast television. He later joined the faculty at UC Berkeley where he eventually focused on the development of computer aided design tools for architects and mechanical engineers. Professor sequent has also collaborated with many artists over the years to make the most of computers [00:26:00] and the emerging rapid prototyping tools to create geometrical sculptures and a wide range of scales and materials. The lecture will be held at 11:00 AM on Saturday, November 16th in room 100 of the genetics and plant biology building on the UC Berkeley campus. The lecture is free and open to the public haired spectrum. We like to share our favorite stories about science. Brad Swift joins me for the news Speaker 9: science daily reports that scientists at the University of Wisconsin Madison [00:26:30] have constructed a three dimensional model of the so-called missing link, cold virus, Rhino virus c Rhino Virus C is believed to be responsible for up to half of all childhood colds and is a serious complicating factor for respiratory conditions such as asthma. Together with Rhino viruses, a n B. The recently discovered virus is responsible for millions of illnesses yearly at an estimated annual cost of more than $40 billion in the United States alone. [00:27:00] Because of the three cold virus strains all contribute to the common cold drug. Candidates that focused on rhinoviruses a and B failed antiviral drugs work by attaching to and modifying surface features of the virus. This highly detailed three dimensional structure for rhinovirus c will give pharmaceutical companies new targets for designing cold thwarting drugs. Speaker 4: UC Berkeley scientists have designed a satellite [00:27:30] that could detect large fires across the western United States by snapping a constant stream of photos of the earth below. Then scanning them for new hotspots that could indicate wildfires. The UC Berkeley teen described their plans for the satellite known as the fire urgency estimate or in geosynchronous orbit or flags. In the October 17th issue of the Journal. Remote Sensing Lego works by analyzing its infrared photos using a computer algorithm to detect differences in the land, especially bright lights [00:28:00] that may be fledgling fires. The program can analyze the entire west in minutes. Creators hope that the early detection of wildfires help to prevent loss of life and widespread damage that usually occur as a result of extensive wildfires. Researchers hope to raise the several hundred million dollars required to build the satellite through a combination of public and private means. Speaker 9: The Northern California chapter of the Society of professional journalists has awarded greater good science center editor in chief [00:28:30] Jason Marsh, uh, 2013, excellence in journalism award for his story. Why inequality is bad for the 1% a gripping look at how income disparity can negatively impact both the wealthy and the poor. Relying on cutting edge research. Jason's story illustrates the ways in which having wealth may adversely affect an individual's ability to be compassionate, understand social cues, and trust others. Those deficiencies can hinder social connection, a key part [00:29:00] of our happiness and our physical health. To read the article, go to the website. Greater good.berkeley.edu Speaker 7: [inaudible].Speaker 9: The music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon Speaker 7: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments [00:29:30] about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot klx@yahoo.com join us in two at this Speaker 2: time. [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's. Next. Speaker 2: N. N. N. N. Speaker 3: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x, [00:00:30] Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program, bringing you interviews, featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 4: Good afternoon. I'm Rick Karnofsky. Brad swift and I are the hosts of today's show. Today we're talking with doctors, Tonya Wilkie and Chris Rink of the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek. They recently published an article entitled insights into the Phylogeny and coding potential [00:01:00] of microbial dark matter in which they have to characterized through relationships between 201 different genomes and identified some unique genomic features. Tonya and Chris, welcome to spectrum. Speaker 5: Thanks for having us. Thank you. Speaker 4: So Tanya, what is microbial dark matter? Speaker 5: We like to take life as we know it and put it in an evolutionary tree in a tree of life. And what this assists us is to figure out the evolutionary histories of organisms and the relationships between [00:01:30] related groups of organisms. So what does this mean? It's to say we take microbial diversity as we know it on this planet and we place it in this tree of life. What you will find is that there will be some major branches in this tree, about 30 of them, and we call these major branches Fila that are made up of organisms that you can cultivate. So we can grow them on plates in the laboratory, we can grow them in Allen Meyer, flask and liquid media. We can study that for CLG. We can figure out what substrates they metabolize, [00:02:00] we can figure out how they behave under different conditions. Speaker 5: Many of them we can even genetically modify. So we really know a lot about these organisms and we can really figure out, you know, how do they function, what are the genetic underpinnings that make them function the way they do in the laboratory and also in the environment where they come from. So now coming back to this tree of life, if you keep looking at this tree of life, uh, we will find at least another 30 off these major branches that we refer to as [00:02:30] Canada. Dot. Sila and these branches have no cultivators, representatives, so all the organisms that make up these branches, we have not yet been able to cultivate in the laboratory. We call these kind of dot, Fila or microbial dark matter. And the term dark matter. All biological dark matter has been coined by the Steve Craig Laboratory at Stanford University when they published the first genomes after a candidate, phylum TM seven. We know that dark matter is in most if not all [00:03:00] ecosystems. So we find it in most ecosystems, but to get at their complete genetic makeup. That's the key challenge. Speaker 4: Yeah. And if you, if you want to push it through the extreme, there are studies out there estimating the number of bacteria species they are and how many we can cultivate. And the result is all there. The estimation of the studies we can cultivate about, you know, one or 2% of all the microbial species out there. So basically nine to 9% is still out there and we haven't even looked at it. So this really, this major on culture microbes and majority is [00:03:30] still waiting out there to be explored. So that sort of carries on the analogy to cosmological dark matter in which there's much more of it than what we actually see and understand. Right. Speaker 5: So how common and how prevalent are, are these dark matter organisms? Yeah, that's a really good question. So in some environments they are what we would consider the rabbi biosphere. So they are actually at fairly low abundance, but our methods are sensitive enough to still pick them up. [00:04:00] In other environments. We had some sediment samples where some of these candidate file, our, actually what we would consider quite abandoned, it's a few percent, let's say 2% of opiate candidate phylum that to us, even 2% is quite abandoned. Again, you have to consider the whole community. And if one member is a 2%, that's, that's a pretty dominant community members. So I'd arise from environment, environment Speaker 4: and Chris, where were samples collected from? So altogether we sampled nine sampling sites all over the globe [00:04:30] and we tried to be as inclusive as possible. So we had marine samples, freshwater samples, sediment samples, um, some samples from habitats with very high temperatures and also a sample from a bioreactor. And there were a few samples among them that for which we had really great hopes. And among them were um, samples from the hot vans from the bottom of Pacific Ocean. The samples we got were from the East Pacific virus sampling side, and that's about 2,500 meters below the store phase. And [00:05:00] the sample there, you really need a submersible that's a small submarine and you can launch from a research vessel. In our case, those samples were taken by Elvin from the woods hole oceanographic institution and now you have a lot of full Canik activity and also the seawater seeps into the earth crust goes pretty deep and gets heated up. Speaker 4: And when it comes back out as a hydrothermal event, it has up to [inaudible] hundred 50 to 400 degrees Celsius. And it is enriched in chemicals such as a sulfur or iron. [00:05:30] It makes us immediately with the surrounding seawater, which is only about a two degrees Celsius. So it's a very, it's a very challenging environment because you have this gradient from two degrees to like 400 degrees within a few centimeters and you have those chemicals that uh, the organisms, the micro organisms could use blast. There is no sunlight. So we thought that's a very interesting habitat to look for. Microbial, dark matter. There were several samples. That's a to us. One of them is the Homestake [00:06:00] mine in South Dakota and that's an old gold mine that is not used anymore since 2002 but are there still scientific experiments going on there? It's a very deep mine, about 8,000 feet deep and we could all sample from about 300 feet. Speaker 4: And we were surprised about this Ikea diversity we found in those samples. There were a few Akia that were not close to any, I don't know another key out there for some of them. We even had to propose new archaeal Fila. Stepping back a bit, Chris, [00:06:30] can you tell us more about Ikea and perhaps the three domains of life? The three domains were really established by Culver's with his landmark paper in 1977 and what he proposed was a new group of Derek here. So then he had all together three domains. You had the bacteria and archaea and the eukaryotes, the eukaryote state. There are different one big differences to have the nucleus, right? They have to DNA in the nucleus and it also includes all the higher taxa. But then you have also their key and the bacteria. [00:07:00] And those are two groups that only single cell organisms, but they are very distant related to each other, the cell envelope, all. And also the cell duplication machinery of the archaea is closer to the eukaryotes than it is to the bacteria. Speaker 5: Yeah, and it's interesting, I mean Ikea, I guess we haven't sequenced some that much yet, but Ikea are very important too, but people are not aware of them. They know about bacteria, but Ikea and maybe because there aren't any RKO pathogen [00:07:30] and we'd like to think about bacteria with regards to human health, it's very important. That's why most of what we sequence are actually pathogens, human pathogens. So we sequence, I don't know how many strains of your senior pastors and other pathogenic bacteria, but archaea are equally important, at least in the environment. But because we rarely find them associated with humans, we don't really think about archaea much. Our people aren't really aware of Ikea. Speaker 4: Talk about their importance, Speaker 5: the importance [00:08:00] in the environment. So Ikea are, for example, found in extreme environments. We find them in Hydro Soma environments. We find them in hot springs. Uh, we, they have, they have biotechnological importance and not a lot of, quite useful in enzymes that are being used in biotechnology are derived from Ikea in part because we find them in these extreme environments and hot environments and they have the machinery to deal with this temperature. So they have enzymes that function [00:08:30] properly at high temperature and extreme conditions, really extreme on the commerce extreme or fields. And that makes them very attractive bio technologically because some of these enzymes that we would like to use should be still more tolerant or should have these features that are sort of more extreme. Um, so we can explain it them for a biotech technological applications. [inaudible] Speaker 6: [inaudible] [00:09:00] you are listening to spectrum on k l x Berkeley. I'm Rick [inaudible] and I'm talking with Kanya vulgate and Chris, her and Kate about using single cell genomics. You're expand our knowledge that the tree of life, Speaker 5: [00:09:30] so again, we called up a range of different collaborators and they were all willing to go back to these interesting sites, even to the hydrothermal vent and get us fresh sample. No one turned us down. So we, we, we screened them again to make sure they are really of the nature that we would like to have them and the ones that were suitable. We then fed into our single cell workflow. Can you talk briefly about that screening? There were two screens in waft. One screen was narrowing down the samples themselves and we received a lot more sample, I would say at least [00:10:00] three times as many sample as we ended up using. And we pre-screened these on a sort of barcode sequencing level. And so we down selected them to about a third. And then within this third we sorted about 9,000 single cells and within these 9,000 single cells, only a subset of them went through successful single cell, whole genome amplification. And out of that set then we were only, we were able to identify another subset. And [00:10:30] in the end we selected 200 for sequencing 201 Speaker 4: and how does single cell sequencing work? Speaker 5: So to give you a high level overview, you take a single cell directly from the environment, you isolate it, and there's different methodologies to do that. And then you break it open, you expose the genetic material within the cell, the genome, and then you amplify the genome. And some single cells will only have one copy of that genome. And we have a methodology, it's a whole genome amplification process that's called multiple displacement amplification [00:11:00] or MDA. And that allows us to make from one copy of the genome, millions and billions of copies. One copy of the genome corresponds to a few family or grams of DNA. We can do much with it. So we have to multiply, we have to make these millions and billions of copies of the genome to have sufficient DNA for next generation sequencing. Speaker 4: Are there other extreme environments that you guys didn't take advantage of in this study that might be promising? Definitely. Um, so we, [00:11:30] we created the list already off environments that would be interesting to us based on, you know, on the results from the last start in the experience we have with environmental conditions and the is microbes we've got out of it. So we're definitely planning to have a followup study where we explore all those, um, habitats that we couldn't include in this, uh, study. Speaker 5: So some examples of the Red Sea and some fjords in Norway and their various that were after Speaker 4: the, that the Black Sea is a very interesting environment too. It's, it's completely anoxic, high levels of sulfide [00:12:00] and it's, it's really, it's huge. So that's a very interesting place to sample too. And how historically have we come to this tree in the old days? And I mean the, the, the pre sequencing area, um, the main criteria that scientists use to categorize organisms whilst the phenotype. That's the, the morphology, the biochemical properties, the development. And that was used to put, uh, organisms into categories. And then with the dawn of the sequencing area, and that was [00:12:30] mainly, um, pushed by the Sanger sequencing, the development of the Sanger sequencing in the 70s. We finally had another and we could use and that was the DNA sequence of organisms. And that was used to classify and categorize organisms. Does a phenotyping still play a role in modern phylogeny? It still does play a role in modern philosophy in the, especially for eukaryotes. Speaker 4: Well you have a very significant phenotype. So what you do there is you can compare a phenotyping information with the [00:13:00] genomic information and on top of that even, uh, information from all the ontology and you try to combine all the information you have doing for, let's say, for the evolutionary relationships among those organisms in modern times, the phylogeny of bacteria, Nokia, it's mainly based on molecular data. Part of our results were used to infer phylogenetic relationships into the started. The evolutionary history of those microbes. We'll be, well do you have for the first time is we now have chine [00:13:30] ohms for a lot of those branches of the tree where before we only had some barcodes so we knew they were there, but we had no information about the genomic content and they'll seem to be hafted for the first time. We can actually look at the evolutionary history of those microbes and there were two, two main findings in our paper. Speaker 4: One was that for a few groups, the f the placement that taxonomic placement in the tree of life was kind of debated in the past. We could help to clarify that. For example, one group is they clock chemo needs [00:14:00] and it was previously published. It could be part of the farm of the spiral kids, but we could Cully show with our analysis that they are their own major branch entry of laughter or their own file them and a a second result. That's, I think it's very important that that's because they didn't share a lot of jeans with others. Bifurcates is that, that's, that's right. So if you placed him in a tree of life, you can see that the don't cluster close parakeets, they'll come out on the other side by out by themselves, not much resembling if the spark is there. And the second result was [00:14:30] that, uh, we found several of those main branches of the tree of life, those Fila the class of together consistently in our analysis. Speaker 4: And so we could group them together and assign super filer to them. One example is a sweet book, Zero Fila Debra Opa 11 or the one and Chino too, and also almost clustered together. So we proposed a super final name. Potesky and Potesky means I'm bear or simple. And we choose that because they have a reduced and streamlined genome. That's another common feature. [00:15:00] I'm Andrea and I, I have to say that, you know, looking into evolutionary relationships, it is, it is a moving target because as Tanya mentioned, especially for microbes and bacteria and like here, there's still so many, um, candidates that are out there for which we have no genomic information. So we definitely need way more sequences, um, to get a better idea of the evolutionary relationships of all the books. Your Nokia out there Speaker 6: [00:15:30] spectrum is a public affairs show about science on k a l x Berkeley. Our guests today are Tanya. Okay. And Chris Rink k you single cell genomics to find the relationships between hundreds of dark matter of microbes. Speaker 4: And can you speak to the current throughput? I would have thought that gathering up organisms in such extreme environments was really the time limiting factor. [00:16:00] But I suppose if you have this archive, other steps might end up taking a while. I will say the most time consuming step is really to to sort those single cells and then to lyse the single cells and amplify the genome and then of course to screen them for the, for genomes of interest for microbial like metagenomes [inaudible] that was a big part of the study. So actually getting the genomic information out of the single cells and if that can be even more streamlined than uh, and push to a higher or even more stupid level, I think [00:16:30] that will speed up the recovery of, of novel microbial dogmatic genomes quite a bit. Speaker 5: Well, we have a pretty sophisticated pipeline now at the JGI where we can do this at a fairly high throughput, but as Chris said, it still takes time and every sample is different. Every sample behaves different depending on what the properties of the samples are. You may have to be treated in a certain way to make it most successful for this application and other staff in the whole process that takes a long time is the key. The quality control [00:17:00] of the data. So the data is not as pretty as a sequencing data from an isolet genome where you get a perfect genome back and the sequence data that you get back is fairly, even the coverage covered all around the genome. Single cell data is messy. The amplification process introduces these artifacts and issues. It can introduce some error because you're making copies of a genome. Speaker 5: So errors can happen. You can also introduce what we call comeric rearrangement. That means that pieces of DNA [00:17:30] go together that shouldn't go together. Again, that happens during the amplification process. It's just the nature of the process. And on top of that, parts of the genome amplify nicely and other parts not so nice. So the overall sort of what we call sequence coverage is very uneven. So the data is difficult to deal with. We have specific assembly pipelines that we do. We do a sort of a digital normalization of the data before we even deal with the data, so it's not as nice. And then on top of that you can have contamination. So the whole process is very [00:18:00] prone to contamination. Imagine you only have one copy of a single cell, five Phantogram, one circle of DNA and any little piece of DNA that you have in that prep that sometimes as we know comes with the reagents. Speaker 5: Because reagents are not designed to deal with such low template molecules. They will call amplify, they will out-compete or compete with your template. So what you end up with in your sequence is your target and other stuff that was in was in the reagents or again, in your prep. We have very rigorous [00:18:30] process of cleaning everything. We you read a lot of things we sterilize, so we need to get rid of any DNA to not, um, to, to have a good quality genome in the end. And so that said, we have developed tools and pipelines at our institute now that specifically help us detect contamination. Sometimes it's not easy to detect it and then remove it. We want to make sure that the single cell genomes that we released at as single cell genome ABC are really ABC and not a plus x and [00:19:00] B plus k because accidentally something came along and contaminated the prep. And especially with candidate Fila, it's, it's fairly difficult to detect tech contamination because what would help us would be if we would have referenced genomes, we're actually generating this reference genome so we don't have a good reference to say, yeah, this is actually, that's our target organism and the rest is public contamination, so it's very tricky. Speaker 4: Are there other examples for [00:19:30] single cell sequencing being used on this many organisms Speaker 5: on this many organisms? No, not that I'm aware of. I know there's an effort underway and the h and p, the human microbiome project where they also identified there, they nicely call it the most wanted list, so they have the target organisms that are quite abundant in different microbiomes within the human body associated with the human body and they've been very successfully able to cultivate. A lot of them bring a lot of them in culture [00:20:00] and it may be easier for the h and p because we can mimic the conditions within the body a little bit better and more controlled. We know our body temperature and we know sort of what the middle year is in the different parts of our body. So it's a little bit easier to bring these organisms and culture than going to the hydrothermal vent and try and recreate these conditions which are extremely difficult to recreate. So that said, um, there are some that they are now targeting with single cell sequencing. So that's another large effort [00:20:30] that I know of that's specifically using single cell genomics to get at some of these reference genomes. Speaker 4: Can you get more out of this then? Sort of phylogenetic links? We found a few unique genomic features and one on one dimension is we found a recode. It's stopped caught on in, in two of those, a bacteria from the hot vans I mentioned earlier. And to give you a little bit of background, so, um, it's, we know the genetic information of each sale is and coded in its DNA, but in order to [00:21:00] make use of this genomic information, this genetic information has to be translated into proteins. And then proteins that could be enzymes that are employed in the metabolism to keep the cell going. And a dispensation is pretty universal between the three domains of life. The way it works, we have three basis in your DNA and three basis are called the core done. And each call is translated in the one amino acid. Speaker 4: So this way you'll build a chain of amino acids and then this chain is for a folder [00:21:30] and then you have your ready made protein. This call them triplet. This three basis also work for start and stop. So there are certain colons that tell the cell, okay, that's where you start a protein. And another called in to tell us the cell. So that's, that's where you enter prod and you're done with it. There are some slight variations, but in general does a universally called, is perceived between all three domains of life. And what we found was very interesting in two of those bacteria from the hot vans. Ah, those two caecilian bacteria, we found the [00:22:00] recording. So one of the accord on did not called for a stop code on anymore, but in the quarter's for an amino acid in that case, glycine. And that has never been seen before. Were you surprised by these results? Speaker 5: To us, they were surprising because they were unique and they were different. On the other hand, I have to say I'm not that surprised because we haven't, like Russ said, we haven't looked at heart yet and considering that we can only cultivate a few percent of all the microbial diversity that exists on this planet as far as, [00:22:30] as far as we know it, it's not that surprising that you find these novel functions and there's these unique features and novel genetic codes because it's really, it's a highly under-explored area. Speaker 4: It is very rewarding. But if you look in the future, um, how much is still out of the sequence? Of course we're interested in that. So we looked at all the files show diversity that's known, that's out there based on this, um, biomarkers that Tony mentioned earlier and we just compared it to the genomes that we have sequenced so far. And we really want [00:23:00] to know, so if you want to cover let's say about 50% of all the fall diversity that's out there, how many achievements do we still have to sequence and the number of the estimate was we need to sequence at least 16,004 more genomes Speaker 5: and this is a moving target. So this is as we know, diversity of today it and every day we sample my environments, we sequence them deeper and everyday our diversity estimates increase. So what we've done with these 201 it's the tip of the iceberg but it's a start. Speaker 4: [00:23:30] Well Tanya and Chris, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Yeah. Speaker 6: [inaudible] that's what shows are archived on iTunes to you. We've queued a simple link for you. The link is tiny, url.com/calex Speaker 7: spectrum Speaker 8: irregular feature of spectrum is a calendar [00:24:00] of some of the science and technology related events happening in the bay area over the next two weeks. Here's Brad swift and Renee Rao here today. Majority tomorrow. Expanding technological inclusion, technological inclusion is not an issue for some of us. It is an issue for all of us. Mitchell Kapore, co-chair of [inaudible] center for social impact and a partner at Kapore capital. We'll moderate a panel discussion among the following [00:24:30] presenters, Jennifer r Guayle, executive director of Latino to Kimberly Bryant, founder of Black Girls Code Connie Mack Keebler, a venture capitalist with the collaborative fund. Vivek Wadhwa academic researcher, writer and entrepreneur here today. Majority tomorrow is free and open to everyone on a first come first seated basis. This is happening on the UC Berkeley campus in Soutar de Di Hall [inaudible] [00:25:00] Auditorium Monday October 7th at 4:00 PM Speaker 7: the second installment of the six part public lecture series, not on the test. The pleasure and uses of mathematics will be held this October 9th Dr. Keith Devlin will deliver a lecture on underlying mathematics in video games. Dr Devlin will show how casual video games that provide representation of mathematics enabled children and adults to learn basic mathematics by playing in the same way people [00:25:30] learn music by learning to play the piano. Professor Devlin is a mathematician at Stanford, a Co founder and president of Inner Tube Games and the math guy of NPR. The lecture will be held on October 9th at 7:00 PM in the Berkeley City College Auditorium located at 2050 Center street in Berkeley. The event is free and open to the public. Speaker 8: The Leonardo arts science evening rendezvous or laser is a lecture series with rotating barrier venues. October 9th there will be a laser [00:26:00] at UC Berkeley. Presenters include Zan Gill, a former NASA scientists, Jennifer Parker of UC Santa Cruz, Cheryl Leonard, a composer, Wayne Vitali, founding member of gamelons Sakara [inaudible]. This is Wednesday, October 9th from 6:30 PM to 9:00 PM on the UC Berkeley campus in barrels hall room 100 Speaker 7: how can we prevent information technology [00:26:30] from destroying the middle class? Jaron Lanier, is it computer scientists, Kim Poser, visual artist and author. October 14th linear will present his ideas on the impact of information technology on his two most recent books are title. You are not a gadget and who owns the future. The seminar will be held in Sue Taja, Dai Hall, but not auditorium on the UC Berkeley campus. Monday, October 14th from 11:00 AM to noon [00:27:00] and that with some science news headlines. Here's the Renee, the intergovernmental panel on climate change released part of its assessment report. Five last Friday. The more than 200 lead authors on their report included Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, Michael Warner and William Collins who had a chapters on longterm climate change productions and climate models. The report reinforces previous conclusions that over the next century, the continents will warm [00:27:30] with more hot extremes and fewer cold extremes. Precipitation patterns around the world will also continue changing. One-Arm Collins noted that climate models since the last report in 2007 have improved significantly as both data collection and mechanistic knowledge have grown using these models. Scientists made several projections of different scenarios for the best, worst and middling cases of continued greenhouse emissions. Speaker 7: [00:28:00] Two recent accomplishments by commercial space programs are notable. Orbital Sciences launched their sickness spacecraft on September 18th a top the company's rocket and Tara's from wallops island, Virginia. On September 28th the Cygnus dock did the international space station for the first time, a space x rocket carrying and Canadian satellite has launched from the California coast in a demonstration flight of a new Falcon rocket. The next generation. Rocket boasts [00:28:30] upgraded engines designed to improve performance and carry heavier payloads. The rocket is carrying a satellite dead kiss IOP, a project of the Canadian Space Agency and other partners. Once in orbit it will track space weather. Speaker 2: Mm mm mm. Mm Huh. Speaker 7: The music [00:29:00] heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Yeah. Speaker 3: Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Address is [inaudible] dot [inaudible] dot com Speaker 9: [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Amy Herr's research focuses on bioinstrumentation innovation to improve quantitative measurements in life sciences and translating that work to provide better clinical diagnostics. Amy is Professor of Bioengineering at UC Berkeley.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Mm MM. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x [00:00:30] Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 4: Good afternoon. My name is Renee Rao and I'll be hosting today's show. Our guest this week is Amy, her associate professor of bioengineering at UC Berkeley. Amy is a teacher and a researcher. Her research focuses on bioinstrumentation innovation to improve quantitative measurements in life sciences [00:01:00] and how to translate that work to provide better clinical diagnoses. She is a pioneer in the new field of proteomics. Brad swift and I interview Amy, her. Speaker 5: Amy, her. Thanks very much for coming on spectrum and welcome. Thank you. I'm very happy to be here. How did you become interested in bioengineering? So I am actually a trained mechanical engineer and I think what really peaked my interest in bioengineering was during graduate study in mechanical engineering. I realized that a lot of [00:01:30] the measurement and instrument challenges that exist that face engineering today really are in the life sciences. So this messy area where things are not necessarily tractable or well-described protein measurement is an area that I've been interested in for some time and I've been working on. And it's especially challenging from the perspective of designing instrument technology, measurement technology. What are protein biomarkers and what makes them elusive? Yeah. So protein biomarkers really is just sort of a catch [00:02:00] all phrase for indicators of disease state, um, indicators of living, organisms, response to treatment, just sort of indicators of what's going on in the organism at a particular time. Speaker 5: So there's many different types of biomarkers. You may have heard quite a bit about this genomics revolution and our use and understanding of information that's coming from nucleic acids. And what we're really looking for in Dow is building on what we've learned from our understanding of nucleic acids. How can we try [00:02:30] to understand proteins, which are the effectors of function, if you will, in living organisms and really try to use that information from proteins to understand all of these questions surrounding disease. So who has a disease, who might respond to specific treatments, who might not respond to specific treatments? How you are responding to specific treatments and in our mind it's released the next phase of what genomics has laid the groundwork for an area that we call proteomics. Can you give us a quick run through [00:03:00] of how molecular diagnosis works now and what new things you are trying to detect and what new information we can get from those? Speaker 5: I guess it has been striking to me as an instrument designer, innovator developer. If you take a look at our understanding of the role of proteins in disease right now, there's a treasure trove I would say, of information that's come out of basic discovery. So trying to understand what proteins are upregulated or downregulated or modified in [00:03:30] response to disease or treatment of disease. Right. So I would say there's definitely more effort that needs to be done in discovery, but we've done a lot of great work in discovery. A huge challenge and unmet need to use the engineering design terminology that exists right now is we have these potential indicators of disease or response to disease or prognosis, but very, very few of them have made it into a clinical setting into a diagnostic. Right now there are less than a hundred [00:04:00] different biomarkers that are being used for diagnostics. Speaker 5: That includes nucleic acids of DNA, RNA and proteins as well, just metabolites as well, right? So very, very few of the known existing bio molecules are being used in any way as a diagnostic measurement. And so there's really a huge gap right now between all of these promising markers that have been identified and those that are currently being used to make a diagnosis. So one of the things that we're [00:04:30] trying to do is to just build a basic framework for measurements that will allow people to make many, many, many measurements of a particular biomarker of potential interest so that you can look at many, many different patients' samples, many, many different disease states. We won't be really data limited. So the technologies that we use right now for a lot of these protein biomarkers to see whether or not the promising ones actually answer a clinical question, they're really rate limiting. Speaker 5: [00:05:00] They're really slow or they require a lot of material and in some cases this biospecimens these materials from patients are precious, hugely limited, right there, sparingly available. So we're just trying to think about ways that we can use these microfluidic architectures that require just tiny amounts of sample to run one measurement. How we can use those to scale up to make thousands of measurements. We're right now tens of measurements can be difficult and to make those measurements on, you know, a [00:05:30] microliter of sample from a patient as opposed to tens to hundreds of microliters. So that for us, this so-called biomarker validation question getting from yet this might work too. Okay, here are the clinical questions this marker can or cannot answer as the gap that we're trying to fill. Are you building these instruments? A major focus of my research group is looking at innovating new instrumentation, new technologies. Speaker 5: So by understanding the underlying physical principles [00:06:00] of the types of transport that we use. So electrophoresis and diffusion and by understanding unmet clinical or life sciences needs. So questions or challenges that currently exist out in life sciences laboratories or in clinical laboratories. We're basically trying to bring those two aspects together to develop new tools. All of the new tools that we develop are developed really to meet an unmet need either in the clinical setting or the life sciences setting and they're built with an understanding these underlying principles, but they all [00:06:30] have to be validated. So when we make a measurement with a new tool, we have to have some confidence in how well our measurement reflects our current understanding of the systems. And we typically do that by using conventional gold standard measurement technologies where appropriate. I think recently we've just come into this really interesting and exciting gray zone where we can make measurements that there really are no existing tools to be able to validate whether our measurement makes sense or not. And so we've had to put some effort and careful thought [00:07:00] into how do we validate our measurements using maybe indirect approaches so that we can say with some confidence the limits and the benefits of the tools that we're introducing. Speaker 4: You said earlier that a lot of your research comes from trying to meet the unmet needs of both the life sciences and the technological aspects. How do you go about picking which needs to meet? Do you find ones that you think, okay, well this is doable, or do you find ones that you think, maybe no one else can do this? I'm going to work on it? Speaker 5: Right. [00:07:30] That's a great question. So as an engineer, as an engineering designer, one of the first things that we do is really try to understand the world around us and try to understand how people approach existing problems, how they define those problems, why they approach them in a particular way. But I think this is one of the most exciting aspects of the work that we do. It's certainly true that if you get this first stage, this identification and understanding of unmet needs wrong, you're going to go down the wrong path, but if you get it right, you can make a huge difference in terms [00:08:00] of how people are approaching either science or medicine and our work is really translational in that way. So we're engineers and we're passionate about making excellent measurements and as you say, measurements that are currently not possible are the measurements that we're really looking to impact. Speaker 5: Measurements that are currently possible but needs significant improvement. We do focus on those as well, but when you can find a measurement that when you're talking to a biologist and explaining kind of what you can do and they look at you and say, oh my gosh, there's no [00:08:30] way I could do that right now, then you know you've hit upon something that's really important to at least consider further to fill a gap and unmet need that's out there at the present time. In many ways, I think it reminds many of us of why we chose to be engineers in the first place. I mean, certainly I can speak for myself and say I'm really excited about being able to make measurements that no one else can make. And understanding how those measurements, how good they are, how much more improvement they need, and maybe trying to understand the physics and think about [00:09:00] is something possible that we've discounted to date. But I think in many ways connecting with the end user also adds another layer of excitement and passion and motivation because you can really see how your work in the lab can make a difference in the world around us. Speaker 6: Aw. [inaudible] you're listening to spectrum k A. L. Alex Berkeley. Our guest today is Amy her in the next segment, [00:09:30] Amy talks about her lab at UC Berkeley. [inaudible] Speaker 5: how long has your lab been up and running? So my lab has been a, at Berkeley six years before I came to UC Berkeley. So I did my doctoral research at Stanford in mechanical engineering and then I loved a research and I wanted to continue doing research and so I worked for five years at a national lab and then coming to UC Berkeley was a big change in many ways, but I think [00:10:00] I'm working with an excellent team of, in many cases, junior colleagues here now, training them, postdocs and students just being invigorated every year with the fresh approaches that students, the frust questions that students ask about why are we doing some things in the way that we're doing them, or why is our understanding limited in this way as a faculty member? Just a huge source of inspiration and motivation over the six years. Has Your approach within the lab changed much? Speaker 5: Our lab has certainly changed. Yeah, [00:10:30] and I think as an individual, you as a researcher over the course of six years, certainly I will have also changed. You learn as you go and you learn on a technical level for sure. Absolutely. I would also say I've learned a lot from my groom to the students and the postdocs and the way that they approach problems. It's been just a fantastic honor to be able to work in bioengineering here at UC Berkeley with an amazing group of people who all come with different perspectives. And I've really pushed the research directions [00:11:00] in my group in ways that I couldn't have imagined six years ago. And they also come from very different disciplines as well, don't they? And has that mix changed for you over the six years? Yeah, that is absolutely true. So bioengineering, when I was in graduate school, which I'd like to think was in a long time ago, but it was, I finished almost a decade ago now. Speaker 5: It didn't even really exist. Right. It was just kind of starting and the graduate level widely at universities around the u s and globally as well. So most of the faculty, if you look at bio engineering, our formal training is [00:11:30] not in bio engineering. We're too old for that, I guess. And so the students who currently come to do doctoral study at UC Berkeley and with our partner institution, University of California, San Francisco, they all come with different backgrounds. More and more of them are coming with a biomedical or bio engineering undergraduate degree. But we certainly, you know, in my group alone have had students who have come from uh, aeronautics, chemical engineering, electrical engineering, chemistry, just a wide range of backgrounds. As someone who essentially [00:12:00] witnessed the genesis of an entire field of engineering and especially one that is so connected to the world. Can you tell us what that was like and how that's affected you? Speaker 5: Yeah. Seeing bioengineering starts really and become just the huge discipline in the really impactful area of research and study that it is today has been really inspiring. It's also does raise a lot of questions, questions about what is the appropriate curriculum for undergraduates who are studying. Bioengineering is something that [00:12:30] the faculty in my department, we talk about all the time. We try to refine our approach to this really, really important basic study that students undertake in their undergraduate years. Right? So there's that aspect of it wanting to make sure that we help them prepare themselves to be the best engineers possible when they leave UC Berkeley on the other hand, just seeing the huge advances that engineering is making in medicine and the way that it's changing the lives of people and has been for some time [00:13:00] for the better is really inspiring. I will say I often notice that students that I come into contact with here, they're really driven to make a positive impact in the world around them. Speaker 5: And I think that is really at the core of what engineers want to do. We want to understand, but we also want to make something, we want to make a positive impact with what we're doing and maybe I think in a very practical sense that's what an engineer is. I wanted to ask you a little [00:13:30] bit about what you've referred to the engineering mindset and I think it's a really interesting perspectives to want to maybe put us in that mind frame. Yeah, I think the engineering approaches to really just question question what you're observing, question what people are telling you. And so the engineering mindset I think is to be skeptical and to be observant, to not listen to necessarily what people tell you, but to use your own eyes and to discuss with peers or mentors [00:14:00] to try to understand and make sense of all of the different perspectives you're going to get when you're trying to understand the problem. Speaker 5: And so as engineers, we're always challenged with getting into kind of one way of thinking and that can push you down a path that could be productive. But if you really step outside and try to integrate a really holistic view of the world or the problem you're trying to understand, you might happen upon new approaches that users would never have dreamed of. Right? So there's that aspect. I think the engineering mindset is also to be objective. And in [00:14:30] our case in bio engineering, trying to be as quantitative as possible and to understand the limits and the advantages of being quantitative. And then certainly in bioengineering, there is a huge aspect of our mindset, which is to translate our solutions out into the world around us so that we can have a positive impact on society and the world more broadly. Spectrum is a public affairs show on k l x Berkeley. [00:15:00] Our guest today is [inaudible] Speaker 6: Amy her in the next segment, Amy offers advice to students interested in bio engineering. Speaker 5: Can you explain how you're using mathematics to reveal biological systems and create new medical applications? Yeah. One of the big things that we've seen lacking in instruments to make protein level measurements is any sort of quantitation, so a lot of the technologies [00:15:30] are just qualitative. You can see the presence of a particular protein of interest or okay, maybe it's higher presence in one sample versus another, but inherently in the way a lot of the conventional approaches, the conventional assays are run, there's very little confidence in being able to pull out exactly how many micrograms and material are present in a sample two it's hard to do comparisons between different samples except in a very qualitative way. What we're working on are technologies that are quantitative. [00:16:00] So that can allow you to pull out absolute mass level or concentration level information about how much protein is present in a particular sample. Speaker 5: And the hope there is that by doing that we can allow ourselves to create large databases of quantitative information about how much protein or particular form of protein is present under specific conditions. So you can imagine if you were doing a study, for example, on a particular biomarker [00:16:30] of interest, so prostate specific antigen, let's take, right. So if you knew that a particular isoform of this protein was present in certain cases, you could actually quantify how much is there. Enter that information in a database and a researcher say in Norway, who's also making similar measurements, but maybe on a different patient cohort could also upload their information. You can compare head to head. So these data sets could get bigger and bigger and bigger. And then potentially looking at questions of cell signaling [00:17:00] and in proteins that carry that signaling information. Perhaps integrating those quantitative levels of these particular proteins back into bioinformatics models that have been developed would lend insight into the exact response of a protein signaling pathway to a particular stimulation and give those bioinformatics models some actual numbers to work with as opposed to just relationships between specific proteins and are you building some of those models? Speaker 5: So a lot of what we do is collaboration with [00:17:30] specialists in protein signaling pathway models. So my lab is into bioinformatics lab, so we don't do a lot of that ourselves. But through our collaborations with the bioinformatics community, we know that quantitative levels of proteins at particular times is really important to these dynamic models. And so that's a major focus of our work as well. Speaker 4: It's interesting that you bring their PSA test up because I think that's been getting a lot of attention lately. I'd say look at more data. They're realizing it's not quite the silver bullet that people thought it was. [00:18:00] Are there any other examples like that that waste have completely overturned people's ideas of what we were seeing once we look at this large scale data? Yeah, Speaker 5: in particular a very striking example that you bring up the test for free versus total prostate specific antigen in blood. Right. And that's been used for many years as an indicator of prostate cancer. I think there are just three beautiful studies that have come out in the last year, one from UCF that have really pointed to the fact [00:18:30] that actually some of these PSA tests are really good at finding prostate cancer. They're just really bad at telling us if it's an aggressive or a slow moving prostate cancer. Right? So the prognostic information, how the patient is going to fare in the long run is just not there. So we're finding the prostate cancer, but we're not able to determine whether we should just watch full weights and see what happens or if we should actually embark upon some treatment. That's been a big interest of our group is looking [00:19:00] at specific diagnostic questions. Speaker 5: Who in the case of prostate cancer, can we improve prognostic information and trying to look at specific forms of the protein. So in this case, working with the researcher at Stanford Medical Center looking at different glyco forms of prostate specific antigen that may be more indicative of longterm outcomes for the patient. That in particular is a really interesting one for me because we started working with this researcher maybe six years ago before these big studies came out that showed the prognostic usefulness of the PSA [00:19:30] test was not so good and I definitely remember us submitting several proposals to funding agencies and basically getting the comments back that will we have an indicator for prostate cancer right now, we don't need another one. And so just even over the short time that we've been working on it, seeing that just turned on its head because of this ability to integrate all of this patient level information across countries and across different sites to try to understand how good is this test really have led us to realize it's not, as you [00:20:00] said, the silver bullet that we once hoped or thought that it was. I think that's a really good example. I think in some of those same studies, mammograms have also come out yet, right, is not necessarily answering the diagnostic questions that they hoped that that diagnostic would answer. What advice would you give to a young person thinking about bioengineering, about preparing for work in a multi disciplinary lab? Speaker 5: I think major advice that I would give to a young [00:20:30] person who's thinking about working in an interdisciplinary lab like those that you'll find in bioengineering, but also across the campus for sure. I know this interdisciplinary focus is something that permeates engineering right now and I think rightly so on many levels. Many of the problems that we're trying to solver so big are complex. That having these different inputs is just critical. I honestly think that is part of our community. We've not done a great job of communicating to either new engineers or people who are thinking about going into engineering and just this idea that [00:21:00] I can work on these really big challenges with teams of amazing people trying to have a positive impact through my work. I can get paid to do that. I can travel the world to do that. I can work on many different types of problems over the lifetime of my career. Speaker 5: Just an amazing career path really for anyone to consider. It's certainly very exciting and it certainly challenges you and it allows you to operate in these spheres that you would never imagine you could. So either with [00:21:30] different teams of people or just on problems that you maybe never even imagined you would come across. I think some of the advice I would give a undergraduate here at UC Berkeley, I would definitely urge them to seek out opportunities, clearly urge them to seek out mentors, so people who are maybe several years older than them, so people who are role models, who they might want to be like when they quote grow up. Right? We all have those people that we look for no matter how old we are. Look also for people around you who are maybe just a couple years [00:22:00] older than you, who have gone through a programmer or embarked upon research in a particular field and pick their brain about what worked for them and what didn't. Speaker 5: If they went back in time, what would they do differently or what are they so glad that they did? I think just finding these resources and making use of them and then paying it forward when your time comes and you have the experience to share insight with other people and advice is advice. You don't have to take it. But I do think it's certainly in my own career really helped me to listen to it and then weigh it for myself. [00:22:30] I think in an interdisciplinary field like bioengineering focusing on getting the rigorous fundamental understanding of engineering and the particular area that you're interested in is really key. Certainly advisees, I urge them to consider either a minor or some sort of emphasis material science, mechanical or electrical engineering cause it might help them out a little bit. But just making use of the resources that are around you and finding those resources is something I would urge students to do. I'd love to [00:23:00] know your favorite protein. Oh my favorite protein. I think actually right now it would be prostate specific antigen. Yes. Because there is so much controversy around it for sure. Yeah. So it was a good question. Sure. Amy, her. Thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Great. It was a pleasure. Thank you so much. Speaker 6: [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [00:23:30] [inaudible] Speaker 5: on the webcast of spectrum, we've chosen to include a new section of Amy's interview suitable. The more technologically inclined among us, she would discuss her exciting work inventing novel means of biological measurement. One other term I wanted to have you weigh in on is the term scale dependent physics and chemistry, and how is that important to your work? So [00:24:00] we are a bioengineering lab. We're an instrument innovation and development lab. So what we look at, or are there new ways to make protein level measurements that can inform our understanding or our approaches to disease? Right. And that's through this portal of proteins is indicators of disease. It's really interesting as you look at some of the basic fluid and material transport phenomenos. So things like diffusion or things like, in our case, we're interested in electro migration, so charged analytes. If you apply an electric field, [00:24:30] they're going to migrate, right? Speaker 5: They're going to go towards the cathode or the anode depending on their charge. These sorts of physical transport phenomena can really benefit from shrinking link scales. So in our case, we're interested in using tiny channels, so channels that hold fluids, liquids in particular channels that have a dimension about the size of a human hair. So they're very small. As you scale down channels to that size, you start to get some really beneficial properties that come out about the fluids. And then in particular, the use of [00:25:00] the electric fields benefits from those tiny channels because the channels have a very high surface area to volume ratio. So as you shrink a channel down, you get more and more surface area for a tiny volume. And that essentially means that if we apply a field, an electric field along a fluid that's in that channel, we can apply a very, very high fields and those high fields are going to make the fluid start heating something that's called jewel heating. Speaker 5: So in the electric circuits you have in your computer, for example, if you apply a field, you're moving electrons, not liquids, [00:25:30] but you're still getting this jewel heating because of the motion of those particles. As we have these really high surface areas, we can dissipate heat really effectively. So we can apply high, higher and higher fields than you could even say a millimeter diameter channel. Now we have channels that are microns in diameter, so orders of magnitude smaller and they cool very effectively. So that allows us to access a transport spaces that aren't accessible kind of in the macro scale. Speaker 5: So my [00:26:00] lab is really focused on taking fabrication approaches that have been developed for the semiconductor industry. So moving electrons around in tiny channels, if you will, and applying that with those sorts of approaches to now, not moving electrons but moving fluids, right liquids around. Um, and the reason we do that is because as we scaled the channels down, the channels that hold the liquids, we get beneficial properties. So heat dissipation is one of those beneficial phenomena. It really starts to [00:26:30] become more and more efficient as we scaled it. The dimensions, the cross section of the channel down. So in our case we like to use these tiny structures, these tiny fluid channels. Again, diameter of about if human here in cross section because it allows us to operate under really, really harsh conditions if you will. So at very, very high field strengths. In addition to that, another beneficial aspect of scaling down is much of the transport that happens inside these tiny channels really ends up relying on diffusion [00:27:00] as being the major mechanism of transport and diffusion a is very efficient over short distances, over long distances. Speaker 5: The scaling is not necessarily favorable and it might take you a long time for a molecule to diffuse a long distance, but as we use these techniques, these fabrication techniques to develop micro and Nano fluidic channels, those distances in those channels are tiny. So microns or nanometers and that means diffusion all the sudden becomes a very effective transport mechanism. [00:27:30] So we use these effective transport scalings these beneficial scalings to allow us to do things like mixing. So we can bring two analytes or two reagents in contact with each other and just rely on diffusion to get them to mix. Whereas in the macro scale we would want to stir or agitate the fluid in some way so we can use passive approaches and rely on diffusion to get effective mixing. Whereas on the macro scale we would have to have some sort of active stirring in order to get those, those species [00:28:00] to come together and react. Speaker 5: So are these techniques being applied to both your understanding of biological systems and in your applications that you're trying to build? It's a great question. So I think primarily a lot of the physical phenomena that we're using are really trying to drive towards efficient assays, efficient measurement technologies for specific applications. So for example, we might be looking at a particular protein mediated signaling pathway [00:28:30] and we might be really interested in different isoforms or different versions of proteins, the same protein, but maybe it has some sort of phosphorylation modification on it. Um, and by using these really efficient separation mechanisms like electrophoresis on the micro scale, it's electro migration properties, we can actually start to resolve species or separate them when if we were to use a less efficient architecture, we might not be able to separate them basically and tell them apart. So it allows us to in some ways [00:29:00] access information that sometimes is not accessible using conventional methodologies, conventional assays. Speaker 5: Um, but it also lets us get at looking at reactions for example, on timescales that you just can't do using macro scale techniques. So being able to look at very fine time points because we have really precise control of fluids using these micro architectures, these microfluidic channels. So there's kind of two answers. One, we want to look at specific proteins as related to clinical [00:29:30] questions. So those applications and in many cases we can do that more efficiently. But on the flip side, the fundamental understanding of biology, we might want to look at timescales that we can't measure box systems as well. Have you discovered anything really new and exciting with this novel level of precision? We have started to move into an area that's a little bit unknown and recently some of the work that's being generated in my lab and we're excited to be preparing now for communication to the broader technical [00:30:00] community is being able to look at protein signaling pathways on a single cell level. Speaker 5: So flow cytometry is one example of technology that exists that allows you to look at literally millions of individual cells and you've basically stained those cells with antibodies to a particular protein. So the cell is going to glow a particular color because the antibody has a floor for conjugated to it. The cell is going to glow as particular color of the antibody binds to an analyte of interest of a protein of interest in that cell. But the [00:30:30] problem is with flow cytometry, if you're looking for proteins that we don't have antibodies that are specific to them. So some of these isoforms for example, there's not an antibody that's just specific to a particular isoform. It's very difficult to to make a flow cytometry measurement or there's other cases, for example, with stem cell research or circulating tumor cells. We have so few starting cells that if you use flow cytometry, you're basically going to lose all of the material before you can make the measurement. Speaker 5: [00:31:00] So using these microfluidic architectures, we can um, do separations of single cells and be able to look at isoforms of particular proteins even if we don't have antibodies specific to one of the isoforms. If we have an antibody that's specific to all of the isoforms but we can resolve them from each other before we use an antibody to probe for them. Or if we have such a tiny starting population of cells like circulating tumor cells, we're going to be able to make measurements of the protein signaling pathways on those, you know, 10 or a hundred cells [00:31:30] that are of interest that we just can't do using conventional technologies. I should say. One of the major methods that my group has been working on over the last couple of years is this idea of western blotting. And this is a really powerhouse work horse analytical technique that's used in clinical and research labs all over the world. Speaker 5: Basically it's an assay that allows you to separate the protein contents of a particular sample, so to resolve species proteins by differences in molecular weight, for example, and [00:32:00] then it allows you to come in with an antibody that's specific to a target of interest and see at a particular molecular weight. Does this antibody recognize that protein? If so, most likely that is the protein that I'm looking for, that's my target or the candidate that I'm looking for. And so we've pushed in several different lines of inquiry, new ways to make this specific measurement. It's two measurements, molecular weight and this binding to an antibody or an immune regent of interest. We've really benefited from materials design, so developing [00:32:30] materials that we can change basically from molecular sieving matrices that are useful for the separation stage. Two materials that actually immobilize the of interest upon exposure to light and after we immobilize the proteins, we can come in with the antibody and probe to see if that particular band at that specific molecular weight is the target of interest. This is, I think, been really informative from the perspective of allowing us to design these systems to operate, say, at the single cell level [00:33:00] or to operate on clinical samples that are difficult to analyze using conventional technologies. Speaker 2: Mm MM. Speaker 3: Okay. Speaker 1: The music heard during this show was written in, produced by Alex Simon. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to [00:33:30] us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l x hit yahoo.com join us into Speaker 7: [inaudible]Speaker 3: [00:34:00] probably. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Claire Kremen and Alastair Iles of ESPM at UC Berkeley, who ran the Berkeley Center for Diversified Farming. Next on their agenda is the Berkeley Food Institute, which will include College of Natural Resources, Goldman School of Public Policy, School of Journalism, Berkeley Law and School of Public Health.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute [00:00:30] program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hey there and good afternoon. My name is Renee Rao and I'll be hosting today's show. Our guest today, our professor Claire Kremen and Assistant Professor Allister isles in the Department of Environmental Science Policy and management at the University of California Berkeley. Claire Carmen focuses her research on conservation, biology and biodiversity. [00:01:00] Allister isles focuses his research on the intersections of science, technology, and environment that contribute to public policy, community welfare, environmental justice, and increased democracy and societal governance. Brad swift interviews the pair about their time as faculty directors of the Berkeley Center for diversified farming and the recent launch of the Berkeley Food Institute. This ambitious enterprise is a collaboration between the College of natural resources, the Goldman School of public policy, the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, [00:01:30] Berkeley Law School, and the school of public health. Allister isles is hearing impaired, so phd candidate Patrick Bower will be reading Alistair's answers during this interview. Speaker 4: In today's interview we have three folks, Claire, Carmen, Allister isles and Patrick Bower. Welcome to spectrum. Thank you. Thank you and a nod from Allister. I want to ask each of you, how were you drawn [00:02:00] to the study of sustainability and diversified farming Speaker 1: on native bees and how they contribute to crop pollination in California and it was really through my study of the bees and particularly of how bees respond to agriculture that I got interested in farming and that my eyes got opened to how unsustainable our current farming system is, particularly with its heavy reliance on monoculture. Speaker 4: [00:02:30] My background is in environmental policies and I've mostly worked on industrial chemical issues for a long time. I've also researched the consumption side of food starting with sustainable seafood. About three years ago, Claire was running a series of round tables on diversified farming systems and by a chance at a faculty lunch, she invited me to participate. I wasn't sure what it was all about, but I enjoyed learning about ecosystem services. I realized that agriculture has a major role to play. I'm making the planet more in the face [00:03:00] of many 21st century environmental dangers like climate change. Trying to change consumer behavior isn't going to be enough to achieve greater sustainability. We need to cover the whole food system and to find new connections across each part, so that's why I moved much more upstream into agriculture. Talk about the new Berkeley Food Institute that you've formed a cow. Speaker 4: How did it get started and what are its goals? We began with [00:03:30] a round table series on diversified farming systems or DFS about three years ago. I can't believe how far we've already come since then. The series was based on a seed grant from the Berkeley Institute of Environment. It had monthly meetings and spent an enormous range of topics from conservation, biology, consumer behavior, the health effects of pesticides on farm workers to policies for promoting DFS. At first, we weren't sure what our goals were. We had a vague idea that the round [00:04:00] table might evolve into a more institutionalized forum. Claire wanted to co-write a paper covering the results of the round tables, but it quickly became obvious that it was such a large topic that we needed a whole special issue. Do you even do justice to the topics? Fortunately we were able to persuade the ecology and society journal to accept our specialists. You plan. It was a lengthy process of assembling the various papers as students are coauthors on most of the papers. We believe strongly in promoting student research and Claire and I wanted [00:04:30] to institutionalize the round tables and that is how we can see to the DFS center. We realized that we couldn't manage all this new growth without hiring an executive director, which meant that we needed to start raising funds Speaker 1: and as we started looking into funding for the center for diversified farming and as we engaged both with donors and also with the top levels of the College of natural resources administration, it became clear that there was actually an opportunity to do something much bigger and much more far reaching [00:05:00] by partnering with the schools of journalism and of public policy. And that's because it's not sufficient to conduct the research that demonstrates the social and environmental benefits of sustainable agriculture or diversified farming systems. You really have to get the word out to a large public and you have to be able to influence key decision makers. So it makes a lot of sense for us to be partnering with journalism and Public Policy. Later on in the institutes development we also were joined [00:05:30] by other key actors, specifically the schools of public health and also the school of law. Speaker 1: So the goal of the institute is really a lofty one. We want nothing less than to be able through research teaching and outreach to be able to actually transform our current food system to one that is far more resilient, far more healthy and far more just how is the institute funded. We're funded this point by private individuals and also by family foundations [00:06:00] are their undergraduate and graduate degree programs within the institute? Not yet, but we are contemplating creating something called a designated emphasis for graduate students, which means several different departments combined together and create an additional degree program that graduate students can go through and we're also beginning to assess whether an undergraduate major makes sense. The first step we're taking already is to conduct an inventory of what's already [00:06:30] available on campus. There are quite a few different faculty that are already teaching courses related to the food system and so we're identifying all of these so that students can have access to this information. Those who are already interested in this Speaker 5: [inaudible]. Our guest today on Spec gem are Claire Allister Isles. In the next segment they talk about impediments to sustainable farming. Is k a l x Berkeley. Speaker 4: [00:07:00] What sort of collaborations will you be trying to foster with the institute? One of the key actions that the new institute will emphasize is nurturing new research and policy collaborations between faculty and students. Many parts of the food system are balkanized. They're divided up from each other and seldom communicate across disciplinary industry or supply chain segment lines. For example, urban agriculture policy makers might not think much about the sorts of foods [00:07:30] that city gardens are providing to poor minority neighborhoods. What we hope for is a set of collaborations that will cross disciplinary lines and that will address research topics that aren't being done but they could help bring about positive changes in the food system. Another thing that we are eager to look into is helping foster stronger connections with off campus actors such as farmers, food worker unions, government agencies and Bay area communities. This is where this would help inform the research being done on campus and where it might help enhance the ability [00:08:00] of these actors to work toward the transformation of the food system that Claire talked about. Some of our faculty already have off campus partners that they run research projects with citizen science or working with lay people and helping generate new science will likely be an important element, but not the only one. How directly will the institute be involved in actual farming or working directly with farmers? Speaker 1: We will definitely include growers on our advisory board and [00:08:30] also some faculty actually work with growers. For example, my work is all on farms owned by real people and so I work with growers on the kinds of experiments we're going to do and also on sometimes on land management that they're doing on their land. Speaker 4: What do you see as the impediments to the broad practice of sustainable agriculture and how can research and education help the impediments to sustainable agriculture legion? The most important impediment is arguably [00:09:00] the industrialized food system that we currently live in. The system is based on farming methods that include monoculture farming, the pervasive use of chemical and fossil fuel inputs, and an emphasis on increasing yields to the exclusion of other outcomes. The system is so entrenched that everyone who grows processes and eats food is caught in it. One example of how the industrial system discourages sustainable farming is the artificially cheap price of foods the food industry can externalize most environmental and social costs of producing food [00:09:30] by displacing these into farming communities, consumers and ecosystems. Public policies can Ivan this by promoting inappropriate subsidies for commodity crops and not properly funding conservation measures on farmland. Speaker 4: In turn, many farmers are trapped within a production structure or they have little room to adopt sustainable farming methods. They may have to comply with supply chain pressures such as contract farming that prescribes exactly what they should do on the farm or the rapid growth and market power of the agrifood corporations. [00:10:00] For decades, farmers have been struggling with the technological treadmill or they're obliged to adopt technological innovations such as pesticides and now GM seeds to be able to maintain their yields and cost structures in order to compete with other farmers doing likewise. Conversely, it can be very challenging for farmers to move to more sustainable methods. It is risky for farmers to try something new that they aren't familiar with and that requires them to develop new skills and knowledge. There has been a dramatic decline in the number of farmers in the u s [00:10:30] and there has been a trend of fewer new farmers entering the sector. On the positive side. These new entrants are more likely to use sustainable farming methods because they've been trained differently. Speaker 1: I think the broadest impediments are some aspects of our regulatory system and also market forces that encourage economies of scale sort of thing that make farmers have to get big or get out. For example, on the regulatory side, this new food safety modernization act is something that's going to impose [00:11:00] a lot of regulations on growers and that can actually disadvantage small growers. And sometimes it's the small growers that are the ones that are practicing more sustainable or more diversified forms of agriculture. But with this new food safety modernization act, they just might not be able to stay in business any longer. So the critical research that we need to do is to document the benefits and the costs and also the trade offs of different approaches. We need to be able to show what these benefits are so that we can hopefully have an influence [00:11:30] on some of the regulations. Speaker 6: Oh, you are listening to spectrum on k a Alex Berkeley. Our guests today are Claire Kremen and Alister aisles. Patrick Bower will be reading out and styles and series Alistair's hearing impaired. In the next segment, they talk about how they analyze farming. Oh, okay. Speaker 4: Would you explain [00:12:00] how you analyze an agricultural system for sustainability? Speaker 1: From an ecological perspective? What I find helpful is the concept of an agriculture that is regenerative. What that means, it's an agriculture that demands few external inputs and creates few wastes. Instead it tends to use the waste products that are produced in the production cycle as inputs, so for example, by composting waste materials or by integrating animals back onto the farm, growers can build soils. [00:12:30] These wells are then able to store water much more effectively protecting against droughts and they can also require, in that case, less water from external sources. Also, these oils can trap and filter nutrients leading to less nutrient waste and less pollution off site, and then such soils are also much more productive so they can lead to greater yields, so it's really a win, win, win, win. I can't really see any downside to farming like that. Speaker 4: In terms of the social and economic components [00:13:00] of an agricultural system, there are many possible measures that we could use. Social scientists have looked at measures such as the justice that is embodied in the system. That is as the agricultural system assuring justice for all the workers, growers in communities across the system. This justice could take the form of fair worker treatment such as paying farm workers better wages and preventing adverse health effects like heatstroke. It could also be limiting the exposures of farm workers in rural communities to pesticides. [00:13:30] Another measure is food security or the ability of consumers and communities, especially poor and minority people to gain access to enough nutritious and healthy foods to feed themselves. In the u s there are at least 40 million people who depend on food stamps to supplement their diets. Yet these people may not be able to afford healthy, sustainably produced foods. Speaker 4: Yet another measure is whether farmers able to sustain themselves through their work or whether they fall into greater debt to be able to stay in farming at all. Many [00:14:00] NGOs and food movements such as the food sovereignty movement would argue that the ability of farmers and communities to decide on what sorts of foods they want to produce and eat isn't an important outcome in and of itself. How has the understanding and measurement of sustainability changed over the years? You have studied it. Social scientists have only been thinking about sustainability for a fairly short time since about the early 1990s sustainable development as a discourse [00:14:30] first began developing in the late 1980s with the Brundtland Commission's report. Initially, social scientists were focused more on the rural sociology of agricultural production. They looked at issues in isolation and emphasized farmers only, but as more researchers began to enter the sustainability field, the focus shifted to thinking more holistically. They started to look at food supply Speaker 7: chains and commodities and how these shape the sustainability of farming. Researchers also began looking at how communities were defining sustainability [00:15:00] in their own terms. In 2000 Jack Kloppenburg led a very interesting study that surveyed a set of rural and urban communities for the sorts of words they would use to describe sustainability. More recently, social scientists have looked at how ecological and social sustainability are closely interconnected. Some of the most exciting new work is looking at the concept of socio ecological systems or how farmers are actively shaping farming landscapes and vice versa. Speaker 8: [00:15:30] Are there estimates or models that show the reductions in greenhouse gas that could be achieved in the conversion from industrial monoculture agriculture to sustainable agriculture? Speaker 1: This is actually something that's fairly well known. The production of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides is a really energy intensive process and so where it has been looked at, when people compare organic agriculture that avoids using those chemicals with conventional agriculture, organic agriculture [00:16:00] usually stacks up much better as far as greenhouse gas emissions, and this is true even though often organic growers have to perhaps use more fuel to do more cultivation practices on their lands, but it balances out because they're not using these energy intensively produced chemicals. Speaker 8: Biofuels were thought to be a sustainable source of energy and an enormous boost for agriculture as well. What are your thoughts on biofuels? Speaker 7: I've been looking [00:16:30] at the environmental and social effects of biofuels in the u s and Brazil for a few years now. Some years ago, biofuels were seen as a very promising technology that could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but in 2008 and a scientists called Tim searching gear sparked off a long debate about whether biofuels actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the overall picture. Some biofuels can actually lead to increased emissions because their production involves a direct or indirect cutting down forests to clear land for agriculture, which results in carbon [00:17:00] dioxide release. The upshot is that governments and NGOs now see biofuels much more skeptically. I think this is a positive development rather than uncritically embracing biofuels as a new development pathway. At the same time, the debate has now swung so much that people often don't distinguish between different types of biofuels. Biofuels are actually very diverse in their feedstock and production methods. Speaker 7: Most of the bad press is around corn ethanol in the u s and I think it's justified because as Michael Pollan, [00:17:30] for example, has written about the corn industry has created countless environmental problems, but there are what we call cellulosic feedstocks, grasses, agricultural crop, leftovers and trees and principle. We can have diversified farming systems that include these sorts of cellulosic crops as part of a fully integrated and diversified rather than having a few larger farmers and agrifood businesses dominate corn ethanol and thereby the biofuels industry. We could alternatively have many smaller farmers produce [00:18:00] grasses. For example. This is something that the new institute may look at. The challenge however is that cellulosic ethanol could easily succumb to the same industrialized monoculture model models we see for corn. So policy will have a very important role in the next decade and helping decide whether this will happen or not. Speaker 6: [inaudible] spectrum is a public affairs show. Hey Alex Berkley, our guests are clear come in and Allister isles, [00:18:30] they're starting the Berkeley food institute this fall and the next thing they talk about the scalability of sustainable farming and its impact on rural communities. Speaker 7: From your experience, what is the scale range of farms doing sustainable agriculture? Speaker 1: Even large scale farms are starting to incorporate sustainability practices into their businesses, which is really exciting, but it's a question whether they're truly sustainable. [00:19:00] As an ecologist, I don't believe that the practice of monoculture is compatible with sustainability. To have sustainability. We need more diverse farming systems when we have these diverse farming systems that can reduce the need for off farm inputs and also generate fewer ways. A good example of this is going back to pesticides and monoculture. When a grower grows a monoculture, they're pretty much forced to use pesticides. When you think about it, they're planting [00:19:30] a huge expanse of the same thing and it's kind of like laying out a feast for a pest species that can just go and rampage through that. And at the same time they've also eradicated the habitat that would have promoted the natural enemies that could've kept that past in check. Speaker 1: So then they really have no other recourse. They have to use pesticides and as I already noted, these take a great deal of energy to produce the results in greenhouse gas emissions. They pollute the surrounding environment. They can lead to unintended loss of biodiversity, of [00:20:00] non target insects. Also both subtle and not so subtle impacts on human health. When we do that, we can't really have a sustainable system, but on the other hand, we shouldn't conflate the practice of monoculture with scale because smaller farms can also practice monoculture and do sometimes practice monoculture and at the same time, perhaps larger farms can practice really diversified agriculture. It's not what I would think of as typical, but that doesn't mean it's impossible and I think it's important that we not limit [00:20:30] our imagination. We'd be able to imagine that a really large farm could be diverse, could be sustainable. Why not? Speaker 7: Does sustainability in any way limit the scale that can be achieved? Speaker 1: Well, I think it's an excellent question and we don't really have the answer to it. If we just look at what's out there, it seems like if you're at a larger scale, maybe that's going to be less sustainable in some ways, but it might be more sustainable in some other ways. There's certainly a relationship between scale ins and sustainability. If [00:21:00] we just look out at what's happening now, there can be unexpected twists. For example, very large companies may be able to develop sustainable practices of certain types such as efficiencies in distribution that small companies can't. On the other hand, smaller farms or companies might be better able to create the ecological complexity that we think is required to engender sustainable processes on farms. Also, when we think about it, some of these limits if do exist to creating sustainable systems [00:21:30] might relate not to biophysical limits, but to institutional arrangements or governance structures, business plans, et cetera. And again, they might be failures of our imagination to conceive of a better way of doing things. So I think it's really an excellent research topic. We need to study the successful models that exist out there at various scales and try to learn from them. Speaker 7: Are there studies that show the impact of sustainable agriculture on rural societies and economies and Willy Institute [00:22:00] undertake work in this area? Frankly, we don't really know what the answers may be. This is because there've been very few systemic studies done of the ways in which sustainable agriculture might benefit rural areas. And the 1940s a UC researcher called Walter Goldschmidt did a very important study and compared to rural towns in California that deferred in the degree of diversified farming and the degree to which they relied on industrialized farming methods. The town that you used more diversified from methods [00:22:30] showed significant gains of social and economic outcomes such as employment and community cohesiveness compared to the more industrialized town. Unfortunately, this sorta study hasn't been done. Again, as far as we are aware, thus the priority of the new institute will be to help sponsor a collaborative research project that updates this research and uses the tools and data that we now have to appraise whether and how diversified farming can provide greater benefits compared to the existing system. Speaker 7: What do you feel [00:23:00] are the best ways to encourage and enable young people to pursue farming? One of the most challenging obstacles we face in the food system today is that there is a rapidly aging farmer workforce. The average age of farmers in the U S is about 57 years, which is something you see in other industrial countries as well. There are widespread perceptions of farming as an acronystic and tedious. Many commentators think that many young people are unenthusiastic [00:23:30] about taking up farming for this reason. Farming is in the past. Therefore, one argument goes, we should invest more and more in labor saving technology to help offset the fact that fewer young people are entering farming in Australia. Where I come from, I heard about a farmer recently who just installed a $400,000 robotic system to milk cows. I don't agree with this sort of argument. To the contrary. Speaker 7: We are seeing a good number of young people take up farming in [00:24:00] both rural and especially urban areas. Farming seems to be a way to reconnect these people with a more sensory and experience rich life. There are tens of farmers schools that are developed across the countries such as the Alba Center near Salinas, where immigrant workers learn to be farmers and are given some support for entering the sector. This is one very powerful way to help new farmers provide training programs to help equip them for actual production, but they then face enormous problems and even getting a [00:24:30] toehold on the farming landscape because land can be very costly and very scarce. So they need financial help like loans and grants to sustain their first few years. At least. There's a new farmer network that has been pushing for bill and Congress to create this new institutional base, but unfortunately, so far it's not been very successful. Speaker 6: A big thanks to Claire Kremen at Alster Isles [00:25:00] for coming on to spectrum. I'll pass. Spectrum shows are archived on iTunes. You we've created a simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/ [inaudible] spectrum. Now a few of the signs of technology events happening locally over the next few weeks. We kind of ski and I present the calendar. Speaker 3: On September 8th the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden will be hosting a workshop led by author [00:25:30] Amy Stewart, who wrote the drunken botanist, the plants that create the world's greatest strengths, a book that details the leaves, bark seeds, roots, flowers and fruit around the world that humans have contrived to turn into alcohol. Stuart will lead a walk through the garden to look at some of the typical plants that have been used throughout the ages. The workshop will be held in the garden from three to 6:00 PM on September 8th the first installment of the six part public lecture series, not on the test. The pleasures and uses [00:26:00] of mathematics will be held this September 11th past spectrum guests, Tony de Rose, a senior scientist and leader of the research group at Pixar animation studios presented a lecture on the use of mathematics in the making of Pixars animated films. Pixar animation is done entirely by computer and Dr. Rose will demonstrate how math and science helped create these stunning visuals in each Pixar film and explain the underlying computer technology, physics, geometry, and applied mathematics that made these pictures possible. [00:26:30] The lecture will be held on September 11th at 7:00 PM in the Berkeley City College Auditorium located at 2050 Center street in Berkeley. The rent is free and open to the public Speaker 7: this month. Science neat is on Tuesday the 17th the topic is fun guy here talks about mushrooms and bring your own mushrooms to have my colleges. Chris Green help you identify them. Science need is a monthly science happy hour for those 21 and over at El Rio bar [00:27:00] three one five eight mission street in San Francisco. Admission is $4 Speaker 3: here at spectrum. We'd like to share our favorite science stories with you. Rick Kaneski joins me for presenting the news. Speaker 7: Nature news reports that several journals have been caught in a scheme to artificially inflate their impact factors by strongly encouraging citations to other journals that were in on the scheme. The impact factor of journals is a measure of the average number of citations to recent articles [00:27:30] and is often used to compare the relative importance of a journal to the field. That is general is with higher impact factors are generally thought of more favorably than lower impact journals. The factors are calculated by Thomson Reuters, the company responsible for both end note citation software and the web of science literature database. Well, self citations have been caught in the past weeding out this collaborative gaming of the system is difficult and it can be costly for those journals [00:28:00] caught Thomson Reuters has suspended the impact factors of 0.6% of the more than 10,000 journals. They index a record percentage. In some cases, editors have been fired in others. Articles published in the suspended journals will not contribute to the rankings of universities responsible for them. Speaker 3: According to a UC Berkeley study published in the Journal proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, blocking a certain enzyme can dramatically slow the ability of tumor cells [00:28:30] to multiply and spread to other tissues. Scientists have long observed that cancer cells metabolize lipids in particular ester lipids at higher rates than normal cells. The UC Berkeley team in activated a certain enzyme known as LPL glycerol phosphate synthase, or a gps that is critical to lipid formation and human breasts and skin cancer cells knocking out the enzymes, significantly reduced tumor growth and movement. The inhibitor has also been [00:29:00] tested in live mice, injected with Kansas owls too, promising results. While other studies have examined specific lipids, a gps appears to regulate a much broader portion of tumor growth and malignancy. Next steps will include developing a cancer therapy based on the age gps inhibitors. Speaker 5: Mm. The music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. We'd also like to thank Patrick Bower [00:29:30] first assistance during the interview. Thank you for listening to spectrum. Join us in two weeks at the same time. [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Zoologist Toni Bodi is currently developing a genomic diagnostic screen for Alzheimer's disease and is a founding member of the Berkeley Bio Labs new bio hacker space. Nature magazine.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Aw. [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible]. Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science [00:00:30] and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hi and good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Our guest is Tony Bodhi Hickerson, a zoologist who was part of a cognitive study of howler monkeys in Mexico. Tony is trying to organize a noninvasive [00:01:00] dolphin study in the wild using wireless network technology. She is currently developing a genomic diagnostic screen for Alzheimer's disease and is a founding member of the Berkeley bio labs, a new bio hackerspace. Tony talks about cognition, Alzheimer's disease, and creating a scientific community resource in the bay area. Rick Karnofsky and Renee Rau interview Tony on this edition of spectrum. Speaker 4: So welcome to spectrum. [00:01:30] I'm Rick Karnofsky here with Brad swift and Renee Rao. Our guest today on spectrum is Tony Bodhi, Hickerson and zoologist. Welcome to spectrum. Thank you for having me. Can you give us a little bit of a description of what you work on? Kind of a brief overview for the audience. That cognition is essentially the ability to receive and process information and the most abstract form. And we kind of think of it as mental processes, which can be both conscious and subconscious. [00:02:00] And so I do research on cognitive abilities of wildlife and at the moment I'm also working on an application in humans. What wildlife do you look at? Um, well I have looked at primates and I've been also involved in a dolphin project. So high functioning mammals. And how do you assess their cognitive abilities? Well, you can do behavioral studies, which is what I primarily do. Speaker 4: And of course just looking at the anatomy as well. So [00:02:30] I try to be as noninvasive as possible. I don't work in a lab with monkeys in a cage. I actually work in the wilderness and follow monkeys around all day. So where do you do that? I was doing that in Mexico for my last study with seven months and from Sunup I watched the sun come up and uh, the howler monkeys, which is a species that I was working on would call in the morning. That's how we'd find them. So we trek through the jungle and find them and then start our study. And it would usually last, well it would last until sundown. So depending on how many hours a like we had [00:03:00] [inaudible] Speaker 5: can you just walk us through what the study was and what you looked at in the howler monkeys and how you interpreted it? Speaker 4: Well, this study, I was a, the head field managers, so it wasn't my particular study, but I was managing all the data collection and uh, we were looking at two different species of Holler monkey. And they're hybrids. So there's hybrid zone in Mexico where both of these species, which we believe based on genetic evidence have been separated for about 3 million [00:03:30] years. They have different number of sex chromosomes. They're very morphologically different, are coming together and meeting successfully. They also have very different social structures and one group tends to be far more aggressive than the other one is much more communal. It has large groups up to 25 30 and the other one usually has three to five. So to see how behaviorly they come together and genetically they come together because in one cross if you have a female of a and a male of B, they can [00:04:00] have an offspring. But if you inverse it they cannot. So it's really interesting also genetically to see how things recombine. What kinds of data did you take? Oh, we took auditory, so we, they're hollow monkeys. So we had all their calls, which it changes from group to group and obviously from species to species. We also took a lot of behavioral information, affiliative, so like affection and aggressive behavior, like attacks and genetic [00:04:30] information through and study captures as well as fecal samples. Speaker 5: I'm just super curious about what it was like following the Heller monkeys and spending literally all day with them. You, Speaker 4: I started to go insane. You actually do. Um, no, it was a really profound life experience for sure. And I couldn't have designed a better project to be part of. Like if I had designed my dream project, it would have been this project. When I started this project, I didn't speak Spanish and [00:05:00] every single person in my team only spoke Spanish, so I learned Spanish very fast. But during the process of learning a second language, you have this inability to completely express yourself and it kind of makes you go insane. And then when you couple that with standing in the middle of like a really humid forest, you know, surrounded by mosquitoes and following monkeys running through the canopy. I got you about month five I think, and I realized that I started to go insane. [00:05:30] When I yelled at an ant out loud, I paused and just laughed hysterically to myself and realize that like this is the point where like I've reached my mental break. Then I'm yelling at ants and I need to get to a city as soon as possible. Speaker 2: Okay. Our guest today on spectrum is Tony Bodhi Hickerson, but she answers to Tony Bodhi in the next, she talks about her idea for a dolphin stone. [00:06:00] This is k a l x Berkeley. Speaker 4: And what do you do with the dolphins? Uh, the Dolphin project, uh, is not a field project, unfortunately at the moment. It's an education campaign for the international mantle project, which is responsible for all dolphin safe tuna that you've ever seen as well as the documentary, the cove. So they're very avid group on [inaudible]. [00:06:30] And so I was putting together a campaign to try and inspire people that they're really intense creatures and why maybe we should respect them. Speaker 5: You tell us a little bit about those abilities and why they're so intense. Speaker 4: There are three groups of mammals that have large brains that's great. Apes, elephants and marine mammals. And the dolphins came from a very different evolutionary path. So they have different [00:07:00] structures, which is also really interesting. They don't have the prefrontal Cortex, which is what we tend to associate with being human, the sort of emotional side of being human. But they have a very intense limbic system, which is also associated with emotions and bonding behavior and sexual behavior. Dolphins have sort of this mixed reputation of being very kind of aggressive and also being really altruistic almost in their actions. [00:07:30] So looking at not only the hard facts of the biological side of things of like what structures they have and what those abilities are, but also case studies of look at these sort of altruistic behaviors. So their ability to perceive the world around them and to react in an emotional state is potentially really profound. Speaker 5: And um, in your study to sort of understand all the ways that the Dolphin perceives the world and the way that it often feels these things, are you looking at the structures in their brains and seeing [00:08:00] the corresponding place where these thought processes and these perceptions happen? Or are you just observing behavior or are you doing both? Speaker 4: Well, hopefully both. So I'm currently designing a project, which is hopefully gonna do exactly what you just said. Our tools at the moment are very limited, especially because we want to be as noninvasive as possible. Animals don't react in captivity the way that they react in the wild. And obviously they don't have the same space or social structure to be able to do the same sorts of things. [00:08:30] There is an up and coming technology that I hope to apply to this sort of research which would allow biological data to be recorded in real time and it would be completely noninvasive. It would be almost like a sticker, so there'd be no puncturing. There would be no need for captivity. Hopefully we could even apply it with minimal stress to the animal and with that we could have gps data body, we could potentially record the vibrations from their echolocation [00:09:00] and also neurological data and this would be the first information of its kind to be able to correlate if there's an approach or an affiliative behavior between two individuals, what areas of their brain are actually being, you know, lit up and that could really profoundly affect what we know about their structure. Speaker 4: Yeah, that that is sounds really exciting. So it would be noninvasive. Do you know how that works? That must be really amazing. The technology that I'm, I'm hoping to work with [00:09:30] is a flexible microchip and I'm hoping to be working with some of the innovators to make it appliable to dolphins and something that would stick for up to a month. They should scan very quickly, so that is a restraint. I don't know as much of the engineering side of it because I'm not as much tech, but from my conversations with the people developing it, it seems like it might not be up to use for a year or two, but hopefully eventually we'll get [00:10:00] there and we'll have a better understanding of how one of the smartest animals on the planet. Thanks. Are other people currently doing anything more invasive? Captivity can be a very invasive process. How animals and captivity get in captivity are often from Dolphin Slaughters, which kill hundreds of their fellow pod mates to get a handful of dolphins because a live dolphin that is pristine, [00:10:30] you know mark free that goes into entertainment or goes into a laboratory studies. They get taken out and they get sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars and the rest of them get slaughtered and sold into the meat markets. Speaker 6: Mm MM. Speaker 3: You are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Our guest today is Tony Bow-tie Hickerson. Tony is a zoologist. In the next segment she talks about diagnosing Alzheimer's disease. Speaker 4: [00:11:00] I actually wanted to ask you a little bit about the work you're doing with Alzheimer's and dice diagnostic work. Could you maybe tell us a little bit about how the process of diagnosing Alzheimer's works currently and what you're hoping to change about that? Well, there really isn't much in terms of diagnosis that's out for the general public. What I'm actually attempting to do, and initially it was for my own curiosity and you know obviously see the potential for other people to use it as [00:11:30] well. I wanted to test myself on this gene. So there is a gene called apoe e and there are three expressions of it and they account for about 95% of all Hymers, one of these types of accounts for 50% of all hammers. I can essentially locate this gene snippet out of the enormous strand of DNA and then look at their two spots where [00:12:00] the nucleotide is a certain sequence that I can tell you. Speaker 4: If that is type one, two or three of that apathy and off of that, they're very strong statistics that will tell you that you have a very high likelihood or very low likelihood of getting Alzheimer's by a certain age. And it's sort of a spectrum due to the fact that we're deployed. So we have two copies of this gene. So if you have this like really strong negative version and one positive version, you will [00:12:30] have later onset Ohio Hymers. Then if you have two really negative versions, but there are really strong numbers that tell us what your likelihood is. But what I would like to do is to make it something that's very accessible for everyone. I don't want to produce this and market it as some expensive tests that's going to just perpetuate this whole medical debt system. I want this to be something that people can access and know for themselves to be able to plan [00:13:00] for their own future and to be able to take care of themselves and their family members more effectively and responsibly. Speaker 4: So it's pretty similar to the aggressive cancer testing would you say? Or? Um, yeah, it's fairly similar. I haven't looked exactly at that one to see. I believe it is also a snip, which is like this single nucleotide change. So it should be very similar. Do you want to tell us a little bit about the process of you sort of isolating this gene? Did you go through and read the papers [00:13:30] and see that this gene was associated with it and develop the processes snippet on your own or I'm in the process of developing the process to snippet. So right now I'm troubleshooting the primer. So the, the molecule that you use to actually cut the DNA, what I have is currently binding to itself. So it is also binding to the site that I want it to, but it's also binding to itself. So I'm trying to sort that issue out. Speaker 4: It's a process that needs to be critiqued a bit before. I'm willing to, you know, expose more [00:14:00] people to the answers cause I want to make sure that it is very accurate before I would to give someone those sorts of answers. You're currently doing some form of genetic screening and you previously did all of these behavioral studies. It's quite a transition. So how, how did you make that transition? Well they're both in principle based on cognition, mental abilities and so all Hymers is the degradation of cognitive abilities, the degradation of being able to recall information as well as [00:14:30] the breakdown of even motor skills and language skills and so that is profoundly interesting to me to to understand where and how cognitive abilities act and then to understand how they're dismantled is the cycle of, of the process of understanding exactly how things work. A lot of times we figure out what parts of the brain do what based on lesion studies, which is causing and disruption. Speaker 4: The initial draw [00:15:00] to this was for my own curiosity. And that was sparked because my father has severe dementia. So I wanted to know for him, is this all Hymers or is it something environmental? And so I want to develop a test for him, for myself and for the public to know what's their likelihood so that they can plan for the future. Are there other differentiating factors you could look at as well besides this, besides this gene? So the gene is pretty profound and [00:15:30] it's significance in whether or not people get all hammers. But there's, there's also, you know, of course a lot of different factors and I should mention that like echoey is a specific kind of all hammers. It's not early onset and not all dementia is Alzheimer's. There's lots of ways to get dementia in old age. So this isn't like a yes, no test. Speaker 4: If you have a really great diagnostic and it looks like you're clear for this, it doesn't mean that when you hit 80 that you're not gonna have problems [00:16:00] still. You still have to take care of yourself. And a lot of studies have shown that simple things and everyone says this, but simple things like diet and exercise. If you exercise on a regular basis, you can break down a lot of these corrosive molecules that cause a lot of mental problems, cause a lot of cardiovascular problems and you have to keep your metabolism up to deal with this and your body will also, you know, work to heal itself. It's just really profound what control you have over your future. [00:16:30] Like I don't want to give people this test and say you're doing, I feel that you two have a lot more control than a lot of people want to admit over the future. And so take responsibility for yourself and take care of your body. Go exercise and eat well and have lots of friends and learn new languages and go travel. See the world Speaker 2: spectrum is a science and technology show on KALX Berkeley. Our guest [00:17:00] today is Tony Bodhi Hickerson in the next segment that Tony talks about, the new Berkeley Bio lab. Speaker 4: So you're involved in a biohacker space. Uh, yes. So actually as of last weekend we moved into a space in Valeho which is my n when the other core members lab on the, hopefully we will be also opening a space [00:17:30] in Berkeley eventually, but for now we're in relay hope and it's essentially like a hacker space, but it's in biotech in general and you pay a membership and you have access to the lab and the materials to do your own research, detached from corporate biases and the strains of academia. So we provide a space in the community to kind of teach each other and [00:18:00] to work in and we allow real hard science to take place and sort of a pioneer setting. What's the name of it and how does it compare it to bio curious and some of the other spaces in the bay area? Speaker 4: Sure. The name of the lab is going to be Berkeley bio labs. Some of the other entities that will be occurring within this lab is a June cell technologies. We're trying to be much more accessible in that our membership [00:18:30] is only going to be $100 a month, whereas a lot of other bio spaces are $2,000 and up a month. I think that having more spaces isn't necessarily a bad thing. We tend to be a little bit more focused on regenerative medicine and stem cell research, so people who are more focused along that lines might be more attracted to work with us, but certainly weren't. We're not discriminating against people who aren't in stem cell research or regenerative medicine. That's just what we tend to do. I shouldn't ask you if you could [00:19:00] tell us a little bit more about the projects that are happening in the space now. Speaker 4: At the moment, we haven't even opened up yet. We were literally still moving all of the giant centrifuges and automated robots. And so right now I'm is my project as well as John's London, which is one of the founding members of the biohacker lab and he works in regenerative medicine and stem cells. [00:19:30] And once we kind of get settled and open our doors, we'll hopefully be screening lots of potential innovators to come and join our project and not necessarily his project but you know, whatever inspires them to try and you know, make a difference. And what will that screening process look like? It'll honestly be very personal. We're going to just meet with people one on one and see what they're interested in doing, what they have done and what they want to see in the future. It's much more about the people and [00:20:00] their drive to do something than the letters after their name. Speaker 4: We all feel that someone who's really driven to take the four or five years after a bachelor's and do their own research potentially has a lot more to offer than someone who might not know what they want to do in his just signing up for pastry. Cause they feel like it's the next step. So we're definitely open to pioneers, innovators and people who are willing to scrap to make a change. How are you getting the word out about the a space? [00:20:30] Well, actually the, the first thing that has happened so far on the 24th I believe it was, we had a paper written about us in nature. And so that was the first real publicity, and this is the second. So the article was called biotechnology independent streak. If anyone cares to look it up in the July 24th issue, it's gotta be super expensive to have all of the high mated robots and the giant centrifuge. Speaker 4: How are you financing [00:21:00] the space? All of the equipment is already owned by John. He's been working in biotech for quite some time and it has accumulated a very impressive stock of machinery and equipment and he's more than happy to share, to enable other people. He's been really phenomenal and assisting me and getting into a lab space, she's really enabled me to be able to do research that I would never be able to do on my own. And he's doing that for hopefully a lot of other people and so [00:21:30] I would hope to perpetuate that and help people get into it and start making a difference. What do you anticipate the future of the hackerspace pain? Well, we hope that we find lots of driven people who want to come and we are overflowing with scientists until we need to open up another space. I would love to see this be a scientific movement. Speaker 4: Science is all about curiosity. It's about having a question and figuring out how to find the answer and I think that that's [00:22:00] something in our education system that a lot of times is not really taught. People are taught facts, they're not taught. How do you figure facts out? You know? It's not about memorization. It's about teaching yourself how to think. How did you get into science? I have always been profoundly curious, but actually I started out as an art major and about two and a half years in I got called into my advisor's [00:22:30] office and I said, you can't take any more science classes. Told me you filled up all your electives and another semester. And if you take another science class, then we're going to kick you out of the fine arts school. So I said, okay. And I put in an application at another university and switched into science because I thought it was completely absurd that they would hinder me from taking science classes, but it was just a curiosity to understand how [00:23:00] the molecular and biological world works. Understand, you know, how life happens and how stars are born. It's something that I don't understand why every single person doesn't have this profound emotional response to understanding all Tony, thanks for joining. Yes, thank you. Speaker 2: Oh, [inaudible]. If you can not always catch spectrum broadcasts, know that shows are archived [00:23:30] on iTunes university, we have created a simple link to the archive just for you. The link is tiny url.com/calyx spectrum. No, a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Rick Karnofsky and I present the calendar. Speaker 3: Tuesday. August 27th the UC Berkeley Botanical Gardens [00:24:00] will host a guided butterfly walk. Join Sally Levinson, the gardens resident caterpillar lady on a walk through the amazing collections of the botanical garden in search of butterflies to register for a butterfly walk, which is free with admission email garden@berkeley.edu the butterfly walk will be held from three to 4:00 PM on Tuesday, August 27th at the UC Berkeley Botanical Gardens. At this month, [00:24:30] actual science, you can learn how the properties of diamonds are uniquely suited for scientific research. Christine beavers is a research scientist based at the advanced light source at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Her specialty is crystallography, which is the determination of 3d structures of molecules from crystals using x-rays. Actual science will be on Thursday, August 29th at 6:00 PM [00:25:00] at actual cafe six three three four San Pablo Avenue in Oakland and mission is free. UC Berkeley is holding its first monthly blood drive of the school year on August 29th you can make an appointment online, but walk-ins are also welcome. Speaker 3: You are eligible to donate if you are in good health way, at least 110 pounds and are 17 years or older. The blood drive will be on Thursday, August 29th in the Anna had [00:25:30] alumni house on the UC Berkeley campus. It will last from 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM you can make an appointment or find more information at the website. Red cross.org using the sponsor code you see be wonder fest and ask a scientist present the neuroscience of magic on Wednesday, September 4th at the [inaudible] street food park, 48 [00:26:00] 11th street in San Francisco. You CSF professor of neuroscience, Adam Gazzaley and the comedy magician, Robert Strong. We'll lead discussions from ancient conjurers t quick handed con artists, two big ticket Las Vegas illusionists magicians. Throughout the ages, I've been expertly manipulating human at attention and perception to dazzle and delight us. [00:26:30] Of course, you know that the phenomenon of cognitive and sensory illusions are responsible for the magic, but you've got to admit it still kind of freaks you out when some guy in a top hat defies the of nature right in front of your eyes. The event is free. Now, two news stories. Speaker 3: Berkeley News Center reports a new theory by fluid dynamics experts at the University of California Berkeley shows how Zombie vorticies [00:27:00] help lead to the birth of a new star reporting in the journal Physical Review Letters, a team led by computational physicist Philip Marcus shows how variations in gas density led to instability, which generates the whirlpool like vorticies needed for stars to form. The Zombie reference is an astronomical nod to pop culture and because of the so called dead zones in which these vorticies exist, this new model has caught the [00:27:30] attention of Marcus's colleagues at UC Berkeley, including Richard Klein, adjunct professor of astronomy and fellow star formation expert, Christopher McKee, UC Berkeley professor of physics and astronomy. They were not part of the work described in physical review letters but are collaborating with Marcus to put the Zombie vorticies through more tests. Science daily reports the identification of what may be the earliest known [00:28:00] biomarker associated with the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease. Speaker 3: The results suggest that this novel potential biomarker is present in cerebral spinal fluid at least a decade before signs of dementia manifest. If our initial findings can be replicated by other laboratories, the results will change the way we currently think about the causes of Alzheimer's Disease said Dr Ramon true? Yes. Research professor [00:28:30] at the CSIC Institute of Biomedical Research of Barcelona and lead author of the study that was published in annals of neurology. This discovery may enable us to search for more effective treatments that can be administered during the preclinical stage. These C S I c researchers demonstrated that a decrease in the content of micro chondrial DNA in cerebral spinal fluid may be a preclinical indicator [00:29:00] for Alzheimer's disease. Furthermore, there may be a direct causal relationship Speaker 6: [inaudible].Speaker 1: The music hub during this show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Address [00:29:30] is spectrum dot k. Alright. yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Joan Ball is a UC Berkeley Grad student in the College of Natural Resouces. Peter Oboyski is Collections Manager & Sr. Museum Scientist at the UC Berkeley Essig Museum of Entomology. www.notesfromnature.orgTranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible]. Speaker 1: [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews, featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hey there and good afternoon. My name is Renee Rao and I'll be hosting today's show. Today we get to hear about an exciting citizen science project from Joanie Ball and Peter Oh Boyski. [00:01:00] Joni is a UC Berkeley graduate student in the College of natural resources where she focuses her research on dragonflies. Peter is a collections manager and senior museum scientist at the UC Berkeley Asig Museum of entomology. They spoke to Brad Swift about the new cal project. The ASIG is collaborating with Zooniverse to run the cal bog website, which allows anyone with an internet connection to help digitize the vast collection of bugs specimens in nine California natural history museums [00:01:30] just over 3000 citizens, scientists have joined the project today. We'll learn more about cal vogue and bugs in general in today's interview, Speaker 4: Joanie Ball and Peter O. Boyski, welcome to spectrum. Thank you. Thank you. Let's talk about the cal bug project that you're both part of and how did that get started? What was the genesis of the project? Speaker 1: So Quebec started in 2010 as a collaboration of the major entomology collections in California. And [00:02:00] as a group, the collections were awarded an NSF grant to database their entymology collections through this program called advancing digitization of biological collections. And the goal is to digitize over 1 million specimens. The purpose is to capture the collection information from the labels, like the species name, when the specimen was collected, who collected it and when it was collected. Speaker 4: So the ECIG museum is an insect collection at UC Berkeley and our collections go back about a hundred years. [00:02:30] And these represents the research of our faculty and students over that period of time. And it's a representation of what's lived in California all this time. So each one of those specimens in the museum is a data point. It tells you what lived where at what time. And so the problem is it's all locked up in these specimens. It's on these tiny little labels sitting in a museum somewhere. And nobody has access to this information. So the point of this project is to make that data available to, to the research community, into the public cause this all [00:03:00] goes online free to everybody to look at. So that's the big point of this is to make this a hundred years of of data available to people, researchers and to do this, you know, is it's a pretty overwhelming task. Speaker 4: Now, other museums have done this before with their vertebrate collections. For instance, the Museum of vertebrate zoology here on campus, they've already database their entire collection and they're able to do wonderful things with it. They're looking at distributions of different species and what time of year they occur. But entomology museums have lagged behind just [00:03:30] because of the sheer volume of specimens that we have. We have orders of magnitude more specimens than some of these other museums and we just thought that was too big of a job and nobody wanted to tackle that job. But now with this funding from the National Science Foundation, we feel like, okay, we can take a shot at this now let's take a stab at it. How big is the collection? Well, we don't actually know, but uh, when you multiply how many specimens per drawer and all the jurors that we have that comes out somewhere around five to 6 million specimens that we have in our collection, and that's [00:04:00] just a USAC, that's just the ecig museum and then combine that with the eight other institutions that we're working with. We're talking tens of millions of specimens among all of us. So to do the 1 million is just a, you know, the tip of the iceberg, but it's a place to start. Speaker 1: In the beginning of the project, we were hiring students to enter the data manually directly from the specimens themselves, but we found that that was taking a really long time. So we started taking photographs of the specimens, which is [00:04:30] beneficial in that we then have a record of both the specimen itself and the labels so we can go back and check specimens later. People can also enter this data from the images from wherever they are online. That's how we've started this notes from nature project where we have an interactive database now for people to enter. The specimen data online. As of this morning we had to over 2,790 people entering data. We're approaching 170,000 [00:05:00] total transcription people entering data online through this project, which started just a few weeks ago. Speaker 4: Wow, that's impressive. It is. Have you tried to calculate how many people you think need to volunteer to help? So when we initially started this project, and we are even in the planning stages, we thought, well how long would it take us to actually database? Just our collection alone. You look at the amount of staff that we have in the budget that we [00:05:30] have, and we figured at least a century to do this in house. So we hired some students to help us out, take some of these images, and they started doing the database for us, but we realized, okay, that cut it down to maybe half a century. It's still, that was going to be too long. We needed more help in having these images that you can be sitting online anywhere in the world and jump online and help us transcribe these images. So that was a huge step forward. It's incredibly simple step to take, but it was a very important one. And how did that idea bubble up? Well, we heard about Speaker 1: Zooniverse, which does a citizen [00:06:00] science organization that creates these web interfaces. In particular, we saw this project called old weather. What this project did was enter weather records from ship logs from World War One. The purpose is to improve climate models for the oceans in that time period. So we knew we wanted to do something similar with with our images. I submitted an application to them. What won them over I think was the actual photos of our specimens with the [00:06:30] pen sticking through them. They're really impressed with that and that's also something that the citizen scientists really like as well. They really enjoy seeing the actual pictures of the insects. Speaker 5: [inaudible] you're listening to spectrum. I'm KLX Berkeley, I guess today are Joanie Ball and Peter Boise from the Calvin project. In the next segment they discuss how they choose which specimens to begin at. Speaker 6: [00:07:00] Talk a little bit about the people at the ECIG that keep it all going. Speaker 4: Yeah, we do have a pretty limited staff in the museum, but I have to say the real work gets done by the undergraduates. These are either volunteers or work study students and they put in endless hours and they're the ones who are taking these images that were putting up online without them work just doesn't get done on campus. They really are the, the workforce of this campus. Speaker 6: Going back to the involvement of the citizen scientists, the transcription [00:07:30] work that they do, how would you characterize who's good at it? What sort of person would enjoy this? Do you have a sense of who that is or do you think people should just try it and see? Speaker 1: Does anyone who's curious and has little time to help out? But it tends to be people who are really enjoy contributing to something. Speaker 4: Yeah, it is an opportunity to be part of a larger community. People enjoy that and I think some people are surprised when they, they like it. So some people just log on, Eh, it's okay. [00:08:00] And some people, it just doesn't do it for them. But they took a look and now they know. But other people, they kind of surprise themselves like, oh, this is actually kind of fun. And in a way you're following an expedition. You can see where these things are coming from, what year they were collected. We had some really funny comments about one of our professors who is still actively collecting. Somebody suggested perhaps he's a vampire because he's been collecting for 50 years and the specimens are still coming in. So a little observations like that and people just, they become part of our community without even knowing it. Speaker 1: Yeah, and some people [00:08:30] who never really had an interest in insects before find themselves now more interested in what's around them. One woman mentioned that as she was driving and insect splattered on her car and she was trying to identify it or you know, suddenly she had this new appreciation for insects, which was pretty neat. Speaker 6: How are you choosing the million specimens start? Speaker 1: Uh, well actually one of the groups that we've decided to focus on [00:09:00] start with are the dragon flies. The reason for that is that we have good collections for them over the hundred years where we have our collections. They've been well collected over time. They're pretty charismatic group. They're also used as biological indicators for stream ecosystem health. So that's one of the groups that we're focusing on. We're also focusing on certain insects that are used in applied research like pollinators or biological control agents. What are the, some of the other groups, Speaker 4: the approach we use to slicking [00:09:30] the groups where groups that we have well-represented in the museum, groups that have some significance regarding global change, whether it be land use change that be climate change, changing the way water is distributed. So which groups are more sensitive to that. That might give us some indication of of what's happened in the past. The other criteria and we use was places where we have longterm collections because museums have some biases in them and we have [00:10:00] to recognize that when we do this kind of research people when to a particular place at a particular time because there's something interesting there for them. So some places we have fewer collections over the years, other places we have nice longterm data sets. So we also focused on locations where we knew we had nice longterm data. That makes sense. Yeah, so collecting is ongoing. Speaker 4: It is consumer. We continually collect the museum specimens. The insect collection comes from a number of sources. The most common [00:10:30] is research that's done right here on campus. Professors, students who are doing research projects, they deposit what we refer to as voucher specimens in the museum. So you write a publication that says you found this species at this place. Somebody else reads it and says, well that sounds odd. I don't think that thing occurs there. Well, you have to be able to go back to that specimen and look at it. Oh yeah, sure enough, there it is. I wouldn't believe that. So we have to voucher these specimens in a museum. So that's a large part of where our collection comes from. In 1939 professor ESIG, [00:11:00] the namesake of our museum, had this idea to start the California insect survey. UC Berkeley is a land grant school, which means we owe a certain responsibility back to the community, to agriculture, to forestry, to the urban ecosystem. Speaker 4: And we need to be able to answer questions. But if we don't have representatives of the insects that are out there, then it's much harder to answer the sort of questions. So that was his logic in launching the California Insec survey, sending professors and students all over the state. And that was in 1939 [00:11:30] so our collections go back earlier than that, but that's where the real boost began in our collections. So from that point on, we've had regular collecting trips. People in the museum, professors, other folks will go out and collect all over the state and then deposit their material. Another source of our specimens, our donations, there's a lot of hobbyists, enthusiasts that aren't necessarily professional entomologists, but they enjoy butterflies or beetles or whatever group. At some point when have their family and their kids and they've got these big boxes taken [00:12:00] up a lot of space in their house. They said, well, Geez, you know, I really like having these here, but yeah, maybe I should give them to a museum somewhere. So I get a lot of that kind of stuff as well. Just in the past couple of years we've had, I don't know about 10,000 donated specimens, which has been really nice. We don't do much in the way of trading there. There are museums out there that'll buy and sell specimens, but because the main interest of our museum is answering questions about California, we can go out and get most of that stuff ourselves. Speaker 5: [00:12:30] Our guest today on spectrum are Joanie, Baal [inaudible]. In the next segment they talk about how cal bug is already affecting research. This is k LX Berkeley. Speaker 4: So how is the end product affecting research do you think from pre digitization and now post digitization? [00:13:00] How are people able to leverage what they have in a database now that they couldn't do previously? Speaker 1: I am doing research using the Jag and fly collections from a few different angles. One of my projects is to resurvey sites that were originally sampled in 1914 for Jag and flies. So this collector clearance, Hamilton Kennedy went around California and Nevada collecting dragonflies that in 1914 and create a list of species [00:13:30] for all of the sites that he visited, which turns out to be around 40 sites throughout the region. The problem was he didn't include the dates that he visited these sites. That information is on his specimen. So I use the collection to reconstruct the dates that he went to these specific sites. And then I revisited those sites on the same day. And now what I'm doing is I'm comparing my surveys to the original surveys that were done in 1914 to see how things like species richness and that proportion of habitat [00:14:00] generalist versus specialist and some other community metrics have changed over that time period. Speaker 1: Another project that I'm working on will be using all of the museums specimens for dragon flies and I'll be comparing communities for different counties for the different time periods throughout that hundred years that we have collections. So I'm looking to see which time periods have enough specimens for a comparison. For example, there was a lot of collecting activity in the 70s there's a lot of current [00:14:30] collecting activity through another group, actually dragon fly enthusiast group who report their sightings, so I'm using their sightings for current species distribution throughout California. One of the last projects that I'm working on is creating species distribution models, which is something that a lot of ecologists are doing right now with historical data. The museum collections are points for that. You can create a latitude and longitude for where you find individual specimens throughout time. I'm using these to [00:15:00] look at changes in species distribution over recent decades in relation to factors like climate and land use. So I started analyzing some of the changes in the dragon fly communities based on the resurvey and some of the things that I'm finding so far is are that communities are becoming more similar throughout this survey. Previously you might find much more different species of at different sites, whereas now you're finding a lot of the same things over and over again. So we're seeing kind of a homogenization [00:15:30] of Jag and fly communities. Speaker 4: A lot of researchers have come to the museum to do similar sorts of studies to Joanie's where they're looking at one species. It's distribution over time. And that meant coming into our museum, looking at our specimens, typing that up, they would bring that home and put that into their database, write up a report on that. But that didn't always end up back in our database. And there's only one species at a time. So the advantage to what we're doing now is we can look at whole communities at a time Joanie's case, the whole dragon [00:16:00] fly dams will fly community rather than looking at one species at a time. So you couldn't do that before without one of these larger databases. We keep thinking in terms of the research, which is one of the main reasons why we're doing this, but there's a lot of practical outcomes for the general public as well. Speaker 4: For instance, maybe you're a fly fisherman and you're going up to this particular drainage basin or this river and you want to know what, what's flying up there? I want to know what kind of flies I should be tying. So at some point in the future you'll be able to pull up in our database and see, well what's flying at that time of year in that area? Or you find a spider in your [00:16:30] house and you want to know what kinds of spiders are found in my area, you should be able to go to our database and find that. Or yeah, you're a farmer and you're thinking about rotating to some new crop that you haven't planted before and you want to know what kind of pests should I be worried about? What things feed on this plant in this area? So those are the kinds of questions that other folks outside of the museum community should be able to use. And like I say, this is all freely available online once it's all been database. So this is, you know, it's not just for us, it's for everybody. Speaker 4: What ends up [00:17:00] being the most diverse species of insects. If you were mentioning dragonflies aren't really all that diverse. Beatles. There's a famous geneticists Haldane. When asked, what has he learned in his studies about the creator? Said the creator had an inordinate fondness for beetles. Certainly beetles are the most species rich out there, and within the Beatles, the weevils, a lot of these are very hosts specialized, and so for every species of plant out there, you may have several species of weevil that specialize on them. So [00:17:30] it said that if you were to take one of every species, take a black tail deer, a blue whale, a sequoia tree, every species of insects out there and lined them all up, four out of 10 would be a beetle. So 40% of the diversity of the macro diversity. Now, when I say this to people who study bacteria and viruses, they say, ah, yeah, well, I see. Okay, you right, you're right. There are, there's a lot out there with that, but of multicellular animals and plants, the insects, certainly out number, most other things. Speaker 3: [00:18:00] I'm Renee Rao and you're listening to spectrum. Today's guest are Jody ball and Peter Boyce. In the next segment, they discuss the importance of entomology. This is Kayla Berkeley. Speaker 4: What is the most studied insect? The more charismatic things, as you might guess, get a lot more attention. Butterflies get a lot of attention there. Show either out during the day, they're conspicuous, they don't hide [00:18:30] themselves. It makes them easy to study and for hobbyists to notice them. The more obscure things, the tiny, the brown, the cryptic things that are much more diverse but are much harder to study and there's far fewer people that actually study them. It's just human nature. Yeah. We were attracted to some things that we find aesthetically pleasing and other things that we don't. It takes a special kind of person to look at them. We call them entomologists. Speaker 4: Within the current environment. Are [00:19:00] Insects ascending or is, are they struggling or is it case by case? Very much case by case and again, the more charismatic things we know a lot more about, I know of about 20 species that are listed as endangered in California. 14 of those are butterflies. Then there is a large [inaudible] three pretty charismatic beetles, lion of grasshopper, so these are all pretty conspicuous sort of things. A lot of them are endangered because of habitat loss. They specialize in a particular plant that only occurs in a particular habitat and especially meadows. [00:19:30] So many meadows had been turned into grazed plots or housing developments or golf courses. There's been all kinds of lawsuits around what to do with this meadow and that sort of thing, but there's probably a lot more out there that have become very rare that we just don't know about it because nobody has looked at them in any great depth. Speaker 4: That said, some of the things we do also promote some insects. Certainly our agriculture is this great field of food for not just us, but for insects as well, so some pest species where we consider them past, you know, they're just trying to live, they flourished. There's other things [00:20:00] prescribed burning where you open up a habitat and let the new vegetation grow back in. There are some insects that specialize on that. Unfortunately, the things that specialize in more stable habitat, say old growth forest, they're having less of a good time about it because those habitats, once you disturb them, it takes a long time for them to get back into balance. So yeah, it's a case by case basis. Somethings are doing well, others are not. Speaker 1: The other thing that we're seeing is like in many other groups, habitat generalists are really expanding because they can [00:20:30] live in a variety of different environments and they're more tolerant to changes in the habitat so they can even live in urban areas. So a lot of the habitat generalists are really expanding while the habitat specialists are more likely to be declining. Speaker 4: So I think to some extent we've talked about it, but is there anything specific about the importance of studying insects that you want to mention? Well, we like to think that humans rule the world and [00:21:00] uh, but you know, if our species was to disappear tomorrow, the world would probably go on. Okay. Maybe even better. But if insects were to disappear tomorrow, most ecosystems would collapse pretty quickly. And so I think that's a pretty compelling reason right there to look at them. The act as pollinators, they're recycling nutrients, they're keeping plants and checks are the plants don't over run the world. They're keeping other insects and checks so they don't overrun the world. It kind of keeps things in balance. The act as food for a lot of other organisms. So they're, they're, uh, one of [00:21:30] the most important components of the ecosystem. And to me that's enough reason to study them. Speaker 4: But beyond that, their biology, their behavior sometimes just fascinating to just sit by a pond and watch a dragon fly. It's, it's just amazing to see how they move and how they can move. I mean, they've inspired so many things. I think the, uh, the helicopter was inspired by dragonflies. It's the same kind of design, you know, beyond that, their physiology, there's just so many things about them that are fascinating. And that's where I came from in all of this as an undergraduate, I was an electrical [00:22:00] engineering major for three years and finally realized that biology was really my passion. By coincidence. My first entomology professor got his phd here at Berkeley in entomology and this is at the University of Connecticut. He's the one who got me excited about it. For me, every day of that classroom was just fascinating. Everything I learned was telling me about this world that has been all around me my whole life, but I've never noticed it. Speaker 4: And then all of a sudden somebody opened my eyes [00:22:30] and I just started noticing more and more and it just fascinates me. I mean it's, it's 20 something years later. I still am just as fascinated today as I was before. But I think some of the more obvious things are things like pollination. Our crops depend on having pollinators in with colony collapse disorder going on with the honey bees. What does that mean? So there's a lot of very compelling reasons too, is to study insects. But I think for most of us it's because we love it. They're just fascinating. Great. Joanie ball and Peter o Boyski. Thanks [00:23:00] very much for coming on spectrum. My pleasure. Thank you. If you think you might want to get involved with cal bag. Here's Peter with some more information about how to do that. There's a number of websites where you can find information about us. The ECIG museum. If you go to our website, ecig.berkeley.edu I'm the collections manager, Peter Boyski and you can contact me directly. Gordon Deshita is one of the coordinators of our project. He's on that website as well. There is a cal bug website, get's cal bug.berkeley.edu [00:23:30] and that also has information about the project. Okay. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 5: the science and technology events happening globally over the next two weeks. Brad switch will join me in presenting the calendar Speaker 3: next Monday. The California Academy of Sciences will host a lecture [00:24:00] by Dr. Anthony [inaudible] Guerra and associate professor of physics at UC Santa Cruz. Dr. Guerra will speak about the evolution of models that scientists use to understand and study the universe. For over two decades, scientists have been refining the standard model they currently use with new data. In light of this, the concept of inflation has been revised in many cases, inflation completely upends. Our picture of the large scale structure of the universe and suggests that the universe may not actually have a beginning. [00:24:30] An object of such enormous size and complexity can only be described as a multi-verse. Dr. Guerra will walk through the development of these ideas and describe other aspects of the multi-verse that scientists wish to test. The lecture will be held on Monday, August 5th at 7:30 PM in the California Academy of Sciences. Planetarium tickets will be available online@calacademy.org Speaker 6: the August East Bay Science Cafe Presents Huta Greys Hammer Phd, [00:25:00] a science officer at the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the state stem cell agency that manages bond funds dedicated to support basic translational and clinical stem cell and regenerative medicine research in California. Her research background is in the study of embryonic development, elucidating how the cells of mouse and chick embryos assemble into functional organs. Udo will explore the power of the promise and the problems [00:25:30] of stem cells. That's Wednesday night, August 7th, 2013 in the Cafe Valparaiso, 41 30 Solano Avenue in Berkeley from seven to 9:00 PM Speaker 5: on spectrum. We also like to cover science stories, so we found particularly interesting. Brad swift flew join me in presenting papers. Speaker 6: A multidisciplinary team at the University of Texas Southwest Medical [00:26:00] Center has found that measuring the oxygenation of tumors can be a valuable tool in guiding radiation therapy, opening the door for personalized therapies that keep tumors in check with oxygen enhancement in research, examining tissue oxygenation levels and predicting radiation response. University of Texas southwest scientists led by Dr. Ralph Mason reported in the June 27th online issue of magnetic resonance in medicine [00:26:30] that countering hypoxic and aggressive tumors with an oxygen challenge, which amounts to inhaling oxygen while monitoring tumor response coincides with a greater delay in tumor growth in irradiated animal model. The next step is clinical trials to assess tumor response to radiation therapy says Dr. Mason. If the results are confirmed in humans, the implication for personalized therapies for cancers could mean fewer radiation treatments [00:27:00] or perhaps one single high dose treatment. In some cases, the simple addition of oxygen to stereotactic body radiation greatly improves response. The key is to identify those patients who will benefit Speaker 3: an android app released Monday. Allow smart phone owners to donate their phones, computing power to scientific research around the world. The app was developed by the Berkeley Open infrastructure for network computing or Boy Inc a project [00:27:30] that is best known for developing similar software for personal computers. The app install software that allows the charging phone's processing power to be used to analyze data or run simulations that would normally require expensive supercomputers. The app supports a variety of projects ranging from a program that searches radio telescope data for spinning stars called pulse eyes to one that searches for a more effective aids treatment through a community grid points creator. David Anderson [00:28:00] noted that the computing power of the nearly 1 billion android devices currently being used around the globe exceeds that of the world's largest conventional super computer. The app is currently available at the android app store, but I found you should keep an eye out as Anderson's next project maybe to design a version compatible with apple systems. Speaker 2: Okay. [00:28:30] [inaudible] [inaudible] music in the show is written produced by Alex Simon, edited by Renee Brown. Speaker 5: [00:29:00] Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum, Doug K l x@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. Speaker 2: [00:29:30] [inaudible] [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Arash Komeili cell biologist, Assc. Prof. plant and microbial biology UC Berkeley. His research uses bacterial magnetosomes as a model system to study the molecular mechanisms governing the biogenesis and maintenance of bacterial organelles. Part 2.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible] [inaudible]. Speaker 1: [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hello and good afternoon. My name is Renee Rao. I'll be hosting today's show. Today we present part two of our interview with a Rosh Kamali. Dr [inaudible] is a cell biologist and associate [00:01:00] professor of plant and microbial biology at UC Berkeley. Previously on spectrum, he discussed his work with magneto tactic bacteria. Here's Dr Camilia explaining why these bacteria so interesting. Speaker 4: We work with a specific type of bacteria. They're called magneto is tactic bacteria and these are organisms that are quite widespread. You can find them in most aquatic environments by almost any sort of classification. You can really group them together if you [00:01:30] take their shape or if you look at even the genes they have, you can't really group them into one specific group as opposed to many other bacteria that you can do that, but unites them together as a group is that they're able to orient in magnetic fields. And some along magnetic fields Speaker 3: today. In part two of his interview, Dr [inaudible] explains how these discoveries might be applied and discusses the scientific outreach he does in our community. Here is Brad swift interviewing a Kamali, Speaker 4: [00:02:00] so how is it that you're trying to leverage what you're learning about the magnetic zone? You're trying to apply it in any way. Are you still really in the pure research mode? I think we're starting to move out or at least branch out to try to do some applications as well. This has been a really, one of the areas of research that's been the most active, or at least the most thought about for Magna [inaudible] bacteria for the last 40 years or so of that people have been working on it. You have two [00:02:30] features of the magnesiums that immediately can be thought of as being very useful for applications, but one is that they're making something that's nanometers size. Very small is magnetic and it has very, very irregular dimensions, quite free of impurities. So you can make magnetic particles in the lab and people have gotten very good at it actually, but it's often very hard to control some of their features. Speaker 4: Maybe contaminants can kind of bind my net [00:03:00] particles pretty easily. And then on top of that you have to sort of use certain types of chemical conditions that are not so favorable. Maybe the Ph has to be a little bit high or chemicals that you don't want to use. And that's one of the reasons why the bacteria are so great. Right? Then as I said, they make an Organelle in this case to magnetism. So then within this tiny 50 nanometers sphere, they can just make what is otherwise a toxic condition inside of that and make this magnetic particle. But the cells are [00:03:30] growing in relatively harmless growth media at 30 degrees centigrade. So you can make magnetic particles under what are not toxic conditions because the bacteria are taking care of that inside of the cell. So that's one of the reasons people have been really fascinated by them. Speaker 4: So how can we take these sort of perfect crystals out of these bacteria and apply them to something else? The other aspect of it that's really important to recognize is that it's not just that the bacteria are randomly making magnetic particles. [00:04:00] They actually have a whole set of genes that they're used to build a magnetism and build the magnetic particle. So the ability to make a magnetic crystal is in coated in jeans, so you can not only extract the magnets out of these bacteria to use it for applications. Maybe you can extract the genes and put them into another organism and now give that other organism the capability to make magnetic nanoparticles. They're [00:04:30] magnetic properties, mixed them, really useful for many different kinds of applications. One of them, they can be potentially contrast agents for magnetic resonance imaging or MRI. When you get an MRI, does a lot of structures that are easily seen, but a lot of things are sort of invisible to the MRI and if you had a little magnetic particle in that region, you'd be able to see it better. One idea is can we put the genes as we learn more about them, can we sort of gather [00:05:00] up a minimum set of genes that are sort of sufficient to make a magnetism and a magnetic particle and then just put those into some other cell types and then see if that's enough to make a magnetic particle and that settle and they can we track it by MRI or something so that that's actually the focus of a grant that we recently got with a few other groups on campus. As a large collaborative grant, Speaker 4: how will you start to [00:05:30] prove that concept? I think we're taking many parallel approaches for it. You know, both to show the utility or the different ways that you would have to image them. One group is working on essentially technologies for imaging, magnetic nanoparticles and animals, and then we are sort of at the very other end of the spectrum and the collaboration, we're trying to say, we think we have a set of genes that are sufficient. This process, let's start taking baby steps [00:06:00] and move them to other types of cells, whether they're bacteria or other cells. And see if we can produce magnetic particles in those cells. Are other collaborators they're focusing more on, well, if we know these genes, can we start transferring them to mammalian cells and then in animal studies we could track cells using magnetic resonance imaging. Each group has focusing on a different aspect of the project. Speaker 4: Some of the other applications are really fascinating too. There's one where [00:06:30] particles hold their magnetic properties very stably and if you give a very strong magnetic field then you can kind of flip the dipole moment of the crystal. You can do this back and forth, keeps switching it, and if the pulse is switching faster than the dipole man can flip on the magnetic protocol. The difference in energies essentially released as heat. We can in that way heat the particle. There's a lot of anticancer treatments to try to essentially have the particles adhere to [00:07:00] a tumor and then heat the particles using this method. Just have the heat of the particles, kill the cells locally. There's been quite a few papers on it and some of these types of studies are in clinical trials to see how effective that could be for different kinds of tumors. Speaker 4: Yeah. Bacteria seems to get used that way. More and more to go into a tumor and linger just on the tumor and continue to just be very local in terms of very specific. And that's, you know, [00:07:30] local drug delivery or local attacking of tumor cells would be something that's very, this bacteria have this great access that other organisms don't have. If you can localize them and direct them. And that's sort of some, there's some other work which I think is also really interesting is to thinking about the magna detected bacteria as a vehicle for delivering drugs. You know, one of the things you can imagine is that you could guide them with a magnetic fields so you can have them guided to some [00:08:00] areas in the body by an external magnetic field. And there's definitely some people who are working on that. Can they move the bacteria through vasculature to a certain area because they can swim along magnetic field. Speaker 4: So if you want to localize it somewhere, you would have to instigate that field there. Yeah, exactly. To direct it. Right. The stuff I was telling you about with the heat treatment, I think all of that is trying to, right now at least because there's not much known about how to target the bacteria, they work with kinds of tumors that are accessible [00:08:30] so that you could inject the particles into the tumor directly directly to the tumor as opposed to try to do a systemic thing. Yeah, exactly. But you can imagine that maybe one benefit of the is is that they are surrounded by biological membrane and you can have proteins on them and people have done this pretty, you can display specific proteins on the surface of magnesiums, so then you could customize your, I need a zone to have affinity for certain types of proteins [00:09:00] or certain types of cells. Some proof of concept of that has been done for sure. Speaker 5: Mm MM. Speaker 3: Our guest on spectrum today, is it rush Molly, I cell biologist and associate professor at UC Berkeley. In the next segment. Dr Camelli speaks more about some of his collaborative. This is k a l x Berkeley. [00:09:30] [inaudible]. Speaker 4: The work you're doing with a sequencing is a lot of it. Trying to catalog everything. Keep track of what's, what sort of explain the sequencing side of what you're doing. The sequencing side, we are fortunate that the organism that we work with is in pure culture. Our lab rat essentially has been already sequenced by someone else. When we sequence, [00:10:00] it's more to make sure if we're going to put some gene fusion into the bacteria or that what we have is correct. Our sequencing is relatively limited. We are trying to branch out more and say nowadays technologies for sequencing the whole genome are much more accessible, affordable, certain types of genetics that we do where we try to delete genes or randomly mutate them. Then we can just start identify what's changed by going back and just sequencing the whole [00:10:30] genome or the bacteria. We are doing a little bit of that. Speaker 4: We do it on campus very accessible and affordable, but it's really something that was unthinkable even five, six years ago that you could do this on a large scale, do it affordably. And it could be a pretty routine tool in research. Sorry, I mean it's a really exciting, actually you're not gonna necessarily have to be restricted to these lab rats that do represent some of the general features of the process you're interested [00:11:00] in, but not the diversity of fitness necessarily. And so you can say, instead of studying just one organism, maybe I can study many other ones. There's still a lot that I can do with my model system in the law that I can't do with some of these other unconventional organisms, but they're at least visible to me. Their genes are visible to me and I don't have to isolate them away from everybody else to get an understanding of [00:11:30] what their genetic makeup is and where they are. Speaker 4: And for things like microbiome studies is revolutionize the whole field. They were, they were always just looking at such a small sliver of what they could isolate. Yeah. And now you can look at everything, you know, they can do lots of really interesting experiments like what's on your fingers, what's on your, you know, how's your right hand different from your left hand and microbial content. Yeah. You know, so that's really interesting. Yeah, it gets very refined. Is synthetic [00:12:00] biology involved in what you're doing in some way? Yeah, definitely. So what I was telling you about the applications, you know, essentially, I mean synthetic biology, I guess there's different ways of defining it. For me, you have inspiration from some biological system and now you're trying to extrapolate that and put it in a new context to do something new or something different than it normally does. Speaker 4: Though. What I was telling you about this, this project that we have on campus or does not support [00:12:30] it by the Keck foundation to put the magnetism genes into other organisms, but that's essentially synthetic biology. So yeah, we are really relying on that and trying to see if we're going to move these genes, how are they going to be more, how can we customize them so that they work better in the new organisms they go to? Can we add on things to them or take things away and doing this using synthetic biology essentially that it would fall under the category of synthetic biology. Sort started like mixing and matching genes and in [00:13:00] new contexts that you wouldn't have naturally. And what sort of safety protocols do you have to abide by in your research? For? For our research, we are working with something that's non-pathogenic that's quite harmless. Speaker 4: We follow the, the university has pretty strict guidelines for even for nonpathogenic organisms. Anytime you're working with recombinant DNA, even those things I was telling you where we are making a fluorescent protein fusion, we really [00:13:30] have to be careful about how we get rid of things and you know, don't just dump it down the drain. Safety-Wise. We don't really use anything harmful in the lab. I think maybe you're getting more into like what do you do with the hybrid organisms somehow and there we have to be, you know, we're always careful about how we dispose of materials. Eat cultures are always killed by bleach or heating before we dispose of it. You know, often people [00:14:00] say imagination runs wild with them. Right. You know? Yeah. And a lot of that has to do with fiction. Yeah. Books and movies and things. But I think it's important to sort of sort of what prompts me to ask. Speaker 4: And I think a lot of times maybe scientists think about that too late, you know, so, so maybe it may not be the first thing you say. That'd be the first thing you think about. And then it may also, it may not be in your training expertise or whatever to even know what would be dangerous. So I, I, [00:14:30] is that something that the university is helping with in the sense of certainly providing those kinds of resources to you so you don't have to be expert, right? We don't. Yeah, exactly. How can you be, and also you know, we have to comply with not just handling of biological organisms, but just how the lab functions. We have not only have to comply with university rules, but we have federal rules for worker safety, city rules that are different. So we have five or six different sort of safety protocols that we have to [00:15:00] abide by and we do get inspections once a year and I know people who work with animals, they have even more extensive things. I'd have to go through a whole separate set of protocols to just the sort of ethical treatment of the animals approved by independent boards and things like that. And the funding agencies have a lot of rules, so they give us money, but they expect us to follow certain types of rules. Speaker 2: [inaudible] [00:15:30] you're listening to spectrum on k a Alex Berkeley. Our guest is a Raj Chameleon. In the next segment he speaks about his work on outreach to the broader public [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] Speaker 4: I noticed you've got a Twitter account. I do, yeah. And is that sort of part [00:16:00] of an outreach effort on your part to get the community involved or people interested in what you're doing? How do you view outreach going forward for your projects? Yeah, so the Twitter thing is you'd asked me that outreach are fun and I think it's both. It's not anonymous. You can be social, my name, you can find it. We have one for the lab also, which not very active at all by mine. A lot of people that I follow are other scientists. I think it is not known so well that there are many scientists on Twitter and there's great outreach [00:16:30] because often is a great way to share new findings and research or things that are exciting to people or having a discussion within the community, but this all accessible. Speaker 4: None of it is anonymous, so you can really see that. It's also fun obviously. For example, I encourage people to look out there. There's a lot of great science writers who take research findings and they in science blogs turn it into very accessible stories to understand the latest developments in research for [00:17:00] outreach. We try to do a lot of things. Members of my lab go out to, there's different events where scientists can interact with the community. I've done a few microbiology experiments with my son's classroom and you know, kindergarten, first, second grade. For me it's been really eye opening to do that because you see you all, sometimes you think what you're doing is so inaccessible on out there. But when you go and just talk to people you see that they can get really excited about, especially kids, [00:17:30] kids can get really excited about micro was, which is kind of funny because it's not something they can see and they really only heard about bad germs. Speaker 4: They've only heard about things that can hurt them and it's just great to go out there and talk about things that are good germs and on their bodies and everything. So we do a little experiment where we take the little auger played, which has the growth for the bacteria. They put their little fingerprints on it or they can see over the course of few days, bacteria grow on there. They washed her hands and they can see that that changes whether they can grow, [00:18:00] and I do the exact same experiment. I teach undergraduate microbiology lab here. You know, the questions that the undergrads ask are almost exactly the same questions that the third graders ask. So it's great to see that they have the insight and the excitement to learn about science. It just has to be, I think, encouraged and followed up more as they go through schooling. Speaker 4: I think another reason for us to go and do outreaches to just sort of, I get more excited about my work when I go and talk to other people and see that it's not so out there [00:18:30] and the university provides a lot of chances for us to do outreach to it. I mean, just recently we had cal day. There was lots of science on campus. Other blogs that you follow because you'd want to mention some colleagues at Berkeley have blogs, but I think people are more active through Twitter than they are through blogs. The scientific American blogs in general are pretty good. You mentioned the Keck Foundation that's brought together this collaboration that you're going to try to do the applied research on. Are there other collaborations [00:19:00] that you're trying to pursue? Yeah. You know our work, we rely on a lot of collaborations mainly because the bacteria do this really amazing thing of building these magnetic particles and we're always just like the example I told you about with the more high resolution electron microscopy where we were able to see something that we hadn't seen before. Speaker 4: There was a lot of people who were interested in imaging magnetic particles. They're developing instruments all the time that you would be able to look at these things in new ways and [00:19:30] we can't build the same instruments, but it ends up being a really great interaction all the time to find these groups that are developing technologies for imaging bacteria or imaging particles and then see how what we've learned can be applied to their technologies. One great collaboration we've had recently is with the walls worth group at Harvard and they have these, essentially there is a way you can treat diamonds so that there's certain defects on the surface of the diamonds and then you can detect magnetic [00:20:00] fields close to the surface of the diamond can actually essentially image these bacteria that we've worked with sitting on the surface of these diamonds because of their magnetic properties. Speaker 4: It's been great for us because working with them, hopefully we're able to fine tune some aspects of their technique to then study the magnetic particles and the magnetic chains in a different way than we had been so far and learn new things. Basically at any given point we might have seven or eight active collaboration's going on. [00:20:30] A lot of it on our part is not that difficult. We just provide a sample of the bacteria and then they work on it and if it goes somewhere then we go and get more involved in the collaboration. You start iterating with them. Yeah, exactly. This Keck collaboration was out of a brainstorming session. Went from there and we have another collaboration. Also synthetic biology that was just funded by the office of naval research and that's between two or three groups that are in different universities. We had always just talked here and there to each other and all of a sudden we realized that we could do something [00:21:00] together. Speaker 4: And that's how that came about. It's a huge part of science I think is even more now with funding situation and you have to really look for more creative ways of doing your science and your sense is that the funding environment is dwindling. Is that good? Yeah. Yeah. I think it was already bad and the sequester just sort of pushed it down even further. For example, you look at NIH, the amount of money is that increasing, which means it's not keeping up with inflation. So your purchasing power is much less and then all of [00:21:30] a sudden the sequester takes out a few percentages off of what was getting funded to you. So I think both the success rates for getting a grant and the amount of money that you get from that grant are lower. Even if you're lucky enough to be able to get the grant. What you could do with the money is less than before. Obviously, you know, I'm biased, but I don't think it's that great. You're essentially sacrificing the next generation of scientists, limiting [00:22:00] it, limiting it big time. Speaker 4: Was there anything that you wanted to mention? One thing I was going to say is that we've talked a lot about these bacteria, but obviously the visual is the easiest way to really appreciate what they do. And we have a, on my lab website, we have a page of videos where you can see how these bacteria migrate along magnetic fields and you can see images of them and you can see the structures within the solid with the magnesium. So clinic. So, so people go to [inaudible] [00:22:30] lab.org they can actually see videos of the bacteria. Great. Yeah, that'd be good. Yeah. Arash Kamali. Thanks very much for being on spectrum. Thank you so much. This was a lot of fun. Speaker 2: [inaudible]. You can follow Rajkot Maley on Twitter at micro magnet or you can watch them. Fantastic [00:23:00] sell videos on his website Oh Maley, that is k o n e I l I e lab.org and now a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next few weeks and Rick chronicity joins me in presenting the calendarSpeaker 3: this Monday. The California Academy of Sciences will host a talk by Dr. John Jenkins, [00:23:30] senior research scientist at the Seti Institute. Dr. Jenkins will speak about NASA search for other habitable planets. In 2009 NASA launched the space cough known as Kepler into orbit in order to survey our own region of the Milky Way. Kepler's has been looking for planets that are similar in size and distance from a son to our owners. In those four years. The probe has collected data on over 190,000 stars and confirmed over 130 new planets. Dr. Jenkins [00:24:00] will discuss the exciting you dated that capital has provided as well as a few of the technical and scientific challenges that went into building a vessel at Kepler. He will also give a brief overview of tests. NASA's next mission to detect earth's closest cousins. This event will be held Monday, July 15th at 7:30 PM in the planetarium of the California Academy of Sciences. Go to cal academy.org to reserve a ticket in advance. Speaker 6: The theme for July is adult science, happy hour science, [00:24:30] neat. His brains, brains, grains, everything you've always wanted to know about your brain and more. There'll be talks in demos on memory, truth and tricks, neurobiology, human brains, a sheep brain dissection and illusions. Science neat takes place at the El Rio bar. Three one five eight mission street in San Francisco and mission for those 21 and over is $4 this month's [00:25:00] science need is on Tuesday, July 16th with doors at six and then talks at six 30 Speaker 3: every Sunday. This month the UC Berkeley Botanical Gardens will be hosting special be explained explainer lectures about the importance of wild bees in the care and maintenance of all gardens and especially in the native California Habitat. The botanical garden also features and amazing collection of plants from nearly every continent. Although there is a focus on plants that thrive in our Mediterranean climate. [00:25:30] The Asian, Californian and South American collections are currently blooming. The garden will be open from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM most days. Although bee explainer tours are only offered from 11 to one 30 on Sundays, admission is $10 for adults and $8 for students. Speaker 6: On Saturday, July 20th at 11:00 AM Dr Steve Croft. We'll give the free public science at cal lecture on snacking gorgeous and cannibalizing the [00:26:00] feeding habits of black holes. Learn about the latest telescopes and how they are giving more information about how black holes grow and merge. Steve Leads the science at cal lecture series and as an assistant project astronomer working on large radio surveys and transient and variable astronomical sources. He helps commission the Allen Telescope Array for science operations and develop data analysis pipelines. He is an expert in the use of data at [00:26:30] a wide range of wavelengths from many different telescopes. The talk is@dwinellehallroomonefortyfivevisitscienceatcaldotberkeley.edu for more information and now Speaker 3: spectrum brings you some of our favorite stories in science and technology news. Rick Kaneski joins me again for the news science news summarized an article published on July 3rd in the proceedings of the royal society a about how surface [00:27:00] tension can lead to upstream contamination. Sebastian BN. Connie observed this when watching the preparation of Argentinian Montay t when hot water was poured from a pot into a container of leaves below some of the tea leaves float upward against the force of gravity and upstream of the water flow being Kinney and his colleagues from the University of Havana and from Rutgers showed through both experiments and simulations. [00:27:30] The particles can flow upstream several meters and up central meter high waterfalls because the downstream flow of clean water creates a gradient. What the container of t or other particles lowering the surface tension of the water, the particles are thus pulled into the clean water which has a greater surface tension. Speaker 3: The team also demonstrated that these results could have practical applications such as through the discharge of a standard pipette in other lab work [00:28:00] or in the simulated release of waste into larger scale channels. Indiana University scientist have transformed mouse embryonic stem cells into key structures of the inner ear. The discovery provides new insight into the sensory Oregon's developmental process and sets the stage for laboratory models of disease, drug discovery, and potential treatments for hearing loss and balance disorders. A research team led by ear. He has Chino Phd and Russi Holton. A professor [00:28:30] at the school of Medicine reported that by using a three dimensional cell culture method, they were able to Koch stem cells to develop into inner ear sensory epithelia containing hair cells, supporting cells and neurons that collectively detect sound had movement and gravity. The researchers reported online Wednesday in the journal Nature, Karl Kohler, the papers first author and a graduate student at the medical school said the three dimensional culture allows the cells to self [00:29:00] organize into complex tissues using mechanical cues that are found during embryonic development. Additional research is needed to determine how exactly inner ear cells involved in auditory sensing might develop as well as how these processes can be applied to develop human inner ear cells. Speaker 7: [inaudible] music heard during the shows witness produced by Alex. Thanks to Rick krones for contributing [00:29:30] to our news and calendar section and to Rene Rao for editing systems. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about [inaudible] about Speaker 3: the show, please send them to us via email Speaker 1: or email address is spectrum. Doug k a l x@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at the same time. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Arash Komeili cell biologist, Assc. Prof. plant and microbial biology UC Berkeley. His research uses bacterial magnetosomes as a model system to study the molecular mechanisms governing the biogenesis and maintenance of bacterial organelles. Part1TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 3: [inaudible] [inaudible]. Speaker 1: [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews, featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 4: Hi, and good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. We are doing another two part interview on spectrum. Our guest is Arash Kamali, [00:01:00] a cell biologist and associate professor of plant and microbial biology at cal Berkeley. His research uses bacterial magneta zones as a model system to study the molecular mechanisms governing the biogenesis and maintenance of bacterial organelles. Today. In part one, Arash walks us through what he is researching and how he was drawn to it in part two, which will air in two weeks. [00:01:30] He explains how these discoveries might be applied and he discusses the scientific outreach he does. Here's part one, a rush. Camelli. Welcome to spectrum. Thank you. I wanted to lay the groundwork a little bit. You're studying bacteria and why did you choose bacteria and not some other micro organism to study? One Speaker 5: practical motivation was that they're easier to study. They're easier to grow in [00:02:00] the lab. You can have large numbers of them. If you're interested in a specific process, you have the opportunity to go deep and try to really understand maybe all the different components that are involved in that process, but it wasn't necessarily a deliberate choice is just as I worked with them it became more and more fascinating and then I wanted to pursue it further. Speaker 4: And then the focus of your research on the bacteria, can you explain that? Speaker 5: Yeah, so we work with [00:02:30] a specific type of bacteria. They're called magnate as hectic bacteria and these are organisms that are quite widespread. You can find them in most aquatic environments by almost any sort of classification. You can really group them together if you take their shape or if you look at even the genes they have, the general genes they have, you can really group them into one specific group as opposed to many other bacteria that you can do that. But Unites Together as a group [00:03:00] is that they're, they're able to orient in magnetic fields and some along magnetic fields. This behavior was discovered quite by accident a couple of times independently. Somebody was looking under a microscope and they noticed that there were bacteria were swimming all in the same direction and they couldn't figure out why. They thought maybe the light from the window was attracting them or some other type of stimuli and they tried everything and they couldn't really figure out why the bacteria were swimming in one direction except they noticed that [00:03:30] regardless of where they were in the lab, they were always swimming in the same geographic direction and so they thought, well, the only thing we can think of that would attract them to the same position is the magnetic field, and they were able to show that sure enough, if you bring a magnet next to the microscope, you can change the swimming direction. Speaker 5: This type of behavior is mediated by a very special structure that the bacteria build inside of their cell, and this was sort of [00:04:00] what attracted me to it. Can you differentiate them? The UK erotic? Yeah. Then the bacterial, can you differentiate those two for us so that we kind of get a sense of is there, they're easy, different differentiate, you know the generally speaking you out excels, enclose their genetic material in an organelle called the nucleus. They're generally much bigger. They have a lot more genetic information associated with them and they have a ton of different kinds of organelles that perform [00:04:30] functions. All these Organelles to fall the proteins to break them down. They have organelles for generating energy, but all those little specific features, you know, you can find some bacterium that has organelles or you can find some bacterial solid that's really huge. Or you can find some bacteria so that encloses its DNA and an organelle. Speaker 5: It's just that you had accels have all of them together. Many of the living organisms that you encounter everyday because you can see them [00:05:00] very easily. Are you carry out, almost all of them are plants and fungi and animals. They're all made up of you. Charismatic cells. It's just that there's this whole unseen world of bacteria and what function does that capability serve, that magnetic functions that it can be realized that yet in many places on earth, the magnetic field will act as a guide through these changes in oxygen levels, sort of like a straight line through these. These [00:05:30] bacteria are stuck in these sort of magnetic field highways. It's thought to be a simpler method for finding the appropriate oxygen levels and simpler in this case means that they have to swim less as swimming takes energy. So the advantage is that they use less energy, get to the same place, that bacteria and that doesn't have the same capabilities relatively speaking, as a simple explanation, it's actually, because it is so simple, the model, you can kind of replicate [00:06:00] it in the lab a little bit. Speaker 5: If you set up a little tube that has the oxygen grading and then the bacteria will go to a certain place and you can actually see that they're sort of a band of bacteria at what they consider for them to be appropriate oxygen levels. And then if you inject some oxygen at the other end of the tube, the bacteria will swim away from this oxygen gradient. Now, if you give them a magnetic field that they can swim along, they can move away from this advancing oxygen threat much more quickly than [00:06:30] bacteria that can't navigate along magnetic fields. So that's sort of a proof of concept a little bit in the lab. There's a lot of reasons why it also doesn't make sense. For example, some of these bacteria make so many of these magnetic structures that we haven't talked about yet, but they make so many of these particles way more than they would ever need to orient in the magnetic field. Speaker 5: So it seems excessive. There are other bacteria that live in places on earth where there is not really this kind of a magnetic field guide. And in those environments there's [00:07:00] plenty of other bacteria that don't have these magneto tactic capabilities and they still can find that specific oxygen zone very easily. So in some ways I think it is an open question but there isn't really enough yet to refute the kind of the generally accepted model on the movement part of it. You were mentioning that they use magnetic field to move backwards and forwards. Only explain the limiting factor. Yeah, that's [00:07:30] an important point actually because it's not that they use the magnetic field for sensing in a way. It's not that they are getting pulled or pushed by the magnetic field. They are sort of passively aligned and the magnetic field sort of like if you have two bar magnets and if one of them is perpendicular to the other one and you bring the other one closer, I'll just move until they're parallel to each other. Speaker 5: This is the same thing. The bacteria have essentially a bar magnet and inside of the cell and so the alignment to the magnetic field [00:08:00] is passive that you can kill the bacteria and they'll still align with the magnetic field. The swimming takes advantage of structures and and machines that are found in all bacteria essentially. So they have flagella that they can use to swim back and forth as you mentioned. And they have a whole bunch of other different kinds of systems for sensing the amount of oxygen or other materials that they're interested in to figure out, should I keep swimming or should I stop swimming? And [00:08:30] as I mentioned earlier, the bacteria are quite diverse. So when you look at different magnatech active bacteria, the types of flagella they have are also different from each other. So it's not one universal mechanism for the swimming, it's just the idea that that the swimming is limited by these magnetic field lines. Speaker 6: [inaudible] [inaudible]. Speaker 5: Our guest today on spectrum is [inaudible] Chameleon, a cell biologist Speaker 7: and associate professor at cal Berkeley. In our next segment, [00:09:00] Arash talks about what attracted him to study the magnetism and why it remains in some bacteria and not others. This is k a l x Berkeley. So Speaker 5: let's talk about the magnetic zone, right? This is sort of my fascination. I was a graduate student at UCF and I studied cell biology. I use the yeast, which are not bacteria but in many ways they are kind of like bacteria. They're much simpler to study than maybe other do care attic [00:09:30] organisms and we have genetics available and so I was very fascinated by east, but I was studying a problem with XL organization and communication within the cell and yeast. We were taught sort of as students in cell biology at the time, that cell organization and having compartments in the cell organelles basically that do different functions was very unique feature of you carry attic cells and there's one of the things I've defined them. I received my phd to do a postdoctoral fellowship. I happen to be [00:10:00] in interviewing at cal tech and professor Mel Simon there he was talking about all kinds of bacteria that he was interested in and he said there's these bacteria that have organelles and I just, it kind of blew my mind because we were told explicitly that that's not true and in many textbooks, even today it still says that bacteria don't have organelles. Speaker 5: I learned more about men and I learned that these magnatech to bacteria that we've been talking about so far, you can actually build a structure inside of the cell, out of their cell membrane and within [00:10:30] this membrane compartment, it's essentially a little factory for making magnetic particles so they can build crystals of mineral called magnetite, which is just an iron oxide. Every three or four and some organisms make a different kind of magnetic minerals called Greg [inaudible], which is an iron sulfur mineral, but these are perfect little crystals, about 50 nanometers in diameter, and they make a chain of these magnesiums, so these membrane enclosed magnetic particles. [00:11:00] This chain is sort of on one side of the cell and it allows the bacteria to orient and magnetic fields because each of those crystals has this magnetic dipole moment in the same direction and all those little dipole moments interact with each other to make a little bar magnet, a little compass needle essentially that forces the bacterium to Orient in the magnetic field. Speaker 5: When I heard about this, I realized that this is just incredibly fascinating. Nobody really knew how it was that the membrane compartment forum [00:11:30] or even if it formed first and the mineral formed inside of it. There wasn't much or anything known about the proteins that were involved in building the compartment and then making the magnetic particle. It just seemed like something that needed to be studied and it was fascinating to me and I've been working on it for 1213 years now. Have we covered what the of the magnetic is that idea behind the function of the magnetism, which is the [00:12:00] structures of the cells build to allow them to align with a magnetic field. We think that function is to simplify the search for low oxygen environments. That's the main model in our field and I think there are definitely some groups that are actively working on understanding that aspect of the behavior better. Speaker 5: How it is that the bacteria can find a certain oxygen concentration. These bacteria in particular, what are the mechanics of them swimming along [00:12:30] the magnetic field and the, is there some other explanation for why they do this? For example, if they are changing orientations into magnetic field, can they sense the strain that the magnetic field is putting onto the cell? Can that be sensed somehow and then used for some work down the line and there are groups that are actively pursuing those kinds of ideas. You were mentioning that this is a particular kind of bacteria that has this capability, right, and others don't. Right. Yet both seem to be equally [00:13:00] effective and populating the water areas that you're studying. No apparent advantage. Disadvantage, so winning in Canada? Yeah, I mean it's a lot of the Darwinian, you could say as long as it's not severely disadvantageous, then maybe they wouldn't be a push for it to be lost. Speaker 5: What is kind of intriguing a little bit is there's examples of magna detective bacteria in many different groups, phylogenetic groups, so many different types of species that will be, let's [00:13:30] say bacterium that normally just lives free in the ocean and then I'll have a relative that's very similar to it, but it's also a magnet, a tactic. In recent years, people have studied this a little bit more and we know now what are the specific set of genes that allow bacteria to become magnetic tactic. So you can look at those genes specifically and say, how is it that bacteria that are otherwise so different from each other can all perform the same function? And if you know the genes that build the structures that allow them to orient [00:14:00] the magnetic fields, you can look at how different those genes are from each other or has similar they are. Speaker 5: And normally with a lot of these types of behaviors in bacteria, there's something called horizontal gene transfer that explains how it is that otherwise similar bacteria can have different functionalities. For example, you can think of that as bacteria being cars and everybody has sort of the same standard set of know features on the car. But you can add on different features if you want to. So you can upgrade and have other kinds of features like leather [00:14:30] seats or regular seats. And so the two cars that have different kinds of seats are very similar to each other. It's just one that got the leather seats. And so these partly are thought to occur by bacteria exchanging genes with each other. Somebody who wasn't magna tactic maybe got these jeans from another organism, but when people look at the genes that make these mag Nita zones, these magnetic structures inside of the cell, what you see is that they appear to be very, very ancient. Speaker 5: So it doesn't seem like there was a lot of recent [00:15:00] exchange of genes between these various groups of bacteria to make them magna tactic. And it almost seems to map to the ancestral divergence of all of these bacteria from each other. One big idea is that the last common ancestor of all these organisms was mag new tactic and that many, many other bacteria have sort of lost this capability over what would be almost 2 billion years of evolution for these bacteria. And then some have retained it. [00:15:30] Those of that have retained it is it's still serving an advantage for them, or is it just sort of Vista GL and they have it and they're sort of stuck in magnetic fields and they have to deal with it? No, but nobody really knows. Actually. The other option is that there was a period of horizontal gene transfer, but it was a very long time ago so that the signature is sort of lost from, again, a couple of billion years of evolution or divergence from each other, but it really looks like whenever this process happened, it was quite anxious. Speaker 3: [00:16:00] You are listening to spectrum on KALX Berkeley. Our guest is Arash [inaudible]. In the next segment, rush talks about organelles in bacterial cells. Speaker 5: [00:16:30] Explain what the Organelle is, so there's a lot of functions within the cell that need to be enclosed in a compartment for various reasons. You can have a biochemical reaction that's not very efficient, but if you put it in within a compartment and concentrates, all of the components that carry that reaction, it can be carried out more efficiently. The other thing is that for some reactions to to happen, you need a chemical environment that's different than the rest of the cellular environment. You can't convert [00:17:00] the whole environment of the cell to that one condition. So by compartmentalizing it you able to carry it out and often the products of these reactions can be toxic to the rest of the cell. And so by componentizing again you can keep the toxic conditions away from the rest of the, so these are the different reasons why you care how to excels. Speaker 5: Like the cells in our body have organelles that do different things like how proteins fold or modify proteins break him down and in bacterial cells it [00:17:30] was thought that they're so simple and so small that they don't really have a need for compartments. Although for many years people have had examples of bacteria that do form compartments. You carrot axles are big and Organelles are really easy to see where the light microscope so you can easily see that the cell has compartments within it. Whereas a lot of bacteria are well studied, are quite simple, they don't have much visible structure within them. And that's maybe even further the bias that there is some divide and this [00:18:00] allowed you carry out access to become more complex, quote unquote, and then it just doesn't exist in bacteria. How is it that they then were revealed? I think they'd been revealed for a long time. Speaker 5: You know, for example, there's electron microscope images from 40 years ago or more where you see for example, photosynthetic bacteria, these are bacteria that can do photosynthesis. They have extensive membrane structures inside of the cell that how's the proteins that harvest light and carry [00:18:30] out photosynthesis and they're, it seems like the idea for having an Organelle is that you just increased it area that you can use for photosynthesis sorta like you just have more solar panels if you just keep spreading the solar panels. Right. So that in this way, by just sort of making wraps of membranes inside of the cell, you just increased the amount of space that you can harvest light. So those were known for a long time and I think it just wasn't a problem that was studied from the perspective of cell biology and cell [00:19:00] organization that much. That's sort of a different angle that people are bringing to it now with many different bacterial organelles. Speaker 5: And part of the reason why it's important to think of it that way is that of course what the products of the bike chemistry inside of the Organelles is fascinating and really important to understand. But to build the organ out itself is also a difficult thing. So for example, you have to bend and remodel the cell membrane [00:19:30] to create, whether it's a sphere or it's wraps of membrane, and that is not a energetically favorable thing to do. It's not easy. So in your cataract cells, we know that there are specific proteins and protein machines. Then their only job is really to bend and remodeled the membrane cause it's not going to happen by itself very easily. And with all of these different structures that are now better recognized in bacteria, we really have no idea how it is that they performed the same function. Is [00:20:00] it using the same types of proteins as what we know in your care at excels or are they using different kinds of proteins? Speaker 5: That was sort of a very basic question to ask. How similar or different is it than how you carry? Like some makes an Oregon own fester was one of the first inspirations for us to study this process in magnatech the bacteria. And what sort of tools are you using to parse this information? In our field we use various tools and it's turned out to be incredibly beneficial [00:20:30] because different approaches have sort of converged on the same answer. So my basic focus was to use genetics as a tool. And the idea here was if we go in and randomly mutate or delete genes in these bacteria and then see which of these random mutations results in a loss of the magnetic phenotype and prevents the cell from making the magnetism Organelles, then maybe we know [00:21:00] those genes that are potentially involved. And so that was sort of what I perfected during my postdoctoral fellowship. Speaker 5: And that was my main approach to study the problem. And then on top of that, the other approach has been really helpful for us. And this is again something we've worked on is once we know some of the candidate proteins to be able to study them, their localization in the cell and they're dynamics, we modify the protein. So that they're linked to fluorescent proteins. So then we can, uh, use for us in this microscopy to follow them within the cell. [00:21:30] Other people, their approach was to say, well, these structures are magnetic. If we break open the cell, we can use a magnet and try to separate the magnesiums from the rest of the cell material. And then if we have the purified magnesiums, we can look to see what kinds of proteins are associated with them and sort of guilt by association. If there is a protein there, it should do something or maybe it does something. Speaker 5: That was the other approach. And the final approach that's been really helpful, [00:22:00] particularly because Magno take it back to your, our diverse, as we talked about earlier, is to take representatives that are really distantly related to each other and sequence their genomes. So get the sequence of their DNA and see what are the things that they have in common with each other. Take two organisms that live in quite different environments and their lineages are quite different from each other, but they both can do this magnetic tactic behavior. And by doing that, people again found [00:22:30] some genes and so if you take the genes that we found by genetics, random mutations of the cell by isolating the magnesiums and cy counting their proteins, and then by doing the genome sequencing, it all converges on the same set of genes. Speaker 2: [inaudible] this concludes part one of our [00:23:00] interview. We'll be sure to catch part two Friday July 12th at noon. Spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. Speaker 7: The link is tiny url.com/calex spectrum. Now a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Speaker 5: Rick Karnofsky [00:23:30] joins me for the calendar on the 4th of July the exploratorium at pier 15 in San Francisco. He's hosting there after dark event for adults 18 and over from six to 10:00 PM the theme for the evening is boom, Speaker 4: learn the science of fireworks, the difference between implosions and explosions and what happens when hot water meets liquid nitrogen tickets are $15 and are available from www.exploratorium.edu [00:24:00] the Santa Clara County Parks has organized an early morning van ride adventure into the back country. To a large bat colony view the bat tornado and learn about the benefits of our local flying mammals. Meet at the park office. Bring a pad to sit on and dress in layers for changing temperatures. This will happen Saturday July six from 4:00 AM to 7:00 AM at Calero County Park [00:24:30] and Santa Clara. Reservations are required to make a reservation call area code (408) 268-3883 Saturday night July six there are two star parties. One is in San Carlos and the other is near Mount Hamilton. The San Carlos event is hosted by the San Mateo Astronomical Society and is held in Crestview Park San Carlos. If you would like to help [00:25:00] with setting up a telescope or would like to learn about telescopes come at sunset which will be 8:33 PM if you would just like to see the universe through a telescope come one or two hours after sunset. Speaker 4: The other event is being hosted by the Halls Valley Astronomical Group. Knowledgeable volunteers will provide you with a chance to look through a variety of telescopes and answer questions about the night. Sky Meet at the Joseph D. Grant ranch county park. [00:25:30] This event starts at 8:30 PM and lasted until 11:00 PM for more information. Call area code (408) 274-6121 July is skeptical hosted by the bay area. Skeptics is on exoplanet colonization down to earth planning. Join National Center for Science Education Staffer and Cal Alum, David Alvin Smith for a conversation [00:26:00] about the proposed strategies to reach other star systems which proposals might work and which certainly won't at the La Pena Lounge. Three one zero five Shattuck in Berkeley on Wednesday July 10th at 7:30 PM the event is free. For more information, visit [inaudible] skeptics.org the computer history museum presents Intel's Justin Ratiner in conversation with John Markoff. Justin Ratner is a corporate [00:26:30] vice president and the chief technology officer of Intel Corporation. He is also an Intel senior fellow and head of Intel labs where he directs Intel's global research efforts in processors, programming systems, security communications, and most recently user experience. Speaker 4: And interaction as part of Intel labs. Ratner is also responsible for funding academic research worldwide through its science and technology centers, [00:27:00] international research institutes and individual faculty awards. This event is happening on Wednesday, July 10th at 7:00 PM the Computer History Museum is located at 1401 north shoreline boulevard in mountain view, California. A feature of spectrum is to present news stories we find interesting. Rick Karnofsky and I present the News Katrin on months and others from the Eulich Research Center in Germany have published the results of their big brain [00:27:30] project. A three d high resolution map of a human brain. In the June 21st issue of science, the researchers cut a brain donated by a 65 year old woman into 7,404 sheets, stain them and image them on a flatbed scanner at a resolution of 20 micrometers. The data acquisition alone took a thousand hours and created a terabyte of data that was analyzed by seven super competing facilities in Canada. Speaker 4: Damn. Making the data [00:28:00] free and publicly available from modeling and simulation to UC Berkeley. Graduate students have managed to more accurately identify the point at which our earliest ancestors were invaded by bacteria that were precursors to organelles like Mitochondria and chloroplasts. Mitochondria are cellular powerhouses while chloroplasts allow plant cells to convert sunlight into glucose. These two complex organelles are thought to have begun as a result of a symbiotic relationship between single cell [00:28:30] eukaryotic organisms and bacterial cells. The graduate students, Nicholas Matzke and Patrick Schiff, examined genes within the organelles and larger cell and compared them using Bayesians statistics. Through this analysis, they were able to conclude that a protio bacterium invaded UCR writes about 1.2 billion years ago in line with earlier estimates and that asino bacterium which had already developed photosynthesis, invaded eukaryotes [00:29:00] 900 million years ago, much later than some estimates which are as high as 2 billion years ago. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 4: The music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Speaker 3: Interview editing assistance by Renee round. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via [00:29:30] email or email address is spectrum dot [inaudible] dot com join us in two weeks. This same time. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dr. Thomas Immel is Assistant Research Physicist at SSL at UC Berkeley. His expertise is interpretation of remote-sensing data and modeling of physical processes in the upper atmosphere & ionosphere. His work includes UV imaging observations from 4 NASA missions. ICON.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible]. Speaker 1: [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Today's interview is part two of our two part interview with Thomas Emel. Thomas is an assistant research [00:01:00] physicist at the space sciences laboratory at UC Berkeley. In April of this year, NASA selected the Ayana spheric connection explorer known as icon to be the next heliophysics explorer satellite mission. The icon mission is to be led by the space sciences laboratory at UC Berkeley. Thomas Emo is the principal investigator of the icon mission icon will be providing NASA's heliophysics [00:01:30] division with a powerful new capability to determine the conditions in space modified by weather on the planet and to understand the way space weather events grow to envelop regions of our planet with dense Ayana spheric plasma. In today's interview, Dr Emo talks in detail about the icon explorer. He gets into the instruments that will be on the icon. What they hope to learn from the mission, [00:02:00] the schedule for the project and the orbit they hope to achieve and what will happen to the data they collect onto the interview. NASA has recently selected the Speaker 4: space sciences lab to do icon and congratulations are in order. Do you want to describe the icon project and how that's come together? Yeah, well thanks. It's been a long process. It was sort of a glimmer in our eye when we first were discovering this [00:02:30] things about the coupling of the atmosphere in the ionosphere, which I've talked about and how it's much stronger than we ever expected and structured and variable. And basically at some point it was unexplainable. And when we devise the mission, we wanted a mission that would measure not one particular thing, but it would measure each of the key parameters of the system that you need to put together to understand, let's drive in the system and how is the system responding? So this was the design for icon and a little bit more flushed out on our, which is icon.ssl.berkeley.edu [00:03:00] explaining what icon stands for to ionosphere connection explorer. Speaker 4: It's one of these things where you come up with an acronym. It sounds so good. Then later on you've tried to figure out what it meant and so we were close but I came up with icon and we have some discussions. We improved it and we basically just simplified it to ionosphere connection and it seemed to make a, it told, it says, well we want to say ins your connection explore because we are in the explorer line, but [00:03:30] icon x didn't sound is too long, so it's just icon. So you have to pitch this to NASA. Right, right. And so you have to verify that all your instruments are going to work and think what's the process of getting, you have the idea, but then there's more to it than that. Obviously in this mode, NASA has some different modes of missions. They have one where this is our mission. Speaker 4: Tell us what instruments you want to put on it. And we'll talk to you maybe and they select your instruments [00:04:00] and then you're on for the ride and the instruments have to meet some requirements and so forth. In this case it's up to the Pi, the principal investigator, to select the right instruments for the science to clearly define the science goals and the requirements for the instruments and demonstrate to the instruments, meet those requirements. So that's the mode we're working in. So it helps to have previously flown instruments that have demonstrated capability. If you don't have a exact replica of an instrument or you're doing some new [00:04:30] changes to an instrument design, then you have to model and predict how their instrument is going to behave on orbit and its capability and show them how much margin you have in your current design. So for instance, we need to know how the plasma is moving in space at all times with accuracy of five meters per second. Speaker 4: And we have a capability of three meters per second. So we have some 60% margin on that value. Do they believe it while we are flying basically a copy of that instrument right now that has that capability [00:05:00] or it would have that capability if they had the pointing capability on the current spacecraft that is flying on. There's a little bit of pointing control and knowledge that we're going to be able to provide better than maybe the last one. So you have to roll all these things in. You know, you have to have the instrument providers talking and knowledgeable of the capability of the spacecraft. You need the spacecraft and know those requirements or the instruments. While you said you need pointed like this, but do you need pointing for three seconds or three minutes or three hours? And so you [00:05:30] have to facilitate a lot of conversations and a lot of discussion in the the principal investigator and basically it's a systems engineering problem through and through and you need a great system engineering look and you need systems engineers in each department talking to each other with the overarching system engineer on the project, making sure that everyone's messages are being conveyed and everything's being captured in your requirements. Speaker 4: Pitching it to NASA. Yeah, we've been through this now twice. This is our second time around when we weren't [00:06:00] selected the first time. Everyone said, well it takes twice, so don't worry about it. Well it was, it was no fun, but we did it twice. And so luckily I don't have to sit here and say, third time's a charm. Uh, we're really pleased to be able to do this now and we think we have a great concept. How much change between the first and the second approach to NASA? Well, we added some capability. We added some real capability to spin the spacecraft very quickly to make measurements here and there. We enhanced the capability of the [00:06:30] spacecraft basically to support a number of different experimental modes that we wanted to be able to perform that they original spacecraft didn't actually have. So we want to spend the whole thing in three minutes. Speaker 4: The whole spacecraft has to spin like a top and three minutes to capture the atmosphere moving in this way and then moving in that way. We want it all. So the new spacecraft's got that. It's got a lot more power to go with that. You need more power. Needed bigger, bigger solar panels to meet your margins on meeting your science goals. We brought [00:07:00] on new team members. We added naval research lab. They're great partners in science and are really one of the original places in the United States for investigations of the upper atmosphere and ionosphere. It's nice to have them on board to have a great wind instrument for imaging. We can image of the wind, which is really cool. Speaker 1: Our guest today is Thomas Emo and the next segment Thomas [00:07:30] talks about the icon instruments and what the project scientists hope to learn from icon. This is KALX Berkeley. Speaker 4: Are there any interesting stories in terms of getting the instruments fleshed out? Testing a design, two instruments [00:08:00] coming from Berkeley and two from other institutions. Ut Dallas and naval research lab. Each instrument is different. The navel instrument coming from naval research lab is a Michelson interferometer and Michelson invented the interferometer to prove that the earth was not moving through an ether back in 1903 so it's not a new instrument, but don't tell NASA. It's not as new instrument. It's a Michaelson guys come on. But they took a very close look at that. It's a very new implementation of a Michelson that's been [00:08:30] proven on the ground and proven in space actually, but in a little different way that was used in space previously. Uh, the UV instruments one is an astronomical instrument that was created to measure one photon at a time, which we have a lot more photons now, so we've got to take off the whole back end electronics that made sure that every photon was actually a photon a, we don't need that anymore. Speaker 4: I'm happy to say because it was massive. We just have the front end of the spectrograph and it's a beautiful little instrument, the far ultraviolet [00:09:00] instrument, which is a little different as an imager and it's a near copy of the one we flew on image, which was the imager we used to make the original observation of the variability in the ionosphere. And again, the Ut Dallas instrument has been flown, I don't know, 20 times. You like to have no interesting stories with your instruments that have whatsoever, so I'm sorry to say. What's interesting is that, you know, it was getting all these instruments that had a lot of heritage, had a lot of experience on orbit, and putting them in the same place on the same time, giving them enough, powering, [00:09:30] putting them in the right directions and designing the science mission to support this. Speaker 4: The interesting thing is the magnetic field at the low latitudes constraints, the plasma controls the plasma at low latitudes where we're going, we're flying out to Florida and we'll never come that far north again. We're going to do a little burn to get to lower latitudes, not too low that we can still operate it from space sciences. I would Berkeley with our dish, we'll still be able to see it in the sky. We're on the magnetic field that we're measuring every, so we're measuring the motion of the plasma and the magnetic field, [00:10:00] and we're measuring the winds and the conductivity all along the magnetic field. The winds of the neutral atmosphere on the conductivity of the ionosphere that together control the electric fields that are generated in the low latitude dynamo or there's a dynamo, it's like a motor where you take a conductor and you run it through a magnetic field, you get a current. So we're on that magnetic field and we're measuring the processes occurring along that magnetic field that drive the currents, that low latitudes. So putting together that mission concept [00:10:30] was actually the interesting part for us and deciding what altitude we had to be at, what inclination was the best trade off for measuring those atmospheric tides, which are extensive and being right at the magnetic equator where you'd like to spend quite a bit of time making these coupled measurements. Speaker 3: Within those discussions, do you rely more on what you know about what's happening or is it blue sky and you're thinking about what are we going to find out? Speaker 4: Hmm, I see. [00:11:00] That's a good question. So depending on who you talk to, we know a lot about the ionosphere and its interaction with the thermosphere, but we have no idea why it changes so much from day to day. And one of the reasons we think we really don't have a handle on that is because we don't have a good measurement of the driver of where that energy is and most of the energies in the atmosphere. So we think that the key to understanding the variability atmospheres to measure that driver first while [00:11:30] you're measuring the response to the ionosphere. So we're measuring the neutral windless first, the motion of the atmosphere, but also key to that is you know how much plasma is on that field line. How much of an electric field are you generating by pushing that plasma across the magnetic field with that wind. Speaker 4: So you need to measure the ionosphere at the same time. Those are overarching belief that the neutral wind is really important. Why is it important? Is it because of the neutral wind pushing the plasma around and suppressing it, keeping it down [00:12:00] or blowing it up? Or is it the electric field that's comes from the Dynamo action itself of the neutral wind pushing the plasma around? Or is it something to do with the temperatures that vary from, you know, this large temperature variability that comes with the tides that can affect the whole upper atmosphere and change how the plasma recombines how it settles at night and change the composition of the apparatus here. One thing I didn't talk about is how in the upper atmosphere that different species separate, so the heavy stuff like and [00:12:30] to basically sits at the bottom of the upper atmosphere, but atomic oxygen becomes a dominant species and as you go up in altitude, the ratio of oxygen, the nitrogen changes, and that's not something that happens anywhere else below a hundred kilometers. Speaker 4: So there's a number of things that can control the atmosphere. And I guess where you'd like to be is being able to predict what's going to happen tomorrow. And if there is a key parameter that you could save yourself some time and going out and measuring instead of flying icon [00:13:00] again, you would fly, say a constellation measure in one thing. Then we should be able to inform that process and inform the next mission or this next space weather mission is trying to capture the most important parameter for predicting the conditions in the atmosphere. Uh, you may be able to reduce your set of measurements we are carrying to enter for ominous for instruments. We're measuring the east, west and the north south wind. Well one of them might make no difference whatsoever and you just need to carry one and [00:13:30] Gosh, you know, it's really, really bright and you only need to measure this part of it. So maybe your requirements aren't so strict as what icon had to carry. You carry a smaller instrument with a smaller detector and a smaller aperture. So there's some things that we can inform in the future. Speaker 2: [inaudible] you are listening to spectrum on Kal experts. Our guest today is Thomas Ilk. In the next [00:14:00] segment Thomas Talks about the icon project integration, presenting the data and how long icon will remain on orbit. And so how long is it? Is Speaker 4: the project going to take the construction side of it before you launch? We're looking at a three and a half year development, so a year of design and then NASA takes a [00:14:30] strong interest in us from now on. I've been arms length for this whole time since it's been a competitive selection. We've haven't really had any time to talk to NASA about what do you really, what do you think, what is this going to work? How you guys gonna like this, you know, we just have to say everything that we think is needed and prepare the way we think and also how NASA requirements cause us to work, do our best job to put together NASA mission. Uh, now we're going to be finally working with NASA very closely on this. So, [00:15:00] um, we have a year of design and then two and a half years of build, which gets us onto this launch vehicle we had planned for a late 2016. Speaker 4: I'm seeing signs that we're probably gonna slip to 2017. So our launch in 2017 is what we're currently planning, but we haven't had our first discussions with NASA yet. They are getting their marvels together and we are too. And we're going to meet later this month and start planning for the future, but we should be launched in 2017 the other instruments are [00:15:30] going to be built at Texas naval research. Yup. And here at the space sciences lab. And then how do you integrate, is that so far out in the distance that you're not there yet? No, we're, we'll integrate here. So the spacecraft has a payload plate where we'll integrate all the instruments on the plate and deliver the instruments all at one time as one unified payload with one interface. So we also build a box that talks to all the instruments that knows what their outputs are that [00:16:00] interfaces to each of them. Speaker 4: So along with our delivery of the instruments to orbital sciences, who's our spacecraft provider will deliver a interface box. So that'll actually go on their side. It'll mount on the spacecraft, but our side is just the payload plate and we'll do that as space sciences lab. And do you end up publishing papers as a result of this or is it really just a making all the data available with something that we've invested a lot of work and time [00:16:30] into the old battle days that you'd sit on your data and never release it and publish all the papers and take all the credit and NASA doesn't support that model anymore. All of our data have to be supplied freely and openly within 30 or 60 days. I forget the exact requirement and so we'll be helping all these other investigators as well get into the data. Speaker 4: So our job is to make the data as plain as possible. What I'm really interested in doing is how to visualize those data so someone can download say a movie or a [00:17:00] some other tool that would really give them our Google earth click here and you show up in Google earth and you can spin around the planet and look at things the way you want to look at them. And instead of writing to particular software, I mean a lot of people don't want to write any software or want to have a look at the data and probably make some headway before getting too deeply into analysis just by having a good view of what you've got. So we will be providing a number of tools to let people do that. I envision a lot of papers coming out of, uh, from these [00:17:30] data and me s I'll be involved in that. Speaker 4: Our team, a number of co-investigators, a lot of professors around the u s at Colorado and Illinois for instance, and at Cornell to make the best sense, we can have our observations given our immediate knowledge of what the spacecraft doing, it's capability, the uncertainties of the measurements and so forth. So certainly expect to be involved in that. It's been a little bit of a lull in my publication career working [00:18:00] on this mission over the past few years, but I think that's going to change as soon as we get on orbit. I'm really looking into looking forward to, uh, just the other day I was writing some code again, I felt fantastic. You know, I've been writing word documents for many years now and it's just been great to get back into some data. And so I really look forward to having the data from his mission as well. And how long will icon fly? Speaker 4: We have a two year mission that we've proposed. [00:18:30] Most heliophysics missions do go into an extended phase. You usually find things that are new and exciting or find other collaborations you'd like to do or other science you'd like to science goals that you might like to achieve in another two years. So we'll have that capability to extend as well. But we actually don't have any fuel on the spacecraft. So we'll be coming home probably 12 or 15 years. Uh, we started 550 kilometer altitude circular orbit, so a nice stable orbit, but eventually it'll be coming back. [00:19:00] But that's the longterm short term is to get up and do our two year mission and then talk about the future. But we will be on orbit for a decade and in terms of coming back to earth, do you have to plot out when and how that'll happen as best you can or is that a randomness to the whole thing? Speaker 4: The only control you have is on the how. You can't the solar panels possibly to try to control the three entry and in our case it will be uncontrolled reentry. A, you need a rocket to take you home if you're going to say [00:19:30] it's controlled, but what we have shown is that everything's going to burn up. Once you crash into the lower atmosphere. Again, you end up burning up everything, all the aluminum and all the gear and all the glass. It does burn up it so it doesn't pose a hazard to any people. Right. Anything below and the chances of running into something else up there, there's something that will be predictable at the time. Yes. You literally, you could camp to solar panels in a wrong direction for a while. Stop Science ops and for a week do something [00:20:00] with your solar panels or see if the guys you're going to fly into are interested in not colliding. Speaker 4: Maybe they have some fuel. For instance, the space station. I don't see any, uh, there's a lot of space in space. Uh, although it's a lot of junk too. There's a lot of junk and we're more concerned about that than ever. We're almost to that point, right where it's just going to start growing no matter what we do. So we don't want to contribute to that. Everything attached to icon will be coming home in 15 years or we're not allowed to contribute to the [00:20:30] problem. Thomas emo. Thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Okay. Thank you very much. Good luck with icon. Thanks. Getting go. Have you back after. That'd be great. Where along the way maybe. Well, here's some horror stories. Well, every mission, some terrifying moments. Speaker 5: So I know that at least I know that now we look forward to that development though and it's going to be a great mission for Berkeley and for NASA. Thanks again. Thank you. Speaker 6: Okay. Speaker 2: [00:21:00] The icon explorer mission website is icon dot s s l. Dot. berkeley.edu Speaker 6: Oh [inaudible] Speaker 2: [00:21:30] now a few of the science and technology events are happening locally over the next two weeks. Rick Karnofsky and Renee Raul join me for the calendar Speaker 5: as part of the second international by annual evolution and cancer conference. USCSF is hosting a free public lecture at 7:00 PM Tonight in the Robertson Auditorium on their mission bay campus. Popular Science Writer Carl Zimmer. [00:22:00] We'll pose the question is cancer or Darwinian demon after his talk science rapper Baba Brinkman will perform selections from the wrap guide to evolution and a preview of his forthcoming rep guide to medicine. For more information, visit cancer dot ucs F. Dot Edu tomorrow. The Science at Cau lecture series will hold it. Student talk, a discussion by the Berkeley Professor [00:22:30] Mariska Craig about the two types of galaxies in the known universe. Well, most consider galaxies as the building blocks of the universe to be incredibly diverse. Professor Creek divides them into two broad types. Those that make new stars and those that don't. Professor Creek will discuss her reasons for making the distinctions and theories over how the differences are originated. The speech will begin tomorrow at 11:00 AM in room 100 of the genetics and plant biology building on the northwest corner of the UC Berkeley campus. [00:23:00] How Lou Longo from the New York botanical garden is giving a three hour introduction to botanical Latin at the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden located at 200 centennial drive on June 22nd learn the names for plants and the way the names are constructed from Latin and Greek. He'll also give simple rules of thumb to pronounce. Plant names with confidence and mission is $30 [00:23:30] register online@botanicalgardendotberkeley.edu June 27th is the exploratorium is Thursday night. Adults only program featuring two physicists discussing the prodigious and Speaker 3: startling theoretical leaps and the epic experimental program that produced the monumental discovery of the Higgs bows on the physicists will be Maria Spira, Pullo Phd and experimental physicist [00:24:00] from Cern and Joanne Hewitt, Phd, a theoretical physicist from Stanford linear accelerator. The 7:30 PM lecture is included with museum admission and we'll have limited seating in the discussion. Spiro Pullo and Hewitt will also explore the implications discovering the Higgs has for future inquiries in physics. Beyond shedding light on the way elementary particles acquire mass, [00:24:30] understanding the Higgs mechanism will likely push the frontiers of fundamental science towards a greater understanding of our universe. June 27th at the exploratorium in San Francisco at 7:30 PM Speaker 7: [inaudible].Speaker 3: [00:25:00] The feature of spectrum is to present news stories that we find interesting. Rick Karnofsky and Renee arou present the news. Speaker 5: A team of researchers led by Lawrence Berkeley national labs. Paulo Monteiro has analyzed a slab of concrete that has drifted in the Mediterranean Sea for the past 2000 years. [00:25:30] The ancient Robin's lab proved to be more durable than most of today's concretes as well as more sustainably made. The creation process of modern Portland cement usually requires temperatures of up to 2,642 degrees Fahrenheit and the fossil fuels burned to reach that temperature are responsible for 7% of industry carbon emissions worldwide. The composition of the Roman slab is such that it can be baked at only 1,652 degrees Fahrenheit, [00:26:00] which would require far less fuel making the production of Roman concrete, both greener and glass expensive. The other concrete uses ash from volcanic regions in the Gulf of Naples that can be reacted with lime and sea water to create mortar chemically similar ash known as Paul is on can still be found in many parts of the world today. Well, currently there are a few green concretes that do use ash in their manufacturing process. This lab has provided the industry with concrete proof of the long term performance [00:26:30] of aspace summit. Yeah. The elusive electron orbitals of the hydrogen atom have been observed directly. Anita stir donut at the FLM for atomic Speaker 6: and molecular physics in Amsterdam. Mark Rakin at the Max Borne Institute in Berlin and their colleagues published these findings in physical review letters. On May 20th the team implemented photo ionization microscopy [00:27:00] first proposed theoretically over 30 years ago. They used UV lasers to excite electrons and then Adam placed and then electric field. These photo electrons went through electromagnetic lenses which focused them onto a CCD detector by collecting tens of thousands of electrons. The team map the shape of the orbitals. Speaker 5: This may you see Berkeley's Ecig Museum of entomology opened a new [00:27:30] citizens science project known as cow book. The museum has begun posting high resolution photos of its more than 1 million specimens and accompanying field notes to the cow bug website where anyone with an interest in the bugs can transcribe the original handwritten information about the specimens, origins and collection. The project is an effort to digitize terrestrial arthropod specimen records with a focus on those hailing from California. The cal boat science team will then use the [00:28:00] newly digitized data to assess how insects have responded to climate change and habit modification over time. The museum began a project in collaboration with eight other California museums in 2010 after realizing that cataloging their vast collection would be impossible with their small staff. The resulting website known as notes from nature host the cow book project as well as her Berrien and ornithological collections. Also waiting to be classified. You can take a look@theircollectionsandperhapsstarttranscribingatnotesfromnature.org Speaker 7: [00:28:30] [inaudible] music or during the show was written, produced by Alex Simon [inaudible]. Spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. The link to the archive is incomprehensible, Speaker 1: so we created a short link for you. That [00:29:00] link is tiny, url.com/ [inaudible] spectrum, all one word. That's tiny, url.com/cadillacs spectrum. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l x@yahoo.com Speaker 6: join us in two [00:29:30] weeks at this same time. [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dr. Thomas Immel is Assistant Research Physicist at SSL at UC Berkeley. His expertise is interpretation of remote-sensing data and modeling of physical processes in the upper atmosphere & ionosphere. His work includes UV imaging observations from 4 NASA missions. ICON.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. [inaudible]. Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews [00:00:30] featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Today's interview is part one of two interviews with Thomas Emmel and assistant research physicist at the space sciences laboratory at UC Berkeley. In April, 2013 NASA selected the Ayana spheric connection explorer or icon to be the next Helio physics [00:01:00] explorer satellite mission. The icon mission is to be led by the space sciences laboratory at UC Berkeley. Thomas Emal is the principal investigator of the icon mission icon will provide NASA's heliophysics division with a powerful new capability to determine the conditions in space modified by weather on earth and to understand the way space weather events grow to envelop regions of our planet with dense ionospheric plasma. In today's interview, Dr Emel talks [00:01:30] about Helio physics, the space sciences lab, and small cube sets, which are small satellites being built at universities. Here's that interview, Thomas Ml. Welcome to spectrum. Speaker 4: Thank you. Brad, would you give us a short description of heliophysics? Sure. Here's your physics is sort of a new term and it's used at NASA to describe in shorthand the disciplines of solar and space physics. [00:02:00] Together. It's a little controversial because it means solar physics, obviously space physicists and people who studied the upper atmosphere have sort of felt the shift with changing it to solar physics. A lot of focus went to solar physics. I think icon is icon. Our mission that talking about today is shows a, another view of heliophysics or another focus. Can you describe starting at the earth's surface, the concentric layers of the atmosphere and out to [00:02:30] the ionosphere and beyond? Sure, and how do you define a layer of the atmosphere is sort of where you start. What's the answer? The answer is we defined layers of the atmosphere by their temperature profile or how the temperature changes with altitude. Speaker 4: It's as simple as that and so there are specific layers that on average have a temperature profile, one direction or the other. That means as you go up in altitude, does the temperature drop or increase as you leave the surface of the planet and go up and you're [00:03:00] in the troposphere and as you go higher in altitude, the temperature drops. And that has to do with just basic atmospheric physics. And also the fact that the surface of the planet is what absorbs most of the solar radiation. So it's hot and as you move away from that in an atmosphere that gets thinner without the Tude, the temperature drops. So you go all the way up to the top of the troposphere and you end up with the tropopause. So there's fears and pauses and once you cross the tropopause, you're in the stratosphere, [00:03:30] you know the next sphere and there you've know you've crossed it because temperature start to increase with altitude. Speaker 4: And they increased because of the fact that solar radiation is being actively absorbed in that region of space. That's not happening in the troposphere. The troposphere is transparent of visible light, but the stratosphere is starting to absorb solar radiation that is harmful to life, UV. And so the heating that occurs, the ozone that's in the stratosphere absorbs that [00:04:00] radiation and basically cause the cause of that place being much warmer. So when you're in the stratosphere though, you've already above about 90% of the atmosphere. It's all on a troposphere the stuff we breathe. So the stratosphere warms up all the way to the top. You hit the strata pause and then things turn around again. The chemistry that supports ozone does not work in the mesosphere and so you end up starting to drop in temperature again. So just like in the troposphere, the base of the mesosphere is the warm [00:04:30] straddle pause and it gets cold from that point. Speaker 4: And the coldest place in the vicinity of earth is the top of the menopause where those temperatures have been dropping all the way up to the boundary of space up to about 95 kilometers. At that point, you've reached just about the boundary of space and the temperatures turn around again and and warm all the way up into your in space and the, the atmosphere that's left up there, it's called the thermosphere because it's very hot and it's hot again because it's absorbing a different region [00:05:00] of solar radiation, extreme on fire ultraviolet. So again, protecting life on the earth as part of our atmosphere does that in a number of ways. So the thermosphere in that case is also where we find the ionosphere. The thermosphere is hot because the solar radiation is very energetic at that altitude. So energetic that ionizes the gas and that's where you find the ionosphere, you find a layer of plasma density, so ions and electrons [00:05:30] living together in the same place as plasma and that plasma becomes very dense, about 200 to 300 kilometers above the earth. Speaker 4: That's the dentist plasma between here in the sun. It's why you can hear at night radio tear ran from your ham radio set up if people still do that anymore because you're bouncing radio waves off of that and it's why you can hear, you know, I am stations over a long distance too in the daytime, but it's at night. That layer is all by itself hanging around and you can bounce [00:06:00] radio signals off of it. So then you keep going into space and the plasma density is actually dropped, but you are protected still. You don't enter into interplanetary space until you get out of the magnetosphere. And that's where Earth's magnetic field controls the motion of the plasma. And this is all the way out to 30,000 kilometers. And then you hit the bow shock and the end of the magnetosphere at the magneto pause. Everything has to end and you end up in the solar wind. Speaker 4: And that's interplanetary [00:06:30] space to interstellar space. And interplanetary space are two different things. We've never been to interstellar space. We're working on that. Voyager is on its way and there's a constant argument over whether or not it's out there. So the sun constitutes the helio sphere. It constructs the heliosphere by its energy and blowing out, and that's the sphere around our planetary system that we're part of. That's right. And that's where voyagers headed out of. Right, right out of the heliosphere. It's leaving and it's not coming back. [00:07:00] And I forget what star it's headed off to. So Helio physics is the study of plasmas and space plasmas and how they interact with bodies, uh, and interact with important things such as planetary atmospheres. Basically anywhere our star is an influence that can influence the processes that occur there. Speaker 3: Our guest today is Thomas Animal. In the next segment, Thomas Talks about heliophysics discoveries. [00:07:30] This is KALX Berkley. And what have been the big revelation trends Speaker 4: in heliophysics? Well, the first discovery and Helio physics was the fact that we had radiation belts. It was our first forays into space carried instrumentation. And the first few explorers, which we're still part of that line icon mission, is part of the explore line. But the first ones carried Geiger counters out of University of Iowa where Jim van Allen was in [00:08:00] charge of that department. And where they built those uh, experiments that discovered what we call the van Allen belts now. So that was the first discovery was that we had an environment around us in space that was hazardous and we didn't know where that radiation came from. It fill a Geiger counter just to see what was there. And when you found us a lot more radiation than they thought. The solar cycle has influences throughout the heliosphere. A solar storm for instance, can launch a coronal mass ejection. Speaker 4: They say these are the words [00:08:30] that are starting to show up in the common discussion of space, whether it was coronal mass ejections had come with a solar flare and we've timed these things. We see a coronal mass ejection, a very large one cause a massive magnetic storm at earth. And a good time later it flies by voyage here and it hits the heliopause and radio waves are admitted from the helio pause, the boundary of interstellar space and voyager picks them up. And those were some of the first studies of void. You're trying to figure out how close [00:09:00] it was to the heliopause. Where we are now in the past 10 years is what we understand more now than ever. That the forcing of plasma in near a space is controlled to a much larger degree than we ever suspected or dare to think or dare to discuss. Speaker 4: Really it's controlled by conditions in the lower atmosphere and that the atmospheric layers that we've talked about and talked to all the temperature variations that occur, there's processes that carry energy and momentum beyond past [00:09:30] all those pauses and layers straight from the surface to space. And it's actually biggest discovery in Helio physics in the last decade is that this coupling of the terrestrial atmosphere to spaces stronger than we thought. And what is your focus at the space sciences lab? Well, it has been in the upper atmosphere, in the atmosphere, looking at how solar wind energy propagates through the system. Solar Wind, [00:10:00] it impacts or it effects the MAG Nitas fear and the number of ways creates a shape, stretches it out. The magnetosphere is what processes also learned energy that produces the Aurora. The Aurora is energized by the solar wind. All that energy has to get through the magnetosphere and then down into our atmosphere in a number of ways. Speaker 4: So we're interested in how that energy propagates through the system and how it's eventually deposited in our atmosphere. And then also how our atmosphere and the [inaudible] sphere as you energize them and [00:10:30] make them more conductive through ionization by Aurora, how it feeds back through the system. So magnetosphere occurrence is a current system, electrical current that heats the atmosphere and how you turn that current on and off during a magnetic storm. The timing and how processes work together as sort of as an engineering problem is something I've been focused on for the past 10 years. That's changed over the years too. I've been sliding to lower latitudes where the plasma density is actually highest [00:11:00] and it's highest for two reasons. One because the sun is overhead more often at low latitudes and I NYSE in the atmosphere more actively or more strongly, but also because there's magnetic field tends to trap the plasma at low latitudes. Speaker 4: And when I say that the plasma is densest in the atmosphere between here in the sun, it's actually the low latitude ionosphere which has the dense plasma that interacts most strongly with the earth's atmosphere. Um, and we know now that the [00:11:30] energy and momentum that propagates up from the lower atmosphere that a lot of that energy is coming up from low latitudes as well. Cause that's where a lot of the energy goes in and tropical rainforest and in the tropical weather systems that curved from day to day with interesting periodicities. The reason you end up with large coupling from the little atmosphere to the upper atmosphere is because the atmosphere can be caused to move a wave like manner and we call it a tide, just like tides in the ocean. The atmosphere tends to have some [00:12:00] 12 hour, 24 hour period of city. Say you have a planet with the Brazilian rainforest on it and that fires up at two in the afternoon every day, day after day you start moving the atmosphere in a periodic manner and you end up growing these really, really large waves in the atmosphere that propagate up into space. Speaker 4: And so it's the combination of the tropical forcing and the tropical ion sphere, which is dense and captured by the magnetic field really creates this interesting environment and we're a great laboratory [00:12:30] for understanding atmosphere, space coupling. Speaker 3: Yeah. Listening to spectrum, I am k a l x Berkeley. Our guest today is Thomas Emma. In the next segment he talks about solar energy interacting with Earth's magnetosphere,Speaker 4: the Aurora [inaudible]. Can you just describe the Aurora for us? The Aurora is a feature of the planet [00:13:00] at high latitudes in the north and the south, the Aurora Borealis of North Aurora Australis down south. What it is, it is light coming from the energization of our atmosphere by space plasma. The Sun obviously has a lot of energy and solar atmosphere is constantly moving out and it's carrying a lot of energy with it. But so that energy arrives at earth as solar plasma blowing past the planet. So those are the energies we're talking about. The magnetosphere as sort of a, [00:13:30] it energizes all of the solar wind particles to higher energies and dumps them into our atmosphere. And the Aurora is what you see when you go out on your deck and Alaska and look up. It's the signature of that process occurring. And when the Aurora's very active, that means that process is very active and there's a lot of energy coming into our atmosphere from the solar wind. Speaker 4: What's great is a Nikon camera has great red response, so you can point your camera to the sky and you can put it to a two second exposure and it will see things [00:14:00] that you can't see with your eyes. Many people now have great auroral imagers in their mitts. They may not even know that they've got that capability. So the waves that are created around the equator in the low latitudes, in thinking about waves on the ocean, they're moving in a specific direction. Are these waves also moving in the specific direction? Are they sort of emanating everywhere? And that's a good question. So the really large scale waves in [00:14:30] the atmosphere, the first thing is to realize that once you've got a wave moving in the atmosphere, there's nothing really to stop it. The waves aren't going to crash on the shore somewhere. They're going to go up and they're going to grow with altitude, their waves, storms derive, and I am talking about the large scale continental scale waves that the wavelength is as large as a continent, at least horizontally, vertically. Speaker 4: There's about 2030 kilometers, but 2030 kilometers is a quarter or a third of the way to space. So they're still large even [00:15:00] though 2030 kilometers doesn't sound that far. In any case, those waves grow with altitude and by the time you get to the edge of space, a wave that might have had a half degree centigrade or Celsius variability to it in amplitude, by the time it gets to the boundary of space and crosses it, it can have an amplitude of 20 or 30 degrees Kelvin or our Celsius. It's the same thing. Uh, it's one way to measure the size of that wave. With that wave also comes a large wind component. The winds, the [00:15:30] motion of the atmosphere is going to go with it. It's this sloshing and the temperature comes from the compression and the expansion of the gas. As the wave moves around the planet, do they go in different directions? Speaker 4: Yeah, we talk about them. We see there's a number of technical terms for the waves. There's eastward and westward traveling waves and some of them are larger than others. This atmosphere supports a couple of waves eastward at a couple of ways, westward more than others. Some of these waves are excited [00:16:00] more naturally than others just because of the source of the excitation, the source of the excitation of the continents. If you look at a map of the earth where lightning occurs on earth, for instance, it's always over the continents because the solar energy is really just being deposited right there at the surface and the atmosphere starts to be put in a motion and the water vapor starts to condense. As the atmosphere rises and you get storms, a tropical rainforest and Africa, tropical rainforests in South America and also a third really large [00:16:30] region of tropical forcing to Southeast Asia. Speaker 4: Those three places on the earth firing off two in the afternoon in the South East Asia than two in the afternoon, Africa, then South American and do that over again every day. It's like a drum head problem, if you know what I mean. If you put a little sand on a drum and you start tapping it in one position, you can form a pattern. You would see where else you could tap it at the same time to reinforce that pattern. Now the rainy seasons of of those different places changes throughout the year. [00:17:00] That's one of the reasons we know it's from the lower atmosphere because we've observed conditions in space that changed with the rainy seasons and there's no reason to have rainy seasons in space. But we do and so we look immediately to where we do have a rainy season, which is in the troposphere. And so the recent developments and numerical model supports the idea that there's a strong connection between the tropic sun conditions and space. Speaker 4: Have you been involved in a lot of past satellite projects at the space science lab or a few [00:17:30] of them? I've been involved in too. Recently icon, which I'm leading and a small satellite re recently completed a flue called cinema that was a student led cubes hat, so a 10 by 10 by 30 centimeter satellite that we built at the lab designed and built. Before that I was analyzing data. I've been spending 10 years analyzing data from missions that we've supported or built and so combining data from a number of [00:18:00] different instruments that space sciences lab has built or satellites that space sciences lab has built. It's been something I've done at the lab, but this is my first time leading a mission. Speaker 5: This is k a l x Berkeley. The show is spectrum. Our guest is Thomas Emma, a physicist at UC Berkeley's space sciences lab. Speaker 4: How has the [00:18:30] cube sat changed the way satellite measurements are made? Well, in some respects that remains to be seen. There's been a number of advances in the capabilities that cubes hats can carry in terms of pointing and power and the instruments have all had to shrink in size as well. But there's a number of capabilities that have grown over the years that allow us to do that. Cell phones have been a big driver and shrinking small processors and getting [00:19:00] into low power processors and communications gear as well. And what's been nice is working with the students here at Berkeley actually. They've had a lot of experience in designing and programming processors for the purposes that we need to fly in space. So there's a number of universities working in this area now and I think they're just getting better. Cinema has been a good experiment for us. Speaker 4: We have four of them in the works this year. There's two Korean cinema. It's going up. [00:19:30] Kate, you young, he university was our partner. There's a lot of interest in supporting keeps that launches at NASA and throughout different government agencies and so you know, we went on a national reconnaissance vehicle, but a, it didn't cost us much. It was fantastic that we had that opportunity and NASA has worked with NRO and other agencies to make this possible for universities to do these. There were a number of university keeps that's on that launch. So these cubes hats that NASA embraces, I guess [00:20:00] that's the only way to get up is NASA says, yeah, this is worth putting up there, or are there now independent ways to get to space? I think NASA is where we'd like to start and that's who we've gone to before. NSF is really the organization that was the first to support a cube type program per se. Speaker 4: And National Science Foundation doesn't have a launch service, but NASA does. So there was a close collaboration early on and some key individuals at NASA Kennedy have taken a remarkable interest [00:20:30] in fostering that program and develop basically what they call a educational launch. Alana was, uh, is the acronym that we went on. Alana. Alana supports a number of, keeps getting into space. You propose to Atlanta, NSF sends them $20,000 or that's it was for us and you get your slot and you get your orbit and you're on orbit for many years. So it's really a great opportunity. So right now it's really good to work with NASA on this, on the cinema [00:21:00] projects. There's quite a bit of student involvement in those. I understand. Can you talk about that? Right. So National Science Foundation supported Space Sciences Labs, cinema project, which is a cube set for high ions, magnetic fields, c I n electrons, it went on it. Speaker 4: It's a great acronym for a very tough thing, but it's a base whether mission, it's to measure the particle environment in space and the magnetic fields. So that was great. You know, we [00:21:30] miss dearly, Bob Lynne, who was the former head of space sciences lab for more than a decade and the principal investigator on one of our explorers Hesi and the principal investigator on cinema, he put that international team together between CUNY University where he was an adjunct professor. We worked with imperial college as well on that mission and they provided the smallest magnetometer have ever seen for a space instrument. It was a high quality, high precision magnetometer, way better than even your iPhone if you can imagine. Also [00:22:00] we had a detector group at LBL and a group providing an electronic part and aces from France. So it was an unbelievable confluence of people and scientific interests that built cinema. Speaker 4: The student aspect was, there were students, uh, from the start in mechanical engineering who really came up with the initial design of a cube sat and it was a couple of masters students, one of whom is still a space sciences lab, David Glaser. And it was great working with the Mechanical Engineering Department [00:22:30] because it was that department of which took the controls problem of how you spin a spacecraft based on inputs from space, the Sun Sensor, we had the magnetometer measurements that you're making. So that was a remarkable achievement. I thought on the mechanical engineering side and working with the electrical engineers, we had a number of cs IEC students as well and really had a good team. They're working on interfacing with the mechanical engineering students who were working on the attitude control or working [00:23:00] with the imperial college students and researchers who were providing magnetometer those a number of difficult tasks that we had some great students come through and everyone got their chance to save cinema. It was a seat of your pants operation. The thing flew and it's functional. We are going to fly the next one with some updates that's gonna work better, so we need more students. The wonderful problem with students is that they graduate to go onto great careers and other places and so we'd like to have those people back. They're not coming [00:23:30] back, so we need to get a new crop of ex students and mechanical engineers and we'll probably be flyering at soda again. Speaker 5: That concludes part one of our two part interview with Thomas Emmylou. Part two will air on 14 in that interview, Dr Hamill discusses icon mission process start to finish. The icon explorer mission website is icon dot s s l. Dot. berkeley.edu [00:24:00] now a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Rick Karnofsky and Renee route Speaker 6: present the calendar this Tuesday, June 4th the San Francisco ASCA scientists lecture series. We'll be hosting a talk by two sides. Officers at the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. You Know Greg Shamor and Kevin Wilson will speak about the potential of stem cell research to help in diseases such as diabetes, spinal cord injury, [00:24:30] heart night disease, and neurological disorders. They will also address the recent restrictions on research and where it is heading today. This June 4th event will be held that the Soma Street food park in San Francisco, the city's first permanent food truck pod. It will begin at 7:00 PM biological anthropologist, Helen Fisher of Rutgers. We'll speak with KQ eds, Michael Krasney about the science of love and attraction. On Tuesday, June 4th [00:25:00] at 7:30 PM at the North Theater in San Francisco, Fisher has written five books on the evolution and future of human sexuality, monogamy, adultery, and divorce, gender differences in the brain, the chemistry of romantic love and human personality types. Speaker 6: And why are we fall in love with one person rather than another? Tickets start at $20 and are available at cal academy. Dot. O. R. G. On Monday, June 10th Brian Day [00:25:30] deleted Lunar Science Institute director at NASA will give a talk about the latest lunar discoveries as litter robotics continue to advance. Our understanding of the moon continues to change. Well, the lunar surface has been previously viewed as a static desert environment. New evidence points to a far more dynamic moonscape than expected. Dr. David will discuss these new discoveries and elaborate on some of NASA's more recent and lunar exploration missions. The event will be held on Monday, June 10th at 7:30 PM in the California [00:26:00] Academy of Sciences. Planetarium. Tuesday we have tickets for the event. Visit the Academy website@calacademy.org the Computer History Museum at 1401 north shoreline boulevard in mountain view is hosting senior vice president and director of IBM Research John Kelly on June 11th at 7:00 PM Museum CEO John Holler, well moderate a conversation with Kelly on topics ranging from his background and the path that led him to IBM. [00:26:30] The history of research there, IBM's Watson and cognitive computing to the newest IBM lab in Nairobi, Kenya. IBM says that Africa is destined to become an important growth market. The company admission is free. register@computerhistory.org Speaker 7: [inaudible]Speaker 6: [00:27:00] spectrum is to present news stories we find interesting. Rick Karnofsky and Renee arou present. The news engineers at UC Berkeley have created a new hydro gel that can be manipulated by exposure to light alone. The team inspired by plant's ability to grow towards light sources [00:27:30] created their gel by combining synthetic elastic proteins with one cell thick sheets of graphite known as graphene. Graphene generates heat when exposed to light, which can cause synthetic proteins to release water. The two materials are combined to form of hydrogen with one side that is more porous than the other. This allows the material to mimic the way plant cells shrink and expand unevenly in response to light. This hydrogen also shrinks and evenly, albeit more precisely allowing to bend and move solely in response [00:28:00] to light. Create or speculate that the shape changing Gel could have applications in drug delivery and tissue engineering. Speaker 6: Mathematician Tang Jang of the University of New Hampshire in Durham published unimportant number theory proof and this week's issue of angels of mathematics. Yang proved a weak form of the twin prime conjecture and as the first to establish the existence of a finite bound four prime gaps. Prime numbers are natural numbers greater [00:28:30] than one that I have no positive divisors other than one and themselves. Interestingly, many come in pairs that have a difference of two for example, three and five 17 and 19 or 101 and 103 Jang showed that for some integer n that is at most 70 million. There are infinitely many pairs of primes that differ by n. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 5: [00:29:00] spectrum is archive on iTunes university. Our special link is tiny url.com/k a l ex spectrum. The music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. [00:29:30] Our email address is spectrum dot kalx@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Janet Jansson is the Senior Staff Scientist in the Earth Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Her expertise is in molecular microbial ecology and “omics” approaches with a focus on soil, marine sediment and human gut environments.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, [00:00:30] a biweekly 30 minute program, bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Good afternoon. I'm your host, Brad Swift. Today's interview is with Janet Jansen, UC Berkeley, adjunct professor of molecular microbial ecology. She is a senior staff scientist in the Earth Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and president elect of the International Society of microbial [00:01:00] ecology. Her expertise is in the area of molecular microbial ecology and Omix approaches with a focus on soil, marine sediment and human gut environments. Today she talks about the human microbiome project, the Earth microbiome project and American Gut, a crowdsourced research project. Onto that interview. Janet Jansen, welcome to spectrum. Hi, what'd you give us a short description [00:01:30] of microbial ecology and give some examples of complex microbial communities. Speaker 4: Sure. So microbial ecology is the study of micro organisms in the environment and their interactions with other microorganisms, plants, animals, that particular habitat that they happen to be living in. So it's really not just studying a single microorganism, but a community of microorganisms. Uh, so some examples [00:02:00] of complex communities. Well, the most complex ecosystem is soil and that's because it has such a diversity of microorganisms and it's really packed full of microbes. So there's so many microorganisms living in soil. So that combined with the diversity makes it a very complex system. The human ecosystem is very complex. Our own intestines have a very complex microbial community. [00:02:30] The oceans or other examples, sediments. So I think this is my community college that you had to think differently than one would when you study organisms in pure culture and their physiology is much more complex Speaker 3: and microbial research seems to have jumped in stature in the past few years. You have a broader view of it than I do. What's your take on the trajectory of microbial research? I think Speaker 4: [00:03:00] particularly the microbial ecology part has increased in stature recently. Microbiology as a field has been around for a long time. But the thing that I think has really boosted the field of microbial ecology is the advent of these new technologies, the new tools to be able to really look at these complex communities and understand them. Until I guess it was about the 1980s there wasn't [00:03:30] any way to really look at these micro organisms in soil. Again, I'll use that as an example, unless you cultivated them onto augur media or looked at them in a microscope. So when the field was limited to looking at what was possible to cultivate, that was only a fraction of the microorganisms that live in soil habitat. So probably fewer than 10% could be cultivated. So the majority of the organisms that were there, [00:04:00] nobody knew anything about them. Their identities or their functions were really unknown. Speaker 4: So it was considered like a black box eco system. But after the late, I guess the 80s and into the 90s there were the developments in DNA extraction techniques. So it was possible to extract DNA from soil and then came PCR amplification methods and methods to be able to amplify specific [00:04:30] pieces of DNA that you had extracted that made it possible to actually study soil microorganisms without cultivating them. And now we have these deep sequencing technologies, so it's really made it much easier to do very deep analysis of these communities and not have to rely on cultivation. Speaker 3: The human microbiome project is in its last year. What were the goals of it and can you speak to that about what the goals were and what you think [00:05:00] you've found out? Speaker 4: The first stage of the h and p was to sequence different bodies sites and understand which micro organisms are residing in different sites in the human body. And so this was looking at a large cohort of humans, healthy humans, and just basically understanding who are the microbial inhabitants of the human body. So that part is winding down. We have that knowledge now. We know that there are different micro organisms that live on your skin, [00:05:30] then in in your gut for examples and also in the oral cavity. So these organisms are specialized to live in different parts of the human body and there are differences between different individuals though. So that means that each human has their own individual microbiome and it can almost be used as a fingerprint. So that was a successfully completed project. The next stage there has been a recent call too, I think it's even called h and p two [00:06:00] to go the next step. So to use other kinds of methods to look at not only which microorganisms are there, but what are they doing. So this would be looking at the functional capabilities of the human microbiome. Another thing that is still ongoing with the h and p is looking at how does disease influence the human microbiome and vice versa. What is the correlation with the microorganisms living with us and disease? And it seems like there are many different links between many [00:06:30] human disease that send the human microbiome Speaker 3: [inaudible] [inaudible]. Speaker 5: Our guest today is microbiologists, Janet Jansen. In the next segment she talks about the microbiome and disease correlation. This is k a l x, Berkeley. Speaker 3: Well, and often in science there's a lot of correlation [00:07:00] that goes on and sometimes you get fooled by the correlation. Sometimes you don't. Are there strategies you use in terms of validating what you think correlates? Speaker 4: Oh, correlations are can be quite challenging. Definitely. So, um, that's an interesting question because then one of the things that is very tricky is if you find a difference in an environmental sample, for example, with the civic treatment or in a human with disease often all we have, [00:07:30] we can then say, well it's correlated to this organism that is higher in abundance or it's correlated to this protein that is higher or lower in abundance. That's a little frustrating. So that the next step, and we're not quite there yet in this field, would be then to say, okay, go beyond correlations and then actually do the proof, you know, to take that organism like Cox postulates, you then prove that this correlation that you see is actually [00:08:00] occurring. But it's difficult with these complex samples, like I was saying before, because you have to move away from the complex environment where you have all these different factors. Speaker 3: So the complexity defeats you in a way because you can't isolate the specific from the general. Exactly. Exactly. And so within this correlation of disease, are there particular diseases that seem to be top priorities in a sense or are most likely to be effected by [00:08:30] the microbiome? An example of Crohn's diseases, Speaker 4: Crohn's disease is the example. I would give us a very clear example and also other inflammatory bowel diseases where there has already been established a link between the gut microbiome and the disease. The details are still under investigation, but there is a difference in the micro organisms that inhabit the intestine in individuals that have Crohn's disease compared to healthy. [00:09:00] So that's known. Speaker 3: And is that the case with ulcers as well? Or they were sort of one of the first, it seems that had this association with the microbiome in the gut, Speaker 4: right. So systemic ulcers, there was a Nobel prize awarded for the discovery of [inaudible] go back to Pylori as the cause of ulcers in the stomach. And so that's a good example, this specific microorganism that can contribute to a disease. And then of course a lot of medications were subsequently [00:09:30] developed to dampen hillcoat back to pylori through new research. We know that there is a considerable diversity of microorganisms in the stomach that people weren't aware of before using these techniques and also in your teeth and then in the oral cavity. There's a very large diversity. I should mention that one of the things that is a really hot topic right now is the link between the brain and the human microbiome, including [00:10:00] the gut microbiome because it's known that some of the metabolites that are produced by these intestinal microbes can pass the blood barrier and then migrated essentially in impact the brain, so some current research is looking at the link between autism and schizophrenia, these kinds of things. Then I think that's really interesting. That's one future direction of the field. Speaker 3: The new initiative in brain mapping exactly [00:10:30] now ties that together. That would be great. At least the findings here was just a new funding. Speaker 4: Yeah, I know. I don't know if they've really decided to make that link for funding, but it probably will come. Speaker 3: Can you talk a bit about American gut and how it's set up to help people figure out their own microbiome? Speaker 4: Sure. So the American get is, it's a relatively new way of doing research [00:11:00] is crowdsourcing. And the idea is that if a person such as myself is interested in knowing quip, my gut microbiome is I can pay a small amount, it's like $100 to get my sample sequence. So that is the way that the project is funded. And so this project, it had a funding goal, I think it was $300,000 to be able to launch the sequencing. And so there was the campaign [00:11:30] and it was sent out to the community and through connections such as Facebook and another with this nice little carrot that if you pay $100 you can get your microbiome. And in addition to gut, it could be your skin sample, oral cavity, your pet. And so this idea really caught on and is a good example of crowdsourcing for funding. Speaker 3: And how are people able to leverage that information? [00:12:00] Is there some characterization that you do as well? Speaker 4: The data that they get back is, it's different kinds of information. So first which micro organisms do I have? That's kind of fun to know. It's sort of like 23 and me where you get information back about which genes you have in, which kind of markers for different things. So depending on your microbial community composition, you may have markers that are more indicative of health, certain kinds of diets like [00:12:30] vegetarian or a protein rich diet, even obesity, there's certain microbial indicators of obesity. So that's just interesting. Another thing that is valuable for the consumer, the person who does this is that you can compare your microbiome to everybody else's. It's all anonymous of course. And nobody knows who's this, who's, but you have your own data and can see how your microbiome fits into a pattern. So do you cluster [00:13:00] with obese people or with a disease type microbiome or a certain kind of eating pattern Speaker 3: and are these online tools that you have available through American gut for people to do this kind of characterization? Speaker 4: So the analysis has to be done by the actual scientists that are doing the samples because it's still quite elaborate and involves a lot of bioinformatics. So currently it's not possible [00:13:30] to do a lot of that on your own, but still to get an output, the actual data, the results of the analysis is what the individual can get through this project. Speaker 2: [inaudible] you were listening to spectrum on a k a l x Berkeley. Our guest today is Janet Jensen. In the next segment she talks about the earth microbiome project. Speaker 3: [00:14:00] Can you talk a bit about the earth microbiome project and maybe differentiate it from the human project? Speaker 4: Yeah, sure. So the Earth microbiome project, which I'll call the emp, is, um, instead of just looking at humans, it's including basically all of earth. So it has a very lofty goal of understanding earth microbial diversity. That project also relies [00:14:30] on collaborators, so it's sort of a crowdsourcing project as well, but limited to the scientific community. So the way that Earth microbiome project works is if a collaborator has an interesting set of samples, for example, from the deep sea or from Yellowstone hot springs that have the required kinds of environmental data, so Ph, nutrients, things like that. Then they can [00:15:00] send an email to the steering committee and say, well, would this study be of interest to the earth microbiome project to the ENP? And then the steering committee looks through the data and decides whether the environmental data is sufficient and if the samples are filling a hole and providing novel information and if so the samples are accepted and the sequencing is done without any costs to the investigator. That's the win win scenario for the emp [00:15:30] because the investigator does of course provide the funding for the study and collection of the samples and the emp provides the funding for the sequencing. Now the funding for emp is also kind of fuzzy because it's through different kinds of companies that have supported by providing regions or equipment and then in turn they get advertisement through the emp that they're sponsors of the project. And so that [00:16:00] also seems to be quite successful. Speaker 3: And the intent again to build a catalog Speaker 4: basically, yes, to build a catalog to find out who's there and are there patterns. The nice thing about heading samples from so many different disparate environments is that you can see, well does this particular microorganism occur across different kinds of environments or is it really endemic only to one kind of habitat? And if you tweak the environment, [00:16:30] for example, with climate change to have increases or losses of certain members of the community that are predictive, one of the aims is to have something like a Google map and then you can highlight all of this sort of organism type in pink. If you click on a button and see where they are localized around the globe. But then if the climate increases by five degrees, then you can click another button and see what happens. Does that organism increase or decrease there? Does another microbial typing [00:17:00] green become more abundant? Speaker 3: The methods you use that you apply to your research. So often we're results oriented with science or at least to the public, you know, what did you find out? It becomes more important than how did you find it out? Can you give us some sense of your methods to doing the research that you do? Speaker 4: I think that the methods, as I mentioned earlier, that's been a limitation to my particular field, but that [00:17:30] also makes it kind of fun because we're always trying to develop better methods and new methods to be able to investigate these systems. And so it's quite challenging, which is something I like. So the method in my own lab that we're developing are different kinds of what I call omix quoting. Oh, mixed methods. So that's everything from sequencing everything, which would be metogenomic x to extracting RNA and [00:18:00] sequencing that. That would be looking at express genes. That's Meta transcriptomics or extracting all the proteins and looking at that. That would be metaproteomics. You can even do the metabolites metabolomics. So these are the current methods that are stated. The art right now for looking at these kinds of complex communities. Speaker 6: [inaudible] [inaudible] Speaker 5: this is k [00:18:30] a l x Berkeley. The show is spectrum. I'm Brad swift. Our guest is professor Janet Jansen, microbial ecologist at Lawrence Berkeley lab and UC Berkeley. Speaker 3: In your experience working on these large projects and also then working in small projects, I'm curious about the, the idea of big science versus small science. You know, the individual scientists toiling [00:19:00] away versus the big group that gets together and decides what they'll do and [inaudible]. Speaker 4: So personally I, I'm a big science kind of person. I definitely appreciate the value of a small science than I do have some smaller targeted projects. I moved to Berkeley lab about five years ago. I was a professor in Sweden before that and my funding was more individual, smaller projects in Sweden. But uh, one of the reasons I came to Berkeley lab was because of the big team science. I really [00:19:30] like that I'm a super collaborator and I can see the value of having people with different skills working together to tackle some really big problems. [inaudible] Speaker 3: and I suppose the culture then becomes really important to the group, the dynamics, the sharing, the openness. And how does that happen, do you think? Have you seen it work well and work badly? Speaker 4: Oh, it's very important. So you had to choose your collaborations as well and sometimes if they, the dynamics [00:20:00] aren't working, then it might be time to rethink the collaborations and revise it in a certain way. But ideally you have people that are so motivated that they are, I know that start delisting, but in the best case situation you have people that are so motivated towards a specific goal that it works quite well. There is an example of one project that is ongoing right now at the lab. It's called the next generation ecosystem [00:20:30] experiment in the Arctic, which is looking at the impact of climate change on permafrost communities. And that's the big doe funded project that involves probably hundreds of researchers at different laboratories, different doe laboratories and universities that are all focusing on one location in Barrow, Alaska, using all of the different tools available at the national labs and expertise at universities as well. Speaker 3: [00:21:00] And how long has that been going on? Speaker 4: It's been about a year and a half. It's a new project, but I'd like it because it has the necessary funding. Of course, when you spread it out, you know, everybody gets a little chunk of it, but it enables incredible things to be done at that site. It's just so much fun to go to these meetings and hear about the lidar sensing team and the modeling team and the hydrology team with their sleds and the geochemists go [00:21:30] in and my part is the microbial ecology. We get deep cores and we extract DNA and sequence them. It's just really a lot of fun Speaker 3: and there's a lot of emphasis on trying to encourage young people to get into science, technology, math. Is there really an opportunity in this field for, for people? Speaker 4: I have to say that right now it's a huge opportunity and there aren't enough persons educated in this field [00:22:00] to be able to fill these growing companies that are starting up. I'm getting several calls from companies that are asking for postdocs from my lab if they're interested in joining and if I were starting right now as a biologist, I would definitely look into bioinformatics and also the metagenome mix fields because these are the sorts of persons that there aren't that many yet. It's not that widespread yet [00:22:30] and there are companies that really need that expertise. Speaker 3: Would you characterize both of those briefly? Speaker 4: The bioinformatics would be more of generation of software algorithms, ways to look at these big data that are generated from different kinds of biological samplesSpeaker 3: and that might include visualization as well as other normal text output kind of a thing. Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely. Everything from the database [00:23:00] management to the visualization of the data and things in between. The statistical analysis, that's a huge growth area and I predict this is going to continue because the data is just getting bigger. It's not going away from that a genomics and these other kinds of omix areas. I think that that would also involve some computing skills, but in addition to differentiate it from bioinformatics, more of the combination with lab skill. Speaker 3: [00:23:30] Janet Johnson. Thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Speaker 4: Thank you. I really enjoyed it. Speaker 3: Well, we'd like to mention a few of the science and technology events locally over the Speaker 7: next two weeks. Rick Karnofsky joins me for the calendar. The Saturday the science of cow lecture will be given by Dr Nadir Mirabal Fathi. The lecture is entitled, connecting infant decimal to infinity, the search for dark matter. [00:24:00] He will speak about a new class of elementary particles known as weakly interacting massive particles or Wimps to resolve inconsistencies in our understanding of the nature at both extreme, large and small scales and how they are connected together. He will also explore the experimental efforts to detect these particles. Interest real laboratories. Nadir r Mirabal Fathi earned Phd in elementary particle physics and cosmology at the University of Paris. He did his postdoctoral [00:24:30] studies at UC Berkeley and has been an associate research physicist at UC Berkeley since 2008 the lecture is Saturday, May 18th at 11:00 AM in room 100 of the genetics and plant biology building. Makerfair. The self-proclaimed greatest show and tell on earth is this weekend, May 18th and 19th at San Mateo fairgrounds. Speaker 7: We talked last year with Tony to rose and Michelle, who? Bianca. Two of the founders of young makers about [00:25:00] the maker fair. Find our interview with them@itunesuortinyurl.com slash calix spectrum one day prices range from $15 to $30. Highlights of this year's maker fair include KQ [inaudible] kitchen sisters with their new radio series, the making of what people make in the bay area and why NASA makers with astronauts, John Grunsfeld, Dennis Bartell's discussing building the new exploratorium, [00:25:30] how to tie a perfect neck tie with Nobel prize physicist Arno Penzias, DIY research with Tekla labs and amazing science. Tornadoes, smoke rings and more. For more information, visit makerfair.com that's maker F A I r e.com the long nose Stuart brand. It's presenting on reviving extinct species on Tuesday, May 21st [00:26:00] at the San Francisco Jazz Center, two Oh one Franklin Street at 7:30 PM tickets are $15 he'll summarize the progress of current de extinction projects including the Europe's Oryx Australia is gastric brooding frog and America's passenger pigeon. Speaker 7: He'll also discuss some of the ancient ecosystem revival projects such as Pleistocene Park in Siberia. New Genomic technology can reassemble the genomes of extinct species [00:26:30] whose DNA is still recoverable from museum specimens and some fossils. Sorry. Jurassic Park fans. No dinosaurs. It is hoped that the jeans unique to the extinct animals can brought back to life in the framework of the genome of the closest living relative. For more information, visit long now.org now Rick Karnofsky and I present to news stories. Alberto Saul from Brown University and colleagues [00:27:00] published an article in science on May 9th that suggests the water that is on the moon came from Earth. The team measured the relative abundance of deuterium that is heavy hydrogen that contains an extra neutron to hydrogen in the water, found in small bubbles of volcanic glass and Melt inclusions in moon rocks. They found the ratio was very similar to the ratio found on earth and from carbonaceous chondrites meteorites that are thought to have supplied [00:27:30] the earth with water. Speaker 7: Higher. Deuterium levels were expected by some who had hypothesized the comments from the Kuyper belt in Oort cloud could have been the source of the Moon's water. If the moon's water did come from Earth, it is likely the earth already had this water when the moon was formed. Some four and a half billion years ago when the earth and another Mars sized planet collided. However, such a collusion may have been hot enough to vaporize the lunar water. There is sir now [00:28:00] debating whether it may have been retained because of the earth's gravity or because the moon shared some of the earth's high temperature atmosphere when it formed pregnant mothers exposure to the flu was associated with a nearly four fold increased risk that their child would develop bipolar disorder in adulthood. In a study funded by the National Institutes of health. The findings add to mounting evidence of possible shared underlying causes and illness processes [00:28:30] with schizophrenia, which some studies have also linked to prenatal exposure to influenza, principal investigator Allen Brown and MD mph of Columbia University says prospective mothers should take common sense preventative measures such as getting flu shots prior to and in early stages of pregnancy and avoiding contact with people who are symptomatic in spite of public health recommendations, only a relatively small fraction of such women [00:29:00] get immunized. Speaker 7: The weight of evidence now suggests that benefits of the vaccine likely outweigh any possible risk to the mother or the newborn. Brown and colleagues reported their findings online. May 8th, 2013 in the Journal of the American Medical Association Psychiatry Speaker 2: [inaudible]. The music heard during the show is written and produced by Alex Simon. [00:29:30] Thank you for listening to spectrum. Had comments about the show, please send them to us via email or email address is spectrum dot k a l s@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Steven Glaser is the Intelligent Infrastructure team leader for CITRIS and a Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley. Glaser talks about wireless sensor networks, geothermal energy testing and his earthquake simulation.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. [inaudible] [inaudible]. Speaker 1: [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Good afternoon. I'm your host, Brad Swift. Today's interview is with UC Berkeley Professor Steven Glaser. Stephen is a faculty member of the Department of Civil and environmental engineering. He's currently [00:01:00] the intelligent infrastructure team leader for citrus, the center for information technology research in service to society. He has also a distinguished affiliated professor at the Technical University of Munich in Germany. In our interview, Stephen Glaser talks about engineering education, his research and field projects Speaker 4: onto the interview. Steven Glacier, welcome to spectrum. Thank you. Thank you for having me. With increasing frequency, [00:01:30] I hear engineers suggesting that engineering education needs to engage students imaginations and provide more opportunity for them to design and build things from day one when they start an education in engineering. What are your feelings about the future of engineering education? Well, it's in a way, it's two pieces. So what kids aren't doing nowadays is playing with physical things when they're young. So they're not necessarily running around [00:02:00] in the woods with their friends tearing stuff up. They're not working on cars, they're not building radios. So when they want to go out and do things in a laboratory or do things in the field, it's very difficult for, so that would be something good to bring back another hand if they want to do computery things, everything's fine and dandy because they have the experience doing that. Speaker 4: Then my lab, I have my own machine shop. I have a lays and bandsaw and mill and whatnot. I'm lucky to have students. I have [00:02:30] to up now, they're very good machinists, so my students all have to be able to do things with their hands. I've been lucky enough to attract them. Is it too late to sort of introduce that into the curriculum in college as an undergraduate? Would engineering benefit from a studio? Oh, I think it would, and I think you're starting to see that. I guess it's the maker movement. It's sometimes called our dean. Sastry is very into that now and do you feel that a unconventional Speaker 3: [00:03:00] path to becoming an engineer as an advantage Speaker 4: in a way, but it's not cost effective? Everybody has an unconventional path. I think you'd gain a lot. I think you see engineering more broadly and I think we see different types of solution. With a broader background, Speaker 3: how would you characterize the conventional path in engineering? Speaker 4: The conventional path would be somebody who you know who's good in math and science. Hopefully [00:03:30] somebody who was interested in things and they've taken math and science in high school. They'd come in, they'd do their engineering, which is quite focused because we have so much to learn and go off to work and they're going to be better at certain things. When I finished high school, I was going to go off to become a philosophy major, which I did. I didn't take math senior year. I didn't need it. I was going to be a liberal arts students, so the students that [00:04:00] do have this better background, they're always going to be better than math than me because they learn the fundamentals. When they were young, instead of me having to pick it up when I was 30. Speaker 3: Your path, the choices you made going into philosophy and then pretty radically altering even from that into being an operations engineer. How were you thinking about engineering at that point? Speaker 4: I'd never followed a path. I kind of followed what I was interested in and [00:04:30] things led to another. So I always read from a very, very young age and you know, literature, technical pieces. I always worked on things, whether it was building models when I was very young or go carts, fixing cars and whatnot. So I'm always was a very good mechanic, studied philosophy and that whole time I was working construction. I got an operating engineer's union and while I was still in college, so I went through the apprentice program. They're learning [00:05:00] to operate heavy equipment, fix heavy equipment, then worked as a driller for about eight years. So I goes fixing things, working with soils. Then I worked for a year in Iraq. My boss there, uh, had a background of being a operating engineer and then going to school and him and his wife talked me into, oh, you need to become an engineer. Speaker 4: And I don't know, one thing led to another and here I am. I never planned on being a faculty member. In fact, when I finished [00:05:30] my phd I didn't want to be a faculty member. Pieces just happened. And here I am at Berkeley. What sort of drilling were you doing? A, we are drilling deep foundations, so uh, might be a five foot diameter hole, a hundred foot deep, which we then use for foundations, for buildings, for retaining walls, for subway excavations of subway stations. I did a lot of work on the red line in the subway in Washington DC. Speaker 5: [inaudible]Speaker 6: [00:06:00] our guest today is Stephen Glaser and the next segment he talks about two of his research projects, one in the lab and one in the field. This is k a l X. Berkeley. Speaker 4: Can you give us an overview of your research? We have a number of projects [00:06:30] different yet they have some fundamental similarities. One of the projects laboratory earthquakes. I designed and make a particularly fine nano seismic sensor. So I can measure displacements down to a pico meter that's tend to the minus 12th is very, very small and I can measure signals that accurately for very wide frequency band from about 10 kilo hertz to two megahertz. So I got like the ultimate seismometer. [00:07:00] So then I can set up experiments in the lab where I can control the geometry. So I know all the mathematical descriptions of the system. I have my perfect sensors, I can load in conditions that I know what's going on. And then when I pick up the signals from the small earthquakes we, cause I can start looking at very small details like what are the little motions that lead up to large sliding. Speaker 4: So I have a block of plexiglass on a very big plate of plexiglass. [00:07:30] So my earthquake is when the whole block moves. But something has to happen before we get frictional movement. And I believe you keep looking small and smaller. You have these small little contact disparities. You have to have little pops at these small areas. And then when do you get a chain reaction? Each pop releases a little energy to the contacts around it and you know at some magic point, enough energies released that all the contacts start popping and you [00:08:00] get an earthquake. And from the lab to a real world setting, how are you translating that kind of work into something that could be in the field? Good question. And it's not universally accepted that material we're using, we're not using rock, we're using plexiglass, but at the stresses we're working with at models ductal rock very well. Speaker 4: So rock that might be on parts of the San Andreas. There's theories [00:08:30] and lots of work that shows that the way the geometry of contacts is fractal, so it scales self similarly, so might surface on a small slider block actually can scale in terms of geometry to a very large fault. We just had a paper in nature that certain earthquakes have lots of high frequency shaking, so the ground shakes more rapidly. The higher frequencies are more dangerous because it reaches, the [00:09:00] resonant frequency is structure. So there's more damage to Hoku. Earthquake was particularly rich and high-frequency. How do you explain it? So my student had some ideas and it turns out it has to do with how long the fall teals between earthquakes. So we could show the mechanism, the lab, the mechanism to fields and now we have an explanation of what's going on in the field instead of strictly an observation. Speaker 4: But I can control things in the laboratory and see that yes, it was due to this [00:09:30] factor. So the healing is the time between earthquakes when the stasis is stable, right? Cause the surfaces, chemical reactions, they start to melt together on some level. Even simply putting a block on a table, the longer it sits, the frictional resistance does go up because it's chemical reactions that are giving us a sheer strength. And then some of your other research, [00:10:00] a big project looking at snow hydrology and the Sierras. This important because the state gets about 65% of the water from snow in the Sierras. And it turns out we don't know beans about how much snow is in the Sierra. So you have Frank Gerkey goes out a few times in the winter. He goes to let's say 40 sites and the Sierra sticks this pole in the ground and that really isn't giving us much information about how much snow there is. Speaker 4: So what we do is we go into a basin, [00:10:30] we'll pick a patch, approximately a square kilometer, put in let's say 20 sensing stations, each one measuring snow depth, temperature, humidity, solar radiation, soil moisture at four depths in the soil and matrix suction at four depths in the soil. We report back the data every 15 minutes. And then we might put like an American river basin, which we're working on now. We'll have 18 such [00:11:00] networks right across the basin and we end up with the network of networks. So each of these local networks sends back to our selves here. They're by cell phone, modem, or satellite modem. The data will come back here. So then you can correlate all that and create real time. We have real time data and our application we're working on now is hydroelectric generation. So we're working with the state, [00:11:30] with the Department of Water Resources. Uh, we're starting to work with PG and nee and southern California Edison. Speaker 4: On doing demonstration projects and ultimately then with the success of these, you would want to see this proliferate across the Sierra. So then I'll do the whole Sierras and we'd like to take these pieces and make a larger system, which would be a water information system for the state where we would also bring in groundwater information around water, isn't it regulated and we [00:12:00] know really little about the ground water situation, but the general project would be through citrus, our center for information technology research for the interest of society. That's one of the CIS psi four centers that were started by Grey Davis and were interdisciplinary in the building. We have people from law, from art production, from various engineering, all working together, sitting together to look at societal problems. And part of the goals [00:12:30] of the CIS PSI institutes, the four across the state is to take the knowledge from campus and put it in a form that it will help the financial wellbeing of the state and the physical wellbeing, emotional wellbeing, the state Speaker 7: [inaudible]. You're listening to spectrum oil expert. [00:13:00] Our guest today is Stephen Glaser. In the next segment, he talks about his geothermal project. Speaker 4: Let's talk a little bit about your geothermal research you're doing and Oh, we have an interesting experiment because we can blow ourselves up. First, we'll start with the idea of enhanced geothermal systems. So we usually think of a geothermal [00:13:30] system like that, the geysers up by Santa Rosa where there's natural water and you stick a straw on the ground and steam comes up and runs your generator. But that's exceedingly rare. I think that geysers might be the only field in the world that's making profit without any kind of subsidy. So what we do have as lots of hot, dry rock, there's hot rock everywhere. So the ideas, you would drill two wells, you would connect them through fractured rock, you'd [00:14:00] pump cold water down one well, push it through the fractured hot rock and pull hot water out of the other and make a cycle. Run that through the generator, then pump it back down. Speaker 4: There's been a lot of work. We're slowly moving towards that becoming a reality. But there's this idea that you could use super critical CO2 so that CO2 under very high pressure, that it's not quite a liquid. It's not quite a gas, but it has good heat carrying capacities, but very low [00:14:30] friction, very low. A Dutch would say viscosity cause it's a fluid. However, nobody has done any measurements with the heat capacity, the state behavior of super-critical CO2 going through hot pours media. So that's what we're doing. The models show one thing, but is it true? We're running experiments in the lab and we can go up to 5,000 PSI pressure and 200 degrees centigrade. So fairly extreme conditions. [00:15:00] We run the Sea of two through a pressure vessel filled with sand and then the vessels heated and we can do all sorts of measurements inside, outside the vessel. Speaker 4: The volume flowing through the mass, flowing through how the heat is taken from the sand into the fluid as it moves through the column. And we can then verify the models, help the modelers improve their program. And we've just written a paper where what we noticed [00:15:30] is that there's a change in the conductivity of the CO2 as it changes temperature that's large enough that it causes problems in the model because the model doesn't take it into account. So this will give us a more realistic view, whether the scheme actually is so much more efficient than using water. Now that we're talking about geology, do you have any comments about fracking? It's become sort of the controversy does your, yeah, I think the New York Times [00:16:00] is kind of responsible for that in and of itself. Fracking's just fine. I think what we've seen with gas production, there's a loophole in the EPA laws and in a lot of states they're very strict with fracturing for oil production and you don't hear horror stories about oil production fracturing and has done all the time. Speaker 4: So the gas, the problems is that they don't take proper care with the fracking fluid. They're not careful with how they cement in their pipes. [00:16:30] A variety of pieces like that. So it's the way the operations are done. It isn't inherently a problem with fracking. And by being careful, you're probably meaning spending money to do it right. Money. Right. And that's the motivation to do it haphazardly is you can do it cheaply, right? Cause in, in the end you need to do something with the fracking fluid and if you just dump it on site, that's obviously cheaper than trucking it away and treating it. If you think about it, the fractured you're growing or [00:17:00] on the order of meters, tens of meters, and they're taking place a kilometer deep, they are not affecting the surface, they're not effecting the awkward aquifers. The problems would be that the pipe which you're pumping the pressurized fluid down, if there's leaks there that would affect the near surface water, you're pulling the gas out. Speaker 4: Well, if the pipe isn't cemented in very well, then you would have leakage of gas, but it can be done totally safe. So it's really a matter of getting the regulation right and getting the [inaudible] in place [00:17:30] and right, exactly. That's the physical makeup of the shale. Make the fracking process, uh, do you need to be more cautious in that environment or there are some side effects to that that don't happen in other geological formations. Each formation is going to be different. What you would watch out for in your design and operation in general, you know, if we leave out the poor operation is that you don't want to damage your petroleum reservoir. So think [00:18:00] of it as a layer of rock that has the gas and then you'd have a cap and then a cap beneath it. And if you run your fractures through your cap, then you might lose your natural gas to some other formation. The chance of it going kilometer and a half to the surface is pretty insignificant. And from a given fracture, there isn't that much gas coming out anyway. You've got to have lots and lots of fractures because shales pretty well in permeable. That's why we thought we'd never get any [00:18:30] kind of patrolling production out of the shales. Speaker 5: [inaudible]Speaker 6: Mrs KALX Berkley, the show is spectrum. Our guest is professor Stephen Glazer, the civil environmental engineer Speaker 4: [00:19:00] with smart infrastructure, kind of a focus of citrus. Is there growing concern that the internet is being seen as not so secure? There's a tremendous amount of work being done now on, on cyber security. One way around it might be to have, you know, like a private internet cause actually to have communication system with let's say water and [00:19:30] power utilities. There is no reason to also be able to access Facebook off of that. In a way. Our telephone system is a pretty complex system, wide ranging system that is much more secure. So the military has their own system but does lots of work being done on that. We're not worrying about it. We can use, you know, the encryption that's available now. Uh, does it mean that the Chinese government can't hack it? Yeah, of course they can, but they don't care how much [00:20:00] snow is at big creek. Speaker 4: If the Internet becomes a means for people to do political action by denial of service and then everybody's kind of shutdown, slowed down, right. Things aren't operating. That's the more broadly based concern that I would hope is being worked on. But you're pulled in two directions cause one by making the Internet so democratic and open, it's open to people who want to make mischief as well as people who want to use it legitimately. [00:20:30] You know, the more freedom you have, the easier it is to take advantage. And you kind of then have to say, well yeah, like our legal system, it's worth a couple of guilty people getting away with a crime than having an innocent person go to jail. So I think a society, we have to decide where we want to be on this and it's certainly not an easy question to look at. Speaker 4: Is there anything that I haven't asked you about that you want to talk about? Oh, maybe the fine quality [00:21:00] of our students here at cal. I think we sometimes forget, but then I talk with friends at other schools and it's pretty amazing with the quality of people we have here and it makes my life tremendously easier. What is it about the students that you uh, notice in terms of their capabilities or their personalities? They're really interested in what they're doing. They're interested in understanding what they're doing. They're interested in doing new things. They're interested [00:21:30] in enhancing knowledge and they're interested in working hard. Sounds like a, a good environment to be a teacher. Your teaching responsibilities are what now? I teach a graduate class on sensors and signal interpretation. I teach an undergraduate class on geological engineering. Great. Stephen Glaser. Thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Brad, thank you for having me. Speaker 7: Aw. [00:22:00] Oh, spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. We have created a short leap to the spectrum Harker type, tiny url.com/kalx spectrum. That's tiny URL, [inaudible] dot com [00:22:30] slash Calex spectrum. A feature of spectrum is to present new stories we find interesting. Speaker 3: Rick Karnofsky and I present the news nature news reports that UCLA Chemistry Professor Patrick Heron well stand trial for three counts [00:23:00] of violating health and safety standards over the 2008 death of one of his research assistants. She heard Bono songy suffered third degree burns after the term butyl lithium. She was drawing from a vial caught fire. She was not wearing a lab coat. Heron could face four and a half years in jail. The UC regents made a plea agreement for their own role in the accident last year. President of the Laboratory Safety Institute, Jim Kauffman, because the case [00:23:30] a game changer that will significantly affect how people think about their responsibilities. fuse.org reports a study that began during the postdoctoral work of northern Arizona's universities. Gregory Cup Barrasso is shedding light on how adults and their dogs and kids share a microbial communities cup. RSO and assistant professor biology says, what we've been learning is the microbial communities that live in and on our [00:24:00] bodies can play a big role in our health. Speaker 3: What was exciting about this study was how cohabitation effected microbial communities. It's a unique data set. We all have bacteria in our digestive tract, but cup RSO explained that while any two humans are 99% identical in their genomes, their gut communities of bacteria may be up to 50% different. It's those differences that interest researchers who seek to link them to the origins of obesity, malnutrition or [00:24:30] even colon cancer cup also asks what factors are driving the difference between the microbial communities in my gut and your gut? This study was an attempt to see if who you're living with is one of the factors. As it turns out, individuals from the same household, particularly couples, share more of their microbiome than they do with other individuals, and having a dog resulted in an even greater similarity because of shared contact with the animal Speaker 7: [00:25:00] [inaudible]. No. We also mentioned a few of the science and technology [00:25:30] events happening locally Speaker 3: for the next two weeks. Rick Karnofsky joins me for the calendar later today. Physicist Fabiola is your naughty co-discoverer of the Higgs Boson at the large Hadron collider in Geneva, Switzerland. We'll deliver a free public lecture titled the Higgs Boson and our life. The talk is part of a three day celebration of the work of University of California Berkeley physicist Bruno's Zunino, whose theory of supersymmetry [00:26:00] has emerged as a possible explanation for the number and variety of fundamental particles seen in nature. That's today, Friday, May 3rd 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM at the Chevron Auditorium International House, 2199 Piedmont Avenue in Berkeley spectrum airs at the same time as NPR is science Friday and we thank you for choosing us. But next week you'll have two chances to catch their team in the bay area, the [00:26:30] Jasper Ridge biological preserve and celebrating their 40th anniversary science. Fridays I ref Lado. Well discuss reviving the science statecraft dialogue with professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies at Stanford Christopher field, cofounder of method Adam Lowry and Noah director Jane Lubchenco. Speaker 3: On Thursday May 9th at 5:30 PM this event takes place at the Synnex Auditorium, six for one night [00:27:00] way in Palo Alto. Then on Friday, May 10th there will be a live broadcast of science Friday at 10:00 AM at the lead ka-shing center at Stanford. These events are free, but will be first come first serve for details. Go to j r DP. Dot stanford.edu best selling author Mary Roach returns to the bone room, presents for a talk in signing of her latest book, Gulp Adventures on the elementary [00:27:30] canal in Gulp, America's funniest science writer. So says the Washington Post takes us down the hatch on an unforgettable tour of our insides. That's Thursday, May 9th 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM it's a free event at the bone room. 1573 Solano avenue in Berkeley. Wonder Fest is having a free event, the Soma Street food park, four to eight 11th street in San Francisco. [00:28:00] On Tuesday May 14th at 7:00 PM Elliot portrait professor of astronomy and physics at UC Berkeley. We'll be discussing the modern origin story from the Big Bang two habitable planets. He'll describe how the university evolved from its smooth beginnings to its current chunky state. Emphasizing how gravity reign supreme and builds up the planets, stars and galaxies required for biological evolution. [00:28:30] Visit Wonder fest.org for more Info. Science at the theater presents eight big ideas. Eight Berkeley lab scientists present eight game changing concepts in eight minutes each. That's Monday, May 13th 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM at the Berkeley Repertory Theater, 2025 Addison Street in downtown Berkeley. This event is free. Speaker 7: Okay. Speaker 3: [00:29:00] The music heard during the show is written and produced by Alex Simon Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 8: Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is [inaudible] spectrum dot k a l s@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Paul Piff, social psychologist and post-doc scholar in the Psychology Dept at UC Berkeley, studies how social hierarchy, inequality, and emotion shape relations between individuals and groups. Paul Piff received PhD in Psychology from UCB May 2012.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k [00:00:30] a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Good afternoon. My name is Brad swift and I'm your house today. In today's interview, Renee Rao and I talk with Paul Piff, a social psychologist and postdoctoral scholar in the psychology department at the University of California, Berkeley. Paul's studies house, social [00:01:00] hierarchy, inequality and emotion shape relations between individuals and groups. Paul piff received his phd in psychology from UC Berkeley in May, 2012 onto the interview. Paul Piff, welcome to spectrum. Thanks so much for having me on. It's a pleasure. I wanted to have you talk about your research. Psychology is such a big field. How does your research fit into that? Speaker 4: Psychology is a big field. Lot of people are psychologists center interested in a lot [00:01:30] of different questions as they relate to people and organisms and why different kinds of organisms do the things that they do. The brand of psychology that I'm really interested in is called social psychology. So what I do is as opposed to having people lay on a couch and talk to me about their problems, I study what people do around others in the reasons for what they do. So I study emotion. That's one of the focuses of my work. I've also recently gotten really interested in [00:02:00] the effects of inequality and specifically how a person's levels of wealth and status in society shapes the ways that they see the world and behave toward other people. As a social psychologist, you take a question that's of interest to you, like how do the rich behave compared to those that are poor. And then you think about how you would design experiments in different kinds of studies to look at that using a very quantitative approach. So as a social psychologist, I design a lot of studies where people literally [00:02:30] come into the lab. There's something happening where I can observe what they do without their necessarily knowing, and I use that to infer basic motivations behind people's behavior. Speaker 3: Can you explain then some of your methods, maybe an example of how you're set up Speaker 4: study, study. So a lot of the work that I've been doing relates to this basic question of how money shapes behavior. So how do people who have a lot of money behave differently toward others from those who don't have [00:03:00] as much money? One of the things that I was interested in studying for example, is how does the amount of money that you have shaped how generous and helping you are toward other people. In social psychology, we call that general category of behavior, pro social behavior or altruism. What makes people behave in ways that help another person out, even if that means they have to do something kind of costly. So let's say I'm interested in looking at levels of generosity, a lot of different ways in which people can be generous toward one another in everyday life. [00:03:30] But I want to study this in the lab. Speaker 4: And so one of the ways that we can do that is using a standard task where we can have someone engage in it and see how generous they are. And one of the tasks that I'll use is called the dictator task. And for instance, in one study in this dictator task, I give someone literally $10 and I say, you can keep all these $10 10 single dollar bills or you can decide how many of these dollar bills you want to give away, if any, [00:04:00] to another person who's totally anonymous that you've been paired with in this study. And I tell them they'll never meet this other person, the other person will never meet them. And I just measure how many of those dollars they're willing to give away. Another thing I do before they come into the lab is measure what their income is. So I can look at how generous they are, how many of these single dollar bills they're willing to give away as a function of how much money they have. Speaker 4: And that's one of the assessments that I used in one area of study to look at levels [00:04:30] of giving levels of generosity in the simple task as a function of how much money people have. So there's rational economic models that would say that if you have a lot of money, that the utility of those $10 is somewhat diminished because you have more money in the first place. So you would predict that as a rational actor, a person who has more money is going to give more money away cause $10 means less. That's the opposite of what we find. In fact, people who make under $15,000 [00:05:00] a year give significantly more on average six to $7 away then to someone who makes 150,000 to $200,000 a year. So we found incredible differences. And so a lot of my work over the last five or six years, and this is in collaboration with other people in my lab, is to try to document why it is that these really notable differences emerge between the haves and the have nots and what the psychological underpinnings of those differences are. But that's an example of a kind of study that will run Speaker 2: [00:05:30] [inaudible]. Our guest today is Paul Piff, a social psychologist. Paul is talking about how he designs his research studies. This is k a l X. Berkeley. Speaker 5: I have a question about the dictator test. Do you find any sort of other correlating variables in between just wealth and lack of [00:06:00] wealth? Do you find education has difference or how people made the wealth? Can you draw a sort of a causal line between saying this person has more and this makes them less empathetic or this person being less empathetic maybe has led to them being wealthier? Speaker 4: The dictator task has been used a lot and there are a lot of correlating variables that we know about already. Age correlates, religion correlates, ethnicity correlates, and so if I'm interested in the specific effects of wealth, I have to [00:06:30] account for those other things and I do so controlling for a lot of other variables. Wealth above and beyond a person's race, their age, what religion they are, how religious they are in the first place. Wealth has a specific effect, but the question that you're getting at I think is a even bigger one, which is how do I know whether it's wealth that causes someone to do something or is it people that are say a little more selfish with their money, who become wealthy in the first place? [00:07:00] And that is a really important question. And I think one of the insights that we've had from a lot of the experimental work that we've done, I can literally take someone whose quote unquote poor, make them feel rich and show you that making them feel wealthy temporarily in the lab actually makes them behave more unethically, which suggests that there's at least in part a causal direction between having money, feeling like you have money and that subjective experience. Speaker 4: It's psychological [00:07:30] experience causing you to behave in some ways that are a little more entitled, a little more self-serving. Now there's an another important question, which is if these differences do exist between those that have and those that don't, are they fixed? Are they rooted? Is that just a fact of life that we have to accept and sort of move on from, or are they sensitive to changes and if they are, what are the kinds of things that you can do to move people's behavior around or to make certain people in society a little more empathetic [00:08:00] without necessarily getting into the details? There are a lot of things that can be done in a lot of my work looks at specific variables that you can manipulate, even through subtle interventions that get people who had a lot more money to behave in ways that are a lot more compassionate and a lot more empathetic. And one of the lessons that I've learned from this work is that it's not that difficult. So it's not that people who have money or necessarily corrupt in any way, but that there's a specific psychological experience associated with privilege [00:08:30] that gets you to become a little more disconnected from others. A little more insular from others in that certain patterns of behavior flow as a result, but those patterns can easily changed. Speaker 5: Can we talk about some of the tweaks that you use to sort of bring about those changes? Speaker 4: Sure. One of the things that I'm really interested in right now is if it's the case that upper status individuals are more likely to behave unethically, then what are some subtle interventions that could be [00:09:00] done? Like a little ethics reminder course at the beginning that, so I've run this where I basically had people do sort of a 10 minutes ethics training program where I remind them about some of the benefits of the rules and how cooperating with others can ultimately bring about gains for the whole group, including yourself. And I see how that basic values intervention changes their patterns of unethical, the downstream. But now in one of the studies that I ran, I just wanted to look at helping behavior. [00:09:30] What makes a person want to help out another? So in this study, the way that I designed my test was I had one group of participants sitting in the lab and about 15 minutes into the study, it's the room bursts. Speaker 4: Another person. Now this is appearing visibly distressed. They're worried, they're sweating, they're anxious, they apologize for being late, and they introduce themselves as their partner in the study. Now there is an experimenter standing there who says, it's so great that you're late. Why don't you go ahead and see yourself in this other room? [00:10:00] And they turn to the participant and ask the participant if they'd be willing to give up some of their own time to help out this other person who would otherwise have to stay on for a lot of extra time to complete all of the tasks that they need to complete. And so that's our measure of helping behavior. How many minutes people are willing to volunteer to help out this other person who's actually a confederate. There's someone we've trained to be late to appear distressed, et cetera. They're an actor. All right. Speaker 4: So in one condition we find that Richard people give [00:10:30] way fewer minutes than poor people paralleling all the other results. But we had this other condition that I think is really revealing in that condition. Before they received in the lab about 15 minutes earlier, they watched a 46 second long video. And in that video, it was just a quick little reminder of the problems of childhood poverty. And it was a video that we'd designed to elicit increased feelings of compassion. Now, in that group, 15 minutes later, when [00:11:00] the people who had seen that video were sitting in a lab and we're introduced to that confederate and asked if they'd be willing to help them out, there were no differences between the rich and the poor in our study. So essentially that quick little reminder of the needs of others made wealthier people just as generous of their time to help out this other person as poor people suggesting that simple reminders of the needs of other people can go a long way toward restoring that empathy gap. And so the interesting question [00:11:30] to me is what are the ways in which in everyday life we can remind even those in the upper echelons of society, of the needs of other people in the small benefits that can be incurred through small and even sometimes trivial acts of kindness toward another person. Speaker 4: You are listening to the on k Speaker 2: a l x Berkeley. Our guest today is Paul. Pissed in the next second [00:12:00] he talks about his collaboration with Facebook. [inaudible] Speaker 5: try not to talk about how psychology seems to be a field that's accessible, not only in terms of mechanics and just finding the work, but also more understandable for a layman or for everyday people. Then most sciences, I think it's one of the most popular majors in colleges across the u s and can you sort of talk about the broad appeal that psychology has and why you think that might [00:12:30] be? I think Speaker 4: that observation rings true. I think psychology is something that's accessible and that that accessibility and the understandable illness of the content is what makes it kind of relatable and popular in the kind of work that we do. It's a positive and a negative. So what I mean by that is everyone who's engaged with others or interacted with others who are, has a sense of how people behave is a, an intuitive psychologist. We're all psychologists. [00:13:00] We all make decisions based on what we think is gonna make us happy. What's gonna make others happy? What's the kind of relationship that's meaningful to me? We all run these kinds of experiments. In fact, the life is sort of like a psychological experiment to run on a single person, 5 billion people at a time or whatever the population of the earth is. So we're all intuitive psychologists. But what that means is for the work that we do, if we find something or generate a finding, it's either obvious. Speaker 4: So someone could say, Oh yeah, you had to run a study [00:13:30] to do that. I've known that all along. Or if it doesn't conform to your worldview, you're wrong. You've run the study incorrectly. So the question is, are we actually convincing people or revealing new insights about how the mind works to others such that our awareness and understanding of psychology is increasing? Or are we simply just telling people what they knew all along or telling them things that they feel like is just flat out wrong? And that's something that I've wondered about myself. To what extent our findings are convincing people or informing people of things that they don't [00:14:00] intuitively experience in their everyday lives. Speaker 5: Do you want to talk about what you're doing with Facebook? I know you're, yeah, we can talk about Facebook in an ongoing collaboration with Facebook. So maybe you should tell us a little bit more about that Speaker 4: with Facebook. Dacher Keltner, who's a psychology faculty member here at Berkeley and Amelianna, Simon Thomas, who's the science director of the greater good science center, also at Berkeley, and I have been working with a team of engineers [00:14:30] at Facebook to put very, very simply make Facebook a more compassionate place. Now, when we started working with Facebook about 12 months ago, that was what was post to us. Help us make Facebook a more compassionate place. What does that mean? How do you do that? Well, what's become clear to me is that there are a lot of opportunities on Facebook and elsewhere to build little tools to make interactions between people and online. A little more sympathetic and a little more empathetic. [00:15:00] So here's an example. A lot of people on Facebook post photos. What that means when photos are getting posted is that there's the possibility that you're going to encounter a photo that you don't like. Speaker 4: And what Facebook found was that people were encountering these photos and just submitting reports to Facebook saying, hey, there's something seriously wrong with this photo. Facebook needs to take it down. And more often than not, people were reporting photos that had been posted by a friend of theirs. Very rarely do these reported photos actually violate [00:15:30] Facebook's terms of services. So Facebook can't do anything about it. And what we thought and what we've done is in the context of a photo being posted that you don't like, maybe this is a photo of your child that you think shouldn't be up at violates your privacy. Maybe it's a photo of you at a party in a some kind of revealing pose that you think is embarrassing. It doesn't really matter. But what we've done is tried to, for instance, give people tools to express why that photo is problematic, not to Facebook but to the person who posted [00:16:00] it. Speaker 4: And so now there's a series of things that pop up on the site. If you're having a problem with something that someone's posted that basically gets you to think about your experience, be a little bit mindful about the feelings that you're experiencing and be a little more mindful in how you express those feelings to the other person. That puts the photo up and when we just looked at the data recently, what we found is that by identifying the particular reason why you're finding that photo problematic and expressing that to the other person gets [00:16:30] them to be a lot more empathetic, a lot more sympathetic and really importantly a lot more likely to take the photo down. So we're actually trying to resolve disputes and conflicts on Facebook and there are a lot of other directions that this work is taken. We're dealing with bullying with the team at Yale, we're doing all sorts of other things that basically relate to what makes people get along or not get along in an online context. Speaker 5: I think the other question that I was trying to get at but didn't quite get to is how you think interactions [00:17:00] on platforms like the Internet, if they are fundamentally different than people interacting face to face or in a laboratory and why you think that might be the case? Speaker 4: Yes. What I mean by that is there's no single answer to the question and I think it's too early to tell. I think that online interactions are expressions of fundamental psychological tendencies, much like real world interactions are. So I don't think that things unfolds [00:17:30] online that wouldn't unfold in the real world, but does that mean that certain things are going to be accentuated or emphasized or magnified in an online setting? I think that's true as well. So I think online interactions are a certain kind of context where dynamics and fold that aren't fundamentally different from other kinds contexts in everyday life, but in which you might see certain kinds of patterns emphasized or magnified. Speaker 2: [00:18:00] This is k a l x Berkeley. The show is spectrum. Our guest is Paul Piff, a social psychologist. Speaker 4: Do you see a future in collaboration between brain studies and psychology? Absolutely. So that that future is now, I think a lot of psychologists who [00:18:30] incorporate brain imaging and brain data, FMR data into their papers, into their studies. This is the direction that even my work is beginning to move into. So I feel like the opportunities for collaboration are definitely there and in fact they're unfolding now. There's a lot of neuroscience that's less interested in quote unquote psychology and more interested in say biology, but there's a lot of social neuroscience, a lot of brain research that's done that's specifically motivated and [00:19:00] oriented around understanding why people feel the things that they do. What does emotion look like in the brain? What drives basic behavior patterns? So absolutely, I think that those opportunities are there, and this is a, an incredibly exciting developing area of the science. Speaker 4: One of the things in the fifties and sixties when BF Skinner and behaviorism was all the rage, is that behaviorism and the quantification of behavior gained traction [00:19:30] because it was argued that you can't look inside the black box. And if you can't look inside the black box, which is people's brains, people's minds, then the only thing you can study is behavior. And if we're interested in a science of behavior, then the only thing we can measure is what a person does or what a rat does or what a pigeon pecks at. But what neuroscience has allowed us to do is take a look at what is happening in that so-called black box. And if you put someone's brain in [00:20:00] a magnet in, scan it and see what's happening in the brain when you're showing them, say, images of another person's suffering, well then you're getting a sense of what compassion looks like neuro anatomically. Speaker 4: And that's a really exciting and incredible opportunity for understanding how basic psychological experiences are rooted in the brain and how basic anatomical structures in the brain can illuminate how psychology works. So I think the [00:20:30] opportunities are bi-directional. If I might, let me just add one more thing, which is one more insight that I think is interesting to me that social psychology seems to have been moving in the direction of, or psychology and there are about 80 or 90 years of research documenting the extent to which people stick to their groups. People are antagonistic potentially toward other groups. There's a history of violence in the human tradition or the history of humanity as sort of a history [00:21:00] of violence and that's given a lot of psychologists the perspective that people are in a way born to be sort of self-serving, especially if you look at behavior from an evolutionary framework, then it makes sense that people would do anything they could to get themselves ahead of the pack and get their groups ahead of the pack of other groups. Speaker 4: And what I think is a really important insight, and this is in part a movement that's been inspired by people like my advisor in graduate [00:21:30] school, Dacher Keltner, toward understanding that people are a lot more complicated than that in that a lot of the driving motivation to behavior is not just what gets you ahead, but also how you can help other people. So in a way, compassion and altruism we're learning is hardwired into the brain and that's a really puzzling thing because it's hard to fit that specifically into an evolutionary framework. But put generally [00:22:00] what I think we're learning about what motivates people is not just that people are motivated to get ahead, but the people are really driven to make others around them happy and to serve other people in ways that benefit others. And that insight has inspired 30 years of the most hard-hitting social psychology that I know of and it's also given rise to just a different kind of conceptualization of what makes people do the things that they do. Paul Piff, thanks very much for coming on spectrum. [00:22:30] That was a lot of fun. Thanks again for having me. On and I'd be happy to come on any other time. Great. Speaker 2: [inaudible] spectrum is archived on iTunes university. To find the archives, do a search in your favorite browser for iTunes Dash and view space k a l x space spectrum. The feature of spectrum is to present new stories we find [00:23:00] interesting and a coolio and Renee route present the news. Speaker 6: A National Institute of Health funded team of researchers at Stanford University have created an entirely transparent mouse brain. This new process known as clarity by its inventors will allow scientists to explore the neural networks and their natural 3d arrangement without having to slice the brain or severing any neural connections. Additionally, the process preserves the delicate biochemistry of the brain, which will allow researchers to test [00:23:30] chemicals affecting specific structures as well as to examine past brain activity. While the breakthrough is not part of the Obama Administration's recent brain exploration initiative, the senior author on the paper, Dr Karl Deisseroth, was involved in the planning of the initiative. Speaker 1: Well, some moderations do need to be made for the more complex human brain. The Stanford lab has already produced transparent human livers, hearts and lungs. You see Berkeley researchers and the integrative Biology Department just came out [00:24:00] with a study showing the positive effects of stress in studies on rats. They found that brief stressful events caused stem cells to branch into new nerve cells that improved the rats. Mental performance. It is important to differentiate acute stress and chronic stress. Chronic stress elevates levels of stress hormones that suppress the production of new neurons, which impairs mental performance. Associate Professor Coffer Characterizes [00:24:30] the overall message of this study as stress can be something that makes you better, but it is a question of how much, how long and how you interpret or perceive it. We'd like to mention a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Rick Karnofsky, Julian and Renee arou present the calendar. NASA astrobiology researcher and Lawrence Berkeley fellow in residence, Felisa Wolf Simon is delivering tonight. Future Friday's [00:25:00] lecture at the Chabot Space and science center at 10,000 Skyline Boulevard in Oakland. She'll be discussing the chemical elements that can support microbial life on earth. Drawing from molecular biology, biochemistry and physiology. Admission is $23 in advance. Visit shabbos space.org for more info this Saturday come to the UC Berkeley campus for the [inaudible] Speaker 6: bears annual kal day. Over 300 lectures, workshops [00:25:30] and presentations will be available with topics ranging from how the interplay of light with the atmosphere can create rainbows to a demonstration from the first laundry folding robot. Rosie Cal Day's tomorrow April 20th held on the UC Berkeley campus and open to the public events. Begin at 8:00 AM go to [inaudible] dot berkeley.edu Speaker 1: false schedule of events April 22nd through April 26th is national parks week. During this week, [00:26:00] admission to all US national parks is free. Put on your hiking boots and visit the nearest national park to you. Speaker 6: On April 27th Berkeley High School will host the day long Alameda County apps challenge contestants are asked to create apps that will address community needs. Using Alameda county open datasets apprise of $3,000 will be awarded to the most inventive and user friendly app. Well, second, third and honorable mentions will also be meted out. Alameda county [00:26:30] invites participation from residents of all skill levels and age groups. The apps challenge is part of a nationwide movement to increase transparency and implement open data policies in governmental organizations. The event be held at Berkeley High School Speaker 1: in downtown Berkeley from 8:00 AM to 7:00 PM on Saturday, April 27th it costs $15 to participate with discounts for students and seniors. There has been a rapid spread of sudden oak death pathogen [00:27:00] referred to Assad over the East Bay hills, specifically in north Berkeley and Montclair. Professor Matteo Garber, Loto, head of the UC Berkeley forest pathology and my collegey lab has been tracking the spread through annual area surveys. Garber Lotos team is looking for volunteers to help conduct annual spring surveys to find diseased trees. There will be several training sessions for volunteers in the bay area. The Berkeley session is on Saturday, April 27th at 1:00 PM [00:27:30] on the Berkeley campus in one 59 Mulford Hall. For other training sessions in the bay area. Searched the web for sod blitz project, but first after dark at the new exploratorium in San Francisco. [inaudible] on Thursday May 2nd after dark is the exploratorium monthly evening program for adults 18 and over. Admission for non-members is $15 in addition to the museums regular exhibits, there will be live music films and [00:28:00] the lectures. The theme this month is home and you can hear about how an empty warehouse on pier 15 was transformed into the explore Torrens new home. Karen [inaudible]. We'll discuss the human microbiome and Ron Hitchman. We'll talk about what makes earth and other goldilocks planets just right for sustaining life. For more information, visit the exploratorium.edu Speaker 6: on Friday May 3rd the San Francisco ASCA scientists lecture series [00:28:30] will host a workshop on crafting the perfect science story. Editors of the science writer handbook will share personal stories of working in the field and address questions about building sustainable science writing careers. The May 3rd event will begin at 7:00 PM in San Francisco's bizarre cafe. More details can be found online at ask a scientist, s f.com Speaker 2: [inaudible] [00:29:00] a character in the show is by lost on a David from his album, folk acoustic and available by it. We have Commons license 3.0 and attribution editing assistance provided by renew route 90 spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us. [00:29:30] Our email address is spectrum lx@yahoo.com join us in two weeks. Same time [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A discussion between two physicists on the Higgs Boson and Super Symmetry. Simone Pagan-Griso, Postdoc Chamberlain Fellow at LBNL, works on the ATLAS team at CERN. Will Johnson, a Physicist at Sandia National Lab in Livermore CA, has worked on the Collider Detector at Fermilab.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next [inaudible]. Welcome to spectrum the science and technology [00:00:30] show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 2: Good afternoon. My name is Brad swift and I'm your host today. In today's interview, Rick Karnofsky talks with two physicists about the search for the Higgs Boson and supersymmetry at cern, Simona Pagan. Greece is a postdoctoral Chamberlain fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories. [00:01:00] Some money first appeared on spectrum on September 23rd, 2011 you can listen to that show online at iTunes u soon after that appearance, somone moved to Switzerland to work in close proximity with the atlas team at cern on among other things, the search for the Higgs Boson. Rick is also joined today by will Johnson, a physicist at Sandia national laboratories in Livermore, California during will's Phd Studies in physics at UC Davis. [00:01:30] He worked on the collider detector at Fermi lab in Illinois. Somani was visiting Berkeley recently and we invited him and will for a followup interview. During the interview you will hear mention of GE v which stands for Giga Electron volt. Speaker 2: The Electron volt is a unit of mass and energy head to Wikipedia for more on the electron volt. Now the interview, welcome back to spectrum. Thank [00:02:00] you. Thank you. Glad to be back. Let's get to it. A few months ago it was widely reported in the media that scientists have discovered the Higgs. Can you walk us through exactly what people found and what bearing that has? Yes. Just a reminder. We look for coalitions of protons at the very high energy in this accelerator in Switzerland, and so what we really look at these, the products of these collisions and we tried to reconstruct for what to see what happened at the very [00:02:30] smallest Cade few months ago. We helped enough data and our analysis of the data got to enough refined to be able to distinguish from the existing of expose explosive with that mass and the not existence. And so we actually found it. Speaker 2: So that was awkward of success in the official masses and efficient mass is around 125 GV GVU is the unit information that we use for the mass. So is a roughly equivalent to the mass of a, [00:03:00] and what detector was this all? So we have two main detectors. General purpose for these kinds of searches are the large Hadron collider. One is called atlas, which is the detector I'm working on and other trees called the CMS. So both experiments had independent analysis on independent at the samples and they confirmed the existence of the heat disposal. So we had two different experiments confirming the same result, which of course is always good, right? And now [00:03:30] what's next? Now? Next, our first call is to measure more accurately the property of this new particular we found to really establish if it is fully the he exposed on or fetus any deviation. Speaker 2: There are several reasons why we may expect some deviations, but up to now I have to say everything looks like he exposed to as predicted by the most simple theory what kind of deviations would, so you can have several things if you want precision measurement that are ongoing [00:04:00] to determine if this is really the particle we were expecting. But on top of that there is a full harder program looking for other different products of these collisions which may show deviations from what we expect. We mentioned I think last time, very briefly one today, which is really popular in the last decades, which is called supersymmetry. This is probably the very next big thing that we are hunting for. Stepping back a little bit, in [00:04:30] the months that interceded are for sharing with you and the report of the Higgs, what if any big steps in data analysis or the way that you guys were running experiments had to change? Speaker 2: Since we talked? One big step came from data. When we're collisions that almost doubled the amount of data we had since we talked and that discovery was announced. One collision happens, but you may have multiple collision happening at the same [00:05:00] time and you need to disentangle them from what you see. A lot of work was put into actual decent tankers, these interactions, and this was really a key to be able to analyze efficiently. So enormous progress was made. Just to give you a rough ideas in our detector, one part of it try to track charged particles transverse in our detector. What you end up having are different points in different [00:05:30] layers of Europe. Sub detectors are you need to connect them to actually track the particles. So this seems easy to have one or two particle, but then you end up having more than a thousand of particles and you need to disentangle who belongs to whom. Speaker 2: Right? So this for example is an area I've worked a little bit hard to to be able to make sure that we actually can efficiently distinguished different particles and not be confused [00:06:00] by our connecting points, which are actually belonging to different particles. Tens are there still improvements being made to the data analysis? Of course, improvements are always ongoing. We worked very hard on that. Right now the larger collider is shutting down for a two years period and on February it will actually shut down and work will be made on the accelerator itself for two years almost. [00:06:30] And we expect to be back in taking data for physics analysis the first months of 2015 and the reason we do this works not only as maintainers, but actually to improve one big thing is that we will be able to raise the energy of the collision of disc pratum's almost double it a little bit less. Speaker 2: So right now we are working at around 8,000 GV. After the shutdown and improvements, we [00:07:00] will be able to collide protests around the 13 thousands GV. So why is that important? Increasing the energy. It actually also increased the probability of producing rare phenomenon like the he exposed in production or particular that predictably supersymmetry theory. In all this theory, the likelihood of producing such particles increased dramatically with an edge. The higher energy we can probe, the higher [00:07:30] are likely to produce those particles. And this is also because they may be heavy, even heavier than the Higgs and not only rare but also with a heavy mass and so the more energy you have the more likely is that you can produce them and what kind of work will be done besides this upgrade, what are all the staff scientists going to do with their time for two years? Speaker 2: We will keep us busy. I'm sure the detectors themselves will be upgraded as well. The [00:08:00] trust, etc. I'm working on has a big project of trying to replace one of its inner most part. I mentioned these detectors to detect charge particles. These are based on silicon and they suffer radiation damage. With all this collision happening, we have a lot of tradition which can damage all the electronics and the censor themselves. A new detector was made and we'd be inserted in addition to the existing ones in order to improve [00:08:30] the detection of discharge particles. This is probably the biggest project which will be ongoing doing shut down for our experiment. There are also several other minor maintenance and other upgrades which are ongoing and in the meantime we easy our analysis strategy, our software in order to be ready when we come back to put in practice what you've learned, analyzing the past two years data and to be even more efficient. So with these [00:09:00] new detectors it'll be detecting even closer to the points of collision? That's correct. In fact, I mentioned things happen very close to where the protons collide. So when I mentioned that particles decay to other particles and so on, that usually happens in a small space like way less than half a millimeter. So it's important to note that you never actually see the particles you produce. You only see the decay products from them. [00:09:30] That's correct. Exactly. Having a detector which is close to where the protons collide will allow us to differentiate even better. Yeah. Speaker 1: [inaudible] you are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Our guests today are Simona and Pega and will Johnson both are physicists. In the next segment they discuss supersymmetry. Speaker 3: [00:10:00] It may not be obvious, but so actually one of the main goals for High Energy Particle Physics is actually defined a single equation. And from this one equation we can drive everything we could possibly need to know about how particles interact, what particles exist, how everything works. So the goal is one grand equation, a grand unified theory right now we have a great equation called the standard model that takes [00:10:30] care of all forces. Everything we know about how physical objects interact and how they exist can be described by this one equation with the exception of gravity. We can't combine that in with this one equation. And also there's some parts to the equation that we think could be a little bit more elegant and we want to combine it with gravity and also possibly take care of some of these ambiguities. Going to supersymmetry allows [00:11:00] us to do that. So one of the big questions is we haven't seen supersymmetry yet. I know when the LHC turned on, everybody was hoping that it would just be very obvious and we would just see supersymmetry. But that hasn't been the case so far. Has there been any hints or signs that people are looking for that supersymmetry is most likely to be hiding? Speaker 2: We were hoping to see signs of the supersymmetry in a couple of years of running of the large Hadron collider. [00:11:30] The large Hadron collider started with an energy which was slower than what is designed and only after this shutdown we will get to the energy which was designed for, so we really hope that is increasing energy, which can shed more light on the natural supersymmetry and why we didn't see it so far. For sure. The data we analyzed so far already poses a slight challenge to the theory itself. It might be good to explain why supersymmetry is such an attractive theory. People who have been looking for it for [00:12:00] 30 years now, we've seen no hints of it yet. Still very convinced. Yes, supersymmetry can explain a lot of the unexplained feature that we see up to now. Supersymmetry will give us from the practical point of view, the door to unify also gravity with the other forces. Speaker 2: A lot of people think that this is the right way to go to be able to actually describe gravity together with the other forces in our single tier. People have already [00:12:30] heard about the string theories and so on. The all implicitly assume that supersymmetry exists in some form of it. So it's very important for us to find any sign of it or this theory, we lack a fundamental part of it. And so actually what happens if it turns out we don't see supersymmetry, the Higgs bows on looks exactly like the standard model predicts and we see no other hints of supersymmetry. Well certainly this is something that we need to consider, right? [00:13:00] There are open questions that we hope supersymmetry can answer if supersymmetry is not found still we need to answer those questions so we need to keep looking. There are several other theories which may predict and explain the same scenarios, just had not the more simple ones. Speaker 2: So just means that probably the most simple solution we found was not the correct one. So we still need to look for other sign of it. I we do it already in parallel. So we consider [00:13:30] the possibility of supersymmetry is not the right answer. It's just the one that we think is most likely we will keep looking even if we had no sign of it, so we really expect to find some sign of something. Maybe supersymmetry may be something else, but we really hope that with the next data we will find a sign of something else beyond what we know. If that doesn't happen still we need to find a mechanism to explain what we see, which is different from what we have taught so far [00:14:00] and that for sure will require big synergy between the theoretical part and the experimental one trying to work together towards a new different solutions. Speaker 2: There are people actively working on data from the LHC looking for other theories. Technicolor is one of the other big ones, but the detectors aren't designed specifically to look at supersymmetry. They're designed to try to catch as wide of possibilities as possible. [00:14:30] Yeah, this is actually a very good point. We perform some generalist searches which do not depend on a specific models, but just look for consistency between the given theory that we have. The standard pondered and what we see. So any hint of it can be used, at least as our guidance in watch theory can predict this kind of phenomenon. So we keep looking also for unexpected as much as possible. Speaker 1: [inaudible] [00:15:00] this is k a l x Berkeley. The show is spectrum. Our guests are Tsimané, Pegol Rizo and Bill Johnson in the next segment. The detailed useful byproducts of high energy particle physics. Speaker 3: Can you think [00:15:30] of any good examples of the technology developed our hundred [inaudible] physics or maybe the announced techniques designed for high energy physics and invented for it have affected people in common everyday life. Speaker 2: This research is really targeted in fundamental research, understanding how nature works, so the effects of it are usually a very long term, so it's very hard to predict what will happen. However, the means that we use to actually [00:16:00] perform these searches, they may have a more direct impact. If we go back a bit in the history, all the nuclear science that was used to start this particle physics in general decades ago is, for example, used to treat cancer. Here in alifornia is for example, very advanced in what is called heartland therapy, so try to treat cancer with protons and they have sidebar advantages with respect to the common radiotherapy, particular for inner most tumors. [00:16:30] In this way you can reach and try to kill the tumor burden, the size of the tumor without having to burn whatever is in the meter. All these kinds of the tactful with a lot of r and d of course on top of them but were taken from what was developed for nuclear physics in the past. Speaker 2: This is a very good example of how technology that we may use for our scope can actually be bring vented and adapted for other scopes in other very big challenge that we face every day [00:17:00] is that the amount of data we collect and the computing power we need to analyze it is huge. In order to cope with this, we had since several years our projects for distributed computing in order to be able our to analyze data everywhere using computing that are located everywhere in the world, sharing computing resources, sharing disc. This was a necessary step for us. In order to be able to carry on and having physics results. However, that can have [00:17:30] also an impact to everyday life. What we see now is our all the cloud computing increasing faster and faster in our everyday life. This is a slightly different version of this distributed computing that we've been developed and worked so far. Speaker 3: The web as we know it today from Speaker 2: what was created at cern. So if you actually see some of the photos of the very irst web browsers, they actually have design specifications and pictures [00:18:00] of the atlas detector at certain it was created for the scientists to communicate, but then it was such useful technology it felt to the rest of the population. So an interesting story is that even today that when you press and you don't find the page, you get these set of [inaudible] and this was actually the room at cern where the irst web server was hosted. A lot of the physics analysis that we do is [00:18:30] really from a statistical point of view, decent target. These huge amount of data that we collect and trying to find a rare phenomenon. It's usually trying to find a handful of events of collisions which have the characteristics you want among the billions that happened. Speaker 2: So these techniques are very similar and are in common to other challenges where you have a huge amount of data and you to find a specific [00:19:00] ones on a slightly different level. But it's what Google needs to find when you put some keywords and you can find what are the relevant pages for you. And there are few. So even in this case, what you need to do is basically try to find the most appropriate few pages among the billions that exist, which match what you're looking for. In many senses, this is not very different from what we try to do. And in fact, some of the technologies [00:19:30] with very big differences are actually in common. Well, ne question of course, is with the shutdown or from your lab, do you see the need for more accelerators besides certainly I strongly think these accelerators are big and they take a lot of resources of our community, not only in terms of the money you need to build them, but also as intellectual power of our community. Speaker 2: Run random and analyze data, but [00:20:00] having a new accelerator right now is not worth the investment in both their mind, intellectual power that we need to put on it, so the larger other collider will run at least up to the end of the Deca. Then probably up to the end of the next tech ad and this will be enough to give us data to answer most of the questions we actually build it for. Of course, people are already thinking of what's next. They're thinking [00:20:30] of new accelerators. They're thinking what is the best choice? I want to build it. If we have the technology, if we need to develop something that we are missing and people are actively working already on this and the LSE is a giant machine. It's hundreds of feet underground in miles Speaker 3: and miles across. So building a bigger tunnel is a very, very expensive proposition. Yes. And there's just fundamental limitations on how strong magnets can be. So a lot of people are investing [00:21:00] a lot of effort into finding other ways of accelerating particles or studying phenomenon that doesn't necessarily need accelerators. Is there anything particularly promising? There's the plasma wave accelerator. Um, there's cosmic sources, so some of the highest energy collisions we get are actually from particles from outer space. And a lot of people are using the atmosphere itself as a detector. So you can look at the interactions in the atmosphere [00:21:30] and then decay particles from those interactions to see what happened. There's also a lot of work going into just looking to see if you can study these processes with a lower energy. So maybe you won't be able to see what particle you're looking for, but you'll be able to see some very slight effects on other particles or another process. Very, very slight effects, which if you're very careful and you study it, it might tell you information about these much heavier particles than you can produce. So there's, there's a lot of ways of finding supersymmetry [00:22:00] yes. Or other further beyond the standard model. Yeah. These are complimentary ways in many senses. As you mentioned, there is a lot of work on going and it's very promising, so we really look forward to these [inaudible] well, thanks for joining us. Thank you Rick as thank you Rick. Cool Speaker 1: background [00:22:30] is archived on iTunes university. To find the archive, do a search in your favorite browser for iTunes Dash u space Calex space spectrum. Speaker 3: We'd like to mention a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next wo weeks. [00:23:00] Rick Kaneski joins me for the calendar. The theme for the Spring Open House at the crucible is the science of art. The Criswell is located at welve sixty eventh street near West Oakland, Bart and mission on Saturday April ix it's free from leven am until our pm the open house seeks to highlight the scientific principles, inquiry and exploration behind the industrial arts processes. Taught and practiced at the [00:23:30] crucible. Highlights include the science of fire, the gravity of mold making, mysteries of steel made visible bicycle physics. Yeah. Surfing the solar flares with science at cal recycled glass processing and more. Speaker 4: There will be demonstrations, tuition discounts, food and bikes for sale. Visit the rucible dot org for more info. In April of wo thousand and twelve a small asteroid impacted [00:24:00] close to home in alifornia at Sutter's mill. The site where gold was irst discovered in ighteen forty eight media are astronomer. Peter Jenniskens of the Seti Institute started a tally of fines and mobilized NASA Ames research center into leading the recovery effort from the air and the ground. eventy seven media rights were found. He will summarize research results reported in a recent eventy author science article and also discuss a econd meteorite fall that happened in [00:24:30] Nevato and Sonoma last October. The presentation is Monday pril eighth at the Academy of Sciences. Planetarium. Tickets for the even hirty event can be purchased nline at Cal Academy Dot Org San Francisco Science Museum. The exploratorium is reopening in their new location at peer ifteen on Wednesday pril seventeenth to celebrate. They will offer free outdoor programming from ine am until en pm [00:25:00] the new museum offers ix galleries on human behavior, living systems maker culture, observing the landscape scene and listening as well as an outdoor space. Speaker 4: More nformation at exploratorium dot edu also on pril seventeenth UC Berkeley is holding its monthly blood drive. You can make an appointment online but walk-ins are also welcome. You are eligible to donate blood if you are in good health, weigh at least ne hundred and ten pounds [00:25:30] and are eventeen years old or older. You can also check out the eligibility guidelines online for it and initial self screening if you are not eligible or you prefer not to donate blood. There are other ways to support campus blood drives through volunteering, encouraging others and simply spreading the word. The blood drive will be on Wednesday, pril seventeenth in the alumni house. On the UC Berkeley campus. It [00:26:00] will last from noon until ix pm you can make an appointment or find more information at the website. Red Cross lood dot Org using the sponsor code you see B. We also like to bring you several news stories that we find interesting. Once again, Rick joins me for the news and Red Alax died of cancer in ineteen fifty one but her immortal cell line called Hela cells derived from her cervical cancer is the oldest and most [00:26:30] commonly used human cell line. Speaker 4: The cells were used to test the polio vaccine and have been used in the research of over eventy thousand scientific papers since lar Steinmetz and others in ermany published the genome of Heela and the journal g hree in March. However, the team has since removed the data from public databases because of privacy concerns expressed by family members and other scientists. Blacks did not give her a consent for the line [00:27:00] to be used and some are concerned that it may disclose genetic traits shared by her descendants. However, no law required that kind of consent in ineteen fifty one and even current regulation differs widely as to what consent would be required to sustain a modern cell line due to the extensive documentation of the cells. The privacy of the healer line may have already been broken with literature already published. Harvard medical school researchers have assembled a draft genome and [00:27:30] a team of University of ashington researchers have spoken about not only the heela genome, but also the more specific information about individual haplotypes at the American Society for Human Genetics Conference in San Francisco. Speaker 4: A recent UC Berkeley study on the lives of wild bees find that the insects thrive better within diversified farming systems. While you might consider the insects yellow nuisances, bees actually play a crucial role in the life cycle of cross pollinated [00:28:00] crops, which account for ne hird of our caloric intake. The mysterious decline in both honeybee and wild bee populations in recent years has prompted many scientists to study the buzzing insects more closely. This study found that crop yield generally increased with wild bee population, but also linked to the recent decline in bee populations to heavy pesticide or fertilizer use. Typically in large scale monoculture agriculture, a number [00:28:30] of alifornia beekeepers seem to agree. They recently sued the federal EPA for failing to ban wo pesticides, widely regarded as harmful to wild bees and honeybees. The wo insecticides named in the lawsuit known as [inaudible] and Simon Foxen have already been found to pose an unacceptably high risk to honeybees by the European food safety authority. Speaker 1: [inaudible] the music heard during the show [00:29:00] is by Louiston at David [inaudible] help on folk make available at creative Commons license hree point zero after music production and editing assistance by Renee Brown. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l xat Yahoo Dot com [00:29:30] join us in wo weeks at this same time. [inaudible] [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Flaminia Catteruccia discusses the molecular basis of mating and reproduction in Anopheles gambiae mosquito. Her research provides insight into the mosquito reproductive biology to better develop vector control. Catteruccia is Associate Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Harvard School of Public Health.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] Speaker 3: [inaudible].Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 1: [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews, featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 4: Good afternoon. My name is Brad swift and I'm the host of today's show. Our interview is with Dr Flaminia cutthroat Chia associate professor of immunology and infectious [00:01:00] diseases in the department of the same name at the Harvard School of Public Health. She is also an associate professor at the University of [inaudible] in Italy. Malaria is a leading cause of death in tropical and subtropical regions. The plasmodium parasite that causes malaria is transmitted by the biting of female [inaudible] mosquitoes. Dr Cutthroat Chias group studies the molecular basis of mating and reproduction in both the female and male of [00:01:30] four species of mosquito. They are looking for the most effective and robust strategies to frustrate mosquito reproduction. Overall, they aim to provide insight into the reproductive biology of this malaria vector, which until recently remained largely unstudied. So the new targets for vector control can be developed. And Dr Cutolo Chia was in the bay area recently for a conference and I was able to arrange an interview Flaminia Katja, welcome to spectrum. [00:02:00] Thank you. What'd you give us an overview of your current Speaker 3: object? Yes, sure. So my research group is based at the Harvard School of Public Health, uh, is working on, uh, the biology of the mosquitoes that transmit malaria in Africa. And mother is still a massive problem for tropical and subtropical countries, but in particular for Africa as it scales almost a million people every year and infects not 200 million people [00:02:30] every year. So it's a massive social and economical problem and malaria is transmitted by mosquitoes. So we believe that if we can stop mosquitoes from transmitting malaria, then we can solve a big problem for the countries that are affected. Three particular, my group focuses on studying some aspects of the mosquito biology that are important for malaria transmission and will focus on reproduction on how mosquitoes reproduce, what makes them fertile. Because [00:03:00] at the end of the day, our goal is to develop novel methods to control mosquito populations. And we think that we could control them by introducing sturdy to international populations as an alternative to what's already been done now, which is mainly based on the use of insecticides to kill them. Speaker 3: And, but they have to be quite targeted ways to use the insecticides by pushing these insecticides on mosquito nets. So that mosquitoes that try to bite on night while people are asleep and the nets get killed [00:03:30] or through sprays or insecticides inside and house walls to kill mosquitoes at arresting indoors. But these methods are not sufficient to stop moderate transmission. And also mosquitoes are becoming resistant to the action of insecticides, which means they're not killed anymore and they change their behavior rather than biting at night inside houses to start by the outdoor and during the day so that insecticides can not get to them anymore. So our thought is our instead is on the idea that, uh, rather than killing [00:04:00] mosquitoes, we can sterilize them so that then there'll be fewer mosquitoes out there. They can transmit malaria and then eventually malaria transmission will stop. Speaker 3: And so we study how mosquitoes reproduce, what's important for their reproductive biology. And we have three major avenues or research. The first one is we try to understand what's important for reproduction because one tracking aspects of reproduction in the malaria mosquitoes is that the females have sex only once in their lives and after that they [00:04:30] completely switch off. They're not interested in more. And so this is quite a vulnerable step in the life cycle of our mosquito because it happens on once. So we are very much interested in understanding what is it that happens to females, what's the switch that completely abolishes that their receptivity to compilation. Because in principle, if we could understand what are the refactoring is as a call to further copulation, then we could induce the same mechanisms in variant females [00:05:00] and trick them into thinking that they've made it. And so they would make any model contributed to the next generations. Speaker 3: So that's a big area of our research where we try to understand what happens to females after copulation after sex so that we can identify what are those factors that change that behavior so that we can induce them. The second area or research and studies is a more translational side. We are interested in developing tools to induce the reality [00:05:30] in male mosquitoes. One idea of control is based on the release of males that are sterile. This males will of course try to find females to have sex with them and eventually those fund them. But there'd be no project coming out of these compilations. And so if we keep doing this over and over again, if you keep releasing sterile males, then we can sterilize most of the females that are natural populations and so the population will crush. And so with malaria [00:06:00] transmission, and so we are trying to find ways to serialize males in a genetic way, introduce genetic stability rather than using irrigations or chemo sterilizations as it's done for other insects. Speaker 3: Because it's important that whatever we do to fertility, it doesn't affect biology. The general biology of this mosquitoes and their behavior and also their fitness and that of competitiveness in terms of meeting and normally irritation or chemo sterilizations, those [00:06:30] can cause severe fitness costs to these mosquitoes. And so we got a little more subtle than we tried to study. So the mosquito DNA and understand what are the factors that are important for my facility so that we can interfere specifically with those factors. And so develop a male mosquito that is sterile and then we can release in the field. So that's our second area of research. And then a newer area research that we're interested in is in understanding what's the impact of what we do in terms of malaria transmission in particular, in terms [00:07:00] of what would be the impact of these measures on the ability of the female to transmit malaria. Speaker 3: Because if we introduce sterility in a population, how does that effect the partial development within those females? We don't want to develop mosquitoes that are sterile, but at the same time that are better at transmitting malaria. And so one new aspect of our research is trying to understand what's the link between reproduction and mosquitoes and Parkside development inside the female. So this [00:07:30] is broadly what our love is doing. Why is it that malaria is so lethal? Well, the mother has been eradicated from large parts of the world, has been eradicated from the u s from Europe and we are actually quite close already getting malaria in Africa as well in the fifties and sixties with the use of insecticides use a queening. And so drugs to kill the precise insecticides to kill mosquitoes. But unfortunately [00:08:00] those programs were stopped because of a number of reasons. And within a few years the number of Americans really went back to what it was before these programs were even started. Speaker 3: So one of the problems with malaria said it's a very dynamic disease from one single case, you can have tens and hundreds of secondary cases that can spread very quickly. So it's very difficult to control. So the synergy between the mosquito and the malaria [00:08:30] is the enabling factor in principle is a preventable and curable disease. It shouldn't be so deadly. However, our ability to control it in the countries where it's presence at the moment is limited by logistic reasons, lack of hospitals, lack of resources, and the fact that the mosquitoes are very efficient at transmitting the parasite. [inaudible] Speaker 4: [00:09:00] you were listening to spectrum on KALX Berkeley. Our guest today is Flaminia Qatari Chia molecular entomologist at the Harvard School of Public Health, researching mosquito reproduction as a way to combat malaria. How long has your project been going? We've been working on it for six [00:09:30] years. So that's kind of new. Yeah. And does it have a length of time or is it pretty open ended? Speaker 3: It's open-ended until I get funded. It's the funding. Yes, yes. Always is, isn't it? Yes. And of course, until it's relevant release, I think the funding will be there until this was a breakthrough. Yeah. A solution. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And Udall, was that a completely empty niche? No one was doing that. So we are really the first ones looking at reproductive biology in this mosquitoes from a molecular [00:10:00] and genetic point of view. Most of the studies before us were performed at the ecological level. So there's actually quite a lot knowing about the ecology of reproduction, but not much known about genetic factors and the pathways that are important for fertility. That's something that is completely new. So whatever we find is novel. So it's exciting for us, but at the same time, we have to do everything you know, is, we have to start from scratch. So it's more challenging maybe Speaker 4: once [00:10:30] the mosquito has ingested the parasite, the malaria parasite from a human, how does it interact with the mosquito? Speaker 5: Okay. Speaker 3: The parasite has a complex life cycle inside the mosquito vector, and it takes a few days to complete from when the mosquito ingests the parasite. When the mosquito can inject the parasite into the next person, it takes about 12 days. And that's the time that the press site needs to go through different developmental stages. [00:11:00] And so once some mosquito takes sliders infected, then the process will have to leave the blood environments. There'll be a stage that happens inside the mosquito midgut and then the prosight will have to leave as quick as possible. Uh, the makeup before he, it gets killed by the mosquito enzymes, digestive enzymes particular, and then it'll have to find its way to the salivary glands, which are these tissues where saliva is produced by the mosquito. And once it reaches the Salami Glands, then [00:11:30] it can be injected into the next person because during blood feeding, the female will inject a little bit of saliva into the team of the person that is this biting. Speaker 3: And so during that process the process can be transmitted. Actually most mosquitoes don't even live long enough for the proceeds to develop. So that's a major roadblock or process in development. Is there any thought to trying to alter the parasite itself? There's a lot of research on modifying [00:12:00] the mosquito so that rather than allowing person development, they'll kill the parasite. And of course there's a lot of research on finding drugs that can kill across sites in people that are infected. And there is research on malaria vaccines as well. We don't have a vaccine yet. There is a vaccine that is now in Stage three trials that could be promising in combination with other control measures. It's quite clear that malaria will not be defeated by using a single measure. So [00:12:30] the use of insecticides, possibly the use of sterile males, hopefully combined with the use of drugs to confirm [inaudible] in people and hopefully also without, without vaccine that could be effective for awhile. We will need all these measures to control the spread of the disease. Speaker 4: How large your group is, is the group that's working on your project. Speaker 5: Okay. Speaker 3: My group is composed by about 10 people at the moment. Speaker 4: And what are the different scientific disciplines you've brought together [00:13:00] with that group? Speaker 5: Yeah, Speaker 3: well it's a combination of molecular biology and genetics and biochemistry. Also evolutionary biology, big of ecology as well. Speaker 5: Okay, Speaker 4: and within the group, how do you orchestrate the workflow of all that? How do you decide which thing you're going to focus on at what point in time Speaker 3: to go ahead and go forward with the research? Oh yeah, those are actually tough decisions sometimes because there is so much [00:13:30] that we can be doing, just so many different ideas. It's circulated in the lab and sometimes it's difficult to prioritize them. So in general, we do discuss ideas all together. I can come up with some ideas and then we discuss, uh, with the group and some we like the brainstorming and then more ideas emerge. And then we focus on what's more important according to our priorities. We always have to make choices. We tried to have projects that are most solid in a way that we [00:14:00] know will give us results quite quickly. And then at the same time also establish longer term projects for maybe bigger goals. So it's a combination of all the two. Speaker 4: What is the life cycle of this mosquito? Speaker 3: So the mosquitoes we work on, um, anopheles mosquitoes that, that are not fillings are the only mosquito, second trust mates, uh, malaria to humans and draw about 30, 40 and awful in species that transmit malaria. And we study in particular, um, our mosquitoes called [00:14:30] Anopheles Gambiae and that's the most important vector in Africa and therefore the most important actor in the world. But we also start in some other mosquitoes out important vectors in other parts of the world. We are now interested in southern American vectors, Asian vectors. So we have four different mosquito species in our lab for comparative studies and Life Cycle is from a female that is, I've been intimidated by a male. Then this female will need to feed them blog to develop eggs. And that's the step that is exploited [00:15:00] by the plasmodium parasite of malaria to be transmitted. And so the female will feed on blood preferentially on, on men, on humans. Speaker 3: She will develop her eggs and then the eggs will be fertilized by the sperm that is transferred from the male. The eggs will be laid water, so the eggs will hatch and give larvae. And then a pupa will with form that doesn't feed. And then after two days and adult will emerge from the PUPA. And so our, as a, as that [00:15:30] little step, males and females will have to find each other for copulation and then the female will have to block feed again. And so that the cycle can start all over again. So overall from egg to egg is about a couple of weeks. The Life Cycle Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 6: this is k a l x Berkeley. The show is spectrum. Our guest is Flaminia [00:16:00] [inaudible]. She's working to eradicate malaria. Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 3: Is there a side effect to affecting the mosquito population so thoroughly? Yeah, that's a very good question. What are the possible effect on the ecosystem of mosquitoes? Useful for anything? Do we need mosquitoes in this world? And these are very good concerns, very reasonable concerns. [00:16:30] However, the Fallon sets targeting fertility is a very specious Pacific control measure. Unlike the use of insecticides where you kill everything that comes in contact with insecticide, if you use mosquitoes to eradicate mosquitoes, that's a very selective way to do that. It's a very specific way to do that. So I think that the effects on the ecosystem will be very marginal, but of course that's something that will have to be followed and would have to be monitored, will be a very insane eco-friendly way to reduce monitor transmission because you would, [00:17:00] we would only target those pieces that cosmic me [inaudible] thousands of mosquitoes species on the planet and only 20 or 30 I at transmitting malaria so we wouldn't kill all mosquitoes and we would only have to target those that ugly at transmitting the disease. Speaker 3: With the mosquitoes that you're growing in the lab, how are you feeding them? We feed them differently depending on their developmental stage, so we, the larval stages, the early stages, we feed them with fish food or cat food and for the adults [00:17:30] we feed them with sugar solutions that both the male and the female will feed on. So it's water mixed with sugar and then the females, we have to feed them on bloods for egg developments, we feed them with blood that we buy from blood banks. So we've completely eliminated the use of animals for that, which is we are very pleased with. Speaker 4: Do you feel you're close with the sterilized male part of the project and do you have plans to try to take it to the next level? Speaker 3: Yeah, we, we are thinking [00:18:00] a lot now about how we can make our system more effective because the way we in use steroids in this males, it's very inefficient in the lab. We need more than a day's work to get 20 or 30 males that are sterile to how do we scale this up. We really need to push and hopefully we can work with engineers and find the best way to scale this up and do the automated way that can be much more effective. Speaker 4: [00:18:30] You're continuing to pursue the female side of it. Speaker 3: The female side of it is what's more exciting for us in a way because there's more biology behind it, but we're also very much interested in understanding what are the determinants of fitness in the males because when we make them sterile, we'll still need to make sure that there will be competitive for meetings with feel females. And so apart from studying the biology of reproduction in females, we're also very much interested in that in what makes a meal good [00:19:00] meal, a fit meal that will have good chance of success once it's released. So yeah, that's why we are studying both male and female reproductive biology. We are not just selling waist to induce 30 but also what are the determinants of fertility? Speaker 4: If you succeed in creating a sterilized male or a female that doesn't lay eggs, do you have a plan or is there a plan for how to introduce them into the wild [00:19:30] or is that something that would need to be developed when the time comes? Speaker 3: We don't have a plan as such, but we are starting to think about a plan in terms of the logistics of it. There is a lot of know how that comes from the release of sterile males for targeting other insects, species, insects, pieces that are mainly agricultural pests like fruit flies, Milo flies, school worms, potato. We will do that. Old insects that cause the via damage [00:20:00] to the agriculture. It's a drug programs and based on the release of millions of sterile flies all over the world really. And so all the issues concerning the mass production of these insects, the packaging and the distribution of these stallions, six to the places where they're needed and then the release, all those issues have already been sorted out for other insects and so in principle shouldn't be too difficult to transfer that expertise onto mosquito work. It [00:20:30] should be feasible. We don't have the expertise in ourselves, but working in collaboration with the people that have it, that should be possible. I'm optimistic that that could be done without huge efforts. Speaker 4: Are you teaching as well as doing your research? Speaker 3: Yeah, I have some teaching to do is not massive. I mainly teach postgraduate students and I teach while they work on, so it's infectious diseases. My teaching load is not very big. Maybe it will get bigger in the next few years because [00:21:00] I've just started a year ago and I'm enjoying it. I enjoy teaching postgraduate students very much because they're small groups and normally they're very interested, very dedicated and also they ask amazing questions. So it's actually quite fulfilling. I know that some of the Harvard students are just brilliant, so it's a different experience from what was used before. I like it very much. Yeah. But I really prefer doing research. You know, it's, it's like that's my first, uh, my [00:21:30] top priority is to do good research, but of course we have a mission to encourage the next generations to get into science and getting into research. I like the idea of contributing to that. Flaminia Katya, thank you very much for coming on spectrum. Welcome. Good luck. Thank you. Speaker 7: I'm gonna [inaudible] Speaker 3: um, Speaker 6: if you would like to hear a previous [00:22:00] spectrum show, they are archived on iTunes university, go to the calyx website, calix.berkeley.edu. Click on programming, select news, scroll down to spectrum and that section. There's a link to podcasts or send us an email@spectrumdotcalyxatyahoo.com and I'll send you the link. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 8: [00:22:30] a feature of spectrum is to present news stories we find interesting. When the news are Renee Rao and Rick Karnofsky, Speaker 9: the UC Berkeley habitus will play host to the first ever dreambox a three d printing bending machine. By the end of this month, the machine will allow users to take advantage of three d printing technology without paying steep up front costs for the machinery [00:23:00] to use. The machine users will first choose an item model within Dream Boxes Catalog upload one of their own via the web. Next, the print command is given and the order is sent to a cloud based print queue before being directed to the vending machine. Once the item has been created, it is put into a locker with a unique unlock code that is texted to the users. The creators estimate that each use of the printer will range from two to $15 on average depending on the complexity of the object and the materials used. Speaker 8: [00:23:30] A team from New Castle University reported in science that honeybees are three times more likely to remember a learn floral scent when they are rewarded with caffeine. Caffeine occurs in coffea and citrus species and to be pharmacologically Speaker 9: active but not repellent to the bees in higher concentrations. It is known to be toxic and repellent due in part to the bitter taste, but in lower concentrations that occur in nature. It offers a reward. [00:24:00] The team also applied caffeine to the brains of the insects and observed that it increased activity aiding the formation of longterm memories. Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 9: A [00:24:30] regular feature of spectrum is dimension. A few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next few weeks. Rick and Renee present the calendar this March nerd night. East Bay will feature UCB associate Professor Matt Walker on Sleeping Memory Guy Branum on the invasion of Canada and the Chabot space and science centers. Jonathan Bradman on the night sky. This will happen Monday, March 25th at the new Parkway Theater in Oakland. Doors will open at seven show begins at eight. [00:25:00] Tickets are available online for $8 and all ages are welcome. Past spectrum guests, Michael Isen will be speaking to the Commonwealth club on the subject of reinventing scientific communication. While most scientific literature is now online, it remains as inaccessible to the public as it was centuries ago. With the physical limitations of print journals replaced by expensive publisher paywalls, [inaudible] who cofounded the Public Library of science. [00:25:30] We'll discuss the scientific journals and new open access models. Tickets are $20 or $7 for students with valid id. Speaker 9: The talk is on Wednesday, March 27th in San Francisco. There is a reception@fivethirtyandthetalkstartsatsixpmvisitcommonwealthclub.org for tickets and more info this April 2nd the ASCA scientist lecture series. We'll discuss tiny creatures with the ability to invade your body, [00:26:00] hijack your cells, change your DNA, and modify you physically and behaviorally to suit their own devious goals. Jack Mackarel, director of the Center for discovery and innovation in parasitic diseases will lead the talk on the parasitic organisms that live among and inside us. Some of the world's most pernicious diseases are caused by these supreme sophisticated organisms, but according to evolutionary biologist, parasites have also played a significant role in shaping the human species. The event will be held Tuesday, April 2nd [00:26:30] at 7:00 PM in Soma Street food park near the corner of 11th and Harrison. Leonardo art science evening rendezvous or laser has several talks this month. Speaker 8: Jess holding explains the use of light and other natural phenomenon to explore perception. NASA is Chris McKay will speak about the curiosity. Mars mission, USF Vagina and Nagarajan presents embedded mathematics in women's ritual [00:27:00] art designs in southern India. She'll talk about the geometry of rice powder paintings. Finally, Nikki, you Layla will discuss the mechanics and construction of marionettes. Laser takes place@stanforduniversityonaprilfourthfromsevenpmtoninepmmoreinformationaboutthelaserseriescanbefoundonthewebatleonardo.info.Speaker 9: That's pretty good. Tuesday, April 16th in the Tuscher African Hall, Mary Roach [00:27:30] will lead an unforgettable tour of the human insides. Questions inspired by our insides are taboo in their own ways. Why is crunchy food so appealing? Why doesn't the stomach digest itself? How much can you eat before your stomach burst? Can Constipation kill you? Did it kill Elvis? Roche will introduce her audience to the scientist who tackle these questions. She will then take the audience through her experiences in a pet food taste test, lab of bacterial [00:28:00] transplant and alive stomach. This lecture will take place Tuesday, April 16th at 7:00 PM in San Francisco for more information and to get tickets in advance, go online to cal academy.org Speaker 2: [inaudible] [inaudible] [00:28:30] music card during the show is by Lasonna David from his album folk and acoustic made available by a creative Commons license 3.0 attribution. Special thanks [00:29:00] to David Dropkin for helping set up the interview. [inaudible] thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via our email address is spectrum dot klx@yahoo.com join us in two [00:29:30] weeks at this same time. The [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Halford discusses the NASA BARREL project and space weather. The Balloon Array for Radiation-belt Relativistic Electron Losses campaign will help study the Van Allen Radiation Belts and why they change over time by using balloons launched in Antarctica.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Mm [inaudible]. Speaker 3: Welcome [00:00:30] to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists. Speaker 1: Good afternoon. I'm your host, Rick Karnofsky. Our guest today is Alexa Helford. Alexa is a postdoc at Dartmouth who studies based weather. She's involved with the balloon group there who recently finished their 2013 launch of the NASA barrel or [00:01:00] balloon array for radiation belt, relativistic electron losses campaign. 20 balloons. Went up in Antarctica in January and February. Next year there'll be doing it again. They're doing this to track where radiation goes when it leaves the radiation belts. Alex, I welcome to spectrum. Thank you. Can you talk to us a little bit about space weather? Speaker 3: Yeah, it is the coolest thing ever cause it's weather, but in space. What does that mean? So whenever you hear of like solar storms [00:01:30] or geomagnetic storms, which tend to make the news, that space weather, the sun always is spewing out junk at us. It's usually a combination of protons, electrons, and magnetic fields. Sometimes there's ions in there. Speaker 1: Well, but when that stuff Speaker 3: hits us, that space, whether it can sometimes create a geomagnetic storm, which is where we have our magnetic fields of the earth being completely rearranged and energy being transported normally into the inner magneto sphere where it can disrupt [00:02:00] things like satellites and eventually caused currently in our ionosphere, which can induce currents in the ground and that can cause problems for technologies even here on earth. Speaker 1: And how frequently do these problems crop up? It depends. So the Sun has an 11 year cycle where it, Speaker 3: it goes from having low activity, which we just came out of an incredibly quiet solar minimum just a few years ago and now we're starting to go into a region of higher activities. So we have a lot more [00:02:30] solar storms occurring. Speaker 1: It depends on the solar cycle. This one looks like it might be a little quieter than the last one, Speaker 3: but you can have multiple storms during the week. In the more northern or very southern regions of the world where you're near the polar caps, you are more effected bySpeaker 1: I sub storms, which can happen three times a day. People study space, weather, what do they hope to do? They hope to eventually it. Okay. Speaker 3: [00:03:00] Right now we are sometimes able to do now casting. So we can essentially tell you what the weather's like right now. And that's really good for us. We do, I mean can't just go outside and look. No, it's a little bit harder than that. No, I especially is putting together space weather packages and the van Allen probes are currently producing space weather data products as well. So we're getting a lot better at this. They usually give you at least a good, you know, [00:03:30] three or four days heads up as to if something's coming at us. They've gotten really, you know, pretty good given the type of data we have for even being able to predict if it's going to affect us or not. And what can we do with those predictions? So the radiation belts are where a lot of this, the damaging space weather effects occur. Speaker 3: They have highly relativistic electrons in them and these highly relativistic electrons can greatly affect ours [00:04:00] satellites. So what happens is any satellites sitting in the radiation belts actually will start gaining charge and we can get lightning strikes that actually occur across the [inaudible], the sides of the satellite, which in itself is quite damaging. Anytime you're hit by lightning is never really a good thing, but the really relativistic one's the killer electrons this week. Call them actually can bury themselves into the software and flip bits and so by flipping the bit they can send phantom [00:04:30] messages to the satellite and sometimes that message is to turn itself off or kill itself and not respond to ground control end. Essentially the satellite is dead floating in space. Satellite companies, when they find that there's going to be a solar storm that's going to hit us and possibly affect their spacecraft, they turn them off because if they turn them off then you know you're not going to get as much charging and you're not going to have as many problems. Speaker 3: What kinds of impacts do we see here on earth? So [00:05:00] back in 1989 there was a solar storm that actually induced currents in the power grid and blacked out. Most of the eastern seaboard of Canada and the North Eastern part of the u s and that was, that was quite a big problem where right now we've actually increased the connectivity of our power grids so that if the same storm were to happen about half the u s would be blacked out. Would there be actions that we could actually take if yes, so what you can do is you can actually turn off the grid or turn [00:05:30] off parts of the power grid so that you're not going to blow a transformer by having this huge amount of new current. In fact, one of the first things with space weather affecting our technology was way back with the telegraphs. They were able to run the telegraphs for hours without any energy because of the induced currents from the solar storms. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 4: are listening to k a l x Berkeley. [00:06:00] I'm talking with Alexa Helford about space weather. Speaker 3: We have stereo, which is one of the coolest missions ever, so it's two satellites. One is [inaudible], a head of earth around Earth orbit and the other one is falling behind [00:06:30] earth orbit and they're looking at the sun. So this is the first time we've ever had a three dimensional view of the sun and now they've gotten far enough around that. We're actually able to see what's going on behind the sun. So before we've always had to to kind of gas and use a Sonogram essentially. Yeah. To try to see what's on the other side of the sun. And now we have actual images of what's going on back there [00:07:00] and we're learning such amazing things from it. It's just the coolest thing ever. And besides, you get to wear 3d classes to view the pictures from it, which is always kind of cool. We're learning so much more about th what happens and, and how things are forming on the surface of the sun that it's really [inaudible] interesting time to kind of be a scientist and learning about [inaudible] this, you know, how space weather's happening. Speaker 3: Uh, besides that we have, you know, satellites in, in our own magnetosphere [00:07:30] that we can look at and we have ground-based magnetometers, which they're all really great with helping kind of understand the environment right now. What kinds of things do you have to measure and track and how do you track them in order to make predictions? That is really, that's an interesting question, but one of the cool things is, is us learning how to do all of this. Right now the ace satellite sits at the l one point, which is a stable orbit between the earth and the sun. We get magnetic [00:08:00] field particle data, so like densities and velocities, uh, from there, and we can use that to try to predict what it's coming at us. Unfortunately, what hits ace might not necessarily hit us, but it's our best predict. You're right now, it's coming to the end of its lifetime and we really need something up there, unfortunately, because we would want a space weather monitor up there, which [00:08:30] would help with science and research. Speaker 3: There's a fight going on as to who should be funding that and who wants to do that because it is, it is a large project, but it's something we need. Just like we need a tsunami warning systems. We need a space weather warning system. Can we talk about barrel a little bit? Yeah, so barrel is the campaign that I'm working on. Barrel is a, an array of that. We're going to be sending up in January of this year and January of [00:09:00] 2014 as well and possibly into February for both of those campaigns. Hopefully we'll be launching 20 balloons each year from two different stations in the antibiotics. So the British Halle Bay station and the South African Sinise station. And what we're going to do is these balloons are like what big weather balloons. They're going to be kind of drifting at 30 kilometers up in altitude and we'll be looking for x-rays. Speaker 3: [00:09:30] So when particles from space get perturbed during these geomagnetic storms, they can actually fall enough far enough down the field lines, these magnetic field lines that they'll hit the ionosphere in atmosphere where they can collide with different particles in neutral atoms and molecules and give off x-rays. And then we can measure those x-rays. So by backing out from that, that x-ray data, we can figure out what type of particles we're [00:10:00] being precipitated. So essentially we're looking at reins of highly relativistic particles and Artica we're looking in Antartica because if you remember your elementary school days when you played with bar magnets and, and iron fillings, you get, you know, if you have a bar magnet with the north and South Pole, you get these kind of curved arcs that go into and out of the northern and southern Poles. And the earth is just like that. So the earth is essentially a large [00:10:30] bar magnet and a, it has its dipole field that that kind of, you know, most of these field lines come in and out of the different poles. Speaker 3: And so when you're looking at these particles, they're going to be following those field lines. So they're just Tracy tracing out those lines that the iron fillings do with the bar magnet. And so these, these electrons and protons will come down the field lines and enter the atmosphere at the pole. So it's the best place to try to find stuff. And also there's not a whole [00:11:00] lot of things that the balloons can hit in the Antarctic, either from the two stations. The two stations give us a better range. And so by launching from both places, we'll be able to cover more land in Antarctica. And so at most we might have eight balloons up at any given time. And so we want to make sure that they're spaced as well as possible. You know, to be able to get the best coverage and having multiple loons up is going to give us an amazing opportunity that we [00:11:30] don't often have in space physics. You know by having multiple balloons, we're going to be able to take a look at how large some of these events are, how much ground they actually cover as well as how long they last. One of the things we can't answer is when you see these waves in space, how large are these waves? We know their wavelengths, but we don't know the region over which they occur. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 1: [00:12:00] this is spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. I'm Rick Karnofsky talking with Alexa Helford of the barrel project, a mission to study the van Allen radiation belts. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 1: [00:12:30] is barrel intentionally complementary to existing techniques? Speaker 3: Yeah, so in fact it is one of the first opportunity missions under the van Allen probes and so we're hoping to have conjugate measurements with them. So what that means is that we hope to essentially be on the same field minds as the satellites out in space. So while the satellites can measure the plasma out there and see these waves that are occurring in [00:13:00] space and see the different particles there, we're going to be able to then see how many of those particles actually made it down the field line. And it's one of the first missions with [inaudible] satellites and balloons that will really be able to do this. And, and hopefully because we're sending up 20 this year, hopefully we'll have lots of conjunctions. So that would be really great. And right now we're just Speaker 1: preparing for that. And do you have like a rough estimate of how high the satellites are versus how high the balloons are? Yes. Are the satellites, Speaker 3: they have [00:13:30] a pair of jeans. So their closest approach to the earth is, I believe around [inaudible], somewhere between three and 600 kilometers. So they're quite a bit higher. But when we have these conjunctions, these satellites are going to be at least four to six earth radii eye away from us. Speaker 1: So what kind of instrumentation is on these balloons? Speaker 3: So we are looking at, um, the magnetic fields. We have a gps transmitter there so that we can tell where [00:14:00] we are. That's kind of useful. And we have the [inaudible] Spectrometer, which is going to be looking at the x-rays and then we also have iridium phones essentially on there so we can actually get back our data quite quickly, which is very nice. It also means that we don't have to try to retrieve all 20 balloons. We've painted all of the payloads white and that's to actually help with the temperature control of all the instrumentation on board. But looking for it white Speaker 1: box [00:14:30] on a white continent turns out to be a very difficult thing. Right. And so these balloons go up, there's a small team over there and then you get all the data back at Dartmouth. Yes. What do you do with that? We are going to analyze it and have lots of fun working with all this data. Um, I'm really excited about it. We're also then going to be working Speaker 3: with the van Allen probes team and any other satellite mission that we can get in contact with that wants to look at our data. We're more than happy [00:15:00] to do that with. But having been an opportunity mission with the van Allen probe sets, the one we're really focusing on and really talking to and working with. So we're going to be looking at [inaudible] the different times when when we have uh, conjunctions and if there are any events. Now for this first mission, our conjunctions are going to be happening in the dawn sector. And so in the dawn sector, the waves that we're looking at are these micro bursts, which we [00:15:30] think are caused by course waves. Um, and this is going to be an exciting time cause it's one of the first times we're actually going to be able to look at this and, and, and be certain about it or relatively certain about it. And what's a course way, it's a course waves are these really fun little waves. They're caused by an electron, cyclotron instability. So it's all kind of generated by these electrons out in space. But if you listen to them, we can actually get way for them. So just like the radio waves you're hearing with us talking, [00:16:00] we get way forms of these, these waves in space and we can play them back through the radio and they sound like there. There sounds like a course of birds in the morning, which is why they're called course waves. Speaker 1: We have a recording of these course waves from the NASA van Allen probes. Speaker 2: [00:16:30] [inaudible] Speaker 4: the sound you just heard [00:17:00] was a chorus with an electromagnetic phenomenon caused by plasma waves in Earth's radiation belts. Hello, you're listening to spectrum on k a Alex Berkeley talking with Alexa Helford about space weather Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 1: it's sort of like terrestrial weather [00:17:30] where so much can influence it. Oh, you rattled off a large list of different particles, all of which have different masses and, and um, would presumably hit us at different times, right? Yeah. Um, how, how do you possibly keep up with all that data? Speaker 3: Um, through statistics? That's what I love to do is data statistics and we're starting to get to a point where we have large enough databases to look at. And actually statistics [00:18:00] is, is, I mean, I know a lot of people hear the word statistics and they think, oh, boring, boring, boring. But it is just so cool. Um, because like you said, we're have so many different things going on and like tresha whether there's so many different factors that we don't necessarily know about, we think we understand what physics is up there. Um, but we know that we're missing some of it because our models don't exactly predict what's happening. So with a lot [00:18:30] of physics, when you're working in a lab, you can control everything. And so your theories can be directly tested because you can control every little bit to match the theory in space. Speaker 3: We can't control anything. It is our laboratory and we can't tell it what to do. We put satellites and balloons and ground-based magnetometers and, and all these different, uh, instruments out there and hope that something interesting happens. So do other planets also experienced space weather? [00:19:00] Yeah. Yeah, they do. In fact, it's, it's really kind of cool when you start looking at it. So mercury has its own little magnetosphere. It's much smaller than ours. So things happen on a much faster time scale. Right now there's a satellite out there called messenger, which is studying the space weather at mercury. And it's really neat to compare it to what we see on the earth because we can see things happening so much faster. So that's really neat. Venus has [00:19:30] some interesting stuff going on there. It doesn't have a magneto sphere, but we can, we can use that as another comparison cause it's a similar sized body to us. Speaker 3: And so it has interesting things on its own. Mars used to have a magnetosphere [inaudible] but Mars is really interesting because that's where we want to go and send people someday. And I really think we should because if anything, humans have always tried to explore and try to go out farther. And so Mars is our new new world, [00:20:00] but we have to be careful going there because it doesn't have the protection of a magnetosphere like we do. So in order to protect the astronauts, we need to have better space weather warning systems in play. And these are all things that people have been thinking much harder about than I ever had. But it's really an exciting thing to think about cause that that's solar wind, it doesn't stop when it hits us. It continues out there. Jupiter, Jupiter is a massive thing. Need a sphere. [00:20:30] It is so cool. Speaker 3: It even has a planet that has a magnetosphere. So there's a main Nita sphere inside of magnetosphere, but Jupiter's magnetosphere is dominated by io. I O sends out tons and tons of sulfur ions from volcanoes and so drives a lot of the main use for dynamics we see there. Saturn on the other hand doesn't have a volcanic moon, quite like Io. [00:21:00] It has other geysers which seem to develop its rings. But a lot of the, the space weather events we see in its magneto sphere actually come from the solar wind. But by the time the solar wind reaches Saturn, it is so diffuse. But we still see things like Aurora out there. We see Aurora on the, um, on the Jovian magnetosphere as well. Um, and that's just so cool. And then once you, you know, you get farther and farther out and each of the big gas giants has its own magnetosphere and they're all [00:21:30] unique in their own way and it just gives us so many different comparisons to our own planet so we can learn so much more by studying theirs as well, which is just kind of cool. Speaker 3: We've only been a field really since about 1957 when the first satellite, we're not, we mean people have been studying space weather for a lot longer than that. But you know, we weren't ever able to get measurements where stuff is happening before we had satellites. So we're right at the [00:22:00] beginning and it's something incredibly exciting time. Yeah. To be in the field cause we're just learning what it's like up there. There's so much we don't know. And every time we put up a new satellite we get back new data. Even if we thought that we'd just be seeing the same kind of thing, there's always something new happening. And so it's so incredibly exciting just to, to see what's out there. Well with that Alexa Alford, thanks for joining us. Thanks so much for having me Speaker 5: [inaudible]Speaker 6: [00:22:30] and now for some science news headlines. Here's an ana at Coolin and Renee Ralph Speaker 5: [inaudible],Speaker 6: professor in sleep expert, Matthew Walker explained in conversation with UC Berkeley new center that when we are young we have deep sleep that helps the brain store and retain new facts and information, but as we get older, the quality of our sleep [00:23:00] deteriorates and prevents those memories from being saved by the brain at night. In a recent study, UC Berkeley scientists discovered that there is a relationship between poor sleep, memory loss and brain deterioration. They found that poor sleep and old age affects memory loss. There are many stages of sleep, one of them being deep sleep, which is an important part of transporting short term memories to longterm memories. UC Berkeley researchers are now looking into therapeutic treatments for memory loss, such as electrical [00:23:30] stimulation to improve deep sleep and thus improve memory. You see, Berkeley researchers see this new discovery as an exciting opportunity to potentially help people remember more of their lives as they get older. Speaker 3: UC Berkeley have designed Speaker 6: a program to help decode ancient lost languages. Previously, human linguists have manually reconstructed languages by analyzing the relationships between the language and the patterns and sound change. The program takes modern [00:24:00] child languages, information about their word meaning and pronunciation and outputs, a rough approximation of the mother language. For example, if French and Spanish were input a language resembling Latin might emerge, the computer system we use together linkages across child languages to mathematically determine awards. First form. In a study published in the National Academy of Sciences Journal, the makers revealed that more than 85% of the system's reconstructions were identical to manual reconstructions [00:24:30] performed by linguist. Using this unique model, the system is essentially able to rewind the evolution of child languages all the way back to the original. The vast data crunching capabilities of the program have allowed scientists to begin seeing larger trends of spreading languages and banishing sounds well. Speaker 6: The computer system has extended the reach of computing in the field of linguistics. It's creators have stressed. They intend it to be used as a complimentary tool to human linguist, not as a replacement. A regular feature of spectrum [00:25:00] is a calendar of some of the science and technology related events happening in the bay area. Over the next two weeks, we'll hear once more from Anna and then Renee meet the animals up close at the Randall Museum home to over 100 animals that can not survive in the wild. Expect to see California wildlife such as rodents and fib. Ian's a great horned owl and even a tortoise every Saturday in March. Starting this Saturday, the ninth in San Francisco, doors open at 11:00 AM admission is free [00:25:30] in conjunction with San Francisco Sunday street program. The exploratorium. We'll have a day long road show featuring moving trucks with art, film, food, performances and activities. Speaker 6: The show will linger in three areas of the city, the mission Bayview and Embarcadero on its way to its nighttime finale at peer 15 this will take place in San Francisco this Sunday, March 10th from 11:00 AM to 10:00 PM for more information on performance times and locations, please visit [00:26:00] the exploratorium website which is exploratorium.edu stress and its effects on body and mind have always been biologically mysterious. This Monday, March 11th Dr Aaron Elica Nali will give her answers to some of those mysteries. Dr Canale is an assistant project scientist at the national primate research center in the Monday colloquium. She will speak about her research in the field of psychobiology. She will focus on the psychosocial effects of [00:26:30] early life stress. Dr [inaudible] has been studying relationships between biological and fostered offspring of rhesus monkey pairs and observing effects of exposure to early life stress on the relationships she has identified genes that cause physiological differences in the brain structure of these monkeys that suffered early stress. Speaker 6: She will also speak about the corresponding differences in the brains of human child abuse victims. The colloquium will be on March 11th from three to 4:30 PM in five [00:27:00] one-on-one Tolman hall on the UC Berkeley campus in case that's not enough science for one day. Also on March 11th Marvin l Cohen, professor of the Graduate School of physics at UC Berkeley will give a speech on condensed matter physics condensed matter physics is also known as goldilocks physics because its primary focuses are skills of energy, time and size that are somewhere in the middle. Consequently, this branch of physics has become one of the most interdisciplinary Professor Cohen will describe some of the fascinating [00:27:30] research involving semiconductors superconductors and nanoscience. He will also relay a few observations about Einstein and his seminar research in condensed matter physics. The free event is open to and aimed at all audiences and should provide an illuminating glimpse into a lesser known branch of physics. Speaker 6: It will be held on March 11th from five to 6:00 PM at the eye house on the corner of Bancroft and Piedmont. The march science at Cal lecture is titled Cloud spotting at Saturday [00:28:00] and titan learning about weather from a billion miles away. The talk will be given by a motto Adom Covex, a researcher in the astronomy department at UC Berkeley. He received his phd in physical chemistry in 2004 at cal studying the photochemical kinetics of hydrocarbon aerosols in planetary atmospheres. He will describe how measurements from telescopes on earth, the Cassini spacecraft that is still orbiting the Saturn system and the Huguenot probe that landed on the surface of Titan. [00:28:30] Saturn's largest moon all inform our knowledge of weather in the Saturn system. The lecture is scheduled for Saturday, March 16th at 11:00 AM and the genetics and plant biology building room 100 on the northwest corner of the UC Berkeley campus. Speaker 5: [inaudible]Speaker 4: the music you [00:29:00] heard during say show we spend the Stein and David from his album book and Acoustic Speaker 5: [inaudible].Speaker 4: It is released under a creative Commons license version 3.0 spectrum was recorded and edited by me, Rick Karnofsky and by Brad Swift. Thank you for listening to spectrum. You're happy to hear from listeners. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. All right. Email address is spectrum [00:29:30] dot klx@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. Speaker 5: [inaudible]Speaker 4: [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In part 2, Michael Eisen discusses the Public Library of Science, his position on GMOs and a labeling strategy. Eisen is Associate Professor of Genetics, Genomics, and Development in UC Berkeley's Dept. of Molecular Biology and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program [00:00:30] bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of spectrum. Today we are presenting part two of our two part interview with Michael Isen and associate professor of genetics genomics in development in UC Berkeley's department of molecular biology. In part one Michael talked about his research of gene regulation this week. Michael explains [00:01:00] the Public Library of science, his feelings on labeling of GMOs in food as well as intellectual property science outreach and science funding. Enjoy the interview. I wanted to talk about the Public Library of science if you were a cofounder of. Yeah, and are you still involved with that? Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm on the board. I've still very actively involved in trying to shape its future and in general in the future of science publishing. Speaker 3: And so can you talk about its business model and how it's changing publishing? Speaker 4: [00:01:30] Sure. The basic idea is that science publishing, it's been around for as long as science has been an endeavor from the 17th century. Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, all these guys were sort of inventing science as we currently know it. And Science as a enterprise obviously requires that scientists communicate with each other and since time immemorial in science, we've had journaled, Francis Bacon, other scientists that 17th century started at seedings of the Royal Society. Right? And for 330 [00:02:00] years or so after they started these journals, they were using the only technology available to them at the time, which was print publishing and a lot of things that follow from the way scientific publishing was structured follow intrinsically from the limitations and features of that printed journal. And as an economic model, the only model that makes sense is for the end users to pay for the first subscription. And you know, there's problems with that. Speaker 4: Only people who [00:02:30] can afford the subscriptions can get access to the scientific literature and so forth. They follow from an intrinsic limitation of a medium. Now in the nineties 1990s that all changed, right? The Internet came along and science was amongst the first groups of people to embrace the Internet, and by the sort of mid to late 1990s basically every scientific journal that existed was online and publishing and electronic edition and increasingly going into their archives and digitizing their, their archives, so forth, so that [00:03:00] by 2000 you now could have had access to a large fraction of the tire published record of scientists. Such an amazing thing to be able to do that, but insanely the business model behind scientific publishing didn't change at all. So publishers who had all these subscriptions, now we're no longer selling print journals or decreasingly selling printed journals. They were just selling access to published material in a database and yet they didn't know innovation and the business [00:03:30] model at all. Speaker 4: They just simply charged people for accessing their database just like they'd been charging people to mail them copies. There was no longer any technical or economic reason why the whole universe couldn't have had immediate free access to the published scientific literature. The only reason that you or anybody else in the world didn't have immediate access to anything published in medicine or science or whatever was that the publishers then let them, so plus and the whole industry of open access publishing around [00:04:00] it. The basic idea is publishers do and have provided an important service and they should be paid for the service they provide, but that as soon as they're done, as soon as the publisher's hands are off the paper, it's freely available to everybody, not just to read, but to use and do with whatever to basically place the scientific literature into the public domain. Speaker 4: Where it belong. Science is a public venture, not exclusively, but for the most part funded by either the federal government, state governments or by public minded foundations. And the idea that [00:04:30] the end product of that investment is the property of publishers is insane and it's a huge impediment to the way science works and to the ability of the public to benefit from scientific information. And so plus has been trying to pull the rug out from underneath this subscription based business model by creating journals that use this alternative business model that are now quite successful plus as a journal plus one which is now the biggest biomedical research journal on the planet. Still only publishes a couple percent [00:05:00] of the total because there's a ton of journals out there, but it's big, it's successful, it's growing. Lots of other publishers are starting to switch not just because of it's a successful business, but because of the pressure from the public pressure from the government. Speaker 4: The NIH now requires that people make papers that are funded by NIH research freely available within a year after publication. Things are moving in the right direction and I think the insanity of a world in which the output of publicly funded publicly minded science is privately owned by people who had nothing to do with [00:05:30] a generation of the science in the first place is, it's not quite over, but it is. The writing's on the wall today. Let's go ahead and there was a bit of pushback on that in the, in the congress. What's the state of that? Is that so it's all a lot of pushback because the publishers, it's an incredibly lucrative business that profit margins for Elsevier and other big commercial publishers exceed those of apple and other sort of paragons of highly profitable businesses. When you have a company that's making $1 billion profit off of the public back [00:06:00] and they see a simple legislative solution to avoiding the problem, I think it's a natural instinct on their part to just try to write a law and you know, basically what happened was someone from their district who has a company in their district who gives them lots of money, writes a bill, gives it to them and says, Hey, could you introduce this?Speaker 4: We have a huge problem. These, you know, radical crazies from Berkeley are trying to undermine our entire business model and to lose jobs, blah, blah, blah. They get this bill introduced and there's non-trivial risk that this kind of things would pass [00:06:30] because they've managed to align themselves with a stronger force in Congress. The pro copyright lobby, they've managed to basically convinced them that this issue with scientific publishing is scientists want to steal publishers content. Just like college kids want to steal music from, you know, musicians the, and so there was a nontrivial risk that this was gonna pass and this is the second time it's been introduced. So fortunately it's very easy to say, look, the taxpayers paid for this stuff. You really think it's right for, you know, somebody who just got diagnosed [00:07:00] with some terrible disease to not have access to information that they paid for. Speaker 4: The publishers lose this every time this becomes a public fight, they're not in a winning path. And so I expect it to happen again, but just like this last time, I don't think they're gonna win. More people in Congress are on our side and paying attention than there are on Elsevier side or those publishers mostly private? Or are they publicly, I mean, they're corporations. I mean, yeah, they're mostly public corporations. So Elsevier is a big publicly traded corporation, but they're mostly from the Netherlands and [00:07:30] London. There's a bunch of big companies, but interestingly we've had as much problem historically with nonprofits, scientific societies, the societies themselves and make a lot of money on their journals. A lot of them do and it's put them in a kind of compromise position where their revenues from their journals are so important to their overall financial stability that they behave like commercial publishers. Speaker 4: It's not just big companies, any established publisher who makes a lot of money on publishing. This is sort of intrinsically compromised I think in this endeavor. [00:08:00] So the next sorta thing Blas is trying to do is to switch to a world in which publishing becomes almost instantaneous, still takes nine months or so on average for most works to go from when an author's ready to share it with the public to when it's actually publicly available, even if the journal is freely accessible. And so there's still a lot wrong with the waste. Scientists communicate with each other and with the public that this is not a close up shop. Once we win this open access battle, it's just the beginning. And this doesn't really conflict with intellectual property rights and things like that. [00:08:30] The idea of open science is really just sharing the information. The intellectual property is independent of how openly accessible the publication is. Speaker 4: On the other hand, I also think that the intellectual property stuff is bad. I've always believed that if you're getting money from the federal government, that the intellectual property you develop should not belong to you. It should be in the public domain, and I think that there's a lot of corruption of the way people behave in science that stems from the personal pressure as well as the pressure from the institutions to turn every idea, every little thing [00:09:00] they generate in the lab into a commodity, and I think it's makes science work poorly, but this is happening and so it doesn't benefit society to have academic, publicly funded research turn into privately held intellectual property. It inhibits the commercialization of those ideas that inhibits the broader use of ideas. Plenty of studies have shown this is generally cost more money to manage this whole intellectual property thing than the system benefits. Speaker 4: At the end of the day, very few universities profit from their intellectual property effort. [00:09:30] Mostly they spend a lot of money on lawyers and systems and they don't have the, you know, cloning patent or whatever it is. But if your interest is in the broader functioning of science and in the broader exposure to the public to the benefits of scientific research, you have to think that this stuff should just go right into the public domain where people want to commercialize it. They can, they just don't own any exclusive right to use it. And I think making it all pre competitive is by far the best thing to do. So while publishing itself to answer the question directly is not a [00:10:00] threatened virtual property. If I could figure out a way to make it so I would do stuff cause I think it's a very, very bad thing that publicly funded scientists, people at University of California that their stuff doesn't just belong to the public. Speaker 5: This is spectrum on KALX Berkeley today. Michael Isen, an associate professor at UC Berkeley reflects on the prop 37 campaign and GMO labeling on food. Speaker 3: Another issue [00:10:30] that involves the public a lot is the interest in GMOs in food. How would you like to see that debate transformed? Having just been through the the election cycle here in California where we had that propositionSpeaker 4: right. As you know, I was very, very much opposed to prop 37 and I think mostly because the campaign against genetically modified organisms was predicated on an ignorance of how the technology works and I felt a fear sort [00:11:00] of of science that the problem for most people was that science was involved in food and there's so many problems with that point of view that it's hard to know where to start. First of all, the reasons why I was particularly opposed to this initiative was that the backers were willfully distorting the science spreading the idea that GMOs were intrinsically dangerous, basically, that the public would benefit from having the wrong knowledge about GMOs, which is what I really felt like they were pushing some. Most scientists look at this and think what GMOs are doing [00:11:30] is so different than what we've done for thousands of years and selective breeding of crop. Speaker 4: The idea that the food we eat is in some natural state is a fallacy. Compare corn to its ancestor teosinte. You compare the tomato you buy in the supermarket to the wild slant islands, the person come. None of these things we eat. Look anything remotely like what you found in the wild. They were transformed by centuries of selective breeding and crossing and all sorts of other genetic techniques. Those are the tools of genetics that genetics has just gotten [00:12:00] better and we can do these things in a different way and yes, genetic modification is not identical, but there's nothing intrinsically weird or intrinsically dangerous about moving genes from one species to another. Putting synthetic genes into a plan. It could be, it's not intrinsically safe either, but the attitude that people seem to take is one of the food we have now is in a natural, untainted state and that the second scientist put their hands on it. Speaker 4: All of a sudden it becomes a dangerous threat, but I also think the industry has been stupid in my [00:12:30] mind and has caused a lot of this problem by basically being secret about it. For me it was sort of a lose lose situation in that neither side of that fight was actually interested in the public understanding the science. So you had a ballot measure from my mind in which more or less everybody involved was trying to promote public ignorance about an issue and it's a struggle. I don't know what the right exact solution is to achieve what I think we really need to do, which is to have the public have a, an understanding of the technology, not a detailed understanding [00:13:00] about what enzymes are used to move plans to do you know, why it exists, how it exists, how it works, what people are doing, why it will benefit them or why could benefit them in the long run and so that they understand it and can weigh the benefits and costs in a rational way. Speaker 4: Not in a rational way. I would love to see the food producers label their food, not with a huge thing on the front that says caution contain genetically modified ingredients, but with a label on back that says, here's where the seeds, the crops that went into this food come [00:13:30] from. Maybe there's not enough room on the label of every plant to give a comprehensive thing, but we know everybody's got a cell phone and a QR reader. Now. It's not impossible to imagine that every food had a little QR code on the back that you could scan and would say, here are the varieties that were used in the food. Some of them are genetically modified and here's why they were genetically modified and here's what benefit accrues from that genetic modification. Here's why you shouldn't be worried about it. I just think somehow we need to get the public more engaged in the, an understanding [00:14:00] of where food comes from, how it's grown, and what the rationale behind this process is so that they're rational actors in the process. Speaker 4: I mean, that's all. I mean, most scientists really want out of this. It's not so much to dictate that the public make particular decisions about science so that we all have our own biases about these things, but that that lack of understanding of the public about these issues and even very simple things like the simple fact that the food we eat has been subjected to genetics and that better education about simple [00:14:30] scientific things like that would make these debates focus on things that actually should be in the public debate, like part of the companies that are using genetically modified crops, exploiting intellectual property in ways that's bad for the public. It certainly seems like in many cases they do. Should we be developing genetically modified crop who basically resulted in increased herbicide use. Those are issues that are worth discussing, but they have to be discussed in a context where people understand what you're talking about and they don't think, oh my God, there's an insecticide [00:15:00] in my corn and everybody's going to die. Speaker 4: And so if I had an easy solution to that problem, we would implement it, but I can recognize when something is not going to achieve it. And I think scaring everybody into thinking that genetic modification is a horrible, dangerous technology that needs to be regulated by the government and some kind of special way was not going to achieve that. Isn't that sort of a difficulty with science in general that oftentimes it gets out in front of the population and presents it with quandaries that it can't grasp and it boils down to fear? [00:15:30] Yeah, I think this is true. This is a lot of this happening with human genetics and things like that. There's plenty of examples of where the way people are used to thinking about things is threatened in some ways or challenged by new science, and I think it's a constant challenge to the scientific community to try to make sure that it doesn't, not so much to make sure that it doesn't get ahead of the public. Speaker 4: That's fine. That's what we're paid to do. Right. But that in doing so, we grapple with the challenge of educating the public [00:16:00] about what we're doing and why and how it's going to benefit them, and it's never going to be completely successful. But I do think that the scientific community is as much to blame as anybody for not having engaged in these issues repeatedly and not having spent it's capital to some extent earning the trust of the public and things like this. You see it with human genetics and probably more acutely than anything with global warming where at some deep level the problem is would an insufficient number of people in the public trust scientists to convey. So what's important [00:16:30] about their understanding of the universe and say they trust them when you do surveys, but it's clear that that trust can be easily undermined with the right kind of PR, right? Speaker 4: It was easy to undermine it from the yes on 37 crowd was easy to undermine scientists as all being self interested somehow all we're all involved in making GMOs and therefore were just shells from Monsanto at some deep level. And though it's absurd and it's easy from the right to say, well scientists, you know, there are a bunch of crazy lefties who just [00:17:00] want us all to be environmentalist's and don't have any care about business. Say these, the public support science. But it's a thin support and it's a thin support because the scientific community hasn't really engaged the public in trying to understand what we're doing and you know, sure, there's plenty of good scientists who are trying to do that, but it certainly have to look at it as a general failure. You know, in terms of scientific literacy in this country. And it bites us all the times in small ways like prop 37 and in big ways like global warming Speaker 5: spectrum is on k a l x Berkeley alternating Fridays. [00:17:30] Michael Eisen is our guest and in this next section Michael Talks about sciences, failure in public outreach and new trends in science funding. Speaker 4: Scientific outreach is a difficult endeavor for a lot of scientists. It doesn't really have a lot of cachet or status within the, and it's tough to fund. Yeah. All that's true. I think it's not without its rewards if fun. I mean, I like talking to the public about science, not because I get anything particular from [00:18:00] it, but just because I like what I do. I like talking about what excites me about the world. I mean, it's fun. A lot of scientists don't feel that way. They don't know they'd rather be in the lab than talking in public. But it's like a lot of things. I think that partly it's just our expectation. We don't expect as a university, as a federal government funding science, it's not considered to be part of what we expect people to do to try to get engaged in communicating. The scientists sort of viewed that there's a another layer of people who are going to be involved in communicating science who are gonna know how to talk to the scientists [00:18:30] and know how to talk to the public. Speaker 4: And there's certainly are fantastic people who do that. But I think ultimately it has to come back to scientists recognizing that it's important. Like if we can't convince the public that what we're doing is important, they're not going to keep giving us money to do it. And so it's a threat to science in every way, not just in its application, but in some practical day to day existence that the public doesn't, when they don't understand us, the scientific community should expect [00:19:00] the people who are doing research or benefiting from the system to do a better job and to take seriously the challenge of communicating it to the public. That's not to say I'm in. Lots of people do it. It's just because it's not organized because it's not expected of people because there's no systematic method for doing it. It peaks me on and he's not as effective I think as it could be if this were a big part of what scientists did and just to tie all these things together. Speaker 4: I'll point out that one of the things I would hope in the long run would happen [00:19:30] as a consequence of the public having hacks as to the scientific literature is that people would start writing papers with the public at least partially in mind when they wrote them. The stuff we do isn't that complicated. I can explain what I do. I could write papers that explained sort of what I'm doing and why and it would be a huge benefit. One of the things we've really, really failed to do is we're good at explaining facts. Here's what we know, here's what we've learned, here's the truth of the system. We're really bad at explaining the scientific method to people and I think people [00:20:00] don't know why. We know things. We know why we believe them. And I think if we were better at writing our papers, I don't expect tons of people to break down the doors and read my papers. Speaker 4: But you know, I think they're interesting and well-written and certainly there are papers that plots publishes that get a lot of public attention to anything involving dinosaurs or anything involving weird sexual practices of animals, right? So when those things are good, really good, strong science, people are looking and paying attention. And if the papers were written in a way [00:20:30] that actually engages the public and thought, well, I'm going to try to explain what I did here to the public that this would probably be the most effective thing we could do, would be to educate the public, educate our students, educate everybody about what scientists do and how we do it. Not just what we discovered, which is I think one of the major problems is focus on facts and discoveries to problem in our public communication. It's a problem in education as a problem just in general for science that we don't talk very much about how we know things, what we're doing [00:21:00] and why. Speaker 4: We just talk about what we've learned. Is there anything that I haven't asked you about that you want to hold forth on? Um, you asking some questions about science funding and about amount of money available for sciences getting tighter and tighter arts, more and more scientists. And I think we're facing a kind of big question about like what does the public want to fund in science? Part of the downside of this big data move in science has been a sort of loss [00:21:30] of appreciation for the importance of individual scientists. And I think that there's all this big science and it's true in biology. People think, well, let's just get a hundred scientists from across the country and we'll all get together and we'll do the most important experiments to do. And these are increasing tendencies for the sort of science by committee kind of way of doing things. Speaker 4: And sometimes that worked, it worked for the human genome project and so forth. But probably one of the things I worry about most in sciences with that, that we're moving away from [00:22:00] a world in which individual scientists get to pursue their own ideas. And you know, which is ultimately where the most interesting stuff usually comes from. You know, genome projects don't win Nobel prizes because their infrastructure, they're not ultimately about discoveries. And so I do worry that seduction of big science is such that funding agencies and other people think that this is a great way for them to control what happens. They're going to put tons of money into these big projects and get everybody to sign on to whatever agenda is coming from the NIH rather than from individual scientists. [00:22:30] And I think it's a struggle we're about to see reach a real head in science as less and less money is available. It's harder and harder to get individual research grants and I think we're just starting to see push back against that in the scientific community. But I don't know who will prevail. I would not like being a scientist if what I did with my days was go to committee meetings with 30 other scientists where we discussed what one experiment we were going to do, which is pieces where things are headed at least at the moment. But Michael lies and thanks very much for coming on [00:23:00] spectrum. Absolute pleasure. Speaker 5: [inaudible] now our calendar of science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Rick Kaneski and Renee arou present the calendar. Speaker 4: Charles Darwin may have been born on February 12th but the fellowship of humanity is celebrating his birthday with the Darwin Day on Sunday, February 24th at 1:30 PM David Seaborg of the world [00:23:30] rainforest fund and a leading expert on evolutionary theory presents the keynote evolution today. Current state of knowledge and controversies, Nobel prize physicist George Smoot and leading expert on Darwin, Peter Hess of the national for science Speaker 6: education. We'll also talk afterwards, enjoy a potluck dinner party with the Speakers. I anticipate primordial soup. The event is at Humanist Hall Three Nine Zero 27th Street in Oakland. Visit Humanist [00:24:00] hall.net for more Info every month. Speaker 7: Nerd night holds an event that can only be described as a gratifying mixture of the discovery channel and beer. This Monday, East Bay's own February nerd night will be held at the new parkway theater. Jessica Richmond will speak about the plethora of microbial cells we play host to within our bodies and what they do there. She will explore the latest research on how our microbes correlate with obesity, anxiety, heart disease, and tooth [00:24:30] decay. We'll Fischer. We'll discuss the history, physics and some modern advances of the processes of creating machines. Finally, Guy Pyre. Zack will speak about his experience as a science planner for the curiosity rover. Nerd night will begin at 7:00 PM on February 25th as the new Parkway Theater in Oakland. The HR tickets can be purchased online at Eastbourne or night, spelled n I t e.com this February 26th the life [00:25:00] sciences divisions at the Lawrence lab in Berkeley will hold a seminar on the subject of life and death at the cellular level. Speaker 7: Denise Montell, a professor of molecular and developmental biology at UC Santa Barbara. We'll discuss her research in the area. Her lab has recently discovered a surprising reversibility of the cell suicide process known as a pop ptosis. She is now testing the hypothesis that the ability of cells to return from the brink of death, so it's to salvage cells that are difficult [00:25:30] to replace such as heart muscles or neurons in the adult brain. The seminars open to the public, although non UC Berkeley students are asked to RSVP by phone or through the lab website. The event will be held in room one for one of the Lawrence Berkeley lab building at seven one seven potter street in West Berkeley. It will begin at 4:00 PM on February 26th this Wednesday at the herps leader in San Francisco. You can learn more about your nightly slumbers. [00:26:00] Professor Matt Walker in the sleep and neuroimaging laboratory at UC Berkeley has found compelling evidence that our light dreamless stage of sleep can solidify short term memories by rewiring the architecture of the brain, burst of electrical impulses known as sleep spindles, maybe networking between the brain's hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex is storage area. His team has also found evidence that sleep can associate and integrate new memories together. Dr. Walker will be in conversation with k a [00:26:30] l w reporter Amy Standen. Tickets for the February 27th event can be found online@calacademy.org Speaker 6: Berkeley Professor Alex Philip Pinko is speaking at the Commonwealth about dark energy and the runaway universe. We expected that the attractive force of gravity would slow down the rate at which the university is expanding, but observations of very distant exploding stars known as Supernova show that the expansion rate is actually speeding up the universe seems [00:27:00] to be dominated by a repulsive dark energy. An Idea Albert Einstein had suggested in 1917 the renounced in 1929 as his biggest blender. The physical origin and nature of dark energy is probably the most important unsolved problem in all of physics. This event will be Thursday, February 28th at five 30 there will be a networking reception followed by the program at six the cost is $20 $8 for Commonwealth members [00:27:30] or $7 for students with valid id. Visit Commonwealth club.org for more info now to news stories presented by Renee and Rick, Speaker 7: a UC Berkeley student team has made it into the final rounds of the Disney sponsored design competition known as imaginations. The competition challenges students to design a Disney experience for the residents of their chosen city. The student team, Tiffany, you on, Catherine Moore and Andrew Linn designed a green robot [00:28:00] food truck called Sammy the students do on Berkeley's reputation as an environmentally friendly city to create Sammy who comes equipped with solar panels and a self cultivating garden. Disney has praised the projects collaborative nature, which incorporates design aspects from each student's major. The students are now presenting their project at Disney headquarters along with five other teams from across the country. Speaker 6: Last Friday, February 16th you may have seen a large fireball in the night sky [00:28:30] over the bay area. Jonathan Bregman of the Chabot Space and science center in Oakland told The Washington Post that meteors that streak through the sky are a very common occurrence. What is uncommon is that it's so close to where people are living. Bregman also noted that 15,000 tons of debris from asteroids enter the earth's atmosphere every year. Usually these things break up into small pieces and are difficult to find. This event was ours. After the 200 foot asteroid named 2012 [00:29:00] d a 14 came within 18,000 miles of earth and after the Valentine's Day, media exploded over Russia and drain more than a thousand people. That media was the largest to hit the earth in more than a century streaking through the atmosphere at supersonic speeds, it created a loud shockwave that broke glass. Scientists estimate that it was about 15 meters across and 7,000 metric tons. Despite this massive size it was undetected until it hit the atmosphere. [00:29:30] Music heard during the show is by Scott and David from his album folk and acoustic released under a creative Commons license 3.0 attributional. Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l x@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In part 1, investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Michael Eisen talks about his research, the field, and both experimental and computational biology. Eisen is Associate Professor of Genetics, Genomics, and Development in UC Berkeley's Dept. of Molecular Biology.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible]. Welcome to [inaudible] Speaker 1: section, the Science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews [00:00:30] featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. Thanks for tuning in. Today we are presenting part one of two interviews with Michael Eisen and associate professor of genetics, genomics and development in UC Berkeley's department of molecular biology. Iceland employs a combination of experimental and computational methods to the study of gene regulation [00:01:00] using the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster as a model system. Isen and his colleagues have pioneered genomic approaches in modern molecular biology and our leaders in the emerging field of computational biology. In part one, Michael talks about how he got started in biology and how his research has evolved onto the interview. Michael Isen, welcome to spectrum. Thank you. My pleasure. Would you give us a narrative of how you initiated your research and how your research has [00:01:30] changed to what it is currently? Speaker 4: Okay. Actually, I grew up in a family of scientists. My parents were both biologists, so I always had an interest in biology. But as a kid, my talents were primarily in math and I was a heavy duty math geek and went to college expecting to be a mathematician and took this freshman calculus class and all the hardcore math geeks tuck. And I did fine. I did well in the class, but [00:02:00] there were several people in the class who were clearly a notch better than me in a way that I think you only can realize and you know, basketball and mathematics at the age of 18 that you're not destined to be the best. And I think math is a field where if you're not the best, it's just kind of boring. And so I stayed as a mathematician and math major in college, but I started increasingly taking a lot of biology classes and had more or less, you know, realized that biology was what really captured my, my attention and [00:02:30] my heart. Speaker 4: And so I went to graduate school but had the idea that I'm interested in biology, but I'm really good at math. So there must be some way of combining these two things. And so I entered a graduate program in biophysics, which is sort of a place where people who are interested in biology maybe haven't taken all the prereqs for a normal biology department but also have a quantitative background go cause. And so, you know, in the way that people sort of drifted into things, I drifted into working on protein structure and [00:03:00] did my phd studying the evolution of the proteins on the surface of flu viruses and using a combination of experimental work and I would hesitate to call it mathematics. It was really just sort of kind of physics and it's, it's a lot of data. You generate a lot of raw data, you generate a lot of data on the coordinates of individual protein molecules and things that they might bind to. Speaker 4: And so it was very natural to start using computers in that work. You know, my background was not in computer science. I programmed as a kid [00:03:30] because my grandfather bought me a computer and I taught myself how to program and I wrote programs to, you know, keep track of baseball statistics and other things like that. In College, I basically never programmed anything in the math department I was in. It was considered not math that you were touching a computer. And so I didn't really do anything with computers until I got to graduate school when you started seeing all this data coming down the pipe. But I wasn't particularly interested in structural biology and I discovered that through six years from graduate school that [00:04:00] although I liked doing it, it wasn't intellectually satisfying, was too small. You're working on one sugar bound to one protein in one virus and I was having trouble seeing how that would expand into something grand and whatever. Speaker 4: You know, the ambitions of, uh, of a graduate student wanting to do something big. And I got lucky in the way that often happens in that my advisor had a colleague he knew from an advisory board. He sat on and he was coming into town because his brother was getting some honorary degree [00:04:30] and I met him in his hotel room, Austin. And he had with him, uh, glass microscope slide onto which had been spotted down little pieces of DNA, each of which corresponded to one gene in the yeast genome. So it's about 6,000 genes in the yeast genome. And you could see them because there was still salt in the spots, but it was a very evocative little device. You could sort of hold it up in front of the sun and you could see the sun sort of glittering on all these little spots. Speaker 4: You could just see the grandness of [00:05:00] the device. Didn't know how people were using them. I didn't know what they would be used for. I didn't know what I would do with them, but I was sort of drawn in by the scale of it all. The idea that you could work on everything at once and you didn't have to choose to work on just one little thing and disappear into a little corner and study. Just that. And so my advisor said, oh, you really should go do this. They need someone who's, you know, understands biology, but can deal with the computational side of things. It's clear that this was going to generate a lot of data [00:05:30] and that, you know, he was right. I mean this was a field that really was in great need of people who understood the biology but could work well in the quantitative computational side of things. Speaker 4: So I packed up and moved to Stanford with a short stint as a minor league baseball announcer in between. Really it was just a very fortuitous time to have gotten into this new field. I mean, the field was really just beginning. So this was in 1996 the first genomes been sequenced, they were microbes, there's bacteria and yeast [00:06:00] and so forth. And we were just getting our first glimpse of the scale of the kind of problems that we were going to be facing in genomics. But what I loved about this device, which is a DNA microarray, it's the sort of became a very hot tool in biology for a number of years was that it wasn't just a computer, it wasn't just data in a computer. It actually you were doing to do experiments with this. I'm interested in biology cause I liked living things. I like doing experiments, I like seeing things and I didn't want to just disappear with someone else's data and [00:06:30] analyze it. Speaker 4: So I went to Stanford to work on these and it really was just this awesome time and we were generating huge amounts of data in the lab and not just me. There were, you know, dozens of people generating tons of different types of experiments and so forth. And we lacked any kind of framework for looking at that data constructively. You couldn't look at those experiments and figure out by looking line by line in an excel spreadsheet at what gene was expressed, at what level and what condition. It just wasn't [00:07:00] the way to do it. And so my main contribution to the field at the time was in bringing tools for organizing the information and presenting it visually and being able to interact with that kind of incredibly complicated data in a way that was intuitive for people who understood the biology and allowed them to go back and forth between the experiment in the computer and the data and really try to make sense of what was a huge amounts of data with huge amounts of information, but something nobody had really been trained to [00:07:30] look at. And so it was there that I really realized kind of the way I like to do science, which is this constant back and forth between experiments on the computer. In my mind and in what I try to teach people in my lab. There's no distinction between doing experiments on the bench or in the field or in a computer that they're just different ways of looking at biology. Speaker 3: This is spectrum line KALX Berkeley. Today, Michael [00:08:00] I's associate professor at UC Berkeley explains his research in developmental biology. Speaker 4: On the basis of that time at Stanford, I got a job at Berkeley and what I did when I started my lab at Berkeley was really tried to focus on one problem. I mean I had been working on a million different problems at Stanford where we had a huge group and a million different people working on, and I was sort of moving around from problem the problem and helping out people with their data or thinking of different experiments. And when I came to Berkeley, I really [00:08:30] wanted to focus on one problem. And the problem that had intrigued me from the beginning of working on the microarray stuff was figuring out how it is that an animal's genome, which is the same essentially in every cell in the body, how it instructs different cells to behave differently, to turn on different genes and to acquire different properties. And so partly because of the influence of people here at Berkeley who were working on fruit flies, I switched my research program to work on [inaudible] when I started my lab at Berkeley, the genome of that [00:09:00] had just been sequenced and I liked working with animals. Speaker 4: I like having something that moves around and you know, had some behaviors and so the lab started to work on flies and pretty much since then that's what we've worked on. That's sort of the story of how I got to where I am. So your research then is you're looking at flies over time? Yeah, I mean, I mean I see how the genes are expressed. I'd say we're looking at classified more as developmental biology in the sense that we're looking at how genes are expressed over time during the lifespan of a lie. To this day, [00:09:30] we can't look at a newly sequenced genome and say, oh well this is what the animal's going to look like. That is, I couldn't tell you except sort of by cheating and knowing, comparing it to other genomes. If I, you gave me a fly genome, I look at it, I wouldn't know it was a fly or a worm or a tree or it's just the way in which the organism acquires it. Speaker 4: Things that make them interesting, their form, their appearance, their function. We have just the tiniest scratch of understanding of how that works. And so it's, for me, the most [00:10:00] interesting problem in biology is how do you get in a complicated structure like an animal out of a single cell. And how is that encoded in a genome sequence? I mean it's a fascinating mystery that I thought, you know, when I first started doing this I thought we'd have solved that problem by now. Not Easily. You know, because we had all this new data, we had the genome sequences we could measure. And a lot of what my lab does is actually measure which genes come on when, during development and try to understand for individual genes where that's been encoded in the genome [00:10:30] and how that happens. And I just sort of figured, well, you know, the problem for all these years was not that the problem was that hard. Speaker 4: We just didn't have the right data to look at this problem. And now we can do these experiments. I can sequence the genome of a fly and in a day I can characterize which genes are turned on when during development. And I sort of naively thought, well, we'll just sort of put it into a computer and shake things up and be clever and we'll figure out how these things are related to each other. And I mean now it's laughable that I would've ever thought that, but it was a very, very complicated thing. It's a process that's [00:11:00] executed by very complicated molecular machines operating in a very complicated environment or the nucleus and it, you know, we really don't understand it very well. We've learned a lot, but it's not a problem. We really understand. And so what is it that you've accumulated in terms of knowledge in that regard? Speaker 4: What do you think you've learned? A small amount of this is coming from my lab, but this is a whole field of people looking at this. But that we know the basic way in which that information is encoded in the genome. [00:11:30] We know that there are tuneable switches that can turn genes on and off in different conditions. And we know basically what molecular processes are involved in doing that in the sense that we know that there are proteins that can bind DNA in a sequence specific manner. So they will stick only to pieces of DNA that contain a motif or a particular code that distinct for each of these factors. In flies, there's several hundred of these factors and for humans that are several thousand of these factors that bind DNA in a [00:12:00] sequence specific manner, and they basically translate the nucleotide sequence of the genome into a different kind of code, which is the code of proteins bound to DNA. Speaker 4: And we know from a million different experiments that it's the action of those proteins binding to DNA that triggers the differential expression of genes in different conditions. So if you have a particular proteins, these are called transcription factors. If you have one in a cell at high levels than the genes [00:12:30] that are responding to that factor will be turned on in that cell. And if there's another cell where that protein isn't present, the set of genes that responds to it won't be turned on. So we know that as a general statement, but working out exactly how those proteins function, what it is that they actually do to turn a gene on and off, how they interact with each other, what conditions are necessary for them to function. All of those things are, I wouldn't say we know nothing about it, but they're very, [00:13:00] very poorly understood. Speaker 4: A lot of this sort of simple ideas that people had of there being a kind of regulatory code that looked something like the protein code that we're, you know, amino acid code that people are familiar with, right, that there'll be a genetic code for gene regulation. The idea that that's true is long disappeared from our thinking in the sense that it's much more like a very, very complicated problem with hundreds of different proteins that all interact with each other in a dynamic way. Something bind recruits, something else. [00:13:30] The thing it recruits changes the coding on the DNA and essence to a different state and then that allows other proteins to come in and that somehow or another that we still really don't understand. You eventually reach a state where the gene is turned on or turned off depending on what these factors are doing and you know, while there's lots of models for how that might function, they're all still tentative and we're getting better. The techniques for doing these kinds of experiments get better all the time. We can take individual pieces of or Sophala embryo [00:14:00] and sequence all the RNA contains and get a really complete picture of what's turned on when the technology is improving to the point where we can do a lot of this by imaging cells as amazing things we can do, but still the next level of understanding the singularity in our understanding of transcriptional regulation is still before us. Speaker 3: Spectrum is on KALX, Berkley alternating Fridays today. Michael [inaudible], associate professor at UC Berkeley [00:14:30] is our guest. In the next section, Michael describes the challenges his research poses Speaker 4: and is the task then the hard work of science and documenting everything's, yeah. Mapping a little bit about just observing. I mean, I'm a big believer in observational science that what's limited us to this has been just our poor tools for looking at what's going on. I mean we still hard to visualize the activity of individual molecules within cells, although we're on the precipice [00:15:00] of being able to do that better. So yeah, it's looking and realizing when the paradigms we have for thinking about this thing are clearly just not sufficient. And I think the fields get trapped sometimes in a way of thinking about how their system works and they do experiments that are predicated on some particular idea. But you know, usually when you have an idea and you pursue it for quite a long time and it doesn't pan out, it's because the idea is wrong. Speaker 4: And not always, but I think the transcriptional regulation field has been slow to adapt [00:15:30] to new sort of models for thinking. Although that is changing, I think that there's a lot of activity now and thinking about the dynamics of DNA and proteins within the nucleus. You know, we tend to think about DNA as kind of a static thing that sits in the nucleus and it's a, it's sort of read out by proteins, but really much more accurate as to think of it as a living kind of warned me like thing in the nucleus that gets pulled around to different parts of the nucleus and where it is in the nucleus is one way in which you control what's turned on and off. And I think people are really [00:16:00] appreciating the importance of this sort of three-dimensional architecture of the nucleus as a key facet and controlling the activity that there's, the nucleus itself is not a homogeneous place. Speaker 4: There is active and inactive regions of the nucleus and it's really largely from imaging that we're learning how that's functioning and you know, we as the whole field and are there lots of collaborators and people who are doing work? Yeah, I mean I'd say oh yeah. I mean it's a, it's an active feeling. Pay Attention to [00:16:30] oh yeah. So it's an active, if not huge field and not just in flies. I mean, I think it's transcriptional regulations of big field and in particular in developmental biology where amongst scientists we're interested in how animals develop. It's long been clear that gene regulation is sort of sits at the center of understanding development and so people interested in developmental biology and have long been interested in transcriptional regulation and I think everybody's got their own take on it here. But yeah, it's a very active field with lots of people, including several other people at Berkeley who are doing really [00:17:00] fascinating stuff. Speaker 4: So it's not out in the wilderness. This is not the hinterlands of science, but it's um, it's a nice field to work in about appropriate size. Our annual meetings only have a thousand, a few thousand people. It's not like some of these fields with 25,000 people. I can realistically know all the people who are working on problems related to ours and I literally know them and I know what they're doing and we sort of exchange ideas. So I like it. It's, it's nice community of people. [00:17:30] Is the field driving a lot of tool development? Absolutely. I say, this is something I really try to encourage people in my lab and people I trained to think, which is when you have a problem, you should be thinking not what am I good at? What can I apply to this problem? What technique has out there that would work here? Speaker 4: But what do I need to do? What is the right way to solve this problem? And if someone else has figured out how to do it, great, do it. But if they haven't, then do it yourself. And I think that this applies sort of very specifically [00:18:00] to doing individual experiments, but also to this broader issue we were talking about before with this interplay between computation and experiment. I think too many people come into science graduate school or wherever, thinking, well, I'm an experimentalist or I'm a computational biologist or whatever. And then they ask a question and then the inevitably hit the point where the logical path and pursuing their question would take them across this self-imposed boundary. Either you're an experimentalist who generated data and you're not [00:18:30] able to get at it in the right way and therefore, you know what you really need to be doing is sitting at a computer and playing around with the data. Speaker 4: But if you view that as a boundary that you're not allowed to cross or you're incapable of crossing, you'll never solve it because it almost never works. You almost never can find somebody else no matter how talented they are. Who's as interested in the problem that you're working on as you are. And I think that's a general rule. Scientists should feel as uninhibited about pursuing new things even if they're bad at it. It's certainly been a mantra [00:19:00] I've always tried to convey to the people in my lab, which is, yeah, sure, you come in with a computer science background and you know you're a coder and you've never picked up a pipette or grown a fly. But that's why the first thing you should do in the lab is go grow flies and vice versa. For the people who come in perfectly good in the lab but unable to do stuff in the computer, the first thing you should do is start playing around with data on the computer and it doesn't always work and not everybody sort of successfully bridges that gap, but the best scientists in my mind are ones who don't [00:19:30] circumscribe what they're good at. Speaker 4: They have problems and they pursue them. When something like visualization, is that a bridge too far to try to embrace that kind of technology? I've always done that. I mean I almost every time I do an analysis in the computer, I reduce it to picture some way or another. You know, because of the human brain, no matter how fancy your analysis is, the human brain is just not good at assimilating information as numbers. What we're good at as thinkers is looking at patterns, [00:20:00] finding patterns and things, looking at looking at images, recognizing when patterns are interesting and important, and there's a crucial role for turning data into something the human brain can pull in. And that's always, for me, one of the most fun things is taking data that is just a string of numbers and figuring out how to present it to your brain in a way that makes some sense for it and the refinement of it so that it's believable. Speaker 4: Yeah, and so then you can do it over and over and over and get the same result. Yeah, and all, I mean it is one of the dangers [00:20:30] you deal with when you're working with, when you're relying on human pattern recognition is we're so good at it that we recognize patterns even when they don't exist. There's a lot of statistics that gets used in modern biology, but often people I think use it incorrectly and people think that statistics is going to tell them what things are important, what things they should be paying attention to. For me, we almost entirely used statistical thinking to tell us when we've fooled ourselves into thinking something's interesting, you know, with enough data and enough things going on, you're going [00:21:00] to find something that looks interesting there and having a check on that part of your brain that likes to find patterns and interesting things is also crucial. Speaker 4: You know, I think people understand that if you flip a coin three times, it's not that we are trying to land on heads, but they have much, much harder time thinking about what happens if you flip a coin a billion times. We're struggling with this in biology, this transformation from small data to big data, it taxes people's ability to think clearly about what kinds of phenomena are interesting and aren't interesting. [00:21:30] Big Data is sort of the promise land now for a lot of people. Yeah. I'm a big believer in data intrinsically. If you're interested in observing things and interested in understanding how they work, the more you can measure about them better. It's just that's not the end of the game. Right? Just simply measuring things that doesn't lead to insight. Going from observing something to understanding it. That's where the challenges and that's true. Whether you're looking at the movement of DNA in a nucleus or you're [00:22:00] looking at people by a target, right? Like the same. It's the same problem. Speaker 3: This concludes part one of our interview with Michael [inaudible]. On the next spectrum, Michael Eisen will explain the Public Library of science, which he [inaudible]. He will give his thoughts on genetically modified organisms and a strategy for labeling food. He discusses scientific outreach and research funding. Don't miss him now. Our calendar of science and technology [00:22:30] events happening locally over the next few weeks. Rick Karnofsky and Renee Rao present the calendar Speaker 5: tomorrow, February 9th from noon to one wild Oakland presents nature photography basics at lake merit. Meet in front of the Rotary Nature Center at 600 Bellevue Avenue at Perkins in Oakland. For this free event, learn to get more out of the camera you currently have and use it to capture beautiful photos of Oakland's jewel lake merit. [00:23:00] Bring your camera and you'll learn the basics of composition, camera settings, but photography and wildlife photography. Okay. Your instructor will be Dan. Tigger, a freelance photographer that publishes regularly in Bay Nature and other magazines. RSVP at Wild Oakland dot o r G. UC Berkeley Speaker 6: is holding its monthly blood drive. This February 12th you are eligible to no-name blood if you are in good health way, at least 110 pounds and are 17 years or older. You can [00:23:30] also check out the eligibility guidelines online for an initial self screening if you're not eligible or you prefer not to donate blood. There are other ways to support campus blood drives through volunteering, encouraging others and simply spreading the word. You can make an appointment online, but walk ins are also welcome. The blood drive will be on February 12th and the alumni house on the UC Berkeley campus will last from 12 to 6:00 PM you can make an appointment or find more information at the website. [00:24:00] Red Cross blood.org using the sponsor code you see be February 13th Dr. Bruce Ames, senior scientist at the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute will speak at a colloquium on the effects that an inadequate supply of vitamins and minerals has on aging. Speaker 6: Dr Ames posits that the metabolism responds to a moderate deficiency of an essential vitamin or mineral by concentrating on collecting the scarce proteins [00:24:30] to help short term survival and reproductive fitness, usually at the expense of proteins important for longterm health. This is known as triaged theory. Dr Ian Discuss ways in which the human metabolism has evolved to favor short term survival over longterm health. He will also present evidence that this metabolic trade-off accelerates aging associated diseases such as cancer, cognitive decline, and cardiovascular disease. The colloquium will be on February 13th from 12 [00:25:00] to 1:15 PM on the UC Berkeley campus in five one oh one Tolman hall February 16th the Monthly Science at Cau Lecture series will hold a talk focusing on the emerging field of synthetic biology, which applies engineering principles to biology to build sales with new capabilities. The Speaker, John Dabber is a mentor in the international genetically engineered machines competition or ai-jen and a UC Berkeley professor, [00:25:30] Dr Debra. We'll discuss the new technique created in J key's link's lab to make low cost drugs to treat malaria. He will also introduce student members of the UC Berkeley Igm team who will discuss their prize winning project. The free public event will be on February 16th from 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM will be held on the UC Berkeley campus in room one oh five of Stanley hall Speaker 5: on Tuesday the 19th how long now and Yearbook Buenos Center for the Arts Presents. Chris Anderson's talk [00:26:00] on the makers revolution. He describes the democratization of manufacturing and the implications that that has. Anderson himself left his job as editor of wired magazine to join a 22 year old from Tijuana and running a typical makers firm. Three d robotics, which builds is do it yourself. Drones, what based collaboration tools and small batch technology such as cheap 3d printers, three d scanners, laser cutters and assembly. Robots are transforming manufacturing. [00:26:30] Suddenly large scale manufacturers are competing, not just with each other on multi-year cycles are competing with swarms of tiny competitors who can go from invention to innovation to market dominance. In a weeks today, Anderson notes there are nearly a thousand maker spaces shared production facilities around the world and they're growing at an astounding rate. The talk is seven 30 to 9:00 PM at the Lam Research Theater at the Yerba Buena Center for the arts at 700 Howard Street in San Francisco. Speaker 5: [00:27:00] Tickets are $15 for more information, visit long now.org now to new stories presented by Renee and Rick. The Federal Communication Commission has released a proposal to create super wifi networks across the nation. This proposal created by FCC Chairman Julius Jenna Koski, is it global first, and if approved, could provide free access to the web in every metropolitan area and many rural areas. The powerful new service could even allow people [00:27:30] to make calls for mobile phones using only the Internet. A robust public policy debate has already sprung up around the proposal, which has drawn aggressive lobbying on both sides. Verizon wireless and at t, and t along with other telecommunications companies have launched a campaign to persuade lawmakers. The proposal is technically and financially unfeasible. Meanwhile, tech companies like Google and Microsoft have championed the ideas sparking innovation and widening access to an [00:28:00] increasingly important resource. We can add this to the growing list of public policy debate over our changing and complex relationship with the Internet. Speaker 5: A team at McMaster university as reported in the February 3rd issue of nature chemical biology that they have found the first demonstration of a secreted metabolite that can protect against toxic gold and cause gold. Biomineralization. That's right. Bacterium Delphia, [00:28:30] a seat of [inaudible] take solutions continuing dissolve the gold and creates gold particles. This helps protect the bacteria from absorbing harmful gold ions, but it also might be used to harvest gold. The researchers found genes that cause gold, precipitation, engineered bacteria that lack these jeans and observed that these bacteria had stunted growth and that there was no gold precipitation. They also extracted the chemical responsible [00:29:00] for the gold mineralization naming it delftibactin a, the molecule creates metallic gold within seconds in Ph neutral conditions at room temperature. Gold exists in extremely dilute quantities in many water sources and the bacteria or the metabolite might be used to extract gold from mine. Waste in the future. Speaker 3: [inaudible] the music her during the show is by Luciana, David [00:29:30] from his album foam and acoustic, released under a creative Commons license, 3.0 attribution. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about show, please send Speaker 1: them to us. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l x@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. Speaker 2: [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Pioneers in Engineering is a UC Berkeley student-run project that provides STEM outreach in local high schools. PIE sponsors and supports a Spring semester robot competition. Guests include Vivek Nedyavila, Andrew Vanderburg, and David Huang. pioneers.berkeley.eduTranscriptsSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 1: [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hi and good afternoon. My name is Brad swift and I'm the host of today's show. Our interview is with representatives of Pioneers and engineering, also known as Pi, [00:01:00] a UC Berkeley student run project. Since 2008 Pi has been doing stem outreach in bay area high schools, Pi sponsors and supports and annual spring semester robot competition, high school teams design, build and operate robots over seven weeks culminating in a thrilling final competition at the Lawrence Hall of Science Pineys UC Berkeley students to be mentors during this year as robot competition. Each [00:01:30] team gets a set of mentors to encourage and guide the team, helping them to realize their potential, explaining Pi, the stem outreach they do and why you may want to join our Vivek Nay Diallo Vala, Andrew Vanderburg and David Hawaiian onto the interview. I want to welcome you all to spectrum. And would you introduce yourselves and tell us what your major is? Speaker 1: Hi, my name is Vivek. I'm a UX major, electrical engineering and [00:02:00] computer sciences. I'm a junior. Speaker 4: I'm Andrew. I'm a senior physics and astronomy major. Speaker 3: Hi, my name is David. I'm a fourth year apply math and computer science major. Andrew, can you explain the history and goals of Pioneers and engineering? Speaker 4: Sure, so pioneer's engineering was founded in 2008 by Berkeley engineers. The general idea is that while there are a lot of good robotics competitions that provide science outreach to high school students, [00:02:30] a lot of them aren't very good at providing outreach to the students who need it. Most. The ones in the underprivileged schools. So pioneers in engineering or pie as we like to call it, is focusing on trying to provide that outreach. So we try to make it more sustainable so that they don't have to pay as much money every year and they don't have to have corporate sponsors. And we also try to make it more friendly so that they don't have to go out and search for their own mentors. They get their own mentors from UC Berkeley and we provide [inaudible]. Speaker 1: [00:03:00] And how did you decide on robots as the focus of your engineering challenge? Speaker 4: I think that robots are kind of a gimmick. They're cool, they're exciting and they have a lot of pop culture and references. But the lessons that we teach them could be applied to engineering, all sorts of different things. Perhaps we could do a science competition and get the same teaching out of it. Robots just provide something exciting. They provide a hook and they provide a climactic final competition where they can [00:03:30] have their robots, you know, compete head to head. [inaudible] Speaker 1: there is a certain kit aspect to what you're doing with the robots in terms of a known entity. A constraint. Speaker 4: Yeah. So we um, give them a very well-defined kit of parts which they can use so they don't have to start from scratch because building a robot from basic electronic components and pieces of metal or plywood is really hard. So we give them a good start. We give [00:04:00] them a kit which they can build upon. They don't have to do all of the electronics. They don't have to do a lot of the tedious work, but they can do something really cool with them in the end. Speaker 1: What's the funding source that you use for this competition? Speaker 4: We see corporate sponsorships. We go to companies like Google, Qualcomm, Boeing, and we ask them if they can support us, if they can. We advertise for them. We put their logos on our banners and our tee shirts [00:04:30] and they also get deductions for supporting charitable causes. [inaudible] Speaker 1: and are you a club? What is your organizational status? Speaker 4: We are technically a project of Tau Beta Pi, which is the engineering honor society and our finances and our organization go through them. Many of our members have or no, not affiliated with Beta Pi. They are recruited by us Speaker 1: beside the robot competition. Are there other projects within Pi [00:05:00] that you're working on? We have a team that actually goes to a high school called Ralph Bunche High School in West Oakland and this team does a program called Pie prep for these kids in which they have 13 or 14 modules of stem outreach kind of and they basically teach them cool things about science and technology and a little bit about robotics and physics and stuff like that and it's, it's once a week. It's intended to be fun and just spark their interest and also give them [00:05:30] a little bit of theoretical knowledge. This has been going very well this semester and from the results in the surveys that we've been taking, we're most likely gonna ramp it up next fall to even more schools. The exact number, we're not sure, but it's going to continue ramping up in the next few years and hopefully touch in the realm of 1314 schools in the area. We're hoping that this is going to be a very successful program and also inspire more interest in our robotics competition for the so we can have something good going on in the fall. It's [00:06:00] something in interest spring so it's like a year round kind of thing. Speaker 3: This is spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Today's topic is pioneers in engineering. Three representatives from Pi join us. They are Vivek, Andrew and David. Andrew. How is it that high school's become involved in the [00:06:30] competition? Speaker 4: We do a lot of recruiting into high schools who fit our core mission, the ones who probably wouldn't be able to compete sustainably and the other robotics competitions that are out there. So we contact teachers and the sciences and we ask them if they're interested and if their students are interested in putting together a team and then they apply for a team and if we have room we'll take them. Speaker 3: What is the limit on teams? You have a capacity issue. Speaker 4: Yeah. We have a limit of about 20 teams could be up as many as 24 this year and the limitations [00:07:00] are put in place by our ability to produce kits and to provide mentors for them. We would rather have a good competition with 25 teams than one that stretched too thin with 35 Speaker 3: and do schools stick with it. Speaker 4: There is a core group of schools who seem to be building up somewhat of a legacy. They'll come back year after year. We actually just had our first student who is a four year high school participant in Pi Join Pi as a staff member [00:07:30] in college. Speaker 3: Great. That's the goal, right? In a way that's sort of the ideal. Andrew, when the teams are picked, they're picked by the teachers at the high schools. Speaker 4: The teams are I guess collected by the teachers at the high school, but they're based on interest. We've in the past tried to limit the number of people on the team, but we're moving away from that because um, we have a lot more mentors than we have in the past. Speaker 3: How do you try to keep the parody of the experience within [00:08:00] the teams and the resources that they have access to the equipment, the time spent? How do you, how do you try to balance all that? Keep everybody kind of on the same level. Speaker 4: So there are teams who have access to a machine shop in their high school and we can't provide that to everyone. But we do provide as a basic set of tools to anyone who wants them. We loan them out if they want to go to the high school and work with their team. And sometimes the high schools come to UC Berkeley and they can use our tools and our workspace in O'Brian Hall [00:08:30] in north side, we also try to ration the experience level of the mentors. We tried to provide the more experienced mentors to the less experienced teams. As a general rule, we try to provide equal experience and different types of engineering to each school. So each school should hope to have a mechanical engineer or someone who's mechanically inclined and someone who is electrically inclined or programming inclined. Speaker 1: And the number of mentors per team. Last year it ranged between four to six [00:09:00] of AVEC. Talk about your experience as a mentor on the robot competition. My experience at Ralph Bunche high school mentoring and was a series of ups and downs. But in the end it kind of culminated in something special. So started off with a few weeks of mentorship prep by um, Andrew and his mentorship team. They prepped us for what we would encounter a little bit of the social aspect of the kids, but mostly about the uh, technical mentorship. Ralph [00:09:30] onto high is a rather underprivileged high school in West Oakland. There were only three of them in the team and we had to struggle with people dropping out, people coming in because of the small size of the team, small quarrels that were involved, a lot of social issues that we were not as equipped for as mentors coming from UC Berkeley. Speaker 1: Um, not to mention the social barrier itself of where we have all come from in our lives compared to where these kids have come from. And [00:10:00] it was a really interesting experience for me because I actually have had a little bit of experience with kids from underprivileged backgrounds and the experience that I had in pulling my mentorship team into it with me trying to get everyone on the same page with these kids to not get frustrated with them, to not unequivocally say something and like have it mar the rest of our mentorship semesters. So it was a journey and it ended up being very rewarding, um, in the sense that [00:10:30] we got second place in the robotics competition and this team of three kids who were definitely the underdogs and it was just, you know, one of those quintessential underdog stories. They ended up getting second place and I was super proud of them. Speaker 1: So very rewarding experience. David, tell us about your experience last year as a mentor. I think the biggest and rather pleasant surprise, uh, during the tournament was at discrimination the week before and during the actual [00:11:00] tournament at the end of the season. The atmosphere was just absolutely incredible. We had, um, PAC has of spectators. We had epic music classing in the background and in both hers mining hardware. We had the scrimmage and the Lawrence Hom signs where we had to file tournament. The stage was very well prepared and when each team sent up their team members send their robot on the stage to compete. It gives you the feeling that you're these [00:11:30] stars on stage, sort of like maybe no gladiators in ancient Roman stadiums where you're the center of the attention of everyone around you and really at some level I feel like that's where colleges should be about is motivating students, motivating students, intellectual growth and also highlighting their achievements and I think in that sense Speaker 5: the Pi robotic competition has totally exceeded my expectation. I remember seeing a couple up the high school students [00:12:00] who ended up winning the competition, just crying on the stage and joy. I have no doubt that it had been a parade and really life changing experience for them. Speaker 3: Spectrum is on KALX Berkeley alternating Fridays. Today, we are talking with Vivec, Andrew and David about pioneers in engineering Speaker 1: as your involvement [00:12:30] in Pi giving you some insights into where you might want to go with your major. Speaker 4: My involvement in Pi has really been my first major experience in teaching and it turns out that teaching is a lot harder than you would think, especially teaching some of the difficult concepts that we have to do so quickly in our decal. It turns out that trying to break down the concepts into logical chunks and presenting them in a logical way is almost as hard, if not harder than learning them yourself. [00:13:00] So I found that teaching and learning to teach was a really good experience for me and it will help me presumably as I graduate and go to Grad school [inaudible] Speaker 1: because are you thinking of being a teacher? Speaker 4: I'm thinking of being hopefully a professor in the future. I hope that my experience in Pi will give me a leg up from working on that and hopefully make it easier for my students to learn in the future. Speaker 3: [inaudible] David, anything. Yeah. Speaker 5: So I try and Pi as a part of my effort to explore [00:13:30] more in computer science, which I started taking classes last year and I have to say during the course of last semesters tournament, I really enjoy working with the staff member, other fellow UC Berkeley students and Pi. And I also really enjoy working with the high school students on my team to the extent that, uh, I'm starting to look more and more into the idea of working at a technology startup. And I'm also fairly sure I'm going to do computer science as a second major along with math. [00:14:00] And so in that sense, I think it's really solidify my interests in this field. Speaker 1: VEC, how has pi affected your plans for the future? I've actually had, I guess in the last few weeks to think about this very seriously. And through talking with a number of people in Pie, I'm very, very inclined to do something kind of like this as a job in the future. Like being scientific outreach. Yeah, exactly. Scientific kind [00:14:30] of stem education. Stem outreach. Yeah. So there's um, a company called sparkfun that we have grown closer to over the last year and this is kind of exactly what they do. They have a sparkfun kit circuit skit and it's a solderless circuit skit where they can bring it to elementary, middle school classrooms and have these kids play around with circuits. They want to fund a trip across the nation teaching stuff like this to little kid. Just seeing things like this happen in the world makes me really rethink, do [00:15:00] I just want to become a fabrications engineer or something or like do I want to be a programmer or do I need something like this without there the risks are higher, but the reward, the potential reward is greater. Yeah, that's, that's how it's changed my outlook. What sort of a time commitment is there to being a Pi staffer or a mentor? Speaker 4: So being a mentor, we ask that you attend a two hour day call once a week. We ask that you mentor your teams [00:15:30] for at least two hours a week. And we also ask that you do a five minute progress report so that we know how your teams are doing. So if you add in transportation time, it's probably adds up to about six to eight hours a week of time commitment. That won't be distributed evenly necessarily because there'll be weeks where you have weekend events, which lasts all day. But I think that most peer mentors have found that the time commitment really isn't a problem because by the time that the time coming and gets large, [00:16:00] you really want to be there and it's a lot of fun. Speaker 1: And then for staff, so I know this isn't the time for staff to get involved or are you always looking for staff or is it really just at the fall? Speaker 4: So we're always looking for staff. We do need mentors more than staff at this moment, but as a staff member, the time commitment is probably larger, probably order of 10 hours a week for the seven or eight weeks around the competition. At other times it's less, more [00:16:30] of a year long job than this intense seven week period as it would be for a mentor. Speaker 1: Andrew, if you want to become a mentor, what's the process? Okay. Speaker 4: For people who are interested in being mentors to the high school students, we are going to have a mentoring decal which starts in early February. On February 4th that decal will run from six to 8:00 PM on Mondays and Thursdays. And it's once a week. You choose one of those two times and uh, you come to that, you learn [00:17:00] about robotics and then we scheduled for a seven week period starting in March time for you to go to your high schools every week. That's flexible, depends on your schedule, on the high school schedule. The final competition will wrap up around April 28th Speaker 1: and the kind of people you're looking for talk about who can be a mentor, Speaker 4: right? So we accept mentors from every background. We believe that our decal will teach them the basics that can get them [00:17:30] to help their high school students out. And we also believe that learning about engineering is not the only purpose of Pi. We think that other students from other backgrounds can contribute just as much as engineers can because in the end it's not just about teaching them to be engineers, it's about teaching them to go to college, what it's like to be in college, what it's like, enjoy learning and some of our best mentors in the past have not been engineers. Speaker 6: [inaudible]Speaker 3: [00:18:00] pioneers in engineering on spectrum detailing their stem outreach. This is k a l X. Speaker 6: [inaudible].Speaker 3: Do you all find Pi to be a real supportive community for your own personal interests as well as the collective interest of doing the competition and start with the Vac, right. [00:18:30] Then we'll go around. Speaker 1: For me it's the spirit of kind of like self-expression. You're doing something very special for these kids. It's a form of giving someone else what I had when I was a kid in the form of my dad or in the form of other people in my life who influenced me towards engineering and to motivate kids or like allow them to have that confidence in themselves. To go towards stem and at least higher education, one of the main goals of Pie. [00:19:00] Don't be afraid to apply to college and stuff like that. That form of self expression and just kind of helping these kids and self fulfillment through that, that the perk that I get, Speaker 4: I feel as if Pi is a really supportive community because even though the going is often tough as a staff member, there's a lot of pressure because he wants to deliver a good competition to the students. Everyone's willing to help each other out. And I think that it's a really good community to have around you because [00:19:30] even though we're all doing a lot of work and sometimes we can get stressed, we remember that we have each other and that we're all working towards a common goal, which is to give these students a good educational experience. And that's something that a lot of them don't get in school. Speaker 5: So coming from the perspective of surf a semi insider outsider, uh, as a pass mentor, um, I think Pi has given me the opportunity to meet a lot of other people who are similarly interested in science and engineering [00:20:00] from the perspective that these are wonderful things to learn about and to see happen in everyday life instead of just something that you learned together job. And going along that perspective, having met all these really interesting people, empire has given me more social avenues to while to hang out, for instance, for Thanksgiving or just took walk around campus and to know that there are all these people around me who are also likewise striving for a similar goal. And that's comforting to know. Speaker 3: [00:20:30] Vivek, Andrew and David, thanks very much for being on spectrum. Thank you. Thank you for having us. Speaker 2: [inaudible] now our calendar of local science and technology events over the next two weeks, Renee Rao and Ricardo [inaudible] present the calendar. Speaker 7: [00:21:00] Okay. Dr. Shannon Bennett, associate curator of microbiology at the California Academy of Sciences. We'll be hosting a lecture by HIV expert, Dr Leo Weinberger, who will discuss the engineering of a retro virus to cure HIV. While progress has been made in controlling the virus with heavy cocktails or combinations of drugs, more virulent and resistant varieties continue to arise, Weinberger will explore his idea of using the same virus that causes the disease to deliver [00:21:30] the cure. The event will be held at 12:00 PM on Saturday, January 26 tickets will be on sale at the California Academy of Sciences website, $15 for adults and seven for students or seniors. Martin Hellman, Speaker 8: the co-inventor of public key cryptography is presenting the free Stanford engineering hero lecture at the Long Engineering Center at Stanford on Tuesday, January 29th from seven to 9:00 PM [00:22:00] with reception after his talk on the wisdom of foolishness, explorers, how tilting at windmills can turn out. Well in the 1970s Homan was competing with the national security agency who had a much larger budgets than he had, and it was warned that the NSA may classify any accomplishments he made. Despite this with help from Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle, Hellman spearheaded systems that are still used to secure Chileans of dollars of financial [00:22:30] transactions a day. Visit www. That's certain.com for more info Speaker 7: east based first nerd night of 2013 we'll feature three Speakers, Daniel Cohen, a phd candidate in the joint UC Berkeley UCLA program. We'll speak about the theme of collective behavior, discussing the mechanism for everything from hurting sheep to sell your cooperation. Andrew Pike, a u Penn geologist by trade has also been [00:23:00] a contender in the competitive rock paper, Scissors League of Philadelphia. He will discuss some of the surprisingly complex strategies to the game. Lena Nielsen, the Innovation Director at the Bluhm center for developing economies at UC Berkeley. We'll explore technological solutions to extreme global problems that are also financially feasible. The event will start at eight but doors open at seven the event is held on January 28th at the new parkway located at four seven four [00:23:30] 24th street in Oakland. Science fans of all ages are welcome and can purchase the $8 tickets online. Speaker 8: On Tuesday, February 5th at 6:00 PM the Felix Block, a professor in theoretical physics at and the director of the Stanford Institute for theoretical physicist, Leonard Susskind is talking to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco located at five nine five market street. The presentation is entitled the theoretical minimum, [00:24:00] what you need to know to start doing physics Susskind. We'll discuss how to learn more about physics and how to think more like a scientist. He will provide a toolkit to help people advance at their own pace. The cost is $20 to the public, $8 to members and $7 to students. Visit www that commonwealth club.org four tickets. Speaker 7: UC Berkeley's center for emerging and neglected diseases will hold its fifth annual [00:24:30] symposium this year. A variety of Speakers will present their work in various areas of infection and host response. The theme of the symposium, the keynote Speaker, dawn Ghanem will explore new developments in malaria drugs across the world. Sarah Sawyer, another Speaker. We'll discuss what typically keeps animal viruses from infecting humans. Other topics will include emerging African biomedical research on HIV AIDS, mycobacterium [00:25:00] tuberculosis, and new testing protocols for infectious diseases in developing countries. The symposium will be held in Stanley Hall on the UC Berkeley campus on February 11th from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM it's open to anyone who registers@www.global health.berkeley.edu Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 8: [00:25:30] the two news items [inaudible] that can Renee, university of Cambridge researchers published an article in Nature Chemistry on January 20th that indicates DNA conform not only the classic double stranded Helix, but also structures that are made from four strands. It's been thought that these square shaped g quadroplex structures may form in the DNA of cells, but this paper is one of the first to provide evidence that they do exist [00:26:00] in human cells. They forum when four Guanines make a special type of hydrogen bond. Speaker 8: The telomeres that protect Chromosomal DNA are Irish and Guanine and research points to quadroplex formation. And there is evidence that suggests quadruplex formation could damage these Tila mirrors and may play a role in how certain genes contribute to cancer. The team created a simple antibody that stabilizes these g quadroplex structures and showed how the structures are [00:26:30] formed and trapped in human DNA. When describing the long term goals of the research, the team told science daily that many current cancer treatments attack DNA, but it's not clear what the rules are. We don't aware in the genome some of them react. It can be a scattergun approach. The possibility that particular cancer cells harboring genes with these motifs can now be targets and appear to be more vulnerable to interference than normal cells is that thrilling prospect. Speaker 7: Okay. A joint [00:27:00] UC Berkeley Duke University Study of couches across the nation reveals a disturbingly high percentage of our sofas contained noticeable levels of toxins. 102 couches in 27 states were examined in this study. Of these 41% were found to contain the chemical chlorinated Tris, a known carcinogen. 17% of the couches also contain Penta BDE, which can cause hormonal disruptions. While chlorinated Tris was banned [00:27:30] from use in children's clothing in the 1970s it continues to be routinely used by companies seeking to make foam furniture more fire resistant. Currently, California State Law requires a certain degree of flame retardancy, but does not require that the types or amount of chemicals used to achieve this be disclosed. Well, most cotton will or down catches are naturally flame resistant. Any foam catches will almost certainly require added chemicals to meet current standards. Last June, [00:28:00] Governor Jerry Brown advised the state legislature to reform flammability standards for furniture. Once the new regulations are adopted, the chemical free couches should be available. Speaker 2: [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible]. The music art during the show is by on a David from his album folk and acoustic released under [00:28:30] a creative Commons license 3.0 attributes. [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible]. [00:29:00] Yeah. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have common staff to show, please send them to us via email. All right, email address is spectrum dot klx@yahoo.com join us in two weeks. This same time. Speaker 9: [inaudible] [00:29:30] [inaudible] [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jarvis Sulcer, Allison Scott, Hailey Shavers, Ruby Alcazar, join us from the Level Playing Field Institute to discuss the year round STEM program in Bay Area High Schools for minority women. We discuss the program, how to apply, and get an idea of what it is like from Hailey and Ruby. lpfi.orgTranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome [00:00:30] to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists. Speaker 3: Good afternoon. I'm Rick Karnofsky. Brad swift and I are the hosts of today's show stay. We're talking about science education of underrepresented minorities with the level playing field institute who run the smash. Some are math and science honors Academy that happens here [00:01:00] at Cau and at Stanford, UCLA and USC. We have the executive director, Jarvis saucer, the director of research and evaluation, Alison Scott and scholars, Ruby Alcazar and Haley Shavers. Jarvis, why don't you tell me a little bit about LPI? Speaker 4: It's a level playing philosophy to them. Our mission is to remove barriers for students of color who are pursuing degrees in stem and stem being science, technology, engineering and math, and to untapped their potential for the advancement [00:01:30] of our nation and the organism. We're founded in 2001 by Freada Kapor Klein focused on issues in the workplace around diversity and we started off Smash Academy at Berkeley in 2004 and we've continued to run the program and they've expanded to UCLA, USC and Stanford for the last couple of years.Speaker 5: Can someone summarize what Smash Academy is? So Speaker 4: smash you. They three year five week residential program for low income students with color who have we interested in pursuing stem degrees [00:02:00] in college and so we support these students through our five week residential program starting in the summer after ninth grade year and they stay with it for three years. Then we brought in additional support in the first two years of college and one of our strategic partners. Speaker 5: And can you tell me how scholars get involved in the program? Speaker 4: Most scholars come from the nine payer counties and they are first nominated by their teachers think they have to get a math and science recommendation and they go through a rigorous application process similar to what a senior in high school [00:02:30] with experience going to college. And then there's a application, they complete math assessment group interviews with staff and even current scholars than a program. And then we make a selection of the students who are about a 30% acceptance rate of students who apply. Speaker 5: How did you do find out about the program? I was friends with Rachel seems nice and she told me about the program and she said, Haley, I know you math [00:03:00] and I know you really like this so you should apply. And I was kind of skeptical. I was like, that's my summer. I'm trying to go places. She's like, just do it. And I did. I got in and it's best. It's the best. I like it. I like it a lot. Yeah.Speaker 6: Well my sister was actually a scholar before I was and so I found it from her. She's four years older than I am. The way she found out was through her guidance counselor at a high school. What kind of activities do take place over that five weeks? Speaker 7: [00:03:30] I think scholarships speak to that because they live and breathe it, breathe it. Speaker 6: It's been different almost every summer. Our schedules. We have classes five days a week, sometimes even on Sundays. So those classes include the core class like math and science and our science writing class. But we also take like tech media, engineering electronics, and then we also have guest Speakers, we call them Speakerseries. We listen to different than people that come from like stem fields and what they're doing with their lives and their careers. And [00:04:00] we also go on a lot of field trips. What's your favorite activity? Speaker 5: I think my favorite activity would have to be a field trip we took to Pixar, we got to tour the place in Emeryville and we also got to sit in on a presentation by one of the programmers who worked on brave. It was, it was really fun to see the inside of Pixar and just to see how they've created all the great movies that I've watched since I was little. Speaker 2: Yeah. [inaudible] Speaker 8: [00:04:30] you are listening to spectrum on k a l LX Berkeley. We're talking to the level playing field institute about science education of underrepresented minorities.Speaker 7: So a lot of research shows that our students come to us from schools. [00:05:00] Those are typically under-resourced, which means that they lack oftentimes access to high quality teachers, advanced placement courses that would prepare them for success in college. Um, in addition to extracurricular activities such as the ones that the scholars described that they participate in smash though, including things like computer science or robotics, which they might not have it there, high schools. And so that's a really great way smash is found to remove some of the barriers that face these students. Speaker 6: [00:05:30] Awesome. Can you talk to us a little bit more about the specific audience of underrepresented students of color that smash hopes to educate? How are their needs different? How are what they already have access to different? Speaker 7: One of the things that we find or that research demonstrates is that if you look at the science and engineering workforce, African American and Latinos make up only 7% of the entire science and engineering workforce, which is really concerning number considering that those populations [00:06:00] are rapidly growing and that the needs of our, our economy and our nation are trending towards stem occupations. And so, um, just that statistic alone speaks to the fact that, that we are leaving behind this significant person of our population and not preparing them for the skills that they'll need in the future. Speaker 4: And another interesting stat is that only being willing or harder to come to valley with copies of found almost every day that company founded by two individual colors, that's [00:06:30] the 1% and so the half and mostly who found, who found comfortable, who start companies in the bay or in the valley, people with typically with stem backgrounds. And so we have a, as Allison mentioned, a [inaudible] amount of potential in students who could be founders of their own company and really transform not only their lives but the lives of many in their community and beyond. Speaker 6: Is there something special about the bay area that would inspire programs like this to start here? Speaker 4: [00:07:00] I think that the diversity of the type of students we have in the barrier and the fact we have multiple cities represented. I mean there are students in our program say from the East Bay who we never set foot on Berkeley campus, even though it's a boat ride away. Or you have students who live in, I don't know, Penis Lou, who we never stepped foot on Stanford's campus. So that opportunity to have two world class universities in our backyard, so to speak, in our scholars, have an opportunity to experience those campuses in terms of the labs [00:07:30] and access to graduate students. And even faculty, I think makes the very unique place. Speaker 7: And in addition, there's the, obviously we have silicon valley in our backyard, so we have access to a lot of companies and employees of those companies who are very willing to come and speak to our scholars and provide [inaudible] Speaker 6: role models and back to the scholars. Um, do you participate in science and math events outside of both smash and, and the school year? Um, I actually just [00:08:00] got an internship for um, building like a teen website and my like hometown Palo Alto. I also do this thing at my school called college pathways. It's um, run by my guidance counselor and is specifically also for minorities and people of color. We go visit different campuses and uh, kind of similar to Speaker series, we have guest Speakers that we listened to. Um, a lot of them have been like engineers and entrepreneurs. Speaker 5: Um, so for me, other than smash casts, which introduced me to a lot of new programs, [00:08:30] I tend to just experiment. If I see something that I like, I'll research it and find out what's behind it and how can I learn. And that's, that's been my whole mindset since I guess my sophomore year of high school and it hasn't stopped. You have examples I have made to three mobile apps. They're very like simple. [00:09:00] I made them, so I felt like I feel really accomplished. I show like a bunch of my friends and they kind of just look at me like, this doesn't do anything. It just, you know, moves from like, you know, this is a lot of work. I've made these, I spend countless hours, you know, fixing it, make sure it doesn't have any errors. And it's, it's been good. I, my parents, they support me and even though I'm like the techie of the house, they don't really understand what I'm talking about, but [00:09:30] I explain it and they get it after a while and they're like, oh, this makes so much sense. Speaker 5: And then they start bragging to all their friends, but, but it's been good. Yeah. So you've mentioned smash cast a few times, but I don't think we've actually talked about what that is. So did you want to give a summary of smash? I think I can. Um, so smash cast is almost like the extension of our taking media class that we take over the summer and the cast stands for communications [00:10:00] and social technology. I want to say we also experiment and like get exposed to different programs. So right now we're diving into corona, which is a mobile app programming and we've learned some of the terminology and we've had a few mobile app companies come and visit us and they've talked about how they've created some of their games and we got to like test their games and uh, give them feedback. Speaker 2: [00:10:30] [inaudible] Speaker 8: you are listening to spectrum on k Alex Berkeley. We're talking with Jarvis, Alison Rubian, Hayley about smash the summer math and science honors academy. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 5: and what's it like [00:11:00] returning back to your regular high school after the end of the summer? He was kind of weird. How was so used to seeing the same faces? Six, six 30 but like seven ish in the morning until, you know, lights out at 11 o'clock. I guess it, I mean it's nice to go back to high school at the same time. I would always really miss smash. Smash is always what I'd look for too during the entire year. I guess it's kind of me going back to my classes also because I was the only like person of [00:11:30] color and a lot of my classes especially then like my science classes. Um, for me it was, it was kind of disappointing because my high school is, it's really small and I, I like the small atmosphere yet again. I like being surrounded by people who are driven to do better. Um, and my high school I attend, I have a small group of friends and at times they kind of have a lack of motivation to do better. Speaker 5: So I'm always there to push them. I'm like, come on you guys, [00:12:00] let's do this work, let's get it done. Um, but that smash, it was kind of vice versa. We pushed each other to a point where we did our best and we got the work done and we still had fun. And also the classes at my escort are kind of disappointing being that I have a computer science class yet there's only like five people and maybe two out of the five are really interested in the class. And then also for my math class it's [00:12:30] me and what other one other junior, because we take a higher level and we're kind of more advanced than the seniors, which is kind of disappointing being that they're kind of kind of our role models, but they're, they lack that motivation to apply for the colleges and they procrastinate a bunch and it's not good. But I think my junior class will be a really good senior class because I'm a part of it. So [00:13:00] there's LPF I help students after they go on to college. Speaker 4: Yes, we do. We have a strategic partner called beyond 12 and their primary focus is to provide support to first generation college students. I mean, effort to get to college because the city show that if a student can make it through their first two years of college, there is the chance of graduating from college significantly increases. Speaker 6: Hailey Hailey, how did you get started in stem? Speaker 5: It would have [00:13:30] to be my big cousin. He makes like custom computers for different people and I would always go over his house and just be interested in what he was building that day and he would make them look really interesting and show me all the parts. And from there I joined this weekend program that was held at a college and we just got to experience different forms of science and engineering and math and we got to take apart a computer and put it back together. [00:14:00] And I think from there I've always wanted to know how a computer works from the inside and see what I can make for other people to use. I like game design and game programming being that you play game and there may be some errors, but for the most part it's smooth and I want to be that person behind that game, writing that code so you can play. Speaker 6: How about Ruby? What got it going for you? Well, I had a really, [00:14:30] really good math teacher my eighth grade year, so middle school and I grew really close with her. It was just like a friendship that we had beyond like student teacher. I'd go to her when I have issues and we just talk like I just sit in a classroom and talk with her during lunch or something. I sweat. That initially kind of started thinking like, well she's so cool. She does too. Like I can do that. And then is that, so my math interest specifically like math has always been one of my favorite subjects. My mom actually forced me [00:15:00] to take a computer class my eighth grade year. Oh Web design class. I actually ended up enjoying it a lot. I was actually grateful for that. And so that kind of snowballed and and then my sister during my middle school years, she kinda accepted into smash and then she'd come back like every weekend telling me all these stories. And so I was like, oh well my sister basically my biggest role model and so I wanted to experience that too. Speaker 8: You are listening to spectrum on k a l x [00:15:30] Berkeley. We're talking with representatives from LPF by the liberal clean field institute. Speaker 9: Jarvis. I was, I was really intrigued with your mentioning of steam by adding the a for art into stem. And do you feel that that's maybe the next wave of creativity coming into stem now? It'll become steam? Speaker 4: I think so. I mean there's been local religion [00:16:00] around that and um, there's definitely a lot of value because of the, again, the creativity piece I think just look at, you know, iPhone, you know Steve Jobs that was inspired by the calligraphy classmate that he had at one point that led to a lot of what, you know, did some design, right? So you couldn't have that class. Who knows what may have with the rest. She may have taken it. So I think there's this one example of how it was the art that inspired and even some of the designs of other types of devices. It's not coming [00:16:30] naturally from engineers per se, but those who had this art sort of angle ass, another flavor and 11 other level of creativity. I finish. And use my creative. But I mean you look at the creativity, you mean even for engineer who's in a, you know, hardcore class they have in that part they can add another level of dimension to their own repertoire so to speak. I think design, no different types of devices and things of that nature. Speaker 9: How about Hayley? Do you think art is something you'd be interested in including in your [00:17:00] stem, getting some studio work somehow, you know, something design oriented? Speaker 5: Uh, definitely. I think if I have a piece of art included with my programming, I could create a lot of things. Like Games are some visual. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And if it's art that I like and that I've made, then I can say I've made a whole entire game about myself or at least with a whole team and [inaudible]. [00:17:30] Yeah, that'd be really, yeah, art is very important. Speaker 9: What sort of tools and discipline has smash provided for you as you know, as individuals kind of personal tools to help you succeed? Speaker 5: It definitely time management because of all of our classes we have homework and almost each class and we will always have to manage our time because we do have free time, but if you're not going to do your homework then you're procrastinating and then that's not good. But [00:18:00] then also teamwork because we work in groups and almost every class and you have to push your group members so we can all get the project done in a timely manner. So time management ties back into that too. Speaker 6: Any advice for people who are considering joining us? Yes. For any prospective applicants are scholars, definitely time management because those things come up really quick. Getting your teacher recs in on time, getting you essays done on time [00:18:30] I guess to the future scholars or they just keep an open mind. There's a lot of different people that come and go through the program and just to take all that you can from all these different people because you're not always going to get this chance if you got accepted, like there's a reason why you're there and so take as much as you can from it. Speaker 9: He is his level playing field on Facebook and Twitter. Speaker 4: Yes, I can go to a website. Um, that'd be the LPL [inaudible] [00:19:00] dot org and you received the links there too. They connected. Speaker 6: And Are you trying to recruit either new scholars or new volunteers or anything like that? Speaker 4: Yes, we're trying to recruit new donors, so anyone who, who like what they've heard today and want to impact more scholars Kotaku website and donate. Also looking for volunteers, those who want to get connected and volunteer their time, their resources Speaker 6: and we're obviously always looking for more talented scholars like Ruby and [00:19:30] Haley, everyone from LTF Jarvis and Ellison and Ruby and Hayley, thanks for joining us. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 8: students wishing to apply to the Smash Academy can visit www dot [inaudible] dot org slash smash online registration closes Friday, February 15th at midnight. Online applications are due Friday, March 1st [00:20:00] I had been dating potential donors can also visit the LPI website to learn more. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 8: Brad Swift joins me for some science news headlines. Speaker 9: UC Berkeley News Center reports the publication of a study by University of Texas. At Austin and University of California Berkeley researchers, Shalani Sha and Claire Kremen in the Journal, p a n a s shows landscapes with large amounts of paved roads and impervious construction [00:20:30] have lower numbers of ground nesting bumblebees, which are important native pollinators. The study suggests that increasing the number of species rich flowering patches in suburban and urban gardens, farms and restored habitats could provide pathways for bees to forage and improve pollination services over large areas. The findings have major applications for global pollinator conservation on a rapidly urbanizing planet. Though it may seem obvious that pavement and ground nesting [00:21:00] don't mix. Joss said our understanding of the effects of pavement and urban growth on native bees has been largely anecdotal, bumblebees nest in the ground and each colony contains a queen and a force of workers. Unlike honeybees, which are not native, bumblebees, do not make harvestable honey. They do, however, provide important pollination services to plants to study the bumblebees. Joe Did not scour the landscape for a nest in the ground, which has proved in the past to be very difficult, especially over large [00:21:30] areas. Instead, she analyzed the genetic relatedness of bees foraging in the landscape GI use this information plus the B's location to estimate the number of bee colonies in an area and determine how far a field the individual bees were foraging. Speaker 8: The UC Berkeley News Center reports on findings presented on Monday, December 17th at the American Society for Cell Biology's annual meeting in San Francisco. Researchers from cal and Lawrence Berkeley showed [00:22:00] that mechanical forces can revert and stop out of control. Growth of cancer cells, professor of bioengineering, Dan Fletcher, said that Tissue Organization is sensitive to mechanical input from the environment at the beginning. Stages of growth and develop the team grew Milligan breast epithelial cells in a gelatin lake substance that had been injected into flexible silicone chambers. The flexible chambers allowed the researchers to apply a compressive force [00:22:30] in the first stages of cell development. Over time, the compress malignant cells grew into more organized healthy looking structures. The researchers used time lapse microscopy over several days to show that early compression also induced coherent rotation in the malignant cells. The characteristic feature of normal development. The new center added that it should be noted that the researchers are not proposing the development of compression bras as a treatment for breast cancer. Compression in and [00:23:00] of itself is not likely to be a therapy said flusher, but this does give us new clues to track down the molecules and structures that could eventually be targeted for therapies. Speaker 9: Here's another UC Berkeley News Center report I simple, precise and inexpensive method for cutting DNA to insert genes into human cells could transform genetic medicine making routine. What now are expensive, complicated and rare procedures for replacing defective genes [00:23:30] in order to fix genetic disease or battle diseases like aids. Discovered last year by Jennifer Doudna and Martin genic of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and University of California Berkeley and the manual Carpentier of the laboratory molecular infection medicine in Sweden and published in science. The new technique was proven to work cutting bacterial DNA. Two new papers published last week in the journal. Science Express demonstrated that the technique also works [00:24:00] in human cells. A third new paper by Doudna and her team reporting. Similarly successful results in human cells has been accepted for publication by the new open access journal Elife. The key to the new technique involves an enzyme called CAS. Nine Doudna discovered the cas nine enzyme while working on the immune system of bacteria with evolved enzymes that cut DNA to defend themselves against viruses. Speaker 9: These bacteria [00:24:30] cut up viral DNA and stick pieces of it into their own DNA from which they make RNA that binds and inactivates the virus. This is a poster child for the role of basic science in making fundamental discoveries that affect human health. Doudna said irregular feature of spectrum is a calendar of some of the science and technology related events happening in the bay area over the next two weeks. Here's Brad Swift [00:25:00] on selected Saturdays from 9:30 AM to 1:30 PM experienced the beauty and rich natural history of Audubon Canyon ranches. 535 Acre Bovary preserve. Participants are divided into small groups and paired with a trained bovie air volunteer to explore the mixed evergreen forest flower, carpeted oak, woodland and rugged chaparral guided natural walks range from two to five miles. Visitors of all ages are welcome. [00:25:30] There is no charge, but donations are appreciated. See the website for reservation information go to ygritte.org the next three hikes are on Saturday, January 12th March 9th and March 20 third@websiteagainygritte.org here's a presentation on over-confidence in the frailty of knowledge. Speaker 9: While self confidence is a prized human attribute, too much confidence can be obnoxious, pernicious, and even deadly. This audience participation [00:26:00] skeptic will present a simple 10 question quiz to measure an important aspect of individual self confidence. With analysis and discussion of these measurements, audience members will be better able to calibrate properly their personal levels of self confidence. The ultimate goal will be a healthier skepticism towards one's own depth of knowledge about the world. This event is a joint production of the bay area skeptics and wonder fest. The Bay area beacon of science. The Speakers are Dr [00:26:30] Maryland Cologne, California State University, East Bay lecturer in psychology and Tucker Hyatt, Stanford visiting scholar and wonder fest. Founding executive director. This will be held Wednesday, January 16th at 7:30 PM until approximately 9:30 PM the location is La Pena Lounge 31 oh five Shattuck avenue in Berkeley, Speaker 3: the American Association of University Whitman Presents. Do Girls Love Science. You Bet Ya. Come here. Stanford's Dr [00:27:00] Siegrid close. Explain why Dr [inaudible] close is the cohost of the 2011 series known universe which aired on the National Geographic Channel. She is an assistant professor at Stanford's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics where she heads up the space environment and satellite systems lab. This event happens Thursday, January 17th at the Sunnyvale Heritage Park Museum five 70 Remington drive in Sunnyvale, California. The doors open at seven [00:27:30] announcements at seven 15 Speaker at seven 30 for more information on this free event, visit www.auw-sv-cupt.org. Speaker 9: The next science at cal lecture will be on January 19th the talk will be given by Dr Mark less girl art and is entitled the shape of our thoughts, visual perception of geometric shape. Most people think that seeing is something that happens [00:28:00] in the eyes, but many aspects of our perception of the world are determined by neural computations that occur in the brain. The visual Cortex, the part of the brain that processes vision takes up nearly a third of our cerebral real estate. Different regions of the visual cortex respond to different aspects or features of visual stimuli, less crow art. We'll discuss his work which shows how intermediate visual processing areas in the visual cortex respond to variation and object silhouettes [00:28:30] and 3D surface orientations. This lecture will happen at 11:00 AM on January 19th in the genetics and plant biology building room 100 on the UC Berkeley campus. Speaker 2: [inaudible]. The music you [00:29:00] heard during say show was [inaudible] and David from his album book and acoustic is released under a creative Commons license version 3.0 spectrum was recorded and edited by me, Rick Karnofsky and by Brad Swift. Thank you for listening to spectrum. You're happy to hear from listeners. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email, right. Email address is spectrum [00:29:30] dot klx@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible] [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Princeton and UC Berkeley trained chemist Delia Milliron is the Deputy Director of the Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley Lab. In part two, Delia talks about her interests, the Molecular Foundry and its unique environment. foundry.lbl.govTranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next [inaudible] [inaudible]. [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews, featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 2: Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Today we present part two of our two part interview with Delia Mill Iron, [00:01:00] the deputy director of the Lawrence Berkeley national lab molecular foundry, Delia mill iron. Received her undergraduate degree in chemistry from Princeton and her phd in physical chemistry from UC Berkeley. Delia leads a research group at the molecular foundry, which has spun off a startup named heliotrope technologies. Her group is a partner in the newly announced Joint Center for Energy Storage Research, a [00:01:30] multistate department of energy research hub focused on developing transformative new battery technologies. Delia's group was recently awarded a $3 million grant by the Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects, agency energy, ARPA e for her work on smart window technologies. Now the final part two of our interview. Uh, even though nano science is a relatively new pursuit, how have the tools to execute [00:02:00] your research and development? How have they advanced? Speaker 3: The tools have progressed remarkably and many would say that our ability to see material on the nataline scale and by c I mean more than just get a picture, but also to see the specifics of the chemistry, the electronic structure and so on that these advances in tools and characterization tools have [00:02:30] been the catalyst for every other development and nanoscience because it's very difficult to move quickly forward in making new materials. For example, if you can't actually see what you're making. So starting with electron microscopy, which used the fact that electrons moving very quickly, you have a wavelength far shorter than that of light and therefore they have the ability to resolve features on the nano meter and in fact on the atomic lane scale. [00:03:00] That's tremendous, right? That's an incredible enabling capability for nanoscience. But electrons are limited in the chemical information, the electronic structure information, they can probe some of this, but light is still king. Speaker 3: So spectroscopy which is using light to probe chemical bonds and composition and so forth is still king of understanding richness, rich detail about materials. So some of the most exciting events is to me [00:03:30] in the tools for nanoscience are bringing optical spectroscopy spectroscopy using light to smaller and smaller and smaller lane scales. The state of the art, if you use conventional optics, just nice, beautifully made lenses and so on is that you can use light to look at things down to about half the wavelength of light. So for visible light that means things on the order of a few hundred nanometers. If you're doing things very, very [00:04:00] well by manipulating the light further leveraging nanoscale phenomena like the plasmonics I mentioned earlier, you can now squeeze light into extremely small volumes and do optical spectroscopy down to lane scales, tens of nanometers across, so doing full rich optical characterization and materials. Speaker 3: Basically using light microscopy at 40 nanometer lanes scales is now [00:04:30] a reality and the kind of information we can get about materials, their properties and how those are related is just going to benefit tremendously from those kinds of new advances. Are there tools that you crave? Unrealized tools? Yes, sure. I love to be able to resolve rich chemical, detailed dental. The Lane scale of Adams, you know, tens of nanometers is nice, but uh, most of our nanocrystals are smaller than this. They're five [00:05:00] nanometers. There are 10 nanometers, they're not 40 or 50 nanometers. So we still haven't quite brought light in a useful way down to the dimensions of the materials that give us the most interesting properties. The other major thing many of us crave is to bring detailed characterization into three dimensions and really four dimensions. So how they're arranged in three dimensional space definitely affects their properties, but it's difficult [00:05:30] to image. Speaker 3: So microscopic tools still often look at the surface of material and so you get a two dimensional map at high resolution. It's much more difficult to get high resolution images and information in three dimensions. And then the fourth dimension is of course time. So being able to follow a structure and the flow of energy and electrons in three dimensional space as it progresses in time, pushing time resolution shorter and shorter and shorter. Can [00:06:00] we track those processes? So that we can understand how function emerges. Because function is very often dynamic in nature. It's not just a static moment in time. It's the way that chemistry and electrons and so forth progress over time. Explain the user program at the foundry. How do people get involved in that? Sure. So the, the user program provides free access to scientists from all over the world [00:06:30] who have an interest in leveraging expertise, materials, capabilities, techniques and so on that we developed at the foundry to advance their science or technology. Speaker 3: And the mode that people use, the foundry takes all different forms. Uh, one of our favorites is for scientists to send a student or postdoc or a young researcher or in fact visit themselves, for example, for a sabbatical and then actually work with us. I buy side in our lab [00:07:00] can best learn the INS and outs of working with synthesizing, measuring whatever it is, the materials and techniques of interest to them. Um, we found that this is a very powerful way to expose young scholars to the potential for interdisciplinary research as we exercise it at the foundry for this new mode of doing science where people from all different disciplines are talking every day about problems to advance a state [00:07:30] of the art. That's been very productive and I think those students and postdocs go home really changed in their outlook on how they approach science and they bring some of that perspective back to their home labs. Speaker 3: They also, by the way, bring some perspective on our safety approach back to their home labs. And we really enjoy the success stories of having companies even and also academic research lab to use our approach to safety in particular [00:08:00] nanomaterial safety but safety in general as a blueprint for setting up their own labs or for reinvigorating the safety culture and so on if their own institution. So this mode of people coming and working with us and engaging in all with a whole variety of scientists and techniques in our labs and then going back home is then tremendously effective. We also spend time, you know, shipping samples back and forth, doing some characterization on other people's materials or vice versa, shipping our materials [00:08:30] out to people who have specialized characterization, approaches that compliment what we do well and this is in the spirit, I would say of good scientific collaboration in general. But the most exciting thing by far is to bring people together and mix up their ideas and their concepts and see new things emerge. Speaker 1: [inaudible]Speaker 2: you are listening to spectrum [00:09:00] on KALX Berkeley, our guest Delia mill iron of Lawrence Berkeley national lab is talking about her work in nanoscience and nanotechnology. Speaker 1: [inaudible]Speaker 2: can you talk about the safety guidelines that are in place at the molecular foundry and in working with nanomaterials? Speaker 3: Yeah, so nanomaterials because it's a relatively new science to deliberately craft them, [00:09:30] we still don't know in many cases, the ways in which their toxicology and the risk of exposure may differ from the same material found in bulk form. And because we have this uncertainty, we owe it to ourselves and to the environment to treat them with an elevated level of care. And so the Department of Energy was actually the first agency in the u s to create specific guidelines for handling [00:10:00] nanoscale materials in laboratory environments. I was actually part of that process several years ago and that policy is updated every year and it forms the basis for what we implement on the ground in the lab terms of safety procedures. For example, we're particularly concerned about any nanomaterials that are not firmly bound within a matrix or firmly bound to a substrate because these have the potential to become airborne [00:10:30] or volatilized or something like this. Speaker 3: So that we most focus on these, which we call it quote unquote unbound engineered nanoparticles, engineered meaning deliberately created and these are always handled in enclosed ventilated environments. So for us, things like glove boxes and fume hoods and then we validate that those kinds of environments do indeed protect workers from exposure by doing low background tests for particle counts during agitated [00:11:00] procedures. So we exaggerate the potential risk. We reduce the background particle count in the lab with a portable clean room and we use a very sensitive particle counter to see if any countable particles are generated in the workspace of the actual scientists working in the lab. Um, and this helps us form systematic approaches to handling materials in ways that don't cause any exposure. Speaker 2: Is the toxicology of nanomaterials [00:11:30] a growing area of study? And what about the interaction of nanomaterials outside of the lab in the environment? Speaker 3: Yes, definitely toxicology is a growing area of study, but you raise an important point, which is even before a nano material that's out in the world can interact with a biological organism. It experiences the environment. And so the first thing that's maybe preliminary in a way, but it is now taking place at the same time as [00:12:00] to understand the fate of nano materials in the environment. So how do they move through different kinds of soil and medium because surface effects are so important. How do molecules that are just found very commonly around us adhere to the surfaces and change the properties of the nanomaterials before they ever encounter the biological organisms because that will have a big effect then on their toxicology. So the fate of Nano materials in the environment is definitely a growing [00:12:30] area of study and we've had scientists at the foundry who have collaborated with geologists for example, to understand how soil conditions and ph and so forth can affect the transport of nanomaterials that are under consideration for solar energy applications. Should they end up released, how would they respond in different kinds of soil environments and be transported or or not. In some cases they are not readily transported and that's equally important to understand Speaker 2: [inaudible] so it becomes [00:13:00] a life cycle study. Yes, materials and those things can take a long time to really get a grasp of what the impact is. How then do we gauge the extent to which nanomaterials get leveraged in the short term and monitor the longterm impacts [inaudible] Speaker 3: I think monitoring is an important point, right? It will take even longer if we're not paying attention to learn how things interact with the environment and what their fate ultimately is. So the [00:13:30] science in the lab is important, but the science as technologies begin to be released is, is equally important to track what's happening in the real world. Um, in the meantime, it's important to be thoughtful about the expected life cycle of technologies, incorporating Nana materials. So recycling programs, encapsulation recovery, assessment of likelihood of release from a completed say [00:14:00] device, like a solar cell solar cells are completely encapsulated in glass, right? So the initial thought would be, well, if this, if everything's going right, there will be no nanomaterials released. But now what if that panel breaks? What's the likelihood of that? So asking these questions upfront and taking, you know, a responsible role in the life cycle of the technology, I think is essential, particularly given the uncertainties. Speaker 4: [inaudible] [00:14:30] our guest is Delia Mil iron, the deputy director of the Lawrence Berkeley national lab molecular foundry. She was a chemist working at the Nano scale. You are listening to spectrum on KALX Berkeley. Speaker 3: How much time do you spend paying attention [00:15:00] to other areas of science and technology? As much as I possibly can. I think inspiration in science comes from broad perspective and so I am as far as I could get from being a biologist as a physical scientist, but the concepts of how biological systems work are quite intricate and inspiring though new discoveries in biomechanical [00:15:30] processes and so on can become the seed. That gives me a new idea of how to put nanocrystals together in a way that generates totally new phenomena, for example. It's also just fascinating, honestly. I mean I've always been fascinated with science, so paying attention to the uh, developments and the exploration of Mars or in astrophysics. There's a tremendous fundamental physics community at the lab and I love to listen to them talk about the [00:16:00] discoveries they're making through telescope observations of distant supernovas and these sorts of things. Speaker 3: I won't say that I can point to any direct impact that's had on my work. But I think expanding your general perspective on the way the world works at all these different length scales and timescales and so on, it forms your context as a scientist and you know, maybe as a person as well. Are there collaborations in other fields you'd like to see grow? [00:16:30] So this idea of connecting biology more deliberately are the concepts of biology more deliberately to materials research, which is my area of investigation I think is quite powerful and under exploited at this stage. It's amazing what molecular biologists now understand about the mechanisms that underlie life and how molecules [00:17:00] interact in elaborate ways to synthesize DNA, to create proteins to, you know, at completely mild conditions, fold proteins up and do catalytic activity. Things that in the engineering world, you know, have traditionally been approached by brute force, you know, thousands of degrees c and so on. And so if we can take some of these concepts from biology and see [00:17:30] how they can affect the way we approach synthetic materials to a greater extent, I think this will be a very important opportunity. Of course there are some people doing this. I don't want to suggest that that's a totally new idea, but I think that connection could be a much broader avenue than what it has been so far. Do you feel there's an element of art in what you do? Speaker 3: I think so. I definitely enjoy art, although not highly skilled. [00:18:00] My Adventures and creating sculpture, you know, clay wood and so on in my mind are in harmony with what we do on the atomic length scale in the way we try to craft nanoscale materials or madams and then craft macro scale materials from those nanoscale materials, putting them together as these building blocks and it has a sculptural aspect to it. And definitely there's beauty in the images generated when we use all these amazing [00:18:30] cutting edge techniques to visualize our structures. Is there anything that we haven't talked about that you wanted to mention? I think the other comment I'd like to make going back to the molecular foundry and I lit up when you asked me, you know, what's the foundry about? Because I really think that the research environment do, the approach to scientific research being carried out at the molecular foundry is [00:19:00] a beautiful example for the way forward for science that science can be greatly accelerated in discovery of new terrain, new subject areas entirely through this mode of intense dynamic collaboration across fields. Speaker 3: I think it was somewhat deliberate and at the same time a bit of an accident that this emerged from the creation of the molecular foundry. What the [00:19:30] founders of the foundry did that was very smart was to hire a group of very young scientists who had an approach to science where they would clearly appreciate being involved in many different projects coming from many different perspectives. This was essential to make the user program work on your scientists must be enthusiastic about collaborating with all these different scientists who have different objectives, [00:20:00] different contexts and so on, but as a consequence of hiring that group of people and putting them together in one building, what naturally happened is we all started to interact in the same way with each other and the result is that you have a coupled series of dynamic feedback loops that greatly accelerate innovation. Speaker 3: One of them being between our science and that of our users and one of them being between the scientists internal to the building and [00:20:30] the results of that experiment really in scientific structure that's represented by the foundry are just starting to appear because we're still quite a young institution and I think that the impact of this sort of model is going to felt for a long time and is going to be replicated and mapped onto other research centers. We've already seen a lot of interests in understanding the way we do our science as research centers are being set up around the [00:21:00] world and that doesn't happen very often. That's an exciting deviation from the traditional department structure, single principal investigator directed research, as brilliant as one scientists and the research group may be. It lacks that dynamism that we have. So it's sort of a high of mentality to science, if you will, and that's really interesting and gonna yield a lot of fruit, I think. Speaker 2: Delia mill iron. Thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Thank [00:21:30] you. Speaker 1: [inaudible]Speaker 2: tours of the Lawrence Berkeley national lab are available monthly. The molecular foundry is on that tour. Just sign up for a tour, go to the Lawrence Berkeley [00:22:00] national lab website, which is lbl.gov Speaker 1: [inaudible].Speaker 2: A regular feature of spectrum is to mention a few of the science and technology events happening over the next two weeks. It's quiet time of the year, not a whole lot going on, but the Lawrence Hall of Science 3d Theater has daily screenings [00:22:30] of two films, space junk, and the last reef space junk is a visually explosive journey of discovery that ways the solutions aimed at restoring our planets. Orbits Space Junk runs through January 6th, 2013 the last reef was made with new macro underwater cinematography. The last reef reveals and astonishing world rarely seen at this scale. The film presents an unprecedented vision of the intriguing creatures that participate [00:23:00] in altering the geology of our planet. The last reef runs through May 5th, 2013 the exploratorium is leaving its only home at the Palace of fine arts and moving to piers 15 and 17 on the Embarcadero in downtown San Francisco. The new exploratorium will open in the spring of 2013 this coming January 2nd is the last day to experience the exploratorium as it is currently installed at the Palace of fine arts opened in 1969 [00:23:30] the exploratorium has evolved in this unwieldy space for 43 years. Catch one final glimpse. Wednesday, January 2nd, 2013 check the exploratorium website for special events on that final day. The website is exploratorium.edu Speaker 1: [inaudible]Speaker 2: for the new segment. I want to do something a little different. As the year [00:24:00] draws to a close. I want to offer a short update on salient, national and commercial space launch ventures. Starting with the u s NASA reports that the Orien spacecraft is coming together for its 2014 test flight. Orianna is a new capsule that will take human exploration beyond earth orbit for the first time in 40 years. The first unmanned flight test of Orien will be launched a top a Delta for rocket from Cape Kennedy. The capsule [00:24:30] will be flown 3,600 miles above the earth and then return to the earth at 5,000 miles per hour for re-entry. The reentry will test the heat yields the landing at sea and the u s navy's recovery of the capsule. The longer term plans are to test the same capsule launched on NASA's next heavy lift rocket dubbed the space launch system. Speaker 2: SLS in 2017 SLS will launch NASA's Orient Spacecraft and other [00:25:00] payloads beyond lower earth orbit providing an entirely new capability for human exploration. Space x, the U S Commercial Space Company has completed the first of a contracted 12 supply missions to the international space station. Space X is also working with NASA to develop and test the dragon capsule to allow it to transport humans to and from the international space station. On that point. In August, NASA announced the winners [00:25:30] of the commercial crew integrated capability funded space act agreements. This program is designed to supply NASA with a domestic commercial capability to transport humans into low earth orbit, specifically to the International Space Station and back. The winning companies are Boeing with a $460 million contract space x at $440 million and Sierra Nevada corporation receiving 212.5 million. [00:26:00] In June, 2012 China launched this shungite in nine spacecraft, a top a long march rocket. The spacecraft carried three crew members on a mission to dock with the Chinese space station. The mission was successful and is widely regarded as a major accomplishment for the Chinese based program. The mission will be repeated. In 2013 India marked its 101st space mission. October 1st of 2012 [00:26:30] with the launch of its heaviest communications. Satellite Gee sat 10 from French Guyana. The Indian Space Research Organization has 10 mission scheduled for 2013 the tentative capper is a plan in November, 2013 Mars orbiter to be done without any international help. Speaker 2: The Russian space program continues to struggle after a series of embarrassing failures in spacecraft launches and flight operations that have cast [00:27:00] the future of the entire program. In doubt, observers fear that the rise of cheaper, more modern and reliable commercial space companies in the United States will peel off Russia's spaced services customers who currently infuse $1 billion annually into the Russian space. Industry. Insiders say consolidation, innovation, and modernization are required to save the industry. Leadership and funding for such a revival program are missing. At this point. The European space [00:27:30] agency successfully launched seven Ariane five rockets from their space port in French, Guyana during 2012 the Arianne five has had 53 successful launches in a row since December, 2002 Speaker 5: [inaudible]Speaker 2: an interesting space, junk liability arose for the European Space Agency. When a large lower earth orbit satellite nearing the end of its fuel supply suddenly went silent. The satellite is now stuck in a prime orbit corridor [00:28:00] that will take 100 years to degrade and fall to earth during the next 100 years. This satellite may collide with other satellites. If it does, the European Space Agency is thought to be liable for the damage done. No removal method of space. Junk currently exists. That's it. Happy New Year. Speaker 1: [inaudible]Speaker 2: [00:28:30] the music heard on the show is by Los [inaudible]. David from his album folk and acoustic made available by a creative Commons license. 3.0 Speaker 1: attribution. [inaudible] thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to my severe eating and address is spectrum dot kalx@yahoo.com [00:29:00] chumminess in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [00:29:30] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.