Podcasts about Bay Area Science Festival

You might know Kishore Hari from Tested.com’s This is Only a Test, or from the Bay Area Science Festival which he directs, or from his podcast, Inquiring Minds. He and Rebecca talk about science communication,...

Busy week as we get close to the holidays! Kishore talks about the big finale for the Bay Area Science Festival, Jeremy recaps Day of the Devs, and Norm shares highlights from DesignerCon. Plus, we scrutinize Face ID, and talk about all the Star Wars and comic book movie news of the week.

Busy week as we get close to the holidays! Kishore talks about the big finale for the Bay Area Science Festival, Jeremy recaps Day of the Devs, and Norm shares highlights from DesignerCon. Plus, we scrutinize Face ID, and talk about all the Star Wars and comic book movie news of the week.

Kishore joins us this week to recap the recent Tested live show and give us a sense of how he puts together the annual Bay Area Science Festival. We talk about some memorable segments from the show and what the audience didn't see. Plus, Adam shows his mom select episodes of Master of None, and we discuss our halloween plans!

This week, Cara has a chance to #TalkNerdy with the director of the Bay Area Science Festival, Kishore Hari. They dive deep into the dos and don'ts of science communication, with a special focus on live events that involve members of the publ--the community. (Kishore hates the term "general public!") They also nerd out about DragonCon and cosplay. Follow Kishore: @sciencequiche.

This week, Cara has a chance to #TalkNerdy with the director of the Bay Area Science Festival, Kishore Hari. They dive deep into the dos and don'ts of science communication, with a special focus on live events that involve members of the publ--the community. (Kishore hates the term "general public!") They also nerd out about DragonCon and cosplay. Follow Kishore: @sciencequiche.

On our recent trip to Alcatraz, we recorded two episodes of Still Untitled in front of a live audience. This second episode features a very special guest: Dr. David Miller, NASA's Chief Technologist. Dr. Miller joins us to talk about the search for Earth-like planets, NASA Spinoffs, and the technological challenges of space exploration. He also shares some weird astronaut stories! (Thanks so much to NASA, Dr. Dave Miller, the US Parks Service, and the Bay Area Science Festival for making this episode possible.)

This episode of Origin Stories was recorded live in San Francisco as part of the Bay Area Science Festival. It was the first of The Leakey Foundation and the Baumann Foundation’s new “Being Human” event series. Our speaker was Robert Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. He gave a fascinating and funny talk about human behavior and the ways we are the same as, and different from, other animals. You can hear more from Dr. Sapolsky on the Inquiring Minds podcast. Host Indre Viskontas interviewed Sapolsky about his work and his thoughts on our prospects as a species. You can find Inquiring Minds on iTunes and at motherjones.com/inquiringminds This episode is part of the Being Human initiative of The Leakey Foundation and the Baumann Foundation. leakeyfoundation.org/beinghuman

Robert Sapolsky is a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University, and a research associate with the Institute of Primate Research at the National Museum of Kenya. We talked to Sapolsky about what it means to be human, what we humans can learn from other species, and why he—despite being a self-described pessimist—feels optimistic about our prospects as a species. This week’s episode was recorded live in San Francisco for the 2015 Bay Area Science Festival and was produced in collaboration with The Leakey Foundation and their podcast Origin Stories.http://leakeyfoundation.org/http://leakeyfoundation.org/originstorieshttp://patreon.com/inquiringminds

Live from the 2015 Bay Area Science Festival, this episode features UC Berkeley's Lindsey Dougherty, a marine biologist who studies disco clams, which light up underwater. Lindsey's trying to figure out why and how these clams act like underwater disco balls. Trying to guess what she studies and learning why it's important are comedians W. Kamau Bell (CNN's "United Shades of America), Kurt Braunohler (Comedy Central), and Emmy Blotnick (@Midnight). Hosted by Chris Duffy. Produced by Pretty Good Friends.

This week's episode of Still Untitled was recorded in front of a live audience on Alcatraz! We chat with Adam about his escape from the island in an early episode of Mythbusters, and discuss some of our favorite heist and Bond films. Thanks to Nerd Nite, the Bay Area Science Festival, and the National Park Service for having us out on Alcatraz! We'll be back next week with another episode from The Rock!

On the show this week we talk to Matt Walker, Principal Investigator at UC Berkeley’s Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab. Walker opens our eyes to exactly how important (and bizarre) sleep is—from the insane effects not sleeping enough can have on you both physically and cognitively, to the fact that, after having fought through ages of natural selection, it’s amazing our brains still need it at all.Once again we welcome back guest host Kishore Hari, Director of the Bay Area Science Festival. You can follow him on Twittter @sciencequiche.iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/inquiring-minds/id711675943RSS: feeds.feedburner.com/inquiring-mindsStitcher: stitcher.com/podcast/inquiring-minds

On the show this week we talk to Professor of Psychology Gabriele Oettingen about her new book Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation. Oettingen has over twenty years of research on the science of motivation under her belt and in this book she outlines her main findings—and turns the conventional wisdom that focusing on fulfilling our goals will help us realize them on its head.We also welcome back guest host Kishore Hari, who is Director of the Bay Area Science Festival. You can follow him on Twittter @sciencequiche.iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/inquiring-minds/id711675943RSS: feeds.feedburner.com/inquiring-mindsStitcher: stitcher.com/podcast/inquiring-minds

On the show this week Indre talks to mathematician and comedian Matt Parker about how math is way more fascinating that you probably think—and how it's connected to everything from credit card numbers to autocorrect.They talk about his new book, Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension: A Mathematician's Journey Through Narcissistic Numbers, Optimal Dating Algorithms, at Least Two Kinds of Infinity, and More.We also welcome back guest host Kishore Hari, director of the Bay Area Science Festival.iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/inquiring-minds/id711675943RSS: feeds.feedburner.com/inquiring-mindsStitcher: stitcher.com/podcast/inquiring-minds

Live from the Bay Area Science Festival! Dr. Claire Simeone works at the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, CA. She's the first scientist to study painkillers for dolphins and she helps comedians Myq Kaplan, Anna Drezen, and Nato Green learn all about her research on seals, whales, and other marine mammals. Hosted by Chris Duffy. Technical direction by Kevin Brunswick. This episode is sponsored by HotelTonight.

On the show this week we talk to cognitive scientist Paul Bloom about the morality of babies. Most of us think of babies as selfish, impulsive, and for the most part out of control. We tend to think of their morality as shaped by experience—by society, by their parents, by early childhood events. But Bloom and his collaborators at Yale have some pretty compelling evidence that at least some parts of our moral compass are innate—that is that babies are born with the capacity to tell good from bad just as they are born with a capacity to develop motor or language skills. And by understanding how our morality develops throughout childhood, we can gain some insight into how our own gut feelings and biases shape our moral lives as adults.We also welcome guest-host Kishore Hari, director of the Bay Area Science Festival, to talk about, among other things, a recent study involving brains and spiders.iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/inquiring-minds/id711675943RSS: feeds.feedburner.com/inquiring-mindsStitcher: stitcher.com/podcast/inquiring-minds

On the show this week Indre talks to Adam Savage about the future of science communication (and why it’s terrifying TV networks), why he’s worried Elon Musk might become a Marvel supervillain, and why it’s so important to him that women be better represented in his field.Indre also talks to host of The Story Collider, Ben Lillie, about the Antares Rocket explosion, flavonols, and Ben explains why he's fascinated by institutional review boards.This episode was recorded live on stage in San Francisco as part of the 2014 Bay Area Science Festival.Note: This episode contains occasional strong language.iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/inquiring-minds/id711675943RSS: feeds.feedburner.com/inquiring-mindsStitcher: stitcher.com/podcast/inquiring-minds

00:00:00 - Arthur C. Clarke wrote in 2010: Odyssey Two that the center of Jupiter was one giant diamond. He probably never expected to be right... sort of. A new model suggests that conditions on Jupiter and Saturn may be right to have diamonds forming in the atmosphere and raining down from above. Pretty trippy stuff, science.   00:23:00 - Most drinks don't cause a trip, but there's only one way to find out for sure: drinking them. Jacob insults Ryan by daring to bring a pre-mixed Zombie cocktail from Bacardi on the show. Tsk tsk. Abe enjoys a Dunkel from Prost Brewing Company. And Ryan gets weird with a Tangerine Dreamsicle collaboration beer from Terrapin Beer Company and Green Flash Brewing Company.   00:31:40 - Jacob hasn't been on the show much lately, so Abe and Ryan demand some answers. Turns out he's been teaching children science as part of Club Scientific. I guess teaching the next generation is an OK excuse...   00:59:49 - PaleoPOWs are a lot like summer camp, you develop very strong bonds and then don't talk for a year. Ryan presents a new recurring donation from Bonnie D. Thanks, Bonnie! Jacob ponders an e-mail on mosquito control techniques inspired by Episode 154 from Mark G. And finally Abe has a new 5-star iTunes review from a user whose name I'd rather not type. Sorry, guy, but thanks for the kind words!       Thanks for listening and be sure to check out the Brachiolope Media Network for more great science podcasts, and be sure to come to our live show in San Francisco as part of the Bay Area Science Festival’s Nerd Nite Block Party next week on Oct 24th!     The video game giveaway this week is Bioshock 2! First donor to e-mail us and ask for it gets a free Steam copy, enjoy!     Music for this week's show: Diamonds Are Forever - Shirley Bassey Sweet Tangerine - The Hush Sound Kids - Childish Gambino (from the album Camp)

00:00:00 - Ryan is join by J. Leighton Reid to talk about birds, forests, and conservation. The first paper discussed is about how forest restoration in the tropics benefits birds.    00:24:34 - Speaking of feeling restored, how about beer? Leighton pulls off something that few guests or even co-hosts have ever accomplished: he has a beer Ryan hasn't heard of, namely a Alphadelic IPA by Hop Valley Brewing Company. Ryan also has a beer hailing from Oregon, a Class of '88 Belgian Style Ale from Deschutes Brewery et al.    00:26:05 - Next up we cover this new technique of applied nucleation, where you plant small patches of trees instead of trying to replant the whole forest. Fewer trees but better results? Talk about a win-win! If you want to know more about the project, you can read about it here and if you'd like to donate directly, you can do so here!   00:55:38 - PaleoPOWs are a lot like forest restoration, we're not quite sure how its done but we're really hoping it works out. Since Ryan is flying is solo this week there's only one entry to be had, but it's a good one. Clifford E. has started a recurring donation, which is hugely awesome for us and for you because it makes the show that much better, so thanks, Cliff! We're also excited to announce that we'll performing a live show in San Francisco as part of the 2014 Bay Area Science Festival in conjunction with the Nerd Nite Block Party. Check the link for details and please stop by if you can! Last up, we're trying to give some games away to donors, if you would like the really cool Indie puzzle game The Bridge and have ever donated to the show, e-mail Ryan for your free copy!      Thanks for listening and be sure to check out the Brachiolope Media Network for more great science podcasts!     Music for this week's show: Prettiest Tree on the Mountain - Ben Sollee The Oregon Trail - Burt Ives Four New Trees - The Mountain Goats

When Kishore Hari is hired to run a new science festival he thinks he has the perfect plan, but the reality was much more than he expected. Kishore Hari is the Director of the Bay Area Science Festival, an annual celebration of science in San Francisco. After spending years operating an environmental services company, he left industry for the greener pastures of public science events and science education. He has founded numerous public science ventures, including a science cafe, a science field trip series, and a comprehensive calendar of science events across the Bay Area. Help keep us going! If you love the podcast, please donate here: http://www.patreon.com/thestorycollider Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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.

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? See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week we feature a conversation with psychologist Alison Gopnik, recorded live at the 2013 Bay Area Science Festival. Gopnik talks about her latest book, The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life. She explains that babies are natural explorers, and way smarter than we used to think. But along the way, we lose that cognitive flexibility and openness—some of us more than others.This episode also features a discussion about a recent study that shows different cells—different cells in the same brain—can have different DNA; and a recent New York Times story that draws attention to the fact that now more than ever, many people who get Ph.Ds don’t get jobs afterwards.Subscribe:itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/inquiring-minds/id711675943feeds.feedburner.com/inquiring-minds

If there is only one show you hear about the end of the world, let it be this one. Recorded before a live audience at the Computer History Museum on October 27th, 2012, this two-part special broadcast of Big Picture Science separates fact from fiction in doomsday prediction. In this second episode: a global viral pandemic … climate change … and the threat of assimilation by super-intelligent machines. Presented as part of the Bay Area Science Festival. Find out more about our guests and their work. Guests: •  Kirsten Gilardi – Wildlife veterinarian at the University of California, Davis. leader of the Gorilla Doctors program, and team leader for the US-AID Emerging Pandemic Threats PREDICT program •  Ken Caldeira – Climate scientist, Carnegie Intuition for Science at Stanford University •  Luke Muehlhauser – Executive Director of the Singularity Institute •  Bradley Voytek – Neuroscience researcher at the University of California, San Francisco Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If there is only one show you hear about the end of the world, let it be this one. Recorded before a live audience at the Computer History Museum on October 27th, 2012, this two-part special broadcast of Big Picture Science separates fact from fiction in doomsday prediction. In this second episode: a global viral pandemic … climate change … and the threat of assimilation by super-intelligent machines. Presented as part of the Bay Area Science Festival. Find out more about our guests and their work. Guests: •   Kirsten Gilardi – Wildlife veterinarian at the University of California, Davis. leader of the Gorilla Doctors program, and team leader for the US-AID Emerging Pandemic Threats PREDICT program •   Ken Caldeira – Climate scientist, Carnegie Intuition for Science at Stanford University •   Luke Muehlhauser – Executive Director of the Singularity Institute •   Bradley Voytek – Neuroscience researcher at the University of California, San Francisco

If there is only one show you hear about the end of the world, let it be this one. Recorded before a live audience at the Computer History Museum on October 27th, 2012, this two-part special broadcast of Big Picture Science separates fact from fiction in doomsday prediction. In this episode: Maya prophesy for December 21, 2012 … asteroid impact and cosmic threats …. and alien invasion. Presented as part of the Bay Area Science Festival. Find out more about our guests and their work. Guests: Guy P. Harrison – Science writer and author of 50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True Andrew Fraknoi – Chair of the Astronomy Department at Foothill College, Los Altos Hills, California Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If there is only one show you hear about the end of the world, let it be this one. Recorded before a live audience at the Computer History Museum on October 27th, 2012, this two-part special broadcast of Big Picture Science separates fact from fiction in doomsday prediction. In this episode: Maya prophesy for December 21, 2012 … asteroid impact and cosmic threats …. and alien invasion. Presented as part of the Bay Area Science Festival. Find out more about our guests and their work. Guests: Guy P. Harrison – Science writer and author of 50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True Andrew Fraknoi – Chair of the Astronomy Department at Foothill College, Los Altos Hills, California

The Voyteks created the Brain Systems, Connections, Associations, and Network Relationships engine, or brainSCANr. The tool is used to explore the relationships between different terms in peer reviewed publications. http://brainscanr.com/TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next 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 3: Good afternoon. I'm Rick Karnofsky. Brad swift and I are the hosts of today's show. We're speaking with Jessica and Bradley Vojtech. Jessica is a designer and a developer who earned her master's of information management and systems here at cal and has [00:01:00] worked on several UC Berkeley websites. She's also working on the future of science education through projects like ned the neuron. Brad is in NIH, N N I g m s postdoctoral fellow at ucs f. He got his phd from cal. He's a prolific blogger and Zombie expert. The void techs are here to talk about brain systems, connections and associations and network relationships or brain scanner. This website helps people explore [00:01:30] how neuroscience terms relate to one another in the peer reviewed literature. They've documented their project in our recent journal of neuroscience methods paper. Speaker 4: Brad and Jessica, welcome to spectrum. Thank you for having us. Thanks. Can you tell us a little bit about brain scanner? Actually, I was at a conference here at cal hell by the CSA, so the cognitive science student association and Undergraduate Association here at cal that they had several neuroscientists and cognitive scientists come and give presentations and I was one of those people. I [00:02:00] was on a panel with a Stanford cognitive scientists at the end of the day. It was a Q and a. We got into a question about what can be known in the neurosciences and I had mentioned that the peer reviewed neuroscientific literature probably smarter than we are. There's something like 3 million peer reviewed neuroscientific publications and I was saying that that is just too many. There is no way for anybody to to integrate all of those facts and I said if there some automated or algorithmic way of doing that, we could probably find some neat stuff out and he disagreed with me pretty strongly on the panel [00:02:30] and I sort of stewed on that for awhile. Speaker 4: That ended up becoming the brain scanner project actually, which is using text mining to look at how different topics in the neurosciences relate to one another. We had conversation about this and I had just started about six months before my a master's program at the School of Information. So all of the stuff that he was saying really jived with what I was learning. So we got together after that. We talked about it off and on sort of over dinner and stuff occasionally, but I think it was [00:03:00] right around won't. Right, right before we found out you were pregnant. Right, right around Christmas when we first actually sat down together to work on it and that was just a random evening. We didn't have, well, we didn't have a baby at the time, so we didn't have much else to do. Brad was working on this thing and he said, you know, I've been working on this all day. Speaker 4: I'm trying to get this algorithm to work and see if we can get any results out of this. And I kind of challenged him. I said, I can do that faster than you can started taking my course. I had [00:03:30] all of these new skills that I just wanted to kind of show off. And I did. She actually beat me. You guys were both sort of where we were. We're basically coding. Yeah. We're sitting on the couch. Not really cause we weren't actually doing it together. We are using two different competitor competing. Exactly. So who do you see as the audience for brain scanner? Well I know the answer to that someone. Right. So I have colleagues who tell me a lot of Grad students actually mostly a who say that they use it as a stop for [00:04:00] searching. The peer reviewed neuroscientific literature. So pub med, which is the surface run by the National Library of medicine, which is part of the national institutes for health index is a lot of these peer reviewed biomedical journals. Speaker 4: Their search engine is quite good but it returns just textual information. You know, you just, you see the 20 most recently published papers or you know, however you want to sort it related to the search term or of interest. Yeah. So basically anybody who wants to create an app can get access to this data. You have to follow certain [00:04:30] rules, but otherwise you can get the information out of this database easily. In a, in a sort of standard format, we provide a graphic or a visualization layer on top of the search so you can put in one of these search terms and you can see here are the topics that relate to it very strongly in literature. Statistically speaking, you know, uh, by that I mean here are the words or terms that show up a lot in papers with the term memory for example. We also then list the papers that are related and you can see the full list of terms and [00:05:00] how it relates to different topics and things like that. Um, if I want to look at a brain region and say, okay, what are the other brain regions that are related to this can really quickly visually see that based upon these 3 million publications that we, we searched through Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 4: you are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. We're talking to with user interface developer, Jessica Vojtech. And neuroscientists, Bradley Wojciech about brain scanner Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 4: [00:05:30] do you see other potentially valuable ways you can harness PubMed's data or other reference sources? Yeah, absolutely. So one of the aspects actually of the paper that we published was ways to address that, that very question. Uh, initially we tried to publish the paper just as a here's a, here's a resource or one of the editor's version on that rejected the paper, said, you know, what, what can you do with this? And a, of course, you know, this is something we've been thinking about. And [00:06:00] so I tried to build a proof of concept. So one of the, one of the things that we showed statistically speaking that you can do with this, does the data they call hypothesis generation or semiautomated hypothesis generation. And this works off of a very simple idea. Um, it's almost like recommend their algorithms and um, like linkedin or Facebook or something like that. Speaker 4: You know, it's like if you know this person, you might know this person, kind of a friend of a friend should be a friend idea. You know, Rick and I, I know you and you know Rick, maybe you have a friend named Jim. And so statistically speaking, [00:06:30] Jim and I might get along right because you and I get along and you, and he'd get along, especially if I and Jim get along. And so you can go through algorithmically and say, you know, in the literature if Migraine for example, which is the example you give in the paper, uh, is strongly related to a neurotransmitter Serotonin, which I didn't know before we made the website actually, um, that in the medical literature there's a whole serotonin hypothesis from migraines I guess because Migraines respond to, uh, antidepressants, which are usually serotonergic drugs. So anyway, Serotonin [00:07:00] and Migraines are very strongly related and neuroscientists know a lot about the basic physiology of Serotonin, where in the brain is expressed and things like that. Speaker 4: And so on the neuroscience side, we know that Serotonin is very strongly expressed in, in a brain region called the striatum, which is sort of deep frontal part of the brain. And, uh, there's thousands of papers that talk about Serotonin and Migraines and Serotonin in this brain region, the striatum respectively, but there's only 19 papers or something like that to talk about that brain region and migraines. [00:07:30] And so statistically speaking, maybe we're missing something here, right? Maybe just nobody's really looked at this connection between migraines in that brain region. Maybe there aren't papers published on it because people have looked and there's nothing there. But, uh, that's why it's somewhat automated. You can go through this list of recommended hypotheses and you as an expert, I can go through that list and say, oh, some of these are nonsense. Or Oh, that's, that could be interesting. Speaker 4: Maybe. Maybe we should look into that. So it gives you a low hanging fruit basically. Yeah. And so that would be something [00:08:00] eventually I would like to build into the site. Are you continuing to analyze new papers as they enter in pub med? We haven't rerun it for awhile. I think there's something on the order of 10,000 new papers published every month in the neurosciences. But when you're standing in the face of 3 million, it's sort of drop in the bucket. So we, we worry running it every month or two. Um, but the results really don't change very quickly. Right. It's pretty stable. So yes, we, we should actually [00:08:30] run it again. It's been about six months or so. If you guys actually like, well I mean as a or perhaps how, you know, the ideas in the literature might change. For instance, that's actually something that I did do. Speaker 4: Um, I eliminated the searches to just bring the regions, so how different brain regions relate to each other across time. So I did a search for all papers published up to like 1905, which wasn't very many. Of course not in your, you know, you have an exponential increase in the number of being published. Okay. But then again, I ran it again for all papers published to like up to 1935, [00:09:00] 55, 75, 95 and you know, 2005, right? Uh, or 2011. And you could actually see how our understanding of how different brain regions relate change over time. And that was kind of neat. Um, if I was going to be a little bit statistically, uh, stronger about this, what I should have done in the original paper, and I didn't think about it until after we republished it was I should've run the semiautomated hypothesis generation algorithm, uh, on a limited amount of data. So I test data set up to like say 1990 [00:09:30] and then found plausible hypotheses from that Dataset and then run it again on the entire thing and see, you know, if we had found new things. And you know, if that corroborated what we've learned in the last 22 years. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 5: you're listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. We're talking with Brad and Jessica Vojtech about brain scanner. They're a site to show links [00:10:00] that may exist between brain structures, cognitive functions, neurological disorders, and more as data mined from the academic literature. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 4: I mean this is a side side project for us. Yeah, Speaker 1: it was two weeks in $11 and 50 cents. And what did that go to? Um, coffee and coffee. Yeah. [00:10:30] Um, no it, it went into the Google app engine server time. So we actually were able to use Google app engine to distribute the processing, which is also what made mind my code a little bit quicker to run through all of this data. Speaker 4: I was doing single queries at a time and because we have 800 terms in the database and we have to do how every term relates to every other term, it's 800 squared,Speaker 1: try to buy two essentially. And then there's the roundtrip between between his your machine and the um, [00:11:00] pub met database. So, you know, you're making requests, you're making requests, making requests anyway. It was maybe three days, three days or four days. And I was able to do it in about two hours by um, putting it into the cloud and using app engine. So that $11 and 50 cents went to paying for the service and agree to say a hundred squared divided by two minus 800 a lot. So do you want to talk about how that dictionary of keywords was generated? Speaker 4: Initially I [00:11:30] had wanted to try and figure out how brain regions relate this. This grew out of my phd work actually at Berkeley. I worked with Professor Bob Knight who used to be the head of the neurosciences institute, Helen Wells neuroscience here. And my phd thesis was looking at how to brain regions, the prefrontal cortex and the Basal Ganglia related to working memory. And as I was standing for my qualifying exams, I was trying to figure out, okay, what are the brain regions that send inputs to [00:12:00] [inaudible], which is one of the parts of the Basal Ganglia and where he dies this ride in project two. And in order to figure that out, I spent, I don't know, two months off and on three months off and on over at the biomedical library here, digging through old, uh, anatomical papers from the 1970s and basically drawing little hand-drawn charts to try and figure out how these things connected. Speaker 4: And it really surprised me. It was frustrating because you know, here we are in, well, when [00:12:30] I was doing this, it was like 2008 right? And all I wanted to know is how different brain regions connect. And I was like, why can't I just go to a website and say, okay, striatum, what are its inputs and outputs? Like we have that information, right? Why can't I do that? Um, and so anyway, that was one of the motivating factors for me also. And there's actually a paper published in 2002 called neuro names. And then this researcher was trying to create an ontology of, of brain region names Ryan. So the terms that we use now in 2012 aren't necessarily [00:13:00] the same that people were using back in 1900 when they were first describing the basic anatomy. And so you have some Latin names for brain regions. Speaker 4: You have modern names for brain regions, you have names for different groupings of brain regions. So I referred earlier to the base like Ganglia, uh, and that is composed of, you know, maybe five different brain regions. And if I talk about three of those brain regions, uh, can I give examples? Is the putamen and the Globus Pallidus, uh, Globus Pallidus is actually contained [00:13:30] of two separate ones. And the putamen and Globus Pallidus if you combine them together or known by one name. But if you combine the putamen with the striatum, that's a different name. And so you actually have these weird venn diagram overlapping naming Schema. Speaker 1: There's a significant vocabulary problem, which is the term that we use in the information sciences. Basically the fact that you have multiple names for the same thing and you have the same name for some different things. So you know this venn diagram idea. Um, so yeah, [00:14:00] if you're going to use a very simple search algorithm, you have, you can't do it, you wouldn't, you're not going to get all of the results. So, um, I think our system tries to solve that vocabulary problem a little bit. Speaker 4: And then there's actually a researcher, um, Russ Poltrack drag, who used to be a faculty of neuroscience at UCLA and I think he's in University of Texas now. And he actually tried to create an ontology for cognitive term. So in cognitive science and psychology and cognitive neuroscience, you know, we have terms like working memory [00:14:30] and attention and in they're trying to create a whole ontology for how these different things really. So like working memory as part of memory, which you know, in memory also contains a longterm memory. And so we'll use his first attempt as a dictionary as well. And then we went to the NIH website and they've got a listing of all these different kinds of neurological disorders and we use that. So we pulled a bunch of publicly available data basically and use those dictionaries as our starting point. Speaker 1: And then we [00:15:00] also took suggestions from the people on our website almost immediately we started getting requests for more and different terms. So you had the, when you find two keywords that appear in a paper together, you assume that they're actually related. Can you comment on if people might have demonstrated that they're not actually related, how does that affect your system? Like some, like an instance in which, uh, it says this brain region is not connected to this other [00:15:30] brain region, right? Um, yes, we have assumed that there's a publication bias that if there is not a connection then someone does not publish a paper about that. Speaker 4: Okay. And negative publications or negative findings go very under reported in the scientific literature. Speaker 1: Right. So we're hopefully taking advantage of that. Hopefully the law of large numbers means that our data is mostly correct and it does seem to be that way. The example that Brad gave, uh, with the Allen Brain Atlas, [00:16:00] that there is certain corroborating evidence that seems to suggest that this is a, at least plausible connections. There's obviously no one say that better. No, that's perfectly scientifically accurate. I tend to get a little bit specific when I'm talking about this kind of stuff. Speaker 4: Is there already some sort of bias that might drive certain kinds of papers up? If the paper has a lot of buzzwords, perhaps it suddenly becomes more important. Do you 100% yes, absolutely. There are always [00:16:30] hot topics. Uh, and that shows up for sure Speaker 1: only because there's more papers published on that subject. We don't currently have a any kind of waiting per paper. Speaker 4: Yeah. Like when you go into the website and you'd do something like, um, there's a brain region called the Amygdala and you know, it'll be very strongly associated with fear. And so that's actually one of my concerns is problem getting these biases. So, you know, there's a lot of literature on this brain region, the Amygdala and how it relates to fear, but it certainly does a lot more than just processing fear, [00:17:00] right? It's this general emotional affective labeling sort of idea that anyway, that's, that's neuroscience specific stuff, you know, and brain region called the insula and disgust or love or you know, these other kinds of strong emotions. And so yeah, it definitely reflects certain biases as well. And we, we try and quantify that even to an extent a little bit. So again, using the Allen Brain Atlas data, we show from our Dataset, what are the top five brain regions that express or that are related to dopamine, for example. Speaker 4: And in the real human brain, what are the top five brain [00:17:30] regions that express dopaminergic related genes? And you can actually see that there's a very clear bias. So one of the regions that expresses dobutamine very strongly is very hard to study. Neuroscientifically speaking. It's, it's deepen deep part of the brain. It's hard to get any, it's very small, so you can't get it from like brain scanning expresses a lot of dopamine, but people don't study it and we can actually quantify then some of these under-studied relationships, right? We're like, here's a brain region that we know expresses a lot of dopamine, but there's a a hundred papers only and another [00:18:00] brain region that's very sexy and too about domain has 10,000 papers. Right? So our system shows you an example well of the current state of scientific literature. So it's not necessarily 100% correct, but it reflects what scientists think as a whole at this point. Yeah, I agree. And we try and be very careful about that in the paper and in talking about it like we are right now Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 5: [00:18:30] you are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. We're talking with user interface developer, Jessica Vojtech and neuroscientist Bradley Vojtech about brain scanner. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 4: I was really surprised you. I taught neuro anatomy for three semesters here at Berkeley and you know, so I know the anatomy pretty well. And on your first ran it, I had one of those like yes, kind [00:19:00] of moments like I can't believe this work because it really does find all of these clusters really nicely. And that was a very pleasant surprise because technically speaking it couldn't have been any other way. Like it just has to, you know, I mean these topics co-occur a lot, so it should be that way, but it's always nice to see something like that work. Brian, I wanted to ask about the journals that you sent the paper off too. How did you pick them? Art Of picking a journal where to send a paper. It's actually really hard. So certain journals get [00:19:30] more readership than others. And then there's the open access factor. Speaker 4: So I'm, I'm a big open science, open data advocate and so I try and shoot for that. I had forgotten, there's actually sort of a, a very wide protest of Elsevier, which is one of the publishing companies right now. And the journal that published my papers and Elsevier Journal, but, uh, I had signed the petition and I was part of that Nash shortly thereafter. That would have impacted my decision had I been thinking about it. Yeah. And yeah, so it's mainly a balance between readership and expectation and you sort [00:20:00] of get a feel after publishing a few papers of what editors are looking for. And so yeah, I am the one that has experience with navigating the academic publishing environment. Yeah. So yeah, we sent it out to a lot of journals and, uh, mostly it didn't pass editorial review, which means that there's an editor that decides whether or not conceptually it will be interesting for their journal to publish it once got center review at a journal and they're like, well, it was sort of torn. Speaker 4: There were four reviewers, four pure reviewers, [00:20:30] and two of them were fairly enthusiastic and the other two are like, this is cool, but so what? Right. Um, and the general consensus was it didn't fit with the theme of the Journal. The Journal of neuroscience methods point really well and your reviewers are very, and um, actually there's a figure at the end of the paper where we did some integration with the Allen Brain. Alice Paul Allen, one of the co founders of Microsoft who is a cuisine heir, has put half a billion dollars into this institute. [00:21:00] Initially the goal was to map, uh, the expression of all of these different genes in the human brain, in the mouse brain, and they made all that data publicly available. And so we use that as a test data set. So we said, okay, where are these different, uh, neurotransmitter related genes actually expressed in the brain and what does our system think about wearing the brain? These neurotransmitters are, there's a week but significant correlation between the two, which suggests that our system reflects actual reality to a certain extent at least. [00:21:30] And that was a suggestion I got from one of the peer reviewers and that was really good. It was a lot of extra work, but it ended up being a really good addition to the paper. Speaker 1: But both of you guys are involved in science education and science outreach. So I was hoping you can comment on that. I'm actually starting a project with a friend of mine building a neuroscience kids books. So we're going to teach neuroscience to elementary school kids with an electronic ebook featuring the neuron. Yes, featured his name is ned the neuron. He's a pure middle cell and he works in the motor cortex of the brain. [00:22:00] And is the neuroscience focus partly driven by bad or do you have any sort of personal interest in as well? I do have a personal interest in and I, I, you know, obviously it's convenient that my husband is a neuroscientist, but actually the character and the original story idea is my partners who's also a neuroscientist and phd in neuroscience here at cal here at cal. Speaker 4: Yeah. I get this question a fair amount. Like why do I do blogging and outreach and things like that. So there's actually a few answers to that. One I find blogging, uh, helps me [00:22:30] do better science. If I have to figure out a very simple way of explaining something, then I feel like I understand it better. It's sort of like one of the best ways to learn something is by trying to teach it. Right. I had a very strange path to academia. I actually got kicked out as an undergraduate from the university. I had to sort of beg my way back in because my grades were pretty low. You know, a couple of people help me out along the way and that were pretty important to me. And I think a lot of Grad students have this experience where they, they feel like they don't belong there in in sense that like, oh [00:23:00] my God, I'm not smart enough to do this. Speaker 4: You know? And when I look at the resumes or cvs of, you know, tenured faculty here at Berkeley, right? It's just paper after paper and award and amazing achievement and you're just like struggling to even understand how to write a paper and it seems just like this daunting, intractable problem. And so because of that, I actually have a section in my CV where I actually list every time a paper has been rejected. I've actually had graduate students tell me that. That's been kind of Nice to see that you know, you see somebody who's doing pretty well and you see that, you know, in order to get there [00:23:30] you sort of have to slog through a lot of crap. Speaker 1: Did you plan to work together some more? I think so. You know, we're obviously working together to raise a son right now. We actually were talking on the way over here about trying to implement some of the ideas we've Speaker 4: been talking about that people have suggested. I think we could definitely do that. Yeah, there's definitely a lot of overlap. I'm very interested in dynamic data visualization and that's something that Jesse's is obviously getting quite quite good at and so I'd [00:24:00] like to start doing that for a lot of my research papers as well. Brad and Jess, thanks for joining us. Oh, thank you very much for having us. Thank you so much for having us. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 6: and now for some science news headlines. Here's Renee Rao and Brad sweet Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 7: [00:24:30] the Berkeley new center reports researchers at the University of California Berkeley are gathering evidence this fall that the Feisty Fox squirrels scampering around campus or not just mindlessly foraging for food but engaging in a long term savings strategy to track the nut stashing activity. The student researchers are using GPS technology to record all of the food burials and in the process are creating [00:25:00] an elaborate map showing every campus tree building and garbage can. Miquel Delgado a doctorial student in psychology heads the squirrel research team in the laboratory of UC Berkeley, psychologist Luchea Jacobs. The research team is replicating the caching experiment on humans by timing students as they burry Easter eggs on campus and try to find them. We're using humans as a model for squirrel behavior to ask questions that we can't ask. Squirrels still got us said the group has a cow squirrels website to promote their work. Speaker 6: [00:25:30] UC Berkeley professor of cell and molecular biology and chemistry. Carolyn Bertozzi has won the 2012 Heinrich Violin prize. Professor Bartow Z has founded the field of bio orthogonal chemistry. In her groundbreaking approach, she creatively exploits the benefits of synthetic chemistry to study the vital processes within living beings. Professor Dr Volk Gang Baumeister, chair of the board of Trustees of the Heinrich Violin Prize says of Professor Berto z. [00:26:00] Her breakthrough method to identify sugar patterns on the cell surface is a milestone for our understanding of the functions of sugars in health and disease and paves the way for novel diagnostic and therapeutic approaches. Speaker 3: 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. Brad swift and Renee Rao join me for this. The second annual Bay Area Science Festival is wrapping up this weekend. [00:26:30] Highlights include art in science and gallery gala showing the intersection of image and research tonight at the Berkeley Arts Festival, Gallery Science superheros tonight at the Tech Museum in San Jose and discovery days at at and t park tomorrow November 3rd from 11:00 AM to 4:00 PM last year more than 21,000 people showed up to this free event this year. There are more than 150 exhibits. Visit Bay area science.org for more information about any of these [00:27:00] great activities and to see their regular calendar of science goings on. Speaker 6: Big Ideas. Berkeley is an annual innovation contest that provides funding, support, and encouragement to interdisciplinary teams of UC undergraduate and graduate students who have big ideas. The pre-proposal entry deadline is 5:00 PM November six 2012 all pre-proposals must be submitted via the online application on the big ideas website. Remember there are big idea advisers to help students craft [00:27:30] their pre-proposals. You can drop in at room 100 Blum hall during scheduled hours or email advisers to schedule an appointment at another time. Check the big ideas website for advisor times or to make an appointment. There will also be an editing blitz November 5th from five to 8:00 PM in room, 100 of bloom hall advisors and past winters will be available to provide applicants with valuable last-minute insights and advice on your pre-proposal. This is a great opportunity to hone your proposal and get support from those [00:28:00] who know what it takes to build a successful big idea. The big ideas website is big ideas.berkeley.edu Speaker 7: on November 8th the center for ethnographic research will hold a colloquium to understand cancer treatment trajectories using an array of ethnographic data. The Speaker Daniel Dohan and associate professor in the Phillip r Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies. We'll discuss this research about inequality and culture with a focus on cancer. He will focus on his most recent study which examines how patients [00:28:30] with advanced diseases find out about and decide whether to participate in clinical trials of new cancer drugs. The event, which is free and open to the public, will be held from four to 5:30 PM at 25 38 Channing waySpeaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 5: the music you [00:29:00] heard during say show was spend less on and David from his album book and Acoustic, 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. 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 [00:29:30] join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The Voyteks created the Brain Systems, Connections, Associations, and Network Relationships engine, or brainSCANr. The tool is used to explore the relationships between different terms in peer reviewed publications. http://brainscanr.com/TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next 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 3: Good afternoon. I'm Rick Karnofsky. Brad swift and I are the hosts of today's show. We're speaking with Jessica and Bradley Vojtech. Jessica is a designer and a developer who earned her master's of information management and systems here at cal and has [00:01:00] worked on several UC Berkeley websites. She's also working on the future of science education through projects like ned the neuron. Brad is in NIH, N N I g m s postdoctoral fellow at ucs f. He got his phd from cal. He's a prolific blogger and Zombie expert. The void techs are here to talk about brain systems, connections and associations and network relationships or brain scanner. This website helps people explore [00:01:30] how neuroscience terms relate to one another in the peer reviewed literature. They've documented their project in our recent journal of neuroscience methods paper. Speaker 4: Brad and Jessica, welcome to spectrum. Thank you for having us. Thanks. Can you tell us a little bit about brain scanner? Actually, I was at a conference here at cal hell by the CSA, so the cognitive science student association and Undergraduate Association here at cal that they had several neuroscientists and cognitive scientists come and give presentations and I was one of those people. I [00:02:00] was on a panel with a Stanford cognitive scientists at the end of the day. It was a Q and a. We got into a question about what can be known in the neurosciences and I had mentioned that the peer reviewed neuroscientific literature probably smarter than we are. There's something like 3 million peer reviewed neuroscientific publications and I was saying that that is just too many. There is no way for anybody to to integrate all of those facts and I said if there some automated or algorithmic way of doing that, we could probably find some neat stuff out and he disagreed with me pretty strongly on the panel [00:02:30] and I sort of stewed on that for awhile. Speaker 4: That ended up becoming the brain scanner project actually, which is using text mining to look at how different topics in the neurosciences relate to one another. We had conversation about this and I had just started about six months before my a master's program at the School of Information. So all of the stuff that he was saying really jived with what I was learning. So we got together after that. We talked about it off and on sort of over dinner and stuff occasionally, but I think it was [00:03:00] right around won't. Right, right before we found out you were pregnant. Right, right around Christmas when we first actually sat down together to work on it and that was just a random evening. We didn't have, well, we didn't have a baby at the time, so we didn't have much else to do. Brad was working on this thing and he said, you know, I've been working on this all day. Speaker 4: I'm trying to get this algorithm to work and see if we can get any results out of this. And I kind of challenged him. I said, I can do that faster than you can started taking my course. I had [00:03:30] all of these new skills that I just wanted to kind of show off. And I did. She actually beat me. You guys were both sort of where we were. We're basically coding. Yeah. We're sitting on the couch. Not really cause we weren't actually doing it together. We are using two different competitor competing. Exactly. So who do you see as the audience for brain scanner? Well I know the answer to that someone. Right. So I have colleagues who tell me a lot of Grad students actually mostly a who say that they use it as a stop for [00:04:00] searching. The peer reviewed neuroscientific literature. So pub med, which is the surface run by the National Library of medicine, which is part of the national institutes for health index is a lot of these peer reviewed biomedical journals. Speaker 4: Their search engine is quite good but it returns just textual information. You know, you just, you see the 20 most recently published papers or you know, however you want to sort it related to the search term or of interest. Yeah. So basically anybody who wants to create an app can get access to this data. You have to follow certain [00:04:30] rules, but otherwise you can get the information out of this database easily. In a, in a sort of standard format, we provide a graphic or a visualization layer on top of the search so you can put in one of these search terms and you can see here are the topics that relate to it very strongly in literature. Statistically speaking, you know, uh, by that I mean here are the words or terms that show up a lot in papers with the term memory for example. We also then list the papers that are related and you can see the full list of terms and [00:05:00] how it relates to different topics and things like that. Um, if I want to look at a brain region and say, okay, what are the other brain regions that are related to this can really quickly visually see that based upon these 3 million publications that we, we searched through Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 4: you are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. We're talking to with user interface developer, Jessica Vojtech. And neuroscientists, Bradley Wojciech about brain scanner Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 4: [00:05:30] do you see other potentially valuable ways you can harness PubMed's data or other reference sources? Yeah, absolutely. So one of the aspects actually of the paper that we published was ways to address that, that very question. Uh, initially we tried to publish the paper just as a here's a, here's a resource or one of the editor's version on that rejected the paper, said, you know, what, what can you do with this? And a, of course, you know, this is something we've been thinking about. And [00:06:00] so I tried to build a proof of concept. So one of the, one of the things that we showed statistically speaking that you can do with this, does the data they call hypothesis generation or semiautomated hypothesis generation. And this works off of a very simple idea. Um, it's almost like recommend their algorithms and um, like linkedin or Facebook or something like that. Speaker 4: You know, it's like if you know this person, you might know this person, kind of a friend of a friend should be a friend idea. You know, Rick and I, I know you and you know Rick, maybe you have a friend named Jim. And so statistically speaking, [00:06:30] Jim and I might get along right because you and I get along and you, and he'd get along, especially if I and Jim get along. And so you can go through algorithmically and say, you know, in the literature if Migraine for example, which is the example you give in the paper, uh, is strongly related to a neurotransmitter Serotonin, which I didn't know before we made the website actually, um, that in the medical literature there's a whole serotonin hypothesis from migraines I guess because Migraines respond to, uh, antidepressants, which are usually serotonergic drugs. So anyway, Serotonin [00:07:00] and Migraines are very strongly related and neuroscientists know a lot about the basic physiology of Serotonin, where in the brain is expressed and things like that. Speaker 4: And so on the neuroscience side, we know that Serotonin is very strongly expressed in, in a brain region called the striatum, which is sort of deep frontal part of the brain. And, uh, there's thousands of papers that talk about Serotonin and Migraines and Serotonin in this brain region, the striatum respectively, but there's only 19 papers or something like that to talk about that brain region and migraines. [00:07:30] And so statistically speaking, maybe we're missing something here, right? Maybe just nobody's really looked at this connection between migraines in that brain region. Maybe there aren't papers published on it because people have looked and there's nothing there. But, uh, that's why it's somewhat automated. You can go through this list of recommended hypotheses and you as an expert, I can go through that list and say, oh, some of these are nonsense. Or Oh, that's, that could be interesting. Speaker 4: Maybe. Maybe we should look into that. So it gives you a low hanging fruit basically. Yeah. And so that would be something [00:08:00] eventually I would like to build into the site. Are you continuing to analyze new papers as they enter in pub med? We haven't rerun it for awhile. I think there's something on the order of 10,000 new papers published every month in the neurosciences. But when you're standing in the face of 3 million, it's sort of drop in the bucket. So we, we worry running it every month or two. Um, but the results really don't change very quickly. Right. It's pretty stable. So yes, we, we should actually [00:08:30] run it again. It's been about six months or so. If you guys actually like, well I mean as a or perhaps how, you know, the ideas in the literature might change. For instance, that's actually something that I did do. Speaker 4: Um, I eliminated the searches to just bring the regions, so how different brain regions relate to each other across time. So I did a search for all papers published up to like 1905, which wasn't very many. Of course not in your, you know, you have an exponential increase in the number of being published. Okay. But then again, I ran it again for all papers published to like up to 1935, [00:09:00] 55, 75, 95 and you know, 2005, right? Uh, or 2011. And you could actually see how our understanding of how different brain regions relate change over time. And that was kind of neat. Um, if I was going to be a little bit statistically, uh, stronger about this, what I should have done in the original paper, and I didn't think about it until after we republished it was I should've run the semiautomated hypothesis generation algorithm, uh, on a limited amount of data. So I test data set up to like say 1990 [00:09:30] and then found plausible hypotheses from that Dataset and then run it again on the entire thing and see, you know, if we had found new things. And you know, if that corroborated what we've learned in the last 22 years. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 5: you're listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. We're talking with Brad and Jessica Vojtech about brain scanner. They're a site to show links [00:10:00] that may exist between brain structures, cognitive functions, neurological disorders, and more as data mined from the academic literature. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 4: I mean this is a side side project for us. Yeah, Speaker 1: it was two weeks in $11 and 50 cents. And what did that go to? Um, coffee and coffee. Yeah. [00:10:30] Um, no it, it went into the Google app engine server time. So we actually were able to use Google app engine to distribute the processing, which is also what made mind my code a little bit quicker to run through all of this data. Speaker 4: I was doing single queries at a time and because we have 800 terms in the database and we have to do how every term relates to every other term, it's 800 squared,Speaker 1: try to buy two essentially. And then there's the roundtrip between between his your machine and the um, [00:11:00] pub met database. So, you know, you're making requests, you're making requests, making requests anyway. It was maybe three days, three days or four days. And I was able to do it in about two hours by um, putting it into the cloud and using app engine. So that $11 and 50 cents went to paying for the service and agree to say a hundred squared divided by two minus 800 a lot. So do you want to talk about how that dictionary of keywords was generated? Speaker 4: Initially I [00:11:30] had wanted to try and figure out how brain regions relate this. This grew out of my phd work actually at Berkeley. I worked with Professor Bob Knight who used to be the head of the neurosciences institute, Helen Wells neuroscience here. And my phd thesis was looking at how to brain regions, the prefrontal cortex and the Basal Ganglia related to working memory. And as I was standing for my qualifying exams, I was trying to figure out, okay, what are the brain regions that send inputs to [00:12:00] [inaudible], which is one of the parts of the Basal Ganglia and where he dies this ride in project two. And in order to figure that out, I spent, I don't know, two months off and on three months off and on over at the biomedical library here, digging through old, uh, anatomical papers from the 1970s and basically drawing little hand-drawn charts to try and figure out how these things connected. Speaker 4: And it really surprised me. It was frustrating because you know, here we are in, well, when [00:12:30] I was doing this, it was like 2008 right? And all I wanted to know is how different brain regions connect. And I was like, why can't I just go to a website and say, okay, striatum, what are its inputs and outputs? Like we have that information, right? Why can't I do that? Um, and so anyway, that was one of the motivating factors for me also. And there's actually a paper published in 2002 called neuro names. And then this researcher was trying to create an ontology of, of brain region names Ryan. So the terms that we use now in 2012 aren't necessarily [00:13:00] the same that people were using back in 1900 when they were first describing the basic anatomy. And so you have some Latin names for brain regions. Speaker 4: You have modern names for brain regions, you have names for different groupings of brain regions. So I referred earlier to the base like Ganglia, uh, and that is composed of, you know, maybe five different brain regions. And if I talk about three of those brain regions, uh, can I give examples? Is the putamen and the Globus Pallidus, uh, Globus Pallidus is actually contained [00:13:30] of two separate ones. And the putamen and Globus Pallidus if you combine them together or known by one name. But if you combine the putamen with the striatum, that's a different name. And so you actually have these weird venn diagram overlapping naming Schema. Speaker 1: There's a significant vocabulary problem, which is the term that we use in the information sciences. Basically the fact that you have multiple names for the same thing and you have the same name for some different things. So you know this venn diagram idea. Um, so yeah, [00:14:00] if you're going to use a very simple search algorithm, you have, you can't do it, you wouldn't, you're not going to get all of the results. So, um, I think our system tries to solve that vocabulary problem a little bit. Speaker 4: And then there's actually a researcher, um, Russ Poltrack drag, who used to be a faculty of neuroscience at UCLA and I think he's in University of Texas now. And he actually tried to create an ontology for cognitive term. So in cognitive science and psychology and cognitive neuroscience, you know, we have terms like working memory [00:14:30] and attention and in they're trying to create a whole ontology for how these different things really. So like working memory as part of memory, which you know, in memory also contains a longterm memory. And so we'll use his first attempt as a dictionary as well. And then we went to the NIH website and they've got a listing of all these different kinds of neurological disorders and we use that. So we pulled a bunch of publicly available data basically and use those dictionaries as our starting point. Speaker 1: And then we [00:15:00] also took suggestions from the people on our website almost immediately we started getting requests for more and different terms. So you had the, when you find two keywords that appear in a paper together, you assume that they're actually related. Can you comment on if people might have demonstrated that they're not actually related, how does that affect your system? Like some, like an instance in which, uh, it says this brain region is not connected to this other [00:15:30] brain region, right? Um, yes, we have assumed that there's a publication bias that if there is not a connection then someone does not publish a paper about that. Speaker 4: Okay. And negative publications or negative findings go very under reported in the scientific literature. Speaker 1: Right. So we're hopefully taking advantage of that. Hopefully the law of large numbers means that our data is mostly correct and it does seem to be that way. The example that Brad gave, uh, with the Allen Brain Atlas, [00:16:00] that there is certain corroborating evidence that seems to suggest that this is a, at least plausible connections. There's obviously no one say that better. No, that's perfectly scientifically accurate. I tend to get a little bit specific when I'm talking about this kind of stuff. Speaker 4: Is there already some sort of bias that might drive certain kinds of papers up? If the paper has a lot of buzzwords, perhaps it suddenly becomes more important. Do you 100% yes, absolutely. There are always [00:16:30] hot topics. Uh, and that shows up for sure Speaker 1: only because there's more papers published on that subject. We don't currently have a any kind of waiting per paper. Speaker 4: Yeah. Like when you go into the website and you'd do something like, um, there's a brain region called the Amygdala and you know, it'll be very strongly associated with fear. And so that's actually one of my concerns is problem getting these biases. So, you know, there's a lot of literature on this brain region, the Amygdala and how it relates to fear, but it certainly does a lot more than just processing fear, [00:17:00] right? It's this general emotional affective labeling sort of idea that anyway, that's, that's neuroscience specific stuff, you know, and brain region called the insula and disgust or love or you know, these other kinds of strong emotions. And so yeah, it definitely reflects certain biases as well. And we, we try and quantify that even to an extent a little bit. So again, using the Allen Brain Atlas data, we show from our Dataset, what are the top five brain regions that express or that are related to dopamine, for example. Speaker 4: And in the real human brain, what are the top five brain [00:17:30] regions that express dopaminergic related genes? And you can actually see that there's a very clear bias. So one of the regions that expresses dobutamine very strongly is very hard to study. Neuroscientifically speaking. It's, it's deepen deep part of the brain. It's hard to get any, it's very small, so you can't get it from like brain scanning expresses a lot of dopamine, but people don't study it and we can actually quantify then some of these under-studied relationships, right? We're like, here's a brain region that we know expresses a lot of dopamine, but there's a a hundred papers only and another [00:18:00] brain region that's very sexy and too about domain has 10,000 papers. Right? So our system shows you an example well of the current state of scientific literature. So it's not necessarily 100% correct, but it reflects what scientists think as a whole at this point. Yeah, I agree. And we try and be very careful about that in the paper and in talking about it like we are right now Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 5: [00:18:30] you are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. We're talking with user interface developer, Jessica Vojtech and neuroscientist Bradley Vojtech about brain scanner. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 4: I was really surprised you. I taught neuro anatomy for three semesters here at Berkeley and you know, so I know the anatomy pretty well. And on your first ran it, I had one of those like yes, kind [00:19:00] of moments like I can't believe this work because it really does find all of these clusters really nicely. And that was a very pleasant surprise because technically speaking it couldn't have been any other way. Like it just has to, you know, I mean these topics co-occur a lot, so it should be that way, but it's always nice to see something like that work. Brian, I wanted to ask about the journals that you sent the paper off too. How did you pick them? Art Of picking a journal where to send a paper. It's actually really hard. So certain journals get [00:19:30] more readership than others. And then there's the open access factor. Speaker 4: So I'm, I'm a big open science, open data advocate and so I try and shoot for that. I had forgotten, there's actually sort of a, a very wide protest of Elsevier, which is one of the publishing companies right now. And the journal that published my papers and Elsevier Journal, but, uh, I had signed the petition and I was part of that Nash shortly thereafter. That would have impacted my decision had I been thinking about it. Yeah. And yeah, so it's mainly a balance between readership and expectation and you sort [00:20:00] of get a feel after publishing a few papers of what editors are looking for. And so yeah, I am the one that has experience with navigating the academic publishing environment. Yeah. So yeah, we sent it out to a lot of journals and, uh, mostly it didn't pass editorial review, which means that there's an editor that decides whether or not conceptually it will be interesting for their journal to publish it once got center review at a journal and they're like, well, it was sort of torn. Speaker 4: There were four reviewers, four pure reviewers, [00:20:30] and two of them were fairly enthusiastic and the other two are like, this is cool, but so what? Right. Um, and the general consensus was it didn't fit with the theme of the Journal. The Journal of neuroscience methods point really well and your reviewers are very, and um, actually there's a figure at the end of the paper where we did some integration with the Allen Brain. Alice Paul Allen, one of the co founders of Microsoft who is a cuisine heir, has put half a billion dollars into this institute. [00:21:00] Initially the goal was to map, uh, the expression of all of these different genes in the human brain, in the mouse brain, and they made all that data publicly available. And so we use that as a test data set. So we said, okay, where are these different, uh, neurotransmitter related genes actually expressed in the brain and what does our system think about wearing the brain? These neurotransmitters are, there's a week but significant correlation between the two, which suggests that our system reflects actual reality to a certain extent at least. [00:21:30] And that was a suggestion I got from one of the peer reviewers and that was really good. It was a lot of extra work, but it ended up being a really good addition to the paper. Speaker 1: But both of you guys are involved in science education and science outreach. So I was hoping you can comment on that. I'm actually starting a project with a friend of mine building a neuroscience kids books. So we're going to teach neuroscience to elementary school kids with an electronic ebook featuring the neuron. Yes, featured his name is ned the neuron. He's a pure middle cell and he works in the motor cortex of the brain. [00:22:00] And is the neuroscience focus partly driven by bad or do you have any sort of personal interest in as well? I do have a personal interest in and I, I, you know, obviously it's convenient that my husband is a neuroscientist, but actually the character and the original story idea is my partners who's also a neuroscientist and phd in neuroscience here at cal here at cal. Speaker 4: Yeah. I get this question a fair amount. Like why do I do blogging and outreach and things like that. So there's actually a few answers to that. One I find blogging, uh, helps me [00:22:30] do better science. If I have to figure out a very simple way of explaining something, then I feel like I understand it better. It's sort of like one of the best ways to learn something is by trying to teach it. Right. I had a very strange path to academia. I actually got kicked out as an undergraduate from the university. I had to sort of beg my way back in because my grades were pretty low. You know, a couple of people help me out along the way and that were pretty important to me. And I think a lot of Grad students have this experience where they, they feel like they don't belong there in in sense that like, oh [00:23:00] my God, I'm not smart enough to do this. Speaker 4: You know? And when I look at the resumes or cvs of, you know, tenured faculty here at Berkeley, right? It's just paper after paper and award and amazing achievement and you're just like struggling to even understand how to write a paper and it seems just like this daunting, intractable problem. And so because of that, I actually have a section in my CV where I actually list every time a paper has been rejected. I've actually had graduate students tell me that. That's been kind of Nice to see that you know, you see somebody who's doing pretty well and you see that, you know, in order to get there [00:23:30] you sort of have to slog through a lot of crap. Speaker 1: Did you plan to work together some more? I think so. You know, we're obviously working together to raise a son right now. We actually were talking on the way over here about trying to implement some of the ideas we've Speaker 4: been talking about that people have suggested. I think we could definitely do that. Yeah, there's definitely a lot of overlap. I'm very interested in dynamic data visualization and that's something that Jesse's is obviously getting quite quite good at and so I'd [00:24:00] like to start doing that for a lot of my research papers as well. Brad and Jess, thanks for joining us. Oh, thank you very much for having us. Thank you so much for having us. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 6: and now for some science news headlines. Here's Renee Rao and Brad sweet Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 7: [00:24:30] the Berkeley new center reports researchers at the University of California Berkeley are gathering evidence this fall that the Feisty Fox squirrels scampering around campus or not just mindlessly foraging for food but engaging in a long term savings strategy to track the nut stashing activity. The student researchers are using GPS technology to record all of the food burials and in the process are creating [00:25:00] an elaborate map showing every campus tree building and garbage can. Miquel Delgado a doctorial student in psychology heads the squirrel research team in the laboratory of UC Berkeley, psychologist Luchea Jacobs. The research team is replicating the caching experiment on humans by timing students as they burry Easter eggs on campus and try to find them. We're using humans as a model for squirrel behavior to ask questions that we can't ask. Squirrels still got us said the group has a cow squirrels website to promote their work. Speaker 6: [00:25:30] UC Berkeley professor of cell and molecular biology and chemistry. Carolyn Bertozzi has won the 2012 Heinrich Violin prize. Professor Bartow Z has founded the field of bio orthogonal chemistry. In her groundbreaking approach, she creatively exploits the benefits of synthetic chemistry to study the vital processes within living beings. Professor Dr Volk Gang Baumeister, chair of the board of Trustees of the Heinrich Violin Prize says of Professor Berto z. [00:26:00] Her breakthrough method to identify sugar patterns on the cell surface is a milestone for our understanding of the functions of sugars in health and disease and paves the way for novel diagnostic and therapeutic approaches. Speaker 3: 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. Brad swift and Renee Rao join me for this. The second annual Bay Area Science Festival is wrapping up this weekend. [00:26:30] Highlights include art in science and gallery gala showing the intersection of image and research tonight at the Berkeley Arts Festival, Gallery Science superheros tonight at the Tech Museum in San Jose and discovery days at at and t park tomorrow November 3rd from 11:00 AM to 4:00 PM last year more than 21,000 people showed up to this free event this year. There are more than 150 exhibits. Visit Bay area science.org for more information about any of these [00:27:00] great activities and to see their regular calendar of science goings on. Speaker 6: Big Ideas. Berkeley is an annual innovation contest that provides funding, support, and encouragement to interdisciplinary teams of UC undergraduate and graduate students who have big ideas. The pre-proposal entry deadline is 5:00 PM November six 2012 all pre-proposals must be submitted via the online application on the big ideas website. Remember there are big idea advisers to help students craft [00:27:30] their pre-proposals. You can drop in at room 100 Blum hall during scheduled hours or email advisers to schedule an appointment at another time. Check the big ideas website for advisor times or to make an appointment. There will also be an editing blitz November 5th from five to 8:00 PM in room, 100 of bloom hall advisors and past winters will be available to provide applicants with valuable last-minute insights and advice on your pre-proposal. This is a great opportunity to hone your proposal and get support from those [00:28:00] who know what it takes to build a successful big idea. The big ideas website is big ideas.berkeley.edu Speaker 7: on November 8th the center for ethnographic research will hold a colloquium to understand cancer treatment trajectories using an array of ethnographic data. The Speaker Daniel Dohan and associate professor in the Phillip r Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies. We'll discuss this research about inequality and culture with a focus on cancer. He will focus on his most recent study which examines how patients [00:28:30] with advanced diseases find out about and decide whether to participate in clinical trials of new cancer drugs. The event, which is free and open to the public, will be held from four to 5:30 PM at 25 38 Channing waySpeaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 5: the music you [00:29:00] heard during say show was spend less on and David from his album book and Acoustic, 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. 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 [00:29:30] join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Bay Area Science Festival is an annual 10-day celebration of the science and technology of the Bay Area. Scientists share stories, passion and science at over 50 events. Programs feature hands-on activities and tours of cutting-edge facilities.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next? Nope. [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. Speaker 2: Good afternoon. My name is Brad swift and I'm Rick Karnofsky. We do have an interview today with Kishore Hari, the director of the bay area science festival that will be happening October 29th through November 6th this is a big, big festival and [00:01:00] Kishore. We'll cover some of the individual events as well as the philosophy behind the festival. This interview is prerecorded and edited, so I'm Kishore Hari. I'm the director of the first annual bay area science festival, which is a 10 day celebration of science throughout the bay area. There's a hundred events from Santa Rosa to San Jose, all to get people excited about all things, science, technology, engineering, and math. 95% of our events are free and I'm really here to [00:01:30] just evangelize science. I love using that term evangelize science because most scientists hate using the word evangelize. Great. Can you describe some of the events that are taking place there? Speaker 2: Some of our major events are big free public outdoor, almost museum like exhibition, so we have three of them across the bay area, one at cal state East Bay for between 40 to 50 different local organizations doing hands on activities. One on Saturday, November 5th [00:02:00] at Infinian raceway. Again 40 to 58 exhibitions this time fee train a lot of organizations from the North Bay and then concluding on Sunday the six with a free day at 18 t park, 170 different exhibits on display. We're essentially turning 18 t park into a free outdoor science museum for the day. It's going to be incredible. There's everything from marine science to the latest medical technology to you can climb aboard an 80 foot trailer that's full of medical diagnostic [00:02:30] equipment that can analyze everything from microbes in your bloodstream to doing a scan of your brain. It's in, it'll be incredible. Those I think are the highlight events. Speaker 2: The ones that we're trying to emphasize the come one, come all enjoy science just like you enjoy arts or music or food festivals. But in addition to that we have a whole series of talks and conversations and hikes and explorations throughout the bay area to really connect people with [00:03:00] just the resources that exist here. Right. The Bay area is pretty much the leader of science and technology in the in the country and we could walk 10 minutes outside of the studio and we could go stand where plutonium was discovered. How cool is that? 10 minutes up the hill is where sal pro mater works. We just won the Nobel Prize in physics. We can go to any spot in the bay area. There's resources like that and so we have a series of science hikes. We have a series of science conversations, so we called the wonder dialogues that are all about [00:03:30] meeting the, the greatest scientific minds here locally. Speaker 2: We have, we even have a science public hall for adults so they can enjoy the fun and see just the inherent science that goes on behind everyday things from beer to music to art galleries, et Cetera. It's too much science for 10 days. So do you have any other work at UCF in addition to sort of organizing this festival? So I'll tell you the premise of the festival as it is actually funded by the National Science Foundation [00:04:00] and they funded for particular sites as a sponsor to see, to really understand what do science festivals do in great sort of scientific thinking. We're going to measure what they do, we're gonna measure the measurable. So that's actually the number one task of this festival is not just to set forth this great festival from Bay area, but actually understand how it impacts communities and then take it to the next level, which is help spread that to communities across the country in particularly seed festivals in [00:04:30] new communities that may not have them or have a dearth of resources. Speaker 2: And the way that sort of has come forth is that we need to lead from the front. So the Boston's the dcs, the Chicago's The San Francisco's of the world need to sort of start the science festivals in those science rich communities that have the museums that have the universities and then really coalesce all of that knowledge generated by that and take that to communities that aren't having it. So initially that's the vision of the project. So I spent [00:05:00] a good percentage of my time evangelizing about science festivals to other communities across the nation and spending a lot of time bringing in a lot of knowledge that exists internationally about how science festivals run. And that has been to great effect because when I, when we started this project, there's maybe like five to seven large scale science festivals in the country in sort of the places you expect Boston, there's the maker fair here. Speaker 2: There is some, there was a big event in Chicago, there's one in DC, et cetera. Now we're expecting [00:05:30] in uh, in 2012, almost 40, in a short period of time. And they're in unusual locations. Like there's one in, in uh, southeast Missouri. Uh, there's, uh, Arkansas as far as launching a statewide festival. North Carolina has a statewide festival. Las Vegas had a science festival. Their actual tagline was Las Vegas Science Festival. What are the odds? So what I thoroughly enjoy about the project more than anything as we get to help communities that you normally [00:06:00] wouldn't identify with this kind of celebration into having it. And then more importantly, on another level, we, we work off of a supplemental grant from the NSF to help seed. These are linked these festivals to science festivals developing in key Middle East nations. So we, um, the Cambridge science festival, it's based out of the MIT museum has long had a relationship with um, the American University of Cairo and they've actually helped launch a Cairo science festival. Speaker 2: [00:06:30] And if you permit me a, a quick story on this, I still can't get over this email. I got one day. So one of our partners from San Diego went to Cairo to sort of help get it off the ground. I think there was about two and a half months after the Arab spring. Really took hold. And they're having, you know, a two day festival in, in the middle of Egypt. And they had all these students come and at the end of this big long day, they went up on the roof and set up some telescopes. So all of these, um, Egyptian [00:07:00] students who never looked through a telescope before in their life could look at the night sky and like, what's more elemental than that than just looking up and enjoying the universe that surrounds us. And they did that for a couple of hours or an astronomer there, and they looked down and from American University of Cairo, you can see Theresa Square and all of the people up on the roof. Speaker 2: Then join the protest that was happening in Tahrir square right after the astronomy viewing. We had one American colleague there and he sort of got swept up in the mob. He, [00:07:30] he's fine. But I still find that amazing how education, uh, cultural events can really mix to become part of like a, a greater movement. Uh, I thoroughly enjoy that. And if science can be an agent of just empowering people, especially in these nations where it's not celebrated or welcomed to have these kinds of ex exploits. That's the kind of thing that I want to be part of and and we should support in terms of exporting our, our, our talent and resources to those nations. Speaker 1: [inaudible] [00:08:00] you're listening to the spectrum on Calex Berkeley. We are talking today with Kishore Hari, the director of the bay area science festival, Speaker 2: the talks. I, I have [00:08:30] to stop and say that I'm a nerd. I am like 110% nerd and I love these rich conversations between intellectuals. Just really going at it about how x, y, or z was discovered. There's a conversation on November 2nd at the cal academy featuring two different neuroscientists talking about what will we ever understand the brain and one of the neuroscientists, Markram has developed something called the blue brain project, which maps [00:09:00] all of the processes that 10,000 neurons will do. That's only a small segment of the neurons in our brain, but how amazing is that just to understand fundamentally what's happening in your brain in that moment. And he's being joined by David Eagleman who is a neuroscientist at Baylor, who is most famous for studying synesthesia and our perception of time and memory, and I think his most famous experiment is where he dropped some of his Grad students 200 feet in free fall to see if they perceive time to go [00:09:30] slower in those moments of of heightened fright and they're going to discuss sort of the, with all of the advances in neuroscience, all the advances in our understanding of how the brain operates. Speaker 2: Is it something that we can ever really touch upon and say, we know how the brain works. We can construct an artificial brain that can operate on human, or is there something just beyond that that is innately human that is innately just us or innately me or, or any of you that can never [00:10:00] be replicated? That one that exciting to me because it's one of those, it's to me the brain is the, is the scientific frontier that, and then on the other side of the spectrum is, um, Peter Norvig from Google and Eric Horvitz from Microsoft are talking about artificial intelligence and where that's going. And Peter Norvig's, I'm sort of famous as he's the one that was running the Stanford Free AI course is pioneering some of the work with the driverless cars that you may have heard about. Eric Horvitz isn't, is no slouch in [00:10:30] his own right leader in the field talking about where this is going with everything from Watson, you know, beating the contestants on jeopardy to driverless cars, to all of those IBM ads that won't stop interrupting my football, watching about how to build a smarter planet. Speaker 2: Where is this actually going? Or can we actually build computer systems that can solve some of our greatest challenges, whether that is curing disease to, you know, understanding, uh, redistributing, distributing traffic. I think these [00:11:00] are fundamental questions and I think they're, again, poking at this big topic of the intersection of humanity and technology that I personally find fascinating. So those are the two that I would that jump off the page to me just from a straight, I'm a nerd perspective and have you drawn on other science festivals for inspiration? Drawn upon is a polite way to say that I have blatantly stolen ideas from other science festivals and I think that's actually probably [00:11:30] the reason that festivals are emerging so much more is that we have a little community, we call it the science festival alliance. It's a member community of all these science festivals and we talk to each other regularly and we give each other ideas and we steal them, we approve upon them. Speaker 2: Sometimes I steal ideas and I make them worse. But in any case, it's that basic ideas. Absolutely. We talked to each all the time about um, everything from events structure to how we work with our partners [00:12:00] to, to just basically venting to each other when we're up at three in the morning, still working on like production timelines and all sorts of fun stuff like that. But that's absolutely how we're innovating. Every community has its own personality and its own assets so they all take on a different flavor. But what's exciting to me is that doing this community community, you really see some different things emerge. I have a close collaborator at the Philadelphia Science Festival and we have a little bit of a rivalry going, a friendly rivalry. And [00:12:30] so this year I think she did two things that just blew, blew it out of the water that were just amazing. Speaker 2: One is she partnered with the Phillies and U Penn engineering constructed a robot to throw out a first pitch. So there are all these like 40,000 Philly fans are just like, Whoa, how am I going to a one-thirty game? And they, all of a sudden this robot gets wheeled out onto the field and like pitches something. And what was amazed, mindblowing about that. I was at that game with a colleague from Cambridge and we're sitting in the, in the upper deck [00:13:00] and there's this down-home Philly guy born and raised. He turned around and he was like, you know, I had a question about that robot. I turned around and I was like, are there any roboticists here? And there's this army of Penn engineers sitting like three rows back and they all stood up and were like, yeah, we're roboticists. And so like some guy that came to a Philly's baseball game was talking to a roboticists about something. Speaker 2: The best question he had, he's like that little bulb on the front of the robot. It looked like it had a camera. Did that actually do anything though? [00:13:30] No, that was decorative and I thought that was great. Then they fully admitted, they just put something on there to make it look cooler. That I thought was incredible. Philadelphia Science Festival had so many amazing things, but I was lucky to be part of their astronomy night and we're doing that here in the bay area as well. We have a astronomy night with 20 different locations that are hosting lectures and telescope viewings and planetarium shows, it'll be amazing. But when I was at the Philadelphia Knight, I went to this lecture by Guy Bluford first African American [00:14:00] in space, grew up in West Philly. So you went back to his west Philly neighborhood and gave a talk about, but how he got to be an astronaut and about the international space station. Speaker 2: And this was one of those perfect moments cause so he's giving this talk and he was talking to basically an audience of about 150 African American kids and, and their parents. And there was a woman that basically was just in the front row at the end was just almost in [00:14:30] tears because she's like, I've lived in this neighborhood my whole life. And sometimes we just need a hero. And if that's what it was, it, and it wasn't a sports player, it wasn't a politician, it wasn't, you know, just somebody, it was somebody that worked hard, that have a lot of pride in that neighborhood that came back. And so that went beyond to me. That was that community taking pride in one of their own, which we all should be able to do. And then the sort of beautiful end of [00:15:00] that night as he talked about the ISS and all of the kind of secret life of living on a spate sedation. Speaker 2: And we walked outside and there some telescopes set up in the, in the lot and the ISS actually passed overhead. And so everyone that got to hear him talk about it got to see the space station for the first time. And I don't know, but that was the first time I'd ever really looked at the space station. And it's like, you know, I hear about it on the news all the time, but there is a space station orbiting the earth [00:15:30] and there's like people in there that's just remarkable. And this guy had been on there and he was standing two feet from me and he, he was as humble as, as any one person could ever be. And just so excited to tell people about that discovery. And then lastly, I'm just a Simpsons nerd. And so there was a guy that gave a talk on science and the Simpsons during the festival. He wrote a book on it. His name's Paul Halpern. He's a professor at the University of Sciences in [00:16:00] Philadelphia and it was in the basement of a library. So it was the most sort of surprising location for Simpsons Hawk and it was full like on an 11 o'clock on a Tuesday. And all of these people asking all of these inane questions, those are ideas I've blatantly stolen. The reason I've stolen it is they're just incredibly brilliant. Speaker 1: [inaudible]Speaker 2: [00:16:30] you are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. We are talking with [inaudible] hiring director, bay area science semester Speaker 1: [inaudible].Speaker 2: You're really poking at those innovative events that do something a little different. And the ones that [00:17:00] strike to me around that is the fact that most of these events, a wide majority, I would say over 75% aren't happening on college campuses. They're not happening in places where science were traditionally housed. So I think about this science pub crawl that's coming on Friday the fourth to take over the mission district in San Francisco. So we have a a science author. His name is Carl Zimmer. He's famous for studying eco ly and microbes in your gut and he wrote this kind of comical book [00:17:30] called Science Inc that's a compendium of all of the great science tattoos people have sent pictures for and he's giving a talk at at a tattoo parlor. I don't think it's very often that you get much science at Tattoo Parlors. You start to see like how the community at large, every place you go when you get your coffee in the morning, when you go into Chotsky store, when you go just walking down the block, it's just surrounding you at all times and that I think is freaking awesome. Speaker 2: [00:18:00] I'm also excited because there's a, there's trainings that take real science experiments into the classroom and we've partnered with a teacher. He teaches a class on biology and within the class they're going to do a specific experiment where they trap bees within the community garden at the school and it's part of a larger experiment to understand how climate change and just you know, micro conditions within your environment are affecting the spread of pollinators. It's amazing that this is [00:18:30] typically taught by just a lecture in the classroom. I don't know about you but at 16 I certainly had no part in any published scientific study and the last one I'll bring up about this is a friend of mine last year piloted this project here in the bay area called science hack day that she formed a little committee of, of interested folks that basically brings together designers, developers and scientists to really hammer on big scientific datasets. It's November 12th and 13th the weekend after the festival, so it's [00:19:00] a post festival event. But the reason I'm so excited about it is 200 people, most of them never met before. Being basically locked into a room and working together just out of nothing and working on big scientific issues. Speaker 2: How did you first get into science and then science advocacy? So the science education route for me, I just call it science education. I have no other way to describe it. Aye owned the company for Awhile. I was a sort of successful [00:19:30] chemist I guess and it was fascinating and exciting because I was in sales and business and product development, all of these things and I realized after years of doing it I just had no real passion for it. Like it was never the thing that that got me up in the morning that drove me to jump to do and when I thought back on all of the things that sort of make me happy in life, one of the memories that always came [00:20:00] up is just be [inaudible] about science with my friends over beers and how that was just an agent of conversation is is science just like brought out the best in us? Speaker 2: We have these kinds of great conversations about where stuff was going and I realized that I was like, well, if that's what I really love to do when I become an agent of that instead of this sort of saying I enjoy it, and I was at a conference, it's the triple a s conference. It was the largest scientific [00:20:30] society at a conference here and I decided once I was just going to go, I was just going to go, go to sessions and joy myself. I know that's probably a little atypical for most people. Let's go to a big science conference and just drop into sessions, but I saw a flyer up about a science cafe and I was like, somebody is making a entire science theme cafe. That sounds great. I would go there all the time. That's not what it was at all. But I, I went to this mixer, I met this, this gentleman Ben, who was like, [00:21:00] who, we basically sat around for a couple hours talking about science over beers and I was like, so what's a science cafe? Speaker 2: And he was like, that's it. Except with a few more people. It's just people talking about science. There's scientists there and sort of ignites a conversation, but it's a sort of democracy thing. Like within a month I had started my own in the city and he just became the best part of my day when I was working on that project is getting all these people together, getting them to talk about different issues and how much learning can happen [00:21:30] in those situations and how hungry people were to learn about all of the great advancements. And I kept following that path and that led me to greater and greater involvement in sort of the marketplace, which is one creating a website, bay area science.org that just listed out all of the incredible science events that are happening and there's literally almost a hundred a week public signs events that are just happening around the bay area. Speaker 2: And I was like, what an incredible resource. I just sort of fell into this position [00:22:00] leading a festival and it was just an amazing opportunity where the, the whole premise was in, in Europe and in Asia, they have these big celebrations of science akin to arts and music festivals and they, they celebrate it like they do anything else. It's just an important part of culture and that couldn't have resonated more with me personally. So I went after that position. I luckily landed into it and here I am a year and a half later, [00:22:30] I wanted to know how you got interested in science personally in the first place. Oh, so all credit to the greatest scientist I've ever known my life, my dad, every morning, like clockwork, the guy was so disciplined at six in the morning, he'd be at his desk and he'd be just reading, not working, reading. He was always very disciplined, but more importantly within that discipline, he was like, there was just innate curiosity on how things work, all credit to him for igniting that [00:23:00] sense of just wonder within me and then just being spirited along by friends and teachers along the way. Speaker 2: I think we've all had a great, the memory of that continues to inspire us. I have to say like it, it all goes back to my dad. I can't thank him enough because it's open so many like doors in my life. It just wondering about stuff and and tinkering is probably some of the most enjoyment I have and now that I have a new son, I [00:23:30] just hope I can impart that same, same interest to him with the caveat that I hope he doesn't destroy my TV or alarm clock or any of those other things that I did back when I was a kid. What can other people who are interested in helping out with the festival do their volunteer opportunities up on our website, pay area, science.org there's a ton of volunteer opportunities. I need help endlessly, whether it be promoting the festival or being on site and helping out the day of. Speaker 2: Most importantly, [00:24:00] I want people to come and enjoy it and after they enjoy being part of the festival and want them to go home and continue that conversation with their loved ones, with their friends and family, that actually is probably the most important component here. I need help, so if you have time and energy and are excited about the science festival, please go sign up on the page. There are different opportunities available, but at the end of the day, I want people to enjoy it. I want people to experience something they've never seen seen before. I want people to take risks, go places that [00:24:30] they normally wouldn't go if you don't normally talk to a scientist, this is your week to finally meet and shake hands and talk with one. I always say the tagline for the festivals, unleash your inner scientists. I think that's what I want to see most from the community is just to get in touch with that, that spot of curiosity and wonder. That's innate in every human being and just go on and enjoy. Okay. Sure. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Speaker 1: [inaudible] [inaudible] [00:25:00] the music played during the show is written and performed by David lost [inaudible] from his album titled Folk and Acoustic [inaudible]. Thank you for listening to spectrum. We are happy to hear from listeners. If you have comments about the show, please send [00:25:30] 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. The [inaudible] [inaudible] [00:26:00] [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The Bay Area Science Festival is an annual 10-day celebration of the science and technology of the Bay Area. Scientists share stories, passion and science at over 50 events. Programs feature hands-on activities and tours of cutting-edge facilities.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next? Nope. [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. Speaker 2: Good afternoon. My name is Brad swift and I'm Rick Karnofsky. We do have an interview today with Kishore Hari, the director of the bay area science festival that will be happening October 29th through November 6th this is a big, big festival and [00:01:00] Kishore. We'll cover some of the individual events as well as the philosophy behind the festival. This interview is prerecorded and edited, so I'm Kishore Hari. I'm the director of the first annual bay area science festival, which is a 10 day celebration of science throughout the bay area. There's a hundred events from Santa Rosa to San Jose, all to get people excited about all things, science, technology, engineering, and math. 95% of our events are free and I'm really here to [00:01:30] just evangelize science. I love using that term evangelize science because most scientists hate using the word evangelize. Great. Can you describe some of the events that are taking place there? Speaker 2: Some of our major events are big free public outdoor, almost museum like exhibition, so we have three of them across the bay area, one at cal state East Bay for between 40 to 50 different local organizations doing hands on activities. One on Saturday, November 5th [00:02:00] at Infinian raceway. Again 40 to 58 exhibitions this time fee train a lot of organizations from the North Bay and then concluding on Sunday the six with a free day at 18 t park, 170 different exhibits on display. We're essentially turning 18 t park into a free outdoor science museum for the day. It's going to be incredible. There's everything from marine science to the latest medical technology to you can climb aboard an 80 foot trailer that's full of medical diagnostic [00:02:30] equipment that can analyze everything from microbes in your bloodstream to doing a scan of your brain. It's in, it'll be incredible. Those I think are the highlight events. Speaker 2: The ones that we're trying to emphasize the come one, come all enjoy science just like you enjoy arts or music or food festivals. But in addition to that we have a whole series of talks and conversations and hikes and explorations throughout the bay area to really connect people with [00:03:00] just the resources that exist here. Right. The Bay area is pretty much the leader of science and technology in the in the country and we could walk 10 minutes outside of the studio and we could go stand where plutonium was discovered. How cool is that? 10 minutes up the hill is where sal pro mater works. We just won the Nobel Prize in physics. We can go to any spot in the bay area. There's resources like that and so we have a series of science hikes. We have a series of science conversations, so we called the wonder dialogues that are all about [00:03:30] meeting the, the greatest scientific minds here locally. Speaker 2: We have, we even have a science public hall for adults so they can enjoy the fun and see just the inherent science that goes on behind everyday things from beer to music to art galleries, et Cetera. It's too much science for 10 days. So do you have any other work at UCF in addition to sort of organizing this festival? So I'll tell you the premise of the festival as it is actually funded by the National Science Foundation [00:04:00] and they funded for particular sites as a sponsor to see, to really understand what do science festivals do in great sort of scientific thinking. We're going to measure what they do, we're gonna measure the measurable. So that's actually the number one task of this festival is not just to set forth this great festival from Bay area, but actually understand how it impacts communities and then take it to the next level, which is help spread that to communities across the country in particularly seed festivals in [00:04:30] new communities that may not have them or have a dearth of resources. Speaker 2: And the way that sort of has come forth is that we need to lead from the front. So the Boston's the dcs, the Chicago's The San Francisco's of the world need to sort of start the science festivals in those science rich communities that have the museums that have the universities and then really coalesce all of that knowledge generated by that and take that to communities that aren't having it. So initially that's the vision of the project. So I spent [00:05:00] a good percentage of my time evangelizing about science festivals to other communities across the nation and spending a lot of time bringing in a lot of knowledge that exists internationally about how science festivals run. And that has been to great effect because when I, when we started this project, there's maybe like five to seven large scale science festivals in the country in sort of the places you expect Boston, there's the maker fair here. Speaker 2: There is some, there was a big event in Chicago, there's one in DC, et cetera. Now we're expecting [00:05:30] in uh, in 2012, almost 40, in a short period of time. And they're in unusual locations. Like there's one in, in uh, southeast Missouri. Uh, there's, uh, Arkansas as far as launching a statewide festival. North Carolina has a statewide festival. Las Vegas had a science festival. Their actual tagline was Las Vegas Science Festival. What are the odds? So what I thoroughly enjoy about the project more than anything as we get to help communities that you normally [00:06:00] wouldn't identify with this kind of celebration into having it. And then more importantly, on another level, we, we work off of a supplemental grant from the NSF to help seed. These are linked these festivals to science festivals developing in key Middle East nations. So we, um, the Cambridge science festival, it's based out of the MIT museum has long had a relationship with um, the American University of Cairo and they've actually helped launch a Cairo science festival. Speaker 2: [00:06:30] And if you permit me a, a quick story on this, I still can't get over this email. I got one day. So one of our partners from San Diego went to Cairo to sort of help get it off the ground. I think there was about two and a half months after the Arab spring. Really took hold. And they're having, you know, a two day festival in, in the middle of Egypt. And they had all these students come and at the end of this big long day, they went up on the roof and set up some telescopes. So all of these, um, Egyptian [00:07:00] students who never looked through a telescope before in their life could look at the night sky and like, what's more elemental than that than just looking up and enjoying the universe that surrounds us. And they did that for a couple of hours or an astronomer there, and they looked down and from American University of Cairo, you can see Theresa Square and all of the people up on the roof. Speaker 2: Then join the protest that was happening in Tahrir square right after the astronomy viewing. We had one American colleague there and he sort of got swept up in the mob. He, [00:07:30] he's fine. But I still find that amazing how education, uh, cultural events can really mix to become part of like a, a greater movement. Uh, I thoroughly enjoy that. And if science can be an agent of just empowering people, especially in these nations where it's not celebrated or welcomed to have these kinds of ex exploits. That's the kind of thing that I want to be part of and and we should support in terms of exporting our, our, our talent and resources to those nations. Speaker 1: [inaudible] [00:08:00] you're listening to the spectrum on Calex Berkeley. We are talking today with Kishore Hari, the director of the bay area science festival, Speaker 2: the talks. I, I have [00:08:30] to stop and say that I'm a nerd. I am like 110% nerd and I love these rich conversations between intellectuals. Just really going at it about how x, y, or z was discovered. There's a conversation on November 2nd at the cal academy featuring two different neuroscientists talking about what will we ever understand the brain and one of the neuroscientists, Markram has developed something called the blue brain project, which maps [00:09:00] all of the processes that 10,000 neurons will do. That's only a small segment of the neurons in our brain, but how amazing is that just to understand fundamentally what's happening in your brain in that moment. And he's being joined by David Eagleman who is a neuroscientist at Baylor, who is most famous for studying synesthesia and our perception of time and memory, and I think his most famous experiment is where he dropped some of his Grad students 200 feet in free fall to see if they perceive time to go [00:09:30] slower in those moments of of heightened fright and they're going to discuss sort of the, with all of the advances in neuroscience, all the advances in our understanding of how the brain operates. Speaker 2: Is it something that we can ever really touch upon and say, we know how the brain works. We can construct an artificial brain that can operate on human, or is there something just beyond that that is innately human that is innately just us or innately me or, or any of you that can never [00:10:00] be replicated? That one that exciting to me because it's one of those, it's to me the brain is the, is the scientific frontier that, and then on the other side of the spectrum is, um, Peter Norvig from Google and Eric Horvitz from Microsoft are talking about artificial intelligence and where that's going. And Peter Norvig's, I'm sort of famous as he's the one that was running the Stanford Free AI course is pioneering some of the work with the driverless cars that you may have heard about. Eric Horvitz isn't, is no slouch in [00:10:30] his own right leader in the field talking about where this is going with everything from Watson, you know, beating the contestants on jeopardy to driverless cars, to all of those IBM ads that won't stop interrupting my football, watching about how to build a smarter planet. Speaker 2: Where is this actually going? Or can we actually build computer systems that can solve some of our greatest challenges, whether that is curing disease to, you know, understanding, uh, redistributing, distributing traffic. I think these [00:11:00] are fundamental questions and I think they're, again, poking at this big topic of the intersection of humanity and technology that I personally find fascinating. So those are the two that I would that jump off the page to me just from a straight, I'm a nerd perspective and have you drawn on other science festivals for inspiration? Drawn upon is a polite way to say that I have blatantly stolen ideas from other science festivals and I think that's actually probably [00:11:30] the reason that festivals are emerging so much more is that we have a little community, we call it the science festival alliance. It's a member community of all these science festivals and we talk to each other regularly and we give each other ideas and we steal them, we approve upon them. Speaker 2: Sometimes I steal ideas and I make them worse. But in any case, it's that basic ideas. Absolutely. We talked to each all the time about um, everything from events structure to how we work with our partners [00:12:00] to, to just basically venting to each other when we're up at three in the morning, still working on like production timelines and all sorts of fun stuff like that. But that's absolutely how we're innovating. Every community has its own personality and its own assets so they all take on a different flavor. But what's exciting to me is that doing this community community, you really see some different things emerge. I have a close collaborator at the Philadelphia Science Festival and we have a little bit of a rivalry going, a friendly rivalry. And [00:12:30] so this year I think she did two things that just blew, blew it out of the water that were just amazing. Speaker 2: One is she partnered with the Phillies and U Penn engineering constructed a robot to throw out a first pitch. So there are all these like 40,000 Philly fans are just like, Whoa, how am I going to a one-thirty game? And they, all of a sudden this robot gets wheeled out onto the field and like pitches something. And what was amazed, mindblowing about that. I was at that game with a colleague from Cambridge and we're sitting in the, in the upper deck [00:13:00] and there's this down-home Philly guy born and raised. He turned around and he was like, you know, I had a question about that robot. I turned around and I was like, are there any roboticists here? And there's this army of Penn engineers sitting like three rows back and they all stood up and were like, yeah, we're roboticists. And so like some guy that came to a Philly's baseball game was talking to a roboticists about something. Speaker 2: The best question he had, he's like that little bulb on the front of the robot. It looked like it had a camera. Did that actually do anything though? [00:13:30] No, that was decorative and I thought that was great. Then they fully admitted, they just put something on there to make it look cooler. That I thought was incredible. Philadelphia Science Festival had so many amazing things, but I was lucky to be part of their astronomy night and we're doing that here in the bay area as well. We have a astronomy night with 20 different locations that are hosting lectures and telescope viewings and planetarium shows, it'll be amazing. But when I was at the Philadelphia Knight, I went to this lecture by Guy Bluford first African American [00:14:00] in space, grew up in West Philly. So you went back to his west Philly neighborhood and gave a talk about, but how he got to be an astronaut and about the international space station. Speaker 2: And this was one of those perfect moments cause so he's giving this talk and he was talking to basically an audience of about 150 African American kids and, and their parents. And there was a woman that basically was just in the front row at the end was just almost in [00:14:30] tears because she's like, I've lived in this neighborhood my whole life. And sometimes we just need a hero. And if that's what it was, it, and it wasn't a sports player, it wasn't a politician, it wasn't, you know, just somebody, it was somebody that worked hard, that have a lot of pride in that neighborhood that came back. And so that went beyond to me. That was that community taking pride in one of their own, which we all should be able to do. And then the sort of beautiful end of [00:15:00] that night as he talked about the ISS and all of the kind of secret life of living on a spate sedation. Speaker 2: And we walked outside and there some telescopes set up in the, in the lot and the ISS actually passed overhead. And so everyone that got to hear him talk about it got to see the space station for the first time. And I don't know, but that was the first time I'd ever really looked at the space station. And it's like, you know, I hear about it on the news all the time, but there is a space station orbiting the earth [00:15:30] and there's like people in there that's just remarkable. And this guy had been on there and he was standing two feet from me and he, he was as humble as, as any one person could ever be. And just so excited to tell people about that discovery. And then lastly, I'm just a Simpsons nerd. And so there was a guy that gave a talk on science and the Simpsons during the festival. He wrote a book on it. His name's Paul Halpern. He's a professor at the University of Sciences in [00:16:00] Philadelphia and it was in the basement of a library. So it was the most sort of surprising location for Simpsons Hawk and it was full like on an 11 o'clock on a Tuesday. And all of these people asking all of these inane questions, those are ideas I've blatantly stolen. The reason I've stolen it is they're just incredibly brilliant. Speaker 1: [inaudible]Speaker 2: [00:16:30] you are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. We are talking with [inaudible] hiring director, bay area science semester Speaker 1: [inaudible].Speaker 2: You're really poking at those innovative events that do something a little different. And the ones that [00:17:00] strike to me around that is the fact that most of these events, a wide majority, I would say over 75% aren't happening on college campuses. They're not happening in places where science were traditionally housed. So I think about this science pub crawl that's coming on Friday the fourth to take over the mission district in San Francisco. So we have a a science author. His name is Carl Zimmer. He's famous for studying eco ly and microbes in your gut and he wrote this kind of comical book [00:17:30] called Science Inc that's a compendium of all of the great science tattoos people have sent pictures for and he's giving a talk at at a tattoo parlor. I don't think it's very often that you get much science at Tattoo Parlors. You start to see like how the community at large, every place you go when you get your coffee in the morning, when you go into Chotsky store, when you go just walking down the block, it's just surrounding you at all times and that I think is freaking awesome. Speaker 2: [00:18:00] I'm also excited because there's a, there's trainings that take real science experiments into the classroom and we've partnered with a teacher. He teaches a class on biology and within the class they're going to do a specific experiment where they trap bees within the community garden at the school and it's part of a larger experiment to understand how climate change and just you know, micro conditions within your environment are affecting the spread of pollinators. It's amazing that this is [00:18:30] typically taught by just a lecture in the classroom. I don't know about you but at 16 I certainly had no part in any published scientific study and the last one I'll bring up about this is a friend of mine last year piloted this project here in the bay area called science hack day that she formed a little committee of, of interested folks that basically brings together designers, developers and scientists to really hammer on big scientific datasets. It's November 12th and 13th the weekend after the festival, so it's [00:19:00] a post festival event. But the reason I'm so excited about it is 200 people, most of them never met before. Being basically locked into a room and working together just out of nothing and working on big scientific issues. Speaker 2: How did you first get into science and then science advocacy? So the science education route for me, I just call it science education. I have no other way to describe it. Aye owned the company for Awhile. I was a sort of successful [00:19:30] chemist I guess and it was fascinating and exciting because I was in sales and business and product development, all of these things and I realized after years of doing it I just had no real passion for it. Like it was never the thing that that got me up in the morning that drove me to jump to do and when I thought back on all of the things that sort of make me happy in life, one of the memories that always came [00:20:00] up is just be [inaudible] about science with my friends over beers and how that was just an agent of conversation is is science just like brought out the best in us? Speaker 2: We have these kinds of great conversations about where stuff was going and I realized that I was like, well, if that's what I really love to do when I become an agent of that instead of this sort of saying I enjoy it, and I was at a conference, it's the triple a s conference. It was the largest scientific [00:20:30] society at a conference here and I decided once I was just going to go, I was just going to go, go to sessions and joy myself. I know that's probably a little atypical for most people. Let's go to a big science conference and just drop into sessions, but I saw a flyer up about a science cafe and I was like, somebody is making a entire science theme cafe. That sounds great. I would go there all the time. That's not what it was at all. But I, I went to this mixer, I met this, this gentleman Ben, who was like, [00:21:00] who, we basically sat around for a couple hours talking about science over beers and I was like, so what's a science cafe? Speaker 2: And he was like, that's it. Except with a few more people. It's just people talking about science. There's scientists there and sort of ignites a conversation, but it's a sort of democracy thing. Like within a month I had started my own in the city and he just became the best part of my day when I was working on that project is getting all these people together, getting them to talk about different issues and how much learning can happen [00:21:30] in those situations and how hungry people were to learn about all of the great advancements. And I kept following that path and that led me to greater and greater involvement in sort of the marketplace, which is one creating a website, bay area science.org that just listed out all of the incredible science events that are happening and there's literally almost a hundred a week public signs events that are just happening around the bay area. Speaker 2: And I was like, what an incredible resource. I just sort of fell into this position [00:22:00] leading a festival and it was just an amazing opportunity where the, the whole premise was in, in Europe and in Asia, they have these big celebrations of science akin to arts and music festivals and they, they celebrate it like they do anything else. It's just an important part of culture and that couldn't have resonated more with me personally. So I went after that position. I luckily landed into it and here I am a year and a half later, [00:22:30] I wanted to know how you got interested in science personally in the first place. Oh, so all credit to the greatest scientist I've ever known my life, my dad, every morning, like clockwork, the guy was so disciplined at six in the morning, he'd be at his desk and he'd be just reading, not working, reading. He was always very disciplined, but more importantly within that discipline, he was like, there was just innate curiosity on how things work, all credit to him for igniting that [00:23:00] sense of just wonder within me and then just being spirited along by friends and teachers along the way. Speaker 2: I think we've all had a great, the memory of that continues to inspire us. I have to say like it, it all goes back to my dad. I can't thank him enough because it's open so many like doors in my life. It just wondering about stuff and and tinkering is probably some of the most enjoyment I have and now that I have a new son, I [00:23:30] just hope I can impart that same, same interest to him with the caveat that I hope he doesn't destroy my TV or alarm clock or any of those other things that I did back when I was a kid. What can other people who are interested in helping out with the festival do their volunteer opportunities up on our website, pay area, science.org there's a ton of volunteer opportunities. I need help endlessly, whether it be promoting the festival or being on site and helping out the day of. Speaker 2: Most importantly, [00:24:00] I want people to come and enjoy it and after they enjoy being part of the festival and want them to go home and continue that conversation with their loved ones, with their friends and family, that actually is probably the most important component here. I need help, so if you have time and energy and are excited about the science festival, please go sign up on the page. There are different opportunities available, but at the end of the day, I want people to enjoy it. I want people to experience something they've never seen seen before. I want people to take risks, go places that [00:24:30] they normally wouldn't go if you don't normally talk to a scientist, this is your week to finally meet and shake hands and talk with one. I always say the tagline for the festivals, unleash your inner scientists. I think that's what I want to see most from the community is just to get in touch with that, that spot of curiosity and wonder. That's innate in every human being and just go on and enjoy. Okay. Sure. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Speaker 1: [inaudible] [inaudible] [00:25:00] the music played during the show is written and performed by David lost [inaudible] from his album titled Folk and Acoustic [inaudible]. Thank you for listening to spectrum. We are happy to hear from listeners. If you have comments about the show, please send [00:25:30] 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. The [inaudible] [inaudible] [00:26:00] [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.