Podcasts about cookstoves

David Bank joins Brian Walsh to discuss some of the top stories from ImpactAlpha this week. Stories mentioned on the podcast: Texas boots Blackrock: https://impactalpha.com/texas-boots-blackrock-saddling-texans-with-the-costs-of-its-campaign-against-esg/ Clean cooking: https://impactalpha.com/leveraging-the-carbon-markets-for-clean-cooking-climate-justice-and-social-impact/ Vanguard gets punked: https://impactalpha.com/elaborate-spoof-takes-aim-at-vanguards-retreat-from-climate-commitments/⁠ Agents of Impact Call 60: https://impactalpha.com/calls/ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/impact-alpha/message

David Bank joins Brian Walsh to discuss some of the top stories from ImpactAlpha this week. Stories mentioned on the podcast: Texas boots Blackrock: ⁠https://impactalpha.com/texas-boots-blackrock-saddling-texans-with-the-costs-of-its-campaign-against-esg/⁠ Clean cooking: ⁠https://impactalpha.com/leveraging-the-carbon-markets-for-clean-cooking-climate-justice-and-social-impact/⁠ Vanguard gets punked: ⁠https://impactalpha.com/elaborate-spoof-takes-aim-at-vanguards-retreat-from-climate-commitments/⁠⁠ Agents of Impact Call 60: ⁠https://impactalpha.com/calls/⁠ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/this-week-in-impact/message

Upgrading stoves for people in the developing world could bring about a double win: improving people's lives while making a big contribution to fighting climate change. We follow along with Duke Professor Subhrendu Pattanayak on a research trip to rural Kenya, and are invited into people's homes to see how they cook, and what might make them change their methods. This is the fourth in our series Climate Change Solutions, a look at surprising answers to the question of what we can do to help cool a rapidly heating planet. Guest:  Subhrendu Pattanayak, Oak Foundation Distinguished Professor of Environmental and Energy Policy, Duke Sanford School of Public Policy Season 8 of Ways & Means is made possible thanks to support from the Office of the Provost at Duke University. Find out more about the Duke Climate Commitment.

Lisa M. Thompson, PhD, MS, RN, FNP, FAAN  is an environmental health scientist and an Associate Professor at Emory University, with appointments in the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing […]

On this episode, we conclude our series examining the work of Project Drawdown and its climate mitigation solutions, and discuss the additional benefits that arise from implementing many of them.

Millions of people still rely on solid fuel stoves for cooking and heating. Kelsey Bilsback joins us to discuss the impacts of this and whether "clean cookstoves" are the answer.

In rural Ethiopia women are more likely than men to collect firewood and cook over stoves that emit harmful smoke. Meanwhile, men are more likely than women to control how household income is spent. Accordingly, men are less likely than women to purchase improved cooking stoves that emit fewer pollutants while cooking. This is the case in rural Ethiopia and also across rural communities throughout much of the developing world.    Dr. Sied Hassan, sought to dig deeper into this phenomenon.  He designed an inventive field experiment to uncover the willingness of men versus the willingness of women to pay for an improved cookstove. Dr. Sied Hassan is a research fellow at Ethiopian Policy Studies institute, a think tank in Ethiopia. He discusses his experiment and the very big policy implications of his findings. We also discuss a related experiment in which he tested various methods to increase the willingness of rural households to pay for solar lighting.  Today’s episode is part of series of episodes that showcase the research and work of the Sustainable Energy Transitions Initiative. SETI is an interdisciplinary global collaborative that aims to foster research on energy access and energy transitions in low and middle-income countries. Currently, SETI is housed at Duke University, where it is led by Professors Subhrendu Pattanayak and Marc Jeuland. To learn more about SETI, follow them on Twitter @SETIenergy.  

For years, the global development community has struggled over the problem of dirty burning cookstoves. These are typically rudimentary stoves that burn wood or other biomass -- and in the process emit harmful smoke indoors. Nearly three billion people around the world cook their meals this way, leading to environmental damage and illness. Indoor air pollution attributed to dirty burning cookstoves kills millions of people each year. The solution to the problem of dirty cookstoves should be straightforward -- just replace cookstoves that emit harmful pollutants with cleaner burning, improved cookstoves. Indeed, there are a great variety of efficient and clean cookstoves available today. But so far, these improved cookstoves are not being used at anywhere near a scale commensurate with the problem. The solution might exist, but consumers are often not using these better cookstoves.  My guest today, Subhrendu Pattanayak, sought to learn why people who would benefit the most from improved cookstoves are not using them. He is the Oak Professor of Environmental and Energy Policy at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. In 2019, he published the results of a five year study with co-author Marc Jeuland of communities in rural India that offers some key insights into the barriers of increasing demand for cleaner burning cookstoves.   We discuss these findings at length in our conversation. Today’s episode is the first installment in a series of episodes that will be published over the next few months that showcase the research and work of the Sustainable Energy Transitions Initiative. SETI is an interdisciplinary global collaborative that aims to foster research on energy access and energy transitions in low- and middle-income countries. Since 2015, the network has expanded to include over 150 researchers, policymakers, and practitioners working in the field of energy from over 35 countries. Currently, SETI is housed at Duke University, where it is led by Professors Subhrendu Pattanayak and Marc Jeuland. SETI’s research addresses the most pressing energy challenges faced by low- and middle-income countries, from clean cooking in Senegal to micro-hydro power in Nepal to coal divestment in Chile. To learn more about SETI, follow them on Twitter @SETIenergy.

Lisa Thompson – researcher, educator, activist! Dr. Lisa M. Thompson, PhD, RN, FNP, FAAN is an Associate Professor at the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing at Emory University. She has spent the past 20 years working on research projects related to household air pollution in rural Guatemala. Air pollution from solid fuel cookstoves is […]

Lisa Thompson – researcher, educator, activist! Dr. Lisa M. Thompson, PhD, RN, FNP, FAAN is an Associate Professor at the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing at Emory University. She has spent the past 20 years working on research projects related to household air pollution in rural Guatemala. Air pollution from solid fuel cookstoves is […]

In this edition we talk with award winning social entrepreneur, Ron Bills, whose company, Envirofit Internationa,l develops technology that will reduce pollution and enhance energy efficiency in developing countries.

How much do we really embrace failure in the social sector? I ask this question because, as someone who has been lucky enough to be a part of the evaluation revolution over the past decade, embracing failure at an institutional level still remains elusive. Organizations and individuals alike still remain reluctant to lay bare the shortcomings of their efforts for a number of reasons that go well beyond just the fear of losing donor funding or having a black mark on your CV. Unfortunately, I’m not here today with a clear cut answer about how to embrace failure other than doing so ultimately requires the same focus and discipline that you would apply to any other skill. You must not specifically incorporate the recognition of failure into your planning and design, you must also be willing to practice it every day, ruthlessly. The good news is that, like so many other things, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that if you can create this discipline and practice in your life, you’ll learn faster, be more adaptable and, perhaps most importantly, the successes you do achieve will be that much sweeter. My guest for the 152nd Terms of Reference Podcast, Nithya Ramanathan, is someone who definitely embraces failure. So much so that the organization she co-founded, NexLeaf Analytics, recently published an article that enumerated the company’s failures for all the world to read about. Nexleaf focuses on how we can better use data to make a difference for those in need. More specifically, Nexleaf focuses on the use of low cost sensors to improve things like cold storage for vaccines or cookstoves for rural families, among many other applications. But, as you’ll hear in just a few minutes, while data is important for Nexleaf, it isn’t the true driving force behind their work. And this is where Nithya underscores in our conversation about the need to embrace failure and to continue to evolve your programs, processes and even yourself.

GUESTS: Christine Lakatos: The Green Corruption File—Hillary Clinton’s convoluted clean cookstove campaign; Paul Driessen: Author Eco-Imperialism, Green Power, Black Death—the Greens always want to help the Third World, but just not too much; Ray Smith: EnterGas LLC—Personal experience with propane cookstoves; David Kreutzer: Sr. Research Fellow in Energy Economics and Climate Change at The Heritage Foundation-- The Green Energy Goal That Is Condemning Many to Prolonged Poverty.

How have recent terrorist attacks affected US policy and our own everyday life?

What is combustion? What happens when wood burns? Learn about the chemistry of combustion in this animated explainer. This Science Spotlight video is part of our Engineering Is: Saving the World with Cookstoves e-book, and is a companion to our Darfur Stoves Project video. The e-book tells the story of how Professor Ashok Gadgil and his team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory designed a cookstove to help internally displaced persons in Darfur. They are now working on designing a new wood-burning stove to reduce indoor air pollution. The e-book includes videos, interactives and media making opportunities that explore the science and engineering principles behind this project.

Women living in the refugee camps of Darfur, Sudan must walk for up to seven hours to collect firewood for cooking, putting them at risk for violent attacks. Alternately, they must sell precious food for fuel. But researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have engineered a more efficient wood-stove, which is greatly reducing the women's need for firewood and the threats against them. This video is part of a series, Engineering Is Saving the World with Cookstoves. Find all of our e-books at kqed.org/ebooks.

Meet Dr. Vi Rapp. She is a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She has a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering and focuses her research on improving combustion and combustion systems. As part of her job she is working on designing a cleaner, more efficient cookstove. This Career Spotlight video is part of our Engineering Is: Saving the World with Cookstoves e-book, which tells the story of how Professor Ashok Gadgil and his team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory designed a cookstove to help internally displaced persons in Darfur. The e-book includes videos, interactives and text that explore the science and engineering principles behind this project. Find all of our e-books @ kqed.org/ebooks.

Note: This episode was recorded last year and is missing some content. It has been uploaded as the podcast is relaunching. Clean cookstoves are cooking instruments designed to save fuel, improve health, empower women, and protect the environment. They are rarely mentioned in the same breath as China-Africa relations, but in this episode, host Winslow Robertson has two clean cookstove experts connect the two topics. Jichong Wu, China Program Manager at the United Nations Foundation and Yiting Wang, Program Development Manager at WWF-China, both share their histories with clean cookstoves as well as explain how those stoves fit into the China-Africa relationship.

Nicholas McConnell, PhD candidate in Astrophysics at UCB summer 2012, and Jeff Silverman, PhD of Astrophysics from UCB in 2011, part one of three, talk about exoplanets and the search for water in the universe. To help analyze data www.galaxyzoo.org or www.planethunters.orgTranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next [inaudible]. Welcome to spectrum science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, [00:00:30] a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 2: Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm joined today by spectrum contributors, Rick Karnofsky and Lisa Katovich. Our interview is with Jeff Silverman, a recent phd in astrophysics from UC Berkeley and Nicholas McConnell, a phd candidate unscheduled to be awarded his phd in astrophysics by UC Berkeley this summer. [00:01:00] Jeff and Nicholas have generously agreed to help spectrum present three shows on astronomy, explaining the big ideas, recent experiments, international collaborations and improvements and observations on technology that are transforming astronomy. In part one we discuss extra solar planets known as exoplanets and the search for liquid water in the universe. Nicholas McConnell and Jeff Silverman. Welcome to spectrum. Thanks for having us do. You're both astronomers. Yup. And today you're going to talk with us about [00:01:30] what's been happening in astronomy in say, the past five years that really stands out for you. That's very salient that you think's important. Nicholas, why don't you bring up the first topic that we're going to discuss here? Speaker 2: Sure. Well, there are many things to choose from, but for me, one of the most exciting things that I think has been happening is that over the last two or three years, thanks mostly to a NASA satellite called the Kepler mission. Astronomers have been discovering literally thousands of new planets orbiting other stars, uh, in our own galaxy every year. [00:02:00] And one particularly exciting discovery that happened in December, 2011 was we found a planet around another star that appeared to be in the so called habitable zone of that planet. The zone where the distance from the star was appropriate that the temperature on the planet could possibly be not too cold and not too hot to have liquid water. And how much of that exoplanet research is done here in the bay area? Quite a large amount. There's a large healthy exoplanet team in the UC Berkeley Astronomy Department, [00:02:30] and many scientists here are heavily involved in the Kepler mission besides this planet in the habitable zone. Speaker 2: Like Nicholas mentioned, thousands of planets have been discovered by this Kepler mission of all shapes and sizes from nearly earth size to Uranus and Neptune size. Did you put her in a little bit bigger orbiting their stars that are sun-like sometimes a little bit smaller, sometimes a little bit bigger than the sun at various distances. There's maybe a couple of examples where we've seen a system of a few planets that sort [00:03:00] of mimic the sizes of planets in our solar system at some of the distances, but most of these planets are found very close to their host star. Nothing like what we see in our own solar system, things that are the size of Jupiter and Saturn that are orbiting even closer than mercury. And so this is a huge weird question that's outstanding. People are trying to figure out how do you make these systems, how do you make these planetary systems and why are they so prevalent and so different from what we know in our own solar system. Speaker 2: And are there some sort of limitations to the [00:03:30] finding techniques to, to locate these planets that might sort of bias you towards finding these large close planets spoken like a true scientist? Yes, we are absolutely biased to find big planets that are very close to their stars. So the first handful of planets that were found were very big. These so-called hot Jupiters, very big Jupiter sized planets near their stars. We are definitely biased by the techniques to find these kinds of planets. Capillary is doing a bit of a better job finding smaller planets, finding them further out. And so we're getting into a point [00:04:00] in time where we're close to being able to find similar looking systems to the solar system, bigger planets further out earth planets around the distance of earth from the sun and we're not really finding them as often as you might expect. Speaker 2: And so it does seem still that even taking into account some of this bias that our solar system is a bit of an oddball now that's certainly may change in the next few years. This is a huge fast moving field, but right now we're still an odd ball. Yeah. I have to say that the, the Kepler mission was designed [00:04:30] so that over the course of the missions lifetime, which was roughly a three year time period, starting maybe 2010 and going through 2013 or so, it was designed so that over that period it could detect a planet, maybe twice the size of our earth but orbiting at star at the same distance that the earth orbits the sun. So capillary is definitely doing a better job than previous missions, finding planets that aren't quite as small as earth but are getting down in that region where we can say this plant is actually fairly similar to the planet earth. Speaker 2: And because we're now simply becoming [00:05:00] able to start to find planets like this, we can begin to say things about how common are earth like planets relative to these hot Jupiters that Jeff was talking about before when we had only detected the hot Jupiters, there was nothing we could say about their relative abundance in the universe compared to planets like the earth was their technology. And Kepler that made this possible. Was there a breakthrough somehow in the, the instrument? The thing Kepler does is it measures the brightness coming from a star [00:05:30] over and over and over again. Uh, and what happens is that if a planet passes in front of the star along the line of sight to Earth, it blocks a little bit of the disk of the star. And so the star gets very slightly fatter. But these differences in the stars brightness are smaller than a percent. Speaker 2: And so in order to pick out that signal that you need to have an instrument that can measure the brightness of a star very, very accurately, repeatedly over and over again and simply by having it outside ears, atmosphere, having it in space and all of the different instrumental [00:06:00] things they did inside that satellite enables Kepler to measure stellar brightnesses with more precision than any instrument that we'd done this for previously. Another interesting piece of technology that was something that they had to tackle. And it's still sort of one of the limitations actually of Kepler, is because you're measuring the brightness of thousands of stars many, many times over and over and over again. That's a huge amount of data, just pure raw pictures that you have floating on a spacecraft and you need to beam those down to earth, to big computers to hold those. Speaker 2: And so [00:06:30] one of the biggest limitations from my understanding is just the bandwidth. It is hard to move that ms send that many, you know, picture files basically from space down, you know, different satellites to big data centers on earth. And so they kind of do it in big bursts and in chunks and they only take certain subsets of the pictures of different stars. Very, very close, a little snapshot, postage stamps right around each of the stars that they're monitoring. And it's still huge amounts of data. Uh, and so this has been a big breakthrough for a number of different [00:07:00] astronomy discoveries, is the large amount of data being able to move it through the Internet, through fiber optics and storing it and going through it in a fast, efficient way. Do you know if there's any kind of preliminary data analysis actually on the coupler? Speaker 2: I'm not completely sure, but there is some, as far as I know, a basic calibrations and, and basic work that it does before it sends down some of the products. But looking, as Nicholas said, for these very slight amounts of dimming in the stars takes a lot of computing power [00:07:30] and fancy algorithms that are run on big machines back on earth. And one of the really interesting things that's actually been done with the Keppra or data is after this processing, after you have, um, sort of your reduced scientific measurements. Um, recently these data have been put on the Internet so that by crowdsourcing people can go, ah, I think the website is called Kepler Zoo. And look at the period, the, the patterns of brightness versus time for all of these different stars. Um, and humans can try to find patterns that the best computer algorithms have failed to find. Um, and [00:08:00] I think there is a space of patterns that computers don't do very well at, but humans are better at. Um, so we're using the public to try to get more planets, uh, than when we, we'd be able to do just the astronomy community by itself. Speaker 1: [inaudible] this is spectrum on k l x Berkeley. We are talking about exoplanets with Jeff Silverman and Nicholas McConnell [00:08:30] reflecting on coupler. How do you, Speaker 2: I think it's changed your worldview. The entire subfield and astronomy have of exoplanets. Planets around other stars effectively didn't exist until the mid to late nineties. So when I was in elementary school, it was nice to think about planets on around other stars and see it in the movies. But it was very scifi. Speaker 3: Fast forward to to mean in college, in the early two thousands [00:09:00] taking astronomy classes, astronomers had discovered a handful of these exoplanets. And I distinctly remember one of my professors saying, you know, we found a few, we're going to find some more in the future. One day you'll pick up the newspaper and the front page will be a picture of an exoplanet. And sure enough, a few years ago, Berkeley astronomers took a picture of an exoplanet and it made the front page newspaper. Uh, and I'll never forget seeing that picture on the front page of the newspaper, just like my professor in college predicted. This is a very fast moving field. We're going to find even more planets earth-like [00:09:30] around sunlight stars that could very well have liquid water. It'll possibly be not that rare to have an earth-like planet in the very near future. Personally, to me, I think it's great. It makes me hope that perhaps we can find an exact earth analog around a sun analog and perhaps there is intelligent life or some kind of life that we can find. And I think an amazing thing that astronomers can do for the world. Speaker 4: I think with the discovery of planets that are similar [00:10:00] to Earth or at least about the same sizes, or we're beginning to go from detecting one, then a couple to actually doing decent statistics where we can project how many have planets about the same size of earth exist, say in our galaxy. I tried to do a very, very rough calculation this morning. If you ask how many earth sized planets are there in the Milky Way, I think the answer is there's probably about a billion or a couple billion. And so I think that's just another interesting way of looking at how [00:10:30] earth is not necessarily unique environment in the universe, but just as we have so much diversity here on earth than in our galaxy. We have evidence now that there is space and room to have as much diversity possibly throughout our galaxy. So I think we really are getting a profound sense of just what kind of environment we have for possibly life and for different conditions, not only in our own solar system, but in this much larger piece of the universe that we're [00:11:00] only beginning to explore. Speaker 5: [inaudible]Speaker 6: you're listening to spectrum on k a l x, Berkeley. We are talking about astrophysics with Nicholas McConnell and Jeff Silverman. Speaker 5: [inaudible]Speaker 3: let's talk about water in the universe. So we've found quite a bit of water [00:11:30] in the universe, oddly enough, sort of starting on the biggest scales. There's, there's some nebulae, some clusters of gas and particles out in the universe that are huge reservoirs of water and sort of related huge reservoirs of alcohols, ethanol's, things like that. Coming a little bit closer to home and looking a little bit more recently. In the past maybe five or 10 years, there's been quite a few new detections, new possible detections, new lines of evidence of liquid water, ice water in our solar system in very interesting [00:12:00] places. One, the moon of Saturn known as, and Solidus is a very shiny, very bright object. It's very, very white, snowy, clean looking objects. A handful of craters have much less cratered than our own moon, a little smaller than our moon as well. Speaker 3: But it had some weird features to it. It looks kind of neat. And so the the Cassini spacecraft, which has been around exploring Saturn and its moon systems and its ring system for the past decade or so, did a few very close flybys of this very interesting moon in solidus [00:12:30] figured out that most of the surface is solid ice water, ice, ammonia, hydrocarbons, stuff as well. Also notice that there were geysers coming off of the surface, which we've seen geysers on a couple of other moons of Jupiter and Saturn, but these were kind of interesting and Cassini was there and we lucked out and Cassini actually flew through one of these geysers and got to detect the particles from the geyser itself, right? They're very direct institute measurements of what's in the guys there and it was mostly water and some ammonia, which was [00:13:00] interesting. And then there's evidence that there was actually more organic compounds in there and so possibly there, this could lead to life. Speaker 3: There could be some kind of bacteria down in the innards of in solidus. That's sort of pushing a a little bit, sort of the next step beyond what the evidence is actually telling us. But it's very, very tantalizing. Just about four or five years ago, a NASA panel on moons and moon explorations in the solar system said that in Solidus is probably the best possibility [00:13:30] for current life outside of earth in our own solar system. And the idea is that underneath this sort of very smooth, icy surface, there's probably a liquid ocean, mostly water, maybe a little bit of salt water, like I said, a little ammonia, some organic compounds, perhaps probably not gray whales and great white sharks. Probably not even little fish and shrimp, but it seems reasonable that there could be microscopic organisms, some kind of life, you know, to be determined. Speaker 3: But it's possible. [00:14:00] There's liquid water, there's reasonable conditions. It's not too salty, it's not too acidic, it's not too hot. And there does seem to be at least the building blocks, some of these organic compounds, perhaps one outstanding issue is how thick is this outer ice layer. So there's been some ideas of what we should send another mission that's just going to drill in there and it had the little submarine and go look around for fish and organisms, but we don't actually have a great handle on how thick that ice layer is. Uh, so Cassini is continuing to study this moon along with the [00:14:30] rest of the stuff in the Saturn system. Other moons, the planet itself, the Rings, uh, and we'll hopefully learn a little bit more about it, but they're already in the works, uh, both NASA, Japanese and European missions to go explore in salad. It's even more now if you want to go a little bit closer than Enceladus, one of the most promising planets areas in our solar system where Speaker 4: people have thought about the possibility of liquid water, where we certainly know that frozen water exists and where we have a headstart on [00:15:00] objects actually on the surface exploring is the planet Mars. And there've been some recent discoveries about both water in the past history of Mars and possibly salty liquid water, actually existing present day on Mars that are fueling a lot of excitement in the scientific community. Right now we have two different kinds of instruments that are doing fantastic observations of Mars. One of them is called the Mars or condescends orbiter. It is a satellite in orbit around Mars that can take fantastically detailed [00:15:30] photographs of the Martian surface. You can see features about a few feet across on the Martian surface with the satellite and then the other are the famous Mars Rovers. Spirit and opportunity spirit recently shut down, met its demise even though these two rovers outlasted their nominal mission timeline by a factor of 10 or so, Opportunity is still exploring the Martian surface and in both cases, instruments have found evidence for water on Mars. Speaker 4: In the case of opportunity. The rover fairly recently [00:16:00] discovered this mineral vein in a rock in a crater on Mars that scientists are pretty certain, could only have been created by liquid water flowing through a crack in the rocket, some ancient time and marches history and creating this particular mineral known as gypsum in certain variances what we use to make plaster of Paris here on Earth. So there is evidence that in particular Martian environments, there was almost certainly liquid water on Mars in the past. Combine that with theoretical models of how the planet and its atmosphere would have evolved over time. [00:16:30] And there are some pictures of ancient Mars being this sort of lush liquid water, much warmer environment than it is today. And so possibly Mars in its past was a hospitable environment for life. Although I'll emphasize we've, we have not yet detected any evidence of present day or fossilized life on Mars, but frankly, we haven't explored a very large fraction of that planet yet. Speaker 4: So I wouldn't be entirely surprised if some discovery came along in the future. Another very, very interesting observation on Mars coming [00:17:00] from the Mars reconnaissance orbiter is that looking over time at the edges of some of the craters on Mars in the warm seasons, they actually found stream like features that looked like dark streams were appearing on the edges of craters and over the course of the warm season as these craters were being more exposed to the sun and warming up a little bit, the streams lengthen as you might expect, little trickles of liquid water to flow downhill and based on mineral analysis which you can do using spectroscopy [00:17:30] from the orbiter and just generally the overall pattern of how these streams change with the seasons. We think that's good evidence that some sort of salty water was creating the streams. Unfortunately we were not able to directly detect water. What we see, it looks more to be like residue from a salt water stream where the water evaporated or where the water is just below the surface. But it seems that in certain seasons and certain places of the planet, there could actually be water and liquid form just at the surface or just below the surface [00:18:00] of Mars today. I mean if you have salt water on Mars, then I think there's at least some chance that you could have some kind of primitive life forum thriving in it. [inaudible] Speaker 3: it's been amazing in the last few years using the orbiter and the rovers on Mars, the different lines of evidence that we have for this ice, either on the surface or just below the surface centimeters below the surface, inches below the surface. And so NASA just recently launched a mission to head to Mars and even bigger rover, something like the size of a small car [00:18:30] that's going to go around and specifically look for water, look for organic molecules, building blocks of life in different parts than where we've already explored on Mars. Speaker 4: And that rover is called curiosity and it's supposed to land on the Martian surface this summer. Is there water on the moon? Our Moon, there is water on the moon in the form of hydrous molecules, so where water is directly incorporated into a solid rock, but I don't think there's any evidence for frozen or liquid water on the moon, [00:19:00] certainly not liquid water. Speaker 5: [inaudible]Speaker 4: can you reflect on the importance of water being discovered in our solar system or in some other solar system or galaxy? Speaker 2: Clearly on earth, water is essential [00:19:30] for all life forms and so whereas there are ideas about exotic kinds of life that could exist without our requirement of having water. It certainly seems like the most natural place to start looking for life outside of our own planet. So knowing that it exists in liquid form in different places in the universe and knowing Lisa in our own solar system where it exists is I think a really good start toward actually doing an Ernest search for life outside earth, maybe in our own solar system. [00:20:00] And I think just knowing how much water there actually is in our universe makes it seem like the universe is maybe a friendlier place than we thought it was. Okay. Speaker 3: One of the basic questions in astronomy of humanity, one of the things that got me interested in astronomy originally was are we alone in the universe? Is there life out there in the solar system, in our galaxy, and looking for water is probably the best way, the most direct way to find where that life could be. Being able to go visit Mars, the Moon, various [00:20:30] moons in our own solar system. Looking for that life in the water or around the water, I think is is something that's a fundamental question for all humankind, not just scientists and astronomers. Speaker 7: That ends one, Jeff Silverman and Nicholas McConnell. We'll be back with part two on our next show. We'll talk about Super Novi and black holes. Rick Karnofsky and Lisa Catholic joined me [00:21:00] for the calendar and the new black hole, Speaker 8: the harmonic oscillators of the 21st century presented by Andrew Strom and dear professor of physics, Harvard University, Monday, March 12th at four 15 to 5:30 PM La Conte Hall Room Number One in the 20th century. Many problems across all of physics were solved by perturb native methods which reduce them to harmonic oscillators. Black holes are poised to play a similar role for the problems of 21st century physics. They are at once [00:21:30] the simplest and most complex objects in the physical universe. Professors durometer will give an introduction to the subject intended for a general audience Speaker 9: daily and Nardo art science evening rendezvous or laser is a monthly series of lectures, presentations, and networking between artists and scientists. This month, laser is on Monday, March 12th at the [inaudible] room of the front building at the University of San Francisco to one 30 zero Fulton Street. It is free, but [00:22:00] please RSVP to p at [inaudible] dot com the event starts at seven with a talk by [inaudible] Viskontas on the art and neuroscience of effective music performance. What is it about this art form that draws people in? What distinguishes a performance that is technically accurate but unmusical from one that elicits the chills. We will explore how music engages the brain and why it continues to be a worldwide addiction. This will be followed by Rebecca Cayman's talk, making the invisible visible [00:22:30] discoveries between art and science, the history of artists as scientists and scientists as artists will be shared drying from the collections of the American philosophical society and the Chemical Heritage Foundation. The development of new art science collaborations will also be discussed. Shawmut caught true of the Stanford Physics Department. We'll speak on are there more dimensions of space which we'll discuss how the extra dimensions proposed by some models such as string theory may explain and unify puzzles [00:23:00] of modern physics. The night we'll conclude with Scott killed doll and Nathaniel stern who will discuss beaming Twitter messages to glaze five eight one D and exoplanet 20 light years away that can support extra terrestrial life using DIY technology. The website for laser is www.leonardo.info Speaker 8: the creative destruction of medicine Wednesday, March 14th at 6:00 PM at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco on the second [00:23:30] floor of five 95 market street, Eric Topol, MD, director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, Co founder and vice chairman of the West Wireless Health Institute and author of the creative destruction of medicine. Dr Topol says that is poised to go through its biggest shakeup in history and unprecedented convergence of technologies such as the ability to digitize human genomes and the invention of wireless tools is gaining momentum, thrusting the medical field into the digital era. Tickets are $20 [00:24:00] for general public, $8 for members and $7 for students. Speaker 9: Ask a scientist is hosting a puzzle party on Pi Day Wednesday, March 14th at 7:00 PM this is a math and logic puzzle competition for teams of up to six people. It is free, but you're encouraged to support the venue by purchasing foods and or drinks. The winning team will get a round of drinks and an overwhelming sense of pride. Bring a jacket in case there is overflow onto the sidewalk of the bizarre [00:24:30] cafe. Five nine two seven California at 21st in San Francisco visit. Ask a scientist sf.com for more info. Speaker 7: Yeah, Speaker 6: the March Science at cal lecture will be given at 11:00 AM on Saturday, March 17th in the genetics and plant biology building room 100 the talk will be given by Dr Hazel Bane and is entitled The Sun a star in our own backyard. Dr Bain is a post doc with the Ruben Rahmati high energy spectroscopic [00:25:00] solar imager solar physics group at the Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley. Her main area of research involves studying solar eruptive events such as flares, jets, and coronal mass ejections using both space and ground-based instruments. In describing her talk, Dr Bane said the stars in the night sky have always been a source of intrigue and wonder with our very own star at the center of our solar system, the sun offers us a unique [00:25:30] opportunity to study the inner workings of these giant balls of plasma. Starting at the core, I will discuss the processes occurring at the different layers of the sun onto news. Speaker 9: The four mile long t veteran particle accelerator at Chicago's Fermi lab was closed in September, 2011 after being one of the most powerful accelerators for 20 years, but in analyzing 500 trillion subatomic particles, Asians from the CDF and DCO, the team says that they may [00:26:00] have generated about a thousand Higgs Bosons the particle that is responsible for mass in the standard model of physics in a previous episode of spectrum that you can download from iTunes you, we interviewed Dr Simoni Pig Ingreso about the hunt for the Higgs. The probability of these measurements being due to a statistical fluke instead of the measurements of the Higgs is about one in 30 or about 2.2 sigma. This is well below the one chance in 3.5 million or five sigma that will be used to claim the actual discovery of the Higgs. [00:26:30] The energy of the detected events is between 115 billion and 135 billion electron volts, which is in good agreement with the range of 124 billion electron volts to 126 billion electron volts that turns large. Hadron collider established with 3.6 sigma certainty. The large Hadron collider is on winter break, but we'll be fixed up again in April to continue trying to find the Higgs with five sigma certainty. Speaker 8: The Cal Energy Corp is offering internships [00:27:00] around the world from Brazil to Germany to Ghana, to China, as well as in the bay area. During the summer of 2012 internships will offer UC Berkeley undergraduates the opportunity to pursue challenging hands on projects and energy and climate research. According to the office of the vice chancellor for research among the projects, cal energy core interns will be involved in our efforts to create green coal as industrial fuel, helping to produce biofuels, working on improving photovoltaics for integration into the [00:27:30] electricity grid, building models to better understand climate change and designing and testing. Cookstoves. The internship program provides a $600 weekly stipend for all interns as well as funding to cover transportation and housing. All placements are full time, more information and application forms are available at the cow energy core website. Speaker 9: Yeah, Speaker 6: explaining science to an 11 year old. The flame challenge sponsored by the Center for communicating science is an attempt to reach the very core of [00:28:00] science communication. The contest asks scientists and generally clever people to submit their own explanations of what a flame is, explanations that would captivate an 11 year old. The flame challenge contest is open for entries between March 2nd and April 2nd with the winners to be announced in June. Entries can be in writing, video or graphics and they can be playful or serious as long as they are accurate and connect with the young judges. For more information and entry [00:28:30] forms, visit the challenge website. Flame challenge.org Speaker 7: [inaudible] music curse during the show goes by on Donna David [inaudible] on for his album title folk and acoustic [00:29:00] just made available by creative Commons license 3.0 contribution. [inaudible]. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show [inaudible] [00:29:30] to our email address is [inaudible] means in two weeks. It's Speaker 6: the same Speaker 5: [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Nicholas McConnell, PhD candidate in Astrophysics at UCB summer 2012, and Jeff Silverman, PhD of Astrophysics from UCB in 2011, part one of three, talk about exoplanets and the search for water in the universe. To help analyze data www.galaxyzoo.org or www.planethunters.orgTranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next [inaudible]. Welcome to spectrum science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, [00:00:30] a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 2: Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm joined today by spectrum contributors, Rick Karnofsky and Lisa Katovich. Our interview is with Jeff Silverman, a recent phd in astrophysics from UC Berkeley and Nicholas McConnell, a phd candidate unscheduled to be awarded his phd in astrophysics by UC Berkeley this summer. [00:01:00] Jeff and Nicholas have generously agreed to help spectrum present three shows on astronomy, explaining the big ideas, recent experiments, international collaborations and improvements and observations on technology that are transforming astronomy. In part one we discuss extra solar planets known as exoplanets and the search for liquid water in the universe. Nicholas McConnell and Jeff Silverman. Welcome to spectrum. Thanks for having us do. You're both astronomers. Yup. And today you're going to talk with us about [00:01:30] what's been happening in astronomy in say, the past five years that really stands out for you. That's very salient that you think's important. Nicholas, why don't you bring up the first topic that we're going to discuss here? Speaker 2: Sure. Well, there are many things to choose from, but for me, one of the most exciting things that I think has been happening is that over the last two or three years, thanks mostly to a NASA satellite called the Kepler mission. Astronomers have been discovering literally thousands of new planets orbiting other stars, uh, in our own galaxy every year. [00:02:00] And one particularly exciting discovery that happened in December, 2011 was we found a planet around another star that appeared to be in the so called habitable zone of that planet. The zone where the distance from the star was appropriate that the temperature on the planet could possibly be not too cold and not too hot to have liquid water. And how much of that exoplanet research is done here in the bay area? Quite a large amount. There's a large healthy exoplanet team in the UC Berkeley Astronomy Department, [00:02:30] and many scientists here are heavily involved in the Kepler mission besides this planet in the habitable zone. Speaker 2: Like Nicholas mentioned, thousands of planets have been discovered by this Kepler mission of all shapes and sizes from nearly earth size to Uranus and Neptune size. Did you put her in a little bit bigger orbiting their stars that are sun-like sometimes a little bit smaller, sometimes a little bit bigger than the sun at various distances. There's maybe a couple of examples where we've seen a system of a few planets that sort [00:03:00] of mimic the sizes of planets in our solar system at some of the distances, but most of these planets are found very close to their host star. Nothing like what we see in our own solar system, things that are the size of Jupiter and Saturn that are orbiting even closer than mercury. And so this is a huge weird question that's outstanding. People are trying to figure out how do you make these systems, how do you make these planetary systems and why are they so prevalent and so different from what we know in our own solar system. Speaker 2: And are there some sort of limitations to the [00:03:30] finding techniques to, to locate these planets that might sort of bias you towards finding these large close planets spoken like a true scientist? Yes, we are absolutely biased to find big planets that are very close to their stars. So the first handful of planets that were found were very big. These so-called hot Jupiters, very big Jupiter sized planets near their stars. We are definitely biased by the techniques to find these kinds of planets. Capillary is doing a bit of a better job finding smaller planets, finding them further out. And so we're getting into a point [00:04:00] in time where we're close to being able to find similar looking systems to the solar system, bigger planets further out earth planets around the distance of earth from the sun and we're not really finding them as often as you might expect. Speaker 2: And so it does seem still that even taking into account some of this bias that our solar system is a bit of an oddball now that's certainly may change in the next few years. This is a huge fast moving field, but right now we're still an odd ball. Yeah. I have to say that the, the Kepler mission was designed [00:04:30] so that over the course of the missions lifetime, which was roughly a three year time period, starting maybe 2010 and going through 2013 or so, it was designed so that over that period it could detect a planet, maybe twice the size of our earth but orbiting at star at the same distance that the earth orbits the sun. So capillary is definitely doing a better job than previous missions, finding planets that aren't quite as small as earth but are getting down in that region where we can say this plant is actually fairly similar to the planet earth. Speaker 2: And because we're now simply becoming [00:05:00] able to start to find planets like this, we can begin to say things about how common are earth like planets relative to these hot Jupiters that Jeff was talking about before when we had only detected the hot Jupiters, there was nothing we could say about their relative abundance in the universe compared to planets like the earth was their technology. And Kepler that made this possible. Was there a breakthrough somehow in the, the instrument? The thing Kepler does is it measures the brightness coming from a star [00:05:30] over and over and over again. Uh, and what happens is that if a planet passes in front of the star along the line of sight to Earth, it blocks a little bit of the disk of the star. And so the star gets very slightly fatter. But these differences in the stars brightness are smaller than a percent. Speaker 2: And so in order to pick out that signal that you need to have an instrument that can measure the brightness of a star very, very accurately, repeatedly over and over again and simply by having it outside ears, atmosphere, having it in space and all of the different instrumental [00:06:00] things they did inside that satellite enables Kepler to measure stellar brightnesses with more precision than any instrument that we'd done this for previously. Another interesting piece of technology that was something that they had to tackle. And it's still sort of one of the limitations actually of Kepler, is because you're measuring the brightness of thousands of stars many, many times over and over and over again. That's a huge amount of data, just pure raw pictures that you have floating on a spacecraft and you need to beam those down to earth, to big computers to hold those. Speaker 2: And so [00:06:30] one of the biggest limitations from my understanding is just the bandwidth. It is hard to move that ms send that many, you know, picture files basically from space down, you know, different satellites to big data centers on earth. And so they kind of do it in big bursts and in chunks and they only take certain subsets of the pictures of different stars. Very, very close, a little snapshot, postage stamps right around each of the stars that they're monitoring. And it's still huge amounts of data. Uh, and so this has been a big breakthrough for a number of different [00:07:00] astronomy discoveries, is the large amount of data being able to move it through the Internet, through fiber optics and storing it and going through it in a fast, efficient way. Do you know if there's any kind of preliminary data analysis actually on the coupler? Speaker 2: I'm not completely sure, but there is some, as far as I know, a basic calibrations and, and basic work that it does before it sends down some of the products. But looking, as Nicholas said, for these very slight amounts of dimming in the stars takes a lot of computing power [00:07:30] and fancy algorithms that are run on big machines back on earth. And one of the really interesting things that's actually been done with the Keppra or data is after this processing, after you have, um, sort of your reduced scientific measurements. Um, recently these data have been put on the Internet so that by crowdsourcing people can go, ah, I think the website is called Kepler Zoo. And look at the period, the, the patterns of brightness versus time for all of these different stars. Um, and humans can try to find patterns that the best computer algorithms have failed to find. Um, and [00:08:00] I think there is a space of patterns that computers don't do very well at, but humans are better at. Um, so we're using the public to try to get more planets, uh, than when we, we'd be able to do just the astronomy community by itself. Speaker 1: [inaudible] this is spectrum on k l x Berkeley. We are talking about exoplanets with Jeff Silverman and Nicholas McConnell [00:08:30] reflecting on coupler. How do you, Speaker 2: I think it's changed your worldview. The entire subfield and astronomy have of exoplanets. Planets around other stars effectively didn't exist until the mid to late nineties. So when I was in elementary school, it was nice to think about planets on around other stars and see it in the movies. But it was very scifi. Speaker 3: Fast forward to to mean in college, in the early two thousands [00:09:00] taking astronomy classes, astronomers had discovered a handful of these exoplanets. And I distinctly remember one of my professors saying, you know, we found a few, we're going to find some more in the future. One day you'll pick up the newspaper and the front page will be a picture of an exoplanet. And sure enough, a few years ago, Berkeley astronomers took a picture of an exoplanet and it made the front page newspaper. Uh, and I'll never forget seeing that picture on the front page of the newspaper, just like my professor in college predicted. This is a very fast moving field. We're going to find even more planets earth-like [00:09:30] around sunlight stars that could very well have liquid water. It'll possibly be not that rare to have an earth-like planet in the very near future. Personally, to me, I think it's great. It makes me hope that perhaps we can find an exact earth analog around a sun analog and perhaps there is intelligent life or some kind of life that we can find. And I think an amazing thing that astronomers can do for the world. Speaker 4: I think with the discovery of planets that are similar [00:10:00] to Earth or at least about the same sizes, or we're beginning to go from detecting one, then a couple to actually doing decent statistics where we can project how many have planets about the same size of earth exist, say in our galaxy. I tried to do a very, very rough calculation this morning. If you ask how many earth sized planets are there in the Milky Way, I think the answer is there's probably about a billion or a couple billion. And so I think that's just another interesting way of looking at how [00:10:30] earth is not necessarily unique environment in the universe, but just as we have so much diversity here on earth than in our galaxy. We have evidence now that there is space and room to have as much diversity possibly throughout our galaxy. So I think we really are getting a profound sense of just what kind of environment we have for possibly life and for different conditions, not only in our own solar system, but in this much larger piece of the universe that we're [00:11:00] only beginning to explore. Speaker 5: [inaudible]Speaker 6: you're listening to spectrum on k a l x, Berkeley. We are talking about astrophysics with Nicholas McConnell and Jeff Silverman. Speaker 5: [inaudible]Speaker 3: let's talk about water in the universe. So we've found quite a bit of water [00:11:30] in the universe, oddly enough, sort of starting on the biggest scales. There's, there's some nebulae, some clusters of gas and particles out in the universe that are huge reservoirs of water and sort of related huge reservoirs of alcohols, ethanol's, things like that. Coming a little bit closer to home and looking a little bit more recently. In the past maybe five or 10 years, there's been quite a few new detections, new possible detections, new lines of evidence of liquid water, ice water in our solar system in very interesting [00:12:00] places. One, the moon of Saturn known as, and Solidus is a very shiny, very bright object. It's very, very white, snowy, clean looking objects. A handful of craters have much less cratered than our own moon, a little smaller than our moon as well. Speaker 3: But it had some weird features to it. It looks kind of neat. And so the the Cassini spacecraft, which has been around exploring Saturn and its moon systems and its ring system for the past decade or so, did a few very close flybys of this very interesting moon in solidus [00:12:30] figured out that most of the surface is solid ice water, ice, ammonia, hydrocarbons, stuff as well. Also notice that there were geysers coming off of the surface, which we've seen geysers on a couple of other moons of Jupiter and Saturn, but these were kind of interesting and Cassini was there and we lucked out and Cassini actually flew through one of these geysers and got to detect the particles from the geyser itself, right? They're very direct institute measurements of what's in the guys there and it was mostly water and some ammonia, which was [00:13:00] interesting. And then there's evidence that there was actually more organic compounds in there and so possibly there, this could lead to life. Speaker 3: There could be some kind of bacteria down in the innards of in solidus. That's sort of pushing a a little bit, sort of the next step beyond what the evidence is actually telling us. But it's very, very tantalizing. Just about four or five years ago, a NASA panel on moons and moon explorations in the solar system said that in Solidus is probably the best possibility [00:13:30] for current life outside of earth in our own solar system. And the idea is that underneath this sort of very smooth, icy surface, there's probably a liquid ocean, mostly water, maybe a little bit of salt water, like I said, a little ammonia, some organic compounds, perhaps probably not gray whales and great white sharks. Probably not even little fish and shrimp, but it seems reasonable that there could be microscopic organisms, some kind of life, you know, to be determined. Speaker 3: But it's possible. [00:14:00] There's liquid water, there's reasonable conditions. It's not too salty, it's not too acidic, it's not too hot. And there does seem to be at least the building blocks, some of these organic compounds, perhaps one outstanding issue is how thick is this outer ice layer. So there's been some ideas of what we should send another mission that's just going to drill in there and it had the little submarine and go look around for fish and organisms, but we don't actually have a great handle on how thick that ice layer is. Uh, so Cassini is continuing to study this moon along with the [00:14:30] rest of the stuff in the Saturn system. Other moons, the planet itself, the Rings, uh, and we'll hopefully learn a little bit more about it, but they're already in the works, uh, both NASA, Japanese and European missions to go explore in salad. It's even more now if you want to go a little bit closer than Enceladus, one of the most promising planets areas in our solar system where Speaker 4: people have thought about the possibility of liquid water, where we certainly know that frozen water exists and where we have a headstart on [00:15:00] objects actually on the surface exploring is the planet Mars. And there've been some recent discoveries about both water in the past history of Mars and possibly salty liquid water, actually existing present day on Mars that are fueling a lot of excitement in the scientific community. Right now we have two different kinds of instruments that are doing fantastic observations of Mars. One of them is called the Mars or condescends orbiter. It is a satellite in orbit around Mars that can take fantastically detailed [00:15:30] photographs of the Martian surface. You can see features about a few feet across on the Martian surface with the satellite and then the other are the famous Mars Rovers. Spirit and opportunity spirit recently shut down, met its demise even though these two rovers outlasted their nominal mission timeline by a factor of 10 or so, Opportunity is still exploring the Martian surface and in both cases, instruments have found evidence for water on Mars. Speaker 4: In the case of opportunity. The rover fairly recently [00:16:00] discovered this mineral vein in a rock in a crater on Mars that scientists are pretty certain, could only have been created by liquid water flowing through a crack in the rocket, some ancient time and marches history and creating this particular mineral known as gypsum in certain variances what we use to make plaster of Paris here on Earth. So there is evidence that in particular Martian environments, there was almost certainly liquid water on Mars in the past. Combine that with theoretical models of how the planet and its atmosphere would have evolved over time. [00:16:30] And there are some pictures of ancient Mars being this sort of lush liquid water, much warmer environment than it is today. And so possibly Mars in its past was a hospitable environment for life. Although I'll emphasize we've, we have not yet detected any evidence of present day or fossilized life on Mars, but frankly, we haven't explored a very large fraction of that planet yet. Speaker 4: So I wouldn't be entirely surprised if some discovery came along in the future. Another very, very interesting observation on Mars coming [00:17:00] from the Mars reconnaissance orbiter is that looking over time at the edges of some of the craters on Mars in the warm seasons, they actually found stream like features that looked like dark streams were appearing on the edges of craters and over the course of the warm season as these craters were being more exposed to the sun and warming up a little bit, the streams lengthen as you might expect, little trickles of liquid water to flow downhill and based on mineral analysis which you can do using spectroscopy [00:17:30] from the orbiter and just generally the overall pattern of how these streams change with the seasons. We think that's good evidence that some sort of salty water was creating the streams. Unfortunately we were not able to directly detect water. What we see, it looks more to be like residue from a salt water stream where the water evaporated or where the water is just below the surface. But it seems that in certain seasons and certain places of the planet, there could actually be water and liquid form just at the surface or just below the surface [00:18:00] of Mars today. I mean if you have salt water on Mars, then I think there's at least some chance that you could have some kind of primitive life forum thriving in it. [inaudible] Speaker 3: it's been amazing in the last few years using the orbiter and the rovers on Mars, the different lines of evidence that we have for this ice, either on the surface or just below the surface centimeters below the surface, inches below the surface. And so NASA just recently launched a mission to head to Mars and even bigger rover, something like the size of a small car [00:18:30] that's going to go around and specifically look for water, look for organic molecules, building blocks of life in different parts than where we've already explored on Mars. Speaker 4: And that rover is called curiosity and it's supposed to land on the Martian surface this summer. Is there water on the moon? Our Moon, there is water on the moon in the form of hydrous molecules, so where water is directly incorporated into a solid rock, but I don't think there's any evidence for frozen or liquid water on the moon, [00:19:00] certainly not liquid water. Speaker 5: [inaudible]Speaker 4: can you reflect on the importance of water being discovered in our solar system or in some other solar system or galaxy? Speaker 2: Clearly on earth, water is essential [00:19:30] for all life forms and so whereas there are ideas about exotic kinds of life that could exist without our requirement of having water. It certainly seems like the most natural place to start looking for life outside of our own planet. So knowing that it exists in liquid form in different places in the universe and knowing Lisa in our own solar system where it exists is I think a really good start toward actually doing an Ernest search for life outside earth, maybe in our own solar system. [00:20:00] And I think just knowing how much water there actually is in our universe makes it seem like the universe is maybe a friendlier place than we thought it was. Okay. Speaker 3: One of the basic questions in astronomy of humanity, one of the things that got me interested in astronomy originally was are we alone in the universe? Is there life out there in the solar system, in our galaxy, and looking for water is probably the best way, the most direct way to find where that life could be. Being able to go visit Mars, the Moon, various [00:20:30] moons in our own solar system. Looking for that life in the water or around the water, I think is is something that's a fundamental question for all humankind, not just scientists and astronomers. Speaker 7: That ends one, Jeff Silverman and Nicholas McConnell. We'll be back with part two on our next show. We'll talk about Super Novi and black holes. Rick Karnofsky and Lisa Catholic joined me [00:21:00] for the calendar and the new black hole, Speaker 8: the harmonic oscillators of the 21st century presented by Andrew Strom and dear professor of physics, Harvard University, Monday, March 12th at four 15 to 5:30 PM La Conte Hall Room Number One in the 20th century. Many problems across all of physics were solved by perturb native methods which reduce them to harmonic oscillators. Black holes are poised to play a similar role for the problems of 21st century physics. They are at once [00:21:30] the simplest and most complex objects in the physical universe. Professors durometer will give an introduction to the subject intended for a general audience Speaker 9: daily and Nardo art science evening rendezvous or laser is a monthly series of lectures, presentations, and networking between artists and scientists. This month, laser is on Monday, March 12th at the [inaudible] room of the front building at the University of San Francisco to one 30 zero Fulton Street. It is free, but [00:22:00] please RSVP to p at [inaudible] dot com the event starts at seven with a talk by [inaudible] Viskontas on the art and neuroscience of effective music performance. What is it about this art form that draws people in? What distinguishes a performance that is technically accurate but unmusical from one that elicits the chills. We will explore how music engages the brain and why it continues to be a worldwide addiction. This will be followed by Rebecca Cayman's talk, making the invisible visible [00:22:30] discoveries between art and science, the history of artists as scientists and scientists as artists will be shared drying from the collections of the American philosophical society and the Chemical Heritage Foundation. The development of new art science collaborations will also be discussed. Shawmut caught true of the Stanford Physics Department. We'll speak on are there more dimensions of space which we'll discuss how the extra dimensions proposed by some models such as string theory may explain and unify puzzles [00:23:00] of modern physics. The night we'll conclude with Scott killed doll and Nathaniel stern who will discuss beaming Twitter messages to glaze five eight one D and exoplanet 20 light years away that can support extra terrestrial life using DIY technology. The website for laser is www.leonardo.info Speaker 8: the creative destruction of medicine Wednesday, March 14th at 6:00 PM at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco on the second [00:23:30] floor of five 95 market street, Eric Topol, MD, director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, Co founder and vice chairman of the West Wireless Health Institute and author of the creative destruction of medicine. Dr Topol says that is poised to go through its biggest shakeup in history and unprecedented convergence of technologies such as the ability to digitize human genomes and the invention of wireless tools is gaining momentum, thrusting the medical field into the digital era. Tickets are $20 [00:24:00] for general public, $8 for members and $7 for students. Speaker 9: Ask a scientist is hosting a puzzle party on Pi Day Wednesday, March 14th at 7:00 PM this is a math and logic puzzle competition for teams of up to six people. It is free, but you're encouraged to support the venue by purchasing foods and or drinks. The winning team will get a round of drinks and an overwhelming sense of pride. Bring a jacket in case there is overflow onto the sidewalk of the bizarre [00:24:30] cafe. Five nine two seven California at 21st in San Francisco visit. Ask a scientist sf.com for more info. Speaker 7: Yeah, Speaker 6: the March Science at cal lecture will be given at 11:00 AM on Saturday, March 17th in the genetics and plant biology building room 100 the talk will be given by Dr Hazel Bane and is entitled The Sun a star in our own backyard. Dr Bain is a post doc with the Ruben Rahmati high energy spectroscopic [00:25:00] solar imager solar physics group at the Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley. Her main area of research involves studying solar eruptive events such as flares, jets, and coronal mass ejections using both space and ground-based instruments. In describing her talk, Dr Bane said the stars in the night sky have always been a source of intrigue and wonder with our very own star at the center of our solar system, the sun offers us a unique [00:25:30] opportunity to study the inner workings of these giant balls of plasma. Starting at the core, I will discuss the processes occurring at the different layers of the sun onto news. Speaker 9: The four mile long t veteran particle accelerator at Chicago's Fermi lab was closed in September, 2011 after being one of the most powerful accelerators for 20 years, but in analyzing 500 trillion subatomic particles, Asians from the CDF and DCO, the team says that they may [00:26:00] have generated about a thousand Higgs Bosons the particle that is responsible for mass in the standard model of physics in a previous episode of spectrum that you can download from iTunes you, we interviewed Dr Simoni Pig Ingreso about the hunt for the Higgs. The probability of these measurements being due to a statistical fluke instead of the measurements of the Higgs is about one in 30 or about 2.2 sigma. This is well below the one chance in 3.5 million or five sigma that will be used to claim the actual discovery of the Higgs. [00:26:30] The energy of the detected events is between 115 billion and 135 billion electron volts, which is in good agreement with the range of 124 billion electron volts to 126 billion electron volts that turns large. Hadron collider established with 3.6 sigma certainty. The large Hadron collider is on winter break, but we'll be fixed up again in April to continue trying to find the Higgs with five sigma certainty. Speaker 8: The Cal Energy Corp is offering internships [00:27:00] around the world from Brazil to Germany to Ghana, to China, as well as in the bay area. During the summer of 2012 internships will offer UC Berkeley undergraduates the opportunity to pursue challenging hands on projects and energy and climate research. According to the office of the vice chancellor for research among the projects, cal energy core interns will be involved in our efforts to create green coal as industrial fuel, helping to produce biofuels, working on improving photovoltaics for integration into the [00:27:30] electricity grid, building models to better understand climate change and designing and testing. Cookstoves. The internship program provides a $600 weekly stipend for all interns as well as funding to cover transportation and housing. All placements are full time, more information and application forms are available at the cow energy core website. Speaker 9: Yeah, Speaker 6: explaining science to an 11 year old. The flame challenge sponsored by the Center for communicating science is an attempt to reach the very core of [00:28:00] science communication. The contest asks scientists and generally clever people to submit their own explanations of what a flame is, explanations that would captivate an 11 year old. The flame challenge contest is open for entries between March 2nd and April 2nd with the winners to be announced in June. Entries can be in writing, video or graphics and they can be playful or serious as long as they are accurate and connect with the young judges. For more information and entry [00:28:30] forms, visit the challenge website. Flame challenge.org Speaker 7: [inaudible] music curse during the show goes by on Donna David [inaudible] on for his album title folk and acoustic [00:29:00] just made available by creative Commons license 3.0 contribution. [inaudible]. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show [inaudible] [00:29:30] to our email address is [inaudible] means in two weeks. It's Speaker 6: the same Speaker 5: [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Berkeley Lab scientists discuss how families in Africa using stoves designed by Berkeley Lab are at the forefront of global carbon reduction. Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Science] [Show ID: 20690]

Berkeley Lab scientists discuss how families in Africa using stoves designed by Berkeley Lab are at the forefront of global carbon reduction. Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Science] [Show ID: 20690]