Podcasts about gulp adventures

Part 1 Stiff by Mary Roach Summary"Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers" by Mary Roach explores the history and science surrounding human corpses. The book is a blend of humor, science, and anecdotes, highlighting the fascinating roles that cadavers play in various fields, including medicine, forensic science, and even traffic safety.Roach begins by discussing the historical perspectives on death and the treatment of bodies after death. She delves into how cadavers have been used in medical schools for dissections and how they contribute to advancements in healthcare. She covers intriguing topics such as the ethical implications of using human remains for research, the processes involved in body donation programs, and the various ways cadavers are utilized in scientific studies.The author also explores unconventional uses of human remains, including how they are used in crash tests to improve vehicle safety and how they contribute to anatomy research. She reflects on the cultural perceptions surrounding death and the treatment of human remains, presenting a balanced view that combines factual information with light-hearted commentary.Overall, "Stiff" provides readers with a unique perspective on mortality, anatomy, and the lives that cadavers lead even after death, blending humor with respect for the subject matter.Part 2 Stiff AuthorMary Roach is an American author known for her humorous and informative writing about scientific topics. She has a talent for making complex subjects accessible and entertaining to the general public. About "Stiff"Release Date: "Stiff: The Curious Life of Human Cadavers" was published on April 1, 2003. The book explores the various roles that cadavers play in medicine, science, and culture, delving into topics like body donation, forensic science, and the biological processes of decomposition. Other WorksMary Roach has authored several critically acclaimed books, including:"Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife" (2005) This book investigates what science has to say about the possibility of an afterlife and examines phenomena like ghosts and near-death experiences."Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex" (2008) An exploration of the science behind sexual pleasure and the various studies that have been conducted on the subject."Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void" (2010) This book discusses the many challenges of space travel and the science behind it, including the psychological and physical effects of being in space."Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal" (2013) A deep dive into the digestive system and the journey food takes through the human body."Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War" (2016) Focused on the science behind combat and how soldiers cope with the unique challenges of warfare."Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law" (2021) Investigates the interactions between humans and wildlife, particularly when animals conflict with human interests. Best EditionsWhile determining the "best" book often depends on personal interests, "Stiff" is widely regarded as one of Roach's most popular and notable works, known for its engaging writing style and insightful content. It has been well-reviewed and has had several editions, including a paperback edition that has made it accessible to more readers. However, each of her books has its own unique appeal, and readers often recommend different titles based on their interests in science, humor, and specific topics. Mary Roach's work continues to be influential, as she bridges the gap between science and general audiences with her humor and storytelling.Part 3 Stiff Chapters"Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers" by Mary Roach explores the theme of mortality and the scientific study of the human body after death. Throughout the book, Roach combines humor with

Why do we have to poop? Why does fiber make you poop? Why is poop brown? Why does it smell so bad? Why do farts smell bad, too? Yup, we're going there! In this episode, Mary Roach, author of Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, answers your questions about those things that we're told not to talk about in polite company: poop and farts. We learn how astronauts use the bathroom in space and how many germs are in one ounce of poop.

Mary Roach visits Google to discuss her book "Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law." What's to be done about a jaywalking moose? A bear caught breaking and entering? A murderous tree? Three hundred years ago, animals that broke the law would be assigned legal representation and put on trial. These days, the answers are best found not in jurisprudence but in science: the curious science of human-wildlife conflict, a discipline at the crossroads of human behavior and wildlife biology.  Mary Roach is the author of six New York Times bestsellers, including "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers"; "Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal", and "Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void." Her books have been published in 21 languages, and her second book, "Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife", was a New York Times Notable Book. Mary has written for National Geographic, Wired, The New York Times Magazine, and the Journal of Clinical Anatomy, among others.  Visit http://youtube.com/TalksAtGoogle/ to watch the video.                               

Author Mary Roach is a hands-on writer specializing in science related topics that tap into some of the more curious and unexpected nooks of our lives. But “hands-on” doesn't fully capture the lengths she'll go to capture her stories – for her book examining the intricacies of sex, science, and relationships, she convinced her husband to have sex while monitored and recorded in an MRI, Ultrasound, Sonogram-like device…Really, no Really! Mary Roach is an author specializing in popular science and humor having written seven New York Times bestsellers, including Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, STIFF: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers; GULP: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, and PACKING FOR MARS: The Curious Science of Life in the Void and her latest book, FUZZ: When Nature Breaks the Law. Mary has written for National Geographic, Wired, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, GQ, and the Journal of Clinical Anatomy, among many, many others. Her 2009 TED talk, "Ten Things You Didn't Know About Orgasm", made the organization's list of top 10 most popular talks of all time. IN THIS EPISODE: How Mary chooses esoteric and often taboo topics. Women's sexual arousal can be measured…or can it? Mary embraces the taboo, including researching how astronauts avoid “fecal decapitation.” The shocking places where donated cadavers can end up. Using the Scientific Method to “prove” the existence of a higher power. India's battles with elephants and monkeys. Googleheim: Science Myth vs. Science Fact   Website: MaryRoach.net X/Twitter: @mary_roach   FOLLOW REALLY NO REALLY: www.reallynoreally.com Instagram YouTube TikTok Facebook Threads X (Twitter)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mary Roach is the author of seven nonfiction books, including Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law. "In these realms of the taboo, there's a tremendous amount of material that is really interesting, but that people have stayed away from. ... I'm kind of a bottom feeder. It's down there on the bottom where people don't want to go. But if that's what it takes to find interesting, new material, I'm fine with it. I don't care. I'm not easily grossed out. I don't feel that there's any reason why we shouldn't look at this. And over time, I started to feel that ... the taboo was preventing people from having conversations that it would be healthy to have." Show notes: @mary_roach maryroach.net Roach on Longform 00:00 Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law (W.W. Norton • 2021) 01:00 Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (W.W. Norton • 2003) 01:00 Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (W.W. Norton • 2008) 01:00 Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void (W.W. Norton • 2010) 01:00 Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal (W.W. Norton • 2014) 02:00 "Cute Inc." (Wired • Dec 1999) 12:00 Roach's Salon archive 46:00 "Hot Seat" (Discover • Mar 1998) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Horace Fletcher is best known for starting a food fad in that came to be known as Fletcherism. This early 20th century fad involved, in part, chewing your food A LOT. Research: Bauerlein, Mark. "The Correspondence of William James. Vol. 3: William and Henry. 1897-1910." The Henry James Review, vol. 16 no. 1, 1995, p. 115-117. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/hjr.1995.0002. Crowninshield, Francis W. “Manners for the Metropolis: An Entrance Key to the Fantastic Life of the 400.” New York. D. Appleton and Company. 1909. Via Babel Trust. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31175009622302 Feltman, Rachel. “Fact: Horace Fletcher became a millionaire lifestyle influencer by telling people to chew as much as possible.” Popular Science. 4/26/2021. https://www.popsci.com/story/science/weirdest-thing-fletcherism-wawa-genetic-testing/ Fleissner, Jennifer L. "Henry James's Art of Eating." ELH, vol. 75 no. 1, 2008, p. 27-62. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/elh.2008.0001. Franklin, Deborah. “Chew, Chew, Chew!” NPR. 7/13/2009. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2009/07/chew_chew_chew.html/ Kean, Sam. “Disappearing spoon: Chewing it Over—and Over and Over and Over.” Distillations. Podcast. 5/4/2021. https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/podcast/chewing-it-over-and-over-and-over-and-over "Horace Fletcher." Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936. Gale In Context: U.S. History, link.gale.com/apps/doc/BT2310013484/GPS?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=e3d11c0e. Accessed 13 Dec. 2022. Levenstein, Harvey A. “Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet.” Berkeley : University of California Press. 2003. New York Times. “HORACE FLETCHER DIES IN COPENHAGEN; Dietetics Expert Was Originator of a System for Proper Mastication of Food. HIS EXPERIMENTS AT YALE Official Food Economist Taught ‘Fletcherism' to 8,000,000 Starving Belgians During the War.” 1/14/1919. https://www.nytimes.com/1919/01/14/archives/horace-fletcher-dies-in-copenhagen-dietetics-expert-was-originator.html Temple, Holly Eliza. “Repast: Horace Fletcher, the Original Food Faddist.” This Is Mold. 5/21/2021. https://thisismold.com/profile/repast/repast-horace-fletcher-the-original-food-faddist Walthausen, Abby. “Fletcherizing Was the Juicing of the 1890s.” MyRecipes. 2/13/2018. https://www.myrecipes.com/extracrispy/fletcherizing-was-the-juicing-of-the-1890s Roach, Mary. “How Many Times Should You Chew Your Food?” Adapted from Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal. Slate. 4/10/2013. http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2013/04/excerpt_of_mary_roach_s_gulp_how_many_times_should_you_chew_a_bite_of_food.html Fletcher, Horace. “Menticulture; or, the A-B-C of True Living.” Chicago. A.C. Mcclurg & Company. 1895. Fletcher, Horace. “Happiness as Found in Forethought Minus Fearthought.” New York. Frederick A. Stokes Company. 1898. Fletcher, Horace. “That Last Waif, Or, Social Quarantine: A Brief.” New York. Frederick A Stokes Company. 1898, 1909. Fletcher, Horace. “The New Glutton, Or, Epicure.” New York. Frederick A Stokes Company. 1899, 1903. Fletcher, Horace. “A.B.C. of Snap Shooting.” San Francisco. Published by the Author. 1880. Fletcher, Horace. “The A.B.-Z. of Our Own Nutrition.” New York. Frederick A Stokes Company. 1903. Fletcher, Horace. “Fletcherism: What It Is, Or, How I Became Young At Sixty.” Frederick A. Stokes Company. 1913. Chittenden, Russell H. “Physiological Economy in Nutrition.” Popular Science Monthly Volume 63 June 1903. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Popular_Science_Monthly/Volume_63/June_1903/Physiological_Economy_in_Nutrition Chittenden, Russell H. “Physiological Economy in Nutrition.” Popular Science Monthly Volume 63 June 1903. “The Influence of Diet on Endurance and General Efficiency.” Popular Science Monthly Volume 71 December 1907. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Popular_Science_Monthly/Volume_71/December_1907/The_Influence_of_Diet_on_Endurance_and_General_Efficiency Chicago Tribune. “New Orleans Celebrites.” 3/29/1896. https://www.newspapers.com/image/349889192/ The Courier-Journal. “Horace Fletcher, Famous Dietician, Never Grew ‘Old' Because He Knew How One Should Live.” The Courier-Journal. Louisville, KY. 6/22/1919. https://www.newspapers.com/image/118906814/ The Times-Democrat. “French Opera Debt.” New Orleans Times-Democrat. 3/27/1894. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Anijams! LINKS:   From Heather's colleague: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach and also Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal among many others   Candy:   Ten Steps To Nanette by Hannah Gadsby (The memoir from Australia's much-loved comedian, Hannah Gadsby, whose stand-up show and self-described swan-song, NANETTE, won the Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2017 before transferring to New York, where it went on to achieve critical acclaim.)   LeAnn: CJ Cherryh: Chanurr series, Downbelow Station, Merchanter's Luck, Cyteen trilogy.   Aimee: Our Flag Means Death:   LeAnn's awesome yarn needles:   Si: Jessie Gender's YouTube   Heather adds: Philosophy Tube: this episode in particular:    And HBomberguy's vaccine thing:     BOOK LINKS:    Halberds:   ("There is the blade for slicing through armor, the spike for thrusting and the hook for was used to take down armed opponents on horseback as they rode by, you could just snag them off. It was like three weapons in one. The halberd was cheap to produce and very versatile in battle. Additionally, halberds were reinforced with metal rims over the shaft, thus making effective weapons for blocking other weapons like swords. This capability increased its effectiveness in battle, and expert halberdiers were as deadly as any other weapon masters were. It is said that a halberd in the hands of a Swiss peasant was the weapon that killed the Duke of Burgundy, Charles the Bold, decisively ending the Burgundian Wars, literally in a single stroke.") And this video, too - very clear Halber info: CraftLit Library PDF: CraftLit Glitch Report Form: FOR FB EVENT TUES Please Register here to get the meeting link for the FREE weekly chat: FOR FB EVENT THURS Please Register here to get the meeting link for the FREE ongoing weekly chat:

A great narrator can elevate a good story into a great audiobook, and can bring any story they read to life. The Narrated audiobook club explored a range of audiobooks narrated by four great narrators: Bahni Turpin, Caitlin Kelly, January LaVoy, and Emily Woo Zeller.  Discussion with Shachi, Mark, Lisa and Scott. Bahni Turpin: The Hate U Give [Libro.fm] / [Overdrive/Libby] / [Audible] / [Episode 71]   Transcendent Kingdom [Libro.fm] / [Overdrive/Libby] / [Audible]   Transcendent Kingdom [Libro.fm] / [Overdrive/Libby] / [Audible]   The Conductors [Libro.fm] / [Overdrive/Libby] / [Audible] / [Episode 95]   The Help [Libro.fm] / [Overdrive/Libby] / [Audible]     Caitlin Kelly: Keeper of the Lost Cities (series) [Audible]   Eliza and Her Monsters [Libro.fm] / [Overdrive/Libby] / [Audible]   Almost There and Almost Not [Libro.fm] / [Overdrive/Libby] / [Audible]   New York 2140 [Libro.fm] / [Overdrive/Libby] / [Audible]   The Atlas Six [Libro.fm] / [Episode 143- March 15th]     January LaVoy The 1619 Project [Libro.fm] / [Overdrive/Libby] / [Audible]   My Monticello (Novella) [Libro.fm] / [Overdrive/Libby] / [Audible] / [Episode 121]   The Ten Thousand Doors of January [Libro.fm] / [Overdrive/Libby] / [Audible]   Phasma (Star Wars) [Overdrive/Libby] / [Audible]   Dooku: Jedi Lost (Star Wars) [Overdrive/Libby] / [Audible] / [Episode 38] I Am Harriet Tubman [Libro.fm] / [Overdrive/Libby] / [Audible]   How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen [Libro.fm] / [Overdrive/Libby] / [Audible]   Never Tell [Libro.fm] / [Overdrive/Libby] / [Audible]     Emily Woo Zeller Episode 122 The Life Changing Magic of Tidying up [Libro.fm] / [Overdrive/Libby] / [Audible] / [Episode 3]   Doctor Aphra (Star Wars) [Overdrive/Libby] / [Audible] / [Episode 74]   Vagabounds [Libro.fm] / [Overdrive/Libby] / [Audible] / [Episode 81]   Strange Beasts of China [Libro.fm] / [Overdrive/Libby] / [Audible] / [Episode 114]   The Poppy War (series) [Libro.fm] / [Overdrive/Libby] / [Audible] / [Episode 114]   The Poppy War (Series) [Libro.fm] /  [Overdrive/Libby] /  [Audible] / [Episode 115]  This is How You Lose the Time War [Libro.fm] /  [Overdrive/Libby] /  [Audible]  Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal [Libro.fm] /  [Overdrive/Libby] /  [Audible]  Ninefox Gambit [Libro.fm] /  [Overdrive/Libby] /  [Audible]

How do you get people to read about science who don't think they're interested in science? You entertain people, you fascinate them-- ultimately you make them care." Beloved nature and science writer Mary Roach is here with new book in hand called Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law. What's to be done about a jaywalking moose? A bear caught breaking and entering? A murderous tree? Three hundred years ago, animals that broke the law would be assigned legal representation and put on trial. These days, the answers are best found not in jurisprudence but in science: the curious science of human-wildlife conflict, a discipline at the crossroads of human behavior and wildlife biology. Daniel and Mary also discuss many personal issues-- how did Mary get into science writing in the first place? How does music contribute to her ability to write? How can science and the humanities help each other, coexist in a better way? Support Talking Beats with Daniel Lelchuk Mary Roach is the author of six New York Times bestsellers, including STIFF: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers; GULP: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, and PACKING FOR MARS: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. Her new book FUZZ: When Nature Breaks the Law, debuts in September 2021. Mary's books have been published in 21 languages, and her second book, SPOOK, was a New York Times Notable Book. Mary has written for National Geographic, Wired, The New York Times Magazine, and the Journal of Clinical Anatomy, among others. She was a guest editor of the Best American Science and Nature Writing series and an Osher Fellow with the San Francisco Exploratorium and serves as an advisor for Orion and Undark magazines. She has been a finalist for the Royal Society's Winton Prize and a winner of the American Engineering Societies' Engineering Journalism Award, in a category for which, let's be honest, she was the sole entrant.

Six-time New York Times bestsellers, including STIFF: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers; GULP: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, and PACKING FOR MARS: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. Her new book FUZZ: When Nature Breaks the Law, debuts in September 2021. Mary's books have been published in 21 languages, and her second book, SPOOK, was a New York Times Notable Book. www.MaryRoach.net Visit Lion's Den Productions Music by Fred Walker, Bits & Pieces. Used with permission. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/altitude-adjustment2/support

NonFicPod with Byrne and Codd is your all-new podcast for bitchin' nonfiction. In this season we're covering everything from the love lives of royalty to the impact of exercise on the brain, from growing up black in a white family to understanding how viruses go, well, viral. In this episode, find out who Emma and Georgie (Byrne and Codd) actually are. As your hosts on this journey we thought it only right to make sure you know who you're signing on with. This series will bring you the finest from writers like Georgina Lawton, Caroline Williams, Dan Smith, Nadia Owusu, and Rosie Wilby. Every fortnight between now and autumn, we'll bring you the inside stories behind the true stories. Brought to you by author and publishing rockstar Georgie Codd (We Swim to the Shark) and author and broadcaster Emma Byrne (Swearing is Good for You and How to Build a Human), NonFicPod is your home for the latest nonfiction must reads. Our extended cut for Patreon backers, Sh*t I Wish I'd Known, teaches you the lessons that we (and our guests) have learned about writing - and life.Books MentionedJack El-Hai, The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental IllnessLindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine Kate Fox, Watching the English: the Hidden Rules of English BehaviourJon Krakauer, Into Thin AirMary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal Mary Roach, Bonk: The Curious Coupling Of Sex and ScienceMary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human CadaversFind Us Online- Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/nonficpod- Bookshop: https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/nonficpod (purchases here support us and independent booksellers.) - Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/nonficpod- Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/nonficpodCredits- Hosts: Emma Byrne and Georgie Codd- Producer: Georgie Codd - Transcription and socials: Beatrice Bazell- Composer: Mike Wyer Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Stay safe out there! Anti-racism resources: https://www.rachelricketts.com/antiracism-resourcesGood list of organizations to donate to, to support Black Lives Matter causes. What I've Finished:Jill spun up her Mork Made Fiber Co batt.  It's a 2-ply, 4.6oz, 246 yards.My Current Fix:Jill just needs some finishing touches before completing her Dash Away Reindeer by Sara Elizabeth Kellner out of Knit Picks Wool of the Andes in Briar Heather.  She's pulled out her WIP of Fox Paws by Xandy Peters using five colors of Knit Picks Palette.  Her Rav page here.  She's halfway done already with her Soldotna Crop by Caitlin Hunter using Malabrigo Rios in Blue Jeans, Sandbank, Valentina and Magenta.  She used WoollyBear99's modifications for a looser neckline.  She's been spinning some Naked Bubblegum colorway 80/20 South American Wool/Viscose fiber from Goodie Supply Company.  She also started the Frolic Quilt pattern by Cluck Cluck Sew using a kit from Connecting Threads that has Cluck Cluck Sew designed fabrics.What I'm Jonesing For:Jill likes the Pupu scrunchie pattern by Sari Nordlund despite all her scrunchie hatred.  She likes the From Where You Were Plucked newborn hat by Corrie Willard.  She's been looking at baby mobiles, including Monster Mobile by Rebecca Danger, Hot Air Balloons Mobile by Doreen Blask and Hot Air Balloon Baby Mobile by Tatyana Korobkova.  She also likes the pullover Windkissed by Tif Neilan.Re-Ups:Holstgarn Coast and SupersoftUppers and Downers:King Arthur Flour Hot Buttered Soft Pretzels recipe.The Lovebirds (2020) - not originally produced for Netflix, but released there.Total Recall (1990)Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001)Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach

In this episode—not for the faint of heart—Rachel and Melody discuss deep questions about death, dying, and decomposition! Check out what we talked about: "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory" by Caitlin Doughty with readalike "From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death" by the same author. Also, Caitlin's YouTube channel Ask a Mortician, website OrderoftheGoodDeath.com, Ted Talk "A Burial Practice That Nourishes the Planet", and podcast Death in the Afternoon. "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers" by Mary Roach with readalike "Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal" by the same author, as well as podcast This Podcast Will Kill You by Erin Welsh and Erin Allmann Updyke. 2010 film "Third Star" featuring Benedict Cumberbatch (also known as Benedryl Cabbagepatch, Bandicoot Crashington, Buttercup Catapult . . . you get the idea). Netflix show "Endgame" with watchalikes "Extremis" and BJ Miller's Ted Talk "What Really Matters at the End of Life." Check out books, movies, and other materials through the Milwaukee County Federated Library System: https://countycat.mcfls.org/ https://www.hoopladigital.com/ https://wplc.overdrive.com/ https://oakcreeklibrary.org/

Kelsey introduces Jason to one of her favorite authors, Mary Roach, through the grossest of her books, 2013's Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal. It gets far more philosophical than expected. Conclusions include: Life is precious, go to therapy, and poop is important. Content Warning: Gulp contains a fair bit of (scientific) content about literal shit, so this podcast includes that as well, this is your heads up.

We talk to science writer Mary Roach about the science of your guts and her book “Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal.”

Mary Roach is the New York Times best-selling author of STIFF: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, SPOOK: Science Tackles the Afterlife, BONK: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, PACKING FOR MARS: The Curious Science of Life in the Void and GULP: Adventures in the Alimentary Canal. Her new book is GRUNT: The Curious Science of Humans at War. Mary Roach was in the Northwest to speak at Town Hall Seattle, presented by University Book Store.

Show #132 | Guest: Mary Roach is a funny and fascinating writer who first arrived in San Francisco in the early 1980s. She’s written six hugely popular science books including Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (2003), Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (2008), and Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal (2013). Clearly a common theme throughout Mary's books is a literary treatment of the human body. When asked by NPR how she picks her topics, she replied, "Well, it's got to have a little science, it's got to have a little history, a little humor - and something gross." | Show Summary: Mary Roach’s new book Grunt tackles the science behind being a soldier. In it, Mary visits a re-purposed movie studio where amputee actors help prepare Marine Corps medics for facing combat wounds. She also samples caffeinated meat, sniffs a WWII stink bomb, and tends to the missiles on a nuclear submarine. Once you listen to this insightful interview, ou'll never see the art of war the same way again.

This week we are extremely excited to have Mary Roach on the show. Mary is the author of 5 New York Times Bestselling books, including her newest, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal. In this episode we spend the first part of the conversation talking about what it is like to be a professional writer,...

Gulp [starts at 4:25] Bestselling author, Mary Roach has been billed as American's funniest science writer.  In "Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal" she takes readers on a journey through the alimentary canal, extolling the marvels of spit on the beginning end, then moving on to the man who had a hole in his stomach that allowed a doctor to observe his digestion.  And . . . on.  Roach even interviews a prison inmate about “rectal smuggling” (including cell phones).  So get ready - here’s Shelley Schlender's conversation with Mary Roach, author of "Gulp". Hosts: Shelley Schlender, Beth Bennett Producer: Joel Parker Engineer: Shelley Schlender Executive Producers: Jane Palmer and Kendra Krueger Listen to the show:

In “Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal,” Mary Roach explores the much-maligned but vital tube from mouth to rear that turns food into the nutrients that keep us alive. She introduces us to scientists who tackle questions no one else thinks to ask. Why doesn't the stomach digest itself? Can wine tasters really tell a $10 bottle from a $100 bottle? Why do Americans eat, on average, no more than thirty different foods on a regular basis? “Gulp” is as much about human beings as it is about human bodies. We meet a “disgust” researcher, a saliva expert, and one of medicine's oddest couples: Alexis St. Martin, a French Canadian trapper with a hole gut-shot in his stomach, and William Beaumont, the army surgeon who achieved fame by placing food inside St. Martin to see what happened. We revisit our conversation with Mary Roach on Wednesday's AU.

Get ready for déjà vu as you listen to some of our favorite interviews in the past year. It’s our annual fundraising podcast. Come for the great interviews, stay for the great interviews. Lend us your support along the way. What’s for dinner? Maybe fried bugs. Listen as we do a taste test. Speaking of dinner, learn why saliva’s acceptable as long as it’s in our mouth. But dollop some into our own soup, and we push the bowl away. Hear adventures of space walking and of space hunting: what happens to the search for extrasolar planets now that the Kepler spacecraft is compromised, and an astronomy research project that takes our interviewer by surprise. Plus, the case for scrapping high school algebra. That’s right: No more “the first train leaves Cleveland at 4:00 pm …” problems. Also … why “The Simpsons” is chock-a-block with advanced math. And, in a world where everyone carries GPS technology in their pockets, will humans ever get lost again – and what’s lost if we don’t. Plus, Mary Roach gives us a tour of our digestive systems. All this and more on a special Big Picture Science podcast. Guests: Hiawatha Bray – Technology reporter, Boston Globe, author of You Are Here: From the Compass to GPS, the History and Future of How We Find Ourselves Chris Hadfield – Astronaut and author of An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth: What Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity, Determination, and Being Prepared for Anything Geoff Marcy – Astronomer, University of California, Berkeley Andrew Hacker – Professor of political science and mathematics at Queens College, City University of New York. His article, “Is Algebra Necessary?”, appeared in The New York Times in 2012. Simon Singh – Science writer, author of The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets Mary Roach – Author, most recently, of Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal Jill Mikucki – Microbiologist at the University of Tennessee Michael Pollan – Journalist, author of Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation and The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals . His article, “The Intelligent Plant,” appeared in the December 23rd issue of The New Yorker. Descripción en español

Mary Roach has been called "America's funniest science writer." Master of the monosyllabically titled bestseller, she has explored sex in Bonk, corpses in Stiff, and the afterlife in Spook. Her latest book, now out in paperback, is Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal. It's, you know, completely gross. But in a way that you can't put down.What kind of things might you learn in a Mary Roach book about the alimentary canal, that convoluted pipeline that runs from where you food goes in all the way to where something else comes out? Well, how about why suicide bombers don't carry bombs in their rectums: Their bodies would absorb much of the explosion and prevent any chance of achieving their deadly objective. It's one of the "reasons to be thankful for your anus," observes Roach on this week's episode.On the show, Roach took host Indre Viskontas on a quick tour of the colon and discussed some uses of the alimentary canal that are surely outside the normal range of advised behavior (just Google "hooping"—not the Hula Hoop kind—and you'll see what we mean). But this isn't all funny; the science of the gut can help you live more, er, comfortably. We talk to Roach about all that and more on this week’s show.This episode also features a discussion of whether humans differ, genetically, in our sensitivity to pain, and on the latest dismal survey showing just how much scientific knowledge Americans refuse to accept.iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/inquiring-minds/id711675943RSS: feeds.feedburner.com/inquiring-mindsStitcher: stitcher.com/podcast/inquiring-minds

In “Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal,” Mary Roach explores the much-maligned but vital tube from mouth to rear that turns food into the nutrients that keep us alive. She introduces us to scientists who tackle questions no one else thinks to ask.

Why does Mary Roach have her arm inside a cow's stomach? What's periblepsis mean? How did I make Mary cry? These and many other questions answered in the podcast, in which we talk about Mary's latest book, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal. Plus, science writer Virginia Hughes on new research on gut bacteria and obesity.

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal; A French artist is going to live inside a bear; Bruce Jenner may be getting a sex change; Supreme Court and their ruling on political contributions

The irresistible, ever-curious, and always best-selling Mary Roach returns with a new adventure to the invisible realm we carry around inside.

Not all conversation is appropriate for the dinner table – and that includes, strangely enough, the subject of eating. Yet what happens during the time that food enters our mouth and its grand exit is a model of efficiency and adaptation. Author Mary Roach takes us on a tour of the alimentary canal, while a researcher describes his invention of an artificial stomach. Plus, a psychologist on why we find certain foods and smells disgusting. And, you don't eat them but they could wiggle their way within nonetheless: surgical snakebots. Guests: Mary Roach – Author, most recently, of Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal Martin Wickham – Head of Nutrition, Leatherhead Food Research, U.K. Paul Rozin – Professor of psychology, University of Pennsylvania Michael Gershon – Professor in the Department of Pathology and Cell Biology, Columbia University Medical Center Howie Choset – Professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University Descripción en español Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Not all conversation is appropriate for the dinner table – and that includes, strangely enough, the subject of eating. Yet what happens during the time that food enters our mouth and its grand exit is a model of efficiency and adaptation. Author Mary Roach takes us on a tour of the alimentary canal, while a researcher describes his invention of an artificial stomach. Plus, a psychologist on why we find certain foods and smells disgusting. And, you don’t eat them but they could wiggle their way within nonetheless: surgical snakebots. Guests: Mary Roach – Author, most recently, of Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal Martin Wickham – Head of Nutrition, Leatherhead Food Research, U.K. Paul Rozin – Professor of psychology, University of Pennsylvania Michael Gershon – Professor in the Department of Pathology and Cell Biology, Columbia University Medical Center Howie Choset – Professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University Descripción en español

“America’s funniest science writer” (Washington Post) takes us down the hatch on an unforgettable tour. The alimentary canal is classic Mary Roach terrain: the questions explored in Gulp are as taboo, in their way, as the cadavers in Stiff and … Continue reading →

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

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

Host: Indre Viskontas In the science section at your local bookstore, you'll find plenty of books on everything from the brain, to the climate, to the cosmos. But how many books will you find that take you on a tour of the digestive tract—from our mouths, to our stomachs, to our intestines? Popular science writer Mary Roach's new book, Gulp, does just that. Decoding the science of taboo topics like vaginal weight-lifting, amputee bowling leagues, and how much food it takes to burst a human stomach has become the signature style of Roach, who has been described by the Washington Post as "America's funniest science writer." Mary Roach writes about human bodies in unusual circumstances and does not shy away from things that are gross. Her previous best-selling books include: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, and Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void but today we’ll be discussing Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal.

Mary Roach Interview: We all love Mary Roach, so in this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind Robert and Julie invite the "Stiff" author on the show to chat about her latest book "Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal." Plus she'll answer listener questions and discuss how to eat with your butt. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://news.iheart.com/podcast-advertisers

Author Mary Roach discusses her new book, "Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal"

Author Mary Roach discusses her new book, "Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal"

Mary Roach talks about her new book Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, which traces what she calls "the whole food chute"