Podcasts about la pena cultural center

A weekly magazine-style radio show featuring the voices and stories of Asians and Pacific Islanders from all corners of our community. The show is produced by a collective of media makers, deejays, and activists. PowerLeeGirls Hosts Miko Lee and Jalena Keane-Lee, a mother daughter team talk about issues in the API community.  What's spreading faster than coronavirus? Racist attacks against Asians. Tonight we discuss, Coronaracism. Guests include Dr. Winston Tseng from the Health Sciences and Ethnic Studies Departments of UC Berkeley and Cynthia Choi Co-Executive Director of Chinese for Affirmative Action. We talk facts, history, policy and what you can do to combat Coronaracism.   Community Calendar March 6 is opening reception for the  Reflections on Home exhibit at OACC. The show runs thru March 28. March 6 First Fridays at 945 ArtSpace in SF: featuring Jon Jang and Lenora Lee International Women's Day is March 8, at 6pm the Empowering Womxn of Color All Stars Night & Reception will be held at La Pena Cultural Center. We Are Here: Contemporary Art and Asian Voices in Los Angeles opens on Friday, March 13 from 6 – 8 pm and runs until June 14. March 14 is the 35th Annual Empowering Womxn of Color Conference at UC Berkeley. March 14 3pm Celebrate Women's History Month with Poetry Reading and Open Mic at EastWind Books in Berkeley. March 15 & 22 Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour March 21 11am-4pm Chinese Americans in Support of Tsuru for Solidarity Free Guided Arts Workshop – art making to close detention camps and ICE All of these events are wheelchair accessible. The post APEX Express – March 5, 2020 – Coronaracism appeared first on KPFA.

This is a black arts and culture site. We will be exploring the African Diaspora via the writing, performance, both musical and theatrical (film and stage), as well as the visual arts of Africans in the Diaspora and those influenced by these aesthetic forms of expression. I am interested in the political and social ramifications of art on society, specifically movements supported by these artists and their forebearers. It is my claim that the artists are the true revolutionaries, their work honest and filled with raw unedited passion. They are our true heroes. Ashay! 1. Compton, California native and CEO, Dr. Theresa Price founded the National College Resources Foundation (NCRF) a 501c3 non-profit organization in 1999 in a direct response to the passing of California’s proposition 209 that banned affirmative action programs in California colleges. Since its inception, the organization has secured and distributed more than $300 million in scholarships & grants to over 400,000 students (over 200,000 first generation students) through 100 College Expos produced by NCRF. The next stop is Oakland, CA at the Marriott on Sat., Feb. 17. https://www.thecollegeexpo.org/events/oakland 2. Jovelyn Richards joins us to talk about her latest project with show featuring: Ciara Lovelace, Kimberly Turner, Feb. 11, 7-8:10 p.m. at La Pena Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley. lapena.org 510-849-2568. 3. John Santos, composer, educator, joins us to talk about, an upcoming concert, The Sacred Roots of Latin Jazz, 2/11, 4 p.m. at the First Presbyterian Church of Oakland. https://santoslatinjazz.brownpapertickets.com/  510-533-6629 4. Billy X, Its About Time Black Panther Programs in the Oakland Public Library: West Oakland (2/17, 1-4 pm), Golden Gate (2/10, 2-5 pm). Visit itsabouttimebpp.net

0:00:00 Introduction Richard Saunders 0:04:38 New Zealand Skeptics 2016 Conference This week we chat to Loretta Marron and find out the latest news from the 'Friends of Science in Medicine'. http://www.scienceinmedicine.org.au 0:16:07 Grain of Salt.... with Eran Segev More in the series of interviews from QED. This week Eran talks with Michael Marshall, Nicola Throp and Geoff Whelan. What does it take these days to host a skeptical convention? 0:35:24 Maynard's Spooky Action... A very Maynard Christmas messge Ho Ho Ho, it's to the cafe we go and chat to Maynard. What does this international star do on Christmas day? Does anyone really care? Find out with Maynard. http://maynard.com.au Also... Richard Saunders talks in California, Dec. 2016 BAS Skeptalk : Thursday, December 29, 2016 - 7:30pm La Pena Cultural Center 3105 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley, CA OC Science Club : Friday, December 30, 2016 - 7:00pm Del Frisco's Grille 772 Spectrum Center Dr, Irvine, California 92618    

0:00:00 Introduction Richard Saunders 0:04:45 Grain of Salt.... with Eran Segev More in the series of interviews from QED. This week Eran talks with Britt Hermes, a former naturopathic 'doctor' who shares the hard truths about naturopathic medicine to protect patients. Her message is "Please don't be fooled by natural and alternative medicine." https://www.naturopathicdiaries.com 0:14:09 New Zealand Skeptics 2016 Conference This week we chat to Susan Gerbic and find out the latest on Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia. What can you do to help? Susan Gerbic at Puzzling World (Video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OObcuaiLwI8&t=7s 0:26:16 Brew Ha Ha: Science in less time than it takes to order a coffee https://www.australiascience.tv/tags/brew-ha-ha With Casey Harrigan 2016 has been a momentous year. Here we give our top 3 biggest science news of 2016! Here's to 2017! Watch more: Zika virus: http://bit.ly/2hm2o1i Paris agreement: http://bit.ly/2gcXP8f Gravitational waves: http://bit.ly/LKgravwaves It's been a big year for sci-fi films, but who pulled it off the best? We review the best and worst movie scientists from 2016. Ever think "I wish my robot could sweat"? Well your dreams have been answered thanks to ingenious research from Japan. Say hello to Kengoro, a 1.7m tall, 56kg musculoskeletal humanoid. Further reading via IEEE Spectrum: http://bit.ly/2eHscrk 0:31:34 Cancer Reseach in Australia Guest reporter Kevin Davies interviews Prof. Ross Hannan, head of the department of cancer biology and therapeutics at The John Curtin School of Medical Research, ANU College of Medicine. What is the latest news on cancer research and what is the link to Jackie Chan? http://jcsmr.anu.edu.au/people/ross-hannan Also... Richard Saunders talks in California, Dec. 2016 BAS Skeptalk : Thursday, December 29, 2016 - 7:30pm La Pena Cultural Center 3105 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley, CA OC Science Club : Friday, December 30, 2016 - 7:00pm Del Frisco's Grille 772 Spectrum Center Dr, Irvine, California 92618

0:00:00 Introduction Richard Saunders 0:06:40 New Zealand Skeptics 2016 Conference We head to Queenstown, then to Wanaka to visit Puzzling World for the NZ Skeptics Dinner and Awards. Joining in is Susan Gerbic. Also an interview with Stuart Landsborough to find out about his $100,000 Psychic Prize. Live music by Brad MacClure http://www.puzzlingworld.co.nz http://www.psychicchallenge.co.nz 0:34:18 Take Stock - With Shelley Stocken Twins! Are you a twin? Are you psychic? Shelley Stocken asks her twin sister or it is the other way around? 0:42:46 Brew Ha Ha: Science in less time than it takes to order a coffee With Ben Lewis South African building Africa’s first private satellite, via ScienceAlert: http://bit.ly/2g9dB55 Australian school students make HIV drug for $2, via Sydney Morning Herald: http://bit.ly/2gXndDN The Pope has called out climate deniers, via Washington Post: http://wapo.st/2fGOTwI Plastic banknotes contain meat by-product, via Quartz: http://bit.ly/2fGQQsM Scurvy is back, via SBS: http://bit.ly/2gAFDqI According to research, people are more likely to recycle things they see as part of their identity. For example, a personalised coffee increases the chances of you recycling your coffee paper cup! Further reading via ScienceDaily: http://bit.ly/2fYD9Vw The Earth-like planet Proxima b has just been discovered orbiting the star nearest to our Sun. We decided to check out some of its features to see if it's likely to be the next hot holiday destination. Further reading via ABC: http://ab.co/2bRS7s4 0:47:11 Sensing Murder - Letter to Network 10 in 2004 With another series of Sensing Murder to be produced in New Zealand, Richard Saunders looks back to 2004 when he wrote a letter of concern to Network 10 Australia before they axed the show. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensing_Murder http://www.psychicchallenge.co.nz/smc/index.html Also... Richard Saunders talks in California, Dec. 2016 BAS Skeptalk : Thursday, December 29, 2016 - 7:30pm La Pena Cultural Center 3105 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley, CA https://www.meetup.com/Bay-Area-Atheists-Agnostics-Humanists-Freethinkers-Skeptics/events/235675261 OC Science Club : Friday, December 30, 2016 - 7:00pm Del Frisco's Grille 772 Spectrum Center Dr, Irvine, California 92618 https://www.facebook.com/events/1136033126517987

Hillary vs. Trump? Should feminists even bother? Writer and rebel Sue Katz says she isn't giving up on Bernie Sanders just yet, and talks about Hillary's feminism of privilege.  Katz is the author of Thanks But No Thanks: The voter's guide to Sarah Palin and Lillian's Last Affair. Then Golden Thread Productions artistic director Torange Yeghiazarian and Rana Mroue, vocal trainer for the Aswat Women's Ensemble, preview this year's “What Do The Women Say,” showcasing Bay Area Middle Eastern women artists building community through art.  What Do the Women Say is Saturday, March 12 at La Pena Cultural Center and features performance and discussion with visual artist Taraneh Hemami; musician Nabila Mango; dancer/choreographer Sharlyn Sawyer; and playwright Betty Shamieh. Comedian Gina Yashere, the only British comic to ever be on Def Comedy Jam, and four-time winner of Best Comedian at the UK Black Entertainment Awards, talks about how she got into comedy and why she loves it. Yashere will be at the Punch Line in SF for four nights March 9-12. The post Womens Magazine – March 7, 2016 appeared first on KPFA.

First up, we talk with Joanne Cronrath Bamberger, editor of Love Her, Love Her Not: The HIllary Paradox.  In the anthology, 28 women present analysis and views of HRC, her candidacy and her meaning for US women.  Bamberger is an entrepreneurial journalist, award-winning writer, and attorney, is the publisher and editor in chief of The Broad Side, a noted digital magazine of women's commentary. Then, we visit with Sabereh Kashi, whose personal documentary explores her return to Iran after her mother's unexpected death.  Using women's ritual, dance and theater, Sabereh's film seeks to bridge her two cultures, challenging American viewers to see the best Iran has to offer us.  Sabereh will be screening portions of the film and celebrating the end of her crowdfunding campaign with a solstice event December 18 at La Pena Cultural Center in Berkeley.   The post Womens Magazine – November 30, 2015 – 28 Ways of Looking at Hillary Clinton; Between Iran and US appeared first on KPFA.

Two members of Odinwa Performance Ensemble, Sister Marysa Kenyatta and Sister Bisola Marignay, Ph.D., join us to talk about their concert this afternoon in Oakland, CA, at Coffee with a Beat on Perkins Street across from Lake Merritt Park. The Performance Ritual is from 3-5 p.m. It is free, but donations are appreciated. The segment is rebroadcast from August 18, 2015. Bisola Marignay, Ph.D., Singer/Performer, Activist/Writer, Facilitator/Educator, draws from her experience in transformative studies, anthropology, linguistics, social activism, performance studies, and spiritual practice to organize thematic formats for Odinma's music performances, and to write the stories, spoken word, poems, and songs that center in the group's performance rituals. Marysa Kenyatta, Julliard trained jazz pianist, has played a clubs all over the San Francisco Bay Area, including the Keystone Korner and other in San Francisco, Mr. Majors, Dillards, La Pena Cultural Center, 57th Street Gallery and many others in Oakland. She is one of the founders of the Women in Jazz jam sessions at Dillards and hs participated in many women's jazz ensembles during the past 20 years. She still continues to perform in various venues all over the Bay Area. Currently, she is with Father Amde Hamilton, a band of the Watts Prophets. Their recording, "Technical Difficulties," has just been released. She is the pianist for Odinwa Performance Ensemble, playing all styles of Afrikan classical music.

Founder of La Pena Cultural Center in Berkeley and President of Sol2Economics, Eric Leenson discusses economic change in CUBA.TRANSCRIPTSpeaker 1:Method to the madness is next. You're listening to method to the madness. I Biweekly Public Affairs show on k a l x Berkeley Celebrating Bay area innovators. Speaker 2:Okay, Speaker 1:[00:00:30] I'm Lisa Kiefer and today I'm interviewing Eric Linson precedent of soul economics. So economics is affirmed that builds strong links among the socially responsible enterprises throughout the Americas. Eric has been involved in socially responsible investing in business for over 25 years. Speaker 3:Welcome to the program, Eric. Oh, it's [00:01:00] a pleasure to be here. You are involved with Cuba Speaker 1:and economic relations there, but you also are president of a company called soul economics, right? I want to talk a lot about Cuba, but tell us what you're doing right now as president of solely economics. Speaker 4:Basically sole economics. It's all about enterprise solutions and solidarity. So the soul is really solution and solidarity in the Americas. It's an effort to link up initiatives around socially responsible enterprise in the U S [00:01:30] and Latin America. So right now my primary project is in Cuba, but I also am working a bit in Central American, Brazil, and other places as well. Speaker 1:Okay. So what are you doing in Cuba with Obama's announcement in December? It feels like the flood gates should be open. What are you doing and what are your concerns about? Speaker 4:We actually started working in Cuba six years ago, so we had a sense that at some point there would be an opening in Cuba in both directions. One, we thought the U s would be looking at changing relations, [00:02:00] and of course that took a lot longer than we expected. And why did you think that? Because it's just so obvious that the u s needs to do that. I mean, the pressure from Latin America has been mounting over long period of time. The policy was totally outdated. It was a failure. I really thought that once Bush was out of office, things would begin changing fairly quickly, and Obama did make some changes that have really helped move things along. But it's taken quite a while to get to the point where, Speaker 1:and even now, a congress has to approve it, releasing the Embargo Act, [00:02:30] right? Yeah. Well, there's a lot of things that need to be done. Right? Right. Speaker 4:Basically what our work has consisted of is I have helped put together a coalition called socially responsible enterprise and local development in Cuba. And the idea of this coalition is to take the best practices of socially responsible enterprise that exists, particularly in the western hemisphere, to Cuba's kind of a menu of what's possible if one believes, and I, I did think this six years ago, that the Cubans would [00:03:00] need to make some adjustments to their economy. And sure enough that part came true pretty soon because four years ago, basically the Cubans announced to the world that their economy wasn't working properly and they would update it in various ways, keeping socialism of course, but at the same time bringing in a certain number of market type, uh, reforms that would allow for more innovation. So essentially our time and then the Cuba side was very good because what we've done over these years is taken about 50 experts, mostly [00:03:30] from Latin America, pretty much entirely from Latin America, but also from Europe and Canada to a lesser extent from the u s to Cuba for conferences to talk about subjects they'd never really talked about before that cover the range from corporate social responsibility to different types of cooperatives. Speaker 4:The idea was to give the Cubans kind of a menu of things that are happening in other places because they've been kind of cut off and let them choose. I mean, if they're going to be redesigning their economy, why not try to take advantage of mistakes and lessons learned [00:04:00] other places. Speaker 1:I'm sure one of the things you talk about is retaining the good things about Cuba. Capitalism can be a freight train when it arrives and how are you teaching them? Or at least talking about keeping the things that are good about Cuba. You know, they have pretty good at health, right? Medicine. And you know, I know there's a couple of things that I've seen some documentaries that they're pretty strong. Speaker 4:Well they're extremely strong in healthcare medicine and I would say in many ways a developing senses of community and participation. We had a [00:04:30] sort of sum up the work of the project along the lines you're talking about. I would say what we're asking constantly are two questions. One is very similar to what you said. How can Cuba maintain the achievement of the revolution while significantly improving their economy? That's like a new paradigm. Right? And the other question along the same lines is how can they skip 20th century capitalism move right into 21st century sustenance Speaker 1:cause they don't even have internet, right? Speaker 4:Very Limited, very limited internet. So basically, I mean I, what [00:05:00] I find also very interesting about this whole project is that if you look around the world today, I think everyone recognizes that our economies are broken. I mean certainly in the capitalist world we see now for quite a while and it really came home to roost with the 2008 financial crisis. I think if you talk to young people anywhere in the world today, in the capitalist world, the future doesn't look necessarily so great. This economy isn't working. So what's really interesting is I think the Cubans have come to the same conclusion that their economy really isn't working. They've said that publicly many [00:05:30] times. Interestingly, they phrased it in a way, typically many things that go wrong, Cuba are blamed on the u s blockade. Now. There's no doubt that blockade is incredibly strong. Each time at the embargo, the embargo, the Cubans called blockade, oh, sorry, the embargo, there's no doubt that is, it is incredibly intense and it really hurts the Cuban economy. Speaker 4:But the Cubans are now in a mode where they recognizing that they've made mistakes as well. So this comes to light in the idea there needs to be some adjustment in economy. Now [00:06:00] what that means is they are not giving up the notion that Cuba will remain a socialist country. The idea is that strategic economic services and industries will stay in state hands. They will not be privatized. Like for instance, for instance, anything to do with education, healthcare, power generation, large, large producers, utilities will stay in state, public hands, all those sorts of things, but that there's a huge realm within the economy that really can be privatized [00:06:30] and let's say if before Cuba was 95% the employees were state workers. Their goal over the next few years is reduced that to about half and half so that half of the economy would become private. Is there any model in the world that is doing something like that now? Speaker 4:Not quite like that. I mean, you know, keep in mind that Cuba is one of the few holdouts of the old socialist world. There aren't too many socialist countries and when eastern Europe and Russia, Soviet Union fell apart, [00:07:00] they were basically bought lock, stock and barrel by the local capitalists or by international capitalists. Cubans are very sensitive to that, where you could make a comparison perhaps, and this is something that Cubans do look at a lot would be China and Vietnam because in China, in Vietnam, while you have a communist system and the state still controls much of the industry, there is a huge private sector and this is one of the debates raging in in Cuba of course, is if they're going to adopt new ways of doing things, who are they looking [00:07:30] to? It's a complex discussion, but very fascinating. First of all, China is deeply embedded economically throughout Latin America. Speaker 4:Many of the countries that were, you know, typically u s client states economically now have more trade with China than they do with us, including countries like Brazil, Peru, and across the board. Quite a few of them, number one. Number two, there's another thing that needs to be dispelled that most Americans don't understand, which is about [00:08:00] the embargo. Really, the United States policy was to isolate Cuba. The United States wound up only isolating itself because everyone else in the world is in Cuba. It's true. The Chinese are making significant investments, but the Europeans are there. This larger South American countries are there, Russia's there. It's the u s that's high still. Why do they need us? Do they need us? Well, there, there are a couple of factors here. Look at the geography. The U S is so close. I mean, it's 90 miles away. It's a logical market and a [00:08:30] logical trading partner. Speaker 4:I mean, it would reduce costs significantly if Cuba had access to u s market and vice versa. Number two, and right now, from a strategic point of view, it's actually probably more important is because the United States has Cuba on the list of terrorist countries. It has incredibly chilling effect on other countries and institutions willingness to deal with Cuba financially. So where are the United States has been successful with the blockade? The embargo is in financial transactions [00:09:00] over the last couple of years, and this is sort of ironic. Under Obama, the financial embargo has strengthened considerably, and over the last few years, several banks in Europe have been fined hundreds of millions of dollars for having transactions, normal transactions with Cuba. Yeah, it's, it's remarkable. And the reason it's gotten tightened is because there've been so much emphasis on the whole issue of anti-terrorism. So Cuba is maintain laughably and artificially on the terrorist list [00:09:30] just to hurt, you know, harass them. Speaker 4:It's got nothing to do with terrorism because Cuba doesn't threaten anyone. In fact, Cuba's been involved, you know, significantly in the whole peace process going on in Columbia, which everyone would love to see results in, in a truce between the government and the guerrilla movements. And haven't they been helping us with the drug trade in Mexico and the drug cartels? And hasn't there been some cooperative? There's been cooperation on a few fronts. You know, the whole question of us politics towards Cuba, it's got nothing to do with foreign policy. It's all about [00:10:00] us domestic politics and a few Cuban American politicians that just have a, have had a stranglehold over the, over US foreign policy. But getting back to, okay, how could Cuba try to benefit from encouraging certain elements of capitalism, uh, while maintaining socialism? One other thing that needs to be said and I don't want to really underestimating the Cuban economy is a really bad shape. Speaker 4:I mean it's really questionable my mind, how long it can go on in the condition it's in. [00:10:30] And one other thing that's become very interesting, I think symbolic is the fact that you have more and more immigration, legal immigration from Cuba to other places because young people don't see opportunities. Some of the best and brightest people who believe me, they're not against the system. They're all in favor of a socialistic system, but they don't see it performing in a way that we'll assign them to stay. Right to start. Cause there's not really an entrepreneurial, no, no. Cuba's very advanced in certain areas [00:11:00] such as biotechnology. They're actually big exporters of biotech products around the world. But you know, the number of positions are limited and because of the embargo and other factors, you know, if you're a professional, your resources are going to be very limited in terms of what you can do. Speaker 4:So it's, it is very important that the Cubans improve their economy and several of the measures are taken to do that or one that are opening up the idea that there can be a lot more private enterprise, you know, allow people to develop their skills. I mean right now [00:11:30] it's still kind of, it's in its emerging stages and about 500,000 people know in Cuba are self employed or have small businesses. Unfortunately the government is very tightly regulating with those businesses can be and for the most part they tend to be service businesses. And how are they approaching these people money to start businesses or are they, there are loans available, but the reality is most people that start businesses in Cuba are doing it based on having connections in the exterior family [00:12:00] members who send them capital. So there's huge flows of money going from say Miami to Havana to establish small businesses. Speaker 4:So that's, that's one area. The other area that's important is the government is really looking towards the development of cooperatives as a really key part of the economy in terms of furthering private enterprise because cooperatives are private. But at the same time, you have any cooperative serve? Well, it's interesting. Cuba [00:12:30] has a long history of agricultural cooperatives. Ever since the time of the revolution, Cuba has fostered the cooperative movement. Now people don't realize this, but about 30% of land in Cuba is still privately owned. I mean, one of the promises of the revolution was to give land to the peasants. They actually did that. And that land, the private nature, Atlanta's remain sacrosanct over time. Uh, so there's a long experience with cooperatives in agricultural sector with mixed results. There's never been a policy of cooperatives [00:13:00] in the urban sector. So for example, before every business, restaurants, beauty parlors, taxi drivers, little bus companies, all state owned and regulated. Speaker 4:Now these are becoming cooperatives and it's giving people that are members much more incentive to produce. They can earn better. And from the Cuban perspective, it's desirable because it's a more socialistic type of enterprise. What the Cubans are very, very clear about, and I have to admit, coming [00:13:30] from the u s it's almost hard to understand sometimes how totally obsessed they are about trying to not have disparities in income. So they really work hard to try to have income, you know, different levels of income equality and this is creating this new opening is creating a big problem because it is creating inequality gaps, especially against people who don't have relatives in exterior. And guess what, if you're black, if you're, you know, living in the countryside as opposed to city [00:14:00] a, if you're probably a single woman, you probably don't have the same connections that other people do. Speaker 4:So this is exacerbating we experience in the West are appearing there. Is that, yeah, I mean so lesser extent because there is a strong commitment to a social safety net. It's not the same. It's not like people got get left behind in the same way at all. But there's the potential for that and the government is very conscious of it. Is this going to happen quickly? Do you think this is happening slowly? It's going to be slow. It's going to be slow. I mean, I think [00:14:30] a lot of people would say it's going to slowly because in a way there is a race against time to make the economic improvement. And the other piece I, I forgot to mention, it's very important is while all this is very central to improving the economy and building more democracy within the economy, Cuba's not going to be successful if they can't reform their state industries. Speaker 4:No words of the big companies are staying state owned or and they're now bringing in more foreign investment on the state on companies. They are making [00:15:00] some really important reforms about the centralizing them. Whereas before everything was planned in a ministry in Havana, they're giving a lot more control [inaudible] decentralizing to those companies but also to the local governments and there they're hoping that the local governments miss admissible. Governments will work closely with the economic groups to really look out for the welfare, more of local communities. But this is in theory. I mean this is something that's just being rolled out. Now [00:15:30] the other element of course is the Cuba needs a lot more foreign investment and you know, it's going to be very interesting to see. Are we able to now? Well you think that will happen? That's the embargo act. Yeah. I mean, in other words, if you look at the reality of the u s situation, let's be real clear what's happened is President Obama under executive authority, it's pretty much going about as far as he can without having to get things approved by Congress. Speaker 4:Although with the Republican Congress, [00:16:00] they're looking for ways to sneak in ways to control control, things like approving budgets like the Senate has to approve an ambassador, that sort of thing. But essentially what's happened is there's been a normalization of diplomatic relations, which means that there can be upgrades from the current relationship. There's going to be embassies, you know, in the respective countries. President has also said he is going to make significant adjustments in trade and commerce relations. There are things that [00:16:30] he can do under presidential authority. So for example, a number of years ago, even after the embargo went into effect, the, uh, the strengthening of the embargo in the 90s, there was legislation passed by Congress, which allows the president to authorize the sale of US goods to Cuba in the areas of food and medicines. At one point, the United States was selling $700 million worth of food to Cuba a year. Speaker 4:That amount has fallen off, not because the Cubans are interested [00:17:00] in buying. It's because under the embargo, it's interesting they can sell food, but they can't offer credit. So one of the things that they're looking at now would be to make credit more accessible. It's estimated that the Cubans would probably be buying $2 billion a year of goods from United States. So in other words, creating a situation where they can be in greater debt. To us, when you talking about trade debt, you're talking about generally short term debt. It's not going to be necessarily longterm. The other thing that's happening is that the Obama saying he's, [00:17:30] he's going to allow us banks to begin relationships with Cuban banks, which right now doesn't happen. That he would expand the nature of a people to people travel to Cuba so that people, many more people could go to Cuba more easily and they could actually use their credit cards when they're cubed. Speaker 4:What you can't do today. And really importantly is one of the announcements was that the US would re-examine whether or not Cuba should be on the terrorist list. That would be, [00:18:00] and that would be really important and I would be willing to bet almost anything that's a formality. They're going to take Cuba off the terrorist list. They just didn't want to do it all in one fell swoop. They want to make it look like they're really making an effort. But you know it's, it's almost funny when the u s does report they have to, the person has to sign off I think every six months on countries if they should remain in the cherish list or not. When you read the report, this presented the president, there's nothing to even suggest that Cuba is a terrorist country and yet you have countries like North Korea, which isn't on [00:18:30] the chairs. Speaker 4:Are you involved in any of Obama's consultations about Cuba? Indirectly. I mean we have developed a number of resources around different things. We have very good contacts in Cuba with different sectors that are promoting these things. And Yeah, we have informal contacts with the State Department and other places. You've got quite a background in the Americas both for you know, social enterprise movements and various things. You also were a co founder of La Pena Cultural Center [00:19:00] here in Berkeley. Right. I want to talk about your background and how did you get so involved in the Americas and Latin America specifically? We know, it's funny. When I was um, I grew up in the east coast and when I was 15, I went on this trip organized by Minister with about 30 other teams to Mexico and I just fell in love with it and somehow I got interested. I started, I was studying Spanish and then when I was in university I studied international affairs and Latin America. Speaker 4:I got a Fulbright scholarship [00:19:30] and arrived in, in Chile one week before a young day was elected president. So my wife is from Argentina, so it's a pretty deep relationship. And how did you end up in the bay area then? Basically, I came out here on kind of a lark and just said, you know what, this is great. Okay, here, I think I'll stay in the bay area. So I've been, I've been in the Berkeley area since late 71. You were CEO of progressive asset management. Let's talk about that a little bit because it was a first at the time, 25 some years ago, right? Well, when we started progressive asset management, it was the first full [00:20:00] service brokerage firms specialize in socially responsible investing. And to be fair, I mean there were a group of us who started, it was a group of about eight or 10 people and basically if you remember me, remember Peter can meho. Speaker 4:He was instrumental and he was the first CEO of John Harrington and other person. And I was there from the beginning and uh, as an officer and as, as an investment advisor. And I became CEO later on and I was CEO for a number of years, but not as the founding CEO. But it was, I think was an important experience and one which allowed me also [00:20:30] to really see the role that business and finance can play in trying to advance progressive social ideas, social ideas. Tell me about La Pena because you know, that's kind of an institution here in Berkeley. How did that get started and why? Well, essentially, as I mentioned, I was in Chile during the yen, the government, I was there for about the first year and a half, and then when I got back here and came out to the bay area, you know, it was obvious that the United States was intervening in Chile, even before the coup. Speaker 4:They had a [00:21:00] economic blockade going against Chilean. They were obviously supporting the military and others. So a group of US began organizing around that issue. Penn years or popular throughout Latin America. Well, especially in the southern cone, Chile, Argentina, and traditionally they were gatherings at the time of harvest to celebrate the harvest and to socialize, etc. What happened was in, in Chile in the 1960s there was a new type of Pena created in urban areas, which [00:21:30] essentially Avital at the potter was one of the founders of this, of this movement, brought the new song with it. So in other words, it became politicized in which it became places that were talking about struggle, talking about the need to make significant political change. Now in Chile, one of the leading proponents of that really love beloved person who was part of the Pena [inaudible] was a folk singer named Victor Hotter, who has became internationally famous. Speaker 4:He was killed by [00:22:00] the junta at the time of the coup. Just coincidentally, I got to meet him and we became friends. So I did know him during my time and chill. I would go to his house for dinner and that sort of thing. And we were in communication before the coke. So at the time of the coup, of course, all of our work escalated. As you know, the dreadful events became clear. So we really started organizing our work here in the bay area, pretty much through Chile. Solidarity work through a group called non-intervention in Chile, of which I was the first coordinator, [00:22:30] but we decided that if we could open a place like opinion that could provide cultural entertainment, political discussion, food and drink, that would be a great way of trying to educate people about the struggle really not only in Chile but worldwide about what imperialism was all about. Speaker 4:So as kind of our response, some of you may remember that the coup and Chili took place on September 11th minutes, a deadly day apparently. So we organize, we incorporated [00:23:00] La Pena on September 11th, 1974 the year after the coup as a sort of symbol of our resistance against it. And at that time there were very future land in this area that were involved. Over the next couple of years there began to come a small stream of Chilean refugees who had been ex political prisoners, tortured, et cetera. That became kind of a social base also of La Pena. Fortunately, we were able to provide work for a number of them. And you know, it really consolidated a relationship [00:23:30] between the bay area and the Chilean community, which is something, of course we're all very proud of and continues to this day. So if I was going to ask you what your involvement is today? Well, no. Speaker 4:Right now I'm actually the treasurer. I've come and gone at at different times. We're in a moment where we're celebrating our 40th anniversary. What are they seeking to accomplish now? We've just gone through, I would say a a a needed generational transformation that up until the last couple of years, you know, most of us, most of the people involved were, you know, [00:24:00] people who'd grown up in the sixties or seventies right now we have a wonderful new executive director, Kristen [inaudible], and a young staff, probably the average age is in their low thirties so we're sort of in the process of redefining what's relevant today, 40 years later now there's a strong, strong tradition around Latin America and that will continue. There's a great deal of interest. Still a lot going. Oh yeah, no, there's all, there's always things going on. You. Latin America will always remain a focus, but we've got to look at [00:24:30] what are, what are the crucial issues of the day. Speaker 4:Not only that, but for those of you in Berkeley who have been around La Pena for a while, I think you'll recognize that La Pena has always been open to oppress people in its history. You know, people don't, don't know this, but even before we opened, when we first opened back in 75 a couple of the groups that use La Penny very regularly where one was the, I'm getting these students in United States who were studying here. You know, this is before the war ended in Vietnam. It ended, [00:25:00] you know, in in 75 sanctuary for a, yeah, it was the place where their reign students, men who were fighting against the Shah of Iran. It became really important. Obviously all those years and the struggle is Chile, but also during the wars, the civil wars in Central America, revolutionary wars and Bla Penny was a real center of activity. It has been a place that I think a lot of people have always felt comfortable. Speaker 4:Um, gays and lesbians have always felt like Pena was open to them. Uh, members of the black community [00:25:30] have felt that way. It's Kinda been a space that I hope has really promoted this idea that we're all here together living and struggling for a better world. So I think each generation has to take on what are the struggles of this time. If I have one message that I'd like to shoot out there, I think it's the following and that is kind of what I was saying before, that we're all looking for alternative economies that can work and that can provide good standards for human beings that [00:26:00] aren't just all about profit for large corporations. Right? This is being approached in different ways in different places. Cuba's particularly interesting because Cuba's coming at it from a socialist point of view, whereas the rest of us are coming at it from a capitalist point of view. Speaker 4:But there's actually a number of things that we share in common. I think it's really important that we hear in the states. Take a better look at what's going on at other places around the world because we tend to be little provincial here and and sort of us centric [00:26:30] where we think everything is happening here. And in reality there is much more going on in other places and trying to do some of these things that is happening here. From my perspective, Latin America has really been a leader in this. If you look at what's going on in countries like Ecuador, Brazil, we'll Livia some of the experiments going on in Venezuela. It's kind of interesting, but it's not only in those countries you have it in Europe. I mean when you have severe economic crisis, [00:27:00] it kind of brings out new inventions and new ideas. Speaker 4:So innovation. So you see it a lot in Spain, in France and in Europe. There is a world movement. It's called, I mean there's different names for it, but it's called social and solidarity economy. And we have some of it here. I've been amazed. One of the countries is leading the charge right now is South Korea. There's really a vibrant alternative economy movement in South Korea. But the point I want to make is I think we need to be more engaged with them. Another, another thing that I learned [00:27:30] on this voyage is Canada, for example, not all of Canada, Quebec, they haven't thriving social and solidarity economy. Something like 10 to 15% of the economy is made up of, we would call kind of alternatives that are much more sensitive towards the needs of people. So I think it's really important for us to get engaged in that participation of a social enterprise and social enterprise. Yeah, that's part of what I'm trying to do in, in, in the work I'm doing. Speaker 1:Well. Speaking of engagement, how would a listener who is interested in what you're doing get ahold of you [00:28:00] and do you have a website? Right. Speaker 4:Well, I think the best way is to look at my website and that's www, sol, s o l economics.com there's lots of information about Cuba. I mean, the biggest focus is on the work with Cuba, but I also try to promote other ideas about understanding what's going on internationally. So you can actually learn a lot about some of the other movements that are happening internationally. Uh, interestingly, one organization is becoming a stronger, stronger [00:28:30] proponent of social solidarity economy is United Nations and they're doing some really interesting things. That's great. So Eric, when are you going to Cuba next? For the next month or so? I tend to go three or four times a year. Yeah. And I certainly encourage people to go to Cuba to see it, to get a feel for it because it is really, I mean every place is unique, but Cuba is really unique in a sense. It's so different from other places and there's still such a sense of community one and the other hand historically so [00:29:00] fascinating because you still are back in the sort of 50s and 60s. Speaker 1:It's a time capsule time capsule. Okay. Well Eric, thank you for being on a program. Great. Well thank you. Speaker 2:Right. Speaker 1:You've been listening to method to the madness, [00:29:30] a biweekly public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley Celebrating Bay area innovators. If you have questions or comments about this show, go to the calyx and find method to the madness. Drop us an email. Tune in again in two weeks. At the same time, have a great weekend. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

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

We will open with Damu Sudi Alii and Jabari Alii, featured artist with First Edition which is performing Sat., March 22, 2014, 8:30 p.m. at the 57th Street Gallery in Oakland. See https://www.facebook.com/FirstEditionTrio/info  At 8:30 Danny Nguyen joins us to talk about World Water Day and his composition, “DANCE THE BLEU”, the College of Alameda's Dance Department and Nguyen Dance Company performance, co-sponsored by Oakland Sister Cities International Da Nang, Saturday March 22nd, 7pm. Free Admission in the College of Alameda Dance Studio, G-111. See http://alameda.peralta.edu/danny-nguyen/  At 9 a.m. Scottish playwright Linda McLean joins us to talk about Every Five Minutes which is going up at the Magic Theatre next week 3/26-4/20/2014. See http://www.aoiagency.com/2010/11/mclean-linda/We close at 9:30 a.m. with an interview with Yeye Luisah Teish who will tell us about the Moisture, The Water Cycle Continues. . . A Ritual Theatre Performance, 7-9 p.m. at La Pena Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Avenue, in Berkeley, Sunday, March 23, 2014, (510) 849-2568. Visit http://lapena.org/event/moisture-the-water-cycle-continues-2/

Today we feature interviews with two artists: Billy Woodberry, director, Bless Their Little Hearts; The Pocketbook, both screening as a part of LA Rebellion at UC Berkeley Pacific Film Archivein Berkeley tonight at 7 PM. Visit bampfa.edu for tickets and information about the series which continues through Oct. 31. The director is flying up from Los Angeles and will be at the screenings. Billy Woodberry is an independent filmmaker who graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles Film/Television Department with an MFA in production. He has appeared in several films by Charles Burnett, Thom Anderson and James Benning. His works have screened at the Camera Austria Symposium, Harvard Film Archive, Human Rights Watch Film Festival and Museum of Modern Art. He has taught in the Art School and the Film/Video School at CalArts since 1989 and has been a member of the Board of the Film Forum, Los Angeles since 1998. Our first interview is with Navarasa Founder and Artistic Director: Dr. Aparna Sindhoor. Navarasa is at La Pena Cultural Center in Berkeley for two nights, Thursday-Friday, Oct. 11-12, 8 PM, presenting their work: Encounters. Dr. Sindhoor is a choreographer, director, actor and singer. Critics have hailed Sindhoor as a powerful voice for creating contemporary works of extraordinary artistry and works that challenge the boundaries of traditional Indian dance, yet contribute to strengthening that tradition. We feature music from the company repertoire. Music: Luisa Maita: Amour & Peace; Archie Shepp: "Arrival [Horace Parlan]."

Pedro Sanchez is a soil scientist, Director of the Tropical Agriculture and Rural Environment Program, and Director of the Millennium Villages Project at the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Dr. Sanchez was elected into the National Academy of Sciences in 2012.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next [inaudible] look at this picture and typology show on k a l s Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists [00:00:30] and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 2: Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. This week on spectrum. Our guest is Professor Pedro Sanchez, a soil scientist who is director of the tropical agriculture and the rural environment program. Senior research scholar and the director of the Millennium Villages Project at the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Dr. Sanchez was director general of the World Agroforestry Center headquartered [00:01:00] in Nairobi, Kenya from 1991 to 2001 and served as co-chair of the UN Millennium Project Hunger Task Force. He is also professor Ameritus of Soil Science and forestry at North Carolina State University and was a visiting professor at the University of California Berkeley. Dr Pedro Sanchez was elected into the National Academy of Sciences in 2012 in late April, 2012 Dr. Sanchez presented the [inaudible] any memorial lecture at the invitation of the UC Berkeley College of natural [00:01:30] resources. Prior to that lecture, Professor Sanchez talked with me about his life and work. Welcome to spectrum Pedro Sanchez. Thank you very much. Want to ask about how you initially got interested in soil science? Speaker 3: Oh boy. Well it goes way back. I'm from Cuba. My dad own a fairly small farm and I always liked to play with dirt. Still I'm [00:02:00] and getting paid for it. But during those days it was just playing. I always liked the, when I took a shower after being out all day to see, uh, to see the drain turn red with all the red mud. And uh, my dad, uh, wanted me to follow his steps, uh, with a farm fertilizer business he had in Cuba when he said he would send me to Cornell because uh, he had gone there and I said, fine. That was all fine with me. I started studying agronomy. [00:02:30] Ah, yeah, I'm majoring in soils. And then I changed hearing seminars from outside people, but that time telling us that Indian with 200 million people, what it's going to start on, this will be a global catastrophe. Oh. I said, well, this will be something I could dedicate my life with and I had been lucky enough to to say that I've done it. Yeah, I've dedicated my life to this. Speaker 2: How did your work, tropical agriculture Speaker 3: [00:03:00] and rural environment issues evolve? The hope was first my interest in tropical soils, not Doyle's in general, but tropical soils. Then the opportunities at Cornell offered me to go to the Philippines. I get my phd degree there. Then out of there I learned about the green revolution and I worked at my first international center, the international rice research and CCU, and from there arm became a assistant professor at North Carolina State [00:03:30] University, the first professor of tropical soil Sekai because they wanted to start a discipline on that. Send me to Peru and work on the green revolution of rice and brew and then afterwards into campus and start teaching tropical soils. You get research money and and right. The first edition of my book. Speaker 2: How do you describe and characterize world hunger and then rural poverty? How are they different? How are they similar overlap? Speaker 3: [00:04:00] They usually are the same person who suffers hunger. It's almost invariably poor. They're both rural and urban. All of the majority of the poor are, are indeed in rural areas of the world still Speaker 2: because it's only recently that the 50% of people now live in cities and that's mostly in the developed world. Speaker 3: No, and in Latin America is 75% [00:04:30] urban. Uh, a Shar is about the same sub Saharan Africa is the only large piece of land in the world where the majority of the people are still rural, about 70% but in the next 20 years they're probably going to be 50, 50 or less. Rural to urban migration continues. Cities get incredibly huge Speaker 2: hunger I guess then for you is caloric intake. Speaker 3: [00:05:00] Okay. Uh, there is a, there is a metric that it's approved by the United Nations on hunger and that is stumping Charles stunting, stunting being been short in height for your age and below a certain level you're considered stunted. That is a product of, of hunger and disease and on all sorts of things. What is the best metric we'd have for measuring hunger [00:05:30] is in children. So that's, that's the best metric. There are many other ones that can related to the amount of food you consume in terms of calories, broken vitamins and micronutrients and the amount of food you're able to, you're able to acquire by money, by buying food like most of us do, and then the utilization of food within your body. That also, that also has some same important variables. I should have. You have sites since [inaudible] and so on. [00:06:00] To me, however, hunger is the state of mind is the state of, not that I really been hungry for very long, I've been very lucky, but it's a state of powerlessness. When you're hungry, nothing else matters. You really have to satisfy that hunger and it's our survival instinct. For example, you cannot possibly think about the environment when you're hungry, so it's a mindset. That [00:06:30] brings us back to our most basic instance. Speaker 4: Today's guest on spectrum is Pedro Sanchez, director of the Millennium Villages Project at the Earth Institute. You are listening to KALX Berkeley. Speaker 3: You've been involved in the United Nations Millennium Village project. Your key part of that, [00:07:00] and can you give us an overview of that project? It's an ongoing project, isn't it? Yeah, it is an ongoing project. I'm not bashful. It was my idea. And that is after finishing all of this recommendations on the UN Millennium Development Goals, my committee working with hunger and similar committees, working on health in sanitation and the environment and poverty and and so on. I was in India, I've seen some model, uh, or they call, uh, bio abilities [00:07:30] of my co-chair, professors forming Athan. And I said to myself, why don't we do this in Africa where the situation is much worse, but how can we help in impoverish villages achieve all the millennium development goals, not only over the whole thing. So I'm talking with my wife and at that time we had received some price money. We had quarter of a million dollars we could invest. Speaker 3: So we decided to let's go invest that money and try to do [00:08:00] it in a village in western Kenya. That will be both working. But when I went to see my director, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, he says, oh no, this is such a great idea. You're not going to do it with your money. We're going to raise lots of money and do it again. He did it within four or five months. We had about a hundred billion dollars in our coffers, so to speak, mostly from private philanthropists. And then we started conceiving. Then that brought me, the program says, okay, let's look for villages of about 5,000 people. [00:08:30] English, they're more than 20% malnourished kids under the age of five. Again, that famous metric on stunting that was, and the people that are making less than a dollar a day, very hard to quantify. So we started one in western Kenya [inaudible] and then as more funds came out, I know they winter in northern Ethiopia. Speaker 3: Oh, Colorado. And within a year and a half or so, we had 80 such feels clustered [00:09:00] and uh, around the 14 sites in 10 African countries, each of them representing a major agricultural zone or farming system where hunger is coming. In other words, who didn't have any, in South Africa, for example, the villages were selected by us. We always have to go basically to the head of states, a precedent or prime minister and ask for permission. But we would make sure that they wouldn't say, well, you have to do, listen, Mike Rich and some tribe didn't succeed. [00:09:30] Basically the way it started as a bunch of us from different disciplines, people working in health, people working infrastructure, water and sanitation and so on. We went to the village how to village meeting and there was some government people who represented different than we asking, well, do you want to become a millennium villages? Speaker 3: You're going to have to work very hard because we're not going to give you any money. We're going to do is help you out with things that you don't have in kind and get a lot of training on many things and [00:10:00] you're going to be asking a zillion questions with the questionnaires that we do. So that was the deal. And then the priorities were selected working with committees of the villagers and specialists from our side on the university site balance the knowledge that the villagers had gotten by themselves with scientific, scientifically grounded idea. So the villages basically said, well, we need [00:10:30] inputs for agriculture because the yields were very low. Said, what are you needs? Well, we use better seats, hybrids, seats, and so on and we need fertilizer. Well, we agreed with that. The other thing they asked right away, in addition to agricultural inputs to grow more food was a clinic. Speaker 3: And we said, okay, but let's get the plants from the Ministry of Health. So it's a proper government clinic. You guys build it, [00:11:00] you guys make the bricks and do all the things they know how to do and we'll provide you with a, with cement, with 10 roof, iron doors and the things I couldn't buy but not a, not a dollar or any shilling change hands. And they did that on their very problem. They did that for schools and even for warehouses later using the same principle that they do most of the work and we come in and provide the necessary things like cement [00:11:30] or whatever. And that's been the rule in pretty much in all the abilities with very, very few exceptions. Nice thing about that. They said they own it, they own it. They have a sense of ownership, they take care of it. And it's very different than if the government or some NGO or some foundation bill such things and gave him the keys to it. Are they in some way cooperatives? You're surely I ended up vigil in the villages, donates the land [00:12:00] for the clinic to be built then, I don't know the ownership, but in most cases basically the clinic is part of the Minister of health and the case of fertilizers and seed. No. Speaker 2: Well and then warehouses and things like that. Speaker 3: Yeah. Warehouses on all ladders. Uh, there, there's a, there, there it's usually built on a place that is donated by a member of the community walk that line. Speaker 2: So there's a certain collective spirit. Speaker 3: Oh, very much so. I mean every farmer farms his or her piece of land [00:12:30] like blank, they harvest, they sell it, share information, all of that share a lot of information. And right now that basic learning development goal has been achieved. They're getting more into different kinds of cooperatives and they band together to sell specific high value products such as milk or tomatoes or things like that. In most cases that are already registered as formal cooperatives. I mean means they can get a line of credit from the banks. They're [00:13:00] going through the process. Now we're going from a subsidize based economy, not only to getting into irregular financial arrangements wholesale. We on other institutions stuff work with banks to convince them to lend to these people. They say they have no collateral. It's true, uh, an institution, uh, Agora, which just starts for the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa, broke ground by promising, not making a deal with it, with one of the banks and the credit guarantees they would refund [00:13:30] the bank 50% of whatever they are, who is, who? People not paying their loans out of hundreds of millions of dollars. And it has happened to have had to pay $4,000 the recovery rate of their loans from this people who have no collateral. It's the same as other people. And now banks now are beginning to look at agriculture, small holder agriculture, the bottom billion, so to speak, as SMH or source. Speaker 4: This is spectrum [00:14:00] KALX Berkeley. I'm talking with Professor Pedro Sanchez about hunger and agriculture in light of a global population of nine to 10 billion people by 2050 Speaker 2: and so does this project then in some ways answer the the critics of aid to developing nations that has failed for so long, decade after decade of just dumping money on countries as opposed to this kind of an integrated project [00:14:30] that you've, Speaker 3: well first, yeah, first let me say that this, this idea that all this money has been wasted is incorrect. I mean there are certainly a lot of wastage, but certainly not. When I started working, and it was like 40 years ago, and by that time countries like Mexico and Brazil and Korea were receiving aid and most of that America now there's no more aid and now they're our best customers in terms of and by [00:15:00] an American experts. So it has worked. The fact that that India is no longer starving, but India, so foot exporter has worked and not all the credit is, is to serve by the aid that donors select the United States gift, but also by their own resources and their own loan and work. But no aid has worked and it has worked then. Yeah, no, ideally and very subject to criticism. But by and large, I think eight in general in broad terms has work specifically [00:15:30] not Speaker 2: do you think there's an attainable rebalancing of agricultural incentives and markets in the developed world and in the developing world that would, uh, work to, you know, accommodate nine to 10 billion people in the world? Speaker 3: Well, first let me say that in either case, developed or undeveloped, there's no such a thing as a, I see ideal market or the perfect market, which my economist friends say, well, this, [00:16:00] oh, you mean you're subsidizing fertilizer? Well, that's sort of distorting the market for fertilizers. And I said, what markets one market are you talking about? It doesn't exist. Uh, I don't believe in perfect markets because I've never seen one. I'm not an economist, but mine are in economics, so knows a little bit about them and they're very distorted by, by subsidies. We subsidize very many rich farmers here who are really starting to the point of the ridiculous. The question [00:16:30] is, are we going to be able to feed 9 billion people by 2050 I would say probably yes. And a, the bigger actors there are going to be South America and Africa to be able to feed themselves. Yes. Unexplored food. Yes. The land resources are there. Of course all this has to do with politics. Nobody can predict what the politics over their specific country going to be. Right. Speaker 2: Like the molecular, like Molly, Speaker 3: Molly or reflect who's going to work [00:17:00] here. Yeah. So, uh, so I mean all this food is political presidents get reelected because it was a successful food programs in Africa, but uh, that it's perfectly feasible. It is. I don't know how much, what's your question about that? Speaker 2: And right now the percentage of land dedicated to agricultural activities, about 12%. Speaker 3: Yeah. And if you include pastures for a cow [00:17:30] production and so on, it's about 30% of the world's land area Speaker 2: and do you see that number? Being able to go up Speaker 3: little bit, maybe one or two percentage points, maybe one percentage points, but no more than that. But there will be an elements and South America on an that will be in opening new Lorenz lands that are not ecologically critical. Tropical rain forest. There's white lines or stuff like that that are [00:18:00] environmental protected. No Way. And there is additional land that can be used, but the main, the main effort is to increase the yields per acre of the land already been used and the best ways to do that in a going forward, sustainable way. What do you feel about that? You need improved plants and you need a balanced set of inputs and not too many and not too few. The genetically modified plants [00:18:30] are, in my opinion, fine. They've gotten a very bad rap, tumbled them or ecologically extremely sound like a bt corn and bt cotton. Speaker 3: They have a genes from a [inaudible] that when the insects bite and trying to suck the SAP or something, they get killed, stuck said to them so that only kill the bad bugs and lose all the other books who have no interested in getting involved with uh, with a corn crop fine as opposed to having insecticides that would kill [00:19:00] all insects. So, uh, there are a lot of good things in genetic modification anyway. We are all genetically modified organisms. We certainly are all of us and has been done by nature by, by random, but it's so much different if you do it in a, in a lab. Conceptually it's the same thing or very clear evidence study of the National Academy of Science August last year and Europe, two big studies, one in the UK and one in Switzerland and they all show [00:19:30] the same thing, that there is no harm done to the environment and to human health where the use of GMOs that have been released. Speaker 3: Then this is basically no different from the development of hybrid corn, which wasn't genetically modified in the sense of transporting one gene from one place to another one, but it was genetically modified by combining plants that would combine their own genes. So, um, we need plants that produce a lot, that have deep roots, that are told them to diseases [00:20:00] and insects and more tolerant to drought and floods because of climate change. You need better plants. And uh, without them we'd be nowhere. And the issue of inputs, agriculture is different from natural systems. Agriculture takes a tremendous amount of nutrients and energy and everything out of the system and it's not returned back and something has to be returned back. That's why we need to fertilizers, fertilizers, whether they're mineral or they're organic, we need to add additional [00:20:30] nutrients on. And there's no question about it. Speaker 3: The issue of organic versus mineral, the plant doesn't care the best way to do it. It's a combination of both, which is called conventional agriculture. Organic farming. If it produces higher premium price, go to it. But we know that the deals are lower and it requires more labor. So my view on all this is not to beat up matic you say you want to have a good balance, the, the time horizon [00:21:00] on the mineral fertilizers, phosphorus and potassium. Do you see that running out at some point in the future and not grading? Uh, the, uh, of course nitrogen is taken from the air and we live in an atmosphere of 78% nitrogen. So it's for all practical purposes, infant. But that's you comes from minds or I know there enormous research, unfortunately concentrated in two or three countries. Canada and Russia. Phosphorus is the one we worry [00:21:30] the most about. Speaker 3: But no, I've been about almost 50 years in this business and every five years or so here we're gonna run out of phosphorus in the next, uh, 50 to a hundred years. And then you keep [inaudible] in the past and best buy, there's more efficiency on the use on there, more that bus it's found. So I, I'm really not worried, not worried, frankly, not worried. I've heard that you're, you're taking a project with the gates foundation to [00:22:00] map all the soils of Africa is yes, yes. The digital soul map of Africa. Okay. And what's going to happen with the data? Um, we're doing it now. At first I saw map of Africa on a scale of a hundred by hundred meters. That's how about a Hector pixel. It will be Hector, two and a half acres of saw properties and that'll come out later in the year of the first approximation. It'll be, it'll be rough. Speaker 3: We're looking now for [00:22:30] continuation of the project for another four years to really do it better and uh, mainstream it into, into countries. And I forgot the other one too, but all the data will be accessible by the way, for the way, in a way that you can sort of like Google earth. You can pin 0.1 place and you can see a hundred by hundred meter pixels and it'll tell you how much sand has and all that. And then you can query [00:23:00] and it will give you a map of sand content. I know their map of organic matter or slow or whatever, whatever you want. Professor Sanchez, thanks very much for joining us on spectrum. You are very welcome. My pleasure. Glad to be back in Berkeley. Speaker 4: [00:23:30] Regular feature of spectrum is to highlight some of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Here's Rick Kaneski and Lisa cabbage with the calendar on Wednesday, Speaker 5: August 29th at 6:00 PM the Commonwealth Club at five nine five market street in San Francisco. It's presenting a talk by the president of the Ocean Conservation Society, Madelina Beersy entitled Dolphin Confidential Confessions [00:24:00] of a field biologist. She'll talk about her experiences at sea from her earliest travels. You're a transformations into an advocate for conservation and dolphin protection. She takes us inside the world of a marine scientist and offer as a firsthand understanding of marine mammal behavior as well as the frustrations, delights, and creativity that makeup Dolphin research bears these fieldwork investigates Dolphin social behavior and intelligence. She shares an honest down to [00:24:30] earth analysis of what it means to be a marine biologist in the field today and the life among the dolphins and addresses the critical environmental and conservation problems they face. The lecture is $20 or $8 for Commonwealth club members or $7 for students with valid id. Visit Commonwealth club.org for more info, Speaker 6: find out what ideas are percolating in the mind of William Gibson, one of our greatest contemporary science fiction writers on Tuesday, September 4th [00:25:00] at 7:00 PM at the Jewish community center in San Francisco, 3,200 California Street, author of the groundbreaking cyberpunk novel Neuro Mansur. Gibson described the internet before it existed and coined the term cyberspace. His first collection of nonfiction writings, distrust that particular flavor, offers provocative insights on everything from the future of technology to compulsive online watch collecting to drug trafficking and Singapore. Again, [00:25:30] that's Tuesday, September 4th at 7:00 PM for tickets and more information. Go to www dot JCC s f. Dot Org Speaker 5: September. His seminar about longterm thinking from the long now foundation will be on Wednesday the fifth at 7:30 PM Tim O'Reilly is discussing the birth of the global mind. The evolution of communication and intelligence. Speech allowed us to communicate and coordinate writing allowed that coordination to spend time and space, [00:26:00] but that's not all in one breakthrough computer application. After another, we see a new kind of manmade symbiosis. The Google autonomous vehicle turns out not to be just a triumph of artificial intelligence algorithms. The car is guided by the cloud memory of roads driven before by Human Google Street view drivers augmented by powerful and precise new sensors in the same way. Crowdsource data from sensor enabled humans is leading to smarter cities, breakthroughs in healthcare and new economies. [00:26:30] The future belongs not to artificial intelligence, but the collective intelligence. This event will take place at the cal theater and San Francisco is Fort Mason. It is $10 or is free for members Speaker 6: visit long now.org for tickets and more info. The September East Bay Science Cafe Welcomes John Duber, assistant professor in the Department of bioengineering at UC Berkeley. He will talk about using synthetic biology to build microbial factories producing biofuels. [00:27:00] One promising direction for the production of liquid transportation fuels is re-engineering the metabolism of microbes like Baker's yeast to convert sugar into a chemical with desirable bio fuel characteristics. Dubar roiled described work being done to produce biofuels using the rapidly emerging approaches of synthetic biology. John Dubar was a 2012 winner of the US Department of Energy's early career research award. East Bay Science cafe is Wednesday, [00:27:30] September 5th in the [inaudible] lounge adjacent to cafe Valparaiso at La Pena Cultural Center from seven to 9:00 PM location 31 oh five Shattuck avenue in Berkeley. Now, Lisa Katovich with two new stories, science news reports that two studies find that nanoscale pollutants can intercrop roots triggering a host of changes to plants growth in health. These tiny particles can stunt plant growth, boost the plants absorption [00:28:00] of pollutants, and increase the need for crop fertilizers. Speaker 6: The new data now for Warren of agriculturally associated human and environmental risks from the accelerating use of manufactured nanomaterials. According to Patricia Holden at UC Santa Barbara and her colleagues. Their report is published online August 20th in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, nanomaterials that get released in the exhaust from diesel fueled tractors can rain down onto crop fields. Those used in fabrics, [00:28:30] sunscreens and other products collect in the solid, separated out of sewage and wastewater. The new studies offer glimpse at the toxic effects. Such nanoparticles may pose to future crops. As exposures rise, the ability of soil and other legumes to fix nitrogen is one of the most important microbial processes in agriculture. So the ability of Nano Sirium to shut this process down was the most significant and most troubling new finding. The UC Berkeley Solar Car Club [00:29:00] team, cal soul placed forth in a field of 12 cars in the 2012 American solar challenge in July, the race was run in stages from Rochester, New York, ending in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Congratulations to the castle team. Speaker 1: The [inaudible] show is by Mozcon and David. This album, [00:29:30] folk and acoustic made available [inaudible] comments, license 3.0 thank you. Listen to spectrum [inaudible] spectrum [inaudible] hi John. [inaudible]. [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Pedro Sanchez is a soil scientist, Director of the Tropical Agriculture and Rural Environment Program, and Director of the Millennium Villages Project at the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Dr. Sanchez was elected into the National Academy of Sciences in 2012.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next [inaudible] look at this picture and typology show on k a l s Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists [00:00:30] and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 2: Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. This week on spectrum. Our guest is Professor Pedro Sanchez, a soil scientist who is director of the tropical agriculture and the rural environment program. Senior research scholar and the director of the Millennium Villages Project at the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Dr. Sanchez was director general of the World Agroforestry Center headquartered [00:01:00] in Nairobi, Kenya from 1991 to 2001 and served as co-chair of the UN Millennium Project Hunger Task Force. He is also professor Ameritus of Soil Science and forestry at North Carolina State University and was a visiting professor at the University of California Berkeley. Dr Pedro Sanchez was elected into the National Academy of Sciences in 2012 in late April, 2012 Dr. Sanchez presented the [inaudible] any memorial lecture at the invitation of the UC Berkeley College of natural [00:01:30] resources. Prior to that lecture, Professor Sanchez talked with me about his life and work. Welcome to spectrum Pedro Sanchez. Thank you very much. Want to ask about how you initially got interested in soil science? Speaker 3: Oh boy. Well it goes way back. I'm from Cuba. My dad own a fairly small farm and I always liked to play with dirt. Still I'm [00:02:00] and getting paid for it. But during those days it was just playing. I always liked the, when I took a shower after being out all day to see, uh, to see the drain turn red with all the red mud. And uh, my dad, uh, wanted me to follow his steps, uh, with a farm fertilizer business he had in Cuba when he said he would send me to Cornell because uh, he had gone there and I said, fine. That was all fine with me. I started studying agronomy. [00:02:30] Ah, yeah, I'm majoring in soils. And then I changed hearing seminars from outside people, but that time telling us that Indian with 200 million people, what it's going to start on, this will be a global catastrophe. Oh. I said, well, this will be something I could dedicate my life with and I had been lucky enough to to say that I've done it. Yeah, I've dedicated my life to this. Speaker 2: How did your work, tropical agriculture Speaker 3: [00:03:00] and rural environment issues evolve? The hope was first my interest in tropical soils, not Doyle's in general, but tropical soils. Then the opportunities at Cornell offered me to go to the Philippines. I get my phd degree there. Then out of there I learned about the green revolution and I worked at my first international center, the international rice research and CCU, and from there arm became a assistant professor at North Carolina State [00:03:30] University, the first professor of tropical soil Sekai because they wanted to start a discipline on that. Send me to Peru and work on the green revolution of rice and brew and then afterwards into campus and start teaching tropical soils. You get research money and and right. The first edition of my book. Speaker 2: How do you describe and characterize world hunger and then rural poverty? How are they different? How are they similar overlap? Speaker 3: [00:04:00] They usually are the same person who suffers hunger. It's almost invariably poor. They're both rural and urban. All of the majority of the poor are, are indeed in rural areas of the world still Speaker 2: because it's only recently that the 50% of people now live in cities and that's mostly in the developed world. Speaker 3: No, and in Latin America is 75% [00:04:30] urban. Uh, a Shar is about the same sub Saharan Africa is the only large piece of land in the world where the majority of the people are still rural, about 70% but in the next 20 years they're probably going to be 50, 50 or less. Rural to urban migration continues. Cities get incredibly huge Speaker 2: hunger I guess then for you is caloric intake. Speaker 3: [00:05:00] Okay. Uh, there is a, there is a metric that it's approved by the United Nations on hunger and that is stumping Charles stunting, stunting being been short in height for your age and below a certain level you're considered stunted. That is a product of, of hunger and disease and on all sorts of things. What is the best metric we'd have for measuring hunger [00:05:30] is in children. So that's, that's the best metric. There are many other ones that can related to the amount of food you consume in terms of calories, broken vitamins and micronutrients and the amount of food you're able to, you're able to acquire by money, by buying food like most of us do, and then the utilization of food within your body. That also, that also has some same important variables. I should have. You have sites since [inaudible] and so on. [00:06:00] To me, however, hunger is the state of mind is the state of, not that I really been hungry for very long, I've been very lucky, but it's a state of powerlessness. When you're hungry, nothing else matters. You really have to satisfy that hunger and it's our survival instinct. For example, you cannot possibly think about the environment when you're hungry, so it's a mindset. That [00:06:30] brings us back to our most basic instance. Speaker 4: Today's guest on spectrum is Pedro Sanchez, director of the Millennium Villages Project at the Earth Institute. You are listening to KALX Berkeley. Speaker 3: You've been involved in the United Nations Millennium Village project. Your key part of that, [00:07:00] and can you give us an overview of that project? It's an ongoing project, isn't it? Yeah, it is an ongoing project. I'm not bashful. It was my idea. And that is after finishing all of this recommendations on the UN Millennium Development Goals, my committee working with hunger and similar committees, working on health in sanitation and the environment and poverty and and so on. I was in India, I've seen some model, uh, or they call, uh, bio abilities [00:07:30] of my co-chair, professors forming Athan. And I said to myself, why don't we do this in Africa where the situation is much worse, but how can we help in impoverish villages achieve all the millennium development goals, not only over the whole thing. So I'm talking with my wife and at that time we had received some price money. We had quarter of a million dollars we could invest. Speaker 3: So we decided to let's go invest that money and try to do [00:08:00] it in a village in western Kenya. That will be both working. But when I went to see my director, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, he says, oh no, this is such a great idea. You're not going to do it with your money. We're going to raise lots of money and do it again. He did it within four or five months. We had about a hundred billion dollars in our coffers, so to speak, mostly from private philanthropists. And then we started conceiving. Then that brought me, the program says, okay, let's look for villages of about 5,000 people. [00:08:30] English, they're more than 20% malnourished kids under the age of five. Again, that famous metric on stunting that was, and the people that are making less than a dollar a day, very hard to quantify. So we started one in western Kenya [inaudible] and then as more funds came out, I know they winter in northern Ethiopia. Speaker 3: Oh, Colorado. And within a year and a half or so, we had 80 such feels clustered [00:09:00] and uh, around the 14 sites in 10 African countries, each of them representing a major agricultural zone or farming system where hunger is coming. In other words, who didn't have any, in South Africa, for example, the villages were selected by us. We always have to go basically to the head of states, a precedent or prime minister and ask for permission. But we would make sure that they wouldn't say, well, you have to do, listen, Mike Rich and some tribe didn't succeed. [00:09:30] Basically the way it started as a bunch of us from different disciplines, people working in health, people working infrastructure, water and sanitation and so on. We went to the village how to village meeting and there was some government people who represented different than we asking, well, do you want to become a millennium villages? Speaker 3: You're going to have to work very hard because we're not going to give you any money. We're going to do is help you out with things that you don't have in kind and get a lot of training on many things and [00:10:00] you're going to be asking a zillion questions with the questionnaires that we do. So that was the deal. And then the priorities were selected working with committees of the villagers and specialists from our side on the university site balance the knowledge that the villagers had gotten by themselves with scientific, scientifically grounded idea. So the villages basically said, well, we need [00:10:30] inputs for agriculture because the yields were very low. Said, what are you needs? Well, we use better seats, hybrids, seats, and so on and we need fertilizer. Well, we agreed with that. The other thing they asked right away, in addition to agricultural inputs to grow more food was a clinic. Speaker 3: And we said, okay, but let's get the plants from the Ministry of Health. So it's a proper government clinic. You guys build it, [00:11:00] you guys make the bricks and do all the things they know how to do and we'll provide you with a, with cement, with 10 roof, iron doors and the things I couldn't buy but not a, not a dollar or any shilling change hands. And they did that on their very problem. They did that for schools and even for warehouses later using the same principle that they do most of the work and we come in and provide the necessary things like cement [00:11:30] or whatever. And that's been the rule in pretty much in all the abilities with very, very few exceptions. Nice thing about that. They said they own it, they own it. They have a sense of ownership, they take care of it. And it's very different than if the government or some NGO or some foundation bill such things and gave him the keys to it. Are they in some way cooperatives? You're surely I ended up vigil in the villages, donates the land [00:12:00] for the clinic to be built then, I don't know the ownership, but in most cases basically the clinic is part of the Minister of health and the case of fertilizers and seed. No. Speaker 2: Well and then warehouses and things like that. Speaker 3: Yeah. Warehouses on all ladders. Uh, there, there's a, there, there it's usually built on a place that is donated by a member of the community walk that line. Speaker 2: So there's a certain collective spirit. Speaker 3: Oh, very much so. I mean every farmer farms his or her piece of land [00:12:30] like blank, they harvest, they sell it, share information, all of that share a lot of information. And right now that basic learning development goal has been achieved. They're getting more into different kinds of cooperatives and they band together to sell specific high value products such as milk or tomatoes or things like that. In most cases that are already registered as formal cooperatives. I mean means they can get a line of credit from the banks. They're [00:13:00] going through the process. Now we're going from a subsidize based economy, not only to getting into irregular financial arrangements wholesale. We on other institutions stuff work with banks to convince them to lend to these people. They say they have no collateral. It's true, uh, an institution, uh, Agora, which just starts for the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa, broke ground by promising, not making a deal with it, with one of the banks and the credit guarantees they would refund [00:13:30] the bank 50% of whatever they are, who is, who? People not paying their loans out of hundreds of millions of dollars. And it has happened to have had to pay $4,000 the recovery rate of their loans from this people who have no collateral. It's the same as other people. And now banks now are beginning to look at agriculture, small holder agriculture, the bottom billion, so to speak, as SMH or source. Speaker 4: This is spectrum [00:14:00] KALX Berkeley. I'm talking with Professor Pedro Sanchez about hunger and agriculture in light of a global population of nine to 10 billion people by 2050 Speaker 2: and so does this project then in some ways answer the the critics of aid to developing nations that has failed for so long, decade after decade of just dumping money on countries as opposed to this kind of an integrated project [00:14:30] that you've, Speaker 3: well first, yeah, first let me say that this, this idea that all this money has been wasted is incorrect. I mean there are certainly a lot of wastage, but certainly not. When I started working, and it was like 40 years ago, and by that time countries like Mexico and Brazil and Korea were receiving aid and most of that America now there's no more aid and now they're our best customers in terms of and by [00:15:00] an American experts. So it has worked. The fact that that India is no longer starving, but India, so foot exporter has worked and not all the credit is, is to serve by the aid that donors select the United States gift, but also by their own resources and their own loan and work. But no aid has worked and it has worked then. Yeah, no, ideally and very subject to criticism. But by and large, I think eight in general in broad terms has work specifically [00:15:30] not Speaker 2: do you think there's an attainable rebalancing of agricultural incentives and markets in the developed world and in the developing world that would, uh, work to, you know, accommodate nine to 10 billion people in the world? Speaker 3: Well, first let me say that in either case, developed or undeveloped, there's no such a thing as a, I see ideal market or the perfect market, which my economist friends say, well, this, [00:16:00] oh, you mean you're subsidizing fertilizer? Well, that's sort of distorting the market for fertilizers. And I said, what markets one market are you talking about? It doesn't exist. Uh, I don't believe in perfect markets because I've never seen one. I'm not an economist, but mine are in economics, so knows a little bit about them and they're very distorted by, by subsidies. We subsidize very many rich farmers here who are really starting to the point of the ridiculous. The question [00:16:30] is, are we going to be able to feed 9 billion people by 2050 I would say probably yes. And a, the bigger actors there are going to be South America and Africa to be able to feed themselves. Yes. Unexplored food. Yes. The land resources are there. Of course all this has to do with politics. Nobody can predict what the politics over their specific country going to be. Right. Speaker 2: Like the molecular, like Molly, Speaker 3: Molly or reflect who's going to work [00:17:00] here. Yeah. So, uh, so I mean all this food is political presidents get reelected because it was a successful food programs in Africa, but uh, that it's perfectly feasible. It is. I don't know how much, what's your question about that? Speaker 2: And right now the percentage of land dedicated to agricultural activities, about 12%. Speaker 3: Yeah. And if you include pastures for a cow [00:17:30] production and so on, it's about 30% of the world's land area Speaker 2: and do you see that number? Being able to go up Speaker 3: little bit, maybe one or two percentage points, maybe one percentage points, but no more than that. But there will be an elements and South America on an that will be in opening new Lorenz lands that are not ecologically critical. Tropical rain forest. There's white lines or stuff like that that are [00:18:00] environmental protected. No Way. And there is additional land that can be used, but the main, the main effort is to increase the yields per acre of the land already been used and the best ways to do that in a going forward, sustainable way. What do you feel about that? You need improved plants and you need a balanced set of inputs and not too many and not too few. The genetically modified plants [00:18:30] are, in my opinion, fine. They've gotten a very bad rap, tumbled them or ecologically extremely sound like a bt corn and bt cotton. Speaker 3: They have a genes from a [inaudible] that when the insects bite and trying to suck the SAP or something, they get killed, stuck said to them so that only kill the bad bugs and lose all the other books who have no interested in getting involved with uh, with a corn crop fine as opposed to having insecticides that would kill [00:19:00] all insects. So, uh, there are a lot of good things in genetic modification anyway. We are all genetically modified organisms. We certainly are all of us and has been done by nature by, by random, but it's so much different if you do it in a, in a lab. Conceptually it's the same thing or very clear evidence study of the National Academy of Science August last year and Europe, two big studies, one in the UK and one in Switzerland and they all show [00:19:30] the same thing, that there is no harm done to the environment and to human health where the use of GMOs that have been released. Speaker 3: Then this is basically no different from the development of hybrid corn, which wasn't genetically modified in the sense of transporting one gene from one place to another one, but it was genetically modified by combining plants that would combine their own genes. So, um, we need plants that produce a lot, that have deep roots, that are told them to diseases [00:20:00] and insects and more tolerant to drought and floods because of climate change. You need better plants. And uh, without them we'd be nowhere. And the issue of inputs, agriculture is different from natural systems. Agriculture takes a tremendous amount of nutrients and energy and everything out of the system and it's not returned back and something has to be returned back. That's why we need to fertilizers, fertilizers, whether they're mineral or they're organic, we need to add additional [00:20:30] nutrients on. And there's no question about it. Speaker 3: The issue of organic versus mineral, the plant doesn't care the best way to do it. It's a combination of both, which is called conventional agriculture. Organic farming. If it produces higher premium price, go to it. But we know that the deals are lower and it requires more labor. So my view on all this is not to beat up matic you say you want to have a good balance, the, the time horizon [00:21:00] on the mineral fertilizers, phosphorus and potassium. Do you see that running out at some point in the future and not grading? Uh, the, uh, of course nitrogen is taken from the air and we live in an atmosphere of 78% nitrogen. So it's for all practical purposes, infant. But that's you comes from minds or I know there enormous research, unfortunately concentrated in two or three countries. Canada and Russia. Phosphorus is the one we worry [00:21:30] the most about. Speaker 3: But no, I've been about almost 50 years in this business and every five years or so here we're gonna run out of phosphorus in the next, uh, 50 to a hundred years. And then you keep [inaudible] in the past and best buy, there's more efficiency on the use on there, more that bus it's found. So I, I'm really not worried, not worried, frankly, not worried. I've heard that you're, you're taking a project with the gates foundation to [00:22:00] map all the soils of Africa is yes, yes. The digital soul map of Africa. Okay. And what's going to happen with the data? Um, we're doing it now. At first I saw map of Africa on a scale of a hundred by hundred meters. That's how about a Hector pixel. It will be Hector, two and a half acres of saw properties and that'll come out later in the year of the first approximation. It'll be, it'll be rough. Speaker 3: We're looking now for [00:22:30] continuation of the project for another four years to really do it better and uh, mainstream it into, into countries. And I forgot the other one too, but all the data will be accessible by the way, for the way, in a way that you can sort of like Google earth. You can pin 0.1 place and you can see a hundred by hundred meter pixels and it'll tell you how much sand has and all that. And then you can query [00:23:00] and it will give you a map of sand content. I know their map of organic matter or slow or whatever, whatever you want. Professor Sanchez, thanks very much for joining us on spectrum. You are very welcome. My pleasure. Glad to be back in Berkeley. Speaker 4: [00:23:30] Regular feature of spectrum is to highlight some of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Here's Rick Kaneski and Lisa cabbage with the calendar on Wednesday, Speaker 5: August 29th at 6:00 PM the Commonwealth Club at five nine five market street in San Francisco. It's presenting a talk by the president of the Ocean Conservation Society, Madelina Beersy entitled Dolphin Confidential Confessions [00:24:00] of a field biologist. She'll talk about her experiences at sea from her earliest travels. You're a transformations into an advocate for conservation and dolphin protection. She takes us inside the world of a marine scientist and offer as a firsthand understanding of marine mammal behavior as well as the frustrations, delights, and creativity that makeup Dolphin research bears these fieldwork investigates Dolphin social behavior and intelligence. She shares an honest down to [00:24:30] earth analysis of what it means to be a marine biologist in the field today and the life among the dolphins and addresses the critical environmental and conservation problems they face. The lecture is $20 or $8 for Commonwealth club members or $7 for students with valid id. Visit Commonwealth club.org for more info, Speaker 6: find out what ideas are percolating in the mind of William Gibson, one of our greatest contemporary science fiction writers on Tuesday, September 4th [00:25:00] at 7:00 PM at the Jewish community center in San Francisco, 3,200 California Street, author of the groundbreaking cyberpunk novel Neuro Mansur. Gibson described the internet before it existed and coined the term cyberspace. His first collection of nonfiction writings, distrust that particular flavor, offers provocative insights on everything from the future of technology to compulsive online watch collecting to drug trafficking and Singapore. Again, [00:25:30] that's Tuesday, September 4th at 7:00 PM for tickets and more information. Go to www dot JCC s f. Dot Org Speaker 5: September. His seminar about longterm thinking from the long now foundation will be on Wednesday the fifth at 7:30 PM Tim O'Reilly is discussing the birth of the global mind. The evolution of communication and intelligence. Speech allowed us to communicate and coordinate writing allowed that coordination to spend time and space, [00:26:00] but that's not all in one breakthrough computer application. After another, we see a new kind of manmade symbiosis. The Google autonomous vehicle turns out not to be just a triumph of artificial intelligence algorithms. The car is guided by the cloud memory of roads driven before by Human Google Street view drivers augmented by powerful and precise new sensors in the same way. Crowdsource data from sensor enabled humans is leading to smarter cities, breakthroughs in healthcare and new economies. [00:26:30] The future belongs not to artificial intelligence, but the collective intelligence. This event will take place at the cal theater and San Francisco is Fort Mason. It is $10 or is free for members Speaker 6: visit long now.org for tickets and more info. The September East Bay Science Cafe Welcomes John Duber, assistant professor in the Department of bioengineering at UC Berkeley. He will talk about using synthetic biology to build microbial factories producing biofuels. [00:27:00] One promising direction for the production of liquid transportation fuels is re-engineering the metabolism of microbes like Baker's yeast to convert sugar into a chemical with desirable bio fuel characteristics. Dubar roiled described work being done to produce biofuels using the rapidly emerging approaches of synthetic biology. John Dubar was a 2012 winner of the US Department of Energy's early career research award. East Bay Science cafe is Wednesday, [00:27:30] September 5th in the [inaudible] lounge adjacent to cafe Valparaiso at La Pena Cultural Center from seven to 9:00 PM location 31 oh five Shattuck avenue in Berkeley. Now, Lisa Katovich with two new stories, science news reports that two studies find that nanoscale pollutants can intercrop roots triggering a host of changes to plants growth in health. These tiny particles can stunt plant growth, boost the plants absorption [00:28:00] of pollutants, and increase the need for crop fertilizers. Speaker 6: The new data now for Warren of agriculturally associated human and environmental risks from the accelerating use of manufactured nanomaterials. According to Patricia Holden at UC Santa Barbara and her colleagues. Their report is published online August 20th in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, nanomaterials that get released in the exhaust from diesel fueled tractors can rain down onto crop fields. Those used in fabrics, [00:28:30] sunscreens and other products collect in the solid, separated out of sewage and wastewater. The new studies offer glimpse at the toxic effects. Such nanoparticles may pose to future crops. As exposures rise, the ability of soil and other legumes to fix nitrogen is one of the most important microbial processes in agriculture. So the ability of Nano Sirium to shut this process down was the most significant and most troubling new finding. The UC Berkeley Solar Car Club [00:29:00] team, cal soul placed forth in a field of 12 cars in the 2012 American solar challenge in July, the race was run in stages from Rochester, New York, ending in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Congratulations to the castle team. Speaker 1: The [inaudible] show is by Mozcon and David. This album, [00:29:30] folk and acoustic made available [inaudible] comments, license 3.0 thank you. Listen to spectrum [inaudible] spectrum [inaudible] hi John. [inaudible]. [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Prof. Garrison Sposito, soil scientist at UC Berkeley, talks about water and soil, the inputs organic and chemical that are often added to soil, soil stewardship, agriculture and food security.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible]. Welcome to spectrum the science [00:00:30] and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program, bringing new interviews featuring bay in scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news.Speaker 1: Good afternoon. My name is Brad swift and I'm the host of today's show. Today we continue our interview with Professor Garrison [inaudible], the Betty and Isaac Barsha, chair of Soil Science in the College of natural resources at UC Berkeley. [00:01:00] Professor [inaudible] is an active teacher and researcher at Berkeley. This is part two of two professors. Pacino talks about the interaction of water with soil and the various inputs, organic and chemical that are often added to soil. He addresses soil stewardship and the challenges ahead for agriculture and food security. Speaker 3: You talked a little bit about the interaction of water and soil. It seems very crucial. So the study of [00:01:30] soil is very tied up in water then? Speaker 4: Yes, and I think the, uh, because of being in California, we may not, not understand that as well as we should because California has very large irrigation systems. One of the things, one of the very first things that Hilgard did when he came to this state to work was to go see a man named Kearney who lived around Fresno. And Kearney had the idea that if water were applied to the soils of the San Joaquin Valley, they might be used to grow crops [00:02:00] because the rainfall was very limited. I mean, you could grow crops that way, but not very many. And Hilgard actually assessed those soils and told him what the problems would be in doing that. And Kearney then began to irrigate the first one to do so and made a fortune doing this. So we have a lot of irrigated land in California for agriculture. And as a result, it doesn't seem as obvious to us that most of the world doesn't irrigate. Speaker 4: 80% of the agriculture in the world is rain fed. Two thirds of the food in the world [00:02:30] is produced by rain fed agriculture. So when you start looking around at places that are less high tech than California, it's actually rainwater that's making the world go around. So the question then is how does rainwater move through soil? How can we optimize its management in use and so forth, and not surprisingly relatively little is known about that because the places where the knowhow exists to study water and soil are the places where irrigation often gets done. And so typically all it has been studied in [00:03:00] the past is how much water do you have to have in the soil at the start of the growing season to make sure you get through it with a decent crop. And you'll hear things about this in the news where they'll say assessment of the water content in the Midwest is such that the corn crop will be less this year or more or whatever. Speaker 4: And the same is true anywhere else. So now a number of people are beginning to realize that we have to learn a lot more about how water behaves in soil before we can really truly expect to do very much about agriculture in that use. [00:03:30] Now this is important because the rain is falling on the soil. It has two places to go. One is maybe three, let's say three at one place is it can just evaporate right back up in the air, which isn't going to help anything unless it goes through a plant. If you could make it go through a plant first before evaporating, then of course you're doing agriculture. Another thing it will do is percolate downward and way down into what we call groundwater into the water that's stored way deep in the earth and so that's a loss. A third thing it can do is move over the land [00:04:00] surface or just underneath the land surface laterally towards some creek or river or whatever. Speaker 4: So that's it. Now obviously then what you want to manage is keeping the water in place long enough to get it through the plants you want so that they will grow and produce whatever it is you're interested in. So that turns out to be a really important deal about which we don't know as anywhere near as much as we should. With irrigation, you're applying huge amounts of water. In fact, they're, the problem usually is what to do with the wall. Excess water that [00:04:30] comes off afterward, often full of salts and various other things you don't want. So it's a totally different problem. We're here. It's taking something that's very erratic. First of all, rain doesn't come like irrigation where you can order it up and get it applied. So you've got to worry about the fact that it comes sporadically and they're dry years in wet years and all of that. And then you've got to know how it's stored in soil on which kinds of quote choices this soil is going to make in terms of whether it will evaporate runoff or percolate downward and so [00:05:00] on. So it's a big deal. But I would say that given the global situation in agriculture, we really haven't begun to study what we should Speaker 5: [inaudible]. This is spectrum on k a l X. Today's guest is Gary [inaudible] Ceto, the soil scientists that you see Berkeley. This next segment covers inputs to soil. Speaker 4: [00:05:30] This gets into the idea of how do you judge soil? What's what's considered productive, nonproductive. A lot of it comes down to these characteristics you were just describing with the water. The ability to hold water. Yes. However, I want to say that the phrase good soil, which is strictly an agricultural phrase or bad soil for that matter, people talk about good soil and what they mean is something they can grow crops on the they want to grow at the rate they want to grow them, et cetera. [00:06:00] Here's a very insightful essay by Gary Snyder, the poet and ecologist who's a local figure called good, wild, sacred and it's about soil and he talks about agricultural soils being called good and wild soils, soils that are under the forest or soils out in the desert, and then sacred soils have to do with native Americans and others who regarded certain areas of soil as as sacred sacred sites. Speaker 4: Well, from the point of view of nature, there is no bad soil because nature simply [00:06:30] adapts to whatever is there. The water supply, the nutrients, everything else and what grows is what you see and it's fine. It's an equilibrium with whatever is provided and nature doesn't mind. Problem comes and the value judgment comes in that humans do say what they want from a soil. We're talking about domesticating that soil. So it'll do what we want in the same way that you break a horse, so to speak, to do what you want. But that wild soil is actually just as good as soil is. The soil is domesticated [00:07:00] and in many ways it may be better because it's an equilibrium where the global environment has to be. Whereas we may, by virtue of doing things to soil to make it, you know, to harness it, you might say make it into a soil that is not in equilibrium with the global environment, could be harming the global environment in some ways. Speaker 4: So a good soil, well, what most people mean is it's a soil that behaves the way we want it to for some particular use. And that use may be as simple as dumping some waste onto it. And of course a good soil could be [00:07:30] one that you can build on if you take everything off and build a house on it. And that's good too. Mostly they mean agriculture or some kind of thing. They want to grow in the soils and trees or whatever, or yard, whatever. And in which case they mean I want to domesticate this soil. I don't want it to be wild. Such ends up involving a lot of inputs. It does energy inputs as well as material inputs. And of course a lot of ways, and I think this is something which people should keep in mind because the use of fertilizer [00:08:00] is certainly an example of this in the water too. Speaker 4: These are examples of technologies. After all, there's a fertilizer technology and that's where it comes from. And there's a water technology that delivers a water that we need to water in excess of what rain might provide. So here's a way to say that so-called second law of thermodynamics for every technology there is a pollution for every technology there is a pollution. Science. People know what I'm talking about and they say the second law would means that there is no such thing as truly [00:08:30] free energy. It always costs you some losses. Heat. That's really what I'm saying here. So if people would keep that in mind, every time they adapt a technology to what they want to do, there's going to be a pollution. And they ought to think about that. In the case of fertilizer, it's the runoff of the excess fertilizer into the waterways or somewhere where it's gonna cause a problem. Speaker 4: They might apply chemicals to kill things. They want to kill weeds with chemicals. So all of these technologies are problems and they're inputs. You're quite [00:09:00] right now with nitrogen, which is essential to any kind of plant we can think of and certainly to agricultural plants. Nitrogen is used to make protein and that's absolutely essential in the, in the time of the first world war for a totally other reason, because they wanted to make something for munitions. Humans learned how to convert the nitrogen in the air to an active form, a reactive form of nitrogen that could be used for any, any reaction and a fertilizer is one kind of reaction. [00:09:30] So we can make nitrogen fertilizers now out of the air. It's called the Harvard process. Michael Pollan's called that the single biggest revolution in modern agriculture and it probably is now. Okay, fine. You can do that. Speaker 4: It doesn't stop the pollution problem, but it says effectively you've got this huge, huge reservoir of nitrogen that you can eventually with enough energy fueled by oil, no doubt convert into reactive nitrate. And we're doing this and we're actually producing a huge amount of reactive nitrated NXS. [00:10:00] It's running into the world's waterways and causing all sorts of problems because a fertilizer in one place as a fertilizer somewhere else. If it's not fertilizing the corn in the Midwest, it's fertilizing the plankton in the Gulf of Mexico and causing them to bloom and cause all sorts of problems there. The same is not true of phosphorus and potassium. They're the other big three. The big three are nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium that plants, all plants need to grow well. Those two have to be mined and there are limited supplies [00:10:30] and they're not being recycled. We have a huge amount of phosphorus running off with erosion. Speaker 4: Phosphorus tends to attach itself to particles and it goes with the particles when they erode and there's huge amounts going into the bottom of the ocean. Now, potassium is somewhat like that. So what we've got our limited supplies. I've heard estimates that the u s phosphorus minds will run out by the middle of this century. In fact, that the next period of time between now and 2050 is the biggest deal for us. All right now [00:11:00] in terms of thinking through these issues of where are we going to get future phosphorus, if our minds run out? Obviously once you start thinking about recycling or not wasting so much a potassiums the same way. Right now, countries are battling over putout so called potash mines. They're battling over this because they can see it's running out. You can't make it out of the air. There's no way to do that. It's gotta be mined out of the rocks. Speaker 4: And that's a huge problem because nobody has thought of a way to grow plants without the p and the K [00:11:30] as they call it, potassium, phosphorus, and potassium. So yeah, those are big inputs. Fossil fuels are an, are a big input too, but actually there's more of them around than these others and we're not, well, we are wasting them, but, but we're not wasting them in the same scale. And this is partly because people don't really think about these things very much. They just think about maximizing yield. So their tendency is to put as much as possible on the ground figuring that if the plant doesn't use it well, it'll go away soon. Speaker 2: [00:12:00] [inaudible] you are listening to part two of a two part interview with Gary [inaudible], a soil scientist at UC Berkeley. The show is spectrum and the station is k a l ex Berkeley. Speaker 3: [00:12:30] Well in terms of the ongoing viability of large scale agriculture, is there a way to maintain a status of that or is there always going to be at some point in need for input? Speaker 4: Well, the way these systems are managed, they are high input systems typically. Now, uh, that's true in this country and that's true in places like Brazil where they have these large scale farms. A lot of the world is much smaller scale. A lot of the world, [00:13:00] it depends on rain fed. Agriculture to live is much smaller scale, but these big systems do produce an awful lot of product corn and soybeans. Actually I think about three quarters of the agriculture. In the world is used to raise animals. So that means a quarter of it's actually growing food that people eat right from the plant and the rest is used either as grass that they're growing cause agriculture means past year or crop. Right now we have about 12% of the earth [00:13:30] surface. It isn't ice covered in cropland and that's often very intensively farmed people who are experts estimate we can go another quarter of that to 15% and if we go beyond that we'll have so messed up the global system that we won't be able to sustain it at all. Speaker 4: So we're pretty close to a tipping point. Crop Land is 12% the rest that's in agriculture, which I think is nearly 40% of the land is in grasses and the grasses are were used to grow animals. [00:14:00] So right there that you can raise a question, well maybe there's too much being expended on growing animals. How much do we really want or need of this right away. Then you're going to cut down on the large scale stuff just to kind of think this through a little bit. Cause if only a quarter is being used to grow food from the plants and it seemed like a huge amount, maybe that is sustainable. So in other words, moving from animal protein to plant protein could be a good way to go to it. Think about this, [00:14:30] people say, well yeah, but you know, animal protein is really balanced. His and the world wants it. Speaker 4: I mean it's not, it's not going the other way. It's not going down. It's going up. There are more countries that one animal protein and they have more and more the means to get it one way or the other. So there's a thing to think about right there. If you want to point a finger then you can say, well animal raising is probably doing the most harm right now to the agricultural use of land. And maybe that needs to be thought through in a different way. So that's an important consideration. But [00:15:00] I, I know no one who's thought seriously about this that thinks that large scale agriculture, the way it's done now could just be expanded to the rest of the world and would be sustainable. It's probably not sustainable even in the United States. Speaker 5: [inaudible] you were listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley professor Gary [inaudible] is our guest. This is part two of a two part interview. [00:15:30] Professor Ceto is discussing how to be a good steward of the soil Speaker 4: or a way to be a good steward of soils for people who are in forestry or in agriculture, people who are managing watersheds. Sure there is, and thinking again about it as an ecosystem, it's really the same story. If you want a person can think of his own yard, [00:16:00] where his home is as this ecosystem to manage to think about and there are ways of being a good steward. Let's take for just soil. First of all is to respect the soil for what it is. So yeah, there is a way to be a good steward and I think most people, they're interested in a good soil, not a wild soil. To them wild means uncontrollable. It means it doesn't do what I want when I want it to do. I want it to produce a grass. It looks unhealthily green. For example, a blue grass, which would never be grown here anyway, instead of some grass that could be adapted [00:16:30] to the area. Speaker 4: Or I want to grow ornamentals that probably shouldn't be grown either and on and on. And the basic idea is respect the soil for what it is. Don't think of a bad soil as a wild soil fact. That's the natural state. And thirdly, soil health is correlated with a humus. Do everything you can to keep the humans, which means a healthy biology. It means inputs of organic matter if you're using it in some fashion to grow things or whatever you do. It's common sense kinds of things at all. Really good farmers [00:17:00] know people who are small scale farmers and who live from the land that they have. They understand these things so they, they get this, but it doesn't have to be a farm. It can be your own yard that you're the steward of and keeping it well. And if you've got kids teaching your kids about what's in that yard, but it's very basic. It isn't complicated. As long as the poisons from your neighbors don't get into your yard in any, on the run off from their fertilizer and all. That's an issue. If you live close together, then let's, it's [00:17:30] true with any ecosystem that anyone has to manage their ways to look after it. Speaker 4: Now the UN is going to meet in Rio, does summer, well in June actually it's the real plus 20th summit to talk about sustainability. Yeah. Nations and there will be presented there some guidelines for what are called planetary boundaries. It means, for example, don't let the global crop land get above 15% of the total land areas, so we don't go over tipping point, don't [00:18:00] let the nitrogen levels in the ocean and all the other places we're putting nitrogen in. It shouldn't be get above certain levels, don't let the CO2 grow any more than this, et Cetera, et cetera. They're going to try to get the UN to adopt these worldwide as guidelines for countries to think about. So the first step toward this being a, you can find it online, it's called planetary boundaries, and if it's a document which they're going to present. So people are thinking about this all over the world who have good minds and are concerned. Speaker 4: So what's happening and soil [00:18:30] is part of this because of course soil conservation is what's going to keep the agriculture going and anything that's being done to degrade that soil or just lose it, lose it by erosion. And we have so much of that going on, you know, just going out in the ocean. It's just unfortunate because that's, you know, it takes so long to replace that. It is not going to be like five years. It's going to be thousands of years to replace it. So we have to wake up to these things. I don't want to, I want you to think I'm an alarmist or anything. There's time, [00:19:00] but we would be foolish not to think about these things carefully. Everybody has a stake in this. They need to get educated on it and think about it. Is there anything about soil that you wanted to, uh, to bring up that I haven't quizzed you about? Speaker 4: You know, I, one thing I was talking about this to my department head who happens to be a soil scientist and pathologist and uh, he's working with others now to bring up the point that soil is a national security issue. It isn't obvious [00:19:30] that that's true at first and except when you start thinking about food now, when could it raise the question of the farm bill? The farm bill actually isn't called the farm bill when it gets passed as a law. It's called the Food Security Act because food is seen as a matter of national security and it is, well, soil is necessary to reduce food. And so the ability for the United States, for example, to take advantage of these incredibly rich soils that I hope we don't ruin is [00:20:00] a security issue. Our ability to do that enhances our security if we're going to import a huge amount of food because we can't grow it ourselves, that's a security issue just like it is for oil. Speaker 4: We would say oil is a security issue. We have a certain amount of coal which is a lot. We have a certain amount of oil but not a lot and some natural gas. We wouldn't hesitate to say that that's a national security issue. We're, we're well endowed way better than many countries, especially with coal. Likewise with rich soils, we are well endowed. We we're so fortunate [00:20:30] in that respect. We tend to use them as if they're gonna last forever and so in that sense I would say that soil is a national security issue at least for the preservation of the food supply and people need to think of it that way. Thanks very much professor supposed to, you know for coming on spectrum, Speaker 6: you're welcome. Speaker 5: If you missed the broadcast of part one of our two part interview with Professor Gary [00:21:00] [inaudible] or any other spectrum show. They are now available as podcasts at iTunes university and easy link to the podcast is on the calyx website under programming in the spectrum description, the regular teacher of spectrum is to mention a few of the science and technology that's happening locally over the next few weeks. Lisa [inaudible] joins me for the calendar. Speaker 6: Physics relates to everything that we do. A new exhibition opening this Saturday, [00:21:30] June 2nd at 1:00 PM at the Lawrence Hall of science shows how a visit to a local skate park can demonstrate important physics principals. Learn the science behind extreme sports at Tony Hawk, read science and see how skateboard legend Tony Hawk joins forces with physics to make 900 degree revolutions admit air right up vertical walls and even fly over rails. Tony Hawk along with fellow professional skateboarders will perform an exciting demonstration [00:22:00] on a specially designed vertical skate ramp set up just outside the hall and visitors can explore over 25 interactive experiences. Spaces Limited and tickets are required. The Lawrence Hall of Science is located at one centennial drive in Berkeley. For more information, go to their website, www.lawrencehallofscience.org Speaker 1: Two unusual planetary events will happen on consecutive days, a partial lunar eclipse, June 4th and the transit of Venus on June 5th [00:22:30] on Monday, June 4th view the partial lunar eclipse in the wee hours of Monday morning from the observatory deck of the Chabot Space and science center at 10,000 Skyline Boulevard in Oakland. The eclipse will be most visible from 2:59 AM to 4:03 AM engage in a conversation with astronomers and knowledgeable volunteers. As you witnessed the moon's passing behind the earth. For more information, go to their website. Shabbos space.org Speaker 6: East Bay Science cafe [00:23:00] presents inside dinosaur bones. What bone tissues reveal about the life of fossil animals. For hundreds of years, scientists have examined fossil bones to learn about the life of the past. Recently, a wealth of new information about the lives of dinosaurs and other extinct animals has come from an unexpected source. Fossilized bone tissues. Come explore the insides of fossils and learn what that tells us about the evolutionary history of animals still alive today. The Speaker is Sarah Werning, a [00:23:30] phd candidate in the Department of integrative biology at the University of California Berkeley. Her research explores how changes in bone tissues in the fossil record reflect the evolution of growth and metabolic rates in reptiles, birds, mammals, and their ancestors. This takes place Wednesday, June 6th from seven to 9:00 PM at Cafe Valparaiso, part of the La Pena Cultural Center at 31 oh five Shaddock avenue. Berkeley Nightlife Speaker 1: [00:24:00] is the California Academy of Sciences Weekly Adult Program where they feature music, cocktails and themes, special exhibits for guests 21 and over. It happens every Thursday. The theme for the June 7th nightlife is sustainable catch in honor of world ocean's Day. There will be sustainable seafood cooking demos by local restaurant tours, talks on white sharks, Galapagos fishes, deep sea diving, and coral reef fish. Robert Murray's film. The end of the line [00:24:30] from the SF ocean film festival will be screened and DJ CEP, founder of one of the longest running dubstep parties. In the U s dub mission. We'll be making music. June 14th night. Life theme will be turtle power play teenage mutant Ninja Turtles. Find out how to help the sea turtle restoration project talk with sea turtle researcher Jay Nichols and visit ray bones Bandar and his display of sea turtle skulls. There will be a special dive [00:25:00] show in the Philippine Coral Reef and the film sea turtle spotlight in the planetarium at six 30 music by DJ Jay Sonic. Visit www.cal academy.org/events/nightlife now, the news Speaker 6: alarmed at the sudden losses of between 30 and 90% of honeybee colonies since 2006 scientists, policymakers, farmers, and beekeepers have posted many theories as to the cause of bee colony [00:25:30] collapse disorder such as pest disease, pesticides, migratory beekeeping, or some combination of these factors. A study from the Harvard School of Public Health that will appear in the June issue of the Bolton of insect tology indicates that the likely culprit in sharp worldwide declines in honeybee colony since 2006 is Imidacloprid, one of the most widely used pesticides. It's the second report to link that pesticide to the mysterious bee. Die-Offs. Imidacloprid [00:26:00] is a member of a family of pesticides known as neonicotinoids introduced in the early 1990s bees can be exposed in two ways through nectar from plant or through high fructose corn syrup that beekeepers use to feed their bees. Since most us grown corn has been treated with imidacloprid. Speaker 6: It's also found in corn syrup. Members of the Harvard Group led by biologist Alex Lu, a specialist in environmental exposure said they found convincing evidence [00:26:30] of the link. Lou and his researchers conducted a field study in Massachusetts over a 23 week period after which 15 out of 16 treated hives died. His experiment included pesticides amounts below what is normally present in the environment. Those exposed to the highest levels of the pesticides died. First, the hives were empty except for food stores. Some pollen and young bees with few dead bees nearby. When other conditions cause hive collapse such as disease or past, many [00:27:00] dead bees are typically found inside and outside the effected hives. These beyond producing honey are prime pollinators of roughly one third of the crop species in the United States including fruits, vegetables, nuts and livestock feed such as Alfalfa and clover. Massive loss of honeybees could result in billions of dollars in agricultural losses. California's almond crop is one of the most vulnerable Speaker 1: well science daily reports that the results of a new US Geological Survey study conclude [00:27:30] that faults west of Lake Tahoe referred to as the Tahoe Sierra frontal fault zone pose, a substantial increase in the seismic hazard assessment for the Lake Tahoe region of California and Nevada and could potentially generate earthquakes with magnitudes ranging from 6.3 to 6.9 a close association of landslide deposits and active faults also suggests that there is an earthquake induced landslide hazard along the steep fault formed range front [00:28:00] west of Lake Tahoe using a new high resolution imaging technology known as bare Earth Airborne Lidar, which stands for light detection and ranging combined with field observations and the modern geochronology lidar imagery allows scientists to see through dense forest cover and recognize earthquake faults that are not detectable with conventional aerial photography. USDS scientist and lead author James Howl says that although the Tahoe Sierra [00:28:30] frontal falls zone has long been recognized as forming the tectonic boundary between the Sierra Nevada to the west and the basin and range province to the east, it's level of activity and seismic hazard was not fully recognized because dense vegetation obscured the surface expressions of the faults using the new lidar technology has improved and clarified. Speaker 1: Previous field mapping has provided visualization of the surface expressions of the faults and has allowed for accurate [00:29:00] measurement of the amount of motion that has occurred on the phone. Fox Speaker 5: [inaudible] music character new show is Bible stone, a David from his album folk and acoustic. It's made available through a creative Commons attributions license 3.0 production assistance by Rick Karnofsky and Lisa catechins. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send [00:29:30] them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l s@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. Speaker 2: [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Prof. Garrison Sposito, soil scientist at UC Berkeley, talks about water and soil, the inputs organic and chemical that are often added to soil, soil stewardship, agriculture and food security.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible]. Welcome to spectrum the science [00:00:30] and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program, bringing new interviews featuring bay in scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news.Speaker 1: Good afternoon. My name is Brad swift and I'm the host of today's show. Today we continue our interview with Professor Garrison [inaudible], the Betty and Isaac Barsha, chair of Soil Science in the College of natural resources at UC Berkeley. [00:01:00] Professor [inaudible] is an active teacher and researcher at Berkeley. This is part two of two professors. Pacino talks about the interaction of water with soil and the various inputs, organic and chemical that are often added to soil. He addresses soil stewardship and the challenges ahead for agriculture and food security. Speaker 3: You talked a little bit about the interaction of water and soil. It seems very crucial. So the study of [00:01:30] soil is very tied up in water then? Speaker 4: Yes, and I think the, uh, because of being in California, we may not, not understand that as well as we should because California has very large irrigation systems. One of the things, one of the very first things that Hilgard did when he came to this state to work was to go see a man named Kearney who lived around Fresno. And Kearney had the idea that if water were applied to the soils of the San Joaquin Valley, they might be used to grow crops [00:02:00] because the rainfall was very limited. I mean, you could grow crops that way, but not very many. And Hilgard actually assessed those soils and told him what the problems would be in doing that. And Kearney then began to irrigate the first one to do so and made a fortune doing this. So we have a lot of irrigated land in California for agriculture. And as a result, it doesn't seem as obvious to us that most of the world doesn't irrigate. Speaker 4: 80% of the agriculture in the world is rain fed. Two thirds of the food in the world [00:02:30] is produced by rain fed agriculture. So when you start looking around at places that are less high tech than California, it's actually rainwater that's making the world go around. So the question then is how does rainwater move through soil? How can we optimize its management in use and so forth, and not surprisingly relatively little is known about that because the places where the knowhow exists to study water and soil are the places where irrigation often gets done. And so typically all it has been studied in [00:03:00] the past is how much water do you have to have in the soil at the start of the growing season to make sure you get through it with a decent crop. And you'll hear things about this in the news where they'll say assessment of the water content in the Midwest is such that the corn crop will be less this year or more or whatever. Speaker 4: And the same is true anywhere else. So now a number of people are beginning to realize that we have to learn a lot more about how water behaves in soil before we can really truly expect to do very much about agriculture in that use. [00:03:30] Now this is important because the rain is falling on the soil. It has two places to go. One is maybe three, let's say three at one place is it can just evaporate right back up in the air, which isn't going to help anything unless it goes through a plant. If you could make it go through a plant first before evaporating, then of course you're doing agriculture. Another thing it will do is percolate downward and way down into what we call groundwater into the water that's stored way deep in the earth and so that's a loss. A third thing it can do is move over the land [00:04:00] surface or just underneath the land surface laterally towards some creek or river or whatever. Speaker 4: So that's it. Now obviously then what you want to manage is keeping the water in place long enough to get it through the plants you want so that they will grow and produce whatever it is you're interested in. So that turns out to be a really important deal about which we don't know as anywhere near as much as we should. With irrigation, you're applying huge amounts of water. In fact, they're, the problem usually is what to do with the wall. Excess water that [00:04:30] comes off afterward, often full of salts and various other things you don't want. So it's a totally different problem. We're here. It's taking something that's very erratic. First of all, rain doesn't come like irrigation where you can order it up and get it applied. So you've got to worry about the fact that it comes sporadically and they're dry years in wet years and all of that. And then you've got to know how it's stored in soil on which kinds of quote choices this soil is going to make in terms of whether it will evaporate runoff or percolate downward and so [00:05:00] on. So it's a big deal. But I would say that given the global situation in agriculture, we really haven't begun to study what we should Speaker 5: [inaudible]. This is spectrum on k a l X. Today's guest is Gary [inaudible] Ceto, the soil scientists that you see Berkeley. This next segment covers inputs to soil. Speaker 4: [00:05:30] This gets into the idea of how do you judge soil? What's what's considered productive, nonproductive. A lot of it comes down to these characteristics you were just describing with the water. The ability to hold water. Yes. However, I want to say that the phrase good soil, which is strictly an agricultural phrase or bad soil for that matter, people talk about good soil and what they mean is something they can grow crops on the they want to grow at the rate they want to grow them, et cetera. [00:06:00] Here's a very insightful essay by Gary Snyder, the poet and ecologist who's a local figure called good, wild, sacred and it's about soil and he talks about agricultural soils being called good and wild soils, soils that are under the forest or soils out in the desert, and then sacred soils have to do with native Americans and others who regarded certain areas of soil as as sacred sacred sites. Speaker 4: Well, from the point of view of nature, there is no bad soil because nature simply [00:06:30] adapts to whatever is there. The water supply, the nutrients, everything else and what grows is what you see and it's fine. It's an equilibrium with whatever is provided and nature doesn't mind. Problem comes and the value judgment comes in that humans do say what they want from a soil. We're talking about domesticating that soil. So it'll do what we want in the same way that you break a horse, so to speak, to do what you want. But that wild soil is actually just as good as soil is. The soil is domesticated [00:07:00] and in many ways it may be better because it's an equilibrium where the global environment has to be. Whereas we may, by virtue of doing things to soil to make it, you know, to harness it, you might say make it into a soil that is not in equilibrium with the global environment, could be harming the global environment in some ways. Speaker 4: So a good soil, well, what most people mean is it's a soil that behaves the way we want it to for some particular use. And that use may be as simple as dumping some waste onto it. And of course a good soil could be [00:07:30] one that you can build on if you take everything off and build a house on it. And that's good too. Mostly they mean agriculture or some kind of thing. They want to grow in the soils and trees or whatever, or yard, whatever. And in which case they mean I want to domesticate this soil. I don't want it to be wild. Such ends up involving a lot of inputs. It does energy inputs as well as material inputs. And of course a lot of ways, and I think this is something which people should keep in mind because the use of fertilizer [00:08:00] is certainly an example of this in the water too. Speaker 4: These are examples of technologies. After all, there's a fertilizer technology and that's where it comes from. And there's a water technology that delivers a water that we need to water in excess of what rain might provide. So here's a way to say that so-called second law of thermodynamics for every technology there is a pollution for every technology there is a pollution. Science. People know what I'm talking about and they say the second law would means that there is no such thing as truly [00:08:30] free energy. It always costs you some losses. Heat. That's really what I'm saying here. So if people would keep that in mind, every time they adapt a technology to what they want to do, there's going to be a pollution. And they ought to think about that. In the case of fertilizer, it's the runoff of the excess fertilizer into the waterways or somewhere where it's gonna cause a problem. Speaker 4: They might apply chemicals to kill things. They want to kill weeds with chemicals. So all of these technologies are problems and they're inputs. You're quite [00:09:00] right now with nitrogen, which is essential to any kind of plant we can think of and certainly to agricultural plants. Nitrogen is used to make protein and that's absolutely essential in the, in the time of the first world war for a totally other reason, because they wanted to make something for munitions. Humans learned how to convert the nitrogen in the air to an active form, a reactive form of nitrogen that could be used for any, any reaction and a fertilizer is one kind of reaction. [00:09:30] So we can make nitrogen fertilizers now out of the air. It's called the Harvard process. Michael Pollan's called that the single biggest revolution in modern agriculture and it probably is now. Okay, fine. You can do that. Speaker 4: It doesn't stop the pollution problem, but it says effectively you've got this huge, huge reservoir of nitrogen that you can eventually with enough energy fueled by oil, no doubt convert into reactive nitrate. And we're doing this and we're actually producing a huge amount of reactive nitrated NXS. [00:10:00] It's running into the world's waterways and causing all sorts of problems because a fertilizer in one place as a fertilizer somewhere else. If it's not fertilizing the corn in the Midwest, it's fertilizing the plankton in the Gulf of Mexico and causing them to bloom and cause all sorts of problems there. The same is not true of phosphorus and potassium. They're the other big three. The big three are nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium that plants, all plants need to grow well. Those two have to be mined and there are limited supplies [00:10:30] and they're not being recycled. We have a huge amount of phosphorus running off with erosion. Speaker 4: Phosphorus tends to attach itself to particles and it goes with the particles when they erode and there's huge amounts going into the bottom of the ocean. Now, potassium is somewhat like that. So what we've got our limited supplies. I've heard estimates that the u s phosphorus minds will run out by the middle of this century. In fact, that the next period of time between now and 2050 is the biggest deal for us. All right now [00:11:00] in terms of thinking through these issues of where are we going to get future phosphorus, if our minds run out? Obviously once you start thinking about recycling or not wasting so much a potassiums the same way. Right now, countries are battling over putout so called potash mines. They're battling over this because they can see it's running out. You can't make it out of the air. There's no way to do that. It's gotta be mined out of the rocks. Speaker 4: And that's a huge problem because nobody has thought of a way to grow plants without the p and the K [00:11:30] as they call it, potassium, phosphorus, and potassium. So yeah, those are big inputs. Fossil fuels are an, are a big input too, but actually there's more of them around than these others and we're not, well, we are wasting them, but, but we're not wasting them in the same scale. And this is partly because people don't really think about these things very much. They just think about maximizing yield. So their tendency is to put as much as possible on the ground figuring that if the plant doesn't use it well, it'll go away soon. Speaker 2: [00:12:00] [inaudible] you are listening to part two of a two part interview with Gary [inaudible], a soil scientist at UC Berkeley. The show is spectrum and the station is k a l ex Berkeley. Speaker 3: [00:12:30] Well in terms of the ongoing viability of large scale agriculture, is there a way to maintain a status of that or is there always going to be at some point in need for input? Speaker 4: Well, the way these systems are managed, they are high input systems typically. Now, uh, that's true in this country and that's true in places like Brazil where they have these large scale farms. A lot of the world is much smaller scale. A lot of the world, [00:13:00] it depends on rain fed. Agriculture to live is much smaller scale, but these big systems do produce an awful lot of product corn and soybeans. Actually I think about three quarters of the agriculture. In the world is used to raise animals. So that means a quarter of it's actually growing food that people eat right from the plant and the rest is used either as grass that they're growing cause agriculture means past year or crop. Right now we have about 12% of the earth [00:13:30] surface. It isn't ice covered in cropland and that's often very intensively farmed people who are experts estimate we can go another quarter of that to 15% and if we go beyond that we'll have so messed up the global system that we won't be able to sustain it at all. Speaker 4: So we're pretty close to a tipping point. Crop Land is 12% the rest that's in agriculture, which I think is nearly 40% of the land is in grasses and the grasses are were used to grow animals. [00:14:00] So right there that you can raise a question, well maybe there's too much being expended on growing animals. How much do we really want or need of this right away. Then you're going to cut down on the large scale stuff just to kind of think this through a little bit. Cause if only a quarter is being used to grow food from the plants and it seemed like a huge amount, maybe that is sustainable. So in other words, moving from animal protein to plant protein could be a good way to go to it. Think about this, [00:14:30] people say, well yeah, but you know, animal protein is really balanced. His and the world wants it. Speaker 4: I mean it's not, it's not going the other way. It's not going down. It's going up. There are more countries that one animal protein and they have more and more the means to get it one way or the other. So there's a thing to think about right there. If you want to point a finger then you can say, well animal raising is probably doing the most harm right now to the agricultural use of land. And maybe that needs to be thought through in a different way. So that's an important consideration. But [00:15:00] I, I know no one who's thought seriously about this that thinks that large scale agriculture, the way it's done now could just be expanded to the rest of the world and would be sustainable. It's probably not sustainable even in the United States. Speaker 5: [inaudible] you were listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley professor Gary [inaudible] is our guest. This is part two of a two part interview. [00:15:30] Professor Ceto is discussing how to be a good steward of the soil Speaker 4: or a way to be a good steward of soils for people who are in forestry or in agriculture, people who are managing watersheds. Sure there is, and thinking again about it as an ecosystem, it's really the same story. If you want a person can think of his own yard, [00:16:00] where his home is as this ecosystem to manage to think about and there are ways of being a good steward. Let's take for just soil. First of all is to respect the soil for what it is. So yeah, there is a way to be a good steward and I think most people, they're interested in a good soil, not a wild soil. To them wild means uncontrollable. It means it doesn't do what I want when I want it to do. I want it to produce a grass. It looks unhealthily green. For example, a blue grass, which would never be grown here anyway, instead of some grass that could be adapted [00:16:30] to the area. Speaker 4: Or I want to grow ornamentals that probably shouldn't be grown either and on and on. And the basic idea is respect the soil for what it is. Don't think of a bad soil as a wild soil fact. That's the natural state. And thirdly, soil health is correlated with a humus. Do everything you can to keep the humans, which means a healthy biology. It means inputs of organic matter if you're using it in some fashion to grow things or whatever you do. It's common sense kinds of things at all. Really good farmers [00:17:00] know people who are small scale farmers and who live from the land that they have. They understand these things so they, they get this, but it doesn't have to be a farm. It can be your own yard that you're the steward of and keeping it well. And if you've got kids teaching your kids about what's in that yard, but it's very basic. It isn't complicated. As long as the poisons from your neighbors don't get into your yard in any, on the run off from their fertilizer and all. That's an issue. If you live close together, then let's, it's [00:17:30] true with any ecosystem that anyone has to manage their ways to look after it. Speaker 4: Now the UN is going to meet in Rio, does summer, well in June actually it's the real plus 20th summit to talk about sustainability. Yeah. Nations and there will be presented there some guidelines for what are called planetary boundaries. It means, for example, don't let the global crop land get above 15% of the total land areas, so we don't go over tipping point, don't [00:18:00] let the nitrogen levels in the ocean and all the other places we're putting nitrogen in. It shouldn't be get above certain levels, don't let the CO2 grow any more than this, et Cetera, et cetera. They're going to try to get the UN to adopt these worldwide as guidelines for countries to think about. So the first step toward this being a, you can find it online, it's called planetary boundaries, and if it's a document which they're going to present. So people are thinking about this all over the world who have good minds and are concerned. Speaker 4: So what's happening and soil [00:18:30] is part of this because of course soil conservation is what's going to keep the agriculture going and anything that's being done to degrade that soil or just lose it, lose it by erosion. And we have so much of that going on, you know, just going out in the ocean. It's just unfortunate because that's, you know, it takes so long to replace that. It is not going to be like five years. It's going to be thousands of years to replace it. So we have to wake up to these things. I don't want to, I want you to think I'm an alarmist or anything. There's time, [00:19:00] but we would be foolish not to think about these things carefully. Everybody has a stake in this. They need to get educated on it and think about it. Is there anything about soil that you wanted to, uh, to bring up that I haven't quizzed you about? Speaker 4: You know, I, one thing I was talking about this to my department head who happens to be a soil scientist and pathologist and uh, he's working with others now to bring up the point that soil is a national security issue. It isn't obvious [00:19:30] that that's true at first and except when you start thinking about food now, when could it raise the question of the farm bill? The farm bill actually isn't called the farm bill when it gets passed as a law. It's called the Food Security Act because food is seen as a matter of national security and it is, well, soil is necessary to reduce food. And so the ability for the United States, for example, to take advantage of these incredibly rich soils that I hope we don't ruin is [00:20:00] a security issue. Our ability to do that enhances our security if we're going to import a huge amount of food because we can't grow it ourselves, that's a security issue just like it is for oil. Speaker 4: We would say oil is a security issue. We have a certain amount of coal which is a lot. We have a certain amount of oil but not a lot and some natural gas. We wouldn't hesitate to say that that's a national security issue. We're, we're well endowed way better than many countries, especially with coal. Likewise with rich soils, we are well endowed. We we're so fortunate [00:20:30] in that respect. We tend to use them as if they're gonna last forever and so in that sense I would say that soil is a national security issue at least for the preservation of the food supply and people need to think of it that way. Thanks very much professor supposed to, you know for coming on spectrum, Speaker 6: you're welcome. Speaker 5: If you missed the broadcast of part one of our two part interview with Professor Gary [00:21:00] [inaudible] or any other spectrum show. They are now available as podcasts at iTunes university and easy link to the podcast is on the calyx website under programming in the spectrum description, the regular teacher of spectrum is to mention a few of the science and technology that's happening locally over the next few weeks. Lisa [inaudible] joins me for the calendar. Speaker 6: Physics relates to everything that we do. A new exhibition opening this Saturday, [00:21:30] June 2nd at 1:00 PM at the Lawrence Hall of science shows how a visit to a local skate park can demonstrate important physics principals. Learn the science behind extreme sports at Tony Hawk, read science and see how skateboard legend Tony Hawk joins forces with physics to make 900 degree revolutions admit air right up vertical walls and even fly over rails. Tony Hawk along with fellow professional skateboarders will perform an exciting demonstration [00:22:00] on a specially designed vertical skate ramp set up just outside the hall and visitors can explore over 25 interactive experiences. Spaces Limited and tickets are required. The Lawrence Hall of Science is located at one centennial drive in Berkeley. For more information, go to their website, www.lawrencehallofscience.org Speaker 1: Two unusual planetary events will happen on consecutive days, a partial lunar eclipse, June 4th and the transit of Venus on June 5th [00:22:30] on Monday, June 4th view the partial lunar eclipse in the wee hours of Monday morning from the observatory deck of the Chabot Space and science center at 10,000 Skyline Boulevard in Oakland. The eclipse will be most visible from 2:59 AM to 4:03 AM engage in a conversation with astronomers and knowledgeable volunteers. As you witnessed the moon's passing behind the earth. For more information, go to their website. Shabbos space.org Speaker 6: East Bay Science cafe [00:23:00] presents inside dinosaur bones. What bone tissues reveal about the life of fossil animals. For hundreds of years, scientists have examined fossil bones to learn about the life of the past. Recently, a wealth of new information about the lives of dinosaurs and other extinct animals has come from an unexpected source. Fossilized bone tissues. Come explore the insides of fossils and learn what that tells us about the evolutionary history of animals still alive today. The Speaker is Sarah Werning, a [00:23:30] phd candidate in the Department of integrative biology at the University of California Berkeley. Her research explores how changes in bone tissues in the fossil record reflect the evolution of growth and metabolic rates in reptiles, birds, mammals, and their ancestors. This takes place Wednesday, June 6th from seven to 9:00 PM at Cafe Valparaiso, part of the La Pena Cultural Center at 31 oh five Shaddock avenue. Berkeley Nightlife Speaker 1: [00:24:00] is the California Academy of Sciences Weekly Adult Program where they feature music, cocktails and themes, special exhibits for guests 21 and over. It happens every Thursday. The theme for the June 7th nightlife is sustainable catch in honor of world ocean's Day. There will be sustainable seafood cooking demos by local restaurant tours, talks on white sharks, Galapagos fishes, deep sea diving, and coral reef fish. Robert Murray's film. The end of the line [00:24:30] from the SF ocean film festival will be screened and DJ CEP, founder of one of the longest running dubstep parties. In the U s dub mission. We'll be making music. June 14th night. Life theme will be turtle power play teenage mutant Ninja Turtles. Find out how to help the sea turtle restoration project talk with sea turtle researcher Jay Nichols and visit ray bones Bandar and his display of sea turtle skulls. There will be a special dive [00:25:00] show in the Philippine Coral Reef and the film sea turtle spotlight in the planetarium at six 30 music by DJ Jay Sonic. Visit www.cal academy.org/events/nightlife now, the news Speaker 6: alarmed at the sudden losses of between 30 and 90% of honeybee colonies since 2006 scientists, policymakers, farmers, and beekeepers have posted many theories as to the cause of bee colony [00:25:30] collapse disorder such as pest disease, pesticides, migratory beekeeping, or some combination of these factors. A study from the Harvard School of Public Health that will appear in the June issue of the Bolton of insect tology indicates that the likely culprit in sharp worldwide declines in honeybee colony since 2006 is Imidacloprid, one of the most widely used pesticides. It's the second report to link that pesticide to the mysterious bee. Die-Offs. Imidacloprid [00:26:00] is a member of a family of pesticides known as neonicotinoids introduced in the early 1990s bees can be exposed in two ways through nectar from plant or through high fructose corn syrup that beekeepers use to feed their bees. Since most us grown corn has been treated with imidacloprid. Speaker 6: It's also found in corn syrup. Members of the Harvard Group led by biologist Alex Lu, a specialist in environmental exposure said they found convincing evidence [00:26:30] of the link. Lou and his researchers conducted a field study in Massachusetts over a 23 week period after which 15 out of 16 treated hives died. His experiment included pesticides amounts below what is normally present in the environment. Those exposed to the highest levels of the pesticides died. First, the hives were empty except for food stores. Some pollen and young bees with few dead bees nearby. When other conditions cause hive collapse such as disease or past, many [00:27:00] dead bees are typically found inside and outside the effected hives. These beyond producing honey are prime pollinators of roughly one third of the crop species in the United States including fruits, vegetables, nuts and livestock feed such as Alfalfa and clover. Massive loss of honeybees could result in billions of dollars in agricultural losses. California's almond crop is one of the most vulnerable Speaker 1: well science daily reports that the results of a new US Geological Survey study conclude [00:27:30] that faults west of Lake Tahoe referred to as the Tahoe Sierra frontal fault zone pose, a substantial increase in the seismic hazard assessment for the Lake Tahoe region of California and Nevada and could potentially generate earthquakes with magnitudes ranging from 6.3 to 6.9 a close association of landslide deposits and active faults also suggests that there is an earthquake induced landslide hazard along the steep fault formed range front [00:28:00] west of Lake Tahoe using a new high resolution imaging technology known as bare Earth Airborne Lidar, which stands for light detection and ranging combined with field observations and the modern geochronology lidar imagery allows scientists to see through dense forest cover and recognize earthquake faults that are not detectable with conventional aerial photography. USDS scientist and lead author James Howl says that although the Tahoe Sierra [00:28:30] frontal falls zone has long been recognized as forming the tectonic boundary between the Sierra Nevada to the west and the basin and range province to the east, it's level of activity and seismic hazard was not fully recognized because dense vegetation obscured the surface expressions of the faults using the new lidar technology has improved and clarified. Speaker 1: Previous field mapping has provided visualization of the surface expressions of the faults and has allowed for accurate [00:29:00] measurement of the amount of motion that has occurred on the phone. Fox Speaker 5: [inaudible] music character new show is Bible stone, a David from his album folk and acoustic. It's made available through a creative Commons attributions license 3.0 production assistance by Rick Karnofsky and Lisa catechins. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send [00:29:30] them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l s@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. Speaker 2: [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Martin Mulvihill, the Executive Director of Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry, discusses the Center's efforts to build an academic program to advance green chemistry through interdisciplinary scholarship. He discussed his views of sustainability in chemistry. bcgc.berkeley.eduTranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 3: 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 [00:00:30] technologists. Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Good afternoon. I'm Rick Karnofsky. Brad swift and I are co-hosting today's show today. We have on Martin Mulva Hill, the executive director of the Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry. He'll talk to us about the center's efforts to build a novel academic program and how he views sustainability and chemistry. Marty Mulvihill, welcome to spectrum. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. I wanted [00:01:00] to have you talk about sustainability and then my take on things. Sustainability is fast becoming a cliche, so if you would spell out what you believe sustainability to be. Speaker 4: Yeah. Sustainability is a broad movement towards both dematerialization materialization and trans materialization, so looking at ways to use fewer resources to still meet the means of society such that future generations [00:01:30] can also meet their needs. That comes from the Brundtland report, which is the UN report, which back in 86 sort of defined sustainability. Sustainability includes a lot of different things, which is much broader than any one discipline and even any one interdisciplinary center can really take on, in my opinion, at the Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry, my background and my current position, we really focus on a narrow part of sustainability and that's the chemicals piece. How do we ensure [00:02:00] that at the molecular level, the things we're building, um, are more sustainable, I. E don't use more resources than necessary and are safe for human health and the environment. The overarching goal for the center, how would you characterize that? Speaker 4: And you're the executive director of the center now, right? That's correct. We have like many of the centers on campus, three main purposes. The first is education. So we're teaching [00:02:30] a number of graduate classes and are redoing the undergraduate laboratories in chemistry. So first and foremost, it's about bringing these concepts of sustainability and green chemistry to our students here at UC Berkeley. Secondarily, as a research institution, we're very interested in pushing the bounds of green chemistry. So making the new materials, working with people to make safer materials and understanding the broad consequences of chemicals within [00:03:00] our environment and business supply chains such that we have better and safer chemicals for consumer use. That's the research piece. And the third piece, because this is applied and a big topic is about engagement. So that's working with both local NGOs, the California government, as well as a local businesses to take a look at how do we, beyond the [00:03:30] walls of UC Berkeley, actually improve the chemical footprint, so to speak. Speaker 4: Can you give us an example of a sustainable versus an unsustainable chemical process? Yeah. I'll give you an example of something that we're working on right now. So we don't necessarily have the more sustainable substitute at hand. But in the wake of the recent oil spills, we were taking a close look at what was used, [00:04:00] what was the response? So first we have to characterize what are your options that are available? What are the technologies in the case that dispersants so something that's gonna take that oil slick and turn it into small globules are your only option either because of concerns about the environment or concerns about the human health, safety of the people cleaning up the oil spill. Sometimes these really are your best option. You dig down another level and you talk to the folks in a toxicology [00:04:30] and you find out that the dispersants we use actually break down more slowly than the oil itself. Speaker 4: So if you're going to add something to an oil slick, it seems like what you'd want is something that breaks down at least as fast as the oil you're trying to get rid of. So again, we talked to our colleagues and we're characterizing this issue. So as chemists, we can think about how can we make something that breaks down more quickly. Additionally, you talked to your, our colleagues that have worked out in the Gulf and characterize [00:05:00] the biological communities that actually break down this oil, found that there are a couple of strains of bacteria that are primarily responsible for that and one of those strains of bacteria is adversely effected by the most commonly used oil dispersant. That's a problem. Again, if you want to clean up oil and sometimes it's absolutely necessary to disperse it, you want to make sure that the things that are naturally going to break it down aren't going to be harmed by the thing you're using to disperse it. Speaker 4: So [00:05:30] with those design parameters in mind, the center is now seeking to create an oil dispersant that breaks down as quickly or more quickly than awhile and is not toxic hopefully to any aquatic life, but especially not to the aquatic life that's going to be primarily responsible for breaking down the dispersant in the oil that we're getting rid of in the first place. So it's a way of, in the past, you would have chemists just to create a molecule that effectively disperses [00:06:00] oil. Absolutely good goal. But it wasn't until other people took a look at what they created that you started understanding the environmental fate and the toxicology of these things. Now we have the knowledge upfront, so I'm working with graduate students in toxicology and in chemistry to characterize this solution from beginning to end before we even claim that this is something we can be used out in the environs Speaker 2: [inaudible] [00:06:30] you you're listening to spectrum on KALX we are speaking with Martin Mulvihill, executive director of the Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry. Speaker 4: The the key thing to getting the center off the ground was getting buy in from college chemistry, the School of Public Health, college in natural resources, Haas School of business and the College of Engineering. So getting all [00:07:00] of those folks at the table was actually probably the biggest challenge. The center is so far met because you find that as the disciplines become, you know, more and more focused and more and more advanced, their ability to communicate actually has lost a little bit. So understanding that a chemist doesn't advance in his field without making new products, while at the same time a environmental scientist has a hard time advancing in his or her field if they don't actually [00:07:30] characterize problems. Chemists don't like to hear about problems. Environmental scientists don't necessarily like to hear about the millions of new chemicals we want to make. So those discussions are aren't necessarily, it's easier as natural as we'd want them to be, but we're breaking those barriers down at Berkeley and the people who break them down the most are actually the students because they aren't indoctrinated in one way of thought yet. So they naturally see the connection between making a capital goal and understanding where [00:08:00] it goes. It's really the people who have been trained for the longest have the hardest time breaking down those boundaries. So a bit of a generational issue. Yeah, absolutely. We view a generational shift in the way that we can see of making and distributing chemicals and materials in our society. Speaker 4: And what about the regulatory environment? I know the European Union is very aggressive and the EPA has somewhat, [00:08:30] California's always been very aggressive. How does that play in this with the industry and their costs and how they want to go forward? Yeah, the regulatory question is a very important one and is actually in some ways where you see Berkeley. Got It start. So since 2006 the folks in public health, especially Mike Wilson makes Schwartzman, they were both working actively with California legislation in this area and continue to work [00:09:00] actively in this area. The regulatory piece, at least the way we see it is all about providing more information, more information to the marketplace and also more information to the consumer. So when you look at things like the reach initiative in the European Union, what is really asking for is information. If you produce chemicals at certain scales, you have to, as the scales increased, provide more and more information. Speaker 4: The next step is going to be how do [00:09:30] we figure out what to do with that information. And it is regulation that can create economic barriers or incentives to adoption of safer chemicals. So the California Green Chemistry initiative is still in the phase of deciding what information we're going to ask for. And then how are we going to promote changes to safer chemicals. Those discussions involve both industry folks, academic folks and NGO folks. They're happening in [00:10:00] real time, so there are certainly differences of opinion there, but we are intering a phase of global chemical production where more information is going to become necessary and consumers, governments and other folks are going to start asking for products that perform better environmentally is an international standard, something that's conceivable and possible because what seems to happen is that developing countries create strict standards [00:10:30] and then the companies just dump in the non developed world or company places where they don't have any sort of regulatory framework. Speaker 4: Yeah, certainly from a my viewpoint international action is certain is necessary because if you have different sets of economic and environmental drivers in different places, it's easy to game the system. I mean we do have a, a global chemical manufacturing [00:11:00] system. It's already global so they can easily move things from one place to another. I think that it's in the best interest of all of us in the end, all of the stakeholders, both individual consumers as well as the companies and the governments to do some coordination, um, coordination of international policies, very tough. You sometimes run the risk of being pushed to the lowest common denominator. I think that's the danger [00:11:30] of going that route. The first step. And what I would like to see globally is at least some standard information requirements. So taking a look at what do you have to test for chemicals produced at what levels based on where you're selling them. So you might be producing them somewhere else and you have to worry about all those, uh, waste products and how they're being dealt with. But at least if you have a standard [00:12:00] for a global standard for what information you have to test in order to sell, it does, you know, good to produce a chemical somewhere that you can then sell back into the developed world. Speaker 5: Talk a little bit about your research in nanotechnology. Speaker 4: Yeah. So, um, I've actually been at Berkeley Awhile and my research as a graduate student was in nanotechnology, making [inaudible] new materials, mostly inorganic materials [00:12:30] that had some application for either the energy space or environmental sensing space. So I was able to create a sensor for arsenic in groundwater. That was actually the project that got me excited about this more interdisciplinary approach to science and technology. After that, I did research on the fate of nanoparticles in the environment. So I went up to the national labs, um, Berkeley national labs right up the hill behind campus [00:13:00] and did a year long postdoc in environmental science and material science characterizing the fate of Nano materials in the environment. Because as we create all these new materials, it's important to take a life cycle approach, right? Understand both how as a chemist I can get the function that I want out of a new material, but also make sure that the end of life isn't going to create unfortunate undesirable harms. So that's an exciting area of my own research [00:13:30] where now that I have a better sense of the life cycle of nanomaterials. We're trying to apply some of that too. Water purification technology, so I still work with a show Gad go who's in environmental engineering and e t d at the labs trying to create new, a safer, I'm sorbent for mineral contamination and groundwater so get rid of things like arsenic or excess fluoride. Speaker 5: Nanoscience then could [00:14:00] also have this kind of sustainability issue and push in. It's Speaker 4: growing cause this, this is a brand new science. It's, yeah, I think nanoscience is a great case study. Take a look at Green Chemistry and nanoscience side by side. They actually started around the same time and they have a lot of the same goals. The goal of nanoscience really is to do more with less, right? Let's take small materials that are well-engineered [00:14:30] to more efficiently produce energy. I mean you look at what Nano technologies being used for. It's a lot of, it looks like the same things that green chemistry is trying to do and in fact folks are also it already looking at the end of life issues around nanomaterials. I think it's a perfect example of how greater awareness, greater awareness from the funding agencies is actually taking a more proactive approach to new chemical materials, Nano materials [00:15:00] being a large class of the new materials that we're producing. So you already have large centers throughout the country that are taking a look at what are the environmental implications of nanomaterials, what are the toxicological fates of new nano materials? It's actually a place where I think we're ahead of the historical curve. Are there still concerns and unknown knowns about nanomaterials? Absolutely. Are nanomaterials making it into consumer products? Yeah, they're just beginning to, [00:15:30] I don't think they represent a clear and present danger that's larger than any of the other chemicals that we're using. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 4: you're listening to spectrum on KLM Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 4: one exciting thing I'd just plug is that this May, we're going to be having our second conference here on campus. So last March was [00:16:00] our first kind of big open public conference and brought in people representing all of these backgrounds. And we're going to do that again, this May. So take a look at our website, it's going to be on May 3rd here on campus. So you know if you're interested in being involved, always send me an email. We have lots of opportunities. Take a look at our classes and consider coming to our conference in May. And the conference is open to the students and community. Absolutely, absolutely. [00:16:30] Great. And what's the website? The website is BC gc.berkeley.edu so Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry, BC GC. Good. See you there. Excellent. Marty Mulvihill thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Thank you very much. Speaker 2: Pleasure. [inaudible] Speaker 6: [00:17:00] irregular feature of spectrum is a calendar that highlight some of the science and technology events happening in the bay area over the next two weeks. The Audubon society is hosting a winter bird count tomorrow, Saturday, January 28th this is a free event open to families of all ages and sizes. Naturalists will lead a bird walk around lake merit to discover and [00:17:30] count wintered bird species such as ducks cormorants inheritance. Meet at the lake 600 Bellevue Avenue in Oakland. Dress warmly bring binoculars and field guides if you have them, but binoculars will be available to borrow. Bring water into lunch. Please RSVP with the Golden Gate Autobon g g a s education@gmail.com or (510) 508-1388 or [00:18:00] also visit www.andgoldengateaudubon.org for more information. Speaker 1: Registration is open for she's Geeky Bay area. This event runs January 27th 28th and 29th at the Computer History Museum in mountain view. She's Kiki hosts on conferences across the U s providing a unique environment for women working in technology and other geeky fields including science, engineering and math. To learn from one another. Grow networks, [00:18:30] connect across generations and discuss issues. Women attending. She's Geeky events. Find inspiration and gain self confidence to pursue or continue on stem career paths because they are given the opportunity to present their work often for the first time. Discuss critical issues and build peer networks for support. Visit www dot [inaudible] dot org for more information Speaker 5: producing natural gas from shale opportunities and challenges of a major new energy source. Mark Zoback is the Benjamin M. Page [00:19:00] professor of geophysics at Stanford University. Mark Conducts Research on institute stress, fault mechanics and reservoir geomechanics. He currently serves on the National Academy of Energy Committee investigating the deep water horizon accident and the secretary of Energy's committee on Shale gas development and environmental protection. His presentation is Monday, January 30th at 4:15 PM on the Stanford University campus whining science center [00:19:30] and Video Auditorium. It is free and open to the public conversations at the Herbst, the power of gaming on a planetary basis. We spend 3 billion hours a week playing video games. That's a lot of time enough to change our lives and probably save the world. The real world while we're at it, author of reality is broken, why games make us better and how they can change the world. Dr Jane mcgonigal discusses her belief [00:20:00] that video games can be a positive platform for exploration and problem solving in our lives and for our planet. In conversation with Ryan Wyatt, director of the Morrison Planetarium, Tuesday, January 31st at 8:00 PM at the herps theatre four oh one Venice avenue in San Francisco, tickets start at $22 Speaker 6: February's free. Leonardo art center, evening rendezvous or laser will be on the first at Sanford [00:20:30] universities. PGO Hall Room one 13 networking begins at six 45 and a talk starts at seven here from artists, Daniel Small and Luca and two Nucci on firstlight, their art based on the Hubble ultra deep field imaging systems portrait of the visible universe that reveals the first light from 13.5 billion years ago. Architect and photo person will present city of the future as of 2008 over 80% [00:21:00] of land of the world that is suitable for raising crops is in use. Where will we find farmland we need? By 2040 80% of the world's population will reside in urban centers pushing out into the neighboring agricultural land. How will we feed ourselves form a NASA scientists. San Gill will talk about collaborative intelligence and how evolution and natural systems can inform social problem solving. Then I will conclude with artists, Phil Ross, his presentation [00:21:30] on micro architecture. Fungi can be used to transform agricultural waste into durable and low impact materials at room temperature. The future is moldy in this presentation, Phil will describe as research on growing a building out of living fungus. For more about the laser series, browse www.leonardo.info Speaker 5: the February science cafe presents exploding and brains mice [00:22:00] who love cat piss and people who eat too much cake. The hidden ways that microbes manipulate animal behavior. All animals live in close contact with micro organisms of all sorts. These micro organisms depend on animals for food, shelter, places to reproduce, et cetera. These microbes lives are thus affected by ways in which the animal behaves in. Many of these microbes have evolved ways to ensure that their hosts behave in ways that are good for them, often at the [00:22:30] expense of the animals. Dr. Michael Isen, we'll talk about new work from his lab and elsewhere. Looking at a variety of different ways in which micro organisms use chemical signals and targeted disruptions of cells in the nervous system to alter animal behavior. He will also touch on the ongoing battles over public access to the scientific literature. Michael Isen is an evolutionary biologist at UC Berkeley and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Science cafe happens Wednesday, [00:23:00] February 1st at 7:00 PM in the La Pena Cultural Center, 31 oh five Shattuck avenue in Berkeley.Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 5: you're listening to spectrum Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 6: and now for some science news headlines. Here's Brad swift Speaker 5: diesel truck emissions in Oakland fall sharply in January, 2010 [00:23:30] the California Air Resources Board banned all 1993 and older drayage trucks from ports and rail yards statewide. They also ordered trucks built within the years 1994 to 2006 to particle filters by the end of the year 2011 in a paper recently published in environmental science and technology. You see Berkeley Professor Robert Harley and coauthors Tim Dolman and Tom Cush [00:24:00] stutter described the process and the results of their monitoring truck exhaust at a section of highway near the port of Oakland and the Oakland rail yards. They compare data they collected from November, 2009 before the ban with data they collected from the same Oakland site in 2010 after the ban, the comparison found black smoke emissions were reduced by about half and the nitrogen oxide emissions dropped by 40% Harley [00:24:30] and his researchers will return to this section of highway several more times over the next two years. As the remaining 2004 to 2006 truck engines are retrofitted with filters, they expect to study in greater depth the properties of emitted particulate matter. They will also examine more closely the chemical composition of the nitrogen oxide emissions to determine the split between nitric oxide and the nitrogen dioxide. [00:25:00] This diesel emissions control program will go statewide to all trucks over the next several years, including trucks from out of state, Speaker 6: neuro psychopharmacologist, David Nutt and colleagues at the Imperial College. London wrote an article that was published in the January 23rd of the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on how hallucinogens such as magic mushrooms work in the human brain. 15 people with previous history of psychedelic usage were injected with a small amount of psilocybin. [00:25:30] This caused an immediate reaction that peaked within minutes and lasted for about an hour. This differed from those injected with Saltwater Placebo functional magnetic resonance imaging brain scans before and after administration showed decreased blood flow activity through some regions of the brain. The result was found again with a new batch of 15 volunteers and through a different brain scan methodology that showed lower blood oxygenation in the brain. Specific areas [00:26:00] affected included the posterior cingulate cortex and medial prefrontal cortex. Science news reports that Brian Roth of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill who was not involved with the study remarked that they had the complete opposite of what had been predicted. They differ from earlier studies that use positron emission tomography. This work hearkens back to an earlier headline we ran on spectrum that reported that some hallucinogen and phenomena such as synesthesia [00:26:30] may arise from a relaxing of some of the brain's filters. It may also help find drugs or derivatives to be used in the treatment of depression, cluster headaches, obsessive compulsive disorder, and other conditions that linked to too much brain Speaker 5: activity. For the first time ever, stem cells from umbilical cords have been converted into other types of cells, which may eventually lead to new treatment options for spinal cord injuries and multiple sclerosis among [00:27:00] other nervous system diseases. James Hickman at University of central Florida, bioengineer and leader of the research group says we're very excited about where this could lead because it overcomes many of the obstacles present with embryonic stem cells. The main challenge in working with stem cells is figuring out the chemical or other triggers that will convince them to convert into a desired cell type. Had Devika Davis, a postdoctoral researcher in Hickman's lab, [00:27:30] was able to transform umbilical stem cells into oligodendrocytes critical structural cells that insulate nerves in the brain and the spinal cord. There are two main options the group hopes to pursue through further research. The first is that the cells could be injected into the body at the point of a spinal cord injury to promote repair. The other possibility for the Hickman team's work relates to multiple sclerosis [00:28:00] and similar nervous system diseases. Speaker 2: [inaudible] music you heard today was from Lozan and David Sofer. These album Croak and acoustic. It is released under the creative Commons attribution license version 3.0 [inaudible] [00:28:30] spectrum was recorded and edited, and by me, Rick Karnofsky and by Brad swift and Mark Taylor, thank you for listening to spectrum. We are happy to hear from this. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l x@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. [00:29:00] [inaudible] [00:29:30] [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Martin Mulvihill, the Executive Director of Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry, discusses the Center’s efforts to build an academic program to advance green chemistry through interdisciplinary scholarship. He discussed his views of sustainability in chemistry. bcgc.berkeley.eduTranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 3: 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 [00:00:30] technologists. Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Good afternoon. I'm Rick Karnofsky. Brad swift and I are co-hosting today's show today. We have on Martin Mulva Hill, the executive director of the Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry. He'll talk to us about the center's efforts to build a novel academic program and how he views sustainability and chemistry. Marty Mulvihill, welcome to spectrum. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. I wanted [00:01:00] to have you talk about sustainability and then my take on things. Sustainability is fast becoming a cliche, so if you would spell out what you believe sustainability to be. Speaker 4: Yeah. Sustainability is a broad movement towards both dematerialization materialization and trans materialization, so looking at ways to use fewer resources to still meet the means of society such that future generations [00:01:30] can also meet their needs. That comes from the Brundtland report, which is the UN report, which back in 86 sort of defined sustainability. Sustainability includes a lot of different things, which is much broader than any one discipline and even any one interdisciplinary center can really take on, in my opinion, at the Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry, my background and my current position, we really focus on a narrow part of sustainability and that's the chemicals piece. How do we ensure [00:02:00] that at the molecular level, the things we're building, um, are more sustainable, I. E don't use more resources than necessary and are safe for human health and the environment. The overarching goal for the center, how would you characterize that? Speaker 4: And you're the executive director of the center now, right? That's correct. We have like many of the centers on campus, three main purposes. The first is education. So we're teaching [00:02:30] a number of graduate classes and are redoing the undergraduate laboratories in chemistry. So first and foremost, it's about bringing these concepts of sustainability and green chemistry to our students here at UC Berkeley. Secondarily, as a research institution, we're very interested in pushing the bounds of green chemistry. So making the new materials, working with people to make safer materials and understanding the broad consequences of chemicals within [00:03:00] our environment and business supply chains such that we have better and safer chemicals for consumer use. That's the research piece. And the third piece, because this is applied and a big topic is about engagement. So that's working with both local NGOs, the California government, as well as a local businesses to take a look at how do we, beyond the [00:03:30] walls of UC Berkeley, actually improve the chemical footprint, so to speak. Speaker 4: Can you give us an example of a sustainable versus an unsustainable chemical process? Yeah. I'll give you an example of something that we're working on right now. So we don't necessarily have the more sustainable substitute at hand. But in the wake of the recent oil spills, we were taking a close look at what was used, [00:04:00] what was the response? So first we have to characterize what are your options that are available? What are the technologies in the case that dispersants so something that's gonna take that oil slick and turn it into small globules are your only option either because of concerns about the environment or concerns about the human health, safety of the people cleaning up the oil spill. Sometimes these really are your best option. You dig down another level and you talk to the folks in a toxicology [00:04:30] and you find out that the dispersants we use actually break down more slowly than the oil itself. Speaker 4: So if you're going to add something to an oil slick, it seems like what you'd want is something that breaks down at least as fast as the oil you're trying to get rid of. So again, we talked to our colleagues and we're characterizing this issue. So as chemists, we can think about how can we make something that breaks down more quickly. Additionally, you talked to your, our colleagues that have worked out in the Gulf and characterize [00:05:00] the biological communities that actually break down this oil, found that there are a couple of strains of bacteria that are primarily responsible for that and one of those strains of bacteria is adversely effected by the most commonly used oil dispersant. That's a problem. Again, if you want to clean up oil and sometimes it's absolutely necessary to disperse it, you want to make sure that the things that are naturally going to break it down aren't going to be harmed by the thing you're using to disperse it. Speaker 4: So [00:05:30] with those design parameters in mind, the center is now seeking to create an oil dispersant that breaks down as quickly or more quickly than awhile and is not toxic hopefully to any aquatic life, but especially not to the aquatic life that's going to be primarily responsible for breaking down the dispersant in the oil that we're getting rid of in the first place. So it's a way of, in the past, you would have chemists just to create a molecule that effectively disperses [00:06:00] oil. Absolutely good goal. But it wasn't until other people took a look at what they created that you started understanding the environmental fate and the toxicology of these things. Now we have the knowledge upfront, so I'm working with graduate students in toxicology and in chemistry to characterize this solution from beginning to end before we even claim that this is something we can be used out in the environs Speaker 2: [inaudible] [00:06:30] you you're listening to spectrum on KALX we are speaking with Martin Mulvihill, executive director of the Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry. Speaker 4: The the key thing to getting the center off the ground was getting buy in from college chemistry, the School of Public Health, college in natural resources, Haas School of business and the College of Engineering. So getting all [00:07:00] of those folks at the table was actually probably the biggest challenge. The center is so far met because you find that as the disciplines become, you know, more and more focused and more and more advanced, their ability to communicate actually has lost a little bit. So understanding that a chemist doesn't advance in his field without making new products, while at the same time a environmental scientist has a hard time advancing in his or her field if they don't actually [00:07:30] characterize problems. Chemists don't like to hear about problems. Environmental scientists don't necessarily like to hear about the millions of new chemicals we want to make. So those discussions are aren't necessarily, it's easier as natural as we'd want them to be, but we're breaking those barriers down at Berkeley and the people who break them down the most are actually the students because they aren't indoctrinated in one way of thought yet. So they naturally see the connection between making a capital goal and understanding where [00:08:00] it goes. It's really the people who have been trained for the longest have the hardest time breaking down those boundaries. So a bit of a generational issue. Yeah, absolutely. We view a generational shift in the way that we can see of making and distributing chemicals and materials in our society. Speaker 4: And what about the regulatory environment? I know the European Union is very aggressive and the EPA has somewhat, [00:08:30] California's always been very aggressive. How does that play in this with the industry and their costs and how they want to go forward? Yeah, the regulatory question is a very important one and is actually in some ways where you see Berkeley. Got It start. So since 2006 the folks in public health, especially Mike Wilson makes Schwartzman, they were both working actively with California legislation in this area and continue to work [00:09:00] actively in this area. The regulatory piece, at least the way we see it is all about providing more information, more information to the marketplace and also more information to the consumer. So when you look at things like the reach initiative in the European Union, what is really asking for is information. If you produce chemicals at certain scales, you have to, as the scales increased, provide more and more information. Speaker 4: The next step is going to be how do [00:09:30] we figure out what to do with that information. And it is regulation that can create economic barriers or incentives to adoption of safer chemicals. So the California Green Chemistry initiative is still in the phase of deciding what information we're going to ask for. And then how are we going to promote changes to safer chemicals. Those discussions involve both industry folks, academic folks and NGO folks. They're happening in [00:10:00] real time, so there are certainly differences of opinion there, but we are intering a phase of global chemical production where more information is going to become necessary and consumers, governments and other folks are going to start asking for products that perform better environmentally is an international standard, something that's conceivable and possible because what seems to happen is that developing countries create strict standards [00:10:30] and then the companies just dump in the non developed world or company places where they don't have any sort of regulatory framework. Speaker 4: Yeah, certainly from a my viewpoint international action is certain is necessary because if you have different sets of economic and environmental drivers in different places, it's easy to game the system. I mean we do have a, a global chemical manufacturing [00:11:00] system. It's already global so they can easily move things from one place to another. I think that it's in the best interest of all of us in the end, all of the stakeholders, both individual consumers as well as the companies and the governments to do some coordination, um, coordination of international policies, very tough. You sometimes run the risk of being pushed to the lowest common denominator. I think that's the danger [00:11:30] of going that route. The first step. And what I would like to see globally is at least some standard information requirements. So taking a look at what do you have to test for chemicals produced at what levels based on where you're selling them. So you might be producing them somewhere else and you have to worry about all those, uh, waste products and how they're being dealt with. But at least if you have a standard [00:12:00] for a global standard for what information you have to test in order to sell, it does, you know, good to produce a chemical somewhere that you can then sell back into the developed world. Speaker 5: Talk a little bit about your research in nanotechnology. Speaker 4: Yeah. So, um, I've actually been at Berkeley Awhile and my research as a graduate student was in nanotechnology, making [inaudible] new materials, mostly inorganic materials [00:12:30] that had some application for either the energy space or environmental sensing space. So I was able to create a sensor for arsenic in groundwater. That was actually the project that got me excited about this more interdisciplinary approach to science and technology. After that, I did research on the fate of nanoparticles in the environment. So I went up to the national labs, um, Berkeley national labs right up the hill behind campus [00:13:00] and did a year long postdoc in environmental science and material science characterizing the fate of Nano materials in the environment. Because as we create all these new materials, it's important to take a life cycle approach, right? Understand both how as a chemist I can get the function that I want out of a new material, but also make sure that the end of life isn't going to create unfortunate undesirable harms. So that's an exciting area of my own research [00:13:30] where now that I have a better sense of the life cycle of nanomaterials. We're trying to apply some of that too. Water purification technology, so I still work with a show Gad go who's in environmental engineering and e t d at the labs trying to create new, a safer, I'm sorbent for mineral contamination and groundwater so get rid of things like arsenic or excess fluoride. Speaker 5: Nanoscience then could [00:14:00] also have this kind of sustainability issue and push in. It's Speaker 4: growing cause this, this is a brand new science. It's, yeah, I think nanoscience is a great case study. Take a look at Green Chemistry and nanoscience side by side. They actually started around the same time and they have a lot of the same goals. The goal of nanoscience really is to do more with less, right? Let's take small materials that are well-engineered [00:14:30] to more efficiently produce energy. I mean you look at what Nano technologies being used for. It's a lot of, it looks like the same things that green chemistry is trying to do and in fact folks are also it already looking at the end of life issues around nanomaterials. I think it's a perfect example of how greater awareness, greater awareness from the funding agencies is actually taking a more proactive approach to new chemical materials, Nano materials [00:15:00] being a large class of the new materials that we're producing. So you already have large centers throughout the country that are taking a look at what are the environmental implications of nanomaterials, what are the toxicological fates of new nano materials? It's actually a place where I think we're ahead of the historical curve. Are there still concerns and unknown knowns about nanomaterials? Absolutely. Are nanomaterials making it into consumer products? Yeah, they're just beginning to, [00:15:30] I don't think they represent a clear and present danger that's larger than any of the other chemicals that we're using. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 4: you're listening to spectrum on KLM Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 4: one exciting thing I'd just plug is that this May, we're going to be having our second conference here on campus. So last March was [00:16:00] our first kind of big open public conference and brought in people representing all of these backgrounds. And we're going to do that again, this May. So take a look at our website, it's going to be on May 3rd here on campus. So you know if you're interested in being involved, always send me an email. We have lots of opportunities. Take a look at our classes and consider coming to our conference in May. And the conference is open to the students and community. Absolutely, absolutely. [00:16:30] Great. And what's the website? The website is BC gc.berkeley.edu so Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry, BC GC. Good. See you there. Excellent. Marty Mulvihill thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Thank you very much. Speaker 2: Pleasure. [inaudible] Speaker 6: [00:17:00] irregular feature of spectrum is a calendar that highlight some of the science and technology events happening in the bay area over the next two weeks. The Audubon society is hosting a winter bird count tomorrow, Saturday, January 28th this is a free event open to families of all ages and sizes. Naturalists will lead a bird walk around lake merit to discover and [00:17:30] count wintered bird species such as ducks cormorants inheritance. Meet at the lake 600 Bellevue Avenue in Oakland. Dress warmly bring binoculars and field guides if you have them, but binoculars will be available to borrow. Bring water into lunch. Please RSVP with the Golden Gate Autobon g g a s education@gmail.com or (510) 508-1388 or [00:18:00] also visit www.andgoldengateaudubon.org for more information. Speaker 1: Registration is open for she's Geeky Bay area. This event runs January 27th 28th and 29th at the Computer History Museum in mountain view. She's Kiki hosts on conferences across the U s providing a unique environment for women working in technology and other geeky fields including science, engineering and math. To learn from one another. Grow networks, [00:18:30] connect across generations and discuss issues. Women attending. She's Geeky events. Find inspiration and gain self confidence to pursue or continue on stem career paths because they are given the opportunity to present their work often for the first time. Discuss critical issues and build peer networks for support. Visit www dot [inaudible] dot org for more information Speaker 5: producing natural gas from shale opportunities and challenges of a major new energy source. Mark Zoback is the Benjamin M. Page [00:19:00] professor of geophysics at Stanford University. Mark Conducts Research on institute stress, fault mechanics and reservoir geomechanics. He currently serves on the National Academy of Energy Committee investigating the deep water horizon accident and the secretary of Energy's committee on Shale gas development and environmental protection. His presentation is Monday, January 30th at 4:15 PM on the Stanford University campus whining science center [00:19:30] and Video Auditorium. It is free and open to the public conversations at the Herbst, the power of gaming on a planetary basis. We spend 3 billion hours a week playing video games. That's a lot of time enough to change our lives and probably save the world. The real world while we're at it, author of reality is broken, why games make us better and how they can change the world. Dr Jane mcgonigal discusses her belief [00:20:00] that video games can be a positive platform for exploration and problem solving in our lives and for our planet. In conversation with Ryan Wyatt, director of the Morrison Planetarium, Tuesday, January 31st at 8:00 PM at the herps theatre four oh one Venice avenue in San Francisco, tickets start at $22 Speaker 6: February's free. Leonardo art center, evening rendezvous or laser will be on the first at Sanford [00:20:30] universities. PGO Hall Room one 13 networking begins at six 45 and a talk starts at seven here from artists, Daniel Small and Luca and two Nucci on firstlight, their art based on the Hubble ultra deep field imaging systems portrait of the visible universe that reveals the first light from 13.5 billion years ago. Architect and photo person will present city of the future as of 2008 over 80% [00:21:00] of land of the world that is suitable for raising crops is in use. Where will we find farmland we need? By 2040 80% of the world's population will reside in urban centers pushing out into the neighboring agricultural land. How will we feed ourselves form a NASA scientists. San Gill will talk about collaborative intelligence and how evolution and natural systems can inform social problem solving. Then I will conclude with artists, Phil Ross, his presentation [00:21:30] on micro architecture. Fungi can be used to transform agricultural waste into durable and low impact materials at room temperature. The future is moldy in this presentation, Phil will describe as research on growing a building out of living fungus. For more about the laser series, browse www.leonardo.info Speaker 5: the February science cafe presents exploding and brains mice [00:22:00] who love cat piss and people who eat too much cake. The hidden ways that microbes manipulate animal behavior. All animals live in close contact with micro organisms of all sorts. These micro organisms depend on animals for food, shelter, places to reproduce, et cetera. These microbes lives are thus affected by ways in which the animal behaves in. Many of these microbes have evolved ways to ensure that their hosts behave in ways that are good for them, often at the [00:22:30] expense of the animals. Dr. Michael Isen, we'll talk about new work from his lab and elsewhere. Looking at a variety of different ways in which micro organisms use chemical signals and targeted disruptions of cells in the nervous system to alter animal behavior. He will also touch on the ongoing battles over public access to the scientific literature. Michael Isen is an evolutionary biologist at UC Berkeley and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Science cafe happens Wednesday, [00:23:00] February 1st at 7:00 PM in the La Pena Cultural Center, 31 oh five Shattuck avenue in Berkeley.Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 5: you're listening to spectrum Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 6: and now for some science news headlines. Here's Brad swift Speaker 5: diesel truck emissions in Oakland fall sharply in January, 2010 [00:23:30] the California Air Resources Board banned all 1993 and older drayage trucks from ports and rail yards statewide. They also ordered trucks built within the years 1994 to 2006 to particle filters by the end of the year 2011 in a paper recently published in environmental science and technology. You see Berkeley Professor Robert Harley and coauthors Tim Dolman and Tom Cush [00:24:00] stutter described the process and the results of their monitoring truck exhaust at a section of highway near the port of Oakland and the Oakland rail yards. They compare data they collected from November, 2009 before the ban with data they collected from the same Oakland site in 2010 after the ban, the comparison found black smoke emissions were reduced by about half and the nitrogen oxide emissions dropped by 40% Harley [00:24:30] and his researchers will return to this section of highway several more times over the next two years. As the remaining 2004 to 2006 truck engines are retrofitted with filters, they expect to study in greater depth the properties of emitted particulate matter. They will also examine more closely the chemical composition of the nitrogen oxide emissions to determine the split between nitric oxide and the nitrogen dioxide. [00:25:00] This diesel emissions control program will go statewide to all trucks over the next several years, including trucks from out of state, Speaker 6: neuro psychopharmacologist, David Nutt and colleagues at the Imperial College. London wrote an article that was published in the January 23rd of the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on how hallucinogens such as magic mushrooms work in the human brain. 15 people with previous history of psychedelic usage were injected with a small amount of psilocybin. [00:25:30] This caused an immediate reaction that peaked within minutes and lasted for about an hour. This differed from those injected with Saltwater Placebo functional magnetic resonance imaging brain scans before and after administration showed decreased blood flow activity through some regions of the brain. The result was found again with a new batch of 15 volunteers and through a different brain scan methodology that showed lower blood oxygenation in the brain. Specific areas [00:26:00] affected included the posterior cingulate cortex and medial prefrontal cortex. Science news reports that Brian Roth of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill who was not involved with the study remarked that they had the complete opposite of what had been predicted. They differ from earlier studies that use positron emission tomography. This work hearkens back to an earlier headline we ran on spectrum that reported that some hallucinogen and phenomena such as synesthesia [00:26:30] may arise from a relaxing of some of the brain's filters. It may also help find drugs or derivatives to be used in the treatment of depression, cluster headaches, obsessive compulsive disorder, and other conditions that linked to too much brain Speaker 5: activity. For the first time ever, stem cells from umbilical cords have been converted into other types of cells, which may eventually lead to new treatment options for spinal cord injuries and multiple sclerosis among [00:27:00] other nervous system diseases. James Hickman at University of central Florida, bioengineer and leader of the research group says we're very excited about where this could lead because it overcomes many of the obstacles present with embryonic stem cells. The main challenge in working with stem cells is figuring out the chemical or other triggers that will convince them to convert into a desired cell type. Had Devika Davis, a postdoctoral researcher in Hickman's lab, [00:27:30] was able to transform umbilical stem cells into oligodendrocytes critical structural cells that insulate nerves in the brain and the spinal cord. There are two main options the group hopes to pursue through further research. The first is that the cells could be injected into the body at the point of a spinal cord injury to promote repair. The other possibility for the Hickman team's work relates to multiple sclerosis [00:28:00] and similar nervous system diseases. Speaker 2: [inaudible] music you heard today was from Lozan and David Sofer. These album Croak and acoustic. It is released under the creative Commons attribution license version 3.0 [inaudible] [00:28:30] spectrum was recorded and edited, and by me, Rick Karnofsky and by Brad swift and Mark Taylor, thank you for listening to spectrum. We are happy to hear from this. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l x@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. [00:29:00] [inaudible] [00:29:30] [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

8:00 AM: Update on the Hunger Strike at Pelican Bay with Deirdre Wilson Project Coordinator for CCWP and Free Battered Women,  and a supporter of the Fast for Justice started by inmates at Pelican Bay, July 1, 2011, and Linda Evans, a former anti-imperialist political prisoner, released in 2001 via a pardon by president Bill Clinton, along with Susan Rosenberg, another political prisoner. 8:30 AM: Maria Acuna, English professor, musician, composer, and Avotcja, Poet/Playwright/Multi-Percussionist/Photographer/Teacher join us to talk about a celebration of Pablo Neruda, Nobel Laureate Chilean poet, 7 PM, Wed., July 27, 2011 @ Cafe Leila, 1724 San Pablo Ave., Berkeley, CA. Avotcja is also celebrating her 70th birthday at La Pena Cultural Center, Sunday, July 24, 7 PM. Visit avotcja.org and quijerema.com 9 AM: Dr. Beheroze Shroff teaches in the Department of Asian American Studies at UC Irvin. She is a documentary film maker whose research for the past 15 years has been on the Siddi or African Indian community in India where she is now. Dr. Henry J. Drewal is the Evjue-Bascom Professor of Art History and Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Adjunct Curator of African Art at the Chazen Museum of Art, UW-Madison. Dr. Sarah Khan, born in Pakistan and raised on the East Coast, received her BA from Smith College majoring in History with a concentration in the Middle East and Arabic. She has a Ph.D in Ethnobotany from CUNY with a specialization in South Asian and Asian Healing systems, specifically Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine. Drs. Khan and Drewal, the curators of the MoAD-SFexhibition "Soulful Stitching: Patchwork Quilts by Africans (Siddis) in India," July 1-Sept. 18, give a lecture at MoAD, Sun., July 24, 2-3:30 PM. 9:30 AM: Noa Ben Hagai, dir., "Blood Relation," @ 31st Annual SFJFF screening July 30, 11:30 AM at JCCSF and again at the Roda at BRT, Aug. 3, 12:25 PM

Paul Birkmeyer, EECS at UC Berkeley, talks about his work in the Biomimetic Millisystems Lab designing and building robots. The Lab seeks to harness features of locomotion, actuation, mechanics, and control strategies to improve millirobot capabilities.TranscriptSpeaker 1: [inaudible] [inaudible]. Welcome to spectrum Speaker 2: the science and technology show [00:00:30] on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program with interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists, a calendar of local events and news. My name is Brad swift and I'm the host of today's show. Today's interview is with Paul Burke Meyer, a phd candidate in the electrical engineering and computer science department known as Ekes. He is working with Professor Ron fearing in his biomimetic millis systems lab building six legged crawling and climbing robots. [00:01:00] The goal of the biomimetic Miller systems lab is to harness features of animal manipulations, locomotion, sensing actuation, mechanics, dynamics and control strategies to radically improve Miller robot capabilities. Miller robots are small robots. For instance, the robot Paul Burke Meyer has built named dash is 10 centimeters long, five centimeters wide and weighs 15 grams. This interview [00:01:30] is prerecorded and edited. Welcome to spectrum Paul Burke. Myer, thanks for coming. Speaker 3: Yeah. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Where are you situated at cal? What's your current status there? I am pursuing my phd here. I'm entering into my fifth year actually. Uh, and I'm studying Ekes specifically electrical engineering and I'm working on robotics in the w department. So Speaker 2: are you in a specific group with any x or is [00:02:00] it just a general study thing? No, it's gotta be something more specific for a Ph d Speaker 3: it is. So, uh, I've been working with Professor Ron fearing since I arrived and he runs the biomimetic Milly systems lab. And within that he has a few different projects, but specifically I'm working on a sort of six legged crawling and climbing robots. Describe for us the robots you're building that my goal for my phd when I first came and still true is to make [00:02:30] a robot that can dynamically climb up a any sort of surface that it's presented with. So the contribution I'm trying to make is how do you make a robot that's minimally actuated? So class uses only a single actuator right now, single motor to drive all the legs. How do you create something that is passively stable? So the structure itself makes it stable when it's climbing. So you don't actually have to spend extra computation and have extra motors on there to keep you from either [00:03:00] falling off the wall or turning and things like that. Speaker 3: Um, how can you climb dynamically, not this sort of slow plodding climbing. How can you climb dynamically, rapidly up a surface and do it stable and do it with very little effort. And what does the foot look like that allows you to make a robot like that. So what does your foot need to do in order to be able to engage and disengage rapidly and without any actuation? So that's [00:03:30] sort of what my phd will say in the end, hopefully. And maybe a year and a half or two years. How did you go about building that kind of a robot? Speaker 3: So the design was long and hard. Um, so when I first came to the biomimetic Mullin systems lab, they were already using what they're calling the smart composite manufacturing process, if you want to describe it. Yeah. So the original process was taking [00:04:00] two pieces of carbon fiber and cutting mirrored slits in both. You cut a bunch of slits on the one piece and you mere it across to the other, and then you take a piece of thin Palmer thin plastic sheet and then you take those two mirrored pieces and put them together and make a sandwich structure. And so you have carbon fiber with one pattern polymer, and then the other piece of carbon fiber with the same pattern that now aligns with the other one, it [00:04:30] bends. Now it's flexible at those polymer hinges at those where those slits were originally. So if each slit is a joint, it doesn't cost you anything to cut more joints out. Speaker 3: Whereas if you're making sort of traditional machined robot out of say aluminum and ball-bearings and things, each new joint does a new bearing, which has some costs, has extra weight. So you can add many, many joints. For example, Dash I think has 75 or more joints in [00:05:00] the robot. Um, many of them are fixed, so they're used just to fold up the final structure and then you glue them in place. Each hip has six moving joints. So each hip has six moving joints. They're six hips. So Justin, the hips alone, they're already 36 moving joints. Um, whereas if you were to do this with ball-bearings, you quickly get something very big and very heavy. So this actually started off as a prototyping process. [00:05:30] Before they would use the carbon fiber process to make their robots. At the time they were making very small robotic flies and you have to assemble these flies under microscopes and it's very tedious. Speaker 3: And if you, if you mess up, so in your design process, you didn't account for something or something doesn't quite align. You've lost a couple of days just working under a microscope, your back hurts, your eyes are tired and it's very frustrating. They realize, hey, this is just a geometric [00:06:00] pattern. So if we make it very small, little fold up the exact same way as if we make it very big, the pattern is the same, the folds are the same. So they take cardboard and make the pattern just bigger and then assemble it by hand without a microscope within a few hours. And exactly, they can tell it's gonna move in the way I want. So this started off as a prototyping process designed by, uh, Aaron Hoover, who's now a professor at Olin and he just graduated. So I actually took this process and started to make [00:06:30] robot designs and realized, Hey, these are actually very functional. Speaker 3: They don't have to be prototypes necessarily. They're actually functional robots at the end. And uh, the cardboard was used, it's cheap cuts very quickly on a laser and you can go through designs very quickly. So instead of having one design that takes two days to build, you can build one in an hour or two. And so you can sort of explore that design space very quickly. So coming into the lab, they were using this manufacturing process where you design everything flat and you cut it out with the laser and you have to fold [00:07:00] it up into something that is functional and moves in the way that you want. And at the time, and still true, we don't have any good way of mapping what a 2d pattern is in the laser cutter, what that map looks like. And what you'll get out when you fold it up into three dimensions. Speaker 3: Keeping in mind that these joints can't spin 360 degrees like a ball bearing. They're limited to at most 180 [00:07:30] degrees before they hit the link on the other side. So you have to in your in your head or on paper draw these structures. Say I started with hips, how can I get a nice leg motion out? And so I designed the hips and then like extrapolated that to six hips and sort of as you go you have to sort of mentally unfold these hips and figure out what that pattern looks like and then you put six hips and then you have to make sure that it can all fit on a flat piece and that when you unfolded [00:08:00] they don't have pieces that are unfolded on top of each other. As you go. Say you'll make a pattern and the first one you make, you fold it up and you realize that some part has to go through another part because the way you designed it actually you didn't realize this part was going to fold into the other cause you have to go back and redesign it. Speaker 3: A lot of trial and error, a lot of trial and error and it took more than 50, maybe, maybe less than a hundred different design iterations for the dash that is [00:08:30] published now from where I started. And even then there were some designs I did with just a single hip just to see what a good hip design was. And it took a lot of time just to get familiar with this folding and unfolding process and laying out parts in two dimensions. And that took me six months just to get familiar with that when I first came. So, so dash is made out of this paper composite. Um, but I've made Balsa wood versions, [00:09:00] I've made fiberglass versions. I actually have not made carbon fiber just because our laser that we use to cut carbon fiber, the bed is not quite big enough so you can't cut pieces quite big enough to make dash. But now we have actually a new laser that I, I will probably pursue carbon fiber if only for the novelty. Um, so it was a, it was a long process. Speaker 4: [inaudible] you are listening to spectrum [00:09:30] line a l x Berkeley. You're talking with Paul Burke Meyer about designing and building small six legged crawling and climbing robots. Speaker 2: The robot that you've built and published a paper about is called Dash. What does that stand for? Dash stands for the dynamic autonomous sprawled hexapod. Once you'd spent a lot of time with Dash, you then wanted [00:10:00] to create an x generation. What was it out of dash that you wanted to explore with clash? Speaker 3: So the things I liked about dash were the fact that it was still fairly small, 10 centimeters long, only 15 grams and very powerful. So if I kept it attached to a wall so it couldn't fall backwards off the wall, it had a lot of power. Could accelerate to full speed within a few hundred milliseconds. I mean it was very, very powerful. So that was nice. But its failure [00:10:30] was in the fact that in order to run it has these two plates basically that move up and down and forward and back relative to each other to drive the legs. That's basically the body is the transmission and it's true, the transmission is moving up and down. And so that's actually the problem is that it's pushing itself off the wall and it does this. So that was the, the main thing I wanted to address, but I liked the way the legs moved. Speaker 3: They call it alternating tripod gait where you have three legs in contact of any one time, so you have this [00:11:00] sort of tripod of support. So I knew what I had generally that worked and I knew sort of what didn't work. And so with clash it was how do I get rid of this up and down motion? And I'd spent enough years doing this smart composite manufacturing that the transition from dash to an entirely new design was only a couple iterations before I got something that actually climbed rather than multiple 50 or so iterations. So that was a lot smoother. The hips are essentially the same, but though the way that they're driven is a little bit different. [00:11:30] And now instead of moving up and down, it's sort of moving side to side and forward and back. So it's not pushing itself off the wall. Speaker 2: Can you describe the control systems you use for your robots? So the, the Speaker 3: interesting thing with the robots that we're making in our lab is that we're trying to reduce the amount of controls necessary as much as possible. Traditional robots, heavy computational power, um, so that they can control each limb and very precisely so in, in, or wants, they don't fall over. [00:12:00] Basically the biggest problem is not falling over for, for legged robots and maintaining stability at least traditionally. So what we're trying to do is to minimize the amount of overhead you have to have, just to be functional. So we've worked with biologists here at Berkeley. They've sort of found these really interesting properties and cockroaches where if they're running over smooth terrain, if you measure their, uh, leg muscle activity, it follows some very repeatable pattern [00:12:30] over smooth terrain, meaning that they're, they're activating the legs the same and then they give them this very rough, varied terrain with bumps, maybe two or three times the height of the cockroach. Speaker 3: They're very significant and they measure the leg activity and it looks almost exactly the same as when it's running on flat terrain. So what that that said to them was the roach is basically saying run and it doesn't care what the terrain is. They've decided that there's this [00:13:00] mechanical complexity and compliance. So the legs basically act as shock absorbers. They're just running and the legs sort of compensate for any roughness in the terrain. What we're trying to do is basically have a robot that does that where you just tell the robot to run and it doesn't care what it hits or what it's running over. It just basically runs and the legs are soft enough and bend enough to sort of compensate forever variation. There isn't the terrain. So the first design of dash that actually [00:13:30] put a motor in the motor actually came from a radio shack toy and I just took the electronics from that toy because it was remote controlled. Speaker 3: Since then, the electronics have been swapped for custom electronics. A couple other students in our lab have designed really small lightweight electronics with an accelerometer and a gyroscope, even a port for uh, integrating a cell phone camera and there students who are using that cell phone camera to sort of [00:14:00] guide the robot from my end. I'm basically doing the robot design and I put these electronics on and I have two commands, three really run. And I tell it how fast and turn left or turn right. And that's it. The nice thing is you don't have to do anything more than that because it, it, it runs well and it can go over a different terrain. It can climb obstacles and dash climb obstacles as tall as itself and it doesn't really care. And so that was what that lets you do is get really [00:14:30] small CPS, really small computers that basically you put on these robots and they take very little power. But now for control, all of all they have to say is go or turn when they can use the rest of their computational time to say, read information from the camera and decide which way do I want to go? What's my objective? So from a stability controls point, it's couldn't be easier. Um, and now we're using these whatever extra [00:15:00] CPU cycles in our small board to do sort of more complicated behavior, but that's sort of another person's project. Speaker 2: What sort of applications do you see this robot having? I know that you would want to use it as a vehicle, right? To have payloads on it. Right? And it also then goes into these strange places or if it can climb walls that's astounding. Right. On its own. Right. And then how do you then utilize it? Speaker 3: The original goal was to have a robot that you could deploy [00:15:30] in search and rescue operations. So, um, say in an earthquake where you have claps buildings or claps minds, um, you can send in very small robots, uh, through the cracks, through the crevices down to find survivors. And you can have thousands of these really cheap and small robots and you don't care if 99% of the robots fail to find anyone or fail to even make it down as long as some small fraction finds a survivor, then you have, [00:16:00] technically you've succeeded. So the goal is to make lots of these small, inexpensive robots that can climb through the cracks, have sensors on them that can detect if someone's alive and then little radios to communicate with each other and communicate with the outside world to say, this is where someone is. Even if it's with some high probability that there's someone here, you know, it's worth spending your time digging in this exact location rather than having to uncover the entire building. Speaker 2: I would imagine there are lots of uses in that realm of, of sensing [00:16:30] environments just in general, whether it's a collapse, building, a search and rescue, but you're just a hazardous place to monitor. And to have these things patrolling. So there's the, the whole idea is numbers and inexpensive, right? Manufacturer, Speaker 3: right. So, so there are also proposals for environmental sensing. So deploying these robots, especially these nice mobile robots and say agricultural areas where you want to track how a crop dusters pesticides [00:17:00] travel across the countryside. You could have robots that sort of move and they can respond to say changing winds so that it can sort of get into the line of you know, the the path of these plumes of pesticides and sort of track how they're progressing across the country if they're affecting, you know, downwind communities. Also we have visions of putting these on bridges to do, checking for signs of stress on bridges and or say the nuclear power plants [00:17:30] in Japan. You could deploy these and have them run around and find you know, leaks or just have a nice mesh sort of deployed sensor network and sort of get readings from lots of different spaces and sort of try to understand how the radiation is moving. Oh Speaker 4: you are listening to spectrum line k a l x Berkeley. We are talking with Paul Burke Meyer about designing and building small six legged crawling [00:18:00] and climbing robots. Speaker 2: So Paul, how did you become interested in engineering? Speaker 3: For me it was pretty clear from the beginning. So when I was younger, um, I was really interested in, well like most people in engineering right now. I built a lot of things out of Legos and connects and things and was really interested in electronics. I actually had [00:18:30] an elderly neighbor next door to me who I would go over and visit and uh, he would give me all of his popular mechanics magazines and popular science magazines when he was done reading them. And I think that was really the hook that got me because I was reading these magazines, seeing all these cool things and thinking like, how can I end up in this magazine? What can I do to be in this magazine because these are all really, really neat things. I think that was the, the original hook. Then, uh, it sort of blossomed [00:19:00] in high school. Speaker 3: We had, uh, an advanced physics class. It was the first time it was offered and it was really sort of undefined. The curriculum wasn't really well formed and uh, as a result we had some freedom that you might not normally have in a high school course to do different projects that we wanted. Uh, the teacher at the time approached me maybe two thirds of the way into the year and said, hey, I have this, uh, this little programming board that they use at MIT for basic robotics things and I just have one of them and [00:19:30] you're doing well in the class. You want to see if you can maybe make a something and we can try to define a project for you using this board. The project ended up being making a robot that could drive through a maze and pop a balloon at the end. And he actually let me pick a partner to work with me. And I actually chose my girlfriend at the time who is now my wife. Um, and so we worked on this project for a long time and had a lot of fun. We made the whole, like the car system programmed the robot [00:20:00] and it was a spectacular failure, but it really was a lot of fun. And I think that was sort of what really cemented engineering for me. Speaker 2: So you mentioned in, in talking about getting started in robotics and engineering, the the aspect of having a lot of fun with it and are you able to maintain that sense of fun and play in your work? For me Speaker 3: this is, it's all fun. It's, I feel like I'm making toys all day [00:20:30] and I don't have to work at it to keep it fun because I love making these things and I think it's really exciting to come up with new structures and sort of understand why things aren't working, what you can do to change them. So for me it's, I mean adjust the, the project itself is so I think, I think it can be fun for other people when you have a like I can make this project fun for other people by actually making something that works and [00:21:00] sharing it with people and having this cool little robot that they can play with that can run up walls and things like that. But I think, I think it's true for lots of people in their careers. I think if you find the one you like, it's fun no matter what you do as long as, as long as you get to do it. So Speaker 2: well thanks very much Paul for coming in and talking. Speaker 3: Came with us was great. You're welcome. There was a lot of fun. Speaker 4: The [00:21:30] video of dash on Youtube, search for dash resilient, high speed 16 gram x and pedal robot regular feature of spectrum is to mention a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next few weeks. [inaudible]. Speaker 2: The Science at Cau lecture series for July will be presented by professor Romanian Kezar Rooney [00:22:00] and will be entitled Exoskeleton Systems for medical applications. Dr Casa Rooney is a professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of California, Berkeley and director of the Berkeley Robotics and human engineering laboratory is one of the world's leading experts in robotic human augmentation. The date of the lecture is Saturday, July 16th at 11:00 AM in the genetics and plant biology building room 100 which is on the northwest corner of the UC Berkeley campus. [00:22:30] The East Bay Science cafe is held the first Wednesday of every month that the cafe of Valparaiso at La Pena Cultural Center, 31 oh five Shattuck avenue in Berkeley from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM the cost of admittance is the purchase of a beverage or food item of your choice. Wednesday, July 6th our crystal Cha graduate student and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow in the Department of integrative biology at UC Berkeley will present. [00:23:00] Her topic is titled Spiders, Crustaceans, and sells omi. A story of how animals use cells to put themselves together. Speaker 2: UC Berkeley. Professor Gordon. Frankie will present a discussion on native bee populations in the bay area at the Peralta community garden. This event is free and open to the public. It will be held Saturday, July 9th at noon in the Peralta community garden. The garden address is 1400 Peralta [00:23:30] AV in Berkeley. Since today's show is at the beginning of the month, let me remind you of the free admittance days for some of the local institutions that normally charge admission. The exploratorium in San Francisco is the first Wednesday of each month. The UC botanical garden in Strawberry Canyon. Berkeley is the first Thursday of each month. The Tech Museum in San Jose is the second Sunday of each month. The Cal Academy of Science in San Francisco is the third Wednesday of each month. [00:24:00] Now several news stories from the UC Berkeley News Center. The story about a new public website providing access to extensive climate change research being conducted at California universities and research centers. Speaker 2: The website. cal-adapt.org has a variety of features tailored for different types of users, including members of the general public, concerned about their neighborhood or region decision-makers such as city planners and resource managers [00:24:30] and experts who want to examine data. The information on the website comes from peer reviewed climate change research funded by the California Energy Commission's public interest energy research program. The site displays the research data in a variety of climate change related scenarios and in map format modeling various projections such as changes in snowpack, wildfire, danger and temperature throughout the end of the century. The cal dash adapt website was developed by the [00:25:00] geospatial innovation facility at UC Berkeley's College of natural resources. Speaker 2: The journal Science gives out a monthly prize called spore. Spore stands for science prize for online resources in education. The June award was given to the molecular work bench software developed by the Concord consortium. The molecular workbench is a free open source software tool that helps learners overcome challenges and understanding the science of atoms [00:25:30] and molecules. This software simulates atomic scale phenomenon, permits users to interact with them. It can model electrons, atoms, and molecules, which makes it exceptable across physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering. Students from grades five through college can use the software to experiment with atomic scale systems. The software includes an author ing tool that enables educators to create complete learning activities with simulations, [00:26:00] text, images, graphs, navigation links and embedded assessments. Hundreds of these activities have been created and tested in classrooms. Educators are free to download and use completed activities or simulations or create their own. Speaker 2: The website is mw.concorde.org/modeler/in an earlier show, we carried a story [00:26:30] about research into toxic flame retardant chemicals in clothing and furniture which pose health hazards for babies and young children. A companion study on the efficacy of the flame retardants was released in June in a peer study presented at the 10th annual symposium on fire safety science at the University of Maryland on June 21st scientists found that California's furniture flammability standard technical bulletin one one seven does not provide measurable fire safety [00:27:00] benefits. The standard has led to the unnecessary use of flame retardant chemicals at high levels and baby products and furniture, widespread human and animal exposure, and the potential to harm human health and the environment. While there are no proven fire safety benefits to technical bulletin one one seven the chemicals used to meet it leak from furniture into house dust, which is ingested by people in pets. Speaker 2: Humans studies have shown associations [00:27:30] between increased flame retardant body levels and reduced IQ in children reduced fertility and to Krinn and thyroid disruption changes in male hormone levels, adverse birth outcomes and impaired development. Flame retardants have been found in the bodies of nearly all north Americans tested with the highest human levels in young children and Californians. Dogs have retardant [00:28:00] levels up to 10 times higher than humans and cats because of their grooming behavior have levels up to 100 times higher. The California standard established by technical bulletin one one seven has become a de facto national standard legislation to allow an alternative fabric flammability standard that would provide equal or greater fire safety without the use of chemical flame retardants failed last month with strong opposition [00:28:30] from lobbyists for Kim Torah, Alber Marley and Israeli chemicals limited. For more information and the complete study, go to the website, green science policy.org Speaker 5: [inaudible] [inaudible]. Speaker 4: The abuse occurred during the show is by Listonic Donna David from his album folk and acoustic made [00:29:00] available by a creative Commons attribution only licensed 3.0 editing assistance was provided by Judith White Marceline and Gretchen Sanders. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have any comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l x@yahoo.com join us in two weeks [00:29:30] at the same time. Speaker 5: [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Paul Birkmeyer, EECS at UC Berkeley, talks about his work in the Biomimetic Millisystems Lab designing and building robots. The Lab seeks to harness features of locomotion, actuation, mechanics, and control strategies to improve millirobot capabilities.TranscriptSpeaker 1: [inaudible] [inaudible]. Welcome to spectrum Speaker 2: the science and technology show [00:00:30] on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program with interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists, a calendar of local events and news. My name is Brad swift and I'm the host of today's show. Today's interview is with Paul Burke Meyer, a phd candidate in the electrical engineering and computer science department known as Ekes. He is working with Professor Ron fearing in his biomimetic millis systems lab building six legged crawling and climbing robots. [00:01:00] The goal of the biomimetic Miller systems lab is to harness features of animal manipulations, locomotion, sensing actuation, mechanics, dynamics and control strategies to radically improve Miller robot capabilities. Miller robots are small robots. For instance, the robot Paul Burke Meyer has built named dash is 10 centimeters long, five centimeters wide and weighs 15 grams. This interview [00:01:30] is prerecorded and edited. Welcome to spectrum Paul Burke. Myer, thanks for coming. Speaker 3: Yeah. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Where are you situated at cal? What's your current status there? I am pursuing my phd here. I'm entering into my fifth year actually. Uh, and I'm studying Ekes specifically electrical engineering and I'm working on robotics in the w department. So Speaker 2: are you in a specific group with any x or is [00:02:00] it just a general study thing? No, it's gotta be something more specific for a Ph d Speaker 3: it is. So, uh, I've been working with Professor Ron fearing since I arrived and he runs the biomimetic Milly systems lab. And within that he has a few different projects, but specifically I'm working on a sort of six legged crawling and climbing robots. Describe for us the robots you're building that my goal for my phd when I first came and still true is to make [00:02:30] a robot that can dynamically climb up a any sort of surface that it's presented with. So the contribution I'm trying to make is how do you make a robot that's minimally actuated? So class uses only a single actuator right now, single motor to drive all the legs. How do you create something that is passively stable? So the structure itself makes it stable when it's climbing. So you don't actually have to spend extra computation and have extra motors on there to keep you from either [00:03:00] falling off the wall or turning and things like that. Speaker 3: Um, how can you climb dynamically, not this sort of slow plodding climbing. How can you climb dynamically, rapidly up a surface and do it stable and do it with very little effort. And what does the foot look like that allows you to make a robot like that. So what does your foot need to do in order to be able to engage and disengage rapidly and without any actuation? So that's [00:03:30] sort of what my phd will say in the end, hopefully. And maybe a year and a half or two years. How did you go about building that kind of a robot? Speaker 3: So the design was long and hard. Um, so when I first came to the biomimetic Mullin systems lab, they were already using what they're calling the smart composite manufacturing process, if you want to describe it. Yeah. So the original process was taking [00:04:00] two pieces of carbon fiber and cutting mirrored slits in both. You cut a bunch of slits on the one piece and you mere it across to the other, and then you take a piece of thin Palmer thin plastic sheet and then you take those two mirrored pieces and put them together and make a sandwich structure. And so you have carbon fiber with one pattern polymer, and then the other piece of carbon fiber with the same pattern that now aligns with the other one, it [00:04:30] bends. Now it's flexible at those polymer hinges at those where those slits were originally. So if each slit is a joint, it doesn't cost you anything to cut more joints out. Speaker 3: Whereas if you're making sort of traditional machined robot out of say aluminum and ball-bearings and things, each new joint does a new bearing, which has some costs, has extra weight. So you can add many, many joints. For example, Dash I think has 75 or more joints in [00:05:00] the robot. Um, many of them are fixed, so they're used just to fold up the final structure and then you glue them in place. Each hip has six moving joints. So each hip has six moving joints. They're six hips. So Justin, the hips alone, they're already 36 moving joints. Um, whereas if you were to do this with ball-bearings, you quickly get something very big and very heavy. So this actually started off as a prototyping process. [00:05:30] Before they would use the carbon fiber process to make their robots. At the time they were making very small robotic flies and you have to assemble these flies under microscopes and it's very tedious. Speaker 3: And if you, if you mess up, so in your design process, you didn't account for something or something doesn't quite align. You've lost a couple of days just working under a microscope, your back hurts, your eyes are tired and it's very frustrating. They realize, hey, this is just a geometric [00:06:00] pattern. So if we make it very small, little fold up the exact same way as if we make it very big, the pattern is the same, the folds are the same. So they take cardboard and make the pattern just bigger and then assemble it by hand without a microscope within a few hours. And exactly, they can tell it's gonna move in the way I want. So this started off as a prototyping process designed by, uh, Aaron Hoover, who's now a professor at Olin and he just graduated. So I actually took this process and started to make [00:06:30] robot designs and realized, Hey, these are actually very functional. Speaker 3: They don't have to be prototypes necessarily. They're actually functional robots at the end. And uh, the cardboard was used, it's cheap cuts very quickly on a laser and you can go through designs very quickly. So instead of having one design that takes two days to build, you can build one in an hour or two. And so you can sort of explore that design space very quickly. So coming into the lab, they were using this manufacturing process where you design everything flat and you cut it out with the laser and you have to fold [00:07:00] it up into something that is functional and moves in the way that you want. And at the time, and still true, we don't have any good way of mapping what a 2d pattern is in the laser cutter, what that map looks like. And what you'll get out when you fold it up into three dimensions. Speaker 3: Keeping in mind that these joints can't spin 360 degrees like a ball bearing. They're limited to at most 180 [00:07:30] degrees before they hit the link on the other side. So you have to in your in your head or on paper draw these structures. Say I started with hips, how can I get a nice leg motion out? And so I designed the hips and then like extrapolated that to six hips and sort of as you go you have to sort of mentally unfold these hips and figure out what that pattern looks like and then you put six hips and then you have to make sure that it can all fit on a flat piece and that when you unfolded [00:08:00] they don't have pieces that are unfolded on top of each other. As you go. Say you'll make a pattern and the first one you make, you fold it up and you realize that some part has to go through another part because the way you designed it actually you didn't realize this part was going to fold into the other cause you have to go back and redesign it. Speaker 3: A lot of trial and error, a lot of trial and error and it took more than 50, maybe, maybe less than a hundred different design iterations for the dash that is [00:08:30] published now from where I started. And even then there were some designs I did with just a single hip just to see what a good hip design was. And it took a lot of time just to get familiar with this folding and unfolding process and laying out parts in two dimensions. And that took me six months just to get familiar with that when I first came. So, so dash is made out of this paper composite. Um, but I've made Balsa wood versions, [00:09:00] I've made fiberglass versions. I actually have not made carbon fiber just because our laser that we use to cut carbon fiber, the bed is not quite big enough so you can't cut pieces quite big enough to make dash. But now we have actually a new laser that I, I will probably pursue carbon fiber if only for the novelty. Um, so it was a, it was a long process. Speaker 4: [inaudible] you are listening to spectrum [00:09:30] line a l x Berkeley. You're talking with Paul Burke Meyer about designing and building small six legged crawling and climbing robots. Speaker 2: The robot that you've built and published a paper about is called Dash. What does that stand for? Dash stands for the dynamic autonomous sprawled hexapod. Once you'd spent a lot of time with Dash, you then wanted [00:10:00] to create an x generation. What was it out of dash that you wanted to explore with clash? Speaker 3: So the things I liked about dash were the fact that it was still fairly small, 10 centimeters long, only 15 grams and very powerful. So if I kept it attached to a wall so it couldn't fall backwards off the wall, it had a lot of power. Could accelerate to full speed within a few hundred milliseconds. I mean it was very, very powerful. So that was nice. But its failure [00:10:30] was in the fact that in order to run it has these two plates basically that move up and down and forward and back relative to each other to drive the legs. That's basically the body is the transmission and it's true, the transmission is moving up and down. And so that's actually the problem is that it's pushing itself off the wall and it does this. So that was the, the main thing I wanted to address, but I liked the way the legs moved. Speaker 3: They call it alternating tripod gait where you have three legs in contact of any one time, so you have this [00:11:00] sort of tripod of support. So I knew what I had generally that worked and I knew sort of what didn't work. And so with clash it was how do I get rid of this up and down motion? And I'd spent enough years doing this smart composite manufacturing that the transition from dash to an entirely new design was only a couple iterations before I got something that actually climbed rather than multiple 50 or so iterations. So that was a lot smoother. The hips are essentially the same, but though the way that they're driven is a little bit different. [00:11:30] And now instead of moving up and down, it's sort of moving side to side and forward and back. So it's not pushing itself off the wall. Speaker 2: Can you describe the control systems you use for your robots? So the, the Speaker 3: interesting thing with the robots that we're making in our lab is that we're trying to reduce the amount of controls necessary as much as possible. Traditional robots, heavy computational power, um, so that they can control each limb and very precisely so in, in, or wants, they don't fall over. [00:12:00] Basically the biggest problem is not falling over for, for legged robots and maintaining stability at least traditionally. So what we're trying to do is to minimize the amount of overhead you have to have, just to be functional. So we've worked with biologists here at Berkeley. They've sort of found these really interesting properties and cockroaches where if they're running over smooth terrain, if you measure their, uh, leg muscle activity, it follows some very repeatable pattern [00:12:30] over smooth terrain, meaning that they're, they're activating the legs the same and then they give them this very rough, varied terrain with bumps, maybe two or three times the height of the cockroach. Speaker 3: They're very significant and they measure the leg activity and it looks almost exactly the same as when it's running on flat terrain. So what that that said to them was the roach is basically saying run and it doesn't care what the terrain is. They've decided that there's this [00:13:00] mechanical complexity and compliance. So the legs basically act as shock absorbers. They're just running and the legs sort of compensate for any roughness in the terrain. What we're trying to do is basically have a robot that does that where you just tell the robot to run and it doesn't care what it hits or what it's running over. It just basically runs and the legs are soft enough and bend enough to sort of compensate forever variation. There isn't the terrain. So the first design of dash that actually [00:13:30] put a motor in the motor actually came from a radio shack toy and I just took the electronics from that toy because it was remote controlled. Speaker 3: Since then, the electronics have been swapped for custom electronics. A couple other students in our lab have designed really small lightweight electronics with an accelerometer and a gyroscope, even a port for uh, integrating a cell phone camera and there students who are using that cell phone camera to sort of [00:14:00] guide the robot from my end. I'm basically doing the robot design and I put these electronics on and I have two commands, three really run. And I tell it how fast and turn left or turn right. And that's it. The nice thing is you don't have to do anything more than that because it, it, it runs well and it can go over a different terrain. It can climb obstacles and dash climb obstacles as tall as itself and it doesn't really care. And so that was what that lets you do is get really [00:14:30] small CPS, really small computers that basically you put on these robots and they take very little power. But now for control, all of all they have to say is go or turn when they can use the rest of their computational time to say, read information from the camera and decide which way do I want to go? What's my objective? So from a stability controls point, it's couldn't be easier. Um, and now we're using these whatever extra [00:15:00] CPU cycles in our small board to do sort of more complicated behavior, but that's sort of another person's project. Speaker 2: What sort of applications do you see this robot having? I know that you would want to use it as a vehicle, right? To have payloads on it. Right? And it also then goes into these strange places or if it can climb walls that's astounding. Right. On its own. Right. And then how do you then utilize it? Speaker 3: The original goal was to have a robot that you could deploy [00:15:30] in search and rescue operations. So, um, say in an earthquake where you have claps buildings or claps minds, um, you can send in very small robots, uh, through the cracks, through the crevices down to find survivors. And you can have thousands of these really cheap and small robots and you don't care if 99% of the robots fail to find anyone or fail to even make it down as long as some small fraction finds a survivor, then you have, [00:16:00] technically you've succeeded. So the goal is to make lots of these small, inexpensive robots that can climb through the cracks, have sensors on them that can detect if someone's alive and then little radios to communicate with each other and communicate with the outside world to say, this is where someone is. Even if it's with some high probability that there's someone here, you know, it's worth spending your time digging in this exact location rather than having to uncover the entire building. Speaker 2: I would imagine there are lots of uses in that realm of, of sensing [00:16:30] environments just in general, whether it's a collapse, building, a search and rescue, but you're just a hazardous place to monitor. And to have these things patrolling. So there's the, the whole idea is numbers and inexpensive, right? Manufacturer, Speaker 3: right. So, so there are also proposals for environmental sensing. So deploying these robots, especially these nice mobile robots and say agricultural areas where you want to track how a crop dusters pesticides [00:17:00] travel across the countryside. You could have robots that sort of move and they can respond to say changing winds so that it can sort of get into the line of you know, the the path of these plumes of pesticides and sort of track how they're progressing across the country if they're affecting, you know, downwind communities. Also we have visions of putting these on bridges to do, checking for signs of stress on bridges and or say the nuclear power plants [00:17:30] in Japan. You could deploy these and have them run around and find you know, leaks or just have a nice mesh sort of deployed sensor network and sort of get readings from lots of different spaces and sort of try to understand how the radiation is moving. Oh Speaker 4: you are listening to spectrum line k a l x Berkeley. We are talking with Paul Burke Meyer about designing and building small six legged crawling [00:18:00] and climbing robots. Speaker 2: So Paul, how did you become interested in engineering? Speaker 3: For me it was pretty clear from the beginning. So when I was younger, um, I was really interested in, well like most people in engineering right now. I built a lot of things out of Legos and connects and things and was really interested in electronics. I actually had [00:18:30] an elderly neighbor next door to me who I would go over and visit and uh, he would give me all of his popular mechanics magazines and popular science magazines when he was done reading them. And I think that was really the hook that got me because I was reading these magazines, seeing all these cool things and thinking like, how can I end up in this magazine? What can I do to be in this magazine because these are all really, really neat things. I think that was the, the original hook. Then, uh, it sort of blossomed [00:19:00] in high school. Speaker 3: We had, uh, an advanced physics class. It was the first time it was offered and it was really sort of undefined. The curriculum wasn't really well formed and uh, as a result we had some freedom that you might not normally have in a high school course to do different projects that we wanted. Uh, the teacher at the time approached me maybe two thirds of the way into the year and said, hey, I have this, uh, this little programming board that they use at MIT for basic robotics things and I just have one of them and [00:19:30] you're doing well in the class. You want to see if you can maybe make a something and we can try to define a project for you using this board. The project ended up being making a robot that could drive through a maze and pop a balloon at the end. And he actually let me pick a partner to work with me. And I actually chose my girlfriend at the time who is now my wife. Um, and so we worked on this project for a long time and had a lot of fun. We made the whole, like the car system programmed the robot [00:20:00] and it was a spectacular failure, but it really was a lot of fun. And I think that was sort of what really cemented engineering for me. Speaker 2: So you mentioned in, in talking about getting started in robotics and engineering, the the aspect of having a lot of fun with it and are you able to maintain that sense of fun and play in your work? For me Speaker 3: this is, it's all fun. It's, I feel like I'm making toys all day [00:20:30] and I don't have to work at it to keep it fun because I love making these things and I think it's really exciting to come up with new structures and sort of understand why things aren't working, what you can do to change them. So for me it's, I mean adjust the, the project itself is so I think, I think it can be fun for other people when you have a like I can make this project fun for other people by actually making something that works and [00:21:00] sharing it with people and having this cool little robot that they can play with that can run up walls and things like that. But I think, I think it's true for lots of people in their careers. I think if you find the one you like, it's fun no matter what you do as long as, as long as you get to do it. So Speaker 2: well thanks very much Paul for coming in and talking. Speaker 3: Came with us was great. You're welcome. There was a lot of fun. Speaker 4: The [00:21:30] video of dash on Youtube, search for dash resilient, high speed 16 gram x and pedal robot regular feature of spectrum is to mention a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next few weeks. [inaudible]. Speaker 2: The Science at Cau lecture series for July will be presented by professor Romanian Kezar Rooney [00:22:00] and will be entitled Exoskeleton Systems for medical applications. Dr Casa Rooney is a professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of California, Berkeley and director of the Berkeley Robotics and human engineering laboratory is one of the world's leading experts in robotic human augmentation. The date of the lecture is Saturday, July 16th at 11:00 AM in the genetics and plant biology building room 100 which is on the northwest corner of the UC Berkeley campus. [00:22:30] The East Bay Science cafe is held the first Wednesday of every month that the cafe of Valparaiso at La Pena Cultural Center, 31 oh five Shattuck avenue in Berkeley from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM the cost of admittance is the purchase of a beverage or food item of your choice. Wednesday, July 6th our crystal Cha graduate student and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow in the Department of integrative biology at UC Berkeley will present. [00:23:00] Her topic is titled Spiders, Crustaceans, and sells omi. A story of how animals use cells to put themselves together. Speaker 2: UC Berkeley. Professor Gordon. Frankie will present a discussion on native bee populations in the bay area at the Peralta community garden. This event is free and open to the public. It will be held Saturday, July 9th at noon in the Peralta community garden. The garden address is 1400 Peralta [00:23:30] AV in Berkeley. Since today's show is at the beginning of the month, let me remind you of the free admittance days for some of the local institutions that normally charge admission. The exploratorium in San Francisco is the first Wednesday of each month. The UC botanical garden in Strawberry Canyon. Berkeley is the first Thursday of each month. The Tech Museum in San Jose is the second Sunday of each month. The Cal Academy of Science in San Francisco is the third Wednesday of each month. [00:24:00] Now several news stories from the UC Berkeley News Center. The story about a new public website providing access to extensive climate change research being conducted at California universities and research centers. Speaker 2: The website. cal-adapt.org has a variety of features tailored for different types of users, including members of the general public, concerned about their neighborhood or region decision-makers such as city planners and resource managers [00:24:30] and experts who want to examine data. The information on the website comes from peer reviewed climate change research funded by the California Energy Commission's public interest energy research program. The site displays the research data in a variety of climate change related scenarios and in map format modeling various projections such as changes in snowpack, wildfire, danger and temperature throughout the end of the century. The cal dash adapt website was developed by the [00:25:00] geospatial innovation facility at UC Berkeley's College of natural resources. Speaker 2: The journal Science gives out a monthly prize called spore. Spore stands for science prize for online resources in education. The June award was given to the molecular work bench software developed by the Concord consortium. The molecular workbench is a free open source software tool that helps learners overcome challenges and understanding the science of atoms [00:25:30] and molecules. This software simulates atomic scale phenomenon, permits users to interact with them. It can model electrons, atoms, and molecules, which makes it exceptable across physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering. Students from grades five through college can use the software to experiment with atomic scale systems. The software includes an author ing tool that enables educators to create complete learning activities with simulations, [00:26:00] text, images, graphs, navigation links and embedded assessments. Hundreds of these activities have been created and tested in classrooms. Educators are free to download and use completed activities or simulations or create their own. Speaker 2: The website is mw.concorde.org/modeler/in an earlier show, we carried a story [00:26:30] about research into toxic flame retardant chemicals in clothing and furniture which pose health hazards for babies and young children. A companion study on the efficacy of the flame retardants was released in June in a peer study presented at the 10th annual symposium on fire safety science at the University of Maryland on June 21st scientists found that California's furniture flammability standard technical bulletin one one seven does not provide measurable fire safety [00:27:00] benefits. The standard has led to the unnecessary use of flame retardant chemicals at high levels and baby products and furniture, widespread human and animal exposure, and the potential to harm human health and the environment. While there are no proven fire safety benefits to technical bulletin one one seven the chemicals used to meet it leak from furniture into house dust, which is ingested by people in pets. Speaker 2: Humans studies have shown associations [00:27:30] between increased flame retardant body levels and reduced IQ in children reduced fertility and to Krinn and thyroid disruption changes in male hormone levels, adverse birth outcomes and impaired development. Flame retardants have been found in the bodies of nearly all north Americans tested with the highest human levels in young children and Californians. Dogs have retardant [00:28:00] levels up to 10 times higher than humans and cats because of their grooming behavior have levels up to 100 times higher. The California standard established by technical bulletin one one seven has become a de facto national standard legislation to allow an alternative fabric flammability standard that would provide equal or greater fire safety without the use of chemical flame retardants failed last month with strong opposition [00:28:30] from lobbyists for Kim Torah, Alber Marley and Israeli chemicals limited. For more information and the complete study, go to the website, green science policy.org Speaker 5: [inaudible] [inaudible]. Speaker 4: The abuse occurred during the show is by Listonic Donna David from his album folk and acoustic made [00:29:00] available by a creative Commons attribution only licensed 3.0 editing assistance was provided by Judith White Marceline and Gretchen Sanders. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have any comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l x@yahoo.com join us in two weeks [00:29:30] at the same time. Speaker 5: [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Today in honor of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz's birthday today, May 19, 2011, we want to pause and reflect on his legacy with those inspired by his tireless zeal and push for justice. Confirmed guests are: Grace C. Stanislaus, Executive Director, Museum of the African Diaspora; author, Sharon G. Flake whose latest book is, You Don't Even Know Me: Stories and Poems about Boys; Adwoa Kudoto, a drummer & teacher from Cape Coast, Ghana (West Africa), joins Emani Dawson Bey, "Liberation Theatre." Both women have shows at La Pena Cultural Center in Berkeley, May 20 & May 25. Visit www.lapena.org We close with a conversation with musician/scholars: Anthony Brown, Jon Jang, and Marcus Shelby to talk about a Soundtrack for a Revolutioninspired by Bother Malcolm. All the excerpts from speeches are available on line at: http://www.archive.org/details/Malcolm_X (great website),http://www.brothermalcolm.net/mxwords/whathesaidarchive.html We also play part of Leon Thomas's "Malcolm's Gone."

We open with a short excerpt of a conversation with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre member, Kirven James Boyd; Catherine Murphy, director, Maestra (teacher), with Dr. Ruth Guillard follow. Murphy's film, which commemorates the 50th Anniversary of the Cuban Literacy Project, is screening at La Pena Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Avenue, in Berkeley, CA. Alice Walker opens the program, which is hosted by Amy Alison. Visit lapena.org and www.maestrathefilm.org We close with a conversation with choreographer, Amara Tabor Smith about her latest show: Our Daily Bread, premiering at CounterPulse, April 14-24, 2011, 1310 Mission Street @ 9th Street, in San Francisco. April 14, 2011 is pay-what-you-can. Visit www.counterpulse.org

Our first guest is Gretchen Wallace, President & Founder of Global Grassroots. GGR's purpose is to catalyze the development of conscious communities of change agents who will work independently, collectively and systematically to advance the rights and wellbeing of women: www.globalgrassroots.org Catinca Tabacaru, Executive Director & General Counsel, Women's Voices Now, which has a film festival in Hollywood, California, March 17-19, 2011 at the Los Angeles Film School, 6363 Sunset Blvd. joins us to talk about her organization. Visit http://womensvoicesnow.org Torange Yeghiazarian who founded Golden Thread Productions in October 1996, which has a current production, "What Do the Women Say?", March 9, 2011, at La Pena Cultural Center, 3150 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley wasn't able to join us, so we will reschedule. Visit www.goldenthread.org We close with Raja Rahim and Thomas Simpson, founder of AfroSolo presenter of the concert featuring Ms. Rahim Sunday, March 13, 2011, 4 PM, at the African American Art & Culture Complex, 762 Fulton Street, San Francisco. Visit www.afrosolo.org or call (415) 771-2376. Today we have a pair of tickets for the 10 PM McCoy Tyner show at Yoshi's San Francisco, Thursday, March 10, 2011, 8 PM. Mr. Tyner features Bobby Hutcherson. Visit www.yoshis.com If you'd like the pair of tickets send me a message here or email to wandaspicksradio@gmail.com with your contact information.

Katerina Cizek, director, "The Bicycle," which screens in the UNAFF 2010, Oct. 27, 5:25, a part of Session XV at Stanford University Medical School, Li Ka Shing Center Bldg., 291 Campus Drive, which starts at 4 PM and ends about 7 PM. Visit www.unaff.org. For Kat's many projects visit: filmmakerinresidence.nfb.ca and her latest work: http://highrise.nfb.ca/ Lance Garner (Franco) & Michael J. Asberry (James) in TheatreWorks production of "Tracy Lett's "Superior Donuts" through October 31. Visit www.theatreworks.org (650) 463-1960. The show is 7:30 PM tonight, Thursday-Friday, 8 PM, Saturday 2 & 8 PM and Sunday, 2 & 7 PM. Tickets are $19 (student)-67. Liza Garza, Sunday, Nov. 14, 8 PM, is featured in La Pena Cultural Center's "Mujeres en la Resistencia," a part of the 11th Annual Hecho en Califas Festival. Visit www.lapena.org We close with an interview with writer, Jacqueline Woodson, whose "Peace, Locomotion," premiered in a stage adaptation at the Kennedy Center, October 23.

Rebroadcast from October 24, 2008: Today we highlighted the Black Panther Party, Oakland Community School, the first charter school in the State of CA and a model promoted by then Gov.Jerry Brown--yes, unbelievable that this same man, as CA Attorney Gen. is promoting the trial of the SF8. We had Billy X, itsabouttimebpp.com, Melvin Dixon, the Commemorator and the Lil' Bobby Hutton Literacy Program and Naomi Banks, former student on the air. "The Down Memory Lane Reunion," is 10/25, 12-5, at the old school site: 6118 International Blvd., Oakland. We also had Naima and Alixa, climblingpoetree.com who have a new show: Hurricane Season, Oct. 24-25, at La Pena Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Ave., in Berkeley, 7:00 doors, 7:30 show. They will also take "Hurricane Season," to Cell Space in SF, 10/30, 7:00 doors, 7:30 show. They are performing poetry at the "Wonders of Cannibis" Festival its second day, 10/26, which also features Dead Prez, at Golden Gate Park in SF, CA. My other guests were, Avotcja & Modupue, which features musician Jon Jang, and others, performing at the Jazz School, in downtown Berkeley, Oct. 24, 8 p.m. Next was guest, Shara K. Lange, whose film, "The Way North," about a Morrocan sports photographer, Fatima Rhazi, turned activist for women's rights in France, screens at 2 p.m. at the Shattuck Cinemas, in Berkeley, 10/25. It's a part of the "12th Arab Film Festival" www.aff.org. We closed with a great conversation with Black Panther Party Chairman,and co-founder, Bobby Seale, ESCC co-founder, Greg Morozumi, and the author of the book, "The Snake Dance," about the Second Annual Third World Book Festival at ESCC, 12-6 p.m. Oct.25-26, at 2277 International Blvd. in Oakland. Visit http://wandaspicks.com

Tim Wise, author, anti-racism advocate. His latest book, "Colorblind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics from Racial Equity," is the topic of our discussion this morning; Akiba Timoya aka Akiba Onada-Sikwoia is African, Blackfoot, Choctaw, Cherokee and Irish. She is Two-Spirited and has been participating in Native American Ceremony for the past 24 years. She is also a member of the Lucumi community and a child of the Orisha. She and DON 'LITTLE CLOUD' DAVENPORT "I am one of the founders of the Black Native American Association in Oakland, California. I am a Seminole with Creek/Chickasaw, Muskogee and African (Nubian/Sudan) Ancestry and of the Bird Clan. I was born in Jackson, Michigan which was on one of the routes of the Underground Railroad where slaves fled to Canada." They will speak about the first annual Black Native American Pow Wow at CSUH this month, Sept. 17-19. Visit www.bnaa.org for the details. The pre-Pow Wow panel is 6:30-8:30 9/17. The procession starts at 1 PM both Saturday and Sunday, Sept. 18-19. Dan Hoyle, "The Real Americans" is our next guest. "The Real Americans," Hoyle's solo performance has been extended through Nov. 6 at The Marsh Theatre Wednesdays-Saturdays, in San Francisco. Visit www.themmarsh.org We close with artist, Somi, who will be at Cafe de Nord in San Francisco, Sept. 16, and at the Monterey Jazz Festival, Sept. 18, then on to Holland. Somi didn't make it, because she is scheduled for next week, 9/10 at 8:30 AM, so tune in then--Mars is in Retrograde. Yes, blame it on the planet that already speeding, I skipped an entire seven days--wow! Meklit Hadero, Somi's friend came to the rescue with a cut from her latest release I like a lot: "Soleil Soleil." We close with a prerecorded interview with Ernie Silva appearing with "Heavy Like the Weight of a Flame," at La Pena Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Avenue, in Berkeley, Sept. 9-10, 8 PM

Jovelyn Richards's "Come Home" at La Pena Cultural Center, Friday, Feb. 26, 2010, 8 PM. Visit www.lapena.org; Wanda Ravernell, Omnira Projects present, "Roots of Faith: Roots of Faith, Roots of Freedom," Sunday, Feb.21, 2010, 2 PM, at the SF Main Library, 100 Larkin Street @ Grant, (510) 436-0658or omniraprojects@yahoo.com; "Love of Art" features artists: Jimi Evans, Ted Pontiflet, Ronnie Prosser, James Reid, at Studio 750A 14th Street @Brush in Oakland, (510)853-2122, every Sat/Sun 12 noon to 5 PM through March 21, 2010. We close with a conversation with Scott Braley and Mickey Ellinger, a photographer/writer team from Oakland who worked with Mrs. Alice Royal to produce the book: Allensworth the Freedom Colony, about a small African American Township founded in 1908 near Bakersfield. They went with Global Exchange to Cuba and will share with us the Cuban plan for sustainable development. Alicia Jrapko also joins us. Alicia is the National Coordinator in the US of the International Committee for the Freedom of the Cuban 5, who has been involved since 2001.

We'll be speaking with former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and Opal Palmer Adisa about the legacy and work of the Hon. Marcus Mosiah Garvey, founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Organization. He was the first victim of FBI surveillance (COINTELPRO). Next we'll be joined by Maalak, Soul Chi and Colette Winlock to speak about "Be Still Meditation" tomorrow. Judith Offer, playwright, "Compared to What," at the Oakland Public Library, 8/15, 2-4 PM at the Main Branch, 125-14th Street, West Auditorium, and Ronnie Stewart, founder, Bay Area Blues Society, which hosts the Blues Stage at Art and Soul in Oakland, 8/15-8/16. We close with a conversation with artists participating in Diáspora Negra - The African Legacy in Music and Dance in Latin America, at La Pena Cultural Center in Berkeley, Friday and Saturday, Aug. 15 & 16.

Recently there was a historic gathering of African-centered Restorative Justice practioners. We will speak to Fania Davis, Jacqueline Roebuck Sahko and Yusufu Mosley and other guests that weekend at the start of the show. The circus is in town and we might have an opportunity to speak to a clown who is veteran of the Gulf War. Lastly, Oakland's Art and Soul is this weekend, August 15-16, and the Blues Stage is what's happening. A pared down band toasted Avotcja at her 68th Leo Birthday Celebration August 2 at La Pena Cultural Center. Hopefully Ronnie Stewart, Bay Area Blues Society Caravan of All Stars might be up early and prepared to share the amazing lineup with us.

Today we'll be speaking to Alicia Jrapko, the United States Coordinator of the Internat'l Committee for the Freedom of the Cuban Five based in Oakland, CA. The artist and his four brothers are serving long sentences. He is serving a life sentences in Florence, Colorado. Visit www.thecuban5.org "Original paintings by Antonio Guerrero Exhibit opens Thursday, August 6, 2009, 7:30 PM at La Pena Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley. The keynote speaker is Alice Walker, novelist, poet and author of prologue to "Letter of Love and Hope, the Story of the Cuban Five. There will be remarks by Gayle McLaughlin, Mayor of Richmond , California, along with music, an excerpt from the video "Against the Silence." Donations at the door $10 - $20 sliding scale. We are hoping to speak to Rea Dol, who is with a coalition of grassroots women's organizations in Haiti and also director of a school in Port-au-Prince before she returns home this weekend. She was in the San Francisco Bay Area last week. We close the show with an interview with one of my favorite artists, musicians, writers--Lewis Jordan, who has a string of events this week and spread throughout the month. He is also faculty at St. Mary's College in Moraga, CA. Lewis Jordan with "Music at Large... music/poetry... begins next week. Each evening he says guest can "expect passion, energy and feel "a healing force" beginning Thursday, August 13, 7:00, at Velma's Blues 'n' Jazz Club, 2246 Jerrold Ave., San Francisco, (415) 824-4606; continuing the next day, Friday, August 14, 8:00, $12 at the Oakland Public Conservatory of Music, 1616 Franklin St., Oakland (510) 836-4649, and then closing out the suite, Wednesday, August 26, 8:00, $10, at Anna's Jazz Island, 2120 Allston Way, Berkeley, (510) 841-5299. You don't want to miss this anointing. If Rea is not available we will have a prerecorded interview with Beth Toni Kruvant, director of "Heart of Stone" which screens at the JCCSF Aug. 8, 4:45 PM.

Today we highlighted the Oakland Community School, the first charter school in the State of CA and a model promoted by then Gov.Jerry Brown--yes, unbelievable that this same man, as CA Attorney Gen. is promoting the trial of the SF8. We had Billy X, itsabouttimebpp.com, Melvin Dixon, the Commemorator and the Lil' Bobby Hutton Literacy Program and Naomi Banks, former student on the air. "The Down Memory Lane Reunion," is 10/25, 12-5, at the old school site: 6118 International Blvd., Oakland. We also had Naima and Alixa, climblingpoetree.com who have a new show: Hurricane Season, Oct. 24-25, at La Pena Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Ave., in Berkeley, 7:00 doors, 7:30 show. They will also take "Hurricane Season," to Cell Space in SF, 10/30, 7:00 doors, 7:30 show. They are performing poetry at the "Wonders of Cannibis" Festival its second day, 10/26, which also features Dead Prez, at Golden Gate Park in SF, CA. My other guests were, Avotcja & Modupue, which features musician Jon Jang, and others, performing at the Jazz School, in downtown Berkeley, Oct. 24, 8 p.m. Next was guest, Shara K. Lange, whose film, "The Way North," about a Morrocan sports photographer, Fatima Rhazi, turned activist for women's rights in France, screens at 2 p.m. at the Shattuck Cinemas, in Berkeley, 10/25. It's a part of the "12th Arab Film Festival" www.aff.org. We closed with a great conversation with Black Panther Party Chairman,and co-founder, Bobby Seale, ESCC co-founder, Greg Morozumi, and the author of the book, "The Snake Dance," about the Second Annual Third World Book Festival at ESCC, 12-6 p.m. Oct.25-26, at 2277 International Blvd. in Oakland. Visit http://wandaspicks.com