Podcasts about lawrence berkeley national lab

What do Unions stand for?  How and why do Unions work?  And how exactly have Unions made life better for millions of workers and their families? Host Timothy Regan welcomes 6 Union leaders to share from the heart about what Unions are all about.  We take a deep dive into Union principles, and hear several stories about successes of Union work. Hear from: Keith Brown, Educator and Executive Secretary/Treasurer of the Alameda Labor Council AFL-CIO. Vilma Serrano, Oakland Teacher and Lead Negotiator/Bargaining Chair of the Oakland Education Association Union. Tanzil Chowdhury, Graduate Student Research Assistant at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and the Unit Chair for the Berkeley Unit of UAW Unit 2865, representing 36000 student workers across the University of California. Sarah Arveson, PhD, Vice President of UAW 5810, union for post-doc and academic researchers across the University of California system. Doug Jones, Political Organizer for SEIU-UHW and health care worker of many years, representing 85,000 health care workers at Kaiser Permanente and across California Michael Sommers, Actor and union member of SAG-AFTRA, currently on strike. The participants ask that you visit these websites for more information: Unionize California Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions SAG-AFTRA Oakland Education Association United Auto Workers       The post The Union Episode: A Panel of Union Leaders on How and Why Unions Work appeared first on KPFA.

Matthew "Oki" O'Connor is the CEO of Scientific Affairs at Cyclarity Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biotech building a new class of medicines designed not to slow the accumulation of vascular damage but to reverse it. Oki and Chris first crossed paths as postdocs at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in the mid-2000s — Oki was in Irina Conboy's lab, not far from the late Judy Campisi's group, where Chris was then working on cellular senescence. After Berkeley, Oki spent nearly a decade running the research program at the SENS Research Foundation, the organization most identified with the "damage repair" framing of aging biology, before co-founding Cyclarity (then known as Underdog Pharmaceuticals) in 2019 to translate one of SENS's most drug-tractable ideas into an actual molecule.When Oki was last on the show in March of 2023 (Episode 36), Cyclarity was deep in IND-enabling work and its lead asset, UDP-003, had only ever seen the inside of a mouse artery. At the end of that conversation, Chris asked what Oki hoped to be discussing the next time he visited. He answered, bluntly, that he wanted to be presenting human data. Last month, at the AHA Vascular Discovery Sessions, Cyclarity reported the results of their first-in-human Phase 1 trial of UDP-003 — a designed cyclodextrin that selectively binds 7-ketocholesterol, the oxidized cholesterol species that drives foam cell formation and arterial plaque. He's back to discuss what the drug actually did when it went hunting for 7KC inside a living human being.In this episode, Chris and Oki cover the unmet need that lipid-lowering drugs — statins, PCSK9 inhibitors, the coming Lp(a) agents — still don't address: none of them remove the damage already sitting in an artery wall. Oki explains the basic chemistry of 7-ketocholesterol and why macrophages, lacking the machinery to recycle it, collapse into foam cells and seed the necrotic core of advanced plaque. They walk through the engineering of UDP-003 as a dimeric beta-cyclodextrin "double cone" tuned for a single oxidized cholesterol species, the design of the 72-volunteer Australian Phase 1, and the exploratory pharmacodynamic readout that has the field's attention: dose-dependent urinary excretion of 7KC, stoichiometric with drug, cleared within a day. The conversation then turns to the 150-patient Phase 2 plan in coronary artery disease patients with plaque imaging as the primary biological readout, the funding math that stands between Cyclarity and that trial, the platform's reach into NASH, vascular dementia, AMD, and aging itself, and how all of this descends from the SENS damage-repair philosophy that Oki has been carrying since LBL.The Finer Details:- Why current standard of care is not enough — statins, PCSK9 inhibitors, GLP-1s, and the soon-to-arrive Lp(a) lowering agents all act by slowing the accumulation of arterial damage, not by reversing what's already there; despite 30 years on the market, statins have never demonstrated an all-cause mortality benefit in a clinical trial, and even the best statin imaging data shows only 1–2% plaque volume regression at very high doses in a subset of patients- The scale of the problem — atherosclerosis is estimated to contribute to roughly 40% of all human deaths once heart attack, stroke, and a surprisingly large COPD contribution are risk-adjusted in, on top of an enormous morbidity tail that includes angina, peripheral artery disease (up to and including amputation), and a growing case for vascular dementia as an undercounted driver of cognitive decline- The biology of 7-ketocholesterol — when an oxygen free radical reacts with cholesterol, it preferentially attacks the 7 position, and a second oxidation step locks the molecule into 7KC, a stable toxic species cells were essentially never equipped to recycle; it builds up in long-lived cells like macrophages, eventually shutting down their ability to traffic lipids back to the liver via HDL and converting them into foam cells that seed soft plaque and, over years, the necrotic core of advanced lesions- The molecular design of UDP-003 — cyclodextrins are naturally occurring carbohydrate rings; the beta size fits half a cholesterol molecule, and Cyclarity's in silico work showed that two beta-cyclodextrins facing wide-side to wide-side form a "double cone" that can fully encapsulate a single cholesterol; engineered correctly, that wrapper can be made selective for 7KC over native membrane cholesterol, which is what gives the drug its therapeutic window- The Phase 1 trial design and result — a traditional 72-volunteer safety study in Australia, split between single ascending dose and multiple ascending dose arms, escalating up to six doses at what Cyclarity believes will be the efficacious level; no serious adverse events, no bioaccumulation, drug excreted essentially completely in the urine (as predicted preclinically), and — the headline exploratory endpoint — dose-dependent urinary 7-ketocholesterol appearing on the same timescale as the drug, consistent with one molecule of UDP-003 binding one molecule of 7KC and leaving the body together- What the urinary 7KC readout can and cannot tell you — the easiest 7KC to mobilize is the free pool in circulation, but there is not nearly enough of it floating in the bloodstream to account for what came out in urine, which means the drug is reaching deeper compartments; how much is coming from vessel wall plaque versus liver versus other peripheral tissues will require the imaging endpoints of Phase 2 to answer- The Phase 2 plan — 150 coronary artery disease patients (the coronary being, as Oki puts it, the artery most likely to kill you), with baseline plaque imaging, a year of dosing, and a repeat scan; safety and PK continue, inflammatory biomarkers come on, and plaque volume change is the prize — for context, a 1% change in plaque volume is associated with roughly a 20% change in next-year risk of heart attack or stroke- The funding math and the platform — Cyclarity has raised $33M to date and needs roughly $45M more to run the Phase 2, with Phase 3 cardiovascular outcomes trials running into the hundreds of millions and likely requiring a pharma partner; beyond atherosclerosis, 7KC is elevated in NASH livers, in Alzheimer's brains, and in the retinal cells that die in age-related macular degeneration, and the underlying chemistry — designed binders that drag a specific toxic molecule out of the body — is meant to generalize into a pipeline against other accumulated damage species, the direct intellectual descendant of the SENS damage-repair programQuotes:"Atherosclerosis, or the plaque that builds up in your blood vessels in your arteries, is estimated to cause approximately 40% of all human death.""When [the macrophage] eats up too much oxidized cholesterol, it just accumulates it… And that's when you get this transition to these kind of monster blob cells called foam cells.""One molecule of our drug is supposed to bind one molecule of 7-ketocholesterol and then go away and never be seen again. You excrete both of them together.""A 1% change in plaque volume is associated with a 20% risk in the next year of your probability of having a heart attack or a stroke.""You pick one target at a time, you do it well, and you take it all the way to the clinic and hopefully prove that you can actually cure patients, help them get better, help their plaque shrink away, and prove that this approach can work."Links:Cyclarity Therapeutics: https://cyclarity.com

It's been 75 years since the United States released its first and only national water strategy. In this episode, John talks with Dr. Newsha Ajami of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Dr. Martin Doyle of Duke University about why that original plan mattered, what it accomplished, and why today's challenges call for a new approach. They explore the historical context of the 1951 plan, the issues it identified that remain relevant today, and how political boundaries, fragmented agencies, and modern pressures like groundwater depletion and climate change make a new national strategy essential.

In this short podcast episode, Bryan explains how duct tape got its name and why it shouldn't actually be used on ducts. Duct tape is a versatile home DIY-fix tool, but despite its name, it wasn't initially made to seal ducts at all. In 1943, we were in the thick of World War II, and ammo shipments were sealed with wax and paper tape. These were often not durable or difficult to open. Johnson & Johnson developed a tape with rubber adhesive on a cotton duck cloth backing (which was already widely used for military uniforms and tent fabrics). This new tape was nicknamed "duck" tape due to the material and its waterproof abilities (like the waterfowl). A woman named Vesta Stoudt informed President FDR about duct tape, and the War Production Board began using it in wartime supply packaging. After the war, America had a housing boom in the 1950s, which included the demand for forced-air heating and cooling systems. Marketers thought the tape could seal the ducts in those homes, so they changed the color to match sheet metal and rebranded it as "duct tape." In the 1960s, this tape was available in retail outlets with the "duct tape" branding. Unfortunately, in tests by the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, duct tape failed miserably at sealing the ducts because the rubber adhesive dries out under heat, and dust weakens the adhesive. As a result, many building codes ban duct tape on ducts (spearheaded by California). Instead, UL-listed foil tape and mastic are approved for sealing ducts. However, duct tape still became famous for its versatility as a patching material. It's prevalent in pop culture and has been used in television shows and even in space.   Have a question that you want us to answer on the podcast? Submit your questions at https://www.speakpipe.com/hvacschool. Purchase your tickets or learn more about the 7th Annual HVACR Training Symposium at https://hvacrschool.com/symposium. Subscribe to our podcast on your iPhone or Android. Subscribe to our YouTube channel. Check out our handy calculators here or on the HVAC School Mobile App for Apple and Android.

The White House released a new executive order in July — Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure  —calling on government to develop AI-ready data centers, streamline federal permitting and encourage private investment in critical infrastructure. Federal agencies are focusing on system resilience to withstand rising environmental and cybersecurity threats as data centers continue to grow. A joint report from the Department of Energy and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab reveals that electricity usage by data centers tripled over the past decade and could double or triple again by 2028 — potentially consuming up to 12% of the nation's electricity. Federal researchers and cybersecurity experts are exploring underground thermal energy storage systems like Borehole Thermal Energy Storage (BTES) to regulate temperatures and reduce grid stress. Leaders from federal/critical infrastructure operational support and National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) are exploring how geothermal solutions can keep data centers operational during extreme weather events and power outages. As the U.S. races to expand its digital infrastructure, these innovations may be key to building a secure and sustainable future.

Professor Joseph Allen directs the Healthy Buildings Program at Harvard Chan School of Public Health. His expertise extends far beyond what makes buildings healthy. He has been a leading voice and advocate during the Covid pandemic for air quality and ventilation. He coined the term “Forever Chemicals” and has written extensively on this vital topic, no less other important exposures, which we covered In our wide-ranging conversation. You will see how remarkably articulate and passionate Prof Allen is about these issues, along with his optimism for solutions.A video snippet of our conversation: buildings as the 1st line of defense vs respiratory pathogens. Full videos of all Ground Truths podcasts can be seen on YouTube here. The audios are also available on Apple and Spotify.Transcript with External Links and Links to AudioEric Topol (00:00:06):Well, hello. It's Eric Topol from Ground Truths and I am just delighted to have with me, Joseph Allen from the Harvard School of Public Health, where he directs the Healthy Buildings Program that he founded and does a whole lot more that we're going to get into. So welcome, Joe.Joseph Allen (00:00:24):Thanks. It's great to be here. I appreciate the invitation.Joe Allen's Background As A DetectiveEric Topol (00:00:28):Well, you have been, as I've learned, rocking it for many years long before the pandemic. There's quite a background about you having been a son of a homicide detective, private eye agency, and then you were going to become an FBI agent. And the quote from that in the article that's the Air Investigator is truly a classic. Yeah, you have in there, “I guarantee I'm the only public health student ever to fail an FBI lie detector polygraph in the morning and start graduate school a few hours later.” That's amazing. That's amazing.Joseph Allen (00:01:29):All right. Well, you've done your deep research apparently. That's good. Yeah, my dad was a homicide detective and I was a private investigator. That's no longer my secret. It's out in the world. And I switched careers and it happened to be the day I took the polygraph at the FBI headquarters in Boston, was the same day I started graduate studies in public health.Sick vs Healthy Buildings (Pre-Covid)Eric Topol (00:01:53):Well, you're still a detective and now you're a detective of everything that can hurt us or help us environmentally and my goodness, how grateful we are that you change your career path. I don't know anyone who's had more impact on buildings, on air, and we're going to get into chemicals as well. So if we go back a bit here, you wrote a book before the pandemic, talk about being prescient. It's called Healthy Buildings: How Indoor Spaces Can Make You Sick - or Keep You Well with John Macomber, your co-author. What was it that gave you the insight to write a book before there was this thing called Covid?Joseph Allen (00:02:41):Yeah, well, thanks for making the connection too, my past career to current career. For many years, I thought there wasn't a connection, but I agree. There's actually a lot of similarities and I also am really appreciative. I am lucky I found the field of Public Health, it's clearly where I belong. I feel like I belong here. It's a place to make an impact that I want to make in my career. So yeah, the Healthy Buildings book, we started writing years before the pandemic and was largely motivated by, I think what you and others and other people in my field have known, is that buildings have an outsized impact on our health. Yet it's not something that comes to the forefront when you ask people about what matters for their health. Right, I often start presentations by asking people that, what constitutes healthy living? They'll say, I can't smoke, I have to eat well.(00:03:30):I have to exercise. Maybe they'll say, outdoor pollution's bad for you. Very few people, if any, will say, well, the air I breathe inside my building matters a lot. And over the years I had started my public health career doing forensic investigations of sick buildings. People really can get sick in buildings. It can be anything from headaches and not being able to concentrate all the way to cancer clusters and people dying because of the building. And I've seen this in my career, and it was quite frustrating because I knew, we all knew how to design and operate buildings in a way that can actually keep people healthy. But I was frustrated like many in my field that it wasn't advancing. In other words, the science was there, but the practice wasn't changing. We were still doing things the wrong way around ventilation, materials we put in our building, and I would lecture over and over and give presentations and I decided I want to try something new.(00:04:22):I do peer-reviewed science. That's great. I write pieces like you for the public, and I thought we'd try a longer form piece in a book, and it's published by Harvard Press. John Macomber for those who know is a professor at Harvard Business School who's an expert in real estate finance. So he'd been talking about the economic benefits of healthier buildings and some hand waving as he describes around public health. I've been talking about the public health benefits and trying to wave an economic argument. We teamed up to kind of use both of our strengths to, I hope make a compelling case that buildings are good for health and they're also just good business. In other words, try to break down as many barriers as we can to adoption. And then the book was published right as Covid hit.Indoor Air Quality and CognitionEric Topol (00:05:05):Yeah. I mean, it's amazing. I know that typically you have to have a book almost a year ahead to have it in print. So you were way, way ahead of this virus. Now, I'm going to come back to it later, but there were two things beyond the book that are pretty striking about your work. One is that you did all these studies to show with people wearing sensors to show that when the levels of CO2 were high by sensors that their cognition indoors was suffering. Maybe you could just tell us a little bit about these sensors and why aren't we all wearing sensors so that we don't lose whatever cognitive power that we have?Joseph Allen (00:05:56):Well, yeah. First I think we will start having these air quality sensors. As you know, they're starting to become a lot more popular. But yeah, when I first joined the faculty full-time at Harvard, one of the first studies I conducted with my team was to look at how indoor air quality influences cognitive function. And we performed a double-blind study where we took people, office workers and put them in a typical office setting. And unbeknownst to them, we started changing the air they were breathing in really subtle ways during the day, so they didn't know what we were doing. At the end of the day, we administered an hour and a half long cognitive function battery, and like all studies, we control for things like caffeine intake, baseline cognitive performance, all the other factors we want to account for. And after controlling for those factors in a double-blind study, we see that indoor air quality, minor improvements to indoor air quality led to dramatic increases in cognitive function test scores across domains that people recognize as important for everyday life.(00:06:59):How do you seek out and utilize information? How do you make strategic decisions? How do you handle yourself during a crisis and importantly recover after that crisis? I don't mean the world's ending crisis. I mean something happens at work that's stressful. How do you handle that and how do you respond? Well, it turns out that amongst all the factors that influence how we respond there, indoor air quality matters a lot. We call that study the COGfx Study for cognitive function. We replicated it across the US, we replicated it across the world with office workers around the world, and again, always showing these links, the subtle impact of indoor air quality on cognitive function performance. Now, that also then starts to be the basis for some of the economic analysis we perform with my colleague at Harvard Business School. We say, well, look, if you perform this much better related to air quality, what would happen if we implemented this at scale in a business?(00:07:51):And we estimate that there are just massive economic gains to be had. On a per person basis, we found and published on this, that's about $6,000 to $7,000 per person per year benefit across a company. It could lead to 10% gains to the bottom line performance of the company. And again, I'm a public health professor. My goal is to improve people's health, but we add a lens, mental health, brain health is part of health, and we add the economic lens to say, look, this is good for a worker of productivity and the costs are downright trivial when you compare it against the benefits, even just including the cognitive function benefits, not even including the respiratory health benefit.Eric Topol (00:08:33):And I mean, it's so striking that you did these studies in a time before sensors were, and they still are not widely accepted, and it really helped prove, and when we start to fall asleep in a group session indoors, it may not just be because we didn't have enough sleep the night before, right.Joseph Allen (00:08:56):It's funny you say that. I talk about that too. It's like, do we actually need the study to tell us to quantify what we've all experienced these bad conference rooms, you get tired, you can't concentrate, you get sleepy while you're driving your car. Yeah, a whole bunch of other factors. Maybe the speaker's boring, but a key factor is clearly indoor air quality and things like good ventilation, the chemical load in the space are all contributing.Eric Topol (00:09:20):Yeah. No, it's pretty darn striking. Now we're going to get into the pandemic, and this of course is when your work finally crystallized that you've been working on this for years, and then finally your collaboration with some of the aerosol experts. It was a transdisciplinary synergy that was truly extraordinary. And when you were on 60 Minutes last October, you said, “Think about the public health gains we've made over the past hundred years. We've made improvements to water quality, outdoor air pollution, our food safety, we've made improvements to sanitation: absolute basics of public health. Where has indoor air been in that conversation?” You brought it to us. I mean, you led the Lancet Commission on this. You've done a White House Summit keynote. You had a lot of influence. Why did it take us to finally wake up to this issue that you've been working on for years?Covid is Airborne, DenialJoseph Allen (00:10:31):Yeah. Well, I appreciate that, but I also liked what you started with. I mean, there's been a lot of us pulling on this, and I think one of the magical moments, if you could say that when the pandemic happened was that it forced these collaborations and forced a lot of us in our field to be a bit more vocal. And even that comment about the gains we made in public health, that comes from an article that we co-authored with 40 plus scientists around the world in science, trying to drive home the point that we've ignored one of the key factors that determines our health. We were all frustrated at the beginning of the pandemic. The first piece I wrote was January 2020, talking about healthy buildings as the first line of defense, airborne spread, ventilation, filtration. I could not get it published. I could not get it published.(00:11:20):So I moved it to an international paper. I wrote it in the Financial Times in early February, but it wasn't until mid-March that the Times took my piece on this airborne spread buildings ventilation. At the same time, we know people like Linsey Marr, Rich Corsi, many others, Shelly Miller out there publishing, doing the fundamental research, all trying to elevate, and I think we started to find each other and say, hey, someone's trying to hit the medical journals. We're not landing there. I'm trying to hit the Times, and we're not landing there. We're trying to get the reporters to pay attention. It's not landing there. Let's team up. Let's write these joint pieces. And I think what happened was you saw the benefit of the collective effort and interdisciplinary expertise, right? We could all start to come together, start instead of having these separate voices, a little bit of a unified voice despite important scientific minor disagreements, but start to say, hey, we started elevate each other and said, this is really important. It's the missing component of the messaging in the early days of the pandemic, and to know how to defend yourself.Eric Topol (00:12:20):Well, I think a lot of people think the big miss, and I know you agree, was the lack of recognition of aerosol transmission instead of just liquid droplets. But what you brought to this was really your priors on the buildings themselves and the ventilation systems and air quality that was highly, I mean, critical to it isn't just the aerosol, it's obviously how buildings are set up. Now, there's an amazing piece of course that appeared in the summer of 2021 called the Air Investigator, which profiled you, and in it brings up several things that finally are, we're starting to get our act together. I mean, ultimately there was in May 2023 years later, the CDC says, we're going to do something about this. Can you tell us what was this very distinct new path that the CDC was at least saying? And also couple that with whatever action if or not action has been taken.Joseph Allen (00:13:33):Yeah. So there really was a monumental shift that took, it was years in development, but we finally won the argument, collectively that airborne spread was the dominant mode of transmission. Okay, we got that. Then the question is, well, what changes? Do we actually get guidance here? And that took a little bit longer. I give Rochelle Walensky a lot of credit when she came into the CDC, we talked with her about this. That's when you start to first see ventilation starts showing up and the guidance, including guidance for schools. So I think that was a big win, but still no one was willing to set an official target or standard around higher ventilation rates. So that's important. Early in the pandemic, some people started to hear a message, yes, ventilation is important. What's the obvious next question, well, how much, what do I need? So in the summer of 2020, actually Shelly Miller and I collaborated on this.(00:14:23):We published some guidance on ventilation targets for schools. We said four to six air changes per hour (ACH) and target that. Well, it wasn't until 2023, spring of 2023 that you mentioned that CDC published target ventilation rates, and they went with five air changes per hour, which is right where we were talking about in summer 2020. It's what the Lancet of COVID-19 Commission adopted, but it's momentous in this way. It's the first time in CDCs history they've ever published a ventilation rate target for health. Now, I know this seems slow at the time, and it was, but if we think about some of the permanent gains that will come out of the pandemic. Pandemic changes society and science and policy and practice this, we are never going back. Now buildings will be a first line of defense for respiratory pathogens going forward that can no longer be ignored. And now we have the published target by CDC. That's a big deal because it's not just a recognition, but there's actually something to shoot for out there. It's a target I happen to like, I think there are differences between different scientists, but ultimately we've lifted the floor and said, look, we actually have to raise ventilation rates and we have something to shoot for. The public needed that kind of guidance a lot earlier, of course, but it was a big deal that it happened. It's just too bad it took until spring 2023.Eric Topol (00:15:46):Yeah, I certainly agree that it was momentous, but a year plus later, has there been any change as a result of this major proclamation, if you will?Joseph Allen (00:15:59):Well, I actually see a lot of change from a practitioner level, but I want to talk about it in two aspects. I see a lot of schools, universities, major companies that have made this shift. For example, in the 60 Minutes piece, I talk that I advised Amazon and globally they're measuring indoor air quality with real-time sensors in their buildings. I've worked with hundreds of school districts that have made improvements to indoor air quality. I know companies that have shifted their entire approach to how they design and operate their buildings. So it's happening. But what really needs to happen, Eric, if this movement is going to benefit everyone, is that these targets need to be codified. They need to go into building codes. It can't just be, oh, I've heard about this. So I made the decision. I have the resources and the money to make this improvement.(00:16:44):To create a healthy building or a healthy school, we need to be sure this gets built into our code. So it just becomes the way it's done. That is not happening. There are some efforts. There are some bills at the national level. Some states are trying to pass bills, and I have to say, this is why I'm optimistic. It feels very slow. I'm as frustrated as anybody. I wanted this done before the pandemic. As soon as the pandemic hit, we saw it. We knew what we needed to get done. It didn't happen. But if we think about the long arc here and the public health gains we're actually, it's remarkable to me that we actually have bills being introduced around indoor air quality that ASHRAE has set a new health focused target for the first time really in their history. CDC, first time. New buildings going up in New York City designed to these public health targets. That's really different. I've been in this field for 20 plus years. I've never seen anything like it. So the pace is still slow, but it really is happening. But it has to reach everybody, and the only way that's going to happen is really this gets into building codes and performance standards.The Old Efficient Energy BuildingsEric Topol (00:17:52):Yeah. Well, I like your optimistic perspective. I do want to go back for a second, back decades ago there was this big impetus to make these energy efficient buildings and to just change the way the buildings were constructed so that there was no leak and it kind of set up this problem or exacerbated, didn't it?Joseph Allen (00:18:19):Yeah. I mean, I've written about this a lot. I write in the book our ventilation standards, they've been a colossal mistake. They have cost the public in terms of its health because in the seventies, we started to really tighten up our building envelopes and lower the ventilation rates. The standards were no longer focused on providing people with a healthy indoor space. As I write in the book, they were targeted towards minimally acceptable indoor air quality, bare minimums. By the way that science is unequivocal, is not protective of health, not protective against respiratory pathogens, doesn't promote good cognitive function, not good for allergies. These levels led to more illness in schools, more absences for teachers and students, an absolute disaster from a public health standpoint. We've been in this, what I call the sick building era since then. Buildings that just don't bring in enough clean outdoor air. And now you take this, you have a building stock for 40 years tighter and tighter and tighter bumps up against a novel virus that spread nearly entirely indoors. Is it any wonder we had, the disaster we had with COVID-19, we built these bills. They were designed intentionally with low ventilation and poor filtration.Optimal Ventilation and FiltrationEric Topol (00:19:41):Yeah. Well, it's extraordinary because now we've got to get a reset and it's going to take a while to get this done. We'll talk a bit about cost of doing this or the investment, if you will, but let's just get some terms metrics straight because these are really important. You already mentioned ACH, the number of air changers per hour, where funny thing you recommended between four and six and the CDC came out with five. There's also the minimum efficiency reporting value (MERV). A lot of places, buildings have MERV 8, which is insufficient. We need MERV 13. Can you tell us about that?Joseph Allen (00:20:23):Yeah, sure. So I think when we think about how much, you have two ways to capture these respiratory particles, right? Or get rid of them. One is you dilute them out of the building or you capture them on filters. You can inactivate them through UV and otherwise. But let's just stay on the ventilation and filtration side of this. So the air changing per hour is talking about how often the air is change inside. It's an easy metric. There are some strengths to it, there's some weaknesses, but it's intuitive and I'll you some numbers so you can make sense of this. We recommended four to six air changes per hour. Typical home in the US has half an air change per hour. Typical school designed to three air changes per hour, but they operate usually at one and a half. So we tried to raise this up to four, five, or six or even higher. On the filtration side, you mentioned MERV, right? That's just a rating system for filters, and you can think about it this way. Most of the filters that are in a building are cheap MERV 8 filters, I tend to think of them as filters that protect the equipment. A MERV 13 filter may capture 80 or 90% of particles. That's a filter designed to protect people. The difference in price between a MERV 8 and a MERV 13 is a couple of bucks.(00:21:30):And a lot of the pushback we got early in the pandemic, some people said, well, look, there's a greater resistance from the better filter. My fan can't handle it. My HVAC system can't handle it. That was nonsense. You have low pressure drop MERV 13 filters. In other words, there really wasn't a barrier. It was a couple extra bucks for a filter that went from a MERV 8 might capture 20 or 30% to a filter, MERV 13 that captures 80 or 90% with very little, if any impact on energy or mechanical system performance. Absolute no-brainer. We should have been doing this for decades because it also protects against outdoor air pollution and other particles we generate indoors. So that was a no-brainer. So you combine both those ventilation filtration, some of these targets are out there in terms of air change per hour. You can combine the metric if we want to get technical to talk about it, but basically you're trying to create an overall amount of clean air. Either you bring in fresh outdoor air or you filter that air. It really is pretty straightforward, but we just didn't have some of these targets set and the standards we're calling for these minimum acceptable levels, which we're not protective of health.Eric Topol (00:22:37):So another way to get better air quality are these portable air cleaners, and you actually just wrote about that with your colleagues in the Royal Society of Chemistry, not a journal that I typically read, but this was an important article. Can you give us, these are not very expensive ways to augment air quality. Can you tell us about these PACs ?Joseph Allen (00:23:06):These portable air cleaners (PACs), so the same logic applies if people say, well, I can't upgrade my system. That's not a problem for very low cost, you could have, these devices are essentially a fan and a filter, and the amount of clean air you get depends on how strong the fan is and how good the filter is. Really pretty simple stuff here, and you can put one of these in a room if it's sized right. My Harvard team has built tools to help people size this. If you're not quite sure how to do it, we have a technical explainer. Really, if you size it right, you can get that four, five or six air changes per hour, very cheap and very quickly. So this was a tool I thought would be very valuable. Rich Corsi and I wrote about this all through the summer of 2020 to talk about, hey, a stop gap measure.(00:23:50):Let's throw out some of these portable air cleaners. You increase the air changes or clean air delivery pretty effectively for very low cost, and they work. And now the paper we just published in my team a couple of days ago starts to advance this more. We used a CFD model, so computational fluid dynamics. Essentially, you can look at the tracers and the airflow patterns in the room, and we learn a couple things that matter. Placement matters, so we like it in the center of the room if you can or as close as possible. And also the airflow matters. So the air cleaners are cleaning the air, but they're also moving the air, and that helps disperse these kind of clouds or plumes when an infected person is breathing or speaking. So you want to have good ventilation, good filtration. Also a lot of air movement in the space to help dilute and move around some of these respiratory particles so that they do get ventilated out or captured in a filter.Eric Topol (00:24:40):Yeah. So let me ask you, since we know outdoors are a lot safer. If you could do all these things indoors with filtration, air changing the quality, can you simulate the outdoors to get rid of the risk or markedly reduce the risk of respiratory viruses like SARS-CoV-2 and others?Joseph Allen (00:25:04):Yeah, you can't drop it to zero. There's no such thing as zero risk in any of these environments. But yeah, I think some of the estimates we've seen in my own team has produced in the 60-70% reduction range. I mean, if you do this right with really good ventilation filtration, you can drop that risk even further. Now, things like distancing matter, whether or not somebody's wearing a mask, these things are all going to play into it. But you can really dramatically drop the risk by handling just the basics of ventilation and filtration. And one way to think about it is this, distance to the infector still matters, right? So if you and I are speaking closely and I breathe on you, it's going to be hard to interrupt that flow. But you can reduce it through good ventilation filtration. But really what it's doing also is preventing super spreading events.(00:25:55):In other words, if I'm in the corner of a room and I'm infectious and you're on the other side, well if that room is sealed up pretty good, poor ventilation, no filtration, the respiratory aerosols are going to build up and your risk is going to increase and we're in there for an hour or two, like you would be in a room or office and you're exposed to infectious aerosol. With good ventilation filtration, those respiratory particles don't have a chance to reach you, or by the time they do, they're much further diluted. Linsey Marr I think was really great early in the pandemic by talking about this in terms of cigarette smoke. So a small room with no ventilation filtration, someone smoking in the corner, yeah, it's going to fill up over time with smoke you're breathing in that secondhand smoke. In a place with great ventilation filtration, that's going to be a lot further reduced, right? You're not going to get the buildup of the smoke and smoke particles are going to operate similarly to respiratory particles. So I think it's intuitive and it's logical. And if you follow public health guidance of harm reduction, risk reduction, if you drop exposure, you drop risk.(00:26:58):The goal is to reduce exposure. How do we do that? Well, we can modify the building which is going to play a key role in exposure reduction.Eric Topol (00:27:06):Now, to add to this, if I wear a sensor or have a sensor in the room for CO2, does that help to know that you're doing the right thing?Joseph Allen (00:27:17):Yeah, absolutely. So people who are not familiar with these air quality sensors. They're small portal air quality sensors. One of the things they commonly measure is carbon dioxide. We're the main source of CO2 inside. It's a really good indicator of ventilation rate and occupancy. And the idea is pretty simple. If the CO2 is low, you don't have a buildup of particles from the respiratory tract, right? And CO2 is a gas, but it's a good indicator of overall ventilation rate. This room I'm in right now at the Harvard School of Public Health has air quality sensors. We have this at Harvard Business School. We have it at the Harvard Health Clinics. Many other places are doing it, Boston Public schools have real-time air quality monitors. Here's the trick with CO2. So first I'll say we have some guidance on this at the Harvard Healthy Buildings page, if people want to go look it up, how to choose an air quality sensor, how to interpret CO2 levels.Carbon Dioxide Levels(00:28:04):But here's a way to think about it. We generally would like to see CO2 levels less than 800 parts per million. Historically, people in my field have said under 1,000 is okay. We like to see that low. If your CO2 is low, the risk is low. If your CO2 is high, it doesn't necessarily mean your risk is high because that's where filtration can come in. So let me say that a little bit better. If CO2 is low, you're diluting enough of the respiratory particles. If it's high, that means your ventilation is low, but you might have excellent filtration happening. Either those MERV 13 filters we talked about or the portable air cleaners. Those filters don't capture CO2. So high CO2 just means you better have a good filter game in place or the risk is going to be high. So if you CO2 is low, you're in good shape. If it's high, you don't quite know. But if you have bad filtration, then the risk is going to be much higher.Eric Topol (00:29:01):I like that 800 number because that's a little lower than some of the other thresholds. And why don't we do as good as we can? The other question about is a particulate matter. So we are worried about the less than 5 microns, less than 2.5 microns. Can you tell us about that and is there a way that you can monitor that directly?Joseph Allen (00:29:25):Sure. A lot of these same sensors that measure CO2 also measure PM 2.5 which stands for particular matter. 2.5 microns is smaller, one of the key components of outdoor air pollution and EPA just set new standards, right? WHO has a standard for 5 microgram per cubic meter. EPA just lowered our national outdoor limit from 12 to 9 microgram per cubic meter. So that's a really good indicator of how well your filters are working. Here again, in a place like this or where you are, you should see particle levels really under 5 microgram per cubic meter without any major source happening. What's really interesting about those like the room I'm in now, when the wildfire smoke came through the East coast last year, levels were extraordinary outside 100, 200, 300 microgram per cubic meter. But because we have upgraded our filters, so we use MERV 15 here at Harvard, the indoor levels of particles stayed very low.(00:30:16):So it shows you how the power of these filters can actually, they do a really good job of capturing particles, whether it be from our lungs or from some other source. So you can measure this, but I'll tell you what's something interesting, if you want to tie it into our discussion about standards. So we think about particles. We have a lot of standards for outdoor air pollution. So there's a national ambient air quality standard 9 microgram per cubic meter. We don't have standards for indoor air quality. The only legally enforceable standard for indoor particles is OSHA's standard, and it's 5,000 microgram per cubic meter 5,000.(00:30:59):And it's absurd, right? It's an absurdity. Here we are EPAs, should it be 12, should it be 9, or should it be 8? And for indoors, the legally enforceable limit for OSHA 5,000. So it points to the big problem here. We talked about earlier about the need for these standards to codify some of this. Yes, we have awareness from the public. We have sensors to measure this. We have CDC now saying what we were saying with the Lancet COVID-19 Commission and elsewhere. This is big movement, but the standards then need to come up behind it and get into code and new standards that are health focused and health based. And we have momentum, but we can't lose it right now because it's the first time in my career I felt like we're on the cusp of really getting this and we are so close. But of course it's always in danger of slipping through our fingers.Regulatory Oversight for AirEric Topol (00:31:45):Well, does this have anything to do with the fact that in the US there's no regulatory oversight over air as opposed to let's say Japan or other places?Joseph Allen (00:31:57):Yeah, I mean, we have regulatory oversight of outdoor air. That's EPA. There's a new bill that was introduced to give EPA more resources to deal with indoor air. EPA has got a great indoor air environments division, but it doesn't have the legally enforceable mandate or statute that we have for outdoor. So they'd give great guidance and have for a long time. I really like that group at EPA, but there's no teeth behind this. So what we have is worker health protections at OSHA to its own admission, says its standards are out of date. So we need an overhaul of how we think about the standards. I like the market driven approach. I think that's being effective, and I think we can do it from voluntary standards that can get adopted into code at the municipal level. I think that's a real path. I see it happening. I see the influence of all this work hitting legislators. So that's where I think the most promising path is for real change.The Risks of Outdoor Air Pollution Eric Topol (00:33:03):Yeah, I think sidestepping, governmental teeth, that probably is going to be a lot quicker. Now, before we get to the cost issue, I do want to mention, as you know very well, the issue of air pollution in Science a dedicated issue just a few weeks ago, it brought up, of course, that outdoor air pollution we've been talking about indoor is extraordinary risk for cancer, dementia, diabetes, I mean everything. Just everything. And there is an interaction between outdoor pollution and what goes on indoor. Can you explain basically reaffirm your concern about particulate matter outdoors, and then what about this interaction with what goes on indoors?Joseph Allen (00:33:59):Yeah, so it's a great point. I mean, outdoor pollution has been one of the most studied environmental pollutants we know. And there's all of these links, new links between Alzheimer's, dementia, Parkinson's disease, anxiety, depression, cardiovascular health, you named it, right? I've been talking about this and very vocal. It's in the book and elsewhere I called the dirty secret of outdoor air pollution. The reality is outdoor air pollution penetrates indoors, and the amount depends on the building structure, the type of filters you have. But let's take an infiltration value of say 50%. So you have a lot of outdoor air pollution, maybe half of that penetrates inside, so it's lower, the concentration is lower, but 90% of the breaths you take are indoor. And if you do the math on it, it's really straightforward. The majority of outdoor air pollution you breathe happens inside.(00:34:52):And people, I think when they hear that think, wait, that can't be right. But that's the reality that outdoor pollution comes inside and we're taking so many breaths inside. Your total daily dose of outdoor air pollution is greater from the time you spend inside. I talk about this all the time. You see any article about outdoor air pollution, what's the cover picture? It's someone outside, maybe they're wearing a mask you can't really see. It's smoky hazy. But actually one of the biggest threats is what's happening inside. The nice thing here, again, the solutions are pretty simple and cost-effective. So again, upgrade from MERV 8 to MERV 13, a portable air cleaner. We are just capturing particles on a filter basic step that can really reduce the threat of outdoor air pollution inside. But it's ignored all the time. When the wildfire smoke hit New York City. New York City's orange, I called colleagues who are in the news business.(00:35:48):We have to be talking about the indoor threat because the guidance was good, but incomplete. Talk about Mayor Adams in New York City. Go inside, okay, that's good advice. And go to a place that has good filtration or they should have been giving out these low cost air cleaners. So just going inside isn't going to protect your lungs unless you're actually filtering a lot more of that air coming in. So trying to drive home the point here that actually we talk about these in silos. Well, wildfire smoke and particles, Covid and respiratory particles, we're all talking about these different environmental issues that harm our health, but they're all happening through or mediated by the building performance. And if we just get the building performance right, some basics around good ventilation, good filtration, you start to address multiple threats simultaneously. Outdoor air pollution, wildfire smoke, allergens, COVID-19, influenza, RSV, better cognitive function performance, anxiety. You start addressing the root cause or one of the contributors and buildings we can then start to leverage as a true public health tool. We have not taken advantage of the power of buildings to be a true public health tool.Eric Topol (00:36:59):Oh, you say it so well, and in fact your Table on page 44 in Healthy Buildings , we'll link it because it shows quantitatively what you just described about outdoor and indoor cross fertilization if you will. Now before leaving air pollution outdoors, indoors, in order for us to affect this transformation that would markedly improve our health at the public health individual level, we're talking about a big investment. Can you put that in, you did already in some respects, but if we did this right in every school, I think in California, they're trying to mandate that in schools, in the White House, they're mandating federal buildings. This is just a little piece of what's needed. This would cost whatever trillions or hundreds of billions of dollars. What would it take to do this? Because obviously the health benefits would be so striking.What's It Gonna Cost?Joseph Allen (00:38:04):Well, I think one of the issues, so we can talk about the cost. A lot of the things I'm talking about are intentionally low cost, right? You look at the Lancet of COVID-19 Commission, our report we wrote a report on the first four healthy building strategies every building should pursue. Number one commission your building that's giving your building a tune-up. Well, guess what? That not only improves air quality, it saves energy and therefore saves money. It actually becomes cost neutral. If not provides an ROI after a couple of years. So that's simple. Increase the amount of outdoor air ventilation coming in that has an energy cost, we've written about this. Improved filtration, that's a couple bucks, really a couple bucks, this is small dollars or portable air cleaners, not that expensive. I think one of the big, and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab has written this famous paper people like to cite that shows there's $20 billion of benefits to the US economy if we do this.(00:38:59):And I think it points to one of the problems. And what I try to address in my book too, is that very often when we're having this conversation about what's it going to cost, we don't talk about the full cost benefit. In other words, we say, well, it's going to cost X amount. We can't do that. But we don't talk about what are the costs of sick buildings? What are the costs of kids being out of school for an entire year? What are the costs of hormonal disruption to an entire group of women in their reproductive years due to the material choices we make in our buildings? What are the costs to outdoor air pollution and cardiovascular disease, mental health? Because we don't have good filters in our buildings that cost a couple dollars. So in our book, we do this cost benefit analysis in the proforma in our book, we lay out what the costs are to a company. We calculate energy costs. We say these are the CapEx costs, capital costs for fixed costs and the OpEx costs for operating expenditures. That's a classic business analysis. But we factor in the public health benefits, productivity, reduced absenteeism. And you do that, and I don't care how you model it, you are going to get the same answer that the benefits far outweigh the cost by orders of magnitude.Eric Topol (00:40:16):Yeah, I want to emphasize orders of magnitude. Not ten hundred, whatever thousand X, right?Joseph Allen (00:40:23):What would be the benefit if we said we could reduce influenza transmission indoors in schools and offices by even a small percent because we improve ventilation and filtration? Think of the hospitalization costs, illness costs, out of work costs, out of school costs. The problem is we haven't always done that full analysis. So the conversation gets quickly to well, that's too much. We can't afford that. I always say healthy buildings are not expensive. Sick buildings are expensive. Totally leave human health out of that cost benefit equation. And then it warps this discussion until you bring human health benefits back in.Forever ChemicalsEric Topol (00:40:58):Well, I couldn't agree more with you and I wanted to frame this by giving this crazy numbers that people think it's going to cost to the reality. I mean, if there ever was an investment for good, this is the one that you've outlined so well. Alright, now I want to turn to this other topic that you have been working on for years long before it kind of came to the fore, and that is forever chemicals. Now, forever chemicals, I had no idea that back in 2018 you coined this term. You coined the term, which is now a forever on forever chemicals. And basically, this is a per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), but no one will remember that. They will remember forever chemicals. So can you tell us about this? Because this of course recently, as you know well in May in the New Yorker, there was an expose of 3M, perhaps the chief offender of these. They're everywhere, but especially they were in 3M products and continue to be in 3M products. Obviously they've been linked with all kinds of bad things. What's the story on forever chemicals?Joseph Allen (00:42:14):Yeah, they are a class of chemicals that have been used for decades since the forties. And as consumers, we like them, right? They're the things that make your raincoat repel rain. It makes your non-stick pan, your scrambled eggs don't stick to the pan. We put them on carpets for stain resistance, but they came with a real dark side. These per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, as I say, a name only a chemist could love have been linked with things like testicular cancer, kidney cancer, interference with lipid metabolism, other hormonal disruption. And they are now a global pollutant. And one of the reasons I wrote the piece to brand them as forever chemicals was because I'm in the field of environmental health. We had been talking about these for a long time and I just didn't hear the public aware or didn't capture their attention. And part of it, I think is how we talk about some of these things.(00:43:14):I think a lot about this. Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, no one's going to, so the forever chemicals is actually a play on their defining feature. So these chemicals, these stain repellent chemicals are characterized by long chains of the carbon fluorine bond. And when we string these together that imparts this and you put them on top of a product that imparts the property of stain resistance, grease resistance, water resistance, but the carbon fluorine bond is the strongest in all of organic chemistry. And these chains of the carbon fluorine bond never fully break down in the environment. And when we talk in my field about persistent organic pollutants, we talk about chemicals that break down on the order of decades. Forever chemicals don't break down. They break down the order of millennia. That's why we're finding them everywhere. We know they're toxic at very low levels. So the idea of talking about forever chemicals, I wanted to talk about their foreverness.(00:44:13):This is permanent. What we're creating and the F and the C are the play on the carbon-fluorine bond and I wrote an article trying to raise awareness about this because some companies that have produced these have known about their toxicity for decades, and it's just starting the past couple of years, we're just starting to pay attention to the scale of environmental pollution. Tens of millions of Americans have forever chemicals in their drinking water above the safe limit, tens of millions. I worked as an expert in a big lawsuit for the plaintiffs that were drinking forever chemicals in their water that was dumped into the drinking water supply by a manufacturing company. I met young men with testicular cancer from drinking forever chemicals in their water. These really has escaped the public's consciousness, it wasn't really talked about. Now of course, we know every water body, we use these things in firefighting foams or every airport has water pollution.(00:45:17):Most airports do. Firefighters are really concerned about this, high rates of cancer in the firefighter population. So this is a major problem, and the cleanup is not straightforward or easy because they're now a global pollutant. They persist forever. They're hard to remediate and we're stuck with them. So that's the downside, I can talk about the positives. I try to remain an optimist or things we're doing to try to solve this problem, but that's ultimately the story. And my motivation was I just to have people have language to be able to talk about this that didn't require a degree in organic chemistry to understand what they were.Eric Topol (00:45:52):Yeah, I mean their pervasiveness is pretty scary. And I am pretty worried about the fact that we still don't know a lot of what they're doing in terms of clinical sequela. I mean, you mentioned a couple types of cancer, but I don't even know if there is a safe threshold.Joseph Allen (00:46:16):Eric, I'll tell you one that'll be really interesting for you. A colleague of mine did a famous study on forever chemicals many years ago now and found that kids with higher levels of forever chemicals had reduced vaccine effectiveness related to these chemicals. So your point is, right, a lot of times we're using these industrial chemicals. We know a couple endpoints for their affecting our bodies, but we don't know all of them. And what we know is certainly alarming enough that we know enough to know we shouldn't be using them.Eric Topol (00:46:51):And you wrote another masterful op-ed in the Washington Post, 6 forever chemical just 10,000 to go. Maybe you could just review what that was about.Joseph Allen (00:47:02):Yeah, I've been talking a lot about this issue I call chemical whack-a-mole. So forever chemical is the perfect example of it. So we finally got people's attention on forever chemicals. EPA just regulated 6 of them. Well, guess what? There are 10,000 if not many more than that. Different variants or what we call chemical cousins. Now that's important for this reason. If you think about how we approach these from a regulatory standpoint, each of the 10,000 plus forever chemicals are treated as different. So by the time EPA regulates 6, that's important. It does free up funding for cleanup and things like this. But already the market had shifted away from those 6. So in other words, in the many thousand products that still use forever chemicals, they're no longer using those 6 because scientists have told people these things are toxic years ago. So they switch one little thing in the chemical, it becomes a new chemical from a regulatory perspective.(00:47:57):But to our bodies, it's the same thing. This happens over and over. This has happened with pesticides. It happens with chemicals and nail polish. It happens in chemicals in e-cigarettes. It happens with flame retardant chemicals. I wrote a piece in the Post maybe six years ago talking about chemical whack-a-mole, and this problem that we keep addressing, these one-off, we hit one, it changes just slightly. Chemical cousin pops up, we hit that one. Five years later, scientists say, hey, the next one doesn't look good either. We're doing this for decades. It's really silly. It's ineffective, it's broken, and there are better ways to handle this going forward.Eric Topol (00:48:31):And you know what gets me, and it's like in the pharma industry that I've seen the people who run these companies like 3M that was involved in a multi-decade coverup, they're never held accountable. I mean, they know what they're doing and they just play these games that you outlined. They're still using 16,000 products, according to the New Yorker, the employee that exposed them, the whistleblower in the New Yorker article.Joseph Allen (00:48:58):That was an amazing article by Sharon Lerner talking to the people who had worked there and she uncovered that they knew the toxicity back in the seventies, and yes, they were still making these products. One of the things that I think has gotten attention of some companies is while the regulations have been behind, the lawsuits are piling up.Joseph Allen (00:49:21):The lawsuit I was a part of as an expert for that was about an $800 million settlement in favor of the plaintiffs. A couple months later is another one that was $750 million. So right there, $1.5 billion, there's been several billion dollars. This has caught the attention of companies. This has caught the attention of product manufacturers who are using the forever chemicals, starting to realize they need to reformulate. And so, in a good way now, that's not the way we should be dealing with this, but it has started to get companies to wake up that maybe they had been sleeping on it, that this is a major problem and actually the markets have responded to it.Eric Topol (00:50:02):Well, that's good.Joseph Allen (00:50:03):Because these are major liabilities on the books.Eric Topol (00:50:05):Yeah, I mean, I think what I've seen of course with being the tobacco industry and I was involved with Vioxx of course, is the companies just appeal and appeal and it sounds really good that they've had to pay $800 million, but they never wind up paying anything because they basically just use their muscle and their resources to appeal and put it off forever. So I mean, it's one way to deal with it is a litigation, but it seems like that's not going to be enough to really get this overhauled. I don't know. You may be more sanguine.Joseph Allen (00:50:44):No, no, I agree with you. It's the wrong way. I mean, we don't want to, the solution here is not to go after companies after people are sick. We need get in front of this and be proactive. I mentioned it only because I know it has made other companies pay attention how many billion does so-and-so sue for. So that's a good signal that other companies are starting to move away from forever chemicals. But I do want to talk about one of the positive approaches we're doing at Harvard, and we have a lot of other partners in the private sector doing this. We're trying to turn off the spigot of forever chemicals entering the market in the first place. As a faculty advisor to what we call the Harvard Healthier Building Materials Academy, we publish new standards. We no longer buy products that have forever chemicals in them for our spaces.(00:51:31):So we buy a chair or carpet. We demand no forever chemicals. What's really neat about this is we also say, we treat them as a whole class. We don't say we don't want PFOA. That's one of the regulated chemicals. We say we don't want any of the 10,000. We are not waiting for the studies to show us they act like the other ones. We've kind of been burned by this for decades. So we're actually telling the suppliers we don't want these chemicals and they're delivering products to us without these chemicals in them. We have 50 projects on our campus built with these new design standards without forever chemicals and other toxic chemicals. We've also done studies that a doctoral student done the study. When we do this, we find lower levels of these chemicals in air and dust, of course. So we're showing that it works.(00:52:19):Now, the goal is not to say, hey, we just want to make Harvard a healthier campus and the hell with everybody else. The goal is to show it can be done with no impact to cost, schedule or product performance. We get a healthier environment, products look great, they perform great. We've also now partnered with other big companies in the tech industry in particular to try and grow or influence the market by saying, look how many X amount of purchasing dollars each year? And it's a lot, and we're demanding that our carpets don't have this, that our chairs don't have it, and the supply chain is responding. The goal, of course, is to just make it be the case that we just have healthy materials in the supply chain for everybody. So if you or I, or anybody else goes to buy a chair, it just doesn't have toxic chemicals in it.Eric Topol (00:53:06):Right, but these days the public awareness still isn't there, nor are the retailers that are selling whether it's going to buy a rug or a chair or new pots and pans. You can't go in and say, does this have any forever chemicals? They don't even know, right?Joseph Allen (00:53:24):Impossible. I study this and it's hard for me when I go out to try and find and make better decisions for myself. This is one of the reasons why we're working, of course, trying to help with the regulatory side, but also trying to change the market. Say, look, you can produce the similar product without these chemicals, save yourself for future lawsuits. Also, there's a market for healthy materials, and we want everybody to be a part of that market and just fundamentally change the supply chain. It's not ideal, but it's what we can do to influence the market. And honestly, we're having a lot of impact. I've been to these manufacturing plants where they have phased out these toxic chemicals.Eric Topol (00:54:03):That's great to hear.Joseph Allen (00:54:06):And we see it working on our campus and other companies' campuses.Eric Topol (00:54:10):Well, nobody can ever accuse you of not taking on big projects, okay.Joseph Allen (00:54:15):You don't get into public health unless you want to tackle the big ones that are really going to influence.Micro(nano) PlasticsEric Topol (00:54:20):Well, that's true, Joe, but I don't know anybody who's spearheading things like you. So it's phenomenal. Now before we wrap up, there's another major environmental problem which has come to the fore, which are plastics, microplastics, nanoplastics. They're everywhere too, and they're incriminated with all the things that we've been talking about as well. What is your view about that?Joseph Allen (00:54:48):Well, I think it's one, well, you see the extent of the pollution. It's a global pollutant. These are petrochemicals. So it's building up, and these are fossil fuel derivatives. So you can link this not just to the direct human health impacts, the ecosystem impacts, but also ecosystem and health impacts through climate change. So we've seen our reliance on plastics grow exponentially over the past several decades, and now we're seeing the price we're paying for that, where we're seeing plastics, but also microplastics kind of everywhere, much like the forever chemicals. Everywhere we look, we find them and we're just starting to scratch a surface on what we know about the environmental impacts. I think there's a lot more that can be done here. Try to be optimistic again, at least if you find a problem, you got to try and point to some kind of solution or at least a pathway towards solutions.(00:55:41):But I like some of the stuff from others colleagues at Yale in particular on the principles of green chemistry. I write about them in my book a little bit, but it's this designing for non-permanence or biodegradable materials so that if we're using anything that we're not leaving these permanent and lasting impacts on our ecosystem that then build up and they build up in the environment, then they build up in all of us and in our food systems. So it seems to me that should be part of it. So think about forever chemicals. Should we be using chemicals that never break down in the environment that we know are toxic? How do we do that? As Harvard, one of the motivating things here for forever chemicals too, is how are we ignoring our own science? Everyone's producing this science, but how do we ignore even our own and we feel we have responsibility to the communities next to us and the communities around the world. We're taking action on climate change. How are we not taking action on these chemicals? I put plastics right in there in terms of the environmental pollutants that largely come from our built environment, food products and the products we purchase and use in our homes and in our bodies and in all the materials we use.Eric Topol (00:56:50):When you see the plastic show up in our arteries with a three, four-fold increase of heart attacks and strokes, when you see it in our testicles and every other organ in the body, you start to wonder, are we ever going to do something about this plastic crisis? Which is somewhat distinct from the forever chemicals. I mean, this is another dimension of the problem. And tying a lot of this together, you mentioned, we are not going to get into it today, but our climate crisis isn't being addressed fast enough and it's making all these things exacerbating.Joseph Allen (00:57:27):Yeah, let me touch on that because I think it is important. It gets to something I said earlier about a lot of these problems we treat as silos, but I think a lot of the problems run through our buildings, and that means buildings are part of the solution set. Buildings consume 40% of global energy.(00:57:42):Concrete and steel count for huge percentages of our global CO2 emissions. So if we're going to get climate solved, we're going to have to solve it through our buildings too. So when you start putting this all together, Eric, right, and this is why I talk about buildings as healthy buildings could potentially be one of the greatest public health interventions we have of this century. If we get it right, and I don't mean we get the Covid part, right. We get the forever chemicals part, right. Or the microplastics part, right. If you start getting this all right, good ventilation, better filtration, healthy materials across the board, energy efficient systems, so we're not drawing on the energy demand of our buildings that are contributing to the climate crisis. Buildings that also address climate adaptation and resilience. So they protect us from extreme heat, wildfire smoke, flooding that we know is coming and happening right now.(00:58:37):You put that all together and it shows the centrality of buildings on our collective health from our time spent indoors, but also their contribution to environmental health, which is ultimately our collective human health as well. And this is why I'm passionate about healthy buildings as a real good lens to put this all under. If we start getting these right, the decisions we make around our buildings, we can really improve the human condition across all of these dimensions we're talking about. And I actually don't think it's all that hard in all of these. I've seen solutions.Eric Topol (00:59:12):I'm with you. I mean, there's innovations that are happening to take the place of concrete, right?Joseph Allen (00:59:20):Sure. We have low emission concrete right now that's available. We have energy recovery ventilation available right now. We have real time sensors. We can do demand control ventilation right now. We have better filters right now. We have healthy materials right now.(00:59:33):We have this, we have it. And it's not expensive if we quantify the health benefits, the many, many multiple benefits. So it's all within our reach, and it's just about finding these different pathways. Some of its market driven, some of it's regulatory, some of it's at the local level, some of it's about raising awareness, giving people the language to talk about these things. So I do think it's the real beginning of the healthy buildings era. I really, truly believe it. I've never seen change like this in my field. I've been chasing sick buildings for a long time.Joseph Allen (01:00:11):And clearly there's pathways to do better.Eric Topol (01:00:13):You're a phenom. I mean, really, you not only have all the wisdom, but you articulate it so well. I mean, you're leading the charge on this, and we're really indebted to you. I'm really grateful for you taking an hour of your busy time to enlighten us on this. I think what you're doing is it's going to keep you busy for your whole career.Joseph Allen (01:00:44):Well, the goal here is for me to put myself out of business. We shouldn't have a healthy buildings program. It just should be the way it's done. So I'm looking forward to the time out of business, hopefully have a healthy building future, then I can retire, be happy, and we'll be onto the next big problem.Eric Topol (01:00:57):We'll all be following your writings, which are many, and fortunately not just for science publications, but also for the public though, they're so important because the awareness level as I can't emphasize enough, it's just not there yet. And I think this episode is going to help bring that to a higher level. So Joe, thank you so much for everything you're doing.Joseph Allen (01:01:20):Well, I appreciate it. Thanks for what you're doing too, and thanks for inviting me on. We can't get the word out unless we start sharing it across our different audiences, so I appreciate it. Thanks so much.Eric Topol (01:01:28):You bet.***********************************************A PollThanks for listening, reading or watching!The Ground Truths newsletters and podcasts are all free, open-access, without ads.Please share this post/podcast with your friends and network if you found it informative!Voluntary paid subscriptions all go to support Scripps Research. Many thanks for that—they greatly helped fund our summer internship programs for 2023 and 2024.Thanks to my producer Jessica Nguyen and Sinjun Balabanoff for audio and video support at Scripps Research.Note: you can select preferences to receive emails about newsletters, podcasts, or all I don't want to bother you with an email for content that you're not interested in. Get full access to Ground Truths at erictopol.substack.com/subscribe

In today's episode of the Daily Scoop Podcast, we delve into the ongoing impacts of the CrowdStrike IT failure. Last week's outage has left several federal agencies scrambling to restore services. At the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, over 5,000 workstations were affected, though the agency's primary systems remain operational. The Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network also experienced disruptions but resolved issues within an hour. Further impacts were reported at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. In legislative responses, House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green and Rep. Andrew Garbarino have requested CrowdStrike's CEO to testify regarding the outage's effects on federal operations. Additionally, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is spearheading a new initiative to integrate artificial intelligence into manufacturing to enhance resilience. NIST plans to invest up to $70 million over five years in a new institute under Manufacturing USA, aiming to advance technology development, workforce education, and shared infrastructure. Wrapping up the episode, we revisit a panel discussion from the recent event, AWS Innovate Day, featuring Charles Worthington and Vinay Singh, the first chief AI officers at the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, respectively. They shared insights on the adoption of generative AI within federal agencies, emphasizing governance, risk management, and transparency. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast on on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

"Understanding the problem is sometimes more important than getting to a solution." In this episode, Dr. Eileen Martin, winner of the 2024 J. Clarence Karcher Award, shares actionable advice and resources to help you make a positive impact in your professional environment. In this episode, we talk about: > The definitions of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in the context of geophysics > The mission statement of the JEDI Committee and its guiding principles > The challenges and opportunities of a volunteer-driven organization > The JEDI Ambassadors program and its role in promoting JEDI principles > How to question biases and actively support colleagues from underrepresented backgrounds > Practical ways to foster inclusion and belonging in professional settings > The importance of recognizing and nominating diverse talent for awards In this conversation with host Andrew Geary, Eileen Martin elaborates on the JEDI Committee's initiatives, including the JEDI Ambassadors program, which aims to integrate JEDI principles across various SEG committees. Listeners will learn practical steps for promoting justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion within their organizations and the broader geophysics community. This episode offers actionable advice and resources to help you make a positive impact in your professional environment. GUEST BIOGRAPHY Dr. Eileen Martin is an associate professor at Colorado School of Mines jointly appointed in geophysics and applied math and statistics. At Mines, she is a part of two industry-aligned consortia: Center for Wave Phenomena and Center to Advance the Science of Exploration to Reclamation in Mining. She earned her PhD from the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering at Stanford in 2018, where she was a member of the Stanford Exploration Project group and an affiliate in the geophysics department at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. She holds an MS in geophysics from Stanford and a BS with a double major in math and computational physics from UT-Austin. She has earned an NSF CAREER grant (2021), the SIAM Activity Group on Geosciences Early Career Prize (2023), and the SEG J. Clarence Karcher Award (2024). LINKS * Visit https://seg.org/podcasts/episode-229-from-barriers-to-belonging-building-strong-companies-teams-in-geophysics/ for links to the Geoscientists Around the Globe series and the complete interview transcript. SHOW CREDITS Andrew Geary at TreasureMint hosted, edited, and produced this episode. The SEG podcast team comprises Jennifer Cobb, Kathy Gamble, and Ally McGinnis. Transcription and episode summary support provided by Headliner. If you have episode ideas or feedback for the show or want to sponsor a future episode, email the show at podcast@seg.org.

In this episode host Christoph Lohr discusses structural and behavioral water waste with Jim Lutz, a retired researcher from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Jim details his career, focusing on water heater efficiency and plumbing systems, and explains how his research has shown the significance of structural waste in residential plumbing, particularly in hot water distribution systems. He emphasizes the inefficacy of low-flow showerheads due to structural waste and advocates for compact plumbing designs to enhance water and energy conservation. Jim also highlights the long-term impact of these decisions on building efficiency and conservation efforts.Podcast discussion links:Water and Energy Wasted During Residential Shower Events: Findings from a Pilot Field Study of Hot Water Distribution SystemsReducing Waste In Residential Hot Water Distribution Systems

In this episode, Dr. Lydia McClure, the newly appointed CEO of Research Bridge Partners, joins host Deborah Westphal to discuss the journey from laboratory discoveries to impactful startups. The conversation spans Lydia's personal career path, the focus of her organization on the middle of America, and the strategies used to identify and support groundbreaking researchers.Highlights:Lydia's Transition to CEO: Insights into Lydia's recent appointment as CEO, her vision for Research Bridge Partners, and the mission to help faculty research evolve into successful companies.Lydia's Career Pathway: From her childhood inspirations at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab to significant roles in government and the investment sector, Lydia shares her comprehensive career journey.Focus on Mid-America: Why Research Bridge Partners is dedicated to fostering biomedical and life sciences innovation specifically in the central United States, compared to the more saturated coasts.Identifying Innovators: How the organization utilizes advanced data analytics and machine learning to find promising researchers and support their paths to commercialization.Navigating the Investment Landscape: Lydia discusses the early-stage investment challenges and the nuances of bridging the language gap between scientists and venture capitalists.Preparing Scholars for Commercial Realities: The tailored guidance provided to Toffler Scholars to refine their research focus based on market and commercial potentials.Ethical Considerations and Funding Models: A deep dive into the ethical dilemmas researchers face and the diverse funding strategies available to translate findings into commercial ventures.Future of Funding in Biomedical Research: Predictions about upcoming investment trends in life sciences, influenced by the industry's recent highs and lows.The Importance of Collaboration: The critical role of strategic partnerships in advancing neuroscientific research and other biomedical innovations.Looking Ahead: Lydia's thoughts on the future of gene and cell therapies, AI, and the potential to revolutionize treatment for rare diseases.This episode with Dr. Lydia McClure provides invaluable insights into the complexities of transforming academic research into viable startups, emphasizing the importance of strategic investment and ethical considerations in today's scientific landscape.For more episodes and information, visit the Karen Toffler Charitable Trust at tofflertrust.org.To learn more about the breakthroughs discussed in this episode and to support ongoing research, visit our website at tofflertrust.org. Technical Podcast Support by Jon Keur at Wayfare Recording Co.

Dr. Peter Fisk is the Executive Director at the National Alliance for Water Innovation or NAWI. NAWI is a collection of 19 universities, four national labs and 190 plus US water companies committed to developing new technologies to enable distributed desalination and water reuse. They're a five-year, $110 million research program supported by the US Department of Energy in partnership with the California Department of Water Resources and the California State Water Resources Control Board. They're headquartered at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in Northern California. Peter joined Berkeley lab in 2017. Prior to that, he was the Chief Executive Officer at Pax Water Technologies from 2008 until January 2017, when it was acquired by UGSI Incorporated. Peter holds a PhD in geochemistry and material science from Stanford and an MBA from the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business. Our conversation today starts with a deep dive into desalination before broadening out into Peter's vision for our water system. Shout-out to former podcast guest Tom Ferguson at Burnt Island Ventures for connecting us with Peter. We've been wanting to learn about desalination and Peter helps us gain a much better understanding of that and so much more.In this episode, we cover:[3:11] Peter's work at the National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI) [5:56] Overview of desalination and its various applications, including ocean desalination and water reuse[9:19] Desalination challenges and opportunities, including energy usage and brine disposal[14:33] Small-scale desalination systems and water reuse in buildings and cities[20:09] The water-energy nexus and the impact of water usage on power generation[27:30] NAWI's ongoing projects, including ultra high recovery desalination and recovery of valuable materials from wastewater[32:16] Status of water innovation in the U.S. and other countries[34:43] Water economics and the need for companies to consider their consumption[36:49] The federal policy landscape for water in the U.S.[38:30] Water as a national security[40:45] Peter's background and career Episode recorded on March 18, 2024 (Published on April 2, 2024) Get connected with MCJ: Jason Jacobs X / LinkedInCody Simms X / LinkedInMCJ Podcast / Collective / YouTube*If you liked this episode, please consider giving us a review! You can also reach us via email at content@mcjcollective.com, where we encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.

Transitioning from a tech-based role to a management role is not without its difficulties. In today's episode, we speak with Jordan Caddick, a project director at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, about his own journey into management. Jordan highlights the importance of time spent in a technical role, continued education throughout one's career, and EQ skills used in leadership. Technical Leadership Talks is brought to you by Texas A&M University's Master of Engineering Technical Management, a program that equips working technical professionals for the next step in their careers.

Everywhere you look, you see more land covered by solar panels. In fact, the Energy Department estimates some 4,000 large solar projects are underway in the U.S. Now, thanks to Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and the U.S. Geological Survey, solar watchers can access a database of them. It shows their size, location and other details. For the whys and hows of this project, Federal Drive Host Tom Temin spoke with the Director of Energy's Solar Energy Technology Office, Becca Jones-Albertus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Everywhere you look, you see more land covered by solar panels. In fact, the Energy Department estimates some 4,000 large solar projects are underway in the U.S. Now, thanks to Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and the U.S. Geological Survey, solar watchers can access a database of them. It shows their size, location and other details. For the whys and hows of this project, Federal Drive Host Tom Temin spoke with the Director of Energy's Solar Energy Technology Office, Becca Jones-Albertus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marcus Lehmann, serves as the CEO of CalWave Power Technologies Inc. Marcus founded CalWave in2014 and uses his experience in systems engineering, energy systems and entrepreneurship, to lead a diverse team of engineers, advisers, and industry partners to unlock the vast and steady carbon-free power from ocean waves. Prior to CalWave, Marcus held research positions at UC Berkeley, Mechanical Engineering, the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and was a project lead at the Cyclotron Road program. Marcus holds a Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from Technical University Hamburg, graduated from Technical University Munich with a Masters in Mechanical Engineering and received an honors degree in technology management from the Center for Digital Technology and Management. https://calwave.energy/ https://nexuspmg.com/

What is Geothermal Energy?Geothermal energy is heat generated in the earth. It is a renewable source of energy, and it is extracted from the inner earth for energy use. Typically, geothermal energy is harnessed through holes that are drilled allowing hot water or steam to be extracted. These resources then drive a turbine to generate electricity and energy. Harnessed in this way, geothermal energy has significantly fewer environmental impacts than fossil fuels. The Pros and Cons of Geothermal EnergyGeothermal energy can provide base load power—available 24/7—which is generally not the case for wind and solar. Wind and solar are intermittent resources, requiring energy storage to be able to match energy demand during times when the wind is not blowing or the sun is not shining. Second, deriving energy from geothermal sources can be done highly efficiently, with less energy than from other sources. Dependability and cost make geothermal energy an appealing option under the right conditions. However, like other forms of energy, geothermal energy also comes with drawbacks. Geothermal resources may be finite, as they can cool over time. Additionally, there is a high upfront investment cost for geothermal energy. Considering both the positives and negatives of geothermal energy is crucial for understanding future feasibility of this energy source. What's Next for Geothermal Development?The US is currently the leader in geothermal energy, and policies and development of the resource may be expanding. Colorado has launched “The Heat Beneath Our Feet” initiative, which supports the development of geothermal energy generation. Additionally, the US Department of the Interior has voiced its support in favor of geothermal energy, for it believes that the expansion of geothermal energy carries many benefits. The United States also produces the most geothermal energy, with California producing the second most geothermal energy after Nevada. As a result of new research and technology, we may only be tapping the surface (so to speak) of available geothermal energy. By some estimates, the United States is using less than 1% of the available geothermal energy. With developing technology, there is hope that this untapped energy can be accessed more broadly and in a cost effective manner.About our guestPat Dobson is a staff scientist leading the geothermal assistance program at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. He has many years of research experience, and focuses on volcanic rock and the effects of water-rock interaction. This has been the focus of much of his research and publications, and he is currently working on field and coupled process modeling studies of The Geysers with Lawrence Labs and Sanford Underground Research Facility.Further ReadingsNational Geographic, Encyclopedia entry: Geothermal Energy (2022)GreenMatch (UK), Advantages and Disadvantages of Geothermal Energy – The Source of Renewable Heat (2023)National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Full Steam Ahead: Unearthing the Power of GeothermalU.S. Department of Interior, Geothermal Energy Development, Statement of Tim Spisak (2019)Western Governors' Association, The Heat Beneath Our FeetCenter for Sustainable Systems, University of Michigan, Geothermal Fact Sheet (2022) For a transcript, please visit https://climatebreak.org/geothermal-power-tapping-earths-heat-for-a-carbon-free-future/

What do Unions stand for?  How and why do Unions work?  And how exactly have Unions made life better for millions of workers and their families? Host Timothy Regan welcomes 6 Union leaders to share from the heart about what Unions are all about.  We take a deep dive into Union principles, and hear several stories about successes of Union work. Hear from: Keith Brown, Educator and Executive Secretary/Treasurer of the Alameda Labor Council AFL-CIO. Vilma Serrano, Oakland Teacher and Lead Negotiator/Bargaining Chair of the Oakland Education Association Union. Tanzil Chowdhury, Graduate Student Research Assistant at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and the Unit Chair for the Berkeley Unit of UAW Unit 2865, representing 36000 student workers across the University of California. Sarah Arveson, PhD, Vice President of UAW 5810, union for post-doc and academic researchers across the University of California system. Doug Jones, Political Organizer for SEIU-UHW and health care worker of many years, representing 85,000 health care workers at Kaiser Permanente and across California Michael Sommers, Actor and union member of SAG-AFTRA, currently on strike. The participants ask that you visit these websites for more information: Unionize California Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions SAG-AFTRA Oakland Education Association United Auto Workers   The post The Union Episode: A Panel of Union Leaders on How and Why Unions Work appeared first on KPFA.

 Welcome to another episode of The New Quantum Era Podcast hosted by Kevin Rowney and Sebastian Hassinger. Today, they are joined by another distinguished researcher, Dr. Harry Buhrman. Dr. Buhrman is a professor at the University of Amsterdam, he's a director at the CWI, and he's the director at Qusoft as well. He's got a long and illustrious career in quantum information. Today, Dr. Buhrman takes us through some of his earlier work and some of his areas of interest, and he also discloses details of his recent paper which was going to be called Ultra Fast Quantum Circuits for Quantum State Preparation, but was posted to the arXiv as State preparation by shallow circuits using feed forward, which provides fascinating results with respect to the core architecture divided into four layers and time complexity around that framework.Key Takeaways:[4:45] Sebastian introduces Dr. Harry Buhrman.[5:31] How did Dr. Buhrman become interested in Quantum Computing?[9:31] Dr. Buhrman remembers the first time he heard about the complexity class known as fast quantum polynomial time, or BQP.[11:35]  Dr. Buhrman and Richard Cleve started working on communication complexity.[14:14] Dr. Buhrman discusses the opportunity that arose after Shor's algorithm.[14:53] Dr. Buhrman has also written biology papers explaining how he became involved in this field.[18:05] Is quantum computation and quantum algorithms the main focus now regarding Dr. Buhrman's areas of study?[20:06] Software and hardware are codependent, so codesigning is needed.[20:58]. What are the big unsolved problems in the areas of time complexity and hierarchy for quantum? [24:50] Does Dr. Buhrman think it's possible that there could be a future where some of the classical time complexity problems could be powerfully informed by quantum information science and Quantum Time complexity discovery?[27:32] Does Dr. Buhrman think that, over time, the distinction between classical information theory and quantum information theory will erode?[28:50] Dr. Burhman talks about his Team's most recent paper.[33:55]  Dr. Buhrman's group is using tmid-circuit measurement and classical fan out to extend the amount of computation time [35:04] How does this approach differ from VQE or QAOA?[38:35] About Dr. Buhrman's current paper, is he thinking through algorithms that may be able to be implemented in at least toy problems sort of scale to try this theory out and implementation?{39:22] Sebastian talks about  QubiC, an open-source Lawrence Berkeley National Lab project.[41:14]  Dr. Buhrman recognizes he is very much amazed by the fact that when he started in this field in the mid-late 90s, it was considered very esoteric and beautiful but probably wouldn't lead to anything practical.[43:49] Dr. Buhrman assures that there is a chance that those intractable problems for classical computing also remain intractable for quantum computers.[44:24] What's the next big frontier for Dr. Buhrman and his team?[47:03] Dr. Buhrman explains Quantum Position Verification used for implementing secure communication protocols.[50:56] Sebastian comments on the hilarious and interesting titles for papers Dr. Buhrman comes up with.[53:10] Kevin and Sebastian share the highlights of an incredible conversation with Dr. Buhrman.Mentioned in this episode:Visit The New Quantum Era PodcastQuantum entanglement and communication complexityThe first peptides: the evolutionary transition between prebiotic amino acids and early proteinsA Qubit, a Coin, and an Advice String Walk Into a Relational ProblemSix hypotheses in search of a theoremTweetables and Quotes:“ Biological processes are quantum mechanical, and sometimes you need the quantum mechanical description to understand them, and indeed, quantum computers could be of great help in simulating them and understanding them better than we currently do.“ — Dr. Harry Buhrman“There's a huge gap between what we can do and what we can prove is true.“ — Dr. Harry Buhrman“Our problems have become bigger but also more interesting, I would say.“ — Dr. Harry Buhrman“We're not the first ones to see that having mid-computation measurements plus classical feed forwards actually is very useful and can help you solve problems or generate states that if you don't have this  are impossible  to make.” — Dr. Harry Buhrman“Big companies are very interested in QC not only for building quantum computers but also figuring out whether it is useful from a software point of view. ” — Dr. Harry Buhrman

Part 3 of 3. My guest for this week's episode is Steve Visco. Steve is the Co-founder, CTO, and CEO of PolyPlus. Before PolyPlus, Steve worked at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab as a Principal Investigator, running several programs in the field of solid state ionics, developing an extensive patent portfolio, much of which has been licensed to industry.

Part 2 of 3. My guest for this week's episode is Steve Visco. Steve is the Co-founder, CTO, and CEO of PolyPlus. Before PolyPlus, Steve worked at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab as a Principal Investigator, running several programs in the field of solid state ionics, developing an extensive patent portfolio, much of which has been licensed to industry.

Part 1 of 3. My guest for this week's episode is Steve Visco. Steve is the Co-founder, CTO, and CEO of PolyPlus. Before PolyPlus, Steve worked at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab as a Principal Investigator, running several programs in the field of solid state ionics, developing an extensive patent portfolio, much of which has been licensed to industry.

The Hetch Hetchy reservoir was created a century ago to supply fresh water for millions of people in the Bay Area. It was created by damming the Tuolumne River, flooding a former mountain valley in the Sierras and forming a reservoir that can hold up to 117 billion gallons of water. Hetch Hetchy embodies a feat of modern engineering, but as the globe warms up and demand for water shifts, the reservoir's storage capacity and water management capabilities may not hold up. For our next installment of Climate Fix: Rethinking Solutions for California, we'll talk about how climate change is putting pressure on Hetch Hetchy and what a far warmer future means for this mountain bathtub. Guests: Samuel Sandoval Solis, PhD, professor, UC Davis; cooperative extension specialist in water resources management, Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources of the University of California Newsha Ajami, PhD, chief development officer for research in Earth and Environmental Sciences, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and president, San Francisco Public Utilities Commission Ezra David Romero, climate reporter, KQED Peter Drekmeier, policy director, Tuolumne River Trust

In this episode, Desiree and Moritz speak to Cody Finke, CEO of Brimstone about building decarbonization and cement decarbonization. Here, they focus on the founding story of Brimstone, Cody's background, and why he focused on cement decarbonization. Cody shares his experience building a company in this sphere, Brimstone's differentiation and process of making carbon negative cement, and the challenges the company faces in scaling their solution internationally. Cody, Desi, and Moritz also discuss the market landscape of companies working on cement decarbonization and the pros/cons of each solution. Lastly, they discuss risk and quality standards, stakeholder engagement, and the talent gap facing the industry.     Biography: Cody Finke is the co-founder and CEO of Brimstone Energy, a company working to commercialize carbon-negative cement by using calcium silicate rock. Cody completed his postdoctoral work as a DOE-funded Cyclotron Road entrepreneurial fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Finke received his Ph.D. from Caltech where he studied electrochemistry and industrial decarbonization. Prior to his Ph.D. Cody received a BA in Chemistry from Carleton College where he was awarded a Goldwater Scholarship by the US Government.     Selected resources:   Email for suggestions:  podcast.greenminds@gmail.com 

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Air Safety to Combat Global Catastrophic Biorisks [REVISED], published by Gavriel Kleinwaks on May 3, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This report is a collaboration between researchers from 1Day Sooner and Rethink Priorities. Overview This post is a revision of a report previously published on how improvements in indoor air quality can address global catastrophic risk from pandemics. After feedback from expert reviewers, we revised the report in accordance with comments. The comments greatly improved the report and we consider the earlier version to be misphrased, misleading, or mathematically underspecified in several places, but we are leaving the post available to illustrate the revision process. Unlike in the previous post, we are not including the full report, given its length. Instead, this post contains a summary of the reviews and of the report, with a link to the full report. Many thanks to the expert reviewers (listed below) for their detailed feedback. Additional thanks to Rachel Shu for research and writing assistance. We also received help and feedback from many other people over the course of this process—a full list is in the “Acknowledgements” section of the report. Summary of Expert Review We asked biosecurity and indoor air quality experts to review this report: Dr. Richard Bruns of the John Hopkins Center for Health Security, Dr. Jacob Bueno de Mesquita and Dr. Alexandra Johnson of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Dr. David Manheim of ALTER, and Professor Shelly Miller of the University of Colorado. These experts suggested a variety of both minor and substantive changes to the document, though these changes do not alter the overall conclusion of the report that indoor air safety is an important lever for reducing GCBRs and that there are several high-leverage funding opportunities around promoting indoor air quality and specific air cleaning interventions. The main changes suggested were: Providing confidence intervals on key estimates, such as our estimate of the overall impact of IAQ interventions, and reframing certain estimates to improve clarity. Modifying the phrasing around the section concerning ‘modelling', to better clarify our position around the specific limitations of existing models (specifically that there aren't models that move from the room and building-level transmission to population-level transmission). Clarifying the distinction between mechanical interventions, specific in-duct vs upper-room systems (254nm) and HVAC-filtration vs portable air cleaners and adding additional information about some interactions between different intervention types Adding general public advocacy for indoor air quality as a funding opportunity and related research that could be done support advocacy efforts. Adding additional relevant literature and more minor details regarding indoor air quality across different sections. Improving the overall readability of the report, by removing repetitive elements. Report Executive Summary (Full report available here.) Top-line summary Most efforts to address indoor air quality (IAQ) do not address airborne pathogen levels, and creating indoor air quality standards that include airborne pathogen levels could meaningfully reduce global catastrophic biorisk from pandemics. We estimate that an ideal adoption of indoor air quality interventions, like ventilation, filtration, and ultraviolet germicidal irradiation (GUV) in all public buildings in the US, would reduce overall population transmission of respiratory illnesses by 30-75%, with a median estimate of 52.5%. Bottlenecks inhibiting the mass deployment of these technologies include a lack of clear standards, cost of implementation, and difficulty changing regulation/public attitudes. The following actions can accelerate deployment and improve IAQ to red...

Image by Ken Lund is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 On today's show: 0:08 – Katie Halper (@kthalps), host of The Katie Halper Show and co-host of The Useful Idiots podcast joins us to discuss the monologue that got her censored and eventual barred from The Hill TV's popular news show Rising. 0:23 – UC academic workers, numbering roughly 40,000 have begun voting on a multi-union strike authorization. We discuss the details with Tanzil Chowdhury, a Graduate Student Research Assistant at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and a member of the SRU-UAW bargaining team. 0:33 – Dean Preston (@DeanPreston) San Francisco Supervisor for District 5 and Quentin L. Kopp, president of the San Francisco Taxpayers Association; a former San Francisco supervisor, state senator, and Superior Court judge debate San Francisco Proposition M. The post Journalist censored for pro-Palestinian remarks on The Hill TV; Plus we host a debate on SF vacancy tax measure appeared first on KPFA.

Etosha Cave, Co-founder and CSO of Twelve, on the sacrifices she made while launching Twelve:“I had no money.  I was living out of my car at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.”Etosha became passionate about energy and climate change while growing up in Houston, and she went on to receive her PhD from Stanford University focusing on electrochemical approaches that could be used to convert CO2 and water into useful plastics and household cleaners.  While at Stanford, Etosha co-founded Twelve, a startup pioneering a new market category called carbon transformation with its proprietary catalyst technology that transforms CO2 into critical chemicals, materials and fuels that are conventionally made from fossil fuels.  Using Twelve's technology, industry brands can meet emissions targets faster while creating essential products–from the foam in running shoes, to the polymers in automobile dashboards, to aviation fuel, to laundry detergent–all while maintaining  the same or higher quality as conventional products made from petrochemicals. 

This week on What About Water?, we look at water infrastructure – from broken water pipes across America to the redistribution of water rights in Chilé – and what role governments play in fixing the systems that distribute our water. Newsha Ajami, Chief Development Officer for Research at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, joins us as our first return guest of the podcast. Newsha and Jay cover the state of America's aging water systems and innovative solutions at play from 50L Homes to on-site water reuse projects, changing views on grassy lawns, and investment in data systems as water infrastructure for the 21st century. On the Last Word we hear from Carolina Vilches, a member of the constitutional convention in Chilé, where large industries hold huge rights to water. She was elected last May to help re-write her country's constitution and recalibrate water distribution. Under Chilé's new laws, she's trying to make sure water gets official protection as a basic human right. Read the guest bios for Newsha Ajami and Carolina Vilches here. 

John Swierk received his undergraduate degrees in Chemistry and Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 2008 and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the Pennsylvania State University in 2014, where he worked with Tom Mallouk. After leaving Penn State he completed a postdoctoral appointment at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab as part of the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis working with T. Don Tilley. After a second postdoctoral appointment at Yale University with Charlie Schmuttenmaer, he was appointed as an Associate Research Scientist with the Yale Energy Sciences Institute. In 2018, he joined the faculty at Binghamton University (SUNY) as an assistant professor. His research focuses on radical reactions initiated by photo- and electrochemical methods, with diverse applications from small molecule synthesis to the photodegradation of tattoo inks. He has received funding from the Doctoral New Investigator Award from the American Chemical Society Petroleum and an R15 grant from the National Institutes of Health. In 2021, he received an NSF CAREER Award. Inking of Immunity is made possible by all these humans: Chris Lynn - Executive Producer & Co-host Becci Owens - Associate Producer & Co-host Mike Smetana - Associate Producer & Co-host Kira Yancey - Production Manager Find us on social media on Facebook (inking.of.immunity), Twitter (@inking_immunity), and Instagram (@inking.of.immunity)

On this episode of The Score, we're speaking with Dr. Karen Symms Gallagher, professor of education and the Hagen Chair in Women's Leadership in the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California, where she also served as dean for 20 years. And Dr. Mark Biggin, a staff scientist in molecular biology at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He also teaches at UC Berkeley. Kathryn Baron (02:30): Dr. Biggin, … what happened that revealed this dark side [of cheating] to you? Dr. Mark Biggin (02:41): Oh, oh, direct experience from a class I was teaching. During the lockdown, suddenly we were giving exams that were unproctored online as opposed to proctored in person. I assumed that if we just told the students to follow the honor code, they would do that. I didn't imagine many students would cheat, but the readers, for the first time I was doing this, pointed out they found two students who obviously had copied their answers. They were very similar. Dr. Mark Biggin (03:08): From there, being me, somewhat an analysis person, I started doing a statistical analysis and I found that some of the students had very usually similar question scores. They got the same scores for many questions, and so the greater scores. When we looked at the written answers of those students, we found that many of those had cheated and the students that we challenged, most of them confessed.Dr. Mark Biggin (03:30): Through some iterative process, we kept finding more and more students who cheated. We eventually found that in that particular class, it was the worst case we had actually. 19% of the students in the end, we found had cheated. I was floored. I kept saying, "Oh, I found say five or six groups, 15/17 students." Said, "Oh, well that must be most of them." Then one of the students who cheated said, "Oh, no, no, no, I bet there's more than that." Dr. Mark Biggin (03:58): That student was right, and just kept going. That was my entrée. Dr. Mark Biggin (04:29): Well, it's important to say these were online exams which were unproctored. They were actually open books, so students were allowed to look at lecture notes, but that wasn't sufficient for some of the students. What they do is they first go through and answer all the questions they can answer and then they collude by just literally sending an email with ... or in some way, a text, whatever, literally the entire exam that they've written. They copy those answers from their colleagues that they didn't know the answer to. Dr. Mark Biggin (05:24): It's just wholesale copying. When you look at some of the copied answers, so a chemical structure, they copy it minutely. It's not that they ... They're really just blindly copying. This is not an intellectual collaboration. This is blind copying. Dr. Karen Symms Gallagher (10:40): In the last couple of years, we've had over a thousand cases that have been referred to SJACS, [ the student run process for academic integrity cases at USC] not exclusively for cheating, but between the fall of 2019 and the fall of 2020, there was 115% increase in cheating, reported cheating by faculty. Most of it was what we call contract cheating. It was collusion, looking up answers during a test. Again, a lot of unproctored tests. It was, like many universities, we rapidly went into online education through Zoom, and we saw this increase of reported cheating. Dr. Karen Symms Gallagher (12:10): We know the saying, there's an app for that. Well, when it comes to cheating, there are hundreds of apps for that. That is because contract cheating, which really is outsourcing answers or essays for an exchange of money, is very lucrative. In the last 10 years alone, there have been a sizable investment by venture capitalists in apps that clearly are cheating apps. I mean, they say they're for homework help, but they're inexpensive. Dr. Karen Symms Gallagher (12:49): They're like signing up for Netflix so it's possible for almost any student to use these apps. Now, be clear, we've had cheating like this. We've actually had what you call contract cheating, but it was usually something that students who had the resources, either the money or the ability to find people have used. But with these apps ... And as an aside, I'm not naming any of them. I don't think that's the important part on this. Dr. Karen Symms Gallagher (13:22): It's just that it is very lucrative for these for-profit ed-tech companies. They advertise on social media so that students are inundated, whether on Facebook or Twitter they get advertising for this. It's in a kind of advertising that appeals to students about how overworked they are, how awful COVID is, let us help you. Dr. Karen Symms Gallagher (13:53): We can not only help you with your answers to your math problems and your ... in the STEM fields, but also, we can write that essay for you with little as a couple of days' notice. In exchange of money, we can have someone write that five-page paper for you, all the way up to we can have them write your research paper. Again, it's the number of commercial cheating apps out there and their ability to advertise in places that they'll find students. Dr. Mark Biggin (17:49): We get a median of 4% of students cheating across all the exams we've looked at, but it varies greatly by class. Some classes seem to have a more persistent problem, probably because they're considered by the students to be high value because they're important. One that I teach is required for medical school and that's one we've had the biggest problem with. That speaks to ... I think is telling you to some extent why students are doing this. Dr. Mark Biggin (18:52): I think academics are to some extent a little naive at ignoring that [economic] incentive. It's an enormous effect. As to the harm done, we've already discussed I think the ... If students know that other students are cheating, although only a minority cheat, the rest of the student body are aware this is happening, particularly during the pandemic. But if you have a lot of online courses or those courses where people can cheat and do cheat, the other students know. Dr. Mark Biggin (19:19): If the administration, the faculty aren't making what are perceived to be sufficiently effective attempts to mitigate and stop that cheating, it creates a pall over the environment. Sort of the sense of trust and comfort with the system is corroded somewhat. Dr. Mark Biggin (20:30): Well, because most classes the students are judged relatively to the other students, for every student who goes up a grade, an honor student who didn't cheat goes down a grade. 10% of students cheating, that's 20% of the grades are inaccurate. 10% got a grade too high and 10% a grade too low. Dr. Karen Symms Gallagher (21:47): Yes. I agree very much with Dr. Biggin, that we have to do something as the administrators and as faculty. We cannot let students prosper from cheating. In the long run, if we erode the belief in the academic integrity of a college, a school, a department, we all suffer. Dr. Karen Symms Gallagher (22:19): That is probably the most insidious part of cheating in general, but these contract cheating, these companies, these websites, these applications that are flagrantly selling cheating kinds of services. It is up to us. I think we, both administrators working with faculty and working with students, because the other students ... I mean, it's right. Other students don't want the cheating to go on.They know it not only harms them on a grade, but in the end, it can harm the value of the degree that they get. Dr. Mark Biggin (25:06): Well, the physicists are always telling us if you haven't measured it, you haven't understood it. The first thing you have to do is measure the amount of cheating, the different forms of cheating that are occurring and know when and where it's occurring. Dr. Mark Biggin (26:55): We've been able to reduce cheating by about twofold, by informing students in advance of the method, and actually showing them the website and the website has a specific page addressed to the students explaining that our goal is not to catch them, but to dissuade them and to tell the honor students, "We're doing this. Don't feel threatened. We're doing this to make sure you get the grade you deserve." Dr. Mark Biggin (27:20): I assumed cheating would plummet. It dropped about twofold. I still had 7% in my class this last summer collude, even with all that information and telling ... The website explained to them, "You'll be caught if you cheat." And they cheated. In fact, one of those students had been caught in the term before in the class, was failed, took the class again, cheated again, and was caught again. Dr. Karen Symms Gallagher (32:08): I really want to pick up on this notion of measuring it. I found out about the 115% increase in SJACS at USC through a student publication. We do not publish what's going on at USC in our handling of student disciplinary actions, nor do most universities. In fact, I went through several student newspapers to find that there's been this increase since the pandemic forced most classes to be online. Dr. Karen Symms Gallagher (32:44): Well, if you don't know what's going on, you're both unaware, but also there's not much we can do about it until we recognize it is an issue. Measuring it, that is seeing again reported issues. A lot of cheating does not get reported because faculty members say, "I'm the bad person if this happens. Students will give me bad reviews on my end of the semester." It destroys the teacher-student relationship.

In this episode, I converse with Prof. James Fraser at the University of California, San Francisco. James was an undergraduate at McGill University, where he worked in the lab of Dr. Francois Fagotto on Xenopus developmental biology. As a graduate student, with Tom Alber at UC Berkeley, James established room-temperature X-ray data collection techniques and electron density sampling strategies to define protein conformational ensembles essential for catalysis. Prior to starting an independent position at UCSF, he was a visiting EMBO Short Term Fellow in the lab of Dan Tawfik at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and developed expertise in directed evolution and high-throughput assays of enzymatic or binding activity. In January 2011, James started his independent career as a QB3 at UCSF Fellow affiliated with the Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology. In January 2013, he was appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences and the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) with promotion to Associate Professor in 2016, and Full Professor in 2020. James is also a Faculty Scientist in the Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. The long-term goals of James' research group is to understand how protein conformational ensembles are reshaped by perturbations, such as mutation and ligand binding, and to quantify how these perturbations impact protein function and organismal fitness. To accomplish these goals, they create new computational and biophysical approaches to study how proteins move between different conformational states. Additionally, the group uses two complementary approaches to study the relationship between protein conformational ensembles and function. To dissect consequences of mutations on organismal fitness, they use high-throughput systems biology and biophysical methods to analyze large sets of clinically or biophysically interesting mutations and to improve the ability to engineer new protein functions, they investigate changes to the conformational ensemble as new enzymatic and binding functions emerge from directed evolution studies. We indulge in a fascinating conversation on his enjoyable journey through science and life; foraying into academia from a family of non-academics; the thrill of methods development; the enormous influence of his brilliant mentors, friends, and collaborators; creating a more equitable, open, and just environment in science; and many more things!!

Grad students in hard sciences are often made to believe that their career options post-graduation are limited to research positions in academia, industry, or national labs. However, the skills one develops during a PhD program are transferable to more job types and settings than expected. In this episode, we talk with Dr. Ashley White, who currently works at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab as both the Director of Communications for the Advanced Light Source and the Head of Strategic Development for the Energy Sciences Area. She discusses her non-traditional career path, difficult decisions she has had to make, and how the skills she has learned along the way make her uniquely qualified in her current job. We'll talk about the importance of her role at a national lab and a little bit about what kind of research actually goes on at LBNL. Guest: Ashley White; Host: Claire Rodman; Reporter: Angela Cleri: Produced by: Angela Cleri and Jeremy Sutherland; Music: Smartphone Zombie by Platinum Butterfly (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.

Listen to a blog summary of this research paper published by Aging, entitled, "Cdkn1a transcript variant 2 is a marker of aging and cellular senescence." The phenomenon in which cells are still metabolically active but can no longer proliferate is known as cellular senescence. Cellular senescence is a normal mechanism in development and tissue homeostasis—and a hallmark of aging. “Most of my lab works on a process called cellular senescence, which is a cellular response to stresses and damage, many of which increase with age,” Dr. Judy Campisi, Professor at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging and Senior Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, said in a recent Aging interview. An international team of researchers from Dr. Campisi's lab are in search of new biological markers of cellular senescence and aging. Understanding mechanisms of aging such as senescence is key for developing new, safe interventions that may extend human life—with compounding socioeconomic and cultural impacts. Researchers from this lab come from institutions including the Buck Institute, the University of California, Berkeley's Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Universidad de Córdoba, Universidad Mayor, Geroscience Center for Brain Health and Metabolism, and Unity Biotechnology. The team published a trending 2021 paper in Aging‘s Volume 13, Issue 10, entitled, “Cdkn1a transcript variant 2 is a marker of aging and cellular senescence.” “Our results are, to our knowledge, the first to study Ckdn1a transcript variants in the context of aging.” There are a number of mechanisms that drive cellular senescence. Previously, mRNA and protein coding gene Cdkn1a transcript variant 1 (p21var1) has been better-studied compared to Cdkn1a transcript variant 2 (p21var2). The authors of this paper explain that this is likely because the encoded protein is identical to that encoded by variant 1, and both variants are regulated by p53. However, neither variants have ever before been studied in the context of aging. In this study, the researchers explored the expression levels of both Cdkn1a transcript variants 1 and 2 in the context of cellular senescence using several tissues from aged mice and a cell culture model of mouse cells. “The stringent cell growth arrest associated with cellular senescence is determined, among other mechanisms, by activities of cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor proteins p16Ink4a and p21Cip1/Waf1, encoded by the Cdkn2a and Cdkn1a loci, respectively [1].” Study results showed that both variants are induced during cellular senescence. They showed that p21var1 and p21var2 are equally sensitive to transcriptional upregulation after p53 stabilization. The in vitro models also found that p21var2 is preferentially induced with age. “In sum, p21var2 expression is consistently elevated with age, in contrast with an absence of age-related change in p21var1 levels.” The researchers conducted further tests in vivo to examine the expression pattern of p21var2 and their results suggested that the circadian regulation of p21Cip1/Waf1 is driven solely by expression of Cdkn1a transcript variant 1. The team also induced cellular senescence in vivo with doxorubicin and ABT-263 (navitoclax) and evaluated the variants' expression. These results confirmed their in vitro findings that p21var2 is more prone to cellular senescence than p21var1, thus making it a better marker for assessing the presence of senescent cells in vivo. “We show that, although tissue-specific exceptions may arise, p21var2 but not p21var1 is a better candidate marker of aging and senescence in mice.” DOI - doi.org/10.18632/aging.203110 Full Text - www.aging-us.com/article/203110/text Correspondence to: Judith Campisi email: jcampisi@buckinstitute.org About Aging Please visit our website at www.Aging-US.com​​ Aging is published by Impact Journals, LLC please visit www.ImpactJournals.com​​ or connect with @ImpactJrnls Media Contact 18009220957 MEDIA@IMPACTJOURNALS.COM

This week, we will be joined by Lipi Gupta, PhD (she/her). Lipi just defended her PhD in Physics 10 days ago from The University of Chicago!!! She is now headed into a software engineering-focused postdoctoral fellowship at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Being a woman in academia, STEM or research comes with its own challenges and self-advocating is necessary but that doesn't mean it's easy! Lipi is here today to share her experiences on this! You can find her on Twitter (@_lipigupta) and LinkedIn! A full-text transcript of this episode is available via google doc. Join us each Saturday at 3 pm EDT/12 pm PDT for the YouTube live stream and check out the PhD Balance YouTube Channel for all the videos! The podcast episodes are posted the Tuesday after the live stream! Want to be a guest or know somebody we should be talking to? Fill out our google form! Follow our host Niba on Twitter: @NotesByNiba Check out the PhD Balance website for more info on Grad Chat!

In 2005, it looked like heat-trapping gases from power plants were only going up.That year, the EIA put out a projection: CO2 emissions from power plants would steadily rise every year, thanks to the incumbency of coal and gas.=Today, they’re half of what was projected. A new report from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab calls it “halfway to zero” -- meaning we are already halfway to a zero-carbon grid.This week: why the path to net-zero may surprise us once again.Then: America’s climate image on the world stage is in tatters. What will it take for the Biden team to stitch it back together before COP negotiations this fall?Finally: a ton of specific policy ideas that can help us expand solar to the people who need it most.BlocPower CEO Donnel Baird joins Katherine and Stephen as our guest co-host this week.Looking to grow your career in solar tech? Aurora Solar is the leader in solar design and sales software. Aurora is hiring across multiple roles including customer success, marketing, sales, operations, and more. See open roles and apply to join Aurora, voted one of the best places to work in 2021, at www.aurorasolar.com/energygang.This podcast is also brought to you by CPower. CPower’s latest book, "Demand-Side Energy Management in the Time of COVID," takes a peek into eight of the biggest commercial industries in North America and reveals key energy management strategies successful organizations executed during the wildest year of the young century. Download it here.

This week Dylan is joined by Adam Balogh, Department Chair of Machine Technology at Laney College aka @Laneymachinetech on Instagram. Adam shares with us his backstory, starting in something surprisingly different than machining, to working with Tom Lipton at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, to teaching young aspiring machinists. Adam talks about his projects, 3d printing, keeping students inspired, and more. Nickolas Means talk on 3 mile island: https://youtu.be/hMk6rF4Tzsg Laney College Machine Technology Department Website: https://laney.edu/machine_technology/ Instagram: @laneymachinetech (2x) YouTube Channels: Machine Tech Video Blog; Laney Machine Tech Berkeley Center for Magnet Technology at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: https://bcmt.lbl.gov/ NYC|CNC Tour of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: https://youtu.be/FmmNRaKpBTI East Bay Municipal Utility District (Local Water/Wastewater Utility with Repair Machine Shop): https://www.ebmud.com/ Terminal Manufacturing Co. (CNC/Manual Job Shop): https://www.terminalmanufacturing.com/ Book Mentioned: "The Instructor, the Man and the Job: A Hand Book for Instructors of Industrial and Vocational Subjects" by Charles Allen (Available @ https://archive.org/details/instructormanjob00allerich) Source for Inexpensive Quality Surplus Optics: www.surplusshed.com Dan Gelbart's Precision Air Bearing Lathe: https://youtu.be/sFrVdoOhu1Q Adam's YouTube Series on Autocollimators: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLL-aWzAbmoUn435Fq3MEAClddgrsPfXPO

The U.S. forfeited leadership in the global effort to combat climate change when it left the Paris Agreement. Now back, will the U.S. resume its former role?---On Friday, February the 19th, the United States officially rejoined the Paris Climate Agreement, bringing to an end an extended period of national disengagement from the global effort to address climate change. As the largest historic emitter of greenhouse gasses, and today’s second largest emitter behind China, U.S. engagement is critical to the global effort to address climate change.Yet the climate framework that the U.S. abandoned under the Trump administration looks different today. The U.S., rather than being a clear leader on climate issues, is embarking on an effort to rebuild trust and reassure the world that it will remain committed to addressing climate change, while the relative influence in of China, Europe and other regions has grown in global climate dialogue.Joanna Lewis, Director of the Science, Technology and International Affairs Program at Georgetown University, discusses how the Paris Climate framework, and the global hierarchy of climate leadership, has changed in recent years. She also looks at the barriers that U.S.-China trade tensions may present to climate cooperation as the U.S. rejoins the Paris process. Joanna Lewis is Director of the Science, Technology and International Affairs Program at Georgetown University. She is also a Strategic Advisor to the China Energy Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.Related ContentInnovation in Isolation: Islands and the Energy Transition https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/research/publications/innovation-in-isolation-islands-and-the-energy-transition/ It’s Ideology Stupid: Why Voters Still Shun Carbon Taxes https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/research/publications/its-ideology-stupid-why-voters-still-shun-carbon-taxes/

Dr Renard Siew, Climate Change Advisor, Centre For Governance and Political Studies Kuala Lumpur and ideaXme Climate Change ambassador, interviews Frans Nauta, founder ClimateLaunchpad www.climatelaunchpad.org and Climate-KIC Accelerator. Climate-KIC Accelerator is the world's largest support program for clean-tech startups. Over its 8 years of operation it supported more than 1.500 startups, that raised over 1,5 B€ in follow on funding. ClimateLaunchpad, discussed in this interview is the world's largest green business ideas competition. It operates in 60 countries and has supported more than 3.000 teams. EIT Climate-KIC: As deputy director Entrepreneurship of EIT Climate-KIC Frans was responsible for the development of the entrepreneurship centres at the Climate-KIC co-locations and regional centres across the EU and the implementation of the Climate-KIC Accelerator Program. He worked as visiting scholar at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and at Cyclotron Road, the tech startup accelerator program of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Frans Nauta's Earlier Career: Before his work with startups, Frans was secretary for Innovation for the Dutch Prime Minister, a professor of Innovation at HAN University in the Netherlands and the founder of Knowledge Land, the leading Dutch think tank on boosting the knowledge economy. He has been teaching Innovation and Entrepreneurship since 2007 as lecturer at Utrecht University. Frans has been trained at the Harvard Business School in the teaching case methodology and currently teaches entrepreneurship and innovation in executive education programs at UC Berkeley Extension, the Climate-KIC Business School and in the Masters Program of Utrecht University. Follow on Twitter @fnauta @renardsiew @ideaxm Find the transcript of this interview at www.radioideaxme.com shortly. ideaXme is a global podcast, creator series and mentor programme. You can find us across the internet – on all major audio platforms, on YouTube, Vimeo and here www.radioideaxme.com.

Our guest this episode is Eliot Crowe talking about the publication the new paper from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Building Commissioning Association on Building commissioning costs and savings across three decades and 1500 North American buildings. The paper is published in “Energy and Buildings, volume 227, 15th Nov 2020. If you enjoy this episode, share it with friends and give us a review, it helps more than you know. In this episode, we discuss: Eliot's work on the LBNL & BCA paper Monitoring based Cx and analytics Technology Ready Levels (TRL) of buildings And much more……. For more information on Eliot Eliot on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/eliot-crowe/ LBNL https://www.lbl.gov/ BCA https://www.bcxa.org/ Download the paper free of charge https://buildings.lbl.gov/publications/building-commissioning-costs-and Bio Eliot has a Bachelor's Degree in Industrial Design and a master's degree in Design, Technology and Project Management. Eliot joined LBNL’s Building Technology and Urban Systems Division (BTUS) November 2016, to support their industry-leading work in the fields of EMIS, M&V, commissioning, and other related areas. He is the co- author of Energy and Buildings, a paper discusses Building commissioning costs and savings across three decades and 1500 North American buildings. Eliot was previously Executive Director of the California Commissioning Collaborative and technical program manager for PECI. Edifice Complex Podcast Podcast on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDGEo1pCt2k8NzvBNJ_78lA Podcast on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/4hyglvmZaiReNGFA4ZvcUZ?si=aOxYtnDWTxOrxtuxhFygPA Podcast on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/edifice-complex-podcast/id1276845500 https://learn.drawingspecialists.com/adam

Our guest this episode is Eliot Crowe talking about the publication the new paper from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Building Commissioning Association on Building commissioning costs and savings across three decades and 1500 North American buildings. The paper is published in “Energy and Buildings, volume 227, 15th Nov 2020. If you enjoy this […]

Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) is a collaborative cross-disciplinary nonprofit biomedical research organization based in Seattle. In 2020, ISB is celebrating its 20th anniversary with a four-part virtual speaker series highlighting some of the most important topics in science and health care. ISB and Town Hall proudly present microbiome researcher and professor Dr. Eric Alm. Following Dr. Alm’s talk on low-cost pandemic tracking efforts in hundreds of cities, using data collected from sewage, he’ll be joined in conversation by ISB Assistant Professor Dr. Sean Gibbons for an in-depth discussion and audience questions. Dr. Eric Alm is a professor of biological engineering at MIT. He earned his PhD from the University of Washington, and then completed postdoctoral work at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab before joining the MIT faculty. His research focuses on non-invasive monitoring of human health, environmental surveillance, sewage epidemiology, and more. Presented by Town Hall Seattle and Institute for Systems Biology.  To make a donation or become a Town Hall Seattle member click here or text TOWN HALL to 44321. 

Our guest today is Dr Andrew Howell who leads the supernova group at the Las Cumbres Observatory and is Adjunct Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In other words, he's an astrophysicist. As a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, he helped to confirm the acceleration of the universe, for which his mentor, Saul Perlmutter was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. After that he moved to the University of Toronto, where he helped make the best measurements of the Dark Energy driving the acceleration of the universe. Andy is also the Principal Investigator of the Global Supernova Project, a worldwide collaboration to observe 1000 supernovae more intensely than has ever before been achieved. He's also been named to the list of the highest cited researchers in the world for the past two years. He is a co-author on more than 200 scientific papers, and has been instrumental in the discovery of several new classes of supernovae, including explosions brighter and dimmer than previously thought possible. His group co-discovered the first kilonova, a merger of two neutron stars, and helped to determine that they are the source of the heaviest elements in the universe like gold and platinum. This was widely heralded as the biggest scientific discovery of 2017, and Andy was selected by the National Science Foundation as one of a handful of scientists to make the official announcement in Washington, D.C. Andy also appears on and hosts radio and television shows about science for outlets such as National Geographic, The History Channel, and the BBC. Perhaps more surprisingly, he's also an accredited film critic who has written for sites such as Film Threat and Ain't It Cool News. His love of cinema inspired him to co-create the show Science Vs. Cinema, which he hosts. On the show he talks to both scientists and the cast and crew of films about the science portrayed in them. He's been a scientific consultant for books, comic books, and TV shows. He regularly gives public talks about science or the science in film all over the world. Learn more about Andy: http://www.dahowell.com/ Follow him on Twitter: @d_a_howell http://ScienceVsCinema.com

In this week's episode, John has a conversation with security engineer Fatema Bannat Wala about the challenges of providing network security in a higher education setting. She has experience working as a security engineer for the University of Delaware and is currently working for Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in the Energy Sciences Network. Fatema shares how she was drawn to transition from being a software engineer to being a security engineer because of diverse and novel challenges security provides on a daily basis. She explains the forces driving those challenges – universities have a wide variety of data they'd like to protect, a never-ending rapid rotation of users, inconsistent mobile device IPs, and a wide variety of compliance regulations like HIPAA and PCI. Universities deal with a variety of data. The crown jewels for a university is the data that it is the custodian of, and that data comes from the students. That data may be a student's personal reports. That data may be a student's health records. That data may be payments from credit cards. That data has to be protected.” She shares security best practices and defense strategies for protecting university assets. She recommends practicing network segmentation in order to prevent a compromise in one causing additional problems in another. “Centralizing all the logs in one location greatly simplifies a lot of processes. A centralized solution for all the logs lets us correlate them efficiently in real time. It's a great help because now you don't have to go to 50 different systems.”  Fatema provides tips for security engineers that are just getting started. She points to the value of EDUCAUSE, a nonprofit organization that specialized in sharing technology resources and mentorship for higher education users.  Listen to the full podcast and gain a greater appreciation of the many threats faced by security engineers working in education and a few ideas for dealing with them. Listen to the full podcast and gain a greater appreciation of the many threats faced by security engineers working in higher education and a few ideas for dealing with them. To hear more security use cases for centralized log management in university settings, join us for a Higher Education Roundtable featuring guests from Brigham Young University, the University of Virginia, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ready to get started with Humio? Get started with our free trial, or schedule a live demo with a Humio team member.

There is a widely-held perception that data centers -- the giant facilities that hold networks of society's supercomputers -- are an out-of-control energy suck.We've all seen headlines like this: “Your Netflix binge may be frying the planet”“Cut back on email if you want to save the environment”“Every Google search you do contributes to climate change”“Bitcoin could be the final nail in the coffin for climate change”It's actually not true, says our guest. These myths are rooted in bad projections and false statements from coal advocates, dating all the way back to the 1990s.Yes, data centers collectively use a lot of energy. But they're becoming hyperefficient. They're a magnet for renewables development. And they're helping us unlock the powerful software, algorithms and heavy computational tasks that run the clean energy economy.Our guest has been researching data centers for decades. It is Jonathan Koomey, an expert on sustainable IT. Jon was previously a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and a lecturer at Stanford. Today, he runs his own research and consulting outfit on the environmental impacts of information technology. We'll talk with him about the different ways that data centers are at the cutting edge of energy and sustainability.The Interchange is brought to you by Prisma Energy Solutions. Prisma Energy Solutions provides a unique financing model for battery energy storage systems that can help you reduce energy demand, participate in both energy and ancillary service markets, improve renewables integration, increase system reliability, and reduce your carbon footprint. Get your system today.We're also brought to you by Wärtsilä Energy. Wärtsilä is leading the energy transition with The Atlas of 100% Renewable Energy, an open-access tool based on the modeling of 145 countries and regions worldwide to illustrate the cost-optimal 100% renewable energy systems.

Special guests Steve Selkowitz of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (https://www.lbl.gov/) and Marc Lafrance of the Department of Energy (https://eere-exchange.energy.gov/)Hosted by Mic Patterson, PhD, LEED AP+ Facade Tectonics Institute (https://facadetectonics.org/)How to get involved with the DOE: https://eere-exchange.energy.gov/___This podcast was brought to you by the 2020 World Congress sponsors:Schüco USAKuraray AmericaPohl FacadesTechnoform North AmericaWalter P MooreRoschmann GroupPermasteelisa North AmericaCadMakersClark PacificEastmanMetawellSikaSto CorpValmontZak World of FacadesEckersley O’CallaghanTriPyramidW&W GlassClark ConstructionDOWUbiquitous EnergyAVRO Consult Engineering PCBelzberg ArchitectsPainters and Allied TradesMorrison HershfieldPCI WestSentech Architectural SystemsSimpson Gumpertz & HegerVentanaViraconWJE

Mary Ann Piette is a Senior Scientist and Division Director at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Her work focuses on energy-using technologies and buildings as well as grid integration. Additionally, she runs the Demand Response Research Center, whose goal is to understand “what works,” in the field of Demand Response (DR). Mary Ann relieves the days of capturing data on 3x5 cards stored in a records room and reflects on how streaming services and automated control are revolutionizing the way DR is capturing and analyzing data--and how the technology is still accelerating.

Forge Global Founders are on the Positive Phil Show… Empowering investors and shareholders by enabling liquidity in the private markets.About Forge Global Inc.Forge Global Inc. is a premier trading and settlement partner for a wide range of investors in the private markets. The company empowers investors and shareholders by enabling liquidity in the private markets. Forge, Inc. was founded by Y Combinator alumni and backed by top investors including Tim Draper, FT Partners and Munich Re. Forge Global’s platform allows shareholders and investors in privately held innovation firms to liquidate a portion of their shares and provides private and institutional investors access to top companies like Spotify, Lyft and 23 and Me before their IPO.www.forgeglobal.comSohail PrasadFounder, PresidentSohail has an extensive background in product management, engineering, and business. As an eighteen-year-old, he was among the youngest founders to go through Y Combinator. Over the years, Sohail has advised and invested in a number of startups, including notable startups such as Zenefits and Coin. He continues to invest actively through S2 Capital, and serves as its Founding Partner. Prior to founding Forge, Sohail managed mobile product at Zynga. He previously joined mobile advertising firm Chartboost as its second engineering hire, and has held roles at Google and the MIT Media Lab. Sohail was awarded TCU's Texas Youth Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2010, and has since been named a Thiel Fellow by the Thiel Foundation. He previously attended Carnegie Mellon University where he studied Electrical & Computer Engineering.Samvit RamadurgamFounder, PresidentSamvit has extensive expertise in engineering, product development, and product growth. He went through the Y Combinator program and started his first venture-backed company when he was nineteen years old. Prior to starting Forge, Samvit co-founded Streem, a cloud storage company which was acquired by Box in 2014. Samvit is an active angel investor and frequently invests in startups through S2 Capital, where he serves as founding partner. His previous work spans numerous startups, most recently including Asana where he built out distributed systems infrastructure and Livemagic where he developed audio fingerprinting algorithms. In a previous life, he conducted research on high temperature superconductivity at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Samvit holds a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley.The Positive Phil Podcast Show, a podcast, available on iTunes, Spotify, iHeartRadio, where Positive Phil talks about personal stories, events and engaging interviews; with famous people, celebrities, athletes, authors, spiritual educators, thought leaders, as well as others in the social, business and entertainment industry.Airing on over 300 digital channels, including iHeart Radio, Spotify, StitcherFm, Google Podcast and published online via RSS feeds globally. (metrics, guests, info) The show has been around for almost 4 years and is one of the most popular podcast shows on the internet in the business-motivation space.Professional radio, tv, podcast host and producer from San Diego California.  We have a large national following on digital media channels, with our popular podcast and network of shows. Airing on iHeart Media, iTunes, Spotify, Spreaker, Stitcher, PlayerFM and over 200 additional media channels.https://www.positivephil.comPositive Stocks is a capital market services & financial communications firm in San Diego California with a proven track record of positively identifying and launching quick-coverage of highly potential small cap & mid cap stocks at an early stage.www.positivestocks.com

Forge Global Founders are on the Positive Phil Show… Empowering investors and shareholders by enabling liquidity in the private markets.About Forge Global Inc.Forge Global Inc. is a premier trading and settlement partner for a wide range of investors in the private markets. The company empowers investors and shareholders by enabling liquidity in the private markets. Forge, Inc. was founded by Y Combinator alumni and backed by top investors including Tim Draper, FT Partners and Munich Re. Forge Global’s platform allows shareholders and investors in privately held innovation firms to liquidate a portion of their shares and provides private and institutional investors access to top companies like Spotify, Lyft and 23 and Me before their IPO.www.forgeglobal.comSohail PrasadFounder, PresidentSohail has an extensive background in product management, engineering, and business. As an eighteen-year-old, he was among the youngest founders to go through Y Combinator. Over the years, Sohail has advised and invested in a number of startups, including notable startups such as Zenefits and Coin. He continues to invest actively through S2 Capital, and serves as its Founding Partner. Prior to founding Forge, Sohail managed mobile product at Zynga. He previously joined mobile advertising firm Chartboost as its second engineering hire, and has held roles at Google and the MIT Media Lab. Sohail was awarded TCU's Texas Youth Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2010, and has since been named a Thiel Fellow by the Thiel Foundation. He previously attended Carnegie Mellon University where he studied Electrical & Computer Engineering.Samvit RamadurgamFounder, PresidentSamvit has extensive expertise in engineering, product development, and product growth. He went through the Y Combinator program and started his first venture-backed company when he was nineteen years old. Prior to starting Forge, Samvit co-founded Streem, a cloud storage company which was acquired by Box in 2014. Samvit is an active angel investor and frequently invests in startups through S2 Capital, where he serves as founding partner. His previous work spans numerous startups, most recently including Asana where he built out distributed systems infrastructure and Livemagic where he developed audio fingerprinting algorithms. In a previous life, he conducted research on high temperature superconductivity at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Samvit holds a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley.The Positive Phil Podcast Show, a podcast, available on iTunes, Spotify, iHeartRadio, where Positive Phil talks about personal stories, events and engaging interviews; with famous people, celebrities, athletes, authors, spiritual educators, thought leaders, as well as others in the social, business and entertainment industry.Airing on over 300 digital channels, including iHeart Radio, Spotify, StitcherFm, Google Podcast and published online via RSS feeds globally. (metrics, guests, info) The show has been around for almost 4 years and is one of the most popular podcast shows on the internet in the business-motivation space.Professional radio, tv, podcast host and producer from San Diego California.  We have a large national following on digital media channels, with our popular podcast and network of shows. Airing on iHeart Media, iTunes, Spotify, Spreaker, Stitcher, PlayerFM and over 200 additional media channels.https://www.positivephil.comPositive Stocks is a capital market services & financial communications firm in San Diego California with a proven track record of positively identifying and launching quick-coverage of highly potential small cap & mid cap stocks at an early stage.www.positivestocks.com

Forge Global Founders are on the Positive Phil Show… Empowering investors and shareholders by enabling liquidity in the private markets.Forge Global Founders are on the Positive Phil Show… Empowering investors and shareholders by enabling liquidity in the private markets.About Forge Global Inc.Forge Global Inc. is a premier trading and settlement partner for a wide range of investors in the private markets. The company empowers investors and shareholders by enabling liquidity in the private markets. Forge, Inc. was founded by Y Combinator alumni and backed by top investors including Tim Draper, FT Partners and Munich Re. Forge Global’s platform allows shareholders and investors in privately held innovation firms to liquidate a portion of their shares and provides private and institutional investors access to top companies like Spotify, Lyft and 23 and Me before their IPO.www.forgeglobal.comSohail PrasadFounder, PresidentSohail has an extensive background in product management, engineering, and business. As an eighteen-year-old, he was among the youngest founders to go through Y Combinator. Over the years, Sohail has advised and invested in a number of startups, including notable startups such as Zenefits and Coin. He continues to invest actively through S2 Capital, and serves as its Founding Partner. Prior to founding Forge, Sohail managed mobile product at Zynga. He previously joined mobile advertising firm Chartboost as its second engineering hire, and has held roles at Google and the MIT Media Lab. Sohail was awarded TCU's Texas Youth Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2010, and has since been named a Thiel Fellow by the Thiel Foundation. He previously attended Carnegie Mellon University where he studied Electrical & Computer Engineering.Samvit RamadurgamFounder, PresidentSamvit has extensive expertise in engineering, product development, and product growth. He went through the Y Combinator program and started his first venture-backed company when he was nineteen years old. Prior to starting Forge, Samvit co-founded Streem, a cloud storage company which was acquired by Box in 2014. Samvit is an active angel investor and frequently invests in startups through S2 Capital, where he serves as founding partner. His previous work spans numerous startups, most recently including Asana where he built out distributed systems infrastructure and Livemagic where he developed audio fingerprinting algorithms. In a previous life, he conducted research on high temperature superconductivity at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Samvit holds a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley.The Positive Phil Podcast Show, a podcast, available on iTunes, Spotify, iHeartRadio, where Positive Phil talks about personal stories, events and engaging interviews; with famous people, celebrities, athletes, authors, spiritual educators, thought leaders, as well as others in the social, business and entertainment industry.Airing on over 300 digital channels, including iHeart Radio, Spotify, StitcherFm, Google Podcast and published online via RSS feeds globally. (metrics, guests, info) The show has been around for almost 4 years and is one of the most popular podcast shows on the internet in the business-motivation space.Professional radio, tv, podcast host and producer from San Diego California.  We have a large national following on digital media channels, with our popular podcast and network of shows. Airing on iHeart Media, iTunes, Spotify, Spreaker, Stitcher, PlayerFM and over 200 additional media channels.https://www.positivephil.comPositive Stocks is a capital market services & financial communications firm in San Diego California with a proven track record of positively identifying and launching quick-coverage of highly potential small cap & mid cap stocks at an early stage.www.positivestocks.com

In California, we share our landscapes with mountain lions. Or cougars, pumas, and panthers, as they are also known. In fact, cougars have lived alongside humans in the Golden State for tens of thousands of years. And as was the case with other wildlife, they suffered greatly when European settlers expanded into the region. For decades, they were killed for bounty, then for predator management , and for a brief period, for sport. Despite all this, the animals have persisted in California, as they have throughout much of their range, which extends from Canada to Argentina. And increasingly, we're able to see them thanks to camera traps and security cameras that catch them slinking through San Francisco neighborhoods, exploring the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab grounds, and walking along Napa trails. So what does it mean to live with mountain lions in urban areas like San Francisco and Berkeley, or in more rural areas like Sonoma county and the Santa Cruz Mountains? What do we know of the pumas we rarely see in person? What lives do they live? What threats do they currently face? And what has California done to protect them? Terra Verde host and Earth Island Journal Managing Editor Zoe Loftus-Farren talks with Sharon Negri, Founder and Director of Wild Futures, which works to foster safe coexistence between people and wildlife, and Leslie Patten, author of Ghost Walker: Tracking a Mountain Lion's Soul Through Science and Story to explore these questions and more. The post Living with Mountain Lions appeared first on KPFA.