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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 […]

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.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

Today we are joined by Anubhav Jain, Staff Scientist & Chemist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Anubhav leads the Hacker Materials Research Group, where his research focuses on applying computing to accelerate the process of finding new materials for functional applications. With the immense amount of published scientific research out there, it can be difficult to understand how that information can be applied to future studies, let alone find a way to read it all. In this episode we discuss: - His latest paper, ‘Unsupervised word embeddings capture latent knowledge from materials science literature’ - The design of a system that takes the literature and uses natural language processing to analyze, synthesize and then conceptualize complex material science concepts - How the method is shown to recommend materials for functional applications in the future - scientific literature mining at its best. Check out the complete show notes at twimlai.com/talk/291.

For well over a decade, researchers have been modeling the cost of state renewable energy mandates.The results break down in predictable ways: conservative and progressive groups often come to very different conclusions based about costs and benefits.An authoritative 2015 report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab found that compliance costs for state renewables targets only make up 2 percent of retail rates in most U.S. states.After a lull, the debate over the cost of renewable energy targets is re-emerging. A new working paper from economists at the University of Chicago concludes that mandates are the most expensive way to reduce carbon pollution — and that they are much bigger drivers of rate increases than previously thought.Many researchers are pushing back on the economists’ modeling of electricity rates. But it’s worth revisiting this debate, since renewables and carbon-free energy targets are used as placeholders for more ambitious climate policy.In this week’s podcast, we’re discussing the findings of this study, the criticism, and how it fits into current trends U.S. in energy policy.Then, Rivian continues to bring in money for electric trucks. What do Amazon and Ford see in the company? Are trucks the next big target for electrification?Finally, a brief look at 5G networks. They could revolutionize energy services, but they’re also fraught with geopolitical and cybersecurity risk. Will the benefits outweigh the risk?Recommended reading:Twitter threads from Jesse Jenkins, Alex Gilbert, Jacob Mays, and Sam Ori.University of Chicago working paperNew York Times: Ford to Invest $500 Million in Rivian, a Tesla RivalNew Yorker: The Terrifying Potential of the 5G NetworkSupport for this podcast comes from PG&E. Did you know that 20 percent of EV drivers in the U.S. are in PG&E’s service area in Northern California? PG&E is helping to electrify corporate fleet vehicles. Get in touch with PG&E’s EV specialists to find out how you can take your transportation fleet electric.We're also sponsored by Wunder Capital. Wunder Capital is the leading commercial solar financing company in the United States. Click here to find out how Wunder Capital can help you finance your next commercial solar project.Subscribe to The Interchange podcast via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you find your audio content. Or integrate our RSS feed into the app of your choice.

Jennifer Doudna spoke at UC Berkeley's International House on Feb. 21, 2019, about the revolutionary gene-editing tool she co-invented, CRISPR-Cas9.Our technological capacity to make changes to genomic data has expanded exponentially since the 2012 discovery of CRISPR-Cas9 as an RNA-programmable genome editing tool. Over the past seven years, this genome editing platform has been used to revolutionize research, develop new agricultural crops and even promises to cure genetic diseases. However, ethical and societal concerns abound, requiring a thoughtful and ongoing discussion among scientists and stakeholder groups.Doudna is a professor in the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley and is Li Ka Shing Chancellor's Professor in Biomedical and Health. She is a member of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2018, Doudna received a Medal of Honor from the American Cancer Society.This talk was hosted by the Institute of International Studies, as part of its Endowed Elberg Series. It was recorded by the Office of Communications and Public Affairs. Watch the video here.Read the transcript on Berkeley News. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Summary:  This episode focuses on Prof. Kristin Persson’s work directing the Materials Project, where she had her group have built an open-source materials informatics platform that reaches over 75,000 users worldwide.   In this episode, Dr. Bryce Meredig and Prof. Persson discuss: The founding of the Materials Project and how it has grown into a widely used global open-source platform Recruiting and supporting a multidisciplinary group that touches materials science, chemistry, high-performance computing, and scalable web development The motivation for making all Materials Project data, applications, and algorithms open-source Success stories from the scientific community’s use of the Materials Project How researchers can best integrate computational methods with machine learning, lab-based synthesis and characterization, and commercial R&D   “We’re building a community. In the end, the goal [of Materials Project] is to make our data and algorithms available to the public so we can accelerate materials design and accelerate solutions to some of our societal problems in renewable energy.” - Dr. Kristin Persson   Prof. Kristin Persson is the Director of the Materials Project, a Staff Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at UC-Berkeley. Known as a pioneer of materials genomics, Kristin co-founded the Materials Project in 2011 with Gerbrand Ceder at MIT. The Materials Project is now a multi-institution, multi-national effort to compute the properties of all known materials and to provide the data, analysis algorithms, and computational materials applications free of charge to the scientific community. The Materials Project aims to accelerate innovation in materials research, and has led to the discovery of new battery materials, transparent conducting oxides, and thermoelectric materials. Prof. Persson is the recipient of the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Early Career Award for Women in Science, the 2013 LBNL Director’s Award for Exceptional Scientific Achievement, and the TMS 2017 Early Career Faculty Fellow Award. She was also a 2018 Kavli Fellow. Dr. Bryce Meredig, is the host of DataLab: The Materials Informatics Podcast, and Chief Science Officer and co-founder of Citrine Informatics.  Dr. Meredig researches the application of machine learning to materials science. He earned his PhD in materials science from Northwestern University, where he focused on materials informatics, and his BAS and MBA at Stanford University, where he is also on the faculty of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. He is the author of more than 20 peer-reviewed publications, including some of the earliest on applying machine learning (ML) to materials development. He was an Arjay Miller Scholar and Terman Fellow at Stanford, and a Presidential Fellow and NDSEG Fellow at Northwestern.   Connect with Bryce: Twitter: @brycemeredig Website: Citrine.io

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.

This week, Andy and Dave discuss the US Department of Commerce’s announcement to consider regulating AI as an export; counter to that idea, Amazon makes freely available 45+ hours of training materials on machine learning, with tailored learning paths; Oren Etzioni proposes ideas for broader regulation of AI research, that attempts to balance the benefits with the potential harms; DARPA tests its CODE program for autonomous drone operations in the presence of GPS and communications jamming; a Chinese researcher announces the use of CRISPR to produce the first gene-edited babies; and the 2018 ACM Gordon Bell Prize goes to Lawrence Berkeley National Lab for achieving the first exa-scale (10^18) application, running on over 27,000 NVIDIA GPUs. Uber’s OpenAI announces advances in exploration and curiosity of an algorithm that help it “win” Montezuma’s Revenge. Research from Facebook AI suggests that pre-training convolutional neural nets may provide fewer benefits over random initialization than previously thought. Google Brain examines how well ImageNet architectures transfers to other tasks. A paper from INDOPACOM describes the exploitation of big data for special operations forces. And Yuxi Li publishes a technical paper on deep reinforcement learning. And a recent paper explores self-organized criticality as a fundamental property of neural systems. Christopher Bishop’s Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning is available online, and the Architects of Intelligence provides one-on-one conversations with 23 AI researchers. Maxim Pozdorovkin releases “The Truth about Killer Robots” on HBO, and finally, a Financial Times articles over-hypes (anti-hypes?) a questionable graph on Chinese AI investments. Go to www.cna.org/AIwithAI for the show notes and links.

There are tens of thousands large-scale wind turbines scattered across America. That means over a million and a half households are located five miles from a turbine. And they’re actually inching closer to homes on average, according to government researchers. So how do those machines impact our property values, our soundscapes, and our quality of life?The Lawrence Berkeley National Lab has a slew of new data on the impact of wind turbines on our lives. In this week's podcast, we’re going to dive into it. (Spoiler: the majority of people like them. We'll explain why.)Then we’re going to talk about the president’s State of the Union Address. Why did Trump duck away from the coal renaissance narrative?And finally, we'll explore the controversy around Massachusetts' deal with Northern Pass to supply 17 percent of its electricity with Canadian hydro.Recommended reading:LBNL: National Survey of Attitudes of Wind Power Project NeighborsGTM: Trump Touts the End of the ‘War on American Energy’GTM: The Controversy Surrounding Massachusetts’ $1.6B Hydropower Transmission LineVox: Reckoning With Climate Change Will Demand Ugly TradeoffsThe Energy Gang is brought to you by CPower Energy Management. Find out more about CPower's demand-side energy management solutions.

Addison Snell and Michael Feldman are joined by guests Horst Simon of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Don Becker as they talk TOP500, SC17 early highlights, and the Beowulf Bash.

Addison Snell discusses how burst buffers are accelerating scientific solutions at NERSC with special guests Debbie Bard, Big Data Architect, National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Mark Wiertalla, Product marketing director of the storage solutions team at Cray.

The cost of wind power has been falling steadily again since the 2008 price spike, and newer projects have been coming in at 2 cents per kilowatt-hour, making them very competitive with natural gas fired power and ranking among the very lowest-cost ways to generate electricity. But can wind prices keep falling, or have they bottomed out? A recent report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, the National Renewable Energy Lab, and other organizations offers some clues. Based on a survey of 163 of the world's foremost wind energy experts, it examines in detail what factors have led to wind's cost reductions in the past, and attempts to forecast what will drive further cost reductions in the future. It also looks at some of the reasons why previous forecasts have underestimated the growth and cost reductions of wind, and suggests that many agency forecasts may be underestimating them still. In this episode, one of the report's principal authors explains the findings and offers some cautionary words about how much confidence we can have in our forecasts.

This week I chat with Rebecca Hartman-Baker of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab about giant computers, computational science, and. . .kangaroo meat. Special thanks to the Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship Program Review for hosting this recording session. Support the show: http://www.patreon.com/pmsutter All episodes: http://www.RealspacePodcast.com Follow on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/PaulMattSutter Like on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/PaulMattSutter Watch on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/c/PaulMattSutter Big Thanks to my top Patreon supporters this month: Justin Gealta, Jerry, Tim Feaver, Helge Bjorkhaug, Alan McClintock, Tim Rattray, Ray Sutter, MIchael Clanton, Bill Smith, Lars Hammer, David Ciaverella, Silvan Wespi, and David Berger! Theme song "Live Long and Podcast" by Nick Bain, Into The Machine Recordings (http://intothemachine.bandcamp.com) 2015, all rights reserved.

Wind keeps getting cheaper and cheaper. According to the latest wind technologies report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, the average price of new U.S. wind contracts came in at 2 cents per kilowatt-hour last year. That coincided with record installations, record generation and continued improvements in technology design. All of those trends were documented by our guest, Ryan Wiser, a senior scientist at Berkeley Lab, along with his colleague Mark Bollinger. In this week's show, we'll talk with Wiser about record installation numbers, technology improvements, and the competitiveness of wind after federal tax credits phase out. This Squared content has been unlocked by ABB Automation & Power World. ABB has a virtual conference coming up in September, called Risk, reliability & recovery. This free online event will focus on the real-world solutions to the challenges that utilities face: shrinking budgets, aging assets, new regulations and a host of new distributed energy assets. Register here: new.abb.com/apw/gtm2 If you sign up for ABB’s conference, you will also get $100 off a new GTM Squared membership. If you’re not already a Square and you want to be, now is the time.

Chemotherapy drugs can have brutal side effects, impacting everything from digestion to the nervous system. But what if these drugs could be localized at the site of a tumor to reduce these harms? This is what researcher Chelsea Chen of the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab is working towards: new drug-capture materials that are essentially chemical sponges. The polymer devices are called ChemoFilters. "We insert this ChemoFilter through a tiny tube into the body, and the device would be placed right next to the tumor. It is used to capture the chemotherapy drug, and that’s past the tumor, before it enters the body’s circulation. That way it decreases the systemic toxicities." While the device was conceived with liver cancer in mind, Chen is working on ChemoFilters that can absorb other chemotherapy drugs as well. "The ChemoFilter will have broad use, but on the other hand, it’s not applicable to all types of cancers." To be used on humans, the device will require additional testing for federal approval.

Saul Perlmutter, UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, describes the research that led to his 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Science] [Show ID: 28609]

Saul Perlmutter, UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, describes the research that led to his 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Science] [Show ID: 28609]

Saul Perlmutter, UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, describes the research that led to his 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Science] [Show ID: 28609]

Saul Perlmutter, UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, describes the research that led to his 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Science] [Show ID: 28609]

Saul Perlmutter, UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, describes the research that led to his 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Science] [Show ID: 28609]

Saul Perlmutter, UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, describes the research that led to his 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Science] [Show ID: 28609]

George Smoot, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, describes the research that led to his Nobel Prize in physics in 2006. Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Science] [Show ID: 28608]

George Smoot, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, describes the research that led to his Nobel Prize in physics in 2006. Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Science] [Show ID: 28608]

George Smoot, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, describes the research that led to his Nobel Prize in physics in 2006. Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Science] [Show ID: 28608]

George Smoot, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, describes the research that led to his Nobel Prize in physics in 2006. Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Science] [Show ID: 28608]

George Smoot, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, describes the research that led to his Nobel Prize in physics in 2006. Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Science] [Show ID: 28608]

George Smoot, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, describes the research that led to his Nobel Prize in physics in 2006. Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Science] [Show ID: 28608]

Mathias Craig, Co-Founder and Exec. Dir. of Blue Energy. Blue Energy is a not for profit, NGO working in Caribbean coastal communities of Eastern Nicaragua to help connect them to energy, clean water, sanitation and other services. Blueenergygroup.orgTranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. [inaudible] [inaudible]. Speaker 3: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k l x Berkeley, a biweekly [00:00:30] 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of loads Speaker 1: [inaudible] and news. Speaker 4: Hi listeners, my name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show this week on spectrum. We present part two of two with our guests, Mathias Craig Co, founder and executive director of Blue Energy. Blue Energy is a nonprofit nongovernmental organization working among the Caribbean coastal communities of [00:01:00] eastern Nicaragua to help connect them to energy, clean water, sanitation, and other essential services. Monte has, Craig is an engineer by training from UC Berkeley and MIT. He talks about what he and blue energy have learned about adapting and localizing technology through projects they undertake with remote isolated communities. Monte has also talks about the future of applied technologies and blue energy in developing areas. Here is part two. [00:01:30] As you work with the technologies that you choose from, how much are you changing those technologies? Are you able to feed back to the people who are actually manufacturing and designing those things? Speaker 1: When we started the organization, we thought of ourselves as sort of a technology creator. When we started working with small scale wind power locally manufactured small scale wind turbines, you know, we were early pioneers in that working with the earliest pioneers like Hugh Pigott, as I had mentioned in another group up in [00:02:00] Colorado, went by the name other power. We really saw ourselves as the primary design. We spent a lot of time. We did design workshops, we did a lot of cad drawings and we were really deep into the technology when we thought that technology was going to be 80% of what we could contribute. What we learned a number of years later was that that's not where we can add the most value. There's a lot of people around the world that can work on technology that had better setups and more experience, more resources to throw at the problem, and we needed to leverage [00:02:30] that. Speaker 1: That was one key realization. Now, on the other end of the spectrum though, we know that just taking technology from around the world and plugging it in never works. It's a lot of romance about that, but the reality is there's tweaking. There's adaptation that has to take place generally not with a cell phone, not with a pencil against her self-contained units, but with systems. These are systems, not products generally and for that you need adaptation and so we started thinking ourselves as technology [00:03:00] tweakers or packers, hackers or we use the word localize a lot to mean not inventing, but how do you take something that is successful somewhere else in a completely different context or if you get lucky, you find something that's operating in a relatively similar context and you say, okay, what needs to change for that to be effective where we are? Speaker 1: We have a ton of examples of this and we found we're very good at this and it's a place where we can add a tremendous amount of value. One example is you have [00:03:30] the mayor's office in Bluefields, which is where we're, we're operationally headquartered there on the Caribbean coast has a lot of requests for latrines to be installed for the communities. It's very poor sanitation in the area. They want to comply with that request. Right now there's thousands of latrine designs out there. How does a severely under-resourced government office figure out which one is going to be appropriate for the local context? The answer is they can't and it's just paralysis there and that's an example of where [00:04:00] we've built very strong partnerships and where we can add a ton of value. We can do that study, we can look at the designs, we can go visit a design in Honduras and check it out and say, oh, this design Central America.Speaker 1: Certain cultural similarities. Certain cultural differences can be very different environment, so let's try it out, but it seems promising. Let's test it for a year and let's study. Let's study the the decomposition of the waste. Is it working? Is it not working? And we did a pilot a few years ago looking at a solar latrine where [00:04:30] you you use passive solar heating, sort of greenhouse effect to help decompose the waste faster. We thought it was very promising. It didn't work in Bluefields because very high humidity, the rainiest part of the country and it didn't work like in the highlands of Honduras, but we saved a ton of money by studying that for a year rather than going out and building a thousand units because there was demand for latrines, so we did a lot of work on that. We've done that now with the water filters, with the well [00:05:00] drilling techniques and technology done that with cookstoves biodigesters everywhere in the technology portfolio. Speaker 1: I'd say we've had a hand in localizing the technology, adapting it and seeing what's going to work and then helping to roll it out slowly. At the end of last year we built our first latrines and built 55 latrines. We'd been studying and working on the trains for over two years. And one of the key elements of being able to do that technology localization are [00:05:30] the students and the international fellows that come work with us on the ground for either short term programs in the summer summer fellows that come in or longer term fellows that come for three months, six months or a year and work with us on adapting the technology. So behind that latrine program of two years, they was, you know, over half dozen students that did research that contributed to their schoolwork on campus and pushed the design forward. [00:06:00] So that's part of our global leadership program. They get the benefit of learning what real technology design is like in the field and learn about that social element that they don't hear about in class generally. Speaker 1: And what we get is we get to move along sort of the r and d side of things. And do you have a good relationship with local governments? Is that one of the things you try to cultivate? Yes, and I think that's something that sets us apart from a lot of nonprofit organizations in development, [00:06:30] generally speaking, but also in Nicaragua's, we've chosen to engage the government directly. The government in some form is what is going to be there and is representative of the people's will in some form. There's always challenges and just like we have in this country about how representative is it, et Cetera, but at the end of the day, it's the ultimate authority in the region and so if you choose to go around it and not engage it as many organizations do, we feel that you severely [00:07:00] limit the potential for your longterm impact. So we engage directly.Speaker 1: It's not always easy and we engage at different levels. We engage the national government. We have an office in Managua and the capital city where we're in constant contact with the ministries, with all levels of national governments. We engage there over on the coast. We engage with the regional government. We engage with the indigenous and creole territorial governments. It's a semi-autonomous region. [00:07:30] It's a very complex governance structure in the country, but we engage at all those levels. To discover what their plans are, to help build capacity where we can, you know, we learn and we teach. And then in the best cases to coordinate, you know, we've done a project with the Ministry of Health. We work with the Ministry of Health, the local nurse. We designed an energy system, install it, the Ministry of Health puts in the vaccine freezer and fills it with medicine and we both train the nurse. Well now that is a very [00:08:00] challenging collaboration to manage, but it leads to very big impact if you're willing to do it the right way. Speaker 1: You know, one of our strongest partners is the municipal office of Bluefields, the municipal government, the mayor and his staff where we're collaborating on a number of initiatives both within the city of Bluefields and the surrounding communities around water and sanitation, around building a biodigester for the slaughter house so that all that animal waste will cease to be dumped into the river untreated [00:08:30] and will actually become a useful byproduct of methane for cooking. And how many may oriel administrations have you dealt with in the Bluefield? There's been sort of three that we've worked with. Nicaragua is a highly polarized country, politically even more so than the United States. You know, we like to think where the extreme example, but not even close. When you look at the world that Greg was highly political and highly polarized. And when I say highly political, meaning that many [00:09:00] government functions and the services that they deliver are dictated by political affiliations. Speaker 1: So the risk of engaging as we do is that you end up on one side or the other and we're on the side of civil society. We want to help strengthen Nicaragua and strengthen the population of Nicaragua regardless of political affiliations. And so in our internal policies, that's very clear. We work with different political parties and in fact we play a very big facilitator [00:09:30] role convening people who would never meet on their own. If we can get the PLC and the Sandinistas to sit down on a table and think about a water and sanitation issue where they politically cannot meet by themselves. We have broker meetings between u s government officials who can't officially sit down or meet directly with with sanity, still government officials because of US policy, but they can be in a meeting talking to us and that can be overheard. Conversations that can be very productive. Speaker 4: [00:10:00] Spectrum is public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley. Our guest is Monte Craig Blue Energy Blue Energy is a nonprofit working along the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. Speaker 1: Are there technologies out there that you'd love to use, are introduced that you just can't really approach? [00:10:30] Oh absolutely. There's a very clear answer to that. For me, it's mobile payments outside of blue energy. Last year I was part of a Fulbright nexus program, a relatively new program. They launched looking at issues of entrepreneurship, climate change and energy in the Americas. So with 20 of us scholars last year and one of the topics I was investigating was pay as you go solar micro grids or home solutions as a new way of opening up access to electricity [00:11:00] to more remote populations in a cost effective way. And it's very powerful, but it hinges on a few technologies. One is the mobile phone. That's going pretty well already. It's exploding worldwide. Nicaragua has pretty good coverage on a population basis, on a geography basis. That's not great in particular in the region we work in because it's isolated and low population density, so not a strong incentive for the network providers, but it's still coming. Speaker 1: It's coming and every year is, oh, there's one more cell tower. The communities are getting connected [00:11:30] piece by piece, so that's great. Now if you can layer this concept of mobile payments on top of the cell phone network, it allows you to think of lots of creative ways of delivering your services more cost effectively. For example, if you designed the communal energy system, you can envision a system where somebody has a cell phone, they have a payment application on the cell phone, they make a small payment, you know, a couple of cents. They can pre buy a certain amount of energy and then you have a remote control meter [00:12:00] on their charge controller in their home that you can activate through the cell phone network. So they pre-buy, you receive your money digitally, you turn on their system and provide them x number of units of energy that they pre-bought and when it runs out it goes off the operates. Speaker 1: Just like the cell phone and most of the world, they don't have plans, monthly plans, you pre-buy credit, you use them when you're out of credit, you can't make a call. You could do the exact same thing with energy. If you had this mechanism and in a place like the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua where the cost of making a payment [00:12:30] is often as much or more than the payment because you have to take a long boat ride and if it's rainy you could take your days and you have to buy fuel and if you could just do that over your cell phone, you reduce the transaction costs tremendously, which opens up just a ton of new solutions. You know, microfinance, which is taken off all around the world. One of the biggest challenges on the Korean coast in Nicaragua is in microfinance. What people are doing is they're making micropayments over a long period of time, 12 months, 18 months, multiple years in some cases. Speaker 1: [00:13:00] But if paying a dollar costs you $2 to make the payment, it all breaks down. If you could make a $1 payment for a couple pennies on your mobile phone, and that's not to mention the traceability, you get digital records of all transactions in a place where it's very hard to collect information. You can also envision it as a mechanism to push back a lot of information to the user. For example, they could remind them to perform maintenance on their batteries rather than sending [00:13:30] a technician out there to check the batteries. Very easier to train somebody how to check the batteries. The problem is they forget to do it, so if you could send them a text every couple months, check the water level on your batteries could have powerful implications in terms of the cost effectiveness of the life cycle of that system for very cheap. That's the one, it's just to me that would revolutionize how we work and I think that the barrier is mobile payments are starting to take off around the world, particularly in east Africa, parts of Southeast Asia [00:14:00] where the underpinning technology platform is strong enough of the cell phone network and government regulation or non regulation is incentivizing in one way or another.Speaker 1: The creation of those payment systems. There are a few starting to pop up in Central America, but central and Latin America is very far behind the innovation that's been happening in Africa and in Nicaragua in particular. It's just getting off the ground as one initiative and Pesto in the capital city of Managua, [00:14:30] but it's not clear when or how they're going to expand to a more national network. If that's not something that blue energy will create. It's something we can advocate for and speak about, but ultimately we're sort of waiting for that next wave of innovation and technology to come out there so that we can build our services on top of it. Do you have any insights or challenges for engineers out there building technologies that you could potentially use? Like the latrines and solar [00:15:00] and wind? Absolutely. I mean, I think that engineers, especially at fancy institutions like Berkeley, Stanford, and MIT, are often sort of skewed towards thinking about flashy, shiny, new high tech things, which are very fun and exciting and can have an impact on their own, right? Speaker 1: But if you're thinking about engineering and technology for the developing world, it is my belief now that you can have a much bigger impact [00:15:30] by looking at simpler technologies and making incremental gains on those. It's not a sexy, right? I mean, studying latrine for multiple years, you're like, how complicated is a latrine? Right? It doesn't have a ton of moving parts. It's from an engineering perspective, it's a little boring, frankly, but there is surprisingly a ton of work to localize the technology to have it create impact and people's first reaction is, hmm, that sounds kind of boring. Second reaction is we ought to be able to figure that out quickly, but that's not true. You know, haven't latrines been figured out? [00:16:00] Aren't there already latrine designs? Absolutely. And there's latrines that work very well in specific contexts and the challenge is not to go and vent a brand new latrine if you're doing that good for you and maybe you'll invent the best one ever. Speaker 1: But for the majority of engineers out there, we don't need all of them going out there and renting a new latrine. Most of them, I believe could be most productive if they want to work in the development space to think about the process of localizing technology that already exists fundamentally in other [00:16:30] places and doing the tweaking. When you're in the field and you're working with people and you've seen the impact it's creating, it's very exciting and that's what the summer fellows we receive from. We have a partnership here with UC Berkeley, with the cal energy core, four of their fellows come and work with Berliner g every summer. You can ask them. It's a very rewarding experience and a very exciting experience that doesn't look very exciting on paper. Studying latrines for example, but you get out in the field see the impact. Make the progress and learn the social dimensions which ultimately [00:17:00] are the most critical, so I think a lot of the opportunity for creating impact if you're a young engineer is be willing to get your hands dirty, get out there in the field, understand that it takes time and focus on making a real meaningful contribution that's well documented and that builds on the previous person's work and that is prepared to interconnect with the next person who's going to come down. Speaker 1: If you can achieve that, that's how you have a huge impact over time. You're not going come in in six weeks [00:17:30] and sign some brand new thing that's going to solve the water and sanitation problem in the developing world. Those solutions don't exist. Speaker 5: [inaudible] you are listening to the spectrum KLX Berkeley Co founder and executive director of Blue Energy Matiaz Craig is our guest. Blue energy facilitates sustainable development in eastern Nicaragua. Speaker 1: [00:18:00] Have you learned things about sustainability in your experience in Nicaragua that might reflect back on the developed world? I think that is one of the most critical things that I've learned in the last 10 years is that this really is a two way street. It's very arrogant for people from the quote unquote developed world to go into a poor community in the developing world. See, for example, that they don't have a sanitation solution and say, oh, [00:18:30] what they need. Obviously here is this kind of latrine, like you're an instant expert. Like they've never thought of this before and you're an expert. Why? Because you come from the developed world and you can lecture them and train them on sustainability and what do you really know about sustainability? Last 10 years have been very humbling. We in the United States, for example, as a country, don't live anywhere near sustainably, right? Speaker 1: We're consuming resources just left and right. And one approach is to say, oh my gosh, I don't want to [00:19:00] be a hypocrite, so I'm not going to go help. And some people take that path. I know I'm not sustainable, so I'm not going to go help people be sustainable, but I don't think that's very productive. I think what is most productive is to engage in that process out there in the field with an explicit intent of thinking. What can you learn from that experience and how can you take that back to where you come from. That is now an explicit part of our model where we have really two initiatives. We have the community development side, which is the physical work that [00:19:30] gets done in Nicaragua and we have what we call the global leadership program, which is bringing people in in part to contribute to the community development work, but the longterm impact of the global leadership program is to build more awareness in those people who are going to go back to their home countries and be leaders in their community around issues of sustainability for example, and climate change and all these other critical topics because their greatest sort of point of leverage is back in their own community, right? Speaker 1: [00:20:00] They can come contribute some in the field, learn something, but if they go on to be a mayor of their town, for example, like that's going to be a huge impact where a business leader in their community with a more heightened sense of awareness of these critical issues like sustainability work on greening initiatives in their town back in the developed world where we're burning through most of the world's resources. Right? I know that. I know I can have a much bigger impact by cutting my electricity consumption in half than I can by installing [00:20:30] a 50 watt solar panel in a remote community. From a global perspective, obviously locally, that 50 watt panel has a huge impact, so I think we have to approach this as a give and take. We can contribute in the field if we do it in an appropriate longterm way, and that we need to be open to that learning experience in the field and take that back in the developed world. Speaker 1: I think that's vital. What are the future plans for blue energy? We made [00:21:00] a critical decision a couple of years ago that for our community development work, we're going to stay geographically concentrated. We're gonna stay focused on Nicaragua with a strong emphasis on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. We feel that there is a tremendous amount of work to be done there and we have 10 years of experience building relationships, understanding that the culture and society, the key ingredients we feel to actually having a meaningful impact and those are things that we've invested heavily in and we feel [00:21:30] that they don't scale very well and so we feel that if we were to expand geographically, we would have to change our model and work in a different way that would be less impactful. We'd have bigger numbers and less impact. We feel strongly that we can have the most impact by staying focused in this geography until every person on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua has access to basic sanitation, clean water and electricity. Speaker 1: Why would we go work anywhere else? Was the question we finally asked ourselves then. Oh, right now [00:22:00] the way that we have an explicit model for creating impact beyond Nicaragua, it's through the global leadership program and there's different components to that. One I mentioned earlier was bringing in international people to work in Nicaragua, take that transformational experience back home with them and be agents of change in their own lives, in their own communities all around the world. The second component is the institution to institution strengthening. That's when we work with a local government office and train them on it tools [00:22:30] so that they can be more effective in their work. Or we work with another development partner and share technology, so it's a way to have an impact beyond any border, but it's not us going out and physically doing another project. And then the third one is sort of based on the practical action, which is one of the organizations I mentioned earlier that has been an inspiration to me is doing a better job of documenting case studies and the learning and publishing that experience documents that can be shared globally. Speaker 1: We are often [00:23:00] requested people say, oh, I see you worked on, you know this bio sand filter. Can you tell me how it's gone? Well, right now that's a long conversation and we do that, but it's not very resource efficient. If we had really well written out, documented case studies of our experience, what worked, what didn't and why and publish that for the global community, I think that could have a big impact and how can people get involved in blue energy? Well, the first thing we need is to grow our support base financial support base. The number [00:23:30] one thing that people can do to help blue energy is to contribute financially to the organization because honestly we feel we have a model that's working very well. We have a very committed, dedicated staff and what we need to do is do more of what we're doing. Speaker 1: The second thing is if you are a student or young professional who is looking to compliment traditional classroom education with experiential learning and personal learning and growth opportunities, you should take a look at our global leadership program. [00:24:00] There is a program fee associated with that that helps us run a professional program that is financially self-sustainable and helps fund the project work that you actually do in the field that has local impact. The primary opportunity for that if you're a current student is during the summer and if you're a young professional, we have longer term fellowship opportunities that range from three months to a year. Some of them requiring a two year commitment, but that's an opportunity to really get out there and go through the full cycle, you know, help develop, project, execute, analyze [00:24:30] it. At the end you get an opportunity to see the full picture and that's an opportunity for professional and personal growth that people again have leveraged for all sorts of future opportunities. Speaker 1: And then the third thing is technology partnerships. Organizations that we can partner with that are champions of a particular technology, like the water filter for example, that we use. We learned that from an organization in Canada called cost c. A. W. S. T. They issue new plans every year. [00:25:00] We share back our design iterations with them so that it can be incorporated into the evolution of the plans. We're always looking for organizations like that. Just the caveat is we're looking for people that have a longterm commitment and are into design iteration. We're not necessarily looking for the flashiest new gadget that somebody just conceived of. We're looking more for long term technology partnerships. Matiaz Craig, thanks very much for being on spectrum. Thanks very much for having me. It was a pleasure. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 5: [00:25:30] To learn more about blue energy, visit their website. The URL is blue energy group.org spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. We've created a simple link for you to get there. The link is tiny url.com/k a l [00:26:00] x spectrum. Speaker 4: Now several science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks in honor of its 40th anniversary. The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center is sponsoring a series of lectures describing the research behind four Nobel prizes. The laureates are also longtime users of the national energy research. Scientific Computing Center is super computing resources. The last two lectures are being [00:26:30] held at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in June. These lectures are free. Tuesday, June 3rd mapping the universe. The Speaker is George Smoot of UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley lab. He won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2006 for his work on the cosmic background explorer. The lecture will be in the building 66 auditorium, Tuesday, June 3rd noon to 1:30 PM then on Wednesday, June 11 [00:27:00] data computation and the fate of the universe Speaker as salt Perlmutter of UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. He won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. This lecture will be in Lawrence Berkeley lab building 50 auditorium, Wednesday, June 11th noon to 1:30 PM now we'll follow up on a previous spectrum news story. Speaker 4: [00:27:30] The Berkeley News Center reports scientists working together on Kelp Watch 2014 announced today that the west coast shoreline shows no signs of ocean born radiation from Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster. Following their analysis of the first collection of Kelp samples along the western US coastline Kelp Watch 2014 is a project that uses coastal kelp beds as detectors of radioactive seawater arriving from Fukushima [00:28:00] via the North Pacific current. It is a collaborative effort led by Steven Manley, marine biology professor at California State University, Long Beach and Kai vetter, head of applied nuclear physics at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a nuclear engineering professor at the University of California Berkeley. The new results are from samples primarily collected from February 24th through March 14th our data does not show the presence of Fukushima radio isotopes [00:28:30] in west coast, giant kelp or bull kelp. Manly said these results should reassure the public that our coastline is safe and that we are monitoring it for these materials. At the same time, these results provide us with a baseline for which we can compare samples gathered later in the year. Information about the procedures and results including the results of the first samples analysis are available to the public at the website. Kelp watch.berkeley.edu the researchers [00:29:00] will continually update the website for public viewing as more samples arrive and are analyzed, including samples from Canada. The second of the three 2014 sampling periods is scheduled to begin in early July. Speaker 4: The Muse occurred during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Speaker 6: Thank you for listening to spectrum. [00:29:30] If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l x@yahoo.com us in two weeks Speaker 7: at the same time. [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mathias Craig, Co-Founder and Exec. Dir. of Blue Energy. Blue Energy is a not for profit, NGO working in Caribbean coastal communities of Eastern Nicaragua to help connect them to energy, clean water, sanitation and other services. Blueenergygroup.orgTranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. [inaudible] [inaudible]. Speaker 3: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k l x Berkeley, a biweekly [00:00:30] 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of loads Speaker 1: [inaudible] and news. Speaker 4: Hi listeners, my name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show this week on spectrum. We present part two of two with our guests, Mathias Craig Co, founder and executive director of Blue Energy. Blue Energy is a nonprofit nongovernmental organization working among the Caribbean coastal communities of [00:01:00] eastern Nicaragua to help connect them to energy, clean water, sanitation, and other essential services. Monte has, Craig is an engineer by training from UC Berkeley and MIT. He talks about what he and blue energy have learned about adapting and localizing technology through projects they undertake with remote isolated communities. Monte has also talks about the future of applied technologies and blue energy in developing areas. Here is part two. [00:01:30] As you work with the technologies that you choose from, how much are you changing those technologies? Are you able to feed back to the people who are actually manufacturing and designing those things? Speaker 1: When we started the organization, we thought of ourselves as sort of a technology creator. When we started working with small scale wind power locally manufactured small scale wind turbines, you know, we were early pioneers in that working with the earliest pioneers like Hugh Pigott, as I had mentioned in another group up in [00:02:00] Colorado, went by the name other power. We really saw ourselves as the primary design. We spent a lot of time. We did design workshops, we did a lot of cad drawings and we were really deep into the technology when we thought that technology was going to be 80% of what we could contribute. What we learned a number of years later was that that's not where we can add the most value. There's a lot of people around the world that can work on technology that had better setups and more experience, more resources to throw at the problem, and we needed to leverage [00:02:30] that. Speaker 1: That was one key realization. Now, on the other end of the spectrum though, we know that just taking technology from around the world and plugging it in never works. It's a lot of romance about that, but the reality is there's tweaking. There's adaptation that has to take place generally not with a cell phone, not with a pencil against her self-contained units, but with systems. These are systems, not products generally and for that you need adaptation and so we started thinking ourselves as technology [00:03:00] tweakers or packers, hackers or we use the word localize a lot to mean not inventing, but how do you take something that is successful somewhere else in a completely different context or if you get lucky, you find something that's operating in a relatively similar context and you say, okay, what needs to change for that to be effective where we are? Speaker 1: We have a ton of examples of this and we found we're very good at this and it's a place where we can add a tremendous amount of value. One example is you have [00:03:30] the mayor's office in Bluefields, which is where we're, we're operationally headquartered there on the Caribbean coast has a lot of requests for latrines to be installed for the communities. It's very poor sanitation in the area. They want to comply with that request. Right now there's thousands of latrine designs out there. How does a severely under-resourced government office figure out which one is going to be appropriate for the local context? The answer is they can't and it's just paralysis there and that's an example of where [00:04:00] we've built very strong partnerships and where we can add a ton of value. We can do that study, we can look at the designs, we can go visit a design in Honduras and check it out and say, oh, this design Central America.Speaker 1: Certain cultural similarities. Certain cultural differences can be very different environment, so let's try it out, but it seems promising. Let's test it for a year and let's study. Let's study the the decomposition of the waste. Is it working? Is it not working? And we did a pilot a few years ago looking at a solar latrine where [00:04:30] you you use passive solar heating, sort of greenhouse effect to help decompose the waste faster. We thought it was very promising. It didn't work in Bluefields because very high humidity, the rainiest part of the country and it didn't work like in the highlands of Honduras, but we saved a ton of money by studying that for a year rather than going out and building a thousand units because there was demand for latrines, so we did a lot of work on that. We've done that now with the water filters, with the well [00:05:00] drilling techniques and technology done that with cookstoves biodigesters everywhere in the technology portfolio. Speaker 1: I'd say we've had a hand in localizing the technology, adapting it and seeing what's going to work and then helping to roll it out slowly. At the end of last year we built our first latrines and built 55 latrines. We'd been studying and working on the trains for over two years. And one of the key elements of being able to do that technology localization are [00:05:30] the students and the international fellows that come work with us on the ground for either short term programs in the summer summer fellows that come in or longer term fellows that come for three months, six months or a year and work with us on adapting the technology. So behind that latrine program of two years, they was, you know, over half dozen students that did research that contributed to their schoolwork on campus and pushed the design forward. [00:06:00] So that's part of our global leadership program. They get the benefit of learning what real technology design is like in the field and learn about that social element that they don't hear about in class generally. Speaker 1: And what we get is we get to move along sort of the r and d side of things. And do you have a good relationship with local governments? Is that one of the things you try to cultivate? Yes, and I think that's something that sets us apart from a lot of nonprofit organizations in development, [00:06:30] generally speaking, but also in Nicaragua's, we've chosen to engage the government directly. The government in some form is what is going to be there and is representative of the people's will in some form. There's always challenges and just like we have in this country about how representative is it, et Cetera, but at the end of the day, it's the ultimate authority in the region and so if you choose to go around it and not engage it as many organizations do, we feel that you severely [00:07:00] limit the potential for your longterm impact. So we engage directly.Speaker 1: It's not always easy and we engage at different levels. We engage the national government. We have an office in Managua and the capital city where we're in constant contact with the ministries, with all levels of national governments. We engage there over on the coast. We engage with the regional government. We engage with the indigenous and creole territorial governments. It's a semi-autonomous region. [00:07:30] It's a very complex governance structure in the country, but we engage at all those levels. To discover what their plans are, to help build capacity where we can, you know, we learn and we teach. And then in the best cases to coordinate, you know, we've done a project with the Ministry of Health. We work with the Ministry of Health, the local nurse. We designed an energy system, install it, the Ministry of Health puts in the vaccine freezer and fills it with medicine and we both train the nurse. Well now that is a very [00:08:00] challenging collaboration to manage, but it leads to very big impact if you're willing to do it the right way. Speaker 1: You know, one of our strongest partners is the municipal office of Bluefields, the municipal government, the mayor and his staff where we're collaborating on a number of initiatives both within the city of Bluefields and the surrounding communities around water and sanitation, around building a biodigester for the slaughter house so that all that animal waste will cease to be dumped into the river untreated [00:08:30] and will actually become a useful byproduct of methane for cooking. And how many may oriel administrations have you dealt with in the Bluefield? There's been sort of three that we've worked with. Nicaragua is a highly polarized country, politically even more so than the United States. You know, we like to think where the extreme example, but not even close. When you look at the world that Greg was highly political and highly polarized. And when I say highly political, meaning that many [00:09:00] government functions and the services that they deliver are dictated by political affiliations. Speaker 1: So the risk of engaging as we do is that you end up on one side or the other and we're on the side of civil society. We want to help strengthen Nicaragua and strengthen the population of Nicaragua regardless of political affiliations. And so in our internal policies, that's very clear. We work with different political parties and in fact we play a very big facilitator [00:09:30] role convening people who would never meet on their own. If we can get the PLC and the Sandinistas to sit down on a table and think about a water and sanitation issue where they politically cannot meet by themselves. We have broker meetings between u s government officials who can't officially sit down or meet directly with with sanity, still government officials because of US policy, but they can be in a meeting talking to us and that can be overheard. Conversations that can be very productive. Speaker 4: [00:10:00] Spectrum is public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley. Our guest is Monte Craig Blue Energy Blue Energy is a nonprofit working along the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. Speaker 1: Are there technologies out there that you'd love to use, are introduced that you just can't really approach? [00:10:30] Oh absolutely. There's a very clear answer to that. For me, it's mobile payments outside of blue energy. Last year I was part of a Fulbright nexus program, a relatively new program. They launched looking at issues of entrepreneurship, climate change and energy in the Americas. So with 20 of us scholars last year and one of the topics I was investigating was pay as you go solar micro grids or home solutions as a new way of opening up access to electricity [00:11:00] to more remote populations in a cost effective way. And it's very powerful, but it hinges on a few technologies. One is the mobile phone. That's going pretty well already. It's exploding worldwide. Nicaragua has pretty good coverage on a population basis, on a geography basis. That's not great in particular in the region we work in because it's isolated and low population density, so not a strong incentive for the network providers, but it's still coming. Speaker 1: It's coming and every year is, oh, there's one more cell tower. The communities are getting connected [00:11:30] piece by piece, so that's great. Now if you can layer this concept of mobile payments on top of the cell phone network, it allows you to think of lots of creative ways of delivering your services more cost effectively. For example, if you designed the communal energy system, you can envision a system where somebody has a cell phone, they have a payment application on the cell phone, they make a small payment, you know, a couple of cents. They can pre buy a certain amount of energy and then you have a remote control meter [00:12:00] on their charge controller in their home that you can activate through the cell phone network. So they pre-buy, you receive your money digitally, you turn on their system and provide them x number of units of energy that they pre-bought and when it runs out it goes off the operates. Speaker 1: Just like the cell phone and most of the world, they don't have plans, monthly plans, you pre-buy credit, you use them when you're out of credit, you can't make a call. You could do the exact same thing with energy. If you had this mechanism and in a place like the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua where the cost of making a payment [00:12:30] is often as much or more than the payment because you have to take a long boat ride and if it's rainy you could take your days and you have to buy fuel and if you could just do that over your cell phone, you reduce the transaction costs tremendously, which opens up just a ton of new solutions. You know, microfinance, which is taken off all around the world. One of the biggest challenges on the Korean coast in Nicaragua is in microfinance. What people are doing is they're making micropayments over a long period of time, 12 months, 18 months, multiple years in some cases. Speaker 1: [00:13:00] But if paying a dollar costs you $2 to make the payment, it all breaks down. If you could make a $1 payment for a couple pennies on your mobile phone, and that's not to mention the traceability, you get digital records of all transactions in a place where it's very hard to collect information. You can also envision it as a mechanism to push back a lot of information to the user. For example, they could remind them to perform maintenance on their batteries rather than sending [00:13:30] a technician out there to check the batteries. Very easier to train somebody how to check the batteries. The problem is they forget to do it, so if you could send them a text every couple months, check the water level on your batteries could have powerful implications in terms of the cost effectiveness of the life cycle of that system for very cheap. That's the one, it's just to me that would revolutionize how we work and I think that the barrier is mobile payments are starting to take off around the world, particularly in east Africa, parts of Southeast Asia [00:14:00] where the underpinning technology platform is strong enough of the cell phone network and government regulation or non regulation is incentivizing in one way or another.Speaker 1: The creation of those payment systems. There are a few starting to pop up in Central America, but central and Latin America is very far behind the innovation that's been happening in Africa and in Nicaragua in particular. It's just getting off the ground as one initiative and Pesto in the capital city of Managua, [00:14:30] but it's not clear when or how they're going to expand to a more national network. If that's not something that blue energy will create. It's something we can advocate for and speak about, but ultimately we're sort of waiting for that next wave of innovation and technology to come out there so that we can build our services on top of it. Do you have any insights or challenges for engineers out there building technologies that you could potentially use? Like the latrines and solar [00:15:00] and wind? Absolutely. I mean, I think that engineers, especially at fancy institutions like Berkeley, Stanford, and MIT, are often sort of skewed towards thinking about flashy, shiny, new high tech things, which are very fun and exciting and can have an impact on their own, right? Speaker 1: But if you're thinking about engineering and technology for the developing world, it is my belief now that you can have a much bigger impact [00:15:30] by looking at simpler technologies and making incremental gains on those. It's not a sexy, right? I mean, studying latrine for multiple years, you're like, how complicated is a latrine? Right? It doesn't have a ton of moving parts. It's from an engineering perspective, it's a little boring, frankly, but there is surprisingly a ton of work to localize the technology to have it create impact and people's first reaction is, hmm, that sounds kind of boring. Second reaction is we ought to be able to figure that out quickly, but that's not true. You know, haven't latrines been figured out? [00:16:00] Aren't there already latrine designs? Absolutely. And there's latrines that work very well in specific contexts and the challenge is not to go and vent a brand new latrine if you're doing that good for you and maybe you'll invent the best one ever. Speaker 1: But for the majority of engineers out there, we don't need all of them going out there and renting a new latrine. Most of them, I believe could be most productive if they want to work in the development space to think about the process of localizing technology that already exists fundamentally in other [00:16:30] places and doing the tweaking. When you're in the field and you're working with people and you've seen the impact it's creating, it's very exciting and that's what the summer fellows we receive from. We have a partnership here with UC Berkeley, with the cal energy core, four of their fellows come and work with Berliner g every summer. You can ask them. It's a very rewarding experience and a very exciting experience that doesn't look very exciting on paper. Studying latrines for example, but you get out in the field see the impact. Make the progress and learn the social dimensions which ultimately [00:17:00] are the most critical, so I think a lot of the opportunity for creating impact if you're a young engineer is be willing to get your hands dirty, get out there in the field, understand that it takes time and focus on making a real meaningful contribution that's well documented and that builds on the previous person's work and that is prepared to interconnect with the next person who's going to come down. Speaker 1: If you can achieve that, that's how you have a huge impact over time. You're not going come in in six weeks [00:17:30] and sign some brand new thing that's going to solve the water and sanitation problem in the developing world. Those solutions don't exist. Speaker 5: [inaudible] you are listening to the spectrum KLX Berkeley Co founder and executive director of Blue Energy Matiaz Craig is our guest. Blue energy facilitates sustainable development in eastern Nicaragua. Speaker 1: [00:18:00] Have you learned things about sustainability in your experience in Nicaragua that might reflect back on the developed world? I think that is one of the most critical things that I've learned in the last 10 years is that this really is a two way street. It's very arrogant for people from the quote unquote developed world to go into a poor community in the developing world. See, for example, that they don't have a sanitation solution and say, oh, [00:18:30] what they need. Obviously here is this kind of latrine, like you're an instant expert. Like they've never thought of this before and you're an expert. Why? Because you come from the developed world and you can lecture them and train them on sustainability and what do you really know about sustainability? Last 10 years have been very humbling. We in the United States, for example, as a country, don't live anywhere near sustainably, right? Speaker 1: We're consuming resources just left and right. And one approach is to say, oh my gosh, I don't want to [00:19:00] be a hypocrite, so I'm not going to go help. And some people take that path. I know I'm not sustainable, so I'm not going to go help people be sustainable, but I don't think that's very productive. I think what is most productive is to engage in that process out there in the field with an explicit intent of thinking. What can you learn from that experience and how can you take that back to where you come from. That is now an explicit part of our model where we have really two initiatives. We have the community development side, which is the physical work that [00:19:30] gets done in Nicaragua and we have what we call the global leadership program, which is bringing people in in part to contribute to the community development work, but the longterm impact of the global leadership program is to build more awareness in those people who are going to go back to their home countries and be leaders in their community around issues of sustainability for example, and climate change and all these other critical topics because their greatest sort of point of leverage is back in their own community, right? Speaker 1: [00:20:00] They can come contribute some in the field, learn something, but if they go on to be a mayor of their town, for example, like that's going to be a huge impact where a business leader in their community with a more heightened sense of awareness of these critical issues like sustainability work on greening initiatives in their town back in the developed world where we're burning through most of the world's resources. Right? I know that. I know I can have a much bigger impact by cutting my electricity consumption in half than I can by installing [00:20:30] a 50 watt solar panel in a remote community. From a global perspective, obviously locally, that 50 watt panel has a huge impact, so I think we have to approach this as a give and take. We can contribute in the field if we do it in an appropriate longterm way, and that we need to be open to that learning experience in the field and take that back in the developed world. Speaker 1: I think that's vital. What are the future plans for blue energy? We made [00:21:00] a critical decision a couple of years ago that for our community development work, we're going to stay geographically concentrated. We're gonna stay focused on Nicaragua with a strong emphasis on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. We feel that there is a tremendous amount of work to be done there and we have 10 years of experience building relationships, understanding that the culture and society, the key ingredients we feel to actually having a meaningful impact and those are things that we've invested heavily in and we feel [00:21:30] that they don't scale very well and so we feel that if we were to expand geographically, we would have to change our model and work in a different way that would be less impactful. We'd have bigger numbers and less impact. We feel strongly that we can have the most impact by staying focused in this geography until every person on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua has access to basic sanitation, clean water and electricity. Speaker 1: Why would we go work anywhere else? Was the question we finally asked ourselves then. Oh, right now [00:22:00] the way that we have an explicit model for creating impact beyond Nicaragua, it's through the global leadership program and there's different components to that. One I mentioned earlier was bringing in international people to work in Nicaragua, take that transformational experience back home with them and be agents of change in their own lives, in their own communities all around the world. The second component is the institution to institution strengthening. That's when we work with a local government office and train them on it tools [00:22:30] so that they can be more effective in their work. Or we work with another development partner and share technology, so it's a way to have an impact beyond any border, but it's not us going out and physically doing another project. And then the third one is sort of based on the practical action, which is one of the organizations I mentioned earlier that has been an inspiration to me is doing a better job of documenting case studies and the learning and publishing that experience documents that can be shared globally. Speaker 1: We are often [00:23:00] requested people say, oh, I see you worked on, you know this bio sand filter. Can you tell me how it's gone? Well, right now that's a long conversation and we do that, but it's not very resource efficient. If we had really well written out, documented case studies of our experience, what worked, what didn't and why and publish that for the global community, I think that could have a big impact and how can people get involved in blue energy? Well, the first thing we need is to grow our support base financial support base. The number [00:23:30] one thing that people can do to help blue energy is to contribute financially to the organization because honestly we feel we have a model that's working very well. We have a very committed, dedicated staff and what we need to do is do more of what we're doing. Speaker 1: The second thing is if you are a student or young professional who is looking to compliment traditional classroom education with experiential learning and personal learning and growth opportunities, you should take a look at our global leadership program. [00:24:00] There is a program fee associated with that that helps us run a professional program that is financially self-sustainable and helps fund the project work that you actually do in the field that has local impact. The primary opportunity for that if you're a current student is during the summer and if you're a young professional, we have longer term fellowship opportunities that range from three months to a year. Some of them requiring a two year commitment, but that's an opportunity to really get out there and go through the full cycle, you know, help develop, project, execute, analyze [00:24:30] it. At the end you get an opportunity to see the full picture and that's an opportunity for professional and personal growth that people again have leveraged for all sorts of future opportunities. Speaker 1: And then the third thing is technology partnerships. Organizations that we can partner with that are champions of a particular technology, like the water filter for example, that we use. We learned that from an organization in Canada called cost c. A. W. S. T. They issue new plans every year. [00:25:00] We share back our design iterations with them so that it can be incorporated into the evolution of the plans. We're always looking for organizations like that. Just the caveat is we're looking for people that have a longterm commitment and are into design iteration. We're not necessarily looking for the flashiest new gadget that somebody just conceived of. We're looking more for long term technology partnerships. Matiaz Craig, thanks very much for being on spectrum. Thanks very much for having me. It was a pleasure. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 5: [00:25:30] To learn more about blue energy, visit their website. The URL is blue energy group.org spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. We've created a simple link for you to get there. The link is tiny url.com/k a l [00:26:00] x spectrum. Speaker 4: Now several science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks in honor of its 40th anniversary. The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center is sponsoring a series of lectures describing the research behind four Nobel prizes. The laureates are also longtime users of the national energy research. Scientific Computing Center is super computing resources. The last two lectures are being [00:26:30] held at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in June. These lectures are free. Tuesday, June 3rd mapping the universe. The Speaker is George Smoot of UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley lab. He won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2006 for his work on the cosmic background explorer. The lecture will be in the building 66 auditorium, Tuesday, June 3rd noon to 1:30 PM then on Wednesday, June 11 [00:27:00] data computation and the fate of the universe Speaker as salt Perlmutter of UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. He won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. This lecture will be in Lawrence Berkeley lab building 50 auditorium, Wednesday, June 11th noon to 1:30 PM now we'll follow up on a previous spectrum news story. Speaker 4: [00:27:30] The Berkeley News Center reports scientists working together on Kelp Watch 2014 announced today that the west coast shoreline shows no signs of ocean born radiation from Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster. Following their analysis of the first collection of Kelp samples along the western US coastline Kelp Watch 2014 is a project that uses coastal kelp beds as detectors of radioactive seawater arriving from Fukushima [00:28:00] via the North Pacific current. It is a collaborative effort led by Steven Manley, marine biology professor at California State University, Long Beach and Kai vetter, head of applied nuclear physics at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a nuclear engineering professor at the University of California Berkeley. The new results are from samples primarily collected from February 24th through March 14th our data does not show the presence of Fukushima radio isotopes [00:28:30] in west coast, giant kelp or bull kelp. Manly said these results should reassure the public that our coastline is safe and that we are monitoring it for these materials. At the same time, these results provide us with a baseline for which we can compare samples gathered later in the year. Information about the procedures and results including the results of the first samples analysis are available to the public at the website. Kelp watch.berkeley.edu the researchers [00:29:00] will continually update the website for public viewing as more samples arrive and are analyzed, including samples from Canada. The second of the three 2014 sampling periods is scheduled to begin in early July. Speaker 4: The Muse occurred during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Speaker 6: Thank you for listening to spectrum. [00:29:30] If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l x@yahoo.com us in two weeks Speaker 7: at the same time. [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

We're entering a new era in biology thanks to stunning images, powerful predictive tools, and a pioneering spirit. Four of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab scientists discuss what this means and what the future holds. Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Science] [Show ID: 25873]

We're entering a new era in biology thanks to stunning images, powerful predictive tools, and a pioneering spirit. Four of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab scientists discuss what this means and what the future holds. Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Science] [Show ID: 25873]

Zoologist Toni Bodi is currently developing a genomic diagnostic screen for Alzheimer's disease and is a founding member of the Berkeley Bio Labs new bio hacker space. Nature magazine.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Aw. [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible]. Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science [00:00:30] and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hi and good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Our guest is Tony Bodhi Hickerson, a zoologist who was part of a cognitive study of howler monkeys in Mexico. Tony is trying to organize a noninvasive [00:01:00] dolphin study in the wild using wireless network technology. She is currently developing a genomic diagnostic screen for Alzheimer's disease and is a founding member of the Berkeley bio labs, a new bio hackerspace. Tony talks about cognition, Alzheimer's disease, and creating a scientific community resource in the bay area. Rick Karnofsky and Renee Rau interview Tony on this edition of spectrum. Speaker 4: So welcome to spectrum. [00:01:30] I'm Rick Karnofsky here with Brad swift and Renee Rao. Our guest today on spectrum is Tony Bodhi, Hickerson and zoologist. Welcome to spectrum. Thank you for having me. Can you give us a little bit of a description of what you work on? Kind of a brief overview for the audience. That cognition is essentially the ability to receive and process information and the most abstract form. And we kind of think of it as mental processes, which can be both conscious and subconscious. [00:02:00] And so I do research on cognitive abilities of wildlife and at the moment I'm also working on an application in humans. What wildlife do you look at? Um, well I have looked at primates and I've been also involved in a dolphin project. So high functioning mammals. And how do you assess their cognitive abilities? Well, you can do behavioral studies, which is what I primarily do. Speaker 4: And of course just looking at the anatomy as well. So [00:02:30] I try to be as noninvasive as possible. I don't work in a lab with monkeys in a cage. I actually work in the wilderness and follow monkeys around all day. So where do you do that? I was doing that in Mexico for my last study with seven months and from Sunup I watched the sun come up and uh, the howler monkeys, which is a species that I was working on would call in the morning. That's how we'd find them. So we trek through the jungle and find them and then start our study. And it would usually last, well it would last until sundown. So depending on how many hours a like we had [00:03:00] [inaudible] Speaker 5: can you just walk us through what the study was and what you looked at in the howler monkeys and how you interpreted it? Speaker 4: Well, this study, I was a, the head field managers, so it wasn't my particular study, but I was managing all the data collection and uh, we were looking at two different species of Holler monkey. And they're hybrids. So there's hybrid zone in Mexico where both of these species, which we believe based on genetic evidence have been separated for about 3 million [00:03:30] years. They have different number of sex chromosomes. They're very morphologically different, are coming together and meeting successfully. They also have very different social structures and one group tends to be far more aggressive than the other one is much more communal. It has large groups up to 25 30 and the other one usually has three to five. So to see how behaviorly they come together and genetically they come together because in one cross if you have a female of a and a male of B, they can [00:04:00] have an offspring. But if you inverse it they cannot. So it's really interesting also genetically to see how things recombine. What kinds of data did you take? Oh, we took auditory, so we, they're hollow monkeys. So we had all their calls, which it changes from group to group and obviously from species to species. We also took a lot of behavioral information, affiliative, so like affection and aggressive behavior, like attacks and genetic [00:04:30] information through and study captures as well as fecal samples. Speaker 5: I'm just super curious about what it was like following the Heller monkeys and spending literally all day with them. You, Speaker 4: I started to go insane. You actually do. Um, no, it was a really profound life experience for sure. And I couldn't have designed a better project to be part of. Like if I had designed my dream project, it would have been this project. When I started this project, I didn't speak Spanish and [00:05:00] every single person in my team only spoke Spanish, so I learned Spanish very fast. But during the process of learning a second language, you have this inability to completely express yourself and it kind of makes you go insane. And then when you couple that with standing in the middle of like a really humid forest, you know, surrounded by mosquitoes and following monkeys running through the canopy. I got you about month five I think, and I realized that I started to go insane. [00:05:30] When I yelled at an ant out loud, I paused and just laughed hysterically to myself and realize that like this is the point where like I've reached my mental break. Then I'm yelling at ants and I need to get to a city as soon as possible. Speaker 2: Okay. Our guest today on spectrum is Tony Bodhi Hickerson, but she answers to Tony Bodhi in the next, she talks about her idea for a dolphin stone. [00:06:00] This is k a l x Berkeley. Speaker 4: And what do you do with the dolphins? Uh, the Dolphin project, uh, is not a field project, unfortunately at the moment. It's an education campaign for the international mantle project, which is responsible for all dolphin safe tuna that you've ever seen as well as the documentary, the cove. So they're very avid group on [inaudible]. [00:06:30] And so I was putting together a campaign to try and inspire people that they're really intense creatures and why maybe we should respect them. Speaker 5: You tell us a little bit about those abilities and why they're so intense. Speaker 4: There are three groups of mammals that have large brains that's great. Apes, elephants and marine mammals. And the dolphins came from a very different evolutionary path. So they have different [00:07:00] structures, which is also really interesting. They don't have the prefrontal Cortex, which is what we tend to associate with being human, the sort of emotional side of being human. But they have a very intense limbic system, which is also associated with emotions and bonding behavior and sexual behavior. Dolphins have sort of this mixed reputation of being very kind of aggressive and also being really altruistic almost in their actions. [00:07:30] So looking at not only the hard facts of the biological side of things of like what structures they have and what those abilities are, but also case studies of look at these sort of altruistic behaviors. So their ability to perceive the world around them and to react in an emotional state is potentially really profound. Speaker 5: And um, in your study to sort of understand all the ways that the Dolphin perceives the world and the way that it often feels these things, are you looking at the structures in their brains and seeing [00:08:00] the corresponding place where these thought processes and these perceptions happen? Or are you just observing behavior or are you doing both? Speaker 4: Well, hopefully both. So I'm currently designing a project, which is hopefully gonna do exactly what you just said. Our tools at the moment are very limited, especially because we want to be as noninvasive as possible. Animals don't react in captivity the way that they react in the wild. And obviously they don't have the same space or social structure to be able to do the same sorts of things. [00:08:30] There is an up and coming technology that I hope to apply to this sort of research which would allow biological data to be recorded in real time and it would be completely noninvasive. It would be almost like a sticker, so there'd be no puncturing. There would be no need for captivity. Hopefully we could even apply it with minimal stress to the animal and with that we could have gps data body, we could potentially record the vibrations from their echolocation [00:09:00] and also neurological data and this would be the first information of its kind to be able to correlate if there's an approach or an affiliative behavior between two individuals, what areas of their brain are actually being, you know, lit up and that could really profoundly affect what we know about their structure. Speaker 4: Yeah, that that is sounds really exciting. So it would be noninvasive. Do you know how that works? That must be really amazing. The technology that I'm, I'm hoping to work with [00:09:30] is a flexible microchip and I'm hoping to be working with some of the innovators to make it appliable to dolphins and something that would stick for up to a month. They should scan very quickly, so that is a restraint. I don't know as much of the engineering side of it because I'm not as much tech, but from my conversations with the people developing it, it seems like it might not be up to use for a year or two, but hopefully eventually we'll get [00:10:00] there and we'll have a better understanding of how one of the smartest animals on the planet. Thanks. Are other people currently doing anything more invasive? Captivity can be a very invasive process. How animals and captivity get in captivity are often from Dolphin Slaughters, which kill hundreds of their fellow pod mates to get a handful of dolphins because a live dolphin that is pristine, [00:10:30] you know mark free that goes into entertainment or goes into a laboratory studies. They get taken out and they get sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars and the rest of them get slaughtered and sold into the meat markets. Speaker 6: Mm MM. Speaker 3: You are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Our guest today is Tony Bow-tie Hickerson. Tony is a zoologist. In the next segment she talks about diagnosing Alzheimer's disease. Speaker 4: [00:11:00] I actually wanted to ask you a little bit about the work you're doing with Alzheimer's and dice diagnostic work. Could you maybe tell us a little bit about how the process of diagnosing Alzheimer's works currently and what you're hoping to change about that? Well, there really isn't much in terms of diagnosis that's out for the general public. What I'm actually attempting to do, and initially it was for my own curiosity and you know obviously see the potential for other people to use it as [00:11:30] well. I wanted to test myself on this gene. So there is a gene called apoe e and there are three expressions of it and they account for about 95% of all Hymers, one of these types of accounts for 50% of all hammers. I can essentially locate this gene snippet out of the enormous strand of DNA and then look at their two spots where [00:12:00] the nucleotide is a certain sequence that I can tell you. Speaker 4: If that is type one, two or three of that apathy and off of that, they're very strong statistics that will tell you that you have a very high likelihood or very low likelihood of getting Alzheimer's by a certain age. And it's sort of a spectrum due to the fact that we're deployed. So we have two copies of this gene. So if you have this like really strong negative version and one positive version, you will [00:12:30] have later onset Ohio Hymers. Then if you have two really negative versions, but there are really strong numbers that tell us what your likelihood is. But what I would like to do is to make it something that's very accessible for everyone. I don't want to produce this and market it as some expensive tests that's going to just perpetuate this whole medical debt system. I want this to be something that people can access and know for themselves to be able to plan [00:13:00] for their own future and to be able to take care of themselves and their family members more effectively and responsibly. Speaker 4: So it's pretty similar to the aggressive cancer testing would you say? Or? Um, yeah, it's fairly similar. I haven't looked exactly at that one to see. I believe it is also a snip, which is like this single nucleotide change. So it should be very similar. Do you want to tell us a little bit about the process of you sort of isolating this gene? Did you go through and read the papers [00:13:30] and see that this gene was associated with it and develop the processes snippet on your own or I'm in the process of developing the process to snippet. So right now I'm troubleshooting the primer. So the, the molecule that you use to actually cut the DNA, what I have is currently binding to itself. So it is also binding to the site that I want it to, but it's also binding to itself. So I'm trying to sort that issue out. Speaker 4: It's a process that needs to be critiqued a bit before. I'm willing to, you know, expose more [00:14:00] people to the answers cause I want to make sure that it is very accurate before I would to give someone those sorts of answers. You're currently doing some form of genetic screening and you previously did all of these behavioral studies. It's quite a transition. So how, how did you make that transition? Well they're both in principle based on cognition, mental abilities and so all Hymers is the degradation of cognitive abilities, the degradation of being able to recall information as well as [00:14:30] the breakdown of even motor skills and language skills and so that is profoundly interesting to me to to understand where and how cognitive abilities act and then to understand how they're dismantled is the cycle of, of the process of understanding exactly how things work. A lot of times we figure out what parts of the brain do what based on lesion studies, which is causing and disruption. Speaker 4: The initial draw [00:15:00] to this was for my own curiosity. And that was sparked because my father has severe dementia. So I wanted to know for him, is this all Hymers or is it something environmental? And so I want to develop a test for him, for myself and for the public to know what's their likelihood so that they can plan for the future. Are there other differentiating factors you could look at as well besides this, besides this gene? So the gene is pretty profound and [00:15:30] it's significance in whether or not people get all hammers. But there's, there's also, you know, of course a lot of different factors and I should mention that like echoey is a specific kind of all hammers. It's not early onset and not all dementia is Alzheimer's. There's lots of ways to get dementia in old age. So this isn't like a yes, no test. Speaker 4: If you have a really great diagnostic and it looks like you're clear for this, it doesn't mean that when you hit 80 that you're not gonna have problems [00:16:00] still. You still have to take care of yourself. And a lot of studies have shown that simple things and everyone says this, but simple things like diet and exercise. If you exercise on a regular basis, you can break down a lot of these corrosive molecules that cause a lot of mental problems, cause a lot of cardiovascular problems and you have to keep your metabolism up to deal with this and your body will also, you know, work to heal itself. It's just really profound what control you have over your future. [00:16:30] Like I don't want to give people this test and say you're doing, I feel that you two have a lot more control than a lot of people want to admit over the future. And so take responsibility for yourself and take care of your body. Go exercise and eat well and have lots of friends and learn new languages and go travel. See the world Speaker 2: spectrum is a science and technology show on KALX Berkeley. Our guest [00:17:00] today is Tony Bodhi Hickerson in the next segment that Tony talks about, the new Berkeley Bio lab. Speaker 4: So you're involved in a biohacker space. Uh, yes. So actually as of last weekend we moved into a space in Valeho which is my n when the other core members lab on the, hopefully we will be also opening a space [00:17:30] in Berkeley eventually, but for now we're in relay hope and it's essentially like a hacker space, but it's in biotech in general and you pay a membership and you have access to the lab and the materials to do your own research, detached from corporate biases and the strains of academia. So we provide a space in the community to kind of teach each other and [00:18:00] to work in and we allow real hard science to take place and sort of a pioneer setting. What's the name of it and how does it compare it to bio curious and some of the other spaces in the bay area? Speaker 4: Sure. The name of the lab is going to be Berkeley bio labs. Some of the other entities that will be occurring within this lab is a June cell technologies. We're trying to be much more accessible in that our membership [00:18:30] is only going to be $100 a month, whereas a lot of other bio spaces are $2,000 and up a month. I think that having more spaces isn't necessarily a bad thing. We tend to be a little bit more focused on regenerative medicine and stem cell research, so people who are more focused along that lines might be more attracted to work with us, but certainly weren't. We're not discriminating against people who aren't in stem cell research or regenerative medicine. That's just what we tend to do. I shouldn't ask you if you could [00:19:00] tell us a little bit more about the projects that are happening in the space now. Speaker 4: At the moment, we haven't even opened up yet. We were literally still moving all of the giant centrifuges and automated robots. And so right now I'm is my project as well as John's London, which is one of the founding members of the biohacker lab and he works in regenerative medicine and stem cells. [00:19:30] And once we kind of get settled and open our doors, we'll hopefully be screening lots of potential innovators to come and join our project and not necessarily his project but you know, whatever inspires them to try and you know, make a difference. And what will that screening process look like? It'll honestly be very personal. We're going to just meet with people one on one and see what they're interested in doing, what they have done and what they want to see in the future. It's much more about the people and [00:20:00] their drive to do something than the letters after their name. Speaker 4: We all feel that someone who's really driven to take the four or five years after a bachelor's and do their own research potentially has a lot more to offer than someone who might not know what they want to do in his just signing up for pastry. Cause they feel like it's the next step. So we're definitely open to pioneers, innovators and people who are willing to scrap to make a change. How are you getting the word out about the a space? [00:20:30] Well, actually the, the first thing that has happened so far on the 24th I believe it was, we had a paper written about us in nature. And so that was the first real publicity, and this is the second. So the article was called biotechnology independent streak. If anyone cares to look it up in the July 24th issue, it's gotta be super expensive to have all of the high mated robots and the giant centrifuge. Speaker 4: How are you financing [00:21:00] the space? All of the equipment is already owned by John. He's been working in biotech for quite some time and it has accumulated a very impressive stock of machinery and equipment and he's more than happy to share, to enable other people. He's been really phenomenal and assisting me and getting into a lab space, she's really enabled me to be able to do research that I would never be able to do on my own. And he's doing that for hopefully a lot of other people and so [00:21:30] I would hope to perpetuate that and help people get into it and start making a difference. What do you anticipate the future of the hackerspace pain? Well, we hope that we find lots of driven people who want to come and we are overflowing with scientists until we need to open up another space. I would love to see this be a scientific movement. Speaker 4: Science is all about curiosity. It's about having a question and figuring out how to find the answer and I think that that's [00:22:00] something in our education system that a lot of times is not really taught. People are taught facts, they're not taught. How do you figure facts out? You know? It's not about memorization. It's about teaching yourself how to think. How did you get into science? I have always been profoundly curious, but actually I started out as an art major and about two and a half years in I got called into my advisor's [00:22:30] office and I said, you can't take any more science classes. Told me you filled up all your electives and another semester. And if you take another science class, then we're going to kick you out of the fine arts school. So I said, okay. And I put in an application at another university and switched into science because I thought it was completely absurd that they would hinder me from taking science classes, but it was just a curiosity to understand how [00:23:00] the molecular and biological world works. Understand, you know, how life happens and how stars are born. It's something that I don't understand why every single person doesn't have this profound emotional response to understanding all Tony, thanks for joining. Yes, thank you. Speaker 2: Oh, [inaudible]. If you can not always catch spectrum broadcasts, know that shows are archived [00:23:30] on iTunes university, we have created a simple link to the archive just for you. The link is tiny url.com/calyx spectrum. No, a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Rick Karnofsky and I present the calendar. Speaker 3: Tuesday. August 27th the UC Berkeley Botanical Gardens [00:24:00] will host a guided butterfly walk. Join Sally Levinson, the gardens resident caterpillar lady on a walk through the amazing collections of the botanical garden in search of butterflies to register for a butterfly walk, which is free with admission email garden@berkeley.edu the butterfly walk will be held from three to 4:00 PM on Tuesday, August 27th at the UC Berkeley Botanical Gardens. At this month, [00:24:30] actual science, you can learn how the properties of diamonds are uniquely suited for scientific research. Christine beavers is a research scientist based at the advanced light source at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Her specialty is crystallography, which is the determination of 3d structures of molecules from crystals using x-rays. Actual science will be on Thursday, August 29th at 6:00 PM [00:25:00] at actual cafe six three three four San Pablo Avenue in Oakland and mission is free. UC Berkeley is holding its first monthly blood drive of the school year on August 29th you can make an appointment online, but walk-ins are also welcome. Speaker 3: You are eligible to donate if you are in good health way, at least 110 pounds and are 17 years or older. The blood drive will be on Thursday, August 29th in the Anna had [00:25:30] alumni house on the UC Berkeley campus. It will last from 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM you can make an appointment or find more information at the website. Red cross.org using the sponsor code you see be wonder fest and ask a scientist present the neuroscience of magic on Wednesday, September 4th at the [inaudible] street food park, 48 [00:26:00] 11th street in San Francisco. You CSF professor of neuroscience, Adam Gazzaley and the comedy magician, Robert Strong. We'll lead discussions from ancient conjurers t quick handed con artists, two big ticket Las Vegas illusionists magicians. Throughout the ages, I've been expertly manipulating human at attention and perception to dazzle and delight us. [00:26:30] Of course, you know that the phenomenon of cognitive and sensory illusions are responsible for the magic, but you've got to admit it still kind of freaks you out when some guy in a top hat defies the of nature right in front of your eyes. The event is free. Now, two news stories. Speaker 3: Berkeley News Center reports a new theory by fluid dynamics experts at the University of California Berkeley shows how Zombie vorticies [00:27:00] help lead to the birth of a new star reporting in the journal Physical Review Letters, a team led by computational physicist Philip Marcus shows how variations in gas density led to instability, which generates the whirlpool like vorticies needed for stars to form. The Zombie reference is an astronomical nod to pop culture and because of the so called dead zones in which these vorticies exist, this new model has caught the [00:27:30] attention of Marcus's colleagues at UC Berkeley, including Richard Klein, adjunct professor of astronomy and fellow star formation expert, Christopher McKee, UC Berkeley professor of physics and astronomy. They were not part of the work described in physical review letters but are collaborating with Marcus to put the Zombie vorticies through more tests. Science daily reports the identification of what may be the earliest known [00:28:00] biomarker associated with the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease. Speaker 3: The results suggest that this novel potential biomarker is present in cerebral spinal fluid at least a decade before signs of dementia manifest. If our initial findings can be replicated by other laboratories, the results will change the way we currently think about the causes of Alzheimer's Disease said Dr Ramon true? Yes. Research professor [00:28:30] at the CSIC Institute of Biomedical Research of Barcelona and lead author of the study that was published in annals of neurology. This discovery may enable us to search for more effective treatments that can be administered during the preclinical stage. These C S I c researchers demonstrated that a decrease in the content of micro chondrial DNA in cerebral spinal fluid may be a preclinical indicator [00:29:00] for Alzheimer's disease. Furthermore, there may be a direct causal relationship Speaker 6: [inaudible].Speaker 1: The music hub during this show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Address [00:29:30] is spectrum dot k. Alright. yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Zoologist Toni Bodi is currently developing a genomic diagnostic screen for Alzheimer’s disease and is a founding member of the Berkeley Bio Labs new bio hacker space. Nature magazine.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Aw. [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible]. Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science [00:00:30] and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hi and good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Our guest is Tony Bodhi Hickerson, a zoologist who was part of a cognitive study of howler monkeys in Mexico. Tony is trying to organize a noninvasive [00:01:00] dolphin study in the wild using wireless network technology. She is currently developing a genomic diagnostic screen for Alzheimer's disease and is a founding member of the Berkeley bio labs, a new bio hackerspace. Tony talks about cognition, Alzheimer's disease, and creating a scientific community resource in the bay area. Rick Karnofsky and Renee Rau interview Tony on this edition of spectrum. Speaker 4: So welcome to spectrum. [00:01:30] I'm Rick Karnofsky here with Brad swift and Renee Rao. Our guest today on spectrum is Tony Bodhi, Hickerson and zoologist. Welcome to spectrum. Thank you for having me. Can you give us a little bit of a description of what you work on? Kind of a brief overview for the audience. That cognition is essentially the ability to receive and process information and the most abstract form. And we kind of think of it as mental processes, which can be both conscious and subconscious. [00:02:00] And so I do research on cognitive abilities of wildlife and at the moment I'm also working on an application in humans. What wildlife do you look at? Um, well I have looked at primates and I've been also involved in a dolphin project. So high functioning mammals. And how do you assess their cognitive abilities? Well, you can do behavioral studies, which is what I primarily do. Speaker 4: And of course just looking at the anatomy as well. So [00:02:30] I try to be as noninvasive as possible. I don't work in a lab with monkeys in a cage. I actually work in the wilderness and follow monkeys around all day. So where do you do that? I was doing that in Mexico for my last study with seven months and from Sunup I watched the sun come up and uh, the howler monkeys, which is a species that I was working on would call in the morning. That's how we'd find them. So we trek through the jungle and find them and then start our study. And it would usually last, well it would last until sundown. So depending on how many hours a like we had [00:03:00] [inaudible] Speaker 5: can you just walk us through what the study was and what you looked at in the howler monkeys and how you interpreted it? Speaker 4: Well, this study, I was a, the head field managers, so it wasn't my particular study, but I was managing all the data collection and uh, we were looking at two different species of Holler monkey. And they're hybrids. So there's hybrid zone in Mexico where both of these species, which we believe based on genetic evidence have been separated for about 3 million [00:03:30] years. They have different number of sex chromosomes. They're very morphologically different, are coming together and meeting successfully. They also have very different social structures and one group tends to be far more aggressive than the other one is much more communal. It has large groups up to 25 30 and the other one usually has three to five. So to see how behaviorly they come together and genetically they come together because in one cross if you have a female of a and a male of B, they can [00:04:00] have an offspring. But if you inverse it they cannot. So it's really interesting also genetically to see how things recombine. What kinds of data did you take? Oh, we took auditory, so we, they're hollow monkeys. So we had all their calls, which it changes from group to group and obviously from species to species. We also took a lot of behavioral information, affiliative, so like affection and aggressive behavior, like attacks and genetic [00:04:30] information through and study captures as well as fecal samples. Speaker 5: I'm just super curious about what it was like following the Heller monkeys and spending literally all day with them. You, Speaker 4: I started to go insane. You actually do. Um, no, it was a really profound life experience for sure. And I couldn't have designed a better project to be part of. Like if I had designed my dream project, it would have been this project. When I started this project, I didn't speak Spanish and [00:05:00] every single person in my team only spoke Spanish, so I learned Spanish very fast. But during the process of learning a second language, you have this inability to completely express yourself and it kind of makes you go insane. And then when you couple that with standing in the middle of like a really humid forest, you know, surrounded by mosquitoes and following monkeys running through the canopy. I got you about month five I think, and I realized that I started to go insane. [00:05:30] When I yelled at an ant out loud, I paused and just laughed hysterically to myself and realize that like this is the point where like I've reached my mental break. Then I'm yelling at ants and I need to get to a city as soon as possible. Speaker 2: Okay. Our guest today on spectrum is Tony Bodhi Hickerson, but she answers to Tony Bodhi in the next, she talks about her idea for a dolphin stone. [00:06:00] This is k a l x Berkeley. Speaker 4: And what do you do with the dolphins? Uh, the Dolphin project, uh, is not a field project, unfortunately at the moment. It's an education campaign for the international mantle project, which is responsible for all dolphin safe tuna that you've ever seen as well as the documentary, the cove. So they're very avid group on [inaudible]. [00:06:30] And so I was putting together a campaign to try and inspire people that they're really intense creatures and why maybe we should respect them. Speaker 5: You tell us a little bit about those abilities and why they're so intense. Speaker 4: There are three groups of mammals that have large brains that's great. Apes, elephants and marine mammals. And the dolphins came from a very different evolutionary path. So they have different [00:07:00] structures, which is also really interesting. They don't have the prefrontal Cortex, which is what we tend to associate with being human, the sort of emotional side of being human. But they have a very intense limbic system, which is also associated with emotions and bonding behavior and sexual behavior. Dolphins have sort of this mixed reputation of being very kind of aggressive and also being really altruistic almost in their actions. [00:07:30] So looking at not only the hard facts of the biological side of things of like what structures they have and what those abilities are, but also case studies of look at these sort of altruistic behaviors. So their ability to perceive the world around them and to react in an emotional state is potentially really profound. Speaker 5: And um, in your study to sort of understand all the ways that the Dolphin perceives the world and the way that it often feels these things, are you looking at the structures in their brains and seeing [00:08:00] the corresponding place where these thought processes and these perceptions happen? Or are you just observing behavior or are you doing both? Speaker 4: Well, hopefully both. So I'm currently designing a project, which is hopefully gonna do exactly what you just said. Our tools at the moment are very limited, especially because we want to be as noninvasive as possible. Animals don't react in captivity the way that they react in the wild. And obviously they don't have the same space or social structure to be able to do the same sorts of things. [00:08:30] There is an up and coming technology that I hope to apply to this sort of research which would allow biological data to be recorded in real time and it would be completely noninvasive. It would be almost like a sticker, so there'd be no puncturing. There would be no need for captivity. Hopefully we could even apply it with minimal stress to the animal and with that we could have gps data body, we could potentially record the vibrations from their echolocation [00:09:00] and also neurological data and this would be the first information of its kind to be able to correlate if there's an approach or an affiliative behavior between two individuals, what areas of their brain are actually being, you know, lit up and that could really profoundly affect what we know about their structure. Speaker 4: Yeah, that that is sounds really exciting. So it would be noninvasive. Do you know how that works? That must be really amazing. The technology that I'm, I'm hoping to work with [00:09:30] is a flexible microchip and I'm hoping to be working with some of the innovators to make it appliable to dolphins and something that would stick for up to a month. They should scan very quickly, so that is a restraint. I don't know as much of the engineering side of it because I'm not as much tech, but from my conversations with the people developing it, it seems like it might not be up to use for a year or two, but hopefully eventually we'll get [00:10:00] there and we'll have a better understanding of how one of the smartest animals on the planet. Thanks. Are other people currently doing anything more invasive? Captivity can be a very invasive process. How animals and captivity get in captivity are often from Dolphin Slaughters, which kill hundreds of their fellow pod mates to get a handful of dolphins because a live dolphin that is pristine, [00:10:30] you know mark free that goes into entertainment or goes into a laboratory studies. They get taken out and they get sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars and the rest of them get slaughtered and sold into the meat markets. Speaker 6: Mm MM. Speaker 3: You are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Our guest today is Tony Bow-tie Hickerson. Tony is a zoologist. In the next segment she talks about diagnosing Alzheimer's disease. Speaker 4: [00:11:00] I actually wanted to ask you a little bit about the work you're doing with Alzheimer's and dice diagnostic work. Could you maybe tell us a little bit about how the process of diagnosing Alzheimer's works currently and what you're hoping to change about that? Well, there really isn't much in terms of diagnosis that's out for the general public. What I'm actually attempting to do, and initially it was for my own curiosity and you know obviously see the potential for other people to use it as [00:11:30] well. I wanted to test myself on this gene. So there is a gene called apoe e and there are three expressions of it and they account for about 95% of all Hymers, one of these types of accounts for 50% of all hammers. I can essentially locate this gene snippet out of the enormous strand of DNA and then look at their two spots where [00:12:00] the nucleotide is a certain sequence that I can tell you. Speaker 4: If that is type one, two or three of that apathy and off of that, they're very strong statistics that will tell you that you have a very high likelihood or very low likelihood of getting Alzheimer's by a certain age. And it's sort of a spectrum due to the fact that we're deployed. So we have two copies of this gene. So if you have this like really strong negative version and one positive version, you will [00:12:30] have later onset Ohio Hymers. Then if you have two really negative versions, but there are really strong numbers that tell us what your likelihood is. But what I would like to do is to make it something that's very accessible for everyone. I don't want to produce this and market it as some expensive tests that's going to just perpetuate this whole medical debt system. I want this to be something that people can access and know for themselves to be able to plan [00:13:00] for their own future and to be able to take care of themselves and their family members more effectively and responsibly. Speaker 4: So it's pretty similar to the aggressive cancer testing would you say? Or? Um, yeah, it's fairly similar. I haven't looked exactly at that one to see. I believe it is also a snip, which is like this single nucleotide change. So it should be very similar. Do you want to tell us a little bit about the process of you sort of isolating this gene? Did you go through and read the papers [00:13:30] and see that this gene was associated with it and develop the processes snippet on your own or I'm in the process of developing the process to snippet. So right now I'm troubleshooting the primer. So the, the molecule that you use to actually cut the DNA, what I have is currently binding to itself. So it is also binding to the site that I want it to, but it's also binding to itself. So I'm trying to sort that issue out. Speaker 4: It's a process that needs to be critiqued a bit before. I'm willing to, you know, expose more [00:14:00] people to the answers cause I want to make sure that it is very accurate before I would to give someone those sorts of answers. You're currently doing some form of genetic screening and you previously did all of these behavioral studies. It's quite a transition. So how, how did you make that transition? Well they're both in principle based on cognition, mental abilities and so all Hymers is the degradation of cognitive abilities, the degradation of being able to recall information as well as [00:14:30] the breakdown of even motor skills and language skills and so that is profoundly interesting to me to to understand where and how cognitive abilities act and then to understand how they're dismantled is the cycle of, of the process of understanding exactly how things work. A lot of times we figure out what parts of the brain do what based on lesion studies, which is causing and disruption. Speaker 4: The initial draw [00:15:00] to this was for my own curiosity. And that was sparked because my father has severe dementia. So I wanted to know for him, is this all Hymers or is it something environmental? And so I want to develop a test for him, for myself and for the public to know what's their likelihood so that they can plan for the future. Are there other differentiating factors you could look at as well besides this, besides this gene? So the gene is pretty profound and [00:15:30] it's significance in whether or not people get all hammers. But there's, there's also, you know, of course a lot of different factors and I should mention that like echoey is a specific kind of all hammers. It's not early onset and not all dementia is Alzheimer's. There's lots of ways to get dementia in old age. So this isn't like a yes, no test. Speaker 4: If you have a really great diagnostic and it looks like you're clear for this, it doesn't mean that when you hit 80 that you're not gonna have problems [00:16:00] still. You still have to take care of yourself. And a lot of studies have shown that simple things and everyone says this, but simple things like diet and exercise. If you exercise on a regular basis, you can break down a lot of these corrosive molecules that cause a lot of mental problems, cause a lot of cardiovascular problems and you have to keep your metabolism up to deal with this and your body will also, you know, work to heal itself. It's just really profound what control you have over your future. [00:16:30] Like I don't want to give people this test and say you're doing, I feel that you two have a lot more control than a lot of people want to admit over the future. And so take responsibility for yourself and take care of your body. Go exercise and eat well and have lots of friends and learn new languages and go travel. See the world Speaker 2: spectrum is a science and technology show on KALX Berkeley. Our guest [00:17:00] today is Tony Bodhi Hickerson in the next segment that Tony talks about, the new Berkeley Bio lab. Speaker 4: So you're involved in a biohacker space. Uh, yes. So actually as of last weekend we moved into a space in Valeho which is my n when the other core members lab on the, hopefully we will be also opening a space [00:17:30] in Berkeley eventually, but for now we're in relay hope and it's essentially like a hacker space, but it's in biotech in general and you pay a membership and you have access to the lab and the materials to do your own research, detached from corporate biases and the strains of academia. So we provide a space in the community to kind of teach each other and [00:18:00] to work in and we allow real hard science to take place and sort of a pioneer setting. What's the name of it and how does it compare it to bio curious and some of the other spaces in the bay area? Speaker 4: Sure. The name of the lab is going to be Berkeley bio labs. Some of the other entities that will be occurring within this lab is a June cell technologies. We're trying to be much more accessible in that our membership [00:18:30] is only going to be $100 a month, whereas a lot of other bio spaces are $2,000 and up a month. I think that having more spaces isn't necessarily a bad thing. We tend to be a little bit more focused on regenerative medicine and stem cell research, so people who are more focused along that lines might be more attracted to work with us, but certainly weren't. We're not discriminating against people who aren't in stem cell research or regenerative medicine. That's just what we tend to do. I shouldn't ask you if you could [00:19:00] tell us a little bit more about the projects that are happening in the space now. Speaker 4: At the moment, we haven't even opened up yet. We were literally still moving all of the giant centrifuges and automated robots. And so right now I'm is my project as well as John's London, which is one of the founding members of the biohacker lab and he works in regenerative medicine and stem cells. [00:19:30] And once we kind of get settled and open our doors, we'll hopefully be screening lots of potential innovators to come and join our project and not necessarily his project but you know, whatever inspires them to try and you know, make a difference. And what will that screening process look like? It'll honestly be very personal. We're going to just meet with people one on one and see what they're interested in doing, what they have done and what they want to see in the future. It's much more about the people and [00:20:00] their drive to do something than the letters after their name. Speaker 4: We all feel that someone who's really driven to take the four or five years after a bachelor's and do their own research potentially has a lot more to offer than someone who might not know what they want to do in his just signing up for pastry. Cause they feel like it's the next step. So we're definitely open to pioneers, innovators and people who are willing to scrap to make a change. How are you getting the word out about the a space? [00:20:30] Well, actually the, the first thing that has happened so far on the 24th I believe it was, we had a paper written about us in nature. And so that was the first real publicity, and this is the second. So the article was called biotechnology independent streak. If anyone cares to look it up in the July 24th issue, it's gotta be super expensive to have all of the high mated robots and the giant centrifuge. Speaker 4: How are you financing [00:21:00] the space? All of the equipment is already owned by John. He's been working in biotech for quite some time and it has accumulated a very impressive stock of machinery and equipment and he's more than happy to share, to enable other people. He's been really phenomenal and assisting me and getting into a lab space, she's really enabled me to be able to do research that I would never be able to do on my own. And he's doing that for hopefully a lot of other people and so [00:21:30] I would hope to perpetuate that and help people get into it and start making a difference. What do you anticipate the future of the hackerspace pain? Well, we hope that we find lots of driven people who want to come and we are overflowing with scientists until we need to open up another space. I would love to see this be a scientific movement. Speaker 4: Science is all about curiosity. It's about having a question and figuring out how to find the answer and I think that that's [00:22:00] something in our education system that a lot of times is not really taught. People are taught facts, they're not taught. How do you figure facts out? You know? It's not about memorization. It's about teaching yourself how to think. How did you get into science? I have always been profoundly curious, but actually I started out as an art major and about two and a half years in I got called into my advisor's [00:22:30] office and I said, you can't take any more science classes. Told me you filled up all your electives and another semester. And if you take another science class, then we're going to kick you out of the fine arts school. So I said, okay. And I put in an application at another university and switched into science because I thought it was completely absurd that they would hinder me from taking science classes, but it was just a curiosity to understand how [00:23:00] the molecular and biological world works. Understand, you know, how life happens and how stars are born. It's something that I don't understand why every single person doesn't have this profound emotional response to understanding all Tony, thanks for joining. Yes, thank you. Speaker 2: Oh, [inaudible]. If you can not always catch spectrum broadcasts, know that shows are archived [00:23:30] on iTunes university, we have created a simple link to the archive just for you. The link is tiny url.com/calyx spectrum. No, a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Rick Karnofsky and I present the calendar. Speaker 3: Tuesday. August 27th the UC Berkeley Botanical Gardens [00:24:00] will host a guided butterfly walk. Join Sally Levinson, the gardens resident caterpillar lady on a walk through the amazing collections of the botanical garden in search of butterflies to register for a butterfly walk, which is free with admission email garden@berkeley.edu the butterfly walk will be held from three to 4:00 PM on Tuesday, August 27th at the UC Berkeley Botanical Gardens. At this month, [00:24:30] actual science, you can learn how the properties of diamonds are uniquely suited for scientific research. Christine beavers is a research scientist based at the advanced light source at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Her specialty is crystallography, which is the determination of 3d structures of molecules from crystals using x-rays. Actual science will be on Thursday, August 29th at 6:00 PM [00:25:00] at actual cafe six three three four San Pablo Avenue in Oakland and mission is free. UC Berkeley is holding its first monthly blood drive of the school year on August 29th you can make an appointment online, but walk-ins are also welcome. Speaker 3: You are eligible to donate if you are in good health way, at least 110 pounds and are 17 years or older. The blood drive will be on Thursday, August 29th in the Anna had [00:25:30] alumni house on the UC Berkeley campus. It will last from 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM you can make an appointment or find more information at the website. Red cross.org using the sponsor code you see be wonder fest and ask a scientist present the neuroscience of magic on Wednesday, September 4th at the [inaudible] street food park, 48 [00:26:00] 11th street in San Francisco. You CSF professor of neuroscience, Adam Gazzaley and the comedy magician, Robert Strong. We'll lead discussions from ancient conjurers t quick handed con artists, two big ticket Las Vegas illusionists magicians. Throughout the ages, I've been expertly manipulating human at attention and perception to dazzle and delight us. [00:26:30] Of course, you know that the phenomenon of cognitive and sensory illusions are responsible for the magic, but you've got to admit it still kind of freaks you out when some guy in a top hat defies the of nature right in front of your eyes. The event is free. Now, two news stories. Speaker 3: Berkeley News Center reports a new theory by fluid dynamics experts at the University of California Berkeley shows how Zombie vorticies [00:27:00] help lead to the birth of a new star reporting in the journal Physical Review Letters, a team led by computational physicist Philip Marcus shows how variations in gas density led to instability, which generates the whirlpool like vorticies needed for stars to form. The Zombie reference is an astronomical nod to pop culture and because of the so called dead zones in which these vorticies exist, this new model has caught the [00:27:30] attention of Marcus's colleagues at UC Berkeley, including Richard Klein, adjunct professor of astronomy and fellow star formation expert, Christopher McKee, UC Berkeley professor of physics and astronomy. They were not part of the work described in physical review letters but are collaborating with Marcus to put the Zombie vorticies through more tests. Science daily reports the identification of what may be the earliest known [00:28:00] biomarker associated with the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease. Speaker 3: The results suggest that this novel potential biomarker is present in cerebral spinal fluid at least a decade before signs of dementia manifest. If our initial findings can be replicated by other laboratories, the results will change the way we currently think about the causes of Alzheimer's Disease said Dr Ramon true? Yes. Research professor [00:28:30] at the CSIC Institute of Biomedical Research of Barcelona and lead author of the study that was published in annals of neurology. This discovery may enable us to search for more effective treatments that can be administered during the preclinical stage. These C S I c researchers demonstrated that a decrease in the content of micro chondrial DNA in cerebral spinal fluid may be a preclinical indicator [00:29:00] for Alzheimer's disease. Furthermore, there may be a direct causal relationship Speaker 6: [inaudible].Speaker 1: The music hub during this show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Address [00:29:30] is spectrum dot k. Alright. yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Janet Jansson is the Senior Staff Scientist in the Earth Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Her expertise is in molecular microbial ecology and “omics” approaches with a focus on soil, marine sediment and human gut environments.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, [00:00:30] a biweekly 30 minute program, bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Good afternoon. I'm your host, Brad Swift. Today's interview is with Janet Jansen, UC Berkeley, adjunct professor of molecular microbial ecology. She is a senior staff scientist in the Earth Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and president elect of the International Society of microbial [00:01:00] ecology. Her expertise is in the area of molecular microbial ecology and Omix approaches with a focus on soil, marine sediment and human gut environments. Today she talks about the human microbiome project, the Earth microbiome project and American Gut, a crowdsourced research project. Onto that interview. Janet Jansen, welcome to spectrum. Hi, what'd you give us a short description [00:01:30] of microbial ecology and give some examples of complex microbial communities. Speaker 4: Sure. So microbial ecology is the study of micro organisms in the environment and their interactions with other microorganisms, plants, animals, that particular habitat that they happen to be living in. So it's really not just studying a single microorganism, but a community of microorganisms. Uh, so some examples [00:02:00] of complex communities. Well, the most complex ecosystem is soil and that's because it has such a diversity of microorganisms and it's really packed full of microbes. So there's so many microorganisms living in soil. So that combined with the diversity makes it a very complex system. The human ecosystem is very complex. Our own intestines have a very complex microbial community. [00:02:30] The oceans or other examples, sediments. So I think this is my community college that you had to think differently than one would when you study organisms in pure culture and their physiology is much more complex Speaker 3: and microbial research seems to have jumped in stature in the past few years. You have a broader view of it than I do. What's your take on the trajectory of microbial research? I think Speaker 4: [00:03:00] particularly the microbial ecology part has increased in stature recently. Microbiology as a field has been around for a long time. But the thing that I think has really boosted the field of microbial ecology is the advent of these new technologies, the new tools to be able to really look at these complex communities and understand them. Until I guess it was about the 1980s there wasn't [00:03:30] any way to really look at these micro organisms in soil. Again, I'll use that as an example, unless you cultivated them onto augur media or looked at them in a microscope. So when the field was limited to looking at what was possible to cultivate, that was only a fraction of the microorganisms that live in soil habitat. So probably fewer than 10% could be cultivated. So the majority of the organisms that were there, [00:04:00] nobody knew anything about them. Their identities or their functions were really unknown. Speaker 4: So it was considered like a black box eco system. But after the late, I guess the 80s and into the 90s there were the developments in DNA extraction techniques. So it was possible to extract DNA from soil and then came PCR amplification methods and methods to be able to amplify specific [00:04:30] pieces of DNA that you had extracted that made it possible to actually study soil microorganisms without cultivating them. And now we have these deep sequencing technologies, so it's really made it much easier to do very deep analysis of these communities and not have to rely on cultivation. Speaker 3: The human microbiome project is in its last year. What were the goals of it and can you speak to that about what the goals were and what you think [00:05:00] you've found out? Speaker 4: The first stage of the h and p was to sequence different bodies sites and understand which micro organisms are residing in different sites in the human body. And so this was looking at a large cohort of humans, healthy humans, and just basically understanding who are the microbial inhabitants of the human body. So that part is winding down. We have that knowledge now. We know that there are different micro organisms that live on your skin, [00:05:30] then in in your gut for examples and also in the oral cavity. So these organisms are specialized to live in different parts of the human body and there are differences between different individuals though. So that means that each human has their own individual microbiome and it can almost be used as a fingerprint. So that was a successfully completed project. The next stage there has been a recent call too, I think it's even called h and p two [00:06:00] to go the next step. So to use other kinds of methods to look at not only which microorganisms are there, but what are they doing. So this would be looking at the functional capabilities of the human microbiome. Another thing that is still ongoing with the h and p is looking at how does disease influence the human microbiome and vice versa. What is the correlation with the microorganisms living with us and disease? And it seems like there are many different links between many [00:06:30] human disease that send the human microbiome Speaker 3: [inaudible] [inaudible]. Speaker 5: Our guest today is microbiologists, Janet Jansen. In the next segment she talks about the microbiome and disease correlation. This is k a l x, Berkeley. Speaker 3: Well, and often in science there's a lot of correlation [00:07:00] that goes on and sometimes you get fooled by the correlation. Sometimes you don't. Are there strategies you use in terms of validating what you think correlates? Speaker 4: Oh, correlations are can be quite challenging. Definitely. So, um, that's an interesting question because then one of the things that is very tricky is if you find a difference in an environmental sample, for example, with the civic treatment or in a human with disease often all we have, [00:07:30] we can then say, well it's correlated to this organism that is higher in abundance or it's correlated to this protein that is higher or lower in abundance. That's a little frustrating. So that the next step, and we're not quite there yet in this field, would be then to say, okay, go beyond correlations and then actually do the proof, you know, to take that organism like Cox postulates, you then prove that this correlation that you see is actually [00:08:00] occurring. But it's difficult with these complex samples, like I was saying before, because you have to move away from the complex environment where you have all these different factors. Speaker 3: So the complexity defeats you in a way because you can't isolate the specific from the general. Exactly. Exactly. And so within this correlation of disease, are there particular diseases that seem to be top priorities in a sense or are most likely to be effected by [00:08:30] the microbiome? An example of Crohn's diseases, Speaker 4: Crohn's disease is the example. I would give us a very clear example and also other inflammatory bowel diseases where there has already been established a link between the gut microbiome and the disease. The details are still under investigation, but there is a difference in the micro organisms that inhabit the intestine in individuals that have Crohn's disease compared to healthy. [00:09:00] So that's known. Speaker 3: And is that the case with ulcers as well? Or they were sort of one of the first, it seems that had this association with the microbiome in the gut, Speaker 4: right. So systemic ulcers, there was a Nobel prize awarded for the discovery of [inaudible] go back to Pylori as the cause of ulcers in the stomach. And so that's a good example, this specific microorganism that can contribute to a disease. And then of course a lot of medications were subsequently [00:09:30] developed to dampen hillcoat back to pylori through new research. We know that there is a considerable diversity of microorganisms in the stomach that people weren't aware of before using these techniques and also in your teeth and then in the oral cavity. There's a very large diversity. I should mention that one of the things that is a really hot topic right now is the link between the brain and the human microbiome, including [00:10:00] the gut microbiome because it's known that some of the metabolites that are produced by these intestinal microbes can pass the blood barrier and then migrated essentially in impact the brain, so some current research is looking at the link between autism and schizophrenia, these kinds of things. Then I think that's really interesting. That's one future direction of the field. Speaker 3: The new initiative in brain mapping exactly [00:10:30] now ties that together. That would be great. At least the findings here was just a new funding. Speaker 4: Yeah, I know. I don't know if they've really decided to make that link for funding, but it probably will come. Speaker 3: Can you talk a bit about American gut and how it's set up to help people figure out their own microbiome? Speaker 4: Sure. So the American get is, it's a relatively new way of doing research [00:11:00] is crowdsourcing. And the idea is that if a person such as myself is interested in knowing quip, my gut microbiome is I can pay a small amount, it's like $100 to get my sample sequence. So that is the way that the project is funded. And so this project, it had a funding goal, I think it was $300,000 to be able to launch the sequencing. And so there was the campaign [00:11:30] and it was sent out to the community and through connections such as Facebook and another with this nice little carrot that if you pay $100 you can get your microbiome. And in addition to gut, it could be your skin sample, oral cavity, your pet. And so this idea really caught on and is a good example of crowdsourcing for funding. Speaker 3: And how are people able to leverage that information? [00:12:00] Is there some characterization that you do as well? Speaker 4: The data that they get back is, it's different kinds of information. So first which micro organisms do I have? That's kind of fun to know. It's sort of like 23 and me where you get information back about which genes you have in, which kind of markers for different things. So depending on your microbial community composition, you may have markers that are more indicative of health, certain kinds of diets like [00:12:30] vegetarian or a protein rich diet, even obesity, there's certain microbial indicators of obesity. So that's just interesting. Another thing that is valuable for the consumer, the person who does this is that you can compare your microbiome to everybody else's. It's all anonymous of course. And nobody knows who's this, who's, but you have your own data and can see how your microbiome fits into a pattern. So do you cluster [00:13:00] with obese people or with a disease type microbiome or a certain kind of eating pattern Speaker 3: and are these online tools that you have available through American gut for people to do this kind of characterization? Speaker 4: So the analysis has to be done by the actual scientists that are doing the samples because it's still quite elaborate and involves a lot of bioinformatics. So currently it's not possible [00:13:30] to do a lot of that on your own, but still to get an output, the actual data, the results of the analysis is what the individual can get through this project. Speaker 2: [inaudible] you were listening to spectrum on a k a l x Berkeley. Our guest today is Janet Jensen. In the next segment she talks about the earth microbiome project. Speaker 3: [00:14:00] Can you talk a bit about the earth microbiome project and maybe differentiate it from the human project? Speaker 4: Yeah, sure. So the Earth microbiome project, which I'll call the emp, is, um, instead of just looking at humans, it's including basically all of earth. So it has a very lofty goal of understanding earth microbial diversity. That project also relies [00:14:30] on collaborators, so it's sort of a crowdsourcing project as well, but limited to the scientific community. So the way that Earth microbiome project works is if a collaborator has an interesting set of samples, for example, from the deep sea or from Yellowstone hot springs that have the required kinds of environmental data, so Ph, nutrients, things like that. Then they can [00:15:00] send an email to the steering committee and say, well, would this study be of interest to the earth microbiome project to the ENP? And then the steering committee looks through the data and decides whether the environmental data is sufficient and if the samples are filling a hole and providing novel information and if so the samples are accepted and the sequencing is done without any costs to the investigator. That's the win win scenario for the emp [00:15:30] because the investigator does of course provide the funding for the study and collection of the samples and the emp provides the funding for the sequencing. Now the funding for emp is also kind of fuzzy because it's through different kinds of companies that have supported by providing regions or equipment and then in turn they get advertisement through the emp that they're sponsors of the project. And so that [00:16:00] also seems to be quite successful. Speaker 3: And the intent again to build a catalog Speaker 4: basically, yes, to build a catalog to find out who's there and are there patterns. The nice thing about heading samples from so many different disparate environments is that you can see, well does this particular microorganism occur across different kinds of environments or is it really endemic only to one kind of habitat? And if you tweak the environment, [00:16:30] for example, with climate change to have increases or losses of certain members of the community that are predictive, one of the aims is to have something like a Google map and then you can highlight all of this sort of organism type in pink. If you click on a button and see where they are localized around the globe. But then if the climate increases by five degrees, then you can click another button and see what happens. Does that organism increase or decrease there? Does another microbial typing [00:17:00] green become more abundant? Speaker 3: The methods you use that you apply to your research. So often we're results oriented with science or at least to the public, you know, what did you find out? It becomes more important than how did you find it out? Can you give us some sense of your methods to doing the research that you do? Speaker 4: I think that the methods, as I mentioned earlier, that's been a limitation to my particular field, but that [00:17:30] also makes it kind of fun because we're always trying to develop better methods and new methods to be able to investigate these systems. And so it's quite challenging, which is something I like. So the method in my own lab that we're developing are different kinds of what I call omix quoting. Oh, mixed methods. So that's everything from sequencing everything, which would be metogenomic x to extracting RNA and [00:18:00] sequencing that. That would be looking at express genes. That's Meta transcriptomics or extracting all the proteins and looking at that. That would be metaproteomics. You can even do the metabolites metabolomics. So these are the current methods that are stated. The art right now for looking at these kinds of complex communities. Speaker 6: [inaudible] [inaudible] Speaker 5: this is k [00:18:30] a l x Berkeley. The show is spectrum. I'm Brad swift. Our guest is professor Janet Jansen, microbial ecologist at Lawrence Berkeley lab and UC Berkeley. Speaker 3: In your experience working on these large projects and also then working in small projects, I'm curious about the, the idea of big science versus small science. You know, the individual scientists toiling [00:19:00] away versus the big group that gets together and decides what they'll do and [inaudible]. Speaker 4: So personally I, I'm a big science kind of person. I definitely appreciate the value of a small science than I do have some smaller targeted projects. I moved to Berkeley lab about five years ago. I was a professor in Sweden before that and my funding was more individual, smaller projects in Sweden. But uh, one of the reasons I came to Berkeley lab was because of the big team science. I really [00:19:30] like that I'm a super collaborator and I can see the value of having people with different skills working together to tackle some really big problems. [inaudible] Speaker 3: and I suppose the culture then becomes really important to the group, the dynamics, the sharing, the openness. And how does that happen, do you think? Have you seen it work well and work badly? Speaker 4: Oh, it's very important. So you had to choose your collaborations as well and sometimes if they, the dynamics [00:20:00] aren't working, then it might be time to rethink the collaborations and revise it in a certain way. But ideally you have people that are so motivated that they are, I know that start delisting, but in the best case situation you have people that are so motivated towards a specific goal that it works quite well. There is an example of one project that is ongoing right now at the lab. It's called the next generation ecosystem [00:20:30] experiment in the Arctic, which is looking at the impact of climate change on permafrost communities. And that's the big doe funded project that involves probably hundreds of researchers at different laboratories, different doe laboratories and universities that are all focusing on one location in Barrow, Alaska, using all of the different tools available at the national labs and expertise at universities as well. Speaker 3: [00:21:00] And how long has that been going on? Speaker 4: It's been about a year and a half. It's a new project, but I'd like it because it has the necessary funding. Of course, when you spread it out, you know, everybody gets a little chunk of it, but it enables incredible things to be done at that site. It's just so much fun to go to these meetings and hear about the lidar sensing team and the modeling team and the hydrology team with their sleds and the geochemists go [00:21:30] in and my part is the microbial ecology. We get deep cores and we extract DNA and sequence them. It's just really a lot of fun Speaker 3: and there's a lot of emphasis on trying to encourage young people to get into science, technology, math. Is there really an opportunity in this field for, for people? Speaker 4: I have to say that right now it's a huge opportunity and there aren't enough persons educated in this field [00:22:00] to be able to fill these growing companies that are starting up. I'm getting several calls from companies that are asking for postdocs from my lab if they're interested in joining and if I were starting right now as a biologist, I would definitely look into bioinformatics and also the metagenome mix fields because these are the sorts of persons that there aren't that many yet. It's not that widespread yet [00:22:30] and there are companies that really need that expertise. Speaker 3: Would you characterize both of those briefly? Speaker 4: The bioinformatics would be more of generation of software algorithms, ways to look at these big data that are generated from different kinds of biological samplesSpeaker 3: and that might include visualization as well as other normal text output kind of a thing. Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely. Everything from the database [00:23:00] management to the visualization of the data and things in between. The statistical analysis, that's a huge growth area and I predict this is going to continue because the data is just getting bigger. It's not going away from that a genomics and these other kinds of omix areas. I think that that would also involve some computing skills, but in addition to differentiate it from bioinformatics, more of the combination with lab skill. Speaker 3: [00:23:30] Janet Johnson. Thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Speaker 4: Thank you. I really enjoyed it. Speaker 3: Well, we'd like to mention a few of the science and technology events locally over the Speaker 7: next two weeks. Rick Karnofsky joins me for the calendar. The Saturday the science of cow lecture will be given by Dr Nadir Mirabal Fathi. The lecture is entitled, connecting infant decimal to infinity, the search for dark matter. [00:24:00] He will speak about a new class of elementary particles known as weakly interacting massive particles or Wimps to resolve inconsistencies in our understanding of the nature at both extreme, large and small scales and how they are connected together. He will also explore the experimental efforts to detect these particles. Interest real laboratories. Nadir r Mirabal Fathi earned Phd in elementary particle physics and cosmology at the University of Paris. He did his postdoctoral [00:24:30] studies at UC Berkeley and has been an associate research physicist at UC Berkeley since 2008 the lecture is Saturday, May 18th at 11:00 AM in room 100 of the genetics and plant biology building. Makerfair. The self-proclaimed greatest show and tell on earth is this weekend, May 18th and 19th at San Mateo fairgrounds. Speaker 7: We talked last year with Tony to rose and Michelle, who? Bianca. Two of the founders of young makers about [00:25:00] the maker fair. Find our interview with them@itunesuortinyurl.com slash calix spectrum one day prices range from $15 to $30. Highlights of this year's maker fair include KQ [inaudible] kitchen sisters with their new radio series, the making of what people make in the bay area and why NASA makers with astronauts, John Grunsfeld, Dennis Bartell's discussing building the new exploratorium, [00:25:30] how to tie a perfect neck tie with Nobel prize physicist Arno Penzias, DIY research with Tekla labs and amazing science. Tornadoes, smoke rings and more. For more information, visit makerfair.com that's maker F A I r e.com the long nose Stuart brand. It's presenting on reviving extinct species on Tuesday, May 21st [00:26:00] at the San Francisco Jazz Center, two Oh one Franklin Street at 7:30 PM tickets are $15 he'll summarize the progress of current de extinction projects including the Europe's Oryx Australia is gastric brooding frog and America's passenger pigeon. Speaker 7: He'll also discuss some of the ancient ecosystem revival projects such as Pleistocene Park in Siberia. New Genomic technology can reassemble the genomes of extinct species [00:26:30] whose DNA is still recoverable from museum specimens and some fossils. Sorry. Jurassic Park fans. No dinosaurs. It is hoped that the jeans unique to the extinct animals can brought back to life in the framework of the genome of the closest living relative. For more information, visit long now.org now Rick Karnofsky and I present to news stories. Alberto Saul from Brown University and colleagues [00:27:00] published an article in science on May 9th that suggests the water that is on the moon came from Earth. The team measured the relative abundance of deuterium that is heavy hydrogen that contains an extra neutron to hydrogen in the water, found in small bubbles of volcanic glass and Melt inclusions in moon rocks. They found the ratio was very similar to the ratio found on earth and from carbonaceous chondrites meteorites that are thought to have supplied [00:27:30] the earth with water. Speaker 7: Higher. Deuterium levels were expected by some who had hypothesized the comments from the Kuyper belt in Oort cloud could have been the source of the Moon's water. If the moon's water did come from Earth, it is likely the earth already had this water when the moon was formed. Some four and a half billion years ago when the earth and another Mars sized planet collided. However, such a collusion may have been hot enough to vaporize the lunar water. There is sir now [00:28:00] debating whether it may have been retained because of the earth's gravity or because the moon shared some of the earth's high temperature atmosphere when it formed pregnant mothers exposure to the flu was associated with a nearly four fold increased risk that their child would develop bipolar disorder in adulthood. In a study funded by the National Institutes of health. The findings add to mounting evidence of possible shared underlying causes and illness processes [00:28:30] with schizophrenia, which some studies have also linked to prenatal exposure to influenza, principal investigator Allen Brown and MD mph of Columbia University says prospective mothers should take common sense preventative measures such as getting flu shots prior to and in early stages of pregnancy and avoiding contact with people who are symptomatic in spite of public health recommendations, only a relatively small fraction of such women [00:29:00] get immunized. Speaker 7: The weight of evidence now suggests that benefits of the vaccine likely outweigh any possible risk to the mother or the newborn. Brown and colleagues reported their findings online. May 8th, 2013 in the Journal of the American Medical Association Psychiatry Speaker 2: [inaudible]. The music heard during the show is written and produced by Alex Simon. [00:29:30] Thank you for listening to spectrum. Had comments about the show, please send them to us via email or email address is spectrum dot k a l s@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Janet Jansson is the Senior Staff Scientist in the Earth Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Her expertise is in molecular microbial ecology and “omics” approaches with a focus on soil, marine sediment and human gut environments.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, [00:00:30] a biweekly 30 minute program, bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Good afternoon. I'm your host, Brad Swift. Today's interview is with Janet Jansen, UC Berkeley, adjunct professor of molecular microbial ecology. She is a senior staff scientist in the Earth Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and president elect of the International Society of microbial [00:01:00] ecology. Her expertise is in the area of molecular microbial ecology and Omix approaches with a focus on soil, marine sediment and human gut environments. Today she talks about the human microbiome project, the Earth microbiome project and American Gut, a crowdsourced research project. Onto that interview. Janet Jansen, welcome to spectrum. Hi, what'd you give us a short description [00:01:30] of microbial ecology and give some examples of complex microbial communities. Speaker 4: Sure. So microbial ecology is the study of micro organisms in the environment and their interactions with other microorganisms, plants, animals, that particular habitat that they happen to be living in. So it's really not just studying a single microorganism, but a community of microorganisms. Uh, so some examples [00:02:00] of complex communities. Well, the most complex ecosystem is soil and that's because it has such a diversity of microorganisms and it's really packed full of microbes. So there's so many microorganisms living in soil. So that combined with the diversity makes it a very complex system. The human ecosystem is very complex. Our own intestines have a very complex microbial community. [00:02:30] The oceans or other examples, sediments. So I think this is my community college that you had to think differently than one would when you study organisms in pure culture and their physiology is much more complex Speaker 3: and microbial research seems to have jumped in stature in the past few years. You have a broader view of it than I do. What's your take on the trajectory of microbial research? I think Speaker 4: [00:03:00] particularly the microbial ecology part has increased in stature recently. Microbiology as a field has been around for a long time. But the thing that I think has really boosted the field of microbial ecology is the advent of these new technologies, the new tools to be able to really look at these complex communities and understand them. Until I guess it was about the 1980s there wasn't [00:03:30] any way to really look at these micro organisms in soil. Again, I'll use that as an example, unless you cultivated them onto augur media or looked at them in a microscope. So when the field was limited to looking at what was possible to cultivate, that was only a fraction of the microorganisms that live in soil habitat. So probably fewer than 10% could be cultivated. So the majority of the organisms that were there, [00:04:00] nobody knew anything about them. Their identities or their functions were really unknown. Speaker 4: So it was considered like a black box eco system. But after the late, I guess the 80s and into the 90s there were the developments in DNA extraction techniques. So it was possible to extract DNA from soil and then came PCR amplification methods and methods to be able to amplify specific [00:04:30] pieces of DNA that you had extracted that made it possible to actually study soil microorganisms without cultivating them. And now we have these deep sequencing technologies, so it's really made it much easier to do very deep analysis of these communities and not have to rely on cultivation. Speaker 3: The human microbiome project is in its last year. What were the goals of it and can you speak to that about what the goals were and what you think [00:05:00] you've found out? Speaker 4: The first stage of the h and p was to sequence different bodies sites and understand which micro organisms are residing in different sites in the human body. And so this was looking at a large cohort of humans, healthy humans, and just basically understanding who are the microbial inhabitants of the human body. So that part is winding down. We have that knowledge now. We know that there are different micro organisms that live on your skin, [00:05:30] then in in your gut for examples and also in the oral cavity. So these organisms are specialized to live in different parts of the human body and there are differences between different individuals though. So that means that each human has their own individual microbiome and it can almost be used as a fingerprint. So that was a successfully completed project. The next stage there has been a recent call too, I think it's even called h and p two [00:06:00] to go the next step. So to use other kinds of methods to look at not only which microorganisms are there, but what are they doing. So this would be looking at the functional capabilities of the human microbiome. Another thing that is still ongoing with the h and p is looking at how does disease influence the human microbiome and vice versa. What is the correlation with the microorganisms living with us and disease? And it seems like there are many different links between many [00:06:30] human disease that send the human microbiome Speaker 3: [inaudible] [inaudible]. Speaker 5: Our guest today is microbiologists, Janet Jansen. In the next segment she talks about the microbiome and disease correlation. This is k a l x, Berkeley. Speaker 3: Well, and often in science there's a lot of correlation [00:07:00] that goes on and sometimes you get fooled by the correlation. Sometimes you don't. Are there strategies you use in terms of validating what you think correlates? Speaker 4: Oh, correlations are can be quite challenging. Definitely. So, um, that's an interesting question because then one of the things that is very tricky is if you find a difference in an environmental sample, for example, with the civic treatment or in a human with disease often all we have, [00:07:30] we can then say, well it's correlated to this organism that is higher in abundance or it's correlated to this protein that is higher or lower in abundance. That's a little frustrating. So that the next step, and we're not quite there yet in this field, would be then to say, okay, go beyond correlations and then actually do the proof, you know, to take that organism like Cox postulates, you then prove that this correlation that you see is actually [00:08:00] occurring. But it's difficult with these complex samples, like I was saying before, because you have to move away from the complex environment where you have all these different factors. Speaker 3: So the complexity defeats you in a way because you can't isolate the specific from the general. Exactly. Exactly. And so within this correlation of disease, are there particular diseases that seem to be top priorities in a sense or are most likely to be effected by [00:08:30] the microbiome? An example of Crohn's diseases, Speaker 4: Crohn's disease is the example. I would give us a very clear example and also other inflammatory bowel diseases where there has already been established a link between the gut microbiome and the disease. The details are still under investigation, but there is a difference in the micro organisms that inhabit the intestine in individuals that have Crohn's disease compared to healthy. [00:09:00] So that's known. Speaker 3: And is that the case with ulcers as well? Or they were sort of one of the first, it seems that had this association with the microbiome in the gut, Speaker 4: right. So systemic ulcers, there was a Nobel prize awarded for the discovery of [inaudible] go back to Pylori as the cause of ulcers in the stomach. And so that's a good example, this specific microorganism that can contribute to a disease. And then of course a lot of medications were subsequently [00:09:30] developed to dampen hillcoat back to pylori through new research. We know that there is a considerable diversity of microorganisms in the stomach that people weren't aware of before using these techniques and also in your teeth and then in the oral cavity. There's a very large diversity. I should mention that one of the things that is a really hot topic right now is the link between the brain and the human microbiome, including [00:10:00] the gut microbiome because it's known that some of the metabolites that are produced by these intestinal microbes can pass the blood barrier and then migrated essentially in impact the brain, so some current research is looking at the link between autism and schizophrenia, these kinds of things. Then I think that's really interesting. That's one future direction of the field. Speaker 3: The new initiative in brain mapping exactly [00:10:30] now ties that together. That would be great. At least the findings here was just a new funding. Speaker 4: Yeah, I know. I don't know if they've really decided to make that link for funding, but it probably will come. Speaker 3: Can you talk a bit about American gut and how it's set up to help people figure out their own microbiome? Speaker 4: Sure. So the American get is, it's a relatively new way of doing research [00:11:00] is crowdsourcing. And the idea is that if a person such as myself is interested in knowing quip, my gut microbiome is I can pay a small amount, it's like $100 to get my sample sequence. So that is the way that the project is funded. And so this project, it had a funding goal, I think it was $300,000 to be able to launch the sequencing. And so there was the campaign [00:11:30] and it was sent out to the community and through connections such as Facebook and another with this nice little carrot that if you pay $100 you can get your microbiome. And in addition to gut, it could be your skin sample, oral cavity, your pet. And so this idea really caught on and is a good example of crowdsourcing for funding. Speaker 3: And how are people able to leverage that information? [00:12:00] Is there some characterization that you do as well? Speaker 4: The data that they get back is, it's different kinds of information. So first which micro organisms do I have? That's kind of fun to know. It's sort of like 23 and me where you get information back about which genes you have in, which kind of markers for different things. So depending on your microbial community composition, you may have markers that are more indicative of health, certain kinds of diets like [00:12:30] vegetarian or a protein rich diet, even obesity, there's certain microbial indicators of obesity. So that's just interesting. Another thing that is valuable for the consumer, the person who does this is that you can compare your microbiome to everybody else's. It's all anonymous of course. And nobody knows who's this, who's, but you have your own data and can see how your microbiome fits into a pattern. So do you cluster [00:13:00] with obese people or with a disease type microbiome or a certain kind of eating pattern Speaker 3: and are these online tools that you have available through American gut for people to do this kind of characterization? Speaker 4: So the analysis has to be done by the actual scientists that are doing the samples because it's still quite elaborate and involves a lot of bioinformatics. So currently it's not possible [00:13:30] to do a lot of that on your own, but still to get an output, the actual data, the results of the analysis is what the individual can get through this project. Speaker 2: [inaudible] you were listening to spectrum on a k a l x Berkeley. Our guest today is Janet Jensen. In the next segment she talks about the earth microbiome project. Speaker 3: [00:14:00] Can you talk a bit about the earth microbiome project and maybe differentiate it from the human project? Speaker 4: Yeah, sure. So the Earth microbiome project, which I'll call the emp, is, um, instead of just looking at humans, it's including basically all of earth. So it has a very lofty goal of understanding earth microbial diversity. That project also relies [00:14:30] on collaborators, so it's sort of a crowdsourcing project as well, but limited to the scientific community. So the way that Earth microbiome project works is if a collaborator has an interesting set of samples, for example, from the deep sea or from Yellowstone hot springs that have the required kinds of environmental data, so Ph, nutrients, things like that. Then they can [00:15:00] send an email to the steering committee and say, well, would this study be of interest to the earth microbiome project to the ENP? And then the steering committee looks through the data and decides whether the environmental data is sufficient and if the samples are filling a hole and providing novel information and if so the samples are accepted and the sequencing is done without any costs to the investigator. That's the win win scenario for the emp [00:15:30] because the investigator does of course provide the funding for the study and collection of the samples and the emp provides the funding for the sequencing. Now the funding for emp is also kind of fuzzy because it's through different kinds of companies that have supported by providing regions or equipment and then in turn they get advertisement through the emp that they're sponsors of the project. And so that [00:16:00] also seems to be quite successful. Speaker 3: And the intent again to build a catalog Speaker 4: basically, yes, to build a catalog to find out who's there and are there patterns. The nice thing about heading samples from so many different disparate environments is that you can see, well does this particular microorganism occur across different kinds of environments or is it really endemic only to one kind of habitat? And if you tweak the environment, [00:16:30] for example, with climate change to have increases or losses of certain members of the community that are predictive, one of the aims is to have something like a Google map and then you can highlight all of this sort of organism type in pink. If you click on a button and see where they are localized around the globe. But then if the climate increases by five degrees, then you can click another button and see what happens. Does that organism increase or decrease there? Does another microbial typing [00:17:00] green become more abundant? Speaker 3: The methods you use that you apply to your research. So often we're results oriented with science or at least to the public, you know, what did you find out? It becomes more important than how did you find it out? Can you give us some sense of your methods to doing the research that you do? Speaker 4: I think that the methods, as I mentioned earlier, that's been a limitation to my particular field, but that [00:17:30] also makes it kind of fun because we're always trying to develop better methods and new methods to be able to investigate these systems. And so it's quite challenging, which is something I like. So the method in my own lab that we're developing are different kinds of what I call omix quoting. Oh, mixed methods. So that's everything from sequencing everything, which would be metogenomic x to extracting RNA and [00:18:00] sequencing that. That would be looking at express genes. That's Meta transcriptomics or extracting all the proteins and looking at that. That would be metaproteomics. You can even do the metabolites metabolomics. So these are the current methods that are stated. The art right now for looking at these kinds of complex communities. Speaker 6: [inaudible] [inaudible] Speaker 5: this is k [00:18:30] a l x Berkeley. The show is spectrum. I'm Brad swift. Our guest is professor Janet Jansen, microbial ecologist at Lawrence Berkeley lab and UC Berkeley. Speaker 3: In your experience working on these large projects and also then working in small projects, I'm curious about the, the idea of big science versus small science. You know, the individual scientists toiling [00:19:00] away versus the big group that gets together and decides what they'll do and [inaudible]. Speaker 4: So personally I, I'm a big science kind of person. I definitely appreciate the value of a small science than I do have some smaller targeted projects. I moved to Berkeley lab about five years ago. I was a professor in Sweden before that and my funding was more individual, smaller projects in Sweden. But uh, one of the reasons I came to Berkeley lab was because of the big team science. I really [00:19:30] like that I'm a super collaborator and I can see the value of having people with different skills working together to tackle some really big problems. [inaudible] Speaker 3: and I suppose the culture then becomes really important to the group, the dynamics, the sharing, the openness. And how does that happen, do you think? Have you seen it work well and work badly? Speaker 4: Oh, it's very important. So you had to choose your collaborations as well and sometimes if they, the dynamics [00:20:00] aren't working, then it might be time to rethink the collaborations and revise it in a certain way. But ideally you have people that are so motivated that they are, I know that start delisting, but in the best case situation you have people that are so motivated towards a specific goal that it works quite well. There is an example of one project that is ongoing right now at the lab. It's called the next generation ecosystem [00:20:30] experiment in the Arctic, which is looking at the impact of climate change on permafrost communities. And that's the big doe funded project that involves probably hundreds of researchers at different laboratories, different doe laboratories and universities that are all focusing on one location in Barrow, Alaska, using all of the different tools available at the national labs and expertise at universities as well. Speaker 3: [00:21:00] And how long has that been going on? Speaker 4: It's been about a year and a half. It's a new project, but I'd like it because it has the necessary funding. Of course, when you spread it out, you know, everybody gets a little chunk of it, but it enables incredible things to be done at that site. It's just so much fun to go to these meetings and hear about the lidar sensing team and the modeling team and the hydrology team with their sleds and the geochemists go [00:21:30] in and my part is the microbial ecology. We get deep cores and we extract DNA and sequence them. It's just really a lot of fun Speaker 3: and there's a lot of emphasis on trying to encourage young people to get into science, technology, math. Is there really an opportunity in this field for, for people? Speaker 4: I have to say that right now it's a huge opportunity and there aren't enough persons educated in this field [00:22:00] to be able to fill these growing companies that are starting up. I'm getting several calls from companies that are asking for postdocs from my lab if they're interested in joining and if I were starting right now as a biologist, I would definitely look into bioinformatics and also the metagenome mix fields because these are the sorts of persons that there aren't that many yet. It's not that widespread yet [00:22:30] and there are companies that really need that expertise. Speaker 3: Would you characterize both of those briefly? Speaker 4: The bioinformatics would be more of generation of software algorithms, ways to look at these big data that are generated from different kinds of biological samplesSpeaker 3: and that might include visualization as well as other normal text output kind of a thing. Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely. Everything from the database [00:23:00] management to the visualization of the data and things in between. The statistical analysis, that's a huge growth area and I predict this is going to continue because the data is just getting bigger. It's not going away from that a genomics and these other kinds of omix areas. I think that that would also involve some computing skills, but in addition to differentiate it from bioinformatics, more of the combination with lab skill. Speaker 3: [00:23:30] Janet Johnson. Thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Speaker 4: Thank you. I really enjoyed it. Speaker 3: Well, we'd like to mention a few of the science and technology events locally over the Speaker 7: next two weeks. Rick Karnofsky joins me for the calendar. The Saturday the science of cow lecture will be given by Dr Nadir Mirabal Fathi. The lecture is entitled, connecting infant decimal to infinity, the search for dark matter. [00:24:00] He will speak about a new class of elementary particles known as weakly interacting massive particles or Wimps to resolve inconsistencies in our understanding of the nature at both extreme, large and small scales and how they are connected together. He will also explore the experimental efforts to detect these particles. Interest real laboratories. Nadir r Mirabal Fathi earned Phd in elementary particle physics and cosmology at the University of Paris. He did his postdoctoral [00:24:30] studies at UC Berkeley and has been an associate research physicist at UC Berkeley since 2008 the lecture is Saturday, May 18th at 11:00 AM in room 100 of the genetics and plant biology building. Makerfair. The self-proclaimed greatest show and tell on earth is this weekend, May 18th and 19th at San Mateo fairgrounds. Speaker 7: We talked last year with Tony to rose and Michelle, who? Bianca. Two of the founders of young makers about [00:25:00] the maker fair. Find our interview with them@itunesuortinyurl.com slash calix spectrum one day prices range from $15 to $30. Highlights of this year's maker fair include KQ [inaudible] kitchen sisters with their new radio series, the making of what people make in the bay area and why NASA makers with astronauts, John Grunsfeld, Dennis Bartell's discussing building the new exploratorium, [00:25:30] how to tie a perfect neck tie with Nobel prize physicist Arno Penzias, DIY research with Tekla labs and amazing science. Tornadoes, smoke rings and more. For more information, visit makerfair.com that's maker F A I r e.com the long nose Stuart brand. It's presenting on reviving extinct species on Tuesday, May 21st [00:26:00] at the San Francisco Jazz Center, two Oh one Franklin Street at 7:30 PM tickets are $15 he'll summarize the progress of current de extinction projects including the Europe's Oryx Australia is gastric brooding frog and America's passenger pigeon. Speaker 7: He'll also discuss some of the ancient ecosystem revival projects such as Pleistocene Park in Siberia. New Genomic technology can reassemble the genomes of extinct species [00:26:30] whose DNA is still recoverable from museum specimens and some fossils. Sorry. Jurassic Park fans. No dinosaurs. It is hoped that the jeans unique to the extinct animals can brought back to life in the framework of the genome of the closest living relative. For more information, visit long now.org now Rick Karnofsky and I present to news stories. Alberto Saul from Brown University and colleagues [00:27:00] published an article in science on May 9th that suggests the water that is on the moon came from Earth. The team measured the relative abundance of deuterium that is heavy hydrogen that contains an extra neutron to hydrogen in the water, found in small bubbles of volcanic glass and Melt inclusions in moon rocks. They found the ratio was very similar to the ratio found on earth and from carbonaceous chondrites meteorites that are thought to have supplied [00:27:30] the earth with water. Speaker 7: Higher. Deuterium levels were expected by some who had hypothesized the comments from the Kuyper belt in Oort cloud could have been the source of the Moon's water. If the moon's water did come from Earth, it is likely the earth already had this water when the moon was formed. Some four and a half billion years ago when the earth and another Mars sized planet collided. However, such a collusion may have been hot enough to vaporize the lunar water. There is sir now [00:28:00] debating whether it may have been retained because of the earth's gravity or because the moon shared some of the earth's high temperature atmosphere when it formed pregnant mothers exposure to the flu was associated with a nearly four fold increased risk that their child would develop bipolar disorder in adulthood. In a study funded by the National Institutes of health. The findings add to mounting evidence of possible shared underlying causes and illness processes [00:28:30] with schizophrenia, which some studies have also linked to prenatal exposure to influenza, principal investigator Allen Brown and MD mph of Columbia University says prospective mothers should take common sense preventative measures such as getting flu shots prior to and in early stages of pregnancy and avoiding contact with people who are symptomatic in spite of public health recommendations, only a relatively small fraction of such women [00:29:00] get immunized. Speaker 7: The weight of evidence now suggests that benefits of the vaccine likely outweigh any possible risk to the mother or the newborn. Brown and colleagues reported their findings online. May 8th, 2013 in the Journal of the American Medical Association Psychiatry Speaker 2: [inaudible]. The music heard during the show is written and produced by Alex Simon. [00:29:30] Thank you for listening to spectrum. Had comments about the show, please send them to us via email or email address is spectrum dot k a l s@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Princeton and UC Berkeley trained chemist Delia Milliron is the Deputy Director of the Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley Lab. In part one, Delia explains Nano Science and Technology. She talks about her research with nanocrystals to make thin films. foundry.lbl.govTranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Mm mm mm mm mm mm mm Speaker 3: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome [00:00:30] to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 4: Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Today is part one of a two part interview with Delia Mil Iron, the deputy director of the Lawrence Berkeley national lab molecular foundry, [00:01:00] Delia mill iron is a chemist. She received her undergraduate degree from Princeton and her phd from UC Berkeley. Delia leads a research group at the molecular foundry which has recently spun off a startup named heliotrope technologies for group is a partner in the newly announced Joint Center for Energy Storage Research, a multistate department of energy research hub focused on developing transformative new battery technology. Delios group was recently awarded a $3 million grant [00:01:30] by the Department of Energy Advanced Research projects, agency dash energy by e for her work on smart window technologies onto the interview. Delia mill iron. Welcome to spectrum. Speaker 5: Thank you.Speaker 4: I suspect that most of our listeners have heard of nanoscience but don't have a lot of perspective on the detail. Would you explain what makes nanoscience and nanotechnology unique? Speaker 5: Sure, [00:02:00] so nano science is about investigating how the properties of matter change sometimes quite dramatically when we structure them on the nanometers scale, which is really the molecular scale. So in a sense it's quite related to chemistry, but it's about materials and matter and how their behavior is very different than what you'd expect from macroscopic pieces of material. Would you like some examples? [00:02:30] Sure. An example would be great. Okay. A classic example is to look at the optical properties or just the visible appearance of gold and everyone knows, of course, when gold is macroscopic, it's shiny and it's yellowish and we're very used to that form of gold. When you make gold in the form of nanoparticles, the things that are, let's say between five and 50 nanometers across [00:03:00] or containing a few thousand atoms per particle, then the gold no longer looks either yellow or shiny. In fact, you can make stable dispersion or solution of gold at that scale in water. And it appears translucent and red in color. And this effect of Nano scaling and gold has been used to color artistic objects for centuries, but we've only recently become to systematically [00:03:30] understand the science of how these sorts of properties can change so dramatically when we make materials in the nanoscale. Speaker 4: So the actual doing of it has been done for a long time, but the understanding is what's more recent and then the ability to recreate Speaker 5: and the ability to control and deliberately manipulate. Yes. So there are plenty of instances of incidental or almost accidental creation of nanoscale materials and [00:04:00] utilization of these nanoscale effects on properties. But the science of it is about systematically correlating the structure and composition and materials to their properties. And then the nanotechnology or the engineering of of nanoscale materials is about deliberately controlling those properties to create new functional things, objects, devices and so on that we can use for useful things all around us. Speaker 4: And what are some of the common things [00:04:30] that we find nano technology in in our daily lives? Speaker 5: As with any new technology. The first applications are fairly pedestrian in some sense and don't require the most exquisite control over the materials. So one that's quite common is to use metal oxide nanocrystals. Typically things like zinc oxide or titanium oxide in sunblock. These materials absorb UV radiation to [00:05:00] protect our skin from damage from UV. But because they're at the nano scale, instead of looking white, it can be clear. And so it's just that ugly, much more pleasing to put on some block that then appears clear, but still does the job of blocking UV radiation. So this doesn't require a very fine control over the details of the structure or the size of the material. It's only important that the scale of the oxide particles be well below the wavelength [00:05:30] of light, and that's what makes it clear. So it's a very simple use, but nonetheless, very practical and helpful. Speaker 4: What are you finding are the challenges of working with nanoscale material? Speaker 5: It's all about taking that control to the next level. Chemists have learned for a long time how to manipulate atoms and create bonds and put them together into small molecules. Now we're working with structures of [00:06:00] a somewhat larger length scale and wanting to control different aspects of the composition and structure. So there are no ready solutions for deliberately arranging the atoms into let's say a five nanometer crystal with precision, um, in order to generate the properties that you'd like or again, just understand them frankly. So both the creation of materials with precise control and detailed understanding of what their structure is are still very [00:06:30] big challenges. Of course conventional microscopy methods don't extend very well to these small length scales. So there's a need for new characterization approaches. And then as I said, the chemical methods for making molecules and small molecular systems likewise don't necessarily translate to the slightly bigger scale that is nanometer length scale of these materials. Speaker 5: So we need a innovations on all sides, making new materials, new ways to look at them and characterize [00:07:00] them. And then finally the third piece is the theory that helps understand their properties and predict new properties. Again, it's sort of an awkward in between lanes scale where atomic detail matters, but larger scale aspects of how the materials come together matters as well. And that's very difficult to approach with computational methods, so we're seeing the frontier of nanoscience is pushing scientists from all different disciplines to advance their tools and their techniques [00:07:30] in order to really take advantage of what can be done at that landscape. Speaker 4: Okay. Speaker 6: Delia mill iron is our guest. She is the deputy director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory molecular foundry. She is a chemist working at the nanoscale. You are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Speaker 4: You've talked about the meter. Yes. Is that a new form of measurement and how does it relate to anything [00:08:00] else? How do we reflect on an nanometre? Sure, Speaker 5: so it's not a new measure. It's simply a meter times 10 to the minus ninth that's what what Nano means and a more conventional measure on that lane scale might be an Angstrom, which is a traditional measure. It's one order of magnitude smaller than an animator, but to put it in more practical terms, I like to think of the Nano crystals that I work with, for example, which are about five nanometers across, [00:08:30] are about a million times smaller than an ant. So that for me gives me a sort of practical reference point as a chemist. It also makes sense to me to think of a five nanometer crystal as containing about a thousand atoms, but atoms are not necessarily a easy to understand lane skill for everybody. So the the ant is maybe a more common reference point, what natural materials have been created and what about them makes them [00:09:00] more promising than another depending on the realm of properties that you examine. Speaker 5: Promising has all sorts of different meanings, right? So things like semiconductor nano wires or perhaps graphene or carbon nanotubes may be considered promising for new electronic materials because the transport of electrons through these structures can proceed quite unimpeded and move very [00:09:30] readily so that we could have fast electronics or very conductive transparent thin films to replace the things we use today in our flat panel displays and so on. Other nano materials are very promising for diagnostics of different kinds of diseases or even for therapy of different kinds of health issues. So there are biological probes being developed that can be directed into specific areas [00:10:00] of your body. For example, where a tumor site is located using a nanoscale magnet and then they also carry a payload of drugs that can then be released specifically at that site. So you could have targeted therapies. So these sort of multifunctional nano constructs are very interesting. Speaker 5: I would say promising in the long run for for new targeted therapies, I have many fewer side effects than these broad spectrum drugs that we commonly use today. In terms of coming up [00:10:30] with new nanomaterials, is it as often the case that you are trying to create something for a specific purpose or that you accidentally find something that has a characteristic that can be applied pretty widely or to a specific use? I think that much of Nano materials research is motivated by the investigation and discovery of new phenomenon. And I distinguish that from targeted application [00:11:00] focused development because it's often unclear what a new material or it's phenomenological characteristics will actually be useful for. In my lab. Uh, we do tend to think of practical connections, but then the ones that we ultimately realize could be very different from the one that motivated us at the outset of the project. So I think as a scientist it's important to be attuned [00:11:30] for surprising opportunities to apply materials in ways you didn't anticipate. And so you have to be aware of the needs that are out there, the big needs in society, basically paying attention for how the phenomena you're discovering might map onto these societal needs. You probably as a scientist, not going to able to take Speaker 5: a new discovery all the way through to a practical application. But if you don't at [00:12:00] least identify those connections, it will be difficult for engineers and industry to take your discoveries and turn them into practical applications. So there's a role on both sides to make that connection. Speaker 4: [inaudible] you are the deputy director of the molecular foundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Tell us about the foundry and the work going on there. Speaker 5: So the molecular foundry is a very special place. It's one of five department of energy funded [00:12:30] nanoscale science research centers, which are located around the country. And we have the mission of pushing the forefront of nanoscience broadly defined, so nanoscience in all different aspects while at the same time acting as a user facility to help others in the scientific community, be they academic researchers, industry, others at national labs move the science in their areas forward by leveraging the tools of nanoscience. [00:13:00] So it in effect, it becomes this amazing hub of activity and nanoscience where people from really all around the world are coming to us to leverage capabilities that we are continuously advancing and developing in different kinds of nanoscience be it inorganic nanocrystals, which is my focus theoretical methods for treating nanoscience completely out of this world. In my mind, I'm spectroscopic techniques [00:13:30] for looking at nanostructures.Speaker 5: All these things are being developed at the foundry, at the absolute bleeding edge of nanoscience, and these can have impact in all different areas. And so our users come, they work with us, they learn these state of the art techniques, generate new materials that they can take home with them to their own laboratories, integrate into their materials and processes and devices and so on or do their a specialized characterization on and the amount of science that results by [00:14:00] that multiplication and leveraging is really very exciting to watch. Oh, it's a hub. It's an intersection of ideas in one place of problem, motivations from different perspectives and then it branches right on back out to impact science and in all different ways. Speaker 4: What sort of a funding horizon are you on? Speaker 5: Uh, so we have very stable funding from the Department of Energy. These centers are quite new. They were only established [00:14:30] over the last 10 years. The foundry has been in full operations for about six years and they are very much the flagship capabilities of the office of science within the Department of Energy and will be for quite some time to come. So they're making a very stable and continued investment in this area and continue to see the value and opportunity for really in the end, American economy, taxpayers and industrial [00:15:00] innovation that's generated by all of this scientific activity. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 4: you were listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley, Delia mill, iron of Lawrence Berkeley national lab is talking about her work in nanoscience and nanotechnology. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 4: what's the focus of your research? Speaker 5: So my research involves the [00:15:30] innovation of Inorganic nanocrystals, which are a few nanometers diameter crystal and arrangements of atoms. And they're using these as building blocks to construct materials. So we put them together with each other and two, for example, porous architectures, or you put them together with polymers or we put them together, uh, with glassy components to construct macroscopic materials often than films. And we're interested [00:16:00] in these primarily for their electrochemical functions. So electric chemical devices are useful for things like batteries, supercapacitors a storing energy also for converting energy. And in our case, we've most recently been focused on electrochromic window applications. So these are function like batteries, but instead of storing charge, they have the effect of changing the tint on a window dynamically as a function [00:16:30] of voltage. But everything starts with the nanocrystals and new ways to put them together with other components to construct materials. Speaker 4: And is the crystal material something unusual or is it real commonplace? Speaker 5: It varies actually. Most of the materials that we craft into nanocrystals are well known and have been studied for a long time in their bulk form. So just as in the example of gold being very different in both and obviously useful for [00:17:00] all sorts of things like currency now having very different function on the Nano scale. We work with materials that maybe are not quite as common places goal, but nonetheless fairly common. So one material we've been working with a lot lately is called indium tin oxide. And whether you know it or not, you probably use it every day. It's the material that provides conductivity in flat panel displays, touch screens, all of these sorts of things. And so in it's normal thin [00:17:30] film form, it's obviously very well established and used around the world for all different applications. It was only synthesized in a well controlled way as Netto crystals in the last few years. Speaker 5: And in the Neto crystal form, it has all of these wonderful properties relating to electric chromic windows. And beyond that it has, I guess I should say more fundamentally, the phenomenology underlying those windows applications is that this [00:18:00] material is plasmonic, which means that it can effectively condense a near infrared light to a very small scale, can amplify the electric field from the light, basically manipulate light in a new way. And people have been doing this with metals like gold as one example. Silver is another for a while, and a whole new field of plasmonics has emerged. Um, now with Ito on the nanoscale, we're bringing [00:18:30] plasmonics into the infrared region of the spectrum, which is going to give us whole news opportunities for manipulation of light of that sword, channeling light and so on. So the, as I was saying earlier, the phenomenology is where we spend the most time and discovery of these plasmonic characteristics of Ito is going to lead to many, many applications. The one we've been focusing on is this electric chromic window idea. Speaker 4: Oh, is this one of the real opportunities [00:19:00] within nano science that when you take a material to the Nano scale, you get all this new behavior [inaudible] Speaker 5: that's the fundamental concept underlying the investigation of nanoscale materials. And so the NNI, the national nanoscience initiative or national nanotechnology initiative, which was started, you know, over a decade ago now had as its founding principle, basically that idea that we would investigate the properties that emerge [00:19:30] when materials are made on the nanoscale that are very distinct from what we see on the macro scale. And from this, uh, we would have a whole new playbook for creating functional materials and devices. Speaker 4: There's been talk about the idea of transparent failure being a good thing in science. So you can learn from what goes wrong. Speaker 5: Yeah, science is full of failure. Most things don't work, especially when you first try them. [00:20:00] So I like to say that in order to be a scientist, you have to be unrelentingly optimistic because you're great idea that you're incredibly excited about, probably won't work or at least it won't work initially. And then you have to try again and try again and try again. And often it won't work even after you've tried again many, many times and you still have to have the same passion for your next great idea that you wake up the next morning [00:20:30] and you're excited to go try something new. That belief in possibility I think is fundamental to science, but at the same point. Yeah, I think you're right. The failures are not merely something to be discarded along the way to, and they do teach us a lot and frankly they suggest the next great idea more often than not. Speaker 5: So we have in mind something we're trying to do and a complete failure to [00:21:00] accomplish that. Whether it's a bond we're trying to make or a way we're trying to control a shape of a material or to create a specific optical property we get something we didn't expect and that should and when science is functioning well does cause you to stop and think about why that's happening. In fact, maybe the challenge, some of the challenge in doing science is not becoming too distracted by all of the [00:21:30] possibilities that emerge. When you do that. It's a mistake of course to be too single minded and focused on an end goal too early because you'll, you'll miss really all the new phenomenon, the things that you least expected are often the most important and innovative, so you have to pay attention to these things and perhaps redefine them as not being failures but rather being a new success or a new seed of a success that can take you in a new direction. Speaker 5: That said, there probably are things that [00:22:00] even in that from that perspective can be viewed as a negative result or a failure and there's an important role. I mean the scientific literature is, is full of every scholarly article has to include a transparent reporting of the conditions that led to what's being defined as success or specific results and a recording of what happens elsewise basically because that allows you to understand much more [00:22:30] deeply where that successful result emerges if you understand the conditions that lead to failure and different types of failure. So definitely for understanding sake, this is essential. Speaker 3: This is the end part. One of our interview with Delia [inaudible] finale, part two will air December 28th at noon. Don't miss it. The molecular foundry website [00:23:00] is foundries.lbl.gov Speaker 1: now the calendar with Lisa [inaudible] and Rick Karnofsky on Saturday, December 15th science at Cow Lecture series. We'll present a free public talk by Rosemary, a Joyce or UC Berkeley anthropology professor on everyday life and science in the Pre-colombian Mayan world. Joyce. We'll discuss how the Maya developed and use their calendar, which spans almost 1200 [00:23:30] years ending around December 21st, 2012 the end of the world, she will explore the observational astronomy made possible through the use of written records, employing one of the only two scripts in the world to develop a sign for zero. The lecture which is free and open to the public, will be held on December 15th from 11 to 12:00 AM in room 100 of the genetics and plant biology building on the UC Berkeley campus. Speaker 7: Tomorrow, December 15th Wild Oakland. [00:24:00] We'll have a free one hour walk from noon to one defined an identifying mushrooms around lake merit. Meet at the Rotary Science Center on the corner of Perkins in Bellevue. The walk will be around the grassy areas, so rattling the boat house and the Lake Merritt Gardens. Learn to read the landscape and find where the mushrooms hide and their role and the local ecology. Bring guidebooks. Have you have them as well as a small pocket knife, a paintbrush [inaudible] jacket. Visit a wild oakland.org for more [00:24:30] info. Speaker 1: On Saturday, December 15th the American Society for Cell Biology welcomes the public to its 2012 keynote lecture. The event will feature Steven Chu Nobel laureate and US Secretary of energy and Arthur Levinson, chair of Genentech and apple here about the future of science and innovation and view an art exhibit by scientists, artists, Graham Johnson and Janet, a Wasa. Attend the art exhibit and reception [00:25:00] from five to five 45 and then stay and listen to the Speakers from six to 7:30 PM free. Preregistration is required at ASC B. Dot. O. R. G, the event takes place at Moscone center west seven 47 Howard street in San Francisco. Saturday, December 15th Speaker 7: the regional parks botanical garden at the intersection of Wildcat Canyon Road and South Park drive and Tilden regional park in the Berkeley hills. [00:25:30] Host the Wayne Rodrick lecture series. These free lectures are on Saturday mornings at 10:30 AM and are on a variety of topics related to plants and natural history. Free Tours of the garden. Begin at 2:00 PM tomorrow's tuck features Dick O'Donnell, who will discuss the floristic surprises and the drought stricken southwest and next Saturday the 22nd of December. Steve Edwards. We'll talk about the botany and GLG of the Lassen region. More information on the series is available@nativeplants.org Speaker 1: [00:26:00] beginning on December 26 the Lawrence Hall of science will begin screening and interactive program in their planetarium called constellations. Tonight. A simple star map will be provided to help participants learn to identify the most prominent constellations of the season in the planetarium. Sky. Questions and activities will be part of the program. The presentation will continue until January 4th and will be held every weekday from two to 2:45 PM [00:26:30] tickets are $4 at the Lawrence Hall of science after the price of admission. Remember that's beginning on December 26th [inaudible] Speaker 7: with two news stories. Here is Rick Karnofsky and Lisa kind of itch. Nature News reported on December 11th Speaker 1: that the u s national ignition facility or Nif at Lawrence Livermore national laboratory is changing directions. Nip uses a 192 ultraviolet laser beams that interact with the gold capsule, creating x-rays. These x-rays [00:27:00] crush a two millimeter target pellet of deuterium and tritium causing fusion. Nif has not yet achieved ignition where it may deliver more energy than it consumes I triple e spectrum criticized the project for being $5 billion over budget and years behind. Schedule in the revised plans [inaudible] scale back to focus on ignition and would devote three years for deciding whether it would be possible. It would increase focus on research, a fusion for the nuclear weapons [00:27:30] stockpile stewardship program and basic science. It would also devote resources to other ignition concepts. Namely polar direct drive on Omega at the University of Rochester and magnetically driven implosions on the San Diego z machine. The Journal. Nature reports that rows matter a natural plant die once price throughout the old world to make fiery red textiles has found a second life as the basis for a new green [00:28:00] battery chemist from the City College of New York teamed with researchers from Rice University and the U S army research lab to develop a nontoxic and sustainable lithium ion battery powered by Perper in a dye extracted from the roots of the matter plant 3,500 years ago. Speaker 1: Civilizations in Asia and the Middle East first boiled matter roots to color fabrics in vivid oranges, reds, and pinks. In its latest incarnation, [00:28:30] the climbing herb could lay the foundation for an ecofriendly alternative to traditional lithium ion batteries. These batteries charge everything from your mobile phone to electric vehicles, but carry with them risks to the environment during production, recycling and disposal. They also pumped 72 kilograms of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for every kilowatt hour of energy in a lithium ion battery. These grim facts have fed a surging demand to develop green batteries [00:29:00] growing matter or other biomass crops to make batteries which soak up carbon dioxide and eliminate the disposal problem. Speaker 3: The news occurred during the show with his bylaw Astana David from his album folk and acoustic made available through creative Commons license 3.0 attribution. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via [00:29:30] our email address is spectrum dot k a l x@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Princeton and UC Berkeley trained chemist Delia Milliron is the Deputy Director of the Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley Lab. In part one, Delia explains Nano Science and Technology. She talks about her research with nanocrystals to make thin films. foundry.lbl.govTranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Mm mm mm mm mm mm mm Speaker 3: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome [00:00:30] to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 4: Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Today is part one of a two part interview with Delia Mil Iron, the deputy director of the Lawrence Berkeley national lab molecular foundry, [00:01:00] Delia mill iron is a chemist. She received her undergraduate degree from Princeton and her phd from UC Berkeley. Delia leads a research group at the molecular foundry which has recently spun off a startup named heliotrope technologies for group is a partner in the newly announced Joint Center for Energy Storage Research, a multistate department of energy research hub focused on developing transformative new battery technology. Delios group was recently awarded a $3 million grant [00:01:30] by the Department of Energy Advanced Research projects, agency dash energy by e for her work on smart window technologies onto the interview. Delia mill iron. Welcome to spectrum. Speaker 5: Thank you.Speaker 4: I suspect that most of our listeners have heard of nanoscience but don't have a lot of perspective on the detail. Would you explain what makes nanoscience and nanotechnology unique? Speaker 5: Sure, [00:02:00] so nano science is about investigating how the properties of matter change sometimes quite dramatically when we structure them on the nanometers scale, which is really the molecular scale. So in a sense it's quite related to chemistry, but it's about materials and matter and how their behavior is very different than what you'd expect from macroscopic pieces of material. Would you like some examples? [00:02:30] Sure. An example would be great. Okay. A classic example is to look at the optical properties or just the visible appearance of gold and everyone knows, of course, when gold is macroscopic, it's shiny and it's yellowish and we're very used to that form of gold. When you make gold in the form of nanoparticles, the things that are, let's say between five and 50 nanometers across [00:03:00] or containing a few thousand atoms per particle, then the gold no longer looks either yellow or shiny. In fact, you can make stable dispersion or solution of gold at that scale in water. And it appears translucent and red in color. And this effect of Nano scaling and gold has been used to color artistic objects for centuries, but we've only recently become to systematically [00:03:30] understand the science of how these sorts of properties can change so dramatically when we make materials in the nanoscale. Speaker 4: So the actual doing of it has been done for a long time, but the understanding is what's more recent and then the ability to recreate Speaker 5: and the ability to control and deliberately manipulate. Yes. So there are plenty of instances of incidental or almost accidental creation of nanoscale materials and [00:04:00] utilization of these nanoscale effects on properties. But the science of it is about systematically correlating the structure and composition and materials to their properties. And then the nanotechnology or the engineering of of nanoscale materials is about deliberately controlling those properties to create new functional things, objects, devices and so on that we can use for useful things all around us. Speaker 4: And what are some of the common things [00:04:30] that we find nano technology in in our daily lives? Speaker 5: As with any new technology. The first applications are fairly pedestrian in some sense and don't require the most exquisite control over the materials. So one that's quite common is to use metal oxide nanocrystals. Typically things like zinc oxide or titanium oxide in sunblock. These materials absorb UV radiation to [00:05:00] protect our skin from damage from UV. But because they're at the nano scale, instead of looking white, it can be clear. And so it's just that ugly, much more pleasing to put on some block that then appears clear, but still does the job of blocking UV radiation. So this doesn't require a very fine control over the details of the structure or the size of the material. It's only important that the scale of the oxide particles be well below the wavelength [00:05:30] of light, and that's what makes it clear. So it's a very simple use, but nonetheless, very practical and helpful. Speaker 4: What are you finding are the challenges of working with nanoscale material? Speaker 5: It's all about taking that control to the next level. Chemists have learned for a long time how to manipulate atoms and create bonds and put them together into small molecules. Now we're working with structures of [00:06:00] a somewhat larger length scale and wanting to control different aspects of the composition and structure. So there are no ready solutions for deliberately arranging the atoms into let's say a five nanometer crystal with precision, um, in order to generate the properties that you'd like or again, just understand them frankly. So both the creation of materials with precise control and detailed understanding of what their structure is are still very [00:06:30] big challenges. Of course conventional microscopy methods don't extend very well to these small length scales. So there's a need for new characterization approaches. And then as I said, the chemical methods for making molecules and small molecular systems likewise don't necessarily translate to the slightly bigger scale that is nanometer length scale of these materials. Speaker 5: So we need a innovations on all sides, making new materials, new ways to look at them and characterize [00:07:00] them. And then finally the third piece is the theory that helps understand their properties and predict new properties. Again, it's sort of an awkward in between lanes scale where atomic detail matters, but larger scale aspects of how the materials come together matters as well. And that's very difficult to approach with computational methods, so we're seeing the frontier of nanoscience is pushing scientists from all different disciplines to advance their tools and their techniques [00:07:30] in order to really take advantage of what can be done at that landscape. Speaker 4: Okay. Speaker 6: Delia mill iron is our guest. She is the deputy director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory molecular foundry. She is a chemist working at the nanoscale. You are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Speaker 4: You've talked about the meter. Yes. Is that a new form of measurement and how does it relate to anything [00:08:00] else? How do we reflect on an nanometre? Sure, Speaker 5: so it's not a new measure. It's simply a meter times 10 to the minus ninth that's what what Nano means and a more conventional measure on that lane scale might be an Angstrom, which is a traditional measure. It's one order of magnitude smaller than an animator, but to put it in more practical terms, I like to think of the Nano crystals that I work with, for example, which are about five nanometers across, [00:08:30] are about a million times smaller than an ant. So that for me gives me a sort of practical reference point as a chemist. It also makes sense to me to think of a five nanometer crystal as containing about a thousand atoms, but atoms are not necessarily a easy to understand lane skill for everybody. So the the ant is maybe a more common reference point, what natural materials have been created and what about them makes them [00:09:00] more promising than another depending on the realm of properties that you examine. Speaker 5: Promising has all sorts of different meanings, right? So things like semiconductor nano wires or perhaps graphene or carbon nanotubes may be considered promising for new electronic materials because the transport of electrons through these structures can proceed quite unimpeded and move very [00:09:30] readily so that we could have fast electronics or very conductive transparent thin films to replace the things we use today in our flat panel displays and so on. Other nano materials are very promising for diagnostics of different kinds of diseases or even for therapy of different kinds of health issues. So there are biological probes being developed that can be directed into specific areas [00:10:00] of your body. For example, where a tumor site is located using a nanoscale magnet and then they also carry a payload of drugs that can then be released specifically at that site. So you could have targeted therapies. So these sort of multifunctional nano constructs are very interesting. Speaker 5: I would say promising in the long run for for new targeted therapies, I have many fewer side effects than these broad spectrum drugs that we commonly use today. In terms of coming up [00:10:30] with new nanomaterials, is it as often the case that you are trying to create something for a specific purpose or that you accidentally find something that has a characteristic that can be applied pretty widely or to a specific use? I think that much of Nano materials research is motivated by the investigation and discovery of new phenomenon. And I distinguish that from targeted application [00:11:00] focused development because it's often unclear what a new material or it's phenomenological characteristics will actually be useful for. In my lab. Uh, we do tend to think of practical connections, but then the ones that we ultimately realize could be very different from the one that motivated us at the outset of the project. So I think as a scientist it's important to be attuned [00:11:30] for surprising opportunities to apply materials in ways you didn't anticipate. And so you have to be aware of the needs that are out there, the big needs in society, basically paying attention for how the phenomena you're discovering might map onto these societal needs. You probably as a scientist, not going to able to take Speaker 5: a new discovery all the way through to a practical application. But if you don't at [00:12:00] least identify those connections, it will be difficult for engineers and industry to take your discoveries and turn them into practical applications. So there's a role on both sides to make that connection. Speaker 4: [inaudible] you are the deputy director of the molecular foundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Tell us about the foundry and the work going on there. Speaker 5: So the molecular foundry is a very special place. It's one of five department of energy funded [00:12:30] nanoscale science research centers, which are located around the country. And we have the mission of pushing the forefront of nanoscience broadly defined, so nanoscience in all different aspects while at the same time acting as a user facility to help others in the scientific community, be they academic researchers, industry, others at national labs move the science in their areas forward by leveraging the tools of nanoscience. [00:13:00] So it in effect, it becomes this amazing hub of activity and nanoscience where people from really all around the world are coming to us to leverage capabilities that we are continuously advancing and developing in different kinds of nanoscience be it inorganic nanocrystals, which is my focus theoretical methods for treating nanoscience completely out of this world. In my mind, I'm spectroscopic techniques [00:13:30] for looking at nanostructures.Speaker 5: All these things are being developed at the foundry, at the absolute bleeding edge of nanoscience, and these can have impact in all different areas. And so our users come, they work with us, they learn these state of the art techniques, generate new materials that they can take home with them to their own laboratories, integrate into their materials and processes and devices and so on or do their a specialized characterization on and the amount of science that results by [00:14:00] that multiplication and leveraging is really very exciting to watch. Oh, it's a hub. It's an intersection of ideas in one place of problem, motivations from different perspectives and then it branches right on back out to impact science and in all different ways. Speaker 4: What sort of a funding horizon are you on? Speaker 5: Uh, so we have very stable funding from the Department of Energy. These centers are quite new. They were only established [00:14:30] over the last 10 years. The foundry has been in full operations for about six years and they are very much the flagship capabilities of the office of science within the Department of Energy and will be for quite some time to come. So they're making a very stable and continued investment in this area and continue to see the value and opportunity for really in the end, American economy, taxpayers and industrial [00:15:00] innovation that's generated by all of this scientific activity. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 4: you were listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley, Delia mill, iron of Lawrence Berkeley national lab is talking about her work in nanoscience and nanotechnology. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 4: what's the focus of your research? Speaker 5: So my research involves the [00:15:30] innovation of Inorganic nanocrystals, which are a few nanometers diameter crystal and arrangements of atoms. And they're using these as building blocks to construct materials. So we put them together with each other and two, for example, porous architectures, or you put them together with polymers or we put them together, uh, with glassy components to construct macroscopic materials often than films. And we're interested [00:16:00] in these primarily for their electrochemical functions. So electric chemical devices are useful for things like batteries, supercapacitors a storing energy also for converting energy. And in our case, we've most recently been focused on electrochromic window applications. So these are function like batteries, but instead of storing charge, they have the effect of changing the tint on a window dynamically as a function [00:16:30] of voltage. But everything starts with the nanocrystals and new ways to put them together with other components to construct materials. Speaker 4: And is the crystal material something unusual or is it real commonplace? Speaker 5: It varies actually. Most of the materials that we craft into nanocrystals are well known and have been studied for a long time in their bulk form. So just as in the example of gold being very different in both and obviously useful for [00:17:00] all sorts of things like currency now having very different function on the Nano scale. We work with materials that maybe are not quite as common places goal, but nonetheless fairly common. So one material we've been working with a lot lately is called indium tin oxide. And whether you know it or not, you probably use it every day. It's the material that provides conductivity in flat panel displays, touch screens, all of these sorts of things. And so in it's normal thin [00:17:30] film form, it's obviously very well established and used around the world for all different applications. It was only synthesized in a well controlled way as Netto crystals in the last few years. Speaker 5: And in the Neto crystal form, it has all of these wonderful properties relating to electric chromic windows. And beyond that it has, I guess I should say more fundamentally, the phenomenology underlying those windows applications is that this [00:18:00] material is plasmonic, which means that it can effectively condense a near infrared light to a very small scale, can amplify the electric field from the light, basically manipulate light in a new way. And people have been doing this with metals like gold as one example. Silver is another for a while, and a whole new field of plasmonics has emerged. Um, now with Ito on the nanoscale, we're bringing [00:18:30] plasmonics into the infrared region of the spectrum, which is going to give us whole news opportunities for manipulation of light of that sword, channeling light and so on. So the, as I was saying earlier, the phenomenology is where we spend the most time and discovery of these plasmonic characteristics of Ito is going to lead to many, many applications. The one we've been focusing on is this electric chromic window idea. Speaker 4: Oh, is this one of the real opportunities [00:19:00] within nano science that when you take a material to the Nano scale, you get all this new behavior [inaudible] Speaker 5: that's the fundamental concept underlying the investigation of nanoscale materials. And so the NNI, the national nanoscience initiative or national nanotechnology initiative, which was started, you know, over a decade ago now had as its founding principle, basically that idea that we would investigate the properties that emerge [00:19:30] when materials are made on the nanoscale that are very distinct from what we see on the macro scale. And from this, uh, we would have a whole new playbook for creating functional materials and devices. Speaker 4: There's been talk about the idea of transparent failure being a good thing in science. So you can learn from what goes wrong. Speaker 5: Yeah, science is full of failure. Most things don't work, especially when you first try them. [00:20:00] So I like to say that in order to be a scientist, you have to be unrelentingly optimistic because you're great idea that you're incredibly excited about, probably won't work or at least it won't work initially. And then you have to try again and try again and try again. And often it won't work even after you've tried again many, many times and you still have to have the same passion for your next great idea that you wake up the next morning [00:20:30] and you're excited to go try something new. That belief in possibility I think is fundamental to science, but at the same point. Yeah, I think you're right. The failures are not merely something to be discarded along the way to, and they do teach us a lot and frankly they suggest the next great idea more often than not. Speaker 5: So we have in mind something we're trying to do and a complete failure to [00:21:00] accomplish that. Whether it's a bond we're trying to make or a way we're trying to control a shape of a material or to create a specific optical property we get something we didn't expect and that should and when science is functioning well does cause you to stop and think about why that's happening. In fact, maybe the challenge, some of the challenge in doing science is not becoming too distracted by all of the [00:21:30] possibilities that emerge. When you do that. It's a mistake of course to be too single minded and focused on an end goal too early because you'll, you'll miss really all the new phenomenon, the things that you least expected are often the most important and innovative, so you have to pay attention to these things and perhaps redefine them as not being failures but rather being a new success or a new seed of a success that can take you in a new direction. Speaker 5: That said, there probably are things that [00:22:00] even in that from that perspective can be viewed as a negative result or a failure and there's an important role. I mean the scientific literature is, is full of every scholarly article has to include a transparent reporting of the conditions that led to what's being defined as success or specific results and a recording of what happens elsewise basically because that allows you to understand much more [00:22:30] deeply where that successful result emerges if you understand the conditions that lead to failure and different types of failure. So definitely for understanding sake, this is essential. Speaker 3: This is the end part. One of our interview with Delia [inaudible] finale, part two will air December 28th at noon. Don't miss it. The molecular foundry website [00:23:00] is foundries.lbl.gov Speaker 1: now the calendar with Lisa [inaudible] and Rick Karnofsky on Saturday, December 15th science at Cow Lecture series. We'll present a free public talk by Rosemary, a Joyce or UC Berkeley anthropology professor on everyday life and science in the Pre-colombian Mayan world. Joyce. We'll discuss how the Maya developed and use their calendar, which spans almost 1200 [00:23:30] years ending around December 21st, 2012 the end of the world, she will explore the observational astronomy made possible through the use of written records, employing one of the only two scripts in the world to develop a sign for zero. The lecture which is free and open to the public, will be held on December 15th from 11 to 12:00 AM in room 100 of the genetics and plant biology building on the UC Berkeley campus. Speaker 7: Tomorrow, December 15th Wild Oakland. [00:24:00] We'll have a free one hour walk from noon to one defined an identifying mushrooms around lake merit. Meet at the Rotary Science Center on the corner of Perkins in Bellevue. The walk will be around the grassy areas, so rattling the boat house and the Lake Merritt Gardens. Learn to read the landscape and find where the mushrooms hide and their role and the local ecology. Bring guidebooks. Have you have them as well as a small pocket knife, a paintbrush [inaudible] jacket. Visit a wild oakland.org for more [00:24:30] info. Speaker 1: On Saturday, December 15th the American Society for Cell Biology welcomes the public to its 2012 keynote lecture. The event will feature Steven Chu Nobel laureate and US Secretary of energy and Arthur Levinson, chair of Genentech and apple here about the future of science and innovation and view an art exhibit by scientists, artists, Graham Johnson and Janet, a Wasa. Attend the art exhibit and reception [00:25:00] from five to five 45 and then stay and listen to the Speakers from six to 7:30 PM free. Preregistration is required at ASC B. Dot. O. R. G, the event takes place at Moscone center west seven 47 Howard street in San Francisco. Saturday, December 15th Speaker 7: the regional parks botanical garden at the intersection of Wildcat Canyon Road and South Park drive and Tilden regional park in the Berkeley hills. [00:25:30] Host the Wayne Rodrick lecture series. These free lectures are on Saturday mornings at 10:30 AM and are on a variety of topics related to plants and natural history. Free Tours of the garden. Begin at 2:00 PM tomorrow's tuck features Dick O'Donnell, who will discuss the floristic surprises and the drought stricken southwest and next Saturday the 22nd of December. Steve Edwards. We'll talk about the botany and GLG of the Lassen region. More information on the series is available@nativeplants.org Speaker 1: [00:26:00] beginning on December 26 the Lawrence Hall of science will begin screening and interactive program in their planetarium called constellations. Tonight. A simple star map will be provided to help participants learn to identify the most prominent constellations of the season in the planetarium. Sky. Questions and activities will be part of the program. The presentation will continue until January 4th and will be held every weekday from two to 2:45 PM [00:26:30] tickets are $4 at the Lawrence Hall of science after the price of admission. Remember that's beginning on December 26th [inaudible] Speaker 7: with two news stories. Here is Rick Karnofsky and Lisa kind of itch. Nature News reported on December 11th Speaker 1: that the u s national ignition facility or Nif at Lawrence Livermore national laboratory is changing directions. Nip uses a 192 ultraviolet laser beams that interact with the gold capsule, creating x-rays. These x-rays [00:27:00] crush a two millimeter target pellet of deuterium and tritium causing fusion. Nif has not yet achieved ignition where it may deliver more energy than it consumes I triple e spectrum criticized the project for being $5 billion over budget and years behind. Schedule in the revised plans [inaudible] scale back to focus on ignition and would devote three years for deciding whether it would be possible. It would increase focus on research, a fusion for the nuclear weapons [00:27:30] stockpile stewardship program and basic science. It would also devote resources to other ignition concepts. Namely polar direct drive on Omega at the University of Rochester and magnetically driven implosions on the San Diego z machine. The Journal. Nature reports that rows matter a natural plant die once price throughout the old world to make fiery red textiles has found a second life as the basis for a new green [00:28:00] battery chemist from the City College of New York teamed with researchers from Rice University and the U S army research lab to develop a nontoxic and sustainable lithium ion battery powered by Perper in a dye extracted from the roots of the matter plant 3,500 years ago. Speaker 1: Civilizations in Asia and the Middle East first boiled matter roots to color fabrics in vivid oranges, reds, and pinks. In its latest incarnation, [00:28:30] the climbing herb could lay the foundation for an ecofriendly alternative to traditional lithium ion batteries. These batteries charge everything from your mobile phone to electric vehicles, but carry with them risks to the environment during production, recycling and disposal. They also pumped 72 kilograms of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for every kilowatt hour of energy in a lithium ion battery. These grim facts have fed a surging demand to develop green batteries [00:29:00] growing matter or other biomass crops to make batteries which soak up carbon dioxide and eliminate the disposal problem. Speaker 3: The news occurred during the show with his bylaw Astana David from his album folk and acoustic made available through creative Commons license 3.0 attribution. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via [00:29:30] our email address is spectrum dot k a l x@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Shashi Buluswar, the executive director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab’s Institute for Globally Transformative Technologies (LIGTT), chats with Jeff Miller, head of Public Affairs. LIGTT’s mandate is to foster the discovery, development, and deployment of a generation of low-carbon, affordable technologies that will advance sustainable methods to fight global poverty. Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Science] [Show ID: 24391]

Shashi Buluswar, the executive director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab’s Institute for Globally Transformative Technologies (LIGTT), chats with Jeff Miller, head of Public Affairs. LIGTT’s mandate is to foster the discovery, development, and deployment of a generation of low-carbon, affordable technologies that will advance sustainable methods to fight global poverty. Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Science] [Show ID: 24391]

Three members of The Berkeley Science Review (Editor-in-chief Sebastien Lounis, Web Editor Adam Hill, and BSR Author Lindsay Glesener) talk about the printed Review and the digital blog. They describe how the BSR has changed their view of science.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Mm hmm. [inaudible]. Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science [00:00:30] and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. In today's interview, Rick Karnofsky talks with three contributors to the Berkeley Science Review. The review is a student run by annual magazine that publishes in fallen spring. The review is also started, a blog that publishes four times a week to augment [00:01:00] the magazine. Our guests, our blog editor, Adam Hill, editor in chief Sebastian Lunas and author Lindsey Glasner. They talk about how it all gets done and what it means to them to do it. Here is Rick with the interview. First of all, welcome to spectrum. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks for why don't you introduce yourself Speaker 4: then what you do for the BSR and also what your research here at cal says. Hi, my name is Sebastian Lunas. I'm the editor in chief of the Berkeley Science Review and I'm also a fifth [00:01:30] year phd student in the graduate group in Applied Science and technology. At UC Berkeley. I do my research at the molecular foundry up at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in Delia Milan's group and focus on studying nanocrystals of transparent conducting oxides. Great. Speaker 1: Uh, my name is Lindsey and I'm a writer for the BSR in the upcoming issue. I'm a graduate student in the physics department with a little bit of luck. I'll be graduating this December getting my phd and I work at the Space Sciences Laboratory [00:02:00] for Dr Bob Lynne. We build instruments that go on rockets, balloons and satellites to look at the solar system and sometimes things outside the solar system. Speaker 5: Yes sir. Right. For the blog. Is that right? I will be, yes. Okay. My name is Adam Hill. I am the editor of the PSR blog and we sort of work in tandem with the magazine to both keep people aware of the BSR in between issues and also to independently promote science and issues of [00:02:30] science education. Great. And your research here at cal? I am in Charles Harris's group in chemistry where I use ultra fast lasers to look at the dynamics of organic metallic catalysts. Okay. So can someone tell me a little bit about the Berkeley Science Review? Speaker 4: I'll take that one. So the Berkeley Science review is UC Berkeley is General Interest Science magazine. It's written, edited, produced entirely by UC Berkeley graduate students and it comes out twice a year. Basically the goal [00:03:00] of highlighting and showcasing and the cutting edge research that's going on at Berkeley, as well as taking a look at UC Berkeley science community and science history and doing so in a way that is accessible to a general audience. So it's not a technical publication, it's not a peer reviewed journal, it's a a general interest science magazine and it's written with the aim of being able to be picked up by anyone on campus and get an exciting look at what's going on at Berkeley. Part of the mission is also to help train editors and authors [00:03:30] through the process of putting together a professional level publication. And we're able to do that because we only publish two issues a year. So it gives us sort of a six month cycle to actually spend some time and work out really high quality content for the magazine as well as a really visually appealing layout. How long has the Berkeley Science Review been around? The science review was started in 2001 man, it's been producing two issues a year since then, so we're, we're going on 23rd issue coming out [00:04:00] this fall has a blog band active for that of the block's been around since Speaker 5: 2010 and a gold team was responsible for starting the blog since then. I think it has grown significantly in scope and readership. And how do you attract readers to both the magazine and and the blog for the blog in particular, we found that social media is one of the best routes to getting significant readership. Speaker 4: In terms of the magazine, I guess to answers, we generally just print as many as we can [00:04:30] and get them all over campus. And what's your approximate circulation? That we typically print between two to 3000 copies per issue and we distribute those across campus and then to a couple of local organizations and coffee shops around campus. Then we have a small number of subscribers, but we sort of know based on the fact that our magazine sort of disappear very quickly that we are getting a significant on our readership, but we're actually conducting a readership survey this fall to sort of get a better idea of how people actually come across the magazine, how many people are reading it, what their sort of [00:05:00] demographic makeup is, and we've also been trying to do a better job over the last year or so of integrating our magazine content with the blog. Speaker 5: And where should people look for that survey? Speaker 4: The magazine will have a prompt in it probably on the inside of the front cover with the link to the survey. We don't want people that haven't read the magazine to be filling out the survey and skewing our results. So if you do pick up the magazine interview. Yeah, exactly. If you do pick up the magazine, [00:05:30] please fill out the survey and let us know who you are. We're very interested and we'd love to hear from you. Lindsey, how did you come to volunteer as a writer? Yeah, my history with the Berkeley Science review is very short. Up until last spring, I was one of those people who would pick up the magazine when I sighed in the places on campus, but I also saw a call for pitches that was advertised to a lot of the departments. I think the particular place I saw, it was graduate student mailing Speaker 1: list in the physics department [00:06:00] and it offered the opportunity to pitch a story for the Berkeley Science Review. And I thought, well, I've got something interesting to write about. So I sent in a pitch and it was accepted. And what was your pitch? The idea for my story was inspired by my phd project, which is a project to put solar, observing x-ray instruments on a NASA rocket. And I thought it might be interesting not only from a scientific perspective, but there's also a bit of a humanist aspect to the story because I thought [00:06:30] people might want to know about what it's like to build one of these experiments and what it's like to go to a launch facility and an actually launched the rocket and once I got a little deeper into the topic, another thing that came into it was Berkeley's long history of building experiments like these. It really goes back to the beginnings of NASA, the whole thing developed together. And so that aspect kind of started taking over the story and became very important to it. Speaker 4: And then from there you just decided to volunteer to write for the blog [00:07:00] as well or, Speaker 1: well I think we've decided that it would be organic to have some blog entries as well because this is a project that is going to launch with any luck on November 2nd so without the timing would be appropriate to have a story about the project and then to have updates on did it launch, what's happening with the project throughout the fall. Speaker 4: This is sort of an example of how we're trying to really integrate the magazine and the web content where it's where it's organic to do so. We figured since it was an ongoing project, [00:07:30] it was a perfect opportunity to sort of transition people right from reading the magazine to reading posts on the blog and sort of integrate those two. Oh, that's great. And it's also worth mentioning that I think there's a significant cross section of the readership who don't necessarily encounter the magazine on campus, but who do read it on our website that said science review.berkeley.edu and do you have your entire back catalog online? We do. We're in the process of fully introducing the very earliest issues as actual searchable texts right [00:08:00] now their catalog in sort of a reader format where you can read them that way, but we're sort of moving towards making them more indexable and more accessible. Speaker 4: And is Lindsay's volunteer story typical? Do you normally draw authors from your readership? I would say her story is typical in that she received an email through somebody, one of the departmental email lists and that's how we do a lot of our outreach for authors. Uh, we have our own active email list that we reach out to when we do a call for pitches, but we also spray them out through the departments [00:08:30] and I would say most of our authors come from that outreach effort. A good proportion of them have read the magazine before. We've been making an effort this year to also get in touch with a lot of the first year students on campus. A lot of our writers are more senior Phd Students, but I think there's also a huge opportunity for first year Grad students that aren't bogged down their research to get involved. Speaker 6: [inaudible] this [00:09:00] is spectrum on k a LX Berkeley. Today's guests are from the Berkeley Science Review and it's Gluck. Speaker 1: How was writing for the BSR different or similar to writing for other publications? It's very challenging. I've spent the last six years getting used to scientific writing for publications or for my colleagues, and it was surprisingly [00:09:30] difficult for me to write for the BSR. I imagine that sort of a common story because it's a broader audience or, yeah, when we're writing for scientific publications, we use very specialized language with carefully chosen words that are really specific, but they're meant for people who already know what those words mean and are very comfortable hearing them and using them. I think when you're writing for a broader audience, you have to choose your words just as carefully or maybe even more so, but you [00:10:00] have to focus less on being so specific and accurate and more on whether the words will be understood and whether they'll be interesting. Speaker 1: Usually when I'm writing a scientific article, I don't need to worry about it being interesting. Hopefully. Interesting enough to site, I shouldn't mention that. In the magazine we have, I serve a number of different formats, so we have a number of different lengths of articles ranging from short little snapshots that are three or 400 words, two feature-length articles like the one that Lindsey wrote, which are typically two [00:10:30] to 4,000 words, sometimes even slightly longer. And so Lindsay jumped in as a first time author with, with one of the features with which I think are quite challenging. I think she did a great job. It was definitely a big barrier to getting started. When I first sat down to try to put some of my ideas on paper, I found it extremely challenging. After things had gotten rolling and I got feedback from the editors, which was very helpful. Speaker 1: Then it became a lot easier. Can you describe that editorial process a little bit more? Well, let's see. So we go through several drafts. So before [00:11:00] the first draft I had met with the first editor for my story. His name is Alexis and she and I had talked about our ideas for the story, which directions we thought it should take, kind of what topics we wanted to put together for the first draft and then I wrote that first draft and that was the one that for me was really challenging to get something down on paper. Then after sending that to her, she circulated it amongst some of the other editors and several of them gave me feedback on it, give me ideas, [00:11:30] pointed out which parts of the draft they thought were interesting, which ones needed more development or just weren't as relevant and then working from that and building it into a second draft is where I got a lot more inspired and writing. It became much easier at that point. It was definitely a fun article to write, although it was difficult because in order to write it, I got to delve a bit into the history of the laboratory. I work at the Space Sciences Laboratory and conduct [00:12:00] interviews with people who are around for some particular pieces of that history. So I don't want to make it sound like writing this article was a huge ordeal that I hated. It was actually a lot of fun. It was just putting the words on paper that I found very difficult at the beginning. Speaker 5: Did you find yourself interviewing a lot of faculty members who you might not have otherwise been interacting with for the piece? Speaker 1: I didn't interview anybody that I didn't know already. Ours tends to be a very intimate community where people know [00:12:30] each other, but I did have conversations with people that I probably wouldn't have talked with otherwise. So a couple of the people that I interviewed were people that I know quite well and have had conversations with before or maybe work with. And some of them were people I knew of but hadn't really ever had a chance to chat with them. And so hearing their stories about building rocket experiments when they were students was very interesting. Speaker 5: Did want to comment on that because I do find that, [00:13:00] uh, both in the case of the blog and the magazine itself, I think one of the best parts of both is the part that gets people out there and talking with scientists either in their field or tangentially related fields with whom they might never otherwise be interacting. It's very easy to get stuck in this little world of your advisor, the couple of students with whom you work on your project, you know, maybe a couple of friends who you see for beer each week. But beyond that, a scientist world can get very [00:13:30] narrow if you're not being proactive in avoiding that. And I think that both the blog and the magazine can really open new experiences to people who are writers and editors in terms of interacting with people in other disciplines or with people of significantly different ages within their own discipline who they might never have otherwise met. Speaker 1: On that note, I also wanted to say a couple of things that had occurred to me too. If you were talking and I wanted to talk about the [00:14:00] value of writing for the BSR for the authors as well as getting information out there for the public. I think this is a really useful thing for the authors who write for both the magazine in the blog in two aspects. I was thinking first about my personal experience and at the stage I'm at in my graduate student career, which is hopefully near the end, you get very zoned in on one particular subject. You kind of managed to convince yourself that this is the only thing in the world that matters [00:14:30] and you spend all your time on that and you can get a little burnt out on that. So for me at the time I started writing for the BSR, it was great to kind of force me to open up my mind a little bit and put my own project in the context of its historical perspective and also the perspective of the community. Speaker 1: It was a great way for me remind myself that there are connections to the community and that I'm not working in this kind of void. This black box down in the basement at the lab. The other thing I was [00:15:00] thinking when you mentioned how you're trying to get a lot of first year authors involved is that that could be really influential for them in choosing a thesis group. I know in the physics department it can be a little bit daunting because you have so many choices of which research group to work with, which particular topic to specialize in and I think a lot of first year physics students are just a little bit lost in that vast parameter space. So by writing for the BSR, I think that would probably encourage them [00:15:30] to find a whisper something they're interested in and start talking to people about it and I could definitely see that leading to them choosing that group to do their thesis work with Speaker 6: [inaudible].Speaker 4: Today's guests on spectrum are Adam Hill, Sebastian Lewis and Lindsay Glasner from the Berkeley Science Review Speaker 6: [inaudible].Speaker 4: [00:16:00] So the print publication is free? Yes. Is your entire budget from cal or do you get outside contributions? We do get quite a bit of funding from cow to the graduate assembly, which provides us with quite a bit of funding and then we also work with our printer. They have a relationship with an advertising agency who then in turn provide the suite of ads that are relevant to a science oriented publication that we are able then to put into our magazine. And how is the editorial stuff [00:16:30] selected each year or each issue or however frequently you guys change things up? It's basically whenever someone decides to leave and we put out a call for applications for the editorial staff, so most editors stay on for two to four issues, which is good because it helps with institutional memory and you get people that are more experienced that are able to coach. Speaker 4: The more junior editors talked about authors and editors. What about art? I mean the BSR is usually a very beautiful publication. [00:17:00] Sure. Where does that all come from? The layout staff. The BSR is sort of the unsung hero of the magazine and one of the most exciting experiences as an author and as an editor is about halfway through the process. We have a meeting with our layout staff where they first show us the designs they've come up with for various articles in the magazine and working with just the words for for quite some time. And then coming in and seeing it actually displayed in a magazine format that looks incredibly professional and is very well designed is incredibly exciting. So the way it works for the magazine is we [00:17:30] have a team of about 10 layout editors and an art director. We don't require the layout editors to come in with an experience. This is sort of another one of the examples of how the BSR is able to take people that are excited about learning about how to do layout, how many to do design and because of the timescale of the magazine, Speaker 5: it gives people enough time to learn those tools and working in an interactive team where they're going to get a lot of feedback on what they're doing and how it looks. And end up with a really amazing product. [00:18:00] What's that editorial process for the blog? Look back, we published four times a week with a crew of about a dozen authors at the moment, so we'll tend to go about a month between publications for an individual author and they'll come to me with some sort of idea. Can I write about pesticides in farming and California is efforts to insist on labeling GMO foods or something like that? You know, I'll say absolutely and the, the main interaction that I have at the [00:18:30] early stage of the process is regulating tone. Actually they're coming at it from the right viewpoint and coming at it from a balanced viewpoint where what they'll have at the end of writing this reporting more than opinion, although we also do have a category for opinion, but I like to try to avoid any ambiguity between the two. Speaker 5: Sure. I think that's an issue that a lot of blogs face is that it can be difficult to separate the editorial standpoint of the blog. Ours is basically scientists' cool from the editorial [00:19:00] standpoint of the individual authors, which can often be very specific and very passionate. Then I'll often not have particularly significant amounts of feedback or interaction with the authors until just a couple of days before their blog is scheduled to go up at which point we'll start hashing things together and seeing it in the digital format is a great way to really get a feel for how a blog post is going to come together part because you can't necessarily know how a blog reads till things like hyperlinks are in place. [00:19:30] Then we'll tend to hang it back and forth making changes when things are going well. We wrap up about the night before the blog post goes up and then the next morning we'll send it up and relate it. To your point earlier about, um, how the BSR has helped you as a researcher have a little bit more breadth than you might as a Grad student. Do you see it changing how you go forward after you leave cows, start your postdoc or whatever? Speaker 1: I think it wouldn't lead me to make decisions differently [00:20:00] after I graduate. Otherwise I don't exactly know what's on their highs and yet for me, but it gives me a little more inspiration about my field. So in that aspect, I suppose it could have a really powerful effect because the decision that I'll be faced with when I graduate is decision that many of us are faced with when we finished our PhDs, which is do you want to stay in academia? Do you want to switch to an engineering job where you can potentially make a lot more money and have a lot more say in where you live, who you work for, that sort of deal. [00:20:30] So inspiring students at a point in their graduate career at which they're about to make that decision, I think is a really good thing. So reminding them of some of the inspiring and motivating things about the field they're in could help to keep them there. The other interesting issue whenever we have anyone involved in science Speaker 7: outreach who are themselves scientists on the areas, how they see the rest of the scientific community looking at their science outreach. So I think Brad Vojtech who was on the show earlier talked about this tweet [00:21:00] of Damocles. You're always waiting until your outreach efforts like sabotage your actual career in some way. Did you have any reservations before for writing to our broader audience? Speaker 1: I would say personally, no. I didn't have any reservations about it. I think that there is a sort of pervasive fear about that in the scientific community. Like if you do too much scientific outreach then people will think that maybe you're not serious about the thing that you're actually working on. And I think that's mostly false. I hope that [00:21:30] people don't actually have that view, but I would say that pretty common. Certainly an anxiety that people have. Yeah, I think so. And there probably is some reason for it as well. I would not want to do scientific outreach to the point where I was not putting out scientific publications because especially as a woman, you want to make sure that people know you can do the work as well as do the outreach about it. I think that some of the barriers between people doing scientific research and doing scientific [00:22:00] outreach are starting to come down a bit. Speaker 1: At my laboratory we're starting to see more and more people who are working both on hard science and doing outreach as well. In particular, a friend of mine is now splitting her time, roughly 50 50 between those two things. And so she's hired by both departments at our lab. So I think any stigma about those things or at least starting to to come down and be resolved. So what should people interested in volunteering for the BSR do? [00:22:30] They should contact us by email, I think is typically the best route for both. So the email address for the Berkeley science if you blog is science review blog@gmail.com and for the magazine or for the BSR as an organization in general. It's the science review@gmaildotcomishouldalsomentionthatmostoftheinformationabouthowtogetinvolveddesirewebsiteatsciencereviewdotberkeley.edu well Lindsey, thanks for joining us. Thank you very much. Cool at all. [00:23:00] Well, thank you both for joining. Yes, thank you. Thank you very much. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 1: Regular feature of spectrum is to mention a few of [00:23:30] the science and technology events happening locally over the next few weeks. Here are Lisa kind of itch Renee Rao and Rick [inaudible] with the calendar. They should both space and science center is starting their next season of night school tonight on third Friday of the month Speaker 7: from seven to 11:00 PM Chabot opens their doors to adults 21 years in over with drinks, music, planetarium shows, telescope viewings and more. Number admission is $5 and general admission is $12 [00:24:00] visit www.chabotspace.org for more information. That's c h a, B o t space dot o r g. Remote Speaker 8: islands have been heralded as natural labs with some spectacular cases of rapid evolution in proliferation of species on November 17th at 11:00 AM in the genetics and plant biology building room 100 science at cal presents professor Rosemary Gillespie, director of the ESIC Museum of entomology [00:24:30] at UC Berkeley. She will address one of the most puzzling features of the high diversity of species on remote islands with her lecture entitled vagrant and Variability Evolution on remote islands. Science at cal is a series of free science lectures aimed at general audiences. On November 20th a museum of Paleontology at UC Berkeley will host a lecture by a university scientist, sue sumo Tomia, who will lead presentations on current research practice talks and discussions on topics [00:25:00] of paleontological interest. Coffee and snacks will be available. The lecture will be held in 1101 of the valley life sciences building on the UC Berkeley campus from 11 to 12:00 PM the new and wildly successful nerd night. East Bay will be held on Tuesday, November 27th at the Stork Club, 2130 Telegraph Avenue in Oakland, doors open at 7:00 PM and the three lectures begin at 8:00 PM you must be 21 and the emission is $8. [00:25:30] Join Calyx DJ eye on the prize and hosts in Davis and Rick Karnofsky for this scientific salon in Oakland Uptown district, Speaker 7: the Stanford Linear National Accelerator Laboratory. Slack is celebrating their 50th anniversary on Wednesday, November 28th at 7:00 PM in the Oshman family JCC Cultural Arts Center located in Jessica Lynn, Sal Townsquare at three nine two one Fabian way in Palo Alto. [00:26:00] The Commonwealth Club presents the event that is $5 for students, $10 for members and $15 for all others. Nobel Prize winner and director of Meredith's, Burton Richter and scientist Norbert Holt comp. We'll discuss how the accelerator has made cutting edge advancements from particle to astrophysics, advanced energy science and more. Sac has discovered two fundamental particles prove that protons are made of corks and shown how DNA directs protein fabrication. For [00:26:30] more on this event. Visit Commonwealth club.org now two news stories with Rennie Rao and Rick Karnofsky Science Daily has recently summarized an article by researchers at the Israel Institute of Technology published in nature materials on a novel way of splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen associate professor of material science and engineering. Abner Rothschild noted that their method of trapping light and the ultra thin films of ferric [00:27:00] oxide is the first of its kind. These rust films are about 5,000 times thinner than standard office paper and are inexpensive, stable in water, non-toxic and can oxidize water without being oxidized to get around poor transport properties. The team uses resonance, light trapping indifference between forward and backward propagating waves enhances the light absorption in quarter wave or in some cases deeper sub wavelength [00:27:30] films amplifying the intensity close to the surface, allowing charged carriers created by the light to reach the surface and oxidize water. This is a promising step into harvesting solar energy and storing it as hydrogen. Speaker 8: UC Berkeley's greater good science center has launched an interactive, shareable online gratitude journal through November. People in the campus community are invited to participate in the cal gratitude challenge by keeping a two week online [00:28:00] gratitude journal. The website was made both to conduct research and educate people about the powers of gratitude in their lives both before and after a 14 day period. Participants are asked to fill out surveys intended to measure traits like resilience, attachment tendencies, and happiest the projects designers are hoping for around a thousand participants. The website is located@thanksfor.org that's t h n. X, the number four [00:28:30] [inaudible] dot org Speaker 2: [inaudible]. The music or during the show is by Los Donna David from his album folk and acoustic released under creative Commons license 3.0 [00:29:00] attribution. [inaudible] [inaudible]. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email or email address is spectrum@klxatyahoo.com [00:29:30] join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Three members of The Berkeley Science Review (Editor-in-chief Sebastien Lounis, Web Editor Adam Hill, and BSR Author Lindsay Glesener) talk about the printed Review and the digital blog. They describe how the BSR has changed their view of science.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Mm hmm. [inaudible]. Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science [00:00:30] and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. In today's interview, Rick Karnofsky talks with three contributors to the Berkeley Science Review. The review is a student run by annual magazine that publishes in fallen spring. The review is also started, a blog that publishes four times a week to augment [00:01:00] the magazine. Our guests, our blog editor, Adam Hill, editor in chief Sebastian Lunas and author Lindsey Glasner. They talk about how it all gets done and what it means to them to do it. Here is Rick with the interview. First of all, welcome to spectrum. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks for why don't you introduce yourself Speaker 4: then what you do for the BSR and also what your research here at cal says. Hi, my name is Sebastian Lunas. I'm the editor in chief of the Berkeley Science Review and I'm also a fifth [00:01:30] year phd student in the graduate group in Applied Science and technology. At UC Berkeley. I do my research at the molecular foundry up at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in Delia Milan's group and focus on studying nanocrystals of transparent conducting oxides. Great. Speaker 1: Uh, my name is Lindsey and I'm a writer for the BSR in the upcoming issue. I'm a graduate student in the physics department with a little bit of luck. I'll be graduating this December getting my phd and I work at the Space Sciences Laboratory [00:02:00] for Dr Bob Lynne. We build instruments that go on rockets, balloons and satellites to look at the solar system and sometimes things outside the solar system. Speaker 5: Yes sir. Right. For the blog. Is that right? I will be, yes. Okay. My name is Adam Hill. I am the editor of the PSR blog and we sort of work in tandem with the magazine to both keep people aware of the BSR in between issues and also to independently promote science and issues of [00:02:30] science education. Great. And your research here at cal? I am in Charles Harris's group in chemistry where I use ultra fast lasers to look at the dynamics of organic metallic catalysts. Okay. So can someone tell me a little bit about the Berkeley Science Review? Speaker 4: I'll take that one. So the Berkeley Science review is UC Berkeley is General Interest Science magazine. It's written, edited, produced entirely by UC Berkeley graduate students and it comes out twice a year. Basically the goal [00:03:00] of highlighting and showcasing and the cutting edge research that's going on at Berkeley, as well as taking a look at UC Berkeley science community and science history and doing so in a way that is accessible to a general audience. So it's not a technical publication, it's not a peer reviewed journal, it's a a general interest science magazine and it's written with the aim of being able to be picked up by anyone on campus and get an exciting look at what's going on at Berkeley. Part of the mission is also to help train editors and authors [00:03:30] through the process of putting together a professional level publication. And we're able to do that because we only publish two issues a year. So it gives us sort of a six month cycle to actually spend some time and work out really high quality content for the magazine as well as a really visually appealing layout. How long has the Berkeley Science Review been around? The science review was started in 2001 man, it's been producing two issues a year since then, so we're, we're going on 23rd issue coming out [00:04:00] this fall has a blog band active for that of the block's been around since Speaker 5: 2010 and a gold team was responsible for starting the blog since then. I think it has grown significantly in scope and readership. And how do you attract readers to both the magazine and and the blog for the blog in particular, we found that social media is one of the best routes to getting significant readership. Speaker 4: In terms of the magazine, I guess to answers, we generally just print as many as we can [00:04:30] and get them all over campus. And what's your approximate circulation? That we typically print between two to 3000 copies per issue and we distribute those across campus and then to a couple of local organizations and coffee shops around campus. Then we have a small number of subscribers, but we sort of know based on the fact that our magazine sort of disappear very quickly that we are getting a significant on our readership, but we're actually conducting a readership survey this fall to sort of get a better idea of how people actually come across the magazine, how many people are reading it, what their sort of [00:05:00] demographic makeup is, and we've also been trying to do a better job over the last year or so of integrating our magazine content with the blog. Speaker 5: And where should people look for that survey? Speaker 4: The magazine will have a prompt in it probably on the inside of the front cover with the link to the survey. We don't want people that haven't read the magazine to be filling out the survey and skewing our results. So if you do pick up the magazine interview. Yeah, exactly. If you do pick up the magazine, [00:05:30] please fill out the survey and let us know who you are. We're very interested and we'd love to hear from you. Lindsey, how did you come to volunteer as a writer? Yeah, my history with the Berkeley Science review is very short. Up until last spring, I was one of those people who would pick up the magazine when I sighed in the places on campus, but I also saw a call for pitches that was advertised to a lot of the departments. I think the particular place I saw, it was graduate student mailing Speaker 1: list in the physics department [00:06:00] and it offered the opportunity to pitch a story for the Berkeley Science Review. And I thought, well, I've got something interesting to write about. So I sent in a pitch and it was accepted. And what was your pitch? The idea for my story was inspired by my phd project, which is a project to put solar, observing x-ray instruments on a NASA rocket. And I thought it might be interesting not only from a scientific perspective, but there's also a bit of a humanist aspect to the story because I thought [00:06:30] people might want to know about what it's like to build one of these experiments and what it's like to go to a launch facility and an actually launched the rocket and once I got a little deeper into the topic, another thing that came into it was Berkeley's long history of building experiments like these. It really goes back to the beginnings of NASA, the whole thing developed together. And so that aspect kind of started taking over the story and became very important to it. Speaker 4: And then from there you just decided to volunteer to write for the blog [00:07:00] as well or, Speaker 1: well I think we've decided that it would be organic to have some blog entries as well because this is a project that is going to launch with any luck on November 2nd so without the timing would be appropriate to have a story about the project and then to have updates on did it launch, what's happening with the project throughout the fall. Speaker 4: This is sort of an example of how we're trying to really integrate the magazine and the web content where it's where it's organic to do so. We figured since it was an ongoing project, [00:07:30] it was a perfect opportunity to sort of transition people right from reading the magazine to reading posts on the blog and sort of integrate those two. Oh, that's great. And it's also worth mentioning that I think there's a significant cross section of the readership who don't necessarily encounter the magazine on campus, but who do read it on our website that said science review.berkeley.edu and do you have your entire back catalog online? We do. We're in the process of fully introducing the very earliest issues as actual searchable texts right [00:08:00] now their catalog in sort of a reader format where you can read them that way, but we're sort of moving towards making them more indexable and more accessible. Speaker 4: And is Lindsay's volunteer story typical? Do you normally draw authors from your readership? I would say her story is typical in that she received an email through somebody, one of the departmental email lists and that's how we do a lot of our outreach for authors. Uh, we have our own active email list that we reach out to when we do a call for pitches, but we also spray them out through the departments [00:08:30] and I would say most of our authors come from that outreach effort. A good proportion of them have read the magazine before. We've been making an effort this year to also get in touch with a lot of the first year students on campus. A lot of our writers are more senior Phd Students, but I think there's also a huge opportunity for first year Grad students that aren't bogged down their research to get involved. Speaker 6: [inaudible] this [00:09:00] is spectrum on k a LX Berkeley. Today's guests are from the Berkeley Science Review and it's Gluck. Speaker 1: How was writing for the BSR different or similar to writing for other publications? It's very challenging. I've spent the last six years getting used to scientific writing for publications or for my colleagues, and it was surprisingly [00:09:30] difficult for me to write for the BSR. I imagine that sort of a common story because it's a broader audience or, yeah, when we're writing for scientific publications, we use very specialized language with carefully chosen words that are really specific, but they're meant for people who already know what those words mean and are very comfortable hearing them and using them. I think when you're writing for a broader audience, you have to choose your words just as carefully or maybe even more so, but you [00:10:00] have to focus less on being so specific and accurate and more on whether the words will be understood and whether they'll be interesting. Speaker 1: Usually when I'm writing a scientific article, I don't need to worry about it being interesting. Hopefully. Interesting enough to site, I shouldn't mention that. In the magazine we have, I serve a number of different formats, so we have a number of different lengths of articles ranging from short little snapshots that are three or 400 words, two feature-length articles like the one that Lindsey wrote, which are typically two [00:10:30] to 4,000 words, sometimes even slightly longer. And so Lindsay jumped in as a first time author with, with one of the features with which I think are quite challenging. I think she did a great job. It was definitely a big barrier to getting started. When I first sat down to try to put some of my ideas on paper, I found it extremely challenging. After things had gotten rolling and I got feedback from the editors, which was very helpful. Speaker 1: Then it became a lot easier. Can you describe that editorial process a little bit more? Well, let's see. So we go through several drafts. So before [00:11:00] the first draft I had met with the first editor for my story. His name is Alexis and she and I had talked about our ideas for the story, which directions we thought it should take, kind of what topics we wanted to put together for the first draft and then I wrote that first draft and that was the one that for me was really challenging to get something down on paper. Then after sending that to her, she circulated it amongst some of the other editors and several of them gave me feedback on it, give me ideas, [00:11:30] pointed out which parts of the draft they thought were interesting, which ones needed more development or just weren't as relevant and then working from that and building it into a second draft is where I got a lot more inspired and writing. It became much easier at that point. It was definitely a fun article to write, although it was difficult because in order to write it, I got to delve a bit into the history of the laboratory. I work at the Space Sciences Laboratory and conduct [00:12:00] interviews with people who are around for some particular pieces of that history. So I don't want to make it sound like writing this article was a huge ordeal that I hated. It was actually a lot of fun. It was just putting the words on paper that I found very difficult at the beginning. Speaker 5: Did you find yourself interviewing a lot of faculty members who you might not have otherwise been interacting with for the piece? Speaker 1: I didn't interview anybody that I didn't know already. Ours tends to be a very intimate community where people know [00:12:30] each other, but I did have conversations with people that I probably wouldn't have talked with otherwise. So a couple of the people that I interviewed were people that I know quite well and have had conversations with before or maybe work with. And some of them were people I knew of but hadn't really ever had a chance to chat with them. And so hearing their stories about building rocket experiments when they were students was very interesting. Speaker 5: Did want to comment on that because I do find that, [00:13:00] uh, both in the case of the blog and the magazine itself, I think one of the best parts of both is the part that gets people out there and talking with scientists either in their field or tangentially related fields with whom they might never otherwise be interacting. It's very easy to get stuck in this little world of your advisor, the couple of students with whom you work on your project, you know, maybe a couple of friends who you see for beer each week. But beyond that, a scientist world can get very [00:13:30] narrow if you're not being proactive in avoiding that. And I think that both the blog and the magazine can really open new experiences to people who are writers and editors in terms of interacting with people in other disciplines or with people of significantly different ages within their own discipline who they might never have otherwise met. Speaker 1: On that note, I also wanted to say a couple of things that had occurred to me too. If you were talking and I wanted to talk about the [00:14:00] value of writing for the BSR for the authors as well as getting information out there for the public. I think this is a really useful thing for the authors who write for both the magazine in the blog in two aspects. I was thinking first about my personal experience and at the stage I'm at in my graduate student career, which is hopefully near the end, you get very zoned in on one particular subject. You kind of managed to convince yourself that this is the only thing in the world that matters [00:14:30] and you spend all your time on that and you can get a little burnt out on that. So for me at the time I started writing for the BSR, it was great to kind of force me to open up my mind a little bit and put my own project in the context of its historical perspective and also the perspective of the community. Speaker 1: It was a great way for me remind myself that there are connections to the community and that I'm not working in this kind of void. This black box down in the basement at the lab. The other thing I was [00:15:00] thinking when you mentioned how you're trying to get a lot of first year authors involved is that that could be really influential for them in choosing a thesis group. I know in the physics department it can be a little bit daunting because you have so many choices of which research group to work with, which particular topic to specialize in and I think a lot of first year physics students are just a little bit lost in that vast parameter space. So by writing for the BSR, I think that would probably encourage them [00:15:30] to find a whisper something they're interested in and start talking to people about it and I could definitely see that leading to them choosing that group to do their thesis work with Speaker 6: [inaudible].Speaker 4: Today's guests on spectrum are Adam Hill, Sebastian Lewis and Lindsay Glasner from the Berkeley Science Review Speaker 6: [inaudible].Speaker 4: [00:16:00] So the print publication is free? Yes. Is your entire budget from cal or do you get outside contributions? We do get quite a bit of funding from cow to the graduate assembly, which provides us with quite a bit of funding and then we also work with our printer. They have a relationship with an advertising agency who then in turn provide the suite of ads that are relevant to a science oriented publication that we are able then to put into our magazine. And how is the editorial stuff [00:16:30] selected each year or each issue or however frequently you guys change things up? It's basically whenever someone decides to leave and we put out a call for applications for the editorial staff, so most editors stay on for two to four issues, which is good because it helps with institutional memory and you get people that are more experienced that are able to coach. Speaker 4: The more junior editors talked about authors and editors. What about art? I mean the BSR is usually a very beautiful publication. [00:17:00] Sure. Where does that all come from? The layout staff. The BSR is sort of the unsung hero of the magazine and one of the most exciting experiences as an author and as an editor is about halfway through the process. We have a meeting with our layout staff where they first show us the designs they've come up with for various articles in the magazine and working with just the words for for quite some time. And then coming in and seeing it actually displayed in a magazine format that looks incredibly professional and is very well designed is incredibly exciting. So the way it works for the magazine is we [00:17:30] have a team of about 10 layout editors and an art director. We don't require the layout editors to come in with an experience. This is sort of another one of the examples of how the BSR is able to take people that are excited about learning about how to do layout, how many to do design and because of the timescale of the magazine, Speaker 5: it gives people enough time to learn those tools and working in an interactive team where they're going to get a lot of feedback on what they're doing and how it looks. And end up with a really amazing product. [00:18:00] What's that editorial process for the blog? Look back, we published four times a week with a crew of about a dozen authors at the moment, so we'll tend to go about a month between publications for an individual author and they'll come to me with some sort of idea. Can I write about pesticides in farming and California is efforts to insist on labeling GMO foods or something like that? You know, I'll say absolutely and the, the main interaction that I have at the [00:18:30] early stage of the process is regulating tone. Actually they're coming at it from the right viewpoint and coming at it from a balanced viewpoint where what they'll have at the end of writing this reporting more than opinion, although we also do have a category for opinion, but I like to try to avoid any ambiguity between the two. Speaker 5: Sure. I think that's an issue that a lot of blogs face is that it can be difficult to separate the editorial standpoint of the blog. Ours is basically scientists' cool from the editorial [00:19:00] standpoint of the individual authors, which can often be very specific and very passionate. Then I'll often not have particularly significant amounts of feedback or interaction with the authors until just a couple of days before their blog is scheduled to go up at which point we'll start hashing things together and seeing it in the digital format is a great way to really get a feel for how a blog post is going to come together part because you can't necessarily know how a blog reads till things like hyperlinks are in place. [00:19:30] Then we'll tend to hang it back and forth making changes when things are going well. We wrap up about the night before the blog post goes up and then the next morning we'll send it up and relate it. To your point earlier about, um, how the BSR has helped you as a researcher have a little bit more breadth than you might as a Grad student. Do you see it changing how you go forward after you leave cows, start your postdoc or whatever? Speaker 1: I think it wouldn't lead me to make decisions differently [00:20:00] after I graduate. Otherwise I don't exactly know what's on their highs and yet for me, but it gives me a little more inspiration about my field. So in that aspect, I suppose it could have a really powerful effect because the decision that I'll be faced with when I graduate is decision that many of us are faced with when we finished our PhDs, which is do you want to stay in academia? Do you want to switch to an engineering job where you can potentially make a lot more money and have a lot more say in where you live, who you work for, that sort of deal. [00:20:30] So inspiring students at a point in their graduate career at which they're about to make that decision, I think is a really good thing. So reminding them of some of the inspiring and motivating things about the field they're in could help to keep them there. The other interesting issue whenever we have anyone involved in science Speaker 7: outreach who are themselves scientists on the areas, how they see the rest of the scientific community looking at their science outreach. So I think Brad Vojtech who was on the show earlier talked about this tweet [00:21:00] of Damocles. You're always waiting until your outreach efforts like sabotage your actual career in some way. Did you have any reservations before for writing to our broader audience? Speaker 1: I would say personally, no. I didn't have any reservations about it. I think that there is a sort of pervasive fear about that in the scientific community. Like if you do too much scientific outreach then people will think that maybe you're not serious about the thing that you're actually working on. And I think that's mostly false. I hope that [00:21:30] people don't actually have that view, but I would say that pretty common. Certainly an anxiety that people have. Yeah, I think so. And there probably is some reason for it as well. I would not want to do scientific outreach to the point where I was not putting out scientific publications because especially as a woman, you want to make sure that people know you can do the work as well as do the outreach about it. I think that some of the barriers between people doing scientific research and doing scientific [00:22:00] outreach are starting to come down a bit. Speaker 1: At my laboratory we're starting to see more and more people who are working both on hard science and doing outreach as well. In particular, a friend of mine is now splitting her time, roughly 50 50 between those two things. And so she's hired by both departments at our lab. So I think any stigma about those things or at least starting to to come down and be resolved. So what should people interested in volunteering for the BSR do? [00:22:30] They should contact us by email, I think is typically the best route for both. So the email address for the Berkeley science if you blog is science review blog@gmail.com and for the magazine or for the BSR as an organization in general. It's the science review@gmaildotcomishouldalsomentionthatmostoftheinformationabouthowtogetinvolveddesirewebsiteatsciencereviewdotberkeley.edu well Lindsey, thanks for joining us. Thank you very much. Cool at all. [00:23:00] Well, thank you both for joining. Yes, thank you. Thank you very much. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 1: Regular feature of spectrum is to mention a few of [00:23:30] the science and technology events happening locally over the next few weeks. Here are Lisa kind of itch Renee Rao and Rick [inaudible] with the calendar. They should both space and science center is starting their next season of night school tonight on third Friday of the month Speaker 7: from seven to 11:00 PM Chabot opens their doors to adults 21 years in over with drinks, music, planetarium shows, telescope viewings and more. Number admission is $5 and general admission is $12 [00:24:00] visit www.chabotspace.org for more information. That's c h a, B o t space dot o r g. Remote Speaker 8: islands have been heralded as natural labs with some spectacular cases of rapid evolution in proliferation of species on November 17th at 11:00 AM in the genetics and plant biology building room 100 science at cal presents professor Rosemary Gillespie, director of the ESIC Museum of entomology [00:24:30] at UC Berkeley. She will address one of the most puzzling features of the high diversity of species on remote islands with her lecture entitled vagrant and Variability Evolution on remote islands. Science at cal is a series of free science lectures aimed at general audiences. On November 20th a museum of Paleontology at UC Berkeley will host a lecture by a university scientist, sue sumo Tomia, who will lead presentations on current research practice talks and discussions on topics [00:25:00] of paleontological interest. Coffee and snacks will be available. The lecture will be held in 1101 of the valley life sciences building on the UC Berkeley campus from 11 to 12:00 PM the new and wildly successful nerd night. East Bay will be held on Tuesday, November 27th at the Stork Club, 2130 Telegraph Avenue in Oakland, doors open at 7:00 PM and the three lectures begin at 8:00 PM you must be 21 and the emission is $8. [00:25:30] Join Calyx DJ eye on the prize and hosts in Davis and Rick Karnofsky for this scientific salon in Oakland Uptown district, Speaker 7: the Stanford Linear National Accelerator Laboratory. Slack is celebrating their 50th anniversary on Wednesday, November 28th at 7:00 PM in the Oshman family JCC Cultural Arts Center located in Jessica Lynn, Sal Townsquare at three nine two one Fabian way in Palo Alto. [00:26:00] The Commonwealth Club presents the event that is $5 for students, $10 for members and $15 for all others. Nobel Prize winner and director of Meredith's, Burton Richter and scientist Norbert Holt comp. We'll discuss how the accelerator has made cutting edge advancements from particle to astrophysics, advanced energy science and more. Sac has discovered two fundamental particles prove that protons are made of corks and shown how DNA directs protein fabrication. For [00:26:30] more on this event. Visit Commonwealth club.org now two news stories with Rennie Rao and Rick Karnofsky Science Daily has recently summarized an article by researchers at the Israel Institute of Technology published in nature materials on a novel way of splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen associate professor of material science and engineering. Abner Rothschild noted that their method of trapping light and the ultra thin films of ferric [00:27:00] oxide is the first of its kind. These rust films are about 5,000 times thinner than standard office paper and are inexpensive, stable in water, non-toxic and can oxidize water without being oxidized to get around poor transport properties. The team uses resonance, light trapping indifference between forward and backward propagating waves enhances the light absorption in quarter wave or in some cases deeper sub wavelength [00:27:30] films amplifying the intensity close to the surface, allowing charged carriers created by the light to reach the surface and oxidize water. This is a promising step into harvesting solar energy and storing it as hydrogen. Speaker 8: UC Berkeley's greater good science center has launched an interactive, shareable online gratitude journal through November. People in the campus community are invited to participate in the cal gratitude challenge by keeping a two week online [00:28:00] gratitude journal. The website was made both to conduct research and educate people about the powers of gratitude in their lives both before and after a 14 day period. Participants are asked to fill out surveys intended to measure traits like resilience, attachment tendencies, and happiest the projects designers are hoping for around a thousand participants. The website is located@thanksfor.org that's t h n. X, the number four [00:28:30] [inaudible] dot org Speaker 2: [inaudible]. The music or during the show is by Los Donna David from his album folk and acoustic released under creative Commons license 3.0 [00:29:00] attribution. [inaudible] [inaudible]. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email or email address is spectrum@klxatyahoo.com [00:29:30] join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Omar Yaghi, director of the Molecular Foundry, the nanoscience facility at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, talks with Jeff Miller, head of Public Affairs. Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Science] [Show ID: 24389]

Omar Yaghi, director of the Molecular Foundry, the nanoscience facility at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, talks with Jeff Miller, head of Public Affairs. Series: "Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory " [Science] [Show ID: 24389]

Physicist Spencer Klein and Electrics Engineer Thorsten Stezelberger, both at Lawrenc Berkeley National Lab, describe the Neutrino Astronomical project IceCube, which was recently completed in Antarctica. They also go on to discuss proposed project Arianna.TranscriptsSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next [inaudible]. Welcome to spectrum [00:00:30] the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 2: Good afternoon. I'm Brad Swift, the host of today's show, Rick Karnofsky and I interview Spencer Klein and Torsten Stessel Berger about the neutrino astronomy project. Ice Cube. Spencer Klein is a senior scientist and group leader at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. [00:01:00] He's a member of the ice cube research team and the Ariana planning group. Thorsten Stetso Berger is an electronics engineer at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. He too is part of the ice cube project and the Ariana team. They join us today to talk about the ice cube project and how it is helping to better define neutrinos. Spencer Klein and Thorsten setser Berger. Welcome to spectrum. Speaker 3: Thank you. Thank you. Can you talk to us a little bit about neutrinos? [00:01:30] Well, neutrinos are subatomic particles which are notable because they barely interact at all. In fact, most of them can go through the earth without interacting. This makes them an interesting subject for astrophysics because you can use them to probe places like the interior of stars where otherwise nothing else can get out and are most of them neutrinos from those sources. There's a wide range of neutrino energies that are studied. Some of the lowest energy neutrinos are solar neutrinos which [00:02:00] come from the interior of our sun. As you move up to higher energies, they come from different sources. We think a lot of the more energetic ones come from supernovas, which is when stars explode, they will produce an initial burst of neutrinos of moderate energy and then over the next thousand years or so, they will produce higher energy neutrinos as ejected spans, producing a cloud filled with shock fronts and you're particularly interested in those high energy. Speaker 3: Yes, ice cube is designed to study those neutrinos and also [00:02:30] neutrinos from even more energetic neutrinos where we don't really know where they come from. There are two theories. One is that they come from objects called active Galactic Nuclei. These are galaxies which have a super massive black hole at their center and they're rejecting a jet of particles perpendicular, more along their axis. And this jet is believed to also be a site to accelerate protons and other cosmic rays to very high energies. The other possible source of ultra energy neutrinos [00:03:00] are gamma ray bursts, which are when two black holes collide or a black hole collides with a neutron star. And if the neutrinos don't interact or interact so rarely and weekly with matter, how do we actually detect them? Well, the simple answer is you need a very large detector. Ice Cube is one cubic kilometer in volume and that's big enough that we think we should be able to detect neutrinos from these astrophysical sources. Speaker 3: The other project we work on, Ariana is even bigger. It's [00:03:30] proposed, but it's proposed to have about a hundred cubic kilometers of volume. And so you have an enormous detector to detect a few events and once you detect them, how can you tell where they came from? Well, with ice cube we can get the incoming direction of the neutrinos to within about a degree. So what we do is we look for neutrinos. Most of what we see out of these background atmospheric neutrinos which are produced when cosmic rays interact in the earth's atmosphere. But on top [00:04:00] of that we look for a cluster of neutrinos coming from a specific direction. That would be a clear sign of a neutrino source, which would be, you know, and then we can look in that direction and see what interesting sources lie. That way we can also look for extremely energetic neutrinos which are unlikely to be these atmospheric neutrinos. Speaker 3: And how is it that you measure that energy? What happens is a neutrino will come in and occasionally interact in the Antarctic. Ice should mention that ice cube is located at the South Pole where [00:04:30] there's 28 hundreds of meters of ice on top of the rock below. Occasionally in Neutrino will come in and interact in the ice and if it's something called a type of neutrino called the [inaudible] Neutrino, most of its energy will go into a subatomic particle called the Meuron. Meuron is interesting because it's electrically charged. As it goes through the ice, it will give off light, something we call Toronto radiation. So we've instrumented this cubic kilometer of ice with over 5,000 optical [00:05:00] modules, which are basically optical sensors. And so we record the amount and arrival times of the light at these optical sensors. And from that we can determine the neutrino direction to about within a degree. Speaker 3: And we can also get an estimate of the energy. Um, essentially is the on is more energetic. It will also produce other electrically charged particles as it travels. Those will give off more light. And so the light output is proportional to the neutrino energy. So you're taking an advantage of the fact that there's [00:05:30] a lot of ice in Antarctica and also that it's very big. Are there other reasons to do it at the South Pole? Well, the other critical component about the ice is that it has to be very clear, shouldn't scatter light and it shouldn't absorb light. And in fact the light can travel up to 200 meters through the ice before being absorbed. This is important because that means we can have a relatively sparse array. You know, we have only 5,000 sensors spread over a cubic kilometer. That's only if the light can travel long distances through the ice. [00:06:00] And do you have to take into account that the ice in the Antarctic is not perfectly clean? Yes. When we reconstruct the neutrino directions, we use this sophisticated maximum likelihood fitter. Essentially we try all sorts of different Milan directions and see which one is the most likely. And that takes into account the optical properties of the ace and includes how they vary with depth. There are some dust layers in the ice where the absorption length is much shorter and some places, [00:06:30] well most of the ice where it's much better. Speaker 4: Our guests on spectrum today are Spencer Klein and Thorsten Stetson Burger from Lawrence Berkeley national lab. They are part of a physics project named Ice Cube. In the next segment they talk about working at the South Pole. This is KALX Berkeley. Speaker 3: Can you compare the two experiments, both ice Cuban on a little bit? Well, ice cube is designed [00:07:00] for sort of moderate energy neutrinos, but for the really energetic neutrinos are, they are rare enough so that a one cubic kilometer detector just isn't big enough. And so for that you need something bigger and it's hard to imagine how you could scale the optical techniques that ice cube uses to larger detectors. So that's why we looked for a new technique in it. Here I should say we, the royal, we either many people, many places in the world looking at different versions. And so what we've chosen is looking [00:07:30] for radio [inaudible] off the mission. You know, we have this interaction in the ice. Some of the time. If it's an electron Neutrino, it produces a compact shower of particles. That shower will have more negatively charged particles than positively charged. Speaker 3: And so it will emit radio waves, you know, at frequencies up to about a Gigahertz coherently, which means that the radio emission strength depends on the square of the neutrino energies. So when you go to very high neutrino energies, this is a preferred technique. Radio waves can [00:08:00] travel between 300 meters and a kilometer in the ice, which means you can get by with a much sparser array. So you can instrument a hundred cubic kilometers with a reasonable number of detectors. When Ariane is developed, it will get to access higher energies. Will it still didn't detect some of the moderately high energies that ice cube is currently reaching? No, and there's no overlap because of the coherence and just not sensitive. I mean, ice cube will occasionally see these much higher energy neutrinos, [00:08:30] but it's just not big enough to see very many of them. Uh, you commented on, or you mentioned the size of the collaboration. Speaker 3: Can you sort of speak about how big these projects are? Sure. Ice Cube has got about 250 scientists in it from the u s Europe, Barbados, Japan, and New Zealand. Oh yeah. And plus one person from Australia now. And that's a well established, you know, it's a large experiment. Arianna is just getting going. It's got, I'll say less than a dozen [00:09:00] people in it. Mostly from UC Irvine and some involvement from LDL. How many years have you had experience with your sensors in the field then? That's kind of a complicated question and that the idea of doing neutrino astronomy in the Antarctic ice has been around for more than 20 years. The first efforts to actually put sensors in the ice, we're in the early 1990s these used very simple sensors. We just had a photo multiplier tube, essentially a very sensitive [00:09:30] optical detector, and they sent their signals to the surface. There are no complicated electronics in the ice. Speaker 3: The first Amanda effort in fact failed because the sensors were near the surface where the light was scattering very rapidly. Turns out the upper kilometer of ice is filled with little air bubbles, but then as you get down in depth, there's enough pressure to squeeze these bubbles out of existence. And so you go from very cloudy ice like what you see if you look in the center of an ice cube and then you go deeper [00:10:00] and you end up with this incredibly clear ice. So the first efforts were in this cloudy ice. Then in the second half of the 1990s Amanda was deployed in the deep highs. This is much smaller than ice cube in many respects. The predecessor, of course, the problem with Amanda was this transmission to the surface. It worked but it was very, very touchy and it wasn't something you could scale to the ice cube size. So one where people got together and came up with these digital optical modules where all of the digitizing electronics [00:10:30] is actually in the module. We also made a lot of other changes and improvements to come up with a detector that would be really robust and then we deployed the first ice cube string in 2005 and continued and then the last string was deployed at the end of 2010 Speaker 5: so basically from the scientific point or engineering point of view, we're learning about the detector. We got data from the first strain. It was not very useful for take neutrino science but you can learn to understand [00:11:00] the detector, learn how the electronics behaves, if there is a problem, change code to get different data. Speaker 3: When we did see some new is in that run and there's this one beautiful event where we saw this [inaudible] from a neutrino just moving straight up the string. I think it hit 51 out of the 60 optical sensors. So we're basically tracking it for 800 meters. It was just a beautiful that Speaker 5: what is the lifelight down there? The food, the day to day, [00:11:30] we've never been there in the winter time, so I can only talk about a summer and in the summer you're there for something specific like drilling or deploying a, so to summertime keeps you pretty busy and you do your stuff and then afterwards you hang out a little bit to wind down. And sometimes with some folks playing pool or ping pong or watching movies or just reading something and then time [00:12:00] again for the sleep or sleeping. And the next day for drawing for example, we had three shifts. And so that kept you pretty, pretty busy. One season when I was thrilling there I was on what we call the graveyard shift. Starting from 11 to I think eight in the morning. I saw and yeah, it was daylight. You don't notice it except you always get dinner for breakfast and scrambled eggs and potatoes for dinner. Speaker 3: The new station at the South Pole is really very nice and I would [00:12:30] say quite comfortable, good recreational facilities. I mean, and I would say the food was excellent, really quite impressive and you get to hang out with a bunch of international scientists that are down there. How collegial isn't, it Speaker 5: depends a little bit on the work. Like when I was rolling on night shift, we mostly got to hang out with people running the station. That was fairly collegial. Speaker 3: There's actually not very many scientists at the South Pole. In the summer there were about 250 [00:13:00] people there and maybe 20 of them were scientists. Most of them were people dealing with logistics. These are people, you know, heavy equipment operators. Fuel Lees would get the fuel off of the plane, cooks people, and even then can building the station wasn't quite done yet. The drillers will lodge wide variety of occupations but not all that many scientists. How close are the experiments to the station? Speaker 5: They are quite a few experiments [00:13:30] based in the station. Ice Cube is a kilometer away about probably Speaker 3: Lamotta and a half to the, to the ice cube lab, which is where the surface electronics is located. Speaker 5: So it's pretty close walking distance called walk. But it depends. I mean I don't mind the calls or it was a nice walk but they have like ice cube, uh, drilling. We are like lunch break also. It's [00:14:00] a little bit far to walk kilometer out or even throughout depending where you drill. So we had a car to drive back and forth to the station to eat lunch. Otherwise you are out for too long. Speaker 3: Yeah, they give you a really good equipment and so it's amazing how plaza you can be about walking around when it's 40 below, outside. Speaker 5: Especially if you do physical work outside as part of drilling also. It's amazing how much of that cold weather Ikea you actually take off because you just [00:14:30] do staff and you warm up. Speaker 4: [inaudible] you are listening to spectrum on KALX Berkeley coming up, our guests, Spencer Klein and Torsten Stotzel Burger detail, the ice cube data analysis process, Speaker 3: the ongoing maintenance of Ice Cube Sarah Plan for its lifetime Speaker 5: for the stuff [00:15:00] in the eyes, it's really hard to replace that. You cannot easily drill down and take them out. They are plans, uh, to keep the surface electronics, especially the computers update them as lower power hardware becomes available. Otherwise I'm not aware of preventive maintenance. You could do with like on a car. Yeah. Speaker 3: I have to say the engineers did a great job on ice cube. About 98% of the optical modules are working. Most of the failures were infant [00:15:30] mortality. They did not survive the deployment when we've only had a handful of optical modules fail after deployment and all the evidence is we'll be able to keep running it as long as it's interesting. And is there a point in which it's no longer interesting in terms of how many sensors are still active? I think we'll reach the point where the data is less interesting before we run out of sensors now. Okay. You know, we might be losing one or two sensors a year. In fact, we're still at the point where [00:16:00] due to various software improvements, including in the firmware and the optical modules, each year's run has more sensors than the previous years. Even if we only had 90% of them working, that would be plenty. Speaker 3: And you know, that's probably a hundred years from now. What do we have guests on to speak about the LHC at certain they were talking about the gigantic amounts of data that they generate and how surprisingly long it takes for scientists to analyze that data to actually get a hold [00:16:30] of data from the detector. And you're generating very large amounts of data. And furthermore, it's in Antarctica. So how much turnaround time is there? Well, the Antarctica doesn't add very much time. We typically get data in the north within a few days or a week after it's taken. There is a bit of a lag and try and take this time to understand how to analyze the data. For example, now we're working on, for the most part, the data that was taken in 2010 and [00:17:00] you know, hope to have that out soon probably for summer conferences. But understanding how to best analyze the data is not trivial. For example, this measurement of the mule on energies, very dependent on a lot of assumptions about the ice and so we have ways to do it now, but we're far from the optimal method Speaker 5: and keep in mind that detector built, it's just finished. So before you always added in a little bit more. So each year the data looked different because you've got more sensors in the data. Speaker 3: [00:17:30] Let's say for things where turnaround is important. For example, dimension, these gamma ray bursts, there's where this happens when a bunch of satellites see a burst of x-rays or gamma rays coming from somewhere in the sky. They can tell us when it happened and give us an estimate of the direction. We can have an and I would say not quite real time, but you know that we could have turned around if a couple of weeks. We also measure the rates in each of the detectors. This is the way to look for low energy neutrinos from a [00:18:00] supernova that is essentially done in real time. If the detector sees an increase, then somebody will get an email alert essentially immediately. If we got one that looked like a Supernova, we could turn that around very quickly. So are the algorithms that you're using for this longer term analysis improving? Speaker 3: Yes. They're much more sophisticated than they were two years ago. I'd say we're gradually approaching and I'm ask some Todrick set of algorithm, but we're still quite a ways [00:18:30] to go. We're still learning a lot of things. You know, this is very different from any other experiment that's been done. Normally experiments if the LHC, if they are tracking a charged particle, they measure points along the track. In our case, the light is admitted at the trend off angle. About 41 degrees. So the data points we see are anywhere from a few meters to a hundred meters from the track. And because of the scattering of light, it's a not so obvious how to find [00:19:00] the optimum track and it's, you know, it's very dependent on a lot of assumptions and we're still working on that. And we have methods that work well. As I said, you know, we can get an angular resolution of better than a degree in some cases, but there's still probably some room to be gotten there. Speaker 5: And then also, I mean I'm not involved in the science, but I hear people have new ideas how to look at a data. So that's still evolving too. Speaker 3: Yeah. Like you know, one analysis that people are working on, but we don't have yet would [00:19:30] be a speculative search where you're looking for a pair of event, a pair of neo-cons going upward through the detector in the same direction at the same time, which would quite possibly be a signal of some sort of new physics. And it's certainly an interesting typology to look for, but we're not there yet. And are there different teams looking at the same data to try to find different results and broaden the search so to speak? Uh, yes. We have seven or eight different physics working [00:20:00] groups in each of those groups is concentrating on a different type of physics or a different class of physics. For example, one group is looking for point sources, you know, hotspots in the sky. Second Group is looking at atmospheric and diffuse neutrinos trying to measure the energy spectrum of the neutrinos. Speaker 3: We do see both the atmospheric and also looking for an additional component. There's a group doing cosmic ray physics. There's a group looking for exotic physics. These are things like these pairs [00:20:30] of upward going particles. Also looking for other oddities such as magnetic monopoles. There's a group that's looking for neutrinos that might be produced from weakly interacting. Massive particles, IAA, dark matter, but there's a group that's monitoring the rates of the detector. This scalers looking for Supernova and oh, there's also a group looking for talented Trinos, which is the this very distinctive topology town. Neutrinos are sort of the third flavor of neutrinos and those are [00:21:00] mostly only produced by extraterrestrial sources and they look very distinctively. You would look for case where you see two clusters of energy and the detector separated by a few hundred meters. Speaker 5: Looking at what's next, what would be the sort of ideal laboratory? If you want something that's very big, obviously Antarctica is a great challenge. Can you do neutrino detection in space for instance? [inaudible] Speaker 3: hmm, that's an interesting question. There are people who [00:21:30] are talking about that and the main application is trying to look for these cosmic gray air showers. The best experiments to study high energy, cosmic gray air showers are these things called air shower arrays, which are an array of detectors. Um, the largest one is something called the OJ Observatory in Argentina. It covers about 3000 square kilometers with an array of detectors on kind of a one and a half kilometer grid. And that's about as largest surface detector as you could imagine. Building the alternative [00:22:00] technology is look for something called air fluorescents. When the showers go through the air, they light it up. Particularly the nitrogen is excited and in that kind of like a fluorescent tube. So you see this burst of light as the shower travels through the atmosphere. O J in addition to the surface detectors has these cameras called flies eyes that look for this fluorescence, but it's limited in scale. And people have proposed building experiments that would sit on satellites or a space station [00:22:30] and look down and look at these showers from above. They could cover a much larger area. They could also look for showers from upward going particles, I. E. Neutrino interactions. But at this point that's all pretty speculative. Speaker 5: And when's your next trip to Antarctica? Uh, that's all depending on funding. I would like to go again and hopefully soon. I think I'm cautiously optimistic. We'll be able to go again this year. Hmm. Spencer in Thorsten. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. Thank you. Speaker 4: [00:23:00] [inaudible] regular feature of spectrum is to mention a few of the science and technology events that are happening locally over the next few weeks. Lisa Katovich joins me for that Speaker 6: calendar. The August general meeting of the East Bay Astronomical Society is Saturday, July 14th at the Chabot space and science centers, Dellums [00:23:30] building 10,000 Skyline Boulevard in Oakland. Ezra Bahrani is the evening Speaker. The title of his talk is UFOs, the proof, the physics and why they're here. The meeting starts at 7:30 PM Speaker 2: join Nobel laureates and social and environmental justice advocates at the towns and Tay Gore third annual seminar for Science and technology on behalf of the peoples of Bengali and the Himalayan basins, the subject, the global water crisis [00:24:00] prevention and solution. Saturday, July 21st 1:30 PM to 7:30 PM the event is jointly sponsored by UC Berkeley's department of Public Health and the international institute of the Bengali and Himalayan basins. Guest Speakers include three Nobel laureates, Charles h towns, Burton Richter and Douglas Ashur off. Also presenting our Francis towns advocate for social justice, Dr. Rush, Gosh [00:24:30] and Sterling Brunel. The event will be held in one 45 Dwinelle hall on the UC Berkeley campus. That's Saturday, July 21st 1:30 PM to 7:30 PM for more details, contact the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, Speaker 6: the next science at cal lectures on July 21st the talk will be given by Dr Jeffrey Silverman and it's entitled exploding stars, Dark Energy, and the runaway universe. Dr Silverman has been a guest [00:25:00] on spectrum. His research has been in the study of Super Novi. His lecture will focus on how the study of supernovae led to the recent discovery that the universe is expanding, likely due to a repulsive and mysterious dark energy. It was these observations that were recently awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics. The lecture is July 21st at 11:00 AM and the genetics and plant biology building room 100 Speaker 2: next to news stories. Speaker 6: 3000 species [00:25:30] of mosquitoes are responsible for malaria, dengue, a fever, yellow fever, West Nile virus, and cephalitis and many more diseases. In Burkina Faso alone, residents can expect 200 bytes a day. Rapid resistance to pesticides on the part of malaria mosquitoes has prompted researchers all over the globe to deploy novel strategies against this and other diseases. Targeting Dengue. A fever has an advantage over malaria as only one species. Eighties [00:26:00] Egypt die is responsible for spreading it versus the 20 species responsible for spreading malaria. A British biotechnology company called Oxitec has developed a method to modify the genetic structure of the male eighties Aegypti mosquito transforming it into a mutant capable of destroying its own species. In 2010 they announced impressive preliminary results of the first known test of 3 million free flying transgenic mosquitoes engineered [00:26:30] to start a population crash after infiltrating wild disease spreading eighties a Gyp dye swarms on Cayman Island. Speaker 6: Oxitec has recently applied to the FDA for approval of its mosquito in the u s with Key West under consideration as a future test site in 2009 key west suffered its first dengate outbreak in 73 years. Australian researchers are testing and mosquito intended to fight dengue, a fever bypassing the disruptive Wolbachia bacteria to other mosquitoes, a very [00:27:00] different approach than transgenic genes funded largely by the bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The project has shown that the Wolbachia strain not only shortens the life of a mosquito, but also reduces the amount of virus it develops. Releases in Queensland, Australia last year showed that Wolbachia could spread through a wild population quickly and future test sites are under consideration. In Vietnam. Speaker 2: The UC Berkeley News Center reports a prototype network being installed by chemists at the University of California. Berkeley [00:27:30] will employ 40 sensors spread over a 27 square mile grid. The information the network will provide could be used to monitor local carbon dioxide emissions to check on the effectiveness of carbon reduction strategies now mandated by the state, but hard to verify built and installed by project leader Professor Ron Cohen and graduate student Virginia Tighe and their lab colleagues. The shoe box size sensors will continuously measure carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, [00:28:00] nitrogen dioxide, and ozone levels as well as temperature, pressure and humidity streaming. The information live to the web through the site. beacon.berkeley.edu the sensor network dubbed Beacon stretches from the East Bay regional parks on the east to interstate eight 80 on the west from El Surrito on the north nearly to San Leandro on the south encompassing open space as well as heavily traffic areas. [00:28:30] Most of the sensors are being mounted on the roofs of local schools in order to get students interested in the connection between carbon dioxide emissions and climate change. The UC Berkeley researchers work with Oakland's Chabot space and science center to create middle school and high school activities using live sensor data stream through the web as part of the students energy and climate science curriculum. The beacon network is a pilot program funded by the National Science Foundation to determine what information can be learned [00:29:00] from a densely spaced network Speaker 1: [inaudible].Speaker 2: The music heard during the show is from most done at David's album, folk and acoustics made available through a creative Commons license 3.0 attribution. Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address [00:29:30] is spectrum dot kalx@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. 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