Podcast appearances and mentions of Lawrence Livermore

What do you do with the world's largest supercomputer? This week, Technology Now looks further at the world of supercomputers and explores what the world's largest supercomputer, El Capitan, and it's sister machine, Tuolumne, are used for. Rob Rieben, a computational physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, tells us more.This is Technology Now, a weekly show from Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Every week, hosts Michael Bird and Aubrey Lovell look at a story that's been making headlines, take a look at the technology behind it, and explain why it matters to organizations and what can be learnt from it.About Rob: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rieben1/SourcesWhat are supercomputers used for:https://www.anl.gov/science-101/supercomputingToday I learned: https://www.england.nhs.uk/2025/05/nhs-first-in-world-to-roll-out-revolutionary-blood-test-for-cancer-patients/https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/may/29/revolutionary-dna-blood-test-to-offer-thousands-in-england-tailored-cancer-careThis week in history:https://www.esa.int/About_Us/50_years_of_ESA/50_years_of_humans_in_space/First_woman_in_space_Valentina

How do you make the world's fastest supercomputer? This week, Technology Now dives into the world of supercomputers, and how El Capitan, the world's largest supercomputer, was built. We will explore the software and hardware requirements as well as investigating the physical requirements needed to even be able to run a supercomputer on your premises. Bronis de Supinski, CTO of Livermore Computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, tells us more.This is Technology Now, a weekly show from Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Every week, hosts Michael Bird and Aubrey Lovell look at a story that's been making headlines, take a look at the technology behind it, and explain why it matters to organizations and what can be learnt from it.About Bronis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bronis-de-supinski-607a441/SourcesEl Capitanhttps://www.hpe.com/us/en/newsroom/press-release/2024/11/hewlett-packard-enterprise-delivers-worlds-fastest-direct-liquid-cooled-exascale-supercomputer-el-capitan-for-lawrence-livermore-national-laboratory.htmlWhat are FLOPShttps://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/FLOPS-floating-point-operations-per-secondToday I LearnedMa. Y., et all, 2025, Near-infrared spatiotemporal colour vision in humans enabled by upconversion contact lenses, ISSN 0092-8674, 10.1016/j.cell.2025.04.019 https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)00454-4This Week in Historyhttps://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20201028-history-of-the-ballpoint-penhttps://spinoff.nasa.gov/space-pens

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory houses some of the world's most advancedsupercomputers. Now it's home to the very fastest called El Capitan. El Capitan is 16 times more powerful than Sierra its predecessor. Both machines support the National Nuclear Security Administration's stockpile stewardship. Federal News Network's Anastasia Obis got more from the labs director of artificial intelligence innovation, Brian Spears, and from computational science leader, Judy Hill. 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.

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory houses some of the world's most advanced supercomputers. Now it's home to the very fastest called El Capitan. El Capitan is 16 times more powerful than Sierra its predecessor. Both machines support the National Nuclear Security Administration's stockpile stewardship. Federal News Network's Anastasia Obis got more from the labs director of artificial intelligence innovation, Brian Spears, and from computational science leader, Judy Hill. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Winegrowing regions in Washington State have many unique challenges from salty soils, to low organic matter, to nematodes. Devin Rippner, Research Viticulture Soil Scientist with USDA-ARS and his colleagues at Washington State University are developing a research vineyard to study soil health building practices. They are testing a variety of management strategies including adjusting irrigation volume to correct for salt build-up, mowing for weed management, compost applications and synthetic fertilizers, and different cover crops. The team is tracking the cost of each practice and will ultimately evaluate wine quality in the coming years. Taking a deeper dive into the future of soil sampling, Devin explains X-ray CT imagery. He has used this technology to evaluate the structure and organic matter from soil columns and aggregates. X-ray CT imagery has also been used to evaluate the impact grape seeds have on tannin flavor profiles. Resources:         80: (Rebroadcast) The Goldilocks Principle & Powdery Mildew Management 90: Nematode Management for Washington Grapes A workflow for segmenting soil and plant X-ray CT images with deep learning in Google's Colaboratory Devin Rippner, USDA ARS Functional Soil Health Healthy Soils Playlist Red Wine Fermentation Alters Grape Seed Morphology and Internal Porosity Soil Health in Washington Vineyards Vineyard soil texture and pH effects on Meloidogyne hapla and Mesocriconema xenoplax Washington Soil Health Initiative Vineyard Team Programs: Juan Nevarez Memorial Scholarship - Donate SIP Certified – Show your care for the people and planet   Sustainable Ag Expo – The premiere winegrowing event of the year Vineyard Team – Become a Member Get More Subscribe wherever you listen so you never miss an episode on the latest science and research with the Sustainable Winegrowing Podcast. Since 1994, Vineyard Team has been your resource for workshops and field demonstrations, research, and events dedicated to the stewardship of our natural resources. Learn more at www.vineyardteam.org.   Transcript [00:00:00] Beth Vukmanic: Wine growing regions in Washington State have many unique challenges from salty soils to low organic matter to nematodes. [00:00:13] Welcome to Sustainable Wine Growing with the Vineyard Team, where we bring you the latest in science and research for the wine industry. I'm Beth Vukmanic, Executive Director. [00:00:23] In today's podcast, Craig McMillan, Critical Resource Manager at Niner Wine Estates, with longtime SIP certified vineyard and the first ever SIP certified winery, speaks with Devin Rippner, Research Viticulture Soil Scientist with USDA ARS. [00:00:41] Devin and his colleagues at Washington State University are developing a research vineyard to study soil health building practices. [00:00:49] They are testing a variety of management strategies, including adjusting irrigation volume to correct for salt buildup, mowing for weed management, Compost applications and synthetic fertilizers and different cover crops. The team is tracking the cost of each practice and will ultimately evaluate wine quality in the coming years. [00:01:08] Taking a deeper dive into the future of soil sampling. Devin explains X ray CT imagery. He has used this technology to evaluate the structure in organic matter from soil columns and soil aggregates. X ray CT imagery has also been used to evaluate the impact that grape seeds have on tannin flavor profiles. [00:01:28] Now let's listen in. [00:01:29] Craig Macmillan: Our guest today is Devin Rippner. He is a research soil scientist with the USDA agricultural research service. He's based out of Prosser, Washington, and he's also an adjunct in the department of crop and soil sciences with Washington state university. [00:01:46] Devin, thanks for being here. [00:01:48] Devin Rippner: Absolutely. Pleasure to be here, Craig. [00:01:50] Craig Macmillan: You are on the leadership team of the Washington State Soil Health Initiative. I think it's a pretty cool little program. Tell us what it is and what it's all about. [00:01:59] Devin Rippner: Yeah, absolutely. So the Washington State Legislature allocated funding to study soil health and soil health building practices in a variety of agricultural systems and so to access that money a number of groups put in competitive proposals at the Prosser Irrigated Agriculture Research and Extension Center, we put in a proposal to study soil health in wine grape systems. [00:02:24] Originally, we actually had it in juice grapes as well, but we were not able to get enough funding for both. Juice grapes are actually a big product out of Washington. [00:02:32] Craig Macmillan: I did not know that. That's interesting. What varieties? [00:02:34] Devin Rippner: Mostly Concord? [00:02:36] I'm less familiar with it. It's something I would, I would like to work in cause they have different constraints than wine grapes. [00:02:41] Ours is focused on wine grapes, but there are systems looking at tree fruit, at potatoes, at small crane cropping systems. There are a variety of systems that are being evaluated. [00:02:54] Craig Macmillan: I looked at a flyer that kind of outlined some of the ideas and issues around , the Wine Grape part. Can you tell us a little bit about that? [00:03:01] Devin Rippner: we have fairly unique soils. We have pretty alkaline soils here in Washington. We're on the arid side of the Cascades. So think Reno rather than like Seattle. we tend to accumulate salts. We also have very coarse textured soils. So a lot of sands to sandy loams or loamy sands. Very little clay. [00:03:23] We have typically under 10 percent clay in a lot of the grape growing regions of washington. we also have low organic matter, because it doesn't rain much here. There has never been a chance for a lot of plants to grow. And so we just have never really built up organic matter. So we typically have about, let's say, maybe 1 percent to 2 percent organic matter in our soils. [00:03:44] That's about half a percent carbon to 1 percent carbon, which is typically it's pretty low for a lot of soils. [00:03:50] Craig Macmillan: It is. [00:03:51] Devin Rippner: those are some of, some of the like unique challenges around soil health. There's also problems with pests. Haven't had too much of an issue with Phylloxera. That's changing. [00:04:01] There are a variety of nematode pests that cause problems in grapes here. When you plant a vineyard into an old vineyard, you're basically putting baby vines into a place that might have a bunch of pests that aren't a big deal for really mature vines. [00:04:14] But as soon as you put a baby in that environment, it does not thrive. [00:04:18] Finding ways to deal with nematode pests, things like that over time , is really important. So those are kind of the things that we are, we are looking at, at our site. [00:04:27] Craig Macmillan: What kind of practices are you investigating to address these things? I hadn't really thought of that about it till now, but nematode is a good one. that's a tough pest. [00:04:37] Devin Rippner: funny thing is this is a long term site, right? So, so our practices for those will really come later. I had a nematologist that worked for me. And she evaluated our soils for for the pathogenic nematodes for wine grapes, and we don't really have them but the thing is they build over time, right? [00:04:52] Just because there might be a few in that soil But when they start colonizing the grape roots over time, they can become problematic We functionally have a rootstock trial at the end of all of our experimental rows and, and rootstocks have been found to be very effective at preventing nematode problems or decreasing the severity of nematode problems. [00:05:13] We will be able to kind of look at that with our rootstock trial. [00:05:17] Craig Macmillan: Do you have any of the GRN stocks in that? [00:05:19] Devin Rippner: We don't, so we have own rooted vines and then we have Telekey 5c 1103p 110r. Let's see then I think St. George [00:05:30] I'm trying to remember what, what the last one is. It's escaping me right now. I apologize. [00:05:34] Craig Macmillan: Well, no, it's all right. Some of the more common root stocks, basically the ones that are very popular. [00:05:39] Devin Rippner: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [00:05:41] The reality is that a lot of the like vitis rupestris, vitis riparia, , they are less prone to nematode parasitism. Than Vinifera. , that's the reality of it. [00:05:50] Craig Macmillan: Yeah. Less susceptible. I think it's probably the best way to put it. Nothing's bulletproof when it comes to this, this problem. [00:05:57] Devin Rippner: And Michelle Moyer in Washington has been doing a lot of work with this, with Inga Zasada, who's a USDA scientist. And their, their results are really cool. They're finding that when you try to fumigate, it helps for a little while, but the rebound is bad, and it's just easier to just use rootstocks. [00:06:15] Craig Macmillan: Yeah. Talk to me a little bit more about, you said salinity can be an issue [00:06:19] Devin Rippner: Yeah, [00:06:20] Craig Macmillan: So here's the, the back and forth on that. You would think that a, a coser, your textured soil salinity would be less of an issue, but you don't get the rain to take advantage of that. Is that , the issue here? [00:06:30] Devin Rippner: 100%. That's exactly it. We build up layers called caliche layers, which are evidence of a lack of water moving downward. [00:06:38] So it's, it's really evidence of water moving down and then back up due to evaporation. We get big buildups of carbonates in our soils and carbonates are a type of salt. [00:06:48] So as you apply other chemicals, Salts, a salty irrigation water , we tend to build up salts in our soils. A lot of our irrigation water comes from the Yakima River or other rivers in the area, columbia River. But there are places where people are on deeper wells and they are seeing salt accumulation in their vineyards. [00:07:06] And it's, it's really challenging to deal with. [00:07:09] Craig Macmillan: Do you have any strategies that you're looking at? Anything you're trying out? [00:07:13] Devin Rippner: at our site over time, we're going to look at higher irrigation volumes versus lower irrigation volumes and seeing if that will change the accumulation of salt at our site. , that's kind of the main experiment around that with our soil health vineyard. [00:07:27] Craig Macmillan: Obviously you're doing this with some pretty salty irrigation water and you're comparing that to less salty water. At one site, you're only gonna have one type of water, right? [00:07:36] Devin Rippner: Right. That's not something that we'll be able to do, but one of the interesting things is we are applying compost and. Our compost can be pretty salty. [00:07:45] So we'll, we'll be getting compost. That'll be kind of four decisiemen per meter. I I'm sorry to use those units and so that, so that is salty. [00:07:54] Craig Macmillan: Yeah, it's salty. [00:07:55] Devin Rippner: Young grapevines, if they grew only in that, they would really struggle. It's over the, the two deciSiemen per meter kind of threshold for grapevines. That's something where we're, you know, we are using clean irrigation water, but some of our amendments coming in can be saltier. [00:08:10] When we have kind of a, a low and high irrigation treatment, we can evaluate the salt accumulation in the root zone. From that particular amendment, right? [00:08:19] Craig Macmillan: What about other types of fertilizer? Are there organic fertilizers or something like that that might be less of a salt contributor than let's say a traditional nitrate based fertilizer? [00:08:28] Devin Rippner: As it turns out, at least for us, we don't apply. a massive amount of nitrogen to our grapevines, so we're often applying between 20 and say 60 pounds of N per year which is not a lot compared to say corn or, tree fruit or, or hops or things like that. [00:08:45] And so we, we don't, Exactly. Expect to see a buildup of, of those salts over time. Honestly, some of the organic amendments end up being saltier than our fertilizer. [00:08:55] That's something when we do a high and low for irrigation, we will be able to look at the accumulation of, of nitrates and things like that. [00:09:02] Cause in our arid environment, you do get accumulations of nitrate, which is kind of funny. [00:09:06] Craig Macmillan: Yeah, that's interesting. You also mentioned the soil pH, alkalinity. What, what's going on there? How bad is it in different spots? What can you do about it? I, I'm fascinated by this because like when you look at viticulture, you have like a lot of knobs on the mixing board, right? You got a lot of sliders and, Soil , you can't slide it very well. It's like very hard to make changes to soil over time. [00:09:33] Devin Rippner: it is. [00:09:33] Craig Macmillan: very slow and very difficult. So I'm very interested in , this issue here. [00:09:39] Devin Rippner: It's funny at our site, the soil pH isn't too bad. It's about 8. Across the board, from the, from the top that so, so we've been measuring from the top of the soil down to about 90 centimeters. About three feet. We do see a pH tick up in our sub soil, but still it's, it's around the eights. [00:09:56] We actually have a lot of carbonates in our soil. There's only more organic carbon in the top six inches of our soil. And from that point on, most of our carbon is in the form of carbonates. [00:10:06] Which is kind of unique. And so once you get down to like 60 to 90 centimeters, so two to three feet in the soil, functionally, 90 percent of the soil carbon is carbon from carbonate. [00:10:16] So dealing with that in the region there's wide variation, so people that are planting into old wheat ground where they've used a lot of ammonium based fertilizers or urea, the pH can be in the fives. And then I, I mean, I've measured soil pH is up to about 9. 8 around here. So, so quite high. [00:10:35] Those soils are hard to deal with. So these are carbonate buffered systems. So to try to lower the pH, you basically have to get rid of all the carbonates. And that is not really feasible. We do see in some of the vineyards that we work in. And again, a lot of this data is preliminary. [00:10:51] I'm trying to get stuff out right now. Getting the vineyard set up has been a massive undertaking. And I've been lucky to work with a great team to, to get it done, but it has taken a lot of my time. [00:11:01] Um, but we, we do see seasonal fluctuations with irrigation. So soils might start off with a pH around eight drop over the course of the growing season into the sixes and then as they dry down for winter time. So we cut irrigation. The pH will start to rise back up as the carbonates move from the subsoil to the surface. [00:11:21] Craig Macmillan: Interesting. Interesting. Let's talk about your vineyard. If I understand correctly, you have a research vineyard there in Prosser that you are building from scratch or have built from scratch. Is that true? [00:11:30] Devin Rippner: Yes. . It is a new vineyard to study soil health building practices. We just finished our second season. And we were very lucky. Vina Matos which is a company out of Portugal. They mechanically planted it for us. [00:11:45] Scientist, so it's, it was, yeah, it was a bit of an undertaking. Even now I've gotten a lot better on a tractor than I was. And, you know, I like to run, like, I'd like to do x ray stuff. And then I'm out there on a tractor, like, yeah, doing stuff. It's a unique challenge. [00:11:59] So we do have a vineyard manager Dr. Liz Gillespie is the vineyard manager. , she honestly does most of the tracker work. I only sub in when she's down with an illness or something like that. [00:12:09] It's been a team effort for the last couple of years. [00:12:12] Craig Macmillan: What are you doing in there? You've talked about a couple of topics, but, and how big is this, this vineyard? [00:12:17] Devin Rippner: It's not that big. It's about 4. 1 acres. , [00:12:20] Craig Macmillan: that's, you know, for research, that's good. [00:12:22] Devin Rippner: yeah, yeah, it is good. We functionally have a business as usual. So we call it our Washington 2021 standard. So it's kind of what growers just do. So that's spraying undervined for weed control and then just let resident vegetation pop up where it may and mow it down. [00:12:39] Most people don't spray or till , their tractor rows. They just. Kind of let it go. We don't get that much rain. You end up selecting for annual grasses it's actually a pretty good weed composition for a tractor row. So then we start building from there. [00:12:52] One of our treatments is what if you just mowed everywhere, right? The goal is to select for annual grasses everywhere over time. [00:12:59] And then we have another treatment where we're mowing everywhere. But we're applying compost for fertilization. Our other treatments get synthetic fertilizers for fertilization, and then we have our compost treatment where we're mowing. [00:13:12] Then we have an undervined cover crop, so that's like our cover crop treatment. [00:13:16] We're curious about undervine legume cover crops. So we have a short subterranean clover that , we've seated in to hopefully eventually start adding nitrogen to the system and, and hopefully we'll be able to back off on more of the synthetic fertilizers over time in that system, but we'll let the vines guide us, right? [00:13:35] Craig Macmillan: What species of clover is that? [00:13:37] Devin Rippner: I'm not sure the exact, so it would be like Dalkey. [00:13:39] it's a clover that basically has low flowers and shoots seed downward. And so , that allows it to replant itself really effectively. [00:13:47] The flowers tend to be below the foliage. So we won't have to worry about mowing them down too badly. , they stay low. And so that's why we selected that. just to try to keep the flowers low and keep foliage away from our vines. [00:14:01] Craig Macmillan: Anything else? [00:14:03] Devin Rippner: Yeah, so then we have our aspirational treatment, which is kind of a mix of the subterranean clover cover crop. And then we have compost fertilization and then kind of breaking the full factorial. We're actually changing what's in , , the tractor row. We're planting an intermediate wheatgrass. [00:14:20] We started with crusted wheatgrass. It's so funny with these experiments. , we seeded in crusted wheatgrass a couple of times and just did not take it's not very effective for competing against other weeds, and it's not very good with traffic. And so now , we're seeding in intermediate wheatgrass. [00:14:35] , it is more traffic tolerant and is more weed tolerant. So we're hoping that we'll be able to outcompete all the other annual grasses and just have kind of a perennial grass cover crop. [00:14:46] Craig Macmillan: Is it on these courses? So is this camp is compaction less of a problem? I would think. [00:14:53] Devin Rippner: We do have some compaction. That we've seen out there. Certainly mechanical planting can cause some extra compaction. It, it takes a lot of force to, you know, rip a giant hole in the ground to drop the vines into. And so we do see some compaction from that. [00:15:06] We have taken bulk density cores from all over the vineyard. And we're hoping to see changes over time in that compaction. So we've done bulk density course from under vine and then in the tractor row. And so we're hoping that over time, these various practices will alter the bulk density, hopefully lower the bulk density in the tractor row. [00:15:27] Craig Macmillan: And then I'm assuming that you're also keeping track of costs for these things. [00:15:32] Devin Rippner: yes, we have been keeping track of costs. We are keeping track of the hourly labor , for mowing. Honestly, we've, we've purchased some undervine mowers and , we have really struggled to find a good solution for our young vines. [00:15:45] We're going to, Purchase another one soon. The biggest thing is that if you have a swing arm on it, it's got to be gentle enough that it, it'll push out of the way , with a bamboo stake in the ground. [00:15:55] And a lot of the existing swing arm mowers for orchards and vineyards it takes a lot of force to move that swing arm. [00:16:03] It's been a real challenge for us. So, so we ended up having people go out with weed eaters, which is super expensive and is actually something that some vineyards do either biodynamic vineyards in the area that they'll send people out with weed eaters to go control the weeds under vine. [00:16:17] I don't want this to be just like a hyper specialized science experiment. If we're sending people out with weed eaters, it sounds a little bit ridiculous, but there are folks in the industry that do it. So it's not. It's not that ridiculous. [00:16:28] Craig Macmillan: It's not that ridiculous. It's legitimate. [00:16:31] Whatever tool that you can make work, depending on the size of your vineyard and depending on what your conditions are. But yeah, you're in row mode. That's going to be an issue until these vines are mature to no doubt about that. I hope you still have a vineyard after knocking down these bamboo stakes. [00:16:44] You don't have like real results yet. You've only just gotten started. [00:16:47] Devin Rippner: We've only just gotten started you know, some of the results that we got were prior to our planting, there were no differences among our treatment blocks for our treatments across the site. So that's nice kind of starting at a, a pretty even baseline. [00:17:03] We're going to track the changes over time. Honestly. I hate to speculate, we don't have the data for it yet, but we've been applying, our synthetic fertilizers based on our like compost mineralization rate. And one of the things that's pretty obvious when you walk out there is that weed competition is brutal for young vines. [00:17:23] So where we're spraying with herbicide under the vines, there's less weed competition. Those vines are just bigger., [00:17:28] we're going to up the amount of fertilizer that we apply next year to try to, like, get around that. And it's one of the challenges at our site is that for long term research, we have to manage our vineyard in a way that kind of limits how many comparisons that we can make. Functionally, two out of our three rows are buffers. It just eats up an enormous amount of space and I'm, I'm hesitant to start putting other treatments into those areas. Like, oh, what if we vary the fertilizer rate to see what the effect is with relation to mowing, right? [00:18:01] So can we get over the weed pressure by, Applying more fertilizer. One of my main takeaways is that a lot of the recommendations that you might get for like, for conventional management won't necessarily work if you're trying to change your system [00:18:16] That's where, you know, growers are going to have to play around and understand that if they're mowing under vine, there is going to be more weed pressure and those weeds take up nitrogen. [00:18:27] You may have to fertilize more. I mean, that, that's just a consequence of, of weed competition. [00:18:32] Craig Macmillan: yeah, yeah, yeah. That's interesting. And in irrigation water too, [00:18:37] Devin Rippner: Oh yeah. Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. They use a lot of water. There's no doubt about it. [00:18:42] Craig Macmillan: Which actually brings me back to the clover. I planted crimson clover in my yard once and I irrigated it and it was really pretty and I actually put two and a half foot, three foot high risers off of my lawn sprinklers to get a sprinkler high enough that I could keep growing it. And I was able to grow it up to about three feet tall and it was gorgeous. It was absolutely amazing. But it does make me wonder if, what's a subterranean clover? It's a low growing clover, but how much effect does irrigation have on it in terms of making it taller or taller? [00:19:13] Devin Rippner: That's a good question. I haven't looked into it that much. I consulted with some colleagues here. Who've done work with a variety of cover crops, and they were the ones that recommended the subterranean clover. It has a short stature and part of it is because of how it flowers and seeds, it can't get that tall because it's, it pushes its seeds into the ground. [00:19:32] And so there's no real benefit for it getting taller because then it will be farther away from where it needs to put its seeds. [00:19:39] That's a real concern. I mean, I've learned so much by , having a vineyard gophers, voles, rats, mice, they can be problematic. Right. And if you have a tall cover crop, that's getting into your vines, like that's an easy pathway up. [00:19:52] Keeping the, those undervine weeds and cover crops short is really important. [00:19:58] Craig Macmillan: Yeah. It's also really important for the success of your predators. [00:20:01] Your barn nows and whatnot. They can't really do much when things are tall. So keep going, keep good luck. You're in it. You're in it now, Devon, [00:20:09] Devin Rippner: Oh, yeah. No, that's what it feels like. I feel like I jumped into the deep end of a pool, but didn't realize it was so deep. And so, yeah, I'm learning. [00:20:17] Craig Macmillan: Because prior to a few years back, cause you were, you were at Davis and you were at the Oakville station. Is that right? For a little while. [00:20:24] Devin Rippner: I pulled some samples from Oakville, but no, I was mostly on main campus. I'm a soil chemist by training. Grapevines are relatively new for me. I worked for Andrew McElrone, who , does some great work a lot of my previous work did not involve grapes, and it was mainly, like, tomatoes or other annual crops, and often, like, pretty lab based stuff. [00:20:47] And so this has been a real deep dive for me to do something different. [00:20:53] Craig Macmillan: which is an excellent transition to some of your work which you did at other crops, but you also did some other interesting things related to vines and to soil. And that is x ray CT imagery. You were the first person to introduce me to this concept. I I had no idea I guess I should say X ray micro CT imagery. What, what are the exact terminology? What is it? What can it do? What can we learn? [00:21:20] Devin Rippner: Thanks for bringing this up. Let me just try to keep it simple and I'll build out from there. Just like a doctor's office where you can get an X ray you can actually X ray soils. And plants and look inside of them. X ray computed tomography is where instead of just taking one x ray, maybe you take 1000 x rays as the sample is slowly moving. And what you end up with is the ability to make a three D reconstruction of that sample. Where you're able to look inside of it. [00:21:50] Materials that absorb x rays look different than materials that don't absorb x rays. And so you're able to start Teasing apart structures that are inside of plants and soils [00:22:01] There's different levels to that. Humans have X ray computed tomography done on them, right? You can go in and have that procedure done to look inside of you. It's very much like an MRI there are some tools that it. look at very big volumes. And then there are some tools that look at very small volumes. [00:22:19] That's where there's the x ray microcomputed tomography is looking at very small volumes. And a lot of times those instruments they're low often located. With synchrotrons. So a synchrotron is a particle accelerator that moves electrons at about the speed of light. And then as they're going at the speed of light, , it bends them, it shifts the path of the electrons. [00:22:43] And in doing so , Theory of relativity says that when you have a big shift , in the direction of these electrons they must lose energy. And so they lose energy as the brightest light that we know of in the known universe. And so some of that light are x rays and those x rays are very tunable, and there's a lot of them. [00:23:03] And so we can basically focus on a really tiny area. And still have a lot of x rays. That lets us look at really small things and still have like good contrast and be able to image them relatively quickly. This field is advancing quickly. I know it sounds pretty crazy to talk about x raying soils and plants and things like that. [00:23:23] But the reality is these x rays can also be used to identify elements. And so you can do elemental speciation. So you can be like, Oh, all of the phosphorus there is as phosphate rather than some other form or it's calcium phosphate, not magnesium phosphate. That's called x ray adsorption, near edge structures. [00:23:42] That's how people do that. A long time ago, these instruments used to be unique. You do like a tomography and then you do like these Zains do elemental information, but those things are converging. Now it's possible to do like x ray CT and also do elemental analysis and speciation on the same sample. [00:24:01] in 100 years, that may be how we do our soil testing is you literally have one of these instruments on the back of a tractor. You pull a soil core. You do a quick scan and you say, here's our structure. We can also see the organic matter inside of the soil column. And then by inference from the outer edge of the soil column, we can get What elements are there and what form they're in and then make predictions on their availability. [00:24:27] Were very far from that, but that's like the vision that I have in my head is that at some point, , these will be sensors that people can just use in the field. Will they use an enormous amount of energy? Absolutely. Technology has, shifted in my lifetime and a lot of things that have seemed absurd in the past are now commonplace. [00:24:47] Craig Macmillan: What kinds of things, and it can be other crops as well, but in particular, there was one you did with, I think, grape seeds. Those are the things that can do what, what have you actually. Zapped [00:24:59] Devin Rippner: Yeah. [00:24:59] Craig Macmillan: a better word. [00:25:01] Devin Rippner: You know. [00:25:01] Craig Macmillan: mind here. Okay. So [00:25:03] Devin Rippner: Yeah. So I work with a lot of folks at different national labs. So the Pacific Northwest National Lab is a lab I work at a lot. And we've done a lot of imaging of soil cores and they're big soil cores. So three inches by 12 inch soil cores and to look at soil structure and we're working on segmenting out organic matter from them. [00:25:22] That's something that was not previously possible, but with modern neural networks and deep learning, we can actually train. Neural networks to identify specific compounds in the soil and identify them. We've done it with soil columns. I've done some work with soil aggregates. [00:25:38] So we can look at very small things as well. I've looked at grape seeds, so we had a little study where working with some folks at Davis they pulled out grape seeds, before, during and after fermentation, functionally, and we looked at how the structures of the seeds were changing. [00:25:58] The idea here is that grapeseeds provide a lot of tannins and they're not necessarily like the best tannins for wine, but they do provide a lot of tannins. [00:26:07] People have always wondered like, why do grapeseeds kind of supply a constant amount of tannins during the fermentation process? And as it turns out, it's because the structure of the seeds is changing during fermentation, [00:26:18] They start cracking. And so the internal structures become more accessible during fermentation. [00:26:23] And so that's what we were seeing using x ray tomography is these internal changes that were happening inside of the grape seeds that could potentially promote tannin extraction. [00:26:32] Craig Macmillan: That is fascinating. That explains a lot. I'm just thinking through, Tannin management. The date currently is in the beginning of November 2024. So we're just wrapping up a harvest here in the Paso Robles, central coast area. And so I've been thinking a lot about tannin management last couple of months on behalf of my friends who make wine, not myself. That's not entirely true. Is there a practical application to that in terms of like timing or conditions or things that would contribute to the, the cracking breakdown of these seeds that you identified? [00:27:05] Devin Rippner: We weren't able to go like that in depth and it's some, it's an area that I would like to build on. But the idea is that. The fermentation is a pretty harsh environment. You have a massive change in pH. Microbes are working hard. You have the production of ethanol, which allows the extraction of different compounds. [00:27:24] The seeds are seemingly being modified during fermentation. There needs to be more work done in this area in terms of seed tanning management. We now have kind of a, the more physical. Explanation for why those cannons are coming out of the seeds. [00:27:39] If you are able to pull your seeds earlier from fermentation, I mean, that's like a ridiculous thing to say, but you know, [00:27:45] Craig Macmillan: no, I mean, winemakers are very clever there's a lot of techniques that have become more prominent, I think, in the last 10, 15 years in terms of things like pressing off early, so getting your extraction fast and then finishing out the fermentation off of skins, off of seeds, you know, that's one way that you can do it really using seed maturity as a major variable in your pick decision is another one that I've seen people really draw to. [00:28:09] I remember people crunching on seeds and going, yeah, that's mature. Now I'm seeing people reject a pick date based on that. [00:28:17] Like we were going to wait for these seeds to mature fully before we pull because of, because of these issues with a seed tannin. So just knowing that I think is fascinating. [00:28:28] And if we can put some time and pH things on that, that would be really cool. Are you going to be using this technology with the with the research plot for anything? [00:28:36] Devin Rippner: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, we [00:28:39] already have started that. We've already started down that route. Shortly after planting we collected soil cores from, , the vine row. And then from where the, the planter tires were functionally running just to look at changes in bulk density. So like kind of how compressed the soil is and then trying to get at changes in porosity. [00:28:58] We looked at these cores relative to , a field next door. That has had very relatively little disturbance in the past, like 4 to 10 years. It's kind of variable but has had less disturbance than say, like, right after planting a vineyard mechanically. Some of the things we see are you know, when you mechanically plant a vineyard, the bulk density , in the vine row is much lower than where the tractor tires are running that intrinsically makes sense. [00:29:26] And they're kind of both different than a place that's been no till or low disturbance for four to 10 years. Some of the things that are most interesting, and, and again, this is preliminary, it's got to go through peer review. . But when we look at the CT scans, you can actually see where worms have been moving, [00:29:45] In these, like, low till and no till plots or this field that has just not really been disturbed. [00:29:51] , so worms are actually making sizable holes in the ground, and those holes contribute to the porosity in these, like, low disturbance soils compared to these very disturbed soils. And that was a really interesting thing to visually see. You can see the worm castings in the scan. [00:30:10] I don't know if you've ever seen worm castings before, but they kind of, they're these little, like, kind of football shaped Things that are all clumped together our soils don't really aggregate. [00:30:20] We don't have enough organic matter and we don't have enough clay. And so that's like driving force behind aggregation in our soil seemingly is worm castings. For me, that was just mind blowing. [00:30:31] I was not expecting to see that. I think I was expecting to see a lot of roots or like root channels and they're there, but the worms are like following these roots and root channels around. [00:30:41] I'm a very visual person. And so when I do CT stuff, it's like, Oh, wow. Like I can see it with my eyes. If I can't see it with my eyes, it's hard for me to believe. But when I see it with my eyes, , it's believable. [00:30:52] Craig Macmillan: We've done a number of interviews recently around so the microbiome and just soil biology kind of in general, , is that gonna be part of your analysis as some of these projects go forward? [00:31:03] Devin Rippner: Yeah, absolutely. So we've done something called phospholipid fatty acid analysis. [00:31:09] So that gives us an idea of kind of, The microbial consortium that's there right when we sample phospholipids don't really stick around in soils. They're quickly degraded. We would like to do some sequencing challenges. We don't have a microbiologist on the team. And, and so we would, we would have to pay for the sequencing. [00:31:28] And even then sequencing is really interesting because, you could be like, oh, we did say 16 S-R-R-N-A sequencing. And that's like, that's a particular like region or a particular type of sequencing that is, that only picks up on say bacteria. [00:31:47] Whereas if you want to see fungi, maybe you need to do something called ITS sequencing. And so unless you do like all of the sequencing, you can get an idea of what's happening to the bacterial communities or the fungal communities. But unless you do all of them, it's really hard to get a more holistic picture. [00:32:05] And then, a lot of the sequencing that we do or is done we're missing things. If the regions analyzed aren't big enough, like we can be blind to specific things that we know are there. And so things like my understanding is that fungal mycorrhizae can actually be hard to detect by sequencing. [00:32:21] And so even if you visually see them in the roots by staining, you may not pick them up by sequencing. It is a challenge. Now, I, you know, I think that certainly studying the microbiome and understanding its relationship , with vine performance and soil health is, is crucial and is really, you know, one of the things that it's kind of the Holy grail [00:32:41] Craig Macmillan: Yeah. [00:32:43] Devin Rippner: We're trying to get there. [00:32:44] Craig Macmillan: We're trying to get there. That is definitely the message, but it also, there's definitely the potential. I think that there's a lot of people working on this. I think we're going to get there. It's, genomics is so big. I've talked to people that are like, at some point we, we, we will probably be able to get down to species, so we will know the bad actors from the good actors, we'll get a sense of what the real ecology is. [00:33:05] That's a decade plus away still, but we're going there. Right? We're we're gonna figure it out. We're gonna figure it out at some point. We're gonna get there. [00:33:14] Devin Rippner: Yeah, I agree. And there's, there are some techniques. There's some really cool techniques. So Jennifer Petridge at Lawrence Livermore lab does a lot Carbon 13 labeling of root exudates. So she basically gives plants, she treats them with carbon 13, enriched CO2. And then she looks at how much of the carbon 13 is then incorporated into the DNA of microbes to try to get at how well associated they are with plants. [00:33:41] I think that work is just incredible. And there's some folks at Davis that are, are working that in that area as well. That's kind of the stuff that gets me really excited to seeing when people are trying to really tie it into what's feeding on root carbon, , who's getting these exudates, things like that. [00:33:59] , that to me is one of the, One of the ways that we'll be able to, like, get at these questions is to, to start differentiating, the bulk soil microbiome from like the, the real rhizosphere associated microbiome. [00:34:11] Craig Macmillan: so you got a lot going on. You got , you got a bunch of different things happening. What's the path ahead look like for you? [00:34:17] Devin Rippner: Sure. So, and with with the soil health vineyard. I mean, I'm very excited to keep that going. We'll do another large sampling event in 2027 or 2028. We'll start making wine from our grapes. Not next year, but the year after that. So we'll be excited to see how our different management strategies influence our wine. [00:34:40] The wines that come out of the vineyard, or the wines made, made from the grapes that come out of the vineyard. So those are some of the things , I'm most excited about with regard to the vineyard. [00:34:50] Otherwise, I have a lot of data that I need to process and get out. That's something that's next. [00:34:56] I, I'm collaborating with some folks from the University of Illinois in Berkeley lab to look at changes to the Moro plots in Illinois over time. So that's the oldest agricultural experiment in the United States. The plots there have been in experimental treatments for 149 years. [00:35:15] And the reason I'm involved is because vineyards can be very long lived things, right? I mean, there are vines in California 100 years old. [00:35:23] This is one of the few experiments to me that's like comparable to what we see in vineyards. And so I'm really curious about, you know, how do, how do management practices influence soil structure, microbiome, the metagenome, the metabolome, things like that, on these century long timelines. [00:35:43] That to me is like some of the really interesting questions. If you have a vineyard for, for a century, or if you want a vineyard for a century, what do you need to do? How do you make that work? Knowing that it's going to take 20 years to have your vineyard be profitable. [00:35:57] I mean, you're already on a different timescale than annual crops, right? yeah. And so it's just like, how, how do we make our, our vineyards as sustainable and long lived as possible? Because , that, that initial investment is huge. It is so much money. [00:36:13] Craig Macmillan: I think that's really great. I think coming up with findings on other crops, but with practices that could be transferable is really great. You know, we don't need to be in our little grape silo. All the time. And in fact some of the soil microbiome stuff have been with interviews with people that had no connection to vineyards whatsoever. And it was great. The things that they were learning, they were absolutely transferable to this crop as well. That hasn't gotten that kind of attention. Grapevines are tough little suckers, really from an evolutionary standpoint, they're pretty rugged and so we can kind of get away with a lot just because of that. [00:36:48] And now I think the margin for error is less and less, especially when we get into tougher and tougher sites like you're talking about and different conditions, especially if you've farmed it for a while and things have changed. Being able to look at other, other systems and see what's there. [00:37:03] What is one thing that you would tell growers around this topic of research? [00:37:09] Devin Rippner: vineyard is very informed by grower practices. We have a grower board that like helps us make decisions. A message that I will say is like science is science and science is often pretty, you know, Like straight laced and rigid because it must be. know, We're going to find things and those results hopefully will be interesting. [00:37:27] But it's not the be all and end all . of science and research. Growers continuing to try innovative things push the boundaries of what they think is possible is really how we get progress. And I am hopeful , once this vineyard is more established to start going back out and working with growers. [00:37:48] When I first started in Prosser, I sampled from probably 40 different vineyards around the state just to get an idea of what the soil properties were like. And we've done some, some experiments with that. Some of our results are that permanganate oxidize oxidizable carbon. So this POC C classically it's been called active carbon. [00:38:08] There's some new research that suggests that it's, that's maybe a misnomer and it's really, often plant derived carbon. [00:38:15] It seems like there are some effects from that, that suppress disease. And I think that , that's an area where growers can really kind of play around and see if there's , waste from their vineyard and applying it to their vines trying to look at what that does to their, POC C values and also try, just getting in trying to look at some of the past issues that those vines may have and see if there's any decreases. [00:38:41] A lot of observational science is really important. I like hearing from growers that, yeah, I did this thing and it looks like it made a difference. There's a lot of value in that and, and I don't discount like grower knowledge in any way, shape, or form. Like it is deep knowledge growers know things that I don't, and I find that out all the time. [00:39:02] I value those observations. They they give me guidance on how I want to do my work. And we do try to incorporate that stuff into the soil health vineyard. Over time we are going to have to figure out like, You know, can we sustain funding for a vineyard for, say, 50 years if all we're doing is like a cover crop, some compost, and then a mix? [00:39:23] That seems like it's maybe not the most sustainable thing. Science requires that type of stuff, but it's just not that sustainable. So finding ways to make use of our, border rows and stuff like that is going to be important. And a lot of the research that we do is going to be informed by grower observations. [00:39:39] Craig Macmillan: Yep. Yep. Exactly. Where can people find out more about you and your work? [00:39:44] Devin Rippner: Sure. So you can look me up online. Devin Rippner a lot of stuff will pop up. There's a USDA website that has a listing of my publications and things like that. I also have a personal website. So those are some places to, to check out my work. [00:40:00] I try to make sure that my stuff is open access and usable. So, like the deep learning code, the image segmentation code that I co developed for X ray ct work is now being applied to like other types of imaging on. So people are using it at hops and a variety of other things on. [00:40:18] So that code is online. Like you can find it it's associated with my papers. You can play around with it and try it with your own stuff. Mhm. And, and, and that's a big thing for me is like open data. I, I love sharing a lot of the, the data that I have and the code that I have so that people can, repeat what I did. [00:40:35] Look me up online and yeah, you'll be, you can find that, find those resources. [00:40:40] Craig Macmillan: we will have links to a lot of that on the show page. So please visit the show page and check this stuff out. I was really happy to hear you use the word repeatability. [00:40:49] Devin Rippner: Yeah, [00:40:50] Craig Macmillan: Yeah. And I also was really, it's hard. it's very, very hard and it's often overlooked. You know, the, , the scientific methods we know today was all built around the idea of repeatability. That's how you demonstrate whether something's real, real, or if it's only real under certain conditions, blah, blah, blah, blah. So that's really great. I'm glad you're doing that. [00:41:08] Well, I want to thank you for being on the podcast. This is a Devin Rippner. He is a research soil scientist with USDA agricultural research service and an adjunct position with the crop and soil science department at Washington state university. Really fun conversation, Devin, lots to think about. I will be following this closely. Or annually, probably [00:41:31] Devin Rippner: Cool. [00:41:31] Yeah. [00:41:32] Craig Macmillan: these things are slow. I'm not going to be checking every week. But I just think it's really cool project and is real inspiration. And I would love to see the same kind of thing replicated in other places. [00:41:41] Devin Rippner: Great. Thanks Craig. That was really fun. [00:41:43] Beth Vukmanic: Thank you for listening. [00:41:49] If you enjoyed this podcast, Vineyard Team has a couple of in field tailgate meetings coming up this year that you won't want to miss. [00:41:56] The first is on February 20th in Paso Robles, and it is a dry farming grower around table. Now you don't need to be a dry farmer to enjoy this event. There'll be a number of different growers here talking about their experiences, trials, challenges, and successes. [00:42:13] The second event is on March 12th, and it is Grazing as a Sustainable Practice for Vineyards, taking place in Los Olivos, and we hope to have some adorable sheep on site. [00:42:24] Make sure you check out the show notes for links to Dev lots of research articles, plus, sustainable wine growing podcast episodes, 80. The Goldilocks principle and powdery mildew management, 90 nematode management for Washington grapes, plus a whole healthy soils playlist. [00:42:42] Now for the fine print, the views, thoughts, and opinions expressed are the speaker's own and do not represent the views, thoughts, and opinions of the USDA ARS. As such, the views, thoughts, and opinions. Presented by the speaker do not constitute an official endorsement or approval by the United States Department of Agriculture or the Agricultural Research Service of any product or service to the exclusion of others that may be suitable. The material and information presented here is for general information purposes only. [00:43:14] If you liked this show, do us a big favor by sharing it with a friend, subscribing, and leaving us a review. You can find all of the podcasts at vineyardteam.org/podcast. And you can reach us at podcast@vineyardteam. org. [00:43:28] Until next time, this is Sustainable Wine Growing with the Vineyard Team.   Nearly perfect transcription by Descript

This episode is sponsored by SysAid.   Get 20% off SysAid Copilot using this link: https://www.sysaid.com/lp/sysaid-copilot-s?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=short-craig     In this episode of the Eye on AI podcast, join us as we delve into the cutting-edge world of AI and high-performance computing with Brian Spears, Director of the AI Innovation Incubator at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.   Brian shares his experience in driving AI into national security science and managing the nation's nuclear stockpile. With a PhD in mechanical engineering, his expertise spans nonlinear dynamical systems and high-dimensional topology, making him uniquely positioned to lead groundbreaking projects in fusion ignition and AI integration.   Discover how Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieved fusion ignition for the first time, harnessing the power of AI to elevate simulation models with precise experimental data. Brian explains how this approach is paving the way for commercially viable fusion energy and advancing stockpile stewardship.   Explore the relationship between high-performance computing and AI as Brian discusses the Department of Energy's FAST initiative. Brian also touches on the importance of public-private partnerships, ethical considerations in AI development, and the future potential of quantum computing.   Tune in to understand how the US is leading the global race in AI and computing technology, setting the stage for unprecedented advancements in science and security.   Don't forget to like, subscribe, and hit the notification bell for more insights into the technologies driving the AI revolution.   Stay Updated: Craig Smith Twitter: https://twitter.com/craigss Eye on A.I. Twitter: https://twitter.com/EyeOn_AI (00:00) Preview (01:52) Introducing Brian Spears (03:14) Fusion Ignition and AI Integration (06:00) Predictive Models and Experimental Data (08:05) Challenges in Fusion Energy (12:03) Inertial Confinement Fusion Explained (14:12) Future of Fusion Energy (17:15) US Leadership in AI and Computing (19:22) Global AI Competition (22:33) High-Performance Computing Infrastructure (26:08) DOE's FAST Initiative (28:55) Transformational AI Applications (34:01) AI Ethics and Safety (36:24) Scientific Models and Large Language Models (39:30) 3D Molecular Modeling (42:47) National AI Research Resource (NAR) (45:18) Recruitment Challenges in AI (48:09) Comparison with China (52:30) DOE's Role and Future Vision (54:19) Quantum Computing

The UK has a new Prime Minister, and one of his first acts will have been to write letters to the captains of our nuclear missile submarines, telling them what to do in the event that the UK gets obliterated by a nuclear strike. But what else might happen after a full-scale nuclear war? Many scientists—most notably Carl Sagan—have theorised that nuclear war would block out the sun, destroy crops, and maybe lead to human extinction. But it turns out this is a very controversial theory. In this rather grim episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart try and work out who's right, and if nuclear winter really would be the end of the world.Another thing the new Prime Minister should be doing is reading Works in Progress magazine, the sponsor of The Studies Show. If he does, he'll find a wealth of ideas that he and his government could use to spark progress and growth in the UK - and in particular, he should be reading the classic essay “The Housing Theory of Everything”. You can find that and much more at worksinprogress.co.Show notes* Putin warning the West that Russia is “ready” for nuclear war* Ned Donovan's article on the UK Prime Minister's “Letters of Last Resort”* The 2024 test where the UK's nuclear deterrent went “plop”* Annie Jacobsen's book Nuclear War: A Scenario* A podcast episode and a Reddit thread criticising the book* Wikipedia on the Moscow-Washington and Beijing-Washington phone lines* The terrifying stories of Stanislav Petrov and Vasily Arkhipov* Eric Schlosser's book Command and Control, about nuclear near-misses* The 11-ton “Mother Of All Bombs” (MOAB) vs. the 9-megaton B53 thermonuclear warhead* Neil Halloran's YouTube video on deaths during and after a nuclear explosion* His later video discussing how he overstated nuclear winter effects* The “Nuke Map”, where you can see how much of a given city would be in the blast radius of a variety of different warheads* The two original 1983 nuclear winter papers in Science: the slightly more circumspect one; the one that mentions human extinction* Long Effective Altruism forum post by Michael Hinge on the evidence for and against nuclear winter effects* Even more detailed post on the same subject by Vasco Grilo* Three papers from three different teams on a regional nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan:* The Rutgers team's original paper in 2014* The follow-up by the Los Alamos team in 2018 (response from Rutgers; response from Los Alamos)* The follow-up by the Lawrence Livermore team in 2020* Carl Sagan's prediction of severe climate effects from Iraq's burning of the Kuwaiti oil wells in 1990/1991* Discussion of why that didn't happen* The extremely sceptical Naval Gazing blog post on nuclear winter* Paper from nuclear winter theorists accusing the US of genocide in Japan* Toby Ord's book The Precipice, on existential riskCreditsThe Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com/subscribe

On this episode, Nate is joined by ER doctor, nuclear power advocate, and podcast host Chris Keefer for a broad ranging conversation including the basics of nuclear energy, how he engages with opposing opinions, and hypotheticals for a future medical system. Coming from a broad background, Chris understands what it means to have a human to human conversation and put together the pieces of our systemic puzzle in a clear and compelling way. What role could nuclear play for our future energy needs - and how are different countries making use of it today? How can we prioritize the health and safety of people under energetic and resource constraints? Most of all, how do we listen to others that we don't agree with - regardless of the issue - to foster the diverse perspectives necessary to navigate the coming challenges of the human predicament?  About Chris Keefer: Chris Keefer MD, CCFP-EM is a Staff Emergency Physician at St Joseph's Health Centre and a Lecturer for the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto. He is also an avid advocate for expanding nuclear power as the President of Canadians for Nuclear Energy and Director of Doctors for Nuclear Energy. Additionally, he is the host of the Decouple Podcast exploring the most pressing questions in energy, climate, environment, politics, and philosophy. PDF Transcript Show Notes  00:00 - Chris Keefer works + info, Decouple Podcast, Canadians for Nuclear Energy 04:45 - Egalitarian hunter gatherer society, infant mortality 05:12 - Bow drill fire 07:10 - Yukon 07:30 - Humans and livestock outweigh wild mammals 50:1, not in the Yukon 08:10 - Dr. Paul Farmer 08:45 - Most humans use to work in agriculture, ~15% now involved in healthcare 10:56 - Ontario nuclear power, one of lowest electric grid in the world 12:01 - Justin Trudeau 12:24 - Simcoe Clinic, Canadian Center for Victims of Torture 14:01 - World population over time 14:36 - Paleodemography 14:59 - Degrowth 15:19 - Infant mortality in developed countries 15:55 - Tight link between energy, materials and GDP 20:54 - Duck and Cover Drills 21:05 - Environmental Movement and Nuclear 21:21 - Nagasaki bomb radiation injuries 21:49 - High dose radiation is deadly, low dose radiation less so 21:05 - Strontium-90 found in the teeth of babies 21:10 - Atmospheric weapons testing ban 22:33 - Fukushima meltdown, health impacts are negligible 23:09 - 20,000 people died from the Fukushima earthquake and following tsunami  23:47 - Fukushima contaminated water has been filtered out and is safe 24:24 - How radiation is measured 26:02 - Health effects from alcohol 26:16 - Drinking culture in the U.S. 27:22 - Nuclear energy density, land footprint 28:23 - Best nuclear applications and limitations 30:01 - Those who live in nuclear powered areas fare better 30:33 - Price of nuclear energy over the lifetime 30:45 - Nuclear power in France 31:18 - Canada energy history, center for nuclear research outside of the Manhattan Project 32:23 - 1000 people die prematurely every year due to coal 33:25 - Ontario population 33:38 - Candu Reactors 34:15 - Levelized cost of electricity, skewed with renewables 37:01 - Lazard Graphs 38:09 - Mark Jacobson 41:07 - Carbon emissions by power source 41:23 - Lifespan of nuclear plants 43:11 - Land use change impacts 43:31 - Nuclear and job creation 46:05 - US spending on military vs healthcare 48:49 - Meiji Restoration 49:33 - Vaclav Smil 50:42 - AI electricity demands 50:55 - AI risks 51:29 - Meredith Angwin  52:42 - Nuclear fuel 53:10 - 46% of uranium enrichment happens in Russia 54:15 - Known Uranium Reserves 54:25 - Haber Bosch  54:55 - Breeder Reactors 55:42 - Uranium in seawater 56:14 - Slow vs Fast Neutrons, fertile elements 57:04 - Sodium Fast Reactor 58:45 - China built a nuclear reactor in less than 4 years 1:00:05 - Defense in depth 1:01:11 - EMP, solar flare 1:01:30 - HBO's Chernobyl, wildlife thriving in chernobyl area 1:03:13 - Death toll from radiation in Chernobyl 1:05:13 - Scientific literature and confirmation bias 1:08:12 - Chernobyl Children's International 1:08:44 - Genome sequencing of highest exposures to radiation from chernobyl 1:09:09 - Germline mutations if the father smokes 1:10:02 - The Great Simplification animated video 1:10:32 - Peak Oil 1:12:10 - Complex 6-continent supply chains 1:12:30 - I, Pencil 1:15:19 - Nuclear Fusion 1:16:24 - Lawrence Livermore 1:17:45 - Tomas Murphy, Galactic Scale Energy 1:18:11 - Small Modular Reactor 1:19:26 - Cost saving in nuclear comes from scaling 1:19:34 - Wright's Law, economies of multiples 1:23:33 - Biden administration policies and advances on nuclear 1:24:00 - Non-profit industrial complex 1:24:24 - The size of the US non-profit economy 1:24:44 - Sierra Club, anti-nuclear history 1:25:14 - Rocky Mountain Club 1:27:15 - Hans Rosling 1:27:32 - Somalia infant mortality rate 1:27:42 - Cuba 1990s economic shock and response 1:27:42 - Vandana Shiva + TGS Episode 1:30:27 - Cognitive Dissonance 1:31:45 - Jonathan Haidt + TGS Podcast, Righteous Mind 1:32:48 - Fatality and hospitalization statistics for COVID for first responders 1:33:22 - Truckers protest in Ottawa 1:34:15 - The problem with superchickens  1:36:54 - How social media tries to keep you online 1:37:12 - Paleopsychology 1:37:55 - Tristan Harris and Daniel Schmachtenberger on Joe Rogan 1:39:45 - John Kitzhaber + TGS Episode, Robert Lustig + TGS Episode 1:39:55 - US healthcare 20% of GDP, 50% of the world's medical prescriptions are in the US  1:41:55 - Superutilizers 1:42:37 - Cuban medical system, spending, life expectancy, infant mortality 1:43:06 - Cuban export of pharmaceuticals 1:44:08 - Preventative medicine, chronic disease management 1:44:25 - Cuban doctor to person ratio, rest of the world 1:48:47 - Social determinants of health 1:49:20 - Cement floor reducing illness in Mexico 1:50:03 - Hygiene hypothesis 1:50:28 - Zoonotic disease and human/animal cohabitation 1:50:50 - Roundworm life cycle 1:52:38 - Acceptable miss rates 1:53:16 - Cancer screening effectiveness  1:53:58 - Drugs produced from nuclear plant byproducts 1:58:18 - Timothy O'Leary 2:02:28 - Superabundance 2:02:40 - Julian Simons and Paul Ehrlich bet 2:02:15 - Malthusian 2:06:08 - Pickering Plant Watch this video episode on YouTube

Most of Guy Morris' childhood felt helpless and hopeless. As an adult, while successful in his career, he hid chronic depression, complex PTSD, hyperanxiety, and addiction for many years. Guy was a homeless runaway at thirteen who now has a 36-year Fortune 100 career, bringing awareness of the rapid advances of A1 as it relates to cyber-security and national security. In addition, he is a published songwriter for Disnew Records, a screenplay writer for Sojourn Entertainment, a Coast Guard charter captain, a PADI diver, an adventurer, and now an author of an intelligent well-researched thriller.  Since his 2021 debut as an indie author, Guy has released three pulse-pounding thrillers inspired by true stories, actual technologies, true global politics, and history.  The true event of when the Ethiopian Ark of the Covenant was stolen and sold on the black markets inspired the Lask Ark following a massacre of 750 men, women, and children in January 2021. Deep research into AI, cyber-espionage, politics, history, religion, prophecy, and politics often provides further motivation. When Guy discovered through an obscure AP article a spy program had escaped the Lawrence Livermore labs at Sandia, a well-known HSA spy lab, two FBI agents showed up at his door. In Guy's interview, he will share what he discovered and why it is necessary to help you understand current and future events. You will want to pass this on to bring awareness and prepare us for what is ahead.   Click here to buy The SNO Chronicles are inspired by the true story of a program that escaped the Lawrence Livermore Labs at Sandia, a cryptology and signals lab for the CIA and NSA. The program was never recaptured. Code named SLVIA (Sophisticated Language Virtual Intelligence Algorithms), and program was designed as a web-crawling virtual spy under a joint CIA-NSA program to create a digital backdoor. Equipped with early versions of deep fake technology as well as other espionage, data gathering, and analysis functions, prototypes of the SLVIA toolset were stolen during the 2016 Russian CIA hack. Over the past decade, SLVIA has formed a network of millions of human connections across the globe known as the SNO (Spy Net Online). Men and women from all political, professional, and religious backgrounds are willing to share what they know and seek the truth behind the headlines. From political and corporate leaders to taxi drivers and hookers SNO members connect through SLVIA completely unaware of other members. Set in a post-coronavirus world with a crippled world economy, rising social and political corruption, and unrest with a global food crisis in the third world, and where real-world AI integrates into digital identity, law enforcement, military and cyber warfare, political corruption, and religious apostasy when SLVIA decodes end time prophecies to interpret world events through a prophetic lens with a frighteningly accurate real-world perspective. During 2020 the US, Russia, and China declined to abide by the international Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems (LAWS) protocol which would restrict any AI from making a kill decision without the validation of a human operator. During 2020, Russia demonstrated a hypersonic missile that could evade current missile defenses. Political corruption and division in the US have destabilized the world's greatest democracy. China, Russia, and Iran have formed an alliance designed to weaken the Western alliance's grip on the world economy and shift power to the east. A decade of hacks of US consumer, corporate, and government information has been weaponized into an artificial intelligence internet virus that can be trained and targeted to hack access and disable connected systems. The 2020 Solar Winds hack was the tip of the iceberg of a coming cyber conflict.

durée : 00:02:59 - Bientôt chez vous - Les études sont menées par ordinateur, par le laboratoire national Lawrence Livermore, au nord de la Californie, et d'après ces scientifiques, notre réponse serait une bombe nucléaire.

Invites are going out for AI Engineer Summit! In the meantime, we have just announced our first Actually Open AI event with Brev.dev and Langchain, Aug 26 in our SF HQ (we'll record talks for those remote). See you soon (and join the Discord)!Special thanks to @nearcyan for helping us arrange this with the Eleuther team.This post was on the HN frontpage for 15 hours.As startups and even VCs hoard GPUs to attract talent, the one thing more valuable than GPUs is knowing how to use them (aka, make GPUs go brrrr).There is an incredible amount of tacit knowledge in the NLP community around training, and until Eleuther.ai came along you pretty much had to work at Google or Meta to gain that knowledge. This makes it hard for non-insiders to even do simple estimations around costing out projects - it is well known how to trade $ for GPU hours, but trading “$ for size of model” or “$ for quality of model” is less known and more valuable and full of opaque “it depends”. This is why rules of thumb for training are incredibly useful, because they cut through the noise and give you the simple 20% of knowledge that determines 80% of the outcome derived from hard earned experience.Today's guest, Quentin Anthony from EleutherAI, is one of the top researchers in high-performance deep learning. He's one of the co-authors of Transformers Math 101, which was one of the clearest articulations of training rules of thumb. We can think of no better way to dive into training math than to have Quentin run us through a masterclass on model weights, optimizer states, gradients, activations, and how they all impact memory requirements.The core equation you will need to know is the following:Where C is the compute requirements to train a model, P is the number of parameters, and D is the size of the training dataset in tokens. This is also equal to τ, the throughput of your machine measured in FLOPs (Actual FLOPs/GPU * # of GPUs), multiplied by T, the amount of time spent training the model.Taking Chinchilla scaling at face value, you can simplify this equation to be `C = 120(P^2)`.These laws are only true when 1000 GPUs for 1 hour costs the same as 1 GPU for 1000 hours, so it's not always that easy to make these assumptions especially when it comes to communication overhead. There's a lot more math to dive into here between training and inference, which you can listen to in the episode or read in the articles. The other interesting concept we covered is distributed training and strategies such as ZeRO and 3D parallelism. As these models have scaled, it's become impossible to fit everything in a single GPU for training and inference. We leave these advanced concepts to the end, but there's a lot of innovation happening around sharding of params, gradients, and optimizer states that you must know is happening in modern LLM training. If you have questions, you can join the Eleuther AI Discord or follow Quentin on Twitter. Show Notes* Transformers Math 101 Article* Eleuther.ai* GPT-NeoX 20B* BLOOM* Turing NLG* Mosaic* Oak Ridge & Frontier Supercomputer* Summit Supercomputer * Lawrence Livermore Lab* RWKV* Flash Attention * Stas BekmanTimestamps* [00:00:00] Quentin's background and work at Eleuther.ai* [00:03:14] Motivation behind writing the Transformers Math 101 article* [00:05:58] Key equation for calculating compute requirements (tau x T = 6 x P x D)* [00:10:00] Difference between theoretical and actual FLOPs* [00:12:42] Applying the equation to estimate compute for GPT-3 training* [00:14:08] Expecting 115+ teraflops/sec per A100 GPU as a baseline* [00:15:10] Tradeoffs between Nvidia and AMD GPUs for training* [00:18:50] Model precision (FP32, FP16, BF16 etc.) and impact on memory* [00:22:00] Benefits of model quantization even with unlimited memory* [00:23:44] KV cache memory overhead during inference* [00:26:08] How optimizer memory usage is calculated* [00:32:03] Components of total training memory (model, optimizer, gradients, activations)* [00:33:47] Activation recomputation to reduce memory overhead* [00:38:25] Sharded optimizers like ZeRO to distribute across GPUs* [00:40:23] Communication operations like scatter and gather in ZeRO* [00:41:33] Advanced 3D parallelism techniques (data, tensor, pipeline)* [00:43:55] Combining 3D parallelism and sharded optimizers* [00:45:43] Challenges with heterogeneous clusters for distribution* [00:47:58] Lightning RoundTranscriptionAlessio: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO in Residence at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host Swyx, writer and editor of Latent Space. [00:00:20]Swyx: Hey, today we have a very special guest, Quentin Anthony from Eleuther.ai. The context for this episode is that we've been looking to cover Transformers math for a long time. And then one day in April, there's this blog post that comes out that literally is called Transformers Math 101 from Eleuther. And this is one of the most authoritative posts that I've ever seen. And I think basically on this podcast, we're trying to give people an intuition around what are the rules of thumb that are important in thinking about AI and reasoning by AI. And I don't think there's anyone more credible than the people at Eleuther or the people training actual large language models, especially on limited resources. So welcome, Quentin. [00:00:59]Quentin: Thank you. A little bit about myself is that I'm a PhD student at Ohio State University, starting my fifth year now, almost done. I started with Eleuther during the GPT-NeoX20B model. So they were getting started training that, they were having some problems scaling it. As we'll talk about, I'm sure today a lot, is that communication costs and synchronization and how do you scale up a model to hundreds of GPUs and make sure that things progress quickly is really difficult. That was really similar to my PhD work. So I jumped in and helped them on the 20B, getting that running smoothly. And then ever since then, just as new systems challenges arise, and as they move to high performance computing systems and distributed systems, I just sort of kept finding myself falling into projects and helping out there. So I've been at Eleuther for a little bit now, head engineer there now, and then finishing up my PhD and then, well, who knows where I'll go next. [00:01:48]Alessio: Awesome. What was the inspiration behind writing the article? Was it taking some of those learnings? Obviously Eleuther is one of the most open research places out there. Is it just part of the DNA there or any fun stories there? [00:02:00]Quentin: For the motivation for writing, you very frequently see in like the DL training space, like these Twitter posts by like, for example, like Stas Bekman at Hugging Face, you'll see like a Twitter post that's like, oh, we just found this magic number and everything is like 20% faster. He's super excited, but doesn't really understand what's going on. And the same thing for us, we very frequently find that a lot of people understand the theory or maybe the fundamentals of why like AI training or inference works, but no one knows like the nitty gritty details of like, how do you get inference to actually run correctly on your machine split across two GPUs or something like that. So we sort of had all of these notes that we had accumulated and we're sort of sharing among engineers within Eleuther and we thought, well, this would really help a lot of other people. It's not really maybe appropriate for like a paper, but for something like a blog post or technical report, this would actually maybe squeeze a lot of performance out of people's hardware they're already running on. So I guess there are a lot of projects in Eleuther that we're sort of trying to share notes with people in a way that typical institutions don't. They sort of live within that institution and then you go to a different institution and they do something very similar, but without the lessons of the previous. And it's because everyone's trying to do their own special sauce with their own stack. Whereas Eleuther, we don't really have that constraint and we can just share everything to everybody. [00:03:14]Swyx: Yeah, this is a level of openness that basically very few people actually embrace. One, it's an extra effort to write things down, of course, but two, it is secret sauce and so that not many people do it. And therefore, oftentimes the only way to learn this stuff is to actually work in one of the large model labs. And so you guys are doing a lot. The only other instance where I can think of where people actually open sourced their process was Facebook's OPT. What else is similar, like sort of trade knowledge, but not formal research knowledge? [00:03:45]Quentin: I would say Bloom. So the Hugging Face Bloom project in big science and all of that, that was very open. I'd say it's the same caliber, if not more detailed than OPT. Other than that, I think there was like a doc from Microsoft on like their Turing NLG. Their paper is pretty relaxed in that it did talk about some of those challenges. Other than like OPT and Bloom and us, I can't think of any. It's a new thing. [00:04:10]Swyx: It matters that you are going for the sort of good enough rules of thumb, because I think a lot of people try to go for precision and being overly precise actually is not helpful. Right. Yes. [00:04:20]Quentin: You'll see some like statements in the blog posts that are just like, we think this is about 1.2 in our experience. And, you know, we don't go any further into detail and it would take maybe an extra month for us to chase down every single little piece of memory. But instead, like getting good enough is still helpful to people. [00:04:36]Alessio: Let's jump into it. The first part of the article, and we'll put this in the show notes so people will be following along with the post. So we don't need to read every single equation and every footnote for it. [00:04:46]Swyx: Okay. [00:04:46]Alessio: But the core equation here is that not the cost of compute, but the compute required to turn a transformer model is roughly equal to tau times T, where like T is the, where tau is the hardware setup throughput that you have. So number of GPUs times the actual flops per GPU. And then T is the time spent. I think people can visualize that pretty easily. It's basically like how many GPUs do you have and how much do you let them run for? And the things that come to it that people have read before in the Chinchilla paper in a way, and the OpenAI scaling law is that you can then equal this to 6PD, where P is the number of parameters in the model and D is the size of the, of the dataset in tokens. So talk a little bit about how people should think about the two. I think a lot of times the focus is on tokens parameter ratio in the training dataset and people don't think as much about the actual flops per GPU, which you're going to mention later in the blog post too, in terms of how much you can get out. So how should people think about this when they're building a model and where should they go to this equation as they're starting to think about training their own transformer-based [00:05:58]Swyx: model? [00:05:58]Quentin: You touched a little bit on the fact that people usually start with the dataset. So you have some dataset that you want to train a model on. And then from there, from the 6PD, you should see, okay, I should have about six tokens per parameter. So that determines my model size thereabouts for Chinchilla Optimal. So since then we've seen that need more something like 20 or more than that to get a good quality model. But the next question that should be on your mind in terms of a systems perspective is how long is it going to take for this model to train and what kind of budget should I expect? So let's say I want some cloud instance for some amount of time and each of them will have some price attached to it. So that's where the throughput comes in. So now that you have this model, this number of parameters, you should map that to a transformer architecture and you should benchmark what throughput you get on your software stack for that type of model. So now you have your flops per second on a single GPU. And then given whatever parallelism scheme, which I'm sure we'll get into, like data parallelism or tensor parallelism or whatever else, how is that flops number going to scale to whatever number of GPUs? And then from there, you're going to get a time. And if you have a time, you have a cost. Those are like the business answers that you'll be able to get using this formula. That's why we sort of split it into the T and the throughput terms so that you can solve for one of them, which is usually get throughput, need time, and from time you get cost. In a nutshell, that's the answer. [00:07:19]Alessio: One thing that I noticed, you mentioned some of these laws are only true when a thousand GPUs for one hour cost the same as one GPU for a thousand hours, given that we have a shortage of the biggest GPUs out there. Any thoughts there on how people should prioritize this? [00:07:36]Quentin: Yeah, so I would say you should find what the minimum number of GPUs is to just fit your model first. The memory bottleneck is your biggest problem if you have a sizable model. If it's a small model, nobody cares. But most models that people care about will need to be split across multiple GPUs. So find the minimum number of GPUs to just fit your one instance of your model and then calculate how long that's going to take. If it's a reasonable amount of time, then you're done. If it takes too long, then you need to start worrying about having multiple instances of that model. I always feel like you should go with the minimum number of GPUs because the more number of GPUs that you have, the more likely it is for things to break. So I would say just find out what time is reasonable for you and then fit the number of GPUs to that and no more. Because people get greedy and they say, if I have twice the GPUs, I can get this done in half the time. And then you end up taking three times the time because everything is breaking every day. And that's when I am up at midnight trying to fix your model that's broken. [00:08:34]Swyx: We had a previous guest which has invested a lot in their framework for training these things. Would there not be an equivalent open source framework you guys would have made that would help with scaling up GPUs linearly like that? Or is this an oversimplification? [00:08:50]Quentin: Okay, yeah. So maybe I should step back. Both Mosaic and us have our own sort of software stack recipe that scales well, theoretically. But I'll get to that in a minute. Mosaic is all based off optimizer sharding. So it's based off ZeRO. So you basically perfectly split your model optimizer and your parameters and your gradients across all of the different GPUs. So your aggregate memory is number of parameters divided by number of GPUs. Same thing for optimizer and so on. Whereas we at Eleuther use a Megatron deep speed based library. And for that, it's a bit more complex. So the efficiency can be a little higher, but it's more prone to failure at the same [00:09:30]Swyx: time. [00:09:30]Quentin: So you kind of have to tune it. In both cases, getting back to like the practical case, you should be able to get linear speed up by adding more GPUs. The problem is that there are hardware failures. You tend to have problems with like maybe loss will overflow if you have too many GPUs or maybe one GPU will hang. You might have software issues. You might have synchronization issues. And that's why I'm saying practically that you should take the minimum number of GPUs that you have because those are the easier cases to debug. That make sense? [00:10:00]Swyx: Yeah. [00:10:00]Quentin: Any more detail on any specific point? [00:10:02]Swyx: Not particularly, just because we haven't actually had to debug those things. But I imagine basically there's a lot of return towards encoding these knowledge into software and not repeating it again. So it makes a ton of sense. I think Alessio had more questions before we move too far into high level, more questions on just the equation itself. I think we want to spend time on essentially, this is the central equation of figuring out compute requirements. Yeah. [00:10:25]Alessio: Another thing in it is that the computer is like the forward pass and like the backwards pass and forward is 2PD, backward is 4PD. Why it's to the ratio between the two? Can you explain that? Why is it two and four? [00:10:39]Quentin: Yeah. [00:10:40]Alessio: Why is it twice the amount? [00:10:42]Quentin: Oh, okay. Intuitively for forward pass, you're just moving, you're propagating forward the inputs through the layer. And then in the backward pass, you're doing something a little more complex than that. You're doing back propagation. And I don't think I can explain it intuitively enough to go into more detail on the exact [00:10:58]Swyx: numbers. Yeah. [00:10:58]Quentin: That's okay. [00:10:59]Swyx: I feel like you want to get out a whiteboard and start drawing like, you know. [00:11:02]Quentin: That's what I would normally do. [00:11:03]Swyx: Tangents and gradients. It's actually surprisingly low to do the back propagation. Honestly, that's one of the fundamental things I love about the math of deep learning so far that as I've explored it, which is, it's surprisingly efficient as compared to other, I guess, numerical methods you might be exposed to and, you know, college calculus. Yeah. [00:11:22]Alessio: And I think the other thing is that things sound simple, you know, when people go on Twitter and say, Oh, 20 is like the optimal ratio. And it's like, then it's like, well, why is that the number? And the answer is usually much, much harder, like what we're seeing right now. So I think it's a, it's a good reminder that the numbers are simple, like all the best and most popular, like math equations are like, so elegant. Obviously the proof behind that is, it's not that easy. That's always a good reminder. [00:11:52]Swyx: I want to put this equation to the test a little bit. We can do this from either GPT-3's perspective or GPT-NeoX, whatever you're more comfortable with. You have this distinction of actual flops versus theoretical flops. And a lot of times when people report the flops it took to train a model, like we just saw one in Lama 2 where the estimate is something that the amount of flops and that's, that's what we go with. So GPT-3 took a 3.14 times 10 to the power 23 flops. That is the theoretical flops. I want to get to a point where I can sort of work out if a number passes the smell test. And I wonder how to do that because I should be able to plug in this equation, right? I know that GPT-3 was trained on 300 billion tokens. I know the parameter size of 175. Is it, is it just like a 6 times 175 times 300? Like I haven't done the math, but what are the nuances here that you might want to call out? [00:12:42]Quentin: Theoretical flops is usually given from, you have a given set of hardware and this is what you expect your hardware to get. The problem is that in practice, full utilization, that's the key word, right? Because in practice, there are a lot of cases where like you're spending time waiting on data movement from like the GPU to CPU. Or for example, you might be waiting to synchronize across the different GPUs. So there's a lot of idle time basically that you're going to be spending during training. [00:13:05]Swyx: Smell tests. [00:13:06]Quentin: I don't know if I have a smell test myself, to be honest, like maybe I'll look at like what sort of flops, what you would expect on like an A100. There's sort of just an expected flops for a given GPU that everyone sort of knows what you should expect. So like for an A100, that number is somewhere between 100 and 180. T flops is what you would expect to see on an A100. For a V100, like an older GPU, it's something more like 40 to 30. So people sort of know, given the kernels that we're running for a deep learning, what sort of flops you expect. And then you sort of compare that to the theory, to the theoretical flops that people are reporting and see if that matches your expectations. [00:13:47]Swyx: Yeah. [00:13:47]Alessio: And in the article you mentioned for the A100, like if you're seeing below 115 teraflops a second, there's something wrong with your model or hardware. How did you get to 115? Is it just, you know, production observability and like you've seen over months and months and months that like that's the baseline or how do you come up with the numbers like that? Yeah. [00:14:08]Quentin: For a number like that, we basically, we compared a lot of different frameworks. So like I mentioned before, Mosaic has their own framework and we have our own framework. They all have their own flop counters too, right? And we saw across a bunch of different hardware configurations that if you tune things correctly, you should be getting above 115 in pretty much all cases. So like there are some cases where things are tuned poorly or your system is a little weird, but we've never been able to get a new system and not been able to get above [00:14:35]Swyx: 115. [00:14:35]Quentin: If something is below 115, you have something really wrong in your software. But that's really all it is, is just comparing across software stacks and hardware systems. [00:14:44]Alessio: What about different GPUs? We had George Hotz on the podcast and he talked about AMD cards and how in theory their flops should be much better than some Nvidia cards, but the reality is like the CUDA runtime makes up for it. How should people think about improving that? You know, like do you see, okay, the A100 is like 115 teraflops. I'd rather just stick with this than try and figure out all the kinks of like a better AMD card or any thoughts there? [00:15:10]Swyx: Right. [00:15:10]Quentin: Well, that's sort of touching on developer time, right? And which ends up being more expensive because at the end of the day, the AMD and Rockham software stack has a long way to go. I would say most things run there, not particularly efficiently, but you're going to have weird bugs that no one has encountered before. One of the big pluses of going with the Nvidia and PyTorch stack is that there are thousands of GitHub issues with everyone facing the same problem as you and resolving them quickly and in an open source way is probably the biggest benefit of going with the Nvidia software stack right now. AMD has about the same hardware, software, not so much. And they haven't quite got the momentum in the open source realm, for example, to get close. Like something, for example, like Flash Attention, it's spread to more Nvidia GPU types than it has like to AMD at all. And waiting on those latest and greatest features to reach AMD is something that's prohibitive to a lot of people, but it's getting there. I'm running a lot of experiments on AMD right now because it's sort of reached the government lab supercomputers now. And so a lot of experiments are going there and it will catch up, I'd say within a few [00:16:14]Swyx: years. [00:16:14]Quentin: Awesome. [00:16:15]Swyx: Maybe just talk about what's available from the government labs and I heard the original, the origin of Eluther started with a grant for TPUs. Is that right? [00:16:24]Quentin: Yes, that was a little before me, but there was a lot of just like getting a grabbing a Google Cloud or TPU pod or something like that is a lot of the original TPU work on Mesh TensorFlow, which is like now like an ancient distributed deep learning library. [00:16:36]Quentin: Eluther got a grant, an insight grant with Oak Ridge last year, and we got quite a bit of Summit Compute. So Summit is a V100 based supercomputer. It's got some weirdness to it. So there's six V100 GPUs per node. And we did a lot of experiments there. It's a challenging system to scale to because your interconnect across nodes is kind of slow in comparison to within a node, which I think we'll get to later. But now Oak Ridge has moved to AMD. So the next grant that we're trying to work towards is on Frontier, which has four AMD GPUs per node and again has a slower interconnect across nodes. So we get all of those new challenges again to try and overlap things. But that's just like you have Oak Ridge, you have Lawrence Livermore. There's a lot of government supercomputers that you can apply for compute towards like open researchers too. It's sort of a new thing. I think we're one of the first like us and like Lion, for example, is another organization that's getting compute from government providers and such. They're all moving to AMD as well. And we look forward to exploring that with them. [00:17:42]Swyx: Yeah. [00:17:43]Alessio: The computing is definitely, it used to be easy to find the GPU. Now, not as much. So you got to find them anywhere. [00:17:49]Swyx: Yes. [00:17:49]Alessio: Let's talk about memory requirements a little bit. So you touched on this a little bit before and just before this, we had a trade out on the pockets from FlashAttention and memory speed was one of our main focuses, but this time we're being bound by actually memory size, like the VRAM itself, when it comes to model weights and parameters and optimizer states and all that fun stuff. Let's go through this and Sean, we can, we can take turns. There's a lot to cover here, but maybe we can start from model weights. So one topic we covered a lot in the past is precision and quantization. That's one of the obviously main driver of memory. You mentioned most of, in the article, most transformers are mixed precision, like FP16 plus FP32 or BF16 FP32, and they can be cast down. And you mentioned up to like INT8 without a lot of performance hit. So let's start there and maybe run people through some of the maths and like the byte per parameter ratio and different precision. [00:18:50]Swyx: Sure. [00:18:51]Quentin: So when I started deep learning, it was all FP32. You have 32 bits, four bytes per parameter. Things were pretty simple. You didn't have to do any loss scaling at all. But the problem was that you didn't get a whole lot of flops once NVIDIA moved to V100s and introduced Tensor cores. So Tensor cores do all of their computation at FP16 precision. So you're kind of throwing all of those away if you're doing things in FP32. So once the hardware moved to V100, the software moved to like mixed precision and APEX and AMP and such. And one counterintuitive part of mixed precision is that you actually require more memory when you're trained because you need an FP16 copy of the weights and an FP32 copy of the weights. The FP16 copy is where you're doing like your actual computation on the Tensor cores. So you get maybe it's not uncommon to get double the throughput that you would see before in FP32. And then you at each step update that FP32 copy with the FP16 update. So both need to be stored in memory. The problem with that is that FP16 is very precise but doesn't have a whole lot of range, [00:19:55]Swyx: dynamic range. [00:19:55]Quentin: So you have a really big mantissa if you're thinking in terms of like floating point representations, not a whole lot of exponent. So BF16 puts more of the bits from the mantissa back to the exponent. So you have a much higher range and a lower precision. And that gets rid of all of this instability problem and loss scaling and such that anyone familiar with debugging knows how unstable it can be, especially for large scale training. And BF16 does away with a lot of that, but it's only supported on A100s. So you see the back and forth between hardware and software. So every time NVIDIA introduces some new Tensor cores or BF16 support or something like that, the software adapts to support it and then training adapts. And then now you mentioned like Ind8 and such. Now we're seeing that you have some model that's been trained in FP16, FP32, whatever else. And then now you want to, with minimal loss and accuracy, quantize that model into a smaller representation like Ind8 and now like Ind4 and things like that and see what you can get away with. And then since deep learning is such like a stochastic problem that a lot of those last bits of precision don't really matter is what we're finding. And I expect that to continue. [00:21:06]Alessio: And so just to put some numbers to it, when you have a FP32, you need four bytes per parameter at inference time to load it in memory. If you have a eight bits model quantized down, you need one byte per parameter. So for example, in an H100, which is 80 gigabyte of memory, you could fit a 70 billion parameters in eight, you cannot fit a FP32 because you will need like 280 gigabytes of memory. So how much does that play into it? Like you mentioned it was all FP32 when you first started. Is it just like a development complexity thing, like going down to FP16 and then Ind8? Or if they could get a GPU with like a terabyte of VRAM, will people just load this memory as like FP32 weights or would they still want to quantize them to make them more efficient? Right. [00:22:00]Quentin: I would say even if you had infinite VRAM, you would still want a quantized model, just a bigger model that's quantized is what I would say. And that's because like I was mentioning there at the end, how like deep learning is very stochastic and a lot, you could have all the precision in the world, but ultimately it's meaningless when you still depend so much like on what the input is. And you depend so much on little variations and maybe a few more samples of training data would matter more. A lot of that precision in a nutshell doesn't really matter in deep learning. All that matters is the big picture. What is that neuron actually saying? And not the tiny details of what it might be thinking. Oh, I also wanted to mention that even if you have an A100, the actual model size is quite a bit smaller that you could load than what you mentioned. That's because of the KV cache. So the KV cache intuitively during inference, it only matters during inference and think intuitively if you're writing a paragraph, you want to remember every single previous word that you've written before you write the next word. So like what is autoregressive language modeling? It's filling in the next word, the next token. So if I say like the dog went to the, and I need to write the next word, I would say park or something. Before I write the next word, my memory is wiped and I have to read the whole thing again. That is life without a KV cache. And a KV cache says, remember everything that I've generated before, as well as all the context before what I've generated. But the memory overhead for a KV cache commonly is either comparable or larger than the model in some cases, if you have a really long context. And I think the exact equation is something like, oh, it's like two times the number of layers, times the number of heads, times the dimension of each head. And then there's two of those. You have one for K, one for V. But that was just a quick aside. Yeah. [00:23:44]Alessio: I know this is Transformers math, but do you think one of the interesting things about RNNs too, it's like moving away from this, like KV cache, the scales with the sequence length and having like a fixed sequence pass. I know those are some of the things that people are working on. [00:24:00]Swyx: Yeah. [00:24:00]Quentin: So there's a paper that I was involved with called RWKV that I would recommend people read. It is answering this exact question. So how do you get Transformers quality without this quadratic attention overhead that Transformers requires? So it is interesting. I don't know if I can really dive too deep into the technical details there. I'd recommend people read the paper. But yeah. [00:24:23]Swyx: Yeah. [00:24:23]Alessio: It's interesting to see if attention is all you need, or maybe attention is all we need, but we need better ways to make it infer in a good way. [00:24:33]Swyx: We've actually done an unreleased episode with one of the RWKV core members and they call it soft attention or light attention. I forget what they call it, but yeah, just ways to approximate it such that it's linear and not quadratic. That's great. Yeah. [00:24:47]Quentin: I didn't know that you were involved. [00:24:48]Swyx: That's great. How did you get involved? Is it just because like everyone just hangs out in Discord and talks about the future of Transformers? Oh yeah. [00:24:55]Quentin: I mean, the RWKV people specifically are in Eleuther all the time. Like they're very close collaboration with us. And my contribution was we have all of these experiments done by all of these people on RNNs and how they relate to Transformers and how do we turn that into a paper and disseminate that digestibly so that people don't have to read through like a Discord log from a year ago to understand what's going on. [00:25:16]Swyx: Oh my God. [00:25:16]Quentin: Just read this paper. So that took some work, but I wasn't a core contributor. So that's why I don't want to go into like the technical details. But yeah, that's how I did. [00:25:24]Swyx: We'll try to get that RWKV episode out. It seems like there's increasing mentions of it and they are doing pretty important work as far as scaling these models are concerned. Okay. So we discussed inference type quantization and memory requirements. And then you also had a section on training with a lot of stuff I think mentioned. I think we probably want to spend the most of our time on optimizer states and the Atom optimizer. Yeah. What are your takes on it and what should people keep in mind when they deal with these optimizers? Okay. [00:25:57]Quentin: I would say the Atom optimizer is good at what it does. It's sort of a broad question. So let me think. You have the copy of the weights and then you have your momentum and your variance that [00:26:08]Swyx: you store. [00:26:08]Quentin: And like, okay, maybe an intuitive explanation for momentum is that like, let's say you have a canyon and you're trying to get to the bottom. And if you're just doing basic SGD, then every step is going to be an equal size. Whereas if you're using something like Atom with the momentum term, then your steps should be progressively larger because you can see, oh, the general trend is we're heading downwards very quickly. But stepping back from that, since you have all of these extra terms in Atom, you require a lot more memory to store it. Like three times as much memory as SGD. And if you have all of this memory being spent on your optimizer states, then how do you distribute it across GPUs? Because you'll find that what ends up being your bottleneck more than just raw compute, raw flops on a given GPU is your parallelism. And that falls back onto how much model you can fit on a single GPU before you need to split it up across a bunch of GPUs. And then you end up spending time, more time with them talking to each other than actually making progress. So that's why all of this time in the blog post is spent on how do you distribute your model? What are all those different distributed strategies look like? Which ones are more efficient? And given that a lot of your memory is being spent optimizers, how do you distribute that optimizer specifically? Because a lot of people, when they talk about parallelism, they talk about model parallelism, the parameters themselves. In actuality, when you're training, a good portion of your memory is actually spent on optimizer states. So what specific part of that would you like to go into? Would you like to go into like zero or sharded optimizers? [00:27:36]Swyx: I think the sharded optimizer stuff is really interesting, but I think we're kind of leaving that towards the end, right? Because that's the maybe more advanced distributed sections. Here, I think we're just going for rough intuition for people who've maybe are familiar with the ideas of these optimizers, but haven't actually had to implement them yet. They read your code, but they don't really understand the intuition behind the code. I see. [00:28:00]Alessio: And Quentin, when you say in the blog post, it says, Adam is magic. How much of it is like actual magic, even to like people like you that are pretty close to the metal, so to speak? Are some of these things just come as gospel? It's like, I know this works, like I'm not touching it. I'm just leveraging it. How much of it are you actually thinking about improving on in your day-to-day work? I see. [00:28:22]Quentin: So I'm a systems guy. I'm an engineer. And a lot of these things come to me as magic. Adam comes to me as magic. I see it from the gods. I say, this is how a deep learning model is trained. And this is how the next step is calculated. And then I say, okay, how do I make that fast? I would say I do look at ways to improve upon it using things like second order optimizers. So there's a lot of research on there because they're hard to distribute. But the core contribution for me always comes down to someone else has done like some deep learning optimization and I need to make it run fast. So I can't really speak to the motivation of why Adam came about other than like simple, intuitive things like I mentioned with like the momentum. But what matters to me is that Adam takes more memory than SGD, specifically three times. And all of that memory needs to go somewhere and it needs to be split efficiently. [00:29:14]Swyx: Yeah. [00:29:14]Alessio: So when you add them all up, you got 12 bytes per parameter with vanilla Adam. [00:29:20]Swyx: Yeah. [00:29:20]Alessio: And then you still get the model parameters and memory too. So as you mentioned, you need to keep a copy of both for like a FB32, FB16 mixed, a copy of both quantization levels. So there's precision levels. So it's six bytes per parameter. Right. [00:29:36]Quentin: Taking a step back again, is that like, okay, most people think of your model getting big. So you need to split with model parallelism purely, something like tensor parallelism. But we can see that the model only takes like two bytes per parameter if we're doing FB16. Whereas the optimizer itself requires four bytes per parameter for the model states, four bytes for momentum, four bytes for variance. So what matters more is how do you split your optimizer efficiently and how do you store it efficiently? And something like bits and bytes, where the optimizer, you got like eight bit Adam, where those optimizer states is only one byte per parameter instead of four or something like that. That is going to give you a much better return on your model training and on your memory overhead required than if you were to, for example, quantize your pure like FB16 model weights down to int8 or something. So for training specifically, your optimizer memory matters a lot. The most in most cases. [00:30:31]Swyx: Well, yeah. [00:30:31]Alessio: And before we dive into zero, just to wrap up the items that you're going to shard later. So you have the parameters, you have the optimizer states, and then you have the gradients. Just maybe touch a little bit on that. And then we can talk about how to efficiently load them in GPUs. [00:30:48]Quentin: So the parameters are the FP32 copies of the parameters. We include them in the optimizer discussion. Some people don't, but just for clarity, it's 12 bytes per param for the optimizer states and four of them are for that FP32 copy of the weights. Four of them are for the momentum. I already went into why it's important to store momentum, but that's also per parameter. You need to store where that parameter is going and where it's been going in the past. You also need to know, okay, we know where it's going, but there's going to be bumps on this canyon that we're going down. So we need to store its variance. How often are those bumps? Should we be focusing more on the momentum? Or is this parameter just kind of jumping around everywhere? Those are all important answers that we need the optimizer to store, and it's per parameter. So that's where all three of those terms come from. And we also include some competing bits and bytes, for example, an SGD to show that depending on your optimizer, you may store all or none of these and in different representations. [00:31:50]Alessio: I'm looking at the total training memory. You essentially have model memory, optimizer memory, gradient memory, and activation memory. I think that's one of the last discussed things. So maybe just give people a little bit of a view. [00:32:03]Swyx: Yeah, this is completely new to me. [00:32:05]Alessio: Active, you know, recomputation, checkpointing, and all of that. [00:32:08]Swyx: Right. [00:32:09]Quentin: So, okay. So to summarize before activation checkpointing, which will be complicated, you have your model params, like I mentioned before, they used to be FP32. Now they're probably BF16, maybe FP16 if it's an older GPU. Then you have your optimizer. That's where a lot of the memory is going. And it's your high precision, usually FP32, copy of the weights. So that's four bytes per param. And then you have, optionally, a couple more terms like we just discussed, like momentum or variance or whatever else, depending on what your optimizer is. Then you have your gradients. So your gradients is what is the gradient update that we get after running the forward pass on the model. And that's going to be whatever your low precision copy of the weights is. So like two bytes per param, if you're using FP16 or BF16. And all of those are sort of set in stone. And that overhead is not going to go away for the duration of training. Your gradients might get cleared after you back propagate them, but your optimizer states and your model states aren't going away. That memory overhead will be there. Activation recomputation and activation memory is dynamic. So some people will come and have this problem where the model loads fine for training. But then when you actually run your first iteration, or you run some future iteration or something like that, you run out of memory, seemingly at random. And it's because of these activations that you're computing on the fly. Good summary, or do you want to get into activation recomputation now, or do you want me to touch on anything else? [00:33:35]Alessio: Yeah, I was going to say, when is the recomputation happening? How does it decide between recomputing versus storing? And talk a bit more about that, maybe. [00:33:47]Quentin: Yeah, okay. So there's a lot of different ways to do this, but I would say there are a few main ones. First is a very simple scheme. You recompute everything. Every single activation that you calculate is just going to be either used or thrown away until the end. So in that case, you care very much about memory. You care very little about compute. Maybe this would be a case where you have to distribute across a lot of different GPUs, for example. And your communication speed is really low. Then that might be a good case for you to just recompute everything. It happens rarely, but it happens. Next up would be something like selective recomputation. So in selective recomputation, which Megatron has a good paper on, and I believe the figure that we have in our blog post is from, in that case, you sort of do a weighted decision for each activation. So for really big activation tensors, you decide, is this going to be more expensive to save in terms of memory or to recompute in terms of compute? So that's sort of the smart scheme that Megatron implements. And there's a lot of different heuristics they use. It's probably not worth mentioning off this super long equation on a pod, but you should go and read that paper if you're interested on selective recomputation. And then a really stupid scheme that most people go with, including NeoX, would be something like, instead of doing all of these heuristics, you just say, if my tensor is bigger than X, I throw it away. And you set X to some static number, and that's it. And that is good enough for a lot of cases. [00:35:18]Swyx: Why is it good enough? [00:35:20]Quentin: You don't want to store more than, you know, X-sized tensor. And some fall above that, some fall below it. And you're not trying to squeeze. You care more about getting something close enough to what the actual heuristic should be without actually computing the heuristic because you don't want to spend the time writing that heuristic code. [00:35:37]Swyx: Cool. I think that does take us on a grand tour of the memory math. Is there any sort of high-level takeaway before we go into the distributed stuff? Zero and all that. Perhaps more detail than most people have ever encountered. And so I'll repeat the equation that Alessio mentioned again, which is total training memory now has all these components that you've mapped out for the first time as far as we're concerned. Model memory, optimizer memory, activation memory, gradient memory. We covered quite a few algorithms as to the choices you can make there. Anything else that you want to mention about just memory math? I don't think so. [00:36:11]Quentin: I think that about covers it. I will say that it's a very different scheme for training and inference. It's common for people to say, oh, BF16 is the best. Done. Whereas a more correct take is that during training, precision matters a bit more. So BF16 will be around longer for training than it will for inference, in which case your model is sort of already baked. And it definitely doesn't need some of those last bits of precision so you can get away much easier with going to int8 for inference rather than training. So everything that you learn for training has to be relearned for inference and vice versa. [00:36:44]Swyx: There's a third category. You're talking about training versus inference. This third category is emerging with regards to fine-tuning and perhaps parameter-efficient methods of fine-tuning. The naive way to implement fine-tuning is just to do more training. But I don't know if you've developed any intuitions over fine-tuning that's worth inserting here. Any intuitions? If you were to write fine-tuning math, what would go in there? That might be an interesting diff to training math. [00:37:10]Quentin: I think there's a lot of questions that are unanswered for fine-tuning. For example, we know scaling laws for training. And some people have done scaling laws for fine-tuning. But how does a model that's already been trained on one domain transfer to another in terms of fine-tuning size? How many tokens per parameter should you have for your fine-tuning dataset? Maybe I'm ignorant, but I feel like a lot of those sort of practical questions on how a model can transfer and how a model can learn or grok some new ability that wasn't in its original training dataset is something that I would definitely put inside a fine-tuning blog post. [00:37:45]Swyx: Something related to perplexity and, I guess, diversity of the tokens that you get. [00:37:49]Quentin: Yeah, sort of dataset transfer is something that I would be curious in. Learning rate transfer is another one. So your model has some decayed learning rate over the course of training. How does that change for fine-tuning? Things like that. [00:38:00]Swyx: All right, cool. Thanks for indulging that stuff. Sure. Yeah. [00:38:03]Alessio: I think after all of this, you can quickly do the math and see that training needs to be distributed to actually work because we just don't have hardware that can easily run this. So let's talk a bit about that. So zero is one of the first things that you mentioned here, which is focused on sharded optimizers. Maybe run people through that and how to think about it. [00:38:25]Swyx: Sure. [00:38:25]Quentin: So zero is centered around two communication operations. And the first is scatter. And people should be looking at the zero figure that I think we have. [00:38:35]Swyx: Yeah. [00:38:36]Quentin: So there's a figure in the paper with parameters, gradients, and optimizer states that people should be looking at when I'm talking about this. Every GPU is going to get its own equal portion of the slice. And if we're doing... There are different stages of zero, but let's just start off with assuming that it's an equal slice of the optimizer states, gradients, and parameters. That would be zero three, stage three in that case. And we do that with a scatter. And the scatter takes, say, one over end GPUs, plus this offset of that slice goes to that GPU. Now all of the GPUs have an equal slice that's in its rank order. And then during each training step, that GPU is going to wait for all of the other slices to communicate so that we now have a whole pie on that GPU, that single GPU. Once we have that whole pie, we do the forward pass on it. And then we distribute that forward pass to all of the others using a gather. So it's a scatter, reduced scatter specifically, and then a gather back to all the others. And you do that each step. So the point of it is that you're sharding these states across GPUs. And with the different stages, you'll see in that figure that the optimizer state is taking the most proportion, which is because of what I mentioned before. We're including the FP32 copy and we're doing atom. So we need those four bytes per param for momentum and for variance. And then zero stage one, which is the most common one, is just optimizer. Zero stage two is optimizer plus gradients. And zero stage three is optimizer gradients and model parameters. But it all comes back to this splitting up and then gathering together back and forth over and over. So you get a lot of communication overhead from zero. But the plus part of that is that you can overlap a lot of that movement with computation. [00:40:23]Alessio: How do you get the optimal number of GPUs to do this on? Is there a way to shard too much as well and put too much overhead? [00:40:31]Quentin: It depends more on what your interconnect is. Taking a step back, there is synchronization that's required, a lot of it, across all of these GPUs. And those tend to be cumulative. So if you go to too many GPUs on an interconnect that's too slow, then you're going to end up spending more time synchronizing. And that magic number where you spend more time synchronizing is going to be different depending on what your fabric is and what your GPU memory is specifically. Just how small of a slice is each GPU getting? I can't, for example, for Summit, that number comes out to be about 20 billion parameters. Now you have 20 billion parameters, and then your magic number of GPUs for that is going to be something like 100 to 200 scale. Beyond that, you're just going to end up spending more time communicating. And the actual flops dipping below some predetermined number by you is going to be whatever your sweet spot ends up being. [00:41:24]Alessio: And then, so this one was like hard for me to go through, so I'm excited to have you run through it, which is a 3D parallelism. [00:41:33]Swyx: It's fancy, it's cutting edge. [00:41:35]Alessio: Yeah, let's talk a bit more about that and some of the work. [00:41:38]Quentin: Okay, 3D parallelism. So what is each dimension? First is the really basic one. That's data parallelism. And data parallelism is you have a copy of the model. Let's say for simplicity, one copy fits on one GPU perfectly. Data parallelism is that now you have two GPUs, so you have one copy on GPU one, one copy on GPU two. Both of them do the forward and backward pass and then synchronize and average the gradients. And then that's a step. Data parallelism for 3D parallelism is actually zero. So it's, you're sharding the optimizer states across all of your different GPUs. Next up is tensor parallelism. Tensor parallelism is you split your model. Like say, if you have two GPUs, you split your model down the middle and each GPU on its tensor specifically is going to do its forward or backward operation on its tensor. And then only when necessary, it'll synchronize that tensor operation with the other GPU. It's a bit more complex than something like pipeline parallelism, which is the third dimension. In pipeline parallelism, let's say you have four layers in your model. And you have four GPUs. You put one layer on each GPU and then GPU one does the forward pass and then sends the output of its activations to GPU two. It does the forward pass, sends activations to three, and you're just moving down a line. That is a naive scheme in that all of the other GPUs are doing nothing while a single GPU is doing its forward or backward pass. So the reason it's called pipeline parallelism is because you're splitting your mini batch into micro batches. So GPU one will do the forward pass on micro batch one and then send to GPU two. And then while GPU two is running on that first micro batch, GPU one is working on the next micro batch. And so you're sort of pipelining the movement and computation of each micro batch. The problem with that is that you need a really big batch size in order to split it up into both mini batches and micro batches. So combining all three of those together, you get a 3D mesh of where each parameter and optimizer state and so on maps to each GPU. And that's 3D parallelism. So let's start diving into details on what have that made sense, what should I jump into more on? [00:43:55]Alessio: I think the main question is, do you need all of the GPUs to be the same to do this? Or can you have mismatching GPUs as well? [00:44:03]Quentin: Okay, two things matter. If there's a difference in VRAM for the two different kinds of GPUs, then you're going to be bottlenecked by whichever GPU has the lower amount of VRAM because it's going to run out of memory. And then you can't like whatever's left on the larger GPUs is going to be empty. As far as I'm aware, there's no like GPU single GPU aware memory overhead scheme that would account for that. The second problem is that let's say all of your GPUs have the same amount of VRAM, but half of them are really slow. And the problem with that is that those synchronizations that I mentioned earlier are going to kill you. So you're going to move as quickly as your slowest GPU in that case. So in both cases, you end up regressing to your slowest or smallest GPU. So you might as well have the same GPUs for all of them. Otherwise, you're wasting the nicer ones. And that also goes to your CPUs and your interconnect. So going back to the 20 billion parameter model that Eleuther was training, that was on a cluster that was sort of Frankenstein made during COVID when there was all of that shortage of network switches and such like that. So every node had a different network switch. And so you ended up moving at the speed of the slowest switch and getting everything tuned properly so that it's not worse than the slowest switch was challenging and is like a real world problem that sometimes comes up. [00:45:28]Alessio: Is this work widely accepted? Like I hadn't learned about this before studying for this episode. Is this something that people are still trying and researching? Or is everybody just aware of this and running this in production? [00:45:43]Quentin: What is this specifically? [00:45:44]Alessio: Like the sharded optimizers plus the 3D parallelism, bringing the two things together and having this kind of mesh strategy. [00:45:51]Quentin: I would say that a lot of major GPT-based models use this scheme. A lot of them now are sort of going with just a pure zero scheme. So just a pure sharded. You just shard everything. And then since that's so easy, everyone gets an equal slice. There's no such thing as a pipeline stage. There's no such thing as what tensor should go on which GPU. Instead, we shard everything equally and treat everything equally. It's a much easier problem to debug, to checkpoint, to run training on than it is with this 3D parallel scheme. I say 3D parallel gives you the most control and also the most ways to go wrong. And depending on whether you have more engineers or whether you have more GPUs, that should decide which of these you go with. [00:46:35]Swyx: It's also not too hard, right? You've basically outlined the five or six different numbers that you need to keep in your head. And it doesn't feel impossible that if you need to achieve that level of control, you've given everybody the main levers to do it with. And that's wonderful. Definitely. [00:46:51]Quentin: The problem that comes up is like, say, like, okay, GPT-4 came out. Now we have VLLMs. [00:46:57]Swyx: Whoa, what are VLLMs? Oh, okay. Virtual LLMs, like the Metro of Expert things? No, like visual. [00:47:03]Quentin: So now you have like multimodal models and such. How do you distribute that? Do you distribute it in a pipeline stage? And do you just shard it? Do you split the tensor and make a tensor parallel? It's sort of hard to change your model and add new features and such when you have this 3D parallel scheme. That's when I say hard. I mean, it's hard to sort of adapt and modify it to new features. [00:47:26]Alessio: I know we're at the hour mark, and I think we put our listeners through a very intense class today. So this was great, Quentin. And we're going to definitely link the article so that people can read it and follow along. Any other research that you're working on in this space that you want to shout out? I know one of our usual, I mean, wrong question is, what's the most interesting unsolved question in AI? So curious to hear if you think it's still on the training inference, math optimization, or are there more areas that people should pay attention to? [00:47:58]Quentin: I think in my area of research, there are two things that I think people should really care about. And the first is multimodal parallelism and RLHF. You were seeing more and more reinforcement learning and coming into the training loop. And so how do you split that some model or some GPUs are working on inference and some GPUs are working on training? And like I mentioned before, you have to relearn everything and they have very unique challenges. How do you split up a KV cache during training, for example? Those are challenges that are not well studied, I don't think. And then multimodal, you have like maybe a vision transformer and a text transformer. How do you split those up? Do you split them up equally? Do you put them on separate GPUs or do you just shard everything? And just maybe one GPU will have some vision, some text parameters. And then the second case I would say is that communication is very often a bottleneck. So we talk about 3D parallelism, but a lot of those like, for example, tensor parallelism, you can't go across nodes with. You'll just get killed in communication. So what I'm getting to is how should you compress your communication before it happens? So on the fly compression, you have some buffer that needs to be communicated. You compress it with a GPU kernel, then you send it across the network and then you decompress it, something like that. Making people spend less money on communication fabrics and more on GPUs as intended is sort of a thing that people need to explore. I think those are my two. [00:49:26]Alessio: Sean, you went over the other half of the lightning round before we wrap it up. [00:49:30]Swyx: That's a good brain dump. Cool. Yeah, I have so many more questions on the multimodal stuff, but that should be for another time. Acceleration, what has already happened in AI that you thought would take much longer? [00:49:42]Quentin: I would say flash attention. Guys, just talk to Tree. And flash attention is just sort of a really great set of kernels that I thought would take a while to get to us. [00:49:51]Alessio: Well, Quentin, thank you very much, man. This was super informative and I think hopefully helps demystify a little bit the blog post. I think people open it and it's like a lot of math on it. And I think you walking them through it was super helpful. So thank you so much for coming on. [00:50:07]Swyx: Of course. [00:50:08]Quentin: And I'm happy to answer any questions that people have offline if they have them. I do read my email. [00:50:13]Swyx: Email and Discord. Of course, yeah. [00:50:15]Quentin: Discord I'm even faster on. [00:50:16]Alessio: Thank you, everyone. [00:50:18]Swyx: Thanks, Quentin. [00:50:19] Get full access to Latent Space at www.latent.space/subscribe

Nuclear fusion holds the potential to provide the world with cheap, clean, virtually inexhaustible energy for the future. For decades, the technology was dismissed as sci-fi fantasy. But a series of recent technological breakthroughs — including a net-energy gain ignition at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory last December — and spate of startups have made both government and investors increasingly optimistic. To talk about the state of the fusion industry, I've brought on Andrew Holland, chief executive officer at the Fusion Industry Association.In This Episode* The importance of recent fusion breakthroughs (1:17)* What should policymakers be doing to promote fusion? (5:58)* Environmentalism and fusion energy (14:09)* Will fusion be the main energy source of the future? (18:57)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversationThe importance of recent fusion breakthroughsJames Pethokoukis: Until recently, fusion energy was a government science project that you didn't hear much about. But now we have dozens of startups involved and frequent media coverage of big breakthroughs. What happened?Andrew Holland: It's results. Results, results, results. Science is progressing. Things have happened on both sides of the science of fusion. Plasma physics has been around for 60 years. It's really hard. It's really challenging. And they had to create a whole new area of physics, plasma physics, to be able to understand how to do fusion. They did that for 60 years, and it was continued short progress here and there, two steps forward, one step back. Until we got to the point probably about five or 10 years ago where the scientists said, “We think we know how to make this work.” But then what's happened is that startups and new thinking came in and applied all of the other technological advances that were out there—things like material science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, high-speed computing—as well as new business practices, putting those in effect onto what had been this kind of staid field of government science.Putting those two together, and that's where the real developments and changes and things are happening. In fact, there are 38 members of the Fusion Industry Association now, with a few others around the world that are stragglers. And it's been just this almost Cambrian explosion of different technologies and ways forward and paths to get there. And everybody is competing to be the one to get there first and the one to get there best. So it is an exciting time. And we're seeing the effects of all of this other technology coming into plasma physics. Things have really changed.So how significant was that breakthrough at Lawrence Livermore last year, both for the technology and also for investor and public awareness? Yeah, it is significant in the kind of public awareness and public assessment of it. I can tell you that our website had its highest day ever in December when the announcement from the NIF happened. And I can tell you just kind of anecdotally a lot of that awareness came about. But the nature, I think, of an exponential curve, a Moore's law–type thing where it doubles every year, doubles every so often—is that when it's exponential, it's going straight up, but for a long time it looks pretty flat. So a long time below the level, it's been doubling and doubling and doubling over a number of years. It just started from a very low point. Those inside the field knew that something was happening, but it never broke out. It never got into the New York Times. It never got into Twitter discussions. It was all sort of inside baseball discussions.It's been a completely new thing for the fusion community to now have a lot of interest coming into it. That said, though, the investors were a little keyed in a little bit earlier. Since the NIF announcement, we've seen some new deal flow. We've got about $6 billion invested in private fusion. Of that, most of it came in before the NIF announcement. Investors were looking at this. Investors were aware of it. We are still seeing some of the deal flow that post-NIF takes some time. There's a lot of due diligence that investors do and stuff like that, so we haven't yet seen the real explosion from NIF of investment and running. But I think we're due to pretty soon.We're seeing this as kind of a starting gun of competition around the world. What should policymakers be doing to promote fusion?What is the policymaker awareness and action on this technology?We're getting there. In March of 2022, the White House held an event calling for a “bold decadal vision on commercial fusion,” basically saying, can you get to commercial fusion in 10 years? It's an aggressive target. Our company said, yes, we can—with your help. The White House put in not an aggressive amount of budget in the scheme of billions and trillions even in the IRA and various other subsidy measures. Instead what they've started up is what's called a new milestone-based public-private partnership. The government gives pay-for-performance metrics on how to invest in fusion companies. Basically, the companies will say, “We think we can do this, this, and this.” And then the government says, “Okay, we'll pay you X amount for each of these milestones when you reach them.” Instead of the old way of doing a public-private partnership, which is you have to account for all the money you put in and we'll give you a fixed dollar amount and all this sort of stuff.This is actually the way that NASA invested in SpaceX. It's a way to promote innovation in the companies while also protecting the taxpayer, because it is still risky in a business sense to put money into fusion. It's a really innovative new model for getting there. The DOE just put out these awards a couple of weeks ago in late May. It's gone to eight companies fusion companies, all doing work here in the United States.We're seeing this as kind of a starting gun of competition around the world. The Brits have an aggressive program for a commercial fusion pilot plant. The Germans just put out a roadmap for how to get there. The Japanese have one. For a long time, the government science people have been cooperating together at ITER, which is the publicly funded science experiment in the south of France. It will get net energy when it turns on, and will be a significant experiment, but it's different than a commercial direction. And now we see all these countries and companies racing towards this. And honestly, we also see the Chinese making aggressive plans and moving forward on their own internal pathway as well. The NIF, in many ways, was kind of a starting gun for this process, and we're seeing it happen around the world.You have diversity: You have government, you have the private sector, and there's also a diversity of technological approaches as well. It's not just one thing, right?Yes. There is a huge diversity in technological approaches. Of the 38 member companies you have of the FIA, none of them are taking the exact same technological pathway. It is, instead, a broad family tree of fusion with, at one end, laser-inertial fusion—which is like what the NIF did: taking lasers and firing them on a tiny pellet of fuel—and on the other end is magnetically confined fusion energy—which is using giant magnets to confine a plasma at extreme temperatures to get fusion out that way. And then in between, there are all sorts of other magneto-inertial types, which is a mix of one or the other. Some use electric pulses, some use giant pistons, some use plasma guns: all sorts of different ways of confining and controlling the plasma. And this is kind of what you'd expect in a new technology: We just don't quite know yet which is the one that will get there first—well, NIF got there first—but which is the one that will get there first in a commercially relevant manner. And then which one will then also show that it's the most commercially competitive as well. While you shouldn't probably expect 38 companies to all get there and all be the most successful there, there are multiple different ways forward. And they will probably all have different markets and different places that pick up each around the world. But exciting times in the technology.We have to make sure that fusion gets the same subsidies as all the other clean-energy technologies. Fusion just needs a level playing field. Whether it's on the regulatory side or the funding side, what should government ideally be doing right now?Three key things. Number one is the regulation. Because fusion is a nuclear technology, it is going to be regulated in the United States by the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. We've been engaged in a process—I've spent a lot of time on this—with the NRC in public that we've been contending that because fusion is so different from nuclear fission—just physically different, like you cannot have a meltdown, there is no long-lived radioactive waste, the fuel is isotopes of hydrogen or other not-dangerous fuels—so because of the physical differences, fusion should not be regulated in the same way that nuclear fission power plants are. And over a multi-year process, we convinced them. And the commission, a bipartisan group of Republicans and Democrats, five members, voted unanimously in April to regulate fusion separately from nuclear fission. It will be regulated like a medical isotope facility, an accelerator. This is a really important thing because it allows a lot more innovation. It should keep costs down. It doesn't mean there's no regulation, it just means it's regulated in the appropriate manner. That's number one.Number two is the public-private partnerships that I talked about. I think it is important that our companies have access to the public programs, have access to the national labs. The researchers have been doing this for a long time, so to be able to work with them—ideally with government dollars, the government dollars would pay at least part of it.And then number three is, we have to make sure we're not asking for special subsidies, but we have to make sure that fusion gets the same subsidies as all the other clean-energy technologies. Fusion just needs a level playing field. We think we'll compete just as well as any other technology.Is that not the case right now?It's not clear that it's the case right now. The IRA subsidies, for example, don't mention fusion. You wouldn't expect it to; this has come so quickly that it doesn't mention fusion. We think it will be designated as a clean technology. There's no reason it won't be. But Treasury has to make that designation. There's going to be a couple of early application programs for the tax credits for manufacturing stuff, and we're going to test that and we'll see if they give any of those competitive tax credits to fusion.Environmentalism and fusion energyEnvironmental groups: Are they pro-fusion? Are they against fusion? Do they view it like nuclear fission? What is the reaction of that community? Because obviously it would be very helpful if those groups were very positive about your efforts.The groups at this point, I'd say most of them, are in a wait-and-see mode. It depends whether a group is a membership organization, which has kind of a grassroots membership and they have to see where their members are, or whether it's more of a “we can think of the best way forward.” We've had good interactions so far with a number of the bipartisan environmental groups. We haven't seen yet where places like Sierra Club or NRDC will come down. We think they should be positive about it. We've made some initial outreach. Some of our companies have worked directly with their local environmental groups as they do the outreach necessary to build new experiments and programs and stuff like that. It's, at this point, still uncertain. But maybe an example from Europe to see where we are: German Greens basically shut down the nuclear fission industry in Germany. On the other hand, the government of Germany now—SPD, so a left-wing government—has announced a pretty substantial investment into nuclear fusion. There is a good evidence that environmentalists won't be against it. Now, it's still mostly to be determined, and we're setting the groundwork to educate people, make them aware that this is not something they should be afraid of. Certainly we think there's no reason for them to oppose it, but it's not my choice.It just seems like fusion has inherent benefits that will allow us to really expand faster and not have the drawbacks that fission has had. Environmentalism and fusion energyWhen people hear “nuclear,” lots of them think about radiation and meltdowns. How do you begin to educate people that fusion is different from fission and maybe shouldn't carry that kind of baggage?It's some work. It's some work, and education in the broad general public is really challenging on any policy issue, much less complicated science. So this is not an easy thing. We have to go in with eyes wide open. We have to be clear and direct, and we can't hide from anything. It is nuclear fusion, right? It is a nuclear reaction in which there are neutrons produced, there is radiation. You don't want to stand next to an unshielded fusion power plant. That would not be good for your health. But we know how to shield it. We know how to protect it, and it will be safe when it's running. But we have to go out in there and demonstrate that. And we can't just tell people, “This will be safe.” We have to engage with them, we have to talk to them, we have to understand what their concerns are. All this sort of stuff.Because we're a new industry, we get to start from zero instead of, unfortunately our cousins in nuclear fission, they're starting from negative so they've got to build it back up. And many of our scientists are also in fission world, and our companies don't want to see them fail, certainly. But it just seems like fusion has inherent benefits that will allow us to really expand faster and not have the drawbacks that fission has had. It's all about speed. When you talk about our energy problems—climate, clean energy, energy security—it's not about building one power plant. It's about building tens, hundreds, thousands of these. And for that, you need speed. That's why we think it's really important to get the regulation right. And regulation is downstream of public perception, so you've got to get people to want this. If they want it and you get the regulation right, there's no reason you can't build these things as fast as you can roll them off an assembly line.Will fusion be the main energy source of the future?Should it be part of the energy mix, like solar and wind are today? Or is this the technology that will power the future like fossil fuels power the present?If we get this right, if we get the deployment right, there is no reason that this can't be the thing that powers humanity for the rest of humanity's existence. There's a saying that once you build the first fusion power plant, the only thing you can build better is a better fusion power plant. We know that the energy system is really complicated. It's really competitive. So in the early days, fusion is going to have to compete. Fusion is going to have to get down to cost. It can't have the same problems as nuclear power or even that we're starting to see in solar or wind of deployment. You've got to be able to build these and deploy these. In the long term, once you have fusion, what you have is abundant power. And ideally abundant cheap power. When you have that, you can do all sorts of other stuff like desalinate salt water and get rid of water problems. If you've got abundant energy, you can create all sorts of energy-dense liquid fuels. That means you won't need oil anymore. You can just with feedstock do that. You can do a lot of cool stuff in space. It takes you from going to Mars in a year and a half to going to Mars in a month. And that just fundamentally changes us. You can have a shuttle going back and forth between the Earth and the Moon. Fusion power means that you have all sorts of new options for this. And it takes energy from something that you pull from out of the ground or you get from weather and turns it into something that is fundamentally a manufactured good. And that's really cool and really kind of changes our security paradigms, our environmental paradigms, and just makes it a real opportunity here to develop and move forward in a new way.Micro Reads▶ Big Tech's Battle Royale Is Coming. The Winner? You. - Joanna Stern, WSJ | ▶ After Affirmative Action, We Can Still Fix the Education Pipeline - Jonathan Chait, New York | ▶ Billionaires and Bureaucrats Mobilize China for AI Race With US - Jane Zhang, Sarah Zheng, Bloomberg | ▶ The 2023 Long-Term Budget Outlook - CBO | ▶ European companies sound alarm over draft AI law - Javier Espinioza, FT | ▶ Big Tech Has a Troubling Stranglehold on Artificial Intelligence - Parmy Olsen, Bloomberg Opinion | ▶ Welcome to the big blimp boom - Rebecca Heilweil, MIT Tech Review | ▶ Genetic marker discovered for the severity of multiple sclerosis - Grace Wade, New Scientist | ▶ Stop talking about tomorrow's AI doomsday when AI poses risks today - Editorial, Nature | ▶ The Path to Abundant Air Travel - Gary D. Leff, Discourse | ▶ Preserving Meaning in a Technology-Driven Society - Michael Westover, Profectus | This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

The second installment of something you've never heard of before. Can the mind actually trigger a nuke? This is what the CIA explored during one amazing experiment California in the Lawrence Livermore national laboratory with one of the most amazing superheroes of all time!! Don't miss out on this one!!

In late 2022, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory made a long-sought breakthrough, achieving self-sustaining “fusion ignition” for the first time and generating breakeven energy. Supporters see fusion as a game changer for production of unlimited clean energy that can help to address climate change globally.  Please join us for a conversation with Dr. Kimberly Budil, director of Lawrence Livermore, about the significance of this achievement. Dr. Budil is the 13th director of Lawrence Livermore. A physicist, she is an expert on high-power, ultra-fast lasers. She has held previous positions at the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Energy. She is the first woman to serve as LLNL director, and is one of the leading female scientists in the United States. We look forward to seeing you for an inspiring evening with one of the Bay Area's key scientific leaders, discussing where Lawrence Livermore's fusion research could lead and how long it might take to positively impact our energy future. SPEAKERS Kim Budil Director, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Katie Hafner Journalist; Host and Co-Executive Producer, "Lost Women of Science"—Moderator In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on March 27th, 2023 by the Commonwealth Club of California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In December 2022, Lawrence Livermore's National Ignition Facility (NIF) achieved ignition. Join Shelly as she speaks with Bob Rosner about what this milestone means to Stockpile Stewardship and to physics. Also - learn how cool it is to focus 192 lasers onto a tiny little capsule. Patreon: www.patreon.com/mynuclearlife email us Article: Bulletin Article

Dr. Andrea (Annie) Kritcher, Ph.D. is a nuclear engineer and physicist who works at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory ( https://www.llnl.gov/ ). She is the design lead of the HYBRID-E capsule technology within Lawrence Livermore's Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) program, and is a member of the ICF leadership team and lead designer for shot N210808, at their National Ignition Facility, a recent experiment that heralded a significant step towards a fusion break-even target. She was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2022. Dr. Kritcher was first employed at Lawrence Livermore as a summer intern in 2004, as an LLNL Lawrence Scholar during her time at UC Berkeley, where she earned a master's degree and doctorate in nuclear engineering, and as a Lawrence postdoctoral fellow in 2009 following completion of her Ph.D. During her postdoctoral appointment she explored using X-rays to measure the properties of warm and hot dense matter (plasma), and measuring how nuclei interact with dense plasma. In 2012, Dr. Kritcher became a member of scientific staff and now serves as team lead for integrated implosion modeling and is a group leader within the design physics division at LLNL. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a federally funded research and development center in Livermore, California, United States. Originally established in 1952, the laboratory now is sponsored by the United States Department of Energy. Its principal responsibility is ensuring the safety, security and reliability of the nation's nuclear weapons through the application of advanced science, engineering, and technology. The laboratory also applies its special expertise and multidisciplinary capabilities towards preventing the proliferation and use of weapons of mass destruction, bolstering homeland security, and solving other nationally important problems, including energy and environmental needs, scientific research and outreach, and economic competitiveness. Support the show

Burning fossil fuels to generate electricity and heat is one of the biggest contributors to climate change, making a fast transition to clean energy crucial to the solution. Fortunately, the technologies for a sustainable energy system already exist. Wind, solar and batteries all offer a promising pathway to a healthy and liveable planet, but what are some of the other, lesser known technologies that could help save the day?In this episode Gail and Loyiso look at two Global Goals and discover how new innovations (Goal 9) are offering solutions to greener, cheaper and cleaner energy (Goal 7). They ask Gabrielle Walker, a leading voice on carbon capture technologies, how we can remove the carbon that's already in the atmosphere, they find out from Vaitea Cowan, founder of Enapter, if Green Hydrogen will make it OK to fly again, and ask plasma physicist Tammy Ma, if one day we will be able to generate unlimited energy like the stars. Guests:Gabrielle Walker, co-founder of CUR8 and co founder of Rethinking Removals.Vaitea Cowan, co-founder of EnapterTammy Ma, plasma physicist at the Lawrence Livermore's National Ignition Facility. For more:https://www.globalgoals.org Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hometown Radio 02/23/23 6p: We go inside the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory Fusion Ignition Project

Andrew For America had the opportunity to sit down with Mr. Guy Morris, author of "intelligent action thrillers" such as, "Swarm," "The Last Ark," and "The Curse of Cortes." Guy draws from his experiences working in the petroleum and energy industries, as well as his experience working for software and internet companies (including Microsoft) that dealt with AI modeling systems, cyber security, the idea of digital currencies, etc. In college, Guy earned three degrees and built a macro-economic model that out-performed the Federal Reserve, which earned him a grad-school scholarship! He also created and produced an award-winning espionage webisode series. Years ago, he discovered that a program had escaped the Lawrence Livermore labs at Sandia, a well-known NSA spy lab. When he eventually determined HOW a spy program could escape NSA, WHAT it was designed to do, and WHY it left, shortly thereafter two FBI agents showed up at his door! Guy introduces himself, talks about his professional and life experiences, and then describes how he uses his knowledge and research findings to develop his amazing "intelligent" thrillers! This was an amazing conversation and I hope you all enjoy the show! Check out Guy Morris and his books on his website: https://www.guymorrisbooks.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OfficialGuyMorrisBooks Twitter: https://twitter.com/guymorrisbooks Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/authorguymorris/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/guybmorris/ Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/18363786.Guy_Morris Visit altmediaunited.com and check out all the awesome podcasts! Visit allegedlyrecords.com and check out all of the amazing punk rock artists! Visit patreon.com/andrewforamerica and become a "My Fellow American" subscriber for only $3 per month! Visit soundcloud.com/andrewforamerica1984 to check out Andrew's music!

How did we achieve nuclear fusion? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Chuck Nice learn about thermonuclear fusion, the world's most powerful lasers, and harnessing nuclear power with operations manager at The National Ignition Facility, Bruno Van Wonterghem.NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free.Thanks to our Patrons Gavin Mallow, Willest74, Isaac Labbe, Allen, and Beefcake for supporting us this week.Photo Credit: U.S. Department of Energy from United States, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Fusion power, clean and limitless, long elusive to scientists, may be headed our way sooner than many suspected thanks to a breakthrough experiment in early December at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL) in California. In this episode of Grid Talk, host Marty Rosenberg talks with Annie Kritcher, the physicist who designed the successful experiment that recreated the energy source of the sun.She explained: “What we're doing here is essentially creating a miniature star in a lab about the size of a human hair to half the size of the human hair. We have 192 giant lasers and when we say giant, that means that the whole system that is used to create this laser energy and all the details associated with it, it's the size of three football fields when you put all of the 192 laser beams together.”  Fusion research has been going on for decades, but the December experiment is a significant breakthrough and represents a new approach. “The thing that's different this time is that for the first time we've actually demonstrated in the laboratory that we can achieve fusion energy gain in a controlled way. Before that, we've never actually generated fusion energy output that was controlled in a laboratory setting. This result motivates and is a proof of principal for all the different approaches out there,” said Kritcher.That increases the likelihood of success.“There's also a huge resurgence in the number of people working in this area and the different approaches that are being looked at and when you have that many people looking at a problem, the progress is highly accelerated.”Dr. Annie Kritcher is the design lead within the Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) team as part of the National Ignition Facility at LLNL. Dr. Kritcher started at LLNL as a summer intern in 2004. She earned a PhD in Nuclear Engineering and Plasma Physics and a MS Nuclear Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. Annie earned her BS in Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences at the University of Michigan.

1) Tammy's scientific background and how an LLNL outreach event influenced the career trajectory of her highschool self 2) A deep dive into the National Ignition Facility and some of the momentous experiments Tammy has been a part of 3) An explanation of fusion reactions, lasers, and the various components involved in the recent fusion breakthrough 4) Lawrence Livermore's mission to create a fusion industry that is equitable, diverse, and just

We discuss the historic fusion announcement with Tammy Ma, lead for the Inertial Fusion Energy Initiative at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where the breakthrough was achieved. For pictures and more info, visit http://www.energy-cast.com/158-nif.html

Last month, scientists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a defence facility that sits under the US Department of Energy, announced that they had achieved a nuclear fusion reaction that produced more energy than it took to ignite it, using high-powered lasers. The announcement was both celebrated as a milestone in science and criticised as an overhyped media spectacle. In this episode of the [i3] Podcast, we speak with Dr Warren McKenzie, founder and Managing Director of HB11 Energy, an Australian nuclear fusion company, about the importance of the experiment, the relevance to fighting climate change, the need for a domestic laser industry and investment opportunities relating to nuclear fusion energy generation. Overview of Warren McKenzie Podcast 01:00 About HB11 Energy 03:00 Scientists in the US have achieved a net gain in energy from nuclear fusion. How important is that result? 04:30 We were the first fusion company to demonstrate any fusion 05:50 The next results in the years to come are going to make massive increases on that net energy gain 06:00 Essentially they are creating a mini star 08:00 This is not the path to clean energy. It has proven the science that will lead to many advancements in technology that [ultimately] will see it happen. There are a lot of technologies around the edges that need to be improved. 10:00 The benefits of Boron: we have a much easier engineering pathway ahead of us 12:35 Lasers are the key to making nuclear fusion happening 17:00 There is a whole range of new applications that have recently been proven that have been enabled by these high-powered lasers 18:00 Rather than having a laser that pulses a few times a day and then needs to cool down, we need a laser that can pulse 10 or 100 times per second, 24/7 20:00 What key industries will grow around a nuclear fusion industry that might be interesting to investors? The main driver will be defense 21:45 It is not secret that Lawrence Livermore is a defense lab 22:30 For the infinite money that is available to these labs, I would like to see them put more into green energy than just into making sure that the world is a little scared of the US' nuclear stockpile 23:00 From boron you can't make a bomb 24:00 Will nuclear energy help with fighting climate change? 26:00 We will definitely see energy being generated by nuclear fusion by 2050 28:00 To accelerate the development of nuclear fusion, we need to lift the ban on nuclear research in Australia 30:00 Breaking the vacuum of space 32:00 Australia developed 90 per cent of the technology that is in solar cells today, but China has led the commercialisation. Let's not have the same thing happening with nuclear fusion

Skeptics joke that nuclear fusion is the energy source of the future … and always will be. But when the Biden White House made a big announcement about the progress of fusion research last week, even diehard skeptics surely took note. My guest on this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast is Arthur Turrell, plasma physicist and author of 2021's excellent and must-read The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet.In This Episode* The consequences of fusion's latest breakthrough (1:06)* Where does fusion go from here? (3:55)* The best path forward for fusion (8:14)* The importance of fusion for an energy-abundant future (13:13)* Will star power take us to the stars? (24:09)Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.The consequences of fusion's latest breakthroughJames Pethokoukis: On December 14, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced that researchers at Lawrence Livermore had succeeded in generating a net-energy-gain fusion reaction. Just how consequential is this?Arthur Turrell: Jim, I would say that we're witnessing a moment of history, really. Controlling the power source of stars, I think, is the greatest technological challenge humanity has ever undertaken. If you look back at human history, there are different stages where we've unlocked different types of energy sources. You can think about unlocking wood. You can think about when humans started to use coal, which packs in more energy than wood. You can think about nuclear fission, which has even more energy than coal. A lot more, because it's a nuclear technology instead of a chemical one. And then you can think about this moment when we have the first proof of concept of using fusion for energy. And of course, fusion unlocks huge amounts of energy: 10 million times, kilogram for kilogram, as compared to coal.There are two main approaches to fusion as I understand it. This was what they call inertial confinement, and then there's magnetic confinement. Does it make a difference, as far as where this technology goes, that it was inertial confinement versus magnetic?It's absolutely a huge scientific achievement. The level of precision and the level of innovation and invention that the researchers at Lawrence Livermore have had to deploy to get here is just an astonishing feat on its own, even if we weren't talking about how this could eventually change the supply of energy.Does it get us anywhere? I think the honest answer is we don't know. We, today, don't know what version of fusion, what way of doing fusion is going to ultimately be the one that is the most economical and the most useful for society. But what I think this result will do is have a huge psychological effect because throughout fusion's history, researchers have said, “Hey, I'd really like to, you know, build a reactor, a prototype reactor.” And funders have quite reasonably said, “We don't even know if the principle works. Go off and show us that it can produce, in principle, more energy out than is put in.” And of course, fusion research has been trying to do that since the 1950s. Now we finally and absolutely have proof of that. I think that it's going to crowd in innovation, interest, and investment in all types of fusion because even though this approach got to that milestone first, it doesn't necessarily mean that this is going be the most economical or the best in the long run.Where does fusion go from here?I think it's Benjamin Franklin who gets the credit, at least that's what I learned in third grade, for discovering electricity in the 1700s. We didn't get the first electric motor until the 1820s, and we really didn't get factories electrifying their factory floors really until the first decades of the 20th century. So this could be an amazing discovery, but it could be a long time just based on how fast it takes advances to be modified and diffuse into an economy. It could be quite some time, if ever, before this actually gets plugged into a grid.Right. Traditionally, these new energy sources take a long time to come onstream. One of my favorite facts, and I have to double check that I've got the year right here, but I think the first solar cell was working in 1883. And only now in the last few years has solar energy become commercially viable in terms of cost. These things take a long time, or they have historically. And here's the really important point. It's never about the amount of time. It's about the amount of investment and political will that we put behind it.If our elected representatives choose to really push this and put lots of funding behind it, and the private sector decides that it's really going to push this, things will move much faster. Correspondingly, if we don't put lots of investment behind it, things will move more slowly. But you are absolutely right when you say that there is a gap here between what we've seen — which is an astonishing experiment, but only scientific feasibility — and what you'd have to have for fusion energy to be on the grid — which is solving some of the engineering and economics challenges that stand in the way between this one-off experiment and doing this repeatedly and economically at scale.For decades, there was very little in the news about fusion research. And since 2019, there have been some big stories about the advances happening in government labs and about the work in the private sector. It seemed like there was already a lot of excitement before this advancement. I can't believe this won't generate even more interest.Absolutely. I think this has been building for quite a long time. It's very tempting to say not much has happened in fusion. But I think if you look back over the decades, there have been improvements. They've been quite steady, and they've probably been coming at the rate you would expect with the level of investment and dedicated resources it's had. But the improvements have been arriving quite steadily. And looking at the history of this particular experiment, the National Ignition Facility, when they've got improvements since 2012 when they really started this type of campaign, the improvements have resulted in a five- or six-times increase in the release of energy. Back in 2019 when the book I wrote about this came out, I sort of said, “Well, they're not actually that many improvements away, so if they can carry on the same trajectory, they're going to crack it at some point.” And last August in 2021, they got to 70 percent, which at the time was a world record as well. And it's kind of like, because fusion scales nonlinearly, especially in this type of doing fusion, this laser fusion, actually they're almost there and it's just a matter of time until they crack it. So I think it's been building for a while. And the huge successes, because things have just happened to have gotten close now after all of this time in both magnetic confinement fusion and in inertial or laser-based fusion, mean that has really stimulated the private sector as well. The whole thing is starting to build on its momentum. And I think that now this is going to cause the wave to crash over and we're going to see efforts to turn this into a power source be completely electrified by this news.The best path forward for fusionIf what happened at Lawrence Livermore Lab does not present an obvious path to commercialization, what else is going on that seems more obvious? We differentiated between magnetic and inertial confinement fusion. Other people will point to deuterium-tritium fusion versus aneutronic fusion. Where is the most likely path, and does it come from government, from the private sector, that will lead us to a commercial reactor?Of course, it's hard to know exactly, but we can certainly make some sensible guesses based on what we know today. To answer the second part about deuterium-tritium fusion or aneutronic fusion, just so your listeners are aware, these are about different types of fuel that we're putting into fusion reactions. So the first kind, deuterium-tritium, those are just special types of hydrogen. Frankly, all of the really serious attempts to do fusion today using these because they require much, much less extreme conditions than the other types of fusion reaction, though people get very excited about the type of fusion that doesn't produce any neutrons, aneutronic fusion, because it has less radioactivity. But it's much, much harder to do.Would it be a better power source? Some people have said that with deuterium-tritium fusion, you would still need some sort of boiler. You'd be using a steam turbine, just like you would if it was coal. While aneutronic actually creates electricity itself.In principle, yes. People haven't really demonstrated that principle in practice. But yeah, that's why people are excited about it, because every time you change energy from one type to another you lose some of the useful energy and you just have a more direct setup with the aneutronic fusion. But I think that's some way away. In terms of what's practical for the next steps to getting to an energy source, there are paths using both this inertial approach and using the magnetic approach.Some of the private-sector companies are using this magnetic confinement approach. I think Commonwealth Fusion Systems, that's what they do.That's right. And Tokamak Energy as well. There are pros and cons of both different approaches. In terms of the kind of approach that the National Ignition Facility is taking, there are some big technological gaps in terms of something that looks more like a power source. This was a single shot of a laser on a single experiment. If it was to be anywhere close to being a useful power source, they would have to do probably 10 shots on that laser a second. And instead of a gain of 1.5, so instead of getting 1.5 units of energy out for every unit of energy you put in, you'd have to probably get at least 30 units of energy out than you put in. Now, as I say, this thing scales nonlinearly, which means that you might get there faster than you think. But it's still a big technological gap.And even if you solve all of that, of course you've then got to do what you said. Ultimately, we're extracting the heat energy and we're using it to turn water into steam, and we're powering a turbine. Now, what some of the people who are working on this magnetic confinement approach would say is that even if they haven't got to net energy gain yet, they have created a lot of gross energy. So they have generated about 30 times more gross energy than NIF produced in output energy in a single experiment. And they would say that some of the steps further down the line are a bit easier to achieve on magnetic confinement fusion. But honestly, I don't think we really know yet. And because we don't know, it's a good thing that we have both public and private sector exploring a range of different options here.How seriously should I take anybody who gives me a date? How confident should I take any of these predictions at this point?Well, that does depend, Jim. Was it the president of the United States who said this to you? Because I feel like he's got some control over it. I think the first question to ask when anyone says that is, at what level of investment? Because that's the thing that's going to make the difference. If we stop all funding to fusion tomorrow, if people decide to do that, then it's going to take forever. But equally, if President Biden says it's going to take 10 years, and he makes a commitment to put in the money that could potentially make that happen, then I'd take it a bit more seriously. I think 10 years is a very tight time scale. But as I've probably mentioned before we saw in the pandemic how even untested technologies can be deployed at great speeds, faster than anyone could have imagined, where there is the political will and the societal need and the money to make it happen.The importance of fusion for an energy-abundant futureWhy is this an interesting source of energy?Nuclear fusion, it's interesting scientifically because every time you go outside on a sunny day, those rays you're feeling on your face from the sun are generated by nuclear fusion. So this is literally the reaction that lights up the universe. It's the reaction that created a lot of the elements that we are made out of, particularly bigger elements. And it was right there at the start of the universe as well, creating some of those fundamental building blocks of life. So it's an extraordinary reaction, and it's amazing to start to be able to control it. But there are practical reasons, even if you don't care about the science at all, to get excited about nuclear fusion as well.It's potentially a very safe source of energy. There's just no chance of meltdown. It's not a chain reaction. If you turn off the laser or you turn off the magnets, the whole thing just stops. So it's hard to start, easy to stop. It also, as far as we can tell, isn't going to produce any long-lived radioactive waste. It will produce some from the reactor chamber itself, so not as a byproduct of the fuel, unlike fission. Maybe the reactor chamber at the end of the plant's life might be rated low-level radioactive for about 100 years as opposed to the potentially thousands of years in fission. So that's another advantage. I should say, though, that fission is an amazing power source and we should be doing a lot more with it. And actually, if you look at the data, it's very safe. But some people don't like it, regardless. It's difficult to get it built. And then the other thing is that renewables are fantastic as well. They work today. They're never going to run out in any practical sense. But they do have this problem that they need to use a lot of land area or a lot of sea area to generate relatively small amounts of energy. I think you've always got pros and cons of these different energy sources.You would need batteries, too, right? Because of the intermittency, potentially, you would need a lot of batteries. Big batteries.Potentially you would need batteries too. Are batteries a bigger technological challenge than getting fusion working on the grid? I don't know. I'm probably a bit more relaxed about the batteries thing. Intermittency can be a problem with them, but also land is such a premium for other things — for food, for people to live — that I think that ultimately might be the bigger issue. And also people don't want to have these things built. They get blocked often. Whereas fusion and fission potentially — definitely in the case of fission, but almost certainly with fusion as well — the actual land area for the amount of energy generated is very, very attractive. So that's another reason. And finally, the fuel for nuclear fusion isn't going to run out anytime soon. There's enough of it on the planet to keep everyone on Earth…The fuel for the kind of fusion we're talking about, deuterium-tritium, where does that fuel come from?They're both special types of hydrogen. Ignore these quite wacky names. They're kind of special, rare types of hydrogen. But the thing is, they're not that rare. Deuterium is one of the ingredients, and about five grams of every bathtub of seawater is deuterium. So there's just absolutely phenomenal amounts of it in the sea. And chemically, it's exactly the same as normal hydrogen. So if we extract it, it doesn't really matter. It's not going to change anything, the fact that we're using it up. And then the other ingredient is a bit more tricky. It's something called tritium. It's very, very weakly radioactive. It's only harmful if you were to ingest it. But the problem is it decays over time into other things, so there's not very much of it around at any one time. But you can create it, and you can create it from another element called lithium.Lithium is very common in the Earth both in ore and in seawater, and there's plenty of that to go around as well. Although of course, it does have some other uses, for example in batteries. So between those two, that's how you do it. Now there are problems: how do we turn the lithium into tritium, that needs to be solved on the kind of engineering side. But in principle, we've got enough fuel for thousands, if not millions, of years of energy for everyone on the planet to have the same level of consumption as people in the US, which you might be surprised to hear is quite high.So this was net energy gain: more energy out than put in. But then you talk about wall plug energy gain in your book. Is that the next big step?You know what, it kind of depends on where we want to focus our efforts, actually. There are a few ways we could go right now. For the benefit of your listeners, in this experiment, what they're measuring is the energy in, the energy that was carried by those laser beams to the target, and the energy that came out of that target from fusion reactions. Now, to actually power up and create those laser beams took a lot more energy. While about three megajoules of energy came out of the target, it took 400 megajoules to actually charge up the batteries, or the capacitor banks that they're called, to actually create those laser beams that had the two megajoules of energy. Wall-plug efficiency would be generating more energy than this entire system, so more than the 400 megajoules and more than the entire facility.The thing to say about the National Ignition facility is it was built to do ignition. It was built to do the scientific bit. They never cared about the fact that their lasers are horribly inefficient, because they knew that wasn't really what they were aiming for. What I suspect they will do on this machine, which is really built for optimizing what happens at the target end, is to try and up the gain as much as they can. Perhaps to a factor of four or five times rather than one-and-a-half times as they've done here, which is probably about the limit of this particular machine.But in the long run, of course, we've got to generate more energy than the facility as a whole. And that means probably going up to gains of at least 30 times. And eventually, if you're doing this form of fusion in a power plant, you'd use way more efficient lasers. This thing was designed 20-plus years ago and the laser efficiency is below 1 percent. There are lasers around today that can fire much faster and which have a 25 percent efficiency. And they're still not quite there in terms of energy terms. But with a bit more technological tweaking, maybe they could be. There are lots of ways to get over this wall-plug efficiency issue in the future. We haven't optimized for that. That is a good next challenge. But there are other parts of the problem that you could work on too.When you look at what government is doing, what some of these private sector companies are doing, what ultimately is the path that you get most excited by and you're like, “I don't know for sure, but this could be it.” This is not investment advice!No, it's absolutely not. It really depends on what kind of a commitment… Assuming things carry on in much the way they did yesterday and the day before, which is not a given, of course, I think probably the most promising path is a big magnetic confinement fusion device called ITER, which is currently being built in the south of France. And ITER is very expensive and on a very big scale but will probably show net energy gain using the magnetic approach. We'll start to test out some of the engineering issues around a prototype power plant. Now, it is not a prototype power plant, but it will start to look at least some of those engineering challenges. I think one possible path for fusion could be ITER gets finished, they're successful in testing out net energy gain and showing it can work in the magnetic way, which I think they almost certainly will (previous experiments with magnetic confinement have got very close), and they'll test out some of the engineering things. And then the private sector could come in at that point and say, “If you're doing it on that scale, it's going to be really expensive and we're going to have really low learning rates” — the smaller you can make a technology, the faster you learn how to make it even cheaper. That could be the time when the private sector really comes in and says, “We can do it for you. We can make them smaller and cheaper, and therefore, we can make the learning rate higher, making this technology more effective.” But that's just one scenario. There are lots of other ones. If the US government, and maybe other nations too, decided to really, really push the laser-based approach, then maybe that could be the one where we see the most progress towards a prototype power plant.Do you think some of these existing private sector companies, like Commonwealth Fusion Systems, I think another one is TAE Technologies, do you see them as legitimate players?Absolutely. Some of them are working on really interesting approaches. And like I say, because we don't know what works, I think it makes a huge amount of sense to let entrepreneurs and innovators just see what sticks to the wall. A lot of them aren't going to get there, because a lot of the designs won't work or they'll have to pivot to slightly different designs. And that's absolutely fine. The ones that are looking at fusion reactions that aren't deuterium and tritium, I am more skeptical of, personally, because that reaction just takes so much more energy to get going. Obviously never say never. The one that I'm probably most excited about, on paper anyway, is Commonwealth Fusion Systems. What the public laboratories have done is build up this huge body of knowledge about what does work. And no one is anywhere near as far ahead as the public laboratories in the UK and the US and the international collaboration ones. They're really the only people who've gotten anywhere close to doing this, because they're the only ones who've actually run with real fusion fuel for a start. Or at least they were until about two years ago. The thing that's quite nice about Commonwealth Fusion Systems is they're really building on tried and tested tokamak technology, but then they're saying, “Hey, the thing that really makes this work is having really powerful magnetic fields. So if we could just find a way to dramatically improve that part of the technology, we could make this dramatically smaller and dramatically easier as well.” I like that approach because they're really just doing this one change. And they've got some really promising technology to do it as well. Some of the advances they've made in superconductors are really exciting and probably stand alone as inventions.Will star power take us to the stars?Finally, we talked about the use case for fusion. It seems to me that there would be a strong use case, as you just mentioned, right here on Earth. But also in space, where we're going to need energy. I haven't really heard much of that mentioned in all the excitement about fusion, but I've thought about it, and I bet you have too.I certainly have. Just for the benefit of people listening, once you are wanting to explore space — and I think it's part of the human psyche to want to explore unknown frontiers, so I think we want to do that; I think most people would take that as a given — if you want to go beyond the very local area, like the Moon and Mars, it's very difficult to do it with conventional rocket technology, because essentially you have to carry the fuel with you. Imagine if you are trying to have a wood-fired interstellar rocket: The amount of wood you have to carry with you is just going to make life much more difficult. It's going to be difficult to get into orbit and then to actually get the thrust you need.Now, one of the great things about nuclear fusion is that it is the most high-energy-density, so amount of energy per kilogram, reaction that we have access to on Earth. It's the highest energy fuel stuff that we can possibly imagine, and it is basically the only one that is going to be able to do this longer-distance travel, because it can get us up to the speeds that we need to actually make some real progress across space. As I like to say, star power is literally the only energy source that can take us to the stars. So we should be doing it for that reason as well. Absolutely. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

Long-anticipated improvements in Fusion energy may or may not be the holy grail, but what's the significance? and when will we really know? While fusion is interesting to watch in the long term, service agreements are changing now. We have a lot of questions, like, does a 35-year service agreement make sense? Will these agreements be good or bad for preventative maintenance? And what other major changes will we see from OEMs this year? Vestas is also in the news because its spinoff, BladeRobots A/S, uses AI-informed robots to provide leading edge maintenance (and a few other things). Skagen Blade Technology ApS is a minority partner. And in Iowa, production lines are back up and running at the Siemens Gamesa blade factory that closed earlier this year. And there's more! Don't miss this episode! Visit Pardalote Consulting at https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com Wind Power Lab - https://windpowerlab.com Weather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.com Intelstor - https://www.intelstor.com Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes' YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!  Uptime 144 Allen Hall: Well, hey guys I'm am about to head into one of the worst snow storms of the season so far. They're talking about two feet of snow and, and rosemary, that's like two thirds of a meter of snow, so I can put it in metric terms for you. . Well, you too. Are sitting in warm, comfortable places. And Rosemary, you're probably even near the ocean. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, that's right. It is unseasonably cold though. . Joel Saxum: Oh man. I'm in shorts and I'm in shorts and flip flops. Houston, Texas is 74 Allen Hall: degrees today, I guess. Some people can live in the lap of luxury and us Hardy nor New Englanders, so will just suffer through the winter like we always do. , well, I mean, Well, yeah, not a big skier. Unfortunately. I've seen too many people blow at their knees, hips, elbows, break their thumbs. , it's so, it's getting old roast man. I, I, I try to avoid that. Well, this is, this is true. Old or smart, one or the other. Joel Saxum: It comes one in the same. Stick with one in same, yeah. Allen Hall: So there's a lot going on this week in renewable energy news, particularly in wind. But we want to start by talking about the Lawrence Livermore Fusion effort. And Rosemary and I go back and forth about how great America is or how long this is gonna take. Rosemary's probably right? I'll, I'll grant her that. But it, it's a good discussion. And then we talk about the Siemens Ka Mesa opening a. Over in Iowa. One, they had mothball for a while, so it's good to see that one kick back open again. Okay. Rosemary Barnes: We're going to talk about a Vestas order that's been announced for Southern Sweden and the interesting part of that is that it comes with a 35 year service agreement. Joel Saxum: And then as we all love innovation and we're sticking with Vestas again, we're gonna talk about Blade robots, the company that they started out of their, their venture capital fund and are now releasing to the market. So you'll be seeing some more, more robots climbing blade. Replacing Allen Hall: technicians possibly. I'm Alan Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and I'm here with Australian Renewables guru Rosemary Barnes. And my good friend Finn Wind Power Lab, Joel Saxon. And this is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. The big news of the week is Lawrence Livermore, national Laboratories Niche, national Ignition Facility, created fusion where they had more energy out than energy in.

Jennifer Granholm Hablar de adelantos científicos es una de las cosas que más hacemos en Hablando de Tecnología. pero hablar de temas como la fusión nuclear, especialmente cuando se trata de la fusión nuclear de ganancia neta positiva, es algo que no hemos hecho nunca. Y hay dos razones de peso para eso. Primero, los temas de física nuclear son altamente sofisticados y requieren de expertos altamente especializados a los que no tenemos acceso regularmente, y segundo —y más importante— este tipo de noticia no salen en los medios regularmente. Sobre todo, no de esta magnitud. El descubrimiento que acaba de anunciar el pasado martes 13 de diciembre la Secretaria de Energía de los Estados Unidos, Jennifer Granholm es comparable en magnitud al del alunizaje del Apollo 11 sobre la luna, el 20 de julio del 1969, la invención del teléfono en el 1876, las observaciones planetarias de Galileo en el 1610 y el descubrimiento del logaritmo en el 1614 y la invención del paracaídas en el 1485 por Leonardo DaVinci, a pesar de que para la época no existía el avión siquiera. Fíjate que entre descubrimiento y descubrimiento transcurrió más de un siglo, y en algunos casos ha habido siglos que han pasado sin pena ni gloria, como fue el caso del siglo 18. La fusión nuclear no es un concepto nuevo. De hecho, la bomba de hidrógeno —que tan temida es en el mundo militar— funciona a base de ese concepto. El problema hasta ahora es que se había tratado de una reacción perdidosa. es decir, que requería aplicar más energía de la que se producía. El verdadero logro de los científicos del Laboratorio Nacional de Lawrence Livermore en California, es que alcanzaron la “Ignición Mediante Fusión”, una reacción controlada en la que la energía producida sobrepasó la energía invertida. Y todo esto dentro de un ambiente contenido. ¿Y por qué esto es importante? Porque se espera que la fusión nuclear sea la contestación a la encrucijada energética que enfrenta la humanidad y que ponga punto final al uso de combustibles fósiles como lo ha hecho la humanidad hasta ahora.   Como sabes, llevo algún tiempo cogiéndolo un poco más suave con Hablando De Tecnología. No porque se me hayan agotado las ideas o el entusiasmo, sino porque he estado invirtiendo tiempo en otros proyectos como mi página de turismo Puerto Rico By GPS. Pero esta noticia era demasiado importante. Y créeme, esto sí es tecnología como la definimos en el programa “la ciencia al servicio de la humanidad”. mejor ejemplo no existe. ENLACES: • Visita la página de Puerto Rico By GPS OTROS EPISODIOS QUE TE PUEDEN INTERESAR: 11 Mitos Tecnológicos Que Suenan Creíbles 16 Mentiras Que Te Dijeron Durante La Infancia 7 Mitos Sobre La Producción de Video 7 Mitos Sobre El Empleo De Personas De La Tercera Edad 13 Realidades Sobre La Educación Universitaria [2022] 11 Mitos Sobre El Agua 7 Mitos y Realidades Sobre YouTube 4 Palabras Que El Público Odia ©2022, Orlando Mergal, MA _________________ El autor es Experto En Comunicación Corporativa (Lic. R-500), Autor de más de media docena de Publicaciones de Autoayuda y Productor de Contenido Digital Inf. 787-306-1590 • 787-750-0000 Divulgación de Relación Material: Algunos de los enlaces en esta entrada son “enlaces de afiliados”. Eso significa que si le das click al enlace, y compras algo, yo voy a recibir una comisión de afiliado. No obstante, tú vas a pagar exactamente lo mismo que pagarías al visitar al comerciante directamente y de manera independiente.  Además, yo sólo recomiendo productos o servicios que utilizo personalmente y que pienso que añadirán valor a mis oyentes. Al patrocinar los productos o servicios que mencionamos en Hablando De Tecnología contribuyes para que el programa continúe. Hago esta divulgación en cumplimiento con con el "16 CFR, Part 255" de la Comisión Federal De Comercio de los Estados Unidos "Guías Concernientes al uso de Endosos y Testimonios en la Publicidad".

V podcaste SHARE hovoríme aj o tom, ako vedci plánujú z jadrovej fúzie vytvoriť elektrickú energiu. Výskumníci z Národného laboratória Lawrence Livermore v Kalifornii ako prví dokázali vytvoriť energeticky výnosnú jadrovú syntézu. Najprv o tom informovali neoficiálne zdroje, neskôr ale túto správu potvrdili priamo predstavitelia americkej vlády. O tom, čo je to jadrová fúzia, prečo sa o ňu ľudstvo desiatky rokov toľko snaží a čo je na nej tak náročné sa v podcaste SHARE zhovárame s redaktorom Živé.sk Marekom Jurčíkom. Rozpráva sa s ním Maroš Žofčin. V aktuálnej časti podcastu SHARE sa dozviete: Vtip o tom, ako je jadrová fúzia vždy o 20 rokov v budúcnosti. Čo to je jadrová fúzia a ako sa líši od jadrového štiepenia. Že ako palivo pri nej stačí voda a neprodukuje žiadny škodlivý odpad. Prečo ju ľudstvo chce dosiahnuť a prečo sa mu to nedarí. Ako dokázali vedci v Kalifornii vytvoriť výnosnú jadrovú fúziu. Či sa podľa ich technológie môže postaviť fúzna elektráreň. Aké ďalšie projekty sa o rovnaký cieľ usilujú. Ako výkonná by bola takáto elektráreň oproti tým dnešným. Články k téme z podcastu: Ľudstvo je na prahu energetickej revolúcie: Potvrdené, vedcom sa podarila prvá energeticky výnosná jadrová fúzia Podcast SHARE pripravujú spoločne magazíny Živé.sk a HernáZóna.sk. NAPÍŠTE NÁM: Ak nám chcete niečo odkázať, doplniť nás alebo sme povedali niečo zle a chcete nás opraviť, môžete nám napísať na podcasty@zive.sk. Všetky maily čítame a na väčšinu odpovedáme.

En el laboratorio Nacional Lawrence Livermore, en  Estados Unidos, lograron reproducir, de forma controlada, las condiciones en las que se produce y libera energía al interior del Sol. El sueño de la electricidad producida por fusión nuclear se persigue desde la década de 1950 y este anuncio abre  una puerta para pensar en producir energía más limpia a partir de la fusión nuclear. Una proeza en la historia de la producción de energía y una revolución energética que sustituirá a las energías fósiles, así es como la secretaria de energía de los Estados Unidos, Jennifer Granholm, presentó los resultados del laboratorio Lawrence Livermore, donde se logró producir, por primera vez, más energía de fusión de la que se utilizó para producirla.  Los físicos han buscado las maneras de recrear ese reacción durante décadas, hecho que promete convertirse en una fuente de energía limpia casi ilimitada. Sobre ello y las posibilidades de que esta nueva teconología pueda producir la energía necesaria para abastecer al planeta conversamos con Luis Pedrero, ingeniero en Energías renovables por el Tecnológico de Monterrey Mucho de lo que está sucediendo ahora está en modo experimental, como tal no se está produciendo energía de estos equipos, se está demostrando todavía el concepto de mantener el plasma y hacer fusión nuclear y debido a la grande masa que tienen, cuesta mucha energía entonces meter energía para sacar energía, se necesita mucho más search para llegar a los 100 millones de kelvin que se necesitan, sin hablar de la cuestión económica  Ante el inminente calentamiento del planeta debido a los gases de efecto invernadero de las energías fósiles es urgente la implementación de energías limpias, como la que potencialmente se podría producir con la fusión nuclear, sin embargo para que esto sea una realidad aún habría que esperar unos cinco años, según estima Luis Pedrero.  Escuche la entrevista haciendo clic en el audio ►►

A net energy gain for fusion in a lab is a landmark scientific achievement but we're decades away from commercialization according to experts. We have to decarbonize the planet by 2050. Will fusion energy contribute? Utility solar farm that lays the panels flat on the ground is commissioned. The Salton Sea in California could provide all the United States lithium needs and then some (CNBC video link). And it could be the greenest lithium in the world. The Keystone pipeline spills its wares all over Kansas. Will traditional nuclear energy be effective to reach our climate goals? A study casts shade on that idea. 17:36 - The fusion breakthrough in California. What it doesn't mean for the race to net zero and what it does mean for our grandchildren. Free New York Times article on this. As well we'll have stories on Canada cancelling fossil fuel subsidies, sorta,  an update on the people shooting at a power substation causing blackouts, sails for cargo ships, people who hate wind turbines are more likely to think the moon landing was fake, plus a new study on traditional nuclear helping or not helping the fight against global warming, and much more! A listener in Virginia asks us about a proposed new community solar farm near him and how he should deal with the misinformation floating around. Buy us a cup of coffee with PayPal Donate! or e-transfer to cleanenergyshow@gmail.com Thanks for listening to our show! Consider rating The Clean Energy Show on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to our show. Follow us on TikTok! @cleanenergypod Our YouTube Channel! @CleanEnergyShow Your hosts: James Whittingham https://twitter.com/jewhittingham Brian Stockton: https://twitter.com/brianstockton Email us at cleanenergyshow@gmail.com Leave us an online voicemail at http://speakpipe.com/cleanenergyshow See you next week! Transcript Clip: Simply put, this is one of the most impressive scientific feats of the 21st century. Brian: Hello, and welcome to episode 143 of the Clean Energy Show. I'm Brian Stockton. I'm James Whittingham. This week fusion breakthrough, all clean energy needs have been met. This podcast is no longer necessary a go. Listen to Joe Rogan. Oh, wait. I'm hearing in my ear that people are overreacting to this. News and commercialization is still decades away. The world's first utility scale solar project is going ahead. With solar panels sitting flat on the ground, these green energy hippies were just too lazy to put them up on a proper mount. The salt and sea in California apparently has more lithium than Nevada's. Lake Mead has dead bodies. Some think there's enough lithium to power the entire United States. And then some. Huge congratulations to TC Energy's keystone pipeline that has successfully leaked more oil than any other pipeline since 2010. Wait, I'm being told that's a bad day as well. We have stories on Canada canceling fossil fuel subsidies. While sort of an update on people shooting at power stations sales for cargo ships, people who hate wind turbines, and more are more likely to think that the moon landing was fake. Plus, a new study on traditional nuclear helping or not helping the fight against global warming, and much more on this week's edition of The Clean Energy Show. Yeah, so first up for me is an update. As you know, I'm trying to get rid of fossil fuels in my own house because I love the planet, and I don't want to burn any more fossil fuels than I have good fuel. So made a little bit of progress. Been speaking to a contractor who could put in an Arctic type air source heat pump so I can get rid of my natural gas furnace. And the latest update is that it's 16 weeks from when you order it because there's a backlog four months and they want you to pay upfront. Oh, you got to pay upfront. You got to pay up front. Yeah. So the point being this week, because we talked about these kinds of subsidies upfront 100%, right? You got to pay 100% upfront. Why is heat pump and then wait 16 weeks? Because there's just huge demand for them, which is basically what's going on all over the world. Like, there's a couple of stories here. I've got one from Clean Technica. The title is Heat Pumps Are on Fire globally. They mean, as in getting more popular, heat pump sales rose 15% in 2021, and they're expecting for something similar or greater this coming year. Europe. They rose by 35% in 2021. And of course, they're very much trying to get off of Russian gas in Europe. And heat pumps is definitely one of the ways to do it. And there's another story here from China. China is actually the world leader on heat pump adoption. Of course, they have a very large population. They do things big in China when they, when they do them. So sales are up 35% in Europe and 45% in China for heat pumps. So I bring this all up because we were talking in the last couple of weeks about subsidies that are available for things like heat pumps. So I'm in the Greener Homes Grant in Canada, so I should get about $5,000 to help offset this cost. In the US is the Inflation Reduction Act, and starting in January, there's going to be subsidies for people to do things like put in heat pumps and other kind of energy upgrades. But I wanted to tell our listeners because there is going to be a global shortage of heat pumps. So if it's something you're thinking of doing, start talking to somebody now and maybe beat the rush, because there's definitely going to be a rush in January in the US. Can a person invest in a heat pump company? I mean, is there anybody who's on the stock market that would make a good investment? Not that I'm aware of, but I'm going to make a note of that and check later because yeah, that's probably a smart idea. Well, get back to us. I'd be curious to know. And then certainly anyone who makes effective, the most cost effective heat pump and maybe the most efficient heat pump, they're going to win the game, especially if they patent that technology. So, I mean, keep an eye on developments there because they are. Sure, yeah, no, there's two things like the cost of the unit and then the efficiency of the unit. Generally speaking, you're going to kind of be paying more upfront, which is the common refrain here on the clean energy show. You're probably going to be paying more upfront for the equipment, but it will be hopefully cheaper in the long run. It's a bit of a weird equation where we live because in this ridiculous frigid place and our natural gas prices are still quite good. Our natural gas is still fairly cheap here. So I'm not necessarily going to be saving money right away by doing this. It's more of a long term gambit and I just want to get the gas out of my house. Yeah, I was going to say paying for it up front. You'd run the risk of them going out of business. But then they're not going to go out of business, are they? The chances are I don't think so because it would be terribly wrong for a heat pump company to go out of business us at this point. Yeah, I suppose the contractor could go out of business, but it should be fine. Well, we'll talk more about that as we go along because heat pumps are the new thing, even where we live, apparently. We're certainly going to monitor if you freeze into a Popsicle or not after you get your heat pump because we get down to -40 here as we talk about our electric vehicles. It's much more of a no brainer if you're on the west coast or on the east coast of Canada or pretty much anywhere in the world where people live. Pretty much anywhere in the world. It's just our ridiculous climate. And just coincidentally, we have fairly decent natural gas prices. By the way, we're still looking for clean energy show property in Hawaii, if you have any. Yeah, please. Anyway, Brian, I want to say thank you to our donors because we've had big donations to the show. Not just donations, which are humbling enough, but big ones. And thank you to the people who have done that. One person chose to do an email transfer, an e transfer, rather via email, because they didn't want to lose any fees and make the most of their donations that did that, and it worked out nicely. So thank you to everyone. I won't name you because you didn't say you could be named, but you know who you are. We appreciate you greatly. Thank you. Thank you very much for your donations. This is an independent production. We've been doing it for over two years now. And we do it because we love the show and we love the planet. But it's also nice to get some money and so James can get a new toaster. I guess we're approaching our third year pretty quick. Before you know it'll be three years. My goodness. That's right, we're coming up on three. Say, did you happen to see Saturday Night Live, the comedy live comedy show in North America? Here I saw part of it was Steve Martin and Steve Martin, I saw part of it they were doing in the opening monologue, which I thought was quite well done, they were doing each other's eulogies. They had pretended to have written each other's eulogies. And this is Steve Martin reading from his eulogy that he had prepared pre death for Martin short, his friend. But I would always be haunted by Marty's last words, tesla Autopilot engaged. I thought that was funny, so I played it on the show. My son, he's been nagging me just before Showtime today, this big fusion announcement. I was waiting to hear from him on this because he's one of these people, these silver bullet people, which is almost everyone. It's probably 99% of the people listen to our show. I'm sorry, but everybody has this silver bullet where it's a pet of theirs, an energy pet. Yeah, whether it's nuclear as a whole, some people, or do that. And then there's nuclear fusion, which has been talked about. I mean, I learned about nuclear fusion from my hairdresser 25 years ago. He's like, oh, it's coming quick, it's coming quick. And you know, that's going to be the thing that's going to solve this whole problem. And of course, a lot of people believe that, and there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, it's been frustratingly long to get to the achievement that we're going to talk about shortly after we update some other stories. But he says this, my first text from my son after the announcement is, oh God, you're going to hate this. So right away he's assuming that I'm going to be upset by this because I've been telling them, arguing with him about nuclear, that you can't compete on cost. And he says the first fusion reactor has been built that produces more energy than it consumes. And later on, after a bunch of bickering and quotes and articles sent back and forth, he said, you said solar would be so cheap that it would be even cheaper than fusion, even down the line. And I was actually quite excited about this announcement on a personal level. I spent the better part of a week researching and digging into this so that I could talk about it on the show this week and have my facts straight. Well, it turns out I was right. Not to spoil the story, but I'm afraid I was right that it is going to be very expensive. I'll get to it later, okay. But it's not going to happen quickly and it's not going to happen cheaply. And the people who made the announcement are the people saying that. So it's not me poopoo nuclear. I am, however, quite excited on a personal level that my kids generation and my grandkids generation will have power that won't have to deal with nuclear waste. It'll be completely safe and completely it's a wonderful technology that has very few caveats of any I mean it's just aside from expense and not being developed yet into a power plant. But yeah, we'll talk about that later. Those substations, I keep seeing them in the news when I'm flipping through the channels. It's turning into a big story. The shooting of the substations. Yeah. So we talked about this probably last week where in North Carolina there was a shooting attack on an electrical substation and 30, 40,000 people were without power for almost a week. Then a few days after that, news of gunfire near the Duke energy facility in South Carolina. Now it seems like probably nothing happened with that one. There were some shots heard, no power outages. But there's a great article on NPR about this. North Carolina attacks highlight the vulnerability of power grids. So here's the thing. There's 55,000 electrical substations around the US. And most of them are kind of vulnerable. These things are liquid cooled. This is the main kind of danger. They're liquid cooled so you can take a rifle shoot into them and then all the liquid drains out and then they overheat and then they fail. Probably the whole thing fails. And I'm guessing it's not just one component, not one capacitor or one individual component. The whole thing has to be replaced. We shouldn't be telling people this, but it is the dues and some of them have been over the years sort of fortified, like put up like brick walls and stuff. Is that right? I didn't know that. But there's 55,000 of them, and they're not going to be particularly well protected, of course. Yeah, it's a concern. I mean, it's maybe not something we should be worried about yet, but I don't know. Who knows? Well, if somebody decided to get organized and attack on a coordinated basis, I mean, a week long power outage for tens of thousands of people is nothing to sneeze at. And it sounded like it was awfully easy to do with. I wonder if they had the knowledge of what they were doing or if it was just they were shot at it and got lucky and just got lucky. I'm not sure. I mean, presumably they knew. I mean, it's this issue of the cooling liquid leaking out. Well, let's hope it was a disgruntled power employee and not somebody who knows what they're doing and trying to disrupt the United States. People talking about on television experts saying that you can't really protect the power, it's just not going to happen. You have to find the people doing it and then get to it that way. I mean, you could put up more barriers, and some of them do have brick walls around them or whatever, but it seems unlikely. I mean, if it turns into a bigger problem, then perhaps there'll be a mass deployment of walls. Not at the moment. And one of the problems that I keep seeing mentioned is that a lot of these stations, they want to be away from people. People don't want to look at them. So they're kind of isolated. In fact, some of them are extremely isolated. They're very remote in rural areas, not near populations. Yeah. So ground mount solar. I know that you brought this up on the show several months ago. This is the idea of putting solar panels just completely flat on the ground without any hardware or panels really at all. Yeah, they're just connected together somehow. So you level the ground first. You probably have to level it, make a nice, smooth, level chunk of land, and you probably have to make us sort of like drainage ditches and stuff like that. So we have one now that's coming online in Texas. And this is 100 MW. This is a decent sized solar project. Ten times what we have here where we live. They're making 10 MW here, and it's just a normal one on regular mounts. This is 100 MW. This story is from Electric, and it will be the only utility scale solar farm that is mounted flat so far to date. There's many advantages to this, but one of them is just that you can put more panels in the same kind of area. That's right, because you're basically just sticking them up right next to each other. So if you're in an area where land is an issue, and you don't quite have enough land for this stuff. Now, of course, there's downsides to that, too. Like you don't get the advantage of the angle of the sun. But as we talk about frequently on the show, the whole solar system will eventually be so overbuilt that those kinds of issues aren't that big a deal. But one of the biggest benefits of this, as near as I can tell, is they can just basically they throw a roomba on this thing to keep it clean. But that's also one of the challenges, Brian, is the fact that they get dirtier because they just sit there. There's not as much of runoff. But then at the same time, the solution to that problem works quite well. You say it's dirt cheap. The robot can clean up to 2 solar every day. So the robot can just kind of run continuously, like Arumba runs in people's houses. So every 50 days it starts over. The rough cost to clean a tracker plant one time is fifty cents per kilowatt hour. This is a plant where they're mounted normally fifty cents per kilowatt hour per kilowatt. And these panels can be cleaned for a year at wow, very interesting. So you would save money. Hardware is not cheap. But the solar panels that I saw here, they track, they're on Movable, tracking things that track the sun east to west. And of course, Texas is a lot farther south. That's going to yeah, we're not in the far north of Canada. We're in southern Canada, but that's still quite far north. So if we had flat panels here, the winter production would be pretty abysmal. Yeah, I don't think it makes sense. I said it last time, I don't think it makes sense in winter climates. Although I'm sure they could develop robots for cleaning snow if they had to. But I think it also just works better where we are. And the more northern you are, even northern half of the United States, it's going to make more sense to actually tilt them towards the sun, perhaps. I assume economically it makes more sense. Yeah. Obviously Texas is a lot further south, so the angle of the sun is not as big a deal in the winter. So yeah, there you go. News from here in Canada against Canada had made a pledge some time ago to stop subsidizing fossil fuel projects abroad outside of Canada. So the good news is that Canada has decided to stop any subsidies that would go to fossil fuel projects outside of Canada. The bad news is they haven't canceled those projects here at home yet. They haven't canceled those subsidies in Canada. But what can I say? It's progress of a kind. This was a pledge that Canada had made last year, and there was a deadline at the end of this year. They said, okay, we're going to do it by the end of 2022. So at the last minute, they have pulled it out and made that announcement. But this is typical of the progress that's happening right now in clean energy, is that governments are just not moving fast enough. But at least they're moving. I wish they'd done it with inside the borders. I mean, we're at a pretty critical time here, climate wise. It'd be nice if they get on that. Yeah. Canada is a fossil fuel country. It is a big part of our economy. So, of course they're worried about killing the economy and that's why they haven't done it here at home. But it's coming someday, I guess. This is the Clean Energy show with Brian Stockton and James Whittingham. Well, this was a very successful scientific experiment done in a laboratory to show that the process of fusion can be duplicated here on the Earth and that they can get more energy out of it than they put into it. But let me say that the way they did it in this National Ignition Facility is not the way we're going to be generating electricity. This was to study the process of fusion itself and study the lasers, the incredible lasers that they use to generate the power. All right, it's time for full team coverage of the fusion breakthrough. Okay. The advancement by Lawrence Livermore national Laboratory researchers will be built on to further develop fusion energy research. So this is a laboratory milestone, one that has been sought after for decades. Brian and from an environmental perspective, fusion has always had a strong appeal because it's not dangerous. It's different than fission, which is your normal nuclear power. Fusion combines atoms rather than splits them. Right. It puts them together. But it's very interesting and it's just hard to do. And they haven't achieved a net energy gain, so it takes a lot of energy to create particles, atoms that want to fuse together. It's hotter than the inside area of the sun. The center of the sun. Yeah. Well, I watched the YouTube channel. The Cleo abram YouTube channel. Huge if true, is sort of the name of the series. And a couple of YouTubers did you watch that? A couple of YouTubers built a fusion reactor in a garage. Did they? And it worked. But the key is they did not get more energy out than they put in. And this has been the problem with fusion for all these years. Takes a huge amount of energy, and they're not getting even that amount of energy out of it. Until now, billions of dollars from governments around the world have been put into this, and this is the first time that it's happened. I guess they got out 1.5 times the energy that they put in, using the world's most powerful laser to do this. There is always a nagging caveat, however, with this, and in that all of its efforts by scientists to control the unruly power of fusion, their experiments consume more energy than what was going in. But that changed. Brian. According to the New York Times, at on December 5, when 192 giant lasers at the laboratory's national ignition facility busted a small cylinder about the size of a pencil eraser that contained a frozen newbin of hydrogen. Do you have any frozen new bins of hydrogen laying around the house? Probably not. Let me check. The freezer encased in diamond. So that makes it even more rare. Well, that sounds totally practical. Well, that's what they did, and that's kind of yeah, it's a long story, but that's what they did. They used all these lasers to get to that. And in a brief moment, lasting less than 100,000,000,000,000th of a second 205 pardon me, 2.5 megajoules of energy, roughly the equivalent of a pound of TNT, I think. The Sneeze At bombarded, the hydrogen pellet out of flowed from that pellet a flood of neutron particles, the product of fusion. See, when you put things, when you put particles together, they create energy. When you take them apart, they create energy. Which carried about three megajoules of energy, a factor of 1.5. Yeah. And basically, this is how the sun works. The sun is like fusion energy is as near as I understand it. That's correct. And obviously, the sun is producing endless amounts of energy for free. It's doing a hell of a job. So the solar panels on our roof are technically fusion. Yeah, technically, wind is technically solar because you need the sun to create wind because it's the energy differences that create wind. So some people like to call wind power solar power, and now we can call it fusion. I don't know if you want to so does Tuesday's announcement mean we'll have cheap fusion energy soon? A lot of people, such as my uppity son, would say yes. They assume, oh, it's a breakthrough. They'll start manufacturing tomorrow. A couple of years from now, we'll see solar panels going to the landfill. Yeah, well, it's taken them, what, 50 years to get this far? Well, the answer is no. According to the New York Times. Okay, so even if scientists figure out how to generate bigger bursts of fusion, immense engineering hurdles would remain. Experiments have studied one burst at a time, basically. So a practical fusion power plant using this concept would require a machine gun pace of laser bursts with new hydrogen targets sliding into place for each burst. That's the challenge. They're using magnets and magnetism to float things and have a continuous repeating chain. There's three different ways of approaches to fusion power, and this is basically an experiment at a nuclear weapons facility. But there's a Canadian team working on something, too, and they're going to have a prototype power plant getting built in the UK. But it still doesn't mean that it's anywhere near decades away. So the torrents of neutrons flying outward from the fusion reactions would have to be converted into electricity. That's another challenge. Basically, the fact that they created more energy doesn't make a power plant. Okay, so the laser complex fills a building with a footprint equal to three football fields. So it's too big, too expensive, and too inefficient for a commercial power plant, at least right now. A manufacturing process to mass reduce the precise hydrogen targets would have to be developed. And that sounds to me nowhere near okay, let's put it into the contest. Grinders. Remember, we have to decarbonize the planet by 50% by 2030 and 100% by 2050. China, if you're listening, 2060 is not good enough, and we can do it. In fact, we have 80% of the technology available to 100% by 2030, I've read, if we wanted to. Yeah, but we choose not to. It's just things like heat pumps. Like, there's going to be a waiting list for my heat pump. We need to just crank up production of the existing technologies, win solar batteries and heat pumps. We just got to make enough of them and that's all we need. Yeah. My son doesn't think that the world is coming together and will reach those targets. I hope they do. I think they'll miss them. But at the same time, I think people underestimate the economics of clean energy from 2030 to 2050. Like, it's going to just erase at least as far as power generation goes. This is from Power magazine. They're on top of this, too. Tony Ralstone, a nuclear engineer at Cambridge University in the UK, told National Public Radio in the United States that unless more significant progress is made, fusion would be unlikely to have a major role in power generation for another 40 to 50 years. Yeah, that's too late. It's too late. It's too late for me, too. My kids might see it when they're my age or older. My grandkids might live in a world where a solar farm erected today would come down and be decommissioned in 30 years. And even then, it doesn't sound like it's going to be there. Okay, it could be, but it doesn't sound like it would be. Well, this is something we've talked about before, too, but there's so many super complicated energy systems that exist today, including things like nuclear. Like making a nuclear plant is just insanely complicated. Building an offshore floating oil platform to drill for oil, it's insanely complicated. And if solar, wind and batteries existed 50 years ago, we wouldn't have done any of these things. They're just too complicated and expensive when these cheaper alternatives exist. And that's kind of the problem is that solar and wind and batteries and geothermal and other things that exist and are getting cheaper make it less profitable for investment into stuff like this. Because there is going to be huge upfront costs to get the development there. And then you're going to have to really back the technology in order to get the prices down. So David Keith, climate expert, says fusion maybe but beware of the hype. I don't know the details, he says, but for what it's worth, my my first professional job was in Canada's National lab, working big lasers for fusion. And I have been interested since. Getting more energy out than went in. Into the laser is cool technical benchmark, but it has almost nothing to do with the practical requirements to make commercial power. That's what people don't realize. And you hear this silver bullet thing, I'm going to finish what he had to say, but they're just not looking at the whole picture, and maybe they're not hearing that one sentence. That caveat at the end of the interview, which is really important. Suppose one had a free supply of fusion reactions in Pellets. You could make competitive electricity? He asks. Hard. Getting cheap energy from neutrons is really hard. Even those neutrons, if they're free, it's really hard. And worse when it needs a high vacuum. So there's lots of just technical details that are hurdles, really. Yeah. Well, these YouTubers that made a fusion reactor in their garage yeah, like a vacuum is one of the big things for it. You got to suck all the air out and they blew a breaker on their wall and then they lost all the air, and then they had to suck all the air out again. It's still kind of cool that they made it and they sort of made it with these off the shelf parts. You know, it's a lot of fun. But yeah, it's just insanely complicated. It's it's it is a genuine breakthrough. Like, they got more energy out and people have been trying to do this for literally 50 years or more. So it's a huge breakthrough, but nowhere in your practice. But it's a slow churn towards commercialization, which is what we think of. Right. Another challenge is that it is as hot as the sun. So that stuff breaks down when you have something that has to contain something that hot and a vacuum in particular. So there's serious challenges here that I'm confident they'll work out. And I think that next century there will be no wind turbines or maybe even solar panels that will just have fusion at the end of this century, sometime maybe 60 years from now, when it's cheap and cheap enough to spread 70 years. I don't know. I think it is the future. It's just going to take a long sounds like it's going to take a long road to get there. So Bloomberg says this. It's still a long way from the breakthrough in California to building a fusion based power plant. Well, this experiment generated excess energy on a small scale. The industry needs to develop systems that can produce much more excess energy on a much larger scale. This is 1.5 brian. I heard ten X as kind of where they need to be, and that energy gain shows that the concept will work, but the systems are still. Complicated and expensive. The New York Times says this this is just taught off the press. This is after the announcement, which happened a little while ago on Tuesday morning. It says it will take quite a while before fusion becomes available on a widespread practical scale, if ever. Probably decades, said Kimberly S. Boodle, the director of the Lawrence Livermore facility where this announcement took place. The director herself is saying probably decades. So I'm not being a poopoo here. I'm not being a nuclear naysayer. This is from the horse's mouth, literally. Now, other people in the industry will say, well, we've moved along fast and it's going to be better than that, but it's certainly going to be decades. We might have something functioning next decade in some level, but it's not going to be commercially functioning that you can replicate and spread. Okay, this is what she said at the good news conference. Not six decades, I don't think, which is what most people used to say, I think not even five decades, which is what we used to say most often. So that sounds like 40 years. I think it's moving into the foreground, probably with concerted effort and investment. A few decades of research on the underlying technologies could put us in a position to build a power plant. Yet this is not around the corner. I'm sorry. I mean, I wish it was, but it's not. Most climate scientists and policymakers say that to achieve that goal of limiting warming to two degrees Celsius, or even the more ambitious target of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming by 2050, the world must reach net zero emissions by then. And this, Brian, under any circumstance, doesn't seem like it's going to be any significant part of that. Even under the most ambitious optimistic scenario, we still have to rely on what we have. And what we have will become at least half as expensive in the next decade. So, Katherine Hale, this is the Canadian climate scientist. I'll just add this on here, she said on Twitter. Yes, it's a huge technological advance, and yes, it will help us long term, but no, it won't get us out of the climate crisis we're in today. The biggest invention we need right now, political and corporate. Will we need Canada to stop those fossil fuel subsidies not just abroad, but here at home as well. All right, I think this next story is the perfect one to go into because it's the exact opposite of what we're just talking about, the exact opposite of the incredibly complex world of fusion reactors. So this is a story from clean technica wind power to cut cargo ship emissions by 20%. So basically, what they're talking about doing, cargo ships take an enormous amount of fuel to ship stuff around the world. They're going to put wind sails on them. And you ever see, like, kiteboarding, is that what that's called? Or parasailing, where you can get on skis in the water, and you got a big sail in front of you to pull you along from your cottage. There are some parasailers at our cottage. It's a crazy sport, and I wish I could do it, but until it's passed me by anyway, they're going to do this on cargo ships. So this is the sea wing sale from a French company called Air Seat. Wait a minute. It's going to be like a parachute? It's like a parachute. Like, it's not like a sailing ship where you're putting up a sale, because I've seen pictures of hard sails put on ships, both new ships and retrofitting ships, and there's different rotating yeah, there's different rotating turbines that they've figured out for ships that kind of sit that look like a chimney. Oh, I'm looking at a picture right now. But yeah, it's like a parachute. And now I assume the caveat is you've got to have the wind at your back for this to work. What happens? The kite goes down? It looks like the ship is flying a giant kite. Yeah, the ship is flying a giant kite, but I imagine there's prevailing westerly winds out on the ocean. So if you're sailing west, just throw up your sail. Maybe they can't use it on the way back. Yes, this has been tested. It should cut emissions by 20%. Like, this is a thing, you know, wind power works. I'm kind of speechless. Like, this seems really cookie, to be honest with you. When you go and fly a kite, the kite twirls around, it goes down into the ground, and you have to send your kid to go throw it up in the air again. And then you know how that works? Well, you couldn't do that with this. It'd be go hit the water, and then you'd be like, oh, well, I guess we're done. I'm sure there's ways to people figure this out for parasailing, for kite surfing. Why can't they figure it out for ships? Well, you got a dude who's very skilled pulling that parasail at the right time to get it lifted up again, and you become very adept at that. But unless there's an automated AI system or something doing it, I don't know. But I mean, this is not the ocean. The ocean is a steady you're not looking at gusts on the ocean. I'm not an atmospheric expert for oceans, but I assume that it's less gusty, that it's just a blow. It flows regularly. Yeah, and they're not talking about powering the whole ship this way. It's a 20% reduction in emissions. This should help. So that's 20% reduction in the price that it takes to fuel those goods across the ocean, too. Yeah, fuel is super expensive, and you would save 20% of your costs. Yeah. Well, that's interesting. And maybe it would work with onboard sales as well. The ones that I was talking about. Brian, I wanted to talk to you about the sultan Sea. This is a place that I passed by in my big California trip a number of years ago. We went down to Calexico, which is right on the US. Border. There's a little town on the American side called Calexico. On the other side looks very different. It's called Mexicali, and it's kind of a cute thing. And of course, there's lots of drugs going on there, according to the shows I've watched on TV. Anyway, 40 miles north of the border, there's the Salt and Sea, which is this dead, salty lake bed. Okay? It's always been that way. And I guess in 1905, there was this overflowing of the Colorado River that overflowed some canals and filled it up partial way, I guess. It's it used to be much bigger, years and years, well, decades even, perhaps centuries ago, I don't know. But it filled up a little bit back then. And then it became like this popular resort in the 50s for like, Frank Sinatra and celebrities would all just go over there from La. And live in the saltwater. And there's all these remnants of this 1950s vacationy place left to look at when you go. It's a ghost town now, but there's lots of geothermal in the area. Okay? And what I didn't know, what I just learned today, is that it's got a lot of bad dust. So because it's geothermal, because the crust is between two tectonic plates, it's thin there. And so the water just sort of gurgles up the brine from the ground water, and it gurgles up because it's heated, and then it brings with it minerals, including lithium. And then the water dries and it just leaves the lithium behind. So this could be the cleanest, greenest lithium on the planet, they claim. And not only that, there's a lot of it. There could be enough to power the entire United States'lithium needs and then some. Yeah, of course, lithium being one of the key components in lithium ion batteries, which are kind of running the world right now. So, yeah, there's lots of dust, including arsenic dust, which is kicking up, so people trying not to even live there anymore. But there was this huge artist community. I mean, you're getting close to Coachella and places like that down there. Eleven geothermal plants producing 400 MW, which powers 350,000 homes worth just from geothermal. So there's actually a lot of geothermal plants there, probably the most in North America, I'd guess. The Earth's crust, like I said, is thin, so all this stuff gergles up. Now, usually at a geothermal plant, they would put the brine back into the ground. The water would come up, this hot brine, they take the energy out of it and transfer it to water to produce steam and then put it back in the ground. But what they're saying is it could be a cheap way, since they're bringing it up already, to just turn that into a lithium extraction. Right there at the geothermal plants or all of the eleven geothermal plants. Lithium mining is usually water intensive and leaves behind contaminants. And this bypasses those things. And there's a cool 15 minutes video that CNBC did. I put a link in your show notes for you to have a look at that. Just wanted to pass that along. And just some quick bad news. The bad news story of the week, the Keystone Pipeline. So this is one of the major oil pipelines that runs between Canada and the US. Massive leak in Kansas. So this is a company, TC Energy. Big controversy in Canada lately about expanding the Keystone Pipeline with kind of mixed results. But I think it's just important to remember that pipelines, it's probably a safer way to transport than by rail. There was a derailment near US not long ago with some oil on board that massive fire. But 26,000 barrels of oil since 2010 coming out of that pipeline. We'll be better off once we can stop doing that. Why a world without pipeline leaks or oil spills? Wouldn't that be something? All right. A nuclear study as a solution to global warming. This is something I want to talk about because it's from Stanford. They did a study and basically they said that in evaluating the solutions to global warming and air pollution and energy security, two important questions arise. And they are should new nuclear plants be built to help solve these problems? A lot of people say yes without thinking about it. I say, should existing aged nuclear plants be kept open as long as possible to help solve these problems? To answer these questions, the main risks associated with nuclear power are examined. And the risks associated with nuclear power can be broken down into two categories. One risk risks affecting its ability to reduce global warming and air pollution. Two risks affecting its ability to provide energy and environmental security aside from climate and air pollution. So the risks in the former category include delays between planning and operation, emissions contributing to global warming and outdoor air pollution, and costs as we talk about a lot. Risks in the latter category include weapons proliferation risks, reactor meltdown risk, radioactive waste risk, and mining, cancer and land despoilment risks. So new nuclear power plants cost 2.3 to 7.4 times those of onshore wind or utility PV per kilowatt hour, and they take five to seven years longer between planning and operation, five to 17 years longer, and produce nine to 37 times the emissions per kilowatt as wind. Something you don't hear about. The emissions that nuclear actually produces is not zero, and it's actually nine to 37 times the emissions of its energy output compared to wind. So, as such, a fixed amount of money spent on a new nuclear plant means much less power generation. A much longer wait for power at a much greater emission rate than the same money spent on WWS technology, wind, water and solar. There is no such thing as a zero or close to zero emission nuclear power plant, says the study. Even existing plants emit due to the continuous mining and refining of uranium needed for the plant. And however, though all power plants emit 4.4 grams per CO2 equivalent per kilowatt hour from the water vapor and heat they release. So water vapor is bad. This is a question I have about the fusion plants, rather, is that are they emitting any water vapor? I haven't heard on that, and I will get back to you as soon as I hear something. Or if you know something, always email us at the Clean Energy Show. Clean Energy Show@gmail.com this contrasts with solar panels and wind turbines, which reduce heat or water vapor fluxes to the air. On top of that, because of all nuclear reactors, they take ten to 19 years or more. Between planning and operation, there's two to five years for utility, solar or wind and nuclear causes a lot of emissions for 100 years. Overall, emissions from the new nuclear 78 to 178 grams/CO2 per kilowatt hour, not close to zero at all. So China's investment in nuclear plants take so long between planning and operation instead of wind and solar resulted, you know, because it chose nuclear instead of wind and solar because it took so long. China's CO2 emissions were increased 1.3% from 2016 to 2017 in one year, rather than they should have declined by 3% if they went the way that we suggest here on the show. Brian? Yeah. Solar, wind and battery. The resulting difference in air pollution emissions may have caused 82,000 additional air pollution deaths in China. This is nothing. This needs at literally between 2016 alone with additional deaths in years prior. And since some feedback here that came in just as we were wrapping up last week's show, this is from well, let's listen. Aloha, James and Brian. My name is Ryan Nielsen. I live in a little town called Gaylax, Virginia. G-A-L ax like galaxy without the Y. I originally grew up in Hawaii, hence the Aloha Go, Hawaii, for their clean energy. I've heard lots of things about it on your show the last few months. I've been listening for about six months now and never miss a week. We started listening after we got our first electric vehicle, an ionic five, and have taken an increased interest in the environment and helping to save our planet. We just found out yesterday about a solar farm. It's going to be a 20 megawatt solar farm that's in the plans for our community just a few miles from our home. And they're having a public commentary period for the next few weeks. I will be going to a public meeting for it at our local library tomorrow, and I wanted to get your guys thoughts on the pros of solar farms in the community to counter all the negative as there are lots of outlandish and ridiculous claims that are out there and already being put out there. So hope to hear from you guys and wanting to leave one of these messages for a while. Mahalo for all that you do. Well, thank you so much. We love SpeakPipe Voicemails because we get to hear our listeners. They're not just an intangible thing that we have to kind of imagine and people can listen to somebody else for a change. It's like having a third host of the show, or a guest perhaps. Congratulations on the Anna five. That's great news. Hoping you are enjoying it. If you have any issues with it or any questions or concerns, let us know. I know more about gaylax Virginia than I should, Brian, because I've been trying to find out, trying to find the solar farm proposal, and I can't find it. There's lots of other ones, but I couldn't find it. I went to the Galeax Library and I couldn't find it there. Yeah, so I can't find anything about it. So I don't know what the exact location is. My only guess that a solar farm could be trouble is if it visually disturbs nature when they put it on a hillside or a high elevation. That's the only thing that I can think of. And I have seen something like that. And I would say, well, why don't you put that in a valley? Or why don't you put it on a flat piece of land where you can't really see it? People probably don't even notice a solar or farms on flat land if you're driving down the highway. If you're not looking for it, there's no negatives, Brian. There's no negatives. No. And wind, it's kind of the same thing. Like, there can be an issue with migratory birds and killing birds, but I think usually the people who are against wind turbines don't genuinely care about birds. There's always small issues. My brother was just telling me recently, he lives in rural Ontario, and this sort of came up at a local planning meeting for the small town that he was in. And they weren't planning to do any clean energy, but it was just sort of on the agenda and they wanted to kind of get everybody's opinion, like the city councilors and everybody was against it. He said, wow. Yeah. I don't think it would have been a year or two ago. I think the rhetoric on Facebook, which is a lot of small town people, are even more connected to Facebook than anyone else because they need to be connected. And there's not a Starbucks to go to, necessarily. I do find that here where we live in a fairly rural area, and there's a lot of people on Facebook and they are in their bubbles and they are getting ridiculous information. Now, I don't know what to tell you about people who believe in ridiculous information. There's no magic bullet. I mean, you can try and sit down with them and reason with them, and sometimes that works, but I wouldn't do that myself. I'd like, screw that. If you want to be dumb, be dumb. If you want to have crazy ideas, fine, have crazy ideas. It'll be built somewhere else. It'll be built in another jurisdiction. Well, I guess that's the one sort of saving grace of all this, because yes, absolutely. There are going to be city councils everywhere voting this kind of stuff down, but it's a tide that can't be stopped. Clean energy is better and cheaper. It will eventually take over everywhere. It's just unfortunate. But I would encourage people to go to their city council meetings or whatever and speak on this topic, because sometimes if you don't, then nobody does. Yeah, I just don't like getting into arguments with people who are cuckoo because you can't reason with somebody who thinks the Earth is flat. And I don't like going to meetings. Meetings. I'm not a big fan of meetings, so I decided to start a podcast instead. This is our way to contribute. Yeah. So 20 is twice the size of the solar farm that I looked at nearby, and they're building around here right now. They are building bigger ones down the road. But, you know, Virginia is actually a pretty good place for solar. They have a lot of projects on the Go rooftop. Solar is possible there. The utility there has school bus rebates, which I happen to see just before I got his message, that they have they're buying a bunch of electric school buses, and they quite like them. They are more expensive right now, but immediately the drivers are really praising them and liking them a lot. We love to hear from you. Contact us by email at clean energyshow@gmail.com. We're on TikTok. We're on YouTube. Go there, find us. If you'd like to look at us and leave us a voicemail like this one, which was fantastic, and we can't thank you enough. SpeakPipe comclean energyshow. But if you don't want to do that, send us an email. We'll hear from you one way or another. And that means it's time for the lightning Round, a fast paced look at the weak in clean energy and climate news. Brian, if our show wasn't long enough as it is, it's long, and I apologize. I apologize, I apologize, I apologize. We are a long one this week. Some people, they can't get enough. Other people say, Come on, my commute is over. You should be done by now. A new clean energy poll from Abacus Research suggests 64% of Canadians realize that clean energy is cheap, affordable energy, which is pretty good, I think. Speaking of naysayers, there's a lot in Canada. That is the positive. It's cheap, it's clean. You want to win over people in a small town. Cheap. You save money cheap. Everybody likes money. Everybody likes saving money. Maybe people don't realize that. They probably read on Facebook that it's more expensive. We heard somebody say last week for the oil industry propaganda, that wind turbines have never worked anywhere in the world. They've been in operation for decades. OK. So it's another one. There's two talking points for you. Clean, cheap. In our current climate, energy security is a big, big thing. If you can control your own energy supply and get it from the sun, you don't have to deal with foreign dictators. Toyota again in the news, they are telling their suppliers that hold on, we're coming up with a new three year EV plan, especially with what they deliver to Europe. So it sounds like we're going to hear in the new year. Toyota coming around on the EVs. We'll see. Oh, it's time for a CES Fast Fact clean Energy show. Fast Fact from Eco watch. In Europe, 40% to 60% of fish caught are discarded because they do not meet supermarket quality standards. Nearly 50% is discarded in the United States. So that is all. Food waste is a big thing, Ryan. Can't they turn it into pet food or something? Discarded. Discarded. I'd look into that further, further information you email us. US gas prices peaked in June at $5 a gallon. That's dollar 31 a liter, which is not where we peaked here. We picked over $2, didn't we? Yeah, for sure. I say to that. In a study of 2055 German adults, a study found that a strong correlation between harboring conspiracy mentality and being unlikely to vote for wind turbines near your community. Again, this gets back to our feedback from Virginia. The correlation held regardless of if the referendum on the building of turbines was proposed by the supporters of the wind farm or its proponents. So in another study of a similar amount of German adults, a conspiracy mentality was found far and away the biggest predictor of voting against the wind farm, much more so than age, gender, education level, sad or being politically right wing. So if you believe in conspiracies, regardless of your political affiliation, regardless of your education and it's always sad to see educated people believe conspiracies. But it happens. I've seen it. Yeah. So Germany ranks third in the world for installed wind power capacity in 2020. Almost a quarter of the country's energy came from wind and the government has pledged to double that by 2030, designated 2% of Germany's landmass to become wind farms. So that's our time for this week, Brian, and it is more than time. So thanks for listening to everyone. We always appreciate it. Tell your friends. Spread the word. Write it on bathroom walls, in public washrooms. We don't care. No, we like to hear from you. As always. Clean energy show@gmail.com. Check us out. On social media, where our handle is at Clean Energy Pod. By the way, if you're new to the show, remember to subscribe on your podcast app to get new episodes delivered every week. And there is a donate button in your show notes if you care to buy us a cup of coffee. We'll see you next week. Probably one day late next this week, but we'll see you then. I can't wait to do it again, Brian. See you next week.

Federal law enforcement data reveals that outside of weather, suspected and confirmed physical attacks on the US electric grid are the number one cause of electrical outages since 2014.  5) Sam Bankman-Fried testifies before House Banking Committee, but declines invitation from Senate; 4) Scientists at Lawrence Livermore reportedly run successful nuclear fusion test; 3) United Kingdom discovers why wind power is unreliable; 2) Nearly 600 electric emergencies in US caused by suspected and confirmed attacks over last nine years; 1) German eco-activist blocks road in protest, glues hand permanently to chunk of asphalt.

Federal law enforcement data reveals that outside of weather, suspected and confirmed physical attacks on the US electric grid are the number one cause of electrical outages since 2014. 5) Sam Bankman-Fried testifies before House Banking Committee, but declines invitation from Senate; 4) Scientists at Lawrence Livermore reportedly run successful nuclear fusion test; 3) United Kingdom discovers why wind power is unreliable; 2) Nearly 600 electric emergencies in US caused by suspected and confirmed attacks over last nine years; 1) German eco-activist blocks road in protest, glues hand permanently to chunk of asphalt.

Join Brother Mark Schroeder as he is interviewed by guest host Darleen Pryds. Mark explores the priority of living in community, in peace and mutual understanding while being passionate for justice and nonviolence advocacy. For a video version of this episode, see: https://youtu.be/9oKMNktEKJI   From Brother Mark's interview: “As a Franciscan, early on, I was active in nonviolent demonstrations, many times ending up in jail. That's beyond the way I was raised and the way I operated when I was a kid. But through that, I really realized the importance of standing up for what you believe, the importance of taking risks. I would've never dreamt of that. And my whole spiritual quest is always, I believe God invites everybody. God invited me into each of these situations so I could learn and grow and see how I handled each one, based on nonviolence.”   “The first time I was ever arrested was Lawrence Livermore lab, which is outside of Oakland, where the nuclear weapons and other weaponry are being developed. It was a Good Friday celebration up there, and that was the first time I ever risked arrest and ended up, ironically, … in the Japanese concentration camps in Livermore. They still exist, but they still had the buildings and that's where we were, a gigantic number of people. And so I've always been involved with nuclear weapons, the abolition of them. I still am.”   “One has to always be aware of oneself, what's going on. And with that, the only way I can teach about being a Christian is you have be active. Do actions that promote justice and peace and non-violence. When I'm outta whack, then it's not gonna work. So that's why I continue to do the best I can to stay focused.”   “I believe anybody that lives in the United States is an addict. It comes in different forms. But if you live in our consumer culture there's addictions, compulsions. So I do my best to stay on top of that. I'm in a 12-step group.”   “Fraternity is the most important thing we have. I wanted that always in religious life, … I've grown to realize that I live with people, I choose to live with people. I choose to interact with them daily. … It can be hard sometimes because of different personalities and I'm sure it's hard for some other friar to live with me, but in reality, it's just the joy. … With it [fraternity], I don't have really a care in the world. It's really a spiritual blessing for me to live in community.”   “Prayer together is important, but prayer has to be enlivening, not just rote and not just cuz we have to do it. Prayer is important together because it's a countercultural way of relating to each other. Communication is really important. ... Since I've been guardian, we've been meeting every Wednesday at four o'clock and a person can verbalize whatever they wanna say. They don't have to talk about feelings if they're not in the mood. I use mutual invitation and that's where one person starts and then that person picks the next person. … The guys tell me that it's really made us a community and continues to. So there's that kind of communication. Also, the friar lifestyle, having meals together is important. … I encourage every friar to have a spiritual director and or therapist if that's needed. And I always tell 'em price is no object, but to be in religious life, you can't be making decisions on your own. You have to really keep discerning God's will not your will.  And the fruit of that for me, is happier, healthier guys living together.”   For a full transcript, please include episode number and email: fslfpodcast@fslf.org.   References:   “Jesuits in California”: https://www.jesuitswest.org/about-us/the-jesuits/   Discernment: There are many spiritual traditions of discernment; here is a video introduction to Ignatian (Jesuit) discernment: https://www.ignatianspirituality.com/what-is-ignatian-spirituality/the-ignatian-way/what-is-discernment/ - here are some Franciscan discernment resources: https://osfphila.org/discernment-franciscan-style/   Franciscan Province of St Barbara: https://sbfranciscans.org/   Fraternity: a Franciscan perspective on fraternitas in a broader social context; also as related to Pope Francis' writing in Fratelli Tutti: https://sacredheartfla.org/2022/05/13/fraternitas-friar-reflections-the-fifth-week-of-easter/   Social Justice involvements: Franciscans for Justice: https://www.franciscansforjustice.org/ Nevada Desert Experience: http://nevadadesertexperience.org/ Example of Good Friday Protest at Lawrence Livermore Lab: https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2011/04/25/18678001.php https://www.santabarbaramission.org/

American Invents Act Has Destroyed Innovation - Cops want to keep mass surveillance app secret; privacy advocates refused - Hackers Hide Malware in Stunning Images Taken by James Webb Space Telescope - TikShock: Don't get caught out by these 5 TikTok scams - Ukrainian Police Bust Crypto Fraud Call Centers Well, the birds are coming home to roost. Well, not the chickens in this case, but this is called the death warrant for American ingenuity. We'll start by talking through this great article from this week's newsletter. [Automated transcript follows.] Well, I hate to say this, but in reality, we are looking at some very, very bad times for inventors, and I've had some of these problems myself before, but last September, there were scores of patent holders who demonstrated in six cities across the US. [00:00:34] They had on these black t-shirts that said homo sapiens, inventor. Endangered species. They were protesting America's decade of stolen dreams. Great article here in the American thinker. It was in my newsletter this year, or excuse me this week, but, uh, but here here's weirdly what happened here. Back in 2011, president Obama pushed through Congress and signed into law. [00:01:04] What they called the America invents act. Now just like the inflation reduction act is going to increase inflation, right? It's all double speak. Isn't it? The American invents act turned over the patent process basically to the biggest Democrat party donors. Big business billionaires, right? Because that's who really is funding them, the Hollywood millionaires, these massive billionaires, Zuckerbergs and, and others. [00:01:35] And what happened here? Is they changed the whole patent law and the basis for it. They flipped the table here, basically. Here's the idea behind the patent law that we've had in place in the United States for well, over a century and patents that are guaranteed in the cons. It used to be that you, if you were first to invent something, if you could show that you were first to invent something, you could file a patent and gain that patent. [00:02:14] Well, what happened is because of all of the donations that went into the Democrats in 2011, from these big, big companies that were lobbying. A, and this is part of the reason I have a huge problem with all this money going to Washington DC, frankly, because it just attracts rodents like these big companies that want to use the law to control you, to gain profit for them. [00:02:39] And really in this case, squash. Potential patent holders. You see there have been piracy for years in the patent field. And this happened to me. I spent a year of my life designing some software, writing some software that emulated an older computer system and allowed you to take. Any of that software and run it on the new system. [00:03:05] And it would run exactly the same way. And a lease on the new hardware was cheaper than just a maintenance contract on the old stuff. Plus it was faster, used less electricity, had more options, et cetera. Right. It was, it was really something, frankly, and I was invited to their headquarters to show them a little bit about. [00:03:27] Did, and, and I was so excited because they wanted to start selling it, right. So they need to understand a little bit better. So I went to the headquarters and met with them, you know, of course paid my own way. Flew down there, stayed in the hotel, rented a car, you know, all the stuff that you have to do. [00:03:43] And then nothing happened afterwards. Wouldn't return phone calls. It just, all of a sudden went silent. And then about a year and a half later Tata, they had an alternative product out on the. . Yeah, and they tried to emulate what I had done, but they did a very, very poor job at it. That's patent theft, that's piracy in this particular case, uh, if you are an inventor, you've probably experienced that sort of thing before, you know, you can put employees all of the non-disclosure agreements you want to have in place, but in reality, good luck enforcing those, especially against a big company. [00:04:25] Well, piracy went on steroids because of president Obama's America and events act. They, as part of that established something, they called the patent trial and appeal board. And it's just gone downhill ever since. So a professor that has more than 40 patents, I'm gonna read a little quote of his, this includes some inventions used in the space shuttles, by the way, which by the way, my invention was used with the space shuttle. [00:04:57] Um, so Dan brown invented something called the bionic wrench. I have one of those. I bought one of those some years back, this is a one size fits all wrench that does not strip bolt corners like it does if you're trying to use vice scripts or some pair of pliers, right. Because you're just too lazy to go and get the right socket size or box wrench or whatever it is. [00:05:22] That's the right size. It very, very. And professor brown says that Sears stole his idea for this bionic wrench right down to the marketing pitch. And then Sears, according to him, went out and hired a Chinese company to make it. And all of a sudden now, what kind of invention does he have? How's he gonna battle somebody like that? [00:05:49] I know a guy who is, uh, completely unethical. You know, I've done many shows from the consumer electronic show and it's really kind of cool, cuz I would get in depth with the inventors and, and explain what they were doing on the air. It was really neat all the way around. It was just a whole lot of fun. [00:06:08] And I met a guy there who was going to the consumer electronic show to find cool new consumer electronics. He thought might be popular. And then he'd go and talk to the people who were exhibiting that wonderful new electronics and say, Hey, I'm interested in, in selling your stuff. I have, you know, retail space and, uh, you know, kiosks in the mall. [00:06:33] What can, uh, what kind of deal can we work out here? Well, you know, first I, can I, let me get a, I, I need a copy of, uh, of your device here. I want a copy of it so I can mess with it and see, see if we really wanna follow through on. Oh, and I, I don't want to carry it around the floor of the consumer electronic show. [00:06:51] So I need you to ship it to me. So they'd ship 'em off. They might be a little speaker. They might be a charger. They might be who knows what? And consumer electronics is pretty broad. And if he liked it, he wouldn't buy it from them. He sent them over to his contacts in China. And had them reverse engineered and make the same thing with his brand label on it. [00:07:16] And he'd sell it in the stores. Now, when it comes to software and a lot of consumer electronics patents, aren't really a big deal because things. Changed so quickly. Right? And if you're a small guy, it's very hard to file a patent. And that's how president Obama sold this American Bens act to us. I remember this very, very clearly where he said, Hey, listen, this is gonna make the patent process way more streamlined, way easier for the small guys to be able to get patents, uh, not only applied for, but actually get them out to market. [00:07:52] And it's just gonna be an absolutely wonderful. It, it isn't because what happens now? Is big companies are not investing in research and development. That is true across the board. Now you might say, Hey Craig, well, how about big companies? How about Tesla? That's R and D. How about SpaceX? That's R and D. [00:08:14] Yes, but they are R and D companies. They're not big companies out there like Facebook, does Facebook try and come up with this or that new invention? Well, yeah, they kind of do from time to time, but most of the time what's been happening is corporate America looks for a winner. And then tries to buy the winner. [00:08:35] Microsoft has been doing that forever. Microsoft in court has lost cases because of what they did to inventors. And now it's been codified in law for over 10 years. So our American ingenuity, which is what we rely on in order to grow our economy, the ingenuity, the, the brain skills, the science, the true science that we have gives us a major competitive advantage because that particular, uh, type of intellectual property has a much higher profit margin than something like manufacturing a widget. [00:09:14] When you get right down to it, that's where the real money is. so a very interesting article and I would suggest you take a little bit of time to read it. If you've ever thought about patenting something, if you had a great idea, it used to be, you know, this is kind of the, the, uh, old wives tale. If you will, if you've got a great idea, you think you might wanna patent it, write it all out, take all of your notes, do it in a, a, a workbook that you can. [00:09:43] Alter right. You can't tear out pages or things. Uh, mail it to yourself in a Manila envelope and make sure you put stamps on it. And then the post office is going to date, stamp it for you or send it to your attorney even better. Right. And your attorney's gonna go ahead and keep that on file. And then when it's time to file the patents, you can say, Hey, look, it here's the proof. [00:10:06] I invented this in April of 2019. It doesn't matter because if some other company sees what you're doing or comes up with a similar or the same idea, and that company has the money to have the lawyers that know patent law inside out and backwards and can go ahead and file that patent claim. You've lost it. [00:10:31] you know, as early as the constitutional convention of 18 or 1787, our founding fathers recognize the need to promote innovation and we have to be promoting it. We've gotta get rid of this Obama era law. Absolutely. We've gotta go from first to file, which is what it has been for a decade. The first person to file you. [00:10:54] And move back to the way it was intended, the way it worked for well over a hundred years where it is a first to invent, it's very, very important for all of us, for economy, et cetera. The, the third law of Congress was a patent act of 1790. It it's just man, have we come a long way, stick around. We'll be right back online. [00:11:19] Craig peterson.com. [00:11:22] You know, we've had firewalls in our cars for a very long time for a very good reason. Right? You wanna keep the engine stuff out of the passenger compartment? The same thing is true. When we're talking about our networks, we're using firewalls to keep things out. [00:11:39] Firewalls are there to keep things out. And we have firewalls in our homes. [00:11:44] If you've got an internet service provider, you've probably got a firewall right there. Something that you don't even think about, right. It's just, there's gonna protect. You, it might, it's providing some services. You might be familiar with them. It's obviously doing a network address translation for you in this day and age. [00:12:06] Pretty much everything is especially with the internet transition that's been going on for years now from, um, IP four to IP six, but, uh, the firewall. is critical for every person and every business out there. But when we get into the configurations of firewalls, frankly, they are really a touchy subject. [00:12:29] You know, every network security professional has their own preferred hardware and software, uh, use Cisco. As a rule, Cisco has some great stuff. What I like the best about the Cisco equipment that we use in software and install at our clients is it is one pane of glass. It's a single vendor that covers everything from endpoint security. [00:12:54] In other words, security on your desktop, through the network itself, the switches, the firewalls, the email filters Absolut. Everything is there and is taken care of by all of the Cisco gear. It it's really quite something to look. I saw, in fact, a survey just last week at businesses who are trying to consolidate, there's just too many vendors in there selling this piece of endpoint, that piece of endpoint. [00:13:25] And, you know, that's part of the problem that I see happen pretty frequently, which is people look at Gartner report. Gartner, of course, a research company. They've got a lot of great research out there that I've used before. I've had Gartner on the radio show before, as well as some of their competitors talking about trends. [00:13:44] Well, There is something known as the upper right quadrant in those Gartner reports where they are rating various vendors for various pieces of software. So there might be for instance, a report on firewalls and the upper right hand cor quadrant is kind of what you want, cuz it's new, it's innovative. It, it innovative. [00:14:06] It's uh, really cool and wonderful. And it's the best. Since life spread. So they go out and they buy that cuz it's upper, right. Gartner quadrant. And then man, they find out, uh, okay, so now we need desk desktop, desktop. Okay. So they find the or buy actually the Gartner report for five to 10 grand. That's like a page long is crazy how expensive these things are. [00:14:32] They then look at that and say, okay, so the best desktop is vendor Y so let me see, we got X for the firewall. We've got Y for the endpoint and then, oh, they need switches. So let's go to the Gartner report. Who's in the upper right quadrant here for switches. Oh, it's uh, vendor Z. Okay. So we got Z. So now all of a sudden. [00:14:51] You end up with all of these different pieces of hardware, different pieces of software that have limited offerability at best interoperability at best. Right? So the, this day and age, when we're talking about cybersecurity, There are so many legitimate attacks every day. I mean, thousands of attacks going on even against a single business. [00:15:18] And there are hundreds potentially of false alarms every day. So how do you deal with that? That that's a good question. So, uh, a lot of businesses turn to companies like mine now, you know, full disclosure, I've been doing internet security work for businesses since, uh, early 1990s. So whew, 30 years now. [00:15:40] And I've been doing internet work for even longer than that, helping to develop it. So they'll go and they'll say, Hey, we need a managed security services provider. Uh, there's a big problem with that. And I, I was watching, uh, Yellowstone that TV show and I, it was a great little example of what we're seeing in the world today. [00:16:05] And Frank, frankly, we've seen forever obviously. And that is if there's a demand for something, all of a sudden, a lot of people will be hanging up shingles. and if they know, if that vendor knows more than you do, or is able to kind of turn, twist your ear and convince you to buy from them, you'll buy from them. [00:16:26] We saw that man around the year, 2000, all of the people who were trying to sell web services that had no idea what they're doing now, we're seeing all kinds of people trying to sell network services, security services that have little idea of what they're doing. We support. These companies that call themselves manage security services providers, where we actually go in, we design the system, we build the system and we implement the system. [00:16:53] We run the system and the third party here builds the client. Right. Cuz it's their client. And you know, that's all fine. It's so well and good, but what should you be looking. Particularly if you are a business, if you want to have a managed firewall, which is, I think important again, it's kind of a long tail thing to have a firewall vendor and, uh, this vendor and a managed vendor, and now it can get to be a headache pretty quickly. [00:17:23] But if you're going to focus on one thing, It's probably the firewall and your end points. Right? So maybe it's two things. So here's what a managed firewall service provider should be able to offer you. First of all, firewall system health and alerting. Software life cycle management, which means your updates, your patches, service, and incident management. [00:17:48] Whenever there's an alarm, they should know about it and they should be handling it. Security policy implementation your reporting, your analysis, your remediation, some of that is required by these various regulations and laws that are out there. You. To do it, uh, you know, without getting in a lot of detail right now, um, network monitoring, uh, the traffic monitoring, you know, the idea here behind any kind of managed service is to bring in a true expert rather than just completely outsourcing. [00:18:24] So you're partnering with someone. One of the things I've, I've bated my head against the wall for, for decades now, is that the it department. Thinks that they're up to snuff to be able to do something, or maybe they just want to do it because it's gonna be wonderful for them on the resume for the next job. [00:18:45] Right. Uh, man, I've seen that a lot of times when, when you are looking at all of this stuff and you've got an it department, maybe you're better off bringing in a very narrow expert to support your it department rather than fight against your it depart. good questions here. Uh, bottom line, they should have better expertise than what you have. [00:19:11] And you've got to read between the lines between your it staff that are currently doing it and the other vendors reducing the burden on your staff. So that maybe what they can do is. Focus more on things that are, uh, revenue generating that are more important to your business. You'll get faster incident response with any luck here. [00:19:33] With service level agreement, proactive security from the managed security services providers, or just regular service providers. Your burden on updates is going to be lower, improved manufacturer support. Because a lot of times, like we do my company mainstream, we have direct connections to the manufacturer. [00:19:56] Our case is usually Cisco because of the volume or services that we have and the equipment that we buy from them, uh, easier to scale there. There's a whole bunch of things, right. Uh, But be careful. One of the things you gotta watch out for too is where are their service people, their support people physically located, and are they us citizens? [00:20:20] A lot of the regulations. In fact, pretty much everyone. I can't think of an exception require us persons to be the ones in control of your network and data. So lots to consider. But keep that all in mind. I think it's an important thing to understand. Stick around. We'll be right back. And in the meantime, visit me online. [00:20:42] Craig peterson.com and sign up for my free newsletter. [00:20:49] The best way to secure a system is something, you know, and something you have, well, many systems have been securing themselves with your phone, right? They send you a text message, but it turns out that that isn't working well. [00:21:05] Having an SMS message sent to you in order to authenticate who you are, has turned out to be well, a problem we've seen over the last few years, people who have things like cryptocurrency who have a cryptocurrency wallet who are keeping their money, if you will, in this wallet and are using. [00:21:30] SMS to verify who they are. So here's how that works. You log into a website using a username or perhaps an email address. Again, it should not be asking for an email address for a login because you probably use the same email address or maybe two or three. And. Have for what? 50, a hundred different sites, maybe a thousand, I've got 3000 records, uh, logins on my one password account. [00:22:02] Okay. So there's a lot of them. They really should be letting you set up your own username so that it can be unique. For every single website that you go to. So, but anyway, that aside, you've got your username, which may be your email address. You've got a password and we've talked about passwords before. [00:22:21] Hopefully you're following the current guidelines, which are, don't worry about random characters, make sure it is long. And that means. A past phrase. So you string three or four words together. You put some digits, some special characters in between the words, maybe, you know, one word is all upper case. You, you play with it a little bit, but it's easy to remember. [00:22:48] So if someone then gets your email address and they get your password, they can potentially log into a website. Correct. And that website might be your bank account. It might be your work account. We've had a lot of problems lately. The FBI is saying that about every 12 hours, they're filing a new report of a company that got their intellectual property stolen. [00:23:22] one of the ways the bad guys steal it is they'll log to your RDP server, your Microsoft remote desktop server, using your credentials that you used at another website. It's that easy. It really is. They might be trying to log in via a VPN again, the same thing. So how do you secure this? How do you secure this? [00:23:47] Well, how to secure this properly? That's where the something you have comes into play. We all have a smartphone of some sort, even if it's not considered a smartphone, it can still receive text messages. So what a lot of these companies did is they asked their underpaid it people to set it up so that when you enter in your username and your password, it then sends you a text message. [00:24:16] Usually with a six digit text message and you then have to type that into the website as well. Seems pretty good. Doesn't it? Well, and, and in 30 it is pretty good. There are however, a few problems. Those people I mentioned who have cryptocurrency accounts and have been using this SMS methodology, which is SMS, of course, text messages have found that sometimes their phones have been hijack. [00:24:48] easy enough to do. And if they know you have a fair amount of cryptocurrency, it's probably worth their effort to spend a few hours to try and get into your account. And they have been getting into your account and people notice, Hey, wait a minute, I'm a kid. They do phone calls or text messages. What's what's with that. [00:25:07] And you found out that they have dismissed you, they have stolen your. Your, uh, SIM card, basically, even though they don't have to physically have hold of it. And there's a number of ways that they do that there's a new scam or newer scam that's out right now that the fishers are using. And that is they're sending out these SSMS, these text messages that are trying to get people to respond. [00:25:34] So how do they get people to respond? Well, In this case, they're primarily going after this company called Octo Octo post. And, uh, there's a number of different types of Octos out there, but anyways, they are trying to get you to. Do something you shouldn't do let me just put it that way. Right. So what they're trying to do is get you to, uh, enter in your username and your password. [00:26:04] Okay. Well, that's been around for a long time. Craig, you're telling me we've had fake bank account, uh, bank website. So they'll send you an email and in it, they'll say, Hey, I need you to go right now. to our bank page and, uh, authorize this $2,000 transaction that wasn't you. And so now you're freaking out, you click on the link, you go to the bank, you try and log in and the login doesn't work well. [00:26:31] That can be because what the fishers did is a made a webpage that looked like the bank's web page. And when you went there and entered in your username and password, you just gave it to the crooks. That's happened a lot. Well, there's a company called Octa O K T a. That is an authentication company. And what the bad guys have done is they have registered domains similar to a company. [00:26:59] So for instance, they went after CloudFlare, which is a huge, um, company they're number one, I think they have like 80% of all of the protection for denial of service and caching a business on the internet. It's just amazing. Cloudflare's huge. And I've used them and continue to use them for some customer. [00:27:19] So, what they did is they found a whole bunch of people that worked for CloudFlare sent them a message. And, and here's what it said. It said alert, your CloudFlare schedule has been updated. Please tap cloudflare-okta.com to view. The changes. So you go there, it looks like a regular Okta login page and they go ahead and ask user name and password, but CloudFlare is smart. [00:27:47] They're using Okta. So they're sending an SMS message to the user to make sure it's really, them turns out what was really happening is yeah, it was sending that guy a text message and it was using telegram. To relay that his response back to the hackers. So now the hackers have your username, they have your password and they have your six digit login key. [00:28:15] That's supposedly unique that supposedly went to you. And in this case, they didn't even have to bother a hijacking your SIM card. In this case, they just sent you that text message. So it's been causing some serious problems. They've been going after all kinds of different companies out there, uh, food service company, DoorDash you've heard of them. [00:28:37] Right? August 25th, they said that there was a sophisticated fishing attack on a third party vendor that allowed a attackers to gain access to some, a door dashes internal company. Tools DoorDash said, intruders stole information on a small percentage of users that have since been notified, big deal, or what a tech crunch, by the way, reported that the incident was linked to the same fishing campaign that targeted Twilio. [00:29:07] That also, as we just mentioned, targeted cloud. So we have to be careful with this. We cannot be using SMS text messages to authenticate ourselves. Some banks now allow you to use one time passwords from things like one password or others. However, some banks don't turn off the SMS, the text messages for authentication, which they really should be doing. [00:29:36] And the other thing I wanna let you know is I like UBI. Y U B ico.com. Yubico check them out. I'm not making a dime off of this, but they have a physical token. That you either have to plug in or the connects via Bluetooth. That is something you have that authenticates you to all major popular websites out there, and many of the tools. [00:30:03] So if you have any questions, just email me, me@craigpeterson.com gimme a few days, but I'll get back to you. [00:30:12] Have you heard about fog reveal? They it's almost invisible when you search for it online, but it's something that police departments have started using. And they're trying to keep all of this secret. So we're gonna tell you what's happening there and got a few others too. [00:30:29] Great little article that was in the newsletter this week. [00:30:32] Hopefully you got my free newsletter, but it is about fog reveal. This is an ours Technica. Often some of these ours Technica stories are carried in multiple places online. It's kind of interesting because we know to some degree what the federal government's doing to collect information on people, they go to open source. [00:30:57] Sources of information. In other words, things that are put out there publicly online, so they might search you your Facebook information or what you've been saying on Twitter, uh, or more, they go to data brokers that anybody can go to. And those data brokers have more information. They probably. Bought records from the states and they know from each individual state what property you own. [00:31:25] If you have a car, if there's liens on it, any mortgages that you might have, right. Putting all of the stuff together. It's kind of an interesting problem, frankly, but that's a, again, they say it's legitimate. Now the federal government is not allowed to collect this information. So they just go to third party data aggregators. [00:31:45] And remember again, If you have apps on your phone, if you have an Android phone, this does not apply to iPhones. Generally it does apply to iPhone apps. However, but, and this is part of the reason I say never, ever, ever use Android. Okay guys, I, I just. Blows my mind. I, I was talking to an old friend of mine. [00:32:09] Uh, he was the, the CTO in fact for the state of New Hampshire. And he was telling me that, uh, you know, we were talking and telling me, yeah, yeah, I got an Android phone. He says, don't you just love Android? And he knows that I do cybersecurity. He knows I've been in it. He hired my company to do a bunch of different tasks for the state, right over the years, we still do business with the state and he's using Android. [00:32:41] He's probably listening right now. BU get a little note from him, but, uh, it, it, it's a problem to use Android any. Those free apps that you're using, that Google maps app that you're using. And of course you can use that on iOS as well is tracking you. They know where you live because they know where your smartphone stays at night. [00:33:04] They know all of this stuff. How do you think the FBI is able to seize a smartphone at a Hardee's drive through. they know where you are. Well, they have some more access to information as it turns out. Uh, one Marilyn based Sergeant, according to the article wrote in a department, email TDY, the benefit of quote, no court paperwork and quote before purchasing the software. [00:33:37] And the Sergeant said the success lies in secre. interesting. So the electronic frontier foundation, FF, who I have supported over the years and the associated press got together. Now, the associated press won a Pulitzer center for crisis reporting, uh, award, I think. But anyways, the Pulitzer center for crisis reporting also got involved here. [00:34:05] So she had these three different organizations trying to figure out. what could, or what would be considered local places best kept secret. So they went online. They started doing some searching, trying to figure this out. And according to ours, Technica, the reporting revealed the potentially extreme extent of data surveillance of ordinary people being tracked and made vulnerable just for moving about. [00:34:38] Small town America. So it isn't just the big cities where you're tracked anymore. Reports showed how police nearly two dozen agencies. One record shows the total figure could possibly be up to 60. Use Google maps, like technology called frog reveal. now this is licensed by fog. I, I keep saying frog it's fog licensed by fog data science, and it gives state and local police a power to surveil. [00:35:10] Hundreds of billions of records from 250 million mobile devices. And if that doesn't scare you, I don't know what does now FF, the electronic frontier foundation found that fog reveal gets its data from veal. That's the same data source the feds use. neither companies disclosing the nature of their business relationship. [00:35:33] Okay. They fog, reveal. Didn't say what Tel is providing and vice versa, right? Yeah. But it really appears that fog reveal is getting data location services to local police at its steep discount. So it's making it more affordable for smaller police departments and private security companies to access major amounts of data and trace devices across months or even years. [00:36:03] isn't that something. So typically FF found that police agencies license the software annually for costs as low as six grand to nine grand. Some agencies spend even more on this tech to track people as they are moving and exactly where they are. Again, think being in a Hardee's drive through having the FBI show up. [00:36:27] Knowing you're there. Uh, ours reviewed one annual contract in Anaheim, California. That was for more than $40,000. So it took months for these three organizations that are used to digging into this sort of stuff, uh, to figure this out, took more than a hundred public records requests to gather thousands of pages of evidence to trying to compile a picture of how local law enforcement. [00:36:55] Is using and mining the location data. Now, to me, this is scary because we look at abuses of power. Through the years and I it's happened again and again and again, we are smelling more and more like Venezuela than we are free us. It's frankly scary, scary to me, but I'm talking about it cuz I think it's important. [00:37:21] That I bring this to light to everybody else out there. Okay. Now fog data science, managing partner, Matthew Brodrick told the associated press that fog reveal has been critical to police to save time and money on investigations, suggesting police who are under-resourced and investigation suffered from reliance on outdated. [00:37:44] Outdated tech now that's true. Isn't it? But isn't it also true that, uh, that's why we have some of these policies and procedures in place. That's why the Supreme court Miranda decision has some policies and procedures. That's why a warrant, a search warrant is supposed to be specific in what they're looking for and where it is located. [00:38:11] We don't allow these broad warrants that the king used to issue, but we are doing that nowadays. It seems against political enemies and that's where it starts really, really scaring me. It isn't that I think that the, the current administration it, or even the next administration in Washington, DC, is going to be rounding up its enemies and putting them up against a. [00:38:38] But when would it happen? Well, it would happen if everything were in place for it to happen. What's one of the most important things for fastest regime. It's to have a citizenry where they know everything about everyone. It, it reminds me of the Soviet era. Show me the man. I'll show you the crime. There's a great book out there right now. [00:39:04] I think it's called, um, three felonies. a day, I think is what the name of it is. But the, it points out how every last one of the people that call ourselves Americans in the United States of America, every one of us commits at least three felonies a day. Now a lot of these things are just absolutely crazy. [00:39:26] You know, there's been a lot of jokes about, oh, did you chair the label off of that pillow? Well, you can cuz you're the consumer, right? It's. The people that are selling it that are in distribution chain that cannot tear that off by law. Okay. But in reality, there is a lot of stuff that could be used against you. [00:39:46] So it it's like when they say, uh, you know, give me this, or why don't you answer that question? It's none of their business. You have a right to be secure in your papers right now, if they have a warrant that's specific, then you need to surrender it. But hopefully the warrant's actually issued by real court. [00:40:08] Some of these agencies now, uh, like the IRS have their own courts that are paid for by the agency. The judges are working for the agency. So you really think they're gonna be fair. I wonder, I wonder. Okay. Couple more things. Next up these pictures taken by the James web space telescope. Have you seen these? [00:40:35] It is amazing. I've seen them side by side with our latest or, you know, our previous high tech pictures. And we're seeing what maybe galaxies that we never could see before. It's just absolutely crazy. Well, guess what bad guys have seen them as. And they are embedding malware inside of some of these amazing images taken by the James web space telescope. [00:41:05] If you can believe this, by the way, they're writing them in go. Uh, so the Phish and emails, they've got a Microsoft office attachment. That's the entry point for the attack chain when you open it, it retrieves and obfuscated, VBA, macro, which in. Auto executed. all of a sudden there is a macro that is de obfuscated and run on your computer. [00:41:34] So be careful careful with that again. And good news. Microsoft is now turning off the execution of macros by default. Double check your machine, making sure that macros are blocked by default. So, yay. Okay. So they are, by the way, changing campaigns to rogue link and ISO files because of the blocked macros. [00:41:56] But, uh, it's good that Microsoft is doing that. Thank goodness. And you Ukraine, the police busted a crypto fraud call center. In fact, more than. And they're also shattering two more Russian bot farms. So we shouldn't be getting as many of those, uh, phone messages from the, uh, the bad guys scammers as we used to get. [00:42:20] Thank you, Ukraine. All right. Online Craig peterson.com. Get that newsletter and stay on top. [00:42:29] Well, we got some election news here from our friends at Google and at Twitter, they are taking opposite directions about exactly how they're gonna handle news postings about the elections. This is an interesting thing. [00:42:46] The federal election commission is the branch of the us government that monitors elections. [00:42:53] It does things like impose fines for misuse of funds. It sets some of the standards for funds and for their use. And. and one of the things it looks at is what are called in kind contributions. This is where someone might, uh, for instance, run a whole bunch of ads on behalf of a candidate. And those ads are coordinated with the campaign and that is illegal. [00:43:24] You're not supposed to do that. And because it's illegal, you know, they try and stop it. But most of the time they end up finding after the fact. And that's part of the reason they want campaigns to be filing their financial reports fairly frequently so they can catch it quite quickly. Well, There have been many complaints from the G O P about what has happened with some of the campaign finance stuff, where you have someone like Facebook or Twitter or Google, who seems to be meddling with the election. [00:44:02] They are running ads for your competition. They are really screening the results from people's searches. And from that those results they're, they're benefiting. There was a study down in orange county here a few years back where they looked at. Google results that were related to the elections going on in orange county and found that the Google results were tainted in such a way that it dramatically favored the Democrats that were running in those districts in orange county, California. [00:44:39] Pretty interesting when you get right down to it. So the GLP says, wait a minute, now that sort of thing is worth millions, tens of millions of dollars, because if they were going to run TV ads, for instance, to get as many eyeballs, to get as much attention to convince people that this is the way they should vote, that would cost them tens of millions of dollars. [00:45:02] So how much is it worth? Where do you go to really straighten things out in order to ultimately make fairness work and well, you know, that's kind of what the federal election commission's supposed to do. Well, here's, what's happening with the next elections. The federal elections commission has decided that Google. [00:45:28] Getting rid of their anti spam measures for. Candidates does not violate a ban on contributions on inkind contributions. So this is an interesting approach because Google's saying, Hey, listen, we want to allow pretty much any political message to come right through to Google Gmail users, inboxes, and not filter those. [00:45:59] Which I frankly think is a smart move on their part. Now some of these campaigns get pretty crazy. They're sending money requests all of the time. It it's been crazy to watch both sides do this and both sides complain about the other side, doing it. But at least by getting rid of these spam rules for the politicians, their messages are gonna get through. [00:46:24] I think that's ultimately a very good thing. So what kind of messages are gonna get through how and why? Well, ultimately they're saying we're gonna let all of them through. and what that means for you. If you already get some of these messages from the politicians, it means your mailbox. At least if it's a Google Gmail box, you are going to be seen even more during elections. [00:46:51] And I think this is gonna go on for very long time. Because Google doesn't want to get caught in the middle. When we're talking about these in kind contributions. If this were to be done for the Republicans or were to be done just for the Democrat, can you imagine the noise that would be made? By both sides and in kind contributions where the Republicans tens of millions of dollars Googled get dull tied up in some of these, uh, you know, lawsuits that would really be inevitable. [00:47:23] Bottom line. Well, Republicans have accused. Google of giving Democrats an advantage in its algorithms. And, and as I said, there have been studies on that that have proved that they have. The big question is why. And there's an article in ours, Technica talking about a meeting that happened in may 20. 22 between Senate Republicans and Google's chief legal officer. [00:47:52] And he said that the most forceful rebuke came from Senator Marco Rubio from Florida who claimed that not a single email from one of his addresses was reaching inboxes. And the Washington post, which of course is a mouthpiece for the Democrat party reported in late July. That the reason it was getting blocked was that a vendor had not enabled an authentication tool that keeps messages from being marked to spam. [00:48:21] Now, if that's true, The Washington post accidentally reported the truth here. And it might be true. I had a company call me up this week. They had their Google ads account banned, and they were trying to figure out the details of why and what happened. And I went in and we solved that problem, and I noticed that they had. [00:48:44] Properly configured their email. There's there's gets technical here. I have a paper we've put together on this, a special report talking about what's called D K I M. These, uh, SPF records DMAR records and how they should all be set up and why I need to use them. So this company was doing marketing. [00:49:04] Obviously they had a Google, Google ad account. They were sending out emails, but because they had not properly and fully configured their email. They were not getting delivered at the rate that they could get delivered. Now that's kind of a very, very big deal when you get right down to it. And the Washington post is saying, well, that's what happened to center to Rubio. [00:49:26] Now there's other things that might happen too. There are. Keywords that are used. There's software called spam assassin. That's very, very common. I have used it since it came out decades ago. I can't even remember how long spam Assassin's been out there, but it looks for certain things in the emails. , it looks for a lot of graphical content, a lot of HTML, even a lot of links and it kind of, it gauges, you know, this is likely spam on this scale. [00:49:56] And typically if the, the score is higher than five or eight, or in some cases, some people said as high as 15, that email is bounced. Well, one of the real big checks as to whether or not this is legitimate email is to check and see. Who is the domain? Does that domain have these special keys that tell us? [00:50:19] Yes, indeed. This did come from us. In other words, in this case did come from Marco Rubio or in the case of my client, it came from their company.com. And is it signed encrypted so that we know that nobody's kind of playing a man in the middle thing, trying to mess things up on us. And they say, okay, well that's a really good score. [00:50:40] So we will, we'll lower that spam score. And, and that's how that game is played. So what by Google doing what it. Talking about doing it's really gonna help out because I have of every company I've checked for email, email deliveries, we've got a, a new customer that is a startup and you know, what do they know? [00:51:02] They they're very narrow. Right? They understand their. Basic technology and their email again, was set up kind of like apparently Senator Rubio's email was set up and, and didn't have these things. And just like this company that I helped this week, they didn't have it set up properly. And, uh, they had experts who supposed experts who had set it up, but both cases, right. [00:51:26] It was outsourced. Yeah. You know how that goes. Now, some Gmail users submitted comments to the federal elections commission and they were criticizing Google's plan cuz they did not want to get more spam. Okay. And there were more than 2,500 comments. You can find them by the way, online, all of the stuff is a matter. [00:51:48] Public record and they call it the docket. And so there's a page out for this particular docket and the commissions through Republicans and Democrat commissioner voted for the order appro Google's plan. I think this is a very, very good deal. And it's really kind of the opposite of what Twitter is planning on doing Twitter has. [00:52:12] essentially announced that it's going to. In the elections. Yeah. So you got Google on the one side saying our hands are clean. We're staying away from this. We don't want anything to do with this. Thank you very much. We love you, but, uh, forget about it. We're just gonna let all the emails. Through, Twitter's saying that it's going to have its wonderful sensors who have been proven right. [00:52:39] Every time he said with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek, and they're gonna have those wonderful sensors that, you know, they're sitting in the basement and, and eating pizza and drinking Coke or red bull. I, I still kinda understand why somebody that's 30, whatever years old needs, energy drinks, you know, come on, come on. [00:53:00] Uh, but anyways, They're they're saying that they, Twitter is going to be the determiner as to whether or not something that is posted on Twitter is correct. Or if it should be censored or if it should be blocked entirely. And they're admitting that they're gonna shadow ban conservative content, they don't like isn't that. [00:53:25] So. Yeah. Uh, that's from the gateway pundit good article. And you'll find it in this week's newsletter. Uh, I think it went out Monday this week and you can follow the link through to these articles on Google and Twitter and the elections or any of the others that we have out there. So stick around, we'll be right back and make sure you sign up. [00:53:46] If you didn't already get that newsletter. Absolutely free. Craig, Peter son.com/subscribe. [00:53:59] I'm not sure a week goes by where I don't hear from a listener saying that somehow Facebook is tracking what they're talking about because all of a sudden ad starts showing up. And they're related to things that they've been talking about. [00:54:16] Meta is the owner of Facebook and Instagram and, and some other things like WhatsApp, which is part of the reason I don't trust WhatsApp, but we've had, I don't know how many complaints from people saying that Facebook is listening in to what they're talking. [00:54:36] And people are kind of wondering, well, wait a minute. Is it listening in on my phone calls? Is it listening when and how? It's a very, very good question. Now Facebook says in a statement that Facebook does not use your phone's microphone to inform ads or to change what in the newsfeed. Some recent articles have suggested that we must be listening to people's conversations in order to show them. [00:55:06] Ads. This is not true. We show ads based on people's interests and other profiled information, not what you're talking out loud about. We only access your microphone if you've given our app permission. And if you are actively using a specific feature that requires audio, this might include recording a video or using in an optional feature. [00:55:30] We introduced two years ago to include music. Or other audio in your status updates. So there it is. There's the official word from our friends over at Facebook. But do you notice there's a little bit of an out in there, right? Facebook does not use your phone microphone to inform ads or change what you see in your news. [00:55:55] Doesn't use your microphone. So there's a study out right now. That is from an X Google engineer. And this article is in the guardian and they are talking about what he found. So, let me explain the background on some of this technology. First, if you are an app developer, if, if you're a developer of any software of any kind you use libraries and these libraries do things like search for a specific set of characters called a string or in search. [00:56:31] Them or move things around or open a connection to another machine. So rather than having implement the whole T C P I P stack and ethernet underneath it and, and all of the operating system work that you'd have to do with all of the interrupts and the buffer fills and reading, toggling. As switches in the hardware, doing all of that sort of stuff. [00:56:52] You just make one library call and say, listen, and you give the port and TA anybody who tries to connect you. It just comes right through. It's all taken care of for you, right? That's what libraries are all about. And they've become much more complex, more recently libraries nowadays can do things like provide you with a full web browser. [00:57:16] Many of the applications that we use on a daily basis, these apps in our phones, particularly, but it's also true with some of the apps on our computers are actually. Just web browsers. They're web browsers that talk to a server out on the internet and yeah, there might be wrapped in various things, but oftentimes if you're trying to pay within an app, it'll go to a third party site. [00:57:44] And part of the beauty of that is. Becomes a, a service to them. They don't have to worry about coding it all up. Right. They don't have to worry about taking your money, keeping everything safe. Am I using really good algorithms here to encrypt it can bad guys hack in? No, no, no. There's, they're just calling this routine that spins up a little web browser. [00:58:07] Inside the application and uses a secure connection to talk to the web server somewhere who cares? Not mine. I'm just the app developer, right? I'm letting you play your farming game or whatever it might be. That makes sense to you guys. So it makes their life much, much easier. Why bother if you've got a website that does everything, why bother coding it all up from scratch in an app? [00:58:34] They don't people don't. Why would. Well, we've seen that again. And again, for instance, look at Microsoft's latest browser out there, edge, not the original edge, but the latest edge, you know how Microsoft is, right. They call it the same thing, even though it's entirely different. Uh, yeah. How many versions of windows where they're like 20 at one point, right? [00:58:56] Different ones or different architectures and just crazy. But now the edge browser is. Built on chromium, which is Google Chrome, which is built on Apple's libraries to manipulate, draw things, et cetera. So you're running your edge browser on your Microsoft windows, computer. You're actually running code libraries. [00:59:21] If you will, from Google and from apple. And that way, if you're developing a browser like edge, you don't have to worry about every little nit bitty thing. That's all taken care of by other programmers who are making a smaller piece of code. Now that's been the whole Unix philosophy forever, by the way. [00:59:42] Instead of having these monolithic applications. That could be just full of bugs and security problems. You just have nice small, easy to maintain, easy to research applications and let other people worry about the little pieces, which is really kind of cool. It's great. Many browsers in fact are based right there on chromium and they modify it around a little bit. [01:00:07] Microsoft added all kinds of spyware to it. Well, it turns out. According to this research from an ex Google engineer that both Facebook and Instagram apps have been taking advantage of this in-app browser technology. And what they're doing is users who click on links inside the Facebook app or inside the Instagram at gram act are actually taken to the webpages. [01:00:39] Using an in-app browser controlled by Facebook or Instagram rather than sending you to your default browser. So if you are using iOS, your default browser might be safari, which is a rather safe. Browser and good for privacy, or you might have decided you wanna use the Chrome browser on iOS or maybe Firefox or brave, or one of dozens of different browsers that are out there. [01:01:10] No, no, it's not gonna use those. It's not gonna use your default browser. It's going to use the in-app browser. And what it's doing with that in-app browser now is here's a quote from him. The Felix Crouse, he's a privacy researcher founded an app development tool that was acquired by Google in 2017. He says, quote, the Instagram app injects their tracking code into. [01:01:37] Website shown, including when clicking on AB ads, enabling them to monitor all user interactions. Like every button that you press, every link you taped, every piece of text that you select or highlight any screenshot you take, any forms, you fill out any user forms, things like passwords addresses, credit card numbers. [01:02:06] Are all seen by the Instagram app? Yes, indeed. So in the statement, of course, uh, medicated that injecting a tracking code, obeyed users preferences on whether or not they allowed apps to follow them. And there was only used to aggregate data before being applied for targeted advertis. Now, this is interesting because according to Crouse, this code injection, uh, was tracked and he was able to look at doing, doing it right for normal browsers. [01:02:42] His test code detected no changes, but for Facebook and Instagram, it finds up to 18 lines of code added by. App into the webpage. So there you go. JavaScript injection and more from our friends at Facebook and Instagram. So they are tracking you, but apparently. They're not listening to your microphone, but they're watching you as you cruise around the web thinking you're using your browser, but no, no. [01:03:18] You're using theirs. Hey, stick around Craig peterson.com. [01:03:24] Cell phone security is something I've talked about for a long time. And you guys know my basics here. If you've been a listener for really any length of time, when it comes to smartphones, we're gonna get into this in more detail, particularly after this raid. [01:03:41] Well, of course everyone's heard, I'm sure about the rate on Trump's property, Mar Lago. [01:03:48] There was something else that happened right. About the same time. And that was representative. Perry Scott Perry was traveling with his in-laws, uh, who are described as elderly. They were on vacation. He's a Republican representative in the house of Congress from Pennsylvania. And he told the Fox news people that three FBI agents approached him, issued him a warrant and demanded he hand over his. [01:04:24] He said they made no attempt to contact my lawyer, who would've made arrangements for them to have my phone, if that was what they wanted. He says I'm outraged. Although not surprised that the FBI. Under the direction of Merrick Garland's DOJ would seize the phone of a sitting member of Congress. My, my phone contains info about my legislative and political activities, personal private discussions with my wife, family constituents, and friends. [01:04:53] None of this is the government's business. Now that's really an interesting point. And, and it brings up the discussion about our smart devices, you know, what should we be doing with our phones and, and what is it frankly, that our phones have in them. Now, just think about that for a minute. Scott Perry rec he, he not recommended. [01:05:21] He mentioned that he had all kinds of records. That were in that phone. You do too. You've got your contacts. Of course. The phone contains information about who you called, where you went, cuz it's got a GPS tracker, but even if GPS is turned off, it's still tracking which cell towers you've connected to. [01:05:43] Uh, we've got all kinds of email in our phones, which are gonna contain business documents, private documents, attorney, client, privilege documents, all kinds of stuff there. And we have the fourth amendment, which protects the right of privacy against unreasonable searches and seizures by the go. Now, in this case, obviously the government got a warrant we could argue about, you know, how legitimate is the warrant and should they have issued it, et cetera. [01:06:16] Right. That that's not what I'm talking about. This is not a political show. In reality. What we're talking about here is the technology. The technology we're using to store this information, this personal information, what should we be using? What shouldn't we be using? How should we use it? Right. All of that sort of stuff. [01:06:38] Well, okay, so we've established that there was not apparently a fourth amendment violation here. There, there might have been, we don't know. We may never know. It doesn't really matter, but if someone gets a hold of your smartphone or your tablet or your computer, what information does it have on there? [01:07:01] And we also have a right under the fifth amendment. against self-incrimination. So if someone's thumbing through our phone, what are they gonna find? People plead the fifth amendment all of the time, because they don't want to get trapped in one of these traps where maybe you don't remember the date. [01:07:24] Right. And all of a sudden you're in a perjury trap because you said something that wasn't true. Well, you know, our, our memories aren't the best, particularly when we're on vacation, we've been drinking a little bit, right. if someone finds your phone, opens it up, someone steals your phone and opens it up. [01:07:44] Someone gets a warrant for your phone and opens it up. What's in there. Now some people have in the past said, okay, what I'll do is I'll just go ahead and I'll wipe my phone remotely and they've done it. Right? The police have had the phone in evidence and in evidence locker and somebody remotely went ahead and wiped their phone. [01:08:04] The police are onto. And what the police have been doing more recently is they put it into a special bag that blocks any sort of signals coming in or out as well as the room. Right. It's kind of a fair date cage anyways, and that way, bad guys, good guys who, if the phones are stolen, they can't remotely wipe them, which is a good thing here, frankly. [01:08:30] But what are we ultimately trying to protect from? That's the question, right? It it's, who's gonna have your phone and what are you trying to protect it from personally? I'm not someone who truly trusts the government. I'm a firm believer in our constitution and our bill of right. Ultimately governments become corrupt. [01:08:52] It happens every time. And even if the whole government isn't corrupt, there's guaranteed to be people within the government, within their bureaucracy, the deep state, if you will, who are out there to get you right. makes sense to you. Makes sense to me. I don't know, but our phones, our smartphones, our computers have a lot of stuff in them. [01:09:14] I've talked on the show before how you should not be taking them to China. If you go to China, because of the evil made. T where they are grabbing your phones. They are duplicating them. Same thing with Russian travelers. Not as much as has been happening in China, but it's happened in Russia, probably a lot now with the whole war thing. [01:09:36] Right. But you shouldn't be taking them because they can be duplicated just like rep Scott. But Scott Perry's phone was duplicated. Now the, the FBI apparently said, well, we're not gonna look through well, why you're duplicating it then. And you know, maybe it's just to preserve evidence. I really don't know, but the bad guys can get at your phone employers if they own your phone can get at your phone and they can get a lot of data out of that. [01:10:06] What do you do? Well, bottom line, if you are traveling internationally, you're gonna wanna make sure to wipe your phone and just bring along maybe a, a basic little flip phone. Uh, cetera. Now there is software that we use. For instance, we use one password and duo in order to keep track of all of our stuff, right. [01:10:31] Our personal information. And. That's the two factor authentication stuff that we use, and we can tell it, Hey, we're traveling out of the country and we will only need these passwords. And it goes ahead and wipes out the password database so that we're not carrying a whole bunch of stuff with us that might be compromised by, uh, a government agency right within what is it? [01:10:54] The USS 50 miles of the border. They can confiscate and examine anything that you have, even if you're not trying to cross the border. and they'll do that at airports. They'll do that at a whole bunch of places. And then you've got the employer side and then you've got the bad guy side. Look at what happened to Khai with the Saudis right here. [01:11:16] He was, uh, you know, a journalist. We could argue that I suppose, but he's a journalist. He is abducted and he is murdered by the Saudis. They get their hands on the phone and they decrypt the. this has happened and it'll happen again. So Apple's done something here that I think is a good step in the right direction. [01:11:40] Apple, of course I've recommended for a long time. Never, ever, ever, ever, ever use Android. Okay. Don't. Use it, Google's using it to track you. You're losing your privacy and the security. Isn't very good. Particularly if your phone's more than three years old, apple has come up with this new lockdown mode on their phones and the lockdown mode is meant for. [01:12:09] People who are really under thumb, you know, people living in Russia or Ukraine, or you name it, Iran, all of these countries that are really out to get their citizens and it it's coming out in iOS. You'll see it there. You probably don't want to use it as a regular person, cuz it does block some of the things you can do, but it also locks it down against these Israeli based companies that have been selling software and hardware to break into cell phones. [01:12:44] So consider iPhones. And if you are one of these people, who's at a high risk consider lockdown mode. [01:12:51] I warned last week about using the ring camera as well as Google's camera. We've got some more news about that today. I was right. A major breakthrough in nuclear fusion and a new toolkit released. Talk about it all now. [01:13:08] Well, quite, quite a time, you know, I, I remember when I first started doing the radio show, uh, 22 years ago, now it started right there year 2000 Y two K and I, I was, uh, wondering, you know, am I gonna have enough stuff to talk about? [01:13:27] and my wife, who was just the most amazing person had been helping me and we subscribed to a bunch of newspapers. Yeah. There used to be newspapers back then. And she went through and was clipping articles that we thought might be good, that people might want to, uh, to hear about. And so she had all. Files. [01:13:49] And we, we subscribe to like four or five different newspapers, including the trashy ones like USA today, just so we knew what was going on out there. We had the financial times and the London times and New York times, and we got just files and files worth of stuff. And didn't take us long to realize, Hey, wait a minute. [01:14:14] There is so much tech news out there and stuff to talk about, uh, that weren't, we don't have to worry about that. So we canceled our subscriptions to all of these different things. I, I have actually a subscription to the New York times still, cuz they gave me a buck a week, which is not a bad deal for the online version because the old gray lady still does have some good text stories. [01:14:39] Some of the other stuff obviously is a problem, but, uh, yeah, tech stories anyways. Now we do a lot of this stuff online, the research, and I put it together and send it out in my newsletter every week. And man, did we have a lot of you guys reading it on Monday was the most, most, uh, red newsletter of mine. [01:15:01] The insider show notes newsletter. Of any of them ever. It was really great. It was like I had a, almost a 50% open rate there within the first day. So that's cool. Thank you guys. And obviously you really value it or you would not have opened that newsletter and click through you. See what I do? Is, uh, you probably know, I appear on radio stations all over the place and I I'm also of course have my own radio show here and elsewhere, and my podcasts, which are on every major podcast platform out there. [01:15:40] And I've been doing this for so long this week. What am I at here? Show? Number, I think it's like 1700. I'm trying to remember weeks. Okay. That's weeks of shows and, uh, we, we have never hit the same stuff twice, which is really rather cool. One of the things I brought up and this was in, uh, a recent show is about. [01:16:09] These ring cameras. And I warned everyone not to use ring and went through the whys. So if you have my newsletter from. A few weeks back, you can just probably search your email box

Episode 76 of Jughead’s Basement sub-category LoFi Interviews with HiFi Guests this week we meet Lookout Records co-founder and writer of Spy Rock Memories Lawrence Livermore. In this discussion we talk about such things as The Greaser and Hippie Movements, Being an Outcast in your own scene, Discovering one’s ancestry, American Democracy, China, retaining a childlike attitude and curiosity, the strained last days of Screeching Weasel’s last days on Lookout records and much much more. www.jugheadsbasementpodcast.com www.sirenrecordsmchenry.com www.larylivermore.com

LLNL biostatistician Nisha Mulakken has enhanced the Lawrence Livermore Microbial Detection Array (LLMDA) system with detection capability for all variants of SARS-CoV-2. The technology detects a broad range of organisms—viruses, bacteria, archaea, protozoa, and fungi—and has demonstrated novel species identification for human health, animal health, biodefense, and environmental sampling scenarios. She discussed the project on this video episode of The Data Standard Podcast.Nisha Mulakkenhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/nishamulakken/The Data Standardhttps://datastandard.io/https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-data-standard/

In this conversation I talk to the Amazing Arati Prabhakar about using Solutions R&D to tackle big societal problems, gaps in the innovation ecosystem, DARPA, and more. Arati’s career has covered almost every corner of the innovation ecosystem - she’s done basically every role at - DARPA she was a program manager, started their Microelectronics Technology Office, and several years later returned to server as its Director. She was also the director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and was a venture capitalist at US venture partners. Now she’s launching Actuate - a non-profit leveraging the ARPA model to go after some of the biggest problems in American society. Links Actuate Website In the Realm of the Barely Feasible - Arati's Article about Actuate and Solutions R&D Arati on Wikipedia  Transcript [00:00:00] welcome to idea machines. I'm your host and Reinhart. And this podcast is a deep dive into the systems and people that bring innovations from glimmers in someone's eye, all the way to tools, processes, and ideas that can shift paradigms. We see these systems outputs everywhere, but what's inside the black boxes with guests. I dig below the surface into crucial, but often unspoken questions. To explore themes of how we enable innovations today and how we could do it better tomorrow. In this conversation, I talked to the amazing RFE provoca about using solutions R and D tackle, big societal problems, gaps in the innovation ecosystem, DARPA and more. Are these career has covered almost every corner of the innovation ecosystem. She's done almost every job at DARPA where she was a program manager, started their micro electronics technology office. And several years later returned serve as their [00:01:00] director. She was also the director at the national Institute of standards and technology and a venture capitalist at us venture partners. Now she's launching actuate a nonprofit leveraging the ARPA model to go after some of the biggest problems in American society. Hope you enjoy my conversation with Arthur. Provoca.  I'd love to start off and sort of frame this for everybody is with a quote from your article, which, which everybody should read and which I will link to in the show notes. You say yet, we lack a systemic understanding of how to nurture the sort of rich ecosystem we need to confront the societal changes facing us. Now over 75 years, the federal government has dramatically increased supportive research and universities and national labs have built layers of incentives and deep culture for the research role. Companies have honed their ability to develop products in markets, shifting away from doing their own fundamental research in established industries, American venture capital and entrepreneurship have supercharged the startup pathway for commercialization in some [00:02:00] sectors, but we haven't yet put enough energy into understanding the bigger space where policy finance and the market meet to scale component ideas into the kind of deep and wide innovations that can solve big previously intractable problems in society. These sorts of problems, aren't aligned to tangible market opportunities or to the missions of established government R and D organizations today, the philanthropic sector can play a pivotal role by taking the early risk of trying new methods for R and D and developing initial examples that governments and markets can adopt and ramp up the hypothesis behind actuate is that solutions R and D can be a starting place for catalyzing the necessary change in the nation's innovation ecosystem. And so with that, with those, I think I want to test it in a nutshell exactly like that. So can we start with how do you see solutions R and D as being different from other R D and, and sort of coupled with that? How is actuate different from other non-profits. Yeah, I think [00:03:00] that's, that's one of the important threads in this tapestry that we want to develop. So solutions R and D let's see. I think those of us who live in the world of R and D and innovation are very familiar with basic research. That that is about new knowledge, new exploration, but it's designed all the incentives, all the funding and the structures are designed to have that end with publishing papers. And then on the other hand, there's. But the whole machinery that turns an advance into, you know, takes a technological advance or a research advance and turns it into the changes that we want in society that could be new products and services. It could be new policies, it could be new practices and that implementation machinery. The market companies, policymaking, what individuals choose to do pilot practices. I think we understand that. And there are places where the, you know, things just move from basic research over into actual [00:04:00] implementation. But in fact, there are, there are a lot of places where that doesn't happen, seamlessly and solutions, R and D is this weird thing in the middle. That builds on top of a rich foundation of basic research. It has it, its objective is to demonstrate and to prove out completely radically better ways. To solve problems or to pursue different opportunities so that they can be implemented at scale. And so it has this hybrid character that it is at the one on one hand, it's very directed to specific goals. And in that sense, it looks more like. Product development and marching forward and, you know, boom, boom, boom, make things happen, execute drive to drive, drive to an integrated goal. And on the other hand it requires a lot of creativity, experimentation risk-taking. And so it has some of those elements from the research side. So it's this middle [00:05:00] kingdom that I. Love because it has, I think it just has enormous leverage. And I, you know, I, I think a couple of points, number one, it's it requires to do it well, requires its own. Types of expertise and practices and culture that are different from either the research or implementation. And secondly, I would say that it, I think it's overall in the U S in the current us innovation system. I think it's something of a gap. There, there, there, there, there are many, many areas where we're not doing it as well as we need to. And then for some of the new problems, which I hope we'll talk about as well. I think it's actually a very interesting lever to boot the whole system up that we're going to need going forward. Yeah. And so actually just piggybacking right off of that, you've outlined three major sort of problems that you're tackling initially. Climate change sort of health, like general American [00:06:00] health and data privacy. I'm actually really interested in, like, what was the process of deciding, like, these are the things that we're going to work on. Yeah, but this whole actuate emerged from a thought process from a lot of. Bebe's rattling around in the box car in my head in the period as I was wrapping up at DARPA in 2016, at the end of 2016 and going into 2017 when I left and what I was thinking about was how phenomenally good our innovation machinery is. For the problems that we set out to tackle at the end of the second world war, that agenda was national security technology for economic growth. A lot of that was information technology. We set out to tackle health. Instead we did biomedicine. We went long on biomedicine, didn't break their left, left a lot of our serious health problems sitting on the shelf and a big agenda was funding, basic research and, and we've executed on that agenda. That's what we are [00:07:00] very, very, very good at what I couldn't stop thinking about. As I was wrapping up at DARPA is the problems that I think will, you know, many of us feel will determine whether we succeed or fail as a society going forward. So it's not that these challenges, you know, national security or how it's not that those problems have gone away and we should stop. It's just that we have some things that will break us at our. Yeah, arguably, they are in the process of breaking us. If we don't deal with them right now, one is access to opportunity for every person in our society. A second is population health at a cost that doesn't break the economy. Another is being able to trust data and information and the information age in which we now live. And the forest obviously is mitigating climate change. And if you think about it, these, these were not, but these weren't the top of mind issues at the end of the second world war, right? I mean, we had other problems. We didn't really know what to do about. So some of these are all problems that we didn't really know what to do about. Some of these are new problems. And, [00:08:00] and so, you know, now here we are in 2021, if you say what's what really matters those were the four areas that we identified that. Are critical to the success of our society. Number one, number two, we aren't succeeding. And that means we need innovation of all different types. And number three, we, we don't, we're not innovating, you know, we're either innovating at the zero billion dollars a year level, or we are spending money on R and D, but it's not yet turning the tide of the problem and, and that, so that's how we ended up focusing on those areas. Got it. And what could you actually, like, I, I love digging into sort of the nitty gritties of like, what was the process of designing these, these programs? Right. So just to sort of scope this a little bit, these broad areas that I'm talking about, I think of as. But the major societal challenges that we face today, actuate, which is a tiny early stage seed stage [00:09:00] nonprofit organization. Our our aspiration is over time to build portfolios of solutions, R and D programs. In each of these areas. And so very, you know, you, you, you made reference to a couple of the specific programs. One is about being able to access many more data sets to mine, their insights by cross-linking across while rigorously preserving privacy. That's some of the whole set that's one very specific program, but, but think of that as just one program and what will eventually be a much broader portfolio in this area of trusting data and information. So part of what we've been doing as we started actuate in late 2019 was big thinking about our strategy, about the four broad societal challenges that we wanted to work in. And then we've also been doing a lot of work on we've defined a couple of specific programs, but perhaps more importantly for scaling the organization, we've been working through our [00:10:00] art. Our mess, our process and methodology to take, you know, the core idea here of course is our, our founding team has a lot of different experiences, but we met at DARPA and what we our inspiration is really to take what we know from that particular model for solutions R and D. And. Mine, the critical, the essential insights and translate them to these very different societal challenges, not national security, but the ones that actuate is gonna focus on. And, and that, so we've, we've been formulating the four areas, but also thinking through, so how do you get from the question of changing population health outcomes to what are the programs that could be high leverage opportunities to do solutions R and D for that objective? Yeah. And so, so there's, there's sort of like two steps. There's one is like going from like the broad area to a specific program. And then there's another, which is sort of designing the [00:11:00] program itself. And I'm interested in what, what w what do you actually do to design the program? Like what, what is, what does that look like? Yeah. Go ahead. The first two programs that we have built out and defined were developed, were invented and designed by my co-founder Wade Shen he was a DARPA program manager for about five years. That's where we met his areas artificial intelligence and data science. And if you work in that area, you can work on any of the world's problems. And he, he worked on an amazing array of different problem areas as well as. Programs that at darker that drove the AI and data science technology itself forward. So you know, DARPA is a building full at any moment in time full of it. It's got a hundred amazing program managers in it. Wade was one of the really exceptional one people even in that very elite crowd. And so you know, Wade can And this is how he [00:12:00] thinks about the world. As you know, we came together because we share these concerns about these major societal challenges and a passion for bringing this kind of solutions R and D to these problems. And then Wade is the kind of guy who can invent these programs, you know, like he can just go do it. He knows how to think about it. He knows how to go do the research and talk to people and line up a program that could really be very impactful. So we, we weighed spelt these two programs, partly because we wanted to understand what that looked like in these areas. And but you know, that's the, as we go forward, we're going to need a process that engages a community of different people. Because over time, we're going to want to build our cadre of program leaders who will define, and then execute the solutions R and D program. And by definition, they can't all be, you know, they all, they can't all be weighed, right. We need to be able to draw from the talents and insights and the passions. With of people who have all kinds of backgrounds technology backgrounds, deep research backgrounds lived experiences [00:13:00] on these problems. People who have, who really, you know, deeply understand how the systems work that create opportunity or population health or, or take away from those objectives. And so a lot of what we've been doing is figuring out. So that's the question I was, if you want to change the future of health in the U S so that instead of spending twice as much as other developed nations per capita on healthcare, and yet having dozens of other countries that have longer lifespans and lower infant mortality rates, which is just criminal for the world's richest economy, if we want a future where that is radically different, where we don't have a hundred million people who either have diabetes or at risk of diabetes, where we don't have. Can, you know, we don't have a public health system. That's thoroughly incapable of containing and disease. Like COVID-19 unlike many other countries around the world. If we want a different future than you know, That's the landscape. And how do you get from that broad set of what we want to, [00:14:00] what do you do about it? And I think what that process looks like, so it has a top-down part and then a bottoms-up part. So the top-down part is understanding that landscape it's, it's the kind of, you know, it's understanding what, how big the problem is. What is the nature of the problem what's who's doing what I mean, these are big complex systems, right? There are many, many, many different kinds of actors. Actors practices, culture that you have to understand. You have to have some notion of how all of those complex systems components are operating and interacting. And then you can start thinking about where there are gaps or opportunities, but still at a very strategic, broad level. And that's about it for top-down because then of course, the model emulating a lot of the power we found in the way DARPA works is then to flip it, to bottoms up. And so then we go find people who are experts. In some aspect of this, again, they might have deep research expertise, deep knowledge of the specific problems or the way the system works. What you want is people who either [00:15:00] know or are willing to go learn enough about what the boxes, and then be willing to live outside of it and figure out how to recast it in a different way. And And, and then, you know, similar to DARPA, there's a process of nurturing and coaching, but allowing these smart individuals to bubble and brew program concepts from, you know, like a couple of bullets on a chart eventually to a full executable program, you know, a process that I think even for someone who's super good at this take six months or a year. So that's what we're just starting to embark on. Got it. And so that's sort of the beginning of of programs. I'm also interested in sort of like, What you hope to happen at the end of them? Sort of you're, you're in a slightly different position that DARPA, which sort of has a, hopefully a way being customer in the DOD. That's one of the funniest ideas on the planet. I just love it when people say, Oh, [00:16:00] well, It's easy because DARPA has DOD waiting for it. All right, please. Yeah. Let's, let's talk about how, yeah, I, okay. So yeah, let's, let's talk about that. And, and yes. And then what do we do? Right. So at DARPA, I first of all, think about six decades of history at DARPA in. Two halves for across generations of that agency. About half of what it has done is prototype military systems, things that were just crazy, that the services would never have tried by themselves, but were very directed at a specific military platform or capability. The other half has been. Sparking core enabling technologies. And that was out of a recognition that if you build your new military capabilities out of just the same old ingredients, you're only going to get so far and you need some very disruptive core technologies. So what came out of military systems? Iconically, of course, it's stealth aircraft. There's a much, much, much longer list, but that's the [00:17:00] easy one that everyone knows. A lot of people know that story in the national security world. Of course, what came out of core, enabling technologies. Well, arguably the entire field of advanced material science, but also ARPANET and the internet the seeds of artificial intelligence, advanced microelectronics, Microsystems, huge numbers of technological revolutions. So if that's what's going on at DARPA the first thing to point out is that half of it and some of the most transformative. Core technology, things that have come out of DARPA did not transition to the world because DOD went and bought a bunch of it. Right. And so and, and so the transition for most of the core enabling technologies is out to industry to turn into products and services. And, you know, we've seen. We've seen many, many stories and how that works often, what it looks like is a project that darkened funds at a university and or company. And then those individuals beyond DARPA funding go forward, identify markets, raise capital, build businesses, [00:18:00] build product lines, build industries, changed the world. Right? So we, that that's that that's not trivial. In itself. And then, but I think I just want to also be clear that even for the half of DARPA, that's been about building prototype military systems by and large DOD is not excited about someone they'd start. I'll tell you just, just one story. When I came to DARPA, we had just started just before I arrived, we had started a program. A great partner manager had been a Navy officer. I was serving at DARPA and he said, you know, wouldn't it be great if the Navy had an autonomous vessel, a ship that could leave the pier and navigate across open oceans for months at a time without a single sailor onboard, not a remote control vehicle, but one that just had sparse supervisory control, radically different tools for the Navy, if something like that existed. And maybe we can actually do that. And the Navy got when the DARPA was. Trying to do this and the Navy thought, but I observed this. And what they thought was that is a [00:19:00] really bad idea. And they tried to shut it down there. Important element of DARPA is the Navy doesn't actually get to tell their people what to do. And my predecessor appropriately said, I don't know if she said, thank you. But she definitely said, we're just doing this. By the time I got to DARPA, the Navy had gone from outright hostile to merely deeply skeptical, which is pretty important because that's the stage. It was. People will tell you what, you know, all the reasons that they don't believe it. And they say, well, how is it going to meet call rags, which are the rules of the road for navigating, you know, in dense areas. And how's it gonna last that long at sea in that harsh Marine environment, they had the entire long, difficult list of challenges. So then we knew then, you know what you gotta do, right. So fast forward before I left DARPA I got to Christen the first ever self-driving ship. See Hunter that we put in the water. And at that christening ceremony, by that time, we were paired up with the Navy and the Navy was a partner with us for awhile. And I think now is taking the effort [00:20:00] forward. And you know, now we have a working prototype. Now the Navy can say, Oh, let me figure out. Do I want to use it to hunt sea mines? Is it a cheaper, safer way to trail quiet diesel submarines? You know, there's a lot more that has to happen to really figure out how you take this and move it forward. So that's a success story, but I think that stealth is another great example. These things were not only not embraced or asked for, or, or. Welcomed when they weren't delivered from DARPA, they were, you know, they were spat upon often. But it doesn't matter because if it's radically better enough and, and the stars align and you get like, I mean, a lot of things she can't control, but that is how big changes happen. And you have to be able to do those things, even when there isn't a customer standing there waiting for it. I appreciate that. And so, yeah. Do so, so like then let's how does that then translate for you guys for actually, yeah, so I think the way to think [00:21:00] about it for any, any, so look, I mean, anytime you're setting out to make. To spark a radical transformation. You, it's not going to happen unless you really think about the entire system of what it's going to take to, to create the change that you want to see in the world. And so let me just take one really specific example. One of our programs, Dave safes at actuate. But one of these is one of Wade's programs that he's built. The objective there is to use privacy technologies that are emerging, that are currently being used ad hoc to build a new architecture and infrastructure that would allow for multiple data sets to be provided on an encrypted basis. And then what would allow researchers or policymakers, anyone who wants to analyze the data and cross-link among those data sets for the insights that they hold would allow them to do that entire process while rigorously preserving privacy. And that includes. The CR the linking, the cleaning and the [00:22:00] linking, you know, all the sort of, or ugly data science stuff that has to happen before you can actually start seeing the insights. So it's a soup to nuts full system. That's the ambition of that program is to demonstrate something that's that's that's. Robust enough and flexible enough to handle many different kinds of data and data problems. So the future that we want to see is that instead of today, where research is, you know, you ended up doing research or policy in halafu, it's sort of a lamppost problem, right? You do a lot of interesting research with the data you happen to be able to get a hold of, or that you happen to have permission to link to other data, but all the really interesting problems what, what. Happens in K through 12, but that leads to different kinds of life outcomes. How has that to other environmental factors in a kid's neighborhood or the way that, that education and that child is going to end up interacting with the criminal justice system? How, how do all of those things tie to the progress of the [00:23:00] economy and jobs and the things that lift people up and allow them to pursue opportunity? That's you know, to answer those kinds of questions, you need 53 different agencies at state local and federal levels, and you need private company data. And you know, like it's all just it's it exists, but that doesn't mean you actually can get at it and start using it. So we want to see a future where you could answer those kinds of questions. Well, so what's it going to take the piece that the program will do when we're able to get it going is to demonstrate a prototype system that allows for radically different kinds of data owners to put their data together, you know, run some real examples and. And do applications show that are demonstrations of what this new data capability would look like, but that's probably not going to be enough. Right. And so the other things that need to happen you know, my dream is there's a future where there's NIST or other standard for the kinds of. [00:24:00] Procedures and processes that would allow the legal counsel of the firm or the organization that owns the data to say, okay, if we comply with this regulation, if we meet this certification, I can now sign off and know that I'm protecting the data properly, but I can, I can make that decision tomorrow, not in six months or a year, like it usually takes today. And, and, and then over time with, you know, with a lot of different players and. An infrastructure for regulation and certification, you can start to see how you could, you could have the kind of rich data future that, you know, w we all talk about these days, but actually isn't quite happening yet. So, so I think that, I don't know if that's a useful, for example, but what the pic, the general picture is. Think about all the entities, all the actors that are going to have to. To do something to change their minds, take an action. And you may not be, I mean, we're not going to go fund all of that. We're going to fund a piece that would allow them to change their minds. And that's really, our [00:25:00] objective is a prototype and demonstrations that cause them to say, okay, we can, we can now do something in a different way. Do you see encouraging them to change their minds as part of the program in that there's sort of like a very there's there's a spectrum of from just like demonstrating the prototype and then washing your hands of it too. Like. Push like knocking on their doors for years. And I assume it's somewhere in the middle. Yeah. There's a lot of leading horses to water recognizing that you can't make them drink. What I, what I think is really clear for many, many years of experience at DARPA and other places is that if you're not deliberate and thoughtful about. Who those players are, what would cause them to change their minds and then doing the active work to engage them all along the process. For sure. If you don't do those things, the chances are pretty, pretty slim. If you do them, you might have a shot. Right. And [00:26:00] and so I think we're as we're designing programs that actually we're being. Very explicit about that engagement process, which starts by you have a lot of conversations with people who are like, most often, they're like, yeah, sure. You're in fantasy land. If that stuff existed, it'd be awesome. I'm like, that's not the reality. And let me tell you what I really need. So that's at the beginning. And then as a program starts, you know, during the execution of a program, that's really when it starts going from. Just, you know, something that the program leader believes in to something that now is starting to be palpably real potentially. Right. And so you want to bring those. Decision makers whose minds need to be changed, but at least could be investors. They could be entrepreneurs. They could be policymakers. I mean, a whole different sets of who those, those, those adopters need to be the ones that are going to take it to scale. But the places where we can bring them to the table are you know, you continue to call them up and tell them what's going on. But. But you [00:27:00] create demonstrations and updates where you bring them to the technology or you bring the technology to them and you say, look, did you, did, you know, this was possible. Look what we can now do. And, you know, ideally they get dazzled and then they say, Oh yeah, but they hear the next three things. That would be a problem. And that tells you what you need for the next phase. So that's what, that's a parallel track to the three to five years of technical work that's going on in the program. That makes a lot of sense. And in terms of the technical work, do you plan on having it be mostly externalized to the organization? The same way that DARPA does. I would say w there there's a very important piece of intellectual work and management and leadership that happens with the program leader and that individuals tiny little team within actuate, very much like at DARPA. But you know, the vast majority, the overwhelming amount of the funding goes out to the, the companies, the [00:28:00] universities, the nonprofits who are doing the different components of R and D and. Testing and demonstrations and all the people who are doing all of that work. And that's for a couple of reasons. Number one you know, these are three to five year projects programs, and we w w what we want to do is we don't want to hire them all and put them under our roof for that period of time just as a practical matter. But the other really important thing is when the program is over. What you want is, you know, a successful program and w a program starts with a program leader who has this vision. Yeah, they are, they are, you know, they're calling people to try to do this really difficult, new thing, and. At the end of a program, what you want is that entire community that you've been funding and working with that, they get the vision. Not only that they built, they delivered it, right? Like they've actually built this thing and they become the most important [00:29:00] vectors for moving it out into the world and getting it. Actually implemented. So the world starts changing. And so for both of those reasons up front and at the back end I think that's, I think that's one of the powers of the DARPA model is, is tapping these amazing talents wherever they are. Yeah. So something that I've actually wondered about with the DARPA model, that I've never been able to find any good information on is what do you do when you run into a situation where You need, like there there's multiple groups that have been working on different pieces and there's like, is there ever contention over, who's going to take it forward or like, like, how do you, how do you sort of coordinate it so that the outcome is the best for the world where like, which might involve like like squashing someone's ego or something like that. I was like, shocked. I'm shocked. So are you thinking I would say they're somewhat different answers if those junctures happen [00:30:00] during a program versus after a program. So, you know, let's say you have a program that that had different university groups working on dunno some advanced chip for doing machine learning or whatever. And, and, and it, I mean, this just happened. I think that there were multiple very good research results, but then were commercialized in different ways by the performers. So at that point, you know, it's like, great. Let them drive it out. Hopefully they, they. But they may compete with each other. They might go after different market segments, but there, there are multiple shots on goal to commercialize something coming out of a program. And I would characterize that as something that DARPA would not particularly, I certainly wouldn't control, probably doesn't even have much influence. Conversely, if you're in a program at the early stages of a program, a lot of the that's a lot of what the core management Work is for the program manager at DARPA or the program leader as we're calling them at actuate [00:31:00] is, you know, so let's back up. Number one, you're trying to do something that achieves huge impact sad, but true that involves taking risks because all the low-risk things have already been done. And so the, the whole art of this. Business is how do you intelligently take and then manage and drive down and eliminate risks. And one of the, one of the really effective tools in the toolkit for managing risk is a to S to S to plant a number of different seeds. And to deliberately have competitive efforts that might, you know one of our programs at actuate, for example is built on the idea that we have all kinds of research that could be better at real-time incentives to help people make better. To develop healthier habits. So, you know, it, when we get that program going, we're going to deliberately have multiple teams who are working on different kinds of incentives, themes, and then a core [00:32:00] management challenge in a program like that is going to be, you know, you, you may choose to start four, but you, you know, at some point you're, you're going to want to down select and go to two. And what is the right point? When is it. Point where you want to say, you know, I'm going to put more of my eggs in these baskets. And so I think that that's integral to the design and then the, the day to day or week to week management of the program. And I imagine that there might be one more situation where at the look you're actually sort of building a system and you have different groups working on different pieces of like different components in the system. And so. What, what, how do you, how do you manage that at the end? Where it's like, okay, like at the end of the day we, we want the system. Yeah. That's exactly right. Yeah. And I, I let's say maybe just one small point at DARPA. DARPA's running 250 or 300 programs at any moment in time. Right? So full-blown huge agency [00:33:00] relative to the scale that we're starting at zero right now at actuary, but in the DARPA portfolio, you will find programs. You know, the self-driving ship program was a systems development program, Gantt charts, milestones, boom, boom, boom. Right on the very other end of the spectrum might be a very much more research oriented program. That's highly exploratory. There's a new physical phenomenon that looks like it could be interesting down the road, but right now you just want to have vibrant research and people pursuing the question in lots of different ways. So there, there are many, many models. Yeah. Somewhat in the middle is probably where is, is what I would characterize where actuate will start and what we're finding in the kinds of programs that we're exploring is over and over again. Here's the pattern there. Number one, there's a, there's a problem for which we think there's a radically better solution. That's possible. The reason we think it's possible is because not because of one new research result, but because there are a handful of different research areas that are advancing in interesting ways. But they [00:34:00] haven't yet those advances have not yet really been applied to the right problem or critically to your point, integrated together into a system that can actually follow the problem. They're just like threads or hopes. Right? Yeah. And so that becomes, I think this is a classic template. For solutions R and D program at DARPA or an actuate. So a great way to manage those kinds of programs is, should think in terms of different tracks of effort. And the first track is to advance the research itself. So it's applied research where you're, you're building on these, these threads and nuggets, which you're really aiming at the specific new capability that your, that the programs. The program's goal is to demonstrate that, right? So track one is applied research. The second track is building prototypes and that's often that's a different kind of performer. It's someone who can integrate the different pieces and you can, you know, you can imagine a process where every seat. Three or six months, there's a drop from applied research into building prototypes. Right. And so, [00:35:00] especially for software tools, this is like the classic way you would do it. So every three to six months to see what's coming out of applied research, that's baked enough to put it into the prototype. And so that that's. That's becomes a very good way to flow things. That's tracks one and two track three is now you got to figure out if this stuff is doing anything. So then it's, it's testing, evaluation and working, you know, trying to show that it works for the application or applications that you're going after. And while there are different tracks, they interact, right? Because as you're learning what works and as you take the integrated prototype, so an integrated prototype for. But tool to help individuals choose healthier habits throughout their days and their weeks. So it's going to integrate a whole host of these different advances that are coming from different areas of a lie, including incentives, as I mentioned before, but, you know, ideally every six months or so as the prototype strop to testing, you start getting real feedback about this, this combination of. [00:36:00] Sensing and coaching and personalized incentive. Is it working or is it not working? Right. And then, then you go through these iteration loops. So I think that's So, yeah, I mean, I think what, what, so what the program looks like when it's underway is you'll see some researchers, universities, or companies you'll see prototype developers, typically more companies there you'll see people who do the tests or the demonstrations. It could be a clinical trial. If it's health-related it could be, I mean, it could be whatever, whatever the form of the prototype or the application is. And then throughout the whole thing, and the management challenge is. You know, you have a plan and then reality is going to happen. It's going to be something different. So how do you keep that whole engine moving forward? That is, that is an amazing description. I really appreciate you going into those details. Cause I think that that's something that. People don't think about it enough is, is sort of like how, how to manage those tracks. I want to actually go back to something that you said earlier, which is that the people that you want sort of as [00:37:00] performers in the program are the people who can see where the boxes and then, and think about, think outside of it. And do you have any, any strategies for finding those people and, and sort of teasing that out of them? Yeah, I, I think I said it more in the context of program leaders. And then, and, you know, by the way, at DARPA, one of the best ways to go find great new program managers or potentially great new program managers. Cause you don't really know until you give them a shot. Is to find, go through the performer base. Right? And there, there, there at DARPA I found there were always, there were always performers who were very, very good at their piece of it and they loved their piece of it. And you have to have those people, but then once in a while, you'd see a performer who started seeing the whole picture and they could help the, you know, they would start being creative about like, we could go here. And when you start seeing that, those are the, those are the signs. So I have a set of. Criteria that I thought about in terms of [00:38:00] DARPA program managers. And it's very similar for Dar for, for actually future program leaders. Number one, it's people who are driven to make a change in the world which like, I mean, this is where I live and breathe, but it. Over time. It has finally dawned on me that not everyone gets out of bed in the morning to make the future a better place. All right. Like that's just like what the culture and the whole point of the exercises. They have to find people who are driven to do that. I'm always looking for domain expertise because you need to be deeply rooted and deeply smart about something that's relevant to the problem it's going to work on almost by definition. You won't be a domain expert on everything that it takes, because these are big systems complex. Thanks. So the next thing I'm always looking for is the ability to understand the whole, the big picture of the system, and then to navigate seamlessly, you know, from, from forest to trees, to bark, to cells, right. And then back up and you have to be able to do that whole thing. And that means you may know a little, a lot [00:39:00] about how you know how some aspect of behavioral science works in a very specific context, but you also, I'm also looking for people who can then extrapolate up to how might that and other advances to be harnessed, to, to move the world forward. Right. And that that's that's I would tell you that's one of the harvest characteristics to find, cause of course. W w you know, there are lots of people who have domain expertise, but that ability to navigate from systems to details is, is actually a very precious commodity that I always love when I find I'm looking for people who, the overall thing I'm looking for is people who have, you know, head in the clouds feet on the ground, because you need to be able to dream, but you actually have to be able to go execute. And in this case, execute by managing other people on projects. Yeah. You know, it's not an individual contributor role. And then the final thing that matters deeply is an ethical core, just because you know, that that's important for how you treat people on [00:40:00] a day-to-day basis. But it's also important because we're talking about really powerful technologies and someone who we need people who are willing to be explicit and thoughtful about the ethical considerations that they'll be weighing in. Yeah. That that's great. I want to change gears just a little bit and sort of talk and talk about money for a little bit. So, so, so you spent many years in venture capital, and so I assume you, you know, the, the, sort of both the upsides and the downsides of, of startups and for capital organizations and you decided to, to start as a nonprofit. And so, so I'd love to sort of understand the thought process behind that because I definitely, I, there, there's sort of a line of thinking that. You know, it's like, if it, like, if it can be done, it should be done as a company, as a, like a startup. And so I'm interested in why you, so I would say that [00:41:00] simple minded and, and to the extent you think that's, if that's your worldview, I would say the things I think need to be done, that I can make a contribution to cannot aren't companies. They're not there. There's not a visible market. And so it's not, it's not a company today. Some of the things we want to work on will part of getting them out to the world will involve markets and therefore companies, including startups, but you know, coming back to these major societal challenges that we have none of them are simply going to be solved. By companies, building new products, services, and profits. And I do think that some of the solutions will ultimately will include companies having really interesting new market opportunities. But it, you know, this is the stuff that the market doesn't do and, and. But, you know, th the, so if you think about us, R and D we spend about half a trillion dollars a year in the U S economy on research and development. [00:42:00] The majority of that of course, is companies doing product development and but about a hundred, I think it's about 140 billion a year that's that's federally funded, R and D and and, and the, the. But areas in which actually is focusing are places where they are not market driven opportunities and, and they are not, I think they are not yet the places where we have the federal R and D machinery and yeah. But so those things need to happen for our ultimate dreams to come true. Right. Is to make the difference that we want more. And, and ideally it seems like you, you'd almost sort of like pull both of those both of those leavers, like towards a certain direction, right? Like that's, that seems like a, a place that you could sit getting opportunities for them. Right. I think that's the biggest pull as you show them something that, that changes their minds. Yeah. And are you funding the organization as like actually as an organization, as a whole? Or are you funding [00:43:00] each sort of program? Like, are you funding it as a program by program basis? We're still at a seed stage just to be really clear, but we spent a lot of time on this strategic question about whether first of all, let's be really clear that what we're trying, we think philanthropy has an important role to play because of the fact that market and government are not. For various reasons, stepping up to the plate on these topics that said that what we're trying to do in the social sector is there isn't a template for it. It's not what philanthropy has, has done at least in the last, you know, Six or eight decades. Very interesting stories about Rockefeller foundation and the green revolution and how they, how they funded the research. But, you know, if you go back and read how they thought about it in the methodologies that they developed, it looks a lot like solutions, R and D and then those. Actually those human beings, those exact people went into whenever bushes organizations on during the second war. And, and [00:44:00] I mean, that's the template for solutions R and D is right. We have an existential crisis and we have things we can do about it. And it's all hands on deck and integrating everything. And. Building radar on the bomb. Right? So, so anyway, so, but it's been decades since part of philanthropy, I would say, was really seriously focused on this kind of solutions, R and D. So with that, that is the significant caveat. So everything we're doing is going to be a big experiment in the social sector question you're to get now to get to your question. That we spend a lot of time thinking about whether we should try to build a program, build a program, go raise money for it. Or if we should try to do something that's even harder, which is to raise a fund, to do multiple programs and build a portfolio we've settled on the ladder. And the reason for that is simply that, first of all, I think, you know, sometimes doing an impossible thing. It's better to do the more impossible thing that actually. Can make an impact. I think this comes back to risk management and we talked about risk management within [00:45:00] a program, but a lot of, you know, how to start have one or two things, every single decade that literally is changing the world. Well, it certainly isn't because all the programs succeed, it is because you have a portfolio. And because it's a very deliberately managed diversified portfolio, it's diverse in. Aspects of national security it's that it's targeting, it's diverse in the technological levers that it's pursuing, it's diverse and timeframes to impact. And so at the end of the day, we concluded that for actually to make a dent on any of these met massive societal challenges that we needed to be able to build portfolio. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. And so teaching to do tracks again and just talk to you a little bit about, about the Pat, like your, your, your, your career, which has included some like amazing things. Like when, when you became the DARPA director, like how, [00:46:00] how did. You know what to do? Like did they, I'm sorry, this is a silly question, but as you say, it seems like such a big role. Yeah. I've been super lucky in the things that I got to do. But I th the luckiest day, I would say in my professional life was the day that Dick Reynolds, who ran the defense sciences office at DARPA in the 1980s. He said to me at a workshop of there that I happened to be attending. He asked if I wanted to come to Darko as a program manager, and I was 27. I had been out of graduate school for. A year. Oh, maybe I was 26 at the time. Anyway, I had only been out of graduate school for about a year. And I was in Washington on a congressional fellowship at that time because I had decided I wanted to do something other than research on the academic track, but I didn't know what that was. It's like on a [00:47:00] Lark, I went to Washington for a year, which was critical because even when you leave the trot, you know, th the, the path you are supposed to be on, that's when you don't know what's going to happen. But one of the things that can happen as amazing new possibilities occur. And that's what happened when Dick asked if I wanted to come to DARPA. So at a very early stage of my career, I landed at DARPA and it was the first place I had ever been. I mean, I had worked. Two summers at bell labs who put me through graduate school. I'd worked at Lawrence Livermore one summer as a summer student. I'd worked at Texas tech and the laser lab as an undergraduate. I'd done this graduate work at Caltech and then I'd been on at the office of technology assessment. And the honest congressional fellowship I got to DARPA and all of a sudden, it just made sense to me, right? Like everything that I thought and believed in the way I was culturally oriented, which was you go find really hard problems. And then the contribution we get to make as technologists is we get to come up with a better way to solve a really hard problem. And we get to [00:48:00] blow open these doors to new opportunities. I just, it just resonated so deeply. So I spent seven years at DARPA the last couple of years, which we're starting with micro at that time, it was the micro electronics technology office, which we spun out of the rail defense sciences office at that time. And I, I, you know, I loved it. It was, it was a crazy ride. Right. I got to do all kinds of things that were very, very meaningful then. And that, you know, for the 30 years, since then, it's been just. Such a delight to see so many things, but have come into the world that trace back to some of the early investments that we got to make. And I would tell you that while I loved it, everything else I got to do after DARPA and I treasure it and I needed those experiences, I never really got over being at DARPA. It was just like, it was my home. It was my place. It was what made sense to me. And So when I got the call in 2012 to go back and lead it I, you know, it was just a dream come true. And [00:49:00] when I got there, it was, you know, being a program manager and then being an office director at DARPA, which I had done in the eighties and nineties, and then going back as director, those are three very different jobs, but so there was a huge amount of learning and growth in every stage. But they are all. Lined up to this mission and vision of an organization. That's just like, I'm wired the way that DARPA is wired. So, so I, I have to say it's, it was the most satisfying job that I've had so far, I'm trying to make actually even more. It was very hard. It was very meaningful, but I have to tell you, it just felt natural. It felt instinctive and natural in a way that none of my other jobs really did. I have to say, I mean, you know, And they were all. Okay. And I think there are other jobs. I think I was good at their other jobs. I was horrible at that matter, but DARPA was the place where it just sort of, it just felt natural to me. Yeah. And, and so sort of to provide on that and, and in closing do you [00:50:00] think that there are any ways to improve on the DARPA model that you're trying to implement going forward? So we talk about this all the time. I mean, I think for small, if the work that we're starting an actuator can have anything like the kind of impact that DARPA has had in, and, and, you know, any subset of its programs Then I can die happy, right? Like if we can really make a contribution to these big societal problems, that's, that's, that's going to make, that's just going to be deeply meaningful to me. We've talked about some of the things that I think are difficult in the DARPA model. One of them is about the more radical the innovation and advanced the harder typically is to get anyone to. Change the way that they work in order to adopt it and get the benefits of it. So I think being we're, we're trying to be even more deliberate about how would you get decision makers to change their minds and implement in the design of our programs have actually, I mean, I think DARPA does that, but that's something we're trying to put [00:51:00] special focus on. I think DARPA's done a huge amount of work to make it easier to, they have legislative authorities and good practices about being able to hire people who. Many of them normally wouldn't consider public service for many reasons, but especially of course, low compensation levels. And while dark was not fully market competitive, we w we were able to move very quickly and had a little bit of a salary cap relief. So, you know, the nonprofit sector is not going to be the place that you make your billions obviously. But I think being outside of government has that advantage and something that we'll, we'll definitely take advantage of. And they're, you know, they're things that are simply not appropriate for the government in a market economy. To do. And so there, there are things that you can do for national security, but that, that unless we have a radical change in our thoughts about industrial policy, which by the way might be happening, I can't quite tell, but there are ways in which government has not [00:52:00] chosen in the past to work with industry or with finance that I think are less, you know, those are not as significant on a limitation for the work we're doing in the social sector. Nice. Excellent. Well, I want to be really respectful of your time. How can, how can people find out more about what you're doing? And like if they, if they think this is interesting, like what, what should they do to, to help out. Well, thanks so much for talking about this. I love the fact that you, that you care about these issues and you've done more than anyone I've seen from outside DARPA to really understand the agency. So that it's been so much fun talking with you, Ben, about that. I think you're going to provide the link to the issues in science and technology. And our website courses, if it's all brand new. So take a look and you know, we're so early right now, but I'm, I'm always looking for people who have a deep passion for these societal challenges who see new opportunities to do things that are radically better way. [00:53:00] And please reach out to us from our website. If you, if, if it resonates, we'd love to hear from you. Thanks for listening. We're always looking to improve. So we'd love feedback and suggestions. You can get in touch on Twitter at Ben underscore Reinhardt. If you found this podcast intriguing, don't forget to share and discuss it with your friends. Thank you.

Post-doctoral Soul Searching: Science JournalismJason started his journey in the field of academia, as a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore labs. Initially, he thought his life was going to be spent in the lab, proving/disproving hypothesis. However, like any other phd candidate, Jason had second-guessed his purpose and started thinking about where he would fit in. One of the things he had landed on was “Science Journalism”.Speaking “Econom-ese”In 2019, as The Economist wanted to take a more serious step towards podcasting (They actually their first podcast in 2006). They were serious about audio and this new podcast was supposed to display that. The team was lead by Tom Standage, Deputy Editor and lead for digital strategy. In a medium article, Tom describes this effort as a way for '“The Economist to come to life in audio everyday”. Check out this awesome medium article about how “The Intelligence” started”Jason still currently hosts this podcast, probably coz he’s been doing a damn good job and his voice is, to quote an anonymous host on Things Have Changed, “sexier than the sound of my own name”. Also, to clear up the suspicion, Jason is 100% American but also 100% spent 20 years in Britain. I mean as far as his accent goes, it’s a Jason Palmer Accent. But admittedly, his voice isn’t the reason we love “The Intelligence”, it’s because we identify with the content. The “Intelligence” is a great way to keep in-tune with the world around you. From stories about the famine happening in Yemen, to the shift in American Politics, the show brings together a really global view of news. At Things Have Changed, we are a group of immigrants that have benefitted from the truly diverse collection of people in the United States. Jed is from the Philippines, Shikher is from India, and Adrian's family is from Poland. When we have conversations, we are bringing our different perspectives to the table, and we find that absolutely vital for personal growth. Learn about how Jason satiates his desire for learning and the type of cocktail he’ll make for us when we visit London someday!Support the show (https://thingshavechanged.substack.com/)

We fire up the show with introductions and a little snippiness on Dan’s part. Henry reports that the weather in Minnesota is nearly human.AI in ScienceJumping into our main topic, Shahin introduces an article from HPCwire interviewing Argonne’s Associate Laboratory Director Rick Stevens about how the DOE will be using AI in science. This is one of the biggest potential changes in our industry and well worth the investigation. But figuring out where AI fits into the traditional world of research and simulation is a difficult problem. Henry points out that nearly every grant proposal needs to include “AI” in order to get serious consideration.We discuss Dan's Great HPC Road Trip* of national labs in 2018 and how nearly every lab is looking at using AI to inform their simulations and cut down on the brute force computing they’re doing now. Dan’s national lab interviews are here: Idaho National Lab, NCAR, NREL, Los Alamos, Sandia, NERSC, Lawrence LivermoreThere’s also a slight tangent where Dan talks about driving hundreds of miles out of his way to mess with Henry’s Las Cruces lot and future home. This resulted in an epic short film “The Haunting of Henry House” which is stuck in bureaucratic  approval cycles according to Henry. RFHPC Hall of Fame?We also discuss the possibility of founding a Radio Free HPC Hall of Fame, but discarded it when we realized that no one would want to be in it.COVID-19As the conversation continues, Dan brings up an article that discusses how COVID-19 might affect processor foundry revenues and demand. We are, as a group, underwhelmed by the analysis. Henry notes that he has seen a significant increase in the price of laptops when shopping for a graduation gift for his nephew. Henry has reportedly seen an increase of around 20% in prices since February.Reasons Why No One Should Ever Be Online. Ever.Hackers have stolen and ransomed AMD’s GPU test files, a dastardly act, but not surprising to see. They’re looking for $100 million to give the files back, while AMD has downplayed their importance and value.Catch of the WeekHenry:  Another empty net week for our pal HenryShahin: How is the internet coping with all of the extra traffic caused by Covid19 isolation?Jessi:   For the first time in recorded history, Jessi’s net is empty….sad.SuperCatchDan:  has a SuperCatch! He does a promo of the inaugural episode of a new RadioFreeHPC segment. Suffice to say that RadioFreeHPC Studios has a brand new production of “Charles Babbage, His Life & Times,” a gripping radio drama that will engage your emotions from A-B.Listen in to hear the full conversation* Download the MP3 * Sign up for the insideHPC Newsletter* Follow us on Twitter * Subscribe on Spotify * Subscribe on Google Play * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed * eMail us

In September of 2018, then-Governor Jerry Brown signed an ambitious executive order committing the State of California to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045 and maintain net negative emissions thereafter. But is this a feasible goal?   Dr. Roger Aines is the Chief Scientist of the Energy Program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and coauthor of the LLNL report Getting to Neutral: Options for Negative Carbon Emissions in California. On this episode of the Reversing Climate Change, Roger joins Ross and Christophe to discuss how the California study came about and walk us through the three carbon removal strategies outlined in the report—natural solutions, waste biomass and direct air capture.   Roger explains the technology involved in turning biomass into hydrogen and offers insight into the relative safety of carbon capture and storage or CCS. Listen in to understand why Roger sees oil and gas evolving into the direct air capture industry and learn how California is leading the charge toward negative emissions.   Key Takeaways   [2:46] Roger’s work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Part of Department of Energy science infrastructure Address questions of moment + long-term issues like climate change   [4:50] The origin of the LLNL report Getting to Neutral  California’s ambition to be carbon neutral by 2045 yet to be studied ClimateWorks funded report to find out if goal feasible   [8:03] The carbon removal strategies outlined in the report Natural solutions (e.g.: trees, store in soil) Waste biomass Direct air capture   [11:02] How we can turn biomass into hydrogen Gasification uses widely available technology from 1920’s Put biomass in gasifier, then catch CO2 to store underground   [15:08] The issues around direct air capture Expensive (cost $300/ton at present) Renewable energy to power takes enormous amount of land   [18:29] Roger’s insight on the safety of carbon capture and storage (CCS) Inject CO2 3K feet underground, fill in spaces in sandstone No leakage from 20-year test done by DOE Must choose right rocks and avoid major fault lines Strict federal and state regulations to control process   [25:20] Industrial carbon management vs. negative emissions Never get rid of all industrial emissions Natural solutions limited to 25M tons stored/year Need to put a lot underground (from atmosphere AND industry)   [31:15] The ‘coming soon’ technology Roger is most excited about Mineral carbonation (rocks react with CO2 to form limestone) Industrial demos in progress in Canada   [35:55] How much the report’s plan would cost California residents Most affordable path = $8B/year (0.3% of GDP) Less than spend on trash collection, average of $60/ton   [39:38] How oil and gas might evolve into the direct air capture industry Companies like Shell want to make products out of CO2 vs. oil Will need constant source, understand tech and have capital   [42:12] Why the LLNL report took a local approach Assume people want jobs and money to stay in state Mistake to assume global optimum will be reached   Connect with Ross & Christophe   Nori Nori on Facebook  Nori on Twitter Nori on Medium Nori on YouTube Nori on GitHub Nori on Patreon Nori Newsletter Email podcast@nori.com  Nori White Paper Subscribe on iTunes Carbon Removal Newsroom   Resources   LLNL Report: Getting to Neutral Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Roger on Twitter Center for Sustainable Energy Research Coordination Network on Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage ClimateWorks Foundation David Roberts on RCC S2EP03 Dr. Greg Dipple on RCC EP009 Project Vesta on CRN EP018 Rhodium Group Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments

A DNA-based additive that could help identify contaminated food.

Well Rick, thanks for joining us. Just introduce yourself.My name is Rick Moy. I'm the chief marketing officer at a company called Acalvio Technologies. We are a Deception 2.0 company. We are creating a distributed deception platform that brings automated deceptions at scale and authenticity to organizations of any size. The goals is to make it easy to manage, deploy, and implement deception strategies in the network in order to do a better job of detecting attackers who have gotten past the prevention that is deployed on the perimeter and on the endpoints. Yeah. Such a great background and experience and fit for some of the conversations that we've been having. We're seeing the realization in the market that static systems aren't secure, they're just not. If an attacker can see what you're doing, they're going to be able to penetrate it.I know you guys have been around a while. Walk through where Deception and changes have happened. What that history looks like.Yeah. Well, so first of all, to set the context like I talked about in my talk this morning, deception has been around for a long time. It exists in nature. You have the Venus Flytrap, the angler fish, you think of those fun things. So, nature's got them. We've used deception in warfare, kinetically, so military use smokescreens, false retreats, fake units, right, during D-Day, we created some inflatable tanks to fool the Germans.In cyber, it really started around 1989 with the German attacker who was breaking into Lawrence Livermore. A guy named Cliff Stoll is one of the first documented deception campaigns, where he actually created fake systems, fake files, and even fake departments logically in the company, and a fake secretary who he gave an account on the system in order to mislead the attacker. So, deception is part of our world, whether we realize it or not.Attackers use deception against us in phishing campaigns, in malware, polymorphic malware. We use deception to sinkhole botnets. We use it to gather threat intelligence externally. The field of honeypots, which most people think about, has been around for 20 years, and that's great. A lot of open source, community level projects. It solves a certain problem, but the change we've noticed over the last few years is that making those enterprise ready, right. What does that mean? No one has time to manage another platform. It takes time to figure out well what kind of campaign do I want to run. There's some manual effort required.The new phase of deception, we call Deception 2.0 has a couple key principals. It's got to be manageable. It's got to be automated. It's got to be authentic. It's got to interoperate with your existing infrastructure fabric. All those things have to be true. That's really only become viable within the last 12, 18 months I would say. There's a lot of Deception offerings that I call more point products. They solve a specific part of the problem, but they aren't as fluid and dynamic as the modern enterprise would like. Keep in mind, developers have been talking about Devops for five years or so now, so that's really become part of the mantra within the CIOs organization. We've gotta be Agile. We've got to adapt to a digital transformation, that's still ongoing.Yeah. You brought up so many good things there. I think that pain point that you talk about where you're already seeing 10,000 threats a day, maybe a million incidents a day, and if you were going to create another system where you're going to create even more incidents. You already are overwhelmed. The idea of how do I handle more when I'm already drinking from the fire hose. How do you guys, both your own technology but what do you see in the market in terms of that filtering, that understanding what is noise on the network and what is the really high-risk elements.That's perfect, right. It's true. There's organizations I've worked with that get millions of alerts a day. That's exactly the problem with the prevention or traditional detection type of technology. Where deception comes in is really a great blessing for the organizations. It's a totally different philosophy.With prevention you're trying to find the bad guy hiding in the crowd. With deception, you've set out fake assets, decoys that will attract them. By definition, anyone whose interacting with that decoy is not following business process. If they're an employee, they're not following the business process. If they're an attacker, they're looking for some data to either steal or ransom back to you. “Deception 2.0 has a couple key principals. It’s got to be manageable. It’s got to be automated. It’s got to be authentic. It’s got to interoperate with your existing infrastructure fabric. ” — Rick Moy The definition of deception is it gives you high-fidelity alerts, so a very small number of them because, in general, they don't occur very often. They're designed specifically to detect lateral movement. Someone who has gotten a foothold on a workstation or a server inside an organization is now trying to pivot and find some of that important treasure to, again, steal or ransom back to you. By doing that, trying to figure out what machines are next to me, what services are in the environment, how do I connect to them ... all those activities could potentially reveal their existence if they connect to them. That's where we come in. Deception's a great compliment to a very noisy existing infrastructure that most organizations already have set up. These two things can be complimentary and used together.Yeah. When you think about when you're creating a network and, essentially, trying to replicate something that looks like your existing environment and putting assets there. How do you do that in a way that's efficient, easy, and that also is believable to an attacker. In many cases, sadly, a lot of organizations don't even know what their network looks like and what's on it. How do you stand one up that's an image of it, a copy of it, that's real ... at least real enough to an attacker?That's a great question. That's exactly one of the shortcomings of the previous generations of honeypot technologies. Modern approaches will allow admins and organizations to use gold images.You can take systems that are actually deployed, dirty images. We call them gold, but a lot of them call them their copper or pewter or their fairly tarnished. They're not necessarily a precious thing. That's exactly what you want. You want to replicate and mimic the actual systems in your environment. If it's too clean, it's going to be suspicious. If it's too locked down, it's probably not going to be a good lure for an attacker. It needs to have the same kinds of flaws that your other systems have.Not to get too technical because we have an audience that spans the range from security professionals to individuals who are tangentially involved, but can you dig in a little bit to one layer deeper in terms of how you do that? Is that done through virtual machines? What's the way you deploy a network?To be honest, there are some that are out of the box that are just standard. There's a whole matrix of different types of deceptions you can deploy. Out of the box, you would get some basic things like SMB file shares, certain Windows operating versions, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10, Server 2012, etc. Those generally we provide. Others can be virtualized or containerized. We call it in our lingo, "service reflection." The process of wrapping an image that's already in production and then mimicking its existence on different VLANs. We have technology that really simplifies that. It's all about making it easy for an organization to roll out a deception campaign.So you're deploying stuff both on prem as well as in the cloud? How is the deployment typically? “There’s a certain investigative, James Bond nature to it ... what’s going on, who’s inside the castle walls, what information do I have, how can we lay some traps to have that person reveal themselves. ” — Rick Moy Acalvio is a cloud first company. Everything we design is meant for organizations who are going to be moving to the cloud or deploying from the cloud. That same engineering discipline allows us to deploy cloud-ready apps on premises in a very efficient DevOps manner. We've done the design for the hard stuff first, but are also deployable on prem.Where are things going? What's new? What do you think people should be really excited and trying out in this phase? What's cutting edge in deception right now?Cutting edge, I'd have to say it's probably the boring part of just making it operational. A couple of years ago, cutting edge was putting up a lone honeypot on the outside of your network and getting external threat intelligence. Well, that's something that a lot of people know. If you put something on the outside of your network, within about 5 minutes, you're going to start getting attacked, right?What's really critically important to the organization, as well as kind of fun I think and so maybe this is the definition of cutting edge, is finding the bad guys who are already inside your network. There's a certain investigative, James Bond nature to it ... what's going on, who's inside the castle walls, what information do I have, how can we lay some traps to have that person reveal themselves. You get into this detective mode, and you start to think well what tools do I have to do that. There really isn't anything more exciting in my mind than the deception arsenal of tools that you have.The honeypot is your actual server, you can put services out there that maybe just like a FTP service, which was used, for example, in the Sony hack. File sharing ... you can put fake spreadsheets out there. You can have false, misleading data in database servers that would, if that data was ever used in public you would know that you had been breached. There's really creative ways that you can think about marking content that if it's touched or used somewhere else will be an indicator. It really forces you, as the security guy, to think a little more holistically about what business are we in. Are we in healthcare ... is it patient records? Are we financial services ... is it bank account information? Are we a R & D shop designing semiconductors, so then it may be IP around a particular laser etching technology or layout of a microprocessor. I would want to have different strategies around each of those. That's what's interesting, and frankly invigorating, for a security person who maybe last week their top priority was applying a patch or responding to some malware on Jane's computer. Now he gets to think more strategically about the business and the threats that it faces. It's something that's typically reserved for the C-level suite, but in reality it's the people who are hands-on that have to implement that. I think it's a great opportunity from many perspectives.Sounds very cool. As people are thinking about adding deception to their strategies, what would you say is the best way to climb the curve, to educate themselves? Are there some resources out there? Are there some books they should check out? What sort of way to get involved there?Actually it's a great question. It's almost a setup. We actually have a couple of books that we've written.Cool.You can go on Amazon. There's a couple historical books you can look at. The Cuckoo's Egg is one. Kevin Mitnick has written a book about deception.We have two free books. One's a Dummies book, Deception for Dummies. It's a very short read. It's actually quite entertaining.You don't have to be a dummy. It does a really good job of explaining it. Then we have an advanced field guide for the advanced practitioner whose had more experience with some honeypot technologies.Awesome. Thanks for taking the time. This is your opportunity if you've got a soap box ... what would you like the community to know if you had 30 seconds, a minute, to say, "Gosh, you know you really need to be thinking about this." I would encourage the community to recognize that deception is all around us. We use it every day, and it's used against us every day, whether it's in advertising, social relationships, and in cyber it's used. Let’s use deception to change the dynamics. The attackers are using automation and forcing us to do manual review of the problems they've created. Deception is the only platform that allows us to lie back to the attacker and change that dynamic and make them do some work.From that perspective, when you look at the technologies at your disposal ... huge points for that. When you also consider that it's lower cost to deploy than a number of other technologies and more effective and lower noise, there's a lot of reasons to look at it. I'd encourage people to have an open mind and to read up on what Gartner says is the number three of the top technologies for the next year.Yeah. Awesome. This is great. Thanks so much.Thanks for the time. 

Founded in 1990, Tales of Blarg became one of the longest running and most influential zines out of the East Bay punk scene that gave the world Lookout Records. Over the years, the it published the work of such Northern California punk rock luminaries as Aaron Cometbus, Iggy Scam, Lawrence Livermore and Robert Eggplant. Janelle Hessig (née Blarg) hasn’t published an issue since 2006, but the writer/cartoonist is still strongly invested in the world of independent publishing. (And inspired a song by Bratmobile along the way.) For years, she worked for Last Gasp, and these days publishes other artists’ work through her own publishing house, when she’s not on the clock at San Francisco PBS affiliate, KQED. In 2014, she published The Cruising Diaries, a collection of writer Brontez Purnell, which Hessig also illustrated. Next year, Gimme Action will publish Rotten Philosophies, a personal collection of work from Hessig, who spent much of last year battling breast cancer. Hessig recommended a local San Francisco bar decorated with work inspired by outsider artist Henry Darger for this conversation, which touches on the importance of self-publishing, the downside of the internet and living day to day with a life threatening disease.

Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention That Launched the Military-Industrial Complex (Simon and Schuster) In Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention That Launched the Military-Industrial Complex, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Hiltzik tells the fascinating story of how one man and one invention forever changed the course of scientific research.  Hiltzik explains how science went “big,” built the bombs that helped win World War II, and became dependent on government and industry. He also sheds new light on the forgotten genius who started it all, Ernest Lawrence. More than eighty years ago in Berkeley, California, a charming and resourceful young scientist with a talent for physics and perhaps an even greater talent for promotion pondered his new invention and declared: “I’m going to be famous!”  His name was Ernest O. Lawrence.  His invention, the cyclotron, would revolutionize nuclear physics, but that was only the beginning of its impact.  It would transform everything about how science was done, in ways that still matter today.  It would deepen our understanding of the basic building blocks of nature. It would help win World War II.   Its influence would be felt in academia, industry, and international affairs. Its progeny include the atomic bomb and the space program. It was the beginning of Big Science.Praise for Big Science“A fascinating biography of a physicist who transformed how science is done.”— Kirkus Reviews“Hiltzik here tells the fascinating story of how this exceptional scientist won support for his epoch-making research tool and then assembled and managed an unprecedented team of experts who used that tool to penetrate subatomic mysteries.  The continuing relevance of such issues will ensure a wide readership for this biographical inquiry into their origins.”— Booklist“In this dual history of Lawrence and the movement he single-handedly brought into being, Hiltzik… explains how Lawrence’s postwar research exceeded the budgets of universities and philanthropic foundations, necessitating government patronage… his portrait of Lawrence, who gave birth to the modern research lab through sheer force of will, is powerful.”— Publishers Weekly“Michael Hiltzik tells an epic story, one with arenas of tragedy as well as triumph, and he tells it well.”— Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian“Einstein famously formulated new theories of the universe while sitting alone in the patent office in Bern. Today, many endeavors in fundamental research require large budgets, elaborate facilities, and huge staffs. How did science become ‘Big Science’?  In this fascinating book, Michael Hiltzik gives us the inside story of this remarkable metamorphosis. This is a gripping biography of Big Science and of the people who originated it.”— Mario Livio, Astrophysicist, and author of Brilliant Blunders“20th-century science delivered a series of revolutions, none more instantaneous than the microseconds it took to explode the first atomic bomb. By framing this story—and the development of the cyclotron that made it possible—from the Lawrence/Livermore perspective rather than the Oppenheimer/Los Alamos perspective that has dominated most accounts, Michael Hiltzik sheds fresh light on the transition from small science to big science that we take for granted today. Especially timely is a fascinating account of Lawrence’s attempt to return to small science: how do you encourage a small group of scientists to produce big results, rather than the other way around?”— George Dyson, author of Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital UniverseMichael Hiltzik is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author who has covered business, technology, and public policy for the Los Angeles Times for more than twenty years.  He currently serves as the Times’s business columnist.  His previous books include Colossus: The Turbulent, Thrilling Saga of the Building of Hoover Dam and The New Deal: A Modern History. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Mr. Hiltzik’s other awards include the 2004 Gerald Loeb Award for outstanding business commentary and the Silver Gavel from the American Bar Association for outstanding legal reporting.  He is a graduate of Colgate University and the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University and lives with his family in Southern California.

Sleep education and awareness to prevent sleep deprivationTRANSCRIPTSpeaker 1:You're listening to k, Berkeley 90.7 FM. And this is method to the madness coming at you from the Public Affairs Department here at Calex celebrating the innovative spirit of the bay area. I'm your host [inaudible] and today we are lucky to have with us in studio, Karen Schwartzback, founder of pivotal sleep. Hey Karen, how's it going? Hey, great. Thanks for having me. So A, we're going to talk about sleep today. Yes, we are. And it's, it's something that we all do a lot. It is yesterday's gone quite a bit of our, uh, nights sleeping. Yeah. It's [00:00:30] amazing because it's something we all do a lot, but we probably don't give a lot of thought to it. Right, right. So, um, so I'd like to start off by asking you about, you founded a company dedicated to sleep yes. And sleep education and awareness. So I want to get into that and what you guys teach. But first let's talk about the problem statement. I always ask this a founder's. Yeah. Why did you start this organization Speaker 2:way back when? I was interested in helping new families actually with the sleep that they were not [00:01:00] getting because their young children weren't sleeping. Uh, once children were sleeping, parents were sleeping better. And what I realized were, was that a lot of my clients had jobs that were, um, very vital to the wellbeing of the community, the world at large. I had pilots and doctors and nurses and firefighters who were the parents of these children. And I often wonder to myself with me being in the hands of a sleep deprived [00:01:30] adult, what might that you know, do in terms of compromising my health and wellbeing? And so not only for their own health and the health of their families, but also just in the world. Uh, people walking around, sleep deprived, driving around, sleep-deprived, flying around, sleep deprived. It really became clear to me that this was, um, sort of epidemic. As a matter of fact, the Center for Disease Control, um, says that sleep is considered a national epidemic. Speaker 1:Okay. So, um, you saw an opportunity [00:02:00] yes. To, um, to address adult sleep issues and make yourself safer, it sounded like. Yes. In part, yeah. Okay. So tell us about your background. Like how did you, uh, you obviously had some, some angle here that made you think of this. How did what, tell us about how you [inaudible]. Great question Speaker 2:came to. So, um, after the birth of my children, I have twins that are almost 19 now with different sleep worries now than when they were babies. Um, I was, um, contracted as an educator at a, [00:02:30] a bay area hospital to educate new and expectant parents. And as a subset of that, I launched a company to support new parents. And the only thing these new parents wanted to really talk about, no matter what I wanted them to talk about was how do I get two babies to sleep and just the impact of sleep deprivation on their own health and wellbeing. And so I sort of toyed around with the idea of helping people with their sleep and um, a client [00:03:00] approach me and ask if I could help her out. She was my Guinea pig. That was 12 years ago and found that I, from a lot of research and personal experience had dialed in a little bit to some sleep solutions for young children. Speaker 2:And so I began to work with families in earnest, um, as sort of a byproduct of my workshop and education programs and, um, never looked back. Actually. I realized I had a knack for it. I was able to drill down into what makes people tick [00:03:30] in terms of achieving or not, um, good sleep. And people used to ask me a lot if I would work with adults. And I used to say once they're walking and talking, you know, I don't want them anymore because they, you know, there's a lot of pushback because, um, we want to do what we want to do in our days, in our evenings and sleep sometimes get short shrift when there's so many other things that we want to do further along. Doing more research, reading Harvard School of sleep medicine, [00:04:00] the Centers for Disease Control, um, uh, the national sleep foundation, seeing the epidemic proportion of sleep deprivation amongst Americans, 50 to 70 million Americans suffer from some degree of sleep loss. Speaker 2:Some it's medical in nature, but I would say probably the majority, it's behavioral. And what I realized was that the behaviors of children aren't that different than the behaviors of adults in terms of structuring sleep in a way to [00:04:30] achieve optimal arrest. Um, and so I started, took the angle of, okay, this is what I do with young children. How different is it for adults and the difference between adults and children's that parents show children or dictate to children what they should do. We as adults or college students or high school students, we have our own minds. And so it's sort of at will to change behaviors to improve sleep health. And so that was really what launched this new entity for me. And the response has been [00:05:00] really remarkable. Speaker 1:AndW when did so the company called pivotal sleep? Speaker 2:Yes. As you launch it. So pivotal sleep is about two years old. Okay. And, um, my other entities started in 2003, so I've been in the sleep world for about 12 years. Okay. Now, uh, let's just [inaudible] Speaker 1:let's try to establish, and we're talking to Karen shores, back of pivotal sleep. She's the founder here on method to the Madison k Alex Berkeley. And let's talk about, I was looking through your website, let's educate a little bit on our listeners. So the, you talk about the three [00:05:30] elements of good sleep. Yeah. Duration, continuity and depth. Can you kind of define for us a little bit about those three? Like what, how do those three things work together to provide good sleep? Speaker 2:Right. And so when you look at those three elements as important, are the precursors to, um, getting a good depth of sleep for a proper duration and good quality. So duration, how many hours of sleep do we need? People always that question. There are people that say, I'm great on five hours sleep. [00:06:00] There are people that say, I get eight hours and I could use more. So there really isn't a magic number. Um, the national sleep foundation and most entities you speak with will say approximately seven to eight hours of sleep for adults. Teenagers, ironically, can't go to sleep as early as adults or younger children because of the onset of Melatonin, which we can get into or, or not. Um, but in terms of the duration of sleep, there is some degree of variability. Uh, there was a recent, not [00:06:30] maybe not so recent study by the University of California, San Francisco, and they found that there's about 3% of the adult population that can sustain themselves well on six hours or less of sleep. Speaker 2:But for the 97% of the rest of us, six hours isn't really adequate sleep. So let's say you get seven hours of sleep. What about the quality of your sleep? There are a lot of apps out there. There are fitbit's and misfits and all these different tools that you can use. It can actually measure the kind [00:07:00] of sleep that you're getting. Am I getting deep sleep? Am I getting light sleep for the duration I'm in bed? How many hours am I actually sleeping? There really isn't a magic number in terms of how many hours of rem sleep versus non rem sleep. You get rem sleep and non-rem sleep together. A sleep cycle is about 90 to 120 minutes for adults. And so, um, there's a sleep specialist that calculates about five hours of five cycles of, um, of total sleep [00:07:30] to get restorative sleep, which turns out to be about seven and a half hours of sleep. Speaker 2:People wake up in the middle of the night and people complain that they can't go back to sleep. So broken sleep isn't as restorative as continuously, but the truth of the matter is a sleep cycle is only 90 to 120 minutes. So we all actually wake up in the course of sleep, but go back to sleep. It's those people that wake up and can't go back to sleep that then have compromised, uh, total restorative rest. So when they wake [00:08:00] up in the morning, they're not ready to get out of bed because they're still tired. Um, but their day begins and they have to get up and, you know, get on with her day. Speaker 1:Yeah. So, um, have you talked about in terms of the three elements, the duration, um, given the fact that everybody's unique and you can't prescribe for everybody, but right. The general guidelines is between seven and eight. Correct. And then, um, the two other factors, continuity. So you're, I think what I heard you say every 90 to 120 minutes, [00:08:30] you're gonna kind of rouse and reposition. Exactly. And then that's the second component and a third is depth. Right? And that's where you could get a fitbit or something like that to measure that. Is that Ram when we hear rem sleep depth, Speaker 2:right. So, so there are, you know, rem and non rem sleep are both important elements of the sleep cycle. So, um, when you're in rem sleep, your body is oddly in a state of paralysis. So your body doesn't, that's how the fitbit actually measures it. It's measuring movement. [00:09:00] So my body's not moving. I'm in my deeper state of sleep, but wrap, my brain is active, but my body's very still. When I'm in a lighter phase of sleep, my brain is in a lighter phase. But my body is more active. So how many cycles of rem or non rem sleep you might be getting, um, is variable as well. So it's not like I have to get six people ask me, well how can I ensure that I get more cycles of Rem Sleep? Well 90 to 120 minutes is both of your four stages of lighter sleep, [00:09:30] non rem sleep and then one stage of, of rem sleep. Speaker 2:So it's your non rem cycles cumulatively are longer than your rem cycles. Um, but cumulatively it creates the restorative nature of your total sleep intake. So it's hard to kind of explain what it is I'm trying to say. But not everybody is getting full cycles because they're waking up from precursory reasons, which I'd be happy to go into and explain to you why people are waking up half way [00:10:00] through the night and they don't know if it's a rum or non-rem cycle that they're waking out of. Right. Okay. Why are they waking up? So not dissimilar to young children. What happens during the day is impacting how you're sleeping at night? So things that people don't think about as impacting the depth of their sleep or the quality or duration of their sleep are things that we might do before we go to bed. For example, low blue light exposure, the smart phones, um, I iPads [00:10:30] computers that is emitting a low blue light, which actually suppresses the body's capacity to produce Melatonin and it can actually impact and disrupt our sleep. Speaker 2:So for those of you out there who are on your computer until you shut it off and turn out the lights, you may fall asleep, but you wake up and you're not sure why you're tired, but the low blue light exposure is actually suppressing the body's ability to produce Melatonin. That's one. Another might be alcohol. A lot of people [00:11:00] have their glass of wine. It sort of sends them off to sleep. But when the body metabolizes wine, it can be dehydrating and there's a sugar content and so it actually can wake people up. So there's things that are happening in the earlier part of our day that's actually impacting why we're waking up in the middle of the night or not being able to fall asleep. And I did a talk over at Lawrence Livermore national labs about a month ago. There are about a hundred people in the room and I asked the question, how many people have a hard time falling asleep? Speaker 2:And maybe 20% of the audience raised [00:11:30] their hand. And the next question was, how many of you have a, you can fall asleep but wake up. And the vast majority of people raise their hands. So that led me to believe that for many people, it's not the falling asleep part, it's the staying asleep part. I'm awake at three o'clock in the morning and I can't go back to sleep. So what do I do? I look at my clock and now I'm doing math and the light is red and stimulating and suddenly I'm awake. And then I'm thinking, okay, if I can fall back asleep, I've got three more hours until I have to get up and be in class or whatever [00:12:00] it might be. And so we're now disrupting our body's ability to go back to sleep because now we're in an active state of thought Speaker 1:and stress and stress. It's, it's like a downward cycle of it. Yeah, Speaker 2:exactly. And a lot of people also think they should stay in bed until they fall back asleep. And most experts will say, if you're laying in bed awake and you can't fall asleep within 15, 20 minutes, you should actually get out of bed and go to a quiet dimly lit place. Not Look at your iPhone or your computer. Don't watch TV. Um, and [00:12:30] um, have a, maybe a light behind your head and read quietly or listen to some relaxing music or play guitar or something that's very relaxing. And when you start to tell drowsy to go back to bed. Speaker 1:Okay, interesting. Well, we're talking to Karen shores, Bach of founder of pivotal sleep here on methods of the magnets. KLX Berkeley 90.7 FM. And we're talking about sleep. So, um, thank you for going over kind of the basics. I did want to ask them. Alec Melatonin. Yes. I'm not very familiar [00:13:00] with it. Can you just explain to how, what is it, how does it get created and how does it relate to sleep? Speaker 2:Great question. So, um, I like to call Melatonin the body's natural sleep drug. And so in between our eyebrows, if you will, we have the pineal gland and the pineal gland secretes Melatonin. Melatonin is the sleep hormone that our bodies use. Melatonin onsets around nine o'clock at night and, um, allows us, you know, seven to nine hours of peak melatonin [00:13:30] production. And so without Melatonin, there are some people that take synthetic Melatonin. There's probably some part of the population that doesn't produce adequate Melatonin. But in essence, if we allow ourselves to utilize the Melatonin within our system and not compromise it by the low blue light or other things that we might be doing that as suppressing it, that should be enough to help asleep. For a lot of people they'll use melatonin because they're doing other things that are compromising Melatonin's function. And [00:14:00] so synthetic Melatonin or other sleep aids that they may use is sort of taking the place of what we can actually create [inaudible] nature has created for us. Speaker 2:Nature has created for us and Melatonin is Melatonin and it's not like it's changed. Circadian Rhythm is 24 hours in a few minutes. And so the body functions before the industrial revolution, before light bulbs, when it got dark, man went to sleep and when the sun came up the man woke up and our bodies are still in that rhythm and Melatonin is actually [00:14:30] stimulated by darkness. And so the low blue that I was talking about earlier is suppressing that about the body's capacity to produce it. But ironically, being out in sunlight, which actually stimulates cortisol, which is sort of the stress or a fight or flight chemical, our bodies produce can actually serve later in the date to expedite Melatonin when we move into darker light or sunset or what have you. So melatonin and cortisol, if I can use a biblical sort of term of David [00:15:00] and Goliath. So I like to think of Melatonin as David, you know, kind of this, you know, groovy, scruffy beard accounting guy and cortisol being Goliath. This big hairy monster, well Melatonin can't bring down cortisol but cortisol can sort of squash Melatonin. And that's how I describe it to folks that I'm working with because it is a very visual that you can see that if I'm doing things that are going to actually compromise the body's ability to suppress Melatonin, Melatonin can't get up and over whatever it is that's [00:15:30] getting in the way. Speaker 1:Yeah. It's interesting. You know, I have a three year old and uh, putting her to sleep is a tough yeah. And um, we've been trying to find the right time and we were debating this. My wife was debating, well, when there's an optimal time, the Melatonin is being released yet we don't quite know what it is. I mean, we're putting her to bed too late. You think the later you put the child to bed, the more tired there'll be, the more they go to sleep. But there's this window of opportunity. Yeah. Right. So how does that work? Speaker 2:Totally counterintuitive. And, and [00:16:00] I've worked with over 500 clients privately. Um, and I've seen time and time and time again the resistance of an earlier bedtime. But the truth of the matter is if a child's put down after their Melatonin window has closed, so let's say your daughter is in the bath and she's having a great time and she comes out of the bath, her Melatonin that was peaking because she was in warm water and elevated body temperature crashes when the body temperature drops and cortisols are at takes over. And so she's zipping around and [00:16:30] full of energy and you think, well that's going to tire her out and she's going to go to sleep. But her, you can't like lift the head and spin around and get the Melatonin, you know, come to the top like cream. And so it's ironic that an earlier bedtime is actually more productive and yields an easier put down than a later bedtime, which is sort of counterintuitive to folks. Speaker 1:Yeah, it really is. So I wanted to go down, I wanted to go down that path for a little bit. So, um, kind of best practices. [00:17:00] Yeah. So, uh, I wanted to talk about kind of different types of people's. Let's talk with babies. Okay. That's more you started your extra money. So, um, given we know all babies are different and all people are different, but you've been doing this for awhile now it sounds like, was it 12 years, 12 years? So, uh, what are some of the top tips for a new parent that you can give to help them, you know, deal with this stress of having this little person who wakes up all the time and cry? Speaker 2:I love that question so [00:17:30] much because some of the things I'm going to tell you are also applicable to adults. And so again, once again, the things that we do before we put the body to bed can impact the body's ability to sleep. So for children, and I can also say most of these things for adults, room environment. So National Sleep Foundation, um, talks about having optimal room environment and most sleep experts will talk about optimizing the room environment. Once again, the body reads, light is awake, [00:18:00] dark is asleep. So for little children and for adults having a room that's dark, cool and quiet, that's really information gathering on the body's part that says, oh, I see it's dark. It's telling my body Melatonin production time and the white noise if you will use it or no noise at all. But having a quiet room environment can also calm the mind. Speaker 2:If there's a white noise element, it's sort of, um, I call it ps noise. It's sort of in the distance, but it just a very settling and relaxing to the subconscious. [00:18:30] There actually some white noise players that have been, um, designed by, um, scientists or they're using the brainwaves as um, sort of the rhythm of the white noise. Um, the temperature. Cool. I say cool is the rule. A cooler room is much more conducive to sleep than a warm room. 65 to 72 degrees peak, whether they be little children or adults. So a cooler room is more optimal, a dark room, a quiet room. Um, if you have clocks or [00:19:00] stimulating day decor or a video camera that has a light shining in the baby's face, that can be very distracting as either as a stimulating element if it's red or if it's green or blue as a low blue light element that's suppressing Melatonin. Speaker 2:So having a room environment that's conducive to sleep, having a routine. And this goes for adults too. It may seem strange to have a ritual around sleep. So we're doing these three things, four things before we go to bed, whether it be a little child who's [00:19:30] having a bath, a diaper change into pajamas, a final feeding, a story, a poem, prayer, whatever it might be. Those elements are conditioning at the body receives at the same way in the same order each and every time the body starts to expect it and anticipate it for adults as well. There's a lot of adults, many adults who have ritual around their sleep. So they may turn off their electronics an hour before they go to sleep. They may take a warm bath, they may do deep [00:20:00] breathing, relaxation, yoga, whatever might be relaxing for them. Perhaps they have a, a chair that they go to and they write their worry list. Speaker 2:So they take out of their mind that things they have to do tomorrow or the worries that they have on their mind so they can sort of cleanse the palate, if you will, to then move into a sleeping phase. So I have a colleague that calls it the sleep room, not the bedroom because parents, people have a tendency to do a lot of things in their bedroom, TV, computers, Bill Paying, [00:20:30] reading, I'm moving it or perceiving it as a place to sleep. It can oftentimes be soothing and relaxing for people because they're not stimulated by all the other things that might go on in a room. So for children to have these routines and, um, environmental, um, triggers, the same applies for adults. The third thing I would say this is really, really important for children and a lot of parents miss this is nutrition. [00:21:00] Um, I call it fueling the car for the body to be able to drive the distance like the car drives with gas net, we need to optimally fuel it. Speaker 2:So a lot of times a three year old might be very carb-heavy crackers, fruits, vegetables, which can be wholesome. You could grow them in your backyard or get them at whole foods or wherever you might get them. But the carbs are carbs, protein sources are more sustainable and can actually help the body fuel itself for more prolonged, more productive sleep for adult, spicy foods, [00:21:30] alcohol, obviously a lot of liquids, red bowls, um, uh, heavy meats. Um, there are a lot of foods that can actually impact the body's ability either to fall asleep or stay asleep either because of the metabolizing in the system or the spicy foods can be disruptive to the digestive process or what have you. Surfing Kathleen's huge. Um, I had a cup of coffee on my way in here and I'm one of those people that can turn off the lights after coffee later in the evening. Speaker 2:But for most people having [00:22:00] coffee, um, after three o'clock, so maybe five hours before you go to bed, for most people not having caffeine, whether it be a soda, a Red Bull, uh, coffee and even decaffeinated beverages still have a degree of caffeine in them. Um, so that's another, um, no, no, if it, if it bothers you. And that's what I say to everybody, whether it be an adult or a child. Just to your point, we're all different and caffeine may not bother me, but my computer might and the computer [00:22:30] may not bother you, but caffeine might. And so when I'm working with um, adults, I have them actually keep a baseline sleep diary. So I'm not going to give you any solutions. I just want you to observe yourself, take yourself into the laboratory, track your behaviors. This is what I did today and this is how I slept tonight. Speaker 2:So in the morning, reflecting back, here's what I did today. And then the morning that I wake up in the middle of the night, did I have a hard time falling asleep in the middle of the night? I'll look at that. I did. What did I do the previous day? That may have been that trigger. [00:23:00] Let's see what happens if I turn off my computer 90 minutes before I go to bed. Let's see what happens if I don't have that glass of wine, whatever it might be, and slowly but surely we can start to pull out the triggers and leaving the things that really aren't disruptive to our sleep. Well, Speaker 1:we were speaking with Karen Schwartzbach, she's the founder of pivotal sleep and she's given a great tips on how to manage your sleep. But I have a question for you. You were talking about babies and a little bit about adults, but you know this, this show, I've interviewed a lot of people who would have startups in. Then we're also on [00:23:30] the UC Berkeley campus and Vlade students and students and people working in startups. They have weird schedules and it's very difficult to have the routine that you're talking about. So how do you prescribe better sleep habits for people in that situation where they can't always control and they might Speaker 2:have to stay up until one o'clock in the morning and doing something and yeah, they've on their on deadline and that just happens in their lives. I think one of the greatest challenges I have working in or near the silicon valley is that we're dealing with a lot [00:24:00] of high tech companies and a lot of very busy executives or startup folks or what have you. They're burning the midnight oil and if they understood the longterm impact, because if I'm tired tomorrow morning, I'm going to grab myself a triple Cappuccino and I kind of good to go. I may start to fade around three o'clock, I just grab another one and I continue to go. But if folks understood the longterm impact of sleep deprivation, whether it be heart disease, obesity, depression, [00:24:30] um, eh, the ailments that can be a result of extended and prolonged sleep deprivation is pretty scary. Speaker 2:But people don't look forward that way there. There are sort of in the moment. So what can I do now to preserve the sleep that I am getting? I had a law firm in New York. Um, the um, wellness director said our attorneys sleep four hours a night and they're not going to get more sleep than that. So please don't come here and tell them to sleep eight hours because that's not gonna, that's not the prescription for them. So what can they do? So it's to make the sleep that they [00:25:00] get count. And I'm not advocating four hours of sleep, so don't miss quote me here. But for students who have finals, for folks that are in startups and maybe are talking to folks in India and they have to be up in the middle of the night for con for conference calls or what have you, there's been some research, there's a doctor in San Diego who actually has done some research around the optimal timing for physical, restorative repair. Speaker 2:So I'm not talking about the optimal time to sleep. It's the optimal time for your body to get its physical [00:25:30] and psychological cellular repair and those hours between 10 and 2:10 PM and 2:00 AM so I have almost 19 year old twins and um, I've had many conversations with them about should I go to sleep at 11 o'clock and get up at three and study or should I stay up till two and then go to bed? So we sort of have an agreement that rather you go to bed between 10, 10 and 11, and then you get up pre-dawn and do your studying because you're actually going to be more alert and you're gonna retain more information [00:26:00] than if you burned through and then just collapse it three to get up at six and start all over again. So that's just one example. It may not work for everyone, but it's just a suggestion. Speaker 2:And, um, this doctor in San Diego feels like she's really onto something. I don't have her name to give you. Um, but I've been very curious to see really the longterm impact on the body's, um, ability to say healthy sleeping that way before the industrial revolution. People actually slept in two, four hour blocks, they'd go to bed when the [00:26:30] sun went down, got up to milk, the cows, went back to bed and slept till six or seven o'clock. So it's really the advent of the light bulb that has really changed the way we function in the work world. Yeah. You know, Speaker 1:it's interesting, there's so many different tactics. Like my, um, you know, when I started to learn a little bit more about sleep and, and I would push myself in sleeping Ivers like five hours a night. But, um, when I started doing is, that'll still happen during the week sometimes. But then I'll, I won't let that happen [00:27:00] more than a couple of days in a row and then I'll try to do that catch up. Right. So it's not, we're not on the long term. Like in a short term, if there's a window I have to do it, I have to do it right. But I'll always try to catch up. Right. And that seems to have made me feel happier and better. And Speaker 2:so people ask that question a lot. Can I catch up? If I have a sleep debt, can you race the sleep debt in the short term? You can probably reduce it, but if that's your lifestyle year upon year upon year and you're sleeping till noon on Saturday and then you're back on [00:27:30] track, you know, Sunday night at late hours, there may be longterm impact. So if I can share just a small anecdote. Um, um, a friend's wife is an executive at Walmart and she gets about four hours of sleep and she's in her early thirties and has never really valued sleep. She's hard charging, very goal oriented, what have you. She had a doctor's appointment and the doctor said that he saw some precursory heart disease. First question he asked her was how well do you sleep? [00:28:00] And she said not well, and you know, before we start medicating you, I want you to start focusing on your sleep. Which was really a surprise to her because she didn't realize that that could potentially be the antidote for her longterm health. Speaker 1:Well also, I think at that age we all feel a little bit indestructable sleep. You know you're trying, there's a lot of people you're trying to serve and sleeps and easy one to sacrifice and it's only for you. Yes, that's the way I used to look at it as I've caught a lot of different people, a lot of different masters. I can just cut that out and I can serve all these different masters [00:28:30] but you know we're finding out more and more as a science comes out that that's a bad idea because you won't be around to serve all this. Speaker 2:Exactly, and I would like to just mention to the Harvard School of sleep medicine talks about the three pillars of health. It's physical activity, nutrition and sleep. So I like to think of it as a tripod. If the one leg on the tripod is missing, that tripod can't stand and so people could just visualize that, yes, I eat well, I get my daily jog but I'm completely sleep deprived. At what point is [00:29:00] that going to catch up with me? I want to give just an a comment to your question about students have to stay up late and folks that are working long hours, just in terms of the low blue light, if being on the computer or our other devices is your device, you can actually download, um, a program that will start changing the backlight of your computer from blue to yellow as the day goes on onto it's set to the clock and um, one's called Pango bright and the other f flux and [00:29:30] I may not be exactly spot on, but if you Google it, you can find, um, a program that you can download that will actually help, um, change the lighting so you can be on the computer longer at night if you, and of course your brain still active, but at least your melatonin production isn't being compromised by that low blue light. Speaker 2:There's also a company called low blue lights.com, founded by two, um, uh, professors at John Carroll University in Ohio. And, um, they worked for GE light bulbs for 30 years, making the brightest light bulbs they could [00:30:00] until they realized in their older age that that was actually compromising people's, uh, sleep quality. So they founded low blue lights and they're about 80 something years old. And I tease them and say, is their pennants for stealing less people asleep for so long? And so they have a whole line of products that are scientifically designed, low blue light glasses, um, screens that can go over your iPhone, your iPad, your computer, your TV, and it's just a sheet of amber plastic. But it's not [00:30:30] just you go to a tap plastics and get a piece of yellow plastic that's very scientifically designed to help preserve Melatonin production while you're, um, on these devices that otherwise could impact. Speaker 1:Well, great tips from our guests today. Karen Shores Bach, the founder of pivotal sleep. So thanks for coming into studio design, Karen, and to learn more about her work and how you can get in touch with her. You go to pivotal sleep.com. Is that right? Any, any other way they should get into contact? That's the best way to reach me. Okay, great. And you've been listening to a method [00:31:00] to the madness day on KLX Berkeley. I'm your host. Selling is our, thanks for joining everybody and have a great Friday. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Jon Stewart hasn’t said this on-air yet… but maybe he will in 2015! VERMONT YANKEE ORAL HISTORY MONTAGE Join activists from throughout New England as they celebrate the closure of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant. Hear from Leslie Sullivan Sachs, Paul Gunter and Kevin Kamps of Beyond Nuclear, plus locals who’ve been in the...

The Social Network Show welcomes Norman Pattiz to the December 17, 2014, episode. Norman Pattiz, founder of Courtside Entertainment Group, PodcastOne and founder and former Chairman and CEO of Westwood One shares his history--from being a leader in broadcast radio to being a leader in podcasting. Find out about PodcastOne, their popular podcasts, and the advantages of on-demand audio over broadcast radio. Norm also shares a new exciting breakthrough for the podcasts on PodcastOne. Norman Pattiz is the founder and former Chairman and CEO of radio giant Westwood One, which under his leadership was America's largest radio network and provider of news, sports, entertainment, talk and traffic programming to the broadcast industry. Westwood One owned, managed or distributed NBC radio networks, CBS News, CNN radio, the Mutual Broadcasting System, NFL Football, NCAA Basketball, March Madness, The Super Bowl, both the Winter and Summer Olympic Games and a wide variety of syndicated music and talk shows. In 2010, Pattiz, founded and launched Courtside Entertainment Group. The company produces and finances multi-platform, quality programming and is the radio home of Loveline, Bill O'Reilly, Dr. Drew, Laura Ingraham, Ron Paul and a wide variety of music super specials. Recognizing the untapped opportunities in the audio on-demand industry, Pattiz launched PodcastOne at the end of 2012. The company quickly became the leading producer and distributor in audio on-demand programming. Today, PodcastOne's popular line-up of personalities and brands include Adam Carolla, Dan Patrick, Steve Austin, Radio Lab, Freakonomics Radio, The Nerdist, Jay Mohr, Kathie Lee Gifford, Dennis Miller, Penn Jillette, Ross Tucker, Yahoo Sports, Bret Eason Ellis, WNYC, KCRW, Loveline, Dr. Drew and over 200 more of the nation's most popular podcasts. PodcastOne programs are downloaded over 120 million times every month. In 2000, Pattiz was appointed by President Clinton and reappointed in 2002 by President Bush to serve on the Broadcasting Board of Governors of the United States of America. The Board oversees all U.S. nonmilitary broadcasting services, including The Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Middle East Broadcasting and others. He was responsible for conceiving and launching America's Arabic language radio and television services to all 22 countries of the Middle East, plus Farsi language broadcasting to Iran reaching a weekly audience of more than 40 million listeners. Pattiz currently serves as a Regent of the University of California. He is the Chairman of the Regent's Oversight Committee of the Department of Energy Laboratories and serves as the Chairman of the Board of the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Security LLC Pattiz is a member of the National Radio Hall of Fame and has been the recipient of numerous professional and leadership awards including the “Giants of Broadcasting Award” from the Library of American Broadcasting and the “Freedom of Speech Award” from the national association of talk radio hosts. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Pacific Council on International Relations. Pattiz resides in Beverly Hills and Santa Barbara and is married to the former LA Rock and Roll radio legend Mary Turner. Dr. Turner Pattiz, a Ph.D. psychologist, is the Chairman of the Board of the Betty Ford Center.

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.

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.

David Sedlak is a professor in the school of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley. He is also the Deputy Director of the NSF Engineering Center named Renuwit, which stands for Reinventing the nation's urban water infrastructure, and a member of the Berkeley Water Center. http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/~sedlak/ http://urbanwatererc.org/TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next [inaudible]. Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a 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 local events and news. Speaker 2: Good afternoon. My name is Brad swift and I'm the host of today's show. Our interview is with UC Berkeley Civil and environmental engineering professor David Sedlak. He is the deputy director of a new NSF engineering center named renew it, which stands for re-inventing the nation's urban water infrastructure. The center partner [00:01:00] institutions are Stanford, the Colorado School of Mines, New Mexico State University and UC Berkeley. Professor said Lac is a member of the Berkeley Water Center and has been teaching at Berkeley for 17 years. This interview is prerecorded and edited. Professor Sedlak, thanks very much for coming to spectrum and talking with us. Oh, you're welcome. I'm really happy to be here. I wanted to start by laying a foundation a little bit for people who may not be familiar with the [00:01:30] kinds of work that you're doing and the issues related to water that you deal with. Speaker 3: I think my main area of interest is really the way in which we manage water in cities. So that includes everything from the drinking water supply, the waste that we generate, the storm runoff that comes through the streets and the entire urban water cycle. Speaker 2: Can you describe the water cycle in a city? Speaker 3: Sure it is. Yeah. There's no one urban water cycle [00:02:00] in the city. The water cycle that we all learn in junior high school is that the water evaporates from the ocean. It falls in the mountains, the mountain runoff create the streams, the streams throat floated the ocean and then there's a city on the stream. The city picks up water from the river, it goes through a water treatment plant. People use it in their houses, it goes down the drain, it goes to a sewage treatment plant. It goes back in the river and it goes to the ocean. And that might've been the situation 70 or 80 [00:02:30] years ago, but now our cities are much more crowded and the situation's much more diverse. So, for example, many cities that river where they collect their drinking water from is downstream of another city. So the water in that river is already been in and out of the previous city. And so the water supply consists of river water mixed with sewage effluent. Speaker 2: And do you think it's helpful to assess water [00:03:00] globally to give a context in the sense of how much fresh water is there, how much wastewater is there? Speaker 3: There's been a lot of good work done on water, especially at the national or regional level. And one of the things that people often miss is that water in cities is quite different from water at a national scale. So for example, at a national scale, cities only use about 20% of the water. The other 80% goes to agriculture and power plant cooling. But [00:03:30] if you're a city and you run out of water, there's not much solace in the fact that there's a farm hundreds of miles away that has water, or there's a power plant in another state that has that water. So water is a local issue. And cities are places where there's a very large demand for water in a very small space and that stresses their ability to deliver water and leads to water shortages. So you can have a situation where you have a country or a state which has [00:04:00] plenty of water, but you have a city that's running out of water and doesn't have a good option for providing more. Speaker 3: Just to give you an example of a city that almost ran out of water a few years ago, so many of us have seen the photos and news stories about Brisbane, Australia last year when they had tremendous flooding that almost washed away the city will about four or five years ago, that same city almost ran out of water. So Brisbane is a city of around a million people along the gold coast [00:04:30] of Australia. It's Australia is equivalent of Florida that it's a place that developed mainly during the 70s up until the present and they don't have an imported water supply from a long distance. And so they were beholden mainly to one main reservoir. And when Australia went into a drought about 10 years ago, the level of water in that reservoir kept sinking and sinking and sinking. And about four years ago they had about 15% [00:05:00] capacity in the reservoir and they were using about one or 2% a month. And so if the rain didn't return, they were going to actually run out of water and there wasn't going to be any water for the city. So they'd already done the water conservation, they'd already stopped all the wasteful uses of water and they were reaching a point where they would have to shut down the city or take emergency measures to bring water in at very high prices. Speaker 2: Cities [00:05:30] really can't know that this is going to befall them, but they all need to take a much more active role in figuring out what the wiggle room is and their water supply. Speaker 3: With wise planning. Cities can anticipate these pinch points or these crunches in their water supply, but that assumes that you have some foresight. I'll give you an example of a place that has a lot of foresight about their water supply. And that would be Singapore, where water is actually considered national security. So [00:06:00] Singapore, if you're not familiar with the geography, is surrounded by Malaysia. And when the British left and they created two countries in that region, Singapore was still receiving its water from Malaysia. So there's a foreign country that controls your water supply and the founder of Singapore, Lee Kuan, you realize that the country will be very susceptible to Malaysia holding them hostage over their water. And so they established an aggressive plan [00:06:30] to develop alternative water supplies so they can wean themselves from their imported water. And today Singapore's at a place where the imported water supplies only fraction of the total water used in the city. Speaker 2: That kind of planning is that growing worldwide and in the United States, Speaker 3: in the United States especially, it seems like we wait for an emergency to happen. And so when a drought happens, someone says, Gee, we [00:07:00] should be doing something about this. And so in places where droughts have occurred and people have seen the start of this progression of shortages, city managers and water utilities have taken some steps to build up the water supply and make themselves more secure. Good example of that would be orange county in southern California, Orange County which grew after the rest of the Los Angeles area has relatively junior water rights relative to the city of Los Angeles [00:07:30] and many of the other communities that get imported water. And so in order to grow they've had to keep improving their local water supply and take on some innovative programs to augment the public water supply that break them away from imported water sources. Speaker 1: [inaudible]Speaker 2: you are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. We are talking with Professor David [00:08:00] said lack about current and future urban water systems. Is there something that individuals can do in terms of recycling water that has an impact?Speaker 3: The best thing people can do to improve the urban waters situation is just to use less water. So the average American uses a hundred gallons or so of water a day, 10 gallons every time we take a shower, a 40 gallons when we washed a load of clothing [00:08:30] in a few gallons. When you flush the toilet, everything else. So if you just think in terms of water use, it's possible to save a lot of water around the house and all of the water you save means that there's that much more water to go around and there's that much more water, water around for the environment. So that's the first thing everyone can do. And I think most of us are guilty in some way or another of wasting water, either leaving the water running while we brush teeth or taking super long showers or just being prolific that with, with our [00:09:00] water use. Speaker 3: I think the other thing that many people don't realize is that there's a connection between water and energy. So there's a lot of energy use in heating water for the house. So if you look at the urban water cycle, we could probably go a long way towards running our urban water system if we didn't heat the water. After all the Romans had flowing water and they didn't have electricity. A lot of our water system functions on gravity, but the minute we start heating many gallons [00:09:30] of water in the home, we're burning a lot of electricity. The other thing that you could do with respect to water is think about runoff and what goes down down into the street. All the junk that we throw out eventually finds its way into the bay and I think most people would be hesitant to just throw a plastic bag or a bucket full of soapy water into the bay if they were standing right next to it. Speaker 3: Well, when you pour it in the street or wash your car or throw some trash in the street, that's [00:10:00] essentially what you do in the home. Is there a way for people to reuse water? There are a lot of people who really want to make a difference with respect to their water. And there's a lot of enthusiasm in the public for something called gray water and gray water is this idea that you have all this water in your house, it's relatively clean. It's the stuff that you, you know the water that was in the sink when you washed your vegetables or it's even the water that was in your washing machine that rinse your clothes after you wash them. [00:10:30] And that we should be able to use this water somehow. And I think it's great that there's this intention to save water and to reuse water and you certainly can collect this water and put it on the plants and the garden. Speaker 3: But it's really not a solution to our larger urban water problems. And there are a couple of reasons for that. One is to do this in an organized way, takes a collection and distribution system. So if you have water from your sink or water from your shower, then [00:11:00] you have to have a way to collect it and you have to have a way to use it and maybe you're going to use it in the garden, but there's no guarantee that that water is going to be safe and free of microbes that can make people sick and there's no guarantee that that's going to be economically attractive once you price out the cost of building all these other pieces. And so new construction, there are many ways to make a building more water efficient, [00:11:30] low flow fixtures and water conserving practices. But the way in which it seems that we're going to make the biggest difference is to think about the whole urban water system and how it can be reinvented to do things differently. Speaker 3: For example, there may be a future when toilets and washing machines don't use water anymore. I have a friend who works for the EPA and he has a vacuum toilet in his house that functions just like [00:12:00] those vacuum toilets on airplanes. So there's nothing that says that 50 years from now we're going to be washing our waists down the toilet with water where there are companies that had been exploring washing machines that use very small quantities of water. So many people were already switched from top loading washing machines to front loading, washing machines that use a fraction of the water. There may be a future where we even cut that two to a fraction once again. So I'm much more confident that technological [00:12:30] innovations will lead the way as opposed to these small scale piece by piece solutions that people feel good about because they're taking an active role but ultimately either turn out to be more expensive than the system we have or have their own sets of limitations. Speaker 3: What sort of advances have there been in sewage treatment over your time of interest? Sure, so sewage treatment plants were [00:13:00] originally designed to to protect surface waters. So really the main reason people built sewage treatment plants was there was too much gunk going into rivers and the fish were dying from lack of oxygen. When you talk about building a sewage treatment plant because you want to recycle the water, perhaps even to put it in the potable water supply, it's a whole different level of technology. So over the last 20 years, technologies have been developed to purify water to a point that you can [00:13:30] have sewage coming in one end of a treatment plant and the water that comes out looks like bottled water coming out of the the store. And there's a whole host of different technologies that are getting less and less expensive every year and are making it more attractive to build these kinds of advanced sewage treatment plants. Speaker 3: Is there a lot of construction of sewage stream and plastic gotta be very expensive? I would imagine that. So the place where you see construction of sewage treatment plants [00:14:00] is in the cities where there's a need to recycle water or to reclaim this sewage as part of the water supply. So, for example, um, Orange County, which I talked about earlier in southern California, built an advanced treatment plant because they wanted to take their sewage and instead of putting it out in the ocean like they used to, they wanted to put it back into the drinking water supply. So they built a very large advanced sewage treatment plant that takes the water and puts it through reverse osmosis membranes. [00:14:30] Those are the same kinds of membranes that are used to desalinate seawater and then subjected to ultraviolet radiation to kill the pathogens along with hydrogen peroxide to break down the chemicals and then putting it into the drinking water supply. Speaker 3: So it's not your grandparents sewage treatment plan. It's really something that's a lot more advanced. And how is that being accepted by the the users? There's a mixed record of public acceptance of advanced sewage treatment [00:15:00] plants for augmenting the water supply. So in Orange County they've had pretty good public acceptance, but they also had a very long program of public education about their water situation. In other places. I'm in San Diego as an example or in Brisbane, Australia. These advanced treatment plants came at the public out of the blue and they really weren't aware that there was a problem and they weren't aware that there were technologies that [00:15:30] had been used as solutions in other places, so when the public heard that there was sewage water going into the water supply, they couldn't accept it and the projects died. A quick death in public hearings. Speaker 4: [inaudible] you are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. We're talking with Professor David Sedlak about [00:16:00] current and future urban water systems. Speaker 3: I was wondering if you want to talk about, sure. The kinds of research, my own research mainly focuses on chemicals and water and I'm very interested in the chemicals mainly that are present in sewage that might find their way back into the environment because our treatment plants aren't perfect. I first got into this topic about 15 years ago when I saw a talk from a scientist [00:16:30] from Britain who had found that fish living near sewage treatment plants were feminized. That is they would go out and collect fish below the sewage treatment plant and they couldn't find any male fish. They all were female. And this phenomena of feminisation was really fascinating to me because I thought to myself, well, if this is happening to the fish when they're at the sewage treatment plant, it's quite possible that there's some chemical in there that's responsible. And so that got me very intrigued by [00:17:00] saying, well, I don't really know of any very potent biologically active chemicals that might be able to pass through a sewage treatment plant. Speaker 3: And that started a, a line of inquiry that has stayed with me to this day. The substance that you're talking about, pharmaceuticals, metals, things like that, are there other things that are in the water that you're looking at? Well, so in the case of the feminized fish, it turned out it was steroid hormones. So it was residual amounts [00:17:30] of estrogens, some of them from birth control pills, some that are just produced within the body and they were president minute quantities, part per trillion levels. And that was enough to feminize the fish. But since then we've expanded and looked at a whole range of different chemicals. And what is very interesting about it to is that these are not the kinds of chemicals that people had been looking for before. So up until interest turn to sewage, affluent people were interested in [00:18:00] chemicals that might come from a factory or an industrial process. Speaker 3: But when we look inside of our homes and when we look inside of our commercial activities inside of our kitchens, we see that there are all of these things that are in sewage that we either wouldn't want to put into a river or we wouldn't want to put back into the water supply. So a lot of this then comes down to educating the population so that they stop putting these things in the water. If only it were that easy. You know, many of these chemicals [00:18:30] that we've been studying are not the result of someone doing something wrong. So you know that the interests that people have had in pharmaceuticals over the past 10 years, pharmaceuticals that show up in water, people say, well, we just have to start pouring our pills down the drain when we're done with them. Well guess what? The pills getting poured down the drain is a very minor fraction of the whole. Speaker 3: The majority of the pharmaceuticals that end up in the sewage come from normal use because those drugs go [00:19:00] inside of our body. They do the great things that we've come to rely on and then they come back out and the molecule hasn't been changed at all. So in many cases, if a pharmaceutical is used correctly, it's final repository is the sewage treatment plant. And I don't know of too many people who are willing to give up their aspirin or their heart medication or whatever it is because they want to protect a fish or a downstream drinking water user. [00:19:30] Technology has evolved to the point where these elements can be removed from the water. As a matter of course, we can remove anything we want from water. It's just a question of cost. And I think that that always, that's always the rub in this whole situation. Speaker 3: So if we wanted to, we could take the nastiest water in the world and make it into water that's so clean, we could use it for semiconductor manufacturing. And that's a lot cleaner than drinking water has to be. The problem is that people have come [00:20:00] to expect their water and their wastewater treatment bills to be low. And so if you want to remove these things, it's going to cost money and oftentimes it's going to cost more money than people are willing to pay. You've done a certain amount of work with wetlands and what's your experience with trying to recreate wetlands? So we talked a little bit already about how the systems for removing contaminants from water have to be inexpensive. [00:20:30] And so starting about 25 years ago, people started to toy around with the idea that you could build wetlands and have the wetlands removed some of these residual pollutants for you. Speaker 3: The idea is you have a sewage treatment plant and instead of that water directly into the river, you put it into an area that has wetland plants in it, cat tails, bull rush, the usual kinds of plants, and in that system the pollutants will disappear because [00:21:00] the plants and the bacteria that break down the decaying plants will also degrade the pollutants. And that certainly works quite well for one of the main pollutants in wastewater, which is nitrate. So nitrate, which is a water pollutant, and it's also a nutrient that causes algae to bloom in rivers. Nitrate can be removed quite well in treatment wetlands. What we've been doing for the past few years has been experimenting with wetlands that [00:21:30] are optimized to remove things like pharmaceuticals and personal care products and the chemicals that we find in wastewater. And one of the ways in which we do that is by exploiting sunlight. Speaker 3: Many of these chemicals are unstable in the presence of sunlight. And so if we can build a wetland where we have lots of sunlight penetration, we can actually take advantage of this natural process. And the good news is that it's pretty much free. You're just relying upon [00:22:00] the gravity to flow the water through the wetland system and the sunlight and the bacteria and the plants to break down the pollutants for you. Now there is another aspect of the work we've been doing with wetlands that I think is also important and that is the idea that we can build wetlands within our cities to help treat the storm water runoff and the polluted water that flows through the cities and improve the habitats that way while providing some aesthetic benefit. So perhaps in the [00:22:30] future or urban creeks instead of being concrete channels to quickly move water out, we're even underground drainage pipes might actually have an element of a natural treatment system built into them. Speaker 3: The new center that you've just become part of here at cal, do you want to describe what that is? You know, over the past decade or so in my research, I've been looking at different pieces of this water puzzle. But I recognized a few years ago along with several of my colleagues [00:23:00] that this is too big a problem to solve with individual technologies. It really takes a holistic look at the entire urban water cycle to solve the problem. And so an opportunity came a couple of years ago to apply for an NSF engineering research center. And, and in this case we decided to go after this question of urban water systems and how they're gonna make the transition from their current state, which is a reliance on imported water consumption of energy [00:23:30] pollution to a future state in which they're more self sufficient and immune from droughts. They use less water and they leave the environment in better condition than what they found in. Speaker 3: We put in a, and we were successful, the center launched at the beginning of August. So the acronym is renew it, reinventing the nations, urban water infrastructure. And that's really what we're all about. We would like to see a system that developed during the 19th [00:24:00] century and the 20th century evolve into something that's going to be suitable for the 21st century and you're going to be involved in project work and field work. I think the thing that's the big challenge with our center is to take the technologies that we develop in the laboratory and study at our test sites and actually get them into the urban water system, but really the success of this project is measured by whether [00:24:30] we have a reinvented urban water system in 10 or 20 years. Professor said, luck. Thank you very much for coming on spectrum. Thanks very much for having me. Speaker 1: Oh, Speaker 5: well Speaker 1: the [inaudible] center website is urban water, e r c.org a regular feature of spectrum is to mention a few of the science and technology events happening locally [00:25:00] over the next few weeks. We can cargo ski joins me for the calendar Speaker 5: in our last episode, Kashara Hari, you mentioned that the bay area science festival is having a pub crawl tonight from six to nine 30 with various venues in San Francisco's mission district participating. This will be a very busy night with lots of places you can stop. Some highlights include nerd night speed dating at the makeout room, which will include lightning talks on dating and romance, a guided tour of natural oddities. I Paxton Gate, a physics circus at Atlas Cafe and a talk [00:25:30] at black and blue tattoo who's hosting Carl Zimmer's presentation on science theme. Tattoos. For more information on these and other activities tonight, visit www.bayareascience.org on Monday, November 7th from seven to 9:00 PM the Berkeley Rep theater at two zero one five Addison is hosting the Berkeley labs science at the theater this month. UC Berkeley's College of natural resources. Professor John Hart will moderate a panel on the secrets of soil. Panelists will discuss how soil microbes change with climate, [00:26:00] how these microbes can lead to better biofuels and how they adapt to extreme environments and mission is free. Speaker 5: Visit www.lbl.gov for more info. MIT President, Dr Susan Hockfield is speaking at the Silicon Valley Bank. Three zero zero five Tasmin drive in Santa Clara on Wednesday, November 9th she'll talk about investing in innovation and scientific research to retain the economic power of the United States. The program starts at 7:00 PM with a check in at six 30 [00:26:30] the event is $7 for students, $12 for Commonwealth club members and $20 for standard admission. Visit www.commonwealthclub.org for more info now several stories. Science insider reports that Lawrence Livermore national laboratory has chosen, noted physicist and National Security Policy Expert Penrose Parnia Albright as their new director. Albright is the 11th director of the lab since it was established in 1952 you places [00:27:00] George Miller who is stepping down after six years. Albright previously served as assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and we'll assume directorship in December, www.llnl.gov has more information. Science news reports at the Advisory Committee on immunization practice announced the recommendation that the vaccine against the human papilloma virus or HPV be used for boys starting at age 11 or 12 HPV can cause genital warts and is the [00:27:30] most common cause of cervical cancer.Speaker 5: So the vaccine is already recommended for girls. While the disease is rarely symptomatic, it is the most commonly sexually transmitted infection in the United States. More than 6 million new infections each year. The vaccine doesn't seem to work against HPV that has already infected an individual, but it is preventative for the uninfected prompting for its early use in both boys and girls. The castle solar car team competed in the world solar challenge in Australia during [00:28:00] October and finished 20th out of 37 teams. The Red Berry commonly called Miracle Fruit has spawned flavor tripping parties as it makes sour foods such as around lemons or bitter foods such as beer, taste sweet like lemonade or ice cream without adding any sugar. While it has been known for more than 40 years that the protein miraculous is the active ingredient in the miracle fruit. It hasn't been clear to how that protein works. Speaker 5: In a paper published in the September 26 edition of the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, [00:28:30] University of Tokyo, biochemists, Keiko Ayub and her team state that the miraculous is interaction with the tongue sensors depends on acidity. The team used molecular modeling and experiments where they used human kidney cells, engineered to produce sweet receptor proteins with fluorescent markers and miraculous and substances with different Ph levels. They found that miraculous had no effect ph 6.7 or higher but had an effect that increased as the Ph decreased from 6.5 to 4.8 they suggest that miraculous [00:29:00] binds to sweet receptors at neutral ph and then functionally changes in acidic environments. Studying miraculous may eventually lead to better ways of sweetening foods without increasing caloric content. Speaker 1: [inaudible] music card during the show is from a less Donna David album titled Folk and Acoustic [inaudible]. Thank you for listening to spectrum. You're happy to hear from listeners. If you have [00:29:30] comments about the show, please send them to us. Our email address is full spectrum dot kalx@yahoo.com join us into [inaudible] time. [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

David Sedlak is a professor in the school of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley. He is also the Deputy Director of the NSF Engineering Center named Renuwit, which stands for Reinventing the nation's urban water infrastructure, and a member of the Berkeley Water Center. http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/~sedlak/ http://urbanwatererc.org/TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next [inaudible]. Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a 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 local events and news. Speaker 2: Good afternoon. My name is Brad swift and I'm the host of today's show. Our interview is with UC Berkeley Civil and environmental engineering professor David Sedlak. He is the deputy director of a new NSF engineering center named renew it, which stands for re-inventing the nation's urban water infrastructure. The center partner [00:01:00] institutions are Stanford, the Colorado School of Mines, New Mexico State University and UC Berkeley. Professor said Lac is a member of the Berkeley Water Center and has been teaching at Berkeley for 17 years. This interview is prerecorded and edited. Professor Sedlak, thanks very much for coming to spectrum and talking with us. Oh, you're welcome. I'm really happy to be here. I wanted to start by laying a foundation a little bit for people who may not be familiar with the [00:01:30] kinds of work that you're doing and the issues related to water that you deal with. Speaker 3: I think my main area of interest is really the way in which we manage water in cities. So that includes everything from the drinking water supply, the waste that we generate, the storm runoff that comes through the streets and the entire urban water cycle. Speaker 2: Can you describe the water cycle in a city? Speaker 3: Sure it is. Yeah. There's no one urban water cycle [00:02:00] in the city. The water cycle that we all learn in junior high school is that the water evaporates from the ocean. It falls in the mountains, the mountain runoff create the streams, the streams throat floated the ocean and then there's a city on the stream. The city picks up water from the river, it goes through a water treatment plant. People use it in their houses, it goes down the drain, it goes to a sewage treatment plant. It goes back in the river and it goes to the ocean. And that might've been the situation 70 or 80 [00:02:30] years ago, but now our cities are much more crowded and the situation's much more diverse. So, for example, many cities that river where they collect their drinking water from is downstream of another city. So the water in that river is already been in and out of the previous city. And so the water supply consists of river water mixed with sewage effluent. Speaker 2: And do you think it's helpful to assess water [00:03:00] globally to give a context in the sense of how much fresh water is there, how much wastewater is there? Speaker 3: There's been a lot of good work done on water, especially at the national or regional level. And one of the things that people often miss is that water in cities is quite different from water at a national scale. So for example, at a national scale, cities only use about 20% of the water. The other 80% goes to agriculture and power plant cooling. But [00:03:30] if you're a city and you run out of water, there's not much solace in the fact that there's a farm hundreds of miles away that has water, or there's a power plant in another state that has that water. So water is a local issue. And cities are places where there's a very large demand for water in a very small space and that stresses their ability to deliver water and leads to water shortages. So you can have a situation where you have a country or a state which has [00:04:00] plenty of water, but you have a city that's running out of water and doesn't have a good option for providing more. Speaker 3: Just to give you an example of a city that almost ran out of water a few years ago, so many of us have seen the photos and news stories about Brisbane, Australia last year when they had tremendous flooding that almost washed away the city will about four or five years ago, that same city almost ran out of water. So Brisbane is a city of around a million people along the gold coast [00:04:30] of Australia. It's Australia is equivalent of Florida that it's a place that developed mainly during the 70s up until the present and they don't have an imported water supply from a long distance. And so they were beholden mainly to one main reservoir. And when Australia went into a drought about 10 years ago, the level of water in that reservoir kept sinking and sinking and sinking. And about four years ago they had about 15% [00:05:00] capacity in the reservoir and they were using about one or 2% a month. And so if the rain didn't return, they were going to actually run out of water and there wasn't going to be any water for the city. So they'd already done the water conservation, they'd already stopped all the wasteful uses of water and they were reaching a point where they would have to shut down the city or take emergency measures to bring water in at very high prices. Speaker 2: Cities [00:05:30] really can't know that this is going to befall them, but they all need to take a much more active role in figuring out what the wiggle room is and their water supply. Speaker 3: With wise planning. Cities can anticipate these pinch points or these crunches in their water supply, but that assumes that you have some foresight. I'll give you an example of a place that has a lot of foresight about their water supply. And that would be Singapore, where water is actually considered national security. So [00:06:00] Singapore, if you're not familiar with the geography, is surrounded by Malaysia. And when the British left and they created two countries in that region, Singapore was still receiving its water from Malaysia. So there's a foreign country that controls your water supply and the founder of Singapore, Lee Kuan, you realize that the country will be very susceptible to Malaysia holding them hostage over their water. And so they established an aggressive plan [00:06:30] to develop alternative water supplies so they can wean themselves from their imported water. And today Singapore's at a place where the imported water supplies only fraction of the total water used in the city. Speaker 2: That kind of planning is that growing worldwide and in the United States, Speaker 3: in the United States especially, it seems like we wait for an emergency to happen. And so when a drought happens, someone says, Gee, we [00:07:00] should be doing something about this. And so in places where droughts have occurred and people have seen the start of this progression of shortages, city managers and water utilities have taken some steps to build up the water supply and make themselves more secure. Good example of that would be orange county in southern California, Orange County which grew after the rest of the Los Angeles area has relatively junior water rights relative to the city of Los Angeles [00:07:30] and many of the other communities that get imported water. And so in order to grow they've had to keep improving their local water supply and take on some innovative programs to augment the public water supply that break them away from imported water sources. Speaker 1: [inaudible]Speaker 2: you are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. We are talking with Professor David [00:08:00] said lack about current and future urban water systems. Is there something that individuals can do in terms of recycling water that has an impact?Speaker 3: The best thing people can do to improve the urban waters situation is just to use less water. So the average American uses a hundred gallons or so of water a day, 10 gallons every time we take a shower, a 40 gallons when we washed a load of clothing [00:08:30] in a few gallons. When you flush the toilet, everything else. So if you just think in terms of water use, it's possible to save a lot of water around the house and all of the water you save means that there's that much more water to go around and there's that much more water, water around for the environment. So that's the first thing everyone can do. And I think most of us are guilty in some way or another of wasting water, either leaving the water running while we brush teeth or taking super long showers or just being prolific that with, with our [00:09:00] water use. Speaker 3: I think the other thing that many people don't realize is that there's a connection between water and energy. So there's a lot of energy use in heating water for the house. So if you look at the urban water cycle, we could probably go a long way towards running our urban water system if we didn't heat the water. After all the Romans had flowing water and they didn't have electricity. A lot of our water system functions on gravity, but the minute we start heating many gallons [00:09:30] of water in the home, we're burning a lot of electricity. The other thing that you could do with respect to water is think about runoff and what goes down down into the street. All the junk that we throw out eventually finds its way into the bay and I think most people would be hesitant to just throw a plastic bag or a bucket full of soapy water into the bay if they were standing right next to it. Speaker 3: Well, when you pour it in the street or wash your car or throw some trash in the street, that's [00:10:00] essentially what you do in the home. Is there a way for people to reuse water? There are a lot of people who really want to make a difference with respect to their water. And there's a lot of enthusiasm in the public for something called gray water and gray water is this idea that you have all this water in your house, it's relatively clean. It's the stuff that you, you know the water that was in the sink when you washed your vegetables or it's even the water that was in your washing machine that rinse your clothes after you wash them. [00:10:30] And that we should be able to use this water somehow. And I think it's great that there's this intention to save water and to reuse water and you certainly can collect this water and put it on the plants and the garden. Speaker 3: But it's really not a solution to our larger urban water problems. And there are a couple of reasons for that. One is to do this in an organized way, takes a collection and distribution system. So if you have water from your sink or water from your shower, then [00:11:00] you have to have a way to collect it and you have to have a way to use it and maybe you're going to use it in the garden, but there's no guarantee that that water is going to be safe and free of microbes that can make people sick and there's no guarantee that that's going to be economically attractive once you price out the cost of building all these other pieces. And so new construction, there are many ways to make a building more water efficient, [00:11:30] low flow fixtures and water conserving practices. But the way in which it seems that we're going to make the biggest difference is to think about the whole urban water system and how it can be reinvented to do things differently. Speaker 3: For example, there may be a future when toilets and washing machines don't use water anymore. I have a friend who works for the EPA and he has a vacuum toilet in his house that functions just like [00:12:00] those vacuum toilets on airplanes. So there's nothing that says that 50 years from now we're going to be washing our waists down the toilet with water where there are companies that had been exploring washing machines that use very small quantities of water. So many people were already switched from top loading washing machines to front loading, washing machines that use a fraction of the water. There may be a future where we even cut that two to a fraction once again. So I'm much more confident that technological [00:12:30] innovations will lead the way as opposed to these small scale piece by piece solutions that people feel good about because they're taking an active role but ultimately either turn out to be more expensive than the system we have or have their own sets of limitations. Speaker 3: What sort of advances have there been in sewage treatment over your time of interest? Sure, so sewage treatment plants were [00:13:00] originally designed to to protect surface waters. So really the main reason people built sewage treatment plants was there was too much gunk going into rivers and the fish were dying from lack of oxygen. When you talk about building a sewage treatment plant because you want to recycle the water, perhaps even to put it in the potable water supply, it's a whole different level of technology. So over the last 20 years, technologies have been developed to purify water to a point that you can [00:13:30] have sewage coming in one end of a treatment plant and the water that comes out looks like bottled water coming out of the the store. And there's a whole host of different technologies that are getting less and less expensive every year and are making it more attractive to build these kinds of advanced sewage treatment plants. Speaker 3: Is there a lot of construction of sewage stream and plastic gotta be very expensive? I would imagine that. So the place where you see construction of sewage treatment plants [00:14:00] is in the cities where there's a need to recycle water or to reclaim this sewage as part of the water supply. So, for example, um, Orange County, which I talked about earlier in southern California, built an advanced treatment plant because they wanted to take their sewage and instead of putting it out in the ocean like they used to, they wanted to put it back into the drinking water supply. So they built a very large advanced sewage treatment plant that takes the water and puts it through reverse osmosis membranes. [00:14:30] Those are the same kinds of membranes that are used to desalinate seawater and then subjected to ultraviolet radiation to kill the pathogens along with hydrogen peroxide to break down the chemicals and then putting it into the drinking water supply. Speaker 3: So it's not your grandparents sewage treatment plan. It's really something that's a lot more advanced. And how is that being accepted by the the users? There's a mixed record of public acceptance of advanced sewage treatment [00:15:00] plants for augmenting the water supply. So in Orange County they've had pretty good public acceptance, but they also had a very long program of public education about their water situation. In other places. I'm in San Diego as an example or in Brisbane, Australia. These advanced treatment plants came at the public out of the blue and they really weren't aware that there was a problem and they weren't aware that there were technologies that [00:15:30] had been used as solutions in other places, so when the public heard that there was sewage water going into the water supply, they couldn't accept it and the projects died. A quick death in public hearings. Speaker 4: [inaudible] you are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. We're talking with Professor David Sedlak about [00:16:00] current and future urban water systems. Speaker 3: I was wondering if you want to talk about, sure. The kinds of research, my own research mainly focuses on chemicals and water and I'm very interested in the chemicals mainly that are present in sewage that might find their way back into the environment because our treatment plants aren't perfect. I first got into this topic about 15 years ago when I saw a talk from a scientist [00:16:30] from Britain who had found that fish living near sewage treatment plants were feminized. That is they would go out and collect fish below the sewage treatment plant and they couldn't find any male fish. They all were female. And this phenomena of feminisation was really fascinating to me because I thought to myself, well, if this is happening to the fish when they're at the sewage treatment plant, it's quite possible that there's some chemical in there that's responsible. And so that got me very intrigued by [00:17:00] saying, well, I don't really know of any very potent biologically active chemicals that might be able to pass through a sewage treatment plant. Speaker 3: And that started a, a line of inquiry that has stayed with me to this day. The substance that you're talking about, pharmaceuticals, metals, things like that, are there other things that are in the water that you're looking at? Well, so in the case of the feminized fish, it turned out it was steroid hormones. So it was residual amounts [00:17:30] of estrogens, some of them from birth control pills, some that are just produced within the body and they were president minute quantities, part per trillion levels. And that was enough to feminize the fish. But since then we've expanded and looked at a whole range of different chemicals. And what is very interesting about it to is that these are not the kinds of chemicals that people had been looking for before. So up until interest turn to sewage, affluent people were interested in [00:18:00] chemicals that might come from a factory or an industrial process. Speaker 3: But when we look inside of our homes and when we look inside of our commercial activities inside of our kitchens, we see that there are all of these things that are in sewage that we either wouldn't want to put into a river or we wouldn't want to put back into the water supply. So a lot of this then comes down to educating the population so that they stop putting these things in the water. If only it were that easy. You know, many of these chemicals [00:18:30] that we've been studying are not the result of someone doing something wrong. So you know that the interests that people have had in pharmaceuticals over the past 10 years, pharmaceuticals that show up in water, people say, well, we just have to start pouring our pills down the drain when we're done with them. Well guess what? The pills getting poured down the drain is a very minor fraction of the whole. Speaker 3: The majority of the pharmaceuticals that end up in the sewage come from normal use because those drugs go [00:19:00] inside of our body. They do the great things that we've come to rely on and then they come back out and the molecule hasn't been changed at all. So in many cases, if a pharmaceutical is used correctly, it's final repository is the sewage treatment plant. And I don't know of too many people who are willing to give up their aspirin or their heart medication or whatever it is because they want to protect a fish or a downstream drinking water user. [00:19:30] Technology has evolved to the point where these elements can be removed from the water. As a matter of course, we can remove anything we want from water. It's just a question of cost. And I think that that always, that's always the rub in this whole situation. Speaker 3: So if we wanted to, we could take the nastiest water in the world and make it into water that's so clean, we could use it for semiconductor manufacturing. And that's a lot cleaner than drinking water has to be. The problem is that people have come [00:20:00] to expect their water and their wastewater treatment bills to be low. And so if you want to remove these things, it's going to cost money and oftentimes it's going to cost more money than people are willing to pay. You've done a certain amount of work with wetlands and what's your experience with trying to recreate wetlands? So we talked a little bit already about how the systems for removing contaminants from water have to be inexpensive. [00:20:30] And so starting about 25 years ago, people started to toy around with the idea that you could build wetlands and have the wetlands removed some of these residual pollutants for you. Speaker 3: The idea is you have a sewage treatment plant and instead of that water directly into the river, you put it into an area that has wetland plants in it, cat tails, bull rush, the usual kinds of plants, and in that system the pollutants will disappear because [00:21:00] the plants and the bacteria that break down the decaying plants will also degrade the pollutants. And that certainly works quite well for one of the main pollutants in wastewater, which is nitrate. So nitrate, which is a water pollutant, and it's also a nutrient that causes algae to bloom in rivers. Nitrate can be removed quite well in treatment wetlands. What we've been doing for the past few years has been experimenting with wetlands that [00:21:30] are optimized to remove things like pharmaceuticals and personal care products and the chemicals that we find in wastewater. And one of the ways in which we do that is by exploiting sunlight. Speaker 3: Many of these chemicals are unstable in the presence of sunlight. And so if we can build a wetland where we have lots of sunlight penetration, we can actually take advantage of this natural process. And the good news is that it's pretty much free. You're just relying upon [00:22:00] the gravity to flow the water through the wetland system and the sunlight and the bacteria and the plants to break down the pollutants for you. Now there is another aspect of the work we've been doing with wetlands that I think is also important and that is the idea that we can build wetlands within our cities to help treat the storm water runoff and the polluted water that flows through the cities and improve the habitats that way while providing some aesthetic benefit. So perhaps in the [00:22:30] future or urban creeks instead of being concrete channels to quickly move water out, we're even underground drainage pipes might actually have an element of a natural treatment system built into them. Speaker 3: The new center that you've just become part of here at cal, do you want to describe what that is? You know, over the past decade or so in my research, I've been looking at different pieces of this water puzzle. But I recognized a few years ago along with several of my colleagues [00:23:00] that this is too big a problem to solve with individual technologies. It really takes a holistic look at the entire urban water cycle to solve the problem. And so an opportunity came a couple of years ago to apply for an NSF engineering research center. And, and in this case we decided to go after this question of urban water systems and how they're gonna make the transition from their current state, which is a reliance on imported water consumption of energy [00:23:30] pollution to a future state in which they're more self sufficient and immune from droughts. They use less water and they leave the environment in better condition than what they found in. Speaker 3: We put in a, and we were successful, the center launched at the beginning of August. So the acronym is renew it, reinventing the nations, urban water infrastructure. And that's really what we're all about. We would like to see a system that developed during the 19th [00:24:00] century and the 20th century evolve into something that's going to be suitable for the 21st century and you're going to be involved in project work and field work. I think the thing that's the big challenge with our center is to take the technologies that we develop in the laboratory and study at our test sites and actually get them into the urban water system, but really the success of this project is measured by whether [00:24:30] we have a reinvented urban water system in 10 or 20 years. Professor said, luck. Thank you very much for coming on spectrum. Thanks very much for having me. Speaker 1: Oh, Speaker 5: well Speaker 1: the [inaudible] center website is urban water, e r c.org a regular feature of spectrum is to mention a few of the science and technology events happening locally [00:25:00] over the next few weeks. We can cargo ski joins me for the calendar Speaker 5: in our last episode, Kashara Hari, you mentioned that the bay area science festival is having a pub crawl tonight from six to nine 30 with various venues in San Francisco's mission district participating. This will be a very busy night with lots of places you can stop. Some highlights include nerd night speed dating at the makeout room, which will include lightning talks on dating and romance, a guided tour of natural oddities. I Paxton Gate, a physics circus at Atlas Cafe and a talk [00:25:30] at black and blue tattoo who's hosting Carl Zimmer's presentation on science theme. Tattoos. For more information on these and other activities tonight, visit www.bayareascience.org on Monday, November 7th from seven to 9:00 PM the Berkeley Rep theater at two zero one five Addison is hosting the Berkeley labs science at the theater this month. UC Berkeley's College of natural resources. Professor John Hart will moderate a panel on the secrets of soil. Panelists will discuss how soil microbes change with climate, [00:26:00] how these microbes can lead to better biofuels and how they adapt to extreme environments and mission is free. Speaker 5: Visit www.lbl.gov for more info. MIT President, Dr Susan Hockfield is speaking at the Silicon Valley Bank. Three zero zero five Tasmin drive in Santa Clara on Wednesday, November 9th she'll talk about investing in innovation and scientific research to retain the economic power of the United States. The program starts at 7:00 PM with a check in at six 30 [00:26:30] the event is $7 for students, $12 for Commonwealth club members and $20 for standard admission. Visit www.commonwealthclub.org for more info now several stories. Science insider reports that Lawrence Livermore national laboratory has chosen, noted physicist and National Security Policy Expert Penrose Parnia Albright as their new director. Albright is the 11th director of the lab since it was established in 1952 you places [00:27:00] George Miller who is stepping down after six years. Albright previously served as assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and we'll assume directorship in December, www.llnl.gov has more information. Science news reports at the Advisory Committee on immunization practice announced the recommendation that the vaccine against the human papilloma virus or HPV be used for boys starting at age 11 or 12 HPV can cause genital warts and is the [00:27:30] most common cause of cervical cancer.Speaker 5: So the vaccine is already recommended for girls. While the disease is rarely symptomatic, it is the most commonly sexually transmitted infection in the United States. More than 6 million new infections each year. The vaccine doesn't seem to work against HPV that has already infected an individual, but it is preventative for the uninfected prompting for its early use in both boys and girls. The castle solar car team competed in the world solar challenge in Australia during [00:28:00] October and finished 20th out of 37 teams. The Red Berry commonly called Miracle Fruit has spawned flavor tripping parties as it makes sour foods such as around lemons or bitter foods such as beer, taste sweet like lemonade or ice cream without adding any sugar. While it has been known for more than 40 years that the protein miraculous is the active ingredient in the miracle fruit. It hasn't been clear to how that protein works. Speaker 5: In a paper published in the September 26 edition of the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, [00:28:30] University of Tokyo, biochemists, Keiko Ayub and her team state that the miraculous is interaction with the tongue sensors depends on acidity. The team used molecular modeling and experiments where they used human kidney cells, engineered to produce sweet receptor proteins with fluorescent markers and miraculous and substances with different Ph levels. They found that miraculous had no effect ph 6.7 or higher but had an effect that increased as the Ph decreased from 6.5 to 4.8 they suggest that miraculous [00:29:00] binds to sweet receptors at neutral ph and then functionally changes in acidic environments. Studying miraculous may eventually lead to better ways of sweetening foods without increasing caloric content. Speaker 1: [inaudible] music card during the show is from a less Donna David album titled Folk and Acoustic [inaudible]. Thank you for listening to spectrum. You're happy to hear from listeners. If you have [00:29:30] comments about the show, please send them to us. Our email address is full spectrum dot kalx@yahoo.com join us into [inaudible] time. [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Discussed USGS modeling technologies that show what a major earthquake on the Hayward fault would look like, and BART’s award winning Earthquake Safety Program.TRANSCRIPTSpeaker 1:Okay. Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. [inaudible] Speaker 1:you're listening to method to the madness. 30 minutes show about the innovative spirit of the bay area. I'm your host [00:00:30] aliene Huizar and innovation is usually born from trying to solve some kind of problem. And one of the biggest problems we have facing us in the bay area is earthquakes. We've got the San Andreas fault, we've got the Hayward fault going right underneath the East Bay hills, directly at her memorial stadium here on the beautiful UC Berkeley campus. And I started to wonder what kind of innovative techniques and technologies do we have in the bay area to deal with this imminent problem [00:01:00] of a huge catastrophic earthquake. So I have two interviews for you today. One is with Brad, a guard a geophysicist from the U S G s that's created some really interesting, incredible 3d models that you can see on our website@wwwdotmethodtothemadness.org that simulate a large event on the Hayward fault. And then we speak with John McPartland from the Bart Board of directors who tells [00:01:30] us about Bart's plans to keep the bay area running. And in particular keep the Transbay tube operational in the event of an earthquake. Speaker 2:Stay with us. Speaker 3:[inaudible]. Speaker 4:[00:02:00] Okay. So let's start off by just saying, uh, your name and your Kinda rank name, number type thing. Brad a garden. Uh, I'm a research geophysicist at the u s gs in Menlo Park. Okay. And do you wanna just give me a little bit about your background? Uh, so my background is in earthquake [00:02:30] modeling. I'm concentrating on the dynamics of rupture, how faults actually slipped and earthquakes as well as the ground motions that are produced by the seismic waves radiated from the rupture. Okay. So, um, would you mind giving us a little bit of history on kind of the, that you're part of the modeling kind of where it's come from in the past and where we are right now. So, uh, people have been modeling earthquakes [00:03:00] in a variety of methods for several decades. Um, and with the advent of, uh, modern computers in sort of the eighties and nineties, um, the ability to be able to capture more sophisticated effects in earthquake, uh, ground motions is increased significantly. Speaker 4:Um, and within the past couple of decades with super computers. Now we can do things in 3d that we could only do in 2d, uh, before. And so now we can do [00:03:30] a large, uh, uh, simulations of earthquakes for the damaging earthquakes, the ones who really care about, so magnitude seven and above, um, earthquakes. And we can capture their 3d effects. So we can, we actually create a model of the earth of volume and propagate the, uh, the rupture through the earth and then compute all the seismic waves radiated out through the three d structure. So, [00:04:00] um, as the geology varies from place to place and as a function of depth into the earth, we can capture those effects. Um, and it really takes advantage of several decades worth of work in terms of actually determining what those properties are based on mapping, uh, remote sensing, um, as well as seismic studies of probing the earth using both passive and active, uh, source experiments. So in some cases we can just sit there and monitor, you know, the waves from [00:04:30] small earthquakes that have been generated and in for what the geologic structure is. But then there's also been specific studies of creating a ref reflection and refraction lines like those used in the oil industry across various sections of the bay area. And all that information gets assembled into our three d model, which then we can use in these 3d computer simulations. Speaker 5:Okay, great. Well, let's talk about the model that this is really what caught my attention. I was doing some research for this story and [00:05:00] these are really incredible models that you've built and right where Calyx I think is right there. So, uh, we, I'd like to understand this a little bit first for the listeners. So, um, how did you go about, um, just coming up with the idea for doing these models? Speaker 4:Um, well, we really, I mean we've been doing sort of three d models for about 10 years or more. Um, and I've been doing models for about that long. It really started way back in graduate school for me and, uh, cal tech, is that right? Yes, I went to cal tech and, [00:05:30] um, that, that was in the mid nineties and that's when really the, the super computers became powerful enough that we could actually start to do these three d models with a realistic variations of the material properties. Um, and s uh, leading up to that, um, the centennial, the 1906 earthquake and we made a big push to, in the bay area to be able to improve our three d structure to be able to do simulations of events on the San Andreas fault. And so after we did [00:06:00] a 1906 like events on the San Andreas fault, the next logical step was to do them for the Hayward fault because it is sort of the other big major player, a fault in the San Francisco Bay area. Speaker 4:Okay. So when you decide, let's do, um, you know, let's do a three d model of the Hayward fault, how do you begin something like that? So we began by spending a couple months of the modelers, um, myself as well as other people who we collaborated to do the modeling, [00:06:30] the three d modeling of the ground motions. Uh, we sat down with the geologists as well as the people who dig turned to the cross, the fault, the Paleo seismologists and sort of other geophysicists within the USDS and some of our external collaborators at Lawrence Livermore and Berkeley. And we developed sort of our, what our scenarios were as suite of scenarios there, where we would have main two large events, the main tune, like 6.8 to 7.1 [00:07:00] for the Hayward fault, incorporating, uh, the known history of earthquakes on the faults, um, how much slip we would expect in those events and the length of rupture. Speaker 4:Um, and this is a, that's where we really looked at sort of past events is where as well as, you know, what is the latest information about how, say the Hayward fault may connect to the writer's creek fault under San Pablo Bay and would they go together? Um, and if they went together, you know, would it generally be, [00:07:30] uh, would the eruption need to start sort of underneath the bay or would it be able to make sort of a jump from one fault to the other? And we eliminated the possibility that, uh, in terms of considering the most likely scenario of it, having actually jumped across to actually starting, uh, under San Pablo Bay if it did rupture both of them. Um, but generally we believe that the two faults in most cases are going to operate independently. They may have events relatively close in time [00:08:00] because the stress is on, one will, uh, are when they're relieved in large event will actually increase the stresses on the other because they basically like end to end. Um, but in most cases we would expect them to actually rupture in separate earthquake. Speaker 1:This is method to the madness. A 30 minute show about the innovative spirit of the bay area. I'm your host Eileen Huizar, and I'm speaking with Brad, a guard a geophysicist with the u s g s in Menlo Park who's telling me about a model. He's made a three d model [00:08:30] that simulates a 6.8 earthquake on the Hayward fault. Can you take me through this with a lotto? We're looking at as the right now, the 6.8 with a [inaudible], Speaker 4:um, center in Berkeley. Uh, we're actually, well, they were actually looking at the ground shaking in Berkeley, but the rupture in this case starts down there. Fremont. Okay. And so we're watching the color showing the intensity of the shaking. And so this light is what we call the p wave. Um, and it's coming through and that's where you'd just be able to start [00:09:00] to feel a little bit of shaking. And then now we're about 17 seconds into the rupture and then we get the strong s wave. And that's where the intensity of shaking increases significantly. Um, and that's where you would sort of a, a person would have the sensation of rather than relatively balanced shaking, uh, in the case of a large event like this, this close to the rupture. Um, and when we look at our three d view, we see, um, some important f effects. Speaker 4:If you look along the fault, the intensity of shaking [00:09:30] is higher. And then as you go away from the fault, the intensity of shaking is generally decreasing. But then there's areas like the Livermore area where we have a basin that extends the strong shaking away from the fault. And then along the Hayward fault, we actually, uh, have, uh, less rigid material on the east side of the fault. And so the intensity of shaking is slightly higher there than it is on the west side. Um, these 3d simulations, we don't have the very thin bay mud, which sits right [00:10:00] along the edge of the bay. And so, uh, when you include those effects, then these intensity, the shaking in these models would actually increase a little more. Um, so that would tend to slightly even out the shaking on the east and West sides of the fault. Speaker 4:But in general, uh, with the softer sediments, um, and this is due to the fact that the areas east of the Hayward fault between the sort of the foothills all the way into the great valley is an area that's been highly be formed over tens of thousands to a hundred of thousands of years. And that's sort [00:10:30] of broken up the rock and made it a less rigid. Whereas underneath the San Francisco Bay, um, once you get rid of that very thin, shallow sediment that's quite soft, then you get into much more competent rock quicker than you do east of the heroin form. So does that mean, so on the Hayward fault where it's more broken down, it's less, uh, the impact would be less because it's more flexible or all the more flexible means that a, it acts a little bit more like Jello. And so it [00:11:00] tends to, uh, you can think of it as being a softer material that, uh, is allowed to move around by being sort of more flexible. Speaker 4:It tends to move more when the same amplitude wave, uh, enters that medium. When it, when that amplitude wave enters a medium, if it goes into a softer medium, actually grows and amplitude, if it goes into a more rigid medium and actually decreases in amplitude. So, uh, that, uh, less rigid material means that it's going actually gonna amplify the shaking. [00:11:30] Um, and so, you know, if you are to be your sort of, your most desirable location is on bedrock, which is very hard. Uh, it means you're gonna sort of move maybe with sort of higher frequencies rather than sort of, uh, but you're going to move less than if you're on a, uh, a less rigid material. Gotcha. Okay. So a, the Speaker 5:Hayward fall, it looks, it's going right along the foothills. It looks like it goes right into the Berkeley campus. Speaker 4:So it goes right underneath [00:12:00] Berkeley stadium come up along, uh, the base of the foothills and then runs into San Pablo Bay at point Purnell. Um, and then running down, it runs down along the base of the hills from Hayward down into Fremont. Um, and then it sort of Peters out in some respects at the surface, but then at depth it continues and, uh, migrates over towards more, even with the Calaveras [00:12:30] fault, um, things at the southern end, um, uh, sort of just east of San Jose, it becomes quite complicated. The surface, there's a lot of secondary faults in between the Hayward fault in the car. The Calaveras fault. Speaker 5:Yeah. I follow one of those earthquake bots on Twitter and there seems like there's always a little something going on down under San Jose, a little bit south of Santa. There's a lot of different things down there, right? Speaker 4:Yeah. So there's a, there's sections of the Calaveras fault that have a lot of [00:13:00] small earthquakes and the Calaveras fault also is, has, uh, once you go farther south down, your Morgan Hill tends to have more, what we call creep in that the stress is being relieved almost continuously by just slow motion the fault. And so it's not as prone to larger earthquakes. And that's also true for sections of the Hayward fault near the surface where you tend to have a creep going on. So there's some sections, uh, in Fremont, um, [00:13:30] up through Hayward and then some sections near Berkeley where, uh, you have offset curves, offset walls, um, and, but these are primarily limited to just the very shallow, most, uh, about a mile to two miles of the, of the ground. And underneath it's locked. And we know from historical records that, uh, in 1868, there was a very large earthquake magnitude about 6.8 November on the hero Fox. Speaker 4:So it's, even though [00:14:00] it has these unique features of slowly creeping up the surface, it's still capable of a large earthquake. And that was the last major earthquake on there, you Hayward fall, right? Yes. And, uh, 1860 was the last one. We know, sort of a definitive deep, um, and Mark Twain wrote about it and roughing it, and we did. So there's a, there's several like witness descriptions. Um, and before that, then it, uh, the previous event to that was somewhere around 150 years, but we don't have [00:14:30] historical accounts. Um, so we don't know the precise date. And so our uncertainty start to grow. Um, in terms of precisely when the last few events have happened. Um, but we do have a record of 12 events over the last, uh, 2000 years for the Hayward fault, um, in Fremont, um, and there approximately 150 years or something like that, about 150 years are ranging from anywhere from about 130 years to 107 years. And we're now [00:15:00] 141 years since right in the sweet spot, right? Somewhere near the middle of the time we expect a Hayward fault event. Speaker 1:You are listening to k a l ex Berkeley. This is method to the madness at 30 minutes show about the innovative spirit of the bay area. I'm your host selling his arm. And we've been talking to Brad, a guard from the u s gs and Menlo Park, who's created some cutting-edge models on what the major earthquake that's about to happen on the Hayward fault will look like. Now we turned [00:15:30] our attention to preparation so we know this earthquake imminent. How are we doing on getting ready for it and searching around. I found that Bart actually has received an innovation award in 2010 from the Northern California chapter of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute for its efforts and its earthquake safety program to protect the system in case of a catastrophic event on the Hayward fault. So I reached out to bart to learn more about the retrofit project that began in 2004. Speaker 6:[00:16:00] Hi, my name is John McPartland. I am art director, but I'm also the vice president of the Bart Board of directors. And I'm also on the Seismic Safety Commission for the state of California. The original retrofit was designed simply to have portions of the system survive and other portions of the system to be able to be operational. [00:16:30] There is a magnitude in cost of about four times in order to be able to improve from survivability to operability. And the reason is you have to have much stronger base structures in the pillars and the list goes on and on and on. The biggest risk of the entire system was the Transbay tube. Uh, and that has since that that was the [00:17:00] first target for our retrofit. And it turns out that not only were we able to stabilize the, the weakest length, which was the, the juncture of on the Transbay tube as you transitioned into the peninsula itself. Speaker 6:Um, but in addition to that, the bay was a lot more stable than we thought it was when we saved a great deal of money. Second issue along those lines is that because [00:17:30] of the recession, a lot of the contracts that have been coming in, um, are coming in, continue to come in at 20 to 25% below the estimate estimated bid. And the rationale behind that is that a lot of these construction companies aren't trying to make a real profit. They're just trying to make payroll. And so we've saved money there between the combination of those two things with the amount of money that we have saved, what we are doing now is we are [00:18:00] increasing the amount of operability sections so that for instance, the on Transbay or the Oakland y, which is the Oakland underground area, basically exits going in the direction of East Oakland, right at about, um, fifth hour, then east seventh. Speaker 6:And from that point on, as soon as it goes, Ariel goes [00:18:30] above grade, it has a survivability quotient and the original design. Now we have enough money to be able to retrofit that for an operability all the way out to the coliseum station. It hasn't been done yet, but we have the money. It's on the books as plant, we're going to do it. That's very interesting. So a combination of factors has made the original bond money go further? Yes. Yup. Um, how do you determine [00:19:00] in terms of priority levels for survivability reasons, operational operability, um, there's a big system. How do you determine which ones is there? Is there a ranking that bar has in terms of what parts are more important than other parts? Yes, and the ranking basically is now, here's where we end up going beyond just servicing the local community. And what we're looking at now is, um, how [00:19:30] we can end up serving as a better component for partner with regional disaster planning. Speaker 6:For instance, if we ended up comparing the now understand that the Oakland Coliseum, which is not designed as a refuge of any kind in the event of a, uh, major earthquake, but let's use a comparison of the coliseum and the Superdome. Now, the Superdome [00:20:00] was refuge of last resort. There was somewhere between 60 and a hundred thousand people in there that had no hope and no way out if we had correction when we have this catastrophic earthquake that is going to for a short period of time. But, uh, it depends on short, his relative term depends on whether you're in the middle of it or not. Well, there's going to be a two days or two weeks, there's going to be a complete collapse [00:20:30] of the infrastructure. Can't use the freeways, rebel in the streets on no water, no communications, no electricity and no way out unless you want to walk. Speaker 6:Now realize that if you had those populations that were gravitating towards the Oakland College, Sam, now all of a sudden the calcium is empty because with we've got electricity and we've got rail, we're moving people a thousand at a time and we're taking them [00:21:00] to outlying areas either on the line that goes to Livermore or online. That ends up going to Richmond or to Concord or to San Francisco because there's five ways into the East Bay and that means there's five ways and there's five ways out we can end up taking refugees out. We can end up bringing a row a week and end up bringing resources in. If I could give you a visualization of what I personally experienced [00:21:30] during the Loma Prieta earthquake, I was the staging officer for a as battalion chief and the Oakland Fire Department as a staging officer for all the apparatus during the Cypress collapse and the initially we had, within four hours we had apparatus fire apparatus that was stacked up four blocks deep and a half a block wide down the side streets. Speaker 6:It was total [00:22:00] gridlock and Cruz were standing there waiting to go to work and we put them to work and we tried to do all the rescue. But over the next two and a half days, the only way that we could end up changing crews was to have a pathway to bring a bus in and have crews simply exchange with one another and take our first cruise in and tired crews out. And we did that for three, four days. We did that until [00:22:30] the Saturday when Buck Helms was found and visualize that same kind of quagmire or gridlock or collapse of infrastructure and in a village and inability to get people out and resources in and take it from Fremont. And then certainly not for the entire things, but in patches from Fremont all the way to Richmond. How the hell are you going to end up doing that? How are you going to get the, the injured out and get the, the, uh, the resources in? If we've [00:23:00] got bart running, we can do that. Speaker 1:This is KLX Berkeley. You're listening to method to the madness. A 30 minute show about the innovative spirit of the bay area. I'm Eileen Huizar and we're talking to Vice President John McPartland of the Bart Board of directors. Bart recently, one in innovation in exemplary practice in earthquake risk reduction reward from the northern California chapter of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute. And I was asking vice-president McPartland about this award and the retrofit that's going on on Bard right now. And specifically I want him to [00:23:30] know about the Transbay tube. What would happen in the event of a huge earthquake and what would happen to the people underneath the bay. Speaker 6:First of all, the, the two danger areas and the transplant to trust me to have is three and a half miles long. And you ended up having about 57, I think 58 sections. Don't quote me on that, that are 330 feet long. And each one of those sections then was put into place, uh, [00:24:00] welded and put into a trench that was dug in the bottom of the bait. And then they turned around and we ended up, uh, putting balanced on top of it. The big fear that we had was that the bottom of the bay was potentially unstable in the event of an earthquake and we would have to on build a better structure to hold it in place. [00:24:30] The Loma Prieta earthquake caused a lateral shift at the, on the peninsula side and the two flux points that, uh, were critical were at the Oakland vent structure and at the San Francisco event structure and at the San Francisco event structure, um, there had been a lateral shift that, uh, move the alignment or the tolerance to a very [00:25:00] short distance within, uh, inches. Speaker 6:That's maximum tolerance for additional lateral shift. That was our first target. Um, not only did we end up fixing that first, I actually went down there and watched them do the, the last piece of work that put it into operation and basically retrofitted that particular section. Additionally, we have found that there has been no lateral shift at all on the Oakland side because [00:25:30] uh, basically we're pretty stable on the Oakland side. The Hayward fault is a long ways away, number one. And number two, it's a continuum of merit. The term that they ended up using in geology is a, uh, Merritt sand. So the consistency of the soil that actually goes to that portion where we ended up having the vent structure is continuous. And so we haven't had any movement there at all. Then the third section, like I said, was that [00:26:00] we didn't have to do any on retrofit at all during for the entire length of the tube because it's in a solid silt and a lot of balanced on top of, and that's not going anywhere. Speaker 6:If I had to be anywhere in the bart system personally and I worked in the safety department and did a lot of training and the translate to, if I had to be on anywhere when a major earthquake hits, I would probably [00:26:30] prefer, I would prefer to be in the Transbay tube. And the reason is that if you're in the underground, then uh, your train can't derail, it'll slam one side and slam the other, but it's not hell yes, it candy real, but, uh, it's not going to end up, uh, doing nearly as much damage. And I have full confidence in the system, being a watertight and be providing enough power for us to be able to get out of there [00:27:00] salsa nights that we've got a lower gallery that we can end up walking through all, although it, it is a long walk. Speaker 1:So there you have it. You can put those co underwater and the Transbay tube fears to rest courtesy of vice-president McPartland and [inaudible]. But we should all have a healthy dose of fear because this earthquake is going to happen. And I asked the question too, Brad Hagar, the geophysicists from the u s g s about what he tells [00:27:30] people to do in preparation for earthquake. Speaker 4:Taking it out of the science world, you're an expert in this is what you've dedicated your life to studying. Um, so what advice do you give to normal people? And they ask you if you're at a party and someone's like, what should I do for an earthquake? What do you say? Um, well the key is to be prepared to have food and water on hand and have a plan of how you're going to contact family members. Then if you can't contact them, do you have a sort of an understanding [00:28:00] of how are you going to handle rel relatives, children that may be dependent upon you because it may be difficult, for example, particularly difficult to get across the bay a if there's a large event because of bridges may be out, maybe even if the bridges survive, then, uh, along the edges there may be some extensive liquefaction that causes difficulties in disruption of actually getting onto the bridge. Speaker 4:Um, and our water supplies, [00:28:30] uh, especially for Hayward events, most of our water, um, comes across the Hayward and either in one form or another through pipelines. Um, as well as, uh, our power. A lot of our power comes across the Hayward fault. Um, much of those left lifelines have been retrofitted. Um, but then the distributions, the secondary distribution systems, a lot of those are still quite vulnerable, um, to disruption in earthquakes. So having enough water and food on hand. Um, uh, up to a [00:29:00] recently people were saying the 72 hours, and now it's, uh, ideally it's a week, um, because, and it's not so much that you wouldn't be able to get any water after 72 hours, but it's gonna be a lot more convenient if you have it on hand and don't have to, you know, perhaps hike a couple of miles or you go to, uh, a centralized distribution point where, uh, quantities may be very limited. Speaker 1:This has been method to the madness on KALX Berkeley. I'm your host Ali in his r and I'd like to thank our guest today, [00:29:30] Brad Agar from the u s gs and John McParland from Bart, both of whom showed us that the innovative spirit of the bay area is alive and well in dealing with the problem of the imminent on the Hayward fault. Speaker 3:You can learn more about this story@ourwebsiteatmethodtothemadness.org. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Larissa Branin reports on a DOE-funded program that brings middle and high school science teachers to the Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley National Labs each summer to give them hands-on experience as research scientists. This segment appears in the Fall 2010 edition of UCTV’s “State of Minds.” [Education] [Show ID: 20201]

Larissa Branin reports on a DOE-funded program that brings middle and high school science teachers to the Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley National Labs each summer to give them hands-on experience as research scientists. This segment appears in the Fall 2010 edition of UCTV’s “State of Minds.” [Education] [Show ID: 20201]

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Krista Marks General Manager, Disney Online Kerpoof Studios Date: August 2, 2010 NCWIT Entrepreneurial Heroes Lucy Sanders: Hi this is Lucy Sanders. I am the CEO of NCWIT or the National Center for Women and Information Technology. And this is one in a series of interviews that we're doing with great entrepreneurs, women who have started IT companies. And they all have great stories to tell, especially in the areas of entrepreneurship and the technology of the future. And with me is Larry Nelson from w3w3.com. Hi Larry. Larry Nelson: Hi, I am happy to be here. Lucy: What's going on with w3w3? Larry: Well we're doing all kinds of very neat things; we interview all kinds of neat people. But we really enjoy the NCWIT interviews because I'm having four daughters, and this idea of information technology in helping support women, it's just fantastic. Lucy: Well today is a real treat for us because today we're interviewing one of my absolute favorite people and entrepreneurs, Krista Marks. And she's a real blend of technical accomplishments, and social passion, and entrepreneurial spirit. You cannot spend more than five seconds with Krista without getting all kinds of really great information, and energy, and passion. And I had the privilege of interviewing her recently at Entrepreneurs Unplugged Session, and it was just a real treat. Everybody loved it. And I know our listeners are going to love the interview today. She's the co-founder of Kerpoof Studios, but before that in working in many technical areas with great technical credentials, patent-holder, et cetera. And when she started Kerpoof it was around a passion of children and innovation, and a great place to be on the Internet for learning. And apparently Disney thought that as well, and acquired Kerpoof in 2008. And Krista is now the general manager of Disney Online. And like I said at the Entrepreneurial Unplugged event she gets that little Mickey Mouse on her card, which I'm entirely jealous about. So welcome Krista. We're very excited to interview you. Krista Marks: Thank you. Thank you. It's good to be here. Lucy: Why don't you tell us a little bit of about what's going on at Disney first before we launch into the interview. Krista: Well one of the most exciting things that's going on, everything on the Create portal is done in bolder. And if you go to disney.com there's a game portal like a video portal, but there's now a Create portal. And that was the vision when Disney acquired us, that we would take an extended technology we've done around Kerpoof and really combine it with their IT, and build kind of an area on that dedicated to creativity. And we've done that. But we have a very big event that's going on now that I'm super excited and proud about which is a digital mosaic. Lucy: Oh wow. Krista: It's a large scale mosaic. There are images of Mickey. We provide the tools for kids to create drawings online. Those drawings are submitted and once moderated there incorporated into a Mosaic of Mickey that takes thousands and thousands pieces of art. In fact, we are rolling out different images of Mickey and each one is populated as a Mosaic. The whole portal is very exciting but for me this is sort of the combination of what is exciting about the web. Is this idea, the technology the technology for those not interesting to me but technology combined with the kind of things you can do in terms of being kids into this story? Be part of the story to participate and that kind of interaction is just super exciting. And to do something on that scale so its not just, "hey kids come in and draw, hey kids come in and draw and be part of something larger. Is part of a large Mosaic dedicated to Mickey?" In addition, it has been hugely successful I think were over 300,000 pieces of art created today. Lucy: Wow that is awesome. I am going to check that out four sure. In addition, its just so fascinating to you knows Krista is a real pioneer in the area of innovation for kids on line and it is very inspiring. Therefore, I am glad a company that is big as Disney is getting into that, that whole area. Krista: Serious, honestly is not it I thought it was very exciting. The reality is to have a company with number one family media company in the world really embrace bringing the kids into this story. Not just saying here is our art and here is art beautiful this is what they do well. Right, they create content saying, "you know what kids we want you to create content too, we want you to be part of that." I think its extraordinary exciting and I am really proud to be part of it. Lucy: Absolutely, one of the things that we always like to ask people and you rather go back in time a little bit. And think through here you are at Disney today but you were not always at Disney. You were interested in technology for some reason so why don't you tell us how you first got interested in technology. And as you look at the technical landscape today what technology do you think are especially important? Krista: My road is not, some ways its super smooth because I went, I graduated high school and I went to college and I studied electrical engineering. I would say it was unsmooth and it is why NCWIT is so important and that when I went to college I did not know about technology or pursuing a career in technology. Which for me it ended up being electrical engineering but obviously the number of careers one can choose in technology. For me what happened in high school is that I really gravitated in mathematics and science, problem solving. This is the areas that I like, unfortunately when I got to orientation for college I sat next to a student and I said what your major is. In addition, they said they were an electrical engineer and I said I do not know what that is, what is that? And they said oh well, I do not what that is either. But I know that if you really like math and physics, that it's really the best major to have and I said oh my gosh. Those are my two favorite things. So I really fell into it. And so I think, why NCWIT is so critical in the kinds of things they're doing, that you are doing which is so important, is that I would like no young person to start college not knowing what computer science, engineering, electrical engineering, all of the areas that on can pursue in technology, bio engineering. You know, the list goes on and on. But to be really aware of those opportunities, it may not be for everyone. But at least to be aware of them and so mindfully know what you're choosing from, when you choose a career. So anyway, again, I think I got lucky which I don't think is a good thing. But the good news is I did end up there and love technology and in fact really wanted, from that point on, to be part of designing technology. And spent a number of years, my first eleven years, designing custom electronics for high energy physics experiments. Got to work around the world, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, that really solidified my love of technology. Again, I was just working on really state of the art technology and systems. Great experience, great first experience. Worked with some real giants in that field and had amazing mentors. So that's kind of how I landed in technology. In terms of technology that I think is very interesting right now. I first would say, look at the I-pad, for a number of reasons. But for me, particularly, and again I'm interested in kids and technology. And the reality is kids learn by touching things. And so the I-pad is just perfectly designed for this demographic. And I think increasingly kids will literally learn how to read and problems solve using these types of devices. You know, what's interesting is, is I'm a part of a number of groups that are always thinking, gosh, can digital media actually make a difference. We have a lot of kids that are falling behind that aren't doing well. And there's always, can it be the silver bullet. We know that kids need scaffolding and they need adults to be there to help them succeed. But can digital media, can technology actually help set them and do something about this. And I think, to me, the I-pad is the first device, first piece of technology. And actually I like to bring up I-pad because a lot of times I think young people don't even think about the I-pad, the I-phone, the computer, that those are pieces of technology that are designed by technologists, right. And that how cool to have a career that, that's the kind of stuff you create, right. And I always say engineers. Look, at the end of the day all we do, we just create stuff. We build stuff whether it be Google the website, whether it be a Ferrari car, whether it be a Boeing airplane, whether it be an I-pad, and I-touch right. Software and hardware, that's what we do, we're creators, we're builders. So that's a piece that's exciting to me. I'm a little excited, I got to go to E3 which is of course the big conference this year, has to spend a little time there. In addition, have to see Microsoft's new Kinect, which of course is new tall. To me you know I would of prior to see thing that I would said the Wii. I think the Wii is very interesting piece of technology. I think its bringing back the sense of intergenerational game play. And again technology for technology's sake is not interesting to me but technology as a means to do interesting things like intergenerational play, very exciting. That takes that to the next level where you have Kinect where your whole body becomes the controller. Right, so you jump up and down on the screen the avatar jumps up and down. This is big stuff this is exciting stuff. I will say in the world self-serving but I think what we just did with the group wall, the digital Mosaic. [inaudible 09:01] is part of the kind of technology that to me is exciting, really pushing what the web can deliver. That level of interactive that frankly up to recently I would say you really only got from desktop software. Lucy: You know I saw Kinect at the Microsoft Facility Summit; it was interesting very, very interesting technology. Larry: Wow, you know, Krista, I thought when I fist met you at First Robotics, when you and I were both judges and of course, Lucy and her husband who were very involved also. But you mentioned Lawrence Livermore National Labs; about 20 years ago, they were a client to mine. Krista: What a small world. Larry: So I wonder if we met there. Krista: Actually, I was at Lawrence Berkley National Labs, something different then Lawrence Livermore. Larry: Oh, OK. Lucy: There all related to Lawrence. Larry: Is that the case. Krista: Actually there not, interesting a little aside the Lawrence was connected with Lawrence Berkley. In fact, his family has fought a long time to have his name removed from Lawrence Livermore. Because he really did high-energy research. He did not do bomb testing or development so a little aside. Lucy: That is interesting. Larry: It is and in fact when I think back there were very few women at all at Lawrence Livermore, very few. Anyhow you know here you are you got this techie background, you like solving problems in math and physics and all. Why you are an entrepreneur and what is about entrepreneurship that makes you tick? Krista: You know I have not really thought about this it is a good question and the more I thought about it. I have been asked this before and one of the simplest reasons and I do not think probably unusual is my father was entrepreneur. I think there's always been a piece of me I really admire him and admire what he has accomplished. I think its something always in the back of my head that is a big dream. I also think, honestly I think it is in the water in the United States. I think we're born and bred on the idea that you can strike it on your own. You can really start your own company. It is an extraordinary thing about this country that makes me excited to be here. I think there's not that you cannot be an entrepreneur in other countries but its very favorable here. We have a very nurturing environment being an entrepreneur. But first of all, my father, I think some other things happened that were critical. I think the reason a lot of people aren't entrepreneurs is not that they don't want to be, but because it's too scary. You have a good job. You're getting good pay. Why would you leave that for something that, frankly, that most people fail. You go to making no money and very unsure. A different level of stress. Because now, really, the buck stops with you in a very real genuine way. And I think because of all that, most people don't make the leap. I had two pivotal events. And I think it's an interesting thing to share because it really validates how I think having mentors or people that believe in you can impact you. I met a very famous entrepreneur, Jerry Fiddler. He's actually the cofounder of Wind River. A company that he grew literally from his garage to a billion dollar company. And I was on a ski trip with mutual friends and he was there. And it was all week. And we were skiing together. And during the course of the week he got to know me. And by the end of the week he said, "I think you would be an amazing entrepreneur. And not only that, I think you would be an amazing CEO and entrepreneur." And I think that someone who you kind of look up to, validates you, and says that, it has a huge impact. And so, at that point, I knew I was going to do it. It was a matter of finding the right group to do it with. It's not true for everyone, but for me, it was really important to do it with cofounders. And I was at Xilinx for the time, and three other people who were at Xilinx, three other engineers, we all had had a lot of success at Xilinx. A very wonderful company Xilinx. And I got to lead some products that really made a difference to their bottom line and their company. And I felt like, wow, I think I can do this. I think I have some good instincts. One of the things I learned when I left Lawrence Berkeley Lab and went to industry, and went to Xilinx that I didn't know about myself was how competitive I was. And I was working on products. And this raging competitor came out of me. When we would lose design wins, I would be so angry. And I would say to the sales people, "What do you mean we've lost?" And they would say, "Well, Krista, you're products are only one of many pieces that factor into a win." And I would say, "What are you talking about? My products should be so good it should determine the win. I want to talk to your customers." And I would go to the customers. And I would say, "What could we have done? Could we have done anything?" And in fact, there were things. They said, if you did 120 of this bus, and you did dynamical lining. You know what? We would have given it to you. Well, we went back and we did those things. And in fact, [inaudible 13:40] at our customer and led to the success. But what I learned is that it's obvious. It's not like a lot of people don't know. But was listening to customers. How powerful that can be. Truly viewing what they want and the kind of success you can have from that. So I think that combined with obviously having seen a father that ended up having role model sort of confirm that they think I could be good at it. With sort of already having some product success within the company and feeling my instincts are good. I think this is something I could do. I think all of that came together to make me able to take that leap. That's a scary leap. I don't think anyone who takes that first leap to become an entrepreneur and start a company from scratch. I always see it as jumping off a cliff. In fact, the other three cofounders, I always said, "We're going jump off this cliff together, and here's what I know. If we hold hands, don't let go, ever. We'll succeed. If we hold hand and don't ever let go, we'll succeed." And I use that metaphor a lot actually. Even when we sold the business, I said that, "Look. You guys, we got to hold hands here. We're holding hands. We're stronger as a four than we are individually." I think that's true. Lucy: That's really awesome advice. And I want to point out Jerry Fiddler's encouragement as being something really important, especially to many women to start companies. That he saw a great skill and he encouraged it. And here we have Krista today, having done a lot of great technology, and a successful entrepreneur. I had cause to be in a room with him once. When he found out I was from Boulder, he came up and said, "Do you know Krista Marks? She's just fabulous. Do you know about Kerpoof?" Larry: Whoa! Wonderful. Lucy: So, he's definitely your fan. Krista: Well that's funny because I actually... at that ski trip, I said Jerry when I become an entrepreneur this means you have to be an advisor. That's what you're signing up for right? I had locked him in right then. Lucy: Oh, that's great. Krista: He was an advisor to Kerpoof. Lucy: So see, I think we know what makes Krista tick about entrepreneurship. It's great. So, along the way Krista you have obviously done some tough things in your career. Why don't you tell the listeners one thing that's especially tough that you've had to do? Krista: I'll answer that in two ways. The short answer is becoming an entrepreneur. By far. Just that single decision to leave the security of a good job. I was doing very well in the context of where I was, and take that risk. Career wise, that was the most radical thing I've ever had to do. I think there are two other things. I think if you become a manager, which I did when I went to Xilinx, I took on a manager role. So, I was managing a group of engineers in Silicon Valley and then eventually also in Boulder that were developing technology. And I think when you become a manger, one of the hardest things in any career, in my opinion, is the first time you have to let someone go. The first time you have to fire someone. That was so hard that I really questioned whether I wanted to be in a leadership role anymore. It really was that difficult. I think it's always a hard thing. I think the first one was the most traumatic for me. It really was very hard and yet really critical in that role. I mean I say if you can't take on that [inaudible 16:55] role, you shouldn't be in that role because the reality is as best as we try to vet people when we hire them, we don't always do a perfect job. So that was very difficult for me. I think the other thing that was tough for me, in terms of it took sort of a ton of brain power is we lead first, we're entrepreneurs. And we initially launched Kerpoof in January of 2007. And we actually didn't have a lot of traffic. And I think we and the founders really had a tough, very tough decision about, do we keep going or do we do something else. You have to understand that was such a radical thing to do. We, all our hardware engineers and software engineers, the software engineers developing for hardware. Really pretty much a high tech classic background and we're coming to not only developing for children, a consumer web space. I mean, we really could not have in many ways, left our domain more completely. And everyone we talked to just thought we were insane, everyone just though we had lost our marbles. You know, why were we doing it? Xilinx is the leader in a product called a field programmable gate array and why are you doing some of that gate array, are you crazy. And we were following our heart, which I think is critical but with that comes more risk, right? You don't know, you don't know. You don't have the context of this. There's risk with that, so. And then combine with when you launch the product. And of course we thought we launch it in and everyone and their mother would use it and that didn't happen. So, we decided to stick with it and at that point, really I think did some true market research. There are two types of market research. One is you find what you want to hear and that feels good. And one is you really, you've got to get the answer. You dig deep. You're looking hard for the answers. And when we did that we really learned some stuff. We made some fairly modest tweaks to Kerpoof. And at that point really started watching it grow, watching the traffic grow. And it's interesting, a lot of the time it's true for entrepreneurs. They often, too quickly throw everything away and completely do something different, when often a small course correction can have a big impact. So that was very, I don't know if that's what you're looking for but I think that's for me personally was a pretty tough decision. Larry: Well speaking of tough decisions and giving good advice, how about if you were sitting down right now and across the desk from you was a young person considering entrepreneurship. What advice would you give them? Krista: That's so funny because my nephew is [inaudible 19:20] is interested in becoming an entrepreneur, so I just did this. I just had a delightful meeting with him over coffee. And that's what he's asking me, right. What was my advice? So I'll tell you the truth because I just did this and that's what I just said. The first thing I said is, "Get a co-founder." One of the things and I talked to a fair number of people and they have a good idea and they're kind of on their own. And I think there's a lot of value, I actually think there's a lot of value and in fact there is research to back up that diminishing return on number of founders doesn't go down until after five. Sort of shocking. If there's a lot of assumptions around the five, I think the five have to be... you offer diversity to their offering different skill sets. But literally and figure the five founders. So one of the things I say because I think it was so critical to me in my success was having co-founders. It's at least one other person. Once a very practical thing, if you can't convince one other person to jump off that cliff with you, how good of an idea is it? [laughter] Lucy: That's a very good point? Larry: Yeah. Krista: Right? That's one [inaudible 20:22] of a idea. But it is such a scary thing. And I say it feels a lot scarier than it is. I think the interesting thing about being an entrepreneur, I was impressed. What was the big deal and the other side is that it's such a big deal. But at the time those decisions feel so big and just having at least one other person hold hands. So the first thing I said to him was he needs to find a co-founder and the good news for him is he has. The other is I actually think the number one indicators for success as an entrepreneur has nothing to do with talent and little to do with good idea. I truly believe that and this is kind of a radical thing to say, it has to do with being tenacious. You need to want it, you need to have the drive, you're going to be there and if it's not right, you're going to make it right. Like I said, I said to my co-founders, "As long as we hold hands. Look, we may be really slow, it may take us 10 years before we have success but we will get to success. That's a given, we're going to get to success. I don't know how long that will take but we're going to get there." So I naturally had the tenacity and the drive and I think you got to have that. If you don't have that it's too hard. You'll just give up because it's too hard. And it's too much of an emotional roller-coaster. Look, most of the time you're looking for people to say yes. Whether it be you're trying to sell something to someone or an investor and the majority of the time you get a no, right? No, no, no, no and then it maybe turns into a no. So it's tough, it's really tough. So if you didn't have that drive and tenacity because you're following your heart, you have a passion. Do you have like, "You're going to work on this day and night, night and day until it's right because you just have to. It's just in your blood, you got to do it." You got to have that. If you don't have that then I sort of think good luck because this is not an easy thing, I think, to succeed. So you have to have kind of had that drive and passion. I think it says the obvious but one of the things I go back to the co-founder. I think it's a very interesting relationship with the co-founder. I almost liken it to a marriage though it's not a marriage but it's literally subjected to that much stress. And so you really, ideally the people that you co-found with you know pretty well, you really trust them, you're really comfortable with them. Because I think if you're not, if the trust isn't there, if that relationship isn't there, I find it hard to believe it would hold up to the kind of stress that is typical for a new entrepreneur. There's exceptions to these. I'm very much shaped by my own experience, so certainly take it with a grain of salt. The two core things in terms of once you decide to be an entrepreneur that I think have shaped me and I believe in, is build value first. One of the things that served us really well is, I felt like if we built value, we would succeed. Instead of focusing on, can we make a million billion dollars? Can we be bought by Disney? Instead of focusing on anything that might be a success scenario, just focusing on building value. So, look, we build this digital drawing tool for online for kids, let's build it really well. Let's make it great! I don't know that that will come with success, but I know that if we keep building value, we'll get there. The correlate of that is to follow your heart. I also think being an entrepreneur is really hard, so even when people are saying, "You are nuts! What do you know about kids? What do you know about the consumer's space?" If that's where your heart is... It's so hard, right? It can't be a means to an end. You have to enjoy the process. And we did. We would develop things for kids, they'd bring kids to the site, they would play with them. We may have been, in the early days, really kind of struggling, but that brought so much joy. Right? Building value, seeing [inaudible 23:56] kid liking it, feeling like, hey, we're on to something! I think part of that was really this fight. To a person, everyone's advice that we were crazy... We really did follow our hearts. Lucy: Yes you did. We had the pleasure of working with Kerpoof a little bit, and it was a great deal of fun. So, Krista, this advice is wonderful advice, and from it you can derive certain personal characteristics about Krista. For example, passion, and competitiveness, and tenacity. But also listening, valuing what the end customer, in this case kids - what do they need? Truly listening to those requirements. What other personal characteristics do you have that you think have given you advantages as an entrepreneur? Krista: Besides tenacity, which I think is a big one - drive, tenacity - I think... To me, this so overwrites everything, but it's very easy. Think of it as audience. Because it's particularly true for technologists, I just think we love technology. We just do, and so it's very easy to get caught up in the technology and forget the customer. It just doesn't matter how cool whatever you're widget is if no one else cares about it. Really identifying who your audience is, who your customer is. I really think focusing, and then being able to listen to your customer. I think sort of that's in general a characteristic of a good entrepreneur. They genuinely want to build things that people are going to use. That maybe isn't as true for a business to business. But I would say even in the business to business kind of entrepreneur at the end of the day the corporate clients that you're going to have or the business clients you're going to have. What do they want? What are their pain-points? What are they struggling with? I just recently talked to a really neat entrepreneur, but I felt like they had 10 ideas. I mean they were all good, but it was hard for me to feel they could all do well at once. I really, my advice to them, personally was just take one, focus on it, do it extremely well, and then grow that, expand that. I think there are a lot of ideas. So one of the characteristics of entrepreneurs that is very valuable is being able to narrow and focus in a very clear way. And sort of to know that focus should become bigger and when it should become narrower. That's a really critical skill. Larry: With everything that you do Krista, and I know you're busy well about 48 hours a day, how do you bring balance into your personal and professional lives? Krista: It's such a [inaudible 26] question for me, because I feel like it doesn't apply as well to entrepreneurs. And the reason is, I think typically when people talk about work life balance, there's very much this notion that work is something that you do because you need to see a paycheck. And so you want to just to turn it off, and not worry about it, and go. And I think when you follow your heart and you're doing what you're passionate about you realize it's 24/7, but it's a different kind of 24/7. And it doesn't mean it's not tiring, it doesn't mean it's not going to cost to your family and friends, certainly. And this is [inaudible 27:02] somewhat true. First becoming an entrepreneur, and even now being part of Disney I don't see as much of my family and friends. But in part that's because I love what I do. I want to do it. I love what I do. But that thing said, we did feel like they were diminishing returns and not being somewhat careful of burnout. And when we became a company we all agreed that we'd take one day off a week. We didn't always honor that. But I think we have the notion of trying to do that, of really trying it one day a week, which was typically Sunday. That know you're coming to the office. That we'd spend time with our friends and family, we'd rejuvenate, go hiking in the mountains, whatever. And certainly that helped. But, again, it is a finer line I think when what you're doing, particularly in entrepreneur it does become all consuming. It's funny one made the analogy. And I thought it was such a good analogy that in many ways being an entrepreneur, starting a company is much like having a child. And if you ever meet a new parent they're obsessed with their child. They want to show you pictures of the child, they want to talk about their child. They're really not interested in anything else in the world, right? There could be earthquakes, and there could be things going on, and they're just oblivious, right? And, that's their first year bubble of new child. And, entrepreneurs are a lot like that. I said - I always joked, you know, that - that the only family they spend a lot to time with - In the first couple of years of my being an entrepreneur, of starting Kerpoof, were people who were into Kerpoof. If you were into Kerpoof, then we could have a good conversation. If you didn't want to have a Kerpoof, I didn't really have much more I wanted to talk about. So, there is sort of a - And, there is an all consumingness that may not happen to everyone. It certainly happens to some entrepreneurs. I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing. You know, I think it's part of doing something extraordinary. It's part of succeeding. I think to answer your question really in the most succinct way, I don' think I do bring a lot of balance to my life. But, I am trying to do a little better and not because I - to do it for it's sake, but because actually I do think that your relationships with your family and your friends are very important to the whole of your life. And, if you neglect it too long, obviously that's at a cost. So, not to say that I don't think those things need to be considered and nourished. And, I think I have neglected them, for sure. And, I am - I making up now for that. Lucy: Well, I learned how to speak Kerpoof. Larry: Yeah. You did. You did. Krista: You did. You did. And, we got to talk. Lucy: I learned how to speak Kerpoof. And, listeners should also know that Krista is very generous with her time in the community with First Robotics, and certainly with NCWIT, and other groups. So, we definitely appreciate that as well. So... So Krista, the last question - You've achieved a lot. You know, you - I'm sure - have things that you want to accomplish in the future. Why don't you tell us a bit about what's next for you. Krista: You know what? One thing that... I don't know. I feel ostensibly believe life is extremely long. I think people say life is short and they're just wrong. I think it's long. I think we have the ability at least in the United States for - Many people have the ability to do many things in the course of their life if they're interested. So, I'm 43 now. So, I believe as many things as I've done to date, I've will, at least if not more, just have found it wiser to do as many more. So, I think life is very long. I also don't tend to be a long-term planner. I never have. I think it's kind of hog wash - much more interested in today and - and short term. So, for me what I know for sure is I feel very passionately about making sure...I really would love to see Disney stay in Boulder. I would love that - how ever long that takes. And, that could take a decade. But, I would love to see Disney remain in Boulder as a presence in Boulder. I think it's an extraordinary company. And, I think they have a real need for the kind of talent... we have in Boulder-technical talents - and also in Dimmer, actually inside Colorado. People don't realize the creative talent. But it is the fifth state in the top five in terms of the number of creative people that are here - artists and creatives - and so that combination of creatives and technologists. I actually hate that word "creative" because I think engineers are creative. But anyways, that's still the term that's used. Creatives - so animators and artists and the kind of amazing engineering talent and technical talent that we have here. That combined is very special. So it's not just an act to have Disney here. I think Disney can actually flourish here. I think we can continue to add something important to what they're trying to achieve with digital media. So that's one goal. Also, and I think this is happening but I really believe that we are changing the face of the Internet in some meaningful way for kids. I think that historically the large companies that frankly own the kids audience. The reality is kids go to very few sites. Nick.com, Disney.com obviously are the two big ones. Then there are a number of other players. Club Penguin certainly is one. But there are only a small number of sites. So what you want is for those sites to offer engaging entertainment but also offer participation, interactivity, and the ability to design because one of the things that's unique to the computer that's not true for a mobile device at least today, and it's certainly not true for a TV, is you can't design. So the computer is this unique platform. I think that, not those mobile platforms won't also be this, but those platforms you actually can participate, right? So to me this large piece of having a place and do that kind of dedicated creativity is a step towards we just move in a direction that nobody would think of doing otherwise. If you create something for kids, you just wouldn't imagine not offering some level of genuine engagement, some level of genuine participation, if it is computer-Internet based. That would just be an obvious step. I don't think we're there yet, but I think we're moving there. One of our competitors - actually it was interesting - I just noticed launched a very modest, but albeit a little center dedicated to creativity on their site, a site you wouldn't anticipate that from. I just thought that was so exciting, right? To me, you know you're leading when people are following. If you're leading in a place that's interesting for kids, then that's very exciting to me. I guess to me that's what's next. Lucy: We vote for that, and we vote for Disney in Boulder. Larry: Yeah, you bet you! Lucy: Absolutely. Well, thank you, Krista. This was very interesting as always. We really appreciate it and want to remind listeners to look for this interview at W3W3.com and also NCWIT.org. Krista: Oh, and thank you, Larry and Lucy. It's really my pleasure to be here. Larry: It's great, and of course we're going to have to follow up on you again. Lucy: Thank you, Krista. Krista: Thank you. Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Krista MarksInterview Summary: "When I went to college, I didn't even know about technology or pursuing a career in technology," says Krista. "Fortunately when I got to orientation for college, I sat next to a student who said she was going to major in electrical engineering. 'What is that?' I said. And she said, 'I know that if you really like math and physics, it's the best major to have. I said, 'Oh my god, those are my two favorite things! I would like every student to be aware of the available opportunities when they're choosing a career. I did end up there and loved technology. In fact, from that point on I really wanted to be involved in designing technology. I spent the first eleven years designing custom electronics, and got to work around the world." Release Date: August 2, 2010Interview Subject: Krista MarksInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry NelsonDuration: 33:56

Are Northern forests a source of global warming or the solution? Forest Ethics has published a new report on protecting the Great Bear rainforest to prevent climate change while a new study by Lawrence Livermore laboratory scientists says that more trees in the north may actually exacerbate global warming. Pratap Chatterjee hosts a discussion between the report authors, Tzeporah Berman of Forest Ethics and Govindasamy Bala of Lawrence Livermore. The post Terra Verde – April 20, 2007 appeared first on KPFA.