Podcast appearances and mentions of miracle fruit

Eddie and Chris are joined by three-time guest Aimee Nezhukumatathil for a conversation about the intersection of food, faith, family, and parenthood, based around her latest collection of essays, Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees. Aimee is the author of multiple volumes of poetry, including Miracle Fruit, Oceanic, and Lucky Fish, as well as several books of essays, World of Wonders (and her most recent, Bite by Bite). Her work has appeared in multiple magazines including Poetry magazine, Ploughshares, FIELD, and American Poetry Review, and she is the first poetry editor for Sierra, the story-telling arm of the Sierra Club.Aimee is also professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi's MFA program where she received the faculty's Distinguished Research and Creative Achievement Award.We're delighted to have her back on The Weight!Resources:Learn more about Aimee on her website Follow her on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTubeBuy her books, including Bite by BiteListen to her previous episodes on The Weight: World of Wonders and Finding Beauty in the Chaos

This is a re-airing of our 2021 episode with the poet and bestselling essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil. We're celebrating the release of her new collection, BITE BY BITE: NOURISHMENTS AND JAMBOREES. Come for the new intro about pizza on the beach, stay for Aimee's reflections on everything from champion trees to 80s-era Madonna to what society tells us about who "gets to" be comfortable in nature.Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the New York Times best-selling illustrated collection of nature essays and Kirkus Prize finalist, WORLD OF WONDERS: IN PRAISE OF FIREFLIES, WHALE SHARKS, & OTHER ASTONISHMENTS (2020, Milkweed Editions), which was chosen as Barnes and Noble's Book of the Year. She has four previous poetry collections: OCEANIC (Copper Canyon Press, 2018), LUCKY FISH (2011), AT THE DRIVE-IN VOLCANO (2007), and MIRACLE FRUIT (2003), the last three from Tupelo Press. Her most recent chapbook is LACE & PYRITE, a collaboration of epistolary garden poems with the poet Ross Gay. Honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pushcart Prize, a Mississippi Arts Council grant, and being named a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. She is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi's MFA program.For more Thresholds, visit us at www.thisisthresholds.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Annie Ryu, CEO of Jack & Annie's, shares insights into her work with jackfruit, highlighting its potential for health and environmental sustainability. Annie discusses managing the jackfruit supply chain, product development, and the challenges of creating a new market. This episode explores trends in the food industry, innovative approaches to combining plant-based and meat products, and strategies for launching new sustainable alternatives to consumer market. Join us in this heartfelt discussion on Annie's company mission, emphasizing the power of purpose-driven entrepreneurship in shaping a greener, more sustainable future for all.In this episode, we discuss: Jackfruit - The Miracle Crop beneficial for human health and the planet Trends in the food industry Launching new products to the consumer market Maximizing both environmental and social impact in business operationsCombining plant-based and meat products for impact at scale #leadership #climatebusiness #entrepreneurship #technology #greentech #greentransition#climatebusinesscast #podcast #climatepodcast #decarbonizing#meatalternative #foodindustry #jackfruit #jackandannies #sustainablefood #plantbased Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We head outside for the nice weather and to flavor trip our balls off. Bobby picked up some Miracle Fruit and we tried all sorts of sour goodies to put this stuff to the test.

If you watch, read, and listen to Black Dog content, then you know our Chief Scientific Officer Kevin Frender. Not only is his plant knowledge encyclopedic, but Kevin is also incredibly passionate about all things growing plants. Bonus discussion Miracle Fruit, one of Kevin's favorite plants.

If you watch, read, and listen to Black Dog content, then you know our Chief Scientific Officer Kevin Frender. Not only is his plant knowledge encyclopedic, but Kevin is also incredibly passionate about all things growing plants. Bonus discussion Miracle Fruit, one of Kevin's favorite plants.

Henry and Santi talk to Dad about the end of the school year, dancing at the orchestra banquet, Henry's composition, Mom's isolation, and the end of Santi's time in America.  In the News, we discuss a woman in Texas who lost her monkey at Dollar General, a man who landed a plane when the pilot became incapacitated, and a woman who was using Tinder to recruit people for her kickball team and got banned for life.  We play Either/Or.  Finally, for Treat Yourself, we sample a variety of fruits after eating Miracle Fruit.

In this episode we talk about the godsend fruit, The Banana, our reasons for starting this podcast, the Death of Tanaka, and more. フルーツの王様？であるバナナ、Podcastを始めたきっかけ、田中の死　などなど...　についてのディスカッション

Regenerative Land Management * This blog contains a few links to products on Amazon.com I've found useful. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from any purchases you make through these links. It's a great way to support the show while greening up your lifestyle. Our earned commissions won't cost you a dime!   Hello and welcome to Part 4 of a 6-part recap series. It's been a humbling exercise to keep up with all the fun stuff that comes with producing a podcast. Creating new episodes is only one of them.   Interviewing a bunch of rebel back-to-the-landers was a pretty attractive introduction to the idea of starting a podcast and getting good ideas out in the open.  I've loved it and am excited to release the other episodes that I have edited and waiting for you.      Doing these recap episodes, however, has been another kind of adventure.     Don't get me wrong; it's been an invaluable practice for me to do these reviews.  I feel like I'm getting out of this podcasting adventure the education that I was looking for.    All the same, creating audio content from a screen full of notes that you've taken from what other people have said is a lot more difficult than just speaking off the cuff. We humans are intrinsically a part of the planet we live on, and we're as inseparable from it as we are intertwined with its other expressions of lifeforms we co-exist with.  We are all composed of recycled molecules that we cyclically share with bacteria, viruses, other creatures, and the soil itself.   There are plenty of religions that tell the story of how we came from the soil, and to the soil, we return.  Yet we continue to tell ourselves and teach our children, the egoic myths that lead most people to think that we can somehow live healthfully, independent from healthy soil, not to mention the life-enriching variety of other earth dwellers that we share it with.   It's imperative for us to weave our inherent interconnection with the rest of our planet's existence back into our culture. We're all part of an organic planet. Like the unimaginable number of different cells that we need for our bodies to function properly, our planet (our larger self) needs its cellular diversity to remain intact and cared for.  Like us, when the planet loses significant parts of its functioning body, imbalances occur that can be much more difficult to return from than if things were already in a more relative state of balance. This episode is all about land management and what we've learned from those who've been doing the work and measuring their results.  Building healthy soil is one of the most important things that any of us could be doing right now. I'm going to say it again; a healthy humanity depends on healthy soil.   I'm going to be a little honest with you. I'm not the plant guy of the family. I  enjoy planting things here and there, and I love preparing food with fresh harvest from the garden, but  I'm generally not the guy you can rely on to keep a seedling alive long enough to transplant it or make sure the fertilization schedule stays current.     This episode was a bit of a challenge for me to get into. I've had to shed a bit of my imposter syndrome to be talking to a bunch of plant-enthusiasts about something that I know very little about, compared to them. At the same time, that's the theme of this entire podcast.  While I certainly have a fair share of things I've learned and can teach newcomers to the farm, this has been my season to humble down, take notes and be a student.   Let's see what that's looked like.    I've divided this episode into three sections. First, we'll talk about the planning stages of land management, followed by a recap of some of our guests' soil-building tips.  Lastly, we'll wrap it up with some insights they've learned from working with the plants themselves.   Let's jump in... It all starts with a good design. Justin Dolan learned a valuable lesson about doing your due diligence and having your land surveyed. While he strongly recommends doing so before buying your property, it worked out to his advantage when he disputed his neighbor's practice of spraying herbicides too close to his gardens.  A little investigation taught him that what they both thought was the neighboring golf course's road, was actually on his side of the property line.  The circumstance drove the golf-course developer toward unexpected production costs, leading them to sell the property to Justin at a low-enough price that Justin was able to take it on and turn it into what's become the country club's 18-hole permaculture disk-golf course.     In telling his story, Justin recommends that when negotiating your land purchase, you can often get the seller of your new property to share the costs of that assessment.   Justin also recommends hiring someone to do a biodiversity study, upon buying it, to educate yourself on what you have living on your property.  How cool would it be to have a customized bird-watching laminate card for you and your visitors to relate to your neighboring critters with!?   He says that “real” country clubs should be taking care of the countryside.  What a concept!   Water management is a crucial element to focus on, for any land project.  Amidst that is to give sufficient focus on how we manage our wastewater.  Justin's greywater and blackwater systems are built to bioremediate toxins.    Bioremediation is a process where certain plants break down the molecular structure of certain toxins, transforming them into inert matter.   The methods he uses make both economic and ecological sense.  Some of the plants he uses include planting lana, hemp, fungus, and oysters to filter the water. He says that hemp is an ideal product to feed with these wastewaters.  He also uses plastic bottles filled with biochar to further filter out pathogens.   Esteban Acosta was another guest who's put some significant thought into optimizing greywater and blackwater.  His biodigester systems have been refined to a point where they produce cooking gas, by fermenting the kitchen and bathroom wastes produced from a small residential home!     The price of gas keeps going up, folks.  Investing in a design that can give you free fuel while creating garden fertilizer is an investment seriously worth considering, especially if you're still in the process of building or designing a new home.   One thing that Justin expressed that stuck with me was that if you design your communal spaces to be beautiful, people will want to protect and contribute to them.     Justin has an infectious enthusiasm for using his property as a living seed bank. He encourages us to share and propagate as many different seeds as we can find.    Like Nico Botefur from Essence Arenal, Justin encourages us to plant our houses by putting bamboo in the ground as early as possible. He boasts that it's like printing your own money.  Seeing the price you can pay for prepared bamboo canes in some places, I'd say he's right.Nico further reminds us to plant plenty of it and use it liberally in ways that the bamboo poles can be replaced easily. It's a renewable resource that can be fun to work with once you get the hang of it. At Finca La Isla, Peter Kring has designed his food forests in an impressively systematic way. His property is designed as a network of crisscrossing rainforest corridors that frame out a series of 1-3 acre lots. Each of these lots has a themed collection of fruit trees and exotic palms planted within them.  That way, the wildlife can pass through his property freely, and while he loses some quantity of food to these neighboring critters, they contribute to the health of the soil, and therefore trees, in very beneficial ways. The key's just to plant more trees!   His neighbor, Terry Lillian Newton, invites us to try and let go of our attachments to what we think the property should be and learn to appreciate its innate essence.   Terry reminds us that if you want to have horses, plan for plenty of open space and a diversity of grasses, herbs, fruits, and flowers. Plant them all around their grazing areas or along the perimeter. She recommends learning more about this method in a book called Paddock Paradise, by Jamie Jackson. Building Healthy Soil Switching over now to the topic of building healthy soil, we'll start with Ed Bernhardt, the guy who refers to the back-to-the-land movement as a “silent revolution.” Ed refers to himself as a deep ecologist who aims to live with the land rather than on it.   Ed provides us with several great recipes for making valuable items like fast compost, his “kombucha for the plants,” a kitchen-made insecticide that's suitable for chewing insects, and even a biosand water filter.  We've made a PDF with these recipes outlined out for you. You can find a link to it in the transcripts of this episode, as well as in the show notes of Ed's Episode (#002.)   Ed also reminds us to do what we can to recycle our waste. Shredding newspaper and food scraps into compost is a great start.  If you live in an urban environment, you can look into buying Compost Drums or Worm Bins to make transforming your trash into treasure, faster and tidier.   Justin Dolan makes his bokashi microorganisms in his livestock corral and uses his animals to mix it.  The process adds nutrients to the mix while creating beneficial bacteria that eat pathogens in the corral. Making bokashi in the animal corals and spraying a tea version of it around the coral keeps it disinfected and smelling great.    In Justin's bokashi-production video, we also looked at his method of sustaining moisture and nutrients in the soil by creating Biochar.  He digs a big hole, about  2x3 meters wide and a meter or so deep, and fills it with wood waste. He ignites it, covers it with a dense layer of palm leaves with some sand on top, and leaves it to smolder. He comes back the next day to remove the leaves, and he's left with a pit full of biochar - enough for the whole year!   His extra touch comes when he removes the biochar. He fills the hole back up with wood to make a hugelkultur bed.  Hugelkultur is this great method of mounting up wood logs and covering it with dirt.  That dirt is planted on, and the wood underneath goes through a slow decomposition process, providing long-term fertilizer for the garden.   Peter Kring mimics nature in the ways he applies mulch to his food forests.  He mulches heavily around the dripline of the trees, adding biochar and manure to the mulch.  That way, the biochar-inoculated-mulch bed slowly covers the area as the trees develop.   Peter also adds micro-organisms to the mix during wet times of the year. For more efficient use in your dripline applications, he recommends harvesting mulch from a nearby forest floor and hydrating it to extract the beneficial microorganisms before applying.   When taking harvest from our trees, he encourages us to put something back for the tree to continue to thrive.  Find out what minerals each tree needs and create a schedule of application.  It doesn't have to be a heavy fertilizing regiment.  A bit of calcium carbonate (or rock phosphate) mixed with some manure and worm compost can be very effective.  He recommends making it in large quantities and then adding your biomass, biochar, and micro-organisms, as needed, throughout the year.   For more information on biochar, Peter recommends checking out the documentary The Secret Of Eldorado - TERRA PRETA, on YouTube.   Esteban's businesses, Sembrando Flores and Viogaz, focus primarily on soil improvement.  Esteban has proven again and again that Biodynamic-preparation applications significantly improve commercial-scale coffee and wine production.   In his practice of working with other landowners, he teaches those coming from a more conventional background and don't trust organic methods to consider replacing a small percentage of their fertilizers with compost to start.  That way, they can measure the results and make decisions from there.   He encourages us to grow our biomass precisely where we want to plant our gardens and trees in the coming year. He primarily uses plants like Macuna & Mexican sunflower for this task. Plant it heavily where you want to plant, and chop it back just before it goes to seed.   This practice aligns with Esteban's approach of setting up conditions where the soil can feed itself. Healthy-soil biology largely replaces the need for soil amendments.  He recommends using small amounts of high-quality compost with high quantities of cheap biomass grown on the fields. Simply apply compost tea on top of the biomass. His Biogas installations provide multiple yields of gas & liquid fertilizer in quantities that can allow you to apply an abundance of that tea weekly, or even daily.   In Nico's YouTube video, he uses the water from his tilapia ponds to drain directly into his biomass pile, which composts down and is moved to the gardens for top mulching. He also has hoses to inoculate his garden beds with the tilapia pond water.  Nico shares the opinion of many of our guests of how building soil should be the #1 priority when starting a new project.    Now, onto the Wonderful World of Plants   My first guest, Suzanna Leff of Finca Amrta, is as passionately connected to her gardens as anyone I've met.  Planting and processing harvest are some of her favorite tactics for helping her volunteers experience the magical qualities of life. In Finca Amrta's farm tour video, one of her volunteers describes how they grow their vanilla beans by gently helping each flower pollinate itself.  So cool!   Ed Berhardt shared a valuable insight when he pointed out that many medicinal herbs often tolerate shade, making them great to plant near the house or amidst tall trees.   One of the most exciting things I've learned from Ed occurred when I went to his place a few years ago, and he taught me how to propagate bamboo by cutting down a culm and creating several 1-meter-long portions from the upper third of the cane.  You cut each piece so that it has at least four nodes.  In between each node, you cut a small square out of one side of the culm - big enough for rainwater to get to it.     You plant the cane laying down lengthwise, half in the soil, with the open windows exposed to the elements.  As the culm fills with water and hydrates, it'll send roots down at each of the nodes, as well as shoots that'll begin to climb to the sky.  It takes a little longer to get going than if you just dig out a more mature shoot from the side of a clump, but it requires much less effort.   Besides the hemp & lana that Justin uses for his blackwater bioremediation, he also uses Mexican Sunflower, a plant that he and Esteban use for Green Manure.   Another one of his favorites to plant around is a bush called Miracle Fruit.  He says that it's an excellent food for people with diabetes.  This miracle fruit removes your ability to taste the acidic qualities of the foods you eat afterward.  This results in sour foods like lemons and vinegar tasting sweet!  It's a great way to satisfy a sweet tooth with non-sweet foods!   Justin likes to play with different plants to create microclimates for other plants and his living spaces.  He uses vining plants to cool down the walls of his house and also uses them to create trellised wind-breaks or dappled shade for more delicate foods. He encourages us to rearrange our perspectives on what medicine is, or can be. He sets the example of planting herbs as a living first aid kit all around and outside your home.   He also encourages us to plant things like neem, hombre grande, madero negro, garlic, and chili, to be used as ingredients for natural pest control. In some cases, it might even be worth importing some beneficial insects like the praying mantis or ladybugs to eat more invasive species like ants and mites. Besides, who wouldn't love to see more praying mantises and ladybugs around, right?   While he recommends that we remove weak and dying plants to keep insects away, he also reminds us that intentionally stressing plants can build resilience in some cases.   Peter Kring is another master gardener who turned out to be a treasure trove of tips.  Most notably, he recommends that most fruiting trees should be pruned after their fruiting cycles.  You have to do your homework, though.  Some fruits, like rambutan, can be pruned back as much as 2 meters, while others, like the mangosteen, don't like to be pruned at all.   Peter's nursery operation consists primarily of grafted durian, chompadek, and other exotic fruits that produce better quality fruits faster when they're propagated as a graft.  As he explains in his YouTube video on the topic, it can shave several years off the time you might have to wait for the tree to bear mature fruits.   Another little tip that he gave us is that if you mix the variety of durian trees you plant in an area, they'll pollinate each other, and the diversity will increase your harvest seasons. I've seen similar things done with avocados.   While, like me, Lynx Guimond may not necessarily be Sailcargo's go-to plant-management guy, the tour we took on his farm really blew me away.  There are far more foods that can be planted near the beach than I ever imagined.  For any properties that need to conserve water, he's demonstrated, yet again, that greywater filtration is a powerful way to water your gardens in a nutrient-rich way.   I'll leave you with one final tip that I've picked up from my own land management learnings. It's in alignment with the principle often described as Value the Marginal. While planting food has its obvious value and importance, don't skimp on the pollinators.  We need to plant pretty things. If not for ourselves and the aesthetic pleasure of our guests, we need a diversity of flowers in our gardens to attract the ever-vigilant birds and bees that make our gardens an Eden.   With that, my friends, I bid you a wonderful rest of your day.  Remember to subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already, so you'll get notified when I eventually release our next episode on natural and sustainable construction methods.Until then, Go find a seed and plant it somewhere lovely!   P.S: Besides leaving a rating and review or sharing the show with someone who'd like it, you can support the show and yourself by visiting our Support the Show page. There, you'll find an array of helpful information, links, and products that I thought you might find useful.  Check it out! Music: Rite of Passage by Kevin MacLeod  Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4291-rite-of-passage  License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ --------------------------------------- Download your FREE guide to Permaculture Living, at: https://sharinginsights.net/permaculture-lifestyle-ebook/  

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the NYTimes best-selling illustrated collection of nature essays and Kirkus Prize finalist, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks & Other Astonishments, which was chosen as Barnes and Noble's and has sold 5 million copies. She has four previous poetry collections: Oceanic, Lucky Fish, At the Drive-in Volcano, and Miracle Fruit. Her most recent chapbook is Lace & Pyrite, a collaboration of epistolary garden poems with the poet Ross Gay. Her writing appears twice in the Best American Poetry Series, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and Tin House.Honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pushcart Prize, Mississippi Arts Council grant, and being named a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. She's the first-ever poetry editor for Sierra magazine, the story-telling arm of The Sierra Club. She is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi's MFA program.· aimeenez.net · www.creativeprocess.info· www.oneplanetpodcast.org

“I think something happened in 2016, where I just snapped. There was a lot of a hateful news going around with American politics, and I didn't know how to answer a lot of my kids questions then. Something I know I can do is to tell them things that I loved about this planet or things that I loved in other people because all they saw or heard about was just this weird ugliness, school shootings, leaders who were saying ‘build that wall' to anybody who looked different than them, and so I remember the night I shut myself up in my office after the kids went to bed and just started writing about plants and animals that I loved from my childhood.”Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the NYTimes best-selling illustrated collection of nature essays and Kirkus Prize finalist, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks & Other Astonishments, which was chosen as Barnes and Noble's and has sold 5 million copies. She has four previous poetry collections: Oceanic, Lucky Fish, At the Drive-in Volcano, and Miracle Fruit. Her most recent chapbook is Lace & Pyrite, a collaboration of epistolary garden poems with the poet Ross Gay. Her writing appears twice in the Best American Poetry Series, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and Tin House.Honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pushcart Prize, Mississippi Arts Council grant, and being named a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. She's the first-ever poetry editor for Sierra magazine, the story-telling arm of The Sierra Club. She is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi's MFA program.· aimeenez.net · www.creativeprocess.info· www.oneplanetpodcast.org

Hangovers, bad breath, weight loss, and so much more! You should consider working this fruit into your diet because of its amazing benefits! The craziest part? You probably didn't even know it was a fruit. Image Source: Getty Images

“I think something happened in 2016, where I just snapped. There was a lot of a hateful news going around with American politics, and I didn't know how to answer a lot of my kids questions then. Something I know I can do is to tell them things that I loved about this planet or things that I loved in other people because all they saw or heard about was just this weird ugliness, school shootings, leaders who were saying ‘build that wall' to anybody who looked different than them, and so I remember the night I shut myself up in my office after the kids went to bed and just started writing about plants and animals that I loved from my childhood.”Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the NYTimes best-selling illustrated collection of nature essays and Kirkus Prize finalist, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks & Other Astonishments, which was chosen as Barnes and Noble's and has sold 5 million copies. She has four previous poetry collections: Oceanic, Lucky Fish, At the Drive-in Volcano, and Miracle Fruit. Her most recent chapbook is Lace & Pyrite, a collaboration of epistolary garden poems with the poet Ross Gay. Her writing appears twice in the Best American Poetry Series, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and Tin House.Honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pushcart Prize, Mississippi Arts Council grant, and being named a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. She's the first-ever poetry editor for Sierra magazine, the story-telling arm of The Sierra Club. She is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi's MFA program.· aimeenez.net · www.creativeprocess.info· www.oneplanetpodcast.org

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the NYTimes best-selling illustrated collection of nature essays and Kirkus Prize finalist, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks & Other Astonishments, which was chosen as Barnes and Noble's and has sold 5 million copies. She has four previous poetry collections: Oceanic, Lucky Fish, At the Drive-in Volcano, and Miracle Fruit. Her most recent chapbook is Lace & Pyrite, a collaboration of epistolary garden poems with the poet Ross Gay. Her writing appears twice in the Best American Poetry Series, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and Tin House.Honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pushcart Prize, Mississippi Arts Council grant, and being named a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. She's the first-ever poetry editor for Sierra magazine, the story-telling arm of The Sierra Club. She is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi's MFA program.· aimeenez.net · www.creativeprocess.info· www.oneplanetpodcast.org

“I think something happened in 2016, where I just snapped. There was a lot of a hateful news going around with American politics, and I didn't know how to answer a lot of my kids questions then. Something I know I can do is to tell them things that I loved about this planet or things that I loved in other people because all they saw or heard about was just this weird ugliness, school shootings, leaders who were saying ‘build that wall' to anybody who looked different than them, and so I remember the night I shut myself up in my office after the kids went to bed and just started writing about plants and animals that I loved from my childhood.”Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the NYTimes best-selling illustrated collection of nature essays and Kirkus Prize finalist, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks & Other Astonishments, which was chosen as Barnes and Noble's and has sold 5 million copies. She has four previous poetry collections: Oceanic, Lucky Fish, At the Drive-in Volcano, and Miracle Fruit. Her most recent chapbook is Lace & Pyrite, a collaboration of epistolary garden poems with the poet Ross Gay. Her writing appears twice in the Best American Poetry Series, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and Tin House.Honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pushcart Prize, Mississippi Arts Council grant, and being named a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. She's the first-ever poetry editor for Sierra magazine, the story-telling arm of The Sierra Club. She is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi's MFA program.· aimeenez.net · www.creativeprocess.info· www.oneplanetpodcast.org

“I think something happened in 2016, where I just snapped. There was a lot of a hateful news going around with American politics, and I didn't know how to answer a lot of my kids questions then. Something I know I can do is to tell them things that I loved about this planet or things that I loved in other people because all they saw or heard about was just this weird ugliness, school shootings, leaders who were saying ‘build that wall' to anybody who looked different than them, and so I remember the night I shut myself up in my office after the kids went to bed and just started writing about plants and animals that I loved from my childhood.”Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the NYTimes best-selling illustrated collection of nature essays and Kirkus Prize finalist, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks & Other Astonishments, which was chosen as Barnes and Noble's and has sold 5 million copies. She has four previous poetry collections: Oceanic, Lucky Fish, At the Drive-in Volcano, and Miracle Fruit. Her most recent chapbook is Lace & Pyrite, a collaboration of epistolary garden poems with the poet Ross Gay. Her writing appears twice in the Best American Poetry Series, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and Tin House.Honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pushcart Prize, Mississippi Arts Council grant, and being named a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. She's the first-ever poetry editor for Sierra magazine, the story-telling arm of The Sierra Club. She is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi's MFA program.· aimeenez.net · www.creativeprocess.info· www.oneplanetpodcast.org

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the NYTimes best-selling illustrated collection of nature essays and Kirkus Prize finalist, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks & Other Astonishments, which was chosen as Barnes and Noble's and has sold 5 million copies. She has four previous poetry collections: Oceanic, Lucky Fish, At the Drive-in Volcano, and Miracle Fruit. Her most recent chapbook is Lace & Pyrite, a collaboration of epistolary garden poems with the poet Ross Gay. Her writing appears twice in the Best American Poetry Series, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and Tin House.Honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pushcart Prize, Mississippi Arts Council grant, and being named a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. She's the first-ever poetry editor for Sierra magazine, the story-telling arm of The Sierra Club. She is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi's MFA program.· aimeenez.net · www.creativeprocess.info· www.oneplanetpodcast.org

“I think something happened in 2016, where I just snapped. There was a lot of a hateful news going around with American politics, and I didn't know how to answer a lot of my kids questions then. Something I know I can do is to tell them things that I loved about this planet or things that I loved in other people because all they saw or heard about was just this weird ugliness, school shootings, leaders who were saying ‘build that wall' to anybody who looked different than them, and so I remember the night I shut myself up in my office after the kids went to bed and just started writing about plants and animals that I loved from my childhood.”Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the NYTimes best-selling illustrated collection of nature essays and Kirkus Prize finalist, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks & Other Astonishments, which was chosen as Barnes and Noble's and has sold 5 million copies. She has four previous poetry collections: Oceanic, Lucky Fish, At the Drive-in Volcano, and Miracle Fruit. Her most recent chapbook is Lace & Pyrite, a collaboration of epistolary garden poems with the poet Ross Gay. Her writing appears twice in the Best American Poetry Series, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and Tin House.Honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pushcart Prize, Mississippi Arts Council grant, and being named a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. She's the first-ever poetry editor for Sierra magazine, the story-telling arm of The Sierra Club. She is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi's MFA program.· aimeenez.net · www.creativeprocess.info· www.oneplanetpodcast.org

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the NYTimes best-selling illustrated collection of nature essays and Kirkus Prize finalist, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks & Other Astonishments, which was chosen as Barnes and Noble's and has sold 5 million copies. She has four previous poetry collections: Oceanic, Lucky Fish, At the Drive-in Volcano, and Miracle Fruit. Her most recent chapbook is Lace & Pyrite, a collaboration of epistolary garden poems with the poet Ross Gay. Her writing appears twice in the Best American Poetry Series, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and Tin House.Honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pushcart Prize, Mississippi Arts Council grant, and being named a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. She's the first-ever poetry editor for Sierra magazine, the story-telling arm of The Sierra Club. She is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi's MFA program.· aimeenez.net · www.creativeprocess.info· www.oneplanetpodcast.org

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the NYTimes best-selling illustrated collection of nature essays and Kirkus Prize finalist, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks & Other Astonishments, which was chosen as Barnes and Noble's and has sold 5 million copies. She has four previous poetry collections: Oceanic, Lucky Fish, At the Drive-in Volcano, and Miracle Fruit. Her most recent chapbook is Lace & Pyrite, a collaboration of epistolary garden poems with the poet Ross Gay. Her writing appears twice in the Best American Poetry Series, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and Tin House.Honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pushcart Prize, Mississippi Arts Council grant, and being named a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. She's the first-ever poetry editor for Sierra magazine, the story-telling arm of The Sierra Club. She is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi's MFA program.· aimeenez.net · www.creativeprocess.info· www.oneplanetpodcast.org

“I think something happened in 2016, where I just snapped. There was a lot of a hateful news going around with American politics, and I didn't know how to answer a lot of my kids questions then. Something I know I can do is to tell them things that I loved about this planet or things that I loved in other people because all they saw or heard about was just this weird ugliness, school shootings, leaders who were saying ‘build that wall' to anybody who looked different than them, and so I remember the night I shut myself up in my office after the kids went to bed and just started writing about plants and animals that I loved from my childhood.”Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the NYTimes best-selling illustrated collection of nature essays and Kirkus Prize finalist, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks & Other Astonishments, which was chosen as Barnes and Noble's and has sold 5 million copies. She has four previous poetry collections: Oceanic, Lucky Fish, At the Drive-in Volcano, and Miracle Fruit. Her most recent chapbook is Lace & Pyrite, a collaboration of epistolary garden poems with the poet Ross Gay. Her writing appears twice in the Best American Poetry Series, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and Tin House.Honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pushcart Prize, Mississippi Arts Council grant, and being named a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. She's the first-ever poetry editor for Sierra magazine, the story-telling arm of The Sierra Club. She is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi's MFA program.· aimeenez.net · www.creativeprocess.info· www.oneplanetpodcast.org

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the NYTimes best-selling illustrated collection of nature essays and Kirkus Prize finalist, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks & Other Astonishments, which was chosen as Barnes and Noble's and has sold 5 million copies. She has four previous poetry collections: Oceanic, Lucky Fish, At the Drive-in Volcano, and Miracle Fruit. Her most recent chapbook is Lace & Pyrite, a collaboration of epistolary garden poems with the poet Ross Gay. Her writing appears twice in the Best American Poetry Series, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and Tin House.Honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pushcart Prize, Mississippi Arts Council grant, and being named a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. She's the first-ever poetry editor for Sierra magazine, the story-telling arm of The Sierra Club. She is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi's MFA program.· aimeenez.net · www.creativeprocess.info· www.oneplanetpodcast.org

“I think something happened in 2016, where I just snapped. There was a lot of a hateful news going around with American politics, and I didn't know how to answer a lot of my kids questions then. Something I know I can do is to tell them things that I loved about this planet or things that I loved in other people because all they saw or heard about was just this weird ugliness, school shootings, leaders who were saying ‘build that wall' to anybody who looked different than them, and so I remember the night I shut myself up in my office after the kids went to bed and just started writing about plants and animals that I loved from my childhood.”Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the NYTimes best-selling illustrated collection of nature essays and Kirkus Prize finalist, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks & Other Astonishments, which was chosen as Barnes and Noble's and has sold 5 million copies. She has four previous poetry collections: Oceanic, Lucky Fish, At the Drive-in Volcano, and Miracle Fruit. Her most recent chapbook is Lace & Pyrite, a collaboration of epistolary garden poems with the poet Ross Gay. Her writing appears twice in the Best American Poetry Series, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and Tin House.Honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pushcart Prize, Mississippi Arts Council grant, and being named a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. She's the first-ever poetry editor for Sierra magazine, the story-telling arm of The Sierra Club. She is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi's MFA program.· aimeenez.net · www.creativeprocess.info· www.oneplanetpodcast.org

In this bonus episode, I read an essay, Firefly (Redux) from World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. From the first of the 30 essays, you find yourself drawn in by the beautiful imagery Aimee uses to describe her joy and amazement of the wondrous world around us. This book compels us to celebrate diversity, to pay attention to the environmental issues plaguing our world, and to spend more time reflecting in nature. This essay in particular brings the book to a nostalgic close - reminding us to cherish and enjoy this beautiful planet we call home. Purchase World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, & Other AstonishmentsAimee is the author of the New York Times best-selling illustrated collection of nature essays and Kirkus Prize finalist, WORLD OF WONDERS: IN PRAISE OF FIREFLIES, WHALE SHARKS, & OTHER ASTONISHMENTS. which was chosen as Barnes and Noble's Book of the Year. She has four previous poetry collections: OCEANIC, LUCKY FISH, AT THE DRIVE-IN VOLCANO, and MIRACLE FRUIT, the last three from Tupelo Press. Her most recent chapbook is LACE & PYRITE, a collaboration of epistolary garden poems with the poet Ross Gay. Her writing appears twice in the Best American Poetry Series, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and Tin House. She is a professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi's MFA program.From World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2020). Copyright © 2020 by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions. milkweed.orgSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

‘Spiritual Miracle Fruit’ (1 John 3) – 27th September 2020. The post ‘Spiritual Miracle Fruit’ (1 John 3) appeared first on Hadleigh Baptist Church.

We celebrate our 6 month anniversary here at 102.1 The Edge and get roasted by the hilarious Jesse Ralph! Also Jay brings a berry to the show that actually turns sour foods into sweet foods by reshaping your taste buds. It's called The Miracle Berry and it's wild. 

There's only so much weight we can carry before we need to lighten our load. This is a conversation about beauty, poetry, humanity, memory, love. We're talking to the renowned poet, Aimee Nezhukumatathil. Aimee was born in Chicago, IL to a Filipina mother and a father from South India. She is the author of multiple volumes of poetry from Miracle Fruit (2003) to Oceanic (2018). Her work has appeared in Poetry magazine, Ploughshares, FIELD, and American Poetry Review. Honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pushcart Prize. The Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters has honored “Oceanic,” a collection of poems by Aimee Nezhukumatathil of Oxford, with its 2019 award for poetry. Her colleague, Beth Ann Fennelly, wrote, “Commonly recognized as one of the finest poets of her generation, Nezhukumatathil is an important observer of the natural world and its human and nonhuman animals. Her metaphorical gifts are astonishing, as well as her nuanced feel for the details that make poems visceral and alive.”We spoke with her before the world was consumed with news about the global pandemic. And we think you will find her to be a breath of fresh air.To learn more about Aimee, visit her website: http://aimeenez.netYou can find her at:• Facebook https://www.facebook.com/Aimee-Nezhukumatathil-official-181587295228446/• Twitter @aimeenez• Amazonhttps://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3AAimee+Nezhukumatathil&s=relevancerank&ref=ntt_at_ep_srchWe can't wait to read her next book, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other AstonishmentsYou can pre-order it here: https://www.amazon.com/World-Wonders-Praise-Fireflies-Astonishments/dp/1571313656/ref=sr_1_2?qid=1585784010&refinements=p_27%3AAimee+Nezhukumatathil&s=books&sr=1-2

Jeremy has invited Brian to come live with him and Producer Sarah for a little while, so you know some shenanigans are in store. Brian tells a story about some bad medicine he received last week. The boys try something called Miracle Fruit. And finally, the big announcement you all have been dying to hear about.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s poem “On Listening to Your Teacher Take Attendance” offers a way to ground yourself during vulnerable moments. The poet gathers strength from being loved, which helps her in times of displacement.A question to reflect on after you listen: What stories do you hold on to when you're feeling displaced?About the poet:Aimee Nezhukumatathil is a professor of English and creative writing in the MFA program at the University of Mississippi. She also serves as the poetry editor for Orion magazine. Her books include Lucky Fish, At the Drive-In Volcano, Miracle Fruit, and Oceanic. Her upcoming book of illustrated essays is World of Wonders. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.“On Listening to Your Teacher Take Attendance” comes from Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s book Oceanic. Thank you to Copper Canyon Press, who published the book, and to Aimee for letting us use her poem. Read it on onbeing.org.Find the transcript for this episode at onbeing.org.The original music in this episode was composed by Gautam Srikishan.

Rachel Herz of Brown and Boston College talks about food psychology. Linda Bartoshuk of the University of Florida examines miracle fruit. Gary Beauchamp of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia on umami. Anne-Marie Chiramberro explains the Basque diaspora. Stephan Mansfield visits with us about the Kurdish areas in northern Iraq and Syria.

Rachel Herz of Brown and Boston College talks about food psychology. Linda Bartoshuk of the University of Florida examines miracle fruit. Gary Beauchamp of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia on umami. Anne-Marie Chiramberro explains the Basque diaspora. Stephan Mansfield visits with us about the Kurdish areas in northern Iraq and Syria.

Show NotesMiracle fruithttp://oncorenutrition.com/miracle-fruit/Tapeworm DietVictorian Era- late 1800s Tablet containing parasite egg - hatches and “eats extra calories” in the digestive systemPossibles side effects: nausea, vomiting, fever, diarrhoea, infection blocked bile ducts, pancreatic ducts, neurological issues (blurred vision, dementia), altered lung + liver failureUpgrade your health - salad leaveshttp://www.leanitup.com/upgrade-your-lettuce-game-boost-your-nutrient-intake-3000-with-this-two-second-salad-hack/Best vegan protein for muscle gainsNeed 8g leucine per day spread over meals and snacks (2.5g per serve) - amino acid - building block plus anabolic triggerMost leucine rich vegan protein powder = corn protein. Leucine rich foods include meat, chicken, fish, nuts & seeds, eggsFor those who prefer vegan protein, a corn protein isolate has a decent BCAA  profile and is an excellent source is leucine. Soy is also another option that is high in leucine.

As if being high wasn’t enough, we eat some miracle fruit—those tablets that make sour things taste sweet…and then we straight up eat lemons and limes, while high. It’s a wild ride, so find out what happens in a rare demo episode of HBR!   Follow us! Twitter @highbrowreviews Instagram @highbrowreviews Email us! highbrowreviews@gmail.com

Santino sits down with standup comic Ian Edwards to talk about his new Comedy Central special airing JULY 12TH at MIDNIGHT and also about Miracle Fruit and the new class of decedents of hipsters and learning to no longer pay attention to other peoples thoughts of how you should live. SEE ME LIVE!!! LEXINGTON, KY JUL 11-13 SACRAMENTO, CA JUL 18-20 MONTREAL JUST FOR LAUGHS JUL 24-27 ST. LOUIS, MO AUG 1-3 TICKETS AT http://www.andrewsantino.com FOLLOW ME ON INSTA https://www.instagram.com/cheetosantino/ FOLLOW WHISKEY GINGER PODCAST ON INSTA https://instagram.com/whiskeygingerpodcast?igshid=mztm4g3wy0gq FOLLOW IAN ON INSTA: https://www.instagram.com/ianedwardscomic/?hl=en For more info on the WHISKEY GINGER SIGN please check out the dope art of https://www.instagram.com/starlingear/?hl=ent

Hi! You've reached the two-part finale of Venture Bros Season Three: The Family That Slays Together, Stays Together. And what a ride it has been! Bryan Dressel is joined on this jam-packed, extra long episode by Nicholas "Ackee" Friedemann, Graham "Mangosteen" Mason, and Matt "Miracle Fruit" Dykes. Stay tuned to the very end of the episode for a special appearance from Brok Holliday, who takes us through his thoughts on the finale as well. A great episode, but "yer not gonna like looking for the keys!" INTRO MUSIC COURTESY Bradley David Parsons inspired by JG Thrilwell RESEARCH COURTESY Brok Holliday

Have you ever flavor-tripped? Put something in your mouth and had a totally unexpected reaction? How does flavor tripping work? In this episode – we’re going to take a look at the science behind the magical reaction of miracle fruit. Have you ever wondered where your food comes from? Not just where it’s grown today, but where it originally popped up in the world? Have you ever bit into a delicious, red, juicy ripe fruit and wondered, hey – why is it this color? What’s responsible for this amazing flavor? Or – is this good for my health? Could it even be medicinal? "Foodie Pharmacology" is a food podcast built for the food curious, the flavor connoisseurs, chefs, science geeks, foodies and adventurous taste experimenters out in the world! So, join me on this adventure through history, medicine, cuisine and molecules as we explore the amazing pharmacology of our foods. Dr. Cassandra Quave is an American ethnobotanist, herbarium curator, and assistant professor at Emory University. Her research focuses on analyzing wild plants used in traditional cultures for food and medicine to combat some of the greatest challenges we face today in medicine: antibiotic resistant infections and cancer.

A small red berry (growing in Vero Beach) that could help cancer patients, and one Treasure Coast city was named to the 'Happiest Seaside Town' list. TCPalm links: Heat stroe vote: bit.ly/2y8nkpK Happiest Seaside Town: bit.ly/2sSkrnI

In this episode of the Survival Medicine Hour with Joe Alton, MD and Amy Alton, ARNP, we give you the latest news, and there is definitely news, about the Zika virus epidemic in South America. When warm weather arrives in your area, will you be in the 30 U.S. states where the Aedes mosquito lives? What does the CDC say about the risk of an epidemic here? Plus, Nurse Amy examines whether we really should have Fluoride in our water, and what the risks are versus the benefits (Hint: She's against it). Joe Alton, aka Dr. Bones, reports on the devastation left by 2 quakes and hundreds of aftershocks in Southern Japan, and Nurse Amy examines an interesting plant in our garden: The Miracle Fruit! All this and more in the Survival Medicine Hour

In this episode of the Survival Medicine Hour with Joe Alton, MD and Amy Alton, ARNP, we give you the latest news, and there is definitely news, about the Zika virus epidemic in South America. When warm weather arrives in your area, will you be in the 30 U.S. states where the Aedes mosquito lives? What does the CDC say about the risk of an epidemic here? Plus, Nurse Amy examines whether we really should have Fluoride in our water, and what the risks are versus the benefits (Hint: She's against it). Joe Alton, aka Dr. Bones, reports on the devastation left by 2 quakes and hundreds of aftershocks in Southern Japan, and Nurse Amy examines an interesting plant in our garden: The Miracle Fruit! All this and more in the Survival Medicine Hour

Themed episode, where Craig and Jeremy discover the wonders of miracle fruit candy...  Lots and lots of laughs in this one. 

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.

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.

This week on Cooking Issues Dave and Nastassia spoke about the scientific wonders of Miracle Fruit, buying a Dutch Oven, cooking pasta as if it were risotto, fixing (and cleaning!) a refrigerated centrifuge from Ebay via a blood bank, plus a fascinating and brief history of the Tichborne Dole. This episode was sponsored by Fairway: like no other market. Photo 1: Mircale Fruit, Photo 2: The Tichborne Dole

Truthdig - Reports - The Hedonists of Power by Chris Hedges http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080623_the_hedonists_of_power/ Modern-day courtiers: The mainstream media Colbert stickin' it to The Man http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Colbert_at_the_2006_White_House_Correspondents'_Association_Dinner http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-869183917758574879 Fascism in America via State-created corporations Get rid of government--problems solved! Journalists' individual sacrifices Where people get their collectivistic fears... Ridiculous nation-state chest-pounding Philosophical rationalizations hide fears Stockholm syndrome writ large: Identifying with and apologizing for the actions of one's political abusers The youth in Iran as potential catalyst for positive change Dealing with political frustration Meddlings of governments as genesis of terrorism The individual values of journalists--or lack thereof Croc Dundee to tax authorities: 'Come and get me' http://movies.msn.com/movies/article.aspx/?news=321662>1=28101 The Real Crocodile Dundee by Vin Suprynowicz http://www.lewrockwell.com/suprynowicz/suprynowicz48.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_William_Ansell Don't appease tax "authorities" (thieves); either you honor property rights or you don't Question for statists: Should any unsolicited product or service be imposed at gunpoint? Recognizing the difference between coercion and voluntary trade "It's hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head." (Sally Kempton) A society of complete liberty is a society of dignity Politics as reflection of self-concept Coming to terms with childhood trauma and fear vis a vis authority The Disowned Self by Nathaniel Branden http://www.nathanielbranden.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=21_23&products_id=46 The Miracle Fruit, a Tease for the Taste Buds by Patrick Farrell and Kassie Bracken http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/28/dining/28flavor.html http://flavortripping.wordpress.com/ & http://www.miraclefruitman.com/ Riding a Flavor Trip :) http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=1615a44db1aa2c70758ae67c12b06cb1f4be9808 bumper music "Gimme Some Truth" by John Lennonhttp://johnlennon.com/html/discography.aspx?upc=724352485826 to comment, please go to http://completeliberty.com/magazine/category/91697  

This was something I had been meaning to do since I arrived in Japan. Alex and I headed out to Namco Namja Town in Ikebukuro (map) this past Saturday in search of miracle fruit. I heard about miracle fruit about 6 months ago and was surprised to hear that it was available in Japan. I … Continue reading "Episode 23 – Miracle Fruit"