Podcasts about oak ridge national lab

In February 2024, Gladstone AI produced a report for the Department of State, which opens by stating that "The recent explosion of progress in advanced artificial intelligence … is creating entirely new categories of weapons of mass destruction-like and weapons of mass destruction-enabling catastrophic risk." To clarify further, they define catastrophic risk as "catastrophic events up to and including events that would lead to human extinction." This strong yet controversial statement has caused much debate in the AI research community and in public discourse. One can imagine scenarios in which this may be true, perhaps in some national security-related scenarios, but how can we judge the merit of these types of statements? It is clear that to do so, it is essential to first truly understand the different risks AI adaptation poses and how those risks are novel. That is, when we talk about AI safety and security, do we truly have a clarity about the meaning of these terms? In this talk, we will examine the characteristics that make AI vulnerable to attacks and misuse in different ways and how they introduce novel risks. These risks may be to the system in which AI is employed, the environment around it, or even to society as a whole. Gaining a better understanding of AI characteristics and vulnerabilities will allow us to evaluate how realistic and pressing the different AI risks are, and better realize the current state of AI, its limitations, and what breakthroughs are still needed to advance its capabilities and safety. About the speaker: Dr. Sadovnik is a senior research scientist and the Research Lead for Center for AI Security Research (CAISER) at Oak Ridge National Lab. As part of this role, Dr. Sadovnik leads multiple research projects related to AI risk, adversarial AI, and large language model vulnerabilities. As one of the founders of CAISER, he's helping to shape its strategy and operations through program leadership, partnership development, workshop organization, teaching, and outreach.Prior to joining the lab, he served as an assistant professor in the department of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and as an assistant professor in the department of computer science at Lafayette College. He received his PhD from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University, advised by Prof. Tsuhan Chen as member of the Advanced Multimedia Processing Lab. Prior to arriving at Cornell he received his bachelor's in electrical and computer engineering from The Cooper Union. In addition to his work and publications in AI and AI security, Dr. Sadovnik has a deep interest in workforce development and computer science education. He continues to teach graduate courses related to machine leaning and artificial intelligence at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Knox County Commission once again blocked Commissioner Rhonda Lee's effort to pass a resolution to "protect the innocence of children" — which many people perceived to be aimed at the LGBTQ community. In this week's episode, Jesse and Scott look at the debate and its implications — and hear a snippet of a dance remix of Lee's remarks that was posted online. Also: Some tweaks coming to the City of Knoxville's "Missing Middle Housing" plan; the growth of the "advanced energy" sector in Tennessee; County Commissioner Andy Fox wants to reject federal grant funding; and some high-tech news from Oak Ridge National Lab. Looking ahead, the guys see Thanksgiving and Christmas on the horizon.

Preston Bryant is a graduate of SMU Cox School of Business with a B.A. in Economics, specializing in energy. In college, he established an oil and gas company in memory of his late father. Preston furthered his expertise in commodities recovery at the firm LPI, where he uncovered a groundbreaking critical materials processing method called Membrane Solvent Extraction. After obtaining exclusive licensing rights from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Lab, he founded Momentum Technologies with the mission to revolutionize the way metals were recovered by challenging the conventional norms that processing facilities must be large, expensive, and centralized. ⁠https://momentum.technology⁠ ⁠https://nexuspmg.com/⁠

In 1996, radio host Art Bell received a mysterious package containing small metallic samples and an incredible story. According to the anonymous author of the enclosed letter, the material fragments had been collected during the recovery of an advanced aerospace vehicle that crashed near Roswell, New Mexico in the summer of 1947. Recently, the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) conducted a series of tests on the legendary material, whose unique physiochemical properties were claimed to enable "inertial mass reduction" (i.e., levitation or antigravity functionality), potentially due to the bismuth and magnesium layers acting as a terahertz waveguide. This week on The Micah Hanks Program, look at AARO and Oak Ridge National Laboratory's findings, as well as a deep dive into the bizarre story of these alleged Roswell materials. Have you had a UFO/UAP sighting? Please consider reporting your sighting to the UAP Sightings Reporting System, a public resource for information about sightings of aerial phenomena. The story doesn't end here... become an X Subscriber and get access to even more weekly content and monthly specials. Want to advertise/sponsor The Micah Hanks Program? We have partnered with the AdvertiseCast to handle our advertising/sponsorship requests. If you would like to advertise with The Micah Hanks Program, all you have to do is click the link below to get started: AdvertiseCast: Advertise with The Micah Hanks Program Show Notes Below are links to stories and other content featured in this episode: ROSWELL MATERIALS: UAP metal fragment not alien in origin: AARO Material of Interest: Magnesium-Zinc-Bismuth – To The Stars*  FLASHBACK: Dr. Hal Puthoff Address to the SSE/IRVA Conference, Las Vegas, 8 June 2018 Tom DeLonge's UFO Organization Says It's Obtained ‘Exotic' Metals Unknown to Science  Linda Howe Lecture from X Con 2004 Analysis of "Art's Parts" by Nicholas A. Reiter  AARO: AARO's Supplement to Oak Ridge National Lab Analysis of Metallic Specimen OAK RIDGE: Oak Ridge Synopsis of Material Analysis ORNL and AARO Material Analysis Update – To The Stars* The Truth About Those Alien Alloys in the NYT UFO Story OURS OR THEIRS? US says UFO sightings likely secret military tests BECOME AN X SUBSCRIBER AND GET EVEN MORE GREAT PODCASTS AND MONTHLY SPECIALS FROM MICAH HANKS. Sign up today and get access to the entire back catalog of The Micah Hanks Program, as well as “classic” episodes of The Gralien Report Podcast, weekly “additional editions” of the subscriber-only X Podcast, the monthly Enigmas specials, and much more. Like us on Facebook Follow @MicahHanks on X. Keep up with Micah and his work at micahhanks.com.

In this video, we dive into the latest analysis from Oak Ridge National Laboratory on a metallic specimen claimed to be of extraterrestrial origin. Chris Lehto reviews the findings and discusses the implications of the report. Join us to explore whether this material holds secrets of the unknown or if it can be explained by earthly science. Don't miss this detailed breakdown of a long-debated mystery.Podcast published on 14 July 2024.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/lehto-files-investigating-uaps--5990774/support.

Dr. John Wagner is the President of Battelle Energy Alliance and Director of the Idaho National Laboratory or INL. INL is one of 17 national labs in the United States and leads the nation in work on advanced nuclear research. INL boasts a rich legacy in the narrative of nuclear energy, marked by its pivotal role in producing the inaugural usable electricity from nuclear sources on its premises. Dozens of reactors have been built at INL during its decades of operation. Dr. Wagner has been with INL since 2016 and has been director of the lab since 2020. Prior to that, he was the division director at the Reactor and Nuclear Services division at Oak Ridge National Lab. He has a PhD in nuclear engineering from Penn State University and has spent his career working to advance nuclear energy innovation. In our conversation, we cover the history of INL, its key priorities, current projects under development, and Dr. Wagner's vision for our nuclear future.In this episode, we cover: [2:00] DOE National Labs Overview[5:24] Introduction to Idaho National Laboratory[12:14] Current projects & reactors at INL, including Advanced Test Reactor (ATR)[14:10] INL's upcoming projects: MARVEL, PELE[15:39] How INL supports private firms in nuclear tech development[18:40] End-to-end reactor devolment cycle, e.g., MARVEL[26:57] How entrepreneurs can collaborate with INL[31:17] Collaboration with NRC, support for regulatory development and training[33:07] INL's involvement in fusion research[34:19] John's focus on nuclear fission, U.S. rebuilding[36:05] Future reactor mix: large-scale, modular, advancedResources Mentioned:Admiral Rickover's 'Paper Reactor' memoThe Most Important Nuclear Reactor (You've Never Heard of)Episode recorded on May 17, 2024 (Published on June 10, 2024) Get connected with MCJ: Jason Jacobs X / LinkedInCody Simms X / LinkedInMCJ Podcast / Collective / YouTube*If you liked this episode, please consider giving us a review! You can also reach us via email at content@mcjcollective.com, where we encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.

This series is the story of a giant metagenome assembly from Wisconsin's Lake Mendota. In this episode: a look at the supercomputing that stitches together large datasets with the assembler program MetaHipMer2.Oak Ridge National Lab is home to two supercomputers — Summit and Frontier — that process terabytes of data with MetaHipMer2. And the National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) has another supercomputer, Perlmutter that works at large scale. But nearby the JGI, a cluster called Dori is also capable of running smaller assemblies — so we head there for a sense of what this supercomputing looks like.Links from this episode:Submit your own proposal to work with the JGIEpisode TranscriptRobert Riley at the 2016 DOE JGI Genomics of Energy & Environment MeetingMetaHipMerThe ExaBiome ProjectOur contact info:Twitter: @JGIEmail: jgi-comms at lbl dot gov

Priests and Priestesses come in a variety of forms: suits, dresses, military fatigues, white lab coats, etc. They walk on red carpets, appear on the silver screen, live in the White House, and work at the pentagon pentagram. Their departments of entertainment, defense, health, and the like are really those of propaganda, war, and death.One of the greatest illusions, and allusions, or magical spells, used by these magi are the countless predictions, projections, and rhetoric about this or that: gene editing, climate, disease, death, reproductive research, etc. Turns out, most, if not all, are conducted through computer model simulations of the real world. Science Daily reports that Quantum Biology and AI are being merged by Oak Ridge National Lab, but the research is not so realistic: “Existing models to computationally predict effective guide RNAs for CRISPR tools were built on data from only a few model species, with weak, inconsistent efficiency when applied to microbes.”Climate records this year have also been reached through the same means. The University of Maine's Climate Reanalyzer uses satellite data and computer simulations to measure the world's condition….The AP goes on to say “NOAA, whose figures are considered the gold standard in climate data, said in a statement… that it cannot validate the unofficial numbers. It noted that the reanalyzer uses model output data, which it called “not suitable” as substitutes for actual temperatures and climate records.”Pfizer said the same thing earlier this year about their work: “With a naturally evolving virus, it is important to routinely assess the activity of an antiviral. Most of this work is conducted using computer simulations or mutations of the main protease–a non-infectious part of the virusA Lancet study from 2021 acknowledged the same: “Early projections of the COVID-19 pandemic prompted federal governments to action. One critical report, published on March 16, 2020, received international attention when it predicted 2 200 000 deaths in the USA and 510 000 deaths in the UK without some kind of coordinated pandemic response.1 This information became foundational in decisions to implement physical distancing and adherence to other public health measures because it established the upper boundary for any worst-case scenarios.”This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/5328407/advertisement

Episode 102: Ben and Steve share stories and takeaways from recent travel, including Oak Ridge National Lab, FABTECH, and the Outer Banks. Benjamin shares NVIDIA's take on the impact of generative AI in robotics. Stephen is peeved by good technology that's been given a snake oil name. Ben closes with collaborative robot fiber placement. - https://gameishard.gg/news/robobusiness-nvidia-to-discuss-role-of-generative-ai-in-robotics/147661/ - https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/axtra3d-launches-new-3d-printing-technology-to-eliminate-sla-and-dlp-trade-offs-224462/ - https://www.compositesworld.com/news/dlr-develops-safe-flexible-workspaces-for-robot-assisted-manual-draping Connect with the Manufacturing Industry here https://www.amtonline.org/events Discover the past, present, and future of American manufacturing with https://www.mmsonline.com/madeintheusapodcast Explore, watch, read, learn, join, and connect at https://www.imts.com/ Tune in to the AM Radio podcast https://www.additivemanufacturing.media/zc/am-radio-podcast For the latest in Manufacturing Technology news https://www.amtonline.org/resources Produced by Ramia Lloyd

Energy generation and distribution are experiencing the kind of disruption that transformed many other industries over the past 20 years. But the electric grid is a stubbornly rigid physical infrastructure that will require vast investments to modernize. Dr. Tim Lieuwen, Regents' Professor and executive director of the Strategic Energy Institute at Georgia Tech, joins the conversation to discuss accelerating the pace of electrification of transportation and modernization of the electric grid to support renewable energy generation and distribution. The changes that will follow the reorganization of the grid will also transform our relationship to energy as fundamentally as the introduction of electricity and power distribution lines in the late 1800s. It will be a challenging, fascinating, and sometimes terrifying time for energy companies, investors, and consumers.Dr. Lieuwen is the author of four books on the physics of combustion and gas turbine engines, as well as a member of governing or advisory boards for Oak Ridge National Lab, Pacific Northwest National Lab, and the National Renewable Energy Lab, among others. Discover how the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law contribute to rapid progress in renewable power and electrification of the economy. We also explore how long fossil fuels will stay in the energy mix and the lessons of Texas' 2021 winter storm power outages. You can learn more about him at https://ae.gatech.edu/directory/person/timothy-charles-lieuwen

Preston Bryant is a graduate of SMU Cox School of Business with a B.A. in Economics, specializing in energy. In college, he established an oil and gas company in memory of his late father. Preston furthered his expertise in commodities recovery at the firm LPI, where he uncovered a groundbreaking critical materials processing method called Membrane Solvent Extraction. After obtaining exclusive licensing rights from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Lab, he founded Momentum Technologies with the mission to revolutionize the way metals were recovered by challenging the conventional norms that processing facilities must be large, expensive, and centralized. https://momentum.technology https://nexuspmg.com/

Last May, the Oak Ridge National Lab, run by the US Department of Energy, unveiled Frontier–the world's fastest supercomputer. It's capable of performing a quintillion calculations per second, breaking what's called the exascale barrier.  The system requires its own power plant, 6,000 gallons of water to keep it cool, and a highly trained staff to operate. So what can it do? And who gets to use it? We set out for Knoxville, Tennessee to try to wrap our brains around Frontier's limitless potential. See more about Frontier here: It Takes 6,000 Gallons of Water to Cool the World's Fastest Supercomputer Listen to The Big Take podcast every weekday and subscribe to our daily newsletter: https://bloom.bg/3F3EJAK  Have questions or comments for Wes and the team? Reach us at bigtake@bloomberg.net.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Inside The ‘Chaos Machine' Of Social Media Despite social media's early promises to build a more just and democratic society, over the past several years, we've seen its propensity to easily spread hate speech, misinformation and disinformation. Online platforms have even played a role in organizing violent acts in the real world, like genocide against the Rohinga people in Myanmar, and the violent attempt to overturn the election at the United States capitol. But how did we get here? Has social media fundamentally changed how we interact with the world? And how did big tech companies accumulate so much unchecked power along the way? Read an excerpt of The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World here.   Taking On Renewables' AC/DC Disconnect In the push to transition society to more renewable energy sources, there are several logistical challenges. One central question involves the best way to connect solar panels and battery storage—which both produce direct current, into an energy grid that primarily provides alternating current at the local level. Dr. Suman Debnath leads a project called the Multiport Autonomous Reconfigurable Solar power plant (MARS) at Oak Ridge National Lab. He and his colleagues have designed a system of advanced power electronics that allow large, utility-scale solar facilities and battery storage projects to feed either AC or DC power, as needed. The approach, Debnath says, will both allow for better integration of those electric resources into the grid, and make it more possible to transport power long distances using more efficient DC transmission lines. Debnath talks with Ira about the MARS project, and ways to modernize the country's power distribution system for greater reliability and efficiency.   Are These Ancient Galaxies Too Big For Their Age? We've all been wowed by the amazing images from the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST. But sometimes, the important data isn't in those amazing galactic swirls or wispy nebula images, but in the images of tiny smudges from far, far away. Astronomers recently described some of those smudges, tiny red dots thought possibly to be ancient, distant galaxies, in the journal Nature. However, if the red dots do in fact represent galaxies, they appear to be too large to fit predictions for how fast galaxies form. The possible galaxies may be about 13 billion years old, forming just 500 to 700 million years after the Big Bang, but appear to contain as many stars as much more mature galaxies. Dr Erica Nelson, an assistant professor of Astrophysics at the University of Colorado, Boulder and one of the authors of that paper, joins Ira to talk about the observation and what could explain the confusing finding.   How These Russian Wasps Could Help Save Ash Trees How do you find an insect the size of your fingertip in a densely packed forest? For Jian Duan, the answer is simple: Follow the dead ash trees. On a rainy day in eastern Connecticut, Duan, a federal research entomologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, walked to a dying ash covered with holes. Peeling back the bark with a drawknife, he revealed a mess of serpentine tunnels. Curled up inside was one of his targets: a larva of emerald ash borer. “Let's collect it,” Duan said, gesturing as his assistant handed him a pair of tweezers tied to a brightly-colored ribbon. (In case you're wondering, the ribbon makes the tweezers easy to spot when they're dropped on the leaf-covered ground.) But today Duan isn't just collecting emerald ash borers. He's also looking for their predator, one released here on purpose in 2019 and 2020: a wasp known as Spathius galinae (pronounced spay-see-us glee-nuh). “It's from the Russian Far East,” Duan said, smiling. “Unfortunately, there are no common names for these parasitic wasps.” To read the rest, visit sciencefriday.com.     Vocal Fry Serves Up Treats For Toothed Whales Toothed whales—species like orcas, bottlenose whales, and dolphins—use echolocation to zero in on prey about a mile deep into the ocean. Until now, scientists couldn't quite figure out how the whales were making these clicking sounds in the deep ocean, where there's little oxygen. A new study published in the journal Science, finds the key to underwater echolocation is vocal fry. Although in whales it might not sound like the creaky voice that some people love to hate, the two sounds are generated in a similar way in the vocal folds. Ira talks with the study's co-author, Dr. Coen Elemans, professor of bioacoustics and animal behavior at the University of Southern Denmark based in Odense, Denmark.   Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

If you're a fan of the Mazda Miata's amazing balance and handling characteristics, then Tonight's Break/Fix guest is to blame. He is best known as the Concept Engineer for the original Miata and he developed the original suspension as well as the packaging layout, achieving the group's goal of the ultimate “Lightweight Sports car.” Norman H. Garrett III  is an accomplished Automotive Engineer having worked for major companies such as Mazda, Subaru and Volvo. His corporate experiences span the global automotive development arena, with notable success in specific markets related to energy, emissions, and materials. He has supported Georgia Tech and Oak Ridge National Lab, and if that wasn't enough, you might recognize him from some of his most recent articles on Hagerty like “A few things you should know before you steal my 914” and “Right seat confessions of an on track driving instructor” - and with that, we'd like to welcome Norman to break/fix to share some of his stories.  This episode is brought to you by SRO Motorsports America and their partners at AWS, Crowdstrike, Fanatec, Pirelli, and the Skip Barber Racing School.

Episode 357: US Passes Signature Chips and Science Act; Oak Ridge National Lab Dedicates Frontier by Intersect360 Research

Every day is a good day to talk about books. So, we invited John Kilpatrick to offer a fresh perspective on writing in this episode filled with humor and valuable writing tips. Don't miss his surprising discoveries of the commonalities between textbooks and novels, and get to explore the contemporary definitions of writing today!Key Takeaways from This EpisodeAdvantages of prioritizing book's readability over technicalityThe importance of identifying your target audienceSimilarities that exist between textbooks and novelsLiterary voice changes and ways to deal with itHow to make people understand complex subjects easierResources Mentioned in This EpisodeThe Godfather by Mario Puzo | Paperback and KindleSo, Anyway… by John Cleese | Paperback and KindleLegend in GraniteSea Power by E.B Potter and Chester NimitzAbout John KilpatrickJohn Kilpatrick is the Managing Director of Greenfield Advisors, Director of the Washington State Economic Development Finance Authority, and is on the National Board of Advisors for Carson College of Business at Washington State University.He holds a Ph.D. in Finance from the University of South Carolina and is the author of numerous books, including the recently published McGraw Hill text, Real Estate Valuation and Strategy. Dr. Kilpatrick's consulting and academic research activities include work for and funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Departments of Energy, Interior, Defense, and Commerce, Oak Ridge National Lab, Southeastern Universities Research Association, Oak Ridge Associated Universities, and numerous city and county governments and private organizations. He is one of the leading authorities in the world on mortgage-backed securities and has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, The New York Times, and other national publications. Dr. Kilpatrick and his wife split their time between homes in Issaquah, Washington, and Key West, Florida. In his spare time, Dr. Kilpatrick is an instrument-rated private pilot, an avid yachtsman, and a Paul Harris Fellow of Rotary International.Website: John A. Kilpatrick | Greenfield AdvisorsLinkedIn: John A. Kilpatrick, Ph.D.Twitter: @john_kilpatrickJohn's book: Real Estate Valuation and Strategy: A Guide for Family Offices and Their AdvisorsLove the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here's How » Join The Author's Corner Community today: Website: Robin ColucciLinkedIn: R Colucci, LLCFacebook: Robin ColucciTwitter: @Robin_ColucciRobin Colucci's Book: How to Write a Book That Sells You: Increase Your Credibility, Income, and Impact

Links Referenced:Spark Innovation Center: https://www.tnresearchpark.org/spark/ TranscriptRickey McCallum: Welcome back to The Research Park Chronicles podcast, where we're documenting the exciting innovations of the University of Tennessee Research Park. I'm your host, Rickey McCallum. For this episode, we're looking into the progressive and inspiring work being done at the Spark Innovation Center, which is currently housed inside the university's Institute for Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Facility at the Research Park. Spark Innovation Center focuses on entrepreneurship development and commercialization of regional technology-based startup companies. With a focus on clean technologies, a space in which Knoxville was rated as the 16th cleantech hub in the country, Spark has quickly become a significant contributor to the efforts here in the East Tennessee region.The Spark Innovation Center is designed to be a place where selected startups come to meet some of their fundamental needs, primarily those looking for wet lab space, or sophisticated prototyping shops, with capabilities for providing high-level mentorship in business model development, financial planning, and investor readiness at its core. As a result, these young startups have access to some of the best entrepreneurial leadership the university has to offer. One of the leaders in the center is Tom Rogers, CEO of the UT Research Park, who sat down with us to give an overview of the Spark Innovation Center, its mission, and its purpose.Tom Rogers: I became completely convinced that working with entrepreneurs, helping them find ways to take new ideas to the marketplace is a key to success in our local economy. We're blessed with a national laboratory, our Research 1 university, a culture of ideas being valued, and putting together a support structure around that has really great potential for the future of this region. So, I think a lot of the challenges that entrepreneurs face is interaction with potential customers, spending time doing customer discovery, understanding, will the dogs eat the dog food? We have a lot of great technology around here and I've seen hundreds of would-be entrepreneurs talk with great passion about what they do and their little gizmo, and ‘look, it works' without ever considering, does it solve a need in the marketplace? And that's really one of the primary things that we emphasize, not just here at Spark, but in the other business accelerators in the region as well. Try to get real. Try to understand that your idea may be the greatest thing in the world, but if customers aren't going to buy it, it's not going to be a successful company.Rickey McCallum: With a passion for getting early tech companies off the ground, the Spark Innovation Center and its programs are proving to be the perfect place for the region to manifest itself as a leader in tech. Another key figure in this regard is John Bruck, the director of the Spark Innovation Center. John's history of success in engineering and his commitment to the Knoxville area, as well as his role as mentor and investor puts him at the cutting edge of helping the startups that are associated with the center and his two primary programs to ensure its success.John Bruck: I am drawn to tech-based companies that are in their earliest stages. And there are really what has grown to be a hub of technological innovation and entrepreneurship here in Knoxville. I think one of the popular business journals has ranked Knoxville as the 16th largest innovation hub in the country, and that's because of programs that have grown out of the University of Tennessee, that have grown out of Oak Ridge National Lab.Rickey McCallum: An integral part of the local technology community, there are a handful of programs across the region in different organizations that have contributed assistance to help foster these young startups. One notable program is the Innovation Crossroads, housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and most recently Techstars, which is a co-sponsored program between ORNL, TVA, and the University of Tennessee, all of which are working in collaboration with the Spark Innovation Center to create the ideal environment for tech startups to grow and hopefully call East Tennessee home.John Bruck: Along with the Innovation Crossroads program, and particularly at UT and now the Research Park, we are positioned to really be a focus for early-stage tech-based companies and that's specifically what has drawn me here, this particular region—specifically Knoxville region—along with the many sources of high intellect and innovation. The challenge that it faces is one of being able to provide the space that's required by tech startups—and by that, I mean laboratory space—and tech-based mentorship and access to tech-oriented capital. But what we saw was the need for those things to match against companies that were growing out of the University of Tennessee and graduating from the University of Tennessee, companies that were graduating from the Innovation Crossroads program, and being able to place those companies into space that met their needs, was affordable, that was readily available, and could provide them with the other kinds of support that they needed to make the company successful. So, if they need programming, for example, a series of workshops on leadership or financial modeling or customer discovery, we're equipped to help those companies, along with providing them with physical space that matches their needs. So, what I think Spark did that is turning out to be quite successful is matching what we offer with what our customers really require, which truly is even less than that we teach to our startups themselves. So, the Spark Innovation Center is an early-stage organization, and it has begun to really meet those needs.Rickey McCallum: Within the Innovation Center, there are two major programs that help early startups get the assistance that they need to flourish in their respective areas of expertise. The first is the Spark Innovation Center, and the second is the Spark Cleantech Accelerator. Both programs bring specifically crafted support for cleantech startup companies in various stages of growth. Let's look at the Spark Innovation Center, Spark's flagship program.This incubator is meaningfully crafted for early tech startup companies who must identify a clear need in cleantech marketplace and are producing a product that demonstrates a solid product-market fit. Companies in the program often build a working prototype before engaging with initial customers, of which there are some pretty interesting ones, to say the least. The incubator is designed to allow these companies the room to scale, both in terms of product and in capital. While this program serves as a catalyst for helping these young companies, at the end of the day, it's the companies themselves who need to strive for excellence. For John, those companies need to demonstrate certain strengths and attributes.John Bruck: The programs need to be collaborative. In fact, I like the mantra, “Collaborate first.” And we do. So, the three technical hubs which are Innovation Crossroads is the oldest, Techstars, and the Spark Innovation Center. The directors of those organizations are actually very close, they know each other, and we collaborate on things like how to increase our number of applications and the quality of our applications.Rickey McCallum: With an emphasis on collaboration at the forefront, John fills us in on what companies can expect once they get accepted into the program.John Bruck: Typical laboratory requirements are made available that aren't really available in any other spaces. First and foremost, there is wet lab space, there is fume hood availability, there are higher than normal power resources that are available, there are gases that can be made available, benchtops, sinks, and DI water sources, all that stuff's available. We're sitting in one of the most sophisticated research labs, probably, in the world. So, that's tremendous to have. In addition, there is day-to-day mentoring and there is periodic programming that falls into the workshops that I mentioned before.Probably the most valuable resource that we provide are connections. And by connections I mean, we can strike up conversations, develop relationships with our strategic partners. So, we have tax experts, we have audit experts, we have energy experts. One of our primary supporters is TVA. We have experts that are in all sorts of supportive supply chain kinds of roles for our companies. We've got quantum computing simulation, and we have pharmaceutical molecular programming, and just, you name it and the connections are possible for us to make and to help the companies out. And then ultimately, we want to connect with customers and we want to connect with investors. So, those connections I think broadly are the biggest resource that we can offer.Rickey McCallum: With all of the support that the Spark Innovation Center provides, it is crucial to see that companies in this program scale, strive, and succeed. Of the current lineup of companies housed in Spark, there are two that are notable. The startups are exemplary cases for the reason, Spark exists to begin with: they identified an area in cleantech where progressive leaps and bounds needed to be made. The result is some of the most exciting work to come out of the Spark Innovation Center so far.I recently caught up with Dr. Anna Douglas, the CEO and co-founder of SkyNano, whose potential contributions to the future of cleantech are limitless in vision. SkyNano made headlines recently with some very exciting news. Anna and her team were named as a finalist in Elon Musk's 100-million dollar XPRIZE carbon removal. Naturally, the work that Dr. Anna Douglas is doing is certainly pushing the cleantech envelope.Dr. Anna Douglas: My name is Anna Douglas. I serve as the co-founder and CEO of SkyNano. SkyNano was really born out of my PhD research at Vanderbilt. So, I went to Vanderbilt to pursue a degree in material science. I primarily studied battery technology as an early graduate student, and I just kept coming across the challenge that the way we synthesize and mine battery materials today is not very sustainable. It puts a huge upfront carbon burden on a battery to last for a very long time in order to actually get the benefits of batteries being clean energy technologies.And so, we started to think about how can we better make materials that go into batteries? Carbon is used in every kind of battery and every kind of next-gen beyond lithium-ion batteries. And so, we started to look at how else can we make carbon structures that are important for these technologies? That's really kind of where the ethos of SkyNano's core technology came from. Once we started to realize, hey, we could make a business case out of this, that's really where that project evolved from just a science project and part of my dissertation into a startup company.Rickey McCallum: When we asked Dr. Douglas about why she chose to apply to the incubator program, her response spoke volumes to the benefits of working at the exceptional facilities at the UT Research Park.Dr. Anna Douglas: So, I think one thing that's unique to hardware-based startups is the need for specialized space. When you're talking about a software startup or an app, you can do that from basically anywhere, you know, laptop, couch, in someone's basement, you got a company. That's not the same for hardware startups, we need very specialized space, we need lab equipment, we need very specialized utilities, waste disposal, things like this. And you can't find that everywhere.And so, for us, really space was the biggest thing we were looking for as we exited the Innovation Crossroads program, you know, looking for a residency program, essentially. And Spark is the only program around that offers that, and there's very few programs like Spark really across the country where space is a part of being a part of the program. The added benefit, of course, is the community and the mentorship that you get alongside of that, but I think the real asset that we were really looking for was space. And this is a pretty second-to-none space you could be in.Rickey McCallum: A second-to-none space. This is exactly the kind of support that Spark wishes to provide to its startups. We asked Dr. Douglas what exactly second-to-none encompassed and what attracted her to the facilities that Spark Innovation Center could provide.Dr. Anna Douglas: Yeah, so we currently rent, we share a lab with Eonix, which is another local Knoxville company. And so together, we lease about 600 square feet. So, SkyNano is 300, Eonix is 300. The really unique capacity of that space is—so SkyNano has a fume hood in that space, so we can do work with chemicals that require ventilation.We have great electrical power. SkyNano is now looking for more electrical power, but for now, this has been really amazing electric capacity. Waste handling and disposal—EHS—comes once a week to come pick up chemical waste, just general good lab ventilation. So, the lab air is replaced six times an hour with fresh air from the exterior. It's basically like working outside without any of the elements.And so, for us, those things are really important and you can't find them anywhere. So, that has been really where Spark has been amazing. Of course, then there's the added benefit of being right on the river, having access to all the walking trails, being close to downtown and all the amenities here. For us, it's been a great recruitment tool [laugh] as we show people where we're located. We've brought on more people since we moved to Spark, and I do think our location has been a factor in that.Rickey McCallum: SkyNano was the perfect fit for the Spark incubator, and with a focus on decarbonization, SkyNano is unprecedented in its timing and application. But it begs to question, what exactly is decarbonization? And how is SkyNano making that happen? Dr. Douglas explains.Dr. Anna Douglas: [electrification 00:15:22], decarbonization, making materials for batteries. I would say, you know, in terms of decarbonization, one thing that has been really tough in industry is finding solutions that can deal with a wide variety of CO2 sources, right? Anything from really high purity carbon dioxide to more industrial sources like what comes out of, you know, a natural gas power plant, which is only, like, four-and-a-half percent by volume CO2, all the way to direct air capture, which is 412 ppm or so.One of the really cool things that SkyNano is doing is we're actually able to address pretty much the whole spectrum of CO2 sources. And so, we can really work with essentially any kind of industrial client or customer who wants to decarbonize their operations, provide a solution for them to get to net-zero on their chemical emissions, but with that, actually make a valuable product. So, it's an overall profitable operation, it kind of helps everyone. And this is a way that a free market solution can win because there's such demand for the end products and there's demand for people who can offtake different types of CO2.Rickey McCallum: The complexity and technical detail of decarbonization are well beyond the reach of what we can offer here, but at the end of the day, it is a technology that can take significant measures to decrease carbon emissions across our society. With the climate crisis—an ever-looming threat and reality—it becomes more crucial with every passing day. But SkyNano is still a company and that company needs to sell a product. So, who exactly is their target customer, and what are they trying to sell?Dr. Anna Douglas: So, we have a solution that is really important to two different types of people. On the CO2 emitter side, right, a lot of, particularly, energy production is trying to move towards a decarbonized economy. So, onboarding things like renewables, nuclear, things like that, to replace our existing coal and natural gas infrastructure. One of the challenges with that, though, is the intermittency, right?And so, the sun's not always shining, the wind's not always blowing, and we don't have enough nuclear sites licensed to just move to nuclear. And so, if we were to onboard pretty much all renewables, that would make the everyday consumer's electric bill just skyrocket. So, when we think about the transition towards a cleaner energy economy, carbon capture and utilization is a very important piece of that because we're actually able to partner with a local utility and decarbonize their operations without the everyday consumer's energy bill going up. Energy pricing influences everything from heating and cooling your house to the cost of your food to the cost of goods, all of it. And so, that's a really important piece.The other way that we really can touch the everyday consumer is just through your materials and devices performing better. So, the materials that we're making, carbon nanotubes, they really should be used in all kinds of things, in your batteries and your tires, in your coatings. If anyone's ever sat on a tarmac waiting for their plane to be de-iced, it's a nightmare. Just a tiny coating of carbon nanotubes on the exterior of planes could de-ice planes in a matter of minutes. The reason that they're not is because of their price today; they're just way too expensive.So, SkyNano's solution really is a way to make these materials at a much lower cost in a way that decarbonizes heavy industry and provides just better technology solutions to everyday consumers.Rickey McCallum: Dr. Douglas and SkyNano's work is but one of many companies housed in the Innovation Center. Another rising success in the incubator program is Eonix. We were joined by its co-founder and CEO Don DeRosa, who spoke to us about how Eonix is changing the game when it comes to the future of battery technologies. Their focus is to make them safe, more stable, and usable across a wide spectrum of markets. Don fills us in on how, as a graduate student, he had a small side hustle that ended up serving as his ignition for his entrepreneurial spirit.Don DeRosa: When my adviser found out, he was actually shocked because he was very entrepreneurial himself as well. So, he thought I was, kind of, a pure-play scientist and when he discovered this, he was like, “You should start using these talents for something else.” So, he gave us an opportunity to commercialize some molecules out of the university that showed a lot of merit for energy storage at the time. He showed us the initial steps to building a hard tech company, and that was fantastic. I don't think we would have been able to do it without him.You don't go from repairing water-damaged iPhones in a one-bedroom graduate school apartment to an electrolyte company right out of the gate. But yeah. So, that was the initial inception. So, around 2013 to 2014, we founded the company.Rickey McCallum: Don has to keep the company secrets close to his chest, so he could not provide us with a technical deep-dive into what exactly he does. But ultimately, Eonix has one major objective.Don DeRosa: We look to commercialize two molecules. We received about a half-a-million dollars in grant funding right out of the gate. And although the two molecules showed a lot of merit in the lab, it took quite some time to figure out how they perform in commercial devices. And that's really the first pivot for our company where we decided that the real problem when it comes to developing materials for energy storage devices, such as lithium-ion batteries, it's not the material you don't have—it's not the absence of some novel, super-crazy compound—it's the fact that it takes years and typically millions of dollars to determine if it's even worthwhile. So, our goal at that time was to develop a technology that could reduce the time and cost it took to comprehensively evaluate a material for new batteries.We eventually were accepted into the Innovation Crossroads program at Oak Ridge National Lab, and we were able to build out this system. And then somebody at the lab was like, “You have this phenomenal system for evaluating materials. Why aren't you using them for lithium [laugh] ion batteries? That's a massive market.” And he was completely right. So, that was the second major pivot. First, it was determining that we really needed a quicker, cheaper way to look at materials, and then we should have focused on a much larger market.Rickey McCallum: With their initial project gaining momentum, Don and Eonix needed to tap into the next stage, they needed scale, and they found the right place to do so.Don DeRosa: That eventually brought us to the Spark Innovation Center at the conclusion of Innovation Crossroads program where we were able to take that system, scale it up, deploy it towards discovering materials for lithium-ion batteries. And honestly, once we came into Spark, we got funding from the US Army, we were able to develop a nonflammable lithium-ion battery electrolyte within four months. So, it's a very quick process. We're currently going through the commercialization and scale process with it. And yeah, that's where we're at today.Rickey McCallum: The business of Eonix aside, Don and his team also needed to find some more practical support that Spark provides.Don DeRosa: To fabricate a battery, you need a lot of materials that aren't necessarily very safe, independently of being packaged in a battery. And they present a lot of environmental health and safety complications. So, out of the gate, you need a facility that recognizes that level of safety is necessary and then has the infrastructure available to account for handling those materials, bringing them in safely. Safety is the most important part when it comes to handling these kinds of materials. And the Spark Innovation Center located at this facility has all of the infrastructure necessary so that we can safely experiment with new materials, we can build batteries here in an environment where we don't have to be concerned with faulty [laugh] infrastructure or endangering anybody.So, that's the first issue. So, Spark Innovation Center, we came in, we were up and running within a month. It was a very smooth process. Smoother than we've had in a traditional academic environment or in a government lab before. So, it was very startup-friendly.Rickey McCallum: With all those needs met, Eonix began to work on their primary focus, which was on making lithium-ion batteries more stable and safe.Don DeRosa: With our system, our screening system that we developed, we were able to in a phase one project, develop materials that were nonflammable substitutes in four months. So, it's like, essentially the Diet Coke of lithium-ion batteries. It's the nonflammable lithium-ion battery. Same exact device—looks the same, manufactured the same—but it just doesn't have any of the flammability in it. And that's a market-specific application. That's just for the defense industry.There are going to be different applications that we're going to target from a materials perspective. So, we're going to rapidly design materials for electric vehicles where you have different concerns than the battery in your cell phone or the battery that might be in your Apple Watch. They're all lithium-ion batteries, but they have different needs and as a result, different materials would perform better. Just takes a really long time to find them. And we're trying to shrink that process.Rickey McCallum: Another core objective for the Spark Innovation Center, especially when it comes to fostering these young entrepreneurs, is to create a gateway to collaboration. Ultimately, we want to extend this beyond the Research Park and university as well as the greater Knoxville area and across the state of Tennessee. Don offers up an excellent take on how this is happening.Don DeRosa: This is actually a great win-win opportunity for our company and the university. We're looking for talent all the time, and the university is looking for workforce training opportunities and giving their students the best possible education for them to either work at a company like ours or work in that field. Now, what's fantastic is we're in the lithium-ion battery space and this market is starving for people to jump into this career in terms of research, manufacturing, all this stuff. And we're looking to hire as well. So, we're able to offer UTK students internships where they can help learn about what's going on at our company, we can get a feel for the roles that we want to explore in the future as well because we're a growing company and we're trying to figure out what direction to grow in.And that's really a win-win opportunity. There's poised to be thousands of manufacturing lithium-ion battery jobs, so that gives them insight to how a battery is fabricated, what materials go in there, what are the safety precautions associated with fabrication, and just gives them a huge leg up in terms of going out and pursuing these careers and landing great jobs. So, in either outcome, we get a great individual to work with us, the university has a great employment track record and graduates a student that's very capable to go out in the job market. And then there's the whole R&D phase where evaluating new materials for lithium-ion batteries is a very big publication space right now. So, any university professor that has a new material, we're able to quickly evaluate it, so something that might take them a few months, maybe even a year, we're able to do in a few weeks.Rickey McCallum: The focus on collaboration is shared by Dr. Douglas as well. Much like Eonix, SkyNano is another excellent relationship to foster for both the Research Park and the local community. Dr. Douglas has already interacted with UT students and she shares her own hopes for the role that collaboration can play.Dr. Anna Douglas: Yeah, absolutely. And I think if I had been exposed to entrepreneurship as a potential career path earlier, perhaps it would have been a bit of an easier transition. And so, I think as a student, that would be a really cool opportunity.So, SkyNano has collaborated a little bit with the university. We've helped support proposals, we've been a subcontractor on some proposals with different faculty across campus, including some in [unintelligible 00:27:15], some outside of [unintelligible 00:27:16]. You know, for us, we can provide a solution in a variety of ways. We have electrochemistry experts on staff, just due to our technology, but certainly, we're also making materials, so we've actually provided carbon nanotube samples that we've made in the lab to a professor on campus to use in an application that we would never have thought of on our own. We've had students come by and look at the lab and help get inspired to think about entrepreneurship as a potential career path. And for us, that's just been a really exciting opportunity because it's not something you get in just a general commercial space.Rickey McCallum: The Research Park and Spark Innovation Center are postured to serve as pillars within the local community, to act as that gateway for collaboration. Following the example of SkyNano and Eonix, there are untold opportunities in the future of other companies to collaborate, contribute, and to become local figures. So, the question is, what's next for our innovators and entrepreneurs? Where do their hopes lie for the future of their companies?Dr. Anna Douglas: On the five-year horizon, we would be looking at actually installing SkyNano plants co-located with heavy-emitting industries—so whether that's energy industry, chemical production, et cetera—and actually serving a pretty significant market with the carbon materials that we're making. On the ten-year horizon, I would imagine every carbon additive material that goes into your tire, your battery, your paints, coatings, whatever is made from carbon dioxide.Don DeRosa: What we do from the materials perspective is we look at what a real pain point is for the application that we're targeting. In the instance of the defense industry, the most paramount thing that they're concerned with is mitigating risk and safety in their system. It's a huge liability to have a lithium-ion battery in a lot of the environments that they work in. I think that's a very compelling market. And it not only offers peace of mind for people installing large grid storage battery systems that would help manage, let's say, wind or solar, but there's definitely an element of cost reduction there as well.So, there's potentially a 20 to 25% CapEx savings out of the gate that you could get on the commercial side for grid storage. And if anybody thinks of anything else, they could feel free to email me. We are always looking places to sell stuff.Rickey McCallum: Let's turn back to John, the director of the Spark Innovation Center. With the great potential of companies like SkyNano and Eonix, John is enthusiastic about the cleantech initiatives that are coming out of the Spark and its incubator and accelerator programs.John Bruck: Those are two programs that work pretty well together and they're very different. One is a two-year program, one is a 12-week program. The longer-term vision I think is that we are able to support, contribute to the advanced energy and high tech business community in the region and in the state. If you look, for example, at the global advanced energy market of $1.4 trillion, the state of Tennessee contributes percentage-level component to that global market.So, we're in the 45 to $50 billion a year range. That's huge. The state of Tennessee has 400,000 employees in the advanced energy space, 20,000 companies. So, when you look at the big picture economy in this space, I think what the dream for the Spark Innovation Center is to work to help the earliest stage companies grow to eventually enter into that space, financially sustainable, and from a business standpoint, very competitive.Rickey McCallum: The stories of Eonix and SkyNano are only the beginning. The Spark Innovation Center is positioned to become a leader in cleantech and an integral part of the Research Park future. Here's the Research Park CEO Tom Rogers again with some thoughts about the role of the Innovation Center.Tom Rogers: The university is a Research 1 university and they've picked up on this momentum in the entrepreneurial world as well. So, the college of business has an Anderson Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. The College of Engineering teaches entrepreneurial courses. The College of Law has a business clinic that teaches law students how to work with startup companies. The UT Research Foundation hires interns that help them look at intellectual property and decide what to pursue in terms of patenting.There's entrepreneurial activity all over this campus. And what we've done collectively—not the Spark Innovation Center so much as the entire region, whether they're part of the university or not—become part of the community and succeed here in Knoxville.Rickey McCallum: The possibilities for what is to come for the Spark Innovation Center and its programs and the future of cleantech are exciting to say the least. The Research Park in collaboration with its member organizations are working hard to stand above the crowd as examples of progressive entrepreneurial spirit. This is a story that is just in its beginnings and the best is still, without a doubt, yet to come. Thank you for joining our brief look into the exciting work being done within the UT Research Park and the Spark Innovation Center. The Research Park, with its history rooted in agriculture and the rise of the fundamental ideas of the Park to the advancements being made within its walls, the atmosphere around the Research Park is only becoming more electric.In our next episode, we'll turn our attention to the Institute for Advanced Materials and Manufacturing, where some incredible work is being done in the world of material sciences. Check out the next episode for an extensive and exciting look at the mind-boggling science being done there.Rickey McCallum: Thank you for listening to The Research Park Chronicles with Rickey McCallum. Keep up with the latest episodes by subscribing on Apple or Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever fine podcasts are found.

Oak Ridge National Lab's Travis Humble discussed the state of quantum technology development and what it demands for future development. 

In today's Federal Newscast, the Energy Department's Oak Ridge National Lab is home to the world's fastest supercomputer.

Ever wanted to talk to THE guy who's in the know about climate change, clean and renewable energy and how to save the planet? We did. We got to sit down with Tim Lieuwen, the Executive Director of the Strategic Energy Institute. And international authority on clean energy. Tim has authored and edited 4 books, holds five patents, is the founder of TurbineLogic and is a multi-award-winning scientist who sits on the advisory boards of the Oak Ridge National Lab, Pacific Northwest national Lab and the National Renewable Energy Lab. We were lucky enough to grab some of Tim's time and get into a very high-level discussion about how to change the future of the environment, as well as some of the realities behind the real impacts of the things we are doing, not just in hurting the environment, but the things we are doing to protect and save it.

Research begins at 22:58 Bunk Funkers, can you keep a secret? Well the residents of Oak Ridge, Tennessee sure can! They secretly worked on one of the US government's top secret military programs during WW2 without ever spilling the beans at Oak Ridge National Lab! Learn all about this historically secret town in this history-packed whole enchilada! Thanks to Tyler Bilyeu for the topic! In the first segment, Andy and Art are captured once again by the titular Mr. Bunker - how did he fool them this time? In the second segment, Andy and Art give you, the listeners, an uninterrupted presentation of their research into Oak Ridge National Lab. Finally, Andy and Art discuss cyber warfare, PPE, Mirrorverse, and so much more! Send us your thoughts to @MrBunkerPod and mrbunkerpod@gmail.com using the hashtag #RobertFaglesNoWayHome Music by Michael Martello Artwork by Hannah Ross Audio Editing by Arthur Stone Follow Us: Patreon Twitter Instagram Website Youtube Merch Links Mentioned: The top-secret laboratory | ORNL   The US Government's Top-Secret Town | A Continuous Lean.  The Secret City - The Atlantic  'Stranger Things': ORNL nuclear physicist Kelly Chipps talks fiction vs. reality - Knox News  6 Indisputable Reasons 'Stranger Things' Is Actually Set in Tennessee - Livability  Scientists are searching for a mirror universe. It could be sitting right in front of you. - NBC News  The Atomic City: Why Oak Ridge Was Chosen for the Manhattan Project - Explore Oak Ridge  Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Lab part of White House initiative for quantum sciences | WZTV  Everybody Hates Charlie – Page 5 – Cumberland Gap Tunnel Conspiracy and the Oak Ridge Connection  Human Radiation Experiments | Atomic Heritage Foundation  Oak Ridge, Tennessee - Wikipedia  The Oak Ridge Story - American Museum of Science and Energy  A Rare Look at the Secret Site of the Atomic Bomb - Smithsonian Channel  The Truth About the Cumberland Gap Tunnel - Bill Marion  Quantum science at Oak Ridge National Laboratory - ORNL Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Links in Transcript UT Research Park: https://www.tnresearchpark.org/ Volkswagen: https://www.vw.com/ University of Tennessee, Knoxville: https://www.utk.edu/  Oak Ridge National Laboratory: https://www.ornl.gov/  TranscriptRickey McCallum: So, what are research parks? Why do we need them? What makes collaboration between educational institutions, public entities, and private companies so powerful and finding innovative, adaptive, and real-world solutions? This is the story of the University of Tennessee Research Park, and it's going to talk about that exact thing. So, welcome to the Research Park Chronicles with Rickey McCallum.Rickey McCallum: Hello and welcome to the very first episode of Research Park Chronicles. I'm your host Rickey McCallum and throughout this podcast, I'm going to take you on a journey through the gateway to collaboration. We're going to talk about why university research parks are so integral to innovation, how the UT Research Park came about here in Knoxville, Tennessee, and what it's already accomplished. And in future episodes, we'll dive in even more to future projects within the park, developments between Volkswagen, which is the power behind the research park in UT, and what research parks mean in the future of scientific discovery, technologies, economies, and consumers.But I'm getting ahead of myself here, so let's start from the beginning. I know you're all dying to know, “Rickey, what exactly is a research park, anyway?” Well, I'm glad you asked. University research parks are the physical locations developed and designed to foster an environment of collaboration between universities, the public and private sectors, and the federal research laboratories. In the case of the UT Research Park, the goal is simple: to become a bridge between science and technology companies and the best up-and-coming scientific minds at the University of Tennessee.These are places established to enable a free flow of ideas between R&D institutes, universities, and research labs in order to solve real-world problems with innovation and cutting-edge solutions. And Volkswagen, the powerhouse German car manufacturer known for leading the industry in innovative developments, wanted to create one right here in little old Knoxville, Tennessee. But why? The answer to that question lies 112 miles south of Knoxville. In 2008, Chattanooga, Tennessee, came into focus when VW chose that scenic southern city as the location of its first U.S. auto plant since the closure of the Westmoreland Assembly Plant in Pennsylvania back in 1988. Now, the Volkswagen Chattanooga Assembly plant builds the US-specific VW Passat and the VW Atlas.With their own assembly plant located just over a hundred miles away, the well-established research-centric UT Knoxville at hand, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory just down the road, how could Knoxville not be the perfect location for researching composite materials?Of course, I say that as if it makes complete sense, but when I first began researching this podcast and reading about the UT Research Park, all I could think of is, why Knoxville and how did we get so lucky?But I had a conversation with my good friend of mine, Dr. Leon Tolbert, who works in the electrical engineering and computer science department at the University of Tennessee, and he gave me a little backstory that will put it all of this into perspective.Dr. Leon Tolbert: So, when Volkswagen first built their plant in Chattanooga, they came to the University of Tennessee—and that was probably more than 10 years ago—and wanted to engage the university because they were looking at hiring graduates of our university, they were looking at working with faculty, and they donated, I think, a pretty substantial sum of money at that time to fund research in engineering. And so, the College of Engineering then gave out grants to faculty who were doing work related to electric vehicles and, I believe, got a couple of those grants, and worked with students on things related to power electronics for electric vehicles. But then, I guess things just kind of coasted along there for a few years, and then, more recently, a couple of years ago, they approached again wanting deeper involvement, and came and looked at the work we were doing already related to electric vehicles, visited our department several times, and then approached us about establishing a Volkswagen fellowship for graduate students, and in that fellowship, they would hire the students to work full-time at Volkswagen while they were pursuing their PhD. And this kind of follows the model in Europe where a lot of the PhD students basically are full-time employees of companies, but they're pursuing a PhD, and they wanted to do something similar here at UT.Rickey McCallum: And they did just that. VW approached UT and created an incredible program for PhD students to work full time on research projects that directly impact real-world struggles. Now, when these students complete this program, they're going to be ready and have applicable real-world experience to show for all their hard work, and have a foundation of research already in place. So, Dr. Hendrik Mainka, project manager and team lead of UT's Innovation Hub, told us a little bit more about the PhD program.Dr. Hendrik Mainka: Yeah, I think that the PhD program probably is pretty unique for the US. I mean, we have a PhD program in Germany at our headquarters where, always, the PhD students are Volkswagen employees. I think that's a huge one, too, a lot of the PhD fellows here and in the US, so PhD fellows you will talk to later, they are all Volkswagen employees, and we're really working with them as our people to make sure we having this close connection, not only to the university, also for our students to really real-life problems, you know? You're working on a wireless power transfer, for example, that's something we want to see the next years being implemented in our cars. And so your PhD research really has a high impact. Same with the research on sizing to optimize our composite parts. That's really applied research on a PhD level, which really helps the company moving forward with the innovations, and also having the students working on real-life problems. I think that's really unique and hopefully, it's beneficial for both sides.Rickey McCallum: It all already sounds pretty great right? A world-renowned, industry-leading auto manufacturer choosing our Knoxville, Tennessee university to start exploring composite materials for more affordable, energy-efficient vehicles we can make right here in the same state.Yeah, it's really awesome, and it gets better. VW didn't just stop at the UT Research Park. In 2019 they announced that they wanted to use Knoxville as the site of their very first North American Innovation Hub. Now, in a partnership between Volkswagen, UT, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Innovation Hub will be an extension, or rather an expansion of the Research Park, and it will further develop research opportunities for UT doctoral students with a focus on electrical engineering and developing lighter components for composite materials.And those opportunities have already begun with the very first wave of doctoral fellows. William Henkin, a VW research fellow at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, gave us a little more insight on just how incredible this PhD program has already been.William Hankin: It's an incredible experience and the fact that I'm the first one kind of paving the way, trailblazing it makes me kind of smile to myself and, like I said, it's validation on everything I've done to this point. As a grad student, you don't necessarily get those feelings all the time, so you got to take advantage of it when you do. [laugh].Rickey McCallum: trailblazing. [laugh]. I like that. That's the perfect way to describe both the program in general and your research projects and goals. What is it specifically that you're focusing on in the Innovation Hub, William?William Hankin: Volkswagen is very interested in next-generation vehicles. And an extension of that is electrification and lightweighting. And so a lot of the work I'm doing is in the lightweighting aspect. And so I'm looking really at composite materials: how to make them stronger, more efficient, and how to implement them in automotive application. So, Department of Energy here in the East Tennessee area is huge. They have the National Transportation Research Center, and they work closely with University of Tennessee, Knoxville, so we have great supporting casts, academic, adjunct faculty, collaboration is prolific and Volkswagen really saw that as an opportunity to put down some roots in this area. And we're really the first generation of fellows here, but I expect this to grow, a lot.Rickey McCallum: and grow it most certainly will. So, this is VW is the very first North American Innovation Hub. And as I said, it means that Knoxville is going to be joining the ranks of Berlin, Tel Aviv, and Tokyo, renowned sites for establishing VW Innovation Hubs.It still sounds just a little too good to be true, or at least it did to me. So, I asked Associate Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of Tennessee rather bluntly, “What's up with that?”If you look at Volkswagen's global footprint, where the Innovation Hubs and their centers and stuff are located, Knoxville's not considered a Tel Aviv or a Tokyo type of location. And so I'm curious if you have any insight of what may have been their thought process, and why Knoxville? I mean, why move here to establish this Innovation Hub?Marc Gibson: Yeah, so that's a good question. I had the opportunity, actually, to visit their Tel Aviv hub last November and I was kind of wondering the same thing, to be honest. I was like, “That puts us in pretty, pretty prestigious company,” I was really excited about that. I had an opportunity to sit down with the folks in Tel Aviv and they outlined why they're there and what the motive was for Volkswagen to locate a hub in Tel Aviv. And certainly, it was around their innovation, their startup culture that they have there, so I knew right away, it was a little bit different why they were looking into Knoxville. I think they look at Knoxville as the future hub for materials and manufacturing. And I think there's a lot to be said, obviously, for the strengths that we have here. But I think they also looked at the vision that the University of Tennessee had and the relationship that we have with ORNL, and I think they really felt like we could move together. Together we can move a mountain and really create something special here.Rickey McCallum: Dr. Uday Vaidya, a Governor's Chair for Advanced Composites Manufacturing at UT followed that up.Dr. Uday Vaidya: as you know, the ecosystem here in Tennessee is very unique. We have a very large, signature flagship university, University of Tennessee, the world's largest DOE lab in terms of materials research, Oakridge Lab, just 20 miles away, the manufacturing demonstration facility at Oak Ridge, and the industry network, which combines along with IACMI which is, again, a very unique piece in this whole equation. So, the entrepreneurial aspect of it is almost natural in that because there are so many technologies that are at play, and a lot of the students and personnel work throughout, you know, in terms of progressing to a certain endpoint as part of their academic career, many of these students are extremely entrepreneurial already. But now that gives them a purpose and a real vision of where their business and entrepreneurial skills could get to. So, we have a number of such examples of students starting companies as part of their PhD or masters training, like the Innovation Crossroads program between Oak Ridge and UT makes a very good case for these students to get seed funding and going. So, the hub that you have here, or the Innovation Hub is a key part of the entire process because now that gives a real home to these kind of ideas to set up, whether it's a space, or an asset, or a process, or the infrastructure required for such a daunting step that they would take. So, such a thing is extremely easy because of operation like the Innovation Hub.So, I believe it should become a very natural relationship on multiple fronts. The technology is just one piece of it. I mean, you have the manufacturing side, you have the materials side, the electrification, battery, so many aspects of Volkswagen's interests which fall within that. But alongside, there's a huge need for the workforce development and then the training, not only at the PhD level but also all the way from the technician people on the shop floor. So, you need multiple points of engagement with the company. So, I think the vast range of programs that UT could offer, along with Oak Ridge and the ecosystem, will continue to engage VW in a continuous way. So, that will also then excite their supply chain, the tier suppliers, tier one, two, three. So, they will want to set up operations in the proximity. So, it has a cascading effect of benefit for sure.Rickey McCallum: A cascading effect. That's the perfect way to describe the blossoming partnership that just keeps going between UT and Volkswagen. And it's certainly cascaded into some wonderful research opportunities and projects. And since Dr. Hendrik Mainka has been there from just about the beginning of the cascade, we turned to him for a little more information on that partnership.Dr. Hendrik Mainka: The conversations, at least, I have been empowered, have started around about in 2015. I think everybody remembers when IACMI, the Composite Institute, was founded in Knoxville. Awesome event with President Obama on-site announcing the DOE-sponsored institute and, yeah, Volkswagen is proud to be a founding member of this Institute, which is basically led by University of Tennessee in Knoxville. And I think that's basically how everything started. And in the following years, we had several IACMI projects together with UT to develop lower-cost, high-speed manufacturing, really efficient method for automotive lightweight composites. Also looked at recycling processes with UT together and the last years. And I think, really, the highlight of this project is a Volkswagen Atlas liftgate. And I think that's pretty much how it began, and how we started our cooperation with UT. And finally, in 2015, we opened the Innovation Hub in Knoxville, which is another major milestone in this development. A big part of innovation is basically co-creation. So, if you're working with companies or experts from different fields, that basically creates a lot of innovation in the way that new ideas are trickling into your field of expertise, and we see that, for example, with some of the UT faculties where we combining fields like AI with material research, which is really kind of a new way to create innovations. Or when we're working with experts of your Carbon Renewable Center to create really innovative materials for automotive applications. We're working with producers of paper and plastics on the other side, and then combining that to awesome new products. I think that's really where you see innovation taking place. So, it's really the capability of having all these different people available for Volkswagen to work with and have this cooperation with UT. I think that's how you might want to describe innovation.Rickey McCallum: Throughout this whole discussion, we've heard from several different perspectives of the evolution of where the partnership came from, and most importantly, where it evolved into. But which really came first? Was it the Innovation Hub that started the conversation? Was it the liftgate project, or specific research that defined really what the Innovation Hub was going to be? Or was it neither? Don't worry, listeners, this isn't the chicken or egg scenario. We do have an answer. A good one, from Marc Gibson.Marc Gibson: Yeah, that's a good question. So, the liftgate project was really kind of our launchpad. That's an IACMI project, led by several of our faculty members here that I think you're probably also going to talk with Dr. Uday Vaidya, and then Dr. Dayakar Penumadu. That project got off the ground and really, I think, excelled their thought process on the confidence that they would have and what we are capable of doing. And so I think once we established that we could do the work and that we had the expertise—and that we had the equipment here. I mean, if you look at the resources that we have here, it's pretty phenomenal. On a global scale, I'm not sure that anyone in the world has the type of capabilities that we have here between UT and ORNL. The cool nuance there is essentially what they do is they identify a project, okay. And they come to us and they say, “Can you solve this project?” And we connect them with a faculty member that we think can solve the problem. And then they create a statement of work, the faculty member goes and identifies a PhD student, and then Volkswagen pays the PhD student to go to school at UT. We're talking about the liftgate on the back of one of these vehicles. To do something like that—you know, I think Volkswagen told me at one time—and you have to ask them, but I think they told me at one time to get something like that changed and on the assembly line on one of their vehicles, it typically takes, like, five years. And, you know… we [laugh] we fast-tracked that. I mean, you look at what we were able to do. I mean, we were able to do that really in like two to three years, and it's now going to be manufactured, going on the assembly line, and consumers are going to be able to buy vehicles that are going to be manufactured in Chattanooga, that had University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory technology in it. I mean, how cool is that? But you can kind of look at some of the other projects that are taking place now, too. I mean, it's not just around lightweighting and composites. Now they're moving into batteries. One of the big things—and you'll have to ask Volkswagen a little bit more about this, but one of the big things about that plant is they've also started almost a billion-dollar infrastructure improvement slash addition, in Chattanooga—and you got to think, that plant's less than 10 years old—to do all battery work and battery research. And so they're really going to be looking at faculty members here. In fact, two of the projects that they've kicked off already are going to be housed in our Department of Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and doing battery work. And I think that speaks volumes; they're not just here to do composites and manufacturing, but they're here to access other areas of expertise, too, which I think is pretty cool.Rickey McCallum: So, Marc mentioned the liftgate project. Let's talk about that. It's the project that is really the main focus right now here at the UT Research Park. So, we're going to get into a little bit more details and specifics about that in one of our next episodes, but it's the first project in which the Research Park is actively working to find an innovative solution to a real-world problem. And it is very important to Tennessee specifically because while research parks do work hard here in Knoxville to create the solution, the VW plant in Chattanooga is working hard to implement that said solution. So, the entire project from start to finish is being handled right here in East Tennessee. So, of course, when it comes to a project like that, we have to think ahead to the impact the project will have on the future. So, what does this project mean for the future of the Innovation Hub in 5, 10, 15 years?Dr. Uday Vaidya: Sure, so in the liftgate project one type of intermediate materials have been used, but composites offer such a broad design space. It's like a painter's palette, really, you can choose a range of different things and come up with unique innovations every single time. So, it just offers innumerable possibilities for futuristic designs. So, the Volkswagen liftgate project, as you know, was one of the first signature projects for IACMI under the Composites Institute. Volkswagen is a key company in the Tennessee area. In Chattanooga, they're producing vehicles. Most of the current vehicles require lightweighting because of possibilities for energy savings, energy efficiency, less fuel consumption, and so on, so every ounce that you save from the vehicle's weight impacts the economy in terms of its cost savings down the road. So, the whole idea from Volkswagen, currently their liftgates are made out of stamped steel, sheet metal, which is good. Excellent material, but there's a lot of potential that composites offer, such as high-impact resistance, ability to tailor, create deep draws, complex shape parts, and near net shape parts. So, we had a good potential there to use all the attributes of composites towards this application, and that's where the unique combination of IACMI, Oak Ridge, University of Tennessee, this ecosystem came into play, of course with other partners as part of this project.So, really, all our industry-related projects are highly valuable because it provides the students and the staff working on it a real-world opportunity. So, everything they're doing has a purpose, meaning, and an actual tangible product, process, et cetera, down the road, that they can see what their research is actually leading into. The Volkswagen project, like any other project, obviously engaged a number of students—both undergrad and grad students—towards problem solving all the way from design process, process modeling, testing, characterization, you know, the whole process of designing a part all the way to the end product, so they could actually see the fruits of the labor at different stages as it was going on. So, that led to a lot of fundamental research along the way for PhD and masters students, as well as a lot of experiential learning for undergraduate students, who had never even seen or known what composites was about, that gave them the opportunity. So, when they now put their CV together—or resume—they would have a huge impact. When they go to their interview, they can actually speak in terms of real-world opportunities they have been faced. So, it's a very valuable relation and experience.Rickey McCallum: And of course, the liftgate project is only the beginning, only one of many projects and research studies being done in the Innovation Hub. So, Dr. Tolbert, some of the topics of discussion that we've had around Volkswagen's partnership is around technologies for future electric vehicles, including power electronics and wireless charging, what's the future of EV, in your mind, with this partnership, and how the University of Tennessee can help advance the technology and innovation that Volkswagen is looking for?Dr. Leon Tolbert: So, I was really excited when Volkswagen approached us to talk about electric vehicles and their plans that they're doing in Chattanooga to build new vehicles, mostly because I've worked on electric vehicles since the 1990s. A lot of that was through Oak Ridge National Lab and the research that they're doing at National Transportation Research Center; they've been working on electric vehicles since the early '90s. And I really see electric vehicles, and just electrification of transportation in general, as a bright future and a trend that's global. We've done quite a bit of work on looking at traction drives using silicon carbide wide bandgap materials to electrify vehicles. And I think, as we've seen, a lot of companies are pursuing autonomous vehicles and that's also going to require electrification of vehicles in order to be able to charge a while they park and things like that. So, we really see a bright future, and we're very excited when Volkswagen came and wanted to work with us on this.So, at the University of Tennessee in our department, we have a wide bandgap traineeship for graduate students, and that was funded by the US Department of Energy specifically to attract US citizens to work on wide bandgap power electronics. And we've had probably more than two dozen students in that program since it's initiated, and most of them are MS students. And I think Volkswagen saw that program, saw our general strengths in power electronics, saw the tremendous amount of work being done at Oak Ridge National Lab, and came and wanting to partner with us in that area. And so they were interested in a couple of students coming out of this traineeship, transitioning to become VW Fellows and pursue PhD, and I think what we like as faculty in working with industry is we want our research to eventually end up being used somewhere. And so it really helps inform our research to make it real-world applicable. And I think students, too, really gain a lot in working with industry because what they're working on, they hope one day will show up in a vehicle. So, I think obviously, there's lots of technologies that go into cars, and we've talked about the electrification of transportation, and so I do think there is quite a bit of room to grow in just drive train technology, there's a lot of room to grow in autonomous vehicles, a lot of room to grow in energy storage and battery technology. And I think this is a unique place, having Oak Ridge National Lab, TVA, University of Tennessee, and all of the research that goes on here. I would be remiss if I don't also mention CURENT. It's an NSF DOE engineering research center dedicated to looking at the future electric grid. And so we have one of the top programs in the country in power systems and power electronics, and more than 100 graduate students in that area. And so this is just really a great place for things like that.Rickey McCallum: So, there you have it. Now you know exactly what a research park is and how Knoxville ended up not only with one but also as the home of a VW Innovation Hub. So, next time we're going to dive in a little deeper. That's right, we're going to get into the projects, specifically the liftgate project, which is the UT Research Park's first project to solve a real-world problem in the VW Atlas. And it just may have been the siren's call that drew attention back to Knoxville and convinced VW to bring their North American Innovation Hub to us. So, find out more next time in the Research Park Chronicles.And thank you for listening to the Research Park Chronicles with Rickey McCallum. We'll pick up here next time with the rest of this story. Keep up with the latest episode by subscribing on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever fine podcasts are found.

Dr Tom Kurfess from Oak Ridge National Lab and Georgia Tech discusses AI and the future of manufacturing technology Longevity Industries presents Destiny of Manufacturing Podcast featuring Dr Tom Kurfess […]

About JakeTechnical Lead by day at the Met Office in the UK, leading a team of software developers delivering services for the UK. By night, gamer and fitness instructor, attempting to get a home cinema and gaming setup whilst coralling 3 cats, 2 rabbits, 2 fish tanks, and my wonderful girlfriend.Links: Met Office: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk Twitter: https://twitter.com/jakehendy TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: It seems like there is a new security breach every day. Are you confident that an old SSH key, or a shared admin account, isn't going to come back and bite you? If not, check out Teleport. Teleport is the easiest, most secure way to access all of your infrastructure. The open source Teleport Access Plane consolidates everything you need for secure access to your Linux and Windows servers—and I assure you there is no third option there. Kubernetes clusters, databases, and internal applications like AWS Management Console, Yankins, GitLab, Grafana, Jupyter Notebooks, and more. Teleport's unique approach is not only more secure, it also improves developer productivity. To learn more visit: goteleport.com. And not, that is not me telling you to go away, it is: goteleport.com. Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Redis, the company behind the incredibly popular open source database that is not the bind DNS server. If you're tired of managing open source Redis on your own, or you're using one of the vanilla cloud caching services, these folks have you covered with the go to manage Redis service for global caching and primary database capabilities; Redis Enterprise. To learn more and deploy not only a cache but a single operational data platform for one Redis experience, visit redis.com/hero. Thats r-e-d-i-s.com/hero. And my thanks to my friends at Redis for sponsoring my ridiculous non-sense.  Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. It's often said that the sun never sets on the British Empire, but it's often very cloudy and hard to see the sun because many parts of it are dreary and overcast. Here to talk today about how we can predict those things in advance—in theory—is Jake Hendy, Tech Lead at the Met Office. Jake, thanks for joining me.Jake: Hey, Corey, it's lovely to be here. Thanks for inviting me on.Corey: There's a common misconception that its startups in San Francisco or the culture thereof, if you can even elevate it to being a culture above something you'd find in a petri dish, that is where cloud stuff happens, where the computer stuff is done. And I've always liked cutting against that. There are governments that are doing interesting things with Cloud; there are large companies and ‘move fast and break things' is the exact opposite of what you generally want from institutions that date back centuries. What's it like working on Cloud, something that for all intents and purposes didn't exist 20 years ago, in the context of a government office?Jake: As you can imagine, it was a bit of a foray into cloud for us when it first came around. We weren't one of the first people to jump. The Met Office, we've got our own data centers, which we've proudly sit on that contains supercomputers and mainframes as well as a plethora of x86 hardware. So, we didn't move fast at the start, but nowadays, we don't move at breakneck speeds, but we like to take advantage of those managed services. It gets out of the way of managing things for us.Corey: Let's back up a second because I tend to be stereotypically American in many ways. What is the Met Office?Jake: What is the Met Office? The Met Office is the UK's National Meteorological Service. And what does that mean? We do a lot of things though with meteorology, from weather forecasting and climate research from our Hadley Centre—which is world-renowned—down to observations, collections, and partnerships around the world. So, if you've been on a plane over Europe, the Middle East, Africa, over parts of Asia, that plane took off because the Met Office provided a forecast for that plane. There's a whole range of things we can talk about there, if you want Corey, of what the Met Office actually does.Corey: Well, let's ask some of the baseline questions. You think of a weather office in a particular country as, oh okay, it tracks the weather in the area of operations for that particular country. Are you looking at weather on a global basis, on a somewhat local basis, or—as mentioned—since due to a long many-century history it turns out that there are UK Commonwealth territories scattered around the globe, where do you start? Where do you stop?Jake: We don't start and we don't stop. The Met Office is very much a 24/7 operation. So, we've got a 24/7 operation center with staff constantly manning it, doing all sorts of things. So, we've got a defense, we work heavily with our defense colleagues from UK armed forces to NATO partners; we've got aviation, as mentioned; we've got marine shipping from—most of the listeners in the UK will have heard of the shipping forecast at one point or another. And we've got private sector as well, from transport, to energy, supermarkets, and more. We have a very heavy UK focus, for obvious reasons, but our remit goes wide. You can actually go and see some of our model data is actually on Amazon Open Data. We've got MOGREPS, which is our ensemble forecast, as well as global models and UK models, with a 24-hour time lag, but feel free to go and have a play. And you can see the wide variety of data that we produce in just those few models.Corey: Yeah, just pulling up your website now; looking at where I am here in San Francisco, it gives me a detailed hour-by-hour forecast. There are only two problems I see with it. The first is that it's using Celsius units, which I—Jake: [laugh].Corey: —as a matter of policy, don't believe in because in this country, we don't really use things that make sense in measuring context. And also, I don't believe it's a real weather site because it's not absolutely festooned with advertisements for nonsense, which is apparently—I wasn't aware—a thing that you could have on the internet. I thought that showing weather data automatically meant that you had to attempt to cater to the lowest common denominator at all times.Jake: That's an interesting point there. So, the Met Office is owned and operated by Her Majesty's Government. We are a Trading Fund with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. But what does that mean it's a Trading Fund?k it means that we're funded by public money. So, that's called the Public Weather Service.But we also offer a more commercial venture. So, depending on what extensions you've got going on in your browser, there are actually adverts that do run on our website, and we do this to help recover some of the cost. So, the Public Weather Service has to recover some of that. And then lots of things are funded by the Public Weather Service, from observations, to public forecasting. But then there are more those commercial ventures such as the energy markets that have more paid products, and things like that as well. So, maybe not that many adverts, but definitely more usable.Corey: Yeah, I disabled the ad blocker, and I'm reloading it and I'm not seeing any here. Maybe I'm just considered to be such a poor ad targeting prospect at this point that people have just given up in despair. Honestly, people giving up on me in despair is kind of my entire shtick.Jake: We focus heavily on user-centered design, so I was fortunate in their previous team to work in our digital area, consumer digital, which looked after our web and mobile channels. And I can heartily say that there are a lot of changes, had a lot of heavy research into them. Not just internal, getting [unintelligible 00:06:09] and having a look at it, but what does this is actually mean for members of the? Public sending people out doing guerrilla public testing, standing outside Tescos—which is one of our large superstores here—and saying, “Hey, what do you think of this?” And then you'd get a variety of opinions, and then features would be adjusted, tweaked, and so on.Corey: So, you folks have been a relatively early adopter, especially in an institutional context. And by institution, I mean, one of those things that feels like it is as permanent as the stones in a castle, on some level, something that's lasted more than 20 years here in California, what a concept. And part of me wonders, were you one of the first UK government offices to use the cloud, and is that because you do weather and someone was very confused by what Cloud meant?Jake: [laugh]. I think we were possibly one of the first; I couldn't say if we were the first. Over in the UK, we've got a very capable network of government agencies doing some wonderful, and very cloud things. And the Government Digital Service was an initiative set up—uh, I can't remember, and I—unfortunately I can't remember the name of the report that caused its creation, but they had a big hand in doing design and cloud-first deployments. In the Met Office, we didn't take a, “Ah, screw it. Let's jump in,” we took a measured step into the cloud waters.Like I said, we've been running supercomputers since the '50s, and mainframes as well, and x86. I mean, we've been around for 100 years, so we constantly adapt, and engage, and iterate, and improve. But we don't just jump in and take a risk because like you said, we are an institution; we have to provide services for the public. It's not something that you can just ignore. These are services that protect life and property, both at home and abroad.Corey: You have provided a case study historically to AWS, about your use cases of what you use, back in 2014. It was, oh, you're a heavy user of EC2, and looking at the clock, and oh, it's 2014. Surprise. But you've also focused on other services as well. I believe you personally provided a bit of a case study slash story of round your use of Pinpoint of all things, which is a wrapper around SES, their email service, in the hopes of making it a little bit more, I guess, understandable slash fully-featured for contacting people, but in my experience is a great sales device to drive business to its competitors.What's it been like working, I guess, both simultaneously with the tried and true, tested yadda, yadda, yadda, EC2 RDS style stuff, but then looking at what else you're deep into Lambda, and DynamoDB, and SQS sort of stands between both worlds give it was the first service in beta, but it also is a very modern way of thinking about services. How do you contextualize all of that? Because AWS has product strategies, clearly, “Yes.” And they build anything for anyone is more or less what it seems. How do you think about the ecosystem of services that are available and apply it to problems that you're working on?Jake: So, in my personal opinion, I think the Met Office is one of a very small handfuls of companies around the world that could use every Amazon service that's offered, even things like Ground Station. But on my first day in the office, I went and sat at my desk and was talking to my new colleagues, and I looked to the left and he said, “Oh, yeah, that's a satellite dish collecting data from a satellite passing overhead.” So, we very much pick the best tool for the job. So, we have systems which do heavy number crunching, and very intense things, we'll go for EC2.We have systems that store data that needs relationships and all sorts of things. Fine, we'll go RDS. In my space, we have over a billion observations a year coming through the system I lead on SurfaceNet. So, do we need RDS? No. What about if we use something like S3 and Glue and Athena to run queries against this?We're very fortunate that we can pick the best tool for the job, and we pride ourselves on getting the most out of our tools and getting the most value for money. Because like I said, we're funded by the taxpayer; the taxpayer wants value for money, and we are taxpayers ourselves. We don't want to see our money being wasted when we got a hundred size auto-scaling group, when we could do it with Lambda instead.Corey: It's fascinating talking about some of the forward-looking stuff, and oh, serverless and throw everything at Cloud and be all in on cloud. Cloud, cloud, cloud. Cloud is the future. But earlier this year, there was a press release where the Met Office and Microsoft are going to be joining forces to build the world's, and I quote, “Most powerful weather and climate forecasting supercomputer.” The government—your government, to be clear—is investing over a billion pounds in the project.It is slated to be online and running by the middle of next year, 2022, which for a government project as I contextualize them feels like it's underwear-on-outside-the-pants superhero speed. But that, I guess, is what happens when you start looking at these public-private partnerships in some respects. How do you contextualize that? What is the story behind, oh, we're—you're clearly investing heavily in cloud, but you're also building your own custom enormous supercomputer rather than just waiting for AWS to drop one at re:Invent. What is the decision-making process look like? What is the strategy behind it?Jake: Oh. [laugh]. So—I'll have to be careful here—supercomputing is something that we've been doing for a long time, since the '50s, and we've grown with that. When the Met Office moved offices from Bracknell in 2002, 2003, we run two supercomputers for operational resilience, at that point [unintelligible 00:12:06] building in the new building; it was ready, and they were like, “Okay, let's move a supercomputer.” So, it came hurtling down the motorway, plugged in, and congrats, we've now got two supercomputers running again. We're very fortunate—Corey: We had one. It got lonely. We wanted to make it a friend. Yeah, I get it.Jake: Yeah. It's long distance; it works. And the Met Office is actually very good at running projects. We've done many supercomputers over the years, and supercomputing our models, we run some very intense models, and we have more demands. We know we can do better.We know there's the observations in my group we collect, there's the science that's continually improving and iterating and getting better, and our limit isn't poor optimizations or poorly written code. They're scientists running some fantastic code; we have a team who go and optimize these models, and you know, in one release, they may knock down a model runtime by four minutes. And you think, okay, that's four minutes, but for example, if that's four minutes across 400 nodes, all of a sudden you've now got 400 nodes that have then got four minutes more of compute. That could be more research, that could be a different model run. You know, we're very good at running these things, and we're very fortunate with very technically capable to understand the difference between a workload that belongs on AWS, a workload that belongs on a supercomputer.And you know, a supercomputer has many benefits, which the cloud providers… are getting into, you know, we have a high performance clusters on Amazon and Azure, or with, you know, InfiniBand networking. But sometimes you really can't beat a hunking great big ton of metal and super water-cooling, sat in a data center somewhere, backed by—we're very fortunate to have one hundred percent renewable energy for the supercomputer, which is—if you look at any of the power requirements for a supercomputer is phenomenal, so we're throwing that credentials behind it for climate change as well. You can't beat a supercomputer sometimes.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle HeatWave is a new high-performance accelerator for the Oracle MySQL Database Service. Although I insist on calling it “my squirrel.” While MySQL has long been the worlds most popular open source database, shifting from transacting to analytics required way too much overhead and, ya know, work. With HeatWave you can run your OLTP and OLAP, don't ask me to ever say those acronyms again, workloads directly from your MySQL database and eliminate the time consuming data movement and integration work, while also performing 1100X faster than Amazon Aurora, and 2.5X faster than Amazon Redshift, at a third of the cost. My thanks again to Oracle Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous nonsense. Corey: I'm somewhat fortunate in the despite living in a world of web apps, these days, my business partner used to work at the Department of Energy at Oak Ridge National Lab, helping with the care and feeding of the supercomputer clusters that they had out there. And you're absolutely right; that matches my understanding with the idea that there are certain workloads you're not going to be able to beat just having this enormous purpose-built cluster sitting there ready to go. Or even if you can, certainly not economically. I have friends who are in the batch side of the world, the HPC side of the world over in the AWS organizations, and they keep—“Hey, look at this. This thing's amazing.”But so much of what they're talking about seems to distill down to, “I have this one-off giant compute task that needs to get done.” Yes, you're right. If I need to calculate the weather one time, then okay, I can make an argument for going with cloud but you're doing this on what appears to be a pretty consistent basis. You're not just assuming—as best I can tell that, “And starting next Wednesday, it will be sunny forever. The end.”Jake: I'm sure many people would love it if we could do weather on-demand.Corey: Oh, yes. [unintelligible 00:15:09] going to reserved instance weather. That would be great. Like, “All right. I'd like to schedule some rain, please.” It really seems like it's one of those areas that is one of the most commonly accepted in science fiction without any real understanding of just what it would take to do something like that. Even understanding and predicting the weather is something that is beyond an awful lot of our current capabilities.Jake: This is exactly it. So, the Met Office is world-renowned for its research capabilities and those really in-depth, very powerful models that we run. So, I mentioned earlier, something called MOGREPS, which is the Met Office's ensemble-based models. And what do we mean by ensembles? You may see in the documentation it's got 18 members.What does that mean? It means that we actually run a simulation 18 times, and we tweak the starting parameters based on these real world inputs. And then you have a number of members that iterate through and supercomputer runs all of them. And we have deterministic models, which have one set of inputs. And you know, it's not just, as you say, one time; these models must run.There are a number of models we do, models on sea state as well, and they've all got to run, so we generally tend to run our supercomputers at top capacity. It's not often you get to go on a supercomputer and there'll be some space for your job to execute right this minute. And there's all the setup as well, so it's not just okay, the supercomputer is ready to go, but there's all the things that go into it, like, those observations, whether it's from the surface, whether it's from satellite data passing overhead, we have our own lightning network, as well. We have many things, like a radar network that we own, and operate. We collaborate with the environment agency for rainfall. And all these things they feed into these models.Okay, now we produce a model, and now it's got to go out. So, it's got to come off the supercomputer, it's got to be processed, maybe the grid that we run the models on needs to be reprojected because different people feed maps in different ways. Then there's got to be cut up because not every customer wants to know what the weather is everywhere. They've got a bit they care about. And of course, these models aren't small; you know, they can be terabytes, so there's also a case of customers might not want to download terabytes; that might cost them a lot. They might only be able to process gigabytes an hour.But then there's other products that we do processing on, so weather models, it might take 40 minutes to over an hour for a model to run. Okay, that's great. You might have missed the first step. Okay, well, we can enrich it with other data that's come in, things like nowcasting, where we do very short runs for the next six-hour forecast. There's a whole number of things that run in the office. And we don't have a choice; they run operationally 24/7, around the clock.I mentioned to you before we started recording, we had an incident of ‘Beast from the East' a number of years back. Some of your listeners may remember this; in the UK, we had a front come in from the east and the UK was blanketed with snow. It was a real severe event. We pretty much kept most of our services running. We worked really hard to make sure that they continued working.And personally I say, perhaps when you go shopping for Black Friday, you might go to a retailer and it's got a queue system up because, you know, it mimics that queue thing when you're outside a store, like in Times Square, and it's raining, be like oh, I might get a deal a minute. I think possibly in the Met Office, we have almost the inverse problem. If the weather's benign, we're still there. People rely on us to go, “Yeah, okay. I can go out and have fun.” When the weather's bad, we don't have a choice. We have to be there because everybody wants us to be there, but we need to be there. It's not a case of this is an optional service.Corey: People often forget that yeah, we are living in a world in which, especially with climate change doing what it's doing, if you get this wrong, people can very easily die. That is not something to take lightly. It's not just about can I go outside and play a pickup game of basketball today?Jake: Exactly. So, you know, operationally, we have something called the National Severe Weather Warning Service, where we issue guidance and alerts across the UK, based on severe weather. And there's a number of different weather types that we issued guidance for. And the severity of that goes from yellow to amber to red. And these are manually generated products, so there's the chief meteorologist who's on shift, and he approves these.And these warnings don't just go out to the members of the public. They go out to Cabinet Office, they go out to first responders, they go out to a number of people who are interested in the weather and have a responsibility. But the other side is that we don't issue a weather warning willy-nilly. It's a measured, calculated decision by our very capable operations team. And once that weather system has passed, the weather story has changed, we'll review it. We go back and we say what could we have done differently?Could the models have predicted this earlier? Could we have new data which would have picked up on this? Some of our next generation products that are in beta, would they have spotted this earlier? There's a lot of service review that continually goes on because like I said, we are the best, and we need to stay the best. People rely on us.Corey: So, here's a question that probably betrays my own ignorance, and that's okay, that's what I'm here to do. When I was a kid, I distinctly remember—first, this is not the era wish the world was black and white; I'm a child of the '80s, let's be clear here, so this is not old-timey nonsense quite as much, but distinctly remember that it was a running gag how unreliable the weather report always was, and it was a bit hit or miss, like, “Well, the paper says it's going to be sunny today, but we're going to pack an umbrella because we know how this works.” It feels, and I could be way off base on this, but it really feels like weather forecasting has gotten significantly more accurate since I was a kid. Is that just nostalgia, and I remember my parents complaining about it, or has there been a qualitative improvement in the accuracy of weather forecasting?Jake: I wish I could tell you all the scientific improvements that we've made, but there's many groups of scientists in the office who I would more than happily shift that responsibility over to, but quite simply, yes. We have a lot of partners we work with around the world—the National Weather Service, DWD in Germany, Meteo France, just to name but a few; there are many—and we all collaborate with data. We all iterate. You know, the American Meteorological Society holds a conference every year, which we attend. And there have been absolutely leaping changes in forecast quality and accuracy over the years.And that's why we continually upgrade our supercomputers. Like I said, yeah, there's research and stuff, but we're pulling in all this science and Meteorology is generally very chaotic systems. We're still discovering many things around how the climate works and how the weather systems work. And we're going to use them to help improve quality of life, early warnings, actually, we can say, oh, in three days time, it's going to be sunny at the beach. Be great if you could know that seven days in advance. It would be great if you knew that 14 days in advance.I mean, we might not do that because at the moment, we might have an idea, but there's also the case of understanding, you know, it's a probability-based decision. And people say, “Oh, it's not going to rain.” But actually, it's a case of, well, we said there's a 20% probability is going to rain. That doesn't mean it's not going to, but it's saying, “Two times out of ten, at this time it's going to rain.” But of course, if you go out 14 days, that's a long lead time, and you know, you talk about chaos theory, and the butterfly moves and flaps its wings, and all of a sudden a [cake 00:22:50] changes color from green to pink or something like that, some other location in the world.These are real systems that have real impacts, so we have to balance out the science of pure numbers, but what do people do with it? And what can people do with it, as well? So, that's why we talk about having timely data as well. People say, “Well, you could run these simulations and all your products take longer to process them and generate them,” but for example, in SurfaceNet, we have five minutes to process an observation once it comes in. We could spend hours fine-tuning that observation to make it perfect, but it needs to be useful.Corey: As you take a look throughout all of the things that AWS is doing—and sure, not all of these are going to necessarily apply directly to empowering the accuracy of weather forecasts, let's be clear here—but you have expressed personal interest in for example, IoT, a bunch of the serverless nonsense we're seeing out there. What excites you the most? What has you the most enthusiastic about what the future the cloud might hold? Because unlike almost everyone else I talk to in this space, you are not selling anything. You don't have a position—that I'm aware of—that oh, yeah, I super want to see this particular thing win the industry because that means you get to buy a boat.You work for the Met Office; you know that in some cases, oh, that boat is not going to have a great time in that part of the world anyway. I don't need one. So, you're a little bit more objective than most people. I have pushing a corporate story. What excites you? Where do you see the future of this industry going in ways that are neat?Jake: Different parts of the office will tell you different things, you know. We worked with Google DeepMind on AI and machine learning. We work with many partners on AI and machine learning, we use it internally, as well. On a personal level, I like quality of life improvements and things that just make my life as both the developer fun and interesting. So, CDK was a big thing.I was a CloudFormation wizard—still hate writing YAML—but the CDK came along and it was [unintelligible 00:24:52] people wouldn't say, but that wasn't, like, know when Lambda launched back in, what, 2013? 2014? No, but it made our lives easier. It meant that actually, we didn't have to worry about, okay, how do we do templating with YAML? Do we have to run some pre-processes or something?It meant that we could invest a little bit of time upfront on CDK and migrating everything over, and then that freed us up to actually doing things that we need for what we call the business or the organization, delivering value, you know? It's great playing with tech but, you know, I need to deliver value. And I think, what was it, in the Google SRE book, they limit the things they do, toiling of manual tasks that don't really contribute anything, they're more like keeping the lights on. Let's get rid of that. Let's focus on delivering value.It's why Lambda is so great. I could patch an EC2, I can automate it, you know, you got AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager, or… whatever its name is, they can go and manage all those patches for you. Why when I can do it in a Lambda and I don't need to worry about it?Corey: So, one last question that I have for you is that you're a tech lead. It's easy for folks to fall into the trap of assuming, “Oh, you're a government. It's like an enterprise only bigger, slower, and way, way, way busier.” How many hundreds of thousands of engineers are working at the Met Office along with you?Jake: So, you can have a look at our public report and you can see the number of staff we have. I think there's about 1800 staff that work at the Met Office. And that includes our account manage, that includes our scientists, that includes HR and legal. And I'd say there's probably less than 300 people who work in technology, as we call it, which is managing our IT estate, managing our Linux estate, managing our storage area networks because, funnily enough, managing petabytes of data is not an easy thing. You know, managing a supercomputer, a mainframe.There really aren't that many people here at the office, but we do so much great stuff. So, as a technical lead, I'm not just a leader of services, but I lead a team of people. I'm responsible for them, for empowering them, and helping them to develop their own careers and their own training. So, it's me and a team of four that look after SurfaceNet. And it's not just SurfaceNet; we've got other systems we look after that SurfaceNet produces data for. Sending messages around the world on the World Meteorological Organization's global telecommunications system. What a mouthful. But you know, these messages go all around the world. And some people might say, “Well, I got a huge team for that.” Well, [unintelligible 00:27:27]. We have other teams that help us—I say, help us—in their own right, they transmit that data. But we're really—I personally wouldn't say we were huge, but boy, do we pack a punch.Corey: Can I just say on a personal note, it's so great to talk to someone who's focusing on building out these environments and solving these problems for a higher purpose slash calling than—and I will get letters for this—than showing ads to people on the internet. I really want to thank you for taking time out of your day to speak with me. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, how you do it, potentially consider maybe joining you if they are eligible to work at the Met Office, where can they find you?Jake: Yeah, so you do have to be a resident in the UK, but www.metoffice.gov.uk is our home on the internet. You can find me on Twitter at @jakehendy, and I could absolutely chew Corey's ear off for many more hours about many of the wonderful services that the Met Office provides. But I can tell he's got something more interesting to do. So, uh [crosstalk 00:28:29]—Corey: Oh, you'd be surprised. It's loads of fun to—no, it's always fun to talk to people who are just in different areas that I don't get to work with very often. It turns out that most of my customers are not focused on telling you what the weather is going to do. And that's fine; it takes all kinds. It's just neat to have this conversation with a different area of the industry. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I appreciate it.Jake: Thank you very much for inviting me on. I guess if we get some good feedback, I'll have to come on and I will have to chew your ear off after all.Corey: Don't offer if you're not serious.Jake: Oh, I am.Corey: Jake Hendy, Tech Lead at the Met Office. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with a comment yelling at one or both of us for having the temerity to rain on your parade.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

About MikeBeside his duties as The Duckbill Group's CEO, Mike is the author of O'Reilly's Practical Monitoring, and previously wrote the Monitoring Weekly newsletter and hosted the Real World DevOps podcast. He was previously a DevOps Engineer for companies such as Taos Consulting, Peak Hosting, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and many more. Mike is originally from Knoxville, TN (Go Vols!) and currently resides in Portland, OR.Links: Software Engineering Daily podcast: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/category/all-episodes/exclusive-content/Podcast/ Duckbillgroup.com: https://duckbillgroup.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Thinkst. This is going to take a minute to explain, so bear with me. I linked against an early version of their tool, canarytokens.org in the very early days of my newsletter, and what it does is relatively simple and straightforward. It winds up embedding credentials, files, that sort of thing in various parts of your environment, wherever you want to; it gives you fake AWS API credentials, for example. And the only thing that these things do is alert you whenever someone attempts to use those things. It's an awesome approach. I've used something similar for years. Check them out. But wait, there's more. They also have an enterprise option that you should be very much aware of canary.tools. You can take a look at this, but what it does is it provides an enterprise approach to drive these things throughout your entire environment. You can get a physical device that hangs out on your network and impersonates whatever you want to. When it gets Nmap scanned, or someone attempts to log into it, or access files on it, you get instant alerts. It's awesome. If you don't do something like this, you're likely to find out that you've gotten breached, the hard way. Take a look at this. It's one of those few things that I look at and say, “Wow, that is an amazing idea. I love it.” That's canarytokens.org and canary.tools. The first one is free. The second one is enterprise-y. Take a look. I'm a big fan of this. More from them in the coming weeks.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Lumigo. If you've built anything from serverless, you know that if there's one thing that can be said universally about these applications, it's that it turns every outage into a murder mystery. Lumigo helps make sense of all of the various functions that wind up tying together to build applications. It offers one-click distributed tracing so you can effortlessly find and fix issues in your serverless and microservices environment. You've created more problems for yourself; make one of them go away. To learn more, visit lumigo.io.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by ChaosSearch. As basically everyone knows, trying to do log analytics at scale with an ELK stack is expensive, unstable, time-sucking, demeaning, and just basically all-around horrible. So why are you still doing it—or even thinking about it—when there's ChaosSearch? ChaosSearch is a fully managed scalable log analysis service that lets you add new workloads in minutes, and easily retain weeks, months, or years of data. With ChaosSearch you store, connect, and analyze and you're done. The data lives and stays within your S3 buckets, which means no managing servers, no data movement, and you can save up to 80 percent versus running an ELK stack the old-fashioned way. It's why companies like Equifax, HubSpot, Klarna, Alert Logic, and many more have all turned to ChaosSearch. So if you're tired of your ELK stacks falling over before it suffers, or of having your log analytics data retention squeezed by the cost, then try ChaosSearch today and tell them I sent you. To learn more, visit chaossearch.io.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I spent the past week guest hosting the Software Engineering Daily podcast, taking listeners over there on a tour of the clouds. Each day, I picked a different cloud and had a guest talk to me about their experiences with that cloud.Now, there was one that we didn't talk about, and we're finishing up that tour here today on Screaming in the Cloud. That cloud is the obvious one, and that is your own crappy data center. And my guest is Duckbill Group's CEO and my business partner, Mike Julian. Mike, thanks for joining me.Mike: Hi, Corey. Thanks for having me back.Corey: So, I frequently say that I started my career as a grumpy Unix sysadmin. Because it isn't like there's a second kind of Unix sysadmin you're going to see. And you were in that same boat. You and I both have extensive experience working in data centers. And it's easy sitting here on the tech coast of the United States—we're each in tech hubs cities—and we look around and yeah, the customers we talked to have massive cloud presences; everything we do is in cloud, it's easy to fall into the trap of believing that data centers are a thing of yesteryear. Are they?Mike: [laugh]. Absolutely not. I mean, our own customers have tons of stuff in data centers. There are still companies out there like Equinix, and CoreSite, and DRC—is that them? I forget the name of them.Corey: DRT. Digital Realty [unintelligible 00:01:54].Mike: Digital Realty. Yeah. These are companies still making money hand over fist. People are still putting new workloads into data centers, so yeah, we're kind of stuck with him for a while.Corey: What's fun is when I talked to my friends over in the data center sales part of the world, I have to admit, I went into those conversations early on with more than my own fair share of arrogance. And it was, “[laugh]. So, who are you selling to these days?” And the answer was, “Everyone, fool.” Because they are.People at large companies with existing data center footprints are not generally doing fire sales of their data centers, and one thing that we learned about cloud bills here at The Duckbill Group is that they only ever tend to go up with time. That's going to be the case when we start talking about data centers as well. The difference there is that it's not just an API call away to lease more space, put in some racks, buy some servers, get them racked. So, my question for you is, if we sit here and do the Hacker News—also known as the worst website on the internet—and take their first principles approach to everything, does that mean the people who are building out data centers are somehow doing it wrong? Did they miss a transformation somewhere?Mike: No, I don't think they're doing it wrong. I think there's still a lot of value in having data centers and having that sort of skill set. I do think the future is in cloud infrastructure, though. And whether that's a public cloud, or private cloud, or something like that, I think we're getting increasingly away from building on top of bare metal, just because it's so inefficient to do. So yeah, I think at some point—and I feel like we've been saying this for years that, “Oh, no, everyone's missed the boat,” and here we are saying it yet again, like, “Oh, no. Everyone's missing the boat.” You know, at some point, the boat's going to frickin' leave.Corey: From my perspective, there are advantages to data centers. And we can go through those to some degree, but let's start at the beginning. Origin stories are always useful. What's your experience working in data centers?Mike: [laugh]. Oh, boy. Most of my career has been in data centers. And in fact, one interesting tidbit is that, despite running a company that is built on AWS consulting, I didn't start using AWS myself until 2015. So, as of this recording, it's 2021 now, so that means six years ago is when I first started AWS.And before that, it was all in data centers. So, some of my most interesting stuff in the data center world was from Oak Ridge National Lab where we had hundreds of thousands of square feet of data center floor space across, like, three floors. And it was insane, just the amount of data center stuff going on there. A whole bunch of HPC, a whole bunch of just random racks of bullshit. So, it's pretty interesting stuff.I think probably the most really interesting bit I've worked on was when I was at a now-defunct company, Peak Hosting, where we had to figure out how to spin up a data center without having anyone at the data center, as in, there was no one there to do the spin up. And that led into interesting problems, like you have multiple racks of equipment, like, thousands of servers just showed up on the loading dock. Someone's got to rack them, but from that point, it all has to be automatic. So, how do you bootstrap entire racks of systems from nothing with no one physically there to start a bootstrap process? And that led us to build some just truly horrific stuff. And thank God that's someone else's problem, now. [laugh].Corey: It makes you wonder if under the hood at all these cloud providers if they have something that's a lot cleaner, and more efficient, and perfect, or if it's a whole bunch of Perl tied together with bash and hope, like we always built.Mike: You know what? I have to imagine that even at AWS at a—I know if this is true at Facebook, where they have a massive data center footprint as well—there is a lot of work that goes into the bootstrap process, and a lot of these companies are building their own hardware to facilitate making that bootstrap process easier. When you're trying to bootstrap, say, like, Dell or HP servers, the management cards only take you so far. And a lot of the stuff that we had to do was working around bugs in the HP management cards, or the Dell DRACs.Corey: Or you can wind up going with some budget whitebox service. I mean, Supermicro is popular, not that they're ultra-low budget. But yeah, you can effectively build your own. And that leads down interesting paths, too. I feel like there's a sweet spot where working on a data center and doing a build-out makes sense for certain companies.If you're trying to build out some proof of concept, yeah, do it in the cloud; you don't have to wait eight weeks and spend thousands of dollars; you can prove it out right now and spend a total of something like 17 cents to figure out if it's going to work or not. And if it does, then proceed from there, if not shut it down, and here's a quarter; keep the change. With data centers, a lot more planning winds up being involved. And is there a cutover at which point it makes sense to evacuate from a public cloud into a physical data center?Mike: You know, I don't really think so. This came up on a recent Twitter Spaces that you and I did around, at what point does it really make sense to be hybrid, or to be all-in on data center? I made the argument that a large-scale HPC does not fit cloud workloads, and someone made a comment that, like, “What is large-scale?” And to me, large-scale was always, like—so Oak Ridge was—or is famous—for having supercomputing, and they have largely been in the top five supercomputers in the world for quite some time. A supercomputer of that size is tens of thousands of cores. And they're running pretty much constant because of how expensive that stuff is to get time on. And that sort of thing would be just astronomically expensive in a cloud. But how many of those are there really?Corey: Yeah, if you're an AWS account manager listening to this and reaching out with, “No, that's not true. After committed spend, we'll wind up giving you significant discounts, and a whole bunch of credits, and jump through all these hoops.” And, yeah, I know, you'll give me a bunch of short-term contractual stuff that's bounded for a number of years, but there's no guarantee that stuff gets renewed at that rate. And let's face it. If you're running those kinds of workloads today, and already have the staff and tooling and processes that embrace that, maybe ripping all that out in a cloud migration where there's no clear business value derived isn't the best plan.Mike: Right. So, while there is a lot of large-scale HPC infrastructure that I don't think particularly fits well on the cloud, there's not a lot of that. There's just not that many massive HPC deployments out there. Which means that pretty much everything below that threshold could be a candidate for cloud workloads, and probably would be much better. One of the things that I noticed at Oak Ridge was that we had a whole bunch of SGI HPC systems laying around, and 90% of the time they were idle.And those things were not cheap when they were bought, and at the time, they're basically worth nothing. But they were idle most of the time, but when they were needed, they're there, and they do a great job of it. With AWS and GCP and Azure HPC offerings, that's a pretty good fit. Just migrate that whole thing over because it'll cost you less than buying a new one. But if I'm going to migrate Titan or Gaia from Oak Ridge over to there, yeah, some AWS rep is about to have a very nice field day. That'd just be too much money.Corey: Well, I'd be remiss as a cloud economist if I didn't point out that you can do this stuff super efficiently in someone else's AWS account.Mike: [laugh]. Yes.Corey: There's also the staffing question where if you're a large blue-chip company, you've been around for enough decades that you tend to have some revenue to risk, where you have existing processes and everything is existing in an on-prem environment, as much as we love to tell stories about the cloud being awesome, and the capability increase and the rest, yadda, yadda, yadda, there has to be a business case behind moving to the cloud, and it will knock some nebulous percentage off of your TCO—because lies, damned lies, and TCO analyses are sort of the way of the world—great. That's not exciting to most strategic-level execs. At least as I see the world. Given you are one of those strategic level execs, do you agree? Am I lacking nuance here?Mike: No, I pretty much agree. Doing a data center migration, you got to have a reason to do it. We have a lot of clients that are still running in data centers as well, and they don't move because the math doesn't make sense. And even when you start factoring in all the gains from productivity that they might get—and I stress the word might here—even when you factor those in, even when you factor in all the support and credits that Amazon might give them, it still doesn't make enough sense. So, they're still in data centers because that's where they should be for the time because that's what the finances say. And I'm kind of hard-pressed to disagree with them.Corey: While we're here playing ‘ask an exec,' I'm going to go for another one here. It's my belief that any cloud provider that charges a penny for professional services, or managed services, or any form of migration tooling or offering at all to their customers is missing the plot. Clearly, since they all tend to do this, I'm wrong somewhere. But I don't see how am I wrong or are they?Mike: Yeah, I don't know. I'd have to think about that one some more.Corey: It's an interesting point because it's—Mike: It is.Corey: —it's easy to think of this as, “Oh, yeah. You should absolutely pay people to migrate in because the whole point of cloud is that it's kind of sticky.” The biggest indicator of a big cloud bill this month is a slightly smaller one last month. And once people wind up migrating into a cloud, they tend not to leave despite all of their protestations to the contrary about multi-cloud, hybrid, et cetera, et cetera. And that becomes an interesting problem.It becomes an area—there's a whole bunch of vendors that are very deeply niched into that. It's clear that the industry as a whole thinks that migrating from data centers to cloud is going to be a boom industry for the next three decades. I don't think they're wrong.Mike: Yeah, I don't think they're wrong either. I think there's a very long tail of companies with massive footprint staying in a data center that at some point is going to get out of a data center.Corey: For those listeners who are fortunate enough not to have to come up the way that we did. Can you describe what a data center is like inside?Mike: Oh, God.Corey: What is a data center? People have these mythic ideas from television and movies, and I don't know, maybe some Backstreet Boys music video; I don't know where it all comes from. What is a data center like? What does it do?Mike: I've been in many of these over my life, and I think they really fall into two groups. One is the one managed by a professional data center manager. And those tend to be sterile environments. Like, that's the best way to describe it. They are white, filled with black racks. Everything is absolutely immaculate. There is no trash or other debris on the floor. Everything is just perfect. And it is freezingly cold.Corey: Oh, yeah. So, you're in a data center for any length of time, bring a jacket. And the soulless part of it, too, is that it's well-lit with fluorescent lights everywhere—Mike: Oh yeah.Corey: —and it's never blinking, never changing. There are no windows. Time loses all meaning. And it's strange to think about this because you don't walk in and think, “What is that racket?” But there's 10,000, 100,000 however many fans spinning all the time. It is super loud. It can clear 120 decibels in there, but it's a white noise so you don't necessarily hear it. Hearing protection is important there.Mike: When I was at Oak Ridge, we had—all of our data centers, we had a professional data center manager, so everything was absolutely pristine. And to get into any of the data centers, you had to go through a training; it was very simple training, but just, like, “These are things you do and don't do in the data center.” And when you walked in, you had to put in earplugs immediately before you walked in the door. And it's so loud just because of that, and you don't really notice it because you can walk in without earplugs and, like, “Oh, it's loud, but it's fine.” And then you leave a couple hours later and your ears are ringing. So, it's a weird experience.Corey: It's awful. I started wearing earplugs every time I went in, just because it's not just the pain because hearing loss doesn't always manifest that way. It's, I would get tired much more quickly.Mike: Oh, yeah.Corey: I would not be as sharp. It was, “What is this? Why am I so fatigued?” It's noise.Mike: Yeah. And having to remember to grab your jacket when you head down to the data center, even though it's 95 degrees outside.Corey: At some point, if you're there enough—which you probably shouldn't be—you start looking at ways to wind up storing one locally. I feel like there could be some company that makes an absolute killing by renting out parkas at data centers.Mike: Yeah, totally. The other group of data center stuff that I generally run into is the exact opposite of that. And it's basically someone has shoved a couple racks in somewhere and they just kind of hope for the best.Corey: The basement. The closet. The hold of a boat, with one particular client we work with.Mike: Yeah. That was an interesting one. So, we had a—Corey and I had a client where they had all their infrastructure in the basement of a boat. And we're [laugh] not even kidding. It's literally in the basement of a boat.Corey: Below the waterline.Mike: Yeah below the waterline. So, there was a lot of planning around, like, what if the hold gets breached? And like, who has to plan for that sort of thing? [laugh]. It was a weird experience.Corey: It turns out that was—was hilarious about that was while they were doing their cloud migration into AWS, their account manager wasn't the most senior account manager because, at that point, it was a small account, but they still stuck to their standard talking points about TCO, and better durability, and the rest, and it didn't really occur to them to come back with a, what if the boat sinks? Which is the obvious reason to move out of that quote-unquote, “data center?”Mike: Yeah. It was a wild experience. So, that latter group of just everything's an absolute wreck, like, everything—it's just so much of a pain to work with, and you find yourself wanting to clean it up. Like, install new racks, do new cabling, put in a totally new floor so you're not standing on concrete. You want to do all this work to it, and then you realize that you're just putting lipstick on a pig; it's still going to be a dirty old data center at the end of the day, no matter how much work you do to it. And you're still running on the same crappy hardware you had, you're still running on the same frustrating deployment process you've been working on, and everything still sucks, despite it looking good.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by ChaosSearch. As basically everyone knows, trying to do log analytics at scale with an ELK stack is expensive, unstable, time-sucking, demeaning, and just basically all-around horrible. So why are you still doing it—or even thinking about it—when there's ChaosSearch? ChaosSearch is a fully managed scalable log analysis service that lets you add new workloads in minutes, and easily retain weeks, months, or years of data. With ChaosSearch you store, connect, and analyze and you're done. The data lives and stays within your S3 buckets, which means no managing servers, no data movement, and you can save up to 80 percent versus running an ELK stack the old-fashioned way. It's why companies like Equifax, HubSpot, Klarna, Alert Logic, and many more have all turned to ChaosSearch. So if you're tired of your ELK stacks falling over before it suffers, or of having your log analytics data retention squeezed by the cost, then try ChaosSearch today and tell them I sent you. To learn more, visit chaossearch.io.Corey: The worst part is playing the ‘what is different here?' Game. You rack twelve servers: eleven come up fine and the twelfth doesn't.Mike: [laugh].Corey: It sounds like, okay, how hard could it be? Days. It can take days. In a cloud environment, you have one weird instance. Cool, you terminate it and start a new one and life goes on whereas, in a data center, you generally can't send back a $5,000 piece of hardware willy nilly, and you certainly can't do it same-day, so let's figure out what the problem is.Is that some sub-component in the system? Is it a dodgy cable? Is it, potentially, a dodgy switch port? Is there something going on with that node? Was there something weird about the way the install was done if you reimage the thing? Et cetera, et cetera. And it leads down rabbit holes super quickly.Mike: People that grew up in the era of computing that Corey and I did, you start learning tips and tricks, and they sound kind of silly these days, but things like, you never create your own cables. Even though both of us still remember how to wire a Cat 5 cable, we don't.Corey: My fingers started throbbing when you said that because some memories never fade.Mike: Right. You don't. Like, if you're working in a data center, you're buying premade cables because they've been tested professionally by high-end machines.Corey: And you still don't trust it. You have a relatively inexpensive cable tester in the data center, and when—I learned this when I was racking stuff the second time, it adds a bit of time, but every cable that we took out of the packaging before we plugged it in, and we tested on the cable tester just to remove that problem. And it still doesn't catch everything because, welcome to the world of intermittent cables that are marginal that, when you bend a certain way, stop working, and then when you look at them, start working again properly. Yes, it's as maddening as it sounds.Mike: Yeah. And then things like rack nuts. My fingers hurt just thinking about it.Corey: Think of them as nuts that bolts wind up screwing into but they're square and they have clips on them so they clip into the standard rack cabinets, so you can screw equipment into them. There are different sizes of them, and of course, they're not compatible with one another. And you have—they always pinch your finger and make you bleed because they're incredibly annoying to put in and out. Some vendors have quick rails, which are way nicer, but networking equipment is still stuck in the ‘90s in that context, and there's always something that winds up causing problems.Mike: If you were particularly lucky, the rack nuts that you had were pliable enough that you could pinch them and pull them out with your fingers, and hopefully didn't do too much damage. If you were particularly unlucky, you had to reach for a screwdriver to try to pry it out, and inevitably stab yourself.Corey: Or sometimes pulling it out with your fingers, it'll—like, those edges are sharp. It's not the most high-quality steel in some cases, and it's just you wind up having these problems. Oh, one other thing you learn super quickly, is first, always have a set of tools there because the one you need is the one you don't have, and the most valuable tool you'll have is a pair of wire cutters. And what you do when you find a bad cable is you cut it before throwing it away.Mike: Yep.Corey: Because otherwise someone who is very well-meaning but you will think of them as the freaking devil, will, “Oh, there's a perfectly good cable sitting here in the trash. I'll put it back with the spares.” So you think you have a failed cable you grab another one from the pile of spares—remember, this is two in the morning, invariably, and you're not thinking on all cylinders—and the problem is still there. Cut the cable when you throw it away.Mike: So, there are entire books that were written about these sorts of tips and tricks that everyone working [with 00:19:34] data center just remembers. They learned it all. And most of the stuff is completely moot now. Like, no one really thinks about it anymore. Some people are brought up in computing in such a way that they never even learned these things, which I think it's fantastic.Corey: Oh, I don't wish this on anyone. This used to be a prerequisite skill for anyone who called themselves a systems administrator, but I am astonished when I talk to my AWS friends, the remarkably senior engineers I talk to who have never been inside of an AWS data center.Mike: Yeah, absolutely.Corey: That's really cool. It also means you're completely divorced from the thing you're doing with code and the rest, and the thing that winds up keeping the hardware going. It also leads to a bit of a dichotomy where the people racking the hardware, in many cases, don't understand the workloads that are on there because if you have the programming insight, and ability, and can make those applications work effectively, you're probably going to go find a role that compensates far better than working in the data center.Mike: I [laugh] want to talk about supply chains. So, when you build a data center, you start planning about—let's say, I'm not Amazon. I'm just, like, any random company—and I want to put my stuff into a data center. If I'm going to lease someone else's data center—which you absolutely should—we're looking at about a 180-day lead time. And it's like, why? Like, that's a long time. What's—Corey: It takes that long to sign a real estate lease?Mike: Yeah.Corey: No. It takes that long to sign a real estate lease, wind up talking to your upstream provider, getting them to go ahead and run the thing—effectively—getting the hardware ordered and shipped in the right time window, doing the actual build-out once everything is in place, and I'm sure a few other things I'm missing.Mike: Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, you have all these things that have to happen, and all of them pay for-freaking-ever. Getting Windstream on the phone to begin with, to even take your call, can often take weeks at a time. And then to get them to actually put an order for you, and then do the turnup. The turnup alone might be 90 days, where I'm just, “Hey, I've bought bandwidth from you, and I just need you to come out and connect the [BLEEP] cables,” might be 90 days for them to do it.And that's ridiculous. But then you also have the hardware vendors. If you're ordering hardware from Dell, and you're like, “Hey, I need a couple servers.” Like, “Great. They'll be there next week.” Instead, if you're saying, “Hey, I need 500 servers,” they're like, “Ooh, uh, next year, maybe.” And this is even pre-pandemic sort of thing because they don't have all these sitting around.So, for you to get a large number of servers quickly, it's just not a thing that's possible. So, a lot of companies would have to buy well ahead of what they thought their needs would be, so they'd have massive amounts of unused capacity. Just racks upon racks of systems sitting there turned off, waiting for when they're needed, just because of the ordering lead time.Corey: That's what auto-scaling looks like in those environments because you need to have that stuff ready to go. If you have a sudden inrush of demand, you have to be able to scale up with things that are already racked, provisioned, and good to go. Sometimes you can have them halfway provisioned because you don't know what kind of system they're going to need to be in many cases, but that's some up-the-stack level thinking. And again, finding failed hard drives and swapping those out, make sure you pull the right or you just destroyed an array. And all these things that I just make Amazon's problem.It's kind of fun to look back at this and realize that we would get annoyed then with support tickets that took three weeks to get resolved in hardware, whereas now three hours in you and I are complaining about the slow responsiveness of the cloud vendor.Mike: Yeah, the amount of quick turnaround that we can have these days on cloud infrastructure that was just unthinkable, running in data centers. We don't run out of bandwidth now. Like, that's just not a concern that anyone has. But when you're running in a data center, and, “Oh, yeah. I've got an OC-3 line connected here. That's only going to get me”—Corey: Which is something like—what is an OC-3? That's something like, what, 20 gigabit, or—Mike: Yeah, something like that. It's—Corey: Don't quote me on that.Mike: Yeah. So, we're going to have to look that up. So, it's equivalent to a T-3, so I think that's a 45 megabit?Corey: Yeah, that sounds about reasonable, yeah.Mike: So, you've got a T-3 line sitting here in your data center. Like that's not terrible. And if you start maxing that out, well, you're maxed out. You need more? Again, we're back to the 90 to 180 day lead time to get new bandwidth.So, sucks to be you, which means you'd have to start planning your bandwidth ahead of time. And this is why we had issues like companies getting Slashdotted back in the day because when you capped the bandwidth out, well, you're capped out. That's it. That's the game.Corey: Now, you've made the front page of Slashdot, a bunch of people visited your site, and the site fell over. That was sort of the way of the world. CDNs weren't really a thing. Cloud wasn't a thing. And that was just, okay, you'd bookmark the thing and try and remember to check it later.We talked about bandwidth constraints. One thing that I think the cloud providers do—at least the tier ones—that are just basically magic is full line rate between any two instances almost always. Well, remember, you have a bunch of different racks, and at the top of every rack, there's usually a switch called—because we're bad at naming things—top-of-rack switches. And just because everything that you have plugged in can get one gigabit to that switch—or 10 gigabit or whatever it happens to be—there is a constraint in that top-of-rack switch. So yeah, one server can talk to another one in a different rack at one gigabit, but then you have 20 different servers in each rack all trying to do something like that and you start hitting constraints.You do not see that in the public cloud environments; it is subsumed away, you don't have to think about that level of nonsense. You just complain about what feels like the egregious data transfer charge.Mike: Right. Yeah. It was always frustrating when you had to order nice high-end switching gear from Cisco, or Arista, or take your pick of provider, and you got 48 ports in the top-of-rack, you got 48 servers all wired up to them—or 24 because we want redundancy on that—and that should be a gigabit for each connection, except when you start maxing it out, no, it's nowhere even near that because the switch can't handle it. And it's absolutely magical, that the cloud provider's like, “Oh, yeah. Of course, we handle that.”Corey: And you don't have to think about it at all. One other use case that I did want to hit because I know we'll get letters if we don't, where it does make sense to build out a data center, even today, is if you have regulatory requirements around data residency. And there's no cloud vendor in an area that suits. This generally does not apply to the United States, but there are a lot of countries that have data residency laws that do not yet have a cloud provider of their choice region, located in-country.Mike: Yeah, I'll agree with that, but I think that's a short-lived problem.Corey: In the fullness of time, there'll be regions everywhere. Every build—a chicken in every pot and an AWS availability zone on every corner.Mike: [laugh]. Yeah, I think it's going to be a fairly short-lived problem, which actually reminds me of even our clients that have data centers are often treating the data center as a cloud. So, a lot of them are using your favorite technology, Corey, Kubernetes, and they're treating Kubernetes as a cloud, running Kube in AWS, as well, and moving workloads between the two Kube clusters. And to them, a data center is actually not really data center; it's just a private cloud. I think that pattern works really well if you have a need to have a physical data center.Corey: And then they start doing a hybrid environment where they start expanding to a public cloud, but then they treat that cloud like just a place to run a bunch of VMs, which is expensive, and it solves a whole host of problems that we've already talked about. Like, we're bad at replacing hard drives, or our data center is located on a corner where people love to get drunk on the weekends and smash into the power pole and take out half of the racks here. Things like that great, yeah, cloud can solve that, but cloud could do a lot more. You're effectively worsening your cloud experience to improve your data center experience.Mike: Right. So, even when you have that approach, the piece of feedback that we give the client was, you have built such a thing where you have to cater to the lowest common denominator, which is the constraints that you have in the data center, which means you're not able to use AWS the way that you should be able to use it so it's just as expensive to run as a data center was. If they were to get rid of the data center, then the cloud would actually become cheaper for them and they would get more benefits from using it. So, that's kind of a business decision for how they've structured it, and I can't really fault them for it, but there are definitely some downsides to the approach.Corey: Mike, thank you so much for joining me here. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, where can they find you?Mike: You know, you can find me at duckbillgroup.com, and actually, you can also find Corey at duckbillgroup.com. We help companies lower their AWS bills. So, if you have a horrifying bill, you should chat.Corey: Mike, thank you so much for taking the time to join me here.Mike: Thanks for having me.Corey: Mike Julian, CEO of The Duckbill Group and my business partner. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice and then challenge me to a cable-making competition.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

A few weeks ago, Krisha added Frank to the emergency contacts on her phone. She was at a restaurant when her phone started acting weird. The phone sent an emergency message to the four people on Krisha's list, including Frank and the friend with whom Krisha was having lunch. The phone sent two photos and an audio message to Krisha's emergency contacts. Other than the friend who was with her, the emergency contacts checked in with Krisha to make sure she was alright. One friend was especially concerned and needed to be reassured. It's T.A.C.O. Tuesday when Krisha & Frank Talk About Content Out of a basket. Today's topic is: “What is your bug-out plan for the apocalypse?” They decide to focus on a sci-fi movie type of apocalypse instead of a Biblical apocalypse or a zombie apocalypse. Krisha doubts she would survive an apocalypse like the ones in asteroid movies. She has looked up the radiation zones based on distance from Oak Ridge National Lab. Frank recalls the movie Blast from the Past which was about a family with a fallout shelter. Today's episode is sponsored by BoneZones.com (don't forget the S) where you can buy books and merchandise autographed by world-renowned forensic anthropologist Dr. Bill Bass. While supplies last, buy a t-shirt and a copy of either Art Bohanan's Prints of a Man or Watauga for only $30. Support the Krisha & Frank Show by purchasing our merchandise at https://teespring.com/stores/krishaandfrank Sign up for a 30-day trial of Audible Premium Plus and get a free premium selection that's yours to keep. Go to http://www.audibletrial.com/KrishaAndFrank Visit our website http://KrishaAndFrank.com. Send a text message or leave a voicemail for Krisha & Frank at (865) 236-0399. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell for notifications: https://YouTube.com/KrishaAndFrank Subscribe to the audio of our podcast on your choice of apps including https://krishaandfrank.podbean.com/ Find us on social media: https://www.facebook.com/KrishaAndFrank https://www.instagram.com/KrishaAndFrank https://www.twitter.com/KrishaAndFrank Thanks! K&F

Addison Snell, Tiffany Trader, and Dan Olds discuss the highlights of last week's Rice Oil and Gas Conference, plus news out of Oak Ridge National Lab.

BERG Health is a Boston-local biotech that leverages AI and patient biology to accelerate drug discovery and development for oncology, neurology, and rare diseases. They partner with the likes of Boehringer Ingelheim, Sanofi, AstraZeneca, among others, to drive key drug development. BERG is also working with the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Lab to blend BERG's AI platform with the Summit supercomputer to map out and repurpose drugs. They intend to help stop the progression of COVID-19 in patients. The company also recently announced a new study published in the Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, which they conducted in collaboration with the University of Oxford and Virginia Commonwealth. The study identifies why COVID-19 is more prevalent in African American populations and how to treat it using existing ACE inhibitors and ARBs. Dr. Niven R. Narain is Co-Founder, President & CEO of Berg, discusses what they are working on across all working drug pipelines and biotech's future amid and beyond COVID. Today's guest is a pioneer in technology development at the intersection of Biology and AI and is the inventor of the Interrogative Biology® platform. It has unraveled actionable disease insight leading to de novo and repurposed development of a deep pipeline of oncology products, metabolic, rare, and CNS diseases. Namely, BPM 31510 currently in Phase 2 trials for cancer covered by over 650 issued and pending US and international patents.  

Srinivas Kilambi, Founder of Keydabra, holds a Ph.D in Chemical-Environmental Engineering from University of Tennessee Knoxville and Oak Ridge National Lab, a MS from Johns Hopkins and Clarkson Universities, B.S from IIT Madras and also a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA). He has been CEO/CTO of multi-billion dollar Private and Public companies/divisions in the USA and […] The post Srinivas Kilambi with Keydabra appeared first on Business RadioX ®.

Episode 34: Ben and Steve start by blabbing about the latest GPUs. Ben asks Steve if he would fly on a hydrogen-powered plane. Steve drools over Oak Ridge National Lab’s experiments with robotic fiber placement. Ben talks about the automation of ammunition production and triggers a rant from Stephen on why small arms cartridges need to be brass cased. Steve cools down with printed diamond cutting tools. Ben brings up cybersecurity for smart factories. Steve closes with the biggest machine tool down under. - https://www.flightglobal.com/air-transport/airbus-shows-off-hydrogen-fuelled-concept-aircraft-for-2035-service-entry/140246.article - https://www.3dprintingmedia.network/orbital-composites-and-ornl-collaborate-composites/ - https://breakingdefense.com/2020/09/replacing-spatulas-with-robots-at-army-ammo-plants/ - https://www.pesmedia.com/mapal-pcd-cutting-tools-16092020/ - https://www.amtnews.org/post/cybersecurity-for-smart-factories - https://www.nist.gov/cyberframework - https://www.ctemag.com/news/industry-news/submarines-be-built-australias-largest-machine-tool Subscribe to the Weekly Newsletter https://www.amtnews.org/subscribe Music provided by www.freestockmusic.com

Immorpher is a dark ambient composer creating soundtracks for Quake & indie titles. When he’s not designing desolate soundscapes, he works as a biophysicist studying COVID19 & nuclear magnetic resonance at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This episode is a celebration of the FPS titles of the Nintendo 64 – especially DOOM 64 – while going on tangents on everything from the professional wrestling industry to transhumanism & climatology. ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK! // Artwork by Haducant/Spaced // Music by Immorpher: https://immorpher.bandcamp.com/ // The Keep: http://inthekeep.com/ // Realms Deep 2020: https://www.realmsdeep.game/ // Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/InTheKeep)

Juan & Terence discuss the viability of thorium reactors as a source of energy in the future.

Dr. Adam Arkin's research focuses on the synthetic biology of microorganisms, environmental genomics, and molecular ecosystems biology. On today's episode, you will learn: How many microbes exist in a single gram of soil, and how scientists conduct research in the lab to try to identify how all of these microbes interact and function as a community What bacteriocin is and how it can utilize a partial phage to kill other bacteria directly How to understand the longitudinal dynamic between viruses and bacteria At the University of California, Berkeley, Adam Arkin, Ph.D. is researching one of his primary interests, which is how microbes (i.e. bacteria, archaea, viruses) transform the environment and impact various processes, including the processes that occur in our own bodies. He is working on how to track and characterize groups of microbes, understand how they operate together, and determine the ways in which we may be able to intervene in order to get microbes to do things that are beneficial to us. The largest projects he's working on involve terrestrial environments, such as the subsurface of a watershed. In particular, Dr. Arkin and his team are researching the microbes in a field behind the Oak Ridge National Lab, where the soil is contaminated with uranium and has the highest level of nitrates on Earth. In that location, microbes breathe in the metals and transform them to immobile and relatively harmless substances. Dr. Arkin explain how this may be applied to the agricultural arena in order to use microbes that mobilize nutrients for crops, protect them from pathogens, increase resilience to drought, and improve their ability to sequester carbon, thereby reducing greenhouse gasses. He continues by discussing the potential of a human microbiome that is resistant to invasion by pathogens and allows us to make better use of nutrients. What's stopping the development of this? Dr. Arkin explains that despite the growing amount of data being gathered in the field, there are still huge gaps in basic data about the composition and function of microbial genes in a wide range of conditions. Consider, for example, that a single gram of soil contains one million microbes and about 10,000 different species of microbes, and that the human gut contains just as many, if not more. He explains the approach that has allowed his research and the research of others to show that most large community microbial dynamics can be described by much smaller numbers of pairwise interactions. In other words, predictions about a large community of microbes can be made based on observations of smaller number of pairwise interactions among community members. In addition to all of this, Dr. Arkin takes a look at viruses and phages, bacteriocin, mechanisms of cell sensing, the various uses of phages (including those in the therapeutic realm), in what ways his research relies on machine learning and computational biology, and so much more. Tune in for the full conversation and visit http://genomics.lbl.gov/ and http://enigma.lbl.gov/ to learn more.

The son of a Pennsylvania preacher, Philip Koehler made his way to Florida courtesy of the U.S. Navy. Eventually he became a Professor of Urban Entomology at the University of Florida. He’s developed a mosquito and fly trap that uses a minimal amount of insecticides, and he also has developed a trap for bed bugs. He patents inventions because “you can write an article for a scientific journal and no one will ever use it.” TRANSCRIPT: Intro: 0:01 Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade a podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We’ll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we’ll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace. Richard Miles: 0:38 Bugs. We’re back to talk about something that everyone who lives or is from Florida is very familiar with and very happy to have on Radio Cade this morning, Dr. Philip Koehler, who is a professor of Urban Entomology at the University of Florida. Thanks for being with us Phil. Dr. Philip Koehler: 0:51 It’s wonderful to be here with you. Richard Miles: 0:53 Phil, I know if I tried to describe your technology I would completely mess it up. So I’m going to ask you to sort of tell me a little bit about your, your core technology core invention , um , and explain it as if , uh , and in this case, very realistic scenario. I don’t know anything about it. Dr. Philip Koehler: 1:11 Yeah, we, we started back in , uh, back in around 2010 or so trying to take on flies and mosquitoes as very dangerous animals that needed to be controlled because they , uh, they are very important from the standpoint of human welfare. There were very few products that were environmentally friendly to be able to control these , uh , these potential disease factors. And we’d gotten some funding from the military in order to develop, first of all, fly traps. And second of all , um , mosquito traps in order to be able to control them. And we’ve, we’ve developed several new technologies that have now been patented and are in the process of being commercialized throughout the entire world. Richard Miles: 1:53 And so if I understand correctly, these technologies , um, they’re, they’re mostly not, or do they have anything to do with sort of insecticides or sprays or anything, or these are different types of pest control? Dr. Philip Koehler: 2:05 Everything that we’ve done utilizes insecticides, however, they are contained so that people won’t contact them. And also they’re not a danger to the environment because they are contained. Richard Miles: 2:16 Okay, so they’re not like sprayed on a field or they’re more in receptacles or containers? Dr. Philip Koehler: 2:23 Exactly. We’re, we’re putting them associated with something that the insects like to go to. So you don’t have to, you don’t have to spray large areas of land. And that was one of the things that I was concerned about back in 2015, that the state of Florida, in order to control Zika factors, u h, they were spraying by air, over large tracks of land. And in many cases, that was the only thing that they had available to them. Richard Miles: 2:50 Okay. So I think, I , I think I understand more or less, and I hope our listeners do as well. So let’s, let’s go back in time to a young Phil Koehler , uh , sort of tell us your origin story, where were you from and how did a nice guy, like you ended up , dealing with bugs? Dr. Philip Koehler: 3:05 Oh, I started growing up in Southeastern Pennsylvania and , uh , my family actually goes back to like 1702. They bought the farm from William Penn. So we were longstanding in the state of , uh, of Pennsylvania. However, I ended up in Florida somehow. And, and I remember when I was playing little league baseball, I was always the right fielder, which was always the sorriest player on the team. And if a ball was hitting my direction, I would never know it because I was watching the ants crawl around on the ground. So I always have enjoyed insects in one way or another through my entire life. Richard Miles: 3:44 So, at what point did you know you weren’t going to make the majors, pretty early on in your baseball career? Dr. Philip Koehler: 3:49 I was, I think the , the managers of the team hated to put me on the field. And so I think it was pretty clear I was not, Richard Miles: 3:56 And this is the days before helicopter parents. Right? So it’s not like your dad stormed onto the field and demanded more playing time for you, right? Dr. Philip Koehler: 4:02 My dad didn’t do that. He did not storm onto the field because I was bad player. Richard Miles: 4:08 So were either of your parents, scientists at all? Dr. Philip Koehler: 4:11 Neither one, as a matter of fact, my father was a minister and, u h, he was, u h, he was for years in, in Pennsylvania then, u h, went to Virginia and then retired back to Pennsylvania again. So it’s, u h, so probably I have a long history of people talking i n my family. Richard Miles: 4:33 Um, so how did you end up in Florida? Did you come here as an undergraduate or did your family have a connection here? Dr. Philip Koehler: 4:39 Actually, no. What happened was I did my undergraduate work at Catava college, which was a college that was affiliated with the church that my father, my father was a minister in . And so I got a really good break because ministers don’t get paid very much. And so I got a good break as far as cost . And then, Richard Miles: 4:59 So, this is in Pennsylvania? Dr. Philip Koehler: 5:01 Uh , this was Catava College is in North Carolina, Salisbury, North Carolina. And while I was there, I was picked up for two NSF fellowships at Oak Ridge National Lab. And I was working on chironomid midges. In other words , uh , uh, insects that grow on the bottoms of lakes. And they had a Lake there that had been contaminated with radioactive waste from building the bombs for , uh , bombing Japan. They’d put that waste in 55 gallon drums, buried it in the hillside. And when they rusted out, they built a dam then to contain the radioactive waste. So I would walk out there and the radioactive waste, collect these midges and then determine the , the abnormalities that were a result of radiation. So I did two summers there, and then I went to Argonne National Lab and was doing neutron activation a nd gamma Ray spectroscopy, which is a physics project. And I found out what I really didn’t want to do in life, which was that. Richard Miles: 6:02 So let me guess, did you, did you volunteer for this, Phil? This sounds sort of like dangerous work, radioactive midges, and I mean, did somebody have a gun to your head or what? Dr. Philip Koehler: 6:11 There were many days that someone was walking behind me with a Geiger counter to see how much radiation I was actually getting. And maybe that’s the reason. Richard Miles: 6:18 He said it was a Geiger counter right there. Just make sure you weren’t didn’t turn and run away. Dr. Philip Koehler: 6:21 Of course, that may be why I’m so strange today. Richard Miles: 6:25 So you shifted from that , um, into, or did you already have an interest in entomology before that sort of academic interest? Dr. Philip Koehler: 6:32 Yes. I had an academic interest in entomology and actually I took my first entomology class at Catava College. But then I went on to Cornell University and got my PhD at Cornell University. I was going to be drafted into the army. They already had me down for that . They already did my physical and were going to put me in the trenches in Vietnam. And I had the opportunity to get into the Navy as an entomologist. And I went in as a Lieutenant , uh , entomologist and spent three years then in Jacksonville. And because I was at Jacksonville and, and teaching classes , on insect control to two Navy personnel, I got to work closely with some of the faculty here at the University of Florida. So I ended up then getting hired, u h, at the University of Florida as an assistant professor back in 1975. So I’ve been here for 44 years. Richard Miles: 7:31 So who knew, thanks to the U.S. Navy, you ended up in Gainesville, Florida. Dr. Philip Koehler: 7:35 That’s right. And what was interesting was I got in the Navy because they needed another entomologist to go to Vietnam, to take care of some of the mosquito problems there. And , um, and at that time they started winding down Vietnam. And so I stayed there in , in Jacksonville for my entire tour of duty. So I had three years , uh , three years there and now 44 here. Richard Miles: 8:01 So I’m going to have to start giving the Navy professional credit here. Cause you’re actually the second guest in a row. I just had a guest on and his sort of trajectory was also to do with the Navy and it was in the area of radio-frequency antennas and he eventually went into the MRI business and so on. And so, you know, go Navy, I guess. Um, uh , okay. So let’s, let’s come sort of back to where you are, did not start a company with your technology, but you did license the technology and understand there’s a company in Italy that is using it? Dr. Philip Koehler: 8:28 Yeah. So, so what happens at the University of Florida is , uh, when you have something that you think is patentable, you let the university know because they have first choice to , uh, to decide whether they want to adopt it or not. The University of Florida adopted these technologies. And then , uh, found a partner with a company that is actually managed out of Italy, but is a Florida company now. And it’s called Florida Insect Control Group. And they’re just to commercializing the technologies that we developed. Richard Miles: 8:59 And who are , who are the major clients, I mean, are these sort of governments that are buying or anybody, these aren’t retail products right? Dr. Philip Koehler: 9:05 Okay. The , the process for this is , is very long and convoluted in order to get the technologies that we have available because we’re using insecticides. We have to go through all of the registration processes for every , uh , for every country that, that these products are going to be sold. And so right now , uh , we’re in the last stage, the company’s in the last stages of getting EPA registration in the United States and also European union , uh , registration , uh , for European countries and also former colonies of those of those countries as well. So, so basically the only registration that we have for use right now is in Poland. And I have no idea why Poland, I can’t even read the label on the product, but it was, it was one that, u h, that seemed reasonable for them to go to. First, Richard Miles: 9:59 I noticed also that you are, you have been inducted or were inducted in the pest management professional hall of fame. I have to say, you’re the first inductee in the pest management hall of fame and I’ve met so, honored here. Dr. Philip Koehler: 10:12 Yeah . So that was, that was quite an honor because they , uh, they try to choose the people that have made the most outstanding contributions to the pest management industry throughout the country and throughout the world. Actually, most of the , uh, the, the organization national pest management association is , uh , is not national. It’s a worldwide association where they have participants from all over the world, including India and Japan. And another thing that I forgot to tell you was that this year I’m being inducted as a fellow in the National Academy of Inventors and, Richard Miles: 10:48 Oh, congratulation in Tampa right? Dr. Philip Koehler: 10:49 It was first started in Tampa, but this year the, the award is going to be in Houston at the space center there. And from what I understand, the, the award will be passed out by the gentlemen who is in charge of patents and trade for the U.S. Richard Miles: 11:04 Oh, Congratulations. Dr. Philip Koehler: 11:05 So it’s quite quite an honor for me. And also I think for the University of Florida. Richard Miles: 11:10 Um, Phil, if you’re allowed to tell us, what are you working on now in terms of research, sort of what’s on the horizon , um, in terms of your , uh , sort of academic interests , or do you have anything else that you are getting ready to license or patent that you can talk about? Dr. Philip Koehler: 11:25 Well, actually , um , uh , I think that according to the University of Florida records, I have 19 patents in the U.S. that have been issued and probably five international. And , uh, there are five more that are being issued at this point. So, so we have quite a, quite a stack of them going through that are novel inventions that, that we’re trying to bring to people, to be able to manage insights that are dangerous in their own yards and in an environmentally friendly way. Richard Miles: 11:57 One thought that occurred to me, Phil is how much do you have to know of or work with? Um, uh, I guess sort of like urban planners or urban designers, or even sociologists, because it occurs to me that some of the patterns in what you’re dealing with right, are , are concentrations of people making decision on somewhere to live, and those patterns change over time. And they change city by city country, by country. How much of your work intersects with that world in which you’re , you’re actually looking at the sociology of the urban environment before you look at the bugs there? Dr. Philip Koehler: 12:28 Yeah. Well, we haven’t really worked with the sociologists all that much. Um , what we’ve, what we’ve been trying to do is work with people in material science and engineering in order to come up with formulations that can be used in the way that we want these products to be used. So by putting together the people that have a knowledge of the molecules, along with the people that have a knowledge of the insects, we’ve been able to come up with novel ways of approaching insect control. So one of the first products that we came up with was a fly trap. That was a color blue. And if you’re familiar with fly traps at all, they’re usually yellow. Now I did not understand why they were yellow because flies always go to blue over yellow and as a matter of fact, it’s like two to one, they’ll go to blue over yellow, but most of the fly traps were developed in agriculture for agriculturally important pests. They’re attacking plants and a sick plant is yellow. And so the i nse cts attracted to things that are, that the agricultural pests are attracted to things that are mostly yellow in color. So they just went ahead and said, we control flies too. W ell , guess what? Blue is a better color. So we came up with blue. And one of the things that I noticed was flies like to squeeze into small cracks and crevices. And I couldn’t believe it. We grow flies at our l ab, of course, and you can put them in a plastic bag and, and crinkle it up. Like you would a bag of potato chips and try to try to seal it off as tight as you can. And the flies would find their way out. They love squeezing into cracks and crevices. So they’re actually attracted to the blue color and then secondarily the black color of a crack. So what we did was we put, uh, w e p u t a piece of yarn on there, treated the yarn with insecticide, and we could kill thousands of flies in a short period of time. We hung them over dumpsters and the flies would, would fall dead. And we catch them in a tray underneath and be able to count them. And it was thousands of flies and like a 24 hour period that you could kill with just a little bit of product on, uh, o n m a ybe 12 inches of yarn on a blue w ith t hat’ s put on a blue background and they’re attracted to the blue color. They think there’s a crack there because they see the black on the blue and they go to that and there’s food there. So they eat it and they die. And it’s a very nice way to be able to control flies without spraying everything around your property and around your, um, y o ur farm for fly control. Richard Miles: 15:05 So you, you make it sound kind of easy, but this, I imagine took hours and hours of research. I mean, I just pity the poor grad assistant who had to count all those flies, right? I mean, this is, this is how long did it take just to , uh, determine what you just told me is that months of research or is that years of research? Dr. Philip Koehler: 15:21 Oh it was years. Actually, we started out by putting, by doing electroretinograms on the flies. Now he’s like electroretinogram is where you shine a particular wavelength of light onto a fly eye. And you have a probes set in there. So you can determine whether there’s an electrical impulse going to the brain or not from that , uh, from that light. And then you can change the wavelengths of light and find out what the fly is most sensitive to. And they’re most sensitive to blue and they can see yellow. And that’s actually, that was the only color that repelled flies. And so the traps that are out there, u h, for the most part are yellow and r epelling flies. Richard Miles: 16:03 In your experience, Phil , is there a certain personality type of people that are attracted to entomology research? Cause it’s, you know, they’re animals for sure, but they’re not like cute furry animals and they’re not plants. So have you noticed any commonalities and you know, you and your colleages? Dr. Philip Koehler: 16:19 Well for a lot of the people, and I must admit this goes back quite a few years, my experience with antibiotics , uh , they’re very much like engineers, they’re socially awkward. And so, so it’s , uh , it’s rather interesting dealing with both engineers and , and entomologists as well. And one other thing, Richard Miles: 16:38 It’s almost like the , the joke, you know, accountants will tell about actuaries and actuaries tell about accounts and who is the more socially awkward, is it something like that? Dr. Philip Koehler: 16:45 Yeah, and maybe the entomologists have been engineer’s beat and you asked how many flies we had to count in order to get this thing done. It was amazing how many flies that we had to count. I had a, I had a student that came to the University of Florida , uh, from Thailand and she didn’t speak very much English and I couldn’t figure out what project to put her on. So I told her to count all the flies and we had one of those traps that we had made, and we wanted to see how many flies it could kill with one charge. So we hung with hung that trap in a cage and we killed flies and we, and we, then we would add more flies in, cause we couldn’t get all the flies in the cage that all at one time we keep on adding flies as they died. And then she had to count every one and she spent three months counting flies. We got up to 40,000. We were still killing 99% of the flies that we released in the cage. And she had to go back to Thailand and so we stopped counting, but every morning I would go in there and she would, u h, she’d separate the flies out into piles of 10. And she would have the days kill there, which m ay b e four or 5,000, u h, flies. And then, u h, then count each fly individually. Richard Miles: 18:06 So I can imagine she went back and had great stories to tell a parties. What did you do in the United States for three months? Well I counted flies. Dr. Philip Koehler: 18:12 Yes. It was an exciting place. Richard Miles: 18:16 Hopefully it didn’t scare off of entomology . Dr. Philip Koehler: 18:18 Actually that information was quite valuable. We killed 40,000 flies with the thing with one charge. And we did that over three months now , you know, whether it’s effective or not. Yeah . We didn’t have to retreat it at all. And so it’s been , uh , that , uh , that whole process of development of that , uh , of that product was, was actually quite interesting. And , um, and Florida insect control group acquired the rights to that and is commercializing that now. Richard Miles: 18:44 So Phil, you’ve also done some work with bedbugs. Tell me what that’s about. Dr. Philip Koehler: 18:47 Yes. We’ve been working extensively with bedbugs over the past 20 years. They started coming back in the U.S. Somewhere around the turn of the century where around the year 2000 or so , uh , bedbugs came back and people really didn’t have a good way to , uh, to manage them. What we’ve done is invented a new type of trap that you can put underneath a bed. And one of the things that they can’t do at the hotels and motels is u sed traps very effectively because they, underneath the mattress and box Springs, they usually have wood that’s on the ground, like a t wo-by-six, u h, that is underneath the mattress and box Springs as a frame. W ell, we’ve invented, u h, u h, a trap t hat can go around those beds and w e’ve feel that we can eliminate the b edbug problem in many of the hotels and motels that would have problems with ifestations. Richard Miles: 19:41 That sounds like a huge commercial potential there, right? I mean, I’ve known a few people, who’ve had bedbugs and it sounds like an absolute nightmare in terms of actually getting rid of them. Dr. Philip Koehler: 19:49 And everyone’s fear is you, when you travel, you stay at a , you stay at a place and you may pick up bedbugs and it’s very easy to bring bedbugs home. And you may be faced with , uh , with a $1,000 or a $2,000 bill in order to have them controlled in your house. They can be much more expensive than even termites to control. Richard Miles: 20:07 Because the conventional treatment now is you have to wet seal off and fumigate a room? Is that how you do it? Dr. Philip Koehler: 20:13 In many cases in Florida, they’re doing fumigation. However, there is heat treatment that’s also available. Uh, but none of those provide longterm protection. As soon as you have the temperature, go back to normal or release the gas, then the bedbugs can come back in again from someplace else. So the next time you stay at a motel, you may bring them back in and it may cost. It may cost a lot of money in order to be able to get them controlled. So we’re trying to come up with some solutions that people could put under , uh, under the legs of their bed, or even in hotels and motels that can be put , uh , put as a frame or underneath the frame of the bed in order to catch bed bugs that are, that are brought into the place. Richard Miles: 20:55 Phil, as you look back on your career, you know, starting in Philadelphia and going to North Carolina and then to Jacksonville , then to Gainesville , um, you know, what, what sort of lessons have you learned or what lessons would you impart to say a younger version of you if you met them on the street, you know, a researcher and in particular, you know, since the Cade Museum , um, you know, we like to tell stories of inventions and inventors, particularly those who think that they’ve got a great idea, the idea may have market potential. Um, you know, what, what should they be thinking about , uh, now, or, you know, what , what do you wish you had done, if anything, and what do you wish you hadn’t done? So that should be enough material in that question to go for quite a long time. Dr. Philip Koehler: 21:37 Okay. Well that was to go for , for quite a while . As a matter of fact , um , my advice to , to kids is they , they need to go to a college that they really , uh , there that really fits their personality. Not every, not every child is destined for the University of Florida and not everybody that gets into the University of Florida is going to be able to adjust, adjust to the size of the university. Because I went to a small place like Catava College that had somewhere around 1100 students, which is, you know , maybe the size of our department at the University of Florida. Um, it allowed me to be able to grow as a person with a small group that , uh, that we all knew each other. And you can survive at the University of Florida if you have a small group. And like at the end of biology department, we do a very good job of, of taking care of our students individually. But there are other departments that have thousands of students in them. We have, we have probably 50 undergraduates and maybe 140 , uh , graduate students. So we’re a small department in the overall scheme of things at the University of Florida. And I think it’s very important for, for kids to be able to find a place that they’re comfortable with , uh, based on their own personality. And even at the University of Florida, it’s a big place, but if you get into a small department, then you have kind of a small field to , uh , to a big place. Richard Miles: 23:06 As far as , uh, you know, a big invention. We had a recent guest on here who said , um, he , he thought a lot of people , uh, were focused on the short-term nature or the short term desire to hit it big out, you know, do something along the lines. But , uh , three to five years, and, and, and his experience was much different. He said, look, if you’re not willing to invest 15 or even 20 years into a project or a company or whatever , um, you know, you , it’s very unrealistic to think you’re going to succeed. Has that been your experience? Dr. Philip Koehler: 23:41 That’s very much my experience. And as a matter of fact , uh, I got in, I got into doing some of the patents and inventions , uh, because you can go ahead and publish a scientific article and put it in a book on a shelf and nobody will ever use it. And I thought that, that, that was a shame because a lot of good scientific research never gets implemented because the professor is being rated on how many publications he’s able to get into scientific journals. And they really don’t take much into account when they’re evaluating you on how many things that you’ve tried to do to make sure that what you’re doing is, is really effecting people’s lives to the positive. So, so I kind of look at it that it’s a long-term investment. And as a matter of fact, anytime that you’re dealing with , uh, with insecticides and trying to contain them in a way that would be environmentally safe, there are a lot of hoops that you have to go through and it’s a long-term process. And we started out way back in 2010 on the mosquito invention. And , uh , we still don’t have EPA registration yet. And part of the process was, was , uh, were some things that happened that I would have never anticipated. And one was that, u h, that when we, what we try to do in that mosquito invention is put a surface on the inside of a container because container mosquitoes are extremely important f or, for people’s health. Those container mosquitoes can transmit d aggy, u h, Zika, u h, Chicken Gunyah. And of course, yellow fever is coming back throughout the world. So those are container breeding mosquitoes. We can treat the interior of our container, have it the right c olor. S o the mosquitoes are attracted to it. So we have black and red is t he colors that are, that are attracted. And then we have a polymer because insecticides b reak d own very rapidly when they’re in high humidity or in water conditions. So we have a polymer to slowly release the chemicals i n the mosquitoes. Then in order to lay eggs, they land on the side of the container, or they rest inside the container b ecause they don’t fly all the time. U h, and then they die when they contact the insecticides, or if they lay eggs before they die, then the larvae then die in the container as well. Well, to make a long story longer, what happened was that EPA wants to know how long that insecticide is going to be at the right concentration when it’s on the shelf. So you have to do a two year study that you have to a pprove a two year shelf life. We ll, because we have a complex mixture. Everyone that deals with insecticides always does gas chromatography in order to determine the amount of chemical that’s in th ere, gas chromatography does not work for complex mixtures like ours. So we spent probably two years doing the wrong thing, trying to figure out what’s wrong with, with this assay, odd , w hy can’t we measure the amount of insecticide that’s in that container. And, and finally, I got so frustrated. I was, I would say, we need to use high pressure liquid chromatography HPLC in order to determine the concentration. And because the company that we’re working with is run out of Italy. They found a lab in Italy that goes, yeah, there isn’t any reason why you should have ever looked at gas chromatography for this. You sho uld ha v e do ne a H P LC right. To begin with. And so the y, t hey did it, everything came out fine. And now we’re dealing with EPA. And again, u h , th at the , t he data has been submitted there. So is it alo ng, t his is a long story, but guess what? Uh, i t ‘s not, as long as the story that we’ve had and tr ying to commercialize this, because you, aren’t going to make a fortune in a year, you aren’t going to make a fortune two years. And it probably is 15 to 20 years out that everything is going to work. We have players who are wanting to use this worldwide, and we have one company has a 37, 0 00 employees that does mosquito control throughout the world. They, they look at this as something that will be integrated into their programs and will work very well with what they’re currently doing. So they want to get a hol d of i t, but we’re stuck with a reg u latory hurdles right now in both the European union and the U.S. and China and Australia, and all of those other places. Richard Miles: 28:13 So here’s some free advice for you, Phil , when you give your acceptance speech at the National Academy of Inventors, repeat a lot of what you just said. I just heard the founder of that. Paul Sanberg, one of the founders, u m, talk about, u h, exactly what you said, that the process of patenting a nd commercialization is a far more effective way to expand the body of knowledge, u m, b ecause y ou g ot t o prove something works, u m, as opposed to simply publishing something academic journal, which may or may not get read, and then maybe forgotten about, but patenting by definition means you have to prove a certain standard and it’s, it’s widely available, widely use may be implemented. And so he argues all the time that inventors play this special role in expanding the body of knowledge, as opposed to, u h, just researchers. I mean, a lot of vendors are also researchers, but the inventors go that extra step of exactly what you just described t o h aving to prove something actually works. Dr. Philip Koehler: 29:03 You don’t often think about it from the standpoint of science, that the proof of science is to publish it in a peer reviewed journal. But the commercialization of that is a whole different process and, and very much , uh, very much different than what most academic people are used to dealing with. Richard Miles: 29:21 My final comment. Uh Phil’s I can’t wait to win a bar bet or trivial pursuit game by saying that insects are actually attracted to blue and not yellow. So I know it’s going to, if I just wait long enough, I know I’m going to , I’m going to win some sort of argument somewhere. Phil, thank you very much for coming on Radio Cade has been very , uh, interesting and , um, good luck and best luck with your research and your product. Dr. Philip Koehler: 29:43 Thank you. Richard Miles: 29:44 I’m Richard Miles. Outro: 29:48 Radio Cade would like to thank the following people for their help and support Liz Gist of the Cade Museum for coordinating and vendor interviews. Bob McPeak of Heartwood Soundstage in downtown Gainesville, Florida for recording, editing and production of the podcasts and music theme, Tracy Collins for the composition and performance of the Radio Cade theme song, featuring violinist, Jacob Lawson and special, thanks to the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville, Florida.

Along America's west coast, the world's most valuable companies are racing to make artificial intelligence smarter. Google and Facebook have boasted of experiments using billions of photos and thousands of high-powered processors. Late last year, a project in eastern Tennessee quietly exceeded the scale of any corporate AI lab. It was run by the US government. The record-setting project involved the world's most powerful supercomputer, Summit, at Oak Ridge National Lab.

Scientists from Brookhaven National Lab, Stony Brook University, and Oak Ridge National Lab discuss the worldwide search for the universe’s “missing matter.” Only four percent of the universe is made of the things we know—everything from people to the planets. The other 96 percent is made of two mysterious forces rippling through the cosmos, what scientists call dark matter and dark energy. What exactly are dark matter and dark energy? And how do scientists look for something they can’t even see? Find out as we dive into the dark universe in this first episode of PubSci Playback—a podcast based on PubSci, Brookhaven’s live science café series that brings scientists and the public into casual conversations over drinks at various locations across Long Island.

Tony Bova is the co-founder and CEO of mobius. Tony is currently finishing his Ph.D. in Energy Science & Engineering at the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Lab, where he studied the production of bioplastics created from lignin, a waste product of the forestry and paper industries. he holds an honors B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Toledo.//mobius (formerly Grow Bioplastics) is focused on converting organic waste to biodegradable plastics for use in agriculture, horticulture, food service, and beyond. mobius is based in Knoxville, TN.learn more about mobius: https://www.mobius.cofollow upside on Twitter: https://twitter.com/upsidefm

Dez Blanchfield gets up close & personal with Jack Wells, Director of Science at Oak Ridge National Lab, to talk about about his personal & professional life journey, his role at Oak Ridge National Lab, how Artificial Intelligence ( i.e. Deep Learning / Machine Learning ) is being deployed & leveraged in their High Performance Computing solutions ( HPC ), and the role IBM’s POWER9 solution is playing in supporting Oak Ridge in their endeavours to design & build super computers. For more info visit http://ibm.com/enterpriseAI

Plenty of people around the world got new gadgets Friday, but one in Eastern Tennessee stands out. Summit, a new supercomputer unveiled at Oak Ridge National Lab is, unofficially for now, the most powerful calculating machine on the planet. It was designed in part to scale up the artificial intelligence techniques that power some of the recent tricks in your smartphone.

On today’s episode of “The Interview” with The Next Platform, we take a look at the evolution of the NAMD molecular dynamics and how the introduction of GPU computing upended performance expectations and set the stage for new metrics now that the Volta GPU architecture will be available on large supercomputers like the Summit machine coming to Oak Ridge National Lab.

On today’s episode of “The Interview” with The Next Platform, we focus on some of the recent quantum computing developments out of Oak Ridge National Lab’s Quantum Computing Institute with the center’s director, Dr. Travis Humble.

Dr. Lonnie Love was the lynchpin that held together the massive effort to build the world's first additive manufactured excavator, Project AME. In this inaugural edition of the AEM Thinking Forward Podcast, we check in with Lonnie at the Oak Ridge National Lab to learn how the new 3D printing technology they develop is changing business models throughout the manufacturing sector.  Learn more about the world's first 3D printed excavator, Project AME, or subscribe to the AEM Industry Advisor for regular updates in your email about industry news. This episode is sponsored by the AEM Thinking Forward initiative, which presents AEM members with critical information about new and emerging trends and technologies that will impact their businesses.    Music by Little Glass Men / CC BY 4.0  

Today, Julien discusses what it was like to work at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee. He was there for 2 weeks conducting magnetic characterization research on materials that he synthesized. Interested in all the science terms? Here are some good places to start if you want to read up on them, if we missed any, feel free to contact us (contact info below) Multiferroic: http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/v6/n1/full/nmat1804.html Magnetic Property Measurement System (MPMS): https://books.google.com/books?id=OH5WAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA56&lpg=PA56&dq=how+does+a+magnetic+property+measurement+system+work&source=bl&ots=KJ6sXpjhAz&sig=ecD25Ac_9gB_91HozBFSQxuNTls&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjrgbKplL_WAhVs0FQKHcJVAbw4ChDoAQhLMAo#v=onepage&q=how%20does%20a%20magnetic%20property%20measurement%20system%20work&f=false Hungover Radio Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jQ_NbelyZE Also, we’re on iTunes! Follow us on twitter: @gaminghungover Ivan: @Bakintheussr Julien: @jujubesgood Follow us on twitch: Ivan: https://www.twitch.tv/comradboyar Julien: https://www.twitch.tv/jujubesgood Follow Julien on instagram: myscientificlife Email us at: Gaminghungover@gmail.com

Artificial intelligence is all over the news, but what's all the hype really about? We travel to Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee to find out how AI is going to revolutionize science, and welcome a new podcast to the Department of Energy family!