Spectrum

Claire Kremen and Alastair Iles of ESPM at UC Berkeley, who ran the Berkeley Center for Diversified Farming. Next on their agenda is the Berkeley Food Institute, which will include College of Natural Resources, Goldman School of Public Policy, School of Journalism, Berkeley Law and School of Public Health.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

Speaker 1:        Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute [00:00:30] program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. 

Speaker 3:        Hey there and good afternoon. My name is Renee Rao and I'll be hosting today's show. Our guest today, our professor Claire Kremen and Assistant Professor Allister isles in the Department of Environmental Science Policy and management at the University of California Berkeley. Claire Carmen focuses her research on conservation, biology and biodiversity. [00:01:00] Allister isles focuses his research on the intersections of science, technology, and environment that contribute to public policy, community welfare, environmental justice, and increased democracy and societal governance. Brad swift interviews the pair about their time as faculty directors of the Berkeley Center for diversified farming and the recent launch of the Berkeley Food Institute. This ambitious enterprise is a collaboration between the College of natural resources, the Goldman School of public policy, the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, [00:01:30] Berkeley Law School, and the school of public health. Allister isles is hearing impaired, so phd candidate Patrick Bower will be reading Alistair's answers during this interview. 

Speaker 4:        In today's interview we have three folks, Claire, Carmen, Allister isles and Patrick Bower. Welcome to spectrum. Thank you. Thank you and a nod from Allister. I want to ask each of you, how were you drawn [00:02:00] to the study of sustainability and diversified farming 

Speaker 1:        on native bees and how they contribute to crop pollination in California and it was really through my study of the bees and particularly of how bees respond to agriculture that I got interested in farming and that my eyes got opened to how unsustainable our current farming system is, particularly with its heavy reliance on monoculture. 

Speaker 4:        [00:02:30] My background is in environmental policies and I've mostly worked on industrial chemical issues for a long time. I've also researched the consumption side of food starting with sustainable seafood. About three years ago, Claire was running a series of round tables on diversified farming systems and by a chance at a faculty lunch, she invited me to participate. I wasn't sure what it was all about, but I enjoyed learning about ecosystem services. I realized that agriculture has a major role to play. I'm making the planet more in the face [00:03:00] of many 21st century environmental dangers like climate change. Trying to change consumer behavior isn't going to be enough to achieve greater sustainability. We need to cover the whole food system and to find new connections across each part, so that's why I moved much more upstream into agriculture. Talk about the new Berkeley Food Institute that you've formed a cow. 

Speaker 4:        How did it get started and what are its goals? We began with [00:03:30] a round table series on diversified farming systems or DFS about three years ago. I can't believe how far we've already come since then. The series was based on a seed grant from the Berkeley Institute of Environment. It had monthly meetings and spent an enormous range of topics from conservation, biology, consumer behavior, the health effects of pesticides on farm workers to policies for promoting DFS. At first, we weren't sure what our goals were. We had a vague idea that the round [00:04:00] table might evolve into a more institutionalized forum. Claire wanted to co-write a paper covering the results of the round tables, but it quickly became obvious that it was such a large topic that we needed a whole special issue. Do you even do justice to the topics? Fortunately we were able to persuade the ecology and society journal to accept our specialists. You plan. It was a lengthy process of assembling the various papers as students are coauthors on most of the papers. We believe strongly in promoting student research and Claire and I wanted [00:04:30] to institutionalize the round tables and that is how we can see to the DFS center. We realized that we couldn't manage all this new growth without hiring an executive director, which meant that we needed to start raising funds 

Speaker 1:        and as we started looking into funding for the center for diversified farming and as we engaged both with donors and also with the top levels of the College of natural resources administration, it became clear that there was actually an opportunity to do something much bigger and much more far reaching [00:05:00] by partnering with the schools of journalism and of public policy. And that's because it's not sufficient to conduct the research that demonstrates the social and environmental benefits of sustainable agriculture or diversified farming systems. You really have to get the word out to a large public and you have to be able to influence key decision makers. So it makes a lot of sense for us to be partnering with journalism and Public Policy. Later on in the institutes development we also were joined [00:05:30] by other key actors, specifically the schools of public health and also the school of law. 

Speaker 1:        So the goal of the institute is really a lofty one. We want nothing less than to be able through research teaching and outreach to be able to actually transform our current food system to one that is far more resilient, far more healthy and far more just how is the institute funded. We're funded this point by private individuals and also by family foundations [00:06:00] are their undergraduate and graduate degree programs within the institute? Not yet, but we are contemplating creating something called a designated emphasis for graduate students, which means several different departments combined together and create an additional degree program that graduate students can go through and we're also beginning to assess whether an undergraduate major makes sense. The first step we're taking already is to conduct an inventory of what's already [00:06:30] available on campus. There are quite a few different faculty that are already teaching courses related to the food system and so we're identifying all of these so that students can have access to this information. Those who are already interested in this 

Speaker 5:        [inaudible]. Our guest today on Spec gem are Claire Allister Isles. In the next segment they talk about impediments to sustainable farming. Is k a l x Berkeley. 

Speaker 4:        [00:07:00] What sort of collaborations will you be trying to foster with the institute? One of the key actions that the new institute will emphasize is nurturing new research and policy collaborations between faculty and students. Many parts of the food system are balkanized. They're divided up from each other and seldom communicate across disciplinary industry or supply chain segment lines. For example, urban agriculture policy makers might not think much about the sorts of foods [00:07:30] that city gardens are providing to poor minority neighborhoods. What we hope for is a set of collaborations that will cross disciplinary lines and that will address research topics that aren't being done but they could help bring about positive changes in the food system. Another thing that we are eager to look into is helping foster stronger connections with off campus actors such as farmers, food worker unions, government agencies and Bay area communities. This is where this would help inform the research being done on campus and where it might help enhance the ability [00:08:00] of these actors to work toward the transformation of the food system that Claire talked about. Some of our faculty already have off campus partners that they run research projects with citizen science or working with lay people and helping generate new science will likely be an important element, but not the only one. How directly will the institute be involved in actual farming or working directly with farmers? 

Speaker 1:        We will definitely include growers on our advisory board and [00:08:30] also some faculty actually work with growers. For example, my work is all on farms owned by real people and so I work with growers on the kinds of experiments we're going to do and also on sometimes on land management that they're doing on their land. 

Speaker 4:        What do you see as the impediments to the broad practice of sustainable agriculture and how can research and education help the impediments to sustainable agriculture legion? The most important impediment is arguably [00:09:00] the industrialized food system that we currently live in. The system is based on farming methods that include monoculture farming, the pervasive use of chemical and fossil fuel inputs, and an emphasis on increasing yields to the exclusion of other outcomes. The system is so entrenched that everyone who grows processes and eats food is caught in it. One example of how the industrial system discourages sustainable farming is the artificially cheap price of foods the food industry can externalize most environmental and social costs of producing food [00:09:30] by displacing these into farming communities, consumers and ecosystems. Public policies can Ivan this by promoting inappropriate subsidies for commodity crops and not properly funding conservation measures on farmland. 

Speaker 4:        In turn, many farmers are trapped within a production structure or they have little room to adopt sustainable farming methods. They may have to comply with supply chain pressures such as contract farming that prescribes exactly what they should do on the farm or the rapid growth and market power of the agrifood corporations. [00:10:00] For decades, farmers have been struggling with the technological treadmill or they're obliged to adopt technological innovations such as pesticides and now GM seeds to be able to maintain their yields and cost structures in order to compete with other farmers doing likewise. Conversely, it can be very challenging for farmers to move to more sustainable methods. It is risky for farmers to try something new that they aren't familiar with and that requires them to develop new skills and knowledge. There has been a dramatic decline in the number of farmers in the u s [00:10:30] and there has been a trend of fewer new farmers entering the sector. On the positive side. These new entrants are more likely to use sustainable farming methods because they've been trained differently. 

Speaker 1:        I think the broadest impediments are some aspects of our regulatory system and also market forces that encourage economies of scale sort of thing that make farmers have to get big or get out. For example, on the regulatory side, this new food safety modernization act is something that's going to impose [00:11:00] a lot of regulations on growers and that can actually disadvantage small growers. And sometimes it's the small growers that are the ones that are practicing more sustainable or more diversified forms of agriculture. But with this new food safety modernization act, they just might not be able to stay in business any longer. So the critical research that we need to do is to document the benefits and the costs and also the trade offs of different approaches. We need to be able to show what these benefits are so that we can hopefully have an influence [00:11:30] on some of the regulations. 

Speaker 6:        Oh, you are listening to spectrum on k a Alex Berkeley. Our guests today are Claire Kremen and Alister aisles. Patrick Bower will be reading out and styles and series Alistair's hearing impaired. In the next segment, they talk about how they analyze farming. Oh, okay. 

Speaker 4:        Would you explain [00:12:00] how you analyze an agricultural system for sustainability? 

Speaker 1:        From an ecological perspective? What I find helpful is the concept of an agriculture that is regenerative. What that means, it's an agriculture that demands few external inputs and creates few wastes. Instead it tends to use the waste products that are produced in the production cycle as inputs, so for example, by composting waste materials or by integrating animals back onto the farm, growers can build soils. [00:12:30] These wells are then able to store water much more effectively protecting against droughts and they can also require, in that case, less water from external sources. Also, these oils can trap and filter nutrients leading to less nutrient waste and less pollution off site, and then such soils are also much more productive so they can lead to greater yields, so it's really a win, win, win, win. I can't really see any downside to farming like that. 

Speaker 4:        In terms of the social and economic components [00:13:00] of an agricultural system, there are many possible measures that we could use. Social scientists have looked at measures such as the justice that is embodied in the system. That is as the agricultural system assuring justice for all the workers, growers in communities across the system. This justice could take the form of fair worker treatment such as paying farm workers better wages and preventing adverse health effects like heatstroke. It could also be limiting the exposures of farm workers in rural communities to pesticides. [00:13:30] Another measure is food security or the ability of consumers and communities, especially poor and minority people to gain access to enough nutritious and healthy foods to feed themselves. In the u s there are at least 40 million people who depend on food stamps to supplement their diets. Yet these people may not be able to afford healthy, sustainably produced foods. 

Speaker 4:        Yet another measure is whether farmers able to sustain themselves through their work or whether they fall into greater debt to be able to stay in farming at all. Many [00:14:00] NGOs and food movements such as the food sovereignty movement would argue that the ability of farmers and communities to decide on what sorts of foods they want to produce and eat isn't an important outcome in and of itself. How has the understanding and measurement of sustainability changed over the years? You have studied it. Social scientists have only been thinking about sustainability for a fairly short time since about the early 1990s sustainable development as a discourse [00:14:30] first began developing in the late 1980s with the Brundtland Commission's report. Initially, social scientists were focused more on the rural sociology of agricultural production. They looked at issues in isolation and emphasized farmers only, but as more researchers began to enter the sustainability field, the focus shifted to thinking more holistically. They started to look at food supply 

Speaker 7:        chains and commodities and how these shape the sustainability of farming. Researchers also began looking at how communities were defining sustainability [00:15:00] in their own terms. In 2000 Jack Kloppenburg led a very interesting study that surveyed a set of rural and urban communities for the sorts of words they would use to describe sustainability. More recently, social scientists have looked at how ecological and social sustainability are closely interconnected. Some of the most exciting new work is looking at the concept of socio ecological systems or how farmers are actively shaping farming landscapes and vice versa. 

Speaker 8:        [00:15:30] Are there estimates or models that show the reductions in greenhouse gas that could be achieved in the conversion from industrial monoculture agriculture to sustainable agriculture? 

Speaker 1:        This is actually something that's fairly well known. The production of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides is a really energy intensive process and so where it has been looked at, when people compare organic agriculture that avoids using those chemicals with conventional agriculture, organic agriculture [00:16:00] usually stacks up much better as far as greenhouse gas emissions, and this is true even though often organic growers have to perhaps use more fuel to do more cultivation practices on their lands, but it balances out because they're not using these energy intensively produced chemicals. 

Speaker 8:        Biofuels were thought to be a sustainable source of energy and an enormous boost for agriculture as well. What are your thoughts on biofuels? 

Speaker 7:        I've been looking [00:16:30] at the environmental and social effects of biofuels in the u s and Brazil for a few years now. Some years ago, biofuels were seen as a very promising technology that could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but in 2008 and a scientists called Tim searching gear sparked off a long debate about whether biofuels actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the overall picture. Some biofuels can actually lead to increased emissions because their production involves a direct or indirect cutting down forests to clear land for agriculture, which results in carbon [00:17:00] dioxide release. The upshot is that governments and NGOs now see biofuels much more skeptically. I think this is a positive development rather than uncritically embracing biofuels as a new development pathway. At the same time, the debate has now swung so much that people often don't distinguish between different types of biofuels. Biofuels are actually very diverse in their feedstock and production methods. 

Speaker 7:        Most of the bad press is around corn ethanol in the u s and I think it's justified because as Michael Pollan, [00:17:30] for example, has written about the corn industry has created countless environmental problems, but there are what we call cellulosic feedstocks, grasses, agricultural crop, leftovers and trees and principle. We can have diversified farming systems that include these sorts of cellulosic crops as part of a fully integrated and diversified rather than having a few larger farmers and agrifood businesses dominate corn ethanol and thereby the biofuels industry. We could alternatively have many smaller farmers produce [00:18:00] grasses. For example. This is something that the new institute may look at. The challenge however is that cellulosic ethanol could easily succumb to the same industrialized monoculture model models we see for corn. So policy will have a very important role in the next decade and helping decide whether this will happen or not. 

Speaker 6:        [inaudible] spectrum is a public affairs show. Hey Alex Berkley, our guests are clear come in and Allister isles, [00:18:30] they're starting the Berkeley food institute this fall and the next thing they talk about the scalability of sustainable farming and its impact on rural communities. 

Speaker 7:        From your experience, what is the scale range of farms doing sustainable agriculture? 

Speaker 1:        Even large scale farms are starting to incorporate sustainability practices into their businesses, which is really exciting, but it's a question whether they're truly sustainable. [00:19:00] As an ecologist, I don't believe that the practice of monoculture is compatible with sustainability. To have sustainability. We need more diverse farming systems when we have these diverse farming systems that can reduce the need for off farm inputs and also generate fewer ways. A good example of this is going back to pesticides and monoculture. When a grower grows a monoculture, they're pretty much forced to use pesticides. When you think about it, they're planting [00:19:30] a huge expanse of the same thing and it's kind of like laying out a feast for a pest species that can just go and rampage through that. And at the same time they've also eradicated the habitat that would have promoted the natural enemies that could've kept that past in check. 

Speaker 1:        So then they really have no other recourse. They have to use pesticides and as I already noted, these take a great deal of energy to produce the results in greenhouse gas emissions. They pollute the surrounding environment. They can lead to unintended loss of biodiversity, of [00:20:00] non target insects. Also both subtle and not so subtle impacts on human health. When we do that, we can't really have a sustainable system, but on the other hand, we shouldn't conflate the practice of monoculture with scale because smaller farms can also practice monoculture and do sometimes practice monoculture and at the same time, perhaps larger farms can practice really diversified agriculture. It's not what I would think of as typical, but that doesn't mean it's impossible and I think it's important that we not limit [00:20:30] our imagination. We'd be able to imagine that a really large farm could be diverse, could be sustainable. Why not? 

Speaker 7:        Does sustainability in any way limit the scale that can be achieved? 

Speaker 1:        Well, I think it's an excellent question and we don't really have the answer to it. If we just look at what's out there, it seems like if you're at a larger scale, maybe that's going to be less sustainable in some ways, but it might be more sustainable in some other ways. There's certainly a relationship between scale ins and sustainability. If [00:21:00] we just look out at what's happening now, there can be unexpected twists. For example, very large companies may be able to develop sustainable practices of certain types such as efficiencies in distribution that small companies can't. On the other hand, smaller farms or companies might be better able to create the ecological complexity that we think is required to engender sustainable processes on farms. Also, when we think about it, some of these limits if do exist to creating sustainable systems [00:21:30] might relate not to biophysical limits, but to institutional arrangements or governance structures, business plans, et cetera. And again, they might be failures of our imagination to conceive of a better way of doing things. So I think it's really an excellent research topic. We need to study the successful models that exist out there at various scales and try to learn from them. 

Speaker 7:        Are there studies that show the impact of sustainable agriculture on rural societies and economies and Willy Institute [00:22:00] undertake work in this area? Frankly, we don't really know what the answers may be. This is because there've been very few systemic studies done of the ways in which sustainable agriculture might benefit rural areas. And the 1940s a UC researcher called Walter Goldschmidt did a very important study and compared to rural towns in California that deferred in the degree of diversified farming and the degree to which they relied on industrialized farming methods. The town that you used more diversified from methods [00:22:30] showed significant gains of social and economic outcomes such as employment and community cohesiveness compared to the more industrialized town. Unfortunately, this sorta study hasn't been done. Again, as far as we are aware, thus the priority of the new institute will be to help sponsor a collaborative research project that updates this research and uses the tools and data that we now have to appraise whether and how diversified farming can provide greater benefits compared to the existing system. 

Speaker 7:        What do you feel [00:23:00] are the best ways to encourage and enable young people to pursue farming? One of the most challenging obstacles we face in the food system today is that there is a rapidly aging farmer workforce. The average age of farmers in the U S is about 57 years, which is something you see in other industrial countries as well. There are widespread perceptions of farming as an acronystic and tedious. Many commentators think that many young people are unenthusiastic [00:23:30] about taking up farming for this reason. Farming is in the past. Therefore, one argument goes, we should invest more and more in labor saving technology to help offset the fact that fewer young people are entering farming in Australia. Where I come from, I heard about a farmer recently who just installed a $400,000 robotic system to milk cows. I don't agree with this sort of argument. To the contrary. 

Speaker 7:        We are seeing a good number of young people take up farming in [00:24:00] both rural and especially urban areas. Farming seems to be a way to reconnect these people with a more sensory and experience rich life. There are tens of farmers schools that are developed across the countries such as the Alba Center near Salinas, where immigrant workers learn to be farmers and are given some support for entering the sector. This is one very powerful way to help new farmers provide training programs to help equip them for actual production, but they then face enormous problems and even getting a [00:24:30] toehold on the farming landscape because land can be very costly and very scarce. So they need financial help like loans and grants to sustain their first few years. At least. There's a new farmer network that has been pushing for bill and Congress to create this new institutional base, but unfortunately, so far it's not been very successful. 

Speaker 6:        A big thanks to Claire Kremen at Alster Isles [00:25:00] for coming on to spectrum. I'll pass. Spectrum shows are archived on iTunes. You we've created a simple link for you. The link is tiny url.com/ [inaudible] spectrum. Now a few of the signs of technology events happening locally over the next few weeks. We kind of ski and I present the calendar. 

Speaker 3:        On September 8th the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden will be hosting a workshop led by author [00:25:30] Amy Stewart, who wrote the drunken botanist, the plants that create the world's greatest strengths, a book that details the leaves, bark seeds, roots, flowers and fruit around the world that humans have contrived to turn into alcohol. Stuart will lead a walk through the garden to look at some of the typical plants that have been used throughout the ages. The workshop will be held in the garden from three to 6:00 PM on September 8th the first installment of the six part public lecture series, not on the test. The pleasures and uses [00:26:00] of mathematics will be held this September 11th past spectrum guests, Tony de Rose, a senior scientist and leader of the research group at Pixar animation studios presented a lecture on the use of mathematics in the making of Pixars animated films. Pixar animation is done entirely by computer and Dr. Rose will demonstrate how math and science helped create these stunning visuals in each Pixar film and explain the underlying computer technology, physics, geometry, and applied mathematics that made these pictures possible. [00:26:30] The lecture will be held on September 11th at 7:00 PM in the Berkeley City College Auditorium located at 2050 Center street in Berkeley. The rent is free and open to the public 

Speaker 7:        this month. Science neat is on Tuesday the 17th the topic is fun guy here talks about mushrooms and bring your own mushrooms to have my colleges. Chris Green help you identify them. Science need is a monthly science happy hour for those 21 and over at El Rio bar [00:27:00] three one five eight mission street in San Francisco. Admission is $4 

Speaker 3:        here at spectrum. We'd like to share our favorite science stories with you. Rick Kaneski joins me for presenting the news. 

Speaker 7:        Nature news reports that several journals have been caught in a scheme to artificially inflate their impact factors by strongly encouraging citations to other journals that were in on the scheme. The impact factor of journals is a measure of the average number of citations to recent articles [00:27:30] and is often used to compare the relative importance of a journal to the field. That is general is with higher impact factors are generally thought of more favorably than lower impact journals. The factors are calculated by Thomson Reuters, the company responsible for both end note citation software and the web of science literature database. Well, self citations have been caught in the past weeding out this collaborative gaming of the system is difficult and it can be costly for those journals [00:28:00] caught Thomson Reuters has suspended the impact factors of 0.6% of the more than 10,000 journals. They index a record percentage. In some cases, editors have been fired in others. Articles published in the suspended journals will not contribute to the rankings of universities responsible for them. 

Speaker 3:        According to a UC Berkeley study published in the Journal proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, blocking a certain enzyme can dramatically slow the ability of tumor cells [00:28:30] to multiply and spread to other tissues. Scientists have long observed that cancer cells metabolize lipids in particular ester lipids at higher rates than normal cells. The UC Berkeley team in activated a certain enzyme known as LPL glycerol phosphate synthase, or a gps that is critical to lipid formation and human breasts and skin cancer cells knocking out the enzymes, significantly reduced tumor growth and movement. The inhibitor has also been [00:29:00] tested in live mice, injected with Kansas owls too, promising results. While other studies have examined specific lipids, a gps appears to regulate a much broader portion of tumor growth and malignancy. Next steps will include developing a cancer therapy based on the age gps inhibitors. 

Speaker 5:        Mm. The music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. We'd also like to thank Patrick Bower [00:29:30] first assistance during the interview. Thank you for listening to spectrum. Join us in two weeks at the same time. [inaudible].

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Zoologist Toni Bodi is currently developing a genomic diagnostic screen for Alzheimer’s disease and is a founding member of the Berkeley Bio Labs new bio hacker space. Nature magazine.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next. 

Speaker 2:        Aw. [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible]. 

Speaker 1:        Welcome to spectrum the science [00:00:30] and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. 

Speaker 3:        Hi and good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Our guest is Tony Bodhi Hickerson, a zoologist who was part of a cognitive study of howler monkeys in Mexico. Tony is trying to organize a noninvasive [00:01:00] dolphin study in the wild using wireless network technology. She is currently developing a genomic diagnostic screen for Alzheimer's disease and is a founding member of the Berkeley bio labs, a new bio hackerspace. Tony talks about cognition, Alzheimer's disease, and creating a scientific community resource in the bay area. Rick Karnofsky and Renee Rau interview Tony on this edition of spectrum. 

Speaker 4:        So welcome to spectrum. [00:01:30] I'm Rick Karnofsky here with Brad swift and Renee Rao. Our guest today on spectrum is Tony Bodhi, Hickerson and zoologist. Welcome to spectrum. Thank you for having me. Can you give us a little bit of a description of what you work on? Kind of a brief overview for the audience. That cognition is essentially the ability to receive and process information and the most abstract form. And we kind of think of it as mental processes, which can be both conscious and subconscious. [00:02:00] And so I do research on cognitive abilities of wildlife and at the moment I'm also working on an application in humans. What wildlife do you look at? Um, well I have looked at primates and I've been also involved in a dolphin project. So high functioning mammals. And how do you assess their cognitive abilities? Well, you can do behavioral studies, which is what I primarily do. 

Speaker 4:        And of course just looking at the anatomy as well. So [00:02:30] I try to be as noninvasive as possible. I don't work in a lab with monkeys in a cage. I actually work in the wilderness and follow monkeys around all day. So where do you do that? I was doing that in Mexico for my last study with seven months and from Sunup I watched the sun come up and uh, the howler monkeys, which is a species that I was working on would call in the morning. That's how we'd find them. So we trek through the jungle and find them and then start our study. And it would usually last, well it would last until sundown. So depending on how many hours a like we had [00:03:00] [inaudible] 

Speaker 5:        can you just walk us through what the study was and what you looked at in the howler monkeys and how you interpreted it? 

Speaker 4:        Well, this study, I was a, the head field managers, so it wasn't my particular study, but I was managing all the data collection and uh, we were looking at two different species of Holler monkey. And they're hybrids. So there's hybrid zone in Mexico where both of these species, which we believe based on genetic evidence have been separated for about 3 million [00:03:30] years. They have different number of sex chromosomes. They're very morphologically different, are coming together and meeting successfully. They also have very different social structures and one group tends to be far more aggressive than the other one is much more communal. It has large groups up to 25 30 and the other one usually has three to five. So to see how behaviorly they come together and genetically they come together because in one cross if you have a female of a and a male of B, they can [00:04:00] have an offspring. But if you inverse it they cannot. So it's really interesting also genetically to see how things recombine. What kinds of data did you take? Oh, we took auditory, so we, they're hollow monkeys. So we had all their calls, which it changes from group to group and obviously from species to species. We also took a lot of behavioral information, affiliative, so like affection and aggressive behavior, like attacks and genetic [00:04:30] information through and study captures as well as fecal samples. 

Speaker 5:        I'm just super curious about what it was like following the Heller monkeys and spending literally all day with them. You, 

Speaker 4:        I started to go insane. You actually do. Um, no, it was a really profound life experience for sure. And I couldn't have designed a better project to be part of. Like if I had designed my dream project, it would have been this project. When I started this project, I didn't speak Spanish and [00:05:00] every single person in my team only spoke Spanish, so I learned Spanish very fast. But during the process of learning a second language, you have this inability to completely express yourself and it kind of makes you go insane. And then when you couple that with standing in the middle of like a really humid forest, you know, surrounded by mosquitoes and following monkeys running through the canopy. I got you about month five I think, and I realized that I started to go insane. [00:05:30] When I yelled at an ant out loud, I paused and just laughed hysterically to myself and realize that like this is the point where like I've reached my mental break. Then I'm yelling at ants and I need to get to a city as soon as possible. 

Speaker 2:        Okay. Our guest today on spectrum is Tony Bodhi Hickerson, but she answers to Tony Bodhi in the next, she talks about her idea for a dolphin stone. [00:06:00] This is k a l x Berkeley. 

Speaker 4:        And what do you do with the dolphins? Uh, the Dolphin project, uh, is not a field project, unfortunately at the moment. It's an education campaign for the international mantle project, which is responsible for all dolphin safe tuna that you've ever seen as well as the documentary, the cove. So they're very avid group on [inaudible]. [00:06:30] And so I was putting together a campaign to try and inspire people that they're really intense creatures and why maybe we should respect them. 

Speaker 5:        You tell us a little bit about those abilities and why they're so intense. 

Speaker 4:        There are three groups of mammals that have large brains that's great. Apes, elephants and marine mammals. And the dolphins came from a very different evolutionary path. So they have different [00:07:00] structures, which is also really interesting. They don't have the prefrontal Cortex, which is what we tend to associate with being human, the sort of emotional side of being human. But they have a very intense limbic system, which is also associated with emotions and bonding behavior and sexual behavior. Dolphins have sort of this mixed reputation of being very kind of aggressive and also being really altruistic almost in their actions. [00:07:30] So looking at not only the hard facts of the biological side of things of like what structures they have and what those abilities are, but also case studies of look at these sort of altruistic behaviors. So their ability to perceive the world around them and to react in an emotional state is potentially really profound. 

Speaker 5:        And um, in your study to sort of understand all the ways that the Dolphin perceives the world and the way that it often feels these things, are you looking at the structures in their brains and seeing [00:08:00] the corresponding place where these thought processes and these perceptions happen? Or are you just observing behavior or are you doing both? 

Speaker 4:        Well, hopefully both. So I'm currently designing a project, which is hopefully gonna do exactly what you just said. Our tools at the moment are very limited, especially because we want to be as noninvasive as possible. Animals don't react in captivity the way that they react in the wild. And obviously they don't have the same space or social structure to be able to do the same sorts of things. [00:08:30] There is an up and coming technology that I hope to apply to this sort of research which would allow biological data to be recorded in real time and it would be completely noninvasive. It would be almost like a sticker, so there'd be no puncturing. There would be no need for captivity. Hopefully we could even apply it with minimal stress to the animal and with that we could have gps data body, we could potentially record the vibrations from their echolocation [00:09:00] and also neurological data and this would be the first information of its kind to be able to correlate if there's an approach or an affiliative behavior between two individuals, what areas of their brain are actually being, you know, lit up and that could really profoundly affect what we know about their structure. 

Speaker 4:        Yeah, that that is sounds really exciting. So it would be noninvasive. Do you know how that works? That must be really amazing. The technology that I'm, I'm hoping to work with [00:09:30] is a flexible microchip and I'm hoping to be working with some of the innovators to make it appliable to dolphins and something that would stick for up to a month. They should scan very quickly, so that is a restraint. I don't know as much of the engineering side of it because I'm not as much tech, but from my conversations with the people developing it, it seems like it might not be up to use for a year or two, but hopefully eventually we'll get [00:10:00] there and we'll have a better understanding of how one of the smartest animals on the planet. Thanks. Are other people currently doing anything more invasive? Captivity can be a very invasive process. How animals and captivity get in captivity are often from Dolphin Slaughters, which kill hundreds of their fellow pod mates to get a handful of dolphins because a live dolphin that is pristine, [00:10:30] you know mark free that goes into entertainment or goes into a laboratory studies. They get taken out and they get sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars and the rest of them get slaughtered and sold into the meat markets. 

Speaker 6:        Mm MM. 

Speaker 3:        You are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Our guest today is Tony Bow-tie Hickerson. Tony is a zoologist. In the next segment she talks about diagnosing Alzheimer's disease. 

Speaker 4:        [00:11:00] I actually wanted to ask you a little bit about the work you're doing with Alzheimer's and dice diagnostic work. Could you maybe tell us a little bit about how the process of diagnosing Alzheimer's works currently and what you're hoping to change about that? Well, there really isn't much in terms of diagnosis that's out for the general public. What I'm actually attempting to do, and initially it was for my own curiosity and you know obviously see the potential for other people to use it as [00:11:30] well. I wanted to test myself on this gene. So there is a gene called apoe e and there are three expressions of it and they account for about 95% of all Hymers, one of these types of accounts for 50% of all hammers. I can essentially locate this gene snippet out of the enormous strand of DNA and then look at their two spots where [00:12:00] the nucleotide is a certain sequence that I can tell you. 

Speaker 4:        If that is type one, two or three of that apathy and off of that, they're very strong statistics that will tell you that you have a very high likelihood or very low likelihood of getting Alzheimer's by a certain age. And it's sort of a spectrum due to the fact that we're deployed. So we have two copies of this gene. So if you have this like really strong negative version and one positive version, you will [00:12:30] have later onset Ohio Hymers. Then if you have two really negative versions, but there are really strong numbers that tell us what your likelihood is. But what I would like to do is to make it something that's very accessible for everyone. I don't want to produce this and market it as some expensive tests that's going to just perpetuate this whole medical debt system. I want this to be something that people can access and know for themselves to be able to plan [00:13:00] for their own future and to be able to take care of themselves and their family members more effectively and responsibly. 

Speaker 4:        So it's pretty similar to the aggressive cancer testing would you say? Or? Um, yeah, it's fairly similar. I haven't looked exactly at that one to see. I believe it is also a snip, which is like this single nucleotide change. So it should be very similar. Do you want to tell us a little bit about the process of you sort of isolating this gene? Did you go through and read the papers [00:13:30] and see that this gene was associated with it and develop the processes snippet on your own or I'm in the process of developing the process to snippet. So right now I'm troubleshooting the primer. So the, the molecule that you use to actually cut the DNA, what I have is currently binding to itself. So it is also binding to the site that I want it to, but it's also binding to itself. So I'm trying to sort that issue out. 

Speaker 4:        It's a process that needs to be critiqued a bit before. I'm willing to, you know, expose more [00:14:00] people to the answers cause I want to make sure that it is very accurate before I would to give someone those sorts of answers. You're currently doing some form of genetic screening and you previously did all of these behavioral studies. It's quite a transition. So how, how did you make that transition? Well they're both in principle based on cognition, mental abilities and so all Hymers is the degradation of cognitive abilities, the degradation of being able to recall information as well as [00:14:30] the breakdown of even motor skills and language skills and so that is profoundly interesting to me to to understand where and how cognitive abilities act and then to understand how they're dismantled is the cycle of, of the process of understanding exactly how things work. A lot of times we figure out what parts of the brain do what based on lesion studies, which is causing and disruption. 

Speaker 4:        The initial draw [00:15:00] to this was for my own curiosity. And that was sparked because my father has severe dementia. So I wanted to know for him, is this all Hymers or is it something environmental? And so I want to develop a test for him, for myself and for the public to know what's their likelihood so that they can plan for the future. Are there other differentiating factors you could look at as well besides this, besides this gene? So the gene is pretty profound and [00:15:30] it's significance in whether or not people get all hammers. But there's, there's also, you know, of course a lot of different factors and I should mention that like echoey is a specific kind of all hammers. It's not early onset and not all dementia is Alzheimer's. There's lots of ways to get dementia in old age. So this isn't like a yes, no test. 

Speaker 4:        If you have a really great diagnostic and it looks like you're clear for this, it doesn't mean that when you hit 80 that you're not gonna have problems [00:16:00] still. You still have to take care of yourself. And a lot of studies have shown that simple things and everyone says this, but simple things like diet and exercise. If you exercise on a regular basis, you can break down a lot of these corrosive molecules that cause a lot of mental problems, cause a lot of cardiovascular problems and you have to keep your metabolism up to deal with this and your body will also, you know, work to heal itself. It's just really profound what control you have over your future. [00:16:30] Like I don't want to give people this test and say you're doing, I feel that you two have a lot more control than a lot of people want to admit over the future. And so take responsibility for yourself and take care of your body. Go exercise and eat well and have lots of friends and learn new languages and go travel. See the world 

Speaker 2:        spectrum is a science and technology show on KALX Berkeley. Our guest [00:17:00] today is Tony Bodhi Hickerson in the next segment that Tony talks about, the new Berkeley Bio lab. 

Speaker 4:        So you're involved in a biohacker space. Uh, yes. So actually as of last weekend we moved into a space in Valeho which is my n when the other core members lab on the, hopefully we will be also opening a space [00:17:30] in Berkeley eventually, but for now we're in relay hope and it's essentially like a hacker space, but it's in biotech in general and you pay a membership and you have access to the lab and the materials to do your own research, detached from corporate biases and the strains of academia. So we provide a space in the community to kind of teach each other and [00:18:00] to work in and we allow real hard science to take place and sort of a pioneer setting. What's the name of it and how does it compare it to bio curious and some of the other spaces in the bay area? 

Speaker 4:        Sure. The name of the lab is going to be Berkeley bio labs. Some of the other entities that will be occurring within this lab is a June cell technologies. We're trying to be much more accessible in that our membership [00:18:30] is only going to be $100 a month, whereas a lot of other bio spaces are $2,000 and up a month. I think that having more spaces isn't necessarily a bad thing. We tend to be a little bit more focused on regenerative medicine and stem cell research, so people who are more focused along that lines might be more attracted to work with us, but certainly weren't. We're not discriminating against people who aren't in stem cell research or regenerative medicine. That's just what we tend to do. I shouldn't ask you if you could [00:19:00] tell us a little bit more about the projects that are happening in the space now. 

Speaker 4:        At the moment, we haven't even opened up yet. We were literally still moving all of the giant centrifuges and automated robots. And so right now I'm is my project as well as John's London, which is one of the founding members of the biohacker lab and he works in regenerative medicine and stem cells. [00:19:30] And once we kind of get settled and open our doors, we'll hopefully be screening lots of potential innovators to come and join our project and not necessarily his project but you know, whatever inspires them to try and you know, make a difference. And what will that screening process look like? It'll honestly be very personal. We're going to just meet with people one on one and see what they're interested in doing, what they have done and what they want to see in the future. It's much more about the people and [00:20:00] their drive to do something than the letters after their name. 

Speaker 4:        We all feel that someone who's really driven to take the four or five years after a bachelor's and do their own research potentially has a lot more to offer than someone who might not know what they want to do in his just signing up for pastry. Cause they feel like it's the next step. So we're definitely open to pioneers, innovators and people who are willing to scrap to make a change. How are you getting the word out about the a space? [00:20:30] Well, actually the, the first thing that has happened so far on the 24th I believe it was, we had a paper written about us in nature. And so that was the first real publicity, and this is the second. So the article was called biotechnology independent streak. If anyone cares to look it up in the July 24th issue, it's gotta be super expensive to have all of the high mated robots and the giant centrifuge. 

Speaker 4:        How are you financing [00:21:00] the space? All of the equipment is already owned by John. He's been working in biotech for quite some time and it has accumulated a very impressive stock of machinery and equipment and he's more than happy to share, to enable other people. He's been really phenomenal and assisting me and getting into a lab space, she's really enabled me to be able to do research that I would never be able to do on my own. And he's doing that for hopefully a lot of other people and so [00:21:30] I would hope to perpetuate that and help people get into it and start making a difference. What do you anticipate the future of the hackerspace pain? Well, we hope that we find lots of driven people who want to come and we are overflowing with scientists until we need to open up another space. I would love to see this be a scientific movement. 

Speaker 4:        Science is all about curiosity. It's about having a question and figuring out how to find the answer and I think that that's [00:22:00] something in our education system that a lot of times is not really taught. People are taught facts, they're not taught. How do you figure facts out? You know? It's not about memorization. It's about teaching yourself how to think. How did you get into science? I have always been profoundly curious, but actually I started out as an art major and about two and a half years in I got called into my advisor's [00:22:30] office and I said, you can't take any more science classes. Told me you filled up all your electives and another semester. And if you take another science class, then we're going to kick you out of the fine arts school. So I said, okay. And I put in an application at another university and switched into science because I thought it was completely absurd that they would hinder me from taking science classes, but it was just a curiosity to understand how [00:23:00] the molecular and biological world works. Understand, you know, how life happens and how stars are born. It's something that I don't understand why every single person doesn't have this profound emotional response to understanding all Tony, thanks for joining. Yes, thank you. 

Speaker 2:        Oh, [inaudible]. If you can not always catch spectrum broadcasts, know that shows are archived [00:23:30] on iTunes university, we have created a simple link to the archive just for you. The link is tiny url.com/calyx spectrum. No, a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Rick Karnofsky and I present the calendar. 

Speaker 3:        Tuesday. August 27th the UC Berkeley Botanical Gardens [00:24:00] will host a guided butterfly walk. Join Sally Levinson, the gardens resident caterpillar lady on a walk through the amazing collections of the botanical garden in search of butterflies to register for a butterfly walk, which is free with admission email [email protected] the butterfly walk will be held from three to 4:00 PM on Tuesday, August 27th at the UC Berkeley Botanical Gardens. At this month, [00:24:30] actual science, you can learn how the properties of diamonds are uniquely suited for scientific research. Christine beavers is a research scientist based at the advanced light source at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Her specialty is crystallography, which is the determination of 3d structures of molecules from crystals using x-rays. Actual science will be on Thursday, August 29th at 6:00 PM [00:25:00] at actual cafe six three three four San Pablo Avenue in Oakland and mission is free. UC Berkeley is holding its first monthly blood drive of the school year on August 29th you can make an appointment online, but walk-ins are also welcome. 

Speaker 3:        You are eligible to donate if you are in good health way, at least 110 pounds and are 17 years or older. The blood drive will be on Thursday, August 29th in the Anna had [00:25:30] alumni house on the UC Berkeley campus. It will last from 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM you can make an appointment or find more information at the website. Red cross.org using the sponsor code you see be wonder fest and ask a scientist present the neuroscience of magic on Wednesday, September 4th at the [inaudible] street food park, 48 [00:26:00] 11th street in San Francisco. You CSF professor of neuroscience, Adam Gazzaley and the comedy magician, Robert Strong. We'll lead discussions from ancient conjurers t quick handed con artists, two big ticket Las Vegas illusionists magicians. Throughout the ages, I've been expertly manipulating human at attention and perception to dazzle and delight us. [00:26:30] Of course, you know that the phenomenon of cognitive and sensory illusions are responsible for the magic, but you've got to admit it still kind of freaks you out when some guy in a top hat defies the of nature right in front of your eyes. The event is free. Now, two news stories. 

Speaker 3:        Berkeley News Center reports a new theory by fluid dynamics experts at the University of California Berkeley shows how Zombie vorticies [00:27:00] help lead to the birth of a new star reporting in the journal Physical Review Letters, a team led by computational physicist Philip Marcus shows how variations in gas density led to instability, which generates the whirlpool like vorticies needed for stars to form. The Zombie reference is an astronomical nod to pop culture and because of the so called dead zones in which these vorticies exist, this new model has caught the [00:27:30] attention of Marcus's colleagues at UC Berkeley, including Richard Klein, adjunct professor of astronomy and fellow star formation expert, Christopher McKee, UC Berkeley professor of physics and astronomy. They were not part of the work described in physical review letters but are collaborating with Marcus to put the Zombie vorticies through more tests. Science daily reports the identification of what may be the earliest known [00:28:00] biomarker associated with the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease. 

Speaker 3:        The results suggest that this novel potential biomarker is present in cerebral spinal fluid at least a decade before signs of dementia manifest. If our initial findings can be replicated by other laboratories, the results will change the way we currently think about the causes of Alzheimer's Disease said Dr Ramon true? Yes. Research professor [00:28:30] at the CSIC Institute of Biomedical Research of Barcelona and lead author of the study that was published in annals of neurology. This discovery may enable us to search for more effective treatments that can be administered during the preclinical stage. These C S I c researchers demonstrated that a decrease in the content of micro chondrial DNA in cerebral spinal fluid may be a preclinical indicator [00:29:00] for Alzheimer's disease. Furthermore, there may be a direct causal relationship 

Speaker 6:        [inaudible].

Speaker 1:        The music hub during this show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Address [00:29:30] is spectrum dot k. Alright. yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible].

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Joan Ball is a UC Berkeley Grad student in the College of Natural Resouces. Peter Oboyski is Collections Manager & Sr. Museum Scientist at the UC Berkeley Essig Museum of Entomology. www.notesfromnature.org

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible]. 

Speaker 1:        [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews, featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. 

Speaker 3:        Hey there and good afternoon. My name is Renee Rao and I'll be hosting today's show. Today we get to hear about an exciting citizen science project from Joanie Ball and Peter Oh Boyski. [00:01:00] Joni is a UC Berkeley graduate student in the College of natural resources where she focuses her research on dragonflies. Peter is a collections manager and senior museum scientist at the UC Berkeley Asig Museum of entomology. They spoke to Brad Swift about the new cal project. The ASIG is collaborating with Zooniverse to run the cal bog website, which allows anyone with an internet connection to help digitize the vast collection of bugs specimens in nine California natural history museums [00:01:30] just over 3000 citizens, scientists have joined the project today. We'll learn more about cal vogue and bugs in general in today's interview, 

Speaker 4:        Joanie Ball and Peter O. Boyski, welcome to spectrum. Thank you. Thank you. Let's talk about the cal bug project that you're both part of and how did that get started? What was the genesis of the project? 

Speaker 1:        So Quebec started in 2010 as a collaboration of the major entomology collections in California. And [00:02:00] as a group, the collections were awarded an NSF grant to database their entymology collections through this program called advancing digitization of biological collections. And the goal is to digitize over 1 million specimens. The purpose is to capture the collection information from the labels, like the species name, when the specimen was collected, who collected it and when it was collected. 

Speaker 4:        So the ECIG museum is an insect collection at UC Berkeley and our collections go back about a hundred years. [00:02:30] And these represents the research of our faculty and students over that period of time. And it's a representation of what's lived in California all this time. So each one of those specimens in the museum is a data point. It tells you what lived where at what time. And so the problem is it's all locked up in these specimens. It's on these tiny little labels sitting in a museum somewhere. And nobody has access to this information. So the point of this project is to make that data available to, to the research community, into the public cause this all [00:03:00] goes online free to everybody to look at. So that's the big point of this is to make this a hundred years of of data available to people, researchers and to do this, you know, is it's a pretty overwhelming task. 

Speaker 4:        Now, other museums have done this before with their vertebrate collections. For instance, the Museum of vertebrate zoology here on campus, they've already database their entire collection and they're able to do wonderful things with it. They're looking at distributions of different species and what time of year they occur. But entomology museums have lagged behind just [00:03:30] because of the sheer volume of specimens that we have. We have orders of magnitude more specimens than some of these other museums and we just thought that was too big of a job and nobody wanted to tackle that job. But now with this funding from the National Science Foundation, we feel like, okay, we can take a shot at this now let's take a stab at it. How big is the collection? Well, we don't actually know, but uh, when you multiply how many specimens per drawer and all the jurors that we have that comes out somewhere around five to 6 million specimens that we have in our collection, and that's [00:04:00] just a USAC, that's just the ecig museum and then combine that with the eight other institutions that we're working with. We're talking tens of millions of specimens among all of us. So to do the 1 million is just a, you know, the tip of the iceberg, but it's a place to start. 

Speaker 1:        In the beginning of the project, we were hiring students to enter the data manually directly from the specimens themselves, but we found that that was taking a really long time. So we started taking photographs of the specimens, which is [00:04:30] beneficial in that we then have a record of both the specimen itself and the labels so we can go back and check specimens later. People can also enter this data from the images from wherever they are online. That's how we've started this notes from nature project where we have an interactive database now for people to enter. The specimen data online. As of this morning we had to over 2,790 people entering data. We're approaching 170,000 [00:05:00] total transcription people entering data online through this project, which started just a few weeks ago. 

Speaker 4:        Wow, that's impressive. It is. Have you tried to calculate how many people you think need to volunteer to help? So when we initially started this project, and we are even in the planning stages, we thought, well how long would it take us to actually database? Just our collection alone. You look at the amount of staff that we have in the budget that we [00:05:30] have, and we figured at least a century to do this in house. So we hired some students to help us out, take some of these images, and they started doing the database for us, but we realized, okay, that cut it down to maybe half a century. It's still, that was going to be too long. We needed more help in having these images that you can be sitting online anywhere in the world and jump online and help us transcribe these images. So that was a huge step forward. It's incredibly simple step to take, but it was a very important one. And how did that idea bubble up? Well, we heard about 

Speaker 1:        Zooniverse, which does a citizen [00:06:00] science organization that creates these web interfaces. In particular, we saw this project called old weather. What this project did was enter weather records from ship logs from World War One. The purpose is to improve climate models for the oceans in that time period. So we knew we wanted to do something similar with with our images. I submitted an application to them. What won them over I think was the actual photos of our specimens with the [00:06:30] pen sticking through them. They're really impressed with that and that's also something that the citizen scientists really like as well. They really enjoy seeing the actual pictures of the insects. 

Speaker 5:        [inaudible] you're listening to spectrum. I'm KLX Berkeley, I guess today are Joanie Ball and Peter Boise from the Calvin project. In the next segment they discuss how they choose which specimens to begin at. 

Speaker 6:        [00:07:00] Talk a little bit about the people at the ECIG that keep it all going. 

Speaker 4:        Yeah, we do have a pretty limited staff in the museum, but I have to say the real work gets done by the undergraduates. These are either volunteers or work study students and they put in endless hours and they're the ones who are taking these images that were putting up online without them work just doesn't get done on campus. They really are the, the workforce of this campus. 

Speaker 6:        Going back to the involvement of the citizen scientists, the transcription [00:07:30] work that they do, how would you characterize who's good at it? What sort of person would enjoy this? Do you have a sense of who that is or do you think people should just try it and see? 

Speaker 1:        Does anyone who's curious and has little time to help out? But it tends to be people who are really enjoy contributing to something. 

Speaker 4:        Yeah, it is an opportunity to be part of a larger community. People enjoy that and I think some people are surprised when they, they like it. So some people just log on, Eh, it's okay. [00:08:00] And some people, it just doesn't do it for them. But they took a look and now they know. But other people, they kind of surprise themselves like, oh, this is actually kind of fun. And in a way you're following an expedition. You can see where these things are coming from, what year they were collected. We had some really funny comments about one of our professors who is still actively collecting. Somebody suggested perhaps he's a vampire because he's been collecting for 50 years and the specimens are still coming in. So a little observations like that and people just, they become part of our community without even knowing it. 

Speaker 1:        Yeah, and some people [00:08:30] who never really had an interest in insects before find themselves now more interested in what's around them. One woman mentioned that as she was driving and insect splattered on her car and she was trying to identify it or you know, suddenly she had this new appreciation for insects, which was pretty neat. 

Speaker 6:        How are you choosing the million specimens start? 

Speaker 1:        Uh, well actually one of the groups that we've decided to focus on [00:09:00] start with are the dragon flies. The reason for that is that we have good collections for them over the hundred years where we have our collections. They've been well collected over time. They're pretty charismatic group. They're also used as biological indicators for stream ecosystem health. So that's one of the groups that we're focusing on. We're also focusing on certain insects that are used in applied research like pollinators or biological control agents. What are the, some of the other groups, 

Speaker 4:        the approach we use to slicking [00:09:30] the groups where groups that we have well-represented in the museum, groups that have some significance regarding global change, whether it be land use change that be climate change, changing the way water is distributed. So which groups are more sensitive to that. That might give us some indication of of what's happened in the past. The other criteria and we use was places where we have longterm collections because museums have some biases in them and we have [00:10:00] to recognize that when we do this kind of research people when to a particular place at a particular time because there's something interesting there for them. So some places we have fewer collections over the years, other places we have nice longterm data sets. So we also focused on locations where we knew we had nice longterm data. That makes sense. Yeah, so collecting is ongoing. 

Speaker 4:        It is consumer. We continually collect the museum specimens. The insect collection comes from a number of sources. The most common [00:10:30] is research that's done right here on campus. Professors, students who are doing research projects, they deposit what we refer to as voucher specimens in the museum. So you write a publication that says you found this species at this place. Somebody else reads it and says, well that sounds odd. I don't think that thing occurs there. Well, you have to be able to go back to that specimen and look at it. Oh yeah, sure enough, there it is. I wouldn't believe that. So we have to voucher these specimens in a museum. So that's a large part of where our collection comes from. In 1939 professor ESIG, [00:11:00] the namesake of our museum, had this idea to start the California insect survey. UC Berkeley is a land grant school, which means we owe a certain responsibility back to the community, to agriculture, to forestry, to the urban ecosystem. 

Speaker 4:        And we need to be able to answer questions. But if we don't have representatives of the insects that are out there, then it's much harder to answer the sort of questions. So that was his logic in launching the California Insec survey, sending professors and students all over the state. And that was in 1939 [00:11:30] so our collections go back earlier than that, but that's where the real boost began in our collections. So from that point on, we've had regular collecting trips. People in the museum, professors, other folks will go out and collect all over the state and then deposit their material. Another source of our specimens, our donations, there's a lot of hobbyists, enthusiasts that aren't necessarily professional entomologists, but they enjoy butterflies or beetles or whatever group. At some point when have their family and their kids and they've got these big boxes taken [00:12:00] up a lot of space in their house. They said, well, Geez, you know, I really like having these here, but yeah, maybe I should give them to a museum somewhere. So I get a lot of that kind of stuff as well. Just in the past couple of years we've had, I don't know about 10,000 donated specimens, which has been really nice. We don't do much in the way of trading there. There are museums out there that'll buy and sell specimens, but because the main interest of our museum is answering questions about California, we can go out and get most of that stuff ourselves. 

Speaker 5:        [00:12:30] Our guest today on spectrum are Joanie, Baal [inaudible]. In the next segment they talk about how cal bug is already affecting research. This is k LX Berkeley. 

Speaker 4:        So how is the end product affecting research do you think from pre digitization and now post digitization? [00:13:00] How are people able to leverage what they have in a database now that they couldn't do previously? 

Speaker 1:        I am doing research using the Jag and fly collections from a few different angles. One of my projects is to resurvey sites that were originally sampled in 1914 for Jag and flies. So this collector clearance, Hamilton Kennedy went around California and Nevada collecting dragonflies that in 1914 and create a list of species [00:13:30] for all of the sites that he visited, which turns out to be around 40 sites throughout the region. The problem was he didn't include the dates that he visited these sites. That information is on his specimen. So I use the collection to reconstruct the dates that he went to these specific sites. And then I revisited those sites on the same day. And now what I'm doing is I'm comparing my surveys to the original surveys that were done in 1914 to see how things like species richness and that proportion of habitat [00:14:00] generalist versus specialist and some other community metrics have changed over that time period. 

Speaker 1:        Another project that I'm working on will be using all of the museums specimens for dragon flies and I'll be comparing communities for different counties for the different time periods throughout that hundred years that we have collections. So I'm looking to see which time periods have enough specimens for a comparison. For example, there was a lot of collecting activity in the 70s there's a lot of current [00:14:30] collecting activity through another group, actually dragon fly enthusiast group who report their sightings, so I'm using their sightings for current species distribution throughout California. One of the last projects that I'm working on is creating species distribution models, which is something that a lot of ecologists are doing right now with historical data. The museum collections are points for that. You can create a latitude and longitude for where you find individual specimens throughout time. I'm using these to [00:15:00] look at changes in species distribution over recent decades in relation to factors like climate and land use. So I started analyzing some of the changes in the dragon fly communities based on the resurvey and some of the things that I'm finding so far is are that communities are becoming more similar throughout this survey. Previously you might find much more different species of at different sites, whereas now you're finding a lot of the same things over and over again. So we're seeing kind of a homogenization [00:15:30] of Jag and fly communities. 

Speaker 4:        A lot of researchers have come to the museum to do similar sorts of studies to Joanie's where they're looking at one species. It's distribution over time. And that meant coming into our museum, looking at our specimens, typing that up, they would bring that home and put that into their database, write up a report on that. But that didn't always end up back in our database. And there's only one species at a time. So the advantage to what we're doing now is we can look at whole communities at a time Joanie's case, the whole dragon [00:16:00] fly dams will fly community rather than looking at one species at a time. So you couldn't do that before without one of these larger databases. We keep thinking in terms of the research, which is one of the main reasons why we're doing this, but there's a lot of practical outcomes for the general public as well. 

Speaker 4:        For instance, maybe you're a fly fisherman and you're going up to this particular drainage basin or this river and you want to know what, what's flying up there? I want to know what kind of flies I should be tying. So at some point in the future you'll be able to pull up in our database and see, well what's flying at that time of year in that area? Or you find a spider in your [00:16:30] house and you want to know what kinds of spiders are found in my area, you should be able to go to our database and find that. Or yeah, you're a farmer and you're thinking about rotating to some new crop that you haven't planted before and you want to know what kind of pests should I be worried about? What things feed on this plant in this area? So those are the kinds of questions that other folks outside of the museum community should be able to use. And like I say, this is all freely available online once it's all been database. So this is, you know, it's not just for us, it's for everybody. 

Speaker 4:        What ends up [00:17:00] being the most diverse species of insects. If you were mentioning dragonflies aren't really all that diverse. Beatles. There's a famous geneticists Haldane. When asked, what has he learned in his studies about the creator? Said the creator had an inordinate fondness for beetles. Certainly beetles are the most species rich out there, and within the Beatles, the weevils, a lot of these are very hosts specialized, and so for every species of plant out there, you may have several species of weevil that specialize on them. So [00:17:30] it said that if you were to take one of every species, take a black tail deer, a blue whale, a sequoia tree, every species of insects out there and lined them all up, four out of 10 would be a beetle. So 40% of the diversity of the macro diversity. Now, when I say this to people who study bacteria and viruses, they say, ah, yeah, well, I see. Okay, you right, you're right. There are, there's a lot out there with that, but of multicellular animals and plants, the insects, certainly out number, most other things. 

Speaker 3:        [00:18:00] I'm Renee Rao and you're listening to spectrum. Today's guest are Jody ball and Peter Boyce. In the next segment, they discuss the importance of entomology. This is Kayla Berkeley. 

Speaker 4:        What is the most studied insect? The more charismatic things, as you might guess, get a lot more attention. Butterflies get a lot of attention there. Show either out during the day, they're conspicuous, they don't hide [00:18:30] themselves. It makes them easy to study and for hobbyists to notice them. The more obscure things, the tiny, the brown, the cryptic things that are much more diverse but are much harder to study and there's far fewer people that actually study them. It's just human nature. Yeah. We were attracted to some things that we find aesthetically pleasing and other things that we don't. It takes a special kind of person to look at them. We call them entomologists. 

Speaker 4:        Within the current environment. Are [00:19:00] Insects ascending or is, are they struggling or is it case by case? Very much case by case and again, the more charismatic things we know a lot more about, I know of about 20 species that are listed as endangered in California. 14 of those are butterflies. Then there is a large [inaudible] three pretty charismatic beetles, lion of grasshopper, so these are all pretty conspicuous sort of things. A lot of them are endangered because of habitat loss. They specialize in a particular plant that only occurs in a particular habitat and especially meadows. [00:19:30] So many meadows had been turned into grazed plots or housing developments or golf courses. There's been all kinds of lawsuits around what to do with this meadow and that sort of thing, but there's probably a lot more out there that have become very rare that we just don't know about it because nobody has looked at them in any great depth. 

Speaker 4:        That said, some of the things we do also promote some insects. Certainly our agriculture is this great field of food for not just us, but for insects as well, so some pest species where we consider them past, you know, they're just trying to live, they flourished. There's other things [00:20:00] prescribed burning where you open up a habitat and let the new vegetation grow back in. There are some insects that specialize on that. Unfortunately, the things that specialize in more stable habitat, say old growth forest, they're having less of a good time about it because those habitats, once you disturb them, it takes a long time for them to get back into balance. So yeah, it's a case by case basis. Somethings are doing well, others are not. 

Speaker 1:        The other thing that we're seeing is like in many other groups, habitat generalists are really expanding because they can [00:20:30] live in a variety of different environments and they're more tolerant to changes in the habitat so they can even live in urban areas. So a lot of the habitat generalists are really expanding while the habitat specialists are more likely to be declining. 

Speaker 4:        So I think to some extent we've talked about it, but is there anything specific about the importance of studying insects that you want to mention? Well, we like to think that humans rule the world and [00:21:00] uh, but you know, if our species was to disappear tomorrow, the world would probably go on. Okay. Maybe even better. But if insects were to disappear tomorrow, most ecosystems would collapse pretty quickly. And so I think that's a pretty compelling reason right there to look at them. The act as pollinators, they're recycling nutrients, they're keeping plants and checks are the plants don't over run the world. They're keeping other insects and checks so they don't overrun the world. It kind of keeps things in balance. The act as food for a lot of other organisms. So they're, they're, uh, one of [00:21:30] the most important components of the ecosystem. And to me that's enough reason to study them. 

Speaker 4:        But beyond that, their biology, their behavior sometimes just fascinating to just sit by a pond and watch a dragon fly. It's, it's just amazing to see how they move and how they can move. I mean, they've inspired so many things. I think the, uh, the helicopter was inspired by dragonflies. It's the same kind of design, you know, beyond that, their physiology, there's just so many things about them that are fascinating. And that's where I came from in all of this as an undergraduate, I was an electrical [00:22:00] engineering major for three years and finally realized that biology was really my passion. By coincidence. My first entomology professor got his phd here at Berkeley in entomology and this is at the University of Connecticut. He's the one who got me excited about it. For me, every day of that classroom was just fascinating. Everything I learned was telling me about this world that has been all around me my whole life, but I've never noticed it. 

Speaker 4:        And then all of a sudden somebody opened my eyes [00:22:30] and I just started noticing more and more and it just fascinates me. I mean it's, it's 20 something years later. I still am just as fascinated today as I was before. But I think some of the more obvious things are things like pollination. Our crops depend on having pollinators in with colony collapse disorder going on with the honey bees. What does that mean? So there's a lot of very compelling reasons too, is to study insects. But I think for most of us it's because we love it. They're just fascinating. Great. Joanie ball and Peter o Boyski. Thanks [00:23:00] very much for coming on spectrum. My pleasure. Thank you. If you think you might want to get involved with cal bag. Here's Peter with some more information about how to do that. There's a number of websites where you can find information about us. The ECIG museum. If you go to our website, ecig.berkeley.edu I'm the collections manager, Peter Boyski and you can contact me directly. Gordon Deshita is one of the coordinators of our project. He's on that website as well. There is a cal bug website, get's cal bug.berkeley.edu [00:23:30] and that also has information about the project. Okay. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 5:        the science and technology events happening globally over the next two weeks. Brad switch will join me in presenting the calendar 

Speaker 3:        next Monday. The California Academy of Sciences will host a lecture [00:24:00] by Dr. Anthony [inaudible] Guerra and associate professor of physics at UC Santa Cruz. Dr. Guerra will speak about the evolution of models that scientists use to understand and study the universe. For over two decades, scientists have been refining the standard model they currently use with new data. In light of this, the concept of inflation has been revised in many cases, inflation completely upends. Our picture of the large scale structure of the universe and suggests that the universe may not actually have a beginning. [00:24:30] An object of such enormous size and complexity can only be described as a multi-verse. Dr. Guerra will walk through the development of these ideas and describe other aspects of the multi-verse that scientists wish to test. The lecture will be held on Monday, August 5th at 7:30 PM in the California Academy of Sciences. Planetarium tickets will be available [email protected] 

Speaker 6:        the August East Bay Science Cafe Presents Huta Greys Hammer Phd, [00:25:00] a science officer at the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the state stem cell agency that manages bond funds dedicated to support basic translational and clinical stem cell and regenerative medicine research in California. Her research background is in the study of embryonic development, elucidating how the cells of mouse and chick embryos assemble into functional organs. Udo will explore the power of the promise and the problems [00:25:30] of stem cells. That's Wednesday night, August 7th, 2013 in the Cafe Valparaiso, 41 30 Solano Avenue in Berkeley from seven to 9:00 PM 

Speaker 5:        on spectrum. We also like to cover science stories, so we found particularly interesting. Brad swift flew join me in presenting papers. 

Speaker 6:        A multidisciplinary team at the University of Texas Southwest Medical [00:26:00] Center has found that measuring the oxygenation of tumors can be a valuable tool in guiding radiation therapy, opening the door for personalized therapies that keep tumors in check with oxygen enhancement in research, examining tissue oxygenation levels and predicting radiation response. University of Texas southwest scientists led by Dr. Ralph Mason reported in the June 27th online issue of magnetic resonance in medicine [00:26:30] that countering hypoxic and aggressive tumors with an oxygen challenge, which amounts to inhaling oxygen while monitoring tumor response coincides with a greater delay in tumor growth in irradiated animal model. The next step is clinical trials to assess tumor response to radiation therapy says Dr. Mason. If the results are confirmed in humans, the implication for personalized therapies for cancers could mean fewer radiation treatments [00:27:00] or perhaps one single high dose treatment. In some cases, the simple addition of oxygen to stereotactic body radiation greatly improves response. The key is to identify those patients who will benefit 

Speaker 3:        an android app released Monday. Allow smart phone owners to donate their phones, computing power to scientific research around the world. The app was developed by the Berkeley Open infrastructure for network computing or Boy Inc a project [00:27:30] that is best known for developing similar software for personal computers. The app install software that allows the charging phone's processing power to be used to analyze data or run simulations that would normally require expensive supercomputers. The app supports a variety of projects ranging from a program that searches radio telescope data for spinning stars called pulse eyes to one that searches for a more effective aids treatment through a community grid points creator. David Anderson [00:28:00] noted that the computing power of the nearly 1 billion android devices currently being used around the globe exceeds that of the world's largest conventional super computer. The app is currently available at the android app store, but I found you should keep an eye out as Anderson's next project maybe to design a version compatible with apple systems. 

Speaker 2:        Okay. [00:28:30] [inaudible] [inaudible] music in the show is written produced by Alex Simon, edited by Renee Brown. 

Speaker 5:        [00:29:00] Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum, Doug K l [email protected] join us in two weeks at this same time. 

Speaker 2:        [00:29:30] [inaudible] [inaudible].

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Arash Komeili cell biologist, Assc. Prof. plant and microbial biology UC Berkeley. His research uses bacterial magnetosomes as a model system to study the molecular mechanisms governing the biogenesis and maintenance of bacterial organelles. Part 2.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible] [inaudible]. 

Speaker 1:        [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. 

Speaker 3:        Hello and good afternoon. My name is Renee Rao. I'll be hosting today's show. Today we present part two of our interview with a Rosh Kamali. Dr [inaudible] is a cell biologist and associate [00:01:00] professor of plant and microbial biology at UC Berkeley. Previously on spectrum, he discussed his work with magneto tactic bacteria. Here's Dr Camilia explaining why these bacteria so interesting. 

Speaker 4:        We work with a specific type of bacteria. They're called magneto is tactic bacteria and these are organisms that are quite widespread. You can find them in most aquatic environments by almost any sort of classification. You can really group them together if you [00:01:30] take their shape or if you look at even the genes they have, you can't really group them into one specific group as opposed to many other bacteria that you can do that, but unites them together as a group is that they're able to orient in magnetic fields. And some along magnetic fields 

Speaker 3:        today. In part two of his interview, Dr [inaudible] explains how these discoveries might be applied and discusses the scientific outreach he does in our community. Here is Brad swift interviewing a Kamali, 

Speaker 4:        [00:02:00] so how is it that you're trying to leverage what you're learning about the magnetic zone? You're trying to apply it in any way. Are you still really in the pure research mode? I think we're starting to move out or at least branch out to try to do some applications as well. This has been a really, one of the areas of research that's been the most active, or at least the most thought about for Magna [inaudible] bacteria for the last 40 years or so of that people have been working on it. You have two [00:02:30] features of the magnesiums that immediately can be thought of as being very useful for applications, but one is that they're making something that's nanometers size. Very small is magnetic and it has very, very irregular dimensions, quite free of impurities. So you can make magnetic particles in the lab and people have gotten very good at it actually, but it's often very hard to control some of their features. 

Speaker 4:        Maybe contaminants can kind of bind my net [00:03:00] particles pretty easily. And then on top of that you have to sort of use certain types of chemical conditions that are not so favorable. Maybe the Ph has to be a little bit high or chemicals that you don't want to use. And that's one of the reasons why the bacteria are so great. Right? Then as I said, they make an Organelle in this case to magnetism. So then within this tiny 50 nanometers sphere, they can just make what is otherwise a toxic condition inside of that and make this magnetic particle. But the cells are [00:03:30] growing in relatively harmless growth media at 30 degrees centigrade. So you can make magnetic particles under what are not toxic conditions because the bacteria are taking care of that inside of the cell. So that's one of the reasons people have been really fascinated by them. 

Speaker 4:        So how can we take these sort of perfect crystals out of these bacteria and apply them to something else? The other aspect of it that's really important to recognize is that it's not just that the bacteria are randomly making magnetic particles. [00:04:00] They actually have a whole set of genes that they're used to build a magnetism and build the magnetic particle. So the ability to make a magnetic crystal is in coated in jeans, so you can not only extract the magnets out of these bacteria to use it for applications. Maybe you can extract the genes and put them into another organism and now give that other organism the capability to make magnetic nanoparticles. They're [00:04:30] magnetic properties, mixed them, really useful for many different kinds of applications. One of them, they can be potentially contrast agents for magnetic resonance imaging or MRI. When you get an MRI, does a lot of structures that are easily seen, but a lot of things are sort of invisible to the MRI and if you had a little magnetic particle in that region, you'd be able to see it better. One idea is can we put the genes as we learn more about them, can we sort of gather [00:05:00] up a minimum set of genes that are sort of sufficient to make a magnetism and a magnetic particle and then just put those into some other cell types and then see if that's enough to make a magnetic particle and that settle and they can we track it by MRI or something so that that's actually the focus of a grant that we recently got with a few other groups on campus. As a large collaborative grant, 

Speaker 4:        how will you start to [00:05:30] prove that concept? I think we're taking many parallel approaches for it. You know, both to show the utility or the different ways that you would have to image them. One group is working on essentially technologies for imaging, magnetic nanoparticles and animals, and then we are sort of at the very other end of the spectrum and the collaboration, we're trying to say, we think we have a set of genes that are sufficient. This process, let's start taking baby steps [00:06:00] and move them to other types of cells, whether they're bacteria or other cells. And see if we can produce magnetic particles in those cells. Are other collaborators they're focusing more on, well, if we know these genes, can we start transferring them to mammalian cells and then in animal studies we could track cells using magnetic resonance imaging. Each group has focusing on a different aspect of the project. 

Speaker 4:        Some of the other applications are really fascinating too. There's one where [00:06:30] particles hold their magnetic properties very stably and if you give a very strong magnetic field then you can kind of flip the dipole moment of the crystal. You can do this back and forth, keeps switching it, and if the pulse is switching faster than the dipole man can flip on the magnetic protocol. The difference in energies essentially released as heat. We can in that way heat the particle. There's a lot of anticancer treatments to try to essentially have the particles adhere to [00:07:00] a tumor and then heat the particles using this method. Just have the heat of the particles, kill the cells locally. There's been quite a few papers on it and some of these types of studies are in clinical trials to see how effective that could be for different kinds of tumors. 

Speaker 4:        Yeah. Bacteria seems to get used that way. More and more to go into a tumor and linger just on the tumor and continue to just be very local in terms of very specific. And that's, you know, [00:07:30] local drug delivery or local attacking of tumor cells would be something that's very, this bacteria have this great access that other organisms don't have. If you can localize them and direct them. And that's sort of some, there's some other work which I think is also really interesting is to thinking about the magna detected bacteria as a vehicle for delivering drugs. You know, one of the things you can imagine is that you could guide them with a magnetic fields so you can have them guided to some [00:08:00] areas in the body by an external magnetic field. And there's definitely some people who are working on that. Can they move the bacteria through vasculature to a certain area because they can swim along magnetic field. 

Speaker 4:        So if you want to localize it somewhere, you would have to instigate that field there. Yeah, exactly. To direct it. Right. The stuff I was telling you about with the heat treatment, I think all of that is trying to, right now at least because there's not much known about how to target the bacteria, they work with kinds of tumors that are accessible [00:08:30] so that you could inject the particles into the tumor directly directly to the tumor as opposed to try to do a systemic thing. Yeah, exactly. But you can imagine that maybe one benefit of the is is that they are surrounded by biological membrane and you can have proteins on them and people have done this pretty, you can display specific proteins on the surface of magnesiums, so then you could customize your, I need a zone to have affinity for certain types of proteins [00:09:00] or certain types of cells. Some proof of concept of that has been done for sure. 

Speaker 5:        Mm MM. 

Speaker 3:        Our guest on spectrum today, is it rush Molly, I cell biologist and associate professor at UC Berkeley. In the next segment. Dr Camelli speaks more about some of his collaborative. This is k a l x Berkeley. [00:09:30] [inaudible]. 

Speaker 4:        The work you're doing with a sequencing is a lot of it. Trying to catalog everything. Keep track of what's, what sort of explain the sequencing side of what you're doing. The sequencing side, we are fortunate that the organism that we work with is in pure culture. Our lab rat essentially has been already sequenced by someone else. When we sequence, [00:10:00] it's more to make sure if we're going to put some gene fusion into the bacteria or that what we have is correct. Our sequencing is relatively limited. We are trying to branch out more and say nowadays technologies for sequencing the whole genome are much more accessible, affordable, certain types of genetics that we do where we try to delete genes or randomly mutate them. Then we can just start identify what's changed by going back and just sequencing the whole [00:10:30] genome or the bacteria. We are doing a little bit of that. 

Speaker 4:        We do it on campus very accessible and affordable, but it's really something that was unthinkable even five, six years ago that you could do this on a large scale, do it affordably. And it could be a pretty routine tool in research. Sorry, I mean it's a really exciting, actually you're not gonna necessarily have to be restricted to these lab rats that do represent some of the general features of the process you're interested [00:11:00] in, but not the diversity of fitness necessarily. And so you can say, instead of studying just one organism, maybe I can study many other ones. There's still a lot that I can do with my model system in the law that I can't do with some of these other unconventional organisms, but they're at least visible to me. Their genes are visible to me and I don't have to isolate them away from everybody else to get an understanding of [00:11:30] what their genetic makeup is and where they are. 

Speaker 4:        And for things like microbiome studies is revolutionize the whole field. They were, they were always just looking at such a small sliver of what they could isolate. Yeah. And now you can look at everything, you know, they can do lots of really interesting experiments like what's on your fingers, what's on your, you know, how's your right hand different from your left hand and microbial content. Yeah. You know, so that's really interesting. Yeah, it gets very refined. Is synthetic [00:12:00] biology involved in what you're doing in some way? Yeah, definitely. So what I was telling you about the applications, you know, essentially, I mean synthetic biology, I guess there's different ways of defining it. For me, you have inspiration from some biological system and now you're trying to extrapolate that and put it in a new context to do something new or something different than it normally does. 

Speaker 4:        Though. What I was telling you about this, this project that we have on campus or does not support [00:12:30] it by the Keck foundation to put the magnetism genes into other organisms, but that's essentially synthetic biology. So yeah, we are really relying on that and trying to see if we're going to move these genes, how are they going to be more, how can we customize them so that they work better in the new organisms they go to? Can we add on things to them or take things away and doing this using synthetic biology essentially that it would fall under the category of synthetic biology. Sort started like mixing and matching genes and in [00:13:00] new contexts that you wouldn't have naturally. And what sort of safety protocols do you have to abide by in your research? For? For our research, we are working with something that's non-pathogenic that's quite harmless. 

Speaker 4:        We follow the, the university has pretty strict guidelines for even for nonpathogenic organisms. Anytime you're working with recombinant DNA, even those things I was telling you where we are making a fluorescent protein fusion, we really [00:13:30] have to be careful about how we get rid of things and you know, don't just dump it down the drain. Safety-Wise. We don't really use anything harmful in the lab. I think maybe you're getting more into like what do you do with the hybrid organisms somehow and there we have to be, you know, we're always careful about how we dispose of materials. Eat cultures are always killed by bleach or heating before we dispose of it. You know, often people [00:14:00] say imagination runs wild with them. Right. You know? Yeah. And a lot of that has to do with fiction. Yeah. Books and movies and things. But I think it's important to sort of sort of what prompts me to ask. 

Speaker 4:        And I think a lot of times maybe scientists think about that too late, you know, so, so maybe it may not be the first thing you say. That'd be the first thing you think about. And then it may also, it may not be in your training expertise or whatever to even know what would be dangerous. So I, I, [00:14:30] is that something that the university is helping with in the sense of certainly providing those kinds of resources to you so you don't have to be expert, right? We don't. Yeah, exactly. How can you be, and also you know, we have to comply with not just handling of biological organisms, but just how the lab functions. We have not only have to comply with university rules, but we have federal rules for worker safety, city rules that are different. So we have five or six different sort of safety protocols that we have to [00:15:00] abide by and we do get inspections once a year and I know people who work with animals, they have even more extensive things. I'd have to go through a whole separate set of protocols to just the sort of ethical treatment of the animals approved by independent boards and things like that. And the funding agencies have a lot of rules, so they give us money, but they expect us to follow certain types of rules. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible] [00:15:30] you're listening to spectrum on k a Alex Berkeley. Our guest is a Raj Chameleon. In the next segment he speaks about his work on outreach to the broader public [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] 

Speaker 4:        I noticed you've got a Twitter account. I do, yeah. And is that sort of part [00:16:00] of an outreach effort on your part to get the community involved or people interested in what you're doing? How do you view outreach going forward for your projects? Yeah, so the Twitter thing is you'd asked me that outreach are fun and I think it's both. It's not anonymous. You can be social, my name, you can find it. We have one for the lab also, which not very active at all by mine. A lot of people that I follow are other scientists. I think it is not known so well that there are many scientists on Twitter and there's great outreach [00:16:30] because often is a great way to share new findings and research or things that are exciting to people or having a discussion within the community, but this all accessible. 

Speaker 4:        None of it is anonymous, so you can really see that. It's also fun obviously. For example, I encourage people to look out there. There's a lot of great science writers who take research findings and they in science blogs turn it into very accessible stories to understand the latest developments in research for [00:17:00] outreach. We try to do a lot of things. Members of my lab go out to, there's different events where scientists can interact with the community. I've done a few microbiology experiments with my son's classroom and you know, kindergarten, first, second grade. For me it's been really eye opening to do that because you see you all, sometimes you think what you're doing is so inaccessible on out there. But when you go and just talk to people you see that they can get really excited about, especially kids, [00:17:30] kids can get really excited about micro was, which is kind of funny because it's not something they can see and they really only heard about bad germs. 

Speaker 4:        They've only heard about things that can hurt them and it's just great to go out there and talk about things that are good germs and on their bodies and everything. So we do a little experiment where we take the little auger played, which has the growth for the bacteria. They put their little fingerprints on it or they can see over the course of few days, bacteria grow on there. They washed her hands and they can see that that changes whether they can grow, [00:18:00] and I do the exact same experiment. I teach undergraduate microbiology lab here. You know, the questions that the undergrads ask are almost exactly the same questions that the third graders ask. So it's great to see that they have the insight and the excitement to learn about science. It just has to be, I think, encouraged and followed up more as they go through schooling. 

Speaker 4:        I think another reason for us to go and do outreaches to just sort of, I get more excited about my work when I go and talk to other people and see that it's not so out there [00:18:30] and the university provides a lot of chances for us to do outreach to it. I mean, just recently we had cal day. There was lots of science on campus. Other blogs that you follow because you'd want to mention some colleagues at Berkeley have blogs, but I think people are more active through Twitter than they are through blogs. The scientific American blogs in general are pretty good. You mentioned the Keck Foundation that's brought together this collaboration that you're going to try to do the applied research on. Are there other collaborations [00:19:00] that you're trying to pursue? Yeah. You know our work, we rely on a lot of collaborations mainly because the bacteria do this really amazing thing of building these magnetic particles and we're always just like the example I told you about with the more high resolution electron microscopy where we were able to see something that we hadn't seen before. 

Speaker 4:        There was a lot of people who were interested in imaging magnetic particles. They're developing instruments all the time that you would be able to look at these things in new ways and [00:19:30] we can't build the same instruments, but it ends up being a really great interaction all the time to find these groups that are developing technologies for imaging bacteria or imaging particles and then see how what we've learned can be applied to their technologies. One great collaboration we've had recently is with the walls worth group at Harvard and they have these, essentially there is a way you can treat diamonds so that there's certain defects on the surface of the diamonds and then you can detect magnetic [00:20:00] fields close to the surface of the diamond can actually essentially image these bacteria that we've worked with sitting on the surface of these diamonds because of their magnetic properties. 

Speaker 4:        It's been great for us because working with them, hopefully we're able to fine tune some aspects of their technique to then study the magnetic particles and the magnetic chains in a different way than we had been so far and learn new things. Basically at any given point we might have seven or eight active collaboration's going on. [00:20:30] A lot of it on our part is not that difficult. We just provide a sample of the bacteria and then they work on it and if it goes somewhere then we go and get more involved in the collaboration. You start iterating with them. Yeah, exactly. This Keck collaboration was out of a brainstorming session. Went from there and we have another collaboration. Also synthetic biology that was just funded by the office of naval research and that's between two or three groups that are in different universities. We had always just talked here and there to each other and all of a sudden we realized that we could do something [00:21:00] together. 

Speaker 4:        And that's how that came about. It's a huge part of science I think is even more now with funding situation and you have to really look for more creative ways of doing your science and your sense is that the funding environment is dwindling. Is that good? Yeah. Yeah. I think it was already bad and the sequester just sort of pushed it down even further. For example, you look at NIH, the amount of money is that increasing, which means it's not keeping up with inflation. So your purchasing power is much less and then all of [00:21:30] a sudden the sequester takes out a few percentages off of what was getting funded to you. So I think both the success rates for getting a grant and the amount of money that you get from that grant are lower. Even if you're lucky enough to be able to get the grant. What you could do with the money is less than before. Obviously, you know, I'm biased, but I don't think it's that great. You're essentially sacrificing the next generation of scientists, limiting [00:22:00] it, limiting it big time. 

Speaker 4:        Was there anything that you wanted to mention? One thing I was going to say is that we've talked a lot about these bacteria, but obviously the visual is the easiest way to really appreciate what they do. And we have a, on my lab website, we have a page of videos where you can see how these bacteria migrate along magnetic fields and you can see images of them and you can see the structures within the solid with the magnesium. So clinic. So, so people go to [inaudible] [00:22:30] lab.org they can actually see videos of the bacteria. Great. Yeah, that'd be good. Yeah. Arash Kamali. Thanks very much for being on spectrum. Thank you so much. This was a lot of fun. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]. You can follow Rajkot Maley on Twitter at micro magnet or you can watch them. Fantastic [00:23:00] sell videos on his website Oh Maley, that is k o n e I l I e lab.org and now a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next few weeks and Rick chronicity joins me in presenting the calendar

Speaker 3:        this Monday. The California Academy of Sciences will host a talk by Dr. John Jenkins, [00:23:30] senior research scientist at the Seti Institute. Dr. Jenkins will speak about NASA search for other habitable planets. In 2009 NASA launched the space cough known as Kepler into orbit in order to survey our own region of the Milky Way. Kepler's has been looking for planets that are similar in size and distance from a son to our owners. In those four years. The probe has collected data on over 190,000 stars and confirmed over 130 new planets. Dr. Jenkins [00:24:00] will discuss the exciting you dated that capital has provided as well as a few of the technical and scientific challenges that went into building a vessel at Kepler. He will also give a brief overview of tests. NASA's next mission to detect earth's closest cousins. This event will be held Monday, July 15th at 7:30 PM in the planetarium of the California Academy of Sciences. Go to cal academy.org to reserve a ticket in advance. 

Speaker 6:        The theme for July is adult science, happy hour science, [00:24:30] neat. His brains, brains, grains, everything you've always wanted to know about your brain and more. There'll be talks in demos on memory, truth and tricks, neurobiology, human brains, a sheep brain dissection and illusions. Science neat takes place at the El Rio bar. Three one five eight mission street in San Francisco and mission for those 21 and over is $4 this month's [00:25:00] science need is on Tuesday, July 16th with doors at six and then talks at six 30 

Speaker 3:        every Sunday. This month the UC Berkeley Botanical Gardens will be hosting special be explained explainer lectures about the importance of wild bees in the care and maintenance of all gardens and especially in the native California Habitat. The botanical garden also features and amazing collection of plants from nearly every continent. Although there is a focus on plants that thrive in our Mediterranean climate. [00:25:30] The Asian, Californian and South American collections are currently blooming. The garden will be open from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM most days. Although bee explainer tours are only offered from 11 to one 30 on Sundays, admission is $10 for adults and $8 for students. 

Speaker 6:        On Saturday, July 20th at 11:00 AM Dr Steve Croft. We'll give the free public science at cal lecture on snacking gorgeous and cannibalizing the [00:26:00] feeding habits of black holes. Learn about the latest telescopes and how they are giving more information about how black holes grow and merge. Steve Leads the science at cal lecture series and as an assistant project astronomer working on large radio surveys and transient and variable astronomical sources. He helps commission the Allen Telescope Array for science operations and develop data analysis pipelines. He is an expert in the use of data at [00:26:30] a wide range of wavelengths from many different telescopes. The talk [email protected] for more information and now 

Speaker 3:        spectrum brings you some of our favorite stories in science and technology news. Rick Kaneski joins me again for the news science news summarized an article published on July 3rd in the proceedings of the royal society a about how surface [00:27:00] tension can lead to upstream contamination. Sebastian BN. Connie observed this when watching the preparation of Argentinian Montay t when hot water was poured from a pot into a container of leaves below some of the tea leaves float upward against the force of gravity and upstream of the water flow being Kinney and his colleagues from the University of Havana and from Rutgers showed through both experiments and simulations. [00:27:30] The particles can flow upstream several meters and up central meter high waterfalls because the downstream flow of clean water creates a gradient. What the container of t or other particles lowering the surface tension of the water, the particles are thus pulled into the clean water which has a greater surface tension. 

Speaker 3:        The team also demonstrated that these results could have practical applications such as through the discharge of a standard pipette in other lab work [00:28:00] or in the simulated release of waste into larger scale channels. Indiana University scientist have transformed mouse embryonic stem cells into key structures of the inner ear. The discovery provides new insight into the sensory Oregon's developmental process and sets the stage for laboratory models of disease, drug discovery, and potential treatments for hearing loss and balance disorders. A research team led by ear. He has Chino Phd and Russi Holton. A professor [00:28:30] at the school of Medicine reported that by using a three dimensional cell culture method, they were able to Koch stem cells to develop into inner ear sensory epithelia containing hair cells, supporting cells and neurons that collectively detect sound had movement and gravity. The researchers reported online Wednesday in the journal Nature, Karl Kohler, the papers first author and a graduate student at the medical school said the three dimensional culture allows the cells to self [00:29:00] organize into complex tissues using mechanical cues that are found during embryonic development. Additional research is needed to determine how exactly inner ear cells involved in auditory sensing might develop as well as how these processes can be applied to develop human inner ear cells. 

Speaker 7:        [inaudible] music heard during the shows witness produced by Alex. Thanks to Rick krones for contributing [00:29:30] to our news and calendar section and to Rene Rao for editing systems. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about [inaudible] about 

Speaker 3:        the show, please send them to us via email 

Speaker 1:        or email address is spectrum. Doug k a l [email protected] join us in two weeks at the same time.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Arash Komeili cell biologist, Assc. Prof. plant and microbial biology UC Berkeley. His research uses bacterial magnetosomes as a model system to study the molecular mechanisms governing the biogenesis and maintenance of bacterial organelles. Part1

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next. 

Speaker 2:        Okay. 

Speaker 3:        [inaudible] [inaudible]. 

Speaker 1:        [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews, featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. 

Speaker 4:        Hi, and good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. We are doing another two part interview on spectrum. Our guest is Arash Kamali, [00:01:00] a cell biologist and associate professor of plant and microbial biology at cal Berkeley. His research uses bacterial magneta zones as a model system to study the molecular mechanisms governing the biogenesis and maintenance of bacterial organelles. Today. In part one, Arash walks us through what he is researching and how he was drawn to it in part two, which will air in two weeks. [00:01:30] He explains how these discoveries might be applied and he discusses the scientific outreach he does. Here's part one, a rush. Camelli. Welcome to spectrum. Thank you. I wanted to lay the groundwork a little bit. You're studying bacteria and why did you choose bacteria and not some other micro organism to study? One 

Speaker 5:        practical motivation was that they're easier to study. They're easier to grow in [00:02:00] the lab. You can have large numbers of them. If you're interested in a specific process, you have the opportunity to go deep and try to really understand maybe all the different components that are involved in that process, but it wasn't necessarily a deliberate choice is just as I worked with them it became more and more fascinating and then I wanted to pursue it further. 

Speaker 4:        And then the focus of your research on the bacteria, can you explain that? 

Speaker 5:        Yeah, so we work with [00:02:30] a specific type of bacteria. They're called magnate as hectic bacteria and these are organisms that are quite widespread. You can find them in most aquatic environments by almost any sort of classification. You can really group them together if you take their shape or if you look at even the genes they have, the general genes they have, you can really group them into one specific group as opposed to many other bacteria that you can do that. But Unites Together as a group [00:03:00] is that they're, they're able to orient in magnetic fields and some along magnetic fields. This behavior was discovered quite by accident a couple of times independently. Somebody was looking under a microscope and they noticed that there were bacteria were swimming all in the same direction and they couldn't figure out why. They thought maybe the light from the window was attracting them or some other type of stimuli and they tried everything and they couldn't really figure out why the bacteria were swimming in one direction except they noticed that [00:03:30] regardless of where they were in the lab, they were always swimming in the same geographic direction and so they thought, well, the only thing we can think of that would attract them to the same position is the magnetic field, and they were able to show that sure enough, if you bring a magnet next to the microscope, you can change the swimming direction. 

Speaker 5:        This type of behavior is mediated by a very special structure that the bacteria build inside of their cell, and this was sort of [00:04:00] what attracted me to it. Can you differentiate them? The UK erotic? Yeah. Then the bacterial, can you differentiate those two for us so that we kind of get a sense of is there, they're easy, different differentiate, you know the generally speaking you out excels, enclose their genetic material in an organelle called the nucleus. They're generally much bigger. They have a lot more genetic information associated with them and they have a ton of different kinds of organelles that perform [00:04:30] functions. All these Organelles to fall the proteins to break them down. They have organelles for generating energy, but all those little specific features, you know, you can find some bacterium that has organelles or you can find some bacterial solid that's really huge. Or you can find some bacteria so that encloses its DNA and an organelle. 

Speaker 5:        It's just that you had accels have all of them together. Many of the living organisms that you encounter everyday because you can see them [00:05:00] very easily. Are you carry out, almost all of them are plants and fungi and animals. They're all made up of you. Charismatic cells. It's just that there's this whole unseen world of bacteria and what function does that capability serve, that magnetic functions that it can be realized that yet in many places on earth, the magnetic field will act as a guide through these changes in oxygen levels, sort of like a straight line through these. These [00:05:30] bacteria are stuck in these sort of magnetic field highways. It's thought to be a simpler method for finding the appropriate oxygen levels and simpler in this case means that they have to swim less as swimming takes energy. So the advantage is that they use less energy, get to the same place, that bacteria and that doesn't have the same capabilities relatively speaking, as a simple explanation, it's actually, because it is so simple, the model, you can kind of replicate [00:06:00] it in the lab a little bit. 

Speaker 5:        If you set up a little tube that has the oxygen grading and then the bacteria will go to a certain place and you can actually see that they're sort of a band of bacteria at what they consider for them to be appropriate oxygen levels. And then if you inject some oxygen at the other end of the tube, the bacteria will swim away from this oxygen gradient. Now, if you give them a magnetic field that they can swim along, they can move away from this advancing oxygen threat much more quickly than [00:06:30] bacteria that can't navigate along magnetic fields. So that's sort of a proof of concept a little bit in the lab. There's a lot of reasons why it also doesn't make sense. For example, some of these bacteria make so many of these magnetic structures that we haven't talked about yet, but they make so many of these particles way more than they would ever need to orient in the magnetic field. 

Speaker 5:        So it seems excessive. There are other bacteria that live in places on earth where there is not really this kind of a magnetic field guide. And in those environments there's [00:07:00] plenty of other bacteria that don't have these magneto tactic capabilities and they still can find that specific oxygen zone very easily. So in some ways I think it is an open question but there isn't really enough yet to refute the kind of the generally accepted model on the movement part of it. You were mentioning that they use magnetic field to move backwards and forwards. Only explain the limiting factor. Yeah, that's [00:07:30] an important point actually because it's not that they use the magnetic field for sensing in a way. It's not that they are getting pulled or pushed by the magnetic field. They are sort of passively aligned and the magnetic field sort of like if you have two bar magnets and if one of them is perpendicular to the other one and you bring the other one closer, I'll just move until they're parallel to each other. 

Speaker 5:        This is the same thing. The bacteria have essentially a bar magnet and inside of the cell and so the alignment to the magnetic field [00:08:00] is passive that you can kill the bacteria and they'll still align with the magnetic field. The swimming takes advantage of structures and and machines that are found in all bacteria essentially. So they have flagella that they can use to swim back and forth as you mentioned. And they have a whole bunch of other different kinds of systems for sensing the amount of oxygen or other materials that they're interested in to figure out, should I keep swimming or should I stop swimming? And [00:08:30] as I mentioned earlier, the bacteria are quite diverse. So when you look at different magnatech active bacteria, the types of flagella they have are also different from each other. So it's not one universal mechanism for the swimming, it's just the idea that that the swimming is limited by these magnetic field lines. 

Speaker 6:        [inaudible] [inaudible]. 

Speaker 5:        Our guest today on spectrum is [inaudible] Chameleon, a cell biologist 

Speaker 7:        and associate professor at cal Berkeley. In our next segment, [00:09:00] Arash talks about what attracted him to study the magnetism and why it remains in some bacteria and not others. This is k a l x Berkeley. So 

Speaker 5:        let's talk about the magnetic zone, right? This is sort of my fascination. I was a graduate student at UCF and I studied cell biology. I use the yeast, which are not bacteria but in many ways they are kind of like bacteria. They're much simpler to study than maybe other do care attic [00:09:30] organisms and we have genetics available and so I was very fascinated by east, but I was studying a problem with XL organization and communication within the cell and yeast. We were taught sort of as students in cell biology at the time, that cell organization and having compartments in the cell organelles basically that do different functions was very unique feature of you carry attic cells and there's one of the things I've defined them. I received my phd to do a postdoctoral fellowship. I happen to be [00:10:00] in interviewing at cal tech and professor Mel Simon there he was talking about all kinds of bacteria that he was interested in and he said there's these bacteria that have organelles and I just, it kind of blew my mind because we were told explicitly that that's not true and in many textbooks, even today it still says that bacteria don't have organelles. 

Speaker 5:        I learned more about men and I learned that these magnatech to bacteria that we've been talking about so far, you can actually build a structure inside of the cell, out of their cell membrane and within [00:10:30] this membrane compartment, it's essentially a little factory for making magnetic particles so they can build crystals of mineral called magnetite, which is just an iron oxide. Every three or four and some organisms make a different kind of magnetic minerals called Greg [inaudible], which is an iron sulfur mineral, but these are perfect little crystals, about 50 nanometers in diameter, and they make a chain of these magnesiums, so these membrane enclosed magnetic particles. [00:11:00] This chain is sort of on one side of the cell and it allows the bacteria to orient and magnetic fields because each of those crystals has this magnetic dipole moment in the same direction and all those little dipole moments interact with each other to make a little bar magnet, a little compass needle essentially that forces the bacterium to Orient in the magnetic field. 

Speaker 5:        When I heard about this, I realized that this is just incredibly fascinating. Nobody really knew how it was that the membrane compartment forum [00:11:30] or even if it formed first and the mineral formed inside of it. There wasn't much or anything known about the proteins that were involved in building the compartment and then making the magnetic particle. It just seemed like something that needed to be studied and it was fascinating to me and I've been working on it for 1213 years now. Have we covered what the of the magnetic is that idea behind the function of the magnetism, which is the [00:12:00] structures of the cells build to allow them to align with a magnetic field. We think that function is to simplify the search for low oxygen environments. That's the main model in our field and I think there are definitely some groups that are actively working on understanding that aspect of the behavior better. 

Speaker 5:        How it is that the bacteria can find a certain oxygen concentration. These bacteria in particular, what are the mechanics of them swimming along [00:12:30] the magnetic field and the, is there some other explanation for why they do this? For example, if they are changing orientations into magnetic field, can they sense the strain that the magnetic field is putting onto the cell? Can that be sensed somehow and then used for some work down the line and there are groups that are actively pursuing those kinds of ideas. You were mentioning that this is a particular kind of bacteria that has this capability, right, and others don't. Right. Yet both seem to be equally [00:13:00] effective and populating the water areas that you're studying. No apparent advantage. Disadvantage, so winning in Canada? Yeah, I mean it's a lot of the Darwinian, you could say as long as it's not severely disadvantageous, then maybe they wouldn't be a push for it to be lost. 

Speaker 5:        What is kind of intriguing a little bit is there's examples of magna detective bacteria in many different groups, phylogenetic groups, so many different types of species that will be, let's [00:13:30] say bacterium that normally just lives free in the ocean and then I'll have a relative that's very similar to it, but it's also a magnet, a tactic. In recent years, people have studied this a little bit more and we know now what are the specific set of genes that allow bacteria to become magnetic tactic. So you can look at those genes specifically and say, how is it that bacteria that are otherwise so different from each other can all perform the same function? And if you know the genes that build the structures that allow them to orient [00:14:00] the magnetic fields, you can look at how different those genes are from each other or has similar they are. 

Speaker 5:        And normally with a lot of these types of behaviors in bacteria, there's something called horizontal gene transfer that explains how it is that otherwise similar bacteria can have different functionalities. For example, you can think of that as bacteria being cars and everybody has sort of the same standard set of know features on the car. But you can add on different features if you want to. So you can upgrade and have other kinds of features like leather [00:14:30] seats or regular seats. And so the two cars that have different kinds of seats are very similar to each other. It's just one that got the leather seats. And so these partly are thought to occur by bacteria exchanging genes with each other. Somebody who wasn't magna tactic maybe got these jeans from another organism, but when people look at the genes that make these mag Nita zones, these magnetic structures inside of the cell, what you see is that they appear to be very, very ancient. 

Speaker 5:        So it doesn't seem like there was a lot of recent [00:15:00] exchange of genes between these various groups of bacteria to make them magna tactic. And it almost seems to map to the ancestral divergence of all of these bacteria from each other. One big idea is that the last common ancestor of all these organisms was mag new tactic and that many, many other bacteria have sort of lost this capability over what would be almost 2 billion years of evolution for these bacteria. And then some have retained it. [00:15:30] Those of that have retained it is it's still serving an advantage for them, or is it just sort of Vista GL and they have it and they're sort of stuck in magnetic fields and they have to deal with it? No, but nobody really knows. Actually. The other option is that there was a period of horizontal gene transfer, but it was a very long time ago so that the signature is sort of lost from, again, a couple of billion years of evolution or divergence from each other, but it really looks like whenever this process happened, it was quite anxious. 

Speaker 3:        [00:16:00] You are listening to spectrum on KALX Berkeley. Our guest is Arash [inaudible]. In the next segment, rush talks about organelles in bacterial cells. 

Speaker 5:        [00:16:30] Explain what the Organelle is, so there's a lot of functions within the cell that need to be enclosed in a compartment for various reasons. You can have a biochemical reaction that's not very efficient, but if you put it in within a compartment and concentrates, all of the components that carry that reaction, it can be carried out more efficiently. The other thing is that for some reactions to to happen, you need a chemical environment that's different than the rest of the cellular environment. You can't convert [00:17:00] the whole environment of the cell to that one condition. So by compartmentalizing it you able to carry it out and often the products of these reactions can be toxic to the rest of the cell. And so by componentizing again you can keep the toxic conditions away from the rest of the, so these are the different reasons why you care how to excels. 

Speaker 5:        Like the cells in our body have organelles that do different things like how proteins fold or modify proteins break him down and in bacterial cells it [00:17:30] was thought that they're so simple and so small that they don't really have a need for compartments. Although for many years people have had examples of bacteria that do form compartments. You carrot axles are big and Organelles are really easy to see where the light microscope so you can easily see that the cell has compartments within it. Whereas a lot of bacteria are well studied, are quite simple, they don't have much visible structure within them. And that's maybe even further the bias that there is some divide and this [00:18:00] allowed you carry out access to become more complex, quote unquote, and then it just doesn't exist in bacteria. How is it that they then were revealed? I think they'd been revealed for a long time. 

Speaker 5:        You know, for example, there's electron microscope images from 40 years ago or more where you see for example, photosynthetic bacteria, these are bacteria that can do photosynthesis. They have extensive membrane structures inside of the cell that how's the proteins that harvest light and carry [00:18:30] out photosynthesis and they're, it seems like the idea for having an Organelle is that you just increased it area that you can use for photosynthesis sorta like you just have more solar panels if you just keep spreading the solar panels. Right. So that in this way, by just sort of making wraps of membranes inside of the cell, you just increased the amount of space that you can harvest light. So those were known for a long time and I think it just wasn't a problem that was studied from the perspective of cell biology and cell [00:19:00] organization that much. That's sort of a different angle that people are bringing to it now with many different bacterial organelles. 

Speaker 5:        And part of the reason why it's important to think of it that way is that of course what the products of the bike chemistry inside of the Organelles is fascinating and really important to understand. But to build the organ out itself is also a difficult thing. So for example, you have to bend and remodel the cell membrane [00:19:30] to create, whether it's a sphere or it's wraps of membrane, and that is not a energetically favorable thing to do. It's not easy. So in your cataract cells, we know that there are specific proteins and protein machines. Then their only job is really to bend and remodeled the membrane cause it's not going to happen by itself very easily. And with all of these different structures that are now better recognized in bacteria, we really have no idea how it is that they performed the same function. Is [00:20:00] it using the same types of proteins as what we know in your care at excels or are they using different kinds of proteins? 

Speaker 5:        That was sort of a very basic question to ask. How similar or different is it than how you carry? Like some makes an Oregon own fester was one of the first inspirations for us to study this process in magnatech the bacteria. And what sort of tools are you using to parse this information? In our field we use various tools and it's turned out to be incredibly beneficial [00:20:30] because different approaches have sort of converged on the same answer. So my basic focus was to use genetics as a tool. And the idea here was if we go in and randomly mutate or delete genes in these bacteria and then see which of these random mutations results in a loss of the magnetic phenotype and prevents the cell from making the magnetism Organelles, then maybe we know [00:21:00] those genes that are potentially involved. And so that was sort of what I perfected during my postdoctoral fellowship. 

Speaker 5:        And that was my main approach to study the problem. And then on top of that, the other approach has been really helpful for us. And this is again something we've worked on is once we know some of the candidate proteins to be able to study them, their localization in the cell and they're dynamics, we modify the protein. So that they're linked to fluorescent proteins. So then we can, uh, use for us in this microscopy to follow them within the cell. [00:21:30] Other people, their approach was to say, well, these structures are magnetic. If we break open the cell, we can use a magnet and try to separate the magnesiums from the rest of the cell material. And then if we have the purified magnesiums, we can look to see what kinds of proteins are associated with them and sort of guilt by association. If there is a protein there, it should do something or maybe it does something. 

Speaker 5:        That was the other approach. And the final approach that's been really helpful, [00:22:00] particularly because Magno take it back to your, our diverse, as we talked about earlier, is to take representatives that are really distantly related to each other and sequence their genomes. So get the sequence of their DNA and see what are the things that they have in common with each other. Take two organisms that live in quite different environments and their lineages are quite different from each other, but they both can do this magnetic tactic behavior. And by doing that, people again found [00:22:30] some genes and so if you take the genes that we found by genetics, random mutations of the cell by isolating the magnesiums and cy counting their proteins, and then by doing the genome sequencing, it all converges on the same set of genes. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible] this concludes part one of our [00:23:00] interview. We'll be sure to catch part two Friday July 12th at noon. Spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. 

Speaker 7:        The link is tiny url.com/calex spectrum. Now a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. 

Speaker 5:        Rick Karnofsky [00:23:30] joins me for the calendar on the 4th of July the exploratorium at pier 15 in San Francisco. He's hosting there after dark event for adults 18 and over from six to 10:00 PM the theme for the evening is boom, 

Speaker 4:        learn the science of fireworks, the difference between implosions and explosions and what happens when hot water meets liquid nitrogen tickets are $15 and are available from www.exploratorium.edu [00:24:00] the Santa Clara County Parks has organized an early morning van ride adventure into the back country. To a large bat colony view the bat tornado and learn about the benefits of our local flying mammals. Meet at the park office. Bring a pad to sit on and dress in layers for changing temperatures. This will happen Saturday July six from 4:00 AM to 7:00 AM at Calero County Park [00:24:30] and Santa Clara. Reservations are required to make a reservation call area code (408) 268-3883 Saturday night July six there are two star parties. One is in San Carlos and the other is near Mount Hamilton. The San Carlos event is hosted by the San Mateo Astronomical Society and is held in Crestview Park San Carlos. If you would like to help [00:25:00] with setting up a telescope or would like to learn about telescopes come at sunset which will be 8:33 PM if you would just like to see the universe through a telescope come one or two hours after sunset. 

Speaker 4:        The other event is being hosted by the Halls Valley Astronomical Group. Knowledgeable volunteers will provide you with a chance to look through a variety of telescopes and answer questions about the night. Sky Meet at the Joseph D. Grant ranch county park. [00:25:30] This event starts at 8:30 PM and lasted until 11:00 PM for more information. Call area code (408) 274-6121 July is skeptical hosted by the bay area. Skeptics is on exoplanet colonization down to earth planning. Join National Center for Science Education Staffer and Cal Alum, David Alvin Smith for a conversation [00:26:00] about the proposed strategies to reach other star systems which proposals might work and which certainly won't at the La Pena Lounge. Three one zero five Shattuck in Berkeley on Wednesday July 10th at 7:30 PM the event is free. For more information, visit [inaudible] skeptics.org the computer history museum presents Intel's Justin Ratiner in conversation with John Markoff. Justin Ratner is a corporate [00:26:30] vice president and the chief technology officer of Intel Corporation. He is also an Intel senior fellow and head of Intel labs where he directs Intel's global research efforts in processors, programming systems, security communications, and most recently user experience. 

Speaker 4:        And interaction as part of Intel labs. Ratner is also responsible for funding academic research worldwide through its science and technology centers, [00:27:00] international research institutes and individual faculty awards. This event is happening on Wednesday, July 10th at 7:00 PM the Computer History Museum is located at 1401 north shoreline boulevard in mountain view, California. A feature of spectrum is to present news stories we find interesting. Rick Karnofsky and I present the News Katrin on months and others from the Eulich Research Center in Germany have published the results of their big brain [00:27:30] project. A three d high resolution map of a human brain. In the June 21st issue of science, the researchers cut a brain donated by a 65 year old woman into 7,404 sheets, stain them and image them on a flatbed scanner at a resolution of 20 micrometers. The data acquisition alone took a thousand hours and created a terabyte of data that was analyzed by seven super competing facilities in Canada. 

Speaker 4:        Damn. Making the data [00:28:00] free and publicly available from modeling and simulation to UC Berkeley. Graduate students have managed to more accurately identify the point at which our earliest ancestors were invaded by bacteria that were precursors to organelles like Mitochondria and chloroplasts. Mitochondria are cellular powerhouses while chloroplasts allow plant cells to convert sunlight into glucose. These two complex organelles are thought to have begun as a result of a symbiotic relationship between single cell [00:28:30] eukaryotic organisms and bacterial cells. The graduate students, Nicholas Matzke and Patrick Schiff, examined genes within the organelles and larger cell and compared them using Bayesians statistics. Through this analysis, they were able to conclude that a protio bacterium invaded UCR writes about 1.2 billion years ago in line with earlier estimates and that asino bacterium which had already developed photosynthesis, invaded eukaryotes [00:29:00] 900 million years ago, much later than some estimates which are as high as 2 billion years ago. 

Speaker 2:        Okay. 

Speaker 4:        The music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. 

Speaker 3:        Interview editing assistance by Renee round. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via [00:29:30] email or email address is spectrum dot [inaudible] dot com join us in two weeks. This same time.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dr. Thomas Immel is Assistant Research Physicist at SSL at UC Berkeley. His expertise is interpretation of remote-sensing data and modeling of physical processes in the upper atmosphere & ionosphere. His work includes UV imaging observations from 4 NASA missions. ICON.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible]. 

Speaker 1:        [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. 

Speaker 3:        Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Today's interview is part two of our two part interview with Thomas Emel. Thomas is an assistant research [00:01:00] physicist at the space sciences laboratory at UC Berkeley. In April of this year, NASA selected the Ayana spheric connection explorer known as icon to be the next heliophysics explorer satellite mission. The icon mission is to be led by the space sciences laboratory at UC Berkeley. Thomas Emo is the principal investigator of the icon mission icon will be providing NASA's heliophysics [00:01:30] division with a powerful new capability to determine the conditions in space modified by weather on the planet and to understand the way space weather events grow to envelop regions of our planet with dense Ayana spheric plasma. In today's interview, Dr Emo talks in detail about the icon explorer. He gets into the instruments that will be on the icon. What they hope to learn from the mission, [00:02:00] the schedule for the project and the orbit they hope to achieve and what will happen to the data they collect onto the interview. NASA has recently selected the 

Speaker 4:        space sciences lab to do icon and congratulations are in order. Do you want to describe the icon project and how that's come together? Yeah, well thanks. It's been a long process. It was sort of a glimmer in our eye when we first were discovering this [00:02:30] things about the coupling of the atmosphere in the ionosphere, which I've talked about and how it's much stronger than we ever expected and structured and variable. And basically at some point it was unexplainable. And when we devise the mission, we wanted a mission that would measure not one particular thing, but it would measure each of the key parameters of the system that you need to put together to understand, let's drive in the system and how is the system responding? So this was the design for icon and a little bit more flushed out on our, which is icon.ssl.berkeley.edu [00:03:00] explaining what icon stands for to ionosphere connection explorer. 

Speaker 4:        It's one of these things where you come up with an acronym. It sounds so good. Then later on you've tried to figure out what it meant and so we were close but I came up with icon and we have some discussions. We improved it and we basically just simplified it to ionosphere connection and it seemed to make a, it told, it says, well we want to say ins your connection explore because we are in the explorer line, but [00:03:30] icon x didn't sound is too long, so it's just icon. So you have to pitch this to NASA. Right, right. And so you have to verify that all your instruments are going to work and think what's the process of getting, you have the idea, but then there's more to it than that. Obviously in this mode, NASA has some different modes of missions. They have one where this is our mission. 

Speaker 4:        Tell us what instruments you want to put on it. And we'll talk to you maybe and they select your instruments [00:04:00] and then you're on for the ride and the instruments have to meet some requirements and so forth. In this case it's up to the Pi, the principal investigator, to select the right instruments for the science to clearly define the science goals and the requirements for the instruments and demonstrate to the instruments, meet those requirements. So that's the mode we're working in. So it helps to have previously flown instruments that have demonstrated capability. If you don't have a exact replica of an instrument or you're doing some new [00:04:30] changes to an instrument design, then you have to model and predict how their instrument is going to behave on orbit and its capability and show them how much margin you have in your current design. So for instance, we need to know how the plasma is moving in space at all times with accuracy of five meters per second. 

Speaker 4:        And we have a capability of three meters per second. So we have some 60% margin on that value. Do they believe it while we are flying basically a copy of that instrument right now that has that capability [00:05:00] or it would have that capability if they had the pointing capability on the current spacecraft that is flying on. There's a little bit of pointing control and knowledge that we're going to be able to provide better than maybe the last one. So you have to roll all these things in. You know, you have to have the instrument providers talking and knowledgeable of the capability of the spacecraft. You need the spacecraft and know those requirements or the instruments. While you said you need pointed like this, but do you need pointing for three seconds or three minutes or three hours? And so you [00:05:30] have to facilitate a lot of conversations and a lot of discussion in the the principal investigator and basically it's a systems engineering problem through and through and you need a great system engineering look and you need systems engineers in each department talking to each other with the overarching system engineer on the project, making sure that everyone's messages are being conveyed and everything's being captured in your requirements. 

Speaker 4:        Pitching it to NASA. Yeah, we've been through this now twice. This is our second time around when we weren't [00:06:00] selected the first time. Everyone said, well it takes twice, so don't worry about it. Well it was, it was no fun, but we did it twice. And so luckily I don't have to sit here and say, third time's a charm. Uh, we're really pleased to be able to do this now and we think we have a great concept. How much change between the first and the second approach to NASA? Well, we added some capability. We added some real capability to spin the spacecraft very quickly to make measurements here and there. We enhanced the capability of the [00:06:30] spacecraft basically to support a number of different experimental modes that we wanted to be able to perform that they original spacecraft didn't actually have. So we want to spend the whole thing in three minutes. 

Speaker 4:        The whole spacecraft has to spin like a top and three minutes to capture the atmosphere moving in this way and then moving in that way. We want it all. So the new spacecraft's got that. It's got a lot more power to go with that. You need more power. Needed bigger, bigger solar panels to meet your margins on meeting your science goals. We brought [00:07:00] on new team members. We added naval research lab. They're great partners in science and are really one of the original places in the United States for investigations of the upper atmosphere and ionosphere. It's nice to have them on board to have a great wind instrument for imaging. We can image of the wind, which is really cool. 

Speaker 1:        Our guest today is Thomas Emo and the next segment Thomas [00:07:30] talks about the icon instruments and what the project scientists hope to learn from icon. This is KALX Berkeley. 

Speaker 4:        Are there any interesting stories in terms of getting the instruments fleshed out? Testing a design, two instruments [00:08:00] coming from Berkeley and two from other institutions. Ut Dallas and naval research lab. Each instrument is different. The navel instrument coming from naval research lab is a Michelson interferometer and Michelson invented the interferometer to prove that the earth was not moving through an ether back in 1903 so it's not a new instrument, but don't tell NASA. It's not as new instrument. It's a Michaelson guys come on. But they took a very close look at that. It's a very new implementation of a Michelson that's been [00:08:30] proven on the ground and proven in space actually, but in a little different way that was used in space previously. Uh, the UV instruments one is an astronomical instrument that was created to measure one photon at a time, which we have a lot more photons now, so we've got to take off the whole back end electronics that made sure that every photon was actually a photon a, we don't need that anymore. 

Speaker 4:        I'm happy to say because it was massive. We just have the front end of the spectrograph and it's a beautiful little instrument, the far ultraviolet [00:09:00] instrument, which is a little different as an imager and it's a near copy of the one we flew on image, which was the imager we used to make the original observation of the variability in the ionosphere. And again, the Ut Dallas instrument has been flown, I don't know, 20 times. You like to have no interesting stories with your instruments that have whatsoever, so I'm sorry to say. What's interesting is that, you know, it was getting all these instruments that had a lot of heritage, had a lot of experience on orbit, and putting them in the same place on the same time, giving them enough, powering, [00:09:30] putting them in the right directions and designing the science mission to support this. 

Speaker 4:        The interesting thing is the magnetic field at the low latitudes constraints, the plasma controls the plasma at low latitudes where we're going, we're flying out to Florida and we'll never come that far north again. We're going to do a little burn to get to lower latitudes, not too low that we can still operate it from space sciences. I would Berkeley with our dish, we'll still be able to see it in the sky. We're on the magnetic field that we're measuring every, so we're measuring the motion of the plasma and the magnetic field, [00:10:00] and we're measuring the winds and the conductivity all along the magnetic field. The winds of the neutral atmosphere on the conductivity of the ionosphere that together control the electric fields that are generated in the low latitude dynamo or there's a dynamo, it's like a motor where you take a conductor and you run it through a magnetic field, you get a current. So we're on that magnetic field and we're measuring the processes occurring along that magnetic field that drive the currents, that low latitudes. So putting together that mission concept [00:10:30] was actually the interesting part for us and deciding what altitude we had to be at, what inclination was the best trade off for measuring those atmospheric tides, which are extensive and being right at the magnetic equator where you'd like to spend quite a bit of time making these coupled measurements. 

Speaker 3:        Within those discussions, do you rely more on what you know about what's happening or is it blue sky and you're thinking about what are we going to find out? 

Speaker 4:        Hmm, I see. [00:11:00] That's a good question. So depending on who you talk to, we know a lot about the ionosphere and its interaction with the thermosphere, but we have no idea why it changes so much from day to day. And one of the reasons we think we really don't have a handle on that is because we don't have a good measurement of the driver of where that energy is and most of the energies in the atmosphere. So we think that the key to understanding the variability atmospheres to measure that driver first while [00:11:30] you're measuring the response to the ionosphere. So we're measuring the neutral windless first, the motion of the atmosphere, but also key to that is you know how much plasma is on that field line. How much of an electric field are you generating by pushing that plasma across the magnetic field with that wind. 

Speaker 4:        So you need to measure the ionosphere at the same time. Those are overarching belief that the neutral wind is really important. Why is it important? Is it because of the neutral wind pushing the plasma around and suppressing it, keeping it down [00:12:00] or blowing it up? Or is it the electric field that's comes from the Dynamo action itself of the neutral wind pushing the plasma around? Or is it something to do with the temperatures that vary from, you know, this large temperature variability that comes with the tides that can affect the whole upper atmosphere and change how the plasma recombines how it settles at night and change the composition of the apparatus here. One thing I didn't talk about is how in the upper atmosphere that different species separate, so the heavy stuff like and [00:12:30] to basically sits at the bottom of the upper atmosphere, but atomic oxygen becomes a dominant species and as you go up in altitude, the ratio of oxygen, the nitrogen changes, and that's not something that happens anywhere else below a hundred kilometers. 

Speaker 4:        So there's a number of things that can control the atmosphere. And I guess where you'd like to be is being able to predict what's going to happen tomorrow. And if there is a key parameter that you could save yourself some time and going out and measuring instead of flying icon [00:13:00] again, you would fly, say a constellation measure in one thing. Then we should be able to inform that process and inform the next mission or this next space weather mission is trying to capture the most important parameter for predicting the conditions in the atmosphere. Uh, you may be able to reduce your set of measurements we are carrying to enter for ominous for instruments. We're measuring the east, west and the north south wind. Well one of them might make no difference whatsoever and you just need to carry one and [00:13:30] Gosh, you know, it's really, really bright and you only need to measure this part of it. So maybe your requirements aren't so strict as what icon had to carry. You carry a smaller instrument with a smaller detector and a smaller aperture. So there's some things that we can inform in the future. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible] you are listening to spectrum on Kal experts. Our guest today is Thomas Ilk. In the next [00:14:00] segment Thomas Talks about the icon project integration, presenting the data and how long icon will remain on orbit. And so how long is it? Is 

Speaker 4:        the project going to take the construction side of it before you launch? We're looking at a three and a half year development, so a year of design and then NASA takes a [00:14:30] strong interest in us from now on. I've been arms length for this whole time since it's been a competitive selection. We've haven't really had any time to talk to NASA about what do you really, what do you think, what is this going to work? How you guys gonna like this, you know, we just have to say everything that we think is needed and prepare the way we think and also how NASA requirements cause us to work, do our best job to put together NASA mission. Uh, now we're going to be finally working with NASA very closely on this. So, [00:15:00] um, we have a year of design and then two and a half years of build, which gets us onto this launch vehicle we had planned for a late 2016. 

Speaker 4:        I'm seeing signs that we're probably gonna slip to 2017. So our launch in 2017 is what we're currently planning, but we haven't had our first discussions with NASA yet. They are getting their marvels together and we are too. And we're going to meet later this month and start planning for the future, but we should be launched in 2017 the other instruments are [00:15:30] going to be built at Texas naval research. Yup. And here at the space sciences lab. And then how do you integrate, is that so far out in the distance that you're not there yet? No, we're, we'll integrate here. So the spacecraft has a payload plate where we'll integrate all the instruments on the plate and deliver the instruments all at one time as one unified payload with one interface. So we also build a box that talks to all the instruments that knows what their outputs are that [00:16:00] interfaces to each of them. 

Speaker 4:        So along with our delivery of the instruments to orbital sciences, who's our spacecraft provider will deliver a interface box. So that'll actually go on their side. It'll mount on the spacecraft, but our side is just the payload plate and we'll do that as space sciences lab. And do you end up publishing papers as a result of this or is it really just a making all the data available with something that we've invested a lot of work and time [00:16:30] into the old battle days that you'd sit on your data and never release it and publish all the papers and take all the credit and NASA doesn't support that model anymore. All of our data have to be supplied freely and openly within 30 or 60 days. I forget the exact requirement and so we'll be helping all these other investigators as well get into the data. 

Speaker 4:        So our job is to make the data as plain as possible. What I'm really interested in doing is how to visualize those data so someone can download say a movie or a [00:17:00] some other tool that would really give them our Google earth click here and you show up in Google earth and you can spin around the planet and look at things the way you want to look at them. And instead of writing to particular software, I mean a lot of people don't want to write any software or want to have a look at the data and probably make some headway before getting too deeply into analysis just by having a good view of what you've got. So we will be providing a number of tools to let people do that. I envision a lot of papers coming out of, uh, from these [00:17:30] data and me s I'll be involved in that. 

Speaker 4:        Our team, a number of co-investigators, a lot of professors around the u s at Colorado and Illinois for instance, and at Cornell to make the best sense, we can have our observations given our immediate knowledge of what the spacecraft doing, it's capability, the uncertainties of the measurements and so forth. So certainly expect to be involved in that. It's been a little bit of a lull in my publication career working [00:18:00] on this mission over the past few years, but I think that's going to change as soon as we get on orbit. I'm really looking into looking forward to, uh, just the other day I was writing some code again, I felt fantastic. You know, I've been writing word documents for many years now and it's just been great to get back into some data. And so I really look forward to having the data from his mission as well. And how long will icon fly? 

Speaker 4:        We have a two year mission that we've proposed. [00:18:30] Most heliophysics missions do go into an extended phase. You usually find things that are new and exciting or find other collaborations you'd like to do or other science you'd like to science goals that you might like to achieve in another two years. So we'll have that capability to extend as well. But we actually don't have any fuel on the spacecraft. So we'll be coming home probably 12 or 15 years. Uh, we started 550 kilometer altitude circular orbit, so a nice stable orbit, but eventually it'll be coming back. [00:19:00] But that's the longterm short term is to get up and do our two year mission and then talk about the future. But we will be on orbit for a decade and in terms of coming back to earth, do you have to plot out when and how that'll happen as best you can or is that a randomness to the whole thing? 

Speaker 4:        The only control you have is on the how. You can't the solar panels possibly to try to control the three entry and in our case it will be uncontrolled reentry. A, you need a rocket to take you home if you're going to say [00:19:30] it's controlled, but what we have shown is that everything's going to burn up. Once you crash into the lower atmosphere. Again, you end up burning up everything, all the aluminum and all the gear and all the glass. It does burn up it so it doesn't pose a hazard to any people. Right. Anything below and the chances of running into something else up there, there's something that will be predictable at the time. Yes. You literally, you could camp to solar panels in a wrong direction for a while. Stop Science ops and for a week do something [00:20:00] with your solar panels or see if the guys you're going to fly into are interested in not colliding. 

Speaker 4:        Maybe they have some fuel. For instance, the space station. I don't see any, uh, there's a lot of space in space. Uh, although it's a lot of junk too. There's a lot of junk and we're more concerned about that than ever. We're almost to that point, right where it's just going to start growing no matter what we do. So we don't want to contribute to that. Everything attached to icon will be coming home in 15 years or we're not allowed to contribute to the [00:20:30] problem. Thomas emo. Thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Okay. Thank you very much. Good luck with icon. Thanks. Getting go. Have you back after. That'd be great. Where along the way maybe. Well, here's some horror stories. Well, every mission, some terrifying moments. 

Speaker 5:        So I know that at least I know that now we look forward to that development though and it's going to be a great mission for Berkeley and for NASA. Thanks again. Thank you. 

Speaker 6:        Okay. 

Speaker 2:        [00:21:00] The icon explorer mission website is icon dot s s l. Dot. berkeley.edu 

Speaker 6:        Oh [inaudible] 

Speaker 2:        [00:21:30] now a few of the science and technology events are happening locally over the next two weeks. Rick Karnofsky and Renee Raul join me for the calendar 

Speaker 5:        as part of the second international by annual evolution and cancer conference. USCSF is hosting a free public lecture at 7:00 PM Tonight in the Robertson Auditorium on their mission bay campus. Popular Science Writer Carl Zimmer. [00:22:00] We'll pose the question is cancer or Darwinian demon after his talk science rapper Baba Brinkman will perform selections from the wrap guide to evolution and a preview of his forthcoming rep guide to medicine. For more information, visit cancer dot ucs F. Dot Edu tomorrow. The Science at Cau lecture series will hold it. Student talk, a discussion by the Berkeley Professor [00:22:30] Mariska Craig about the two types of galaxies in the known universe. Well, most consider galaxies as the building blocks of the universe to be incredibly diverse. Professor Creek divides them into two broad types. Those that make new stars and those that don't. Professor Creek will discuss her reasons for making the distinctions and theories over how the differences are originated. The speech will begin tomorrow at 11:00 AM in room 100 of the genetics and plant biology building on the northwest corner of the UC Berkeley campus. [00:23:00] How Lou Longo from the New York botanical garden is giving a three hour introduction to botanical Latin at the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden located at 200 centennial drive on June 22nd learn the names for plants and the way the names are constructed from Latin and Greek. He'll also give simple rules of thumb to pronounce. Plant names with confidence and mission is $30 [00:23:30] register [email protected] June 27th is the exploratorium is Thursday night. Adults only program featuring two physicists discussing the prodigious and 

Speaker 3:        startling theoretical leaps and the epic experimental program that produced the monumental discovery of the Higgs bows on the physicists will be Maria Spira, Pullo Phd and experimental physicist [00:24:00] from Cern and Joanne Hewitt, Phd, a theoretical physicist from Stanford linear accelerator. The 7:30 PM lecture is included with museum admission and we'll have limited seating in the discussion. Spiro Pullo and Hewitt will also explore the implications discovering the Higgs has for future inquiries in physics. Beyond shedding light on the way elementary particles acquire mass, [00:24:30] understanding the Higgs mechanism will likely push the frontiers of fundamental science towards a greater understanding of our universe. June 27th at the exploratorium in San Francisco at 7:30 PM 

Speaker 7:        [inaudible].

Speaker 3:        [00:25:00] The feature of spectrum is to present news stories that we find interesting. Rick Karnofsky and Renee arou present the news. 

Speaker 5:        A team of researchers led by Lawrence Berkeley national labs. Paulo Monteiro has analyzed a slab of concrete that has drifted in the Mediterranean Sea for the past 2000 years. [00:25:30] The ancient Robin's lab proved to be more durable than most of today's concretes as well as more sustainably made. The creation process of modern Portland cement usually requires temperatures of up to 2,642 degrees Fahrenheit and the fossil fuels burned to reach that temperature are responsible for 7% of industry carbon emissions worldwide. The composition of the Roman slab is such that it can be baked at only 1,652 degrees Fahrenheit, [00:26:00] which would require far less fuel making the production of Roman concrete, both greener and glass expensive. The other concrete uses ash from volcanic regions in the Gulf of Naples that can be reacted with lime and sea water to create mortar chemically similar ash known as Paul is on can still be found in many parts of the world today. Well, currently there are a few green concretes that do use ash in their manufacturing process. This lab has provided the industry with concrete proof of the long term performance [00:26:30] of aspace summit. Yeah. The elusive electron orbitals of the hydrogen atom have been observed directly. Anita stir donut at the FLM for atomic 

Speaker 6:        and molecular physics in Amsterdam. Mark Rakin at the Max Borne Institute in Berlin and their colleagues published these findings in physical review letters. On May 20th the team implemented photo ionization microscopy [00:27:00] first proposed theoretically over 30 years ago. They used UV lasers to excite electrons and then Adam placed and then electric field. These photo electrons went through electromagnetic lenses which focused them onto a CCD detector by collecting tens of thousands of electrons. The team map the shape of the orbitals. 

Speaker 5:        This may you see Berkeley's Ecig Museum of entomology opened a new [00:27:30] citizens science project known as cow book. The museum has begun posting high resolution photos of its more than 1 million specimens and accompanying field notes to the cow bug website where anyone with an interest in the bugs can transcribe the original handwritten information about the specimens, origins and collection. The project is an effort to digitize terrestrial arthropod specimen records with a focus on those hailing from California. The cal boat science team will then use the [00:28:00] newly digitized data to assess how insects have responded to climate change and habit modification over time. The museum began a project in collaboration with eight other California museums in 2010 after realizing that cataloging their vast collection would be impossible with their small staff. The resulting website known as notes from nature host the cow book project as well as her Berrien and ornithological collections. Also waiting to be classified. You can take a look@theircollectionsandperhapsstarttranscribingatnotesfromnature.org 

Speaker 7:        [00:28:30] [inaudible] music or during the show was written, produced by Alex Simon [inaudible]. Spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. The link to the archive is incomprehensible, 

Speaker 1:        so we created a short link for you. That [00:29:00] link is tiny, url.com/ [inaudible] spectrum, all one word. That's tiny, url.com/cadillacs spectrum. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l [email protected] 

Speaker 6:        join us in two [00:29:30] weeks at this same time. [inaudible].

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dr. Thomas Immel is Assistant Research Physicist at SSL at UC Berkeley. His expertise is interpretation of remote-sensing data and modeling of physical processes in the upper atmosphere & ionosphere. His work includes UV imaging observations from 4 NASA missions. ICON.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next. 

Speaker 2:        Okay. [inaudible]. 

Speaker 1:        Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews [00:00:30] featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. 

Speaker 3:        Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Today's interview is part one of two interviews with Thomas Emmel and assistant research physicist at the space sciences laboratory at UC Berkeley. In April, 2013 NASA selected the Ayana spheric connection explorer or icon to be the next Helio physics [00:01:00] explorer satellite mission. The icon mission is to be led by the space sciences laboratory at UC Berkeley. Thomas Emal is the principal investigator of the icon mission icon will provide NASA's heliophysics division with a powerful new capability to determine the conditions in space modified by weather on earth and to understand the way space weather events grow to envelop regions of our planet with dense ionospheric plasma. In today's interview, Dr Emel talks [00:01:30] about Helio physics, the space sciences lab, and small cube sets, which are small satellites being built at universities. Here's that interview, Thomas Ml. Welcome to spectrum. 

Speaker 4:        Thank you. Brad, would you give us a short description of heliophysics? Sure. Here's your physics is sort of a new term and it's used at NASA to describe in shorthand the disciplines of solar and space physics. [00:02:00] Together. It's a little controversial because it means solar physics, obviously space physicists and people who studied the upper atmosphere have sort of felt the shift with changing it to solar physics. A lot of focus went to solar physics. I think icon is icon. Our mission that talking about today is shows a, another view of heliophysics or another focus. Can you describe starting at the earth's surface, the concentric layers of the atmosphere and out to [00:02:30] the ionosphere and beyond? Sure, and how do you define a layer of the atmosphere is sort of where you start. What's the answer? The answer is we defined layers of the atmosphere by their temperature profile or how the temperature changes with altitude. 

Speaker 4:        It's as simple as that and so there are specific layers that on average have a temperature profile, one direction or the other. That means as you go up in altitude, does the temperature drop or increase as you leave the surface of the planet and go up and you're [00:03:00] in the troposphere and as you go higher in altitude, the temperature drops. And that has to do with just basic atmospheric physics. And also the fact that the surface of the planet is what absorbs most of the solar radiation. So it's hot and as you move away from that in an atmosphere that gets thinner without the Tude, the temperature drops. So you go all the way up to the top of the troposphere and you end up with the tropopause. So there's fears and pauses and once you cross the tropopause, you're in the stratosphere, [00:03:30] you know the next sphere and there you've know you've crossed it because temperature start to increase with altitude. 

Speaker 4:        And they increased because of the fact that solar radiation is being actively absorbed in that region of space. That's not happening in the troposphere. The troposphere is transparent of visible light, but the stratosphere is starting to absorb solar radiation that is harmful to life, UV. And so the heating that occurs, the ozone that's in the stratosphere absorbs that [00:04:00] radiation and basically cause the cause of that place being much warmer. So when you're in the stratosphere though, you've already above about 90% of the atmosphere. It's all on a troposphere the stuff we breathe. So the stratosphere warms up all the way to the top. You hit the strata pause and then things turn around again. The chemistry that supports ozone does not work in the mesosphere and so you end up starting to drop in temperature again. So just like in the troposphere, the base of the mesosphere is the warm [00:04:30] straddle pause and it gets cold from that point. 

Speaker 4:        And the coldest place in the vicinity of earth is the top of the menopause where those temperatures have been dropping all the way up to the boundary of space up to about 95 kilometers. At that point, you've reached just about the boundary of space and the temperatures turn around again and and warm all the way up into your in space and the, the atmosphere that's left up there, it's called the thermosphere because it's very hot and it's hot again because it's absorbing a different region [00:05:00] of solar radiation, extreme on fire ultraviolet. So again, protecting life on the earth as part of our atmosphere does that in a number of ways. So the thermosphere in that case is also where we find the ionosphere. The thermosphere is hot because the solar radiation is very energetic at that altitude. So energetic that ionizes the gas and that's where you find the ionosphere, you find a layer of plasma density, so ions and electrons [00:05:30] living together in the same place as plasma and that plasma becomes very dense, about 200 to 300 kilometers above the earth. 

Speaker 4:        That's the dentist plasma between here in the sun. It's why you can hear at night radio tear ran from your ham radio set up if people still do that anymore because you're bouncing radio waves off of that and it's why you can hear, you know, I am stations over a long distance too in the daytime, but it's at night. That layer is all by itself hanging around and you can bounce [00:06:00] radio signals off of it. So then you keep going into space and the plasma density is actually dropped, but you are protected still. You don't enter into interplanetary space until you get out of the magnetosphere. And that's where Earth's magnetic field controls the motion of the plasma. And this is all the way out to 30,000 kilometers. And then you hit the bow shock and the end of the magnetosphere at the magneto pause. Everything has to end and you end up in the solar wind. 

Speaker 4:        And that's interplanetary [00:06:30] space to interstellar space. And interplanetary space are two different things. We've never been to interstellar space. We're working on that. Voyager is on its way and there's a constant argument over whether or not it's out there. So the sun constitutes the helio sphere. It constructs the heliosphere by its energy and blowing out, and that's the sphere around our planetary system that we're part of. That's right. And that's where voyagers headed out of. Right, right out of the heliosphere. It's leaving and it's not coming back. [00:07:00] And I forget what star it's headed off to. So Helio physics is the study of plasmas and space plasmas and how they interact with bodies, uh, and interact with important things such as planetary atmospheres. Basically anywhere our star is an influence that can influence the processes that occur there. 

Speaker 3:        Our guest today is Thomas Animal. In the next segment, Thomas Talks about heliophysics discoveries. [00:07:30] This is KALX Berkley. And what have been the big revelation trends 

Speaker 4:        in heliophysics? Well, the first discovery and Helio physics was the fact that we had radiation belts. It was our first forays into space carried instrumentation. And the first few explorers, which we're still part of that line icon mission, is part of the explore line. But the first ones carried Geiger counters out of University of Iowa where Jim van Allen was in [00:08:00] charge of that department. And where they built those uh, experiments that discovered what we call the van Allen belts now. So that was the first discovery was that we had an environment around us in space that was hazardous and we didn't know where that radiation came from. It fill a Geiger counter just to see what was there. And when you found us a lot more radiation than they thought. The solar cycle has influences throughout the heliosphere. A solar storm for instance, can launch a coronal mass ejection. 

Speaker 4:        They say these are the words [00:08:30] that are starting to show up in the common discussion of space, whether it was coronal mass ejections had come with a solar flare and we've timed these things. We see a coronal mass ejection, a very large one cause a massive magnetic storm at earth. And a good time later it flies by voyage here and it hits the heliopause and radio waves are admitted from the helio pause, the boundary of interstellar space and voyager picks them up. And those were some of the first studies of void. You're trying to figure out how close [00:09:00] it was to the heliopause. Where we are now in the past 10 years is what we understand more now than ever. That the forcing of plasma in near a space is controlled to a much larger degree than we ever suspected or dare to think or dare to discuss. 

Speaker 4:        Really it's controlled by conditions in the lower atmosphere and that the atmospheric layers that we've talked about and talked to all the temperature variations that occur, there's processes that carry energy and momentum beyond past [00:09:30] all those pauses and layers straight from the surface to space. And it's actually biggest discovery in Helio physics in the last decade is that this coupling of the terrestrial atmosphere to spaces stronger than we thought. And what is your focus at the space sciences lab? Well, it has been in the upper atmosphere, in the atmosphere, looking at how solar wind energy propagates through the system. Solar Wind, [00:10:00] it impacts or it effects the MAG Nitas fear and the number of ways creates a shape, stretches it out. The magnetosphere is what processes also learned energy that produces the Aurora. The Aurora is energized by the solar wind. All that energy has to get through the magnetosphere and then down into our atmosphere in a number of ways. 

Speaker 4:        So we're interested in how that energy propagates through the system and how it's eventually deposited in our atmosphere. And then also how our atmosphere and the [inaudible] sphere as you energize them and [00:10:30] make them more conductive through ionization by Aurora, how it feeds back through the system. So magnetosphere occurrence is a current system, electrical current that heats the atmosphere and how you turn that current on and off during a magnetic storm. The timing and how processes work together as sort of as an engineering problem is something I've been focused on for the past 10 years. That's changed over the years too. I've been sliding to lower latitudes where the plasma density is actually highest [00:11:00] and it's highest for two reasons. One because the sun is overhead more often at low latitudes and I NYSE in the atmosphere more actively or more strongly, but also because there's magnetic field tends to trap the plasma at low latitudes. 

Speaker 4:        And when I say that the plasma is densest in the atmosphere between here in the sun, it's actually the low latitude ionosphere which has the dense plasma that interacts most strongly with the earth's atmosphere. Um, and we know now that the [00:11:30] energy and momentum that propagates up from the lower atmosphere that a lot of that energy is coming up from low latitudes as well. Cause that's where a lot of the energy goes in and tropical rainforest and in the tropical weather systems that curved from day to day with interesting periodicities. The reason you end up with large coupling from the little atmosphere to the upper atmosphere is because the atmosphere can be caused to move a wave like manner and we call it a tide, just like tides in the ocean. The atmosphere tends to have some [00:12:00] 12 hour, 24 hour period of city. Say you have a planet with the Brazilian rainforest on it and that fires up at two in the afternoon every day, day after day you start moving the atmosphere in a periodic manner and you end up growing these really, really large waves in the atmosphere that propagate up into space. 

Speaker 4:        And so it's the combination of the tropical forcing and the tropical ion sphere, which is dense and captured by the magnetic field really creates this interesting environment and we're a great laboratory [00:12:30] for understanding atmosphere, space coupling. 

Speaker 3:        Yeah. Listening to spectrum, I am k a l x Berkeley. Our guest today is Thomas Emma. In the next segment he talks about solar energy interacting with Earth's magnetosphere,

Speaker 4:        the Aurora [inaudible]. Can you just describe the Aurora for us? The Aurora is a feature of the planet [00:13:00] at high latitudes in the north and the south, the Aurora Borealis of North Aurora Australis down south. What it is, it is light coming from the energization of our atmosphere by space plasma. The Sun obviously has a lot of energy and solar atmosphere is constantly moving out and it's carrying a lot of energy with it. But so that energy arrives at earth as solar plasma blowing past the planet. So those are the energies we're talking about. The magnetosphere as sort of a, [00:13:30] it energizes all of the solar wind particles to higher energies and dumps them into our atmosphere. And the Aurora is what you see when you go out on your deck and Alaska and look up. It's the signature of that process occurring. And when the Aurora's very active, that means that process is very active and there's a lot of energy coming into our atmosphere from the solar wind. 

Speaker 4:        What's great is a Nikon camera has great red response, so you can point your camera to the sky and you can put it to a two second exposure and it will see things [00:14:00] that you can't see with your eyes. Many people now have great auroral imagers in their mitts. They may not even know that they've got that capability. So the waves that are created around the equator in the low latitudes, in thinking about waves on the ocean, they're moving in a specific direction. Are these waves also moving in the specific direction? Are they sort of emanating everywhere? And that's a good question. So the really large scale waves in [00:14:30] the atmosphere, the first thing is to realize that once you've got a wave moving in the atmosphere, there's nothing really to stop it. The waves aren't going to crash on the shore somewhere. They're going to go up and they're going to grow with altitude, their waves, storms derive, and I am talking about the large scale continental scale waves that the wavelength is as large as a continent, at least horizontally, vertically. 

Speaker 4:        There's about 2030 kilometers, but 2030 kilometers is a quarter or a third of the way to space. So they're still large even [00:15:00] though 2030 kilometers doesn't sound that far. In any case, those waves grow with altitude and by the time you get to the edge of space, a wave that might have had a half degree centigrade or Celsius variability to it in amplitude, by the time it gets to the boundary of space and crosses it, it can have an amplitude of 20 or 30 degrees Kelvin or our Celsius. It's the same thing. Uh, it's one way to measure the size of that wave. With that wave also comes a large wind component. The winds, the [00:15:30] motion of the atmosphere is going to go with it. It's this sloshing and the temperature comes from the compression and the expansion of the gas. As the wave moves around the planet, do they go in different directions? 

Speaker 4:        Yeah, we talk about them. We see there's a number of technical terms for the waves. There's eastward and westward traveling waves and some of them are larger than others. This atmosphere supports a couple of waves eastward at a couple of ways, westward more than others. Some of these waves are excited [00:16:00] more naturally than others just because of the source of the excitation, the source of the excitation of the continents. If you look at a map of the earth where lightning occurs on earth, for instance, it's always over the continents because the solar energy is really just being deposited right there at the surface and the atmosphere starts to be put in a motion and the water vapor starts to condense. As the atmosphere rises and you get storms, a tropical rainforest and Africa, tropical rainforests in South America and also a third really large [00:16:30] region of tropical forcing to Southeast Asia. 

Speaker 4:        Those three places on the earth firing off two in the afternoon in the South East Asia than two in the afternoon, Africa, then South American and do that over again every day. It's like a drum head problem, if you know what I mean. If you put a little sand on a drum and you start tapping it in one position, you can form a pattern. You would see where else you could tap it at the same time to reinforce that pattern. Now the rainy seasons of of those different places changes throughout the year. [00:17:00] That's one of the reasons we know it's from the lower atmosphere because we've observed conditions in space that changed with the rainy seasons and there's no reason to have rainy seasons in space. But we do and so we look immediately to where we do have a rainy season, which is in the troposphere. And so the recent developments and numerical model supports the idea that there's a strong connection between the tropic sun conditions and space. 

Speaker 4:        Have you been involved in a lot of past satellite projects at the space science lab or a few [00:17:30] of them? I've been involved in too. Recently icon, which I'm leading and a small satellite re recently completed a flue called cinema that was a student led cubes hat, so a 10 by 10 by 30 centimeter satellite that we built at the lab designed and built. Before that I was analyzing data. I've been spending 10 years analyzing data from missions that we've supported or built and so combining data from a number of [00:18:00] different instruments that space sciences lab has built or satellites that space sciences lab has built. It's been something I've done at the lab, but this is my first time leading a mission. 

Speaker 5:        This is k a l x Berkeley. The show is spectrum. Our guest is Thomas Emma, a physicist at UC Berkeley's space sciences lab. 

Speaker 4:        How has the [00:18:30] cube sat changed the way satellite measurements are made? Well, in some respects that remains to be seen. There's been a number of advances in the capabilities that cubes hats can carry in terms of pointing and power and the instruments have all had to shrink in size as well. But there's a number of capabilities that have grown over the years that allow us to do that. Cell phones have been a big driver and shrinking small processors and getting [00:19:00] into low power processors and communications gear as well. And what's been nice is working with the students here at Berkeley actually. They've had a lot of experience in designing and programming processors for the purposes that we need to fly in space. So there's a number of universities working in this area now and I think they're just getting better. Cinema has been a good experiment for us. 

Speaker 4:        We have four of them in the works this year. There's two Korean cinema. It's going up. [00:19:30] Kate, you young, he university was our partner. There's a lot of interest in supporting keeps that launches at NASA and throughout different government agencies and so you know, we went on a national reconnaissance vehicle, but a, it didn't cost us much. It was fantastic that we had that opportunity and NASA has worked with NRO and other agencies to make this possible for universities to do these. There were a number of university keeps that's on that launch. So these cubes hats that NASA embraces, I guess [00:20:00] that's the only way to get up is NASA says, yeah, this is worth putting up there, or are there now independent ways to get to space? I think NASA is where we'd like to start and that's who we've gone to before. NSF is really the organization that was the first to support a cube type program per se. 

Speaker 4:        And National Science Foundation doesn't have a launch service, but NASA does. So there was a close collaboration early on and some key individuals at NASA Kennedy have taken a remarkable interest [00:20:30] in fostering that program and develop basically what they call a educational launch. Alana was, uh, is the acronym that we went on. Alana. Alana supports a number of, keeps getting into space. You propose to Atlanta, NSF sends them $20,000 or that's it was for us and you get your slot and you get your orbit and you're on orbit for many years. So it's really a great opportunity. So right now it's really good to work with NASA on this, on the cinema [00:21:00] projects. There's quite a bit of student involvement in those. I understand. Can you talk about that? Right. So National Science Foundation supported Space Sciences Labs, cinema project, which is a cube set for high ions, magnetic fields, c I n electrons, it went on it. 

Speaker 4:        It's a great acronym for a very tough thing, but it's a base whether mission, it's to measure the particle environment in space and the magnetic fields. So that was great. You know, we [00:21:30] miss dearly, Bob Lynne, who was the former head of space sciences lab for more than a decade and the principal investigator on one of our explorers Hesi and the principal investigator on cinema, he put that international team together between CUNY University where he was an adjunct professor. We worked with imperial college as well on that mission and they provided the smallest magnetometer have ever seen for a space instrument. It was a high quality, high precision magnetometer, way better than even your iPhone if you can imagine. Also [00:22:00] we had a detector group at LBL and a group providing an electronic part and aces from France. So it was an unbelievable confluence of people and scientific interests that built cinema. 

Speaker 4:        The student aspect was, there were students, uh, from the start in mechanical engineering who really came up with the initial design of a cube sat and it was a couple of masters students, one of whom is still a space sciences lab, David Glaser. And it was great working with the Mechanical Engineering Department [00:22:30] because it was that department of which took the controls problem of how you spin a spacecraft based on inputs from space, the Sun Sensor, we had the magnetometer measurements that you're making. So that was a remarkable achievement. I thought on the mechanical engineering side and working with the electrical engineers, we had a number of cs IEC students as well and really had a good team. They're working on interfacing with the mechanical engineering students who were working on the attitude control or working [00:23:00] with the imperial college students and researchers who were providing magnetometer those a number of difficult tasks that we had some great students come through and everyone got their chance to save cinema. It was a seat of your pants operation. The thing flew and it's functional. We are going to fly the next one with some updates that's gonna work better, so we need more students. The wonderful problem with students is that they graduate to go onto great careers and other places and so we'd like to have those people back. They're not coming [00:23:30] back, so we need to get a new crop of ex students and mechanical engineers and we'll probably be flyering at soda again. 

Speaker 5:        That concludes part one of our two part interview with Thomas Emmylou. Part two will air on 14 in that interview, Dr Hamill discusses icon mission process start to finish. The icon explorer mission website is icon dot s s l. Dot. berkeley.edu [00:24:00] now a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Rick Karnofsky and Renee route 

Speaker 6:        present the calendar this Tuesday, June 4th the San Francisco ASCA scientists lecture series. We'll be hosting a talk by two sides. Officers at the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. You Know Greg Shamor and Kevin Wilson will speak about the potential of stem cell research to help in diseases such as diabetes, spinal cord injury, [00:24:30] heart night disease, and neurological disorders. They will also address the recent restrictions on research and where it is heading today. This June 4th event will be held that the Soma Street food park in San Francisco, the city's first permanent food truck pod. It will begin at 7:00 PM biological anthropologist, Helen Fisher of Rutgers. We'll speak with KQ eds, Michael Krasney about the science of love and attraction. On Tuesday, June 4th [00:25:00] at 7:30 PM at the North Theater in San Francisco, Fisher has written five books on the evolution and future of human sexuality, monogamy, adultery, and divorce, gender differences in the brain, the chemistry of romantic love and human personality types. 

Speaker 6:        And why are we fall in love with one person rather than another? Tickets start at $20 and are available at cal academy. Dot. O. R. G. On Monday, June 10th Brian Day [00:25:30] deleted Lunar Science Institute director at NASA will give a talk about the latest lunar discoveries as litter robotics continue to advance. Our understanding of the moon continues to change. Well, the lunar surface has been previously viewed as a static desert environment. New evidence points to a far more dynamic moonscape than expected. Dr. David will discuss these new discoveries and elaborate on some of NASA's more recent and lunar exploration missions. The event will be held on Monday, June 10th at 7:30 PM in the California [00:26:00] Academy of Sciences. Planetarium. Tuesday we have tickets for the event. Visit the Academy [email protected] the Computer History Museum at 1401 north shoreline boulevard in mountain view is hosting senior vice president and director of IBM Research John Kelly on June 11th at 7:00 PM Museum CEO John Holler, well moderate a conversation with Kelly on topics ranging from his background and the path that led him to IBM. [00:26:30] The history of research there, IBM's Watson and cognitive computing to the newest IBM lab in Nairobi, Kenya. IBM says that Africa is destined to become an important growth market. The company admission is free. [email protected] 

Speaker 7:        [inaudible]

Speaker 6:        [00:27:00] spectrum is to present news stories we find interesting. Rick Karnofsky and Renee arou present. The news engineers at UC Berkeley have created a new hydro gel that can be manipulated by exposure to light alone. The team inspired by plant's ability to grow towards light sources [00:27:30] created their gel by combining synthetic elastic proteins with one cell thick sheets of graphite known as graphene. Graphene generates heat when exposed to light, which can cause synthetic proteins to release water. The two materials are combined to form of hydrogen with one side that is more porous than the other. This allows the material to mimic the way plant cells shrink and expand unevenly in response to light. This hydrogen also shrinks and evenly, albeit more precisely allowing to bend and move solely in response [00:28:00] to light. Create or speculate that the shape changing Gel could have applications in drug delivery and tissue engineering. 

Speaker 6:        Mathematician Tang Jang of the University of New Hampshire in Durham published unimportant number theory proof and this week's issue of angels of mathematics. Yang proved a weak form of the twin prime conjecture and as the first to establish the existence of a finite bound four prime gaps. Prime numbers are natural numbers greater [00:28:30] than one that I have no positive divisors other than one and themselves. Interestingly, many come in pairs that have a difference of two for example, three and five 17 and 19 or 101 and 103 Jang showed that for some integer n that is at most 70 million. There are infinitely many pairs of primes that differ by n. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 5:        [00:29:00] spectrum is archive on iTunes university. Our special link is tiny url.com/k a l ex spectrum. The music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. [00:29:30] Our email address is spectrum dot [email protected] join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible].

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Janet Jansson is the Senior Staff Scientist in the Earth Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Her expertise is in molecular microbial ecology and “omics” approaches with a focus on soil, marine sediment and human gut environments.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next. 

Speaker 2:        Okay. 

Speaker 1:        Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, [00:00:30] a biweekly 30 minute program, bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. 

Speaker 3:        Good afternoon. I'm your host, Brad Swift. Today's interview is with Janet Jansen, UC Berkeley, adjunct professor of molecular microbial ecology. She is a senior staff scientist in the Earth Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and president elect of the International Society of microbial [00:01:00] ecology. Her expertise is in the area of molecular microbial ecology and Omix approaches with a focus on soil, marine sediment and human gut environments. Today she talks about the human microbiome project, the Earth microbiome project and American Gut, a crowdsourced research project. Onto that interview. Janet Jansen, welcome to spectrum. Hi, what'd you give us a short description [00:01:30] of microbial ecology and give some examples of complex microbial communities. 

Speaker 4:        Sure. So microbial ecology is the study of micro organisms in the environment and their interactions with other microorganisms, plants, animals, that particular habitat that they happen to be living in. So it's really not just studying a single microorganism, but a community of microorganisms. Uh, so some examples [00:02:00] of complex communities. Well, the most complex ecosystem is soil and that's because it has such a diversity of microorganisms and it's really packed full of microbes. So there's so many microorganisms living in soil. So that combined with the diversity makes it a very complex system. The human ecosystem is very complex. Our own intestines have a very complex microbial community. [00:02:30] The oceans or other examples, sediments. So I think this is my community college that you had to think differently than one would when you study organisms in pure culture and their physiology is much more complex 

Speaker 3:        and microbial research seems to have jumped in stature in the past few years. You have a broader view of it than I do. What's your take on the trajectory of microbial research? I think 

Speaker 4:        [00:03:00] particularly the microbial ecology part has increased in stature recently. Microbiology as a field has been around for a long time. But the thing that I think has really boosted the field of microbial ecology is the advent of these new technologies, the new tools to be able to really look at these complex communities and understand them. Until I guess it was about the 1980s there wasn't [00:03:30] any way to really look at these micro organisms in soil. Again, I'll use that as an example, unless you cultivated them onto augur media or looked at them in a microscope. So when the field was limited to looking at what was possible to cultivate, that was only a fraction of the microorganisms that live in soil habitat. So probably fewer than 10% could be cultivated. So the majority of the organisms that were there, [00:04:00] nobody knew anything about them. Their identities or their functions were really unknown. 

Speaker 4:        So it was considered like a black box eco system. But after the late, I guess the 80s and into the 90s there were the developments in DNA extraction techniques. So it was possible to extract DNA from soil and then came PCR amplification methods and methods to be able to amplify specific [00:04:30] pieces of DNA that you had extracted that made it possible to actually study soil microorganisms without cultivating them. And now we have these deep sequencing technologies, so it's really made it much easier to do very deep analysis of these communities and not have to rely on cultivation. 

Speaker 3:        The human microbiome project is in its last year. What were the goals of it and can you speak to that about what the goals were and what you think [00:05:00] you've found out? 

Speaker 4:        The first stage of the h and p was to sequence different bodies sites and understand which micro organisms are residing in different sites in the human body. And so this was looking at a large cohort of humans, healthy humans, and just basically understanding who are the microbial inhabitants of the human body. So that part is winding down. We have that knowledge now. We know that there are different micro organisms that live on your skin, [00:05:30] then in in your gut for examples and also in the oral cavity. So these organisms are specialized to live in different parts of the human body and there are differences between different individuals though. So that means that each human has their own individual microbiome and it can almost be used as a fingerprint. So that was a successfully completed project. The next stage there has been a recent call too, I think it's even called h and p two [00:06:00] to go the next step. So to use other kinds of methods to look at not only which microorganisms are there, but what are they doing. So this would be looking at the functional capabilities of the human microbiome. Another thing that is still ongoing with the h and p is looking at how does disease influence the human microbiome and vice versa. What is the correlation with the microorganisms living with us and disease? And it seems like there are many different links between many [00:06:30] human disease that send the human microbiome 

Speaker 3:        [inaudible] [inaudible]. 

Speaker 5:        Our guest today is microbiologists, Janet Jansen. In the next segment she talks about the microbiome and disease correlation. This is k a l x, Berkeley. 

Speaker 3:        Well, and often in science there's a lot of correlation [00:07:00] that goes on and sometimes you get fooled by the correlation. Sometimes you don't. Are there strategies you use in terms of validating what you think correlates? 

Speaker 4:        Oh, correlations are can be quite challenging. Definitely. So, um, that's an interesting question because then one of the things that is very tricky is if you find a difference in an environmental sample, for example, with the civic treatment or in a human with disease often all we have, [00:07:30] we can then say, well it's correlated to this organism that is higher in abundance or it's correlated to this protein that is higher or lower in abundance. That's a little frustrating. So that the next step, and we're not quite there yet in this field, would be then to say, okay, go beyond correlations and then actually do the proof, you know, to take that organism like Cox postulates, you then prove that this correlation that you see is actually [00:08:00] occurring. But it's difficult with these complex samples, like I was saying before, because you have to move away from the complex environment where you have all these different factors. 

Speaker 3:        So the complexity defeats you in a way because you can't isolate the specific from the general. Exactly. Exactly. And so within this correlation of disease, are there particular diseases that seem to be top priorities in a sense or are most likely to be effected by [00:08:30] the microbiome? An example of Crohn's diseases, 

Speaker 4:        Crohn's disease is the example. I would give us a very clear example and also other inflammatory bowel diseases where there has already been established a link between the gut microbiome and the disease. The details are still under investigation, but there is a difference in the micro organisms that inhabit the intestine in individuals that have Crohn's disease compared to healthy. [00:09:00] So that's known. 

Speaker 3:        And is that the case with ulcers as well? Or they were sort of one of the first, it seems that had this association with the microbiome in the gut, 

Speaker 4:        right. So systemic ulcers, there was a Nobel prize awarded for the discovery of [inaudible] go back to Pylori as the cause of ulcers in the stomach. And so that's a good example, this specific microorganism that can contribute to a disease. And then of course a lot of medications were subsequently [00:09:30] developed to dampen hillcoat back to pylori through new research. We know that there is a considerable diversity of microorganisms in the stomach that people weren't aware of before using these techniques and also in your teeth and then in the oral cavity. There's a very large diversity. I should mention that one of the things that is a really hot topic right now is the link between the brain and the human microbiome, including [00:10:00] the gut microbiome because it's known that some of the metabolites that are produced by these intestinal microbes can pass the blood barrier and then migrated essentially in impact the brain, so some current research is looking at the link between autism and schizophrenia, these kinds of things. Then I think that's really interesting. That's one future direction of the field. 

Speaker 3:        The new initiative in brain mapping exactly [00:10:30] now ties that together. That would be great. At least the findings here was just a new funding. 

Speaker 4:        Yeah, I know. I don't know if they've really decided to make that link for funding, but it probably will come. 

Speaker 3:        Can you talk a bit about American gut and how it's set up to help people figure out their own microbiome? 

Speaker 4:        Sure. So the American get is, it's a relatively new way of doing research [00:11:00] is crowdsourcing. And the idea is that if a person such as myself is interested in knowing quip, my gut microbiome is I can pay a small amount, it's like $100 to get my sample sequence. So that is the way that the project is funded. And so this project, it had a funding goal, I think it was $300,000 to be able to launch the sequencing. And so there was the campaign [00:11:30] and it was sent out to the community and through connections such as Facebook and another with this nice little carrot that if you pay $100 you can get your microbiome. And in addition to gut, it could be your skin sample, oral cavity, your pet. And so this idea really caught on and is a good example of crowdsourcing for funding. 

Speaker 3:        And how are people able to leverage that information? [00:12:00] Is there some characterization that you do as well? 

Speaker 4:        The data that they get back is, it's different kinds of information. So first which micro organisms do I have? That's kind of fun to know. It's sort of like 23 and me where you get information back about which genes you have in, which kind of markers for different things. So depending on your microbial community composition, you may have markers that are more indicative of health, certain kinds of diets like [00:12:30] vegetarian or a protein rich diet, even obesity, there's certain microbial indicators of obesity. So that's just interesting. Another thing that is valuable for the consumer, the person who does this is that you can compare your microbiome to everybody else's. It's all anonymous of course. And nobody knows who's this, who's, but you have your own data and can see how your microbiome fits into a pattern. So do you cluster [00:13:00] with obese people or with a disease type microbiome or a certain kind of eating pattern 

Speaker 3:        and are these online tools that you have available through American gut for people to do this kind of characterization? 

Speaker 4:        So the analysis has to be done by the actual scientists that are doing the samples because it's still quite elaborate and involves a lot of bioinformatics. So currently it's not possible [00:13:30] to do a lot of that on your own, but still to get an output, the actual data, the results of the analysis is what the individual can get through this project. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible] you were listening to spectrum on a k a l x Berkeley. Our guest today is Janet Jensen. In the next segment she talks about the earth microbiome project. 

Speaker 3:        [00:14:00] Can you talk a bit about the earth microbiome project and maybe differentiate it from the human project? 

Speaker 4:        Yeah, sure. So the Earth microbiome project, which I'll call the emp, is, um, instead of just looking at humans, it's including basically all of earth. So it has a very lofty goal of understanding earth microbial diversity. That project also relies [00:14:30] on collaborators, so it's sort of a crowdsourcing project as well, but limited to the scientific community. So the way that Earth microbiome project works is if a collaborator has an interesting set of samples, for example, from the deep sea or from Yellowstone hot springs that have the required kinds of environmental data, so Ph, nutrients, things like that. Then they can [00:15:00] send an email to the steering committee and say, well, would this study be of interest to the earth microbiome project to the ENP? And then the steering committee looks through the data and decides whether the environmental data is sufficient and if the samples are filling a hole and providing novel information and if so the samples are accepted and the sequencing is done without any costs to the investigator. That's the win win scenario for the emp [00:15:30] because the investigator does of course provide the funding for the study and collection of the samples and the emp provides the funding for the sequencing. Now the funding for emp is also kind of fuzzy because it's through different kinds of companies that have supported by providing regions or equipment and then in turn they get advertisement through the emp that they're sponsors of the project. And so that [00:16:00] also seems to be quite successful. 

Speaker 3:        And the intent again to build a catalog 

Speaker 4:        basically, yes, to build a catalog to find out who's there and are there patterns. The nice thing about heading samples from so many different disparate environments is that you can see, well does this particular microorganism occur across different kinds of environments or is it really endemic only to one kind of habitat? And if you tweak the environment, [00:16:30] for example, with climate change to have increases or losses of certain members of the community that are predictive, one of the aims is to have something like a Google map and then you can highlight all of this sort of organism type in pink. If you click on a button and see where they are localized around the globe. But then if the climate increases by five degrees, then you can click another button and see what happens. Does that organism increase or decrease there? Does another microbial typing [00:17:00] green become more abundant? 

Speaker 3:        The methods you use that you apply to your research. So often we're results oriented with science or at least to the public, you know, what did you find out? It becomes more important than how did you find it out? Can you give us some sense of your methods to doing the research that you do? 

Speaker 4:        I think that the methods, as I mentioned earlier, that's been a limitation to my particular field, but that [00:17:30] also makes it kind of fun because we're always trying to develop better methods and new methods to be able to investigate these systems. And so it's quite challenging, which is something I like. So the method in my own lab that we're developing are different kinds of what I call omix quoting. Oh, mixed methods. So that's everything from sequencing everything, which would be metogenomic x to extracting RNA and [00:18:00] sequencing that. That would be looking at express genes. That's Meta transcriptomics or extracting all the proteins and looking at that. That would be metaproteomics. You can even do the metabolites metabolomics. So these are the current methods that are stated. The art right now for looking at these kinds of complex communities. 

Speaker 6:        [inaudible] [inaudible] 

Speaker 5:        this is k [00:18:30] a l x Berkeley. The show is spectrum. I'm Brad swift. Our guest is professor Janet Jansen, microbial ecologist at Lawrence Berkeley lab and UC Berkeley. 

Speaker 3:        In your experience working on these large projects and also then working in small projects, I'm curious about the, the idea of big science versus small science. You know, the individual scientists toiling [00:19:00] away versus the big group that gets together and decides what they'll do and [inaudible]. 

Speaker 4:        So personally I, I'm a big science kind of person. I definitely appreciate the value of a small science than I do have some smaller targeted projects. I moved to Berkeley lab about five years ago. I was a professor in Sweden before that and my funding was more individual, smaller projects in Sweden. But uh, one of the reasons I came to Berkeley lab was because of the big team science. I really [00:19:30] like that I'm a super collaborator and I can see the value of having people with different skills working together to tackle some really big problems. [inaudible] 

Speaker 3:        and I suppose the culture then becomes really important to the group, the dynamics, the sharing, the openness. And how does that happen, do you think? Have you seen it work well and work badly? 

Speaker 4:        Oh, it's very important. So you had to choose your collaborations as well and sometimes if they, the dynamics [00:20:00] aren't working, then it might be time to rethink the collaborations and revise it in a certain way. But ideally you have people that are so motivated that they are, I know that start delisting, but in the best case situation you have people that are so motivated towards a specific goal that it works quite well. There is an example of one project that is ongoing right now at the lab. It's called the next generation ecosystem [00:20:30] experiment in the Arctic, which is looking at the impact of climate change on permafrost communities. And that's the big doe funded project that involves probably hundreds of researchers at different laboratories, different doe laboratories and universities that are all focusing on one location in Barrow, Alaska, using all of the different tools available at the national labs and expertise at universities as well. 

Speaker 3:        [00:21:00] And how long has that been going on? 

Speaker 4:        It's been about a year and a half. It's a new project, but I'd like it because it has the necessary funding. Of course, when you spread it out, you know, everybody gets a little chunk of it, but it enables incredible things to be done at that site. It's just so much fun to go to these meetings and hear about the lidar sensing team and the modeling team and the hydrology team with their sleds and the geochemists go [00:21:30] in and my part is the microbial ecology. We get deep cores and we extract DNA and sequence them. It's just really a lot of fun 

Speaker 3:        and there's a lot of emphasis on trying to encourage young people to get into science, technology, math. Is there really an opportunity in this field for, for people? 

Speaker 4:        I have to say that right now it's a huge opportunity and there aren't enough persons educated in this field [00:22:00] to be able to fill these growing companies that are starting up. I'm getting several calls from companies that are asking for postdocs from my lab if they're interested in joining and if I were starting right now as a biologist, I would definitely look into bioinformatics and also the metagenome mix fields because these are the sorts of persons that there aren't that many yet. It's not that widespread yet [00:22:30] and there are companies that really need that expertise. 

Speaker 3:        Would you characterize both of those briefly? 

Speaker 4:        The bioinformatics would be more of generation of software algorithms, ways to look at these big data that are generated from different kinds of biological samples

Speaker 3:        and that might include visualization as well as other normal text output kind of a thing. 

Speaker 4:        Yeah, absolutely. Everything from the database [00:23:00] management to the visualization of the data and things in between. The statistical analysis, that's a huge growth area and I predict this is going to continue because the data is just getting bigger. It's not going away from that a genomics and these other kinds of omix areas. I think that that would also involve some computing skills, but in addition to differentiate it from bioinformatics, more of the combination with lab skill. 

Speaker 3:        [00:23:30] Janet Johnson. Thanks very much for coming on spectrum. 

Speaker 4:        Thank you. I really enjoyed it. 

Speaker 3:        Well, we'd like to mention a few of the science and technology events locally over the 

Speaker 7:        next two weeks. Rick Karnofsky joins me for the calendar. The Saturday the science of cow lecture will be given by Dr Nadir Mirabal Fathi. The lecture is entitled, connecting infant decimal to infinity, the search for dark matter. [00:24:00] He will speak about a new class of elementary particles known as weakly interacting massive particles or Wimps to resolve inconsistencies in our understanding of the nature at both extreme, large and small scales and how they are connected together. He will also explore the experimental efforts to detect these particles. Interest real laboratories. Nadir r Mirabal Fathi earned Phd in elementary particle physics and cosmology at the University of Paris. He did his postdoctoral [00:24:30] studies at UC Berkeley and has been an associate research physicist at UC Berkeley since 2008 the lecture is Saturday, May 18th at 11:00 AM in room 100 of the genetics and plant biology building. Makerfair. The self-proclaimed greatest show and tell on earth is this weekend, May 18th and 19th at San Mateo fairgrounds. 

Speaker 7:        We talked last year with Tony to rose and Michelle, who? Bianca. Two of the founders of young makers about [00:25:00] the maker fair. Find our interview with [email protected] slash calix spectrum one day prices range from $15 to $30. Highlights of this year's maker fair include KQ [inaudible] kitchen sisters with their new radio series, the making of what people make in the bay area and why NASA makers with astronauts, John Grunsfeld, Dennis Bartell's discussing building the new exploratorium, [00:25:30] how to tie a perfect neck tie with Nobel prize physicist Arno Penzias, DIY research with Tekla labs and amazing science. Tornadoes, smoke rings and more. For more information, visit makerfair.com that's maker F A I r e.com the long nose Stuart brand. It's presenting on reviving extinct species on Tuesday, May 21st [00:26:00] at the San Francisco Jazz Center, two Oh one Franklin Street at 7:30 PM tickets are $15 he'll summarize the progress of current de extinction projects including the Europe's Oryx Australia is gastric brooding frog and America's passenger pigeon. 

Speaker 7:        He'll also discuss some of the ancient ecosystem revival projects such as Pleistocene Park in Siberia. New Genomic technology can reassemble the genomes of extinct species [00:26:30] whose DNA is still recoverable from museum specimens and some fossils. Sorry. Jurassic Park fans. No dinosaurs. It is hoped that the jeans unique to the extinct animals can brought back to life in the framework of the genome of the closest living relative. For more information, visit long now.org now Rick Karnofsky and I present to news stories. Alberto Saul from Brown University and colleagues [00:27:00] published an article in science on May 9th that suggests the water that is on the moon came from Earth. The team measured the relative abundance of deuterium that is heavy hydrogen that contains an extra neutron to hydrogen in the water, found in small bubbles of volcanic glass and Melt inclusions in moon rocks. They found the ratio was very similar to the ratio found on earth and from carbonaceous chondrites meteorites that are thought to have supplied [00:27:30] the earth with water. 

Speaker 7:        Higher. Deuterium levels were expected by some who had hypothesized the comments from the Kuyper belt in Oort cloud could have been the source of the Moon's water. If the moon's water did come from Earth, it is likely the earth already had this water when the moon was formed. Some four and a half billion years ago when the earth and another Mars sized planet collided. However, such a collusion may have been hot enough to vaporize the lunar water. There is sir now [00:28:00] debating whether it may have been retained because of the earth's gravity or because the moon shared some of the earth's high temperature atmosphere when it formed pregnant mothers exposure to the flu was associated with a nearly four fold increased risk that their child would develop bipolar disorder in adulthood. In a study funded by the National Institutes of health. The findings add to mounting evidence of possible shared underlying causes and illness processes [00:28:30] with schizophrenia, which some studies have also linked to prenatal exposure to influenza, principal investigator Allen Brown and MD mph of Columbia University says prospective mothers should take common sense preventative measures such as getting flu shots prior to and in early stages of pregnancy and avoiding contact with people who are symptomatic in spite of public health recommendations, only a relatively small fraction of such women [00:29:00] get immunized. 

Speaker 7:        The weight of evidence now suggests that benefits of the vaccine likely outweigh any possible risk to the mother or the newborn. Brown and colleagues reported their findings online. May 8th, 2013 in the Journal of the American Medical Association Psychiatry 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]. The music heard during the show is written and produced by Alex Simon. [00:29:30] Thank you for listening to spectrum. Had comments about the show, please send them to us via email or email address is spectrum dot k a l [email protected] join us in two weeks at this same time.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Steven Glaser is the Intelligent Infrastructure team leader for CITRIS and a Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley. Glaser talks about wireless sensor networks, geothermal energy testing and his earthquake simulation.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next. 

Speaker 2:        Okay. [inaudible] [inaudible]. 

Speaker 1:        [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. 

Speaker 3:        Good afternoon. I'm your host, Brad Swift. Today's interview is with UC Berkeley Professor Steven Glaser. Stephen is a faculty member of the Department of Civil and environmental engineering. He's currently [00:01:00] the intelligent infrastructure team leader for citrus, the center for information technology research in service to society. He has also a distinguished affiliated professor at the Technical University of Munich in Germany. In our interview, Stephen Glaser talks about engineering education, his research and field projects 

Speaker 4:        onto the interview. Steven Glacier, welcome to spectrum. Thank you. Thank you for having me. With increasing frequency, [00:01:30] I hear engineers suggesting that engineering education needs to engage students imaginations and provide more opportunity for them to design and build things from day one when they start an education in engineering. What are your feelings about the future of engineering education? Well, it's in a way, it's two pieces. So what kids aren't doing nowadays is playing with physical things when they're young. So they're not necessarily running around [00:02:00] in the woods with their friends tearing stuff up. They're not working on cars, they're not building radios. So when they want to go out and do things in a laboratory or do things in the field, it's very difficult for, so that would be something good to bring back another hand if they want to do computery things, everything's fine and dandy because they have the experience doing that. 

Speaker 4:        Then my lab, I have my own machine shop. I have a lays and bandsaw and mill and whatnot. I'm lucky to have students. I have [00:02:30] to up now, they're very good machinists, so my students all have to be able to do things with their hands. I've been lucky enough to attract them. Is it too late to sort of introduce that into the curriculum in college as an undergraduate? Would engineering benefit from a studio? Oh, I think it would, and I think you're starting to see that. I guess it's the maker movement. It's sometimes called our dean. Sastry is very into that now and do you feel that a unconventional 

Speaker 3:        [00:03:00] path to becoming an engineer as an advantage 

Speaker 4:        in a way, but it's not cost effective? Everybody has an unconventional path. I think you'd gain a lot. I think you see engineering more broadly and I think we see different types of solution. With a broader background, 

Speaker 3:        how would you characterize the conventional path in engineering? 

Speaker 4:        The conventional path would be somebody who you know who's good in math and science. Hopefully [00:03:30] somebody who was interested in things and they've taken math and science in high school. They'd come in, they'd do their engineering, which is quite focused because we have so much to learn and go off to work and they're going to be better at certain things. When I finished high school, I was going to go off to become a philosophy major, which I did. I didn't take math senior year. I didn't need it. I was going to be a liberal arts students, so the students that [00:04:00] do have this better background, they're always going to be better than math than me because they learn the fundamentals. When they were young, instead of me having to pick it up when I was 30. 

Speaker 3:        Your path, the choices you made going into philosophy and then pretty radically altering even from that into being an operations engineer. How were you thinking about engineering at that point? 

Speaker 4:        I'd never followed a path. I kind of followed what I was interested in and [00:04:30] things led to another. So I always read from a very, very young age and you know, literature, technical pieces. I always worked on things, whether it was building models when I was very young or go carts, fixing cars and whatnot. So I'm always was a very good mechanic, studied philosophy and that whole time I was working construction. I got an operating engineer's union and while I was still in college, so I went through the apprentice program. They're learning [00:05:00] to operate heavy equipment, fix heavy equipment, then worked as a driller for about eight years. So I goes fixing things, working with soils. Then I worked for a year in Iraq. My boss there, uh, had a background of being a operating engineer and then going to school and him and his wife talked me into, oh, you need to become an engineer. 

Speaker 4:        And I don't know, one thing led to another and here I am. I never planned on being a faculty member. In fact, when I finished [00:05:30] my phd I didn't want to be a faculty member. Pieces just happened. And here I am at Berkeley. What sort of drilling were you doing? A, we are drilling deep foundations, so uh, might be a five foot diameter hole, a hundred foot deep, which we then use for foundations, for buildings, for retaining walls, for subway excavations of subway stations. I did a lot of work on the red line in the subway in Washington DC. 

Speaker 5:        [inaudible]

Speaker 6:        [00:06:00] our guest today is Stephen Glaser and the next segment he talks about two of his research projects, one in the lab and one in the field. This is k a l X. Berkeley. 

Speaker 4:        Can you give us an overview of your research? We have a number of projects [00:06:30] different yet they have some fundamental similarities. One of the projects laboratory earthquakes. I designed and make a particularly fine nano seismic sensor. So I can measure displacements down to a pico meter that's tend to the minus 12th is very, very small and I can measure signals that accurately for very wide frequency band from about 10 kilo hertz to two megahertz. So I got like the ultimate seismometer. [00:07:00] So then I can set up experiments in the lab where I can control the geometry. So I know all the mathematical descriptions of the system. I have my perfect sensors, I can load in conditions that I know what's going on. And then when I pick up the signals from the small earthquakes we, cause I can start looking at very small details like what are the little motions that lead up to large sliding. 

Speaker 4:        So I have a block of plexiglass on a very big plate of plexiglass. [00:07:30] So my earthquake is when the whole block moves. But something has to happen before we get frictional movement. And I believe you keep looking small and smaller. You have these small little contact disparities. You have to have little pops at these small areas. And then when do you get a chain reaction? Each pop releases a little energy to the contacts around it and you know at some magic point, enough energies released that all the contacts start popping and you [00:08:00] get an earthquake. And from the lab to a real world setting, how are you translating that kind of work into something that could be in the field? Good question. And it's not universally accepted that material we're using, we're not using rock, we're using plexiglass, but at the stresses we're working with at models ductal rock very well. 

Speaker 4:        So rock that might be on parts of the San Andreas. There's theories [00:08:30] and lots of work that shows that the way the geometry of contacts is fractal, so it scales self similarly, so might surface on a small slider block actually can scale in terms of geometry to a very large fault. We just had a paper in nature that certain earthquakes have lots of high frequency shaking, so the ground shakes more rapidly. The higher frequencies are more dangerous because it reaches, the [00:09:00] resonant frequency is structure. So there's more damage to Hoku. Earthquake was particularly rich and high-frequency. How do you explain it? So my student had some ideas and it turns out it has to do with how long the fall teals between earthquakes. So we could show the mechanism, the lab, the mechanism to fields and now we have an explanation of what's going on in the field instead of strictly an observation. 

Speaker 4:        But I can control things in the laboratory and see that yes, it was due to this [00:09:30] factor. So the healing is the time between earthquakes when the stasis is stable, right? Cause the surfaces, chemical reactions, they start to melt together on some level. Even simply putting a block on a table, the longer it sits, the frictional resistance does go up because it's chemical reactions that are giving us a sheer strength. And then some of your other research, [00:10:00] a big project looking at snow hydrology and the Sierras. This important because the state gets about 65% of the water from snow in the Sierras. And it turns out we don't know beans about how much snow is in the Sierra. So you have Frank Gerkey goes out a few times in the winter. He goes to let's say 40 sites and the Sierra sticks this pole in the ground and that really isn't giving us much information about how much snow there is. 

Speaker 4:        So what we do is we go into a basin, [00:10:30] we'll pick a patch, approximately a square kilometer, put in let's say 20 sensing stations, each one measuring snow depth, temperature, humidity, solar radiation, soil moisture at four depths in the soil and matrix suction at four depths in the soil. We report back the data every 15 minutes. And then we might put like an American river basin, which we're working on now. We'll have 18 such [00:11:00] networks right across the basin and we end up with the network of networks. So each of these local networks sends back to our selves here. They're by cell phone, modem, or satellite modem. The data will come back here. So then you can correlate all that and create real time. We have real time data and our application we're working on now is hydroelectric generation. So we're working with the state, [00:11:30] with the Department of Water Resources. Uh, we're starting to work with PG and nee and southern California Edison. 

Speaker 4:        On doing demonstration projects and ultimately then with the success of these, you would want to see this proliferate across the Sierra. So then I'll do the whole Sierras and we'd like to take these pieces and make a larger system, which would be a water information system for the state where we would also bring in groundwater information around water, isn't it regulated and we [00:12:00] know really little about the ground water situation, but the general project would be through citrus, our center for information technology research for the interest of society. That's one of the CIS psi four centers that were started by Grey Davis and were interdisciplinary in the building. We have people from law, from art production, from various engineering, all working together, sitting together to look at societal problems. And part of the goals [00:12:30] of the CIS PSI institutes, the four across the state is to take the knowledge from campus and put it in a form that it will help the financial wellbeing of the state and the physical wellbeing, emotional wellbeing, the state 

Speaker 7:        [inaudible]. You're listening to spectrum oil expert. [00:13:00] Our guest today is Stephen Glaser. In the next segment, he talks about his geothermal project. 

Speaker 4:        Let's talk a little bit about your geothermal research you're doing and Oh, we have an interesting experiment because we can blow ourselves up. First, we'll start with the idea of enhanced geothermal systems. So we usually think of a geothermal [00:13:30] system like that, the geysers up by Santa Rosa where there's natural water and you stick a straw on the ground and steam comes up and runs your generator. But that's exceedingly rare. I think that geysers might be the only field in the world that's making profit without any kind of subsidy. So what we do have as lots of hot, dry rock, there's hot rock everywhere. So the ideas, you would drill two wells, you would connect them through fractured rock, you'd [00:14:00] pump cold water down one well, push it through the fractured hot rock and pull hot water out of the other and make a cycle. Run that through the generator, then pump it back down. 

Speaker 4:        There's been a lot of work. We're slowly moving towards that becoming a reality. But there's this idea that you could use super critical CO2 so that CO2 under very high pressure, that it's not quite a liquid. It's not quite a gas, but it has good heat carrying capacities, but very low [00:14:30] friction, very low. A Dutch would say viscosity cause it's a fluid. However, nobody has done any measurements with the heat capacity, the state behavior of super-critical CO2 going through hot pours media. So that's what we're doing. The models show one thing, but is it true? We're running experiments in the lab and we can go up to 5,000 PSI pressure and 200 degrees centigrade. So fairly extreme conditions. [00:15:00] We run the Sea of two through a pressure vessel filled with sand and then the vessels heated and we can do all sorts of measurements inside, outside the vessel. 

Speaker 4:        The volume flowing through the mass, flowing through how the heat is taken from the sand into the fluid as it moves through the column. And we can then verify the models, help the modelers improve their program. And we've just written a paper where what we noticed [00:15:30] is that there's a change in the conductivity of the CO2 as it changes temperature that's large enough that it causes problems in the model because the model doesn't take it into account. So this will give us a more realistic view, whether the scheme actually is so much more efficient than using water. Now that we're talking about geology, do you have any comments about fracking? It's become sort of the controversy does your, yeah, I think the New York Times [00:16:00] is kind of responsible for that in and of itself. Fracking's just fine. I think what we've seen with gas production, there's a loophole in the EPA laws and in a lot of states they're very strict with fracturing for oil production and you don't hear horror stories about oil production fracturing and has done all the time. 

Speaker 4:        So the gas, the problems is that they don't take proper care with the fracking fluid. They're not careful with how they cement in their pipes. [00:16:30] A variety of pieces like that. So it's the way the operations are done. It isn't inherently a problem with fracking. And by being careful, you're probably meaning spending money to do it right. Money. Right. And that's the motivation to do it haphazardly is you can do it cheaply, right? Cause in, in the end you need to do something with the fracking fluid and if you just dump it on site, that's obviously cheaper than trucking it away and treating it. If you think about it, the fractured you're growing or [00:17:00] on the order of meters, tens of meters, and they're taking place a kilometer deep, they are not affecting the surface, they're not effecting the awkward aquifers. The problems would be that the pipe which you're pumping the pressurized fluid down, if there's leaks there that would affect the near surface water, you're pulling the gas out. 

Speaker 4:        Well, if the pipe isn't cemented in very well, then you would have leakage of gas, but it can be done totally safe. So it's really a matter of getting the regulation right and getting the [inaudible] in place [00:17:30] and right, exactly. That's the physical makeup of the shale. Make the fracking process, uh, do you need to be more cautious in that environment or there are some side effects to that that don't happen in other geological formations. Each formation is going to be different. What you would watch out for in your design and operation in general, you know, if we leave out the poor operation is that you don't want to damage your petroleum reservoir. So think [00:18:00] of it as a layer of rock that has the gas and then you'd have a cap and then a cap beneath it. And if you run your fractures through your cap, then you might lose your natural gas to some other formation. The chance of it going kilometer and a half to the surface is pretty insignificant. And from a given fracture, there isn't that much gas coming out anyway. You've got to have lots and lots of fractures because shales pretty well in permeable. That's why we thought we'd never get any [00:18:30] kind of patrolling production out of the shales. 

Speaker 5:        [inaudible]

Speaker 6:        Mrs KALX Berkley, the show is spectrum. Our guest is professor Stephen Glazer, the civil environmental engineer 

Speaker 4:        [00:19:00] with smart infrastructure, kind of a focus of citrus. Is there growing concern that the internet is being seen as not so secure? There's a tremendous amount of work being done now on, on cyber security. One way around it might be to have, you know, like a private internet cause actually to have communication system with let's say water and [00:19:30] power utilities. There is no reason to also be able to access Facebook off of that. In a way. Our telephone system is a pretty complex system, wide ranging system that is much more secure. So the military has their own system but does lots of work being done on that. We're not worrying about it. We can use, you know, the encryption that's available now. Uh, does it mean that the Chinese government can't hack it? Yeah, of course they can, but they don't care how much [00:20:00] snow is at big creek. 

Speaker 4:        If the Internet becomes a means for people to do political action by denial of service and then everybody's kind of shutdown, slowed down, right. Things aren't operating. That's the more broadly based concern that I would hope is being worked on. But you're pulled in two directions cause one by making the Internet so democratic and open, it's open to people who want to make mischief as well as people who want to use it legitimately. [00:20:30] You know, the more freedom you have, the easier it is to take advantage. And you kind of then have to say, well yeah, like our legal system, it's worth a couple of guilty people getting away with a crime than having an innocent person go to jail. So I think a society, we have to decide where we want to be on this and it's certainly not an easy question to look at. 

Speaker 4:        Is there anything that I haven't asked you about that you want to talk about? Oh, maybe the fine quality [00:21:00] of our students here at cal. I think we sometimes forget, but then I talk with friends at other schools and it's pretty amazing with the quality of people we have here and it makes my life tremendously easier. What is it about the students that you uh, notice in terms of their capabilities or their personalities? They're really interested in what they're doing. They're interested in understanding what they're doing. They're interested in doing new things. They're interested [00:21:30] in enhancing knowledge and they're interested in working hard. Sounds like a, a good environment to be a teacher. Your teaching responsibilities are what now? I teach a graduate class on sensors and signal interpretation. I teach an undergraduate class on geological engineering. Great. Stephen Glaser. Thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Brad, thank you for having me. 

Speaker 7:        Aw. [00:22:00] Oh, spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. We have created a short leap to the spectrum Harker type, tiny url.com/kalx spectrum. That's tiny URL, [inaudible] dot com [00:22:30] slash Calex spectrum. A feature of spectrum is to present new stories we find interesting. 

Speaker 3:        Rick Karnofsky and I present the news nature news reports that UCLA Chemistry Professor Patrick Heron well stand trial for three counts [00:23:00] of violating health and safety standards over the 2008 death of one of his research assistants. She heard Bono songy suffered third degree burns after the term butyl lithium. She was drawing from a vial caught fire. She was not wearing a lab coat. Heron could face four and a half years in jail. The UC regents made a plea agreement for their own role in the accident last year. President of the Laboratory Safety Institute, Jim Kauffman, because the case [00:23:30] a game changer that will significantly affect how people think about their responsibilities. fuse.org reports a study that began during the postdoctoral work of northern Arizona's universities. Gregory Cup Barrasso is shedding light on how adults and their dogs and kids share a microbial communities cup. RSO and assistant professor biology says, what we've been learning is the microbial communities that live in and on our [00:24:00] bodies can play a big role in our health. 

Speaker 3:        What was exciting about this study was how cohabitation effected microbial communities. It's a unique data set. We all have bacteria in our digestive tract, but cup RSO explained that while any two humans are 99% identical in their genomes, their gut communities of bacteria may be up to 50% different. It's those differences that interest researchers who seek to link them to the origins of obesity, malnutrition or [00:24:30] even colon cancer cup also asks what factors are driving the difference between the microbial communities in my gut and your gut? This study was an attempt to see if who you're living with is one of the factors. As it turns out, individuals from the same household, particularly couples, share more of their microbiome than they do with other individuals, and having a dog resulted in an even greater similarity because of shared contact with the animal 

Speaker 7:        [00:25:00] [inaudible]. No. We also mentioned a few of the science and technology [00:25:30] events happening locally 

Speaker 3:        for the next two weeks. Rick Karnofsky joins me for the calendar later today. Physicist Fabiola is your naughty co-discoverer of the Higgs Boson at the large Hadron collider in Geneva, Switzerland. We'll deliver a free public lecture titled the Higgs Boson and our life. The talk is part of a three day celebration of the work of University of California Berkeley physicist Bruno's Zunino, whose theory of supersymmetry [00:26:00] has emerged as a possible explanation for the number and variety of fundamental particles seen in nature. That's today, Friday, May 3rd 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM at the Chevron Auditorium International House, 2199 Piedmont Avenue in Berkeley spectrum airs at the same time as NPR is science Friday and we thank you for choosing us. But next week you'll have two chances to catch their team in the bay area, the [00:26:30] Jasper Ridge biological preserve and celebrating their 40th anniversary science. Fridays I ref Lado. Well discuss reviving the science statecraft dialogue with professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies at Stanford Christopher field, cofounder of method Adam Lowry and Noah director Jane Lubchenco. 

Speaker 3:        On Thursday May 9th at 5:30 PM this event takes place at the Synnex Auditorium, six for one night [00:27:00] way in Palo Alto. Then on Friday, May 10th there will be a live broadcast of science Friday at 10:00 AM at the lead ka-shing center at Stanford. These events are free, but will be first come first serve for details. Go to j r DP. Dot stanford.edu best selling author Mary Roach returns to the bone room, presents for a talk in signing of her latest book, Gulp Adventures on the elementary [00:27:30] canal in Gulp, America's funniest science writer. So says the Washington Post takes us down the hatch on an unforgettable tour of our insides. That's Thursday, May 9th 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM it's a free event at the bone room. 1573 Solano avenue in Berkeley. Wonder Fest is having a free event, the Soma Street food park, four to eight 11th street in San Francisco. [00:28:00] On Tuesday May 14th at 7:00 PM Elliot portrait professor of astronomy and physics at UC Berkeley. We'll be discussing the modern origin story from the Big Bang two habitable planets. He'll describe how the university evolved from its smooth beginnings to its current chunky state. Emphasizing how gravity reign supreme and builds up the planets, stars and galaxies required for biological evolution. [00:28:30] Visit Wonder fest.org for more Info. Science at the theater presents eight big ideas. Eight Berkeley lab scientists present eight game changing concepts in eight minutes each. That's Monday, May 13th 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM at the Berkeley Repertory Theater, 2025 Addison Street in downtown Berkeley. This event is free. 

Speaker 7:        Okay. 

Speaker 3:        [00:29:00] The music heard during the show is written and produced by Alex Simon 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

Speaker 8:        Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is [inaudible] spectrum dot k a l [email protected] join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible].

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Paul Piff, social psychologist and post-doc scholar in the Psychology Dept at UC Berkeley, studies how social hierarchy, inequality, and emotion shape relations between individuals and groups. Paul Piff received PhD in Psychology from UCB May 2012.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

Speaker 1:        Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k [00:00:30] a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. 

Speaker 3:        Good afternoon. My name is Brad swift and I'm your house today. In today's interview, Renee Rao and I talk with Paul Piff, a social psychologist and postdoctoral scholar in the psychology department at the University of California, Berkeley. Paul's studies house, social [00:01:00] hierarchy, inequality and emotion shape relations between individuals and groups. Paul piff received his phd in psychology from UC Berkeley in May, 2012 onto the interview. Paul Piff, welcome to spectrum. Thanks so much for having me on. It's a pleasure. I wanted to have you talk about your research. Psychology is such a big field. How does your research fit into that? 

Speaker 4:        Psychology is a big field. Lot of people are psychologists center interested in a lot [00:01:30] of different questions as they relate to people and organisms and why different kinds of organisms do the things that they do. The brand of psychology that I'm really interested in is called social psychology. So what I do is as opposed to having people lay on a couch and talk to me about their problems, I study what people do around others in the reasons for what they do. So I study emotion. That's one of the focuses of my work. I've also recently gotten really interested in [00:02:00] the effects of inequality and specifically how a person's levels of wealth and status in society shapes the ways that they see the world and behave toward other people. As a social psychologist, you take a question that's of interest to you, like how do the rich behave compared to those that are poor. And then you think about how you would design experiments in different kinds of studies to look at that using a very quantitative approach. So as a social psychologist, I design a lot of studies where people literally [00:02:30] come into the lab. There's something happening where I can observe what they do without their necessarily knowing, and I use that to infer basic motivations behind people's behavior. 

Speaker 3:        Can you explain then some of your methods, maybe an example of how you're set up 

Speaker 4:        study, study. So a lot of the work that I've been doing relates to this basic question of how money shapes behavior. So how do people who have a lot of money behave differently toward others from those who don't have [00:03:00] as much money? One of the things that I was interested in studying for example, is how does the amount of money that you have shaped how generous and helping you are toward other people. In social psychology, we call that general category of behavior, pro social behavior or altruism. What makes people behave in ways that help another person out, even if that means they have to do something kind of costly. So let's say I'm interested in looking at levels of generosity, a lot of different ways in which people can be generous toward one another in everyday life. [00:03:30] But I want to study this in the lab. 

Speaker 4:        And so one of the ways that we can do that is using a standard task where we can have someone engage in it and see how generous they are. And one of the tasks that I'll use is called the dictator task. And for instance, in one study in this dictator task, I give someone literally $10 and I say, you can keep all these $10 10 single dollar bills or you can decide how many of these dollar bills you want to give away, if any, [00:04:00] to another person who's totally anonymous that you've been paired with in this study. And I tell them they'll never meet this other person, the other person will never meet them. And I just measure how many of those dollars they're willing to give away. Another thing I do before they come into the lab is measure what their income is. So I can look at how generous they are, how many of these single dollar bills they're willing to give away as a function of how much money they have. 

Speaker 4:        And that's one of the assessments that I used in one area of study to look at levels [00:04:30] of giving levels of generosity in the simple task as a function of how much money people have. So there's rational economic models that would say that if you have a lot of money, that the utility of those $10 is somewhat diminished because you have more money in the first place. So you would predict that as a rational actor, a person who has more money is going to give more money away cause $10 means less. That's the opposite of what we find. In fact, people who make under $15,000 [00:05:00] a year give significantly more on average six to $7 away then to someone who makes 150,000 to $200,000 a year. So we found incredible differences. And so a lot of my work over the last five or six years, and this is in collaboration with other people in my lab, is to try to document why it is that these really notable differences emerge between the haves and the have nots and what the psychological underpinnings of those differences are. But that's an example of a kind of study that will run 

Speaker 2:        [00:05:30] [inaudible]. Our guest today is Paul Piff, a social psychologist. Paul is talking about how he designs his research studies. This is k a l X. Berkeley. 

Speaker 5:        I have a question about the dictator test. Do you find any sort of other correlating variables in between just wealth and lack of [00:06:00] wealth? Do you find education has difference or how people made the wealth? Can you draw a sort of a causal line between saying this person has more and this makes them less empathetic or this person being less empathetic maybe has led to them being wealthier? 

Speaker 4:        The dictator task has been used a lot and there are a lot of correlating variables that we know about already. Age correlates, religion correlates, ethnicity correlates, and so if I'm interested in the specific effects of wealth, I have to [00:06:30] account for those other things and I do so controlling for a lot of other variables. Wealth above and beyond a person's race, their age, what religion they are, how religious they are in the first place. Wealth has a specific effect, but the question that you're getting at I think is a even bigger one, which is how do I know whether it's wealth that causes someone to do something or is it people that are say a little more selfish with their money, who become wealthy in the first place? [00:07:00] And that is a really important question. And I think one of the insights that we've had from a lot of the experimental work that we've done, I can literally take someone whose quote unquote poor, make them feel rich and show you that making them feel wealthy temporarily in the lab actually makes them behave more unethically, which suggests that there's at least in part a causal direction between having money, feeling like you have money and that subjective experience. 

Speaker 4:        It's psychological [00:07:30] experience causing you to behave in some ways that are a little more entitled, a little more self-serving. Now there's an another important question, which is if these differences do exist between those that have and those that don't, are they fixed? Are they rooted? Is that just a fact of life that we have to accept and sort of move on from, or are they sensitive to changes and if they are, what are the kinds of things that you can do to move people's behavior around or to make certain people in society a little more empathetic [00:08:00] without necessarily getting into the details? There are a lot of things that can be done in a lot of my work looks at specific variables that you can manipulate, even through subtle interventions that get people who had a lot more money to behave in ways that are a lot more compassionate and a lot more empathetic. And one of the lessons that I've learned from this work is that it's not that difficult. So it's not that people who have money or necessarily corrupt in any way, but that there's a specific psychological experience associated with privilege [00:08:30] that gets you to become a little more disconnected from others. A little more insular from others in that certain patterns of behavior flow as a result, but those patterns can easily changed. 

Speaker 5:        Can we talk about some of the tweaks that you use to sort of bring about those changes? 

Speaker 4:        Sure. One of the things that I'm really interested in right now is if it's the case that upper status individuals are more likely to behave unethically, then what are some subtle interventions that could be [00:09:00] done? Like a little ethics reminder course at the beginning that, so I've run this where I basically had people do sort of a 10 minutes ethics training program where I remind them about some of the benefits of the rules and how cooperating with others can ultimately bring about gains for the whole group, including yourself. And I see how that basic values intervention changes their patterns of unethical, the downstream. But now in one of the studies that I ran, I just wanted to look at helping behavior. [00:09:30] What makes a person want to help out another? So in this study, the way that I designed my test was I had one group of participants sitting in the lab and about 15 minutes into the study, it's the room bursts. 

Speaker 4:        Another person. Now this is appearing visibly distressed. They're worried, they're sweating, they're anxious, they apologize for being late, and they introduce themselves as their partner in the study. Now there is an experimenter standing there who says, it's so great that you're late. Why don't you go ahead and see yourself in this other room? [00:10:00] And they turn to the participant and ask the participant if they'd be willing to give up some of their own time to help out this other person who would otherwise have to stay on for a lot of extra time to complete all of the tasks that they need to complete. And so that's our measure of helping behavior. How many minutes people are willing to volunteer to help out this other person who's actually a confederate. There's someone we've trained to be late to appear distressed, et cetera. They're an actor. All right. 

Speaker 4:        So in one condition we find that Richard people give [00:10:30] way fewer minutes than poor people paralleling all the other results. But we had this other condition that I think is really revealing in that condition. Before they received in the lab about 15 minutes earlier, they watched a 46 second long video. And in that video, it was just a quick little reminder of the problems of childhood poverty. And it was a video that we'd designed to elicit increased feelings of compassion. Now, in that group, 15 minutes later, when [00:11:00] the people who had seen that video were sitting in a lab and we're introduced to that confederate and asked if they'd be willing to help them out, there were no differences between the rich and the poor in our study. So essentially that quick little reminder of the needs of others made wealthier people just as generous of their time to help out this other person as poor people suggesting that simple reminders of the needs of other people can go a long way toward restoring that empathy gap. And so the interesting question [00:11:30] to me is what are the ways in which in everyday life we can remind even those in the upper echelons of society, of the needs of other people in the small benefits that can be incurred through small and even sometimes trivial acts of kindness toward another person. 

Speaker 4:        You are listening to the on k 

Speaker 2:        a l x Berkeley. Our guest today is Paul. Pissed in the next second [00:12:00] he talks about his collaboration with Facebook. [inaudible] 

Speaker 5:        try not to talk about how psychology seems to be a field that's accessible, not only in terms of mechanics and just finding the work, but also more understandable for a layman or for everyday people. Then most sciences, I think it's one of the most popular majors in colleges across the u s and can you sort of talk about the broad appeal that psychology has and why you think that might [00:12:30] be? I think 

Speaker 4:        that observation rings true. I think psychology is something that's accessible and that that accessibility and the understandable illness of the content is what makes it kind of relatable and popular in the kind of work that we do. It's a positive and a negative. So what I mean by that is everyone who's engaged with others or interacted with others who are, has a sense of how people behave is a, an intuitive psychologist. We're all psychologists. [00:13:00] We all make decisions based on what we think is gonna make us happy. What's gonna make others happy? What's the kind of relationship that's meaningful to me? We all run these kinds of experiments. In fact, the life is sort of like a psychological experiment to run on a single person, 5 billion people at a time or whatever the population of the earth is. So we're all intuitive psychologists. But what that means is for the work that we do, if we find something or generate a finding, it's either obvious. 

Speaker 4:        So someone could say, Oh yeah, you had to run a study [00:13:30] to do that. I've known that all along. Or if it doesn't conform to your worldview, you're wrong. You've run the study incorrectly. So the question is, are we actually convincing people or revealing new insights about how the mind works to others such that our awareness and understanding of psychology is increasing? Or are we simply just telling people what they knew all along or telling them things that they feel like is just flat out wrong? And that's something that I've wondered about myself. To what extent our findings are convincing people or informing people of things that they don't [00:14:00] intuitively experience in their everyday lives. 

Speaker 5:        Do you want to talk about what you're doing with Facebook? I know you're, yeah, we can talk about Facebook in an ongoing collaboration with Facebook. So maybe you should tell us a little bit more about that 

Speaker 4:        with Facebook. Dacher Keltner, who's a psychology faculty member here at Berkeley and Amelianna, Simon Thomas, who's the science director of the greater good science center, also at Berkeley, and I have been working with a team of engineers [00:14:30] at Facebook to put very, very simply make Facebook a more compassionate place. Now, when we started working with Facebook about 12 months ago, that was what was post to us. Help us make Facebook a more compassionate place. What does that mean? How do you do that? Well, what's become clear to me is that there are a lot of opportunities on Facebook and elsewhere to build little tools to make interactions between people and online. A little more sympathetic and a little more empathetic. [00:15:00] So here's an example. A lot of people on Facebook post photos. What that means when photos are getting posted is that there's the possibility that you're going to encounter a photo that you don't like. 

Speaker 4:        And what Facebook found was that people were encountering these photos and just submitting reports to Facebook saying, hey, there's something seriously wrong with this photo. Facebook needs to take it down. And more often than not, people were reporting photos that had been posted by a friend of theirs. Very rarely do these reported photos actually violate [00:15:30] Facebook's terms of services. So Facebook can't do anything about it. And what we thought and what we've done is in the context of a photo being posted that you don't like, maybe this is a photo of your child that you think shouldn't be up at violates your privacy. Maybe it's a photo of you at a party in a some kind of revealing pose that you think is embarrassing. It doesn't really matter. But what we've done is tried to, for instance, give people tools to express why that photo is problematic, not to Facebook but to the person who posted [00:16:00] it. 

Speaker 4:        And so now there's a series of things that pop up on the site. If you're having a problem with something that someone's posted that basically gets you to think about your experience, be a little bit mindful about the feelings that you're experiencing and be a little more mindful in how you express those feelings to the other person. That puts the photo up and when we just looked at the data recently, what we found is that by identifying the particular reason why you're finding that photo problematic and expressing that to the other person gets [00:16:30] them to be a lot more empathetic, a lot more sympathetic and really importantly a lot more likely to take the photo down. So we're actually trying to resolve disputes and conflicts on Facebook and there are a lot of other directions that this work is taken. We're dealing with bullying with the team at Yale, we're doing all sorts of other things that basically relate to what makes people get along or not get along in an online context. 

Speaker 5:        I think the other question that I was trying to get at but didn't quite get to is how you think interactions [00:17:00] on platforms like the Internet, if they are fundamentally different than people interacting face to face or in a laboratory and why you think that might be the case? 

Speaker 4:        Yes. What I mean by that is there's no single answer to the question and I think it's too early to tell. I think that online interactions are expressions of fundamental psychological tendencies, much like real world interactions are. So I don't think that things unfolds [00:17:30] online that wouldn't unfold in the real world, but does that mean that certain things are going to be accentuated or emphasized or magnified in an online setting? I think that's true as well. So I think online interactions are a certain kind of context where dynamics and fold that aren't fundamentally different from other kinds contexts in everyday life, but in which you might see certain kinds of patterns emphasized or magnified. 

Speaker 2:        [00:18:00] This is k a l x Berkeley. The show is spectrum. Our guest is Paul Piff, a social psychologist. 

Speaker 4:        Do you see a future in collaboration between brain studies and psychology? Absolutely. So that that future is now, I think a lot of psychologists who [00:18:30] incorporate brain imaging and brain data, FMR data into their papers, into their studies. This is the direction that even my work is beginning to move into. So I feel like the opportunities for collaboration are definitely there and in fact they're unfolding now. There's a lot of neuroscience that's less interested in quote unquote psychology and more interested in say biology, but there's a lot of social neuroscience, a lot of brain research that's done that's specifically motivated and [00:19:00] oriented around understanding why people feel the things that they do. What does emotion look like in the brain? What drives basic behavior patterns? So absolutely, I think that those opportunities are there, and this is a, an incredibly exciting developing area of the science. 

Speaker 4:        One of the things in the fifties and sixties when BF Skinner and behaviorism was all the rage, is that behaviorism and the quantification of behavior gained traction [00:19:30] because it was argued that you can't look inside the black box. And if you can't look inside the black box, which is people's brains, people's minds, then the only thing you can study is behavior. And if we're interested in a science of behavior, then the only thing we can measure is what a person does or what a rat does or what a pigeon pecks at. But what neuroscience has allowed us to do is take a look at what is happening in that so-called black box. And if you put someone's brain in [00:20:00] a magnet in, scan it and see what's happening in the brain when you're showing them, say, images of another person's suffering, well then you're getting a sense of what compassion looks like neuro anatomically. 

Speaker 4:        And that's a really exciting and incredible opportunity for understanding how basic psychological experiences are rooted in the brain and how basic anatomical structures in the brain can illuminate how psychology works. So I think the [00:20:30] opportunities are bi-directional. If I might, let me just add one more thing, which is one more insight that I think is interesting to me that social psychology seems to have been moving in the direction of, or psychology and there are about 80 or 90 years of research documenting the extent to which people stick to their groups. People are antagonistic potentially toward other groups. There's a history of violence in the human tradition or the history of humanity as sort of a history [00:21:00] of violence and that's given a lot of psychologists the perspective that people are in a way born to be sort of self-serving, especially if you look at behavior from an evolutionary framework, then it makes sense that people would do anything they could to get themselves ahead of the pack and get their groups ahead of the pack of other groups. 

Speaker 4:        And what I think is a really important insight, and this is in part a movement that's been inspired by people like my advisor in graduate [00:21:30] school, Dacher Keltner, toward understanding that people are a lot more complicated than that in that a lot of the driving motivation to behavior is not just what gets you ahead, but also how you can help other people. So in a way, compassion and altruism we're learning is hardwired into the brain and that's a really puzzling thing because it's hard to fit that specifically into an evolutionary framework. But put generally [00:22:00] what I think we're learning about what motivates people is not just that people are motivated to get ahead, but the people are really driven to make others around them happy and to serve other people in ways that benefit others. And that insight has inspired 30 years of the most hard-hitting social psychology that I know of and it's also given rise to just a different kind of conceptualization of what makes people do the things that they do. Paul Piff, thanks very much for coming on spectrum. [00:22:30] That was a lot of fun. Thanks again for having me. On and I'd be happy to come on any other time. Great. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible] spectrum is archived on iTunes university. To find the archives, do a search in your favorite browser for iTunes Dash and view space k a l x space spectrum. The feature of spectrum is to present new stories we find [00:23:00] interesting and a coolio and Renee route present the news. 

Speaker 6:        A National Institute of Health funded team of researchers at Stanford University have created an entirely transparent mouse brain. This new process known as clarity by its inventors will allow scientists to explore the neural networks and their natural 3d arrangement without having to slice the brain or severing any neural connections. Additionally, the process preserves the delicate biochemistry of the brain, which will allow researchers to test [00:23:30] chemicals affecting specific structures as well as to examine past brain activity. While the breakthrough is not part of the Obama Administration's recent brain exploration initiative, the senior author on the paper, Dr Karl Deisseroth, was involved in the planning of the initiative. 

Speaker 1:        Well, some moderations do need to be made for the more complex human brain. The Stanford lab has already produced transparent human livers, hearts and lungs. You see Berkeley researchers and the integrative Biology Department just came out [00:24:00] with a study showing the positive effects of stress in studies on rats. They found that brief stressful events caused stem cells to branch into new nerve cells that improved the rats. Mental performance. It is important to differentiate acute stress and chronic stress. Chronic stress elevates levels of stress hormones that suppress the production of new neurons, which impairs mental performance. Associate Professor Coffer Characterizes [00:24:30] the overall message of this study as stress can be something that makes you better, but it is a question of how much, how long and how you interpret or perceive it. We'd like to mention a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Rick Karnofsky, Julian and Renee arou present the calendar. NASA astrobiology researcher and Lawrence Berkeley fellow in residence, Felisa Wolf Simon is delivering tonight. Future Friday's [00:25:00] lecture at the Chabot Space and science center at 10,000 Skyline Boulevard in Oakland. She'll be discussing the chemical elements that can support microbial life on earth. Drawing from molecular biology, biochemistry and physiology. Admission is $23 in advance. Visit shabbos space.org for more info this Saturday come to the UC Berkeley campus for the [inaudible] 

Speaker 6:        bears annual kal day. Over 300 lectures, workshops [00:25:30] and presentations will be available with topics ranging from how the interplay of light with the atmosphere can create rainbows to a demonstration from the first laundry folding robot. Rosie Cal Day's tomorrow April 20th held on the UC Berkeley campus and open to the public events. Begin at 8:00 AM go to [inaudible] dot berkeley.edu 

Speaker 1:        false schedule of events April 22nd through April 26th is national parks week. During this week, [00:26:00] admission to all US national parks is free. Put on your hiking boots and visit the nearest national park to you. 

Speaker 6:        On April 27th Berkeley High School will host the day long Alameda County apps challenge contestants are asked to create apps that will address community needs. Using Alameda county open datasets apprise of $3,000 will be awarded to the most inventive and user friendly app. Well, second, third and honorable mentions will also be meted out. Alameda county [00:26:30] invites participation from residents of all skill levels and age groups. The apps challenge is part of a nationwide movement to increase transparency and implement open data policies in governmental organizations. The event be held at Berkeley High School 

Speaker 1:        in downtown Berkeley from 8:00 AM to 7:00 PM on Saturday, April 27th it costs $15 to participate with discounts for students and seniors. There has been a rapid spread of sudden oak death pathogen [00:27:00] referred to Assad over the East Bay hills, specifically in north Berkeley and Montclair. Professor Matteo Garber, Loto, head of the UC Berkeley forest pathology and my collegey lab has been tracking the spread through annual area surveys. Garber Lotos team is looking for volunteers to help conduct annual spring surveys to find diseased trees. There will be several training sessions for volunteers in the bay area. The Berkeley session is on Saturday, April 27th at 1:00 PM [00:27:30] on the Berkeley campus in one 59 Mulford Hall. For other training sessions in the bay area. Searched the web for sod blitz project, but first after dark at the new exploratorium in San Francisco. [inaudible] on Thursday May 2nd after dark is the exploratorium monthly evening program for adults 18 and over. Admission for non-members is $15 in addition to the museums regular exhibits, there will be live music films and [00:28:00] the lectures. The theme this month is home and you can hear about how an empty warehouse on pier 15 was transformed into the explore Torrens new home. Karen [inaudible]. We'll discuss the human microbiome and Ron Hitchman. We'll talk about what makes earth and other goldilocks planets just right for sustaining life. For more information, visit the exploratorium.edu 

Speaker 6:        on Friday May 3rd the San Francisco ASCA scientists lecture series [00:28:30] will host a workshop on crafting the perfect science story. Editors of the science writer handbook will share personal stories of working in the field and address questions about building sustainable science writing careers. The May 3rd event will begin at 7:00 PM in San Francisco's bizarre cafe. More details can be found online at ask a scientist, s f.com 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible] [00:29:00] a character in the show is by lost on a David from his album, folk acoustic and available by it. We have Commons license 3.0 and attribution editing assistance provided by renew route 90 spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us. [00:29:30] Our email address is spectrum [email protected] join us in two weeks. Same time [inaudible].

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