Spectrum

A discussion between two physicists on the Higgs Boson and Super Symmetry. Simone Pagan-Griso, Postdoc Chamberlain Fellow at LBNL, works on the ATLAS team at CERN. Will Johnson, a Physicist at Sandia National Lab in Livermore CA, has worked on the Collider Detector at Fermilab.

Transcript

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

Speaker 2:        Good afternoon. My name is Brad swift and I'm your host today. In today's interview, Rick Karnofsky talks with two physicists about the search for the Higgs Boson and supersymmetry at cern, Simona Pagan. Greece is a postdoctoral Chamberlain fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories. [00:01:00] Some money first appeared on spectrum on September 23rd, 2011 you can listen to that show online at iTunes u soon after that appearance, somone moved to Switzerland to work in close proximity with the atlas team at cern on among other things, the search for the Higgs Boson. Rick is also joined today by will Johnson, a physicist at Sandia national laboratories in Livermore, California during will's Phd Studies in physics at UC Davis. [00:01:30] He worked on the collider detector at Fermi lab in Illinois. Somani was visiting Berkeley recently and we invited him and will for a followup interview. During the interview you will hear mention of GE v which stands for Giga Electron volt. 

Speaker 2:        The Electron volt is a unit of mass and energy head to Wikipedia for more on the electron volt. Now the interview, welcome back to spectrum. Thank [00:02:00] you. Thank you. Glad to be back. Let's get to it. A few months ago it was widely reported in the media that scientists have discovered the Higgs. Can you walk us through exactly what people found and what bearing that has? Yes. Just a reminder. We look for coalitions of protons at the very high energy in this accelerator in Switzerland, and so what we really look at these, the products of these collisions and we tried to reconstruct for what to see what happened at the very [00:02:30] smallest Cade few months ago. We helped enough data and our analysis of the data got to enough refined to be able to distinguish from the existing of expose explosive with that mass and the not existence. And so we actually found it. 

Speaker 2:        So that was awkward of success in the official masses and efficient mass is around 125 GV GVU is the unit information that we use for the mass. So is a roughly equivalent to the mass of a, [00:03:00] and what detector was this all? So we have two main detectors. General purpose for these kinds of searches are the large Hadron collider. One is called atlas, which is the detector I'm working on and other trees called the CMS. So both experiments had independent analysis on independent at the samples and they confirmed the existence of the heat disposal. So we had two different experiments confirming the same result, which of course is always good, right? And now [00:03:30] what's next? Now? Next, our first call is to measure more accurately the property of this new particular we found to really establish if it is fully the he exposed on or fetus any deviation. 

Speaker 2:        There are several reasons why we may expect some deviations, but up to now I have to say everything looks like he exposed to as predicted by the most simple theory what kind of deviations would, so you can have several things if you want precision measurement that are ongoing [00:04:00] to determine if this is really the particle we were expecting. But on top of that there is a full harder program looking for other different products of these collisions which may show deviations from what we expect. We mentioned I think last time, very briefly one today, which is really popular in the last decades, which is called supersymmetry. This is probably the very next big thing that we are hunting for. Stepping back a little bit, in [00:04:30] the months that interceded are for sharing with you and the report of the Higgs, what if any big steps in data analysis or the way that you guys were running experiments had to change? 

Speaker 2:        Since we talked? One big step came from data. When we're collisions that almost doubled the amount of data we had since we talked and that discovery was announced. One collision happens, but you may have multiple collision happening at the same [00:05:00] time and you need to disentangle them from what you see. A lot of work was put into actual decent tankers, these interactions, and this was really a key to be able to analyze efficiently. So enormous progress was made. Just to give you a rough ideas in our detector, one part of it try to track charged particles transverse in our detector. What you end up having are different points in different [00:05:30] layers of Europe. Sub detectors are you need to connect them to actually track the particles. So this seems easy to have one or two particle, but then you end up having more than a thousand of particles and you need to disentangle who belongs to whom. 

Speaker 2:        Right? So this for example is an area I've worked a little bit hard to to be able to make sure that we actually can efficiently distinguished different particles and not be confused [00:06:00] by our connecting points, which are actually belonging to different particles. Tens are there still improvements being made to the data analysis? Of course, improvements are always ongoing. We worked very hard on that. Right now the larger collider is shutting down for a two years period and on February it will actually shut down and work will be made on the accelerator itself for two years almost. [00:06:30] And we expect to be back in taking data for physics analysis the first months of 2015 and the reason we do this works not only as maintainers, but actually to improve one big thing is that we will be able to raise the energy of the collision of disc pratum's almost double it a little bit less. 

Speaker 2:        So right now we are working at around 8,000 GV. After the shutdown and improvements, we [00:07:00] will be able to collide protests around the 13 thousands GV. So why is that important? Increasing the energy. It actually also increased the probability of producing rare phenomenon like the he exposed in production or particular that predictably supersymmetry theory. In all this theory, the likelihood of producing such particles increased dramatically with an edge. The higher energy we can probe, the higher [00:07:30] are likely to produce those particles. And this is also because they may be heavy, even heavier than the Higgs and not only rare but also with a heavy mass and so the more energy you have the more likely is that you can produce them and what kind of work will be done besides this upgrade, what are all the staff scientists going to do with their time for two years? 

Speaker 2:        We will keep us busy. I'm sure the detectors themselves will be upgraded as well. The [00:08:00] trust, etc. I'm working on has a big project of trying to replace one of its inner most part. I mentioned these detectors to detect charge particles. These are based on silicon and they suffer radiation damage. With all this collision happening, we have a lot of tradition which can damage all the electronics and the censor themselves. A new detector was made and we'd be inserted in addition to the existing ones in order to improve [00:08:30] the detection of discharge particles. This is probably the biggest project which will be ongoing doing shut down for our experiment. There are also several other minor maintenance and other upgrades which are ongoing and in the meantime we easy our analysis strategy, our software in order to be ready when we come back to put in practice what you've learned, analyzing the past two years data and to be even more efficient. So with these [00:09:00] new detectors it'll be detecting even closer to the points of collision? That's correct. In fact, I mentioned things happen very close to where the protons collide. So when I mentioned that particles decay to other particles and so on, that usually happens in a small space like way less than half a millimeter. So it's important to note that you never actually see the particles you produce. You only see the decay products from them. [00:09:30] That's correct. Exactly. Having a detector which is close to where the protons collide will allow us to differentiate even better. Yeah. 

Speaker 1:        [inaudible] you are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Our guests today are Simona and Pega and will Johnson both are physicists. In the next segment they discuss supersymmetry. 

Speaker 3:        [00:10:00] It may not be obvious, but so actually one of the main goals for High Energy Particle Physics is actually defined a single equation. And from this one equation we can drive everything we could possibly need to know about how particles interact, what particles exist, how everything works. So the goal is one grand equation, a grand unified theory right now we have a great equation called the standard model that takes [00:10:30] care of all forces. Everything we know about how physical objects interact and how they exist can be described by this one equation with the exception of gravity. We can't combine that in with this one equation. And also there's some parts to the equation that we think could be a little bit more elegant and we want to combine it with gravity and also possibly take care of some of these ambiguities. Going to supersymmetry allows [00:11:00] us to do that. So one of the big questions is we haven't seen supersymmetry yet. I know when the LHC turned on, everybody was hoping that it would just be very obvious and we would just see supersymmetry. But that hasn't been the case so far. Has there been any hints or signs that people are looking for that supersymmetry is most likely to be hiding? 

Speaker 2:        We were hoping to see signs of the supersymmetry in a couple of years of running of the large Hadron collider. [00:11:30] The large Hadron collider started with an energy which was slower than what is designed and only after this shutdown we will get to the energy which was designed for, so we really hope that is increasing energy, which can shed more light on the natural supersymmetry and why we didn't see it so far. For sure. The data we analyzed so far already poses a slight challenge to the theory itself. It might be good to explain why supersymmetry is such an attractive theory. People who have been looking for it for [00:12:00] 30 years now, we've seen no hints of it yet. Still very convinced. Yes, supersymmetry can explain a lot of the unexplained feature that we see up to now. Supersymmetry will give us from the practical point of view, the door to unify also gravity with the other forces. 

Speaker 2:        A lot of people think that this is the right way to go to be able to actually describe gravity together with the other forces in our single tier. People have already [00:12:30] heard about the string theories and so on. The all implicitly assume that supersymmetry exists in some form of it. So it's very important for us to find any sign of it or this theory, we lack a fundamental part of it. And so actually what happens if it turns out we don't see supersymmetry, the Higgs bows on looks exactly like the standard model predicts and we see no other hints of supersymmetry. Well certainly this is something that we need to consider, right? [00:13:00] There are open questions that we hope supersymmetry can answer if supersymmetry is not found still we need to answer those questions so we need to keep looking. There are several other theories which may predict and explain the same scenarios, just had not the more simple ones. 

Speaker 2:        So just means that probably the most simple solution we found was not the correct one. So we still need to look for other sign of it. I we do it already in parallel. So we consider [00:13:30] the possibility of supersymmetry is not the right answer. It's just the one that we think is most likely we will keep looking even if we had no sign of it, so we really expect to find some sign of something. Maybe supersymmetry may be something else, but we really hope that with the next data we will find a sign of something else beyond what we know. If that doesn't happen still we need to find a mechanism to explain what we see, which is different from what we have taught so far [00:14:00] and that for sure will require big synergy between the theoretical part and the experimental one trying to work together towards a new different solutions. 

Speaker 2:        There are people actively working on data from the LHC looking for other theories. Technicolor is one of the other big ones, but the detectors aren't designed specifically to look at supersymmetry. They're designed to try to catch as wide of possibilities as possible. [00:14:30] Yeah, this is actually a very good point. We perform some generalist searches which do not depend on a specific models, but just look for consistency between the given theory that we have. The standard pondered and what we see. So any hint of it can be used, at least as our guidance in watch theory can predict this kind of phenomenon. So we keep looking also for unexpected as much as possible. 

Speaker 1:        [inaudible] [00:15:00] this is k a l x Berkeley. The show is spectrum. Our guests are Tsimané, Pegol Rizo and Bill Johnson in the next segment. The detailed useful byproducts of high energy particle physics. 

Speaker 3:        Can you think [00:15:30] of any good examples of the technology developed our hundred [inaudible] physics or maybe the announced techniques designed for high energy physics and invented for it have affected people in common everyday life. 

Speaker 2:        This research is really targeted in fundamental research, understanding how nature works, so the effects of it are usually a very long term, so it's very hard to predict what will happen. However, the means that we use to actually [00:16:00] perform these searches, they may have a more direct impact. If we go back a bit in the history, all the nuclear science that was used to start this particle physics in general decades ago is, for example, used to treat cancer. Here in alifornia is for example, very advanced in what is called heartland therapy, so try to treat cancer with protons and they have sidebar advantages with respect to the common radiotherapy, particular for inner most tumors. [00:16:30] In this way you can reach and try to kill the tumor burden, the size of the tumor without having to burn whatever is in the meter. All these kinds of the tactful with a lot of r and d of course on top of them but were taken from what was developed for nuclear physics in the past. 

Speaker 2:        This is a very good example of how technology that we may use for our scope can actually be bring vented and adapted for other scopes in other very big challenge that we face every day [00:17:00] is that the amount of data we collect and the computing power we need to analyze it is huge. In order to cope with this, we had since several years our projects for distributed computing in order to be able our to analyze data everywhere using computing that are located everywhere in the world, sharing computing resources, sharing disc. This was a necessary step for us. In order to be able to carry on and having physics results. However, that can have [00:17:30] also an impact to everyday life. What we see now is our all the cloud computing increasing faster and faster in our everyday life. This is a slightly different version of this distributed computing that we've been developed and worked so far. 

Speaker 3:        The web as we know it today from 

Speaker 2:        what was created at cern. So if you actually see some of the photos of the very irst web browsers, they actually have design specifications and pictures [00:18:00] of the atlas detector at certain it was created for the scientists to communicate, but then it was such useful technology it felt to the rest of the population. So an interesting story is that even today that when you press and you don't find the page, you get these set of [inaudible] and this was actually the room at cern where the irst web server was hosted. A lot of the physics analysis that we do is [00:18:30] really from a statistical point of view, decent target. These huge amount of data that we collect and trying to find a rare phenomenon. It's usually trying to find a handful of events of collisions which have the characteristics you want among the billions that happened. 

Speaker 2:        So these techniques are very similar and are in common to other challenges where you have a huge amount of data and you to find a specific [00:19:00] ones on a slightly different level. But it's what Google needs to find when you put some keywords and you can find what are the relevant pages for you. And there are few. So even in this case, what you need to do is basically try to find the most appropriate few pages among the billions that exist, which match what you're looking for. In many senses, this is not very different from what we try to do. And in fact, some of the technologies [00:19:30] with very big differences are actually in common. Well, ne question of course, is with the shutdown or from your lab, do you see the need for more accelerators besides certainly I strongly think these accelerators are big and they take a lot of resources of our community, not only in terms of the money you need to build them, but also as intellectual power of our community. 

Speaker 2:        Run random and analyze data, but [00:20:00] having a new accelerator right now is not worth the investment in both their mind, intellectual power that we need to put on it, so the larger other collider will run at least up to the end of the Deca. Then probably up to the end of the next tech ad and this will be enough to give us data to answer most of the questions we actually build it for. Of course, people are already thinking of what's next. They're thinking [00:20:30] of new accelerators. They're thinking what is the best choice? I want to build it. If we have the technology, if we need to develop something that we are missing and people are actively working already on this and the LSE is a giant machine. It's hundreds of feet underground in miles 

Speaker 3:        and miles across. So building a bigger tunnel is a very, very expensive proposition. Yes. And there's just fundamental limitations on how strong magnets can be. So a lot of people are investing [00:21:00] a lot of effort into finding other ways of accelerating particles or studying phenomenon that doesn't necessarily need accelerators. Is there anything particularly promising? There's the plasma wave accelerator. Um, there's cosmic sources, so some of the highest energy collisions we get are actually from particles from outer space. And a lot of people are using the atmosphere itself as a detector. So you can look at the interactions in the atmosphere [00:21:30] and then decay particles from those interactions to see what happened. There's also a lot of work going into just looking to see if you can study these processes with a lower energy. So maybe you won't be able to see what particle you're looking for, but you'll be able to see some very slight effects on other particles or another process. Very, very slight effects, which if you're very careful and you study it, it might tell you information about these much heavier particles than you can produce. So there's, there's a lot of ways of finding supersymmetry [00:22:00] yes. Or other further beyond the standard model. Yeah. These are complimentary ways in many senses. As you mentioned, there is a lot of work on going and it's very promising, so we really look forward to these [inaudible] well, thanks for joining us. Thank you Rick as thank you Rick. Cool 

Speaker 1:        background [00:22:30] is archived on iTunes university. To find the archive, do a search in your favorite browser for iTunes Dash u space Calex space spectrum. 

Speaker 3:        We'd like to mention a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next wo weeks. [00:23:00] Rick Kaneski joins me for the calendar. The theme for the Spring Open House at the crucible is the science of art. The Criswell is located at welve sixty eventh street near West Oakland, Bart and mission on Saturday April ix it's free from leven am until our pm the open house seeks to highlight the scientific principles, inquiry and exploration behind the industrial arts processes. Taught and practiced at the [00:23:30] crucible. Highlights include the science of fire, the gravity of mold making, mysteries of steel made visible bicycle physics. Yeah. Surfing the solar flares with science at cal recycled glass processing and more. 

Speaker 4:        There will be demonstrations, tuition discounts, food and bikes for sale. Visit the rucible dot org for more info. In April of wo thousand and twelve a small asteroid impacted [00:24:00] close to home in alifornia at Sutter's mill. The site where gold was irst discovered in ighteen forty eight media are astronomer. Peter Jenniskens of the Seti Institute started a tally of fines and mobilized NASA Ames research center into leading the recovery effort from the air and the ground. eventy seven media rights were found. He will summarize research results reported in a recent eventy author science article and also discuss a econd meteorite fall that happened in [00:24:30] Nevato and Sonoma last October. The presentation is Monday pril eighth at the Academy of Sciences. Planetarium. Tickets for the even hirty event can be purchased nline at Cal Academy Dot Org San Francisco Science Museum. The exploratorium is reopening in their new location at peer ifteen on Wednesday pril seventeenth to celebrate. They will offer free outdoor programming from ine am until en pm [00:25:00] the new museum offers ix galleries on human behavior, living systems maker culture, observing the landscape scene and listening as well as an outdoor space. 

Speaker 4:        More nformation at exploratorium dot edu also on pril seventeenth UC Berkeley is holding its monthly blood drive. You can make an appointment online but walk-ins are also welcome. You are eligible to donate blood if you are in good health, weigh at least ne hundred and ten pounds [00:25:30] and are eventeen years old or older. You can also check out the eligibility guidelines online for it and initial self screening if you are not eligible or you prefer not to donate blood. There are other ways to support campus blood drives through volunteering, encouraging others and simply spreading the word. The blood drive will be on Wednesday, pril seventeenth in the alumni house. On the UC Berkeley campus. It [00:26:00] will last from noon until ix pm you can make an appointment or find more information at the website. Red Cross lood dot Org using the sponsor code you see B. We also like to bring you several news stories that we find interesting. Once again, Rick joins me for the news and Red Alax died of cancer in ineteen fifty one but her immortal cell line called Hela cells derived from her cervical cancer is the oldest and most [00:26:30] commonly used human cell line. 

Speaker 4:        The cells were used to test the polio vaccine and have been used in the research of over eventy thousand scientific papers since lar Steinmetz and others in ermany published the genome of Heela and the journal g hree in March. However, the team has since removed the data from public databases because of privacy concerns expressed by family members and other scientists. Blacks did not give her a consent for the line [00:27:00] to be used and some are concerned that it may disclose genetic traits shared by her descendants. However, no law required that kind of consent in ineteen fifty one and even current regulation differs widely as to what consent would be required to sustain a modern cell line due to the extensive documentation of the cells. The privacy of the healer line may have already been broken with literature already published. Harvard medical school researchers have assembled a draft genome and [00:27:30] a team of University of ashington researchers have spoken about not only the heela genome, but also the more specific information about individual haplotypes at the American Society for Human Genetics Conference in San Francisco. 

Speaker 4:        A recent UC Berkeley study on the lives of wild bees find that the insects thrive better within diversified farming systems. While you might consider the insects yellow nuisances, bees actually play a crucial role in the life cycle of cross pollinated [00:28:00] crops, which account for ne hird of our caloric intake. The mysterious decline in both honeybee and wild bee populations in recent years has prompted many scientists to study the buzzing insects more closely. This study found that crop yield generally increased with wild bee population, but also linked to the recent decline in bee populations to heavy pesticide or fertilizer use. Typically in large scale monoculture agriculture, a number [00:28:30] of alifornia beekeepers seem to agree. They recently sued the federal EPA for failing to ban wo pesticides, widely regarded as harmful to wild bees and honeybees. The wo insecticides named in the lawsuit known as [inaudible] and Simon Foxen have already been found to pose an unacceptably high risk to honeybees by the European food safety authority. 

Speaker 1:        [inaudible] the music heard during the show [00:29:00] is by Louiston at David [inaudible] help on folk make available at creative Commons license hree point zero after music production and editing assistance by Renee Brown. 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 xat Yahoo Dot com [00:29:30] join us in wo weeks at this same time. [inaudible] [inaudible].

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Flaminia Catteruccia discusses the molecular basis of mating and reproduction in Anopheles gambiae mosquito. Her research provides insight into the mosquito reproductive biology to better develop vector control. Catteruccia is Associate Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next. 

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

Speaker 3:        [inaudible].

Speaker 2:        [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:        Good afternoon. My name is Brad swift and I'm the host of today's show. Our interview is with Dr Flaminia cutthroat Chia associate professor of immunology and infectious [00:01:00] diseases in the department of the same name at the Harvard School of Public Health. She is also an associate professor at the University of [inaudible] in Italy. Malaria is a leading cause of death in tropical and subtropical regions. The plasmodium parasite that causes malaria is transmitted by the biting of female [inaudible] mosquitoes. Dr Cutthroat Chias group studies the molecular basis of mating and reproduction in both the female and male of [00:01:30] four species of mosquito. They are looking for the most effective and robust strategies to frustrate mosquito reproduction. Overall, they aim to provide insight into the reproductive biology of this malaria vector, which until recently remained largely unstudied. So the new targets for vector control can be developed. And Dr Cutolo Chia was in the bay area recently for a conference and I was able to arrange an interview Flaminia Katja, welcome to spectrum. [00:02:00] Thank you. What'd you give us an overview of your current 

Speaker 3:        object? Yes, sure. So my research group is based at the Harvard School of Public Health, uh, is working on, uh, the biology of the mosquitoes that transmit malaria in Africa. And mother is still a massive problem for tropical and subtropical countries, but in particular for Africa as it scales almost a million people every year and infects not 200 million people [00:02:30] every year. So it's a massive social and economical problem and malaria is transmitted by mosquitoes. So we believe that if we can stop mosquitoes from transmitting malaria, then we can solve a big problem for the countries that are affected. Three particular, my group focuses on studying some aspects of the mosquito biology that are important for malaria transmission and will focus on reproduction on how mosquitoes reproduce, what makes them fertile. Because [00:03:00] at the end of the day, our goal is to develop novel methods to control mosquito populations. And we think that we could control them by introducing sturdy to international populations as an alternative to what's already been done now, which is mainly based on the use of insecticides to kill them. 

Speaker 3:        And, but they have to be quite targeted ways to use the insecticides by pushing these insecticides on mosquito nets. So that mosquitoes that try to bite on night while people are asleep and the nets get killed [00:03:30] or through sprays or insecticides inside and house walls to kill mosquitoes at arresting indoors. But these methods are not sufficient to stop moderate transmission. And also mosquitoes are becoming resistant to the action of insecticides, which means they're not killed anymore and they change their behavior rather than biting at night inside houses to start by the outdoor and during the day so that insecticides can not get to them anymore. So our thought is our instead is on the idea that, uh, rather than killing [00:04:00] mosquitoes, we can sterilize them so that then there'll be fewer mosquitoes out there. They can transmit malaria and then eventually malaria transmission will stop. 

Speaker 3:        And so we study how mosquitoes reproduce, what's important for their reproductive biology. And we have three major avenues or research. The first one is we try to understand what's important for reproduction because one tracking aspects of reproduction in the malaria mosquitoes is that the females have sex only once in their lives and after that they [00:04:30] completely switch off. They're not interested in more. And so this is quite a vulnerable step in the life cycle of our mosquito because it happens on once. So we are very much interested in understanding what is it that happens to females, what's the switch that completely abolishes that their receptivity to compilation. Because in principle, if we could understand what are the refactoring is as a call to further copulation, then we could induce the same mechanisms in variant females [00:05:00] and trick them into thinking that they've made it. And so they would make any model contributed to the next generations. 

Speaker 3:        So that's a big area of our research where we try to understand what happens to females after copulation after sex so that we can identify what are those factors that change that behavior so that we can induce them. The second area or research and studies is a more translational side. We are interested in developing tools to induce the reality [00:05:30] in male mosquitoes. One idea of control is based on the release of males that are sterile. This males will of course try to find females to have sex with them and eventually those fund them. But there'd be no project coming out of these compilations. And so if we keep doing this over and over again, if you keep releasing sterile males, then we can sterilize most of the females that are natural populations and so the population will crush. And so with malaria [00:06:00] transmission, and so we are trying to find ways to serialize males in a genetic way, introduce genetic stability rather than using irrigations or chemo sterilizations as it's done for other insects. 

Speaker 3:        Because it's important that whatever we do to fertility, it doesn't affect biology. The general biology of this mosquitoes and their behavior and also their fitness and that of competitiveness in terms of meeting and normally irritation or chemo sterilizations, those [00:06:30] can cause severe fitness costs to these mosquitoes. And so we got a little more subtle than we tried to study. So the mosquito DNA and understand what are the factors that are important for my facility so that we can interfere specifically with those factors. And so develop a male mosquito that is sterile and then we can release in the field. So that's our second area of research. And then a newer area research that we're interested in is in understanding what's the impact of what we do in terms of malaria transmission in particular, in terms [00:07:00] of what would be the impact of these measures on the ability of the female to transmit malaria. 

Speaker 3:        Because if we introduce sterility in a population, how does that effect the partial development within those females? We don't want to develop mosquitoes that are sterile, but at the same time that are better at transmitting malaria. And so one new aspect of our research is trying to understand what's the link between reproduction and mosquitoes and Parkside development inside the female. So this [00:07:30] is broadly what our love is doing. Why is it that malaria is so lethal? Well, the mother has been eradicated from large parts of the world, has been eradicated from the u s from Europe and we are actually quite close already getting malaria in Africa as well in the fifties and sixties with the use of insecticides use a queening. And so drugs to kill the precise insecticides to kill mosquitoes. But unfortunately [00:08:00] those programs were stopped because of a number of reasons. And within a few years the number of Americans really went back to what it was before these programs were even started. 

Speaker 3:        So one of the problems with malaria said it's a very dynamic disease from one single case, you can have tens and hundreds of secondary cases that can spread very quickly. So it's very difficult to control. So the synergy between the mosquito and the malaria [00:08:30] is the enabling factor in principle is a preventable and curable disease. It shouldn't be so deadly. However, our ability to control it in the countries where it's presence at the moment is limited by logistic reasons, lack of hospitals, lack of resources, and the fact that the mosquitoes are very efficient at transmitting the parasite. [inaudible] 

Speaker 4:        [00:09:00] you were listening to spectrum on KALX Berkeley. Our guest today is Flaminia Qatari Chia molecular entomologist at the Harvard School of Public Health, researching mosquito reproduction as a way to combat malaria. How long has your project been going? We've been working on it for six [00:09:30] years. So that's kind of new. Yeah. And does it have a length of time or is it pretty open ended? 

Speaker 3:        It's open-ended until I get funded. It's the funding. Yes, yes. Always is, isn't it? Yes. And of course, until it's relevant release, I think the funding will be there until this was a breakthrough. Yeah. A solution. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And Udall, was that a completely empty niche? No one was doing that. So we are really the first ones looking at reproductive biology in this mosquitoes from a molecular [00:10:00] and genetic point of view. Most of the studies before us were performed at the ecological level. So there's actually quite a lot knowing about the ecology of reproduction, but not much known about genetic factors and the pathways that are important for fertility. That's something that is completely new. So whatever we find is novel. So it's exciting for us, but at the same time, we have to do everything you know, is, we have to start from scratch. So it's more challenging maybe 

Speaker 4:        once [00:10:30] the mosquito has ingested the parasite, the malaria parasite from a human, how does it interact with the mosquito? 

Speaker 5:        Okay. 

Speaker 3:        The parasite has a complex life cycle inside the mosquito vector, and it takes a few days to complete from when the mosquito ingests the parasite. When the mosquito can inject the parasite into the next person, it takes about 12 days. And that's the time that the press site needs to go through different developmental stages. [00:11:00] And so once some mosquito takes sliders infected, then the process will have to leave the blood environments. There'll be a stage that happens inside the mosquito midgut and then the prosight will have to leave as quick as possible. Uh, the makeup before he, it gets killed by the mosquito enzymes, digestive enzymes particular, and then it'll have to find its way to the salivary glands, which are these tissues where saliva is produced by the mosquito. And once it reaches the Salami Glands, then [00:11:30] it can be injected into the next person because during blood feeding, the female will inject a little bit of saliva into the team of the person that is this biting. 

Speaker 3:        And so during that process the process can be transmitted. Actually most mosquitoes don't even live long enough for the proceeds to develop. So that's a major roadblock or process in development. Is there any thought to trying to alter the parasite itself? There's a lot of research on modifying [00:12:00] the mosquito so that rather than allowing person development, they'll kill the parasite. And of course there's a lot of research on finding drugs that can kill across sites in people that are infected. And there is research on malaria vaccines as well. We don't have a vaccine yet. There is a vaccine that is now in Stage three trials that could be promising in combination with other control measures. It's quite clear that malaria will not be defeated by using a single measure. So [00:12:30] the use of insecticides, possibly the use of sterile males, hopefully combined with the use of drugs to confirm [inaudible] in people and hopefully also without, without vaccine that could be effective for awhile. We will need all these measures to control the spread of the disease. 

Speaker 4:        How large your group is, is the group that's working on your project. 

Speaker 5:        Okay. 

Speaker 3:        My group is composed by about 10 people at the moment. 

Speaker 4:        And what are the different scientific disciplines you've brought together [00:13:00] with that group? 

Speaker 5:        Yeah, 

Speaker 3:        well it's a combination of molecular biology and genetics and biochemistry. Also evolutionary biology, big of ecology as well. 

Speaker 5:        Okay, 

Speaker 4:        and within the group, how do you orchestrate the workflow of all that? How do you decide which thing you're going to focus on at what point in time 

Speaker 3:        to go ahead and go forward with the research? Oh yeah, those are actually tough decisions sometimes because there is so much [00:13:30] that we can be doing, just so many different ideas. It's circulated in the lab and sometimes it's difficult to prioritize them. So in general, we do discuss ideas all together. I can come up with some ideas and then we discuss, uh, with the group and some we like the brainstorming and then more ideas emerge. And then we focus on what's more important according to our priorities. We always have to make choices. We tried to have projects that are most solid in a way that we [00:14:00] know will give us results quite quickly. And then at the same time also establish longer term projects for maybe bigger goals. So it's a combination of all the two. 

Speaker 4:        What is the life cycle of this mosquito? 

Speaker 3:        So the mosquitoes we work on, um, anopheles mosquitoes that, that are not fillings are the only mosquito, second trust mates, uh, malaria to humans and draw about 30, 40 and awful in species that transmit malaria. And we study in particular, um, our mosquitoes called [00:14:30] Anopheles Gambiae and that's the most important vector in Africa and therefore the most important actor in the world. But we also start in some other mosquitoes out important vectors in other parts of the world. We are now interested in southern American vectors, Asian vectors. So we have four different mosquito species in our lab for comparative studies and Life Cycle is from a female that is, I've been intimidated by a male. Then this female will need to feed them blog to develop eggs. And that's the step that is exploited [00:15:00] by the plasmodium parasite of malaria to be transmitted. And so the female will feed on blood preferentially on, on men, on humans. 

Speaker 3:        She will develop her eggs and then the eggs will be fertilized by the sperm that is transferred from the male. The eggs will be laid water, so the eggs will hatch and give larvae. And then a pupa will with form that doesn't feed. And then after two days and adult will emerge from the PUPA. And so our, as a, as that [00:15:30] little step, males and females will have to find each other for copulation and then the female will have to block feed again. And so that the cycle can start all over again. So overall from egg to egg is about a couple of weeks. The Life Cycle 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 6:        this is k a l x Berkeley. The show is spectrum. Our guest is Flaminia [00:16:00] [inaudible]. She's working to eradicate malaria. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

Speaker 3:        Is there a side effect to affecting the mosquito population so thoroughly? Yeah, that's a very good question. What are the possible effect on the ecosystem of mosquitoes? Useful for anything? Do we need mosquitoes in this world? And these are very good concerns, very reasonable concerns. [00:16:30] However, the Fallon sets targeting fertility is a very specious Pacific control measure. Unlike the use of insecticides where you kill everything that comes in contact with insecticide, if you use mosquitoes to eradicate mosquitoes, that's a very selective way to do that. It's a very specific way to do that. So I think that the effects on the ecosystem will be very marginal, but of course that's something that will have to be followed and would have to be monitored, will be a very insane eco-friendly way to reduce monitor transmission because you would, [00:17:00] we would only target those pieces that cosmic me [inaudible] thousands of mosquitoes species on the planet and only 20 or 30 I at transmitting malaria so we wouldn't kill all mosquitoes and we would only have to target those that ugly at transmitting the disease. 

Speaker 3:        With the mosquitoes that you're growing in the lab, how are you feeding them? We feed them differently depending on their developmental stage, so we, the larval stages, the early stages, we feed them with fish food or cat food and for the adults [00:17:30] we feed them with sugar solutions that both the male and the female will feed on. So it's water mixed with sugar and then the females, we have to feed them on bloods for egg developments, we feed them with blood that we buy from blood banks. So we've completely eliminated the use of animals for that, which is we are very pleased with. 

Speaker 4:        Do you feel you're close with the sterilized male part of the project and do you have plans to try to take it to the next level? 

Speaker 3:        Yeah, we, we are thinking [00:18:00] a lot now about how we can make our system more effective because the way we in use steroids in this males, it's very inefficient in the lab. We need more than a day's work to get 20 or 30 males that are sterile to how do we scale this up. We really need to push and hopefully we can work with engineers and find the best way to scale this up and do the automated way that can be much more effective. 

Speaker 4:        [00:18:30] You're continuing to pursue the female side of it. 

Speaker 3:        The female side of it is what's more exciting for us in a way because there's more biology behind it, but we're also very much interested in understanding what are the determinants of fitness in the males because when we make them sterile, we'll still need to make sure that there will be competitive for meetings with feel females. And so apart from studying the biology of reproduction in females, we're also very much interested in that in what makes a meal good [00:19:00] meal, a fit meal that will have good chance of success once it's released. So yeah, that's why we are studying both male and female reproductive biology. We are not just selling waist to induce 30 but also what are the determinants of fertility? 

Speaker 4:        If you succeed in creating a sterilized male or a female that doesn't lay eggs, do you have a plan or is there a plan for how to introduce them into the wild [00:19:30] or is that something that would need to be developed when the time comes? 

Speaker 3:        We don't have a plan as such, but we are starting to think about a plan in terms of the logistics of it. There is a lot of know how that comes from the release of sterile males for targeting other insects, species, insects, pieces that are mainly agricultural pests like fruit flies, Milo flies, school worms, potato. We will do that. Old insects that cause the via damage [00:20:00] to the agriculture. It's a drug programs and based on the release of millions of sterile flies all over the world really. And so all the issues concerning the mass production of these insects, the packaging and the distribution of these stallions, six to the places where they're needed and then the release, all those issues have already been sorted out for other insects and so in principle shouldn't be too difficult to transfer that expertise onto mosquito work. It [00:20:30] should be feasible. We don't have the expertise in ourselves, but working in collaboration with the people that have it, that should be possible. I'm optimistic that that could be done without huge efforts. 

Speaker 4:        Are you teaching as well as doing your research? 

Speaker 3:        Yeah, I have some teaching to do is not massive. I mainly teach postgraduate students and I teach while they work on, so it's infectious diseases. My teaching load is not very big. Maybe it will get bigger in the next few years because [00:21:00] I've just started a year ago and I'm enjoying it. I enjoy teaching postgraduate students very much because they're small groups and normally they're very interested, very dedicated and also they ask amazing questions. So it's actually quite fulfilling. I know that some of the Harvard students are just brilliant, so it's a different experience from what was used before. I like it very much. Yeah. But I really prefer doing research. You know, it's, it's like that's my first, uh, my [00:21:30] top priority is to do good research, but of course we have a mission to encourage the next generations to get into science and getting into research. I like the idea of contributing to that. Flaminia Katya, thank you very much for coming on spectrum. Welcome. Good luck. Thank you. 

Speaker 7:        I'm gonna [inaudible] 

Speaker 3:        um, 

Speaker 6:        if you would like to hear a previous [00:22:00] spectrum show, they are archived on iTunes university, go to the calyx website, calix.berkeley.edu. Click on programming, select news, scroll down to spectrum and that section. There's a link to podcasts or send us an [email protected] and I'll send you the link. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 8:        [00:22:30] a feature of spectrum is to present news stories we find interesting. When the news are Renee Rao and Rick Karnofsky, 

Speaker 9:        the UC Berkeley habitus will play host to the first ever dreambox a three d printing bending machine. By the end of this month, the machine will allow users to take advantage of three d printing technology without paying steep up front costs for the machinery [00:23:00] to use. The machine users will first choose an item model within Dream Boxes Catalog upload one of their own via the web. Next, the print command is given and the order is sent to a cloud based print queue before being directed to the vending machine. Once the item has been created, it is put into a locker with a unique unlock code that is texted to the users. The creators estimate that each use of the printer will range from two to $15 on average depending on the complexity of the object and the materials used. 

Speaker 8:        [00:23:30] A team from New Castle University reported in science that honeybees are three times more likely to remember a learn floral scent when they are rewarded with caffeine. Caffeine occurs in coffea and citrus species and to be pharmacologically 

Speaker 9:        active but not repellent to the bees in higher concentrations. It is known to be toxic and repellent due in part to the bitter taste, but in lower concentrations that occur in nature. It offers a reward. [00:24:00] The team also applied caffeine to the brains of the insects and observed that it increased activity aiding the formation of longterm memories. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

Speaker 9:        A [00:24:30] regular feature of spectrum is dimension. A few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next few weeks. Rick and Renee present the calendar this March nerd night. East Bay will feature UCB associate Professor Matt Walker on Sleeping Memory Guy Branum on the invasion of Canada and the Chabot space and science centers. Jonathan Bradman on the night sky. This will happen Monday, March 25th at the new Parkway Theater in Oakland. Doors will open at seven show begins at eight. [00:25:00] Tickets are available online for $8 and all ages are welcome. Past spectrum guests, Michael Isen will be speaking to the Commonwealth club on the subject of reinventing scientific communication. While most scientific literature is now online, it remains as inaccessible to the public as it was centuries ago. With the physical limitations of print journals replaced by expensive publisher paywalls, [inaudible] who cofounded the Public Library of science. [00:25:30] We'll discuss the scientific journals and new open access models. Tickets are $20 or $7 for students with valid id. 

Speaker 9:        The talk is on Wednesday, March 27th in San Francisco. There is a reception@fivethirtyandthetalkstartsatsixpmvisitcommonwealthclub.org for tickets and more info this April 2nd the ASCA scientist lecture series. We'll discuss tiny creatures with the ability to invade your body, [00:26:00] hijack your cells, change your DNA, and modify you physically and behaviorally to suit their own devious goals. Jack Mackarel, director of the Center for discovery and innovation in parasitic diseases will lead the talk on the parasitic organisms that live among and inside us. Some of the world's most pernicious diseases are caused by these supreme sophisticated organisms, but according to evolutionary biologist, parasites have also played a significant role in shaping the human species. The event will be held Tuesday, April 2nd [00:26:30] at 7:00 PM in Soma Street food park near the corner of 11th and Harrison. Leonardo art science evening rendezvous or laser has several talks this month. 

Speaker 8:        Jess holding explains the use of light and other natural phenomenon to explore perception. NASA is Chris McKay will speak about the curiosity. Mars mission, USF Vagina and Nagarajan presents embedded mathematics in women's ritual [00:27:00] art designs in southern India. She'll talk about the geometry of rice powder paintings. Finally, Nikki, you Layla will discuss the mechanics and construction of marionettes. Laser takes place@stanforduniversityonaprilfourthfromsevenpmtoninepmmoreinformationaboutthelaserseriescanbefoundonthewebatleonardo.info.

Speaker 9:        That's pretty good. Tuesday, April 16th in the Tuscher African Hall, Mary Roach [00:27:30] will lead an unforgettable tour of the human insides. Questions inspired by our insides are taboo in their own ways. Why is crunchy food so appealing? Why doesn't the stomach digest itself? How much can you eat before your stomach burst? Can Constipation kill you? Did it kill Elvis? Roche will introduce her audience to the scientist who tackle these questions. She will then take the audience through her experiences in a pet food taste test, lab of bacterial [00:28:00] transplant and alive stomach. This lecture will take place Tuesday, April 16th at 7:00 PM in San Francisco for more information and to get tickets in advance, go online to cal academy.org 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible] [inaudible] [00:28:30] music card during the show is by Lasonna David from his album folk and acoustic made available by a creative Commons license 3.0 attribution. Special thanks [00:29:00] to David Dropkin for helping set up the interview. [inaudible] thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via our email address is spectrum dot [email protected] join us in two [00:29:30] weeks at this same time. The [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible].

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

Halford discusses the NASA BARREL project and space weather. The Balloon Array for Radiation-belt Relativistic Electron Losses campaign will help study the Van Allen Radiation Belts and why they change over time by using balloons launched in Antarctica.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next. 

Speaker 2:        Mm [inaudible]. 

Speaker 3:        Welcome [00:00:30] to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists. 

Speaker 1:        Good afternoon. I'm your host, Rick Karnofsky. Our guest today is Alexa Helford. Alexa is a postdoc at Dartmouth who studies based weather. She's involved with the balloon group there who recently finished their 2013 launch of the NASA barrel or [00:01:00] balloon array for radiation belt, relativistic electron losses campaign. 20 balloons. Went up in Antarctica in January and February. Next year there'll be doing it again. They're doing this to track where radiation goes when it leaves the radiation belts. Alex, I welcome to spectrum. Thank you. Can you talk to us a little bit about space weather? 

Speaker 3:        Yeah, it is the coolest thing ever cause it's weather, but in space. What does that mean? So whenever you hear of like solar storms [00:01:30] or geomagnetic storms, which tend to make the news, that space weather, the sun always is spewing out junk at us. It's usually a combination of protons, electrons, and magnetic fields. Sometimes there's ions in there. 

Speaker 1:        Well, but when that stuff 

Speaker 3:        hits us, that space, whether it can sometimes create a geomagnetic storm, which is where we have our magnetic fields of the earth being completely rearranged and energy being transported normally into the inner magneto sphere where it can disrupt [00:02:00] things like satellites and eventually caused currently in our ionosphere, which can induce currents in the ground and that can cause problems for technologies even here on earth. 

Speaker 1:        And how frequently do these problems crop up? It depends. So the Sun has an 11 year cycle where it, 

Speaker 3:        it goes from having low activity, which we just came out of an incredibly quiet solar minimum just a few years ago and now we're starting to go into a region of higher activities. So we have a lot more [00:02:30] solar storms occurring. 

Speaker 1:        It depends on the solar cycle. This one looks like it might be a little quieter than the last one, 

Speaker 3:        but you can have multiple storms during the week. In the more northern or very southern regions of the world where you're near the polar caps, you are more effected by

Speaker 1:        I sub storms, which can happen three times a day. People study space, weather, what do they hope to do? They hope to eventually it. Okay. 

Speaker 3:        [00:03:00] Right now we are sometimes able to do now casting. So we can essentially tell you what the weather's like right now. And that's really good for us. We do, I mean can't just go outside and look. No, it's a little bit harder than that. No, I especially is putting together space weather packages and the van Allen probes are currently producing space weather data products as well. So we're getting a lot better at this. They usually give you at least a good, you know, [00:03:30] three or four days heads up as to if something's coming at us. They've gotten really, you know, pretty good given the type of data we have for even being able to predict if it's going to affect us or not. And what can we do with those predictions? So the radiation belts are where a lot of this, the damaging space weather effects occur. 

Speaker 3:        They have highly relativistic electrons in them and these highly relativistic electrons can greatly affect ours [00:04:00] satellites. So what happens is any satellites sitting in the radiation belts actually will start gaining charge and we can get lightning strikes that actually occur across the [inaudible], the sides of the satellite, which in itself is quite damaging. Anytime you're hit by lightning is never really a good thing, but the really relativistic one's the killer electrons this week. Call them actually can bury themselves into the software and flip bits and so by flipping the bit they can send phantom [00:04:30] messages to the satellite and sometimes that message is to turn itself off or kill itself and not respond to ground control end. Essentially the satellite is dead floating in space. Satellite companies, when they find that there's going to be a solar storm that's going to hit us and possibly affect their spacecraft, they turn them off because if they turn them off then you know you're not going to get as much charging and you're not going to have as many problems. 

Speaker 3:        What kinds of impacts do we see here on earth? So [00:05:00] back in 1989 there was a solar storm that actually induced currents in the power grid and blacked out. Most of the eastern seaboard of Canada and the North Eastern part of the u s and that was, that was quite a big problem where right now we've actually increased the connectivity of our power grids so that if the same storm were to happen about half the u s would be blacked out. Would there be actions that we could actually take if yes, so what you can do is you can actually turn off the grid or turn [00:05:30] off parts of the power grid so that you're not going to blow a transformer by having this huge amount of new current. In fact, one of the first things with space weather affecting our technology was way back with the telegraphs. They were able to run the telegraphs for hours without any energy because of the induced currents from the solar storms. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 4:        are listening to k a l x Berkeley. [00:06:00] I'm talking with Alexa Helford about space weather. 

Speaker 3:        We have stereo, which is one of the coolest missions ever, so it's two satellites. One is [inaudible], a head of earth around Earth orbit and the other one is falling behind [00:06:30] earth orbit and they're looking at the sun. So this is the first time we've ever had a three dimensional view of the sun and now they've gotten far enough around that. We're actually able to see what's going on behind the sun. So before we've always had to to kind of gas and use a Sonogram essentially. Yeah. To try to see what's on the other side of the sun. And now we have actual images of what's going on back there [00:07:00] and we're learning such amazing things from it. It's just the coolest thing ever. And besides, you get to wear 3d classes to view the pictures from it, which is always kind of cool. We're learning so much more about th what happens and, and how things are forming on the surface of the sun that it's really [inaudible] interesting time to kind of be a scientist and learning about [inaudible] this, you know, how space weather's happening. 

Speaker 3:        Uh, besides that we have, you know, satellites in, in our own magnetosphere [00:07:30] that we can look at and we have ground-based magnetometers, which they're all really great with helping kind of understand the environment right now. What kinds of things do you have to measure and track and how do you track them in order to make predictions? That is really, that's an interesting question, but one of the cool things is, is us learning how to do all of this. Right now the ace satellite sits at the l one point, which is a stable orbit between the earth and the sun. We get magnetic [00:08:00] field particle data, so like densities and velocities, uh, from there, and we can use that to try to predict what it's coming at us. Unfortunately, what hits ace might not necessarily hit us, but it's our best predict. You're right now, it's coming to the end of its lifetime and we really need something up there, unfortunately, because we would want a space weather monitor up there, which [00:08:30] would help with science and research. 

Speaker 3:        There's a fight going on as to who should be funding that and who wants to do that because it is, it is a large project, but it's something we need. Just like we need a tsunami warning systems. We need a space weather warning system. Can we talk about barrel a little bit? Yeah, so barrel is the campaign that I'm working on. Barrel is a, an array of that. We're going to be sending up in January of this year and January of [00:09:00] 2014 as well and possibly into February for both of those campaigns. Hopefully we'll be launching 20 balloons each year from two different stations in the antibiotics. So the British Halle Bay station and the South African Sinise station. And what we're going to do is these balloons are like what big weather balloons. They're going to be kind of drifting at 30 kilometers up in altitude and we'll be looking for x-rays. 

Speaker 3:        [00:09:30] So when particles from space get perturbed during these geomagnetic storms, they can actually fall enough far enough down the field lines, these magnetic field lines that they'll hit the ionosphere in atmosphere where they can collide with different particles in neutral atoms and molecules and give off x-rays. And then we can measure those x-rays. So by backing out from that, that x-ray data, we can figure out what type of particles we're [00:10:00] being precipitated. So essentially we're looking at reins of highly relativistic particles and Artica we're looking in Antartica because if you remember your elementary school days when you played with bar magnets and, and iron fillings, you get, you know, if you have a bar magnet with the north and South Pole, you get these kind of curved arcs that go into and out of the northern and southern Poles. And the earth is just like that. So the earth is essentially a large [00:10:30] bar magnet and a, it has its dipole field that that kind of, you know, most of these field lines come in and out of the different poles. 

Speaker 3:        And so when you're looking at these particles, they're going to be following those field lines. So they're just Tracy tracing out those lines that the iron fillings do with the bar magnet. And so these, these electrons and protons will come down the field lines and enter the atmosphere at the pole. So it's the best place to try to find stuff. And also there's not a whole [00:11:00] lot of things that the balloons can hit in the Antarctic, either from the two stations. The two stations give us a better range. And so by launching from both places, we'll be able to cover more land in Antarctica. And so at most we might have eight balloons up at any given time. And so we want to make sure that they're spaced as well as possible. You know, to be able to get the best coverage and having multiple loons up is going to give us an amazing opportunity that we [00:11:30] don't often have in space physics. You know by having multiple balloons, we're going to be able to take a look at how large some of these events are, how much ground they actually cover as well as how long they last. One of the things we can't answer is when you see these waves in space, how large are these waves? We know their wavelengths, but we don't know the region over which they occur. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 1:        [00:12:00] this is spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. I'm Rick Karnofsky talking with Alexa Helford of the barrel project, a mission to study the van Allen radiation belts. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 1:        [00:12:30] is barrel intentionally complementary to existing techniques? 

Speaker 3:        Yeah, so in fact it is one of the first opportunity missions under the van Allen probes and so we're hoping to have conjugate measurements with them. So what that means is that we hope to essentially be on the same field minds as the satellites out in space. So while the satellites can measure the plasma out there and see these waves that are occurring in [00:13:00] space and see the different particles there, we're going to be able to then see how many of those particles actually made it down the field line. And it's one of the first missions with [inaudible] satellites and balloons that will really be able to do this. And, and hopefully because we're sending up 20 this year, hopefully we'll have lots of conjunctions. So that would be really great. And right now we're just 

Speaker 1:        preparing for that. And do you have like a rough estimate of how high the satellites are versus how high the balloons are? Yes. Are the satellites, 

Speaker 3:        they have [00:13:30] a pair of jeans. So their closest approach to the earth is, I believe around [inaudible], somewhere between three and 600 kilometers. So they're quite a bit higher. But when we have these conjunctions, these satellites are going to be at least four to six earth radii eye away from us. 

Speaker 1:        So what kind of instrumentation is on these balloons? 

Speaker 3:        So we are looking at, um, the magnetic fields. We have a gps transmitter there so that we can tell where [00:14:00] we are. That's kind of useful. And we have the [inaudible] Spectrometer, which is going to be looking at the x-rays and then we also have iridium phones essentially on there so we can actually get back our data quite quickly, which is very nice. It also means that we don't have to try to retrieve all 20 balloons. We've painted all of the payloads white and that's to actually help with the temperature control of all the instrumentation on board. But looking for it white 

Speaker 1:        box [00:14:30] on a white continent turns out to be a very difficult thing. Right. And so these balloons go up, there's a small team over there and then you get all the data back at Dartmouth. Yes. What do you do with that? We are going to analyze it and have lots of fun working with all this data. Um, I'm really excited about it. We're also then going to be working 

Speaker 3:        with the van Allen probes team and any other satellite mission that we can get in contact with that wants to look at our data. We're more than happy [00:15:00] to do that with. But having been an opportunity mission with the van Allen probe sets, the one we're really focusing on and really talking to and working with. So we're going to be looking at [inaudible] the different times when when we have uh, conjunctions and if there are any events. Now for this first mission, our conjunctions are going to be happening in the dawn sector. And so in the dawn sector, the waves that we're looking at are these micro bursts, which we [00:15:30] think are caused by course waves. Um, and this is going to be an exciting time cause it's one of the first times we're actually going to be able to look at this and, and, and be certain about it or relatively certain about it. And what's a course way, it's a course waves are these really fun little waves. They're caused by an electron, cyclotron instability. So it's all kind of generated by these electrons out in space. But if you listen to them, we can actually get way for them. So just like the radio waves you're hearing with us talking, [00:16:00] we get way forms of these, these waves in space and we can play them back through the radio and they sound like there. There sounds like a course of birds in the morning, which is why they're called course waves. 

Speaker 1:        We have a recording of these course waves from the NASA van Allen probes. 

Speaker 2:        [00:16:30] [inaudible] 

Speaker 4:        the sound you just heard [00:17:00] was a chorus with an electromagnetic phenomenon caused by plasma waves in Earth's radiation belts. Hello, you're listening to spectrum on k a Alex Berkeley talking with Alexa Helford about space weather 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 1:        it's sort of like terrestrial weather [00:17:30] where so much can influence it. Oh, you rattled off a large list of different particles, all of which have different masses and, and um, would presumably hit us at different times, right? Yeah. Um, how, how do you possibly keep up with all that data? 

Speaker 3:        Um, through statistics? That's what I love to do is data statistics and we're starting to get to a point where we have large enough databases to look at. And actually statistics [00:18:00] is, is, I mean, I know a lot of people hear the word statistics and they think, oh, boring, boring, boring. But it is just so cool. Um, because like you said, we're have so many different things going on and like tresha whether there's so many different factors that we don't necessarily know about, we think we understand what physics is up there. Um, but we know that we're missing some of it because our models don't exactly predict what's happening. So with a lot [00:18:30] of physics, when you're working in a lab, you can control everything. And so your theories can be directly tested because you can control every little bit to match the theory in space. 

Speaker 3:        We can't control anything. It is our laboratory and we can't tell it what to do. We put satellites and balloons and ground-based magnetometers and, and all these different, uh, instruments out there and hope that something interesting happens. So do other planets also experienced space weather? [00:19:00] Yeah. Yeah, they do. In fact, it's, it's really kind of cool when you start looking at it. So mercury has its own little magnetosphere. It's much smaller than ours. So things happen on a much faster time scale. Right now there's a satellite out there called messenger, which is studying the space weather at mercury. And it's really neat to compare it to what we see on the earth because we can see things happening so much faster. So that's really neat. Venus has [00:19:30] some interesting stuff going on there. It doesn't have a magneto sphere, but we can, we can use that as another comparison cause it's a similar sized body to us. 

Speaker 3:        And so it has interesting things on its own. Mars used to have a magnetosphere [inaudible] but Mars is really interesting because that's where we want to go and send people someday. And I really think we should because if anything, humans have always tried to explore and try to go out farther. And so Mars is our new new world, [00:20:00] but we have to be careful going there because it doesn't have the protection of a magnetosphere like we do. So in order to protect the astronauts, we need to have better space weather warning systems in play. And these are all things that people have been thinking much harder about than I ever had. But it's really an exciting thing to think about cause that that's solar wind, it doesn't stop when it hits us. It continues out there. Jupiter, Jupiter is a massive thing. Need a sphere. [00:20:30] It is so cool. 

Speaker 3:        It even has a planet that has a magnetosphere. So there's a main Nita sphere inside of magnetosphere, but Jupiter's magnetosphere is dominated by io. I O sends out tons and tons of sulfur ions from volcanoes and so drives a lot of the main use for dynamics we see there. Saturn on the other hand doesn't have a volcanic moon, quite like Io. [00:21:00] It has other geysers which seem to develop its rings. But a lot of the, the space weather events we see in its magneto sphere actually come from the solar wind. But by the time the solar wind reaches Saturn, it is so diffuse. But we still see things like Aurora out there. We see Aurora on the, um, on the Jovian magnetosphere as well. Um, and that's just so cool. And then once you, you know, you get farther and farther out and each of the big gas giants has its own magnetosphere and they're all [00:21:30] unique in their own way and it just gives us so many different comparisons to our own planet so we can learn so much more by studying theirs as well, which is just kind of cool. 

Speaker 3:        We've only been a field really since about 1957 when the first satellite, we're not, we mean people have been studying space weather for a lot longer than that. But you know, we weren't ever able to get measurements where stuff is happening before we had satellites. So we're right at the [00:22:00] beginning and it's something incredibly exciting time. Yeah. To be in the field cause we're just learning what it's like up there. There's so much we don't know. And every time we put up a new satellite we get back new data. Even if we thought that we'd just be seeing the same kind of thing, there's always something new happening. And so it's so incredibly exciting just to, to see what's out there. Well with that Alexa Alford, thanks for joining us. Thanks so much for having me 

Speaker 5:        [inaudible]

Speaker 6:        [00:22:30] and now for some science news headlines. Here's an ana at Coolin and Renee Ralph 

Speaker 5:        [inaudible],

Speaker 6:        professor in sleep expert, Matthew Walker explained in conversation with UC Berkeley new center that when we are young we have deep sleep that helps the brain store and retain new facts and information, but as we get older, the quality of our sleep [00:23:00] deteriorates and prevents those memories from being saved by the brain at night. In a recent study, UC Berkeley scientists discovered that there is a relationship between poor sleep, memory loss and brain deterioration. They found that poor sleep and old age affects memory loss. There are many stages of sleep, one of them being deep sleep, which is an important part of transporting short term memories to longterm memories. UC Berkeley researchers are now looking into therapeutic treatments for memory loss, such as electrical [00:23:30] stimulation to improve deep sleep and thus improve memory. You see, Berkeley researchers see this new discovery as an exciting opportunity to potentially help people remember more of their lives as they get older. 

Speaker 3:        UC Berkeley have designed 

Speaker 6:        a program to help decode ancient lost languages. Previously, human linguists have manually reconstructed languages by analyzing the relationships between the language and the patterns and sound change. The program takes modern [00:24:00] child languages, information about their word meaning and pronunciation and outputs, a rough approximation of the mother language. For example, if French and Spanish were input a language resembling Latin might emerge, the computer system we use together linkages across child languages to mathematically determine awards. First form. In a study published in the National Academy of Sciences Journal, the makers revealed that more than 85% of the system's reconstructions were identical to manual reconstructions [00:24:30] performed by linguist. Using this unique model, the system is essentially able to rewind the evolution of child languages all the way back to the original. The vast data crunching capabilities of the program have allowed scientists to begin seeing larger trends of spreading languages and banishing sounds well. 

Speaker 6:        The computer system has extended the reach of computing in the field of linguistics. It's creators have stressed. They intend it to be used as a complimentary tool to human linguist, not as a replacement. A regular feature of spectrum [00:25:00] is a calendar of some of the science and technology related events happening in the bay area. Over the next two weeks, we'll hear once more from Anna and then Renee meet the animals up close at the Randall Museum home to over 100 animals that can not survive in the wild. Expect to see California wildlife such as rodents and fib. Ian's a great horned owl and even a tortoise every Saturday in March. Starting this Saturday, the ninth in San Francisco, doors open at 11:00 AM admission is free [00:25:30] in conjunction with San Francisco Sunday street program. The exploratorium. We'll have a day long road show featuring moving trucks with art, film, food, performances and activities. 

Speaker 6:        The show will linger in three areas of the city, the mission Bayview and Embarcadero on its way to its nighttime finale at peer 15 this will take place in San Francisco this Sunday, March 10th from 11:00 AM to 10:00 PM for more information on performance times and locations, please visit [00:26:00] the exploratorium website which is exploratorium.edu stress and its effects on body and mind have always been biologically mysterious. This Monday, March 11th Dr Aaron Elica Nali will give her answers to some of those mysteries. Dr Canale is an assistant project scientist at the national primate research center in the Monday colloquium. She will speak about her research in the field of psychobiology. She will focus on the psychosocial effects of [00:26:30] early life stress. Dr [inaudible] has been studying relationships between biological and fostered offspring of rhesus monkey pairs and observing effects of exposure to early life stress on the relationships she has identified genes that cause physiological differences in the brain structure of these monkeys that suffered early stress. 

Speaker 6:        She will also speak about the corresponding differences in the brains of human child abuse victims. The colloquium will be on March 11th from three to 4:30 PM in five [00:27:00] one-on-one Tolman hall on the UC Berkeley campus in case that's not enough science for one day. Also on March 11th Marvin l Cohen, professor of the Graduate School of physics at UC Berkeley will give a speech on condensed matter physics condensed matter physics is also known as goldilocks physics because its primary focuses are skills of energy, time and size that are somewhere in the middle. Consequently, this branch of physics has become one of the most interdisciplinary Professor Cohen will describe some of the fascinating [00:27:30] research involving semiconductors superconductors and nanoscience. He will also relay a few observations about Einstein and his seminar research in condensed matter physics. The free event is open to and aimed at all audiences and should provide an illuminating glimpse into a lesser known branch of physics. 

Speaker 6:        It will be held on March 11th from five to 6:00 PM at the eye house on the corner of Bancroft and Piedmont. The march science at Cal lecture is titled Cloud spotting at Saturday [00:28:00] and titan learning about weather from a billion miles away. The talk will be given by a motto Adom Covex, a researcher in the astronomy department at UC Berkeley. He received his phd in physical chemistry in 2004 at cal studying the photochemical kinetics of hydrocarbon aerosols in planetary atmospheres. He will describe how measurements from telescopes on earth, the Cassini spacecraft that is still orbiting the Saturn system and the Huguenot probe that landed on the surface of Titan. [00:28:30] Saturn's largest moon all inform our knowledge of weather in the Saturn system. The lecture is scheduled for Saturday, March 16th at 11:00 AM and the genetics and plant biology building room 100 on the northwest corner of the UC Berkeley campus. 

Speaker 5:        [inaudible]

Speaker 4:        the music you [00:29:00] heard during say show we spend the Stein and David from his album book and Acoustic 

Speaker 5:        [inaudible].

Speaker 4:        It is released under a creative Commons license version 3.0 spectrum was recorded and edited by me, Rick Karnofsky and by Brad Swift. Thank you for listening to spectrum. You're happy to hear from listeners. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. All right. Email address is spectrum [00:29:30] dot [email protected] join us in two weeks at this same time. 

Speaker 5:        [inaudible]

Speaker 4:        [inaudible].

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

In part 2, Michael Eisen discusses the Public Library of Science, his position on GMOs and a labeling strategy. Eisen is Associate Professor of Genetics, Genomics, and Development in UC Berkeley's Dept. of Molecular Biology and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

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 program [00:00:30] bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. 

Speaker 3:        My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of spectrum. Today we are presenting part two of our two part interview with Michael Isen and associate professor of genetics genomics in development in UC Berkeley's department of molecular biology. In part one Michael talked about his research of gene regulation this week. Michael explains [00:01:00] the Public Library of science, his feelings on labeling of GMOs in food as well as intellectual property science outreach and science funding. Enjoy the interview. I wanted to talk about the Public Library of science if you were a cofounder of. Yeah, and are you still involved with that? 

Speaker 4:        Yeah, I'm on the board. I've still very actively involved in trying to shape its future and in general in the future of science publishing. 

Speaker 3:        And so can you talk about its business model and how it's changing publishing? 

Speaker 4:        [00:01:30] Sure. The basic idea is that science publishing, it's been around for as long as science has been an endeavor from the 17th century. Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, all these guys were sort of inventing science as we currently know it. And Science as a enterprise obviously requires that scientists communicate with each other and since time immemorial in science, we've had journaled, Francis Bacon, other scientists that 17th century started at seedings of the Royal Society. Right? And for 330 [00:02:00] years or so after they started these journals, they were using the only technology available to them at the time, which was print publishing and a lot of things that follow from the way scientific publishing was structured follow intrinsically from the limitations and features of that printed journal. And as an economic model, the only model that makes sense is for the end users to pay for the first subscription. And you know, there's problems with that. 

Speaker 4:        Only people who [00:02:30] can afford the subscriptions can get access to the scientific literature and so forth. They follow from an intrinsic limitation of a medium. Now in the nineties 1990s that all changed, right? The Internet came along and science was amongst the first groups of people to embrace the Internet, and by the sort of mid to late 1990s basically every scientific journal that existed was online and publishing and electronic edition and increasingly going into their archives and digitizing their, their archives, so forth, so that [00:03:00] by 2000 you now could have had access to a large fraction of the tire published record of scientists. Such an amazing thing to be able to do that, but insanely the business model behind scientific publishing didn't change at all. So publishers who had all these subscriptions, now we're no longer selling print journals or decreasingly selling printed journals. They were just selling access to published material in a database and yet they didn't know innovation and the business [00:03:30] model at all. 

Speaker 4:        They just simply charged people for accessing their database just like they'd been charging people to mail them copies. There was no longer any technical or economic reason why the whole universe couldn't have had immediate free access to the published scientific literature. The only reason that you or anybody else in the world didn't have immediate access to anything published in medicine or science or whatever was that the publishers then let them, so plus and the whole industry of open access publishing around [00:04:00] it. The basic idea is publishers do and have provided an important service and they should be paid for the service they provide, but that as soon as they're done, as soon as the publisher's hands are off the paper, it's freely available to everybody, not just to read, but to use and do with whatever to basically place the scientific literature into the public domain. 

Speaker 4:        Where it belong. Science is a public venture, not exclusively, but for the most part funded by either the federal government, state governments or by public minded foundations. And the idea that [00:04:30] the end product of that investment is the property of publishers is insane and it's a huge impediment to the way science works and to the ability of the public to benefit from scientific information. And so plus has been trying to pull the rug out from underneath this subscription based business model by creating journals that use this alternative business model that are now quite successful plus as a journal plus one which is now the biggest biomedical research journal on the planet. Still only publishes a couple percent [00:05:00] of the total because there's a ton of journals out there, but it's big, it's successful, it's growing. Lots of other publishers are starting to switch not just because of it's a successful business, but because of the pressure from the public pressure from the government. 

Speaker 4:        The NIH now requires that people make papers that are funded by NIH research freely available within a year after publication. Things are moving in the right direction and I think the insanity of a world in which the output of publicly funded publicly minded science is privately owned by people who had nothing to do with [00:05:30] a generation of the science in the first place is, it's not quite over, but it is. The writing's on the wall today. Let's go ahead and there was a bit of pushback on that in the, in the congress. What's the state of that? Is that so it's all a lot of pushback because the publishers, it's an incredibly lucrative business that profit margins for Elsevier and other big commercial publishers exceed those of apple and other sort of paragons of highly profitable businesses. When you have a company that's making $1 billion profit off of the public back [00:06:00] and they see a simple legislative solution to avoiding the problem, I think it's a natural instinct on their part to just try to write a law and you know, basically what happened was someone from their district who has a company in their district who gives them lots of money, writes a bill, gives it to them and says, Hey, could you introduce this?

Speaker 4:        We have a huge problem. These, you know, radical crazies from Berkeley are trying to undermine our entire business model and to lose jobs, blah, blah, blah. They get this bill introduced and there's non-trivial risk that this kind of things would pass [00:06:30] because they've managed to align themselves with a stronger force in Congress. The pro copyright lobby, they've managed to basically convinced them that this issue with scientific publishing is scientists want to steal publishers content. Just like college kids want to steal music from, you know, musicians the, and so there was a nontrivial risk that this was gonna pass and this is the second time it's been introduced. So fortunately it's very easy to say, look, the taxpayers paid for this stuff. You really think it's right for, you know, somebody who just got diagnosed [00:07:00] with some terrible disease to not have access to information that they paid for. 

Speaker 4:        The publishers lose this every time this becomes a public fight, they're not in a winning path. And so I expect it to happen again, but just like this last time, I don't think they're gonna win. More people in Congress are on our side and paying attention than there are on Elsevier side or those publishers mostly private? Or are they publicly, I mean, they're corporations. I mean, yeah, they're mostly public corporations. So Elsevier is a big publicly traded corporation, but they're mostly from the Netherlands and [00:07:30] London. There's a bunch of big companies, but interestingly we've had as much problem historically with nonprofits, scientific societies, the societies themselves and make a lot of money on their journals. A lot of them do and it's put them in a kind of compromise position where their revenues from their journals are so important to their overall financial stability that they behave like commercial publishers. 

Speaker 4:        It's not just big companies, any established publisher who makes a lot of money on publishing. This is sort of intrinsically compromised I think in this endeavor. [00:08:00] So the next sorta thing Blas is trying to do is to switch to a world in which publishing becomes almost instantaneous, still takes nine months or so on average for most works to go from when an author's ready to share it with the public to when it's actually publicly available, even if the journal is freely accessible. And so there's still a lot wrong with the waste. Scientists communicate with each other and with the public that this is not a close up shop. Once we win this open access battle, it's just the beginning. And this doesn't really conflict with intellectual property rights and things like that. [00:08:30] The idea of open science is really just sharing the information. The intellectual property is independent of how openly accessible the publication is. 

Speaker 4:        On the other hand, I also think that the intellectual property stuff is bad. I've always believed that if you're getting money from the federal government, that the intellectual property you develop should not belong to you. It should be in the public domain, and I think that there's a lot of corruption of the way people behave in science that stems from the personal pressure as well as the pressure from the institutions to turn every idea, every little thing [00:09:00] they generate in the lab into a commodity, and I think it's makes science work poorly, but this is happening and so it doesn't benefit society to have academic, publicly funded research turn into privately held intellectual property. It inhibits the commercialization of those ideas that inhibits the broader use of ideas. Plenty of studies have shown this is generally cost more money to manage this whole intellectual property thing than the system benefits. 

Speaker 4:        At the end of the day, very few universities profit from their intellectual property effort. [00:09:30] Mostly they spend a lot of money on lawyers and systems and they don't have the, you know, cloning patent or whatever it is. But if your interest is in the broader functioning of science and in the broader exposure to the public to the benefits of scientific research, you have to think that this stuff should just go right into the public domain where people want to commercialize it. They can, they just don't own any exclusive right to use it. And I think making it all pre competitive is by far the best thing to do. So while publishing itself to answer the question directly is not a [00:10:00] threatened virtual property. If I could figure out a way to make it so I would do stuff cause I think it's a very, very bad thing that publicly funded scientists, people at University of California that their stuff doesn't just belong to the public. 

Speaker 5:        This is spectrum on KALX Berkeley today. Michael Isen, an associate professor at UC Berkeley reflects on the prop 37 campaign and GMO labeling on food. 

Speaker 3:        Another issue [00:10:30] that involves the public a lot is the interest in GMOs in food. How would you like to see that debate transformed? Having just been through the the election cycle here in California where we had that proposition

Speaker 4:        right. As you know, I was very, very much opposed to prop 37 and I think mostly because the campaign against genetically modified organisms was predicated on an ignorance of how the technology works and I felt a fear sort [00:11:00] of of science that the problem for most people was that science was involved in food and there's so many problems with that point of view that it's hard to know where to start. First of all, the reasons why I was particularly opposed to this initiative was that the backers were willfully distorting the science spreading the idea that GMOs were intrinsically dangerous, basically, that the public would benefit from having the wrong knowledge about GMOs, which is what I really felt like they were pushing some. Most scientists look at this and think what GMOs are doing [00:11:30] is so different than what we've done for thousands of years and selective breeding of crop. 

Speaker 4:        The idea that the food we eat is in some natural state is a fallacy. Compare corn to its ancestor teosinte. You compare the tomato you buy in the supermarket to the wild slant islands, the person come. None of these things we eat. Look anything remotely like what you found in the wild. They were transformed by centuries of selective breeding and crossing and all sorts of other genetic techniques. Those are the tools of genetics that genetics has just gotten [00:12:00] better and we can do these things in a different way and yes, genetic modification is not identical, but there's nothing intrinsically weird or intrinsically dangerous about moving genes from one species to another. Putting synthetic genes into a plan. It could be, it's not intrinsically safe either, but the attitude that people seem to take is one of the food we have now is in a natural, untainted state and that the second scientist put their hands on it. 

Speaker 4:        All of a sudden it becomes a dangerous threat, but I also think the industry has been stupid in my [00:12:30] mind and has caused a lot of this problem by basically being secret about it. For me it was sort of a lose lose situation in that neither side of that fight was actually interested in the public understanding the science. So you had a ballot measure from my mind in which more or less everybody involved was trying to promote public ignorance about an issue and it's a struggle. I don't know what the right exact solution is to achieve what I think we really need to do, which is to have the public have a, an understanding of the technology, not a detailed understanding [00:13:00] about what enzymes are used to move plans to do you know, why it exists, how it exists, how it works, what people are doing, why it will benefit them or why could benefit them in the long run and so that they understand it and can weigh the benefits and costs in a rational way. 

Speaker 4:        Not in a rational way. I would love to see the food producers label their food, not with a huge thing on the front that says caution contain genetically modified ingredients, but with a label on back that says, here's where the seeds, the crops that went into this food come [00:13:30] from. Maybe there's not enough room on the label of every plant to give a comprehensive thing, but we know everybody's got a cell phone and a QR reader. Now. It's not impossible to imagine that every food had a little QR code on the back that you could scan and would say, here are the varieties that were used in the food. Some of them are genetically modified and here's why they were genetically modified and here's what benefit accrues from that genetic modification. Here's why you shouldn't be worried about it. I just think somehow we need to get the public more engaged in the, an understanding [00:14:00] of where food comes from, how it's grown, and what the rationale behind this process is so that they're rational actors in the process. 

Speaker 4:        I mean, that's all. I mean, most scientists really want out of this. It's not so much to dictate that the public make particular decisions about science so that we all have our own biases about these things, but that that lack of understanding of the public about these issues and even very simple things like the simple fact that the food we eat has been subjected to genetics and that better education about simple [00:14:30] scientific things like that would make these debates focus on things that actually should be in the public debate, like part of the companies that are using genetically modified crops, exploiting intellectual property in ways that's bad for the public. It certainly seems like in many cases they do. Should we be developing genetically modified crop who basically resulted in increased herbicide use. Those are issues that are worth discussing, but they have to be discussed in a context where people understand what you're talking about and they don't think, oh my God, there's an insecticide [00:15:00] in my corn and everybody's going to die. 

Speaker 4:        And so if I had an easy solution to that problem, we would implement it, but I can recognize when something is not going to achieve it. And I think scaring everybody into thinking that genetic modification is a horrible, dangerous technology that needs to be regulated by the government and some kind of special way was not going to achieve that. Isn't that sort of a difficulty with science in general that oftentimes it gets out in front of the population and presents it with quandaries that it can't grasp and it boils down to fear? [00:15:30] Yeah, I think this is true. This is a lot of this happening with human genetics and things like that. There's plenty of examples of where the way people are used to thinking about things is threatened in some ways or challenged by new science, and I think it's a constant challenge to the scientific community to try to make sure that it doesn't, not so much to make sure that it doesn't get ahead of the public. 

Speaker 4:        That's fine. That's what we're paid to do. Right. But that in doing so, we grapple with the challenge of educating the public [00:16:00] about what we're doing and why and how it's going to benefit them, and it's never going to be completely successful. But I do think that the scientific community is as much to blame as anybody for not having engaged in these issues repeatedly and not having spent it's capital to some extent earning the trust of the public and things like this. You see it with human genetics and probably more acutely than anything with global warming where at some deep level the problem is would an insufficient number of people in the public trust scientists to convey. So what's important [00:16:30] about their understanding of the universe and say they trust them when you do surveys, but it's clear that that trust can be easily undermined with the right kind of PR, right? 

Speaker 4:        It was easy to undermine it from the yes on 37 crowd was easy to undermine scientists as all being self interested somehow all we're all involved in making GMOs and therefore were just shells from Monsanto at some deep level. And though it's absurd and it's easy from the right to say, well scientists, you know, there are a bunch of crazy lefties who just [00:17:00] want us all to be environmentalist's and don't have any care about business. Say these, the public support science. But it's a thin support and it's a thin support because the scientific community hasn't really engaged the public in trying to understand what we're doing and you know, sure, there's plenty of good scientists who are trying to do that, but it certainly have to look at it as a general failure. You know, in terms of scientific literacy in this country. And it bites us all the times in small ways like prop 37 and in big ways like global warming 

Speaker 5:        spectrum is on k a l x Berkeley alternating Fridays. [00:17:30] Michael Eisen is our guest and in this next section Michael Talks about sciences, failure in public outreach and new trends in science funding. 

Speaker 4:        Scientific outreach is a difficult endeavor for a lot of scientists. It doesn't really have a lot of cachet or status within the, and it's tough to fund. Yeah. All that's true. I think it's not without its rewards if fun. I mean, I like talking to the public about science, not because I get anything particular from [00:18:00] it, but just because I like what I do. I like talking about what excites me about the world. I mean, it's fun. A lot of scientists don't feel that way. They don't know they'd rather be in the lab than talking in public. But it's like a lot of things. I think that partly it's just our expectation. We don't expect as a university, as a federal government funding science, it's not considered to be part of what we expect people to do to try to get engaged in communicating. The scientists sort of viewed that there's a another layer of people who are going to be involved in communicating science who are gonna know how to talk to the scientists [00:18:30] and know how to talk to the public. 

Speaker 4:        And there's certainly are fantastic people who do that. But I think ultimately it has to come back to scientists recognizing that it's important. Like if we can't convince the public that what we're doing is important, they're not going to keep giving us money to do it. And so it's a threat to science in every way, not just in its application, but in some practical day to day existence that the public doesn't, when they don't understand us, the scientific community should expect [00:19:00] the people who are doing research or benefiting from the system to do a better job and to take seriously the challenge of communicating it to the public. That's not to say I'm in. Lots of people do it. It's just because it's not organized because it's not expected of people because there's no systematic method for doing it. It peaks me on and he's not as effective I think as it could be if this were a big part of what scientists did and just to tie all these things together. 

Speaker 4:        I'll point out that one of the things I would hope in the long run would happen [00:19:30] as a consequence of the public having hacks as to the scientific literature is that people would start writing papers with the public at least partially in mind when they wrote them. The stuff we do isn't that complicated. I can explain what I do. I could write papers that explained sort of what I'm doing and why and it would be a huge benefit. One of the things we've really, really failed to do is we're good at explaining facts. Here's what we know, here's what we've learned, here's the truth of the system. We're really bad at explaining the scientific method to people and I think people [00:20:00] don't know why. We know things. We know why we believe them. And I think if we were better at writing our papers, I don't expect tons of people to break down the doors and read my papers. 

Speaker 4:        But you know, I think they're interesting and well-written and certainly there are papers that plots publishes that get a lot of public attention to anything involving dinosaurs or anything involving weird sexual practices of animals, right? So when those things are good, really good, strong science, people are looking and paying attention. And if the papers were written in a way [00:20:30] that actually engages the public and thought, well, I'm going to try to explain what I did here to the public that this would probably be the most effective thing we could do, would be to educate the public, educate our students, educate everybody about what scientists do and how we do it. Not just what we discovered, which is I think one of the major problems is focus on facts and discoveries to problem in our public communication. It's a problem in education as a problem just in general for science that we don't talk very much about how we know things, what we're doing [00:21:00] and why. 

Speaker 4:        We just talk about what we've learned. Is there anything that I haven't asked you about that you want to hold forth on? Um, you asking some questions about science funding and about amount of money available for sciences getting tighter and tighter arts, more and more scientists. And I think we're facing a kind of big question about like what does the public want to fund in science? Part of the downside of this big data move in science has been a sort of loss [00:21:30] of appreciation for the importance of individual scientists. And I think that there's all this big science and it's true in biology. People think, well, let's just get a hundred scientists from across the country and we'll all get together and we'll do the most important experiments to do. And these are increasing tendencies for the sort of science by committee kind of way of doing things. 

Speaker 4:        And sometimes that worked, it worked for the human genome project and so forth. But probably one of the things I worry about most in sciences with that, that we're moving away from [00:22:00] a world in which individual scientists get to pursue their own ideas. And you know, which is ultimately where the most interesting stuff usually comes from. You know, genome projects don't win Nobel prizes because their infrastructure, they're not ultimately about discoveries. And so I do worry that seduction of big science is such that funding agencies and other people think that this is a great way for them to control what happens. They're going to put tons of money into these big projects and get everybody to sign on to whatever agenda is coming from the NIH rather than from individual scientists. [00:22:30] And I think it's a struggle we're about to see reach a real head in science as less and less money is available. It's harder and harder to get individual research grants and I think we're just starting to see push back against that in the scientific community. But I don't know who will prevail. I would not like being a scientist if what I did with my days was go to committee meetings with 30 other scientists where we discussed what one experiment we were going to do, which is pieces where things are headed at least at the moment. But Michael lies and thanks very much for coming on [00:23:00] spectrum. Absolute pleasure. 

Speaker 5:        [inaudible] now our calendar of science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Rick Kaneski and Renee arou present the calendar. 

Speaker 4:        Charles Darwin may have been born on February 12th but the fellowship of humanity is celebrating his birthday with the Darwin Day on Sunday, February 24th at 1:30 PM David Seaborg of the world [00:23:30] rainforest fund and a leading expert on evolutionary theory presents the keynote evolution today. Current state of knowledge and controversies, Nobel prize physicist George Smoot and leading expert on Darwin, Peter Hess of the national for science 

Speaker 6:        education. We'll also talk afterwards, enjoy a potluck dinner party with the Speakers. I anticipate primordial soup. The event is at Humanist Hall Three Nine Zero 27th Street in Oakland. Visit Humanist [00:24:00] hall.net for more Info every month. 

Speaker 7:        Nerd night holds an event that can only be described as a gratifying mixture of the discovery channel and beer. This Monday, East Bay's own February nerd night will be held at the new parkway theater. Jessica Richmond will speak about the plethora of microbial cells we play host to within our bodies and what they do there. She will explore the latest research on how our microbes correlate with obesity, anxiety, heart disease, and tooth [00:24:30] decay. We'll Fischer. We'll discuss the history, physics and some modern advances of the processes of creating machines. Finally, Guy Pyre. Zack will speak about his experience as a science planner for the curiosity rover. Nerd night will begin at 7:00 PM on February 25th as the new Parkway Theater in Oakland. The HR tickets can be purchased online at Eastbourne or night, spelled n I t e.com this February 26th the life [00:25:00] sciences divisions at the Lawrence lab in Berkeley will hold a seminar on the subject of life and death at the cellular level. 

Speaker 7:        Denise Montell, a professor of molecular and developmental biology at UC Santa Barbara. We'll discuss her research in the area. Her lab has recently discovered a surprising reversibility of the cell suicide process known as a pop ptosis. She is now testing the hypothesis that the ability of cells to return from the brink of death, so it's to salvage cells that are difficult [00:25:30] to replace such as heart muscles or neurons in the adult brain. The seminars open to the public, although non UC Berkeley students are asked to RSVP by phone or through the lab website. The event will be held in room one for one of the Lawrence Berkeley lab building at seven one seven potter street in West Berkeley. It will begin at 4:00 PM on February 26th this Wednesday at the herps leader in San Francisco. You can learn more about your nightly slumbers. [00:26:00] Professor Matt Walker in the sleep and neuroimaging laboratory at UC Berkeley has found compelling evidence that our light dreamless stage of sleep can solidify short term memories by rewiring the architecture of the brain, burst of electrical impulses known as sleep spindles, maybe networking between the brain's hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex is storage area. His team has also found evidence that sleep can associate and integrate new memories together. Dr. Walker will be in conversation with k a [00:26:30] l w reporter Amy Standen. Tickets for the February 27th event can be found [email protected] 

Speaker 6:        Berkeley Professor Alex Philip Pinko is speaking at the Commonwealth about dark energy and the runaway universe. We expected that the attractive force of gravity would slow down the rate at which the university is expanding, but observations of very distant exploding stars known as Supernova show that the expansion rate is actually speeding up the universe seems [00:27:00] to be dominated by a repulsive dark energy. An Idea Albert Einstein had suggested in 1917 the renounced in 1929 as his biggest blender. The physical origin and nature of dark energy is probably the most important unsolved problem in all of physics. This event will be Thursday, February 28th at five 30 there will be a networking reception followed by the program at six the cost is $20 $8 for Commonwealth members [00:27:30] or $7 for students with valid id. Visit Commonwealth club.org for more info now to news stories presented by Renee and Rick, 

Speaker 7:        a UC Berkeley student team has made it into the final rounds of the Disney sponsored design competition known as imaginations. The competition challenges students to design a Disney experience for the residents of their chosen city. The student team, Tiffany, you on, Catherine Moore and Andrew Linn designed a green robot [00:28:00] food truck called Sammy the students do on Berkeley's reputation as an environmentally friendly city to create Sammy who comes equipped with solar panels and a self cultivating garden. Disney has praised the projects collaborative nature, which incorporates design aspects from each student's major. The students are now presenting their project at Disney headquarters along with five other teams from across the country. 

Speaker 6:        Last Friday, February 16th you may have seen a large fireball in the night sky [00:28:30] over the bay area. Jonathan Bregman of the Chabot Space and science center in Oakland told The Washington Post that meteors that streak through the sky are a very common occurrence. What is uncommon is that it's so close to where people are living. Bregman also noted that 15,000 tons of debris from asteroids enter the earth's atmosphere every year. Usually these things break up into small pieces and are difficult to find. This event was ours. After the 200 foot asteroid named 2012 [00:29:00] d a 14 came within 18,000 miles of earth and after the Valentine's Day, media exploded over Russia and drain more than a thousand people. That media was the largest to hit the earth in more than a century streaking through the atmosphere at supersonic speeds, it created a loud shockwave that broke glass. Scientists estimate that it was about 15 meters across and 7,000 metric tons. Despite this massive size it was undetected until it hit the atmosphere. [00:29:30] Music heard during the show is by Scott and David from his album folk and acoustic released under a creative Commons license 3.0 attributional. 

Speaker 1:        Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address 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.

In part 1, investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Michael Eisen talks about his research, the field, and both experimental and computational biology. Eisen is Associate Professor of Genetics, Genomics, and Development in UC Berkeley's Dept. of Molecular Biology.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]. Welcome to [inaudible] 

Speaker 1:        section, 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. Thanks for tuning in. Today we are presenting part one of two interviews with Michael Eisen and associate professor of genetics, genomics and development in UC Berkeley's department of molecular biology. Iceland employs a combination of experimental and computational methods to the study of gene regulation [00:01:00] using the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster as a model system. Isen and his colleagues have pioneered genomic approaches in modern molecular biology and our leaders in the emerging field of computational biology. In part one, Michael talks about how he got started in biology and how his research has evolved onto the interview. Michael Isen, welcome to spectrum. Thank you. My pleasure. Would you give us a narrative of how you initiated your research and how your research has [00:01:30] changed to what it is currently? 

Speaker 4:        Okay. Actually, I grew up in a family of scientists. My parents were both biologists, so I always had an interest in biology. But as a kid, my talents were primarily in math and I was a heavy duty math geek and went to college expecting to be a mathematician and took this freshman calculus class and all the hardcore math geeks tuck. And I did fine. I did well in the class, but [00:02:00] there were several people in the class who were clearly a notch better than me in a way that I think you only can realize and you know, basketball and mathematics at the age of 18 that you're not destined to be the best. And I think math is a field where if you're not the best, it's just kind of boring. And so I stayed as a mathematician and math major in college, but I started increasingly taking a lot of biology classes and had more or less, you know, realized that biology was what really captured my, my attention and [00:02:30] my heart. 

Speaker 4:        And so I went to graduate school but had the idea that I'm interested in biology, but I'm really good at math. So there must be some way of combining these two things. And so I entered a graduate program in biophysics, which is sort of a place where people who are interested in biology maybe haven't taken all the prereqs for a normal biology department but also have a quantitative background go cause. And so, you know, in the way that people sort of drifted into things, I drifted into working on protein structure and [00:03:00] did my phd studying the evolution of the proteins on the surface of flu viruses and using a combination of experimental work and I would hesitate to call it mathematics. It was really just sort of kind of physics and it's, it's a lot of data. You generate a lot of raw data, you generate a lot of data on the coordinates of individual protein molecules and things that they might bind to. 

Speaker 4:        And so it was very natural to start using computers in that work. You know, my background was not in computer science. I programmed as a kid [00:03:30] because my grandfather bought me a computer and I taught myself how to program and I wrote programs to, you know, keep track of baseball statistics and other things like that. In College, I basically never programmed anything in the math department I was in. It was considered not math that you were touching a computer. And so I didn't really do anything with computers until I got to graduate school when you started seeing all this data coming down the pipe. But I wasn't particularly interested in structural biology and I discovered that through six years from graduate school that [00:04:00] although I liked doing it, it wasn't intellectually satisfying, was too small. You're working on one sugar bound to one protein in one virus and I was having trouble seeing how that would expand into something grand and whatever. 

Speaker 4:        You know, the ambitions of, uh, of a graduate student wanting to do something big. And I got lucky in the way that often happens in that my advisor had a colleague he knew from an advisory board. He sat on and he was coming into town because his brother was getting some honorary degree [00:04:30] and I met him in his hotel room, Austin. And he had with him, uh, glass microscope slide onto which had been spotted down little pieces of DNA, each of which corresponded to one gene in the yeast genome. So it's about 6,000 genes in the yeast genome. And you could see them because there was still salt in the spots, but it was a very evocative little device. You could sort of hold it up in front of the sun and you could see the sun sort of glittering on all these little spots. 

Speaker 4:        You could just see the grandness of [00:05:00] the device. Didn't know how people were using them. I didn't know what they would be used for. I didn't know what I would do with them, but I was sort of drawn in by the scale of it all. The idea that you could work on everything at once and you didn't have to choose to work on just one little thing and disappear into a little corner and study. Just that. And so my advisor said, oh, you really should go do this. They need someone who's, you know, understands biology, but can deal with the computational side of things. It's clear that this was going to generate a lot of data [00:05:30] and that, you know, he was right. I mean this was a field that really was in great need of people who understood the biology but could work well in the quantitative computational side of things. 

Speaker 4:        So I packed up and moved to Stanford with a short stint as a minor league baseball announcer in between. Really it was just a very fortuitous time to have gotten into this new field. I mean, the field was really just beginning. So this was in 1996 the first genomes been sequenced, they were microbes, there's bacteria and yeast [00:06:00] and so forth. And we were just getting our first glimpse of the scale of the kind of problems that we were going to be facing in genomics. But what I loved about this device, which is a DNA microarray, it's the sort of became a very hot tool in biology for a number of years was that it wasn't just a computer, it wasn't just data in a computer. It actually you were doing to do experiments with this. I'm interested in biology cause I liked living things. I like doing experiments, I like seeing things and I didn't want to just disappear with someone else's data and [00:06:30] analyze it. 

Speaker 4:        So I went to Stanford to work on these and it really was just this awesome time and we were generating huge amounts of data in the lab and not just me. There were, you know, dozens of people generating tons of different types of experiments and so forth. And we lacked any kind of framework for looking at that data constructively. You couldn't look at those experiments and figure out by looking line by line in an excel spreadsheet at what gene was expressed, at what level and what condition. It just wasn't [00:07:00] the way to do it. And so my main contribution to the field at the time was in bringing tools for organizing the information and presenting it visually and being able to interact with that kind of incredibly complicated data in a way that was intuitive for people who understood the biology and allowed them to go back and forth between the experiment in the computer and the data and really try to make sense of what was a huge amounts of data with huge amounts of information, but something nobody had really been trained to [00:07:30] look at. And so it was there that I really realized kind of the way I like to do science, which is this constant back and forth between experiments on the computer. In my mind and in what I try to teach people in my lab. There's no distinction between doing experiments on the bench or in the field or in a computer that they're just different ways of looking at biology. 

Speaker 3:        This is spectrum line KALX Berkeley. Today, Michael [00:08:00] I's associate professor at UC Berkeley explains his research in developmental biology. 

Speaker 4:        On the basis of that time at Stanford, I got a job at Berkeley and what I did when I started my lab at Berkeley was really tried to focus on one problem. I mean I had been working on a million different problems at Stanford where we had a huge group and a million different people working on, and I was sort of moving around from problem the problem and helping out people with their data or thinking of different experiments. And when I came to Berkeley, I really [00:08:30] wanted to focus on one problem. And the problem that had intrigued me from the beginning of working on the microarray stuff was figuring out how it is that an animal's genome, which is the same essentially in every cell in the body, how it instructs different cells to behave differently, to turn on different genes and to acquire different properties. And so partly because of the influence of people here at Berkeley who were working on fruit flies, I switched my research program to work on [inaudible] when I started my lab at Berkeley, the genome of that [00:09:00] had just been sequenced and I liked working with animals. 

Speaker 4:        I like having something that moves around and you know, had some behaviors and so the lab started to work on flies and pretty much since then that's what we've worked on. That's sort of the story of how I got to where I am. So your research then is you're looking at flies over time? Yeah, I mean, I mean I see how the genes are expressed. I'd say we're looking at classified more as developmental biology in the sense that we're looking at how genes are expressed over time during the lifespan of a lie. To this day, [00:09:30] we can't look at a newly sequenced genome and say, oh well this is what the animal's going to look like. That is, I couldn't tell you except sort of by cheating and knowing, comparing it to other genomes. If I, you gave me a fly genome, I look at it, I wouldn't know it was a fly or a worm or a tree or it's just the way in which the organism acquires it. 

Speaker 4:        Things that make them interesting, their form, their appearance, their function. We have just the tiniest scratch of understanding of how that works. And so it's, for me, the most [00:10:00] interesting problem in biology is how do you get in a complicated structure like an animal out of a single cell. And how is that encoded in a genome sequence? I mean it's a fascinating mystery that I thought, you know, when I first started doing this I thought we'd have solved that problem by now. Not Easily. You know, because we had all this new data, we had the genome sequences we could measure. And a lot of what my lab does is actually measure which genes come on when, during development and try to understand for individual genes where that's been encoded in the genome [00:10:30] and how that happens. And I just sort of figured, well, you know, the problem for all these years was not that the problem was that hard. 

Speaker 4:        We just didn't have the right data to look at this problem. And now we can do these experiments. I can sequence the genome of a fly and in a day I can characterize which genes are turned on when during development. And I sort of naively thought, well, we'll just sort of put it into a computer and shake things up and be clever and we'll figure out how these things are related to each other. And I mean now it's laughable that I would've ever thought that, but it was a very, very complicated thing. It's a process that's [00:11:00] executed by very complicated molecular machines operating in a very complicated environment or the nucleus and it, you know, we really don't understand it very well. We've learned a lot, but it's not a problem. We really understand. And so what is it that you've accumulated in terms of knowledge in that regard? 

Speaker 4:        What do you think you've learned? A small amount of this is coming from my lab, but this is a whole field of people looking at this. But that we know the basic way in which that information is encoded in the genome. [00:11:30] We know that there are tuneable switches that can turn genes on and off in different conditions. And we know basically what molecular processes are involved in doing that in the sense that we know that there are proteins that can bind DNA in a sequence specific manner. So they will stick only to pieces of DNA that contain a motif or a particular code that distinct for each of these factors. In flies, there's several hundred of these factors and for humans that are several thousand of these factors that bind DNA in a [00:12:00] sequence specific manner, and they basically translate the nucleotide sequence of the genome into a different kind of code, which is the code of proteins bound to DNA. 

Speaker 4:        And we know from a million different experiments that it's the action of those proteins binding to DNA that triggers the differential expression of genes in different conditions. So if you have a particular proteins, these are called transcription factors. If you have one in a cell at high levels than the genes [00:12:30] that are responding to that factor will be turned on in that cell. And if there's another cell where that protein isn't present, the set of genes that responds to it won't be turned on. So we know that as a general statement, but working out exactly how those proteins function, what it is that they actually do to turn a gene on and off, how they interact with each other, what conditions are necessary for them to function. All of those things are, I wouldn't say we know nothing about it, but they're very, [00:13:00] very poorly understood. 

Speaker 4:        A lot of this sort of simple ideas that people had of there being a kind of regulatory code that looked something like the protein code that we're, you know, amino acid code that people are familiar with, right, that there'll be a genetic code for gene regulation. The idea that that's true is long disappeared from our thinking in the sense that it's much more like a very, very complicated problem with hundreds of different proteins that all interact with each other in a dynamic way. Something bind recruits, something else. [00:13:30] The thing it recruits changes the coding on the DNA and essence to a different state and then that allows other proteins to come in and that somehow or another that we still really don't understand. You eventually reach a state where the gene is turned on or turned off depending on what these factors are doing and you know, while there's lots of models for how that might function, they're all still tentative and we're getting better. The techniques for doing these kinds of experiments get better all the time. We can take individual pieces of or Sophala embryo [00:14:00] and sequence all the RNA contains and get a really complete picture of what's turned on when the technology is improving to the point where we can do a lot of this by imaging cells as amazing things we can do, but still the next level of understanding the singularity in our understanding of transcriptional regulation is still before us. 

Speaker 3:        Spectrum is on KALX, Berkley alternating Fridays today. Michael [inaudible], associate professor at UC Berkeley [00:14:30] is our guest. In the next section, Michael describes the challenges his research poses 

Speaker 4:        and is the task then the hard work of science and documenting everything's, yeah. Mapping a little bit about just observing. I mean, I'm a big believer in observational science that what's limited us to this has been just our poor tools for looking at what's going on. I mean we still hard to visualize the activity of individual molecules within cells, although we're on the precipice [00:15:00] of being able to do that better. So yeah, it's looking and realizing when the paradigms we have for thinking about this thing are clearly just not sufficient. And I think the fields get trapped sometimes in a way of thinking about how their system works and they do experiments that are predicated on some particular idea. But you know, usually when you have an idea and you pursue it for quite a long time and it doesn't pan out, it's because the idea is wrong. 

Speaker 4:        And not always, but I think the transcriptional regulation field has been slow to adapt [00:15:30] to new sort of models for thinking. Although that is changing, I think that there's a lot of activity now and thinking about the dynamics of DNA and proteins within the nucleus. You know, we tend to think about DNA as kind of a static thing that sits in the nucleus and it's a, it's sort of read out by proteins, but really much more accurate as to think of it as a living kind of warned me like thing in the nucleus that gets pulled around to different parts of the nucleus and where it is in the nucleus is one way in which you control what's turned on and off. And I think people are really [00:16:00] appreciating the importance of this sort of three-dimensional architecture of the nucleus as a key facet and controlling the activity that there's, the nucleus itself is not a homogeneous place. 

Speaker 4:        There is active and inactive regions of the nucleus and it's really largely from imaging that we're learning how that's functioning and you know, we as the whole field and are there lots of collaborators and people who are doing work? Yeah, I mean I'd say oh yeah. I mean it's a, it's an active feeling. Pay Attention to [00:16:30] oh yeah. So it's an active, if not huge field and not just in flies. I mean, I think it's transcriptional regulations of big field and in particular in developmental biology where amongst scientists we're interested in how animals develop. It's long been clear that gene regulation is sort of sits at the center of understanding development and so people interested in developmental biology and have long been interested in transcriptional regulation and I think everybody's got their own take on it here. But yeah, it's a very active field with lots of people, including several other people at Berkeley who are doing really [00:17:00] fascinating stuff. 

Speaker 4:        So it's not out in the wilderness. This is not the hinterlands of science, but it's um, it's a nice field to work in about appropriate size. Our annual meetings only have a thousand, a few thousand people. It's not like some of these fields with 25,000 people. I can realistically know all the people who are working on problems related to ours and I literally know them and I know what they're doing and we sort of exchange ideas. So I like it. It's, it's nice community of people. [00:17:30] Is the field driving a lot of tool development? Absolutely. I say, this is something I really try to encourage people in my lab and people I trained to think, which is when you have a problem, you should be thinking not what am I good at? What can I apply to this problem? What technique has out there that would work here? 

Speaker 4:        But what do I need to do? What is the right way to solve this problem? And if someone else has figured out how to do it, great, do it. But if they haven't, then do it yourself. And I think that this applies sort of very specifically [00:18:00] to doing individual experiments, but also to this broader issue we were talking about before with this interplay between computation and experiment. I think too many people come into science graduate school or wherever, thinking, well, I'm an experimentalist or I'm a computational biologist or whatever. And then they ask a question and then the inevitably hit the point where the logical path and pursuing their question would take them across this self-imposed boundary. Either you're an experimentalist who generated data and you're not [00:18:30] able to get at it in the right way and therefore, you know what you really need to be doing is sitting at a computer and playing around with the data. 

Speaker 4:        But if you view that as a boundary that you're not allowed to cross or you're incapable of crossing, you'll never solve it because it almost never works. You almost never can find somebody else no matter how talented they are. Who's as interested in the problem that you're working on as you are. And I think that's a general rule. Scientists should feel as uninhibited about pursuing new things even if they're bad at it. It's certainly been a mantra [00:19:00] I've always tried to convey to the people in my lab, which is, yeah, sure, you come in with a computer science background and you know you're a coder and you've never picked up a pipette or grown a fly. But that's why the first thing you should do in the lab is go grow flies and vice versa. For the people who come in perfectly good in the lab but unable to do stuff in the computer, the first thing you should do is start playing around with data on the computer and it doesn't always work and not everybody sort of successfully bridges that gap, but the best scientists in my mind are ones who don't [00:19:30] circumscribe what they're good at. 

Speaker 4:        They have problems and they pursue them. When something like visualization, is that a bridge too far to try to embrace that kind of technology? I've always done that. I mean I almost every time I do an analysis in the computer, I reduce it to picture some way or another. You know, because of the human brain, no matter how fancy your analysis is, the human brain is just not good at assimilating information as numbers. What we're good at as thinkers is looking at patterns, [00:20:00] finding patterns and things, looking at looking at images, recognizing when patterns are interesting and important, and there's a crucial role for turning data into something the human brain can pull in. And that's always, for me, one of the most fun things is taking data that is just a string of numbers and figuring out how to present it to your brain in a way that makes some sense for it and the refinement of it so that it's believable. 

Speaker 4:        Yeah, and so then you can do it over and over and over and get the same result. Yeah, and all, I mean it is one of the dangers [00:20:30] you deal with when you're working with, when you're relying on human pattern recognition is we're so good at it that we recognize patterns even when they don't exist. There's a lot of statistics that gets used in modern biology, but often people I think use it incorrectly and people think that statistics is going to tell them what things are important, what things they should be paying attention to. For me, we almost entirely used statistical thinking to tell us when we've fooled ourselves into thinking something's interesting, you know, with enough data and enough things going on, you're going [00:21:00] to find something that looks interesting there and having a check on that part of your brain that likes to find patterns and interesting things is also crucial. 

Speaker 4:        You know, I think people understand that if you flip a coin three times, it's not that we are trying to land on heads, but they have much, much harder time thinking about what happens if you flip a coin a billion times. We're struggling with this in biology, this transformation from small data to big data, it taxes people's ability to think clearly about what kinds of phenomena are interesting and aren't interesting. [00:21:30] Big Data is sort of the promise land now for a lot of people. Yeah. I'm a big believer in data intrinsically. If you're interested in observing things and interested in understanding how they work, the more you can measure about them better. It's just that's not the end of the game. Right? Just simply measuring things that doesn't lead to insight. Going from observing something to understanding it. That's where the challenges and that's true. Whether you're looking at the movement of DNA in a nucleus or you're [00:22:00] looking at people by a target, right? Like the same. It's the same problem. 

Speaker 3:        This concludes part one of our interview with Michael [inaudible]. On the next spectrum, Michael Eisen will explain the Public Library of science, which he [inaudible]. He will give his thoughts on genetically modified organisms and a strategy for labeling food. He discusses scientific outreach and research funding. Don't miss him now. Our calendar of science and technology [00:22:30] events happening locally over the next few weeks. Rick Karnofsky and Renee Rao present the calendar 

Speaker 5:        tomorrow, February 9th from noon to one wild Oakland presents nature photography basics at lake merit. Meet in front of the Rotary Nature Center at 600 Bellevue Avenue at Perkins in Oakland. For this free event, learn to get more out of the camera you currently have and use it to capture beautiful photos of Oakland's jewel lake merit. [00:23:00] Bring your camera and you'll learn the basics of composition, camera settings, but photography and wildlife photography. Okay. Your instructor will be Dan. Tigger, a freelance photographer that publishes regularly in Bay Nature and other magazines. RSVP at Wild Oakland dot o r G. UC Berkeley 

Speaker 6:        is holding its monthly blood drive. This February 12th you are eligible to no-name blood if you are in good health way, at least 110 pounds and are 17 years or older. You can [00:23:30] also check out the eligibility guidelines online for an initial self screening if you're not eligible or you prefer not to donate blood. There are other ways to support campus blood drives through volunteering, encouraging others and simply spreading the word. You can make an appointment online, but walk ins are also welcome. The blood drive will be on February 12th and the alumni house on the UC Berkeley campus will last from 12 to 6:00 PM you can make an appointment or find more information at the website. [00:24:00] Red Cross blood.org using the sponsor code you see be February 13th Dr. Bruce Ames, senior scientist at the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute will speak at a colloquium on the effects that an inadequate supply of vitamins and minerals has on aging. 

Speaker 6:        Dr Ames posits that the metabolism responds to a moderate deficiency of an essential vitamin or mineral by concentrating on collecting the scarce proteins [00:24:30] to help short term survival and reproductive fitness, usually at the expense of proteins important for longterm health. This is known as triaged theory. Dr Ian Discuss ways in which the human metabolism has evolved to favor short term survival over longterm health. He will also present evidence that this metabolic trade-off accelerates aging associated diseases such as cancer, cognitive decline, and cardiovascular disease. The colloquium will be on February 13th from 12 [00:25:00] to 1:15 PM on the UC Berkeley campus in five one oh one Tolman hall February 16th the Monthly Science at Cau Lecture series will hold a talk focusing on the emerging field of synthetic biology, which applies engineering principles to biology to build sales with new capabilities. The Speaker, John Dabber is a mentor in the international genetically engineered machines competition or ai-jen and a UC Berkeley professor, [00:25:30] Dr Debra. We'll discuss the new technique created in J key's link's lab to make low cost drugs to treat malaria. He will also introduce student members of the UC Berkeley Igm team who will discuss their prize winning project. The free public event will be on February 16th from 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM will be held on the UC Berkeley campus in room one oh five of Stanley hall 

Speaker 5:        on Tuesday the 19th how long now and Yearbook Buenos Center for the Arts Presents. Chris Anderson's talk [00:26:00] on the makers revolution. He describes the democratization of manufacturing and the implications that that has. Anderson himself left his job as editor of wired magazine to join a 22 year old from Tijuana and running a typical makers firm. Three d robotics, which builds is do it yourself. Drones, what based collaboration tools and small batch technology such as cheap 3d printers, three d scanners, laser cutters and assembly. Robots are transforming manufacturing. [00:26:30] Suddenly large scale manufacturers are competing, not just with each other on multi-year cycles are competing with swarms of tiny competitors who can go from invention to innovation to market dominance. In a weeks today, Anderson notes there are nearly a thousand maker spaces shared production facilities around the world and they're growing at an astounding rate. The talk is seven 30 to 9:00 PM at the Lam Research Theater at the Yerba Buena Center for the arts at 700 Howard Street in San Francisco. 

Speaker 5:        [00:27:00] Tickets are $15 for more information, visit long now.org now to new stories presented by Renee and Rick. The Federal Communication Commission has released a proposal to create super wifi networks across the nation. This proposal created by FCC Chairman Julius Jenna Koski, is it global first, and if approved, could provide free access to the web in every metropolitan area and many rural areas. The powerful new service could even allow people [00:27:30] to make calls for mobile phones using only the Internet. A robust public policy debate has already sprung up around the proposal, which has drawn aggressive lobbying on both sides. Verizon wireless and at t, and t along with other telecommunications companies have launched a campaign to persuade lawmakers. The proposal is technically and financially unfeasible. Meanwhile, tech companies like Google and Microsoft have championed the ideas sparking innovation and widening access to an [00:28:00] increasingly important resource. We can add this to the growing list of public policy debate over our changing and complex relationship with the Internet. 

Speaker 5:        A team at McMaster university as reported in the February 3rd issue of nature chemical biology that they have found the first demonstration of a secreted metabolite that can protect against toxic gold and cause gold. Biomineralization. That's right. Bacterium Delphia, [00:28:30] a seat of [inaudible] take solutions continuing dissolve the gold and creates gold particles. This helps protect the bacteria from absorbing harmful gold ions, but it also might be used to harvest gold. The researchers found genes that cause gold, precipitation, engineered bacteria that lack these jeans and observed that these bacteria had stunted growth and that there was no gold precipitation. They also extracted the chemical responsible [00:29:00] for the gold mineralization naming it delftibactin a, the molecule creates metallic gold within seconds in Ph neutral conditions at room temperature. Gold exists in extremely dilute quantities in many water sources and the bacteria or the metabolite might be used to extract gold from mine. Waste in the future. 

Speaker 3:        [inaudible] the music her during the show is by Luciana, David [00:29:30] from his album foam and acoustic, released under a creative Commons license, 3.0 attribution. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about show, please send 

Speaker 1:        them to us. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l [email protected] join us in two weeks at this same time. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

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

Pioneers in Engineering is a UC Berkeley student-run project that provides STEM outreach in local high schools. PIE sponsors and supports a Spring semester robot competition. Guests include Vivek Nedyavila, Andrew Vanderburg, and David Huang. pioneers.berkeley.edu

Transcripts

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next 

Speaker 2:        [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:        Hi and good afternoon. My name is Brad swift and I'm the host of today's show. Our interview is with representatives of Pioneers and engineering, also known as Pi, [00:01:00] a UC Berkeley student run project. Since 2008 Pi has been doing stem outreach in bay area high schools, Pi sponsors and supports and annual spring semester robot competition, high school teams design, build and operate robots over seven weeks culminating in a thrilling final competition at the Lawrence Hall of Science Pineys UC Berkeley students to be mentors during this year as robot competition. Each [00:01:30] team gets a set of mentors to encourage and guide the team, helping them to realize their potential, explaining Pi, the stem outreach they do and why you may want to join our Vivek Nay Diallo Vala, Andrew Vanderburg and David Hawaiian onto the interview. I want to welcome you all to spectrum. And would you introduce yourselves and tell us what your major is? 

Speaker 1:        Hi, my name is Vivek. I'm a UX major, electrical engineering and [00:02:00] computer sciences. I'm a junior. 

Speaker 4:        I'm Andrew. I'm a senior physics and astronomy major. 

Speaker 3:        Hi, my name is David. I'm a fourth year apply math and computer science major. Andrew, can you explain the history and goals of Pioneers and engineering? 

Speaker 4:        Sure, so pioneer's engineering was founded in 2008 by Berkeley engineers. The general idea is that while there are a lot of good robotics competitions that provide science outreach to high school students, [00:02:30] a lot of them aren't very good at providing outreach to the students who need it. Most. The ones in the underprivileged schools. So pioneers in engineering or pie as we like to call it, is focusing on trying to provide that outreach. So we try to make it more sustainable so that they don't have to pay as much money every year and they don't have to have corporate sponsors. And we also try to make it more friendly so that they don't have to go out and search for their own mentors. They get their own mentors from UC Berkeley and we provide [inaudible]. 

Speaker 1:        [00:03:00] And how did you decide on robots as the focus of your engineering challenge? 

Speaker 4:        I think that robots are kind of a gimmick. They're cool, they're exciting and they have a lot of pop culture and references. But the lessons that we teach them could be applied to engineering, all sorts of different things. Perhaps we could do a science competition and get the same teaching out of it. Robots just provide something exciting. They provide a hook and they provide a climactic final competition where they can [00:03:30] have their robots, you know, compete head to head. [inaudible] 

Speaker 1:        there is a certain kit aspect to what you're doing with the robots in terms of a known entity. A constraint. 

Speaker 4:        Yeah. So we um, give them a very well-defined kit of parts which they can use so they don't have to start from scratch because building a robot from basic electronic components and pieces of metal or plywood is really hard. So we give them a good start. We give [00:04:00] them a kit which they can build upon. They don't have to do all of the electronics. They don't have to do a lot of the tedious work, but they can do something really cool with them in the end. 

Speaker 1:        What's the funding source that you use for this competition? 

Speaker 4:        We see corporate sponsorships. We go to companies like Google, Qualcomm, Boeing, and we ask them if they can support us, if they can. We advertise for them. We put their logos on our banners and our tee shirts [00:04:30] and they also get deductions for supporting charitable causes. [inaudible] 

Speaker 1:        and are you a club? What is your organizational status? 

Speaker 4:        We are technically a project of Tau Beta Pi, which is the engineering honor society and our finances and our organization go through them. Many of our members have or no, not affiliated with Beta Pi. They are recruited by us 

Speaker 1:        beside the robot competition. Are there other projects within Pi [00:05:00] that you're working on? We have a team that actually goes to a high school called Ralph Bunche High School in West Oakland and this team does a program called Pie prep for these kids in which they have 13 or 14 modules of stem outreach kind of and they basically teach them cool things about science and technology and a little bit about robotics and physics and stuff like that and it's, it's once a week. It's intended to be fun and just spark their interest and also give them [00:05:30] a little bit of theoretical knowledge. This has been going very well this semester and from the results in the surveys that we've been taking, we're most likely gonna ramp it up next fall to even more schools. The exact number, we're not sure, but it's going to continue ramping up in the next few years and hopefully touch in the realm of 1314 schools in the area. We're hoping that this is going to be a very successful program and also inspire more interest in our robotics competition for the so we can have something good going on in the fall. It's [00:06:00] something in interest spring so it's like a year round kind of thing. 

Speaker 3:        This is spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Today's topic is pioneers in engineering. Three representatives from Pi join us. They are Vivek, Andrew and David. Andrew. How is it that high school's become involved in the [00:06:30] competition? 

Speaker 4:        We do a lot of recruiting into high schools who fit our core mission, the ones who probably wouldn't be able to compete sustainably and the other robotics competitions that are out there. So we contact teachers and the sciences and we ask them if they're interested and if their students are interested in putting together a team and then they apply for a team and if we have room we'll take them. 

Speaker 3:        What is the limit on teams? You have a capacity issue. 

Speaker 4:        Yeah. We have a limit of about 20 teams could be up as many as 24 this year and the limitations [00:07:00] are put in place by our ability to produce kits and to provide mentors for them. We would rather have a good competition with 25 teams than one that stretched too thin with 35 

Speaker 3:        and do schools stick with it. 

Speaker 4:        There is a core group of schools who seem to be building up somewhat of a legacy. They'll come back year after year. We actually just had our first student who is a four year high school participant in Pi Join Pi as a staff member [00:07:30] in college. 

Speaker 3:        Great. That's the goal, right? In a way that's sort of the ideal. Andrew, when the teams are picked, they're picked by the teachers at the high schools. 

Speaker 4:        The teams are I guess collected by the teachers at the high school, but they're based on interest. We've in the past tried to limit the number of people on the team, but we're moving away from that because um, we have a lot more mentors than we have in the past. 

Speaker 3:        How do you try to keep the parody of the experience within [00:08:00] the teams and the resources that they have access to the equipment, the time spent? How do you, how do you try to balance all that? Keep everybody kind of on the same level. 

Speaker 4:        So there are teams who have access to a machine shop in their high school and we can't provide that to everyone. But we do provide as a basic set of tools to anyone who wants them. We loan them out if they want to go to the high school and work with their team. And sometimes the high schools come to UC Berkeley and they can use our tools and our workspace in O'Brian Hall [00:08:30] in north side, we also try to ration the experience level of the mentors. We tried to provide the more experienced mentors to the less experienced teams. As a general rule, we try to provide equal experience and different types of engineering to each school. So each school should hope to have a mechanical engineer or someone who's mechanically inclined and someone who is electrically inclined or programming inclined. 

Speaker 1:        And the number of mentors per team. Last year it ranged between four to six [00:09:00] of AVEC. Talk about your experience as a mentor on the robot competition. My experience at Ralph Bunche high school mentoring and was a series of ups and downs. But in the end it kind of culminated in something special. So started off with a few weeks of mentorship prep by um, Andrew and his mentorship team. They prepped us for what we would encounter a little bit of the social aspect of the kids, but mostly about the uh, technical mentorship. Ralph [00:09:30] onto high is a rather underprivileged high school in West Oakland. There were only three of them in the team and we had to struggle with people dropping out, people coming in because of the small size of the team, small quarrels that were involved, a lot of social issues that we were not as equipped for as mentors coming from UC Berkeley. 

Speaker 1:        Um, not to mention the social barrier itself of where we have all come from in our lives compared to where these kids have come from. And [00:10:00] it was a really interesting experience for me because I actually have had a little bit of experience with kids from underprivileged backgrounds and the experience that I had in pulling my mentorship team into it with me trying to get everyone on the same page with these kids to not get frustrated with them, to not unequivocally say something and like have it mar the rest of our mentorship semesters. So it was a journey and it ended up being very rewarding, um, in the sense that [00:10:30] we got second place in the robotics competition and this team of three kids who were definitely the underdogs and it was just, you know, one of those quintessential underdog stories. They ended up getting second place and I was super proud of them. 

Speaker 1:        So very rewarding experience. David, tell us about your experience last year as a mentor. I think the biggest and rather pleasant surprise, uh, during the tournament was at discrimination the week before and during the actual [00:11:00] tournament at the end of the season. The atmosphere was just absolutely incredible. We had, um, PAC has of spectators. We had epic music classing in the background and in both hers mining hardware. We had the scrimmage and the Lawrence Hom signs where we had to file tournament. The stage was very well prepared and when each team sent up their team members send their robot on the stage to compete. It gives you the feeling that you're these [00:11:30] stars on stage, sort of like maybe no gladiators in ancient Roman stadiums where you're the center of the attention of everyone around you and really at some level I feel like that's where colleges should be about is motivating students, motivating students, intellectual growth and also highlighting their achievements and I think in that sense 

Speaker 5:        the Pi robotic competition has totally exceeded my expectation. I remember seeing a couple up the high school students [00:12:00] who ended up winning the competition, just crying on the stage and joy. I have no doubt that it had been a parade and really life changing experience for them. 

Speaker 3:        Spectrum is on KALX Berkeley alternating Fridays. Today, we are talking with Vivec, Andrew and David about pioneers in engineering 

Speaker 1:        as your involvement [00:12:30] in Pi giving you some insights into where you might want to go with your major. 

Speaker 4:        My involvement in Pi has really been my first major experience in teaching and it turns out that teaching is a lot harder than you would think, especially teaching some of the difficult concepts that we have to do so quickly in our decal. It turns out that trying to break down the concepts into logical chunks and presenting them in a logical way is almost as hard, if not harder than learning them yourself. [00:13:00] So I found that teaching and learning to teach was a really good experience for me and it will help me presumably as I graduate and go to Grad school [inaudible] 

Speaker 1:        because are you thinking of being a teacher? 

Speaker 4:        I'm thinking of being hopefully a professor in the future. I hope that my experience in Pi will give me a leg up from working on that and hopefully make it easier for my students to learn in the future. 

Speaker 3:        [inaudible] David, anything. Yeah. 

Speaker 5:        So I try and Pi as a part of my effort to explore [00:13:30] more in computer science, which I started taking classes last year and I have to say during the course of last semesters tournament, I really enjoy working with the staff member, other fellow UC Berkeley students and Pi. And I also really enjoy working with the high school students on my team to the extent that, uh, I'm starting to look more and more into the idea of working at a technology startup. And I'm also fairly sure I'm going to do computer science as a second major along with math. [00:14:00] And so in that sense, I think it's really solidify my interests in this field. 

Speaker 1:        VEC, how has pi affected your plans for the future? I've actually had, I guess in the last few weeks to think about this very seriously. And through talking with a number of people in Pie, I'm very, very inclined to do something kind of like this as a job in the future. Like being scientific outreach. Yeah, exactly. Scientific kind [00:14:30] of stem education. Stem outreach. Yeah. So there's um, a company called sparkfun that we have grown closer to over the last year and this is kind of exactly what they do. They have a sparkfun kit circuit skit and it's a solderless circuit skit where they can bring it to elementary, middle school classrooms and have these kids play around with circuits. They want to fund a trip across the nation teaching stuff like this to little kid. Just seeing things like this happen in the world makes me really rethink, do [00:15:00] I just want to become a fabrications engineer or something or like do I want to be a programmer or do I need something like this without there the risks are higher, but the reward, the potential reward is greater. Yeah, that's, that's how it's changed my outlook. What sort of a time commitment is there to being a Pi staffer or a mentor? 

Speaker 4:        So being a mentor, we ask that you attend a two hour day call once a week. We ask that you mentor your teams [00:15:30] for at least two hours a week. And we also ask that you do a five minute progress report so that we know how your teams are doing. So if you add in transportation time, it's probably adds up to about six to eight hours a week of time commitment. That won't be distributed evenly necessarily because there'll be weeks where you have weekend events, which lasts all day. But I think that most peer mentors have found that the time commitment really isn't a problem because by the time that the time coming and gets large, [00:16:00] you really want to be there and it's a lot of fun. 

Speaker 1:        And then for staff, so I know this isn't the time for staff to get involved or are you always looking for staff or is it really just at the fall? 

Speaker 4:        So we're always looking for staff. We do need mentors more than staff at this moment, but as a staff member, the time commitment is probably larger, probably order of 10 hours a week for the seven or eight weeks around the competition. At other times it's less, more [00:16:30] of a year long job than this intense seven week period as it would be for a mentor. 

Speaker 1:        Andrew, if you want to become a mentor, what's the process? Okay. 

Speaker 4:        For people who are interested in being mentors to the high school students, we are going to have a mentoring decal which starts in early February. On February 4th that decal will run from six to 8:00 PM on Mondays and Thursdays. And it's once a week. You choose one of those two times and uh, you come to that, you learn [00:17:00] about robotics and then we scheduled for a seven week period starting in March time for you to go to your high schools every week. That's flexible, depends on your schedule, on the high school schedule. The final competition will wrap up around April 28th 

Speaker 1:        and the kind of people you're looking for talk about who can be a mentor, 

Speaker 4:        right? So we accept mentors from every background. We believe that our decal will teach them the basics that can get them [00:17:30] to help their high school students out. And we also believe that learning about engineering is not the only purpose of Pi. We think that other students from other backgrounds can contribute just as much as engineers can because in the end it's not just about teaching them to be engineers, it's about teaching them to go to college, what it's like to be in college, what it's like, enjoy learning and some of our best mentors in the past have not been engineers. 

Speaker 6:        [inaudible]

Speaker 3:        [00:18:00] pioneers in engineering on spectrum detailing their stem outreach. This is k a l X. 

Speaker 6:        [inaudible].

Speaker 3:        Do you all find Pi to be a real supportive community for your own personal interests as well as the collective interest of doing the competition and start with the Vac, right. [00:18:30] Then we'll go around. 

Speaker 1:        For me it's the spirit of kind of like self-expression. You're doing something very special for these kids. It's a form of giving someone else what I had when I was a kid in the form of my dad or in the form of other people in my life who influenced me towards engineering and to motivate kids or like allow them to have that confidence in themselves. To go towards stem and at least higher education, one of the main goals of Pie. [00:19:00] Don't be afraid to apply to college and stuff like that. That form of self expression and just kind of helping these kids and self fulfillment through that, that the perk that I get, 

Speaker 4:        I feel as if Pi is a really supportive community because even though the going is often tough as a staff member, there's a lot of pressure because he wants to deliver a good competition to the students. Everyone's willing to help each other out. And I think that it's a really good community to have around you because [00:19:30] even though we're all doing a lot of work and sometimes we can get stressed, we remember that we have each other and that we're all working towards a common goal, which is to give these students a good educational experience. And that's something that a lot of them don't get in school. 

Speaker 5:        So coming from the perspective of surf a semi insider outsider, uh, as a pass mentor, um, I think Pi has given me the opportunity to meet a lot of other people who are similarly interested in science and engineering [00:20:00] from the perspective that these are wonderful things to learn about and to see happen in everyday life instead of just something that you learned together job. And going along that perspective, having met all these really interesting people, empire has given me more social avenues to while to hang out, for instance, for Thanksgiving or just took walk around campus and to know that there are all these people around me who are also likewise striving for a similar goal. And that's comforting to know. 

Speaker 3:        [00:20:30] Vivek, Andrew and David, thanks very much for being on spectrum. Thank you. Thank you for having us. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible] now our calendar of local science and technology events over the next two weeks, Renee Rao and Ricardo [inaudible] present the calendar. 

Speaker 7:        [00:21:00] Okay. Dr. Shannon Bennett, associate curator of microbiology at the California Academy of Sciences. We'll be hosting a lecture by HIV expert, Dr Leo Weinberger, who will discuss the engineering of a retro virus to cure HIV. While progress has been made in controlling the virus with heavy cocktails or combinations of drugs, more virulent and resistant varieties continue to arise, Weinberger will explore his idea of using the same virus that causes the disease to deliver [00:21:30] the cure. The event will be held at 12:00 PM on Saturday, January 26 tickets will be on sale at the California Academy of Sciences website, $15 for adults and seven for students or seniors. Martin Hellman, 

Speaker 8:        the co-inventor of public key cryptography is presenting the free Stanford engineering hero lecture at the Long Engineering Center at Stanford on Tuesday, January 29th from seven to 9:00 PM [00:22:00] with reception after his talk on the wisdom of foolishness, explorers, how tilting at windmills can turn out. Well in the 1970s Homan was competing with the national security agency who had a much larger budgets than he had, and it was warned that the NSA may classify any accomplishments he made. Despite this with help from Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle, Hellman spearheaded systems that are still used to secure Chileans of dollars of financial [00:22:30] transactions a day. Visit www. That's certain.com for more info 

Speaker 7:        east based first nerd night of 2013 we'll feature three Speakers, Daniel Cohen, a phd candidate in the joint UC Berkeley UCLA program. We'll speak about the theme of collective behavior, discussing the mechanism for everything from hurting sheep to sell your cooperation. Andrew Pike, a u Penn geologist by trade has also been [00:23:00] a contender in the competitive rock paper, Scissors League of Philadelphia. He will discuss some of the surprisingly complex strategies to the game. Lena Nielsen, the Innovation Director at the Bluhm center for developing economies at UC Berkeley. We'll explore technological solutions to extreme global problems that are also financially feasible. The event will start at eight but doors open at seven the event is held on January 28th at the new parkway located at four seven four [00:23:30] 24th street in Oakland. Science fans of all ages are welcome and can purchase the $8 tickets online. 

Speaker 8:        On Tuesday, February 5th at 6:00 PM the Felix Block, a professor in theoretical physics at and the director of the Stanford Institute for theoretical physicist, Leonard Susskind is talking to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco located at five nine five market street. The presentation is entitled the theoretical minimum, [00:24:00] what you need to know to start doing physics Susskind. We'll discuss how to learn more about physics and how to think more like a scientist. He will provide a toolkit to help people advance at their own pace. The cost is $20 to the public, $8 to members and $7 to students. Visit www that commonwealth club.org four tickets. 

Speaker 7:        UC Berkeley's center for emerging and neglected diseases will hold its fifth annual [00:24:30] symposium this year. A variety of Speakers will present their work in various areas of infection and host response. The theme of the symposium, the keynote Speaker, dawn Ghanem will explore new developments in malaria drugs across the world. Sarah Sawyer, another Speaker. We'll discuss what typically keeps animal viruses from infecting humans. Other topics will include emerging African biomedical research on HIV AIDS, mycobacterium [00:25:00] tuberculosis, and new testing protocols for infectious diseases in developing countries. The symposium will be held in Stanley Hall on the UC Berkeley campus on February 11th from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM it's open to anyone who [email protected] health.berkeley.edu 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 8:        [00:25:30] the two news items [inaudible] that can Renee, university of Cambridge researchers published an article in Nature Chemistry on January 20th that indicates DNA conform not only the classic double stranded Helix, but also structures that are made from four strands. It's been thought that these square shaped g quadroplex structures may form in the DNA of cells, but this paper is one of the first to provide evidence that they do exist [00:26:00] in human cells. They forum when four Guanines make a special type of hydrogen bond. 

Speaker 8:        The telomeres that protect Chromosomal DNA are Irish and Guanine and research points to quadroplex formation. And there is evidence that suggests quadruplex formation could damage these Tila mirrors and may play a role in how certain genes contribute to cancer. The team created a simple antibody that stabilizes these g quadroplex structures and showed how the structures are [00:26:30] formed and trapped in human DNA. When describing the long term goals of the research, the team told science daily that many current cancer treatments attack DNA, but it's not clear what the rules are. We don't aware in the genome some of them react. It can be a scattergun approach. The possibility that particular cancer cells harboring genes with these motifs can now be targets and appear to be more vulnerable to interference than normal cells is that thrilling prospect. 

Speaker 7:        Okay. A joint [00:27:00] UC Berkeley Duke University Study of couches across the nation reveals a disturbingly high percentage of our sofas contained noticeable levels of toxins. 102 couches in 27 states were examined in this study. Of these 41% were found to contain the chemical chlorinated Tris, a known carcinogen. 17% of the couches also contain Penta BDE, which can cause hormonal disruptions. While chlorinated Tris was banned [00:27:30] from use in children's clothing in the 1970s it continues to be routinely used by companies seeking to make foam furniture more fire resistant. Currently, California State Law requires a certain degree of flame retardancy, but does not require that the types or amount of chemicals used to achieve this be disclosed. Well, most cotton will or down catches are naturally flame resistant. Any foam catches will almost certainly require added chemicals to meet current standards. Last June, [00:28:00] Governor Jerry Brown advised the state legislature to reform flammability standards for furniture. Once the new regulations are adopted, the chemical free couches should be available. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible]. The music art during the show is by on a David from his album folk and acoustic released under [00:28:30] a creative Commons license 3.0 attributes. [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible]. [00:29:00] Yeah. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have common staff to show, please send them to us via email. All right, email address is spectrum dot [email protected] join us in two weeks. This same time. 

Speaker 9:        [inaudible] [00:29:30] [inaudible] [inaudible].

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Jarvis Sulcer, Allison Scott, Hailey Shavers, Ruby Alcazar, join us from the Level Playing Field Institute to discuss the year round STEM program in Bay Area High Schools for minority women. We discuss the program, how to apply, and get an idea of what it is like from Hailey and Ruby. lpfi.org

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

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

Speaker 3:        Good afternoon. I'm Rick Karnofsky. Brad swift and I are the hosts of today's show stay. We're talking about science education of underrepresented minorities with the level playing field institute who run the smash. Some are math and science honors Academy that happens here [00:01:00] at Cau and at Stanford, UCLA and USC. We have the executive director, Jarvis saucer, the director of research and evaluation, Alison Scott and scholars, Ruby Alcazar and Haley Shavers. Jarvis, why don't you tell me a little bit about LPI? 

Speaker 4:        It's a level playing philosophy to them. Our mission is to remove barriers for students of color who are pursuing degrees in stem and stem being science, technology, engineering and math, and to untapped their potential for the advancement [00:01:30] of our nation and the organism. We're founded in 2001 by Freada Kapor Klein focused on issues in the workplace around diversity and we started off Smash Academy at Berkeley in 2004 and we've continued to run the program and they've expanded to UCLA, USC and Stanford for the last couple of years.

Speaker 5:        Can someone summarize what Smash Academy is? So 

Speaker 4:        smash you. They three year five week residential program for low income students with color who have we interested in pursuing stem degrees [00:02:00] in college and so we support these students through our five week residential program starting in the summer after ninth grade year and they stay with it for three years. Then we brought in additional support in the first two years of college and one of our strategic partners. 

Speaker 5:        And can you tell me how scholars get involved in the program? 

Speaker 4:        Most scholars come from the nine payer counties and they are first nominated by their teachers think they have to get a math and science recommendation and they go through a rigorous application process similar to what a senior in high school [00:02:30] with experience going to college. And then there's a application, they complete math assessment group interviews with staff and even current scholars than a program. And then we make a selection of the students who are about a 30% acceptance rate of students who apply. 

Speaker 5:        How did you do find out about the program? I was friends with Rachel seems nice and she told me about the program and she said, Haley, I know you math [00:03:00] and I know you really like this so you should apply. And I was kind of skeptical. I was like, that's my summer. I'm trying to go places. She's like, just do it. And I did. I got in and it's best. It's the best. I like it. I like it a lot. Yeah.

Speaker 6:        Well my sister was actually a scholar before I was and so I found it from her. She's four years older than I am. The way she found out was through her guidance counselor at a high school. What kind of activities do take place over that five weeks? 

Speaker 7:        [00:03:30] I think scholarships speak to that because they live and breathe it, breathe it. 

Speaker 6:        It's been different almost every summer. Our schedules. We have classes five days a week, sometimes even on Sundays. So those classes include the core class like math and science and our science writing class. But we also take like tech media, engineering electronics, and then we also have guest Speakers, we call them Speakerseries. We listen to different than people that come from like stem fields and what they're doing with their lives and their careers. And [00:04:00] we also go on a lot of field trips. What's your favorite activity? 

Speaker 5:        I think my favorite activity would have to be a field trip we took to Pixar, we got to tour the place in Emeryville and we also got to sit in on a presentation by one of the programmers who worked on brave. It was, it was really fun to see the inside of Pixar and just to see how they've created all the great movies that I've watched since I was little. 

Speaker 2:        Yeah. [inaudible] 

Speaker 8:        [00:04:30] you are listening to spectrum on k a l LX Berkeley. We're talking to the level playing field institute about science education of underrepresented minorities.

Speaker 7:        So a lot of research shows that our students come to us from schools. [00:05:00] Those are typically under-resourced, which means that they lack oftentimes access to high quality teachers, advanced placement courses that would prepare them for success in college. Um, in addition to extracurricular activities such as the ones that the scholars described that they participate in smash though, including things like computer science or robotics, which they might not have it there, high schools. And so that's a really great way smash is found to remove some of the barriers that face these students. 

Speaker 6:        [00:05:30] Awesome. Can you talk to us a little bit more about the specific audience of underrepresented students of color that smash hopes to educate? How are their needs different? How are what they already have access to different? 

Speaker 7:        One of the things that we find or that research demonstrates is that if you look at the science and engineering workforce, African American and Latinos make up only 7% of the entire science and engineering workforce, which is really concerning number considering that those populations [00:06:00] are rapidly growing and that the needs of our, our economy and our nation are trending towards stem occupations. And so, um, just that statistic alone speaks to the fact that, that we are leaving behind this significant person of our population and not preparing them for the skills that they'll need in the future. 

Speaker 4:        And another interesting stat is that only being willing or harder to come to valley with copies of found almost every day that company founded by two individual colors, that's [00:06:30] the 1% and so the half and mostly who found, who found comfortable, who start companies in the bay or in the valley, people with typically with stem backgrounds. And so we have a, as Allison mentioned, a [inaudible] amount of potential in students who could be founders of their own company and really transform not only their lives but the lives of many in their community and beyond. 

Speaker 6:        Is there something special about the bay area that would inspire programs like this to start here? 

Speaker 4:        [00:07:00] I think that the diversity of the type of students we have in the barrier and the fact we have multiple cities represented. I mean there are students in our program say from the East Bay who we never set foot on Berkeley campus, even though it's a boat ride away. Or you have students who live in, I don't know, Penis Lou, who we never stepped foot on Stanford's campus. So that opportunity to have two world class universities in our backyard, so to speak, in our scholars, have an opportunity to experience those campuses in terms of the labs [00:07:30] and access to graduate students. And even faculty, I think makes the very unique place. 

Speaker 7:        And in addition, there's the, obviously we have silicon valley in our backyard, so we have access to a lot of companies and employees of those companies who are very willing to come and speak to our scholars and provide [inaudible] 

Speaker 6:        role models and back to the scholars. Um, do you participate in science and math events outside of both smash and, and the school year? Um, I actually just [00:08:00] got an internship for um, building like a teen website and my like hometown Palo Alto. I also do this thing at my school called college pathways. It's um, run by my guidance counselor and is specifically also for minorities and people of color. We go visit different campuses and uh, kind of similar to Speaker series, we have guest Speakers that we listened to. Um, a lot of them have been like engineers and entrepreneurs. 

Speaker 5:        Um, so for me, other than smash casts, which introduced me to a lot of new programs, [00:08:30] I tend to just experiment. If I see something that I like, I'll research it and find out what's behind it and how can I learn. And that's, that's been my whole mindset since I guess my sophomore year of high school and it hasn't stopped. You have examples I have made to three mobile apps. They're very like simple. [00:09:00] I made them, so I felt like I feel really accomplished. I show like a bunch of my friends and they kind of just look at me like, this doesn't do anything. It just, you know, moves from like, you know, this is a lot of work. I've made these, I spend countless hours, you know, fixing it, make sure it doesn't have any errors. And it's, it's been good. I, my parents, they support me and even though I'm like the techie of the house, they don't really understand what I'm talking about, but [00:09:30] I explain it and they get it after a while and they're like, oh, this makes so much sense. 

Speaker 5:        And then they start bragging to all their friends, but, but it's been good. Yeah. So you've mentioned smash cast a few times, but I don't think we've actually talked about what that is. So did you want to give a summary of smash? I think I can. Um, so smash cast is almost like the extension of our taking media class that we take over the summer and the cast stands for communications [00:10:00] and social technology. I want to say we also experiment and like get exposed to different programs. So right now we're diving into corona, which is a mobile app programming and we've learned some of the terminology and we've had a few mobile app companies come and visit us and they've talked about how they've created some of their games and we got to like test their games and uh, give them feedback. 

Speaker 2:        [00:10:30] [inaudible] 

Speaker 8:        you are listening to spectrum on k Alex Berkeley. We're talking with Jarvis, Alison Rubian, Hayley about smash the summer math and science honors academy. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 5:        and what's it like [00:11:00] returning back to your regular high school after the end of the summer? He was kind of weird. How was so used to seeing the same faces? Six, six 30 but like seven ish in the morning until, you know, lights out at 11 o'clock. I guess it, I mean it's nice to go back to high school at the same time. I would always really miss smash. Smash is always what I'd look for too during the entire year. I guess it's kind of me going back to my classes also because I was the only like person of [00:11:30] color and a lot of my classes especially then like my science classes. Um, for me it was, it was kind of disappointing because my high school is, it's really small and I, I like the small atmosphere yet again. I like being surrounded by people who are driven to do better. Um, and my high school I attend, I have a small group of friends and at times they kind of have a lack of motivation to do better. 

Speaker 5:        So I'm always there to push them. I'm like, come on you guys, [00:12:00] let's do this work, let's get it done. Um, but that smash, it was kind of vice versa. We pushed each other to a point where we did our best and we got the work done and we still had fun. And also the classes at my escort are kind of disappointing being that I have a computer science class yet there's only like five people and maybe two out of the five are really interested in the class. And then also for my math class it's [00:12:30] me and what other one other junior, because we take a higher level and we're kind of more advanced than the seniors, which is kind of disappointing being that they're kind of kind of our role models, but they're, they lack that motivation to apply for the colleges and they procrastinate a bunch and it's not good. But I think my junior class will be a really good senior class because I'm a part of it. So [00:13:00] there's LPF I help students after they go on to college. 

Speaker 4:        Yes, we do. We have a strategic partner called beyond 12 and their primary focus is to provide support to first generation college students. I mean, effort to get to college because the city show that if a student can make it through their first two years of college, there is the chance of graduating from college significantly increases. 

Speaker 6:        Hailey Hailey, how did you get started in stem? 

Speaker 5:        It would have [00:13:30] to be my big cousin. He makes like custom computers for different people and I would always go over his house and just be interested in what he was building that day and he would make them look really interesting and show me all the parts. And from there I joined this weekend program that was held at a college and we just got to experience different forms of science and engineering and math and we got to take apart a computer and put it back together. [00:14:00] And I think from there I've always wanted to know how a computer works from the inside and see what I can make for other people to use. I like game design and game programming being that you play game and there may be some errors, but for the most part it's smooth and I want to be that person behind that game, writing that code so you can play. 

Speaker 6:        How about Ruby? What got it going for you? Well, I had a really, [00:14:30] really good math teacher my eighth grade year, so middle school and I grew really close with her. It was just like a friendship that we had beyond like student teacher. I'd go to her when I have issues and we just talk like I just sit in a classroom and talk with her during lunch or something. I sweat. That initially kind of started thinking like, well she's so cool. She does too. Like I can do that. And then is that, so my math interest specifically like math has always been one of my favorite subjects. My mom actually forced me [00:15:00] to take a computer class my eighth grade year. Oh Web design class. I actually ended up enjoying it a lot. I was actually grateful for that. And so that kind of snowballed and and then my sister during my middle school years, she kinda accepted into smash and then she'd come back like every weekend telling me all these stories. And so I was like, oh well my sister basically my biggest role model and so I wanted to experience that too. 

Speaker 8:        You are listening to spectrum on k a l x [00:15:30] Berkeley. We're talking with representatives from LPF by the liberal clean field institute. 

Speaker 9:        Jarvis. I was, I was really intrigued with your mentioning of steam by adding the a for art into stem. And do you feel that that's maybe the next wave of creativity coming into stem now? It'll become steam? 

Speaker 4:        I think so. I mean there's been local religion [00:16:00] around that and um, there's definitely a lot of value because of the, again, the creativity piece I think just look at, you know, iPhone, you know Steve Jobs that was inspired by the calligraphy classmate that he had at one point that led to a lot of what, you know, did some design, right? So you couldn't have that class. Who knows what may have with the rest. She may have taken it. So I think there's this one example of how it was the art that inspired and even some of the designs of other types of devices. It's not coming [00:16:30] naturally from engineers per se, but those who had this art sort of angle ass, another flavor and 11 other level of creativity. I finish. And use my creative. But I mean you look at the creativity, you mean even for engineer who's in a, you know, hardcore class they have in that part they can add another level of dimension to their own repertoire so to speak. I think design, no different types of devices and things of that nature. 

Speaker 9:        How about Hayley? Do you think art is something you'd be interested in including in your [00:17:00] stem, getting some studio work somehow, you know, something design oriented? 

Speaker 5:        Uh, definitely. I think if I have a piece of art included with my programming, I could create a lot of things. Like Games are some visual. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And if it's art that I like and that I've made, then I can say I've made a whole entire game about myself or at least with a whole team and [inaudible]. [00:17:30] Yeah, that'd be really, yeah, art is very important. 

Speaker 9:        What sort of tools and discipline has smash provided for you as you know, as individuals kind of personal tools to help you succeed? 

Speaker 5:        It definitely time management because of all of our classes we have homework and almost each class and we will always have to manage our time because we do have free time, but if you're not going to do your homework then you're procrastinating and then that's not good. But [00:18:00] then also teamwork because we work in groups and almost every class and you have to push your group members so we can all get the project done in a timely manner. So time management ties back into that too. 

Speaker 6:        Any advice for people who are considering joining us? Yes. For any prospective applicants are scholars, definitely time management because those things come up really quick. Getting your teacher recs in on time, getting you essays done on time [00:18:30] I guess to the future scholars or they just keep an open mind. There's a lot of different people that come and go through the program and just to take all that you can from all these different people because you're not always going to get this chance if you got accepted, like there's a reason why you're there and so take as much as you can from it. 

Speaker 9:        He is his level playing field on Facebook and Twitter. 

Speaker 4:        Yes, I can go to a website. Um, that'd be the LPL [inaudible] [00:19:00] dot org and you received the links there too. They connected. 

Speaker 6:        And Are you trying to recruit either new scholars or new volunteers or anything like that? 

Speaker 4:        Yes, we're trying to recruit new donors, so anyone who, who like what they've heard today and want to impact more scholars Kotaku website and donate. Also looking for volunteers, those who want to get connected and volunteer their time, their resources 

Speaker 6:        and we're obviously always looking for more talented scholars like Ruby and [00:19:30] Haley, everyone from LTF Jarvis and Ellison and Ruby and Hayley, thanks for joining us. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 8:        students wishing to apply to the Smash Academy can visit www dot [inaudible] dot org slash smash online registration closes Friday, February 15th at midnight. Online applications are due Friday, March 1st [00:20:00] I had been dating potential donors can also visit the LPI website to learn more. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 8:        Brad Swift joins me for some science news headlines. 

Speaker 9:        UC Berkeley News Center reports the publication of a study by University of Texas. At Austin and University of California Berkeley researchers, Shalani Sha and Claire Kremen in the Journal, p a n a s shows landscapes with large amounts of paved roads and impervious construction [00:20:30] have lower numbers of ground nesting bumblebees, which are important native pollinators. The study suggests that increasing the number of species rich flowering patches in suburban and urban gardens, farms and restored habitats could provide pathways for bees to forage and improve pollination services over large areas. The findings have major applications for global pollinator conservation on a rapidly urbanizing planet. Though it may seem obvious that pavement and ground nesting [00:21:00] don't mix. Joss said our understanding of the effects of pavement and urban growth on native bees has been largely anecdotal, bumblebees nest in the ground and each colony contains a queen and a force of workers. Unlike honeybees, which are not native, bumblebees, do not make harvestable honey. They do, however, provide important pollination services to plants to study the bumblebees. Joe Did not scour the landscape for a nest in the ground, which has proved in the past to be very difficult, especially over large [00:21:30] areas. Instead, she analyzed the genetic relatedness of bees foraging in the landscape GI use this information plus the B's location to estimate the number of bee colonies in an area and determine how far a field the individual bees were foraging. 

Speaker 8:        The UC Berkeley News Center reports on findings presented on Monday, December 17th at the American Society for Cell Biology's annual meeting in San Francisco. Researchers from cal and Lawrence Berkeley showed [00:22:00] that mechanical forces can revert and stop out of control. Growth of cancer cells, professor of bioengineering, Dan Fletcher, said that Tissue Organization is sensitive to mechanical input from the environment at the beginning. Stages of growth and develop the team grew Milligan breast epithelial cells in a gelatin lake substance that had been injected into flexible silicone chambers. The flexible chambers allowed the researchers to apply a compressive force [00:22:30] in the first stages of cell development. Over time, the compress malignant cells grew into more organized healthy looking structures. The researchers used time lapse microscopy over several days to show that early compression also induced coherent rotation in the malignant cells. The characteristic feature of normal development. The new center added that it should be noted that the researchers are not proposing the development of compression bras as a treatment for breast cancer. Compression in and [00:23:00] of itself is not likely to be a therapy said flusher, but this does give us new clues to track down the molecules and structures that could eventually be targeted for therapies. 

Speaker 9:        Here's another UC Berkeley News Center report I simple, precise and inexpensive method for cutting DNA to insert genes into human cells could transform genetic medicine making routine. What now are expensive, complicated and rare procedures for replacing defective genes [00:23:30] in order to fix genetic disease or battle diseases like aids. Discovered last year by Jennifer Doudna and Martin genic of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and University of California Berkeley and the manual Carpentier of the laboratory molecular infection medicine in Sweden and published in science. The new technique was proven to work cutting bacterial DNA. Two new papers published last week in the journal. Science Express demonstrated that the technique also works [00:24:00] in human cells. A third new paper by Doudna and her team reporting. Similarly successful results in human cells has been accepted for publication by the new open access journal Elife. The key to the new technique involves an enzyme called CAS. Nine Doudna discovered the cas nine enzyme while working on the immune system of bacteria with evolved enzymes that cut DNA to defend themselves against viruses. 

Speaker 9:        These bacteria [00:24:30] cut up viral DNA and stick pieces of it into their own DNA from which they make RNA that binds and inactivates the virus. This is a poster child for the role of basic science in making fundamental discoveries that affect human health. Doudna said irregular feature of spectrum is a calendar of some of the science and technology related events happening in the bay area over the next two weeks. Here's Brad Swift [00:25:00] on selected Saturdays from 9:30 AM to 1:30 PM experienced the beauty and rich natural history of Audubon Canyon ranches. 535 Acre Bovary preserve. Participants are divided into small groups and paired with a trained bovie air volunteer to explore the mixed evergreen forest flower, carpeted oak, woodland and rugged chaparral guided natural walks range from two to five miles. Visitors of all ages are welcome. [00:25:30] There is no charge, but donations are appreciated. See the website for reservation information go to ygritte.org the next three hikes are on Saturday, January 12th March 9th and March 20 [email protected] here's a presentation on over-confidence in the frailty of knowledge. 

Speaker 9:        While self confidence is a prized human attribute, too much confidence can be obnoxious, pernicious, and even deadly. This audience participation [00:26:00] skeptic will present a simple 10 question quiz to measure an important aspect of individual self confidence. With analysis and discussion of these measurements, audience members will be better able to calibrate properly their personal levels of self confidence. The ultimate goal will be a healthier skepticism towards one's own depth of knowledge about the world. This event is a joint production of the bay area skeptics and wonder fest. The Bay area beacon of science. The Speakers are Dr [00:26:30] Maryland Cologne, California State University, East Bay lecturer in psychology and Tucker Hyatt, Stanford visiting scholar and wonder fest. Founding executive director. This will be held Wednesday, January 16th at 7:30 PM until approximately 9:30 PM the location is La Pena Lounge 31 oh five Shattuck avenue in Berkeley, 

Speaker 3:        the American Association of University Whitman Presents. Do Girls Love Science. You Bet Ya. Come here. Stanford's Dr [00:27:00] Siegrid close. Explain why Dr [inaudible] close is the cohost of the 2011 series known universe which aired on the National Geographic Channel. She is an assistant professor at Stanford's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics where she heads up the space environment and satellite systems lab. This event happens Thursday, January 17th at the Sunnyvale Heritage Park Museum five 70 Remington drive in Sunnyvale, California. The doors open at seven [00:27:30] announcements at seven 15 Speaker at seven 30 for more information on this free event, visit www.auw-sv-cupt.org. 

Speaker 9:        The next science at cal lecture will be on January 19th the talk will be given by Dr Mark less girl art and is entitled the shape of our thoughts, visual perception of geometric shape. Most people think that seeing is something that happens [00:28:00] in the eyes, but many aspects of our perception of the world are determined by neural computations that occur in the brain. The visual Cortex, the part of the brain that processes vision takes up nearly a third of our cerebral real estate. Different regions of the visual cortex respond to different aspects or features of visual stimuli, less crow art. We'll discuss his work which shows how intermediate visual processing areas in the visual cortex respond to variation and object silhouettes [00:28:30] and 3D surface orientations. This lecture will happen at 11:00 AM on January 19th in the genetics and plant biology building room 100 on the UC Berkeley campus. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]. The music you [00:29:00] heard during say show was [inaudible] and David from his album book and acoustic is released under a creative Commons license version 3.0 spectrum was recorded and edited by me, Rick Karnofsky and by Brad Swift. Thank you for listening to spectrum. You're happy to hear from listeners. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email, right. Email address is spectrum [00:29:30] dot [email protected] join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible] [inaudible].

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Princeton and UC Berkeley trained chemist Delia Milliron is the Deputy Director of the Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley Lab. In part two, Delia talks about her interests, the Molecular Foundry and its unique environment. foundry.lbl.gov

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next [inaudible] [inaudible]. [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 2:        Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Today we present part two of our two part interview with Delia Mill Iron, [00:01:00] the deputy director of the Lawrence Berkeley national lab molecular foundry, Delia mill iron. Received her undergraduate degree in chemistry from Princeton and her phd in physical chemistry from UC Berkeley. Delia leads a research group at the molecular foundry, which has spun off a startup named heliotrope technologies. Her group is a partner in the newly announced Joint Center for Energy Storage Research, a [00:01:30] multistate department of energy research hub focused on developing transformative new battery technologies. Delia's group was recently awarded a $3 million grant by the Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects, agency energy, ARPA e for her work on smart window technologies. Now the final part two of our interview. Uh, even though nano science is a relatively new pursuit, how have the tools to execute [00:02:00] your research and development? How have they advanced? 

Speaker 3:        The tools have progressed remarkably and many would say that our ability to see material on the nataline scale and by c I mean more than just get a picture, but also to see the specifics of the chemistry, the electronic structure and so on that these advances in tools and characterization tools have [00:02:30] been the catalyst for every other development and nanoscience because it's very difficult to move quickly forward in making new materials. For example, if you can't actually see what you're making. So starting with electron microscopy, which used the fact that electrons moving very quickly, you have a wavelength far shorter than that of light and therefore they have the ability to resolve features on the nano meter and in fact on the atomic lane scale. [00:03:00] That's tremendous, right? That's an incredible enabling capability for nanoscience. But electrons are limited in the chemical information, the electronic structure information, they can probe some of this, but light is still king. 

Speaker 3:        So spectroscopy which is using light to probe chemical bonds and composition and so forth is still king of understanding richness, rich detail about materials. So some of the most exciting events is to me [00:03:30] in the tools for nanoscience are bringing optical spectroscopy spectroscopy using light to smaller and smaller and smaller lane scales. The state of the art, if you use conventional optics, just nice, beautifully made lenses and so on is that you can use light to look at things down to about half the wavelength of light. So for visible light that means things on the order of a few hundred nanometers. If you're doing things very, very [00:04:00] well by manipulating the light further leveraging nanoscale phenomena like the plasmonics I mentioned earlier, you can now squeeze light into extremely small volumes and do optical spectroscopy down to lane scales, tens of nanometers across, so doing full rich optical characterization and materials. 

Speaker 3:        Basically using light microscopy at 40 nanometer lanes scales is now [00:04:30] a reality and the kind of information we can get about materials, their properties and how those are related is just going to benefit tremendously from those kinds of new advances. Are there tools that you crave? Unrealized tools? Yes, sure. I love to be able to resolve rich chemical, detailed dental. The Lane scale of Adams, you know, tens of nanometers is nice, but uh, most of our nanocrystals are smaller than this. They're five [00:05:00] nanometers. There are 10 nanometers, they're not 40 or 50 nanometers. So we still haven't quite brought light in a useful way down to the dimensions of the materials that give us the most interesting properties. The other major thing many of us crave is to bring detailed characterization into three dimensions and really four dimensions. So how they're arranged in three dimensional space definitely affects their properties, but it's difficult [00:05:30] to image. 

Speaker 3:        So microscopic tools still often look at the surface of material and so you get a two dimensional map at high resolution. It's much more difficult to get high resolution images and information in three dimensions. And then the fourth dimension is of course time. So being able to follow a structure and the flow of energy and electrons in three dimensional space as it progresses in time, pushing time resolution shorter and shorter and shorter. Can [00:06:00] we track those processes? So that we can understand how function emerges. Because function is very often dynamic in nature. It's not just a static moment in time. It's the way that chemistry and electrons and so forth progress over time. Explain the user program at the foundry. How do people get involved in that? Sure. So the, the user program provides free access to scientists from all over the world [00:06:30] who have an interest in leveraging expertise, materials, capabilities, techniques and so on that we developed at the foundry to advance their science or technology. 

Speaker 3:        And the mode that people use, the foundry takes all different forms. Uh, one of our favorites is for scientists to send a student or postdoc or a young researcher or in fact visit themselves, for example, for a sabbatical and then actually work with us. I buy side in our lab [00:07:00] can best learn the INS and outs of working with synthesizing, measuring whatever it is, the materials and techniques of interest to them. Um, we found that this is a very powerful way to expose young scholars to the potential for interdisciplinary research as we exercise it at the foundry for this new mode of doing science where people from all different disciplines are talking every day about problems to advance a state [00:07:30] of the art. That's been very productive and I think those students and postdocs go home really changed in their outlook on how they approach science and they bring some of that perspective back to their home labs. 

Speaker 3:        They also, by the way, bring some perspective on our safety approach back to their home labs. And we really enjoy the success stories of having companies even and also academic research lab to use our approach to safety in particular [00:08:00] nanomaterial safety but safety in general as a blueprint for setting up their own labs or for reinvigorating the safety culture and so on if their own institution. So this mode of people coming and working with us and engaging in all with a whole variety of scientists and techniques in our labs and then going back home is then tremendously effective. We also spend time, you know, shipping samples back and forth, doing some characterization on other people's materials or vice versa, shipping our materials [00:08:30] out to people who have specialized characterization, approaches that compliment what we do well and this is in the spirit, I would say of good scientific collaboration in general. But the most exciting thing by far is to bring people together and mix up their ideas and their concepts and see new things emerge. 

Speaker 1:        [inaudible]

Speaker 2:        you are listening to spectrum [00:09:00] on KALX Berkeley, our guest Delia mill iron of Lawrence Berkeley national lab is talking about her work in nanoscience and nanotechnology. 

Speaker 1:        [inaudible]

Speaker 2:        can you talk about the safety guidelines that are in place at the molecular foundry and in working with nanomaterials? 

Speaker 3:        Yeah, so nanomaterials because it's a relatively new science to deliberately craft them, [00:09:30] we still don't know in many cases, the ways in which their toxicology and the risk of exposure may differ from the same material found in bulk form. And because we have this uncertainty, we owe it to ourselves and to the environment to treat them with an elevated level of care. And so the Department of Energy was actually the first agency in the u s to create specific guidelines for handling [00:10:00] nanoscale materials in laboratory environments. I was actually part of that process several years ago and that policy is updated every year and it forms the basis for what we implement on the ground in the lab terms of safety procedures. For example, we're particularly concerned about any nanomaterials that are not firmly bound within a matrix or firmly bound to a substrate because these have the potential to become airborne [00:10:30] or volatilized or something like this. 

Speaker 3:        So that we most focus on these, which we call it quote unquote unbound engineered nanoparticles, engineered meaning deliberately created and these are always handled in enclosed ventilated environments. So for us, things like glove boxes and fume hoods and then we validate that those kinds of environments do indeed protect workers from exposure by doing low background tests for particle counts during agitated [00:11:00] procedures. So we exaggerate the potential risk. We reduce the background particle count in the lab with a portable clean room and we use a very sensitive particle counter to see if any countable particles are generated in the workspace of the actual scientists working in the lab. Um, and this helps us form systematic approaches to handling materials in ways that don't cause any exposure. 

Speaker 2:        Is the toxicology of nanomaterials [00:11:30] a growing area of study? And what about the interaction of nanomaterials outside of the lab in the environment? 

Speaker 3:        Yes, definitely toxicology is a growing area of study, but you raise an important point, which is even before a nano material that's out in the world can interact with a biological organism. It experiences the environment. And so the first thing that's maybe preliminary in a way, but it is now taking place at the same time as [00:12:00] to understand the fate of nano materials in the environment. So how do they move through different kinds of soil and medium because surface effects are so important. How do molecules that are just found very commonly around us adhere to the surfaces and change the properties of the nanomaterials before they ever encounter the biological organisms because that will have a big effect then on their toxicology. So the fate of Nano materials in the environment is definitely a growing [00:12:30] area of study and we've had scientists at the foundry who have collaborated with geologists for example, to understand how soil conditions and ph and so forth can affect the transport of nanomaterials that are under consideration for solar energy applications. Should they end up released, how would they respond in different kinds of soil environments and be transported or or not. In some cases they are not readily transported and that's equally important to understand 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible] so it becomes [00:13:00] a life cycle study. Yes, materials and those things can take a long time to really get a grasp of what the impact is. How then do we gauge the extent to which nanomaterials get leveraged in the short term and monitor the longterm impacts [inaudible] 

Speaker 3:        I think monitoring is an important point, right? It will take even longer if we're not paying attention to learn how things interact with the environment and what their fate ultimately is. So the [00:13:30] science in the lab is important, but the science as technologies begin to be released is, is equally important to track what's happening in the real world. Um, in the meantime, it's important to be thoughtful about the expected life cycle of technologies, incorporating Nana materials. So recycling programs, encapsulation recovery, assessment of likelihood of release from a completed say [00:14:00] device, like a solar cell solar cells are completely encapsulated in glass, right? So the initial thought would be, well, if this, if everything's going right, there will be no nanomaterials released. But now what if that panel breaks? What's the likelihood of that? So asking these questions upfront and taking, you know, a responsible role in the life cycle of the technology, I think is essential, particularly given the uncertainties. 

Speaker 4:        [inaudible] [00:14:30] our guest is Delia Mil iron, the deputy director of the Lawrence Berkeley national lab molecular foundry. She was a chemist working at the Nano scale. You are listening to spectrum on KALX Berkeley. 

Speaker 3:        How much time do you spend paying attention [00:15:00] to other areas of science and technology? As much as I possibly can. I think inspiration in science comes from broad perspective and so I am as far as I could get from being a biologist as a physical scientist, but the concepts of how biological systems work are quite intricate and inspiring though new discoveries in biomechanical [00:15:30] processes and so on can become the seed. That gives me a new idea of how to put nanocrystals together in a way that generates totally new phenomena, for example. It's also just fascinating, honestly. I mean I've always been fascinated with science, so paying attention to the uh, developments and the exploration of Mars or in astrophysics. There's a tremendous fundamental physics community at the lab and I love to listen to them talk about the [00:16:00] discoveries they're making through telescope observations of distant supernovas and these sorts of things. 

Speaker 3:        I won't say that I can point to any direct impact that's had on my work. But I think expanding your general perspective on the way the world works at all these different length scales and timescales and so on, it forms your context as a scientist and you know, maybe as a person as well. Are there collaborations in other fields you'd like to see grow? [00:16:30] So this idea of connecting biology more deliberately are the concepts of biology more deliberately to materials research, which is my area of investigation I think is quite powerful and under exploited at this stage. It's amazing what molecular biologists now understand about the mechanisms that underlie life and how molecules [00:17:00] interact in elaborate ways to synthesize DNA, to create proteins to, you know, at completely mild conditions, fold proteins up and do catalytic activity. Things that in the engineering world, you know, have traditionally been approached by brute force, you know, thousands of degrees c and so on. And so if we can take some of these concepts from biology and see [00:17:30] how they can affect the way we approach synthetic materials to a greater extent, I think this will be a very important opportunity. Of course there are some people doing this. I don't want to suggest that that's a totally new idea, but I think that connection could be a much broader avenue than what it has been so far. Do you feel there's an element of art in what you do? 

Speaker 3:        I think so. I definitely enjoy art, although not highly skilled. [00:18:00] My Adventures and creating sculpture, you know, clay wood and so on in my mind are in harmony with what we do on the atomic length scale in the way we try to craft nanoscale materials or madams and then craft macro scale materials from those nanoscale materials, putting them together as these building blocks and it has a sculptural aspect to it. And definitely there's beauty in the images generated when we use all these amazing [00:18:30] cutting edge techniques to visualize our structures. Is there anything that we haven't talked about that you wanted to mention? I think the other comment I'd like to make going back to the molecular foundry and I lit up when you asked me, you know, what's the foundry about? Because I really think that the research environment do, the approach to scientific research being carried out at the molecular foundry is [00:19:00] a beautiful example for the way forward for science that science can be greatly accelerated in discovery of new terrain, new subject areas entirely through this mode of intense dynamic collaboration across fields. 

Speaker 3:        I think it was somewhat deliberate and at the same time a bit of an accident that this emerged from the creation of the molecular foundry. What the [00:19:30] founders of the foundry did that was very smart was to hire a group of very young scientists who had an approach to science where they would clearly appreciate being involved in many different projects coming from many different perspectives. This was essential to make the user program work on your scientists must be enthusiastic about collaborating with all these different scientists who have different objectives, [00:20:00] different contexts and so on, but as a consequence of hiring that group of people and putting them together in one building, what naturally happened is we all started to interact in the same way with each other and the result is that you have a coupled series of dynamic feedback loops that greatly accelerate innovation. 

Speaker 3:        One of them being between our science and that of our users and one of them being between the scientists internal to the building and [00:20:30] the results of that experiment really in scientific structure that's represented by the foundry are just starting to appear because we're still quite a young institution and I think that the impact of this sort of model is going to felt for a long time and is going to be replicated and mapped onto other research centers. We've already seen a lot of interests in understanding the way we do our science as research centers are being set up around the [00:21:00] world and that doesn't happen very often. That's an exciting deviation from the traditional department structure, single principal investigator directed research, as brilliant as one scientists and the research group may be. It lacks that dynamism that we have. So it's sort of a high of mentality to science, if you will, and that's really interesting and gonna yield a lot of fruit, I think. 

Speaker 2:        Delia mill iron. Thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Thank [00:21:30] you. 

Speaker 1:        [inaudible]

Speaker 2:        tours of the Lawrence Berkeley national lab are available monthly. The molecular foundry is on that tour. Just sign up for a tour, go to the Lawrence Berkeley [00:22:00] national lab website, which is lbl.gov 

Speaker 1:        [inaudible].

Speaker 2:        A regular feature of spectrum is to mention a few of the science and technology events happening over the next two weeks. It's quiet time of the year, not a whole lot going on, but the Lawrence Hall of Science 3d Theater has daily screenings [00:22:30] of two films, space junk, and the last reef space junk is a visually explosive journey of discovery that ways the solutions aimed at restoring our planets. Orbits Space Junk runs through January 6th, 2013 the last reef was made with new macro underwater cinematography. The last reef reveals and astonishing world rarely seen at this scale. The film presents an unprecedented vision of the intriguing creatures that participate [00:23:00] in altering the geology of our planet. The last reef runs through May 5th, 2013 the exploratorium is leaving its only home at the Palace of fine arts and moving to piers 15 and 17 on the Embarcadero in downtown San Francisco. The new exploratorium will open in the spring of 2013 this coming January 2nd is the last day to experience the exploratorium as it is currently installed at the Palace of fine arts opened in 1969 [00:23:30] the exploratorium has evolved in this unwieldy space for 43 years. Catch one final glimpse. Wednesday, January 2nd, 2013 check the exploratorium website for special events on that final day. The website is exploratorium.edu 

Speaker 1:        [inaudible]

Speaker 2:        for the new segment. I want to do something a little different. As the year [00:24:00] draws to a close. I want to offer a short update on salient, national and commercial space launch ventures. Starting with the u s NASA reports that the Orien spacecraft is coming together for its 2014 test flight. Orianna is a new capsule that will take human exploration beyond earth orbit for the first time in 40 years. The first unmanned flight test of Orien will be launched a top a Delta for rocket from Cape Kennedy. The capsule [00:24:30] will be flown 3,600 miles above the earth and then return to the earth at 5,000 miles per hour for re-entry. The reentry will test the heat yields the landing at sea and the u s navy's recovery of the capsule. The longer term plans are to test the same capsule launched on NASA's next heavy lift rocket dubbed the space launch system. 

Speaker 2:        SLS in 2017 SLS will launch NASA's Orient Spacecraft and other [00:25:00] payloads beyond lower earth orbit providing an entirely new capability for human exploration. Space x, the U S Commercial Space Company has completed the first of a contracted 12 supply missions to the international space station. Space X is also working with NASA to develop and test the dragon capsule to allow it to transport humans to and from the international space station. On that point. In August, NASA announced the winners [00:25:30] of the commercial crew integrated capability funded space act agreements. This program is designed to supply NASA with a domestic commercial capability to transport humans into low earth orbit, specifically to the International Space Station and back. The winning companies are Boeing with a $460 million contract space x at $440 million and Sierra Nevada corporation receiving 212.5 million. [00:26:00] In June, 2012 China launched this shungite in nine spacecraft, a top a long march rocket. The spacecraft carried three crew members on a mission to dock with the Chinese space station. The mission was successful and is widely regarded as a major accomplishment for the Chinese based program. The mission will be repeated. In 2013 India marked its 101st space mission. October 1st of 2012 [00:26:30] with the launch of its heaviest communications. Satellite Gee sat 10 from French Guyana. The Indian Space Research Organization has 10 mission scheduled for 2013 the tentative capper is a plan in November, 2013 Mars orbiter to be done without any international help. 

Speaker 2:        The Russian space program continues to struggle after a series of embarrassing failures in spacecraft launches and flight operations that have cast [00:27:00] the future of the entire program. In doubt, observers fear that the rise of cheaper, more modern and reliable commercial space companies in the United States will peel off Russia's spaced services customers who currently infuse $1 billion annually into the Russian space. Industry. Insiders say consolidation, innovation, and modernization are required to save the industry. Leadership and funding for such a revival program are missing. At this point. The European space [00:27:30] agency successfully launched seven Ariane five rockets from their space port in French, Guyana during 2012 the Arianne five has had 53 successful launches in a row since December, 2002 

Speaker 5:        [inaudible]

Speaker 2:        an interesting space, junk liability arose for the European Space Agency. When a large lower earth orbit satellite nearing the end of its fuel supply suddenly went silent. The satellite is now stuck in a prime orbit corridor [00:28:00] that will take 100 years to degrade and fall to earth during the next 100 years. This satellite may collide with other satellites. If it does, the European Space Agency is thought to be liable for the damage done. No removal method of space. Junk currently exists. That's it. Happy New Year. 

Speaker 1:        [inaudible]

Speaker 2:        [00:28:30] the music heard on the show is by Los [inaudible]. David from his album folk and acoustic made available by a creative Commons license. 3.0 

Speaker 1:        attribution. [inaudible] thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to my severe eating and address is spectrum dot [email protected] [00:29:00] chumminess in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [00:29:30] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible].

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Princeton and UC Berkeley trained chemist Delia Milliron is the Deputy Director of the Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley Lab. In part one, Delia explains Nano Science and Technology. She talks about her research with nanocrystals to make thin films. foundry.lbl.gov

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next. 

Speaker 2:        Mm mm mm mm mm mm mm 

Speaker 3:        [inaudible].

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

Speaker 4:        Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Today is part one of a two part interview with Delia Mil Iron, the deputy director of the Lawrence Berkeley national lab molecular foundry, [00:01:00] Delia mill iron is a chemist. She received her undergraduate degree from Princeton and her phd from UC Berkeley. Delia leads a research group at the molecular foundry which has recently spun off a startup named heliotrope technologies for group is a partner in the newly announced Joint Center for Energy Storage Research, a multistate department of energy research hub focused on developing transformative new battery technology. Delios group was recently awarded a $3 million grant [00:01:30] by the Department of Energy Advanced Research projects, agency dash energy by e for her work on smart window technologies onto the interview. Delia mill iron. Welcome to spectrum. 

Speaker 5:        Thank you.

Speaker 4:        I suspect that most of our listeners have heard of nanoscience but don't have a lot of perspective on the detail. Would you explain what makes nanoscience and nanotechnology unique? 

Speaker 5:        Sure, [00:02:00] so nano science is about investigating how the properties of matter change sometimes quite dramatically when we structure them on the nanometers scale, which is really the molecular scale. So in a sense it's quite related to chemistry, but it's about materials and matter and how their behavior is very different than what you'd expect from macroscopic pieces of material. Would you like some examples? [00:02:30] Sure. An example would be great. Okay. A classic example is to look at the optical properties or just the visible appearance of gold and everyone knows, of course, when gold is macroscopic, it's shiny and it's yellowish and we're very used to that form of gold. When you make gold in the form of nanoparticles, the things that are, let's say between five and 50 nanometers across [00:03:00] or containing a few thousand atoms per particle, then the gold no longer looks either yellow or shiny. In fact, you can make stable dispersion or solution of gold at that scale in water. And it appears translucent and red in color. And this effect of Nano scaling and gold has been used to color artistic objects for centuries, but we've only recently become to systematically [00:03:30] understand the science of how these sorts of properties can change so dramatically when we make materials in the nanoscale. 

Speaker 4:        So the actual doing of it has been done for a long time, but the understanding is what's more recent and then the ability to recreate 

Speaker 5:        and the ability to control and deliberately manipulate. Yes. So there are plenty of instances of incidental or almost accidental creation of nanoscale materials and [00:04:00] utilization of these nanoscale effects on properties. But the science of it is about systematically correlating the structure and composition and materials to their properties. And then the nanotechnology or the engineering of of nanoscale materials is about deliberately controlling those properties to create new functional things, objects, devices and so on that we can use for useful things all around us. 

Speaker 4:        And what are some of the common things [00:04:30] that we find nano technology in in our daily lives? 

Speaker 5:        As with any new technology. The first applications are fairly pedestrian in some sense and don't require the most exquisite control over the materials. So one that's quite common is to use metal oxide nanocrystals. Typically things like zinc oxide or titanium oxide in sunblock. These materials absorb UV radiation to [00:05:00] protect our skin from damage from UV. But because they're at the nano scale, instead of looking white, it can be clear. And so it's just that ugly, much more pleasing to put on some block that then appears clear, but still does the job of blocking UV radiation. So this doesn't require a very fine control over the details of the structure or the size of the material. It's only important that the scale of the oxide particles be well below the wavelength [00:05:30] of light, and that's what makes it clear. So it's a very simple use, but nonetheless, very practical and helpful. 

Speaker 4:        What are you finding are the challenges of working with nanoscale material? 

Speaker 5:        It's all about taking that control to the next level. Chemists have learned for a long time how to manipulate atoms and create bonds and put them together into small molecules. Now we're working with structures of [00:06:00] a somewhat larger length scale and wanting to control different aspects of the composition and structure. So there are no ready solutions for deliberately arranging the atoms into let's say a five nanometer crystal with precision, um, in order to generate the properties that you'd like or again, just understand them frankly. So both the creation of materials with precise control and detailed understanding of what their structure is are still very [00:06:30] big challenges. Of course conventional microscopy methods don't extend very well to these small length scales. So there's a need for new characterization approaches. And then as I said, the chemical methods for making molecules and small molecular systems likewise don't necessarily translate to the slightly bigger scale that is nanometer length scale of these materials. 

Speaker 5:        So we need a innovations on all sides, making new materials, new ways to look at them and characterize [00:07:00] them. And then finally the third piece is the theory that helps understand their properties and predict new properties. Again, it's sort of an awkward in between lanes scale where atomic detail matters, but larger scale aspects of how the materials come together matters as well. And that's very difficult to approach with computational methods, so we're seeing the frontier of nanoscience is pushing scientists from all different disciplines to advance their tools and their techniques [00:07:30] in order to really take advantage of what can be done at that landscape. 

Speaker 4:        Okay. 

Speaker 6:        Delia mill iron is our guest. She is the deputy director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory molecular foundry. She is a chemist working at the nanoscale. You are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. 

Speaker 4:        You've talked about the meter. Yes. Is that a new form of measurement and how does it relate to anything [00:08:00] else? How do we reflect on an nanometre? Sure, 

Speaker 5:        so it's not a new measure. It's simply a meter times 10 to the minus ninth that's what what Nano means and a more conventional measure on that lane scale might be an Angstrom, which is a traditional measure. It's one order of magnitude smaller than an animator, but to put it in more practical terms, I like to think of the Nano crystals that I work with, for example, which are about five nanometers across, [00:08:30] are about a million times smaller than an ant. So that for me gives me a sort of practical reference point as a chemist. It also makes sense to me to think of a five nanometer crystal as containing about a thousand atoms, but atoms are not necessarily a easy to understand lane skill for everybody. So the the ant is maybe a more common reference point, what natural materials have been created and what about them makes them [00:09:00] more promising than another depending on the realm of properties that you examine. 

Speaker 5:        Promising has all sorts of different meanings, right? So things like semiconductor nano wires or perhaps graphene or carbon nanotubes may be considered promising for new electronic materials because the transport of electrons through these structures can proceed quite unimpeded and move very [00:09:30] readily so that we could have fast electronics or very conductive transparent thin films to replace the things we use today in our flat panel displays and so on. Other nano materials are very promising for diagnostics of different kinds of diseases or even for therapy of different kinds of health issues. So there are biological probes being developed that can be directed into specific areas [00:10:00] of your body. For example, where a tumor site is located using a nanoscale magnet and then they also carry a payload of drugs that can then be released specifically at that site. So you could have targeted therapies. So these sort of multifunctional nano constructs are very interesting. 

Speaker 5:        I would say promising in the long run for for new targeted therapies, I have many fewer side effects than these broad spectrum drugs that we commonly use today. In terms of coming up [00:10:30] with new nanomaterials, is it as often the case that you are trying to create something for a specific purpose or that you accidentally find something that has a characteristic that can be applied pretty widely or to a specific use? I think that much of Nano materials research is motivated by the investigation and discovery of new phenomenon. And I distinguish that from targeted application [00:11:00] focused development because it's often unclear what a new material or it's phenomenological characteristics will actually be useful for. In my lab. Uh, we do tend to think of practical connections, but then the ones that we ultimately realize could be very different from the one that motivated us at the outset of the project. So I think as a scientist it's important to be attuned [00:11:30] for surprising opportunities to apply materials in ways you didn't anticipate. And so you have to be aware of the needs that are out there, the big needs in society, basically paying attention for how the phenomena you're discovering might map onto these societal needs. You probably as a scientist, not going to able to take 

Speaker 5:        a new discovery all the way through to a practical application. But if you don't at [00:12:00] least identify those connections, it will be difficult for engineers and industry to take your discoveries and turn them into practical applications. So there's a role on both sides to make that connection. 

Speaker 4:        [inaudible] you are the deputy director of the molecular foundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Tell us about the foundry and the work going on there. 

Speaker 5:        So the molecular foundry is a very special place. It's one of five department of energy funded [00:12:30] nanoscale science research centers, which are located around the country. And we have the mission of pushing the forefront of nanoscience broadly defined, so nanoscience in all different aspects while at the same time acting as a user facility to help others in the scientific community, be they academic researchers, industry, others at national labs move the science in their areas forward by leveraging the tools of nanoscience. [00:13:00] So it in effect, it becomes this amazing hub of activity and nanoscience where people from really all around the world are coming to us to leverage capabilities that we are continuously advancing and developing in different kinds of nanoscience be it inorganic nanocrystals, which is my focus theoretical methods for treating nanoscience completely out of this world. In my mind, I'm spectroscopic techniques [00:13:30] for looking at nanostructures.

Speaker 5:        All these things are being developed at the foundry, at the absolute bleeding edge of nanoscience, and these can have impact in all different areas. And so our users come, they work with us, they learn these state of the art techniques, generate new materials that they can take home with them to their own laboratories, integrate into their materials and processes and devices and so on or do their a specialized characterization on and the amount of science that results by [00:14:00] that multiplication and leveraging is really very exciting to watch. Oh, it's a hub. It's an intersection of ideas in one place of problem, motivations from different perspectives and then it branches right on back out to impact science and in all different ways. 

Speaker 4:        What sort of a funding horizon are you on? 

Speaker 5:        Uh, so we have very stable funding from the Department of Energy. These centers are quite new. They were only established [00:14:30] over the last 10 years. The foundry has been in full operations for about six years and they are very much the flagship capabilities of the office of science within the Department of Energy and will be for quite some time to come. So they're making a very stable and continued investment in this area and continue to see the value and opportunity for really in the end, American economy, taxpayers and industrial [00:15:00] innovation that's generated by all of this scientific activity. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 4:        you were listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley, Delia mill, iron of Lawrence Berkeley national lab is talking about her work in nanoscience and nanotechnology. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 4:        what's the focus of your research? 

Speaker 5:        So my research involves the [00:15:30] innovation of Inorganic nanocrystals, which are a few nanometers diameter crystal and arrangements of atoms. And they're using these as building blocks to construct materials. So we put them together with each other and two, for example, porous architectures, or you put them together with polymers or we put them together, uh, with glassy components to construct macroscopic materials often than films. And we're interested [00:16:00] in these primarily for their electrochemical functions. So electric chemical devices are useful for things like batteries, supercapacitors a storing energy also for converting energy. And in our case, we've most recently been focused on electrochromic window applications. So these are function like batteries, but instead of storing charge, they have the effect of changing the tint on a window dynamically as a function [00:16:30] of voltage. But everything starts with the nanocrystals and new ways to put them together with other components to construct materials. 

Speaker 4:        And is the crystal material something unusual or is it real commonplace? 

Speaker 5:        It varies actually. Most of the materials that we craft into nanocrystals are well known and have been studied for a long time in their bulk form. So just as in the example of gold being very different in both and obviously useful for [00:17:00] all sorts of things like currency now having very different function on the Nano scale. We work with materials that maybe are not quite as common places goal, but nonetheless fairly common. So one material we've been working with a lot lately is called indium tin oxide. And whether you know it or not, you probably use it every day. It's the material that provides conductivity in flat panel displays, touch screens, all of these sorts of things. And so in it's normal thin [00:17:30] film form, it's obviously very well established and used around the world for all different applications. It was only synthesized in a well controlled way as Netto crystals in the last few years. 

Speaker 5:        And in the Neto crystal form, it has all of these wonderful properties relating to electric chromic windows. And beyond that it has, I guess I should say more fundamentally, the phenomenology underlying those windows applications is that this [00:18:00] material is plasmonic, which means that it can effectively condense a near infrared light to a very small scale, can amplify the electric field from the light, basically manipulate light in a new way. And people have been doing this with metals like gold as one example. Silver is another for a while, and a whole new field of plasmonics has emerged. Um, now with Ito on the nanoscale, we're bringing [00:18:30] plasmonics into the infrared region of the spectrum, which is going to give us whole news opportunities for manipulation of light of that sword, channeling light and so on. So the, as I was saying earlier, the phenomenology is where we spend the most time and discovery of these plasmonic characteristics of Ito is going to lead to many, many applications. The one we've been focusing on is this electric chromic window idea. 

Speaker 4:        Oh, is this one of the real opportunities [00:19:00] within nano science that when you take a material to the Nano scale, you get all this new behavior [inaudible] 

Speaker 5:        that's the fundamental concept underlying the investigation of nanoscale materials. And so the NNI, the national nanoscience initiative or national nanotechnology initiative, which was started, you know, over a decade ago now had as its founding principle, basically that idea that we would investigate the properties that emerge [00:19:30] when materials are made on the nanoscale that are very distinct from what we see on the macro scale. And from this, uh, we would have a whole new playbook for creating functional materials and devices. 

Speaker 4:        There's been talk about the idea of transparent failure being a good thing in science. So you can learn from what goes wrong. 

Speaker 5:        Yeah, science is full of failure. Most things don't work, especially when you first try them. [00:20:00] So I like to say that in order to be a scientist, you have to be unrelentingly optimistic because you're great idea that you're incredibly excited about, probably won't work or at least it won't work initially. And then you have to try again and try again and try again. And often it won't work even after you've tried again many, many times and you still have to have the same passion for your next great idea that you wake up the next morning [00:20:30] and you're excited to go try something new. That belief in possibility I think is fundamental to science, but at the same point. Yeah, I think you're right. The failures are not merely something to be discarded along the way to, and they do teach us a lot and frankly they suggest the next great idea more often than not. 

Speaker 5:        So we have in mind something we're trying to do and a complete failure to [00:21:00] accomplish that. Whether it's a bond we're trying to make or a way we're trying to control a shape of a material or to create a specific optical property we get something we didn't expect and that should and when science is functioning well does cause you to stop and think about why that's happening. In fact, maybe the challenge, some of the challenge in doing science is not becoming too distracted by all of the [00:21:30] possibilities that emerge. When you do that. It's a mistake of course to be too single minded and focused on an end goal too early because you'll, you'll miss really all the new phenomenon, the things that you least expected are often the most important and innovative, so you have to pay attention to these things and perhaps redefine them as not being failures but rather being a new success or a new seed of a success that can take you in a new direction. 

Speaker 5:        That said, there probably are things that [00:22:00] even in that from that perspective can be viewed as a negative result or a failure and there's an important role. I mean the scientific literature is, is full of every scholarly article has to include a transparent reporting of the conditions that led to what's being defined as success or specific results and a recording of what happens elsewise basically because that allows you to understand much more [00:22:30] deeply where that successful result emerges if you understand the conditions that lead to failure and different types of failure. So definitely for understanding sake, this is essential. 

Speaker 3:        This is the end part. One of our interview with Delia [inaudible] finale, part two will air December 28th at noon. Don't miss it. The molecular foundry website [00:23:00] is foundries.lbl.gov 

Speaker 1:        now the calendar with Lisa [inaudible] and Rick Karnofsky on Saturday, December 15th science at Cow Lecture series. We'll present a free public talk by Rosemary, a Joyce or UC Berkeley anthropology professor on everyday life and science in the Pre-colombian Mayan world. Joyce. We'll discuss how the Maya developed and use their calendar, which spans almost 1200 [00:23:30] years ending around December 21st, 2012 the end of the world, she will explore the observational astronomy made possible through the use of written records, employing one of the only two scripts in the world to develop a sign for zero. The lecture which is free and open to the public, will be held on December 15th from 11 to 12:00 AM in room 100 of the genetics and plant biology building on the UC Berkeley campus. 

Speaker 7:        Tomorrow, December 15th Wild Oakland. [00:24:00] We'll have a free one hour walk from noon to one defined an identifying mushrooms around lake merit. Meet at the Rotary Science Center on the corner of Perkins in Bellevue. The walk will be around the grassy areas, so rattling the boat house and the Lake Merritt Gardens. Learn to read the landscape and find where the mushrooms hide and their role and the local ecology. Bring guidebooks. Have you have them as well as a small pocket knife, a paintbrush [inaudible] jacket. Visit a wild oakland.org for more [00:24:30] info. 

Speaker 1:        On Saturday, December 15th the American Society for Cell Biology welcomes the public to its 2012 keynote lecture. The event will feature Steven Chu Nobel laureate and US Secretary of energy and Arthur Levinson, chair of Genentech and apple here about the future of science and innovation and view an art exhibit by scientists, artists, Graham Johnson and Janet, a Wasa. Attend the art exhibit and reception [00:25:00] from five to five 45 and then stay and listen to the Speakers from six to 7:30 PM free. Preregistration is required at ASC B. Dot. O. R. G, the event takes place at Moscone center west seven 47 Howard street in San Francisco. Saturday, December 15th 

Speaker 7:        the regional parks botanical garden at the intersection of Wildcat Canyon Road and South Park drive and Tilden regional park in the Berkeley hills. [00:25:30] Host the Wayne Rodrick lecture series. These free lectures are on Saturday mornings at 10:30 AM and are on a variety of topics related to plants and natural history. Free Tours of the garden. Begin at 2:00 PM tomorrow's tuck features Dick O'Donnell, who will discuss the floristic surprises and the drought stricken southwest and next Saturday the 22nd of December. Steve Edwards. We'll talk about the botany and GLG of the Lassen region. More information on the series is [email protected] 

Speaker 1:        [00:26:00] beginning on December 26 the Lawrence Hall of science will begin screening and interactive program in their planetarium called constellations. Tonight. A simple star map will be provided to help participants learn to identify the most prominent constellations of the season in the planetarium. Sky. Questions and activities will be part of the program. The presentation will continue until January 4th and will be held every weekday from two to 2:45 PM [00:26:30] tickets are $4 at the Lawrence Hall of science after the price of admission. Remember that's beginning on December 26th [inaudible] 

Speaker 7:        with two news stories. Here is Rick Karnofsky and Lisa kind of itch. Nature News reported on December 11th 

Speaker 1:        that the u s national ignition facility or Nif at Lawrence Livermore national laboratory is changing directions. Nip uses a 192 ultraviolet laser beams that interact with the gold capsule, creating x-rays. These x-rays [00:27:00] crush a two millimeter target pellet of deuterium and tritium causing fusion. Nif has not yet achieved ignition where it may deliver more energy than it consumes I triple e spectrum criticized the project for being $5 billion over budget and years behind. Schedule in the revised plans [inaudible] scale back to focus on ignition and would devote three years for deciding whether it would be possible. It would increase focus on research, a fusion for the nuclear weapons [00:27:30] stockpile stewardship program and basic science. It would also devote resources to other ignition concepts. Namely polar direct drive on Omega at the University of Rochester and magnetically driven implosions on the San Diego z machine. The Journal. Nature reports that rows matter a natural plant die once price throughout the old world to make fiery red textiles has found a second life as the basis for a new green [00:28:00] battery chemist from the City College of New York teamed with researchers from Rice University and the U S army research lab to develop a nontoxic and sustainable lithium ion battery powered by Perper in a dye extracted from the roots of the matter plant 3,500 years ago. 

Speaker 1:        Civilizations in Asia and the Middle East first boiled matter roots to color fabrics in vivid oranges, reds, and pinks. In its latest incarnation, [00:28:30] the climbing herb could lay the foundation for an ecofriendly alternative to traditional lithium ion batteries. These batteries charge everything from your mobile phone to electric vehicles, but carry with them risks to the environment during production, recycling and disposal. They also pumped 72 kilograms of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for every kilowatt hour of energy in a lithium ion battery. These grim facts have fed a surging demand to develop green batteries [00:29:00] growing matter or other biomass crops to make batteries which soak up carbon dioxide and eliminate the disposal problem. 

Speaker 3:        The news occurred during the show with his bylaw Astana David from his album folk and acoustic made available through creative Commons license 3.0 attribution. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via [00:29:30] our email address is spectrum dot k a l [email protected] join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible].

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

Discussion with Sam Borgeson, a PhD student in the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley. Sam’s aim is to reduce the environmental impacts of our buildings. He talks about building energy consumption, energy conservation, and the challenges building managers face in conservation.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        [inaudible].

Speaker 2:        [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, a calendar of local events and news. My name is Brad swift and I'm the host of today's show. Our interview is with three representatives of the organization, community resources for science, also known as crs. They are, relieves [00:01:00] a is cotton Nova crs program, Assistant Professor Bob Bergman of the UC Berkeley Department of chemistry. And Miriam Bowering, a graduate student and Professor Bergman's research group. Community Resources for Science is a nonprofit organization. The goal of crs is to help teachers give elementary and middle school students more opportunities to do science, to ask questions, test ideas, get their hands [00:01:30] on real science activities. Through these efforts, crs hopes to inspire the next generation of thinkers, makers, problem solvers, and leaders. This interview is prerecorded and edited today. We have a group of three people from the community resources for science talking with us about their program. And why don't you each introduce yourself and then we'll get into some details about your organization. 

Speaker 3:        [00:02:00] My name is [inaudible]. Uh, I'm the program assistant at community resources for science. 

Speaker 4:        My name is Bob Bergman. I'm a professor of chemistry at UC Berkeley. And I help to organize an outreach program, which was initially called chemistry in the classroom and then became community in the classroom and now it's called basis and it helps to organize graduate students to do presentations in the local schools. 

Speaker 3:        I'm Miriam Bowering. I am a graduate student in chemistry at UC Berkeley [00:02:30] and I'm also a classroom volunteer. I bring groups of my coworkers into fifth grade classrooms to do science with them. 

Speaker 2:        We're Alyssa, can you give us an overview of what crs does? 

Speaker 3:        Community resources for science is an organization that was started by two parents who were involved with a lot of science in their children's schools and they decided that there was now enough science being done, so they figured out a way to individual teachers [00:03:00] get the resources that they need, uh, Ba snails from a local store or books that they need, um, or waste organized field trips. And it evolved into bringing scientists into classrooms to do hands on presentations as well. And that's grown from that? Uh, yeah. I mean now we're able to organize hundreds of volunteers that we have go into, uh, over 280 classrooms this past year [00:03:30] and get kids involved in doing actual science. And where is it that, uh, that you do this? What school districts? Uh, yeah, we are primarily in Alameda County and the Berkeley and Oakland School districts, uh, that we do the actual presentations because um, our volunteers can reach those areas most easily those schools. 

Speaker 3:        But we go out and provide services to teachers and Castro valley as well. And some of the other West Contra Costa County [00:04:00] schools. What's the grade range that you try to impact? Crs as an organization has been supporting teachers k through five from its beginnings and we've started expanding into middle schools, so mostly sixth grade, um, because they still have one science teacher, but seventh and eighth they kind of start to branch out into different subjects. However, we do still work with teachers in seventh and eighth grade and we're very [00:04:30] willing to provide them with the personal support on an individual basis that they might need, you know, requesting resources and things like that. And we do go into middle schools and do science days where we have four or five lessons going on for different classrooms and they do, you know, one set in the morning and then they switch it around and do another set in the afternoon. And for teachers to get involved, how did they do that? Free?

Speaker 5:        Uh, yes it is. I think they can just visit the website, [00:05:00] which is www.crscience.org all the information they need is there. So they can not only contact crs to get scientists into their classrooms, but they can also look for other kinds of resources on the website there. 

Speaker 3:        How do you find volunteers? How do you go about recruiting a, we actually recruited a lot more volunteers this past year than [00:05:30] we have in the past. And we're really excited about that. And thanks to our campus coordinators, Leah and Kristen, we were able to really reach out to 20 of the departments on campus and we have volunteers from 20th think what is their 21 departments here at UC Berkeley? So we're really proud of that. And Bob has done a great job of really getting the word out in the Department of Chemistry and college chemistry. A little bit about, how about the history of that is 

Speaker 4:        this really started [00:06:00] almost accidentally. I was at a party and one of the people from crs was someone that my wife had gone to a graduate school at UC Berkeley with and she said that they were thinking about trying to get more scientists into the classrooms and wondered if I knew of anybody who wanted to do that. So I said I would go back to the campus and send out an email message in my department and just see if anyone was interested in doing that because it must have been seven or eight [00:06:30] years ago, I guess. And we started with a group of about 12 volunteers. Uh, we met in a seminar room in the chemistry department and I think it was probably one of the original organizers. It was probably Anne Jennings who came over and gave a short talk about what crs was all about and what they wanted to do to organize this program. 

Speaker 4:        It's not a very simple thing. You not only need to have good contacts with the teachers, but, uh, you can't just throw people [00:07:00] into the classroom directly. You've got to give them some training and, you know, get them to understand what, um, what's age appropriate. Especially for the classes we were targeting, which were grades three to five. So we started with those 12 people and they basically, at that time, I put together their own presentations. And one of the interesting things about this program is that the graduate student volunteers actually come up with their own presentations, mostly isn't canned presentations that they get some [00:07:30] from somewhere else and they've come with, come up with some extremely creative stuff. Um, they're teaching kids at this level of things that I personally, you know, are really relatively sophisticated. And I personally never thought that you'd be able to, you know, sort of do this with people at that age. 

Speaker 4:        But that was reasonably successful and it's really been the graduate student volunteers who've done most of the recruiting. So it started out in the chemistry department and these 12 original people [00:08:00] began to kind of, you know, dragoon their friends into doing this. And so it grew from 12 to 20 to 40 to 50 and then they began to attract and talk to some people in other departments. And then we reached a point where we thought that maybe there was a slightly different way that we could do this. They came up with the idea that maybe instead of doing this on an individual basis, we could do it with teams of graduate students. You may know that [00:08:30] that in most science departments, graduate students are part of research groups. So there'll be one professor who directs a, you know, a bunch of graduate students whom anywhere from three or four to 15 or 20 people, sometimes larger. 

Speaker 4:        Uh, so the idea was to now put together teams that would be localized. Each team would be localized in a particular research group that and that has several advantages. One was that someone who wanted to do this didn't have to join in as kind of a lone individual. There's [00:09:00] always a certain reticence about that. The other thing that I think major advantage of this change was that it generated some continuity so that graduate students are not here forever or at least we hope they are not. And uh, as they graduate and before they graduate, they begin to bring in new students first year students who see that this program is going on and see that there are people who are interested in excited about it. And so that really is a major attraction for people to sign up. 

Speaker 1:        [inaudible] [00:09:30] you are listening to spectrum on KALX Berkeley we are talking with release has gotten over Professor Bob Bergman and Miriam Bowering about their work with community resources for science. 

Speaker 4:        Yeah, I would say that one of the other things [00:10:00] that I worried about when we started this program was what, what their response was going to be from the research directors. That professors that these graduate students we're working with. Okay. Because you know, you, you could envision, um, somebody giving these kids a hard time because you know, they should be in the lab doing research and here they are out doing presentations in the local schools. I've seen my role as trying to, at least in the chemistry department, keep the faculty informed about what's going on. So right from the beginning when we started [00:10:30] this, uh, I, you know, got up at several meetings. My Chemistry Department faculty meets once a week and I gave several very short presentations telling people that graduate students were going to be doing this and that we hope that everybody would be supportive of it because we thought it was not only good for them educationally, but it was a real service to the community. 

Speaker 4:        One of the things that that actually made this thing go much more smoothly than I might've thought is that a lot of people are supported, their research is supported by the National Science Foundation at [00:11:00] Berkeley and the National Science Foundation has actually required as part of their proposals, something called a statement of broader impact. And one of those broader impacts that you can put into your proposals is something about how people in your research group might be, you know, reaching out to the local community. So I think as time went on, people began to view this not so much as an incursion, as a favor to them because they could easily then put in their proposals the fact that their students were [00:11:30] involved in this and these activities. And I think that really was one of the things that that made it a lot less of a problem to do this and many research groups around the, around the campus, what is the teaching philosophy you apply to building your lesson plans? 

Speaker 4:        There's a lot of, you know, ambiguity's about the research that's been done in educating people. One thing comes through extremely clearly and that is the two general ways that you can think of [00:12:00] or for educating people, and this is really true at any level including the college level, are to stand up in front of them and just talk at them and the other is get people involved in doing things, have them actually do hands on stuff. On the two founders started this, they knew that that kind of research had been done and so they started from the beginning making it clear to people that they were not the volunteers. I mean that they were not going to go in the classroom and just a lecture. Okay, just write things on the board and tell people stuff because [00:12:30] certainly at grades three to five and probably at even higher grades, you're going to lose people after about the first three minutes when you do that. So the, the goal of right from the beginning was to go in with presentations that involved having the kids do stuff that with their own hands and that's been something that we've stuck with really I think quite religiously since the beginning. 

Speaker 5:        Definitely all lessons are expected to be hands on minds, [00:13:00] on, uh, inquiry style work. And Bob mentioned that the typical way you get to scientists in a classroom is someone's mom or dad comes in. And also typically what you get is someone's stands at the front and maybe doesn't talk but maybe just blow something up up there, which is fun for everyone. But it's, it's really great to go in there and gives the kids equipment to play with and let them start figuring things out themselves and, [00:13:30] and be able to guide them. I think it's also interesting to see the way we're able to even help educate teachers a little bit about how science works. So I've seen some really amazing teachers through this program, but you know, none of them are scientists and a lot of them don't really understand basically what it takes to be a scientist. 

Speaker 5:        So at the end we usually give a few minutes to talk about any questions the teacher or students might have. And the teachers say, well, what does it take to be a scientist? Um, [00:14:00] and we might say, well just keep observing the world around you. Stay curious, play with things. And the teacher says, so what they meant to say was study hard and no, no, that's not it. You've got to be able to nurture that natural curiosity kids have. So I think that's a big part of what we do is go in there and kill some myths about what it takes to be a scientist. The great thing about the graduate [00:14:30] students that go in is they shatter stereotypes about scientists for the children. What do you see clip art style in your head when someone says scientist. Right. And that's not what ends up in their classroom. And that's really beautiful to see them kind of taken aback by that. When scientists first in, you know, 

Speaker 3:        young and most of our volunteers are female actually, which is another great plus and young female scientists [00:15:00] doing things that kids didn't think was science. 

Speaker 4:        Yeah. I think that it just turns out that graduate students are almost the ideal place in people's Times of life to do this. I have a bit more time flexibility. They still are still working very hard on their research, but you know, it's not, you know, okay, you have to be here at eight o'clock in the morning, you have to leave at five, you know, the way you would in a corporation setting. They're not overly wellmed with classes, at least not [00:15:30] after the first couple of semesters. So they have some flexibility in, in that regard. And there's a reasonable support from the institution. Right. I think that's a big issue that the, the campus and you know, and uh, as I said to a large extent, the, you know, people's research advisors have really provided a lot of at least moral support for this. And so it, it really makes graduate students almost ideal. 

Speaker 4:        I think what relates is said about, you know, shattering these stereotypes is also has been a really interesting sort of eye opener for me. [00:16:00] It really is true that these kids have a very different stereotype about what scientists are from what they see coming into the classrooms and having people who they see almost as kind of corresponding to s you know, to a big sister or cousin or you know, somebody that, you know, they really can relate to I think has had a big effect. And then having people at, you know, sort of the student time of their lives when they're still young enough to be, to be seen as young people by the kids in the classrooms [00:16:30] as I think been an important facet of this. [inaudible] 

Speaker 1:        [inaudible] you are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. We are talking with releases, got Nova Professor Bob Burg and Miriam Bowery about their work with community resources for science. 

Speaker 3:        [00:17:00] How do you assess the impact your presentations have on students? 

Speaker 4:        Um, no. You put your finger on one of the stickiest issues with respect to all of this kind of thing with respect to education in general, which is not only how do you find out if it works, but how do you define what works? And you know, whether something works and what doesn't, [00:17:30] I think when all of us like to do in the most perfect world is, is actually track the people who experience these presentations and see what difference it makes in their lives. Okay. So this is a big deal, right? Because if you know anything about research in general and educational research, it's not enough to just track the people who have had this experience. You've got to have a control group of people who haven't had the experience, right? And then you've got to track two groups. [00:18:00] And you know, in some ways it's, it's like having a drug that's really effective. 

Speaker 4:        There's a real moral question as to whether it's okay to keep a control group that isn't, doesn't have access to this stuff. Right? But assuming you can do that, um, it would require way more resources than we have to track people, let's say to the point where they've applied to college, right? Or even to the point where they've gone through college to see how successful they've been once they've been in that environment. What we hope and what we sort of believe [00:18:30] deep in our hearts completely intuitively is that people who have these experiences will do better later in their educational lives. But proving that in a scientifically respectable way is a major undertaking and it's one that we really don't have resources for by any means right now. So, you know, we're pretty much working under the, the faith I guess that exposing people to this sort of thing will really make them [00:19:00] more interested in science. 

Speaker 4:        So we really believe quite strongly that a, a major impact of this is not just, you know, generating people who, who might turn out to be scientists. Although we certainly hope that would be one of the things that that happens. But we'd really like to educate the general public on scientific issues, how science is done and why it's exciting and the meaning of many scientific investigations is, and we hope that by catching people catching, you know, kids early and [00:19:30] doing this, uh, really will have a lasting effect. The best we can do is get feedback from the people involved in the program and see whether they like it. And if they like it and they feel it's been successful and there you are at the point at which they're experiencing these presentations, if if they're excited about what we're doing. That's what we're going with. 

Speaker 5:        This is the great thing about community resources for science. There is a staff there who are experts in science education, [00:20:00] so I sent my lesson plan draft to Heidi Williamson who coordinates the basis program and she read it. She gave me a long email with lots of suggestions of various levels of detail and I worked them in and I continued to develop as now my team members are giving me feedback and so are the teachers. So the lessons really do get improved over time from that first draft. It's not, it's not just any graduate student can make something up and go in and help the kids [00:20:30] learn something. There really is some accountability [inaudible] 

Speaker 4:        are there any interesting stories that any of you have that you want to share about classroom experiences with with the program? 

Speaker 5:        My favorite moments in there are when kids really put stuff together. So when they hear what we've told them and they make their observations and then they just come up with something good at their own theory for why a water job looks different from an [00:21:00] oil drop and it really makes sense or why you can get a piece of pencil lead to float on water if it's horizontal but not vertical. And when they can explain that themselves after making the observations, it's just, it's incredibly high ventilation rates if you're not right under the dots, but they actually aren't accomplishing anything in terms of air quality. So that's my plug, I guess, for people to pay attention and think about their environment. Sam Bergeson, thanks [00:21:30] for being on spectrum. Oh, it's my pleasure. Thanks for having me. 

Speaker 1:        [inaudible]

Speaker 2:        did you see an example of data visualization? Check out the official campus dashboard at the website. My power.berkeley.edu 

Speaker 1:        [inaudible]

Speaker 2:        [00:22:00] irregular feature of spectrum is dimension. A few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next few weeks. Rick Karnofsky and Lisa cabbage with the calendar 

Speaker 6:        on Saturday, December 1st wonderfest is putting on a special event called end of days. Does Hollywood get doomsday? Right? Planetary Scientists, Chris McKay will discuss this topic as he introduces a special screening of seeking a friend for the end of the world. Starting [00:22:30] Steve Grill and Karen Knightley popcorn is free and a no host drink and candy bar. We'll be there. Tickets are tax deductible and benefit wonderfest and variety children's charity of northern California. They must be purchased in advance for $25 visit wonderfest.org for more info. The annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union is the first week of December at the Moscone Center. Each year they have a public lecture that is [00:23:00] free and open to the public. This year that talk is on Sunday, December 2nd from noon to one and Moscone South Room One oh two lead scientists for the Mars exploration program. Michael Meyer program scientists for the Mars Science Laboratory. John Groton, seeing and participating in scientists on the Mars Science Laboratory. Rebecca Williams, well discuss curiosity driven Mars exploration. Curiosity is the most sophisticated explorer ever sent to another [00:23:30] planet and the trio. We'll talk about its latest activities. A full sized inflatable model of the rover and hands on activities for families will follow the lecture. For more information, visit agu.org 

Speaker 7:        on Tuesday, December 4th at 7:00 PM at the California Academy of Science and Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, Mary Ellen Hannibal. We'll present the Pritzker lecture, the spine of the continent, her book about one of the single most [00:24:00] ambitious conservation efforts ever undertaken to create linked, protected areas extending from the Yukon to Mexico, the entire length of North America. This movement is the brainchild of Michael Sule, the founder of conservation biology. EO Wilson calls it the most important conservation initiative in the world today. In this fascinating presentation, Mary-Ellen Hannibal takes us on a tour of her travels down the length of the North American spine, sharing stories and anecdotes about [00:24:30] the passionate, idiosyncratic people she meets along the way and the species they love. Reservations are required and seating is limited. Go to the California Academy of Science website for tickets. 

Speaker 6:        Now three new stories, and I'm joined by Rick Kaneski and Lisa cabbage. The November 29th issue of nature has an article discussing a massive black hole in the tiny galaxy, n g c one two seven seven one of the galaxies in the cluster that is [00:25:00] the constellation Perseus to the best of our astronomical knowledge. Almost every galaxy should contain in its central region what is called a supermassive black hole. Past studies have shown that the mass of the black coal typically accounts for about a 10th of a percent of the massive its home galaxy that Max Planck Institute for Astronomy. In Heidelberg. Researchers know that the black hole has a mass equivalent of 17 billion suns, that the galaxy [00:25:30] is only a quarter of the milky ways diameter. These observations made with the Hubble Space Telescope and the Hobby Eberly telescope show that the black hole accounts for almost 14% of the galaxies mass past spectrum guests. Nicholas McConnell published a paper last year that holds the current record for the largest black hole, which is between six and 37 billion solar masses. So the black hole in NGC one to seven seven may or may [00:26:00] not top this record. 

Speaker 7:        The journal Nature Geoscience reports this week that the shells of marine snails known as terra pods living in the seas around Antarctica are being dissolved by ocean acidification. These tiny animals are a valuable food source for fish and birds and play an important role in the oceanic carbon cycle. During a science cruise in 2008 researchers from British Antarctic survey and the University of East Anglia in collaboration with colleagues from the [00:26:30] u s would tell oceanographic institution and Noah discovered severe dissolution of the shells of living terra pods in southern ocean waters. The team examined an area of upwelling where winds cause cold water to be pushed upwards from the deep to the surface of the ocean up well, water is usually more corrosive to a particular type of calcium carbonate or arrogant night that terra pods use to build their shells. The team found that as a result of the additional influence of ocean acidification, [00:27:00] this corrosive water severely dissolve the shells of terror pods, coauthor and science cruise leader. 

Speaker 7:        Dr Geraint Tarling says as one of only a few oceanic creatures that build their shells out of air gunnite in the polar regions. Terror pods are an important food source for fish and birds as well as a good indicator of ecosystem health. The tiny snails do not necessarily die as a result of their shells dissolving. However, it may increase their vulnerability to predation and infection. Consequently having an [00:27:30] impact to other parts of the food web. Ocean acidification is caused by the uptake of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere emitted admitted as a result of fossil fuel burning. The finding supports predictions that the impact of ocean acidification on marine ecosystems and food webs may be significant 

Speaker 2:        science daily reports that dozens of climate scientists have reconciled their measurements of ice sheet changes in Antarctica and Greenland over the past two decades. [00:28:00] The results published November 29th in the journal Science roughly have the uncertainty and discard some conflicting observations. The effort led by Andrew Shepherd at the University of Leeds in the UK reconciles three existing ways to measure losses. The first method takes an accounting approach. Combining climate models and observations to tally up the gain or loss to other methods. Use special satellites to precisely measure the height and gravitational pull [00:28:30] of the ice sheets to calculate how much ice is present. Each method has strengths and weaknesses. Until now, scientists using each method released estimates independent from the others. This is the first time they have all compared their methods for the same times and locations. Understanding ice sheets is central to modeling global climate and predicting sea level rise. Even tiny changes to sea level when added over an entire ocean can have substantial [00:29:00] effects on storm surges and flooding and coastal and island communities. 

Speaker 8:        The music heard during the show is by Stan David from his album, folk and acoustic made available by a creative Commons license 3.0 for attribution. 

Speaker 9:        Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please [00:29:30] send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l [email protected] join us in two weeks at this same.

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