Spectrum

Three members of The Berkeley Science Review (Editor-in-chief Sebastien Lounis, Web Editor Adam Hill, and BSR Author Lindsay Glesener) talk about the printed Review and the digital blog. They describe how the BSR has changed their view of science.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next. 

Speaker 2:        Mm hmm. [inaudible]. 

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

Speaker 3:        Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. In today's interview, Rick Karnofsky talks with three contributors to the Berkeley Science Review. The review is a student run by annual magazine that publishes in fallen spring. The review is also started, a blog that publishes four times a week to augment [00:01:00] the magazine. Our guests, our blog editor, Adam Hill, editor in chief Sebastian Lunas and author Lindsey Glasner. They talk about how it all gets done and what it means to them to do it. Here is Rick with the interview. First of all, welcome to spectrum. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks for why don't you introduce yourself 

Speaker 4:        then what you do for the BSR and also what your research here at cal says. Hi, my name is Sebastian Lunas. I'm the editor in chief of the Berkeley Science Review and I'm also a fifth [00:01:30] year phd student in the graduate group in Applied Science and technology. At UC Berkeley. I do my research at the molecular foundry up at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in Delia Milan's group and focus on studying nanocrystals of transparent conducting oxides. Great. 

Speaker 1:        Uh, my name is Lindsey and I'm a writer for the BSR in the upcoming issue. I'm a graduate student in the physics department with a little bit of luck. I'll be graduating this December getting my phd and I work at the Space Sciences Laboratory [00:02:00] for Dr Bob Lynne. We build instruments that go on rockets, balloons and satellites to look at the solar system and sometimes things outside the solar system. 

Speaker 5:        Yes sir. Right. For the blog. Is that right? I will be, yes. Okay. My name is Adam Hill. I am the editor of the PSR blog and we sort of work in tandem with the magazine to both keep people aware of the BSR in between issues and also to independently promote science and issues of [00:02:30] science education. Great. And your research here at cal? I am in Charles Harris's group in chemistry where I use ultra fast lasers to look at the dynamics of organic metallic catalysts. Okay. So can someone tell me a little bit about the Berkeley Science Review? 

Speaker 4:        I'll take that one. So the Berkeley Science review is UC Berkeley is General Interest Science magazine. It's written, edited, produced entirely by UC Berkeley graduate students and it comes out twice a year. Basically the goal [00:03:00] of highlighting and showcasing and the cutting edge research that's going on at Berkeley, as well as taking a look at UC Berkeley science community and science history and doing so in a way that is accessible to a general audience. So it's not a technical publication, it's not a peer reviewed journal, it's a a general interest science magazine and it's written with the aim of being able to be picked up by anyone on campus and get an exciting look at what's going on at Berkeley. Part of the mission is also to help train editors and authors [00:03:30] through the process of putting together a professional level publication. And we're able to do that because we only publish two issues a year. So it gives us sort of a six month cycle to actually spend some time and work out really high quality content for the magazine as well as a really visually appealing layout. How long has the Berkeley Science Review been around? The science review was started in 2001 man, it's been producing two issues a year since then, so we're, we're going on 23rd issue coming out [00:04:00] this fall has a blog band active for that of the block's been around since 

Speaker 5:        2010 and a gold team was responsible for starting the blog since then. I think it has grown significantly in scope and readership. And how do you attract readers to both the magazine and and the blog for the blog in particular, we found that social media is one of the best routes to getting significant readership. 

Speaker 4:        In terms of the magazine, I guess to answers, we generally just print as many as we can [00:04:30] and get them all over campus. And what's your approximate circulation? That we typically print between two to 3000 copies per issue and we distribute those across campus and then to a couple of local organizations and coffee shops around campus. Then we have a small number of subscribers, but we sort of know based on the fact that our magazine sort of disappear very quickly that we are getting a significant on our readership, but we're actually conducting a readership survey this fall to sort of get a better idea of how people actually come across the magazine, how many people are reading it, what their sort of [00:05:00] demographic makeup is, and we've also been trying to do a better job over the last year or so of integrating our magazine content with the blog. 

Speaker 5:        And where should people look for that survey? 

Speaker 4:        The magazine will have a prompt in it probably on the inside of the front cover with the link to the survey. We don't want people that haven't read the magazine to be filling out the survey and skewing our results. So if you do pick up the magazine interview. Yeah, exactly. If you do pick up the magazine, [00:05:30] please fill out the survey and let us know who you are. We're very interested and we'd love to hear from you. Lindsey, how did you come to volunteer as a writer? Yeah, my history with the Berkeley Science review is very short. Up until last spring, I was one of those people who would pick up the magazine when I sighed in the places on campus, but I also saw a call for pitches that was advertised to a lot of the departments. I think the particular place I saw, it was graduate student mailing 

Speaker 1:        list in the physics department [00:06:00] and it offered the opportunity to pitch a story for the Berkeley Science Review. And I thought, well, I've got something interesting to write about. So I sent in a pitch and it was accepted. And what was your pitch? The idea for my story was inspired by my phd project, which is a project to put solar, observing x-ray instruments on a NASA rocket. And I thought it might be interesting not only from a scientific perspective, but there's also a bit of a humanist aspect to the story because I thought [00:06:30] people might want to know about what it's like to build one of these experiments and what it's like to go to a launch facility and an actually launched the rocket and once I got a little deeper into the topic, another thing that came into it was Berkeley's long history of building experiments like these. It really goes back to the beginnings of NASA, the whole thing developed together. And so that aspect kind of started taking over the story and became very important to it. 

Speaker 4:        And then from there you just decided to volunteer to write for the blog [00:07:00] as well or, 

Speaker 1:        well I think we've decided that it would be organic to have some blog entries as well because this is a project that is going to launch with any luck on November 2nd so without the timing would be appropriate to have a story about the project and then to have updates on did it launch, what's happening with the project throughout the fall. 

Speaker 4:        This is sort of an example of how we're trying to really integrate the magazine and the web content where it's where it's organic to do so. We figured since it was an ongoing project, [00:07:30] it was a perfect opportunity to sort of transition people right from reading the magazine to reading posts on the blog and sort of integrate those two. Oh, that's great. And it's also worth mentioning that I think there's a significant cross section of the readership who don't necessarily encounter the magazine on campus, but who do read it on our website that said science review.berkeley.edu and do you have your entire back catalog online? We do. We're in the process of fully introducing the very earliest issues as actual searchable texts right [00:08:00] now their catalog in sort of a reader format where you can read them that way, but we're sort of moving towards making them more indexable and more accessible. 

Speaker 4:        And is Lindsay's volunteer story typical? Do you normally draw authors from your readership? I would say her story is typical in that she received an email through somebody, one of the departmental email lists and that's how we do a lot of our outreach for authors. Uh, we have our own active email list that we reach out to when we do a call for pitches, but we also spray them out through the departments [00:08:30] and I would say most of our authors come from that outreach effort. A good proportion of them have read the magazine before. We've been making an effort this year to also get in touch with a lot of the first year students on campus. A lot of our writers are more senior Phd Students, but I think there's also a huge opportunity for first year Grad students that aren't bogged down their research to get involved. 

Speaker 6:        [inaudible] this [00:09:00] is spectrum on k a LX Berkeley. Today's guests are from the Berkeley Science Review and it's Gluck. 

Speaker 1:        How was writing for the BSR different or similar to writing for other publications? It's very challenging. I've spent the last six years getting used to scientific writing for publications or for my colleagues, and it was surprisingly [00:09:30] difficult for me to write for the BSR. I imagine that sort of a common story because it's a broader audience or, yeah, when we're writing for scientific publications, we use very specialized language with carefully chosen words that are really specific, but they're meant for people who already know what those words mean and are very comfortable hearing them and using them. I think when you're writing for a broader audience, you have to choose your words just as carefully or maybe even more so, but you [00:10:00] have to focus less on being so specific and accurate and more on whether the words will be understood and whether they'll be interesting. 

Speaker 1:        Usually when I'm writing a scientific article, I don't need to worry about it being interesting. Hopefully. Interesting enough to site, I shouldn't mention that. In the magazine we have, I serve a number of different formats, so we have a number of different lengths of articles ranging from short little snapshots that are three or 400 words, two feature-length articles like the one that Lindsey wrote, which are typically two [00:10:30] to 4,000 words, sometimes even slightly longer. And so Lindsay jumped in as a first time author with, with one of the features with which I think are quite challenging. I think she did a great job. It was definitely a big barrier to getting started. When I first sat down to try to put some of my ideas on paper, I found it extremely challenging. After things had gotten rolling and I got feedback from the editors, which was very helpful. 

Speaker 1:        Then it became a lot easier. Can you describe that editorial process a little bit more? Well, let's see. So we go through several drafts. So before [00:11:00] the first draft I had met with the first editor for my story. His name is Alexis and she and I had talked about our ideas for the story, which directions we thought it should take, kind of what topics we wanted to put together for the first draft and then I wrote that first draft and that was the one that for me was really challenging to get something down on paper. Then after sending that to her, she circulated it amongst some of the other editors and several of them gave me feedback on it, give me ideas, [00:11:30] pointed out which parts of the draft they thought were interesting, which ones needed more development or just weren't as relevant and then working from that and building it into a second draft is where I got a lot more inspired and writing. It became much easier at that point. It was definitely a fun article to write, although it was difficult because in order to write it, I got to delve a bit into the history of the laboratory. I work at the Space Sciences Laboratory and conduct [00:12:00] interviews with people who are around for some particular pieces of that history. So I don't want to make it sound like writing this article was a huge ordeal that I hated. It was actually a lot of fun. It was just putting the words on paper that I found very difficult at the beginning. 

Speaker 5:        Did you find yourself interviewing a lot of faculty members who you might not have otherwise been interacting with for the piece? 

Speaker 1:        I didn't interview anybody that I didn't know already. Ours tends to be a very intimate community where people know [00:12:30] each other, but I did have conversations with people that I probably wouldn't have talked with otherwise. So a couple of the people that I interviewed were people that I know quite well and have had conversations with before or maybe work with. And some of them were people I knew of but hadn't really ever had a chance to chat with them. And so hearing their stories about building rocket experiments when they were students was very interesting. 

Speaker 5:        Did want to comment on that because I do find that, [00:13:00] uh, both in the case of the blog and the magazine itself, I think one of the best parts of both is the part that gets people out there and talking with scientists either in their field or tangentially related fields with whom they might never otherwise be interacting. It's very easy to get stuck in this little world of your advisor, the couple of students with whom you work on your project, you know, maybe a couple of friends who you see for beer each week. But beyond that, a scientist world can get very [00:13:30] narrow if you're not being proactive in avoiding that. And I think that both the blog and the magazine can really open new experiences to people who are writers and editors in terms of interacting with people in other disciplines or with people of significantly different ages within their own discipline who they might never have otherwise met. 

Speaker 1:        On that note, I also wanted to say a couple of things that had occurred to me too. If you were talking and I wanted to talk about the [00:14:00] value of writing for the BSR for the authors as well as getting information out there for the public. I think this is a really useful thing for the authors who write for both the magazine in the blog in two aspects. I was thinking first about my personal experience and at the stage I'm at in my graduate student career, which is hopefully near the end, you get very zoned in on one particular subject. You kind of managed to convince yourself that this is the only thing in the world that matters [00:14:30] and you spend all your time on that and you can get a little burnt out on that. So for me at the time I started writing for the BSR, it was great to kind of force me to open up my mind a little bit and put my own project in the context of its historical perspective and also the perspective of the community. 

Speaker 1:        It was a great way for me remind myself that there are connections to the community and that I'm not working in this kind of void. This black box down in the basement at the lab. The other thing I was [00:15:00] thinking when you mentioned how you're trying to get a lot of first year authors involved is that that could be really influential for them in choosing a thesis group. I know in the physics department it can be a little bit daunting because you have so many choices of which research group to work with, which particular topic to specialize in and I think a lot of first year physics students are just a little bit lost in that vast parameter space. So by writing for the BSR, I think that would probably encourage them [00:15:30] to find a whisper something they're interested in and start talking to people about it and I could definitely see that leading to them choosing that group to do their thesis work with 

Speaker 6:        [inaudible].

Speaker 4:        Today's guests on spectrum are Adam Hill, Sebastian Lewis and Lindsay Glasner from the Berkeley Science Review 

Speaker 6:        [inaudible].

Speaker 4:        [00:16:00] So the print publication is free? Yes. Is your entire budget from cal or do you get outside contributions? We do get quite a bit of funding from cow to the graduate assembly, which provides us with quite a bit of funding and then we also work with our printer. They have a relationship with an advertising agency who then in turn provide the suite of ads that are relevant to a science oriented publication that we are able then to put into our magazine. And how is the editorial stuff [00:16:30] selected each year or each issue or however frequently you guys change things up? It's basically whenever someone decides to leave and we put out a call for applications for the editorial staff, so most editors stay on for two to four issues, which is good because it helps with institutional memory and you get people that are more experienced that are able to coach. 

Speaker 4:        The more junior editors talked about authors and editors. What about art? I mean the BSR is usually a very beautiful publication. [00:17:00] Sure. Where does that all come from? The layout staff. The BSR is sort of the unsung hero of the magazine and one of the most exciting experiences as an author and as an editor is about halfway through the process. We have a meeting with our layout staff where they first show us the designs they've come up with for various articles in the magazine and working with just the words for for quite some time. And then coming in and seeing it actually displayed in a magazine format that looks incredibly professional and is very well designed is incredibly exciting. So the way it works for the magazine is we [00:17:30] have a team of about 10 layout editors and an art director. We don't require the layout editors to come in with an experience. This is sort of another one of the examples of how the BSR is able to take people that are excited about learning about how to do layout, how many to do design and because of the timescale of the magazine, 

Speaker 5:        it gives people enough time to learn those tools and working in an interactive team where they're going to get a lot of feedback on what they're doing and how it looks. And end up with a really amazing product. [00:18:00] What's that editorial process for the blog? Look back, we published four times a week with a crew of about a dozen authors at the moment, so we'll tend to go about a month between publications for an individual author and they'll come to me with some sort of idea. Can I write about pesticides in farming and California is efforts to insist on labeling GMO foods or something like that? You know, I'll say absolutely and the, the main interaction that I have at the [00:18:30] early stage of the process is regulating tone. Actually they're coming at it from the right viewpoint and coming at it from a balanced viewpoint where what they'll have at the end of writing this reporting more than opinion, although we also do have a category for opinion, but I like to try to avoid any ambiguity between the two. 

Speaker 5:        Sure. I think that's an issue that a lot of blogs face is that it can be difficult to separate the editorial standpoint of the blog. Ours is basically scientists' cool from the editorial [00:19:00] standpoint of the individual authors, which can often be very specific and very passionate. Then I'll often not have particularly significant amounts of feedback or interaction with the authors until just a couple of days before their blog is scheduled to go up at which point we'll start hashing things together and seeing it in the digital format is a great way to really get a feel for how a blog post is going to come together part because you can't necessarily know how a blog reads till things like hyperlinks are in place. [00:19:30] Then we'll tend to hang it back and forth making changes when things are going well. We wrap up about the night before the blog post goes up and then the next morning we'll send it up and relate it. To your point earlier about, um, how the BSR has helped you as a researcher have a little bit more breadth than you might as a Grad student. Do you see it changing how you go forward after you leave cows, start your postdoc or whatever? 

Speaker 1:        I think it wouldn't lead me to make decisions differently [00:20:00] after I graduate. Otherwise I don't exactly know what's on their highs and yet for me, but it gives me a little more inspiration about my field. So in that aspect, I suppose it could have a really powerful effect because the decision that I'll be faced with when I graduate is decision that many of us are faced with when we finished our PhDs, which is do you want to stay in academia? Do you want to switch to an engineering job where you can potentially make a lot more money and have a lot more say in where you live, who you work for, that sort of deal. [00:20:30] So inspiring students at a point in their graduate career at which they're about to make that decision, I think is a really good thing. So reminding them of some of the inspiring and motivating things about the field they're in could help to keep them there. The other interesting issue whenever we have anyone involved in science 

Speaker 7:        outreach who are themselves scientists on the areas, how they see the rest of the scientific community looking at their science outreach. So I think Brad Vojtech who was on the show earlier talked about this tweet [00:21:00] of Damocles. You're always waiting until your outreach efforts like sabotage your actual career in some way. Did you have any reservations before for writing to our broader audience? 

Speaker 1:        I would say personally, no. I didn't have any reservations about it. I think that there is a sort of pervasive fear about that in the scientific community. Like if you do too much scientific outreach then people will think that maybe you're not serious about the thing that you're actually working on. And I think that's mostly false. I hope that [00:21:30] people don't actually have that view, but I would say that pretty common. Certainly an anxiety that people have. Yeah, I think so. And there probably is some reason for it as well. I would not want to do scientific outreach to the point where I was not putting out scientific publications because especially as a woman, you want to make sure that people know you can do the work as well as do the outreach about it. I think that some of the barriers between people doing scientific research and doing scientific [00:22:00] outreach are starting to come down a bit. 

Speaker 1:        At my laboratory we're starting to see more and more people who are working both on hard science and doing outreach as well. In particular, a friend of mine is now splitting her time, roughly 50 50 between those two things. And so she's hired by both departments at our lab. So I think any stigma about those things or at least starting to to come down and be resolved. So what should people interested in volunteering for the BSR do? [00:22:30] They should contact us by email, I think is typically the best route for both. So the email address for the Berkeley science if you blog is science review [email protected] and for the magazine or for the BSR as an organization in general. It's the science review@gmaildotcomishouldalsomentionthatmostoftheinformationabouthowtogetinvolveddesirewebsiteatsciencereviewdotberkeley.edu well Lindsey, thanks for joining us. Thank you very much. Cool at all. [00:23:00] Well, thank you both for joining. Yes, thank you. Thank you very much. 

Speaker 2:        Okay. 

Speaker 1:        Regular feature of spectrum is to mention a few of [00:23:30] the science and technology events happening locally over the next few weeks. Here are Lisa kind of itch Renee Rao and Rick [inaudible] with the calendar. They should both space and science center is starting their next season of night school tonight on third Friday of the month 

Speaker 7:        from seven to 11:00 PM Chabot opens their doors to adults 21 years in over with drinks, music, planetarium shows, telescope viewings and more. Number admission is $5 and general admission is $12 [00:24:00] visit www.chabotspace.org for more information. That's c h a, B o t space dot o r g. Remote 

Speaker 8:        islands have been heralded as natural labs with some spectacular cases of rapid evolution in proliferation of species on November 17th at 11:00 AM in the genetics and plant biology building room 100 science at cal presents professor Rosemary Gillespie, director of the ESIC Museum of entomology [00:24:30] at UC Berkeley. She will address one of the most puzzling features of the high diversity of species on remote islands with her lecture entitled vagrant and Variability Evolution on remote islands. Science at cal is a series of free science lectures aimed at general audiences. On November 20th a museum of Paleontology at UC Berkeley will host a lecture by a university scientist, sue sumo Tomia, who will lead presentations on current research practice talks and discussions on topics [00:25:00] of paleontological interest. Coffee and snacks will be available. The lecture will be held in 1101 of the valley life sciences building on the UC Berkeley campus from 11 to 12:00 PM the new and wildly successful nerd night. East Bay will be held on Tuesday, November 27th at the Stork Club, 2130 Telegraph Avenue in Oakland, doors open at 7:00 PM and the three lectures begin at 8:00 PM you must be 21 and the emission is $8. [00:25:30] Join Calyx DJ eye on the prize and hosts in Davis and Rick Karnofsky for this scientific salon in Oakland Uptown district, 

Speaker 7:        the Stanford Linear National Accelerator Laboratory. Slack is celebrating their 50th anniversary on Wednesday, November 28th at 7:00 PM in the Oshman family JCC Cultural Arts Center located in Jessica Lynn, Sal Townsquare at three nine two one Fabian way in Palo Alto. [00:26:00] The Commonwealth Club presents the event that is $5 for students, $10 for members and $15 for all others. Nobel Prize winner and director of Meredith's, Burton Richter and scientist Norbert Holt comp. We'll discuss how the accelerator has made cutting edge advancements from particle to astrophysics, advanced energy science and more. Sac has discovered two fundamental particles prove that protons are made of corks and shown how DNA directs protein fabrication. For [00:26:30] more on this event. Visit Commonwealth club.org now two news stories with Rennie Rao and Rick Karnofsky Science Daily has recently summarized an article by researchers at the Israel Institute of Technology published in nature materials on a novel way of splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen associate professor of material science and engineering. Abner Rothschild noted that their method of trapping light and the ultra thin films of ferric [00:27:00] oxide is the first of its kind. These rust films are about 5,000 times thinner than standard office paper and are inexpensive, stable in water, non-toxic and can oxidize water without being oxidized to get around poor transport properties. The team uses resonance, light trapping indifference between forward and backward propagating waves enhances the light absorption in quarter wave or in some cases deeper sub wavelength [00:27:30] films amplifying the intensity close to the surface, allowing charged carriers created by the light to reach the surface and oxidize water. This is a promising step into harvesting solar energy and storing it as hydrogen. 

Speaker 8:        UC Berkeley's greater good science center has launched an interactive, shareable online gratitude journal through November. People in the campus community are invited to participate in the cal gratitude challenge by keeping a two week online [00:28:00] gratitude journal. The website was made both to conduct research and educate people about the powers of gratitude in their lives both before and after a 14 day period. Participants are asked to fill out surveys intended to measure traits like resilience, attachment tendencies, and happiest the projects designers are hoping for around a thousand participants. The website is [email protected] that's t h n. X, the number four [00:28:30] [inaudible] dot org 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]. The music or during the show is by Los Donna David from his album folk and acoustic released under creative Commons license 3.0 [00:29:00] attribution. [inaudible] [inaudible]. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email or email address is [email protected] [00:29:30] join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible].

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The Voyteks created the Brain Systems, Connections, Associations, and Network Relationships engine, or brainSCANr. The tool is used to explore the relationships between different terms in peer reviewed publications. http://brainscanr.com/

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

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

Speaker 3:        Good afternoon. I'm Rick Karnofsky. Brad swift and I are the hosts of today's show. We're speaking with Jessica and Bradley Vojtech. Jessica is a designer and a developer who earned her master's of information management and systems here at cal and has [00:01:00] worked on several UC Berkeley websites. She's also working on the future of science education through projects like ned the neuron. Brad is in NIH, N N I g m s postdoctoral fellow at ucs f. He got his phd from cal. He's a prolific blogger and Zombie expert. The void techs are here to talk about brain systems, connections and associations and network relationships or brain scanner. This website helps people explore [00:01:30] how neuroscience terms relate to one another in the peer reviewed literature. They've documented their project in our recent journal of neuroscience methods paper. 

Speaker 4:        Brad and Jessica, welcome to spectrum. Thank you for having us. Thanks. Can you tell us a little bit about brain scanner? Actually, I was at a conference here at cal hell by the CSA, so the cognitive science student association and Undergraduate Association here at cal that they had several neuroscientists and cognitive scientists come and give presentations and I was one of those people. I [00:02:00] was on a panel with a Stanford cognitive scientists at the end of the day. It was a Q and a. We got into a question about what can be known in the neurosciences and I had mentioned that the peer reviewed neuroscientific literature probably smarter than we are. There's something like 3 million peer reviewed neuroscientific publications and I was saying that that is just too many. There is no way for anybody to to integrate all of those facts and I said if there some automated or algorithmic way of doing that, we could probably find some neat stuff out and he disagreed with me pretty strongly on the panel [00:02:30] and I sort of stewed on that for awhile. 

Speaker 4:        That ended up becoming the brain scanner project actually, which is using text mining to look at how different topics in the neurosciences relate to one another. We had conversation about this and I had just started about six months before my a master's program at the School of Information. So all of the stuff that he was saying really jived with what I was learning. So we got together after that. We talked about it off and on sort of over dinner and stuff occasionally, but I think it was [00:03:00] right around won't. Right, right before we found out you were pregnant. Right, right around Christmas when we first actually sat down together to work on it and that was just a random evening. We didn't have, well, we didn't have a baby at the time, so we didn't have much else to do. Brad was working on this thing and he said, you know, I've been working on this all day. 

Speaker 4:        I'm trying to get this algorithm to work and see if we can get any results out of this. And I kind of challenged him. I said, I can do that faster than you can started taking my course. I had [00:03:30] all of these new skills that I just wanted to kind of show off. And I did. She actually beat me. You guys were both sort of where we were. We're basically coding. Yeah. We're sitting on the couch. Not really cause we weren't actually doing it together. We are using two different competitor competing. Exactly. So who do you see as the audience for brain scanner? Well I know the answer to that someone. Right. So I have colleagues who tell me a lot of Grad students actually mostly a who say that they use it as a stop for [00:04:00] searching. The peer reviewed neuroscientific literature. So pub med, which is the surface run by the National Library of medicine, which is part of the national institutes for health index is a lot of these peer reviewed biomedical journals. 

Speaker 4:        Their search engine is quite good but it returns just textual information. You know, you just, you see the 20 most recently published papers or you know, however you want to sort it related to the search term or of interest. Yeah. So basically anybody who wants to create an app can get access to this data. You have to follow certain [00:04:30] rules, but otherwise you can get the information out of this database easily. In a, in a sort of standard format, we provide a graphic or a visualization layer on top of the search so you can put in one of these search terms and you can see here are the topics that relate to it very strongly in literature. Statistically speaking, you know, uh, by that I mean here are the words or terms that show up a lot in papers with the term memory for example. We also then list the papers that are related and you can see the full list of terms and [00:05:00] how it relates to different topics and things like that. Um, if I want to look at a brain region and say, okay, what are the other brain regions that are related to this can really quickly visually see that based upon these 3 million publications that we, we searched through 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 4:        you are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. We're talking to with user interface developer, Jessica Vojtech. And neuroscientists, Bradley Wojciech about brain scanner 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 4:        [00:05:30] do you see other potentially valuable ways you can harness PubMed's data or other reference sources? Yeah, absolutely. So one of the aspects actually of the paper that we published was ways to address that, that very question. Uh, initially we tried to publish the paper just as a here's a, here's a resource or one of the editor's version on that rejected the paper, said, you know, what, what can you do with this? And a, of course, you know, this is something we've been thinking about. And [00:06:00] so I tried to build a proof of concept. So one of the, one of the things that we showed statistically speaking that you can do with this, does the data they call hypothesis generation or semiautomated hypothesis generation. And this works off of a very simple idea. Um, it's almost like recommend their algorithms and um, like linkedin or Facebook or something like that. 

Speaker 4:        You know, it's like if you know this person, you might know this person, kind of a friend of a friend should be a friend idea. You know, Rick and I, I know you and you know Rick, maybe you have a friend named Jim. And so statistically speaking, [00:06:30] Jim and I might get along right because you and I get along and you, and he'd get along, especially if I and Jim get along. And so you can go through algorithmically and say, you know, in the literature if Migraine for example, which is the example you give in the paper, uh, is strongly related to a neurotransmitter Serotonin, which I didn't know before we made the website actually, um, that in the medical literature there's a whole serotonin hypothesis from migraines I guess because Migraines respond to, uh, antidepressants, which are usually serotonergic drugs. So anyway, Serotonin [00:07:00] and Migraines are very strongly related and neuroscientists know a lot about the basic physiology of Serotonin, where in the brain is expressed and things like that. 

Speaker 4:        And so on the neuroscience side, we know that Serotonin is very strongly expressed in, in a brain region called the striatum, which is sort of deep frontal part of the brain. And, uh, there's thousands of papers that talk about Serotonin and Migraines and Serotonin in this brain region, the striatum respectively, but there's only 19 papers or something like that to talk about that brain region and migraines. [00:07:30] And so statistically speaking, maybe we're missing something here, right? Maybe just nobody's really looked at this connection between migraines in that brain region. Maybe there aren't papers published on it because people have looked and there's nothing there. But, uh, that's why it's somewhat automated. You can go through this list of recommended hypotheses and you as an expert, I can go through that list and say, oh, some of these are nonsense. Or Oh, that's, that could be interesting. 

Speaker 4:        Maybe. Maybe we should look into that. So it gives you a low hanging fruit basically. Yeah. And so that would be something [00:08:00] eventually I would like to build into the site. Are you continuing to analyze new papers as they enter in pub med? We haven't rerun it for awhile. I think there's something on the order of 10,000 new papers published every month in the neurosciences. But when you're standing in the face of 3 million, it's sort of drop in the bucket. So we, we worry running it every month or two. Um, but the results really don't change very quickly. Right. It's pretty stable. So yes, we, we should actually [00:08:30] run it again. It's been about six months or so. If you guys actually like, well I mean as a or perhaps how, you know, the ideas in the literature might change. For instance, that's actually something that I did do. 

Speaker 4:        Um, I eliminated the searches to just bring the regions, so how different brain regions relate to each other across time. So I did a search for all papers published up to like 1905, which wasn't very many. Of course not in your, you know, you have an exponential increase in the number of being published. Okay. But then again, I ran it again for all papers published to like up to 1935, [00:09:00] 55, 75, 95 and you know, 2005, right? Uh, or 2011. And you could actually see how our understanding of how different brain regions relate change over time. And that was kind of neat. Um, if I was going to be a little bit statistically, uh, stronger about this, what I should have done in the original paper, and I didn't think about it until after we republished it was I should've run the semiautomated hypothesis generation algorithm, uh, on a limited amount of data. So I test data set up to like say 1990 [00:09:30] and then found plausible hypotheses from that Dataset and then run it again on the entire thing and see, you know, if we had found new things. And you know, if that corroborated what we've learned in the last 22 years. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 5:        you're listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. We're talking with Brad and Jessica Vojtech about brain scanner. They're a site to show links [00:10:00] that may exist between brain structures, cognitive functions, neurological disorders, and more as data mined from the academic literature. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 4:        I mean this is a side side project for us. Yeah, 

Speaker 1:        it was two weeks in $11 and 50 cents. And what did that go to? Um, coffee and coffee. Yeah. [00:10:30] Um, no it, it went into the Google app engine server time. So we actually were able to use Google app engine to distribute the processing, which is also what made mind my code a little bit quicker to run through all of this data. 

Speaker 4:        I was doing single queries at a time and because we have 800 terms in the database and we have to do how every term relates to every other term, it's 800 squared,

Speaker 1:        try to buy two essentially. And then there's the roundtrip between between his your machine and the um, [00:11:00] pub met database. So, you know, you're making requests, you're making requests, making requests anyway. It was maybe three days, three days or four days. And I was able to do it in about two hours by um, putting it into the cloud and using app engine. So that $11 and 50 cents went to paying for the service and agree to say a hundred squared divided by two minus 800 a lot. So do you want to talk about how that dictionary of keywords was generated? 

Speaker 4:        Initially I [00:11:30] had wanted to try and figure out how brain regions relate this. This grew out of my phd work actually at Berkeley. I worked with Professor Bob Knight who used to be the head of the neurosciences institute, Helen Wells neuroscience here. And my phd thesis was looking at how to brain regions, the prefrontal cortex and the Basal Ganglia related to working memory. And as I was standing for my qualifying exams, I was trying to figure out, okay, what are the brain regions that send inputs to [00:12:00] [inaudible], which is one of the parts of the Basal Ganglia and where he dies this ride in project two. And in order to figure that out, I spent, I don't know, two months off and on three months off and on over at the biomedical library here, digging through old, uh, anatomical papers from the 1970s and basically drawing little hand-drawn charts to try and figure out how these things connected. 

Speaker 4:        And it really surprised me. It was frustrating because you know, here we are in, well, when [00:12:30] I was doing this, it was like 2008 right? And all I wanted to know is how different brain regions connect. And I was like, why can't I just go to a website and say, okay, striatum, what are its inputs and outputs? Like we have that information, right? Why can't I do that? Um, and so anyway, that was one of the motivating factors for me also. And there's actually a paper published in 2002 called neuro names. And then this researcher was trying to create an ontology of, of brain region names Ryan. So the terms that we use now in 2012 aren't necessarily [00:13:00] the same that people were using back in 1900 when they were first describing the basic anatomy. And so you have some Latin names for brain regions. 

Speaker 4:        You have modern names for brain regions, you have names for different groupings of brain regions. So I referred earlier to the base like Ganglia, uh, and that is composed of, you know, maybe five different brain regions. And if I talk about three of those brain regions, uh, can I give examples? Is the putamen and the Globus Pallidus, uh, Globus Pallidus is actually contained [00:13:30] of two separate ones. And the putamen and Globus Pallidus if you combine them together or known by one name. But if you combine the putamen with the striatum, that's a different name. And so you actually have these weird venn diagram overlapping naming Schema. 

Speaker 1:        There's a significant vocabulary problem, which is the term that we use in the information sciences. Basically the fact that you have multiple names for the same thing and you have the same name for some different things. So you know this venn diagram idea. Um, so yeah, [00:14:00] if you're going to use a very simple search algorithm, you have, you can't do it, you wouldn't, you're not going to get all of the results. So, um, I think our system tries to solve that vocabulary problem a little bit. 

Speaker 4:        And then there's actually a researcher, um, Russ Poltrack drag, who used to be a faculty of neuroscience at UCLA and I think he's in University of Texas now. And he actually tried to create an ontology for cognitive term. So in cognitive science and psychology and cognitive neuroscience, you know, we have terms like working memory [00:14:30] and attention and in they're trying to create a whole ontology for how these different things really. So like working memory as part of memory, which you know, in memory also contains a longterm memory. And so we'll use his first attempt as a dictionary as well. And then we went to the NIH website and they've got a listing of all these different kinds of neurological disorders and we use that. So we pulled a bunch of publicly available data basically and use those dictionaries as our starting point. 

Speaker 1:        And then we [00:15:00] also took suggestions from the people on our website almost immediately we started getting requests for more and different terms. So you had the, when you find two keywords that appear in a paper together, you assume that they're actually related. Can you comment on if people might have demonstrated that they're not actually related, how does that affect your system? Like some, like an instance in which, uh, it says this brain region is not connected to this other [00:15:30] brain region, right? Um, yes, we have assumed that there's a publication bias that if there is not a connection then someone does not publish a paper about that. 

Speaker 4:        Okay. And negative publications or negative findings go very under reported in the scientific literature. 

Speaker 1:        Right. So we're hopefully taking advantage of that. Hopefully the law of large numbers means that our data is mostly correct and it does seem to be that way. The example that Brad gave, uh, with the Allen Brain Atlas, [00:16:00] that there is certain corroborating evidence that seems to suggest that this is a, at least plausible connections. There's obviously no one say that better. No, that's perfectly scientifically accurate. I tend to get a little bit specific when I'm talking about this kind of stuff. 

Speaker 4:        Is there already some sort of bias that might drive certain kinds of papers up? If the paper has a lot of buzzwords, perhaps it suddenly becomes more important. Do you 100% yes, absolutely. There are always [00:16:30] hot topics. Uh, and that shows up for sure 

Speaker 1:        only because there's more papers published on that subject. We don't currently have a any kind of waiting per paper. 

Speaker 4:        Yeah. Like when you go into the website and you'd do something like, um, there's a brain region called the Amygdala and you know, it'll be very strongly associated with fear. And so that's actually one of my concerns is problem getting these biases. So, you know, there's a lot of literature on this brain region, the Amygdala and how it relates to fear, but it certainly does a lot more than just processing fear, [00:17:00] right? It's this general emotional affective labeling sort of idea that anyway, that's, that's neuroscience specific stuff, you know, and brain region called the insula and disgust or love or you know, these other kinds of strong emotions. And so yeah, it definitely reflects certain biases as well. And we, we try and quantify that even to an extent a little bit. So again, using the Allen Brain Atlas data, we show from our Dataset, what are the top five brain regions that express or that are related to dopamine, for example. 

Speaker 4:        And in the real human brain, what are the top five brain [00:17:30] regions that express dopaminergic related genes? And you can actually see that there's a very clear bias. So one of the regions that expresses dobutamine very strongly is very hard to study. Neuroscientifically speaking. It's, it's deepen deep part of the brain. It's hard to get any, it's very small, so you can't get it from like brain scanning expresses a lot of dopamine, but people don't study it and we can actually quantify then some of these under-studied relationships, right? We're like, here's a brain region that we know expresses a lot of dopamine, but there's a a hundred papers only and another [00:18:00] brain region that's very sexy and too about domain has 10,000 papers. Right? So our system shows you an example well of the current state of scientific literature. So it's not necessarily 100% correct, but it reflects what scientists think as a whole at this point. Yeah, I agree. And we try and be very careful about that in the paper and in talking about it like we are right now 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 5:        [00:18:30] you are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. We're talking with user interface developer, Jessica Vojtech and neuroscientist Bradley Vojtech about brain scanner. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 4:        I was really surprised you. I taught neuro anatomy for three semesters here at Berkeley and you know, so I know the anatomy pretty well. And on your first ran it, I had one of those like yes, kind [00:19:00] of moments like I can't believe this work because it really does find all of these clusters really nicely. And that was a very pleasant surprise because technically speaking it couldn't have been any other way. Like it just has to, you know, I mean these topics co-occur a lot, so it should be that way, but it's always nice to see something like that work. Brian, I wanted to ask about the journals that you sent the paper off too. How did you pick them? Art Of picking a journal where to send a paper. It's actually really hard. So certain journals get [00:19:30] more readership than others. And then there's the open access factor. 

Speaker 4:        So I'm, I'm a big open science, open data advocate and so I try and shoot for that. I had forgotten, there's actually sort of a, a very wide protest of Elsevier, which is one of the publishing companies right now. And the journal that published my papers and Elsevier Journal, but, uh, I had signed the petition and I was part of that Nash shortly thereafter. That would have impacted my decision had I been thinking about it. Yeah. And yeah, so it's mainly a balance between readership and expectation and you sort [00:20:00] of get a feel after publishing a few papers of what editors are looking for. And so yeah, I am the one that has experience with navigating the academic publishing environment. Yeah. So yeah, we sent it out to a lot of journals and, uh, mostly it didn't pass editorial review, which means that there's an editor that decides whether or not conceptually it will be interesting for their journal to publish it once got center review at a journal and they're like, well, it was sort of torn. 

Speaker 4:        There were four reviewers, four pure reviewers, [00:20:30] and two of them were fairly enthusiastic and the other two are like, this is cool, but so what? Right. Um, and the general consensus was it didn't fit with the theme of the Journal. The Journal of neuroscience methods point really well and your reviewers are very, and um, actually there's a figure at the end of the paper where we did some integration with the Allen Brain. Alice Paul Allen, one of the co founders of Microsoft who is a cuisine heir, has put half a billion dollars into this institute. [00:21:00] Initially the goal was to map, uh, the expression of all of these different genes in the human brain, in the mouse brain, and they made all that data publicly available. And so we use that as a test data set. So we said, okay, where are these different, uh, neurotransmitter related genes actually expressed in the brain and what does our system think about wearing the brain? These neurotransmitters are, there's a week but significant correlation between the two, which suggests that our system reflects actual reality to a certain extent at least. [00:21:30] And that was a suggestion I got from one of the peer reviewers and that was really good. It was a lot of extra work, but it ended up being a really good addition to the paper. 

Speaker 1:        But both of you guys are involved in science education and science outreach. So I was hoping you can comment on that. I'm actually starting a project with a friend of mine building a neuroscience kids books. So we're going to teach neuroscience to elementary school kids with an electronic ebook featuring the neuron. Yes, featured his name is ned the neuron. He's a pure middle cell and he works in the motor cortex of the brain. [00:22:00] And is the neuroscience focus partly driven by bad or do you have any sort of personal interest in as well? I do have a personal interest in and I, I, you know, obviously it's convenient that my husband is a neuroscientist, but actually the character and the original story idea is my partners who's also a neuroscientist and phd in neuroscience here at cal here at cal. 

Speaker 4:        Yeah. I get this question a fair amount. Like why do I do blogging and outreach and things like that. So there's actually a few answers to that. One I find blogging, uh, helps me [00:22:30] do better science. If I have to figure out a very simple way of explaining something, then I feel like I understand it better. It's sort of like one of the best ways to learn something is by trying to teach it. Right. I had a very strange path to academia. I actually got kicked out as an undergraduate from the university. I had to sort of beg my way back in because my grades were pretty low. You know, a couple of people help me out along the way and that were pretty important to me. And I think a lot of Grad students have this experience where they, they feel like they don't belong there in in sense that like, oh [00:23:00] my God, I'm not smart enough to do this. 

Speaker 4:        You know? And when I look at the resumes or cvs of, you know, tenured faculty here at Berkeley, right? It's just paper after paper and award and amazing achievement and you're just like struggling to even understand how to write a paper and it seems just like this daunting, intractable problem. And so because of that, I actually have a section in my CV where I actually list every time a paper has been rejected. I've actually had graduate students tell me that. That's been kind of Nice to see that you know, you see somebody who's doing pretty well and you see that, you know, in order to get there [00:23:30] you sort of have to slog through a lot of crap. 

Speaker 1:        Did you plan to work together some more? I think so. You know, we're obviously working together to raise a son right now. We actually were talking on the way over here about trying to implement some of the ideas we've 

Speaker 4:        been talking about that people have suggested. I think we could definitely do that. Yeah, there's definitely a lot of overlap. I'm very interested in dynamic data visualization and that's something that Jesse's is obviously getting quite quite good at and so I'd [00:24:00] like to start doing that for a lot of my research papers as well. Brad and Jess, thanks for joining us. Oh, thank you very much for having us. Thank you so much for having us. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 6:        and now for some science news headlines. Here's Renee Rao and Brad sweet 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 7:        [00:24:30] the Berkeley new center reports researchers at the University of California Berkeley are gathering evidence this fall that the Feisty Fox squirrels scampering around campus or not just mindlessly foraging for food but engaging in a long term savings strategy to track the nut stashing activity. The student researchers are using GPS technology to record all of the food burials and in the process are creating [00:25:00] an elaborate map showing every campus tree building and garbage can. Miquel Delgado a doctorial student in psychology heads the squirrel research team in the laboratory of UC Berkeley, psychologist Luchea Jacobs. The research team is replicating the caching experiment on humans by timing students as they burry Easter eggs on campus and try to find them. We're using humans as a model for squirrel behavior to ask questions that we can't ask. Squirrels still got us said the group has a cow squirrels website to promote their work. 

Speaker 6:        [00:25:30] UC Berkeley professor of cell and molecular biology and chemistry. Carolyn Bertozzi has won the 2012 Heinrich Violin prize. Professor Bartow Z has founded the field of bio orthogonal chemistry. In her groundbreaking approach, she creatively exploits the benefits of synthetic chemistry to study the vital processes within living beings. Professor Dr Volk Gang Baumeister, chair of the board of Trustees of the Heinrich Violin Prize says of Professor Berto z. [00:26:00] Her breakthrough method to identify sugar patterns on the cell surface is a milestone for our understanding of the functions of sugars in health and disease and paves the way for novel diagnostic and therapeutic approaches. 

Speaker 3:        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. Brad swift and Renee Rao join me for this. The second annual Bay Area Science Festival is wrapping up this weekend. [00:26:30] Highlights include art in science and gallery gala showing the intersection of image and research tonight at the Berkeley Arts Festival, Gallery Science superheros tonight at the Tech Museum in San Jose and discovery days at at and t park tomorrow November 3rd from 11:00 AM to 4:00 PM last year more than 21,000 people showed up to this free event this year. There are more than 150 exhibits. Visit Bay area science.org for more information about any of these [00:27:00] great activities and to see their regular calendar of science goings on. 

Speaker 6:        Big Ideas. Berkeley is an annual innovation contest that provides funding, support, and encouragement to interdisciplinary teams of UC undergraduate and graduate students who have big ideas. The pre-proposal entry deadline is 5:00 PM November six 2012 all pre-proposals must be submitted via the online application on the big ideas website. Remember there are big idea advisers to help students craft [00:27:30] their pre-proposals. You can drop in at room 100 Blum hall during scheduled hours or email advisers to schedule an appointment at another time. Check the big ideas website for advisor times or to make an appointment. There will also be an editing blitz November 5th from five to 8:00 PM in room, 100 of bloom hall advisors and past winters will be available to provide applicants with valuable last-minute insights and advice on your pre-proposal. This is a great opportunity to hone your proposal and get support from those [00:28:00] who know what it takes to build a successful big idea. The big ideas website is big ideas.berkeley.edu 

Speaker 7:        on November 8th the center for ethnographic research will hold a colloquium to understand cancer treatment trajectories using an array of ethnographic data. The Speaker Daniel Dohan and associate professor in the Phillip r Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies. We'll discuss this research about inequality and culture with a focus on cancer. He will focus on his most recent study which examines how patients [00:28:30] with advanced diseases find out about and decide whether to participate in clinical trials of new cancer drugs. The event, which is free and open to the public, will be held from four to 5:30 PM at 25 38 Channing way

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 5:        the music you [00:29:00] heard during say show was spend less on and David from his album book and Acoustic, 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. 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] [00:29:30] join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible].

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

Past Engineers of KALX talk about the development of the station and its challenges. Features Sam Wood, Ron Quan, David Josephson, and Susan Calico. Also, past Music Director and Station Manager Doc Pelzel provides his insights.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible] [inaudible]. 

Speaker 1:        Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley. We have a special show this week to highlight the [00:00:30] 50th anniversary of calyx and the kick off of the fundraiser. We look back over the 50 years by talking with past engineers of Calyx, those key people who made it possible for radio to happen. Our guests, our previous engineers, Sam Wood, Ron Kwon, David Josephson, Susan Calico, and to pass station manager Dr Pell Cell. We wanted to give you an idea of how Calex struggled and evolved into its current form through the eyes of the engineers that made it happen on with the show. Rick and I [00:01:00] are here with doc pell, Zelle and doc. What was it like early on in the 60s here at Calex? Yeah, I started it. Yeah. 

Speaker 3:        [inaudible] about six months after it became an FM station and about um, oh six and a half years after it was an am station as usually a case with a college radio station. A bunch of engineers get together and decide, hey, let's do a radio station. And they put Patti page records in the library and they want you to play [00:01:30] music to study by. Okay. And then they go and fiddle with the wires, everything and get the stuff going. And then the, uh, then the firies come in and uh, and radicalize everything musically and, and make the engineers all nervous and depressed and then start building an audience. So 

Speaker 1:        we have a phone interview with one of those early engineers from Calex Sam wood, let's go do that. 

Speaker 4:        Okay. 

Speaker 5:        Sam Wood, thanks very much for coming on spectrum and talking to us about the early days of Calex. 

Speaker 4:        Well thank you for having me. 

Speaker 5:        And [00:02:00] what years were you at cal? 

Speaker 4:        I was actually there from the fall of 1963 through the spring of 1968. 

Speaker 5:        And how did you get interested in radio at cal? 

Speaker 4:        Well, actually I lived in the unit one residence hall, which was actually called Putnam Hall. Down the hall from me were two double e's who basically a hung out with for a while. And they took me over and introduced me to the founders of radio cow. 

Speaker 5:        [00:02:30] And what did you find there? You know, what was on the ground engineering wise?

Speaker 4:        Well, at that point the station actually had a small studio and a little control room and a shop area. This was all in the basement of unit two residence hall. The actual original work that was done by Marshall and Jim started in 1961 everyone talks about 62 well that's about the time that they finally got some of the equipment working, [00:03:00] but they actually put this together in 1961 

Speaker 5:        and what were the engineering challenges for you back then? 

Speaker 4:        Well, the challenges were that we had no time and very little money, so we ended up having to build much of what we had. We got some surplus gear from some of the commercial stations and we'd modify some of that, but we ended up building most of the stuff on our own. In fact, the transmitters that we [00:03:30] had for the carrier current station were actually built out of food service trays for the chassis. And then surplus scrap wood for the frame. The transformers came out of the physics department and the tubes came out of, I think it was the chem department, so really this is literally built up from scraps. We spent a lot of time and very little money 

Speaker 5:        and that carrier system that you talked about, describe that a bit. 

Speaker 4:        That was basically an a m transmitter. [00:04:00] It operated in the am radio band and it coupled into the power lines of the residence halls and it started out in unit two and then they expanded it to unit one and eventually into unit three and students who wanted to listen to the station could tune it in on an am radio. 

Speaker 5:        And who were some of the key people that were in the engineering group back then? You've mentioned a few names. Do you want to sorta run down? Who was who? 

Speaker 4:        Sure. John grilly worked with me. [00:04:30] He became chief engineer a later on, another guy, Bob Tasjan, who was an engineer and he helped out also Lee fells and Stein who later became one of the homebrew computer network people. John Connors, Scott Loftus, us, mark Tendus, Charlie Bedard. These were all engineering people who helped out in various ways. 

Speaker 5:        How much time and impact did this have on your studies? 

Speaker 4:        Oh, it was, it was interesting shoehorning [00:05:00] everything together because it, I spent far more time than I probably should have down there. I did all right, but mainly because once I got into upper division, the double e part of it, I had a natural ability to be able to work through the problems. And I think some of my experience at radio cow actually helped me in some of my w classes. 

Speaker 5:        Do you want to tell some stories about uh, pulling cables? 

Speaker 4:        Oh, the cables? Yes. We were in a very interesting situation with the university. [00:05:30] We got friendly with some of the top people at the university and were able to therefore have a general attitude toward us of, we don't care how the cable gets into the conduit, but once it's there, you can use it. So we ended up having little wire pulling campaigns, typically about two or three in the morning where we'd pull cable and we called it midnight wire and cable. And we wired up. Much of the, one of our biggest accomplishments was [00:06:00] the studios in the basement of Dwinelle Hall that we built up. Didn't have any real connection with the telephone network or any of the other university cable networks that we needed to be connected to. So we, uh, ended up pulling approximately 200 feet of 75 pair cable all the way from the grounds and buildings part of Darnell all the way to the studios. 

Speaker 4:        And we figured out a really neat little trick using a vacuum cleaner [00:06:30] and a sponge and some fishing line so we could get a pole wire into a conduit that normally you couldn't. So we pulled this cable in that gave us our connectivity into the network at one l hall. One of the things also, I hadn't mentioned, we needed a lot of wire and cable to build the station. So the way we got that was, Marshall talked his way into getting access to the Republican convention at the Cow Palace. This is a 1964 [00:07:00] Republican convention, so we went over as the convention was winding up and we sqround miles and miles of cable off the ground that people didn't want. So we were able to get enough cable to wire much of our requirements for the station. So some of these outside activities were really quite exciting. 

Speaker 5:        What sort of impacted all your work at cal radio and then Cadillacs have on your personal and professional life? 

Speaker 4:        Well, [00:07:30] it gave me a different dimension because I had pretty much just focused on engineering and I like building things and that's why I went into engineering. The radio cow experience gave me a taste of what else you have to be able to do. You know, not that I have a good aptitude for it, but at least I have an appreciation for issues regarding organization and how to be able to put something together and get it through the system. [00:08:00] We really had to have an organization that we've built from the ground up to make this viable to do something like this in an environment where there's basically nothing available to you unless you know how to go and get it. It taught me how to go and get it, which was really useful. I consider that the experience that I got at radio cow far more important than the courses that I took. I mean I took a lot of interest in courses but the station gave me experience. You can't [00:08:30] get any other way. And that helped me and startups and it helped me in understanding how to make things work, not just from the technical end but from the other end too. 

Speaker 5:        Any reflections on uh, what the station meant to the university community? 

Speaker 4:        When we actually built the station, people really liked it and got involved and things were going unfortunately later, uh, into the 70s, there turned out to [00:09:00] be a number of problems. The station basically it shifted from being run by the engineering people to being run by others in the university who had different agendas. The stations really had its ups and downs and it's come back really well and with a lot more community efforts now than it had originally. So it is really important that you have a continuing set of goals and a continuing purpose and someone to build the structure into [00:09:30] running the station. Initially when it was starting from scratch, it was ad hoc, so clearly by definition there was no embedded structure that was suitable. Now that the station especially has got structuring, it's important to maintain the functionality and maintain that the way it operates and everything from one class to the next. Because by definition students come and students go and that doesn't lend itself for the kind of structure you need for an ongoing activity. The station [00:10:00] has had a long growth cycle here and I'm glad to see it's still around. 

Speaker 1:        Sam would, thanks very much for coming on spectrum and talking with us about the early days of Calex. 

Speaker 4:        Well, thank you for having me. 

Speaker 1:        You're listening to the spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Our topic this week is the 50th anniversary of Kelex. We're talking to engineers about how Calex got started. It's also fundraiser week. Call us in the five and dime. That's six, four, two five, two five, nine. We're back now with [00:10:30] duck pell sal and doc. Next up is Ron Kwan. What are your insights into him? 

Speaker 3:        Uh, Ron Kwan came in later on and he, he really did a, an amazing job with nothing. I mean we were still in a s ASU c funded club, which was a budget of few blue chip stamps was how much they gave us each year. And uh, so the fact that we were even able to, to function at all was truly amazing. But yeah, to Ron, Ron knew his stuff. In fact, he's, um, he's even still doing that macgyver kind of thing [00:11:00] of building like a lie detector with a, with an old cigarette butt and a rubber band. 

Speaker 1:        Ron Quan, thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Thank you. How did you get interested in radio? 

Speaker 6:        Well, in radio I build crystal radios when I was like nine or 10 years old through my brother. Getting into broadcast was actually kind of a fluke. What had happened was one of my friends got his FCC license, he had his third class license [00:11:30] and he was trying to get a second class license. Back in those days you would have your third, your second and your first class. And nowadays I think it's only like third class in general. So what happens is he's kind of like almost daring me to do it as well. And he had taken the test, the second class [inaudible] about two or three and had failed. And how he would do is he would take these questions and answer booklets and just try to memorize [00:12:00] the answers. So I did it the hard way. I, I got this book called Electronic Communication by, by Robert Schrader, who, who taught at Laney College back here in the East Bay. 

Speaker 6:        And it's a thick book. It's almost like half of a telephone book. So I spent 150 hours and six weeks studying it. Between the time I enter cow and after I just graduated from high school and I passed the tests, but just barely I thing. But I got [00:12:30] it. And then when I entered cau back in 72 I heard that there was a radio station here. And so I said, where is this place in this as well? It's a, I think 500 Eshleman hall. So I went there I think during my second quarter. So that would be like the winter of, yeah, 73 and ran into a few people and one of them was Henry Chu who was the station manager and they said, yeah, we [00:13:00] have somebody outside getting the transmitter, a room ready to work, but we, we always can need help in the studio and elsewhere. 

Speaker 6:        So for about three or four months I worked with this outside engineer and then I think by the time I had finished my first year, then I became the chief engineer, which then I found out was a very strange job in itself because you get called a lot [00:13:30] sometimes I'd 11 o'clock in the evening like, Hey, a, the photo preempt went out. And I say, well, what did you do? Uh, well everything was working just fine. Instead, I picked you, kicked the switch underneath it based back in those days we were so poor, we didn't even mount the damn thing. We stuck this funnel pre-amp deer off to the corner, but it was on the floor. Instead of this jockey would be moving his or her feet around it and kicked the switch off. And so I would have to come back [00:14:00] and deal with that. 

Speaker 6:        So it was a very good job though. I lasted for about roughly a year. Uh, some of the crazy things that, that we did were that we did remote broadcasts and one of them was the famous UCLA cow game. Uh, when Bill Walton and John Wooden came to town, Dick was broadcast at the Oakland Coliseum or someplace like that. And so I had to whip up some kind of like a conso and a backup [00:14:30] in case of, you know, everything else failed in. Fortunately all that worked. And the backup amplifier was this heath kit Hi-fi amplifier that I found at a, I think in Norton Hall where the, all the equipment was, was being stashed at the time. And so, so it worked out fine. And I was, you know, actually sitting on top of instrument hall that night, uh, listening to the game, making sure everything was okay. So the radio part was sort of like, I just kind of fell into this thing. I didn't really [00:15:00] intend to work in radio, but it turned out to be a very good experience. So, so I took a nosedive in my grades and then I came back during my junior and senior year. 

Speaker 3:        Did you learn anything from [inaudible] that helped you with your career? 

Speaker 6:        The coolest thing about working at cow ax and also in broadcast, I got to see how people actually work the equipment and people don't always read the manual. People will use whatever [00:15:30] they have to get the job done and nobody really cares, you know? Well we have to use specific headphone or a specific something to this. You know, you have to design a thing to be idiot proof. And so that was the biggest lesson. I learned a work in broadcasting. And it was actually a great advantage because, uh, most people who work for an Ampex or a Sony when they get out of college, they have absolutely no practical knowledge of how [00:16:00] the users use their equipment and, and how they might configure it. So, so that, that, that part was good. Great. Ryan Quan, thanks very much for coming on. Spectrum. Thank you. 

Speaker 3:        It's fundraiser week call (510) 642-5259 to pledge. We are back with doc pell cell and doc the 70s were a turbulent time. What was it like here at Cadillacs during that upheaval there was a lot of different factions at the stations that were sort of vying [00:16:30] for either control of it. And as a result, whoever won didn't really do anything except their own particular little fiefdom of area they wanted to work in and everything else sort of fell apart. So the station fell off the air a few times in the 73 74 period. Uh, there was a time in the early seventies when, um, the station studio equipment was stolen. There was no chief engineer. Our license was up for renewal. [00:17:00] The student government had had a war with the politics of the station, so we had no budget, so we had literally like nothing left. We were off the air for a period of time. 

Speaker 3:        It looked pretty bleak. Then it's about in the 73 and four period tell a person named Andy Reimer who was, had been a student at UC Irvine, transferred up here for his last few years and he showed the university that their lack of oversight might cause them to lose their license and he outlined a program for [00:17:30] how he would build a station in a management team and have some accountability, but how the university would have to pump some money and some oversight into it. He pretty much pull the station out of the ashes and sort of Phoenix like it was resurrected and came back and began what is probably on its current path to where it is. David Josephson 

Speaker 7:        was the chief engineer at that time and we just happened to have David Josephson in here. Excellent. Thanks for inviting me. It's always a pleasure to come back and visit Berkeley. [00:18:00] How did you get started in radio? Well, I had the good fortune of landing in Berkeley at age, about nine or 10 when, uh, all sorts of experiments were happening. My mother was involved with KPFA and I was an electronic tinkerer experiment or I had a pirate radio station and the under the stairs in our house and she was doing some promotion work for KPFA. And I said, well, Gee, maybe I can get involved with a real radio here. They were very, uh, open [00:18:30] to that idea. So I started immediately then learning about production recording program, uh, editing and so on. So I got my, uh, third class license when I was 10 and read board shifts at Kpmj, but we moved away from Berkeley, uh, right after some of the worst of the people's park riots up to more rural northern California. 

Speaker 7:        And, uh, finished high school there and decided that I really wanted [00:19:00] to stay involved in radio and electronics and audio broadcasting, uh, design and stuff like that. So came back to Berkeley and uh, was intent on being an engineering student when there was a, a note on the chalkboard of the Amateur Radio Club that the radio station was looking for an engineer as far as I knew the station was off the air and gone, which it was at that point, but I was part of the crew then that, uh, resurrected it. What was the time period? You were a chief engineer? [00:19:30] I was chief engineer from 75 through 79 I was here the four years. What were the main technical issues at the time? Just the resurrecting of cal. Yeah, building the station from scratch. The challenge was to build something that we could put on the air, making it work, making it illegal. 

Speaker 7:        I started in the spring quarter of 75 and I think we started working on it toward the end of spring. I think we [00:20:00] were working on it for most of the summer. I was here all summer and I think we went on the air before school started again in the fall. What's important is that there was a crew of people who came together at that time who most of whom had a background in radio. The general manager, Andy Reimer, uh, had been manager of the UC Irvine Station when he was there for a couple of years. The other cluster of people were mostly involved in a record business. [00:20:30] You know Tim divine who went on to be out of an art at a and m I guess doc Pelz l of course. It was kind of keeping the continuity of things from the older time and running the music department. So we had a couple of months to figure out what could be patched together. A of my friends from KPFA helped staff and technicians from the w department provided test equipment, parts access to bits and pieces. So we just kind of pulled it together from that. [00:21:00] The next step was to be some thing a little bit more accessible and reliable than this closet up on the the roof of Dwinelle and that's when Andy got to doing the political thing and got us space in Lawrence Hall of Science. We moved the studios up there first 

Speaker 1:        and you moved the transmitter up on the hill? That was next? That was stage two. So the first two, yeah. I think first phase was to get the studio to Lawrence Hall because we were being booted out of to know [00:21:30] and then the transmitter followed. How long after that? That was a year, more than a year after that because there was a lot of construction that was secondary to the studio operations. Back in the early days of Calex, a lot of the engineers were students at the time. 

Speaker 7:        All of the engineers were students or former students or part time students. That was actually fairly common in college radio around [00:22:00] the country. There were more radio engineers out there because of the small radio stations around everywhere needed more engineers. The equipment was less reliable, transmitters needed work all the time. There were a lot more people who, as teenagers were working in radio and so they were a lot more engineers and there were a lot more people who were familiar with the technical requirements of, of an audio chain and a transmitter and studio transmitter, [00:22:30] links and antennas and things like that. So, uh, yeah, I was a student part time during that time. I, I think I got it about two years during my four years here, I said I graduated from colleagues. Most of the other engineers were also students or community people. There weren't any staff engineers while I was there except me. I mean, if they finally got a kind of a stipend salary for the chief engineer. 

Speaker 1:        How did your time at Calyx influence your career? 

Speaker 7:        [00:23:00] Most of the people I know who had solid college radio experiences when they were in school refer to them throughout their lives as a defining experience in enabling experience. That was, I mean, I don't know how many of them consider that they learned more from the radio station than they did from classes like I do, but I'm sure it's a significant fraction. The real challenge that drove what I was able to [00:23:30] feel confident in doing in later years was dealing with something that had to work all the time with limited resources and patching together things to make a system work and that that whole discipline of able to see a system come together and allocating limited resources to fitting that all together. That's the engineering challenge of doing the engineering of a radio station. At least it was then when things were not reliable, not stable, [00:24:00] not dependable, and things were being fixed all the time. And that applies to any technology that's in kind of development, I think. [inaudible] 

Speaker 1:        David Josephson, thanks very much for coming on spectrum talking with us. Very welcome. Thanks for inviting me. K, a l ex Berkeley doc pell sal. Thanks very much for your help getting the context of the sixties and seventies squared away and it's fundraiser week here at Calyx fundraiser. So give us a call. [00:24:30] We need your donations. (510) 642-5259 back to spectrum. We're going to talk with Susan Calico, who took over in the 80s as chief engineer. Susan Kaliko. Thanks very much for coming on spectrum and talking to us about Calex. 

Speaker 8:        Thank you. I'm glad to be here. It's nice to be back at the station and see how nice it looks. 

Speaker 1:        I wanted to find out from you how you got interested in radio in the first place. 

Speaker 8:        Well, I have to go back much further than my time at Calex. I [00:25:00] got out of school and I was very interested in writing and got involved at the daily cow. So I was a journalist for a little while and then I became a copy editor and somehow that wasn't enough. So I went down to KPFA, which is also in Berkeley and volunteered there. I got involved in first in women's news and then during that time, which was in the mid to late seventies, there were almost no women who knew anything technical at that station. So, [00:25:30] um, when I was at KPFA, I took advantage of the fact that you could do pretty much anything kind of like here I got my third class license, which was required to actually run the board on the air and learned how to do that. And again, was always teaching people. And I was there for probably about 10 years, everything overlapped with everything else and I had just studied for and gotten my first class radio license, which was in those days required to be the responsible [00:26:00] engineer at a station and the job of Calyx came up. So I applied for that and got in and well the work began. 

Speaker 1:        What were the years you were a chief engineer at Calex? 

Speaker 8:        Oh, I was engineer at Calex starting in 1981, I believe in the late, late in the year through uh, early 1995. So it was about 13 years altogether. 

Speaker 1:        While you were the engineer, there [00:26:30] was a move from Lawrence Hall of science down to bondage. What was that like? 

Speaker 8:        As I recall, we managed to get the honors studio down and settled and on the air and the newsroom was about to move from over in the student union and I got pneumonia, so I was at home in bed for two weeks with a fever. Well, the engineering volunteers basically put in the new studio. So it's, you know, as usual there's, there's never enough money to [00:27:00] do what you need to do, so you just have to do what you can with what you've got. And we were lucky enough to have some good volunteers who could really take care of business. 

Speaker 1:        The next big technical challenge you had was increasing the power from 10 watts to 500 watts. How did that go? 

Speaker 8:        We had to get a new transmitter, which was huge compared to our one that we had. And so we had to sort of rearrange things up at the transmitter shad and I'll patch all the leaks because I mean, when you get new [00:27:30] equipment, you want it to be good. Uh, we had to have a new cable running up the transmitter tower, which I think it's, it's not quite a hundred feet. I think it's something like 80 or 85 or something like that. I do remember, um, being up on the tower with the surveyors down below, because in such a crowded market, as Calex is in, in the bay area here, there are many FM stations. You have to be careful not to step on anybody else's frequency. So we had to have a very directional [00:28:00] and oddly shaped signal, the antennas crafted so that it directs the signal in the way that you want. 

Speaker 8:        But if your antenna isn't pointed exactly where you want it, you're going to not be, you know, I mean, the FCC is not gonna like you being out of line there. So I went up on the tower, loosen the bolts on the, uh, on the antenna and the surveyors down below, going all over this way, you know, and I'm like whackwhackwhack no, no, no, a little, little bit back. But those [00:28:30] were expenses we couldn't avoid because it had to be certified. But eventually it all got done and in our case it was 500 watts, which isn't a whole lot. That transmitter could have done a lot more, but that was what we were allowed to do, so we had to keep it pretty close. 

Speaker 1:        What was the culture like at Calex during your years? 

Speaker 8:        I learned that no matter how weird people looked, most of them or really good people, they were sweet people. They, you know, a lot of our djs [00:29:00] were just really nice people. They were pretty easy to work with. They were considerate and I wouldn't always be able to tell by looking at them 

Speaker 1:        Cadillacs. How did it affect you professionally? 

Speaker 8:        I spent 13 years here and I really, really learned a lot more electronics and a lot more transmitter information and so I really understood why everything worked. 

Speaker 1:        [00:29:30] Susan Calico, thanks very much for coming in and talking with us. 

Speaker 8:        Well, it's been a pleasure to see that the station is still here and that the equipment still works. 

Speaker 1:        The card during the show. It was by law, Stan and David for these help on folk and acoustic made available by a creative Commons license. 3.0 attribution. Please do donate to the calyx fundraiser and we'll see you in two weeks with another edition of spectrum at the same time.

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

Susan Shaheen is co-Director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center and Lecturer at UC Berkeley. She discusses the revolution underway in transportation choices which she believes will be driven by smart phones.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next [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. Our guest today is Susan Shaheen, co-director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at UC Berkeley. Susan also lectures [00:01:00] at UC Berkeley. Susan's Shaheen received her master's degree from the University of Rochester and her phd in ecology from UC Davis. She joins us to talk about the work she's been doing at the center as well as the centers. Broader scope. Susan Shaheen. Thanks for coming on spectrum. My pleasure. I wanted to get your perspective, a historic perspective on transportation and when you look back, what do you see as the profound changes that [00:01:30] have happened over a period of time that you're comfortable with reflecting on 

Speaker 3:        [inaudible]? So I think transportation and the environment were significant, particularly in the state of California in the mid 1950s where relationships between exhaust emissions and smog and other types of air pollutants came together. And we started to garner a lot more understanding about that. And so in terms of [00:02:00] my personal interests, that was a really significant moment in time for the nation, but in particular for California, which, which led the way and that garnered a lot of interest and vehicle technologies and strategies for addressing transportation emissions. 

Speaker 2:        And is that really what started the sustainability movement within transportation 

Speaker 3:        in terms of transportation? Sustainability in those terms I think are more modern day than the mid [00:02:30] 1950s when we started to become really cognizant of smog and emissions, particularly in the La Basin area. There was a, the Brundtland Commission came about and in 1987 they produced a document called our common future and that really focused on sustainability. And that's when we started to hear more about the three pillars of sustainability. So economics, equity and the environment. And around that late 1980s early 1990s period, I believe that's really [00:03:00] when a lot of the discussion about transportation sustainability came about, but we had already been looking at vehicle technologies, fuels strategies for demand management, like carpooling long before then. But I think in terms of there being more of a movement or a focus on sustainability and transportation, that probably came about more in the late 1980s and early 1990s before I came on the scene. 

Speaker 3:        How did the Transportation Sustainability Research Center get started? [00:03:30] So the uh, Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California Berkeley as part of the Institute of Transportation Studies. It came about five years ago. It was founded as the brainchild of Professor Norgaard and Professor Sam or Matt Nat. And they thought it was really important time for us to put together a center that focused on vehicles, fuels as well as demand management strategies that could [00:04:00] employ electronic and wireless communication systems. So that's how we got our start in the center. How do you choose your projects? Well, we always choose our projects based on someone's interest within a center. So some, some great form of passion associated with it. And we find that sometimes the scale of the project needs to be very, very large. So if there's an opportunity for a large grant and it fits [00:04:30] with our mission and mandate for instance, goods movement, we have a project that's by point $5 million to implement a smart parking, uh, management system for long haul truckers on the I five. 

Speaker 3:        And that requires a lot of money and a lot of technology and a lot of getting out there and getting your hands dirty and implementing things. And it takes scale and money and time to build something like that. And so that's our largest project overall and it really warrants that kind [00:05:00] of financial base, but we can also do things for 50 to $75,000 that are highly impactful. We've received awards for research on car sharing, things that I think may have cost $55,000 in terms of grant monies to produce. But the work itself was impactful enough that it made a difference and was really powerful to people in the field and to decision makers and gave them the data that they needed. So a lot of it just has to do with our passion and [00:05:30] if there's a grant opportunity that fits really well with our interests, we go for it and we don't necessarily say, okay, a small grant isn't going to do what we needed to do because we know about it than that, we know that sometimes you need small grants to do really impactful things and sometimes you need massive grants to do really impactful things. 

Speaker 3:        It just depends on what we're trying to do. But in my research I've found over time that I don't need is larger grant anymore to do as [00:06:00] impactful and innovative research as I used to have to. And that's because there's so many innovative entrepreneurial companies out there doing this that I don't have to go and build the thing anymore and create the service and imagine the service because there's entrepreneurs everyday contacting us saying, would you partner with us and help us to study and understand what we've built? And we're delighted because that means we can do so much more research when we don't actually [00:06:30] have to go out and build it. But if we need to go out and build it, we will do that. 

Speaker 2:        It does the center deal at all with larger forms of transportation trucks. You mentioned trucks that you were involved with that do you get into shipping overseas, shipping trains, things like that because California has such a, a destination for so much material from Asia products? 

Speaker 3:        That's a great question. We have a great deal of interest in all forms of goods movement at present. Our focus is primarily [00:07:00] trying to get our hands around and our understanding of origin and destination patterns and the long distance trucking industry. And I believe that you know, more and more will venture into freight to rail and also deal more with the ports. But it's a different area of research. It's not as well understood. It's an unregulated industry in many ways. And so getting data is a major issue and really understanding that data and working [00:07:30] with it is I think a notable contribution that we're trying to make with respect to just even understanding what's going on on the [inaudible]. So I think it's going to be a big area and continuing area of research at TSTC. I think there's so many opportunities for us to make freight and goods movement more sustainable, but it's not the easiest area to study or to get into and we're really trying to build up this understanding and then go from there. 

Speaker 1:        [00:08:00] This is spectrum on k a Alex Berkeley. We're talking with Susan Shaheen about transportation, sustainability. 

Speaker 2:        What are the strengths and weaknesses of the free market and government approaches to having an impact on transportation? [inaudible] 

Speaker 3:        [00:08:30] no, I think government can play a tremendous role in making sure that we continue to have public transportation and we continue to have safe roads and bridges and that's a really significant role and they can also play a notable role in terms of public policy with respect to incentivizing different types of behavior if it's through road pricing strategies, so to s mode shift, get people think about taking a different mode at a different time, incentivizing people to [00:09:00] buy alternative fuel vehicles, giving them access to the Hov lanes or the high occupancy vehicle lanes. I also feel that the government can play a tremendous role in terms of providing third parties with access to data about transit services. And what we've started to see is a lot of new companies and new opportunities providing people with access to information that really wasn't there before. So I think the government can play a role in really [00:09:30] encouraging and facilitating openness and sharing and a really different way of experiencing transportation than we ever have before. 

Speaker 3:        And I think industry has a tremendous role to play as well. Why not allow them to be as innovative as possible and create new opportunities and new modes if some of the things I study include car sharing, which is short term access to vehicles, and we've started to see lots of investment and interest in the idea of peer-to-peer car sharing or personal [00:10:00] vehicle sharing services where people could actually put their own vehicle into a shared use setting and we could see car sharing go outside of dense urban areas where traditionally lives into suburban areas and there's ideas for scooter sharing services. Public bike sharing is just growing and leaps and bounds around the world. It's about to double in size in terms of the number of programs just in the year 2012 in the United States. So [00:10:30] there's so many opportunities for creating new industries and new jobs and new transportation choices. 

Speaker 3:        And I think the government has a tremendous role in that and creating and encouraging and inspiring these partnerships with individuals who have innovative ideas. I think we're really entering into a new era of mobility, which is very exciting. And then you have to tread the line between interfering with the market, choosing winners and losers gets run out [inaudible] [inaudible] [00:11:00] and not over-regulated. So there's a balance there. Right. And I think that's where research is really critical is to understand, you know, when you incentivize, what is the impact of that incentivization, you know, is it working, is it not working? Do you need to do more, do you need to do less? And that's where I think a lot of our work can come in to help provide policymakers and decision makers with more informed understanding about what, what is actually happening in the system. And we're really [00:11:30] moving into an era of massive databases and opportunities to look at real time data and in a way that we never could before because of the availability of electronic and wireless communication systems, the ubiquity of cell phones and smart phone technology and sensor technologies and the cost of these things are dropping. 

Speaker 3:        So again, I believe we're really entering into a new era and mobility and transportation and it's just gonna require sort of a new way of thinking about openness and sharing. And there are [00:12:00] going to be some, some struggles in this, but I think there's more opportunities than there are barriers. And is the center very focused on having an impact in policy? We're very focused on that. So we truly want to make a difference and we want to do real world research and get out and be involved in demonstration projects and pilot projects and any type of endeavor. You know, we just received a grant from the University of California Transportation Center here at Berkeley [00:12:30] to look at personal vehicle sharing services. So we're not actually going out and implementing it or designing it or doing any of that, which we often do, but we're actually just working with companies throughout North America to see what they're doing and to help them actually understand through our data collection processes and analyses, what is this doing and what kind of impact is it having and what role might policy makers play to encourage more of this and what would work best overall [00:13:00] in terms of growing this opportunity? 

Speaker 3:        If people really like it, I'm a big fan of diversity and choice and all of my research. If it deals with fuels or if it deals with giving people an opportunity to see, you know, when is the next bus coming or on a mobile app in a, where can I find the bike sharing vehicle? I am really, really a big fan of giving people choices and information because I think that's critical to giving people an [00:13:30] opportunity to, to experience transportation in a new way. But I think for a long time people haven't felt that there's a lot of choices and once they invest in a private vehicle, they viewed that a lot of those, you know, transportation costs are sunk and so there's really minor expenses associated with that, but that's actually really not the truth. But you know that fixed cost really does change people's relationship with other transportation modes. [00:14:00] The more we can give people choices and have him think about transportation costs is variable. We can see a really different attitude towards taking different modes at different points in time, including getting lots of physical exercise. 

Speaker 1:        And this is the public affairs show spectrum on KALX Berkeley. We're talking with Susan Shaheen about transportation sustainability. [00:14:30] Next we talk about bike sharing and car sharing, the bike sharing during 

Speaker 3:        project. Can you talk a little bit about that? You were mentioning that it's going to double. Yeah, so public bike sharing as a form of public transportation, it's gone through actually several evolutions. The first generation of it started in 19 five and Amsterdam and it was a system called provosts or white bikes, which you might've heard of. They deployed, 50 of them, put them around the community and [00:15:00] they promptly disappeared. And so then we've seen different evolutions of the bike sharing concept into the 1980s where we moved into a more technology based approach where you had a coined deposit system so you couldn't just take it for free. Shortly after that we saw movement into what we call the third generation, which is more IT-based, which requires sort of the identity of somebody to be linked to that bike. And what we found is that the more advanced technology use, the more reliable [00:15:30] these systems become and the more they can be integrated into people's Daily community, which is pretty significant. 

Speaker 3:        Now, bikes are being used not just for recreational purposes, but to complete a first mile or last mile or a many mile trip that is actually part of a person's daily life. And these concepts have just taken hold. And I started to monitor this about seven or eight years ago and cataloged more and more of these bike sharing systems. They leave [00:16:00] has over 20,000 bikes in Paris. Honjo, which we've studied is in China. 60,000 bikes will, Han has over 70,000 bikes and it's public bike sharing system. New York City is sent to launch sometime late this summer or fall with 7,000 bikes leading up to 10,000 bikes. They're not taking a cent of public money to deploy the system. They have a title sponsorship with City Group, so [00:16:30] things are really changing in terms of transportation and mobility. How do they deal with the safety side of it all? All these people jumping on bikes without helmets probably. 

Speaker 3:        Yeah. Yeah. On the safety side, it's actually quite interesting is the majority of programs do not require people to wear helmets, so the majority of people actually don't wear helmets and using these systems and I think liability issues associated with public bike sharing are going [00:17:00] to be become more prominent and more important, particularly as they scale in size and they become larger. We do think or hypothesize that as these systems proliferate and people become more aware of them, there will be safety benefits as well because drivers will be more aware that, okay, those are capital bikeshare bikes riding down the street. I need to be conscious and aware of them because there's a lot more bikers on on the road, but the issue of density and more and more of these bicycles hitting [00:17:30] the road is an issue and I think a lot of municipalities are working more and more to build supportive infrastructure. 

Speaker 3:        New York City's an example of that. So these programs often go hand in hand with cycling infrastructure. But you do raise a good question associated with the helmets and there are some happening. San Vol is a company in British Columbia that's developed a dispensing system that actually cleans the helmet. So that could be a creative strategy. [00:18:00] A lot of the bike sharing programs actually offer helmets or give them out with a membership, but we think that a lot of times what happens is somebody who doesn't necessarily plan to take that bike and then realizes, wow, I want to take that bike. They're conveniently located like street furniture throughout the city. I'm just going to jump on it and go from point to point. And so the helmet is a difficult thing to plan for if that's how you use it. Carpools, car sharing. Can you talk about that a bit? 

Speaker 3:        [00:18:30] Yeah, so I've been studying shared use vehicle systems since the mid 1990s I did my doctorate on car sharing. That again is the idea of short term vehicle access where you don't actually need to own a vehicle but you have access to a whole fleet of vehicles and you use them by the hour and we've seen over time tremendous growth in the number of operators throughout North America. We've seen a membership continually grow as we've been tracking it. We also see [00:19:00] some very interesting behavioral effects in response to what we call traditional or neighborhood car sharing where many times people who join these systems actually end up either foregoing or selling a vehicle after they start using the system because they realize they don't need a car and they can trade off this fixed vehicle asset for variable costs and take public transportation, more ride share, Carpool more bike more a, we're also seeing [00:19:30] a really neat concept which is called one way car sharing traditional car sharing works and that you go into an out of the same location similar to a rental car system and many of us in the shared use space of thought, if we were able to provide a one way service similar to public bike sharing where you start off one place and you leave the bike in another place or a vehicle in another place, this might attract a whole different usage pattern and what would this do? 

Speaker 3:        [00:20:00] So several companies are getting started in this Daimler's cargo system, which uses a little smart vehicle launched in Austin. They're now in Washington, D c they're in Portland, they're in San Diego and this system is doing quite well. It requires a lot of public infrastructure because the vehicles have to be parked throughout the business areas or a neighborhood areas, but people actually instead of accessing the vehicle [00:20:30] by the hour, they're now actually accessing it by the minute and taking it one from one location to the next. BMW launched its program called drive. Now in the bay area, the first in the United States, it had only been operating in Germany prior to that. So lots of change and evolution in this shared you space coupled with public bike sharing, lots of innovation and ride sharing movements towards Uber taxi services and dynamic ride [00:21:00] sharing services have vago launched this spring and is providing dynamic ride sharing services. 

Speaker 3:        So I think what we're going to start to see is the bundling of these concepts and technologies and hopefully linkages to smart card technology like your clipper card and it would give you access to any one of the car sharing programs or the public bike sharing program is planned for San Francisco. I think, you know, with time we're gonna see a lot more smart apps that tell us [00:21:30] what our choices are. If it'd be a taxi or a car sharing vehicle or a carpooling vehicle. And I think it's all going to be integrated. And I think the big mobility device is going to become our phone through these smart apps. So a lot is happening and there's a lot to be watching. We're actually keeping pretty busy these days. In terms of our projects in the shared use space, we, we just uh, got great news, uh, the end of last week that we were funded to actually evaluate cargos, pure electric [00:22:00] vehicle based one way, car sharing service in San Diego. 

Speaker 3:        And we have another grant to look at the integration of electric vehicle bikes and to see car shares fleet in San Francisco. So it's going to be a service of both car sharing and Evy bike sharing, all combined into one service. So there's going to be a lot going on and a lot to watch in this space. And I, I do think the bay area is a critical location to see what's happening. What do you think is the best way [00:22:30] for individuals to find out about all of these options that are starting to happen? Is there someone who's consolidating these kinds of things on a website that they could go to or how do you search? I think you know for the bay area in particular, I think MTC, the metropolitan transportation commission has a really good five one one.org site that can provide you with a lot of information on your choices. Also, as of MTA has apps that you can download like the SF park site, so I think just go into your public transportation [00:23:00] operators websites like Bart, but also again, the regional transportation agencies are doing a really good job of getting information out there. Susan, Shane, thanks very much for coming on spectrum. You're welcome. It was great to meet you. 

Speaker 1:        [inaudible] [00:23:30] regular feature of spectrum is to mention a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Rick Karnofsky joins me with the calendar this month. 

Speaker 4:        Leonardo art science evening rendezvous or laser is on Wednesday, October 10th at Stanford Universities. [00:24:00] Jordan Hall Building Four 20 Room 41 talk. Start at seven with Andrew Todd Hunter discussing bridging the fuzzy techie divide, the senior reflection capstone in biology. Terry barely years subsequent. Talk on where at the beginning meets the end. It's about making technologies vulnerabilities visible and illustrating how easily modern inventions can become footnotes to a bygone era. [00:24:30] Mark Jacobson then discusses a plan to power the world with a wind, water, and sun. He focuses on three of the most significant problems facing the world today. Global warming, air pollution, and energy insecurity. Tonight ends with composer Sheryl Leonard's music from high latitudes, making music out of sounds, objects and experiences from the polar regions. To Register, visit www.leonardo.info the [00:25:00] northern California Science Writers Association and Swissnex our host, Tina taught by why are dotcoms Kevin Polson on cybercrime an inside view.

Speaker 4:        He will talk about Max Butler, one of the highest value cybercriminals ever brought down by the FBI and Secret Service Butler, a hacker establish a worldwide operation from his safe house in a high rise apartment building in San Francisco's tenderloin. Butler eventually dominated a global black market in stolen credit card numbers, [00:25:30] supplying a far flung counterfeiting operation. Polson first described this in a wired article and then in his book published last year, kingpin, how one hacker took over the billion dollar cyber crime underground. The talk is on Thursday, October 11th doors at six 30 talk at seven reception with appetizers from seven 45 until nine 30 it's at Swissnex seven three zero Montgomery Street in San Francisco. Visit Swissnex, San Francisco. Dot. O R, g, [00:26:00] the San Francisco Opera, and the California Academy of Science Present Moby Dick, a whale of a tale in celebration of the musical conversion of Herman Melville's. Classic novel scientists will discuss Melville's famous dedication to the 19th century scientific accuracy in his writings. 

Speaker 4:        There'll also be biologists who will present on modern day whale science and conservation practices. The event is at the California Academy of Sciences. 55 music concourse drive in San Francisco's [00:26:30] Golden Gate Park on Tuesday, October sixteenth@sevenpmitistendollarsforyourmembersandtwelvedollarsforthegeneralpublicvisitwww.cal academy.org now, here's Rick Karnofsky with two news stories to stellar mass. Black holes have been discovered in globular cluster m 22 located at 10,000 light years away by a team of international researchers who published their findings in nature on October 4th using the Carl g [00:27:00] jetski very large array in New Mexico. They found two black holes and argue that there may be as many as five to a hundred in the classroom. This runs contrary to earlier theories that suggested only a single black hole of that size could survive in a popular cluster. They are the first stellar mass black holes found in a globular cluster in the Milky Way and the first observed via radio waves that of course, I mean Arthur j straighter of Michigan State University and the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics was quoted [00:27:30] by scientific American saying that because they were seen by radio, they have to not just be in binary's, but they have to be in binaries that are close enough that mass transfer is actually taking place. 

Speaker 4:        In an article published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in September, Yale researchers showed that academic research faculty have a gender bias in favor of male students. The team performed a randomized double blind study in which university scientists were given applications purportedly from [00:28:00] students applying for a lab manager position. The content of the applications were all identical, but sometimes a male name was attached and sometimes a female name was attached. Female applicants were rated lower than men on the measured scales of competence, higher ability mentoring and we're giving lower salary offers. The mean salary offered by male scientist for male students was $30,520 for the female students. It was $27,111 female scientists recommended lower salaries for both [00:28:30] genders, but had an even greater bias against female students who received an average offer of 25,000 compared to the average offer of $29,333 per milestone. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]. The music heard during the show is from an album by Lascano David entitled Folk Acoustic made available by a creative Commons [00:29:00] license 3.0 [inaudible] 

Speaker 1:        [inaudible]. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us. Email address is spectrum [inaudible] at yahoo.com [inaudible].

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

Members of the UCSF Brewers Guild (Yug Varma, Kenton Hokanson, Ryan Dalton, Scott Hansen, and Rober Schiemann) discuss the science of beer making.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next. 

Speaker 2:        [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 4:        Good afternoon. I'm Rick Karnofsky, the host of today's show. Today we're talking about the science of Beer with UCF brewers guild members. You've Varma, Kenton, Hawkinson, Ryan Dalton, Scott Hansen, and Robert Shimon. Can you guys please introduce yourselves and say what your research focuses on? 

Speaker 5:        [00:01:00] Hi, I'm Yogi. I am a post doc and I studied the human microbiome. We study bacteria associated with the human body. 

Speaker 6:        I'm Kenton. I'm a Grad student and I said he synapses and the regulations. Mostly I am concerned with homeostasis and the idea is if you perturb one half of us in attic pair, then the other half somehow recognizes this and quickly adapts itself to maintain normal neuronal function. 

Speaker 1:        I'm Ryan, I'm a graduate student in neuroscience [00:01:30] and I study the olfactory system. My name is Scott Hansen. I'm a graduate student and the questions I've been interested in are how cells interpret signals from their environment. Being a biochemist, I tried to understand how the proteins at the cellular level are being rearranged and forming different complexes to produce shape changes. My name is Robert Shimon. I'm a first year graduate student. I'm setting bioinformatics and uh, I got into brewing beer as an undergrad. When that [00:02:00] my hobbies, I kind of start doing something and I get completely obsessed with it. So I, at first I was, uh, didn't drink beer at all or didn't drink any alcohol and then, uh, had my first taste of beer and then decided within a couple of months that I'd start brewing and haven't looked back ever since. Cool. 

Speaker 5:        Scott, can you please explain what the ucs F brewers guild is? 

Speaker 1:        The UCSI brewers guild was founded by myself and Michael Schulty and Colin does more about three years ago. So we decided to just hang [00:02:30] out every month and just talk about the beer that we were making. Shortly after that, I joined forces with some people at linkedin laboratories and a the Soma San Francisco and they provided a venue for us to start having biannual beer brewing festivals.

Speaker 5:        Youth, how do we get beer? So beer is a holy confluence of hops, east malted barley or malted grains [00:03:00] and water. In fact, there is an ancient beer law [inaudible] which is the earliest consumer protection law and that says that beer must be only malted barley and hops and water. At that time. They of course did not know that east made beer. That discovery was made by Pester in the late 18 hundreds but essentially that's what beer is. Can you explain to us Robert? So the majority of grains used in brewering are malted grains. [00:03:30] And so what that means is basically after the grain has been harvested, it's taken, it's soaked in water, are allowed to absorb a certain amount of water and then allowed to germinate. And then once it reaches a certain stage of germination, it's roasted too to help germination and prevent the the seed from converting all of the starches into simple sugars. 

Speaker 5:        But it's allowed to germinate long enough such that it produces the enzymes next necessary for the conversion of the starches into the sugars or the other reasons to get out these simple sugars. Some of these simple sugars are available [00:04:00] to the yeast right at the end. The chief reason why some of these start just have to be converted to sugar is because the next step is to roast them. Right? And the roasting process stops the germination, but it also causes a lot of the mired reactions to occur. The different flavors that you get from Malter because of two reactions. One is caramelization, which is just a sugar caramelizing, which gives you the Tophi sort of, you know, sweet caramel flavors. The other is the mired reaction, which will give you anything from bready to bread [00:04:30] CROs to nutty Biscotti chocolaty coffee. You know, that's the progression of flavors depending on how long euros and how dark the roast is. 

Speaker 5:        And so for the Meyer reactions, of course you need amino acids or some nitrogen source and then you need the simple sugar because if you have the complex starch, all it'll do is burn. You're listening to the spectrum on Calex I'm talking to with the UCS have brewers guild. Now, is it fair to say that a lot of the difference in flavor that you get is from this malting process and this roasting process or do you get [00:05:00] differences based on where the multis grown or that kind of barley used for the malt? The variety of multi is important. The where it was grown I think less so. There's two row barley and there's six rolled barley. So two row barley has a lot more enzymes but very little sugar and six roll barleys the opposite. So you want some Touro barley to provide all the enzymes during mashing to break down the starches. 

Speaker 5:        But you need some starches around six row malt is added to just get the heft [00:05:30] of the sugar in and are non barley and grains molted both that took, some are rice is not because rice is just a ton of simple fermentable sugars. Wheat is and Rye. Yes it is oatmeal. No. Okay. Um, you consider that's a non barley. That's a good point. Um, well you can roast oatmeal at home. I don't know if the oats, you get a roasted [inaudible] you get, [00:06:00] it would not be roasted, but people do toast it in their oven. Oh yeah. And that again, there's a little in my yard magic and gives you some roasted oatmeal flavors. So Kenton, the next process is to boil the granite, is that right? 

Speaker 6:        Grain carries it inside of, it kind of starts as like a stored energy source. And what we do as brewers is buy grain that has all this starch. We crush it up and then soak it in water that activates a bunch of enzymes, [00:06:30] which are just little machines that chop up these starches into sugars. A ton of thought and work goes into just turning those starches into sugar using nothing but water at the appropriate temperatures and then flushing it out and we try to flush out as much of the sugar as possible. And then we've made sugary water that also has other compounds from the barley that gives a different characteristics. And then we just will, we boil it and he did that to sterilize it. And also it gives you an opportunity to add things that flavor. It's southern most common [00:07:00] of those obviously as hops. 

Speaker 6:        And when you boil hops, they UI summarize an acid inside of them that turns the the sugar water, which we call wart more bitter. And that's also a time when you can add other things. Coffee, beans, fruit. And what's the spice that we often use? Corn Polo. Oh yeah. We used to the peppers a yeah. Of Coriander. Um, it gives you a chance to dump in anything you like that will influence how the, the final product tastes or if you dump it in right at the very end how it smells. [00:07:30] And so once you've boiled it for as long as you want to, you cool it as quickly as possible trying to keep it from being contaminated by any of the bugs that float around in the air. And then you dump in yeast, which love the sugar that you've put into the water. And so they will just go crazy for a few weeks fermenting when they ferment, they produce CO2 and alcohol and that turns the wart into a beer. 

Speaker 5:        And Ryan does the boiling process change the malt in other ways. 

Speaker 7:        You drive [00:08:00] where it called my yard reactions, which are reactions between diverse sugar molecules and the diverse short proteins and amino acids that occur in the beer. These reactions are essentially a linking of these two molecules and because you, you're creating a very heterogeneous set of compounds, you have a flavor that is very complex and it's very hard to replicate without actually boiling this set of ingredients together. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 8:        [00:08:30] you're listening to spectrum on Calex Berkeley memories at the ucs after his guild are discussing the chemical conversions at the solutions of multi barley and hops and their analysis of homebrewing data [inaudible] 

Speaker 1:        so Robert, let's talk about hops. Actually, one trend that I kind [00:09:00] of think is pretty cool and interesting on the technology side of things is that some breweries are using now it's called a super critical hop extracts packet tube full of hops. You pressurize it with CO2 on one end and all of the hot oils are kind of forced out and you're left with all the vegetable matter in the tube and you have all kinds of those. Nice, wonderful, rich oils left out of it. These breweries have taken to using these superhero hop extracts to kind of reduce their losses and beer and also kind of just increase the amount of hot oils you can get into beer and how do we get new hot varieties [00:09:30] and some understanding of how new for hot varieties arise is that they had this group up at Oregon State University. They breed new hops, get different hop varieties, try brewing beers with these new hop varieties, see if they taste good. If they taste good, they'll distribute them to breweries for them to experiment with. If the breweries like them, then they'll become kind of mainstays and you hops propagate by a rhizome. 

Speaker 5:        Yeah, it propagates by Rhizome, which is actually a route modification under the ground and so it's very easy to swap rhizomes with someone who's growing hops and grow your [00:10:00] own because rhizomes are super hardy. They grow in binds, which are essentially creepers and their stem has this super velcro material, which is great to play around with. You just stick it on anything that has a fiber and it'll just latch on it. It's very, very tough. And anyone who's grown this will attest to it. They're really hard to get rid of once you've had them in for a year or so in your garden. Super Tunnel. Yeah. And they grow super tall and they grow super fast. Uh, you're a newly growing hop. Bine will [00:10:30] grow up to, I've heard a foot a day, which is kind of boggling, but I, I have seen it grow several inches a day. 

Speaker 5:        Wow. Well, my hops will probably start a blooming in July or August and they're usually ripened by September or October depending on the season. Initially they're these green almost line green or, or darker green upside down sort of papery chandelier's. Uh, they look very [00:11:00] delicate and beautiful and when they're wet, they're kind of soft to the touch. But when they dry out, they get slightly more Brown and get papery and they have a kind of pollen that you can, that sort of rubs on your fingers. And when they get papery and dry, that's when the oils and the mature, and that's when you're supposed to harvest them. Even at that stage, they're usually a little wet, so you need to dry them. Air Drying is preferred over a oven drying over [00:11:30] the lowest possible temperature setting because obviously oven drying will get a lot more of the volatiles out of the house. 

Speaker 5:        And what does this air drying process do? It just takes the water out. The air drying, partly matures the oils and it removes the grassy flavor because if you ever use wet hops in your beer, it'll taste like a mouthful of grass. The alpha acid that is often talked about by homebrewers is chiefly Humu loan, which is a fluoro all [00:12:00] derivative. And that I summarizes when you boil it into ISO alpha acids. Now, Humu alone on its own is not very soluble, but when you boil it, it gets more soluble. So you actually extract it. It also gets more bitter. The bitterness of course is a little, it gives a little bit of a stringency, which is bracing. But uh, more importantly, uh, hops is the chief antibacterial compound in beer. It Ma, it helps massively [00:12:30] to prevent spoilage. Hops are actually a soporific, right? They are. They're estrogenic. And, um, in fact, one of the, um, other things that I'm going to use them for is make hop pillows, just stuffed them into pillows and uh, apparently they help you sleep at night. Yeah. 

Speaker 7:        This is spectrum. We're talking with the UCF brewers guild. Ryan, does water chemistry matter? The historical example that everyone always cites is the beers that come out of Burton on Trent versus the beers that come out of Dublin. The beer that comes out of Dublin is black and you know, you wonder [00:13:00] why it's black. It's great. You know, perhaps is not black because the, the people of Ireland, uh, enjoy a dark beer. It's, it's black because the water chemistry necessitates that. And the reason that is is because these enzymes that are converting starches to sugars during your mash depend on Ph and barley that it has been roasted for different amounts of time, have different effects on the acidity of your mash water. In Dublin where the water is quite basic, it needs to be acidified by a dark malt, which has a strong [00:13:30] power to acidify water to bring it into the range where these enzymes are active. Whereas if you have water that is already without adjustment at that Ph range, you do not need to to use dark malts and you can create a a lighter beer. I incidentally, the tap water in San Francisco is really good for a pretty diverse range of styles. And why is there water so good? 

Speaker 6:        That's very low on minerals. So it gives you a lot of flexibility to add the minerals you want. It comes a little basic to begin with. So we often [00:14:00] add minerals to our mash to lower the Ph, but it'll, it'll turn out most things we, yeah, there like Florida where my sister lives, the water is cell-free and I don't think you could even brew with it. You know, one of the parameters that will affect how your, your beer tastes in the end is this sulfur to chloride ratio. And I don't think you could add enough chloride there. It's disgusting. So you know, in San Francisco we are, 

Speaker 5:        this is actually funny because usually most a [00:14:30] beer book say, Oh, you know, you should worry about the chloride content of your water because water is chlorinated in most municipal water supplies and [inaudible]. 

Speaker 7:        So do you use regular tap water then or do you filter it in some way reverse osmosis or buy distilled water? 

Speaker 6:        A lot of people will cut their water with distilled water or reverse osmosis water to reduce the mineral content. Not Necessary, at least in San Francisco or anyone who gets their water from Hetch Hetchy, which is sort of a natural filter. So we don't, we don't [00:15:00] cut our water with anything. We add minerals to it for almost every brew [inaudible]. 

Speaker 5:        So I, I started d chlorinating my water with Campton tablets. Do you guys do the same? Do you think that's necessary? I started using a, a sorbic acid, just vitamin C, which basically has the same thing as a Campton tablets. But honestly, I haven't noticed any flavor differences in my beard since I've started. 

Speaker 6:        The San Francisco water report has the chloride content and it's not extraordinarily high. Yeah. So it's probably not a bad thing to do, but it's not necessary. [00:15:30] Yeah. 

Speaker 5:        Yeah. In fact, one of the best ways of removing clothing from water register boil it boil for 15 minutes and you're pretty much getting rid of all the chlorine. So do you think that in the process of boiling all of the sugar and the wart that's equivalent to pre boiling water? I would say so. Uh, especially by the time it hits, I mean, or rather the heat, the yeast hits the work. Um, you're probably clear if a lot of, or [00:16:00] all the clothing that you should basically be worrying about would have just dissipated. Another way of getting rid of clothing is just, just pour water into a pot and just leave it out for hours and hours. So boiling is much more fast and efficient. Is it evaporating? It is. It's available tile. Um, and you know, it just, uh, it ds as the water is, that's what it does. 

Speaker 5:        It just drives all the gasses dissolved gases from the water. The only problem is that that doesn't work for chloramines. So yeah, you can convert the chloramines [00:16:30] into chlorine by adding Campton tablets or a little bit of Campton tablet or a little bit of a citric acid or sorbic acid and then that'll convert into chlorine. And then either through boiling or letting it sit out, the chlorine will evaporate. Yeah. But I mean, I frankly love San Francisco water out of the tap is delicious to drink it. It's really one of the tastiest, sort of an unprocessed waters that I haven't drunk. 

Speaker 4:        What kind of minerals do you add and why? 

Speaker 6:        So we mostly add calcium [00:17:00] chloride and calcium sulfate. We, we basically drive the Ph as low as we can until our mineral additions get excessive. And we just feel like we're making it hard and stupid. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 4:        you are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. We're talking about the science involved in beer making with members of the [00:17:30] UC Sir Gurus Guild. Kenton. If a person were to just start homebrewing, what do you think is the most important thing that they pay attention to? 

Speaker 6:        I think temperature that is both really important and also one of the things that you get classically terrible advice about. Get a good thermometer. [00:18:00] If you're going to invest in one thing that doesn't come into standard brew kit, 

Speaker 5:        you should consider what the temperature is in your house. You should have thermometers in different places in your house. Figure out what temperature is. If it's 90 degrees in the middle of the summer, you're not bro-ing okay. Unless you have a refrigerator. So, so just the temperature is think about what type of beer you want to make and then you know, brew with the seasons. I think that's the best way to do it. 

Speaker 6:        Ryan, what kind of data [00:18:30] do you record when you're brewing? 

Speaker 7:        We have a really good time brewing. You hear people say all the time that brewing is both art and science, right? In our brewing process and in our brewing theory, the art is in the exploration, but the science is sort of in making sure that we can get back to where we've been 

Speaker 6:        for people. Like I think all of us in the room who are like probably unhealthily obsessed with data and getting it consistent and [00:19:00] being in control. Maybe the biggest obstacle to brewing and getting satisfaction from it was the terrible information that's available on the Internet. When you have a question that you want to answer to and you've just go out into the world looking for it, then some of the information is old and some of it is just like willfully wrong where someone has made the decision and like posted authoritatively about it and they're just wrong. 

Speaker 7:        Yeah, I mean if you Google something and you get your answer from Yahoo Answers, then it's wrong. Right? [00:19:30] But that's basically what you're dealing with when you, when you Google something about beer recipes that no one followed up on, uh, ideas that people have a misinformation pass from one person to another with complete, uh, authoritative tone. 

Speaker 6:        Yeah. So we started pulling together some things. I mean a lot of brewing is has been studied. I mean the breweries know everything and then we, homebrewers are sort of trying to like figure certain things out what we, on what parameters predict deficiency and everything. And so we started pulling together all the formulas, [00:20:00] everything into one place. So we keep track when we brew, we record things like our gravity's, which is the a measure the density of the water, which is a measure of how much is dissolved in the water. And we mostly worry about that being sugar. We feed that in a largely sugar depending on the way we mashed. Uh, so we record our gravity's and we record the lengths the durations are Boyle and things like that. And then we plug it all into what's been an excel sheet, [00:20:30] just a huge excel sheet that we call the beer gulay tricks. 

Speaker 6:        And it basically builds predictions for us. Like we plug in our brewing plan and it will tell us things like the color and the bitterness, the volume that we should get out of it, how strong it should be in the end, how much it should cost to brew the diastolic power. Right. That the same or different as, as you were saying, different grains have a different amount of enzymes but that's sort of known in a rough way. And so it'll tell [00:21:00] you whether you have sufficient grain that will, you know, power you through the mashing step, things like that. And so we put it all in one place, which is online as well. It will be soon to be real metrics. And so you mentioned that you calculate the costs of brewing beer. 

Speaker 1:        Is that mainly just you geeking out or do you, is this really a decision point 

Speaker 6:        whether you brew a beer or not amount? It's not a decision. So we basically want to triumph [inaudible] [00:21:30] the turning point, right? The main thing we look at is our efficiency. And so then we like have a beer that we produced that we love and then we just want to try to make it better. And one thing we can use is like if we're more efficient than it costs less to brew the beer. And that's exciting, but we would never buy less green. Let's save money on it. 

Speaker 1:        So for the wine making industry, they [inaudible] digital refractometers as gravity changes the refractive index of the liquid with which the gravity is changing also changes. And so when you, as the refractive index changes, if you [00:22:00] place this on the surface of a prism, the critical angle of light passing through this prism also changes. And so you can basically place a liquid sample on a prism ShineLight through the prism. And then from that you can kind of backward compute what the gravity of the liquid sitting on the prism is. And so what I'm hoping trying to do once I get a little bit of free time after I'm done with rotations in classes, my first year is to build, is to build a floating sensor that'll sit in my beer, give me real time temperature and gravity measurements with this little prison system. So [00:22:30] if any of you guys have any experience building, stuff like that, I'd love some help this summer. Scott and anyone else, what kind of advice do you have for aspiring homebrewers? One thing I often see with homebrewers is that they're so attached to their beers. The first batch of beer I made, 

Speaker 5:        I dunno if I want to like give it out. Holding onto that beer is pointless. The only way that you're going to get good at brewing beer is taking chances and just and just going for it. So the process is [00:23:00] just extremely robust. It's very difficult to make a bad beer so you can invest at any level you like. We like to, to really geek out and, and understand it. We were obsessed with controlling it, but you don't need to do that to make beer. If you can cook, you can make beer. Homebrewers are the most genial, open, convivial fellows I have ever met. They don't hoard recipes. Home brewers in general are some of the best people to hang out with, especially when we're brewing cause we're probably [00:23:30] at our happiest or close to. It usually consists of consuming homebrewers as well. So if you, oh, I think that's a rule. I think that was written down somewhere. So if you're not doing that, you're breaking some pretty harsh rules. 

Speaker 1:        Well guys, thanks for joining us. Thank you. Our pleasure. Thanks. 

Speaker 3:        And now for some science news headlines, here's Brad swift and Lisa cabbage. 

Speaker 9:        [00:24:00] The Economist reports that Dr. David Kaplan and biomedical researcher at Tufts University who has studied silk for 22 years and devised ways to use silk and biomedical applications, has developed a new way to pack medicines into tiny silk pockets that make the medicines almost indifferent to heat boiling silkworm cocoons in sodium carbonate. Caplin separates out of protein named fibrillin. He mixes the fibro in was salt. Then mixes that solution with the medicines [00:24:30] to be preserved and spreads the results out as a film before freeze drying them. The process immobilizes the medicines molecules preventing them from unfolding and thus losing their potency. Dr Kaplan and his team demonstrated the effectiveness of their new technique by trying it out on the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, as well as the antibiotics, tetracycline, and penicillin. The medicines when stored using this process retained 85% potency after six months at 45 degrees Celsius. The next step is to begin human testing [00:25:00] of the silk film medicines. If successful, this process will have enormous benefits for the global distribution of medicines. Currently, most medicines, including vaccines, require refrigeration to retain potency. The World Health Organization estimates that half of all vaccines produced are destroyed because refrigeration is lost at some point during distribution. 

Speaker 10:      Science magazine reports that an international team of plant biologists working with the u s da have found that mitigating [00:25:30] climate change through carbon sequestration actually pumps more carbon into the atmosphere. Increased carbon dioxide stimulates the growth of our boosts dealer. My Corozal fun guy, a mF , a type of fungus that is often found in the roots of most land plants. Experiments were conducted in greenhouses as well as fields of wild oats, wheat and soybeans. Lay Chang post-doctorate fellow in plant science at Penn state said elevated levels of carbon dioxide increased [00:26:00] both the size of AMF colonies and decomposition. AMF colonies are found in the roots of 80% of land plant species and play a critical role in Earth's carbon cycle. The fungus receives and stores carbon. A byproduct of the plant's photosynthesis from its host plant in its long vein likes structures as the carbon transitions to the soil. The AMF triggers additional decomposition of organic carbon near the plant's root systems. This decomposition releases more [00:26:30] carbon dioxide back into the air, which means that terrestrial ecosystems may have limited capacity to haul climate change by cleaning up excessive greenhouse gases. The big fear is that this will turn the soil into a carbon source 

Speaker 9:        rather than a carbon sink. A regular 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 and Lisa cabbage. Scott Stevens, [00:27:00] associate professor of fire sciences at the UC Berkeley College of natural resources and a past guest on spectrum will present a lecture entitled fire and Ecosystem Resiliency in California forests Thursday, September 13th from noon until 1:00 PM room one 32 in Mulford Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. The California coastal cleanup day is Saturday, September 15th from eight 30 to noon. Historically, this is the largest statewide volunteer event. The cities [00:27:30] of Berkeley and Oakland are organizing shoreline cleanups. The East Bay regional parks district is also organizing shoreline cleanups along East Bay waterways. Pick up every bit of human made debris you can find and record what you remove. Data collection is important. Your data goes into ocean conservancy's international database. 

Speaker 9:        Used to identify the sources of debris and help devise solutions to the marine debris problem. To get involved and get more details, contact Kevin Fox at the East Bay regional [00:28:00] parks district. Patty Donald at the city of Berkeley and Brin Samuel at the city of Oakland or a search online for California Coastal Cleanup Day on September 16th from 11 to 12:00 PM the UC botanical gardens at 200 centennial drive in Berkeley will present a lecture, small space orchards growing fruit trees in small gardens, Claire and author of California fruit and vegetable gardening. We'll show you two simple techniques for growing [00:28:30] a small orchard in a typical bay area home garden. You'll learn the best fruit varieties, space saving techniques and plant and care for container grown fruit trees and much more copies of Clare's book will also be available for purchase. You must register in advance 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

Speaker 3:        The music you [00:29:00] heard during say show was Palestine and David from his album book and Acoustic 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

Speaker 3:        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. Our email address is spectrum [00:29:30] dot [email protected] join us in two weeks at this same time. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 3:        [inaudible].

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

Pedro Sanchez is a soil scientist, Director of the Tropical Agriculture and Rural Environment Program, and Director of the Millennium Villages Project at the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Dr. Sanchez was elected into the National Academy of Sciences in 2012.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next [inaudible] look at this picture and typology show on k a l s Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists [00:00:30] and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. 

Speaker 2:        Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. This week on spectrum. Our guest is Professor Pedro Sanchez, a soil scientist who is director of the tropical agriculture and the rural environment program. Senior research scholar and the director of the Millennium Villages Project at the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Dr. Sanchez was director general of the World Agroforestry Center headquartered [00:01:00] in Nairobi, Kenya from 1991 to 2001 and served as co-chair of the UN Millennium Project Hunger Task Force. He is also professor Ameritus of Soil Science and forestry at North Carolina State University and was a visiting professor at the University of California Berkeley. Dr Pedro Sanchez was elected into the National Academy of Sciences in 2012 in late April, 2012 Dr. Sanchez presented the [inaudible] any memorial lecture at the invitation of the UC Berkeley College of natural [00:01:30] resources. Prior to that lecture, Professor Sanchez talked with me about his life and work. Welcome to spectrum Pedro Sanchez. Thank you very much. Want to ask about how you initially got interested in soil science? 

Speaker 3:        Oh boy. Well it goes way back. I'm from Cuba. My dad own a fairly small farm and I always liked to play with dirt. Still I'm [00:02:00] and getting paid for it. But during those days it was just playing. I always liked the, when I took a shower after being out all day to see, uh, to see the drain turn red with all the red mud. And uh, my dad, uh, wanted me to follow his steps, uh, with a farm fertilizer business he had in Cuba when he said he would send me to Cornell because uh, he had gone there and I said, fine. That was all fine with me. I started studying agronomy. [00:02:30] Ah, yeah, I'm majoring in soils. And then I changed hearing seminars from outside people, but that time telling us that Indian with 200 million people, what it's going to start on, this will be a global catastrophe. Oh. I said, well, this will be something I could dedicate my life with and I had been lucky enough to to say that I've done it. Yeah, I've dedicated my life to this. 

Speaker 2:        How did your work, tropical agriculture 

Speaker 3:        [00:03:00] and rural environment issues evolve? The hope was first my interest in tropical soils, not Doyle's in general, but tropical soils. Then the opportunities at Cornell offered me to go to the Philippines. I get my phd degree there. Then out of there I learned about the green revolution and I worked at my first international center, the international rice research and CCU, and from there arm became a assistant professor at North Carolina State [00:03:30] University, the first professor of tropical soil Sekai because they wanted to start a discipline on that. Send me to Peru and work on the green revolution of rice and brew and then afterwards into campus and start teaching tropical soils. You get research money and and right. The first edition of my book. 

Speaker 2:        How do you describe and characterize world hunger and then rural poverty? How are they different? How are they similar overlap? 

Speaker 3:        [00:04:00] They usually are the same person who suffers hunger. It's almost invariably poor. They're both rural and urban. All of the majority of the poor are, are indeed in rural areas of the world still 

Speaker 2:        because it's only recently that the 50% of people now live in cities and that's mostly in the developed world. 

Speaker 3:        No, and in Latin America is 75% [00:04:30] urban. Uh, a Shar is about the same sub Saharan Africa is the only large piece of land in the world where the majority of the people are still rural, about 70% but in the next 20 years they're probably going to be 50, 50 or less. Rural to urban migration continues. Cities get incredibly huge 

Speaker 2:        hunger I guess then for you is caloric intake. 

Speaker 3:        [00:05:00] Okay. Uh, there is a, there is a metric that it's approved by the United Nations on hunger and that is stumping Charles stunting, stunting being been short in height for your age and below a certain level you're considered stunted. That is a product of, of hunger and disease and on all sorts of things. What is the best metric we'd have for measuring hunger [00:05:30] is in children. So that's, that's the best metric. There are many other ones that can related to the amount of food you consume in terms of calories, broken vitamins and micronutrients and the amount of food you're able to, you're able to acquire by money, by buying food like most of us do, and then the utilization of food within your body. That also, that also has some same important variables. I should have. You have sites since [inaudible] and so on. [00:06:00] To me, however, hunger is the state of mind is the state of, not that I really been hungry for very long, I've been very lucky, but it's a state of powerlessness. When you're hungry, nothing else matters. You really have to satisfy that hunger and it's our survival instinct. For example, you cannot possibly think about the environment when you're hungry, so it's a mindset. That [00:06:30] brings us back to our most basic instance. 

Speaker 4:        Today's guest on spectrum is Pedro Sanchez, director of the Millennium Villages Project at the Earth Institute. You are listening to KALX Berkeley. 

Speaker 3:        You've been involved in the United Nations Millennium Village project. Your key part of that, [00:07:00] and can you give us an overview of that project? It's an ongoing project, isn't it? Yeah, it is an ongoing project. I'm not bashful. It was my idea. And that is after finishing all of this recommendations on the UN Millennium Development Goals, my committee working with hunger and similar committees, working on health in sanitation and the environment and poverty and and so on. I was in India, I've seen some model, uh, or they call, uh, bio abilities [00:07:30] of my co-chair, professors forming Athan. And I said to myself, why don't we do this in Africa where the situation is much worse, but how can we help in impoverish villages achieve all the millennium development goals, not only over the whole thing. So I'm talking with my wife and at that time we had received some price money. We had quarter of a million dollars we could invest. 

Speaker 3:        So we decided to let's go invest that money and try to do [00:08:00] it in a village in western Kenya. That will be both working. But when I went to see my director, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, he says, oh no, this is such a great idea. You're not going to do it with your money. We're going to raise lots of money and do it again. He did it within four or five months. We had about a hundred billion dollars in our coffers, so to speak, mostly from private philanthropists. And then we started conceiving. Then that brought me, the program says, okay, let's look for villages of about 5,000 people. [00:08:30] English, they're more than 20% malnourished kids under the age of five. Again, that famous metric on stunting that was, and the people that are making less than a dollar a day, very hard to quantify. So we started one in western Kenya [inaudible] and then as more funds came out, I know they winter in northern Ethiopia. 

Speaker 3:        Oh, Colorado. And within a year and a half or so, we had 80 such feels clustered [00:09:00] and uh, around the 14 sites in 10 African countries, each of them representing a major agricultural zone or farming system where hunger is coming. In other words, who didn't have any, in South Africa, for example, the villages were selected by us. We always have to go basically to the head of states, a precedent or prime minister and ask for permission. But we would make sure that they wouldn't say, well, you have to do, listen, Mike Rich and some tribe didn't succeed. [00:09:30] Basically the way it started as a bunch of us from different disciplines, people working in health, people working infrastructure, water and sanitation and so on. We went to the village how to village meeting and there was some government people who represented different than we asking, well, do you want to become a millennium villages? 

Speaker 3:        You're going to have to work very hard because we're not going to give you any money. We're going to do is help you out with things that you don't have in kind and get a lot of training on many things and [00:10:00] you're going to be asking a zillion questions with the questionnaires that we do. So that was the deal. And then the priorities were selected working with committees of the villagers and specialists from our side on the university site balance the knowledge that the villagers had gotten by themselves with scientific, scientifically grounded idea. So the villages basically said, well, we need [00:10:30] inputs for agriculture because the yields were very low. Said, what are you needs? Well, we use better seats, hybrids, seats, and so on and we need fertilizer. Well, we agreed with that. The other thing they asked right away, in addition to agricultural inputs to grow more food was a clinic. 

Speaker 3:        And we said, okay, but let's get the plants from the Ministry of Health. So it's a proper government clinic. You guys build it, [00:11:00] you guys make the bricks and do all the things they know how to do and we'll provide you with a, with cement, with 10 roof, iron doors and the things I couldn't buy but not a, not a dollar or any shilling change hands. And they did that on their very problem. They did that for schools and even for warehouses later using the same principle that they do most of the work and we come in and provide the necessary things like cement [00:11:30] or whatever. And that's been the rule in pretty much in all the abilities with very, very few exceptions. Nice thing about that. They said they own it, they own it. They have a sense of ownership, they take care of it. And it's very different than if the government or some NGO or some foundation bill such things and gave him the keys to it. Are they in some way cooperatives? You're surely I ended up vigil in the villages, donates the land [00:12:00] for the clinic to be built then, I don't know the ownership, but in most cases basically the clinic is part of the Minister of health and the case of fertilizers and seed. No. 

Speaker 2:        Well and then warehouses and things like that. 

Speaker 3:        Yeah. Warehouses on all ladders. Uh, there, there's a, there, there it's usually built on a place that is donated by a member of the community walk that line. 

Speaker 2:        So there's a certain collective spirit. 

Speaker 3:        Oh, very much so. I mean every farmer farms his or her piece of land [00:12:30] like blank, they harvest, they sell it, share information, all of that share a lot of information. And right now that basic learning development goal has been achieved. They're getting more into different kinds of cooperatives and they band together to sell specific high value products such as milk or tomatoes or things like that. In most cases that are already registered as formal cooperatives. I mean means they can get a line of credit from the banks. They're [00:13:00] going through the process. Now we're going from a subsidize based economy, not only to getting into irregular financial arrangements wholesale. We on other institutions stuff work with banks to convince them to lend to these people. They say they have no collateral. It's true, uh, an institution, uh, Agora, which just starts for the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa, broke ground by promising, not making a deal with it, with one of the banks and the credit guarantees they would refund [00:13:30] the bank 50% of whatever they are, who is, who? People not paying their loans out of hundreds of millions of dollars. And it has happened to have had to pay $4,000 the recovery rate of their loans from this people who have no collateral. It's the same as other people. And now banks now are beginning to look at agriculture, small holder agriculture, the bottom billion, so to speak, as SMH or source. 

Speaker 4:        This is spectrum [00:14:00] KALX Berkeley. I'm talking with Professor Pedro Sanchez about hunger and agriculture in light of a global population of nine to 10 billion people by 2050 

Speaker 2:        and so does this project then in some ways answer the the critics of aid to developing nations that has failed for so long, decade after decade of just dumping money on countries as opposed to this kind of an integrated project [00:14:30] that you've, 

Speaker 3:        well first, yeah, first let me say that this, this idea that all this money has been wasted is incorrect. I mean there are certainly a lot of wastage, but certainly not. When I started working, and it was like 40 years ago, and by that time countries like Mexico and Brazil and Korea were receiving aid and most of that America now there's no more aid and now they're our best customers in terms of and by [00:15:00] an American experts. So it has worked. The fact that that India is no longer starving, but India, so foot exporter has worked and not all the credit is, is to serve by the aid that donors select the United States gift, but also by their own resources and their own loan and work. But no aid has worked and it has worked then. Yeah, no, ideally and very subject to criticism. But by and large, I think eight in general in broad terms has work specifically [00:15:30] not 

Speaker 2:        do you think there's an attainable rebalancing of agricultural incentives and markets in the developed world and in the developing world that would, uh, work to, you know, accommodate nine to 10 billion people in the world? 

Speaker 3:        Well, first let me say that in either case, developed or undeveloped, there's no such a thing as a, I see ideal market or the perfect market, which my economist friends say, well, this, [00:16:00] oh, you mean you're subsidizing fertilizer? Well, that's sort of distorting the market for fertilizers. And I said, what markets one market are you talking about? It doesn't exist. Uh, I don't believe in perfect markets because I've never seen one. I'm not an economist, but mine are in economics, so knows a little bit about them and they're very distorted by, by subsidies. We subsidize very many rich farmers here who are really starting to the point of the ridiculous. The question [00:16:30] is, are we going to be able to feed 9 billion people by 2050 I would say probably yes. And a, the bigger actors there are going to be South America and Africa to be able to feed themselves. Yes. Unexplored food. Yes. The land resources are there. Of course all this has to do with politics. Nobody can predict what the politics over their specific country going to be. Right. 

Speaker 2:        Like the molecular, like Molly, 

Speaker 3:        Molly or reflect who's going to work [00:17:00] here. Yeah. So, uh, so I mean all this food is political presidents get reelected because it was a successful food programs in Africa, but uh, that it's perfectly feasible. It is. I don't know how much, what's your question about that? 

Speaker 2:        And right now the percentage of land dedicated to agricultural activities, about 12%. 

Speaker 3:        Yeah. And if you include pastures for a cow [00:17:30] production and so on, it's about 30% of the world's land area 

Speaker 2:        and do you see that number? Being able to go up 

Speaker 3:        little bit, maybe one or two percentage points, maybe one percentage points, but no more than that. But there will be an elements and South America on an that will be in opening new Lorenz lands that are not ecologically critical. Tropical rain forest. There's white lines or stuff like that that are [00:18:00] environmental protected. No Way. And there is additional land that can be used, but the main, the main effort is to increase the yields per acre of the land already been used and the best ways to do that in a going forward, sustainable way. What do you feel about that? You need improved plants and you need a balanced set of inputs and not too many and not too few. The genetically modified plants [00:18:30] are, in my opinion, fine. They've gotten a very bad rap, tumbled them or ecologically extremely sound like a bt corn and bt cotton. 

Speaker 3:        They have a genes from a [inaudible] that when the insects bite and trying to suck the SAP or something, they get killed, stuck said to them so that only kill the bad bugs and lose all the other books who have no interested in getting involved with uh, with a corn crop fine as opposed to having insecticides that would kill [00:19:00] all insects. So, uh, there are a lot of good things in genetic modification anyway. We are all genetically modified organisms. We certainly are all of us and has been done by nature by, by random, but it's so much different if you do it in a, in a lab. Conceptually it's the same thing or very clear evidence study of the National Academy of Science August last year and Europe, two big studies, one in the UK and one in Switzerland and they all show [00:19:30] the same thing, that there is no harm done to the environment and to human health where the use of GMOs that have been released. 

Speaker 3:        Then this is basically no different from the development of hybrid corn, which wasn't genetically modified in the sense of transporting one gene from one place to another one, but it was genetically modified by combining plants that would combine their own genes. So, um, we need plants that produce a lot, that have deep roots, that are told them to diseases [00:20:00] and insects and more tolerant to drought and floods because of climate change. You need better plants. And uh, without them we'd be nowhere. And the issue of inputs, agriculture is different from natural systems. Agriculture takes a tremendous amount of nutrients and energy and everything out of the system and it's not returned back and something has to be returned back. That's why we need to fertilizers, fertilizers, whether they're mineral or they're organic, we need to add additional [00:20:30] nutrients on. And there's no question about it. 

Speaker 3:        The issue of organic versus mineral, the plant doesn't care the best way to do it. It's a combination of both, which is called conventional agriculture. Organic farming. If it produces higher premium price, go to it. But we know that the deals are lower and it requires more labor. So my view on all this is not to beat up matic you say you want to have a good balance, the, the time horizon [00:21:00] on the mineral fertilizers, phosphorus and potassium. Do you see that running out at some point in the future and not grading? Uh, the, uh, of course nitrogen is taken from the air and we live in an atmosphere of 78% nitrogen. So it's for all practical purposes, infant. But that's you comes from minds or I know there enormous research, unfortunately concentrated in two or three countries. Canada and Russia. Phosphorus is the one we worry [00:21:30] the most about. 

Speaker 3:        But no, I've been about almost 50 years in this business and every five years or so here we're gonna run out of phosphorus in the next, uh, 50 to a hundred years. And then you keep [inaudible] in the past and best buy, there's more efficiency on the use on there, more that bus it's found. So I, I'm really not worried, not worried, frankly, not worried. I've heard that you're, you're taking a project with the gates foundation to [00:22:00] map all the soils of Africa is yes, yes. The digital soul map of Africa. Okay. And what's going to happen with the data? Um, we're doing it now. At first I saw map of Africa on a scale of a hundred by hundred meters. That's how about a Hector pixel. It will be Hector, two and a half acres of saw properties and that'll come out later in the year of the first approximation. It'll be, it'll be rough. 

Speaker 3:        We're looking now for [00:22:30] continuation of the project for another four years to really do it better and uh, mainstream it into, into countries. And I forgot the other one too, but all the data will be accessible by the way, for the way, in a way that you can sort of like Google earth. You can pin 0.1 place and you can see a hundred by hundred meter pixels and it'll tell you how much sand has and all that. And then you can query [00:23:00] and it will give you a map of sand content. I know their map of organic matter or slow or whatever, whatever you want. Professor Sanchez, thanks very much for joining us on spectrum. You are very welcome. My pleasure. Glad to be back in Berkeley. 

Speaker 4:        [00:23:30] Regular feature of spectrum is to highlight some of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Here's Rick Kaneski and Lisa cabbage with the calendar on Wednesday, 

Speaker 5:        August 29th at 6:00 PM the Commonwealth Club at five nine five market street in San Francisco. It's presenting a talk by the president of the Ocean Conservation Society, Madelina Beersy entitled Dolphin Confidential Confessions [00:24:00] of a field biologist. She'll talk about her experiences at sea from her earliest travels. You're a transformations into an advocate for conservation and dolphin protection. She takes us inside the world of a marine scientist and offer as a firsthand understanding of marine mammal behavior as well as the frustrations, delights, and creativity that makeup Dolphin research bears these fieldwork investigates Dolphin social behavior and intelligence. She shares an honest down to [00:24:30] earth analysis of what it means to be a marine biologist in the field today and the life among the dolphins and addresses the critical environmental and conservation problems they face. The lecture is $20 or $8 for Commonwealth club members or $7 for students with valid id. Visit Commonwealth club.org for more info, 

Speaker 6:        find out what ideas are percolating in the mind of William Gibson, one of our greatest contemporary science fiction writers on Tuesday, September 4th [00:25:00] at 7:00 PM at the Jewish community center in San Francisco, 3,200 California Street, author of the groundbreaking cyberpunk novel Neuro Mansur. Gibson described the internet before it existed and coined the term cyberspace. His first collection of nonfiction writings, distrust that particular flavor, offers provocative insights on everything from the future of technology to compulsive online watch collecting to drug trafficking and Singapore. Again, [00:25:30] that's Tuesday, September 4th at 7:00 PM for tickets and more information. Go to www dot JCC s f. Dot Org 

Speaker 5:        September. His seminar about longterm thinking from the long now foundation will be on Wednesday the fifth at 7:30 PM Tim O'Reilly is discussing the birth of the global mind. The evolution of communication and intelligence. Speech allowed us to communicate and coordinate writing allowed that coordination to spend time and space, [00:26:00] but that's not all in one breakthrough computer application. After another, we see a new kind of manmade symbiosis. The Google autonomous vehicle turns out not to be just a triumph of artificial intelligence algorithms. The car is guided by the cloud memory of roads driven before by Human Google Street view drivers augmented by powerful and precise new sensors in the same way. Crowdsource data from sensor enabled humans is leading to smarter cities, breakthroughs in healthcare and new economies. [00:26:30] The future belongs not to artificial intelligence, but the collective intelligence. This event will take place at the cal theater and San Francisco is Fort Mason. It is $10 or is free for members 

Speaker 6:        visit long now.org for tickets and more info. The September East Bay Science Cafe Welcomes John Duber, assistant professor in the Department of bioengineering at UC Berkeley. He will talk about using synthetic biology to build microbial factories producing biofuels. [00:27:00] One promising direction for the production of liquid transportation fuels is re-engineering the metabolism of microbes like Baker's yeast to convert sugar into a chemical with desirable bio fuel characteristics. Dubar roiled described work being done to produce biofuels using the rapidly emerging approaches of synthetic biology. John Dubar was a 2012 winner of the US Department of Energy's early career research award. East Bay Science cafe is Wednesday, [00:27:30] September 5th in the [inaudible] lounge adjacent to cafe Valparaiso at La Pena Cultural Center from seven to 9:00 PM location 31 oh five Shattuck avenue in Berkeley. Now, Lisa Katovich with two new stories, science news reports that two studies find that nanoscale pollutants can intercrop roots triggering a host of changes to plants growth in health. These tiny particles can stunt plant growth, boost the plants absorption [00:28:00] of pollutants, and increase the need for crop fertilizers. 

Speaker 6:        The new data now for Warren of agriculturally associated human and environmental risks from the accelerating use of manufactured nanomaterials. According to Patricia Holden at UC Santa Barbara and her colleagues. Their report is published online August 20th in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, nanomaterials that get released in the exhaust from diesel fueled tractors can rain down onto crop fields. Those used in fabrics, [00:28:30] sunscreens and other products collect in the solid, separated out of sewage and wastewater. The new studies offer glimpse at the toxic effects. Such nanoparticles may pose to future crops. As exposures rise, the ability of soil and other legumes to fix nitrogen is one of the most important microbial processes in agriculture. So the ability of Nano Sirium to shut this process down was the most significant and most troubling new finding. The UC Berkeley Solar Car Club [00:29:00] team, cal soul placed forth in a field of 12 cars in the 2012 American solar challenge in July, the race was run in stages from Rochester, New York, ending in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Congratulations to the castle team. 

Speaker 1:        The [inaudible] show is by Mozcon and David. This album, [00:29:30] folk and acoustic made available [inaudible] comments, license 3.0 thank you. Listen to spectrum [inaudible] spectrum [inaudible] hi John. [inaudible]. [inaudible].

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

Inventor and self-described hacker Mitch Altman talks about Noisebridge, the San Francisco hackerspace he co-founded. Altman is responsible for co-founding 3-ware is now the President and CTO of Cornfield Electronics. His many inventions include TV-B-Gone and NeuroDreamer sleep mask.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]. Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k l x Berkeley, a biweekly 

Speaker 1:        30 minute program bringing you interviews, featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. 

Speaker 3:        Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift on today's show. Rick Carnesi and I interview Mitch Altman. [00:00:30] Mitch is an inventor and self-described hacker. He cofounded the company three where and is now the president and CTO of cornfield electronics. We're talking to him about Noisebridge, the San Francisco hackerspace that he co founded, as well as some of his many inventions. These include the TVB gone a remote that turns off most TVs and his recently successful Kickstarter project, the neuro dreamer sleep mask. Mitch Altman. Welcome to spectrum. [00:01:00] Thanks. Would you mind telling us sort of that career path? 

Speaker 4:        How I got to sitting here today? Uh, I've been a geek all my life. You know, I dreamed about this stuff when I was a little kid. I actually did a, I remember having this recurring dream where I saw the inside of my mom's radio, which, uh, they were tubes. I didn't know what tooks were though. They were just glowing. They look cool. And I dreamed about pushing it off the counter to see what was in it. And in my dreams I actually did it. But in real life [00:01:30] I was always too timid. But I really wanted to see what was inside. And eventually I started taking apart my parents things and somehow they let me and eventually I learned to put them back together, making my own things from scratch. It's been fun in electronics, I always want to know how things work. I mean that's, that's what makes us geeks tick, you know. 

Speaker 4:        But the thing that fascinated me the most was electronics. So I started playing with wires and alligator clips and putting forks into electrical outlets and having my parents scrape me off the ceiling [00:02:00] and learning from my mistakes, learning and growing. And eventually I was making my own intercoms between my brother's bunk bed and mine below him in high school, making an electronic bong. And, uh, that was one of the things that actually got me talking to other kids rather than just being alone geek. So, uh, inventing, making things. It's been part of my life since I can remember thinking. But you've also had this entrepreneurial spirit as well, I suppose. Yeah. And I'm not really sure [00:02:30] where that came from. Maybe from my parents. My father was an architect, you know, and I see a lot of what I do as art, you know, expressing ourselves truthfully and doing things in a way that give other people an opportunity to think about themselves in the world around them. 

Speaker 4:        And my father did his art architecture and it made him a living without really being conscious of it. That's probably the path that I followed. I actually quit the job that I had created for myself, which was consulting in electronics [00:03:00] for usually small companies. But I quit that so I could explore ways of doing more of what I loved and that's how I came across TV be gone. And I was lucky enough that it actually makes me a living. It's really cool to be able to make a living by doing what you love, making enough money, doing what you love to keep doing what you love. I mean, that's my idea of success. Where does the inspiration come from your projects? Well, that's a good question. Where does inspiration come from? You know, obviously, uh, other people can be inspiring random [00:03:30] events in our lives and people are a great random elements in our lives. 

Speaker 4:        And if we relate to people when they throw something at us that really sticks in our [inaudible] and uh, nibbles away at us, uh, it's like sticking in there. Maybe it's subconscious. Eventually it becomes an idea for a project that screaming to come out, TV gone. I got the idea of sitting in a Chinese restaurant in 1993 talking with some friends and we were there [00:04:00] to talk to each other, not to watch TV. And yet there was a TV on and we were watching the TV and that was crazy. So we started talking about that and then I thought, wouldn't it be wonderful if I could just turn off these horrible distractions everywhere I went? And instantly I knew I could because I'm a geek. Of course. It took me 10 years to get to a point in my life where I had time and energy to do it. 

Speaker 4:        And I'm glad I did. And I had to make that time though. You know, inspiration is really important. Ideas are really important, but they don't go anywhere unless [00:04:30] you make the time to do something with them. And you just prioritize it because you're passionate about it. Or how, how do you make sure that you actually finish something? You start o finishing what you start. Well, you know, I think that's overrated. I've done zillions of projects as have we all that we have that I haven't finished. That's great. You know, and if I'm not motivated to finish it, that leaves time for doing something else. TV began I think is the first project in my entire life where I actually finished it. Totally. And I had to, if I was going to make [00:05:00] it a product, you know, and uh, I don't think we've mentioned TV beyond for people that don't know, it is a key chain that turns TVs off in public places and it really does work. 

Speaker 4:        And I did it cause I got rid of TV in my life at home. I am a TV addict. Uh, I watched it every waking moment of my life as an unhappy child, but I didn't have to keep doing it later in life. And I chose not to, but in public, no one chooses those things to be on. People don't leave their home to watch television except me for sports [00:05:30] bars or something. But I don't like bars and I don't like sports so I don't go to those but everywhere else. So I made it so I could turn them off and other people wanted them. And then when their friends wanted them in friends of friends, that's when I decided I would make a bunch. So, um, I started it like many projects and it got on a roll unlike many projects. But I actually was so passionate about it continually and I had so many people that are kept asking me when's that going to be done? That that probably helped me follow through and actually finish it [00:06:00] and get it to a point where it's a manufacturable product. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible] you are listening to spectrum Inka LX Berkeley. Our guest is inventor Mitch Altman. 

Speaker 4:        And once you get something at that point, what's next? Do you tinker and invent more stuff or do you spend time supporting TVB gone or, yeah. Well when you do what you love, all sorts of [00:06:30] interesting things open up that you might notice where you wouldn't if you're consumed doing something that just exhausts you like a job, you know, you don't like that too. Many of us, unfortunately on our planet are in that position. I have been working on many other projects along the way. I started getting into hacker conferences and maker fairs as a result of TVB gone. People invited me to these things and I, um, would give talks, [00:07:00] which is kind of bizarre for me. A totally introverted geek, terrified of public speaking. Like so many other of us introverted geeks. But, uh, it turned out I liked it. It makes it easier to talk about something you love. 

Speaker 4:        Yeah. I don't like being pedantic. Uh, I like making things fun and if other people relate then maybe they'll learn something, maybe make a new choice in their life that serves them better and I don't want to tell anyone else what to do. Well sometimes I do, but I like making it more fun for people to choose for themselves what's good for themselves. [00:07:30] I found a place where at hacker conferences, at maker fairs where I could teach doing what I really love, which is soldering and making cool things with electronics and that led to me finding things to teach with. So I started making my own little kits for total beginners and I started doing that by hacking other people's kids and then making my own and that's been supplementing my income a little bit, but mostly it's been paying for me to be able to travel around the world and teach doing this, which I also [00:08:00] love. 

Speaker 4:        That led to going to more hacker conferences and maker fairs and things related and going to hacker spaces that existed but not too many back then. Back then was 2007 okay. The first maker fair was 2006 which led me to meet people who invited me to the first hacker conference also in 2006 that I went to a hope in New York every other year. And I've been actually helping organize those now, which is another thing I make time for at one [00:08:30] of these hacker conferences in Germany, put on by the chaos computer club who have been responsible for creating hackerspaces in Germany and then the world for over a quarter century now of in 2007 it was about a quarter century of that and they gave a presentation on how to start your own and I was way inspired to come home and do that in my home town and with my friend Jake, we Noisebridge and instantly we just put out the word and we got lots [00:09:00] of way cool people to help and with our ideas and their ideas collected more people. 

Speaker 4:        And Noisebridge was a just a natural growth out of all of our enthusiasm and inspiration for having the energy and the high really of being at one of these hacker conferences where people do what they love, explore it, they love Sharon, teach and learn from each other. Uh, but not just once a year, uh, but every day, all night, all day, all year round. [00:09:30] And Wow. Hundreds of us go through there every week. And it constantly amazes me how many cool people are doing cool things there now. And what kinds of things happen at Noisebridge? It's very diverse. A, it's not just tech. You know, I teach soldering and electronics, but [inaudible] Mondays. Yeah. So every Monday, uh, since 2007, I've been teaching how to solder and I love doing that. I'm really good at it by now too. And when I'm not in town, I'm on the road. Other people do [00:10:00] it on Wednesdays. 

Speaker 4:        There's a similar kind of thing for craft and art folks to get together and that's called scow sewing, crafting or whatever. Also on Mondays is people. There's someone who's teaching a class on how to do your own website. There's a python language class, there's German language, human language class, there's a space exploration program, there's food classes. We have a full kitchen, we have a dark room, there's lithography classes. He printing three d printers. We got lots of those. And we understood [00:10:30] sewing machines and lots of cool, uh, electronics equipment as well as the machine shop and laser cutter and a library. We've got classrooms, we've got events, spaces, all this and more. And everything happens just because people think it would be cool to do. And they, they do it and people help. And this is just one of about a thousand hackerspaces in the world. Now it's another thing I love doing is going around helping people start these supportive communities, which are hackerspaces for people to explore and do what they love and hopefully even make a living out of it [00:11:00] so they can do what they enjoy and find fulfillment in their lives. 

Speaker 4:        You know, now there's only a thousand in the world. What will the world be like when there's a million? Uh, more opportunities for people to do. Way more cool things. Earlier guests on our show did talk about the makerspace project of which you're fairly vocal critics. So can you say why you're a critic? I wouldn't say I'm a critic. I love maker fair and I love make magazine. They've created opportunities for so many people and my life has been [00:11:30] changed for the positive by it and so it was so many other people and it will continue to be that kind of positive role model for others as well. They recently sought and received a grant for $10 million from DARPA, which is an arm of a research arm of the u s military. Their goal is to help create new technology for the u s military. That's their stated goal. So they have a bunch of grants now available. 

Speaker 4:        Most of them are because they [00:12:00] see the u s education system as horribly flawed as do I. People in the u s military see that just as clearly as many of us too. And making grants for hands on learning is a way to give more people opportunity to at least have a start and becoming high quality engineers, which they need to further the goals of their organizations, which is in my view, simply put to hurt and kill people. Of course, that's [00:12:30] my personal view. You know, other people will see it differently. What I would love to see happen is for people to explore and continually reevaluate what it means to them to receive funding from organizations or people whose goals don't align with your own cause. There's consequences, so anything we do, there's consequences. There's pluses and minuses for everything. When you accept funds from sources that have goals that don't [00:13:00] align with your own, of course you're helping your goals because you have funding to do so, but you're also helping the goals of the funding source, which don't align with your own. 

Speaker 4:        How do you actually weigh the pluses and minuses in that way? It's not easy, but for me, after struggling with it for months, I can't feel good about associating myself with helping the goals of DARPA. Even though good things come from what DARPA has [00:13:30] done, I would rather put my energy directly into doing things that I believe are helping people rather than helping the goals of an organization that does things that I find well, use the word reprehensible, so I'm not trying to talk anyone into not associating with makerfair or make magazine. I still respect many of the people at make and a maker fair, great deal. I think they'll do great things. I just can't feel [00:14:00] good about helping myself and I really would hope that people do consider the funding sources because it does change what you'll do maybe consciously, maybe subconsciously. So what are you willing to do that you might not have done to make it more likely to get funding renewed funding? 

Speaker 4:        What are they going to stop doing that they might have done because it doesn't look so good to the funding source? I see these as very, very much related. It's really important [00:14:30] to explore these things before making a conscious choice about whether to accept these funding sources. Maybe it's worth it. Maybe it isn't. It's up to each and every individual. I need a couple points of clarification just to make sure we got everything right. Yeah. So the DARPA funding at all go to maker fair to your knowledge? Uh, sort of the, with some of the other projects that those same people were doing well before making my choice. I talk to the person who started maker fair and make magazine, [00:15:00] uh, Dale Dougherty and he's a great guy. We've done lots of cool things through the years together. And my main goal was to explore the possibility of helping with maker fair without being associated with DARPA funding. And the funding that they got is for a program they call mentor program a but that's intertwined with making makerfair. So there's no way to dissociate the funding 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible] [00:15:30] this is spectrum k a l x Berkeley. Our guest is Mitch Altman, Co founder of the hackerspace Noisebridge. 

Speaker 4:        I also see this theme of wanting to help people. So for instance, you host these depression and Geek meetups. Life isn't all totally wonderful. Life is full of things that are amazingly wonderful and rapturous and blissful and it's full of things [00:16:00] that totally suck and anything in between up, down and all around. And any given life, no matter how wonderful your life is, uh, there's ups and downs. And I, um, started off my life as a totally depressed geek and, um, I was brutally bullied. I was, you know, I'm introverted geeks when I was a little kid, did not farewell. And not only that, but, uh, I was an am queer and little kids take any difference big and small, and they brutalize [00:16:30] people for it. Uh, life was horrible for me and my parents were terrible parents. Lucky for me. They turned out to be cool people as adults for me when I was at adult. 

Speaker 4:        And uh, no matter what childhood can be rough for people and there's unhealed stuff and we carry all of that with us if we survive into adulthood. And here we all are as adults living our lives, hopefully exploring and doing what we love with the help of, uh, our supportive communities, including hackerspaces, but still there was a huge [00:17:00] amount of depression in geek communities. Uh, last November a friend of mine killed himself. It was the first time in my life where I felt close to someone who killed themselves. And, uh, it's rough. It really, really sucks. There's nothing like it. And still, uh, by this time in my life I tried to see opportunity in anything to help not only myself but other people. It's part of my healing process. So I wrote up [00:17:30] a very personal blog post on the Noisebridge blog site about my feelings and hundreds or more people responded. 

Speaker 4:        It was overwhelming. And, uh, it really showed me that way more people are dealing with depression than I could imagine. And, and my friend, I had no clue he was, and I'm very sensitive to it. He hit it so well and I hit it well when I was a first half of my life living with depression. But yeah, a lot of us in the geek world. And in our planet are suffering [00:18:00] with depression. So after all these responses, I thought, you know, maybe we could have a meetup where we can talk about this and openly and if we talk about this openly as a community, maybe maybe someone will reach out for help rather than harm themselves and maybe someone will live another night. And any case, these geek and depression meetups that I started are now happening in various cities around the world and hopefully more as, as we become [00:18:30] more open about this cause, you know, I think we really can benefit all of us, each of us and as a community, if everyone is able to be totally open about all of who we are and not have to be shameful or secretive about something, you know, we can be open about everything but this then, then soon we're closing off huge parts of our lives and we have this part we can't even explore ourselves cause we can't talk about it to anyone. 

Speaker 4:        We're not open about it with ourselves and not just about being queer or [00:19:00] whatever, but also being depressed, feeling suicidal, has a lot of shame associated with it. And a lot of people feel, unfortunately, sadly, tragically, that the easiest way out is killing themselves rather than just asking for help. And that's just so awful and unnecessary. So, uh, there are geeking depression meetups now that happened in San Francisco. I would like to see more happen elsewhere, bigger, small, whatever, and I'm [00:19:30] always available if anyone wants to contact me for any reason, project help how to start a company. Uh, if you're depressed, if you want someone to talk you into quitting a job, you don't like anything. I'm totally willing to communicate any time. Just please email me [email protected]. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]. Our Guest Today on spectrum is Mitch Altman, enter hackerspace activist. This is KALX Berkeley. 

Speaker 4:        [00:20:00] You had, uh, mentioned this sort of lackluster state of science, technology, engineering and math education or education in general. Do you see other possible solutions to bringing that up? Yes. This is one of the huge reasons why I started Noisebridge and why help other hackerspaces start. These are places where education happens in a very real wonderful way. Noisebridge is a 500 C3 public [00:20:30] benefit corporation in the state of California, but it's not your traditional kind of education organization. We teach and learn and share through hands on whether it's with computers, whether it's in a kitchen, a sewing machine, a soldering iron, a machine shop, whether it's exploring biology and growing mushrooms or using a laser cutter or exploring space. It's all about learning and teaching and sharing. People can try stuff if they know they love something, they can blurt more, they can [00:21:00] teach it. 

Speaker 4:        It's really fantastic and this is an opportunity for some people to actually learn what they want to learn to live lives that they want to live. I wish the u s education system were more of that way, but it's very unfortunate that the only schools, well most of the schools that actually provide that opportunity are very expensive. Private schools in our country and there are fortunately some exceptions. I was just teaching some kids over at them, met West School in [00:21:30] Oakland who are providing hands on learning for their kids and it's public. It's really cool that, that, that exists. But it's only, I think 165 kids are allowed there. I would love to see more of that. So hackerspaces around the world are providing these opportunities right now. It's very few opportunities compared to what we need. There's only a thousand hackerspaces in the world and we need a million and we'll get there. 

Speaker 4:        Uh, because hackerspaces are incredibly cool. People are [00:22:00] spontaneously creating them. There's all sorts of ways we can create these niches within which we can provide ourselves the services that our governments are not providing us. Hackerspaces just happened to be a really wonderful way near and dear to my heart and Mitch, our hackerspaces able to reach out to younger students populations that are stuck in those schools that you were talking about that aren't doing any of this hands on stuff. Yeah, well they, it's already, uh, it's already there. I mean, Noisebridge has [00:22:30] always been welcoming to people of all ages and most hackerspaces are, although some are afraid of liability issues a and they only have 18 and over, which I think is absurd. Yeah, there's, there's no age limit for learning. Not If we don't have it beaten out of us. That is, I'm not doing hackerspaces to get rid of schools. 

Speaker 4:        I would love schools to become places where people can actually learn, but kids can have these often totally free and it Noisebridge [00:23:00] it's always free opportunities as an alternative during lunch or before or after school, they can come to Noisebridge over weekends, uh, with or without their parents. People are always welcome to come. Hopefully as there were more and more hackerspaces, there'll be more opportunities for these kids. There are hackerspaces in the East Bay, there's ace monster toys. There's one that's just forming now called pseudo room, s u d o room, [00:23:30] and there's mothership hacker moms, which is primarily for moms who are hackers and there's also a lowel space. I can't remember what the acronym stands for, unfortunately, but therefore liberating ourselves locally. There you go. Liberating ourselves locally. There are a bunch of cool people primarily for, uh, hackers of color, of various sorts and we need more. There's actually people just now starting to talk about another hackerspace in [00:24:00] San Francisco. What I would love to see is a hackerspace in every neighborhood of San Francisco, every neighborhood of every city around the country. We need a million of these things. Okay. Well, Mitch, thanks for joining us. Yeah, it's been great being here. Thanks for having me. Awesome. 

Speaker 5:        Mm. 

Speaker 6:        A regular feature of spectrum is to mention a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Rick Kaneski at Lisa kind of joined me for the calendar. The next science [00:24:30] at cal lecture will be given at 11:00 AM on August the 18th in genetics and plants biology room 100 the lecture will be given by Dr Anton Trypsin and will be titled, can one see a flower through a granite wall? Amazing capabilities of neutron imaging. The detection technology developed for NASA astrophysical missions at UC Berkeley space science lab has been successfully extended to such diverse areas as synchrotron instrumentation, biomedical imaging, ground-based astronomy [00:25:00] and neutron micro tomography. Dr Trypsin will talk about his experience with neutron imaging and how it's useful find new applications. He got his phd in Applied Physics in 1992 at the Russian Academy of Sciences and was then a British royal society fellow with University of Lye Chester and joined the space scientist lab at UC Berkeley in 1996 where he is currently a research associate 

Speaker 7:        on Saturday, August 18th the exploratorium at three six zero one line street at the Palace of fine arts in San Francisco [00:25:30] and celebrating founder of Frank Oppenheimer's hundredth birthday. Standard admission is $25 but college students, seniors, teachers, persons with disabilities and youths age six to 17 pay only $19 members and children five and under are free during regular museum hours of 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM visitors can take part in a variety of events and activities. Honoring Frank at the explorer bowls table from 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM you can make a spinning top when [00:26:00] a Frank's favorite DIY projects throughout the day in the mine theater. You can see a series of exploratorium home movies featuring the early days of the museum as well as footage of frank engaging with visitors and staff. Today's events will also feature a frank themed presentation in the McBean theater and screenings of some of his favorite films from the museums, cinema arts archives, including the Em's classic powers of 10 there will also be birthday cake exploratory members can go [00:26:30] to a special celebration from six [inaudible] 9:00 PM for more information, visit exploratorium.edu no news with [inaudible] 

Speaker 6:        Karnofsky and Lisa Katovich. The Berkeley Earth surface temperature reports that the average temperature of the earth land has risen by 2.5 Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of 1.5 degrees over the most recent 50 years. The good match between the new temperature record and historical carbon dioxide records suggest [00:27:00] that the most straightforward explanation for this warming is human greenhouse gas emissions. Five Times more station records were used than in previous analyses and a new statistical approach allowed Berkeley Earth to go about a hundred years farther back in time than previous studies allowing the team to conclude that the contribution of solar activity to global warming is negligible. Five scientific papers including the raw data are available [email protected] Elizabeth Mueller Co founder and executive director [00:27:30] of Berkeley Earth says that one of our goals at Berkeley Earth is complete transparency. We believe that everyone should be able to access raw climate data and do their own analysis. Mueller was a guest on spectrum and her interview is available on iTunes university 

Speaker 7:        science daily reports that UCLA researchers found that older adults who regularly used a brain fitness program played on the computer demonstrated significantly improved memory and language skills. The team studied 59 participants with an [00:28:00] average age of 84 recruited from local retirement communities in southern California. The volunteers were split into two groups. The first group you used the brain fitness program for an average of 73 and a half, 20 minute sessions across a six month period. Well a second group. You use it less than 45 times. During that same period, researchers found that the first group demonstrated significantly higher improvement in memory and language skills compared to the second group. The study's findings add to the field exploring whether such brain fitness tools may help improve language [00:28:30] in memory and may ultimately help protect individuals from the cognitive decline associated with aging and Alzheimer's disease. Age-Related memory decline affects approximately 40% of older adults and is characterized by self perception of memory loss and decline in memory performance. Previous studies have shown that engaging in mental activities can help improve memory. That little research has been done to determine whether the numerous brain fitness games or memory training programs on the market are effective. This is one of the first studies to assess the cognitive effects [00:29:00] of the computerized memory training program. 

Speaker 1:        [inaudible]

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 1:        [inaudible].

Speaker 2:        The music heard during the show is by Anna David from his album folk acoustic made available by a creative Commons license 3.0 attribution. [00:29:30] 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.at 

Speaker 1:        yahoo.com join us in two weeks at the same time. [inaudible].

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Maggie Koerth-Baker, the science editor for boingboing.net, discusses her book "Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before it Conquers Us" and talks about the past, present, and future of energy infrastructure. www.maggiekb.com/books

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. I'd like to thank past spectrum guests and director of the Bay Area Science Festival Kashara Hari for helping to coordinate this interview. We're speaking with Maggie, Chris Baker, science editor for the hugely [00:01:00] popular blog, [inaudible] dot net and the author of the recent book before the lights go out, conquering the energy crisis before it conquers us. Maggie, welcome to the spectrum. 

Speaker 1:        Thank you for having me. So why this book? This book came about because I'm married to a guy who actually works in the energy industry. My husband is an energy efficiency analyst, which means that he basically uses software algorithms to figure out how to make buildings as energy efficient as possible for the least amount of money. [00:01:30] And so when he got that job, he started coming home and talking to me a lot about how energy worked and how electricity worked. And it started to occur to me that there was this big disconnect between what the experts knew about our energy infrastructure and what everybody else, you know, not just lay people that government and business and you know, everybody actually has to make decisions about energy. What they knew, and there was all these details that were, you know, just basic information [00:02:00] to my husband to the point that he didn't even talk about them to people, but that void not basic information at all outside this niche. And so I really wanted to try to bridge that gap in education between the experts and everyone else. You cover 

Speaker 3:        both sort of energy infrastructure and energy generation in use as well as some of the environmental issues that are 

Speaker 1:        of concern to this. Yeah, I really wanted to have a book that kind of explains sort of a behind the scenes look at [00:02:30] w you know, where our electricity comes from and why it comes to us in the way that it comes to us and how this current infrastructure that we have affects what we can and can't do to solve our energy crisis problems over the next 30 or 40 years. People are familiar with gasoline in a way that they're not familiar with electricity. You know, I spill gas on my shoes on a monthly basis and it's right there at the pump every day. Electricity's different, you know, it's kind of has this [00:03:00] sort of feeling of like magical elves in the wall that make my lights turn on and I don't, I don't know what happens. It's a black box and that was really interesting to me is kind of going inside that black box and helping people understand what's going on behind is incredibly important part of their daily lives that they depend upon for everything. 

Speaker 1:        So what is going on and how do we get here? Yeah, so we have a really imperfect system. This is I think something that is hard for people [00:03:30] to understand sometimes that when we're talking about changing the energy system, we're not talking about going from something that works really well to something that's risky. We're talking about taking this thing that wasn't designed by anybody. It just evolved piecemeal, like a little patchwork quilt made up by 50 or 60 or 70 different quilters and trying to make it something that can work for the future. Right now we have a system that is surprisingly precarious. There are, you know, centers all over the u s where these people called grid controllers [00:04:00] have to manually balance electric supply and electric demand on a minute by minute basis, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You know that process have to be manual basically because we've never made it anything else. 

Speaker 1:        There are technologies. Some of the things that we talk about, we talk about smart grids that could make this more automated, but we've never bought those, so we just have these guys. It would also be a lot easier if we had more storage on our electric grid, but we don't really have any storage on our electric grid because [00:04:30] it's always been cheaper to just have these guys and that puts us at risk, not just in terms of how we integrate wind and solar onto our grid, but it also puts us at risk in terms of blackouts. There have been a lot of times, particularly as you get more extreme weather events where this old manual grid can't respond fast enough to changes that are happening and people lose power. I'm interested about the blackouts that have happened historically. [00:05:00] Did you find in your research that there lessons learned from all the blackouts that have happened? 

Speaker 1:        Some yes and some no. We have learned a lot more about interconnecting parts of the grid to kind of help people get past some of these blackouts. Up until the 1970s even a lot of our grids were just these completely separate islands where a town would be its own grid and another town would be its own grid and there'd be no connection between the two. But [00:05:30] there were a lot of rolling blackouts that happened because you had this constantly increasing electric demand that this small grid couldn't actually keep up with in terms of creating more generation. So one of the things that we found is that it made more sense to start connecting these things to one another and now we have this completely national system where places that don't have enough electricity can get it from somewhere else. And that's a really important thing. 

Speaker 1:        That's a important change that has happened and has made the system more reliable. [00:06:00] There are better things we could do with that interconnection. One of the things that would really help is to have a little bit more distributed generation. So you know, generation, instead of being on the scale of millions of homes being powered by one power plant, hundreds or thousands of homes being powered by one power plant, and those things can be scattered around in a lot more places and they can allow us to access natural resources like gas from landfills or hydroelectric power that we can't get to at [00:06:30] a really large scale right now. And would also then strengthen the system up. Because if you have your power coming from a lot of places, shutting down, one of them doesn't shut down power to millions of people. And that's a big deal. Kind of a resilience thing. 

Speaker 1:        Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Is there any reason I shouldn't just build a solar farm in my backyard? There's not a reason why you shouldn't build a solar farm in your backyard, but there is a good reason to think [00:07:00] that you're not going to supply all the energy you need for yourself. You know, this isn't, when I talk about de-centralization, I'm not talking about everybody going off the grid and everybody becoming, you know, their own self-sufficient farm basically. That's not a really realistic way to think about the world. I could make this great garden in my backyard, but my chances of feeding my entire family for a full year based only in what's in that garden are pretty slim, but at the same time, I might not like the choices that I have at the giant supermarket in the suburbs. [00:07:30] So this is where I kind of like to talk about decentralization as being a lot like a farmer's market. It's kind of somewhere in the middle. It's got enough diversity of choices that it's better than the really large scale that way, but it also still enables you to share resources among multiple people and make use of these shared networks of energy use and energy, a production that we really need to have a reliable system. You're not going to have [00:08:00] a reliable system. You're not going to have a 21st century system if you're trying to have everybody be off the grid. It just won't work. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 3:        you are listening to spectrum the science and technology show on k l x Berkeley. I'm Rick Karnofsky. Brad swift and I are interviewing Maggie. Chris Baker about our energy infrastructure 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 1:        [00:08:30] so how much energy do we produce and consume in this country? Here we used 98 quadrillion BTUs of energy in 2010 which is enough energy to take something decide is the great salt lake and boil it dry twice. So that's a lot of energy. It's, it's kind of hard to wrap your head around, it's just that massive. [00:09:00] But if you think about boiling away a lake, the size of the Great Salt Lake, twice in a year, you kind of get an idea of how much energy we're using and what's the trend of our energy usage. It generally goes up, it goes, it fluctuates a lot. We've had some dips in the past eight or nine, eight or seven years because of recession issues. But if you look at like the overall trend, what you see as it going up. So one of the things that would be really helpful is if we can kind [00:09:30] of find ways to stabilize energy use and not grow at this constant growth rate without having to be in a recession to do that. 

Speaker 1:        What are some of the surprising things you found when researching the book? One of the biggest surprises for me was that we don't have storage on the electric grid. I honestly thought just had not even ever considered that. That wasn't there until I found out that it wasn't, you know, batteries [00:10:00] are just such this huge part of our lives. They're in everything we use there in our cars. They're in laptops, they're, you know, just all over the place. It just made sense that there would be batteries on the grid and there really aren't not enough to actually make a difference. And that's because they're much bigger and much more expensive and we don't necessarily have battery technology worked out in a way that can make it cheap and make it big. And that's something that we really need a lot more r and D on. 

Speaker 1:        But [00:10:30] there are other ways to store energy and I just was really surprised to find out that we weren't using them. Can you give examples? One of the things is called compressed air energy storage, which is one of the most cost effective ways that we can store energy at a grid scale. And it basically involves how you bring electricity potentials from overnight when there's not a lot of demand for it into the day when there is on the great plains where get most of our wind power from wind [00:11:00] actually blows more at night in a lot of those places, but there's no demand for that electricity. So you just can't use it, which is a problem because we have, you know, these wind farms built and they're not getting us all of the power they could be giving us. So one of the things you can do is have your wind farm hooked up to an air compressor and at night when the wind is blowing and there's not demand, you use that wind power to power the air compressor, which pumps compressed air into porous rock underground. 

Speaker 1:        Basically use the earth as a giant battery [00:11:30] and then the next day you just run the system backwards and that compressed air comes out and helps to run a natural gas generator that produces electricity for far, far less energy than we'd otherwise need. So in addition to making our system smarter and putting storage on the grid, what other improvements can be made to the system? We need a lot more ways people to use energy efficiency better than we do today. There's a big difference between energy efficiency and conservation. [00:12:00] Conservation is great, but conservation is all about not doing something. Whereas energy efficiency is about finding ways to do it better. So you can get the services you need and want. You can get these things that make our lives clean and comfortable and convenient. But you can do that for less energy. And a lot of that has to do with making it easy for energy efficiency to happen. 

Speaker 1:        You do make the case that individual consumer contribution is great, but we do need to make these system level changes. How do we actually start to do that? [00:12:30] Yeah. So that's, that's a tough thing. One of the things that I've learned in the course of this research is that energy isn't just our choices. It's not just the sources we're using, it's the systems and the infrastructure that kind of control how we use energy. You know, I've been telling people that the average American uses twice as much energy as the average European, but that's not because they're better people than us. That's because they have infrastructures that allow them to do that without becoming energy experts or without agonizing over every single choice they make every day. And I think [00:13:00] a big part of it has to start with making the case for this. In terms of practicality. 

Speaker 1:        I think the places where I've seen that kind of top down infrastructure change happen, particularly the u s military or things where it started with the people who wanted to make individual changes, going to the people in charge and making a practical case for what benefits we're going to get if we make a couple of these changes and then those changes started influencing the way that everybody [00:13:30] else at the bottom of this chain of command thought about how they used energy and they became more aware of it in their lives and they became smarter about what they were doing. And then that led to pressure. That led to more changes at the top, which led to more cultural changes at the bottom. And you kind of get this nice feedback loop, but I think it has to start with what kind of pressures we put on our government, not just in terms of you need to do this because it's good for the environment, but here are these really good practical things we're going to get out [00:14:00] of making these changes. 

Speaker 1:        We're going to make our system more stable. We're going to make us better able to deal with weather, with terrorism, with all these different things that can affect the grid. And I think that that's a good place to start. How vulnerable is the grid to attack either physically or software wise? Software wise it's not very much right now. It will be more when we have a smart grid and I think this is something that worries people a lot and I think it's reasonable cause it's a reasonable risk, but we have [00:14:30] to kind of consider the balance between benefits and detriments. You know the analogy I ended up using in the book was my dad's typewriter from 1986 was a lot less vulnerable to cyber attack and identity theft than his internet enabled computer now. But I don't think he'd ever go back to that typewriter because their stuff he gets from that Internet enabled computer that he could never possibly get otherwise. And I think that we [00:15:00] need to be cautious in how we set things up. We need to be intelligent in how we set up our security systems and we need to know that we're not ever going to have anything set up perfectly and there's going to be failures, but that the benefits are going to outweigh the risks. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 1:        you're listening to spectrum on k a l ex Maggie. Chris Baker is discussing [00:15:30] her recent book before the lights go out. 

Speaker 1:        Do you think dynamic pricing of energy has any role? Definitely does. This is another one of those aspects of how you reduce demand and reduce the need to build new power plants has to do a lot with reducing those peak loads. When we build power plants, we don't just build power plants for the amount of energy that is used. Most of the time we have to [00:16:00] build power plants for the theoretical peak in energy that we might hit at any given point, which means we have a lot of power plants in the u s that aren't actually producing much electricity and it just kind of sitting in idle for most of the year because we need them in the middle of summer, in the afternoon. And if we can cut those peak loads down, that means that we don't have to have as many of those things. They don't have to be on, they don't have to be idling because idling is not a really efficient way to use those fuels. 

Speaker 1:        [00:16:30] So that's where the dynamic pricing thing comes in because right now if you are a business, you are charged for electricity in a really different way than individuals are. As a business, your electricity costs more when people want more of it and costs less when people want less of it so that you're kind of incentivized to not use electricity during that peak time. We don't charge people in residential areas like that and [00:17:00] I think that there could be a big benefit. It would take also implementing systems so people know what's going on because if you don't know that the cost changes throughout the day, there's really nothing you can do about it. But there's some really cool technologies, like a, an orb that sits on your table and changes color based on the price of electricity or you know what demand for electricity is like. And so you can look at that and know, well, the orb is red. 

Speaker 1:        I shouldn't run the dishwasher right now, and that's the kind [00:17:30] of thing that you need built in if you're going to make dynamic pricing work, don't to swap out all of your appliances. Right. Which is a nice thing. Also, one of the things I found interesting about the book is that you get a lot of evidence for climate change, but then you also say even if you don't believe in climate change, energy efficiency is still very important. Yeah. This is one of those things that I was really surprised by when I was doing the research was the idea that I don't have to convince people that climate change is real in order to convince them that we need energy change. This [00:18:00] is something people are willing to sign on for for a whole host of reasons. There was a really great story that ended up opening the book with where a nonprofit in Kansas was doing these focus groups to kind of find out what people thought about climate and energy and kind of get a good idea of, you know, how they would develop their programs. 

Speaker 1:        And they kept running over and over into these situations where you'd have some guy talking about how climate change is a socialist plot. It's going to destroy us all. And then you'd ask him, you know, [00:18:30] what are you doing about energy? And the same guy would have switched out all of his light bulb to cfls and he'd owned a Prius and he was excited about wind power because he was excited about those things for different reasons. To save a lot of money. He gets to save money, he gets to be part of this Apollo project, kind of USA, USA kind of thing. And you know, there's lots of different reasons why people care about this stuff. There are opportunities we're missing to communicate with people in their language, their cultural language instead [00:19:00] of trying to convince them to be part of our cultural language. And I think that's a mistake that we make a lot as you know, communicators of sustainability and of environmentalism is that we don't make a big enough effort to talk to people in different cultural languages. 

Speaker 3:        I would like to say I really like your footnotes in the book. They're not only like useful links that were, you know, I was able to fall on my kindle. I don't know how useful they are in the hard backwards. I don't know about that either. The uh, [00:19:30] just the stories that are hitting back there are, are absolutely fantastic. So what sort of motivated you to put all that in? 

Speaker 1:        Not being able to cut out great stories that didn't quite have a place in the main text. You know, there's just so many cool things that I learned that didn't quite fit with the narrative of the story and I needed a place to put them. And then I had all these footnotes and now there's like 50 pages of footnotes, but one like one of my favorites was the [00:20:00] story of Thomas Edison when he was developing the grid system in New York City, which was the first grid system in the world. And they had this faulty junction box under a street corner that when it rained and the ground got saturated that you had kind of an electric connection up to the street. And that ended up leading to everybody in New York crowded around the street corner watching horses and buggies go by and then the horses hitting this electrified patch of ground and like rearing [00:20:30] and freaking out and kind of got to the point apparently where people sort of like urging them on like, no, no, there's no problem here and bring your horse through. 

Speaker 1:        Um, and so they finally called down Edison's staff bowsers. Yeah, exactly. Basically giant joy buzzer. And they finally down Edison staff to get this thing fixed. And so they get it fixed and everything's fine. But then the next day, this used horse salesman shows up at Edison's office asking him to install an intentionally faulty junction box under [00:21:00] his used horse paddock to make the horses look more energetic than they actually are. And that's really where the story ends in the Edison archives. There's no record of whether or not he took the guy up on that offer. Has the way you use energy actually changed at all? Definitely. It's changed not because of the book. It changed when my husband got the job that he has. Uh, we've done a lot to make our house more energy efficient. We have a 1920s bungalow in Minneapolis that, you know, it's, [00:21:30] it's not going to be something where we can like reorient it on the site and make it save energy. 

Speaker 1:        But there's a lot of things that were already done because of how they used to design buildings that involved that, you know, we have a 40 foot wide lot and our house is not right in the middle of it. Our House is set so that the north side of our lot is extremely small. Like is basically the smallest setback you can possibly have while the south side of our lot is much wider. And that was done in old Minneapolis neighborhoods [00:22:00] specifically. So you got more light coming in during the winter and more warmth and we're able to capture some of that energy that you wouldn't be able to capture otherwise if your house didn't have that kind of setback. So, I mean there's a lot of that kind of stuff that was built into how our house was built. And we've since gone through and my husband has like an expanding foam addiction and took it through the entire house and basically patched up everything that could possibly be construed as a, uh, leak in the house. [00:22:30] So we're, we're held up now with our, uh, with stucco and expanding foam. Oh, make it bigger. Thanks for joining. Yes, thank you so much. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

Speaker 1:        Now for some science news headlines, here's Brad swift and Lisa Katovich 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

Speaker 4:        [00:23:00] The California condors returned to flying free in the wild after a close brush with extinction, maybe an illusory recovery. The hundred plus condors soaring over California swallow so much led shot as they scavenge carcasses that the population can't sustain itself without steady medical care and continual resupply from captive populations. Toxicologist Myra Finkelstein of UC Santa Cruz described analyses of lead [00:23:30] in blood and feathers in the June 25th proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Each year about 20% of the state's monitored birds flunk their lead tests badly enough to need detox. This grim paper supplies the data to confirm the toll of lead ammunition on condors in the wild, regional or species. Specific regulations do restrict ammunition in California and Arizona, the two states where condos live, but those rules don't seem to be solving the problem without a politically difficult nationwide ban [00:24:00] on lead ammunition. California condors will exist in the wild only due to costly extensive human intervention. Essentially in an outdoor zoo state 

Speaker 5:        science news reports that quantum information has leaped through the air about 100 kilometers in two new experiments further and with greater fidelity than ever before. The research brings truly long distance quantum communication networks in which satellites could beam encrypted information around the globe closer to reality. [00:24:30] Both studies involve quantum teleportation, which transports the quantum state of one particle to another. This star trek like feet is possible because of a phenomenon called entanglement in which pairs of particles become linked in such a way that measuring a certain property in one instantly determines the same property for the other, even if separated by large distances. In the first experiment, Anton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna and his colleagues used a pair of entangled photons [00:25:00] to transmit a piece of quantum information over 143 kilometers between two of the Canary Islands. In the second experiment, John Way Pawn of the University of Science and technology of China in Shanghai and his colleagues and tangled many protons together and teleported information 97 kilometers across the lake in China. These experiments are a milestone towards future satellite based quantum teleportation. 

Speaker 4:        In the July issue of [00:25:30] the Journal cell, researchers from Stanford University reported the world's first complete computer model of an organism, the bacteria, Mycoplasma genitalium, a humble parasitic bacterium known mainly for showing up uninvited in the human urogenital and respiratory tracks. Its distinction is that it contains the smallest genome of any free living organism, only 525 genes as opposed to the 4,288 genes of eco lie. [00:26:00] The final model made use of more than 1900 experimentally determined parameters to integrate these disparate data points into a unified machine. Researchers modeled individual biological processes at 28 separate modules each governed by its own algorithm. These modules communicated to each other after every step making for a unified whole that closely matched the bacteria as real world behavior models like this could bring rational design to biology, allowing for computer guided experimental regimes and wholesale [00:26:30] creation of new micro organisms. 

Speaker 3:        Irregular feature of spectrum is a calendar of science related events happening in the bay area over the next two weeks. Here's Lisa Katovich and Brad's swift, 

Speaker 4:        the coming century war against your computers. The title of the August long now foundation seminar, Tuesday, July 31st Cory Doctorow, the night Speaker contend set the war against computer freedom will just keep escalating. Copyright wars, net neutrality and stop [00:27:00] online piracy act. We're early samples of what's to come. Victories in those battles were temporary and conflict in the decades ahead. We'll feature even higher stakes, more convoluted issues, and far more powerful technology. The debate is how civilization decides to conduct itself and in whose interests. Cory Doctorow writes contemporary science fiction. Recent books include for the win makers and little brother. The seminar will be held Tuesday, July 31st seven 30 to 9:00 PM at the Yerba Buena Center, Novellus Theater [00:27:30] 700 Howard Street, San Francisco admission is $10 [inaudible] 

Speaker 5:        cosmos reconsidered. Alex Philapannco, UC Berkeley astronomy professor will present key video excerpts from Carl Sagans, legendary Cosmos Television series, offer uptodate commentary and invite audience questions. This event is presented by wonder fest and ask a scientist. The presentation will be held at the California Institute of Integral Studies. 1453 [00:28:00] mission street in San Francisco, July 31st 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM and mission is free. 

Speaker 4:        The Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft is nearing the end of its eight month voyage to Mars to deliver the newest Mars rover. August 5th there will be two events featuring live feeds of the attempt to land the rover called curiosity on the Martian surface at Ames research center in mountain view, a public gathering to view the landing will take place from five to midnight. For details go to the NASA Ames research [00:28:30] center site, nasa.gov/centers/ames this event is free. The Chabot science center in Oakland will also have a live feed from 6:00 PM to 11 o'clock along with other presentations about the mission and landing. These events are included in the general admission to the center 

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

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

Physicist Spencer Klein and Electrics Engineer Thorsten Stezelberger, both at Lawrenc Berkeley National Lab, describe the Neutrino Astronomical project IceCube, which was recently completed in Antarctica. They also go on to discuss proposed project Arianna.

Transcripts

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next [inaudible]. Welcome to spectrum [00:00:30] 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. I'm Brad Swift, the host of today's show, Rick Karnofsky and I interview Spencer Klein and Torsten Stessel Berger about the neutrino astronomy project. Ice Cube. Spencer Klein is a senior scientist and group leader at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. [00:01:00] He's a member of the ice cube research team and the Ariana planning group. Thorsten Stetso Berger is an electronics engineer at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. He too is part of the ice cube project and the Ariana team. They join us today to talk about the ice cube project and how it is helping to better define neutrinos. Spencer Klein and Thorsten setser Berger. Welcome to spectrum. 

Speaker 3:        Thank you. Thank you. Can you talk to us a little bit about neutrinos? [00:01:30] Well, neutrinos are subatomic particles which are notable because they barely interact at all. In fact, most of them can go through the earth without interacting. This makes them an interesting subject for astrophysics because you can use them to probe places like the interior of stars where otherwise nothing else can get out and are most of them neutrinos from those sources. There's a wide range of neutrino energies that are studied. Some of the lowest energy neutrinos are solar neutrinos which [00:02:00] come from the interior of our sun. As you move up to higher energies, they come from different sources. We think a lot of the more energetic ones come from supernovas, which is when stars explode, they will produce an initial burst of neutrinos of moderate energy and then over the next thousand years or so, they will produce higher energy neutrinos as ejected spans, producing a cloud filled with shock fronts and you're particularly interested in those high energy. 

Speaker 3:        Yes, ice cube is designed to study those neutrinos and also [00:02:30] neutrinos from even more energetic neutrinos where we don't really know where they come from. There are two theories. One is that they come from objects called active Galactic Nuclei. These are galaxies which have a super massive black hole at their center and they're rejecting a jet of particles perpendicular, more along their axis. And this jet is believed to also be a site to accelerate protons and other cosmic rays to very high energies. The other possible source of ultra energy neutrinos [00:03:00] are gamma ray bursts, which are when two black holes collide or a black hole collides with a neutron star. And if the neutrinos don't interact or interact so rarely and weekly with matter, how do we actually detect them? Well, the simple answer is you need a very large detector. Ice Cube is one cubic kilometer in volume and that's big enough that we think we should be able to detect neutrinos from these astrophysical sources. 

Speaker 3:        The other project we work on, Ariana is even bigger. It's [00:03:30] proposed, but it's proposed to have about a hundred cubic kilometers of volume. And so you have an enormous detector to detect a few events and once you detect them, how can you tell where they came from? Well, with ice cube we can get the incoming direction of the neutrinos to within about a degree. So what we do is we look for neutrinos. Most of what we see out of these background atmospheric neutrinos which are produced when cosmic rays interact in the earth's atmosphere. But on top [00:04:00] of that we look for a cluster of neutrinos coming from a specific direction. That would be a clear sign of a neutrino source, which would be, you know, and then we can look in that direction and see what interesting sources lie. That way we can also look for extremely energetic neutrinos which are unlikely to be these atmospheric neutrinos. 

Speaker 3:        And how is it that you measure that energy? What happens is a neutrino will come in and occasionally interact in the Antarctic. Ice should mention that ice cube is located at the South Pole where [00:04:30] there's 28 hundreds of meters of ice on top of the rock below. Occasionally in Neutrino will come in and interact in the ice and if it's something called a type of neutrino called the [inaudible] Neutrino, most of its energy will go into a subatomic particle called the Meuron. Meuron is interesting because it's electrically charged. As it goes through the ice, it will give off light, something we call Toronto radiation. So we've instrumented this cubic kilometer of ice with over 5,000 optical [00:05:00] modules, which are basically optical sensors. And so we record the amount and arrival times of the light at these optical sensors. And from that we can determine the neutrino direction to about within a degree. 

Speaker 3:        And we can also get an estimate of the energy. Um, essentially is the on is more energetic. It will also produce other electrically charged particles as it travels. Those will give off more light. And so the light output is proportional to the neutrino energy. So you're taking an advantage of the fact that there's [00:05:30] a lot of ice in Antarctica and also that it's very big. Are there other reasons to do it at the South Pole? Well, the other critical component about the ice is that it has to be very clear, shouldn't scatter light and it shouldn't absorb light. And in fact the light can travel up to 200 meters through the ice before being absorbed. This is important because that means we can have a relatively sparse array. You know, we have only 5,000 sensors spread over a cubic kilometer. That's only if the light can travel long distances through the ice. [00:06:00] And do you have to take into account that the ice in the Antarctic is not perfectly clean? Yes. When we reconstruct the neutrino directions, we use this sophisticated maximum likelihood fitter. Essentially we try all sorts of different Milan directions and see which one is the most likely. And that takes into account the optical properties of the ace and includes how they vary with depth. There are some dust layers in the ice where the absorption length is much shorter and some places, [00:06:30] well most of the ice where it's much better. 

Speaker 4:        Our guests on spectrum today are Spencer Klein and Thorsten Stetson Burger from Lawrence Berkeley national lab. They are part of a physics project named Ice Cube. In the next segment they talk about working at the South Pole. This is KALX Berkeley. 

Speaker 3:        Can you compare the two experiments, both ice Cuban on a little bit? Well, ice cube is designed [00:07:00] for sort of moderate energy neutrinos, but for the really energetic neutrinos are, they are rare enough so that a one cubic kilometer detector just isn't big enough. And so for that you need something bigger and it's hard to imagine how you could scale the optical techniques that ice cube uses to larger detectors. So that's why we looked for a new technique in it. Here I should say we, the royal, we either many people, many places in the world looking at different versions. And so what we've chosen is looking [00:07:30] for radio [inaudible] off the mission. You know, we have this interaction in the ice. Some of the time. If it's an electron Neutrino, it produces a compact shower of particles. That shower will have more negatively charged particles than positively charged. 

Speaker 3:        And so it will emit radio waves, you know, at frequencies up to about a Gigahertz coherently, which means that the radio emission strength depends on the square of the neutrino energies. So when you go to very high neutrino energies, this is a preferred technique. Radio waves can [00:08:00] travel between 300 meters and a kilometer in the ice, which means you can get by with a much sparser array. So you can instrument a hundred cubic kilometers with a reasonable number of detectors. When Ariane is developed, it will get to access higher energies. Will it still didn't detect some of the moderately high energies that ice cube is currently reaching? No, and there's no overlap because of the coherence and just not sensitive. I mean, ice cube will occasionally see these much higher energy neutrinos, [00:08:30] but it's just not big enough to see very many of them. Uh, you commented on, or you mentioned the size of the collaboration. 

Speaker 3:        Can you sort of speak about how big these projects are? Sure. Ice Cube has got about 250 scientists in it from the u s Europe, Barbados, Japan, and New Zealand. Oh yeah. And plus one person from Australia now. And that's a well established, you know, it's a large experiment. Arianna is just getting going. It's got, I'll say less than a dozen [00:09:00] people in it. Mostly from UC Irvine and some involvement from LDL. How many years have you had experience with your sensors in the field then? That's kind of a complicated question and that the idea of doing neutrino astronomy in the Antarctic ice has been around for more than 20 years. The first efforts to actually put sensors in the ice, we're in the early 1990s these used very simple sensors. We just had a photo multiplier tube, essentially a very sensitive [00:09:30] optical detector, and they sent their signals to the surface. There are no complicated electronics in the ice. 

Speaker 3:        The first Amanda effort in fact failed because the sensors were near the surface where the light was scattering very rapidly. Turns out the upper kilometer of ice is filled with little air bubbles, but then as you get down in depth, there's enough pressure to squeeze these bubbles out of existence. And so you go from very cloudy ice like what you see if you look in the center of an ice cube and then you go deeper [00:10:00] and you end up with this incredibly clear ice. So the first efforts were in this cloudy ice. Then in the second half of the 1990s Amanda was deployed in the deep highs. This is much smaller than ice cube in many respects. The predecessor, of course, the problem with Amanda was this transmission to the surface. It worked but it was very, very touchy and it wasn't something you could scale to the ice cube size. So one where people got together and came up with these digital optical modules where all of the digitizing electronics [00:10:30] is actually in the module. We also made a lot of other changes and improvements to come up with a detector that would be really robust and then we deployed the first ice cube string in 2005 and continued and then the last string was deployed at the end of 2010 

Speaker 5:        so basically from the scientific point or engineering point of view, we're learning about the detector. We got data from the first strain. It was not very useful for take neutrino science but you can learn to understand [00:11:00] the detector, learn how the electronics behaves, if there is a problem, change code to get different data. 

Speaker 3:        When we did see some new is in that run and there's this one beautiful event where we saw this [inaudible] from a neutrino just moving straight up the string. I think it hit 51 out of the 60 optical sensors. So we're basically tracking it for 800 meters. It was just a beautiful that 

Speaker 5:        what is the lifelight down there? The food, the day to day, [00:11:30] we've never been there in the winter time, so I can only talk about a summer and in the summer you're there for something specific like drilling or deploying a, so to summertime keeps you pretty busy and you do your stuff and then afterwards you hang out a little bit to wind down. And sometimes with some folks playing pool or ping pong or watching movies or just reading something and then time [00:12:00] again for the sleep or sleeping. And the next day for drawing for example, we had three shifts. And so that kept you pretty, pretty busy. One season when I was thrilling there I was on what we call the graveyard shift. Starting from 11 to I think eight in the morning. I saw and yeah, it was daylight. You don't notice it except you always get dinner for breakfast and scrambled eggs and potatoes for dinner. 

Speaker 3:        The new station at the South Pole is really very nice and I would [00:12:30] say quite comfortable, good recreational facilities. I mean, and I would say the food was excellent, really quite impressive and you get to hang out with a bunch of international scientists that are down there. How collegial isn't, it 

Speaker 5:        depends a little bit on the work. Like when I was rolling on night shift, we mostly got to hang out with people running the station. That was fairly collegial. 

Speaker 3:        There's actually not very many scientists at the South Pole. In the summer there were about 250 [00:13:00] people there and maybe 20 of them were scientists. Most of them were people dealing with logistics. These are people, you know, heavy equipment operators. Fuel Lees would get the fuel off of the plane, cooks people, and even then can building the station wasn't quite done yet. The drillers will lodge wide variety of occupations but not all that many scientists. How close are the experiments to the station? 

Speaker 5:        They are quite a few experiments [00:13:30] based in the station. Ice Cube is a kilometer away about probably 

Speaker 3:        Lamotta and a half to the, to the ice cube lab, which is where the surface electronics is located. 

Speaker 5:        So it's pretty close walking distance called walk. But it depends. I mean I don't mind the calls or it was a nice walk but they have like ice cube, uh, drilling. We are like lunch break also. It's [00:14:00] a little bit far to walk kilometer out or even throughout depending where you drill. So we had a car to drive back and forth to the station to eat lunch. Otherwise you are out for too long. 

Speaker 3:        Yeah, they give you a really good equipment and so it's amazing how plaza you can be about walking around when it's 40 below, outside. 

Speaker 5:        Especially if you do physical work outside as part of drilling also. It's amazing how much of that cold weather Ikea you actually take off because you just [00:14:30] do staff and you warm up. 

Speaker 4:        [inaudible] you are listening to spectrum on KALX Berkeley coming up, our guests, Spencer Klein and Torsten Stotzel Burger detail, the ice cube data analysis process, 

Speaker 3:        the ongoing maintenance of Ice Cube Sarah Plan for its lifetime 

Speaker 5:        for the stuff [00:15:00] in the eyes, it's really hard to replace that. You cannot easily drill down and take them out. They are plans, uh, to keep the surface electronics, especially the computers update them as lower power hardware becomes available. Otherwise I'm not aware of preventive maintenance. You could do with like on a car. Yeah. 

Speaker 3:        I have to say the engineers did a great job on ice cube. About 98% of the optical modules are working. Most of the failures were infant [00:15:30] mortality. They did not survive the deployment when we've only had a handful of optical modules fail after deployment and all the evidence is we'll be able to keep running it as long as it's interesting. And is there a point in which it's no longer interesting in terms of how many sensors are still active? I think we'll reach the point where the data is less interesting before we run out of sensors now. Okay. You know, we might be losing one or two sensors a year. In fact, we're still at the point where [00:16:00] due to various software improvements, including in the firmware and the optical modules, each year's run has more sensors than the previous years. Even if we only had 90% of them working, that would be plenty. 

Speaker 3:        And you know, that's probably a hundred years from now. What do we have guests on to speak about the LHC at certain they were talking about the gigantic amounts of data that they generate and how surprisingly long it takes for scientists to analyze that data to actually get a hold [00:16:30] of data from the detector. And you're generating very large amounts of data. And furthermore, it's in Antarctica. So how much turnaround time is there? Well, the Antarctica doesn't add very much time. We typically get data in the north within a few days or a week after it's taken. There is a bit of a lag and try and take this time to understand how to analyze the data. For example, now we're working on, for the most part, the data that was taken in 2010 and [00:17:00] you know, hope to have that out soon probably for summer conferences. But understanding how to best analyze the data is not trivial. For example, this measurement of the mule on energies, very dependent on a lot of assumptions about the ice and so we have ways to do it now, but we're far from the optimal method 

Speaker 5:        and keep in mind that detector built, it's just finished. So before you always added in a little bit more. So each year the data looked different because you've got more sensors in the data. 

Speaker 3:        [00:17:30] Let's say for things where turnaround is important. For example, dimension, these gamma ray bursts, there's where this happens when a bunch of satellites see a burst of x-rays or gamma rays coming from somewhere in the sky. They can tell us when it happened and give us an estimate of the direction. We can have an and I would say not quite real time, but you know that we could have turned around if a couple of weeks. We also measure the rates in each of the detectors. This is the way to look for low energy neutrinos from a [00:18:00] supernova that is essentially done in real time. If the detector sees an increase, then somebody will get an email alert essentially immediately. If we got one that looked like a Supernova, we could turn that around very quickly. So are the algorithms that you're using for this longer term analysis improving? 

Speaker 3:        Yes. They're much more sophisticated than they were two years ago. I'd say we're gradually approaching and I'm ask some Todrick set of algorithm, but we're still quite a ways [00:18:30] to go. We're still learning a lot of things. You know, this is very different from any other experiment that's been done. Normally experiments if the LHC, if they are tracking a charged particle, they measure points along the track. In our case, the light is admitted at the trend off angle. About 41 degrees. So the data points we see are anywhere from a few meters to a hundred meters from the track. And because of the scattering of light, it's a not so obvious how to find [00:19:00] the optimum track and it's, you know, it's very dependent on a lot of assumptions and we're still working on that. And we have methods that work well. As I said, you know, we can get an angular resolution of better than a degree in some cases, but there's still probably some room to be gotten there. 

Speaker 5:        And then also, I mean I'm not involved in the science, but I hear people have new ideas how to look at a data. So that's still evolving too. 

Speaker 3:        Yeah. Like you know, one analysis that people are working on, but we don't have yet would [00:19:30] be a speculative search where you're looking for a pair of event, a pair of neo-cons going upward through the detector in the same direction at the same time, which would quite possibly be a signal of some sort of new physics. And it's certainly an interesting typology to look for, but we're not there yet. And are there different teams looking at the same data to try to find different results and broaden the search so to speak? Uh, yes. We have seven or eight different physics working [00:20:00] groups in each of those groups is concentrating on a different type of physics or a different class of physics. For example, one group is looking for point sources, you know, hotspots in the sky. Second Group is looking at atmospheric and diffuse neutrinos trying to measure the energy spectrum of the neutrinos. 

Speaker 3:        We do see both the atmospheric and also looking for an additional component. There's a group doing cosmic ray physics. There's a group looking for exotic physics. These are things like these pairs [00:20:30] of upward going particles. Also looking for other oddities such as magnetic monopoles. There's a group that's looking for neutrinos that might be produced from weakly interacting. Massive particles, IAA, dark matter, but there's a group that's monitoring the rates of the detector. This scalers looking for Supernova and oh, there's also a group looking for talented Trinos, which is the this very distinctive topology town. Neutrinos are sort of the third flavor of neutrinos and those are [00:21:00] mostly only produced by extraterrestrial sources and they look very distinctively. You would look for case where you see two clusters of energy and the detector separated by a few hundred meters. 

Speaker 5:        Looking at what's next, what would be the sort of ideal laboratory? If you want something that's very big, obviously Antarctica is a great challenge. Can you do neutrino detection in space for instance? [inaudible] 

Speaker 3:        hmm, that's an interesting question. There are people who [00:21:30] are talking about that and the main application is trying to look for these cosmic gray air showers. The best experiments to study high energy, cosmic gray air showers are these things called air shower arrays, which are an array of detectors. Um, the largest one is something called the OJ Observatory in Argentina. It covers about 3000 square kilometers with an array of detectors on kind of a one and a half kilometer grid. And that's about as largest surface detector as you could imagine. Building the alternative [00:22:00] technology is look for something called air fluorescents. When the showers go through the air, they light it up. Particularly the nitrogen is excited and in that kind of like a fluorescent tube. So you see this burst of light as the shower travels through the atmosphere. O J in addition to the surface detectors has these cameras called flies eyes that look for this fluorescence, but it's limited in scale. And people have proposed building experiments that would sit on satellites or a space station [00:22:30] and look down and look at these showers from above. They could cover a much larger area. They could also look for showers from upward going particles, I. E. Neutrino interactions. But at this point that's all pretty speculative. 

Speaker 5:        And when's your next trip to Antarctica? Uh, that's all depending on funding. I would like to go again and hopefully soon. I think I'm cautiously optimistic. We'll be able to go again this year. Hmm. Spencer in Thorsten. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. Thank you. 

Speaker 4:        [00:23:00] [inaudible] regular feature of spectrum is to mention a few of the science and technology events that are happening locally over the next few weeks. Lisa Katovich joins me for that 

Speaker 6:        calendar. The August general meeting of the East Bay Astronomical Society is Saturday, July 14th at the Chabot space and science centers, Dellums [00:23:30] building 10,000 Skyline Boulevard in Oakland. Ezra Bahrani is the evening Speaker. The title of his talk is UFOs, the proof, the physics and why they're here. The meeting starts at 7:30 PM 

Speaker 2:        join Nobel laureates and social and environmental justice advocates at the towns and Tay Gore third annual seminar for Science and technology on behalf of the peoples of Bengali and the Himalayan basins, the subject, the global water crisis [00:24:00] prevention and solution. Saturday, July 21st 1:30 PM to 7:30 PM the event is jointly sponsored by UC Berkeley's department of Public Health and the international institute of the Bengali and Himalayan basins. Guest Speakers include three Nobel laureates, Charles h towns, Burton Richter and Douglas Ashur off. Also presenting our Francis towns advocate for social justice, Dr. Rush, Gosh [00:24:30] and Sterling Brunel. The event will be held in one 45 Dwinelle hall on the UC Berkeley campus. That's Saturday, July 21st 1:30 PM to 7:30 PM for more details, contact the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, 

Speaker 6:        the next science at cal lectures on July 21st the talk will be given by Dr Jeffrey Silverman and it's entitled exploding stars, Dark Energy, and the runaway universe. Dr Silverman has been a guest [00:25:00] on spectrum. His research has been in the study of Super Novi. His lecture will focus on how the study of supernovae led to the recent discovery that the universe is expanding, likely due to a repulsive and mysterious dark energy. It was these observations that were recently awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics. The lecture is July 21st at 11:00 AM and the genetics and plant biology building room 100 

Speaker 2:        next to news stories. 

Speaker 6:        3000 species [00:25:30] of mosquitoes are responsible for malaria, dengue, a fever, yellow fever, West Nile virus, and cephalitis and many more diseases. In Burkina Faso alone, residents can expect 200 bytes a day. Rapid resistance to pesticides on the part of malaria mosquitoes has prompted researchers all over the globe to deploy novel strategies against this and other diseases. Targeting Dengue. A fever has an advantage over malaria as only one species. Eighties [00:26:00] Egypt die is responsible for spreading it versus the 20 species responsible for spreading malaria. A British biotechnology company called Oxitec has developed a method to modify the genetic structure of the male eighties Aegypti mosquito transforming it into a mutant capable of destroying its own species. In 2010 they announced impressive preliminary results of the first known test of 3 million free flying transgenic mosquitoes engineered [00:26:30] to start a population crash after infiltrating wild disease spreading eighties a Gyp dye swarms on Cayman Island. 

Speaker 6:        Oxitec has recently applied to the FDA for approval of its mosquito in the u s with Key West under consideration as a future test site in 2009 key west suffered its first dengate outbreak in 73 years. Australian researchers are testing and mosquito intended to fight dengue, a fever bypassing the disruptive Wolbachia bacteria to other mosquitoes, a very [00:27:00] different approach than transgenic genes funded largely by the bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The project has shown that the Wolbachia strain not only shortens the life of a mosquito, but also reduces the amount of virus it develops. Releases in Queensland, Australia last year showed that Wolbachia could spread through a wild population quickly and future test sites are under consideration. In Vietnam. 

Speaker 2:        The UC Berkeley News Center reports a prototype network being installed by chemists at the University of California. Berkeley [00:27:30] will employ 40 sensors spread over a 27 square mile grid. The information the network will provide could be used to monitor local carbon dioxide emissions to check on the effectiveness of carbon reduction strategies now mandated by the state, but hard to verify built and installed by project leader Professor Ron Cohen and graduate student Virginia Tighe and their lab colleagues. The shoe box size sensors will continuously measure carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, [00:28:00] nitrogen dioxide, and ozone levels as well as temperature, pressure and humidity streaming. The information live to the web through the site. beacon.berkeley.edu the sensor network dubbed Beacon stretches from the East Bay regional parks on the east to interstate eight 80 on the west from El Surrito on the north nearly to San Leandro on the south encompassing open space as well as heavily traffic areas. [00:28:30] Most of the sensors are being mounted on the roofs of local schools in order to get students interested in the connection between carbon dioxide emissions and climate change. The UC Berkeley researchers work with Oakland's Chabot space and science center to create middle school and high school activities using live sensor data stream through the web as part of the students energy and climate science curriculum. The beacon network is a pilot program funded by the National Science Foundation to determine what information can be learned [00:29:00] from a densely spaced network 

Speaker 1:        [inaudible].

Speaker 2:        The music heard during the show is from most done at David's album, folk and acoustics made available through a creative Commons license 3.0 attribution. 

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 [00:29:30] is spectrum dot [email protected] join us in two weeks at this same time. [inaudible].

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Lisa Randall is a theoretical physicist, expert on particle physics and cosmology who was a visiting Miller Professor at UC Berkeley in 2011-2012. Author of two books “Warped Passages” and “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,” she is currently Professor at Harvard University.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next 

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

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

Speaker 3:        Good afternoon. I'm Rick Karnofsky. Brad swift and I are interviewing Lisa Randall, the author of the recent popular physics book, knocking on Heaven's door, how physics and scientific thinking aluminate the universe and the modern world. She's a visiting Miller professor [00:01:00] in the Physics Department here at cal and our first postdoc was also here as a president's fellow. She is currently a frank be buried junior professor of science at Harvard University and previously wrote the book worked passages and also the Libretto for Hector Perez, hyper music prologue. Lisa Randall, welcome to spectrum. In your book, you talk a lot about the large hadron collider at cern. Can you talk to us more about that? 

Speaker 4:        So I'm very interested in what's happening at the large Hadron Collider, but I'm also quite interested in just [00:01:30] what it means to do science. After I wrote my first book were passages. A lot of people showed that even when they were interested in science, there were some confusions about just how science advances and how science works in practice. And you know, people think of it as this very definite thing with definite announcers. But right now, and we see this right now with the large hedge on clutter and the Hicks herd, you know, it's messy in the beginning. We don't know the answers and it's important to understand the role of uncertainty, the role of scale and sort of building ideas on top of each other. Having said that, I'll tell you a little bit [00:02:00] about um, surgeon and the large Hadron collider. As a theorist, I'm not actively working on experiments. 

Speaker 4:        What I do is I suggest what that can look for us, such as exotic ideas, like extra dimensions of space or versions of supersymmetry. But we also tell them how to go about doing the experiments to some extent, or at least discussed that and tried to interpret what they find. But what the large Hadron collider is, it's a giant underground being 27 kilometers in circumference. It collides together hydrogens, which are pro protons, which are our form of Hadrons, and it's doing it at high [00:02:30] energy, the highest energy ever achieved in such collisions. And the goal is via equals MC squared to create particles that have never been made before because they're too heavy. You need high energy to make heavier particles. And in looking at these particles, we want to understand what underlies the structure of the standard model. What is it that gives particles, their math, what is it explains the values of these masses. So it's a long story. That's why there's a whole book, but there's a lot of interesting stuff in it. Have you been to cern to see the itself [00:03:00] officially? I'm a visiting professor there, although I don't have much time to spend there. It was actually really fun. The first time I visited it, it was much more excited than I thought. You know, I'd seen other experiments before, but um, it's just bigger and the magnitude and the people involved are so impressive. 

Speaker 5:        Uh, what's the motivation for pushing to other link scales to improving our models of the universe? 

Speaker 4:        That's a great question. And part of it is it's just intrinsically interesting. When people discovered the elements of an Adam, they didn't just find a nucleus and electron, which of course [00:03:30] is very interesting in itself, but they found eventually quantum mechanics. We found the underlying physical law. It's quite different than what we had anticipated. So we're not just looking for new stuff, new particles. We're really looking for the underlying physical structure to understand more deeply what's going on. Of course, that doesn't mean that the standard model is wrong, but it could be that it's not the most basic understanding of particle physics and that could be something deeper and richer that underlies it. So that's part of the goal is I [00:04:00] think that people are just interested in what's there. But also by pushing technology, by pushing scientific thought to the limits, there's all sorts of subsidiary benefits in terms of an educated populace in terms of people being interested and excited and just knowing more about the world. 

Speaker 5:        We know from just pitting data that adding extra parameters will often lead to a better fits. Is there some justification beyond that for wanting these simple low parameter models? 

Speaker 4:        We're trying to get a deeper understanding of connections among things. We're not just trying to enumerate them, list [00:04:30] them. We'd like to say that if I measured this quantity, I can predict that one. So the standard model in some sense has very few parameters in terms of there's only three forces plus gravity, these strong, weak and electromagnetic force. And with those parameters you can predict an enormous number of different processes. So it is true that you can of course add from, but you don't necessarily gain understanding by doing that. What we're trying to do is really gain some deeper understanding about the connections, the underlying physical [00:05:00] laws, and it takes a while before we know that we've achieved that. 

Speaker 5:        I'd also like to sort of touch on testability of different models. So in both war passages and the knocking on heaven story, you talk about your own work with extra dimensional space. 

Speaker 4:        The dimensions of course are just sort of the stage. They're the setting and so, um, in fact, we don't, we generally only think about having one additional dimension other than the three we know about left right forward, backward, up, down. The idea is that there could be an extra dimension. Put My collaborator Robin Syndrome and I were interested in this extra dimension for a couple of reasons. [00:05:30] One is just to understand abstractly what's going on. We had actually set out to explore, but we found accidentally you could have even an infinite extra dimension that has no visible consequences. In other words, something as dramatic as an infinite to mention could be untestable. The other side of the coin though is that there is a version of the series where it actually explains why particle messes are what they are. We're answers something we call the hierarchy problem, which can be interpreted as why gravity is so weak compared to the other fundamental forces. 

Speaker 4:        Gravity [00:06:00] might not seem that weak because after all, we have the entire earth acting on us, but from the point of view of fundamental particles, gravity is extraordinarily weak. And by having an extra dimension, we can hope to explain that in the sense that we found a, what we called a warp to extra dimension, and gravity is strong elsewhere, but very weak where we are at various exponentially quickly as you'd go out in another dimension. Now, what's amazing about that is that like any theory that explains this question of the weakness of gravity and why masses are what they are, it leads to testable predictions [00:06:30] and that's what we're quite excited about at the large Hadron collider. It's looking not only for the Higgs Boson, I don't we can come back to that has to do with how particles acquire their mass, but it's also looking for the theory that explains why these masses are what they are, and that leads to testable consequences at about the energies at the large Hadron collider studies. We could be unlucky and it could be a little bit heavier or we could be lucky and it could be right in range. 

Speaker 6:        [inaudible] you're listening to spectrum on k a [00:07:00] l x Berkeley. We're talking with Lisa Randall, theoretical particle physicist about her new book knocking on Heaven's door. 

Speaker 4:        In terms of new tools. Are there things like simulation that you would see value in, in fact of these experiments run in conjunction with simulation? The thing is you can only simulate accurately what you've, what you know about. They certainly simulate what would be the consequences [00:07:30] if some of these ideas were correct, such as extra dimensions or supersymmetry. But then there's no alternative to going out and seeing whether they're actually realized in nature. And can you give us some examples about what we expect to see just besides observations of subatomic particles at a particular mass energy window? Well, actually what we expect to see exacerbations of subatomic particles headed mass energy window, but they're particles with very special properties. And that's part of the art of the kind of, uh, both theory and experiment is to really see what are those [00:08:00] special properties in general, you know, your clients have the protons, protons are in some sense messy objects. 

Speaker 4:        They have things inside corks, cal together by glue, ones that communicate the strong nuclear force. And so when you collide them together, you get a lot of junk that comes out. And what you have to do is distinguish something new, something we haven't seen before, a particle with different properties from the mess of stuff that comes out of the standard model. So for example, if this warped extra dimensional idea is correct and indeed explains the weakness of gravity particles, like [00:08:30] the ones we know about, they have similar properties in the sense of they interact in similar ways, but they're heavier, they're heavier because it's a reflection of the fact that they have momentum in another dimension because we don't see that dimension directly. We interpret that as additional math. So you would look for particles that have very particular properties related to the ones we know about, but they're heavier. So that would be one example. And because they had these very particular properties, you can it and say this is in fact a Calusa client particle. There's another version of potential [00:09:00] solution called super symmetry. And in that case, for every particle we know about, there's an associated particle that's again heavier but would have the same charges. And related interactions. So again, we have a very definite idea of what these particles should look like. And so there are very definite search strategies 

Speaker 5:        on sort of link scales. You look at not only subatomic particles but dark energy and dark matter which are associated with cosmology, which you also hope to observe at the LHC or are there other experiments that might test theories about that? 

Speaker 4:        So we have to be clear here on the large [00:09:30] Hadron collider is primarily designed to do particle physics and answer these questions about mass that we keep alluding to. However, there is a possibility that he could also shed light on dark matter. So first of all, dark matter, it's actual matter. It's actual stuff that clumps just like the matter we know about, but it doesn't interact with light. It's really transparent matter. Now dark energy on the other hand is a whole other beast. It's not particles, it doesn't clump. It does. It spreads out throughout the universe. So the large Hadron collider won't shed light on dark energy. However, there [00:10:00] is a chance it could shed light on dark matter. And the reason for that is what could be just a coincidence or it could be some deep underlying clue which is that if a particle is stable and neutral, the states did not interact with light and has the kind of mass that can be produced at the large Hadron collider. 

Speaker 4:        If it has those properties and you just trace its cosmological evolution, what's happened to it since the beginning of time because it's heavy, there's not that much left of it today. It turns out to have just about the right amount to account for [00:10:30] the measured value of the dark matter measured through its gravitational effects which makes many people think that there is a chance to produce and find out about dark matter at the large Hadron collider. Of course, because it interacts so weekly, it's a very indirect thing. You'd have to produce something else that then could decay into it or produce it. Having said that, there are also a lot of very exciting experiments, J and talk a little bit about them looking much more directly for dark matter. Really looking for it either because it annihilates in the sky and they can see what comes out of it or dark matter actually [00:11:00] leaves a signal in some big underground vat of stuff. And so it recoils and you see a little bit of evidence there. So there are many more directed experiments for dark matter. 

Speaker 5:        So you're both a practicing theoretical physicist in both popularized and communicate science and physics through books or through parents is like this. How does this sort of science outreach or advocacy sort of feed into your own research and vice versa. 

Speaker 4:        But, and in terms of actual research on the whole, it means that I just have less time to try. I'm afraid, [00:11:30] but, but what I do do it, it's very directed and, and I do feel like if I'm doing stuff, it should be interesting and important. So I've managed to um, also do some very interesting research and I have to say after doing a lot of book talks in the fall, I was quite happy to visit surgeon and just get back to research too. Do you think all scientists should have the same sort of ability to communicate with the public? Absolutely not. I think, I mean, I, you know, and I a self to never thought I would do this kind of thing. Actually when I started out it was only after I, you know, I basically, I wrote some papers that really became like the most cited [00:12:00] papers around and I just thought, you know, people who really want to understand science, they should have access to it. 

Speaker 4:        You know, there's some very general broad books and there's very specific, but I thought, you know, I'd like to do something where you sort of really tell the full story of really how science is really happening. And I didn't know I would do a second book, but like I said, I'm sort of inspired a little bit by just wanting to explain really the nature of science in a way that would get rid of some of the silly arguments that you sometimes see in the newspaper or whatever I did. Just to really understand how it works. How much do you think the general public should know about [00:12:30] science? More than I do. I don't know. Um, I don't think they have to know about everything going on at the [inaudible] client or unless they want to. I think that what I'm doing is providing access to that detailed information, but I do think that they should understand just the nature of scientific thinking, what, you know, very broad brush, statistical thought, what it means to be right and wrong, how theories build on each other and what it means to have an approximation and to understand that science really involves that sort of middle ground. 

Speaker 4:        I think also, [00:13:00] you know, to understand risk better and to understand what goes into, um, the ways we think about risks so people are more prepared to deal with it, what it is that allows us to put new ideas together, both in science and, and in art. So I think all of these things are, we're just, we've just would have more interesting discussions and more productive discussions if people were more aware of, you know, sort of basic mathematics and basic statistical thought. Can you talk about your imagination for us a bit. It's very hard to talk about [00:13:30] one's imagination. I will say that what I, one thing I like about scientists, it's sort of constrained creativity. You sort of have definite problems to focus on where you have a world of ideas to think about, but you have these very definite problems and so definite marks of progress when you've connected various things that seems to totally disparate or find some underlying connections. And especially if you can do it in a way that can be tested and eventually tested correctly. 

Speaker 6:        It's a spectrum on k eight LX Brooklyn. [00:14:00] We're talking with Lisa Randall, theoretical physicist coming up. She talks about the intersection of art and science [inaudible] 

Speaker 4:        so your latest book, a mix, several musical illusions including the title of course. Uh, and you wrote the Libretto too. Do you yourself have a strong interest in music? It's a little embarrassing. I think where my major interests in music is that lyrics stick in my head whether I want them to or not. So I think I actually, I come in [00:14:30] probably more from a work point of view. The word stick in my head, although tunes they stick it in my head with tunes and sometimes, but right in Libretto, um, was I was just a lucky opportunity. In fact, it was so different from anything I'd thought about. Um, you know, I just finished writing war passages, which was a book where it tried to tie together really 20th century physics thought and really build up to where we are today in terms of particle string theory and the ideas I've worked on about extra dimensions of space. 

Speaker 4:        And it was really a challenge to put it all into a linear order. And then, um, you know, I hadn't [00:15:00] many sort of writers and artists contact me, but the composer Hetero Pero just had this really interesting idea. The idea was to really put physics into the opera in a way that they don't usually do. You know, you'll have movies or books or whatever about artists or writers, but you never actually see them doing what they do. So the, it was kind of interesting idea to have actual physics and she was actually a physicist and a composer. One of the protagonists. I like the idea of sort of the unifying theme of sort of what drives discovery, what drives creative thought, both for artists [00:15:30] and for scientists. And so having the, having an extra dimension of space seemed like a really nice metaphor for that once. 

Speaker 4:        And it was wonderful to work with Hector because, you know, I'd never done something like this so we could work together. He could tell me the kinds of things he needed or wanted. We had Matthew Ritchie, the artists come on board to do the set. So it was just an at a premiere at the Pompidou Center. So how good is that? So, so it was just a brilliant opportunity. So, so yes, I do like music, but probably, um, this is a lot of people around who are far more expert than I am. Well, you know, I also co [00:16:00] curated an art exhibit, um, on the theme of scale. Obviously it was something I was thinking about a lot. Brian's buck. And we had artists who sort of reflected on scale both the way artists do, but also the way scientists do. The idea was sort of not to just have art representing science, but to take a theme that both artists and scientists think about a lot and see if they could work with that and so have physics or biology feed into it if they wanted to, but it didn't have to. 

Speaker 4:        So a couple of pieces scientifically related, but mostly it was abstract art and it was great. I do think I, in fact, I was just on a panel discussion, um, [00:16:30] the last couple of days, um, from the Radcliffe Institute talking about science and art in the crossroads. And it's just, it's a very exciting time for that. There's some good, good art coming out of it and there's some bad art coming out of it, but it's a time where we're sort of thinking what it means. And I think for different people it means different things. I mean, for me, because the science I do is so abstract, I find it nice way to communicate, to sort of introduce people to ideas. And in fact, we saw that even with the people at the Pompidou Center who at first were very skeptical of this American physicist writing a Libretto [00:17:00] for their opera, but then really came to embrace the project and was so excited about the idea of physics itself and also representing physics in this opera. 

Speaker 4:        Your most recent book actually talks quite a bit about religion. Science and religion are sort of often pitted against one another. Can you talk about that a bit? Um, I thought it was important. I didn't want to extensively dwell on that. It wasn't a book about that, but I thought I would discuss two of the ideas that have had struck me as important. One was really sort of where, where do, where does scientific and religious thought really diverged so that we can actually have a productive [00:17:30] conversation about it and the other, so there were two chapters. One was about that essentially, and one was about why do we care? Why is this issue considered so important? For the first issue it had to do is I think a lot of people will sort of say I'm spiritual, but I like science. But the question is what does that mean? 

Speaker 4:        What does it mean to be spiritual? And so just to really define what a scientific way of thinking is in terms of if you believe spirituality has to do with a way of thinking about the world. Science would say, well the way of thinking about the world is rooted in some sort of physical [00:18:00] substrate. And so if that's true, does that mean that's petroleum is affecting individual neurons? How, how exactly is that working? So trust to sort of isolate what the difference is in terms of how you would approach the problem, what it is you're thinking about. And I do think that there are very different ways of at a fundamental level of thinking about it, of course, as a social or psychological phenomenon that's entirely different story. And of course any kind of spirituality, religion can play a big role for people, but that's not the same as actually understanding how things work. 

Speaker 4:        And understanding [00:18:30] either how you make your decisions or how planets move or anything, so I thought it was just important to get that. To me to be clear about that in terms of why we care, I think it really is sort of where people feel more in control. Do you think that science is helping us control our environment and giving us breakthroughs that allows us to have a better world or do you think that you'd rather see some higher authority takeover? I like to think that we have the ability to understand more and be able to move forward. Sometimes scientists [00:19:00] are seen as very egotistical because they think they can figure things out for themselves, but actually scientists are questioning their, they're trying to understand things they're not taking for granted that we, that we know the answers and I think that's a wonderful way to approach the world. 

Speaker 6:        You are tuned to k a l x Berkley. The show is spectrum. Our guest is Lisa rambled, theoretical particle physicist and often in the coming segments she talks about scientific outreach. 

Speaker 4:        [00:19:30] We as scientists sometimes succumb to marketing. I mean the hangs flows on is nicknamed the God particle by some. Um, do you think that this hurts us or helps us? Uh, I, in fact I say we shouldn't take the name of the Higgs Boson in vain. And so I don't, I mean I think there is marketing and it happens. It's different because we're talking to different people. We tend to say we're talking to the public, but the public or different people, I mean, some people will already be interested in science and want to know what's really going on. There are other people who like [00:20:00] the people at the Pompidou Center who'd never heard a strength or you'd never heard of extra dimensions. And this was a way of introducing them to the idea. And for those people, maybe it's not so bad to say that God particles catch someone's eye and then, and then actually tell them what's really going on. 

Speaker 4:        And what was really interesting, um, when, when they had some evidence for the Higgs Boson back in December, I was asked to write a piece for Newsweek and they were like, well, of course you'll tell us how this changes the world. And I said, well, it's not really changing the world. Like, well why is everyone so interested as I was like, I don't know. So it became kind of an article about the fact that people are interested [00:20:30] even though it doesn't necessarily directly change the world. And I think there is a level that once people start thinking about it, it becomes intrinsically interesting and it's after all, if you think about the things that people get fascinated by, um, it doesn't, it doesn't have to change the world. It can be something that just captures our interest and certainly understanding the world at a deeper level falls into that category. 

Speaker 4:        Do you think science funding in this country is diminishing or stable, especially for big projects? No, I think it's a good question. And I think we're at a, at a critical juncture where we do seem [00:21:00] to be in danger of losing that. And I think that actually isn't as much a question of just interest, but which sort of short term versus longterm thinking. You know, to the extent that science funding is increasing, it's more for short term projects. Let's try to solve this problem. And often that's not the way big science advances or there are major scientific advances. Sometimes you just have to jump in the water and just hope that things will happen. And not just blindly. I mean, you go into the deep end, you go in the right part and you know what, you know what you're looking for. [00:21:30] But a lot of scientific discoveries had consequences. 

Speaker 4:        No one anticipated. I mean, we're just talking about lunch. Even when the electron was discovered, they were like, well, that's useless. Um, you know, it's, it's, people don't know what's gonna come out of it, but major things come out of it. And certainly, um, having attention to science has, has never failed in the past. I mean, there's no society that's paid a lot of attention to science that has failed because of it. It's easy to sort of point to the technological innovations who's benefiting to the general public and telling them they want science that way. But how do you sort [00:22:00] of tie that to the question of how much science should be funded and especially which scientific projects should be funded? That's a very specific question that one would have to do on a case by case basis. I think that the kind of physics I do, it's deep fundamental physics. 

Speaker 4:        It can only be done experimentally by these sorts of big projects and so it's just one direction to go in. I think there's a lot of attempt in just sort of smaller projects and those will have, could have important consequences, but it's very easy to overstate because especially things that are biological, they seem so directly [00:22:30] related to human beings. But you know, it's crazy. I mean quantum mechanics, it's couldn't seem more abstract than that, but the electronics where evolution came out of that through semiconductors and that of course has greatly affected our lives. So it isn't something where it's very, and I actually talk about cost benefit analysis and in applied to science or applied more generally. You know, we really want to be able to pin numbers and to pin probabilities into, but there are cases where we can't and we have to acknowledge that we have to acknowledge the uncertainties in, in doing this. 

Speaker 4:        There's a lot of interesting questions just in particle physics [00:23:00] and we have these experiments now and I think, uh, and particularly during sort of the public stuff and, and science, I mean if ever our physics fails or doesn't work or whatever, I mean there's certainly were interesting questions and I think about them. I talk to people. I mean, I think there's a lot of interesting stuff. It's interesting to reflect on it and talk to colleagues, find out whether it's similar in different in different types of sciences. Find out about other scientific advances. Certainly physics isn't the only field making advances today and to really not only the kind of physics I do, Emmy [inaudible] [00:23:30] is she sort of a hero of yours here? I don't, I don't have heroes. I know people are always really disappointed that, you know, they were like, so who are your heroes? 

Speaker 4:        I'm like, well I don't have, I mean what, I do have a science, you know, I think there's science that I really appreciate and I think she was one of the people that made interesting advances and it was exciting when I found out that it was a woman because you don't learn about many women in your elementary physics classes. Not as many people have heard of her as I've heard of some of the other scientists. And it's, it's interesting. Are there other salient [00:24:00] people active now that you refer to quite often follow their work closely? You know, one of the fun things about having the book be over is just visiting other places. Might not even people that I hadn't known about or heard of can be doing interesting things. It turns out so it's been fun catching up and finding out what people are doing. 

Speaker 4:        But um, overall, overall I think the field will go forward with lots of people contributing. And is that a huge challenge? Just trying to keep up with all the information that's out there. The answer is sort of yes or no. I mean I think I often keep up by doing stuff [00:24:30] and in fact I, you know, I was sort of lucky in the sense that as soon as the book was kind of done, I ended up doing a project that actually was sort of kind of central to where people are going today in terms of thinking about supersymmetry in fact. And so, um, and to the extent that I can get involved right away, which is sometimes easier when you have some interesting idea about something or whatever. Um, that's quite helpful. Is there anything that you would want to mention about the predominance of matter over anti matter? 

Speaker 4:        Well, that's a, that's a big scientific [00:25:00] question about barrier genesis. It's called how, why there's more baryons what we call them than anti barons, more protons and antiprotons. In fact, it's something I've gotten involved with in the context of dark matter. And the reason for that, which is that the amount of energy and dark matter, it's about six times the amount of energy and ordinary matter. In principle, it could have been, you know, a factor of a trillion off. So the fact that they're so similar seems to indicate there could be a connection between the creation of dark matter and the creation of ordinary matter. So it's actually quite an interesting research problem [00:25:30] right now. Are you going to write a third book or are you, I don't have immediate plans, but a, I didn't have a media plan so, and told me, I was like, yeah, I don't remember where I talked to you after you wrote your first book. You said you'd never write another book. I completely forget ever saying that so, so I, I wouldn't rule it out, but I don't know what I'm going to do yet. Elisa Randall, thanks for joining us. Thank you very much for that. 

Speaker 6:        [inaudible] [00:26:00] bringing a feature of spectrums to mention a few of the science and technology events happening in the bay area. 

Speaker 4:        Here's Rick with the calendar. The reason for reason and the center for inquiry are hosting Speaker Mark Edward, who will discuss his book, Psychic Blues, Confessions of a conflicted medium on Saturday, July 7th at Kelly's Irish pub, five 30 Jackson Street in San Francisco. [00:26:30] This free talk starts at 5:00 PM with doors at four 30 with decades of experience practicing mental magic, Edward has worked on both sides of the psychic fence. He believes that most of the psychic business 

Speaker 3:        are out and out scam artists and that the common need to believe in things supernatural is merely a part of human nature. From phone psyche to headliner at the famed Magic Castle Mark Edward will recount his experiences and expose techniques you used in the multibillion dollar [00:27:00] psychic industry. For more information, visit reason for reason.org. That's the reason the number four reason. Dot. O r.G , the Leonardo art science evening rendezvous or laser. This month will be at the University of San Francisco at 6:45 PM on Monday, July 9th the talks at this free meeting include Ian winters presenting on responsive installations based on attention, social [00:27:30] memory and the use of motion capture analysis. Christina smoke a on synthetic biology, the next generation of biotechnology. Mark Jacobson on a plan to power the world for all purposes with wind, water and the sun and both the UC Berkeley professor of anthropology, Paul Rainbow and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, Adrian van Allen on synthetic biology and security. You can find more information on [00:28:00] how to [email protected] now, Lisa cabbage with the news story 

Speaker 7:        using remote sensing technology, researchers from Stanford University have discovered the largest ever bloom of phytoplankton buried underneath the Arctic Ice Shelf, four times more concentrated than open ocean blooms. They came across this bloom by accident in Alaska as Chuck CISI while cutting through ice that was only a meter thick compared to the three meter thickness [00:28:30] in the past. Under ice. Blooms are rarely seen microscopic phytoplankton that rely on the sun for nutrients and form the base of the Arctic Food Web as Climate Change thins. The Arctic ice sheet completing the summer cycle earlier, the timing of the under ice bloom could throw off the timing of the entire Arctic food web. When the ice sheet melt in the spring, Su plankton moves into areas of open water to feed on phytoplankton and in turn become food for fish. If they follow the seasons rather [00:29:00] than the blooms, they may arrive too late affecting larger animals like whales. 

Speaker 3:        [inaudible]

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

Speaker 6:        The music card during the show is by Los Donna David from his album folk and acoustic is made available through creative Commons attribution license 3.0 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 6:        production assistance by Lisa cabbage 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

Speaker 6:        Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments [00:29:30] 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 at this same 

Speaker 2:        time.

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