Spectrum

Prof. Garrison Sposito, soil scientist at UC Berkeley, talks about water and soil, the inputs organic and chemical that are often added to soil, soil stewardship, agriculture and food security.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]. Welcome to spectrum the science [00:00:30] and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program, bringing new interviews featuring bay in scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news.

Speaker 1:        Good afternoon. My name is Brad swift and I'm the host of today's show. Today we continue our interview with Professor Garrison [inaudible], the Betty and Isaac Barsha, chair of Soil Science in the College of natural resources at UC Berkeley. [00:01:00] Professor [inaudible] is an active teacher and researcher at Berkeley. This is part two of two professors. Pacino talks about the interaction of water with soil and the various inputs, organic and chemical that are often added to soil. He addresses soil stewardship and the challenges ahead for agriculture and food security. 

Speaker 3:        You talked a little bit about the interaction of water and soil. It seems very crucial. So the study of [00:01:30] soil is very tied up in water then? 

Speaker 4:        Yes, and I think the, uh, because of being in California, we may not, not understand that as well as we should because California has very large irrigation systems. One of the things, one of the very first things that Hilgard did when he came to this state to work was to go see a man named Kearney who lived around Fresno. And Kearney had the idea that if water were applied to the soils of the San Joaquin Valley, they might be used to grow crops [00:02:00] because the rainfall was very limited. I mean, you could grow crops that way, but not very many. And Hilgard actually assessed those soils and told him what the problems would be in doing that. And Kearney then began to irrigate the first one to do so and made a fortune doing this. So we have a lot of irrigated land in California for agriculture. And as a result, it doesn't seem as obvious to us that most of the world doesn't irrigate. 

Speaker 4:        80% of the agriculture in the world is rain fed. Two thirds of the food in the world [00:02:30] is produced by rain fed agriculture. So when you start looking around at places that are less high tech than California, it's actually rainwater that's making the world go around. So the question then is how does rainwater move through soil? How can we optimize its management in use and so forth, and not surprisingly relatively little is known about that because the places where the knowhow exists to study water and soil are the places where irrigation often gets done. And so typically all it has been studied in [00:03:00] the past is how much water do you have to have in the soil at the start of the growing season to make sure you get through it with a decent crop. And you'll hear things about this in the news where they'll say assessment of the water content in the Midwest is such that the corn crop will be less this year or more or whatever. 

Speaker 4:        And the same is true anywhere else. So now a number of people are beginning to realize that we have to learn a lot more about how water behaves in soil before we can really truly expect to do very much about agriculture in that use. [00:03:30] Now this is important because the rain is falling on the soil. It has two places to go. One is maybe three, let's say three at one place is it can just evaporate right back up in the air, which isn't going to help anything unless it goes through a plant. If you could make it go through a plant first before evaporating, then of course you're doing agriculture. Another thing it will do is percolate downward and way down into what we call groundwater into the water that's stored way deep in the earth and so that's a loss. A third thing it can do is move over the land [00:04:00] surface or just underneath the land surface laterally towards some creek or river or whatever. 

Speaker 4:        So that's it. Now obviously then what you want to manage is keeping the water in place long enough to get it through the plants you want so that they will grow and produce whatever it is you're interested in. So that turns out to be a really important deal about which we don't know as anywhere near as much as we should. With irrigation, you're applying huge amounts of water. In fact, they're, the problem usually is what to do with the wall. Excess water that [00:04:30] comes off afterward, often full of salts and various other things you don't want. So it's a totally different problem. We're here. It's taking something that's very erratic. First of all, rain doesn't come like irrigation where you can order it up and get it applied. So you've got to worry about the fact that it comes sporadically and they're dry years in wet years and all of that. And then you've got to know how it's stored in soil on which kinds of quote choices this soil is going to make in terms of whether it will evaporate runoff or percolate downward and so [00:05:00] on. So it's a big deal. But I would say that given the global situation in agriculture, we really haven't begun to study what we should 

Speaker 5:        [inaudible]. This is spectrum on k a l X. Today's guest is Gary [inaudible] Ceto, the soil scientists that you see Berkeley. This next segment covers inputs to soil. 

Speaker 4:        [00:05:30] This gets into the idea of how do you judge soil? What's what's considered productive, nonproductive. A lot of it comes down to these characteristics you were just describing with the water. The ability to hold water. Yes. However, I want to say that the phrase good soil, which is strictly an agricultural phrase or bad soil for that matter, people talk about good soil and what they mean is something they can grow crops on the they want to grow at the rate they want to grow them, et cetera. [00:06:00] Here's a very insightful essay by Gary Snyder, the poet and ecologist who's a local figure called good, wild, sacred and it's about soil and he talks about agricultural soils being called good and wild soils, soils that are under the forest or soils out in the desert, and then sacred soils have to do with native Americans and others who regarded certain areas of soil as as sacred sacred sites. 

Speaker 4:        Well, from the point of view of nature, there is no bad soil because nature simply [00:06:30] adapts to whatever is there. The water supply, the nutrients, everything else and what grows is what you see and it's fine. It's an equilibrium with whatever is provided and nature doesn't mind. Problem comes and the value judgment comes in that humans do say what they want from a soil. We're talking about domesticating that soil. So it'll do what we want in the same way that you break a horse, so to speak, to do what you want. But that wild soil is actually just as good as soil is. The soil is domesticated [00:07:00] and in many ways it may be better because it's an equilibrium where the global environment has to be. Whereas we may, by virtue of doing things to soil to make it, you know, to harness it, you might say make it into a soil that is not in equilibrium with the global environment, could be harming the global environment in some ways. 

Speaker 4:        So a good soil, well, what most people mean is it's a soil that behaves the way we want it to for some particular use. And that use may be as simple as dumping some waste onto it. And of course a good soil could be [00:07:30] one that you can build on if you take everything off and build a house on it. And that's good too. Mostly they mean agriculture or some kind of thing. They want to grow in the soils and trees or whatever, or yard, whatever. And in which case they mean I want to domesticate this soil. I don't want it to be wild. Such ends up involving a lot of inputs. It does energy inputs as well as material inputs. And of course a lot of ways, and I think this is something which people should keep in mind because the use of fertilizer [00:08:00] is certainly an example of this in the water too. 

Speaker 4:        These are examples of technologies. After all, there's a fertilizer technology and that's where it comes from. And there's a water technology that delivers a water that we need to water in excess of what rain might provide. So here's a way to say that so-called second law of thermodynamics for every technology there is a pollution for every technology there is a pollution. Science. People know what I'm talking about and they say the second law would means that there is no such thing as truly [00:08:30] free energy. It always costs you some losses. Heat. That's really what I'm saying here. So if people would keep that in mind, every time they adapt a technology to what they want to do, there's going to be a pollution. And they ought to think about that. In the case of fertilizer, it's the runoff of the excess fertilizer into the waterways or somewhere where it's gonna cause a problem. 

Speaker 4:        They might apply chemicals to kill things. They want to kill weeds with chemicals. So all of these technologies are problems and they're inputs. You're quite [00:09:00] right now with nitrogen, which is essential to any kind of plant we can think of and certainly to agricultural plants. Nitrogen is used to make protein and that's absolutely essential in the, in the time of the first world war for a totally other reason, because they wanted to make something for munitions. Humans learned how to convert the nitrogen in the air to an active form, a reactive form of nitrogen that could be used for any, any reaction and a fertilizer is one kind of reaction. [00:09:30] So we can make nitrogen fertilizers now out of the air. It's called the Harvard process. Michael Pollan's called that the single biggest revolution in modern agriculture and it probably is now. Okay, fine. You can do that. 

Speaker 4:        It doesn't stop the pollution problem, but it says effectively you've got this huge, huge reservoir of nitrogen that you can eventually with enough energy fueled by oil, no doubt convert into reactive nitrate. And we're doing this and we're actually producing a huge amount of reactive nitrated NXS. [00:10:00] It's running into the world's waterways and causing all sorts of problems because a fertilizer in one place as a fertilizer somewhere else. If it's not fertilizing the corn in the Midwest, it's fertilizing the plankton in the Gulf of Mexico and causing them to bloom and cause all sorts of problems there. The same is not true of phosphorus and potassium. They're the other big three. The big three are nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium that plants, all plants need to grow well. Those two have to be mined and there are limited supplies [00:10:30] and they're not being recycled. We have a huge amount of phosphorus running off with erosion. 

Speaker 4:        Phosphorus tends to attach itself to particles and it goes with the particles when they erode and there's huge amounts going into the bottom of the ocean. Now, potassium is somewhat like that. So what we've got our limited supplies. I've heard estimates that the u s phosphorus minds will run out by the middle of this century. In fact, that the next period of time between now and 2050 is the biggest deal for us. All right now [00:11:00] in terms of thinking through these issues of where are we going to get future phosphorus, if our minds run out? Obviously once you start thinking about recycling or not wasting so much a potassiums the same way. Right now, countries are battling over putout so called potash mines. They're battling over this because they can see it's running out. You can't make it out of the air. There's no way to do that. It's gotta be mined out of the rocks. 

Speaker 4:        And that's a huge problem because nobody has thought of a way to grow plants without the p and the K [00:11:30] as they call it, potassium, phosphorus, and potassium. So yeah, those are big inputs. Fossil fuels are an, are a big input too, but actually there's more of them around than these others and we're not, well, we are wasting them, but, but we're not wasting them in the same scale. And this is partly because people don't really think about these things very much. They just think about maximizing yield. So their tendency is to put as much as possible on the ground figuring that if the plant doesn't use it well, it'll go away soon. 

Speaker 2:        [00:12:00] [inaudible] you are listening to part two of a two part interview with Gary [inaudible], a soil scientist at UC Berkeley. The show is spectrum and the station is k a l ex Berkeley. 

Speaker 3:        [00:12:30] Well in terms of the ongoing viability of large scale agriculture, is there a way to maintain a status of that or is there always going to be at some point in need for input? 

Speaker 4:        Well, the way these systems are managed, they are high input systems typically. Now, uh, that's true in this country and that's true in places like Brazil where they have these large scale farms. A lot of the world is much smaller scale. A lot of the world, [00:13:00] it depends on rain fed. Agriculture to live is much smaller scale, but these big systems do produce an awful lot of product corn and soybeans. Actually I think about three quarters of the agriculture. In the world is used to raise animals. So that means a quarter of it's actually growing food that people eat right from the plant and the rest is used either as grass that they're growing cause agriculture means past year or crop. Right now we have about 12% of the earth [00:13:30] surface. It isn't ice covered in cropland and that's often very intensively farmed people who are experts estimate we can go another quarter of that to 15% and if we go beyond that we'll have so messed up the global system that we won't be able to sustain it at all. 

Speaker 4:        So we're pretty close to a tipping point. Crop Land is 12% the rest that's in agriculture, which I think is nearly 40% of the land is in grasses and the grasses are were used to grow animals. [00:14:00] So right there that you can raise a question, well maybe there's too much being expended on growing animals. How much do we really want or need of this right away. Then you're going to cut down on the large scale stuff just to kind of think this through a little bit. Cause if only a quarter is being used to grow food from the plants and it seemed like a huge amount, maybe that is sustainable. So in other words, moving from animal protein to plant protein could be a good way to go to it. Think about this, [00:14:30] people say, well yeah, but you know, animal protein is really balanced. His and the world wants it. 

Speaker 4:        I mean it's not, it's not going the other way. It's not going down. It's going up. There are more countries that one animal protein and they have more and more the means to get it one way or the other. So there's a thing to think about right there. If you want to point a finger then you can say, well animal raising is probably doing the most harm right now to the agricultural use of land. And maybe that needs to be thought through in a different way. So that's an important consideration. But [00:15:00] I, I know no one who's thought seriously about this that thinks that large scale agriculture, the way it's done now could just be expanded to the rest of the world and would be sustainable. It's probably not sustainable even in the United States. 

Speaker 5:        [inaudible] you were listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley professor Gary [inaudible] is our guest. This is part two of a two part interview. [00:15:30] Professor Ceto is discussing how to be a good steward of the soil 

Speaker 4:        or a way to be a good steward of soils for people who are in forestry or in agriculture, people who are managing watersheds. Sure there is, and thinking again about it as an ecosystem, it's really the same story. If you want a person can think of his own yard, [00:16:00] where his home is as this ecosystem to manage to think about and there are ways of being a good steward. Let's take for just soil. First of all is to respect the soil for what it is. So yeah, there is a way to be a good steward and I think most people, they're interested in a good soil, not a wild soil. To them wild means uncontrollable. It means it doesn't do what I want when I want it to do. I want it to produce a grass. It looks unhealthily green. For example, a blue grass, which would never be grown here anyway, instead of some grass that could be adapted [00:16:30] to the area. 

Speaker 4:        Or I want to grow ornamentals that probably shouldn't be grown either and on and on. And the basic idea is respect the soil for what it is. Don't think of a bad soil as a wild soil fact. That's the natural state. And thirdly, soil health is correlated with a humus. Do everything you can to keep the humans, which means a healthy biology. It means inputs of organic matter if you're using it in some fashion to grow things or whatever you do. It's common sense kinds of things at all. Really good farmers [00:17:00] know people who are small scale farmers and who live from the land that they have. They understand these things so they, they get this, but it doesn't have to be a farm. It can be your own yard that you're the steward of and keeping it well. And if you've got kids teaching your kids about what's in that yard, but it's very basic. It isn't complicated. As long as the poisons from your neighbors don't get into your yard in any, on the run off from their fertilizer and all. That's an issue. If you live close together, then let's, it's [00:17:30] true with any ecosystem that anyone has to manage their ways to look after it. 

Speaker 4:        Now the UN is going to meet in Rio, does summer, well in June actually it's the real plus 20th summit to talk about sustainability. Yeah. Nations and there will be presented there some guidelines for what are called planetary boundaries. It means, for example, don't let the global crop land get above 15% of the total land areas, so we don't go over tipping point, don't [00:18:00] let the nitrogen levels in the ocean and all the other places we're putting nitrogen in. It shouldn't be get above certain levels, don't let the CO2 grow any more than this, et Cetera, et cetera. They're going to try to get the UN to adopt these worldwide as guidelines for countries to think about. So the first step toward this being a, you can find it online, it's called planetary boundaries, and if it's a document which they're going to present. So people are thinking about this all over the world who have good minds and are concerned. 

Speaker 4:        So what's happening and soil [00:18:30] is part of this because of course soil conservation is what's going to keep the agriculture going and anything that's being done to degrade that soil or just lose it, lose it by erosion. And we have so much of that going on, you know, just going out in the ocean. It's just unfortunate because that's, you know, it takes so long to replace that. It is not going to be like five years. It's going to be thousands of years to replace it. So we have to wake up to these things. I don't want to, I want you to think I'm an alarmist or anything. There's time, [00:19:00] but we would be foolish not to think about these things carefully. Everybody has a stake in this. They need to get educated on it and think about it. Is there anything about soil that you wanted to, uh, to bring up that I haven't quizzed you about? 

Speaker 4:        You know, I, one thing I was talking about this to my department head who happens to be a soil scientist and pathologist and uh, he's working with others now to bring up the point that soil is a national security issue. It isn't obvious [00:19:30] that that's true at first and except when you start thinking about food now, when could it raise the question of the farm bill? The farm bill actually isn't called the farm bill when it gets passed as a law. It's called the Food Security Act because food is seen as a matter of national security and it is, well, soil is necessary to reduce food. And so the ability for the United States, for example, to take advantage of these incredibly rich soils that I hope we don't ruin is [00:20:00] a security issue. Our ability to do that enhances our security if we're going to import a huge amount of food because we can't grow it ourselves, that's a security issue just like it is for oil. 

Speaker 4:        We would say oil is a security issue. We have a certain amount of coal which is a lot. We have a certain amount of oil but not a lot and some natural gas. We wouldn't hesitate to say that that's a national security issue. We're, we're well endowed way better than many countries, especially with coal. Likewise with rich soils, we are well endowed. We we're so fortunate [00:20:30] in that respect. We tend to use them as if they're gonna last forever and so in that sense I would say that soil is a national security issue at least for the preservation of the food supply and people need to think of it that way. Thanks very much professor supposed to, you know for coming on spectrum, 

Speaker 6:        you're welcome. 

Speaker 5:        If you missed the broadcast of part one of our two part interview with Professor Gary [00:21:00] [inaudible] or any other spectrum show. They are now available as podcasts at iTunes university and easy link to the podcast is on the calyx website under programming in the spectrum description, the regular teacher of spectrum is to mention a few of the science and technology that's happening locally over the next few weeks. Lisa [inaudible] joins me for the calendar. 

Speaker 6:        Physics relates to everything that we do. A new exhibition opening this Saturday, [00:21:30] June 2nd at 1:00 PM at the Lawrence Hall of science shows how a visit to a local skate park can demonstrate important physics principals. Learn the science behind extreme sports at Tony Hawk, read science and see how skateboard legend Tony Hawk joins forces with physics to make 900 degree revolutions admit air right up vertical walls and even fly over rails. Tony Hawk along with fellow professional skateboarders will perform an exciting demonstration [00:22:00] on a specially designed vertical skate ramp set up just outside the hall and visitors can explore over 25 interactive experiences. Spaces Limited and tickets are required. The Lawrence Hall of Science is located at one centennial drive in Berkeley. For more information, go to their website, www.lawrencehallofscience.org 

Speaker 1:        Two unusual planetary events will happen on consecutive days, a partial lunar eclipse, June 4th and the transit of Venus on June 5th [00:22:30] on Monday, June 4th view the partial lunar eclipse in the wee hours of Monday morning from the observatory deck of the Chabot Space and science center at 10,000 Skyline Boulevard in Oakland. The eclipse will be most visible from 2:59 AM to 4:03 AM engage in a conversation with astronomers and knowledgeable volunteers. As you witnessed the moon's passing behind the earth. For more information, go to their website. Shabbos space.org 

Speaker 6:        East Bay Science cafe [00:23:00] presents inside dinosaur bones. What bone tissues reveal about the life of fossil animals. For hundreds of years, scientists have examined fossil bones to learn about the life of the past. Recently, a wealth of new information about the lives of dinosaurs and other extinct animals has come from an unexpected source. Fossilized bone tissues. Come explore the insides of fossils and learn what that tells us about the evolutionary history of animals still alive today. The Speaker is Sarah Werning, a [00:23:30] phd candidate in the Department of integrative biology at the University of California Berkeley. Her research explores how changes in bone tissues in the fossil record reflect the evolution of growth and metabolic rates in reptiles, birds, mammals, and their ancestors. This takes place Wednesday, June 6th from seven to 9:00 PM at Cafe Valparaiso, part of the La Pena Cultural Center at 31 oh five Shaddock avenue. Berkeley Nightlife 

Speaker 1:        [00:24:00] is the California Academy of Sciences Weekly Adult Program where they feature music, cocktails and themes, special exhibits for guests 21 and over. It happens every Thursday. The theme for the June 7th nightlife is sustainable catch in honor of world ocean's Day. There will be sustainable seafood cooking demos by local restaurant tours, talks on white sharks, Galapagos fishes, deep sea diving, and coral reef fish. Robert Murray's film. The end of the line [00:24:30] from the SF ocean film festival will be screened and DJ CEP, founder of one of the longest running dubstep parties. In the U s dub mission. We'll be making music. June 14th night. Life theme will be turtle power play teenage mutant Ninja Turtles. Find out how to help the sea turtle restoration project talk with sea turtle researcher Jay Nichols and visit ray bones Bandar and his display of sea turtle skulls. There will be a special dive [00:25:00] show in the Philippine Coral Reef and the film sea turtle spotlight in the planetarium at six 30 music by DJ Jay Sonic. Visit www.cal academy.org/events/nightlife now, the news 

Speaker 6:        alarmed at the sudden losses of between 30 and 90% of honeybee colonies since 2006 scientists, policymakers, farmers, and beekeepers have posted many theories as to the cause of bee colony [00:25:30] collapse disorder such as pest disease, pesticides, migratory beekeeping, or some combination of these factors. A study from the Harvard School of Public Health that will appear in the June issue of the Bolton of insect tology indicates that the likely culprit in sharp worldwide declines in honeybee colony since 2006 is Imidacloprid, one of the most widely used pesticides. It's the second report to link that pesticide to the mysterious bee. Die-Offs. Imidacloprid [00:26:00] is a member of a family of pesticides known as neonicotinoids introduced in the early 1990s bees can be exposed in two ways through nectar from plant or through high fructose corn syrup that beekeepers use to feed their bees. Since most us grown corn has been treated with imidacloprid. 

Speaker 6:        It's also found in corn syrup. Members of the Harvard Group led by biologist Alex Lu, a specialist in environmental exposure said they found convincing evidence [00:26:30] of the link. Lou and his researchers conducted a field study in Massachusetts over a 23 week period after which 15 out of 16 treated hives died. His experiment included pesticides amounts below what is normally present in the environment. Those exposed to the highest levels of the pesticides died. First, the hives were empty except for food stores. Some pollen and young bees with few dead bees nearby. When other conditions cause hive collapse such as disease or past, many [00:27:00] dead bees are typically found inside and outside the effected hives. These beyond producing honey are prime pollinators of roughly one third of the crop species in the United States including fruits, vegetables, nuts and livestock feed such as Alfalfa and clover. Massive loss of honeybees could result in billions of dollars in agricultural losses. California's almond crop is one of the most vulnerable 

Speaker 1:        well science daily reports that the results of a new US Geological Survey study conclude [00:27:30] that faults west of Lake Tahoe referred to as the Tahoe Sierra frontal fault zone pose, a substantial increase in the seismic hazard assessment for the Lake Tahoe region of California and Nevada and could potentially generate earthquakes with magnitudes ranging from 6.3 to 6.9 a close association of landslide deposits and active faults also suggests that there is an earthquake induced landslide hazard along the steep fault formed range front [00:28:00] west of Lake Tahoe using a new high resolution imaging technology known as bare Earth Airborne Lidar, which stands for light detection and ranging combined with field observations and the modern geochronology lidar imagery allows scientists to see through dense forest cover and recognize earthquake faults that are not detectable with conventional aerial photography. USDS scientist and lead author James Howl says that although the Tahoe Sierra [00:28:30] frontal falls zone has long been recognized as forming the tectonic boundary between the Sierra Nevada to the west and the basin and range province to the east, it's level of activity and seismic hazard was not fully recognized because dense vegetation obscured the surface expressions of the faults using the new lidar technology has improved and clarified. 

Speaker 1:        Previous field mapping has provided visualization of the surface expressions of the faults and has allowed for accurate [00:29:00] measurement of the amount of motion that has occurred on the phone. Fox 

Speaker 5:        [inaudible] music character new show is Bible stone, a David from his album folk and acoustic. It's made available through a creative Commons attributions license 3.0 production assistance by Rick Karnofsky and Lisa catechins. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send [00:29:30] them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l [email protected] join us in two weeks at this same time. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

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Prof. Garrison Sposito, soil scientist at UC Berkeley, is an active teacher and researcher. Prof. Sposito describes how soils form, how soil science has matured and talks about the influence of Hans Jenny on his work and life.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 3:        [inaudible].

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

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

Speaker 1:        Good afternoon. My name is Brad swift and I'm the host of today's show. Our interview is with Professor Garrison's Pasito, the Betty and Isaac Barsha, chair of Soil Science in the College of natural resources at UC Berkeley. Professor Sposato is an active teacher and researcher. This show is part [00:01:00] one of two parts today. Professor Saucito describes how soils form. He explains how soil science has matured and talks about the influence of Berkeley legend CNE on his work and life. Professor, Gary's Pasito 

Speaker 4:        come to spectrum. Thank you very much. Glad to be here. 

Speaker 1:        To start, would you give us a brief overview of soil and how it forms 

Speaker 4:        in the simplest way to say this soil is the [00:01:30] weathered earth material on the land, the surface of the land. It can extend to fairly great depths depending on how much weathering goes on because weathering is what creates soil. There are two main factors that are involved. One is the percolation of water from rainfall percolates downward and this causes weathering the other, which is critically important and that is the biology that goes on in soil. That is to say the the microbes, [00:02:00] the worms, all of the creatures that live in soil and the roots of plants, which in fact contribute greatly to what happens in the soil to make it soil. Ultimately what happens is that the, what's called the parent material, which is the material from which the soil starts, which could be anything from a cooling volcanic ash material to wind blown dust like it is in China or in the Midwest of the u s or rock material that has come in from somewhere else, from transport [00:02:30] by a river, whatever it is. 

Speaker 4:        That's some geologic material. And at that point in time when it sits still long enough to have percolating water and creatures start to live in it, that starts it on the way to becoming a soil. What are the various timelines that can be involved in that process? They're long, they're long timelines relative to human standards. So for a soil to form in a way that one would be recognizably say, oh that's a soil. And I'll say in a moment here, [00:03:00] what tells us, oh that's the soil can easily be half a million years to really to see the development. Obviously there are soils that are younger than this, but in general it takes a long time. In California we have soils that are a million years old and we have soils that are 15,000 years old, but they formed slowly by our standards. Now the way that we tell them as soils and not simply some weathered rock or whatever is that they have layering, they're called horizons in the [00:03:30] discipline of soil science. 

Speaker 4:        This layering is caused by the percolating water, which moves material downward and then deposits it at some point because the water stops percolating. And secondly, the biological creatures are involved in the dissolution and dissolving of the minerals that are in the rock material. So the layering is coming about from both loss of material and accumulation and that layering tells you it's a soil, but it happens slowly. It's a slow process. [00:04:00] How much variation is there worldwide and soils? Quite a lot. What one should know is that there are large classification units of soil which are based on climate and there are 12 of them. For example, a soils that are permanently frozen such as those in the Arctic zone. Those have a certain name, they're called Jelly sols from a French word. That means to freeze soils that are found in the human tropics that are very red [00:04:30] from the iron minerals in them and highly weathered and so forth. 

Speaker 4:        They're called oxy Sauls and so on. Now within them are sub classifications and the one that corresponds to what a species would be in biology is called a series. There are about more than 20,000 soil series or species in the United States. There are probably upwards of several hundred thousand different soil series worldwide, so the soil series are [00:05:00] mapped so we know where they are and these maps are available online for California and for many parts of the world, it's probably the most important aspect of first getting to know soils is to prepare a map with the series in it. And for that reason, the gates foundation has given a friend of mine, Pedro Sanchez, $20 million to provide a digital soil map of Africa so that we have a, an understanding of all the African soils and this is in conjunction with improving agriculture. [00:05:30] You've got to know the soil characteristics before you can start to do anything with US soil. And this is the first step. 

Speaker 5:        [inaudible]

Speaker 1:        this is spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. I'm talking with Gary's Pasito, a soil scientist at UC Berkeley 

Speaker 5:        [inaudible]

Speaker 4:        in the development of soil science. Have there been [00:06:00] dramatic epics where certain discoveries were made that changed the game, so to speak? Not so much as discoveries as in really large groups of people of a certain kind working towards similar goals. For example, the late 19th century is characterized at a time when earth scientists began to look at soil as useful for study in its own right. And the first things that they did was to try to understand how they formed [00:06:30] as weathered materials and secondly, to begin to try to classify them in some way. That period lasted until, well, it's still ongoing. I suppose, but it was really pushed forward around the turn of the century. And one of the largest names in that field at the time was Eugenie Hilgard for whom Hilgard Hall on the Berkeley campus is named. He was trained as a geologist. He was the state geologists from Mississippi and he was hired here at Berkeley as the second professor [00:07:00] of agriculture. 

Speaker 4:        The first one, I think he was here only for a couple of years and a lot of people don't know this, but Berkeley began as an a and m campus, agricultural, mechanical, and that's what it was supposed to be. That was it. And the first agriculture professor thought that's what it ought to be. And the regions didn't agree. And so they fired him and they hired Hilgard and heel guard. They said, we want you to understand that you're part of a larger, more general campus than simply agriculture. But it's very important to the state of California [00:07:30] that you develop agricultural emphasis on your work with soil. And one of the first things he did was to go around the state and sampled the soils. And he prepared the first soil map of California, which you can see in Hilgard Hall. But he also helped classify and he also discussed something about how soils form. 

Speaker 4:        So that was one great group. Then came another group of people who did a lot of their work in the 1930s and forties of the last century. These [00:08:00] people in soil science all came from other disciplines and to a large extent they did. So because of the depression. A good example of sterling Hendricks who was Linus Pauling's, first Grad student at cal tech, he worked on the structure of minerals with Pauling cause that's how Pauling made his first famous set of discoveries and couldn't find a job as a physical chemist. There just wasn't a demand. And at that time, and so he did find a job with a USDA US Department of Agriculture and he spent a whole career [00:08:30] there. He did work on minerals. He was the first one really just show that crystal and minerals existed in soils. People thought it was just sort of stuff. They didn't know what it was. Unfortunately, they developed the tools at cal tech among other places, and palling made great use of these train Hendricks to do this. And then Hendrix got a job with a USDA, began to study plants as well, and actually made a name studying plants. Another example, Albert van Zillow, 

Speaker 4:        who took a phd under John Lewis here at Berkeley, who was [00:09:00] the Louis Hall's name for him, Fan Solo couldn't get a job except down at the citrus experiment station in Riverside. So he went down there as a chemist, if you know Lewis, his work, he was a great contributor to the branch of physical chemistry called thermodynamics. First thing vast law did was supply it to soils. And that's stood the test of time. It's been very, very useful. And finally I mentioned Han CNE who got his phd in physical chemistry in Zurich. Switzerland couldn't find work anywhere. [00:09:30] Left, immigrated to the u s first to the University of Missouri. And then in 1936, uh, he was able to secure a job up at Berkeley in a plant science unit, uh, teaching some things about souls, but all of these people were in there. Others I could name were quote, forced to come into soil science because it was opportunity. 

Speaker 4:        Actually one of my own mentors, Royal Rose Street, uh, here at Berkeley, I was a grad student at Berkeley and soil science right in Hilgard Hall. In fact, uh, he was [00:10:00] a student of joke. There's a show called over in Chemistry and Nobel laureate. His thesis was on the properties of liquid hydrogen, and yet he was one of the great soil chemists after the 30s. So these people all turned their skills to, to soil because it was an unknown with respect to the application of exact sciences. And the discipline made huge bounds because of this, because they were so well trained. Actually the depression was one of the best things that ever happened to soil science because it got all these great minds [00:10:30] working. They couldn't find work elsewhere if there had been good times. Who knows? Now finally, there's another one that most people agree was very important and it also relates back to exact sciences. 

Speaker 4:        And that is all the advances that took place in the latter part of the, of the last century in disciplines such as molecular biology or chemistry at the molecular scale. And to some extent physics. These disciplines were really producing very interesting results. And so for example, [00:11:00] methods of molecular biology were applied in microbiology of soil to characterize the organisms that were living there such as bacteria. And these methods are very important because most of the bacteria and the other tiny organisms in soil cannot be grown in culture, meaning you can't take them out of the soil and grow them in the lab. Probably less than 10% can be grown this way. They're just out there wild in the soil. But the new methods of molecular biology didn't require that they allowed you to fingerprint [00:11:30] literally through the DNA of these organisms who they were. And this was applied to soils and chemistry evolved, all these very fancy techniques for investigating minerals or any solid actually, but minerals in particular and so on. 

Speaker 4:        So the people in soil science were aware of these things and they took all these methods in and they made great strides with these approaches. Not so much the people, but simply the methodologies made their way into the discipline. And that legacy has gone on for some time now. Right [00:12:00] now we're, we're sort of still taking advantage of it. What I see happening now is the soil scientists are beginning to join with other people in ecology and climate change so that they're part of a larger team, let's say, which is working toward trying to understand how the global system actually functions and what role soil plays in that. I would say that's the next thing that's going on, a kind of cross disciplinary interaction. But these other three epochs everyone recognizes as really important to the advancement of the discipline [00:12:30] and none of them really were created by the discipline itself. They came from happenstance, from circumstance and depression. I mean, you know, I suppose right now there may be, there'll be some very brilliant students who, who might've stayed in chemistry or physics or whatever who will come into soil science. In fact, I know this is true at Berkeley. I'm seeing it happen. 

Speaker 3:        [inaudible] you are listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Today's guest [00:13:00] is professor Gary [inaudible]. We are about to talk about his research. 

Speaker 4:        How about your research? How has it evolved over your career and your studying soil? Actually, I'm an anomaly. It's true that I took a degree here in soil science under a professor named Ken Babcock and another name Roy Overstreet, whom I mentioned earlier in conjunction with joke. [00:13:30] Babcock was my main guiding professor and I did a thesis, uh, which had a very large amount of chemistry and physics in it because I thought that those disciplines should be applied to soil in a very fundamental way. And after I did that, Professor Babcock said, well this is good work, but don't expect to get a job because nobody's interested in this. And he was right and there wasn't any interest in it. People told me, for example, that chemistry doesn't apply to soil [00:14:00] is too complicated. It doesn't work. You can't talk about it this way. So I got a job in the cal state system teaching for nearly a decade. 

Speaker 4:        And then my major prof told me about Pam Cock, that a professor at Riverside, by that time there was a campus at Riverside, uh, had suddenly dropped dead of a heart attack in his fifties, and they were looking for someone to replace him and they thought they should go in a fundamental direction more so than they had. And so I thought, well, maybe after [00:14:30] 10 years, my time has finally come. So I got a job down there and that worked out pretty well. And then I ultimately transferred up here because I wanted to work on forest is soils. And we have a forestry oriented, uh, unit up here. So I'm, I'm a little bit different from the usual because most people in my field would have come through a kind of agronomic background with let's say a little dash of chemistry and a little dash or biology and so forth. 

Speaker 4:        And they're generalists or their pathologists. So they're trained in earth science and they look at cell formation. [00:15:00] But I came into it from a very fundamental point of view. So I kind of waited around for my opportunity to, to bring this to bear. And what I'm speaking of really is a molecular scale approach to understanding soil. That's what they thought didn't apply. That was so complicated. You could, and in fact, what has evolved is that actually works out pretty well for the same reason that molecular biology helps medicine. So does them like it or approach to soils help agriculture or any of the other applications [00:15:30] they might not have thought. So at first in either discipline, but in fact it's true. So now what I've seen it evolve is a recognition that is actually useful, uh, over time. And what I do with my work is to try to be ever more molecular using the latest methods from chemistry and physics in that direction to try to understand how soils function. 

Speaker 4:        And it works out pretty well. And there are tools which, uh, have been developed in those disciplines that can be applied [00:16:00] with some care because we have very heterogeneous material. It's not to a pure substance. So that's where the art comes in and understanding how to use these techniques in ways that won't fool you, but it does work. And so that's it. So it's evolved simply, I get to be the person I want it to be when I was in Grad school by just simply waiting long enough, one of the former deans at the college of Natural Resources here defined a distinguished professor as someone who's outlived his enemies. I wouldn't say that I, that's [00:16:30] a little strong in a, in a bit cynical, but what I would say is that if you believe in what you're doing in your, you persevere, probably you will find that it gains some acceptance. And I'm living proof of the late bloomer theory of, of that sort of thing. And I think most of my colleagues would agree that finally now the world seems to understand that yeah, you can do molecular scale work on something as complicated as a soil. 

Speaker 3:        You are listening to part one of [00:17:00] a two part interview with Gary [inaudible], a soil scientist at UC Berkeley. The show is spectrum and the station is k a l. X. Berkeley. 

Speaker 4:        Describe what Hahn's Yannis impact has been on your thinking about soil and how has his work informed yours? Well first of all I mentioned he was trained as a physical chemist and then he found that he wasn't able to get work in Zurich [00:17:30] and so he wanted an academic career. So he came to the u s after he got here, especially in Missouri where he began to just learn the soil. He traveled around Missouri and I've seen the photographs that he's, that he took of the landscapes and began to learn about and think about soils. And Hilgard had already pioneered a little of this in of thinking about what things do come together to form a soil. Obviously you need some earth material to start with. You need organisms, you need time and so on. So Yeni [00:18:00] codified all of this in a book which he published 70 years ago, last year called factors of soil formation. 

Speaker 4:        And if you look at it from my point of view, what you see is a book about soil, organizing the soil and thinking about the way it formed, the way a physical chemist, and I don't mean the chemistry, I mean the logic of it is like a physical chemist. Actually a person in thermodynamics in physical chemistry would think about it effectively. He was using chemistry as the metaphor in which to place soil science [00:18:30] and it was an astounding book and it's still today read very profitably. We all had benefited from this. That said, Hans [inaudible] was a personal friend of mine and I spoke at his 85th birthday, which was celebrated up here for example, and I traveled with him to field sites and so forth and listened to him talk about soils and so forth. So he clearly had a strong personal influence on me as well. 

Speaker 4:        He was a very mild mannered person, very thoughtful, very strict in his beliefs. [00:19:00] He was also quite a good artist. He drew all the illustrations for his books himself, which he never mentioned in the book. You wouldn't know except they all look the same and it's, it's him. Art and agriculture were the two big loves of his life and he combined them as best he could in his own work. But he was trained as a physical chemist. So he had that really keen analytical mind and that was clear from his approach to the subject. So I would say he was an influence in the way he influenced every person and soil science through his work. But he also was an influence to me personally because [00:19:30] I could see how this person was living his life and initially doing a lot of hard work to do what would be called the normal science, meaning pushing the data points and doing the things that advanced the technique of the science. 

Speaker 4:        And then as he got older, he began to think about soils as a resource and their conservation. And he realized that a lot was not being done that should be done. And so he began actively to work toward conservation, working with conservation groups and others [00:20:00] to to help in that. Even though that doesn't require a chemical background for sure to do, but he realized how important it was. So that's what I'm seeing with myself as well. Soil is a resource now is suddenly loomed again is a big deal because of agriculture and because of the world of the world we're living in. And so I see that that's something I should do as well. So he's a role model in that sense. 

Speaker 1:        This concludes part one of our two part interview with Professor Gary [inaudible]. Tune in two weeks from [00:20:30] today for part two in part two professors placido talks about the interaction with water and soil, chemical and organic inputs that get applied to soil, good stewardship of soil and industrial agriculture. A regular feature 

Speaker 6:        of spectrum is dimension. A few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next few weeks. Rick [inaudible] and Lisa [inaudible] joined me for the calendar. Our last episode of spectrum featured [00:21:00] Tony Rose and Michelle Houben guy who talked to us about the young makers program that teams up high-schoolers with adult mentors to make things for make affair. You can see their work at the seventh annual bay area maker fair on Saturday the 19th and Sunday the 20th at the San Mateo Event Center one three four six Saratoga drive in San Mateo is like Bernie Man Without the drugs sandstorms and nudity c creative and resourceful people involved with science and technology, engineering, food and arts and craft [00:21:30] one day. Tickets are 27 50 for adults, 1654 soons and $12 for children ages four to 12 check out makerfair.com for more info. That's maker F a I r e e.com 

Speaker 7:        Saturday May 19th the science at Cau Lecture series presents Professor Ruth Tringham, founder and director of the UC Berkeley multimedia authoring center for teaching in anthropology. She is also the creative director and president [00:22:00] of the Center for digital archeology. Her lecture is titled Reconciling Science and the imagination in the construction of the deep prehistoric past. In the lecture. She will introduce some of the ways in which as an archeologist writer, she is exploring an alternative way of writing about prehistory in which the imagination that conjures up sentient prehistoric actors is entangled with the empirical scientific data of archeological excavations. That's tomorrow at the genetics and plant [00:22:30] biology building room 100 at 11:00 AM 

Speaker 6:        there is a partial solar eclipse this weekend. You can learn about it and observe it for free at the Lawrence Hall of Science one centennial drive in Berkeley from one to 8:00 PM on Sunday the 20th or view it from Chabot at 10,000 skyline in Oakland for $5 between five and 8:00 PM with the maximum eclipse at 6:32 PM Susan Frankel is presenting in the long now seminar series on Tuesday May 22nd from seven 30 to [00:23:00] 9:00 PM at the cal theater in San Francisco's Fort Mason. Her talk on Eternal Plastic, a love story discusses how plastic now pervades civilization and why its cheapness has made it the basic material of the throwaway culture. One third of all plastic now goes into disposable packaging. It's durability means that any toxic events persist indefinitely in the environment. [inaudible] plastic presents a problem in temporal management of the very long term and the very short term. How do we get the benefits of plastics amazing durability [00:23:30] while reducing its harm from the convenient disposability. Visit [inaudible] dot org for tickets which are $10 now news with Rick and Lisa, 

Speaker 7:        the May 8th New Scientist magazine reports that recent technological in neuroscience such as functional near infrared spectroscopy allows researchers to watch young baby's brain in their initial encounters with language. Using this technique, Laura and potato and her colleagues have Gallaudet university in Washington d C [00:24:00] discovered a profound difference between babies brought up speaking either one or two languages. Popular theory suggests that babies are born citizens of the world capable of discriminating between the sounds of any language by the time they are a year old. However, they are thought to have lost this ability homing in exclusively on the sounds of their mother tongue. That seemed to be the case with monolinguals, but potato study found that bilingual children still showed increased neural activity in response to completely unfamiliar languages. [00:24:30] At the end of their first year, she found that the bilingual experiences wedges opened the window for learning language. 

Speaker 7:        Importantly, the children still reached the same linguistic milestones such as their first word at roughly the same time as monolingual babies. Supporting the idea that bilingualism can invigorate rather than hinder a child's development. Bilingualism improves the brains executive system, a broad suite of mental skills that center on the ability to block out irrelevant information [00:25:00] and concentrate on a task at hand. Two languages are constantly competing for attention in the bilingual brain. As a result, whenever bilingual speak, write or listen to the radio, the brain is busy choosing the right word while inhibiting the same term from the other language. It is a considerable test of executive control, just the kind of cognitive workout that is common in many commercial brain training programs, which often require you to ignore distracting information while tackling [00:25:30] a task. 

Speaker 6:        Nature News reports on an article published on May 4th in science that blonde hair and people from the Solomon Islands in Melanesia evolves independently from Europeans, Stanford geneticists, Carlos Bustamante and his team compared the genomes of 43 blonde and 42 dark haired Solomon Islanders, and revealed that the islanders blonde hair was strongly associated with a single mutation in the t y r p one gene. That gene encodes an enzyme [00:26:00] that influences pigmentation in mice and humans. Several genes are known to contribute to blonde hair coloration in Europeans, but t y r p one is not involved. About one quarter of Solomon Islanders carry the recessive mutation for blonde hair and the mutation accounts for about 30% of blondes in the Solomon Islands. We used to Monte. I thinks that Melanesian mutation might have arisen between 5,000 and 30,000 years ago, but does not know why, nor does he know why. This mechanism differs from that of European blindness 

Speaker 7:        research [00:26:30] published in April Steele Physical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union states that for the first time scientists have captured images of auroras above the giant Ice Planet Uranus. Finding further evidence of just how peculiar a world that distant planet is detected by means of carefully scheduled observations from the Hubble Space Telescope. The newly witnessed Uranian light show consistent of short-lived, faint glowing dots, a world [00:27:00] of difference from the colorful curtains of light that often ring Earth's poles. Auroras are produced in the atmosphere as charged solar wind particles as they accelerate and the magneto sphere and are guided by the magnetic field close to the magnetic poles. That's why the Earth Auroras are found around the high latitudes. While working as a research physicist in the space science lab at UC Berkeley in the early 1980s professor John T. Clark of the Boston University Center for Space Physics Observed [00:27:30] X-ray sources from ground-based telescopes and found the first evidence for an Aurora on Uranus. The voyager to fly by in 1986 confirmed that your readiness was indeed a strange beast. Dennis now a better understanding of your rain. Renesas magnetosphere could help scientists test their theories of how Earth's magnetosphere functions. A crucial question and the effort to develop fusion reactors. 

Speaker 6:        Science insider reports this week that the newly proposed helium Stewardship Act [00:28:00] of 2012 Senate bill two three seven four would maintain a roughly 15 years supply of helium for federal users, including the holders of research scans. It would also give priority to federally funded researchers in times of shortage. If Congress fails to renew provisions of the 1996 law that is expiring next year, the u s will discontinue sales from the Federal Reserve, which is responsible for 30% of the world's helium. This would be a big problem for manufacturers of semiconductors and microchips as [00:28:30] well as users of magnetic resonance imaging and other cryogenic instruments. Penn State Physics Professor Moses Chan praises the bill testifying that liquid helium may account for up to 40% of the total budget of some grants is only criticism of the current bill is no provision to reward those who recapture helium used in research. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 1:        [00:29:00] spectrum podcasts are now available on iTunes university. Go to the calyx website. There's a link to the podcast list in the spectrum show description. The music hard during the show is by Astana David from his album folk and acoustic. It has made available through a creative Commons attribution license 3.0 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 1:        production assistance has been provided by Rick Karnofsky and Lisa kind of. Yeah. Thank you for listening [00:29:30] to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l [email protected] 

Speaker 2:        join us in two weeks at this same time.

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Tony DeRose and Michelle Hlubinka discuss Young Makers, a collaboration between Pixar, the Exploratorium, and Maker Media to connect kids with adult mentors to develop projects for the Maker Faire (May 19-20, 2012 in San Mateo). www.youngmakers.org

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

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

Speaker 3:        Hi, I'm Rick Karnofsky. Brad swift and I are the hosts of today's show. We are speaking with Dr Tony Rose who got his graduate degree from cal and is now the head of research at Pixar [00:01:00] and Michelle who Banka the educational director for our Riley and maker media. They are here to discuss the young makers program, this collaboration between Pixar mic magazine and the exploratorium teams, young people with adult makers to create and construct amazing projects for the maker fair. Each year they'll talk about the program and what you might expect to see from the teams that this year's maker fair at the San Mateo Fair gowns on May 19th and 20th how you might get involved next year and about the future of educating and encouraging more young people to make more things in the [00:01:30] physical world. And please stay tuned for a chance to win tickets to the maker fair after this program. Tony and Michelle, thanks for joining us. Thanks. It's nice to be here. Yeah, thank you. And can you tell us a little bit about the young makers program? Sure. I can start. The 

Speaker 4:        program was based, at least in part on my own family's experience where several years ago, my older son who's always loved to build things, grew out of Legos and we realized there was nothing for him to really graduate into until we discovered maker fair in 2006 [00:02:00] so we went to maker fair a couple of times as spectators and then starting in 2008 we started creating our own projects to share and we had such a great time and we all learned so much that the young makers program is an attempt to try to bring that sort of experience to other kids and other families. 

Speaker 5:        Tony came to us, uh, make and make are fair and was also having a conversation with our collaborators, Mike and Karen at the exploratorium about potentially doing some work that could get more kids [00:02:30] excited about science and technology. We all agree that this is something that really needs to be done and we're all excited about working together. Let's do it. So that can was 2010, right? We launched a pilot and we had 20 kids come create projects, which they exhibited at maker fair that year. Everything from a hamster habitat that functions also as a coffee table to a fire breathing dragon, all things that the kids came up with of their own design and worked with [00:03:00] mentors to create over the space of a few months leading up to maker fair. 

Speaker 4:        So Michelle said in the pilot run in 2010 we had about 20 kids. Last year we had about 150 participants total. About a hundred were cads and a hundred were adult supporters in various roles, mentors and club managers. This year we have about 300 so we're growing pretty rapidly and what we're trying to do now is start to think about how to scale beyond the bay area and help to create similar efforts and at least other metropolitan regions, if not, you know, even rural [00:03:30] regions 

Speaker 5:        nationally or eventually internationally. Eventually internationally. There's nothing that would constrain this to the U s we're already international. I think we have a group in Calgary, Alberta. Right. That's started up. And do you see an advantage or disadvantage? Young makers is mostly outside of schools. 

Speaker 4:        It started mostly outside of schools, but we're really looking for early adopter kind of teachers like Aaron at the lighthouse school to see if we can adapt it to in school. School curriculum is a really complicated thing, so we don't want [00:04:00] to be gated on, you know, widespread immediate adoption. So we're trying to develop a lot of models and materials and resources and best practices in whatever setting we can run the fastest, which happens to be informal out of school after school. But I think a lot of the materials that we're developing will hopefully be usable by teachers address toward academic curriculum during the school day. 

Speaker 5:        Hmm. I'm just to follow up on the lighthouse charter school. Sure. So we're hoping they're going to be [00:04:30] a part of a project that we're doing to get more making back into high schools. So I'm sure you know that a lot of schools have been getting their technical arts programs, technical education, really. They've got lots of vocational ads. They've also been calling these, we're trying to reverse that trend and we got some funding from DARPA to work on getting, making back into schools and it's called the makerspace project. So we are trying to find 10 schools in California this year and then a hundred the following year and then a thousand the year after that [00:05:00] all around the country have thousand and this is to try to create those kinds of shop spaces. So this kind of thing is happening at lighthouse charter school already, but we'd like to see a lot more of it happening. Are there other corporate sponsors that are interested in joining the program? Yes, there has been a lot of uh, corporate interest in getting involved with the maker movement. And so as part of that we are starting the maker education collaborative. Do you want to say something about that Tony 

Speaker 4:        w [00:05:30] what are the motivations for the, the collaborative is w w we began to realize that there are so many different ways to connect kids with making the young makers program is, you know, out of school typically more ambitious, middle and high school level. But you could change all those traces to be in school younger. And so there's a whole bunch of variations and probably so many variations that no one company or no one organization could, could do it. But if you look at the [00:06:00] various different programs that could be created, there's a lot of overlap in the, in the needs and the resources and so one of the things the collaborative is trying to do is pull together a common platform so that as companies or organizations want to launch something, they don't have to start from dirt. There's a big network that they can plug into and you know, get off and running really quickly. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 6:        you are listening to the spectrum on k a l ex [00:06:30] today we are talking with Michelle [inaudible] of maker Media and Tony de Rosa Pixar about the young makers program that promotes young people to make fantastic things. 

Speaker 5:        Maker fairs, this really family friendly event. Tony came with his family and what we love about the family model is that it's a really nice way that people have been able to engage and get closer and work together with their kids. [00:07:00] In the way that I think we imagine happened back in the Norman Rockwell era a lot more than it does today. Now that we're much more in a screen-based society. But part of our job is getting kids to either get away from the screens or only use those screens when they need to find out what they need to do to get back off the screens again. What's certainly interesting coming from someone from Pixar who makes it relatively passive entertainment, right? 

Speaker 4:        Right. But if you think about the, the, the kinds of people that we have now and that we [00:07:30] want to continue to hire, they're, there are people that know how to learn on their own. They work really well in groups. They're highly multidisciplinary. And those are, those are exactly the attributes that, that the young makers program is designed to develop. And the kids that participate have those traits. We're just trying to, you know, help, help them grow in all those ways. And one of the nice things about the, this more ambitious project that we have this year is it's not just our family, it's, it's five families working together. So it becomes really a community building [00:08:00] activity. And you know, the neighbors that walk by, you know, get drawn in because they see all this crazy stuff going on in the driveway and it, so it's just a really wonderful healthy thing that everybody can contribute to and feel good about. So you touched upon the kinds of people that Pixar is interested in. Are there other things that set Pixar and O'Reilly and exploratory in that part that make them natural fits for sponsors? Well, for one thing, we're not afraid to make mistakes. So when we started working on this program and none of us [00:08:30] knew how this was going to work, so in true maker spirit we just sort of jumped in and were figuring out stuff as we go. Yeah, we all appreciate, yeah, the 

Speaker 5:        learning by making, I think all of us appreciate story in a different way. Mike and Karen, especially at the exploratorium, are very good about documenting the work that they do and sharing that story and helping other museums explore that same theme. Tony, obviously I Pixar, they're in the business of making stories and we're all about hunting out those stories and sharing them with others. 

Speaker 4:        What do you think of [00:09:00] creativity in digital environments? I think we're all fans of creativity in whatever form it takes. My younger son is really into Minecraft right now. One of the things you can really see is his facial reasoning has become incredibly honed. He can go into one of these environments that he's built and you know, they're very extensive. He can, he can navigate through those. Those amazes very quickly. It has become a community thing too. So he has friends that, you know, get out and play together. [00:09:30] You know, I think you can take anything too far and so we have to work to dial that back a little bit. But I think our point of view is that there are lots of burgeoning virtual opportunities for creativity. Minecraft is one video editing, web design, but the opportunities to express creativity in physical form is diminishing. And that that's the trend we're trying to reverse. 

Speaker 5:        What kinds of things did you make when you were younger? Uh, well I am well known in my circle of friends for making calendars [00:10:00] of all things. I had a character named to Bianca, obviously a pseudonym for Mays who went on adventures around the world and then I tried to pack in as many facts into this calendar as I could. So I did oodles a research trying to find something related to my theme every year. So one year it was being, it goes to ancient Egypt, it goes to the art museum and so I tried to find facts for every single day of the year to share with people. Part of the reason I left those calendars though is [00:10:30] because I was getting more and more excited that we learn in a hands on way. And so the kind of pedagogical stance of this fact filled trivia based calendar had nothing to do with hands on learning and so I've been trying to resolve them. 

Speaker 5:        What do you think makes for a good project for the young makers? I think the most important thing for a project to have is that the person making it has a passion about it and is excited [00:11:00] to make it. Usually the more successful projects also have something a little bit quirky or unusual about it. Sometimes bringing together two disparate things that nobody has put together before. So I'm trying to think of a great example of that habitat combat for example of bringing together a need for a base for a hamster to live and wanting it to be an attractive centerpiece [00:11:30] of a living room in the form of a coffee table. If that would be an example of a quirky approach to solving your problem. 

Speaker 4:        I think a couple of other attributes that make a project, you know really worthwhile as to is for the team to pick a project that is just beyond or maybe even a little bit further than just beyond their current abilities so that when they complete it they really feel a sense of accomplishment. It's not a done deal going in. There's, there are all sorts of twists and turns and one of the challenges that the mentors are posed [00:12:00] with is how do I assess the skills of the team and help to dial in so that you hit that, that sweet spot that's just, it's ambitious but not too ambitious. It's just a natural part of the process to hit failures and roadblocks and our approach is learn from the failures and figure out how to get around the roadblocks and pick up the pieces and go on. So for us, failure isn't something to be avoided. It's something to be embraced and, and learn from. 

Speaker 5:        And are most of the projects finished to completion? [00:12:30] We were, we've been doing 

Speaker 4:        very surprised the, my expectation anyway was we might get completion rates of maybe 30 to 50% something like that. And we've seen typically more like 80% completion rates. So 

Speaker 5:        it's amazing how motivating a deadline is. Is it? A lot of that completion has to do with, we work very hard to help them find the mentoring that they need in order to complete it. I remember last year, something that seems like it was going to be pretty simple. [00:13:00] A couple of girls will not, the project wasn't simple, but finding them a mentor seemed like it would be simple. They wanted to create a pedal powered car. So we tapped into some of our bike networks because as you can imagine, the bicycling network and the network of people who are excited about making overlap pretty heavily sent out email after email. And then we discovered that part of the problem was that these girls were making it at their school, Lighthouse Charter school here in Oakland. They're working on their project at school, but they don't have the facilities for fabricating [00:13:30] and doing the welding there. And so it's also a matter of trying to get the kids to the fabrication facility or get that convinced that bike guy to haul all the welding stuff probably on his bike to lighthouse charter school. So those are the kinds of things that we're trying to figure out in these first few years when we're doing the mentor matching. You're listening to the spectrum on k a l, X. Today 

Speaker 6:        we're talking with Michelle Lupica of maker Media and Tony de Rosa Pixar [00:14:00] about the young makers program that encourages young makers to team with adult mentors to make fantastic projects and show them off at the maker. 

Speaker 5:        Okay, and do you think the kids who don't finish still get a lot out of the program? Oh yeah, so they, they did finish, I want to say they did finish it. It was a beautiful pink pedal powered bike, but what it meant is that, you know, as we were getting closer and closer to that deadline of maker fair, we had to work harder and harder to persuade someone to come and [00:14:30] work with them and help them achieve what they were trying to do. But they of course I think also had to scale back a little bit. That's a big part of this is setting real expectations for what can be accomplished in time for it. One thing that we're very excited about this program in contrast to other programs is that we really put an emphasis on exhibition of our competition. This is an where you know whether you have succeeded or failed based on how you interact with others and how they can understand [00:15:00] what motivated you and what the project is all about and kids know whether or not their project worked or not. 

Speaker 4:        One of the other things that distinguishes the program from a lot of other activities right now is that the projects aren't in response to a challenge that's posed by adults or organizers. The project visions come from the kids themselves, so they're very open ended. They're very broad. They're often extremely multidisciplinary, you know, combining in very natural ways, various branches [00:15:30] of science, engineering, art, music, and there's this unifying vision that pulls all those disciplines together. And I think the non-competition and open-endedness is one of the reasons that we see a higher percentage of girls than a lot of other programs. We're about 40% girls right now where I think a lot of other activities, science fairs and competitions are much more male oriented. 

Speaker 5:        Is the way that the girls and boys approach a program different in any way? 

Speaker 4:        Yes, there are a few gender [00:16:00] differences. I think that that that tend to occur, and not universally of course, but one is that the boys often want to work in small groups or alone, whereas the girls tend to want to work in larger groups. How large is large? Three or four is the typical size. 

Speaker 5:        We had one group I think last year with about seven girls working together on a water totter. It was a pump that was powered by us. You saw, 

Speaker 4:        I think another gender difference we've seen echoed in a number of projects. Has girls tend to want to work on things that are [00:16:30] socially beneficial and kind of right or or the hamster habitat. Whereas the boys often gravitate towards something that is a little edgier or more dangerous spits out fire. Yeah, fire is a good one. Yeah, and that's okay. One of our mottoes is, you know, anything cool is fair game. Do something cool, do something you're passionate about and it'll probably fit right in. 

Speaker 5:        And how do you guys help recruit and improve mentors for this program? 

Speaker 4:        Well, for recruiting, we've tapped into our [00:17:00] own social networks, so there are a lot of participants. For Pixar for instance, that are sort of natural born makers themselves. [inaudible] are interested in teaching. 

Speaker 5:        Yeah. This upcoming maker fair I believe is our 13th event and at each one we have 600 to a thousand makers. So often what we'll do is we'll say a kid has a specific question, we'll try to find a mentor some times local, but sometimes they're okay with asking and answering questions from farther away. When the makers [00:17:30] would sign up for maker fair, we would ask them, would you be willing to mentor? I think for this round we actually took that question out because we found that most makers, again, because of that generosity of spirit that characterizes the bay area, and I think makers in any place, they don't say no when you ask them a question because they're for there to be more people like them that have this innate curiosity. So they're, they're happy to fuel that. 

Speaker 4:        We also get people finding the website and you know, hearing stories like this [00:18:00] and they are drawn into the program through those means as well. 

Speaker 6:        You are listening to spectrum on k a l LX today. We're talking to Tony Darrow's, a Pixar and Michelle Lupica of maker media about the young makers program that helps students create an exhibit, their projects and maker fair. 

Speaker 4:        Another great example is a boy in Arizona, Joey Hoodie. So we got to talking with Joey, created a project, brought it to maker fair. It was a pneumatic marshmallow cannon and we'd come to find out that [00:18:30] Joey suffers from Aspbergers syndrome, but he's just flourishes in the making community. So he came to maker fair. He had a great time. I think they've been to basically every making event in every city since then. And it was really exciting to see him invited to the White House who was a wonderful picture of Joey and the president and this, it's the most wonderful you probably just off camera. Yeah. But the, the look on President Obama's face is just priceless. You know, his, his jaw dropped basically. So it was just, [00:19:00] I think it'd been a life changing experience for Joey and, and hopefully can be for a lot of other similar kids. 

Speaker 5:        The kids at the next table. Two are in the New York Times picture kind of cowering in horror. They watch him launch this marshmallow into the wall of the state room. I'm also interested in if any of the young makers who have made projects before are interested in coming back and being mentors. Are they sort of Gung Ho about continuing the program? 

Speaker 4:        We don't have a long enough track record to have kids that have graduated, come [00:19:30] back as mentors. Most of them that graduate go off to college. Typically studying engineering programs. What we have seen as some of the more advanced and older young makers mentoring some of the younger young makers in the program. And that's another reason that the club model is really nice because there's not only enter age learning, but we've seen intergenerational learning. In fact, we had one team last year where there was a young maker, the father was the main mentor and the grandfather was also participating. The grandfather was kind of an old school electrical [00:20:00] engineer and the project was to build police car instrumented with various sensors and sounds. So the grandfather's first reaction was, you know, let's build custom circuits for each of those functions. And somebody in one of the blessings sessions suggested looking at Ardwino, which is a, an embedded microprocessor system. And so they ended up adopting Ardwino for the project. The, the young maker ended up teaching the grandfather about embedded micro control software. [00:20:30] And so the, the learning goes both ways. How can people get involved with young makers next year? If you're interested in participating in the 2013 season of young makers, go to young makers.org there's a signup link on the left margin. We'll get you on our mailing list and we'll let you know as the season starts to spin up and can people expect 

Speaker 7:        from maker fair in a couple of weeks. 

Speaker 5:        So maker fairs coming up May 19th and 20th Saturday and Sunday at the San Mateo Expo Center. It's this fun filled weekend of DIY. Do it yourself. Technology and art is a little bit like burning [00:21:00] man without the drugs. Sandstorms and unity. The team that was working on the water totter. They were thinking of making a three hump lump from Dr Seuss, but scaled back. I think the original is a seven Hump Hump. We have everything from the Coke Zero Mentos fountains and that architect, which is a performance of Tesla coils and heavy rock music, which is fantastic to [00:21:30] 600 other people showing off their projects and arts, crafts, engineering, green design, music, science, technology, rockets and robots, felting, beekeeping. We've got it all. If you want more information, go to maker fair.com that's m a k e r f a I r e.com. Don't forget the e. It's the greatest show and Chow on earth. Thank you both for joining us. [00:22:00] Thank you for having us. It's been great. Thanks. 

Speaker 6:        A regular feature of spectrum is a calendar of some of the science and technology events happening in the bay area. Over the next two weeks. We say Katovich and Brad swift join me for this. 

Speaker 8:        One of the most fundamental questions in biology is why we age. On Monday May 7th the Department of Molecular and cell biology at UC Berkeley will present the seminar cellular metabolism, aging and disease from four to 5:00 PM at the Lee Ka-shing Center. [00:22:30] The featured Speaker is Donica Chen from Berkeley Center for nutritional science and toxicology. Chen will address the aging process and therapeutic targets to slow down aging,

Speaker 7:        putting water online. On Wednesday May 9th the floating Sensor Network Team will conduct a major experiment. They will launch the complete 100 unit floating sensor fleet and introduce the fleet and its realtime sensing capabilities to the public. Wednesday morning. The fleet will be launched [00:23:00] from Walnut Grove, California and cycled through the Sacramento River Georgiana SLU environment for the rest of the day at 4:00 PM in sweetheart or dye hall and the UC Berkeley campus. There will be around table discussion and public seminar. During the round table discussion, water researchers will explore the implications of this emerging sensing technology on the future of California's water management challenges. For more information or to RSVP for the event contact Lori Mariano. [00:23:30] Her email address is [email protected] the general meeting of the bay area and Mycological Society is on Thursday May 10th from seven 30 to 9:30 PM in room three three eight of UC Berkeley's Kaushal and hall. At 

Speaker 3:        this free event, you can have your mushrooms identified and then listen to an 8:00 PM presentation by Alan Rockefeller on the mushrooms of Mexico. He discusses his extensive fieldwork from his most recent format strip as well as other trips over the past five years in seven [00:24:00] Mexican states. He'll show images of the edible poisonous in psychoactive mushrooms. Yes collected DNA sequences, phylogenetic trees, micrographs, and mushroom food. For more information, visit www.bayareamushrooms.org nerd night. San Francisco is celebrating their second anniversary soon. We all have the organizers on spectrum. On June 15th they host a monthly gathering of nerds with three presentations and drinking on the third Wednesday of every month at the rickshaw [00:24:30] stop, one 55 fell street at Venice in San Francisco. The 24th installment will be an audio show on May 16th doors at seven 30 show at eight and mission has $8 I'm excited to have two of my friends give me in Texas time around UC Berkeley. POSTDOC Brian Patton discusses atomic magnetometry. Megan Carlson talks about [inaudible] the art of super cute and Logan Hesser weighs in on the vagaries of the English language. For more information, visit sf.internet.com that's [00:25:00] s f dot. Nerd and ite.com and now for some science news headlines. Here's Lisa Katovich and Brad Swift. 

Speaker 8:        A study presented at the experimental biology conference in San Diego in April reported that migraine sufferers are more likely to experience brain freeze by bringing on brain freeze in the lab and volunteers and studying blood flow in their brains. Researchers from the Department of veteran affairs, the National University of Ireland in Galloway and Harvard Medical School [00:25:30] found that the sudden headache seems to be triggered by an abrupt increase in blood flow in the anterior cerebral artery and disappears when the artery constricts. The findings could eventually lead to new treatments for a variety of different headaches. This dilation. Then quick constriction may be a type of self defense for the brain because the skull is a closed structure, the sudden influx of blood could raise pressure and induced pain. This vessel constriction may be the way to bring pressure down in the brain before it reaches dangerous levels. Drugs that block [00:26:00] sudden vessel dilation or target channels involved specifically in the vessel. Dilation of headaches could be one way of changing a headaches course and that would be good news for the approximately 10% of the population that suffers from migraines. 

Speaker 3:        Will Johnson sent in an ars technica summary of an April 22nd nature physics article by Zau Song, Ma and others from the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Quantum entanglement is a process by which 14 one particle into a given state can make a second particle go into [00:26:30] another given state, even if it is far away. Ma's team has shown experimentally that through a process known as delayed choice entanglement swapping, the result of a measurement may be dependent upon whether entanglement is performed after the measurement. They use the pulse ultraviolet laser beam and Beta [inaudible] boray crystals to generate two polarized entangled photon pairs, we'll call them photons one and two and photons three and four photons one in four have their polarities measured. Photons two and three are each delayed [00:27:00] and then subjected to either an entangles state measurement or a separable state measurement, but the choice of this measurement determines what was measured for photons. One in for this quantum steering of the past challenges, the ordinary notion of space time, 

Speaker 7:        DNA traces cattle back to a small herd domesticated around 10,500 years ago. All cattle are descendant from as few as 80 animals that were domesticated from wild ox in the Near East some 10,500 years ago. According to a genetic study reported by science daily [00:27:30] and international team of scientists from the National Museum of Natural History and see n r s in France, the University of man's in Germany and UCL in the U K we're able to conduct the study by first extracting DNA from the bones of domestic cattle excavated in Iranian archeological sites. These sites. Date two not long after the invention of farming and are in the region where cattle were first domesticated, the team examined how small differences in the DNA [00:28:00] sequence of those cattle as well as cattle living today could have arisen given different population histories using computer simulations. They found that the DNA differences could only have arisen if a small number of animals approximately 80 were domesticated from wild ox. The study is published in the current issue of the journal of molecular biology and evolution 

Speaker 9:        [inaudible].

Speaker 2:        [00:28:30] Okay. 

Speaker 9:        The music you heard during today's program was by lost Donna David from his album folk and acoustic. It is released under creative Commons attribution only. License version three point here. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 9:        spectrum was recorded and edited by me, Rick Carnesi, and by Brad Swift 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

Speaker 9:        [00:29:00] 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 dot k a l [email protected] join us in two weeks at this same time. 

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

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

Joe Cordaro is a principle member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore. He is a research chemist who received his PhD in chemistry from UC Berkeley. He talks with us about his work in concentrated solar power systems.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

Speaker 1:        Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l [00:00:30] 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 [inaudible]. 

Speaker 3:        Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm joined today by spectrum contributors. Rick Karnofsky and Lisa [inaudible]. Rick and I interviewed Joe Carderock, a principal member of the technical staff at Sandia national laboratories in Livermore. He is a research chemist. [00:01:00] Joe received his phd in chemistry from UC Berkeley. He talks with us about his work in concentrated solar power systems. Joe, welcome to spectrum. Thank you. Rick. Can you explain to us a little bit about concerted solar power? Sure. I'd be happy to. People have looked at using mirrors to focus light to do exactly what we are now doing in the 21st century since the mid 17 and 18 hundreds. There's a few reports that people using mirrors to focus [00:01:30] sunlight to heat up water in a boiler to generate steam for creating a pump for irrigation. And there's also been a report of a printing press that was powered off of steam that was generated using mirrors to focus light to once again heat up a boiler. 

Speaker 3:        Um, that all happened in the 19th early 20th century. But from about the early 1920s until the 1970s not a lot of work went into looking at concentrated solar power to make electricity. Primarily that was because at the same [00:02:00] time that research to make solar electricity from sunlight was taking off, oil was discovered and that became much cheaper and economical than it was to invest in technology to look at concentrated solar power. So concentrated solar power is a method by using in mirrors to focus the sun's rays onto a type of central receiver in order to boil water, to turn a turbine to generate electricity. So it's really a complicated way to boil water just to make electricity, but it works [00:02:30] and it only uses the sun. Is this sort of input for energy? Yeah, it's actually pretty amazing that we, that we don't use this more often because there is no emission from it. 

Speaker 3:        There's no greenhouse gases, there's no radioactive material and it's mostly made using commodity parts that can almost 70% be made in the United States. So there's three main architectures for concentrated solar power. There's the sterling engine, there's parabolic trough systems and then a central receiver tower [00:03:00] vista. Then engines are maybe the most efficient type of concentrated solar power, but they also have the most moving parts and a reliability is somewhat low right now. Their module, so you can add one and then another and another and another and increase your field side to base on demand. You can also just stick one in your backyard if you had the money to buy it and uh, didn't mind the thumping noise at the sterling pump makes so they're a little loud. The most employed type of concentrated solar [00:03:30] power facility right now is a parabolic trough system. And in a parabolic trough system you have a field of mirrors that are focused on a central tube that runs through the parabolic trough. 

Speaker 3:        And this tube is about three inches in diameter. And inside the tube is a working fluid and it's usually a silicon based oil. And the silicon based oil is used because the uh, operating temperature for that is around zero degrees Celsius up to 450. If you're in the desert, you typically have cold winter nights, [00:04:00] so you need to have a flu that doesn't solidify at nighttime in the wintertime. And so zeros are pretty good, that lower limit, but the a heat transfer fluid and based on silicon is slightly expensive. And how does that upper limit established? How hot can these things really go? So the upper limit would be the thermal stability of working fluid and the upper stability is just dependent on the chemical nature of the fluid. So the bond strengths of the actual carbon oxygen and silicon bonds within the heat transfer fluid. 

Speaker 3:        But as far as the amount [00:04:30] of heat energy that can be sort of harvested, that's going to be dependent on the thermal heat capacity of the fluid times the actual density times the uh, flow rate. So the more heat you can store per volume per time will give you a more energy out at the end of the day. But all of that is gonna be dependent on factors like your thermal conductivity between the two betters holding the heat transfer fluid, and then also the heat exchangers that are down the line when you convert from a silicon [00:05:00] oil heat to steam heat. So there's a lot of limiting factors that control your efficiency of these things and a lot of losses. Also third type of concentrated solar power facility called the central receiver tower. And in those systems you have one tower that could maybe be 50 to a a hundred meters above the ground and that tower surrounded by field of mirrors and those mirrors are flat. 

Speaker 3:        I also call them heliostats and those mirrors track the sun and then reflect the sun's rays onto the central receiver tower. And [00:05:30] the essential receiver tower has a molten salt inside of it and the temperature that usually goes up to about 550 degrees Celsius. And the reason why we're using molten salt is because you can get a higher operating temperature. Then you count the silicon fluid and this molten salt heats up to its operating temperature, which has been pumped only a short distance to a heat exchanger, which then boils water to turn a turbine to make electricity. 

Speaker 2:        This is spectrum on k a l x [00:06:00] Berkeley. We are talking with Joe Cordaro of Sandia national laboratories about concentrated solar power. 

Speaker 3:        And Are we limited at all about where we would deploy a concentrated solar power plants or are these all going to end up in the deserts of Arizona or so one of the main limitations for concentrated solar powers that you need to have good sunlight, you need to do need to have many, many days of sunlight [00:06:30] per year with a high intensity. So putting a concentrated solar power field up in northern Europe or the northeast of the United States doesn't always make sense economically. It's a much better to put it in the desert in California or Arizona or New Mexico or Utah or in Africa. So the key being cloud free, cloud free with a lower latitudes. And how prevalent are concentrated solar power plants right now? Well, [00:07:00] they're building them pretty rapidly, but I think the total percentage of the electricity we get in the United States, it's probably less than 1%, but they're building these plants in California and Arizona, especially essential receiver towers. 

Speaker 3:        There's a big plant being built in Ivanpah, which is outside of Barstow. There's a couple of being built outside Las Vegas and Phoenix. They're building them in Morocco. They're building them in Italy. There's quite a few in Spain and there's some in France. Israel is building them. The amount of electricity [00:07:30] coming from these plants is uh, increasing, but it's still nothing compared to coal or natural gas. So essentially receiver towers are being explored a lot more because they have the potential for higher efficiency because you can go to higher temperature. So the carnow efficiency basically says that the higher difference in temperature between your hot and cold for doing work gives you the higher efficiency. So if you can increase your high operating temperature to five, six, seven, 800 degrees Celsius, but keep [00:08:00] your low operating temperature is still above the boiling point of water, you'll have a much more efficient cycle. 

Speaker 3:        So if you're limited by our heat transfer fluid, thermal stability of 450 degrees, then you're uh, overall fishing in the plant will be limited. So a lot of the work that the Department of energy is doing to try to improve the efficiencies of these systems is to look at higher operating temperatures. But with higher operating temperatures comes also a materials compatibility issues. And then also higher losses. So as you go to higher temperature, you not only get better [00:08:30] efficiency for your carnow efficiency, but you also get higher radiative losses. So you actually start to lose more heat throughout your whole system. And your materials become more difficult to match. And Costco, Costco really high. And why is that? Well, materials are becoming a big issue. There's not a lot of industries that currently use high temperature materials that except the nuclear industry. So if you want to do large scale industrial power plants, you really [00:09:00] want to stick with commodity items that can be purchased cheaply. 

Speaker 3:        Otherwise the costs are too expensive. So there's a lot of analysis that goes into try to decide if I increase my temperature by just 200 degrees or even a hundred degrees, is the efficiency gain worth the cost? So one of the big issues with these costs and material selection are the corrosion issues with your heat transfer fluid. So if you have a fluid that's operating at 700 or 800 degrees Celsius, you start to have incompatible [00:09:30] materials between your heat transfer fluid and the actual material of the pipe is made out of, I don't know, most of these salt baths, very simple sort of two ion component systems like this. Well the only actual molten salt used in the fields now are based off of sodium, potassium nitrate and nitrite mixture. So there are four components, two to four components, and they're pretty simple. But they do have reactive properties with a lot of alloys. 

Speaker 3:        So there are still some [00:10:00] corrosion issues, especially when you get above 550 degrees. So there's the longterm stability of the molten salt bath or the molten salt storage tank, or the molten salt pipes that have to be considered because it's a 30 year plant that leave expected design. So most power plants are built with the idea that it's going to have a 30 year lifetime. So you have to figure out what's gonna happen over 30 years. And the rate of a simple chemical reaction usually doubles with every 10 degrees increase in temperature. So if you have a simple first order [00:10:30] reaction, like the decomposition of a Moan Salt, and you increase the temperature by 10 degrees, you can expect your rate to double. And so that starts to really matter. If you're looking at something that's going to be a 30 year lifetime, 

Speaker 2:        you were listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Brad swift and Rick Karnofsky are talking with Joe Cordura about concentrated solar power and [inaudible]. 

Speaker 3:        [00:11:00] So how intense is the beam once all these mirrors reflected into the molten salts? The central receiver tower like I described, has a large receiving window that maybe 10 by 10 meters and it's a target area that's painted black in order to absorb as much sunlight as possible from maybe a hundred, maybe 200 or maybe a thousand mirrors in the field, and they're focusing the sun's energy onto the central target in order to [00:11:30] get a really, really high temperature so that you can heat up some working heat transfer fluid. There's a way that a lot of the engineer's describe the intensity is it by the number of sons that are being focused onto that area and you're focusing all of those mirrors on a central spot, but you can get up to 3000 suns mean focused onto a single spot. 3000 suns is quite a high amount of energy and also very high temperature and there have been reports of birds that have flown [00:12:00] in the path of the sun. It's hot enough that they've burst into a little ball of fire and then fallen down into a fiery death below. Fortunately, it's only a few birds every once in a while, but that's how hot it does get in front of those receivers. You get nowhere that high of intensity and a parabolic trough system because you only have one large curved, mere focusing the sunlight onto a tube rather than hundreds of mirrors all focusing onto a central receiver. 

Speaker 3:        [00:12:30] Can you explain more about how you store the, is it the heat you're storing? Are you, what are you storing actually, so one of the biggest advantage of concentrated solar power is the ability to store thermal heat. When you use the sun to generate electricity, you're depending on the sun's sunlight to be consistent on the race to be consistent. And if a cloud goes in front of the sun and you're generate electricity using photovoltaics, your power drops to zero until the cloud moves [00:13:00] out of the sky. At nighttime, you can't generate any electricity either cause you don't have any sun. If you look at the peak demand time for electricity in the United States, it tracks with the date, time sun, which is good. But then it also continues into the evening until six seven eight o'clock at night when everyone comes home at night and turns on their washer and dryer turns on their television and it turns on their dishwasher. 

Speaker 3:        If you don't have any electricity on the grid available, then you're going to have a big problem. Coal and nuclear power plants can just generate electricity 24 hours a day without any problem. So [00:13:30] concentrated solar power offers the ability to do that as well through what we call thermal storage. So if you have a huge field of parabolic troughs that are heating up a heat transfer fluid to a high temperature, you can then take this fluid and store it into a large tank. And this hot fluid is going to stay hot for eight 1220 hours to pay on how big you build that tank. So now if you have a hot tank that's storing all of this heat, you can draw heat from that tank rather than drawing it from the field. [00:14:00] So you can decouple the power generation cycle from the actual solar sunlight. 

Speaker 3:        So the tank is kept at a high temperature and constantly being recharged by the sun. But if the sun disappears, you have a reserve of fluid that's still hot that you can use to generate electricity by boiling water. And the size of that tank is dependent on how many hours of storage you want. So people will make these tanks based off of an eight hour storage cycle or a 10 hour or 12 hour [00:14:30] storage time. So typically they're made up of an eight hour storage time because no one needs a lot of electricity at four, five in the morning, and then the sun comes back up again and you can start your whole plant back up. And that makes it much easier to tie into the grid and much easier to distribute electricity to the population. So what we call a dispatchable electricity generation. That's a big advantage for concentrated solar power compared to wind or photovoltaics and what [00:15:00] happens to the system if the outage is longer so you don't just have to worry about nights they have to worry about clouds or dust storms or, so there's a lot of potential backups that can be engineered into a system. 

Speaker 3:        One of them being gas powered burners just put in line to boil water to power the system in reverse basically. So if there was a really big problem where you had no sunlight for a week, could potentially use natural [00:15:30] gas burners to boil water but cycle it in reverse and so then the water goes and operates as a heat transfer fluid actually warm up the salt again. Fortunately historical data I think shows that that just is not a big risk. I mean you wouldn't build a plant in the northeast where you actually could have a week of cloud cover and cold rainy weather. You'd build a plant in the desert and a week of no sun doesn't happen. There's been plants that have been in operation for 30 years [00:16:00] in the desert in California, and there's historical data that is available to kind of map out where in the world you would build these plants. 

Speaker 3:        That goes back many, many, many years and the Department of Energy has collected this data, specifically the national renewable energy lab. Our enrol in Colorado has a lot of this data and industry and the national labs work strongly together to try to figure out where the best places to build these plants that have not only the highest solar [00:16:30] radiation, but also the lowest environmental impact when you build a plant because despite it being a zero emitter of greenhouse gases, there are environmental issues related to water usage and also endangered species and the Atlantan usage. Pretty big. Yeah, they can be quite large. So there are some land issues that are associated with building a system in the middle of the desert. There's also issues about how do you get the electricity to where consumers actually [00:17:00] live. If you build a power plant in the middle of the desert but everyone lives a couple hundred miles away or thousands of miles away, how do you actually get the electricity to more populated areas? And this is an issue Europe is dealing with because they want to build power plant in North Africa and then have electricity ship to continental Europe somehow. So it's another topic, but they're looking at ways to make high voltage DC transmission lines from northern Europe down into Africa. So you can actually distribute the electricity from where it's generated. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 3:        [00:17:30] Joe Cornaro is our guest. The show is spectrum. The station is k a l x Berkeley. The topic is concentrated solar power. 

Speaker 3:        And what are some of the other open research questions that are out there besides the materials compatibility issues that you, some of the other areas are looking at. How do you actually set up a field of mirrors that maybe [00:18:00] 50 acres big and then get everyone in those mirrors to actually align properly without making it an incredibly expensive task. So all of these mirrors have to track the sun at the same angle and you have to figure out how can you put all these mirrors on some type of mechanical platform that moves to track the sun and then direct the sunlight efficiently. Cause just a small error in one of the mirrors can really change your beam and decrease your efficiency quite significantly. [00:18:30] You also have to think about what happens when a big wind storm comes around in the desert and you have 70 mile an hour winds. 

Speaker 3:        Now all the mirrors have to be stowed, turned pretty much horizontal so that they don't get blown away. Then you have to worry about the sand that comes by and and polishes. The mirrors are unpolished as them heres so there's a lot of technology goes into the coatings figuring out new pumps, valves and fittings when you're running at 800 degrees. So you can pump a fluid at 500 degrees. We have commercial equipment to do [00:19:00] that, but using that equipment at 700 or 800 degrees hasn't been tested. So manufacturers will make things that they say possibly will work at 800 but it's not actually been tested at 800 and then we don't even have sensors to measure things that 800 on a large scale like this to measure what kinds of things? A viscosity is a big one. So we want to know how fast a fluid is flowing through a pipe so we can calculate how much heat is coming out. 

Speaker 3:        So we know how much steam we're going to generate and try [00:19:30] to measure viscosity at 800 degrees hasn't been done either. So we have active programs to look at making new sensors for viscosity. Some of the other issues, I'm trying to get more efficient steam cycles. Actually there are commercially available turbines to make steam for the uh, colon, natural gas industry that have been around for 50 75 years and they work really well up to a certain temperature. But if you can go higher with your heat transfer fluid, then you want to go higher with your turbine as well. And then [00:20:00] using steam no longer as efficient. And so people are looking at other types of cycles that don't use water anymore to make steam, but they're using super critical CO2 or helium or some other type of gas for what we call air brain cycles. 

Speaker 3:        And those could operate up to 1200 degrees and Japan has actually looked at those for quite awhile, but America has been pretty scared of looking at a 1200 degree high pressure systems. As far as the risk. Yeah, as far as the risk goes, it is a little bit more dangerous [00:20:30] when you have 1200 degrees and high high pressure systems, but the efficiency could be a lot higher. So all of this is still open for optimization. All of it requires inputs from systems engineers to finance people to determine the cost, whether it's worth it down to scientists, to the Terman stability and compatibility of parts to the last thing you want to do is build a big field and then have to replace a huge [00:21:00] portion of it in three years because you have something break that'll make the entire project economically a nonstarter. So the risks have to be reduced to save as much as possible. 

Speaker 4:        Joe, how was it? Did you became involved in concentrated solar power? 

Speaker 3:        After I got to Sandia national labs, I began working in the concentrated solar power research project because I was a chemist in looking at materials, compatibility issues and also stability issues of heat transfer fluids and while it doesn't sound like the most sexy [00:21:30] area of chemistry to be in formulating new salts and looking at high temperature materials, I really, really enjoy it because it is actually being built is actually real science being turned into engineering projects that is actually being deployed throughout the world to solve our problems and to make us energy independent. So unlike a lot of academic research that I did in school, concentrated solar power is real. It's been done and it's been put to use and that makes me incredibly [00:22:00] excited about being part of that project. Joe Codero, thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. 

Speaker 2:        Regular feature of spectrum is to mention a few of the science and technology events happening in the bay area over the next few weeks. Rick and Lisa, join me for the calendar. 

Speaker 5:        UC Berkeley's Institute of East Asian Studies [00:22:30] will hold a symposium titled Towards Longterm Sustainability in response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. It takes place today and tomorrow and it starts soon, one 30 to five 30 today, so you better hurry up and get over there, but if you can't make it today, tomorrow will feature three Speakers, all of whom have been actively involved in analyzing the Fukushima nuclear plant accident, its historical context, and the sociopolitical actions taken by the various stakeholders. The symposium [00:23:00] will situate the causes and the consequences of the disaster in the context of a longterm sustainable future. For more information, go to the website, I. E. A [email protected] 

Speaker 4:        cal day is tomorrow, Saturday, April 21st the Berkeley campus, the museums, the botanical garden are open to the public. There are a wide variety of presentations and facilities you can tour for details, go to the website, cal day.berkeley.edu 

Speaker 5:        [00:23:30] on June 5th, 2012 Venus will transit or pass directly in front of the sun. A transit like this is so rare. No human alive today. We'll witness it again. The next one will not be until 2117 get ready. This event by going to the transit of Venus Planetarium program at the Lawrence Hall of science this Saturday on cow day at 3:00 PM learn why transits are so rare, how studying transits taught us exactly how big our solar system is [00:24:00] and how they may be the key to discovering other earths and other star systems. Then come back on June 5th and observed the actual transit of Venus at the Lawrence Hall of Science. The hall will have several solar telescopes for viewing the eclipse safely on the main plaza. Most of us are aware of the obesity epidemic facing the United States, but is it simply a matter of calories in, calories out on Thursday, May 3rd from 1210 to 1:00 PM in the auditorium of the Berkeley Art Museum, [00:24:30] you CSF neuroendocrinologist Robert Lustig will present the lecture health, Darwin Diet disease and dollars. He will examine some of the more controversial dietary factors contributing to the obesity epidemic, the role that these obesogens potentially play in our evolution toward an unhealthy nation. And possible solutions for turning this trend around. You must register for this event. Go to u h S. Dot. berkeley.edu 

Speaker 6:        [00:25:00] on Saturday April 28th at 1:30 PM the Commonwealth Club and the Youth Science Initiative. Host the research group lead for Pixar and our guest on spectrum two weeks from today, Tony rose. Senator, the admission is $20 Commonwealth Club members get in for 12 

Speaker 6:        and is $7 for students 18 and under. The talk will be at the Los Altos High School Eagle Theater, two zero one almond avenue in Los Altos. Tony will discuss how math [00:25:30] is central to Pixar film production process and also the young makers program. That's the topic of our interview. In the next episode of spectrum, students are teamed up with adult mentors to design and build ambitious projects for the maker fair for tickets and more information, visit www.commonwealthclub.org another feature is spectrum guest Maggie Court. Baker will also be giving a lecture soon. Maggie is the science editor of Boeing, boeing.net and we'll be discussing her recent book before the lights go [00:26:00] out, conquering the energy crisis before it conquers us. She'll put the fun back in the infrastructure and described the surprising ways our electric system evolved, what we can and can't do about the energy crisis now and what the future might hold. This is the spring seminar for the Berkeley Science Review and will take place in the lead caching building room. Three four five on Wednesday May 2nd at 6:00 PM yeah, RSVP At B e r c. Dot. berkeley.edu [00:26:30] pseudo room, a newly forming East Bay hackerspace is having a free kickoff and fundraiser on Friday May 4th at 7:00 PM at Tech Liminal two six eight 14th street in downtown Oakland. Okay. Pseudo room is a collaborative community of tech developers, citizen scientists, activists and artists. Mitch Altman, cofounder of Noisebridge. We'll discuss hackerspaces for more information, visit s u d o room.org [00:27:00] now the news 

Speaker 5:        significant declines are expected in the number of emperor penguins over the next century due to earlier spring warming around Antarctica. A new study in the April 13th edition of Science Daily reports that an international team of scientists using satellite mapping technology reveals there are twice as many emperor penguins in Antarctica than previously thought. Using a technique known as pan sharpening to increase the resolution of the satellite imagery. They were able to differentiate between birds, [00:27:30] eye shadow and Penguin Guano. In the first comprehensive census of a species taken from space 595,000 birds were counted almost double the previous estimates. 

Speaker 6:        The origin of cosmic grays has long been and remains a mystery. The ice cube collaboration in which Berkeley lab is a crucial contributor published in an article in the April 18th issue of nature on their exhaustive search for a high energy neutrinos that would likely be produced if the violent extra galactic [00:28:00] explosions known as Gamma Ray bursts are a source of ultra high energy cosmic rays. They I know events they have correspondents to these bursts when they would predict to see at least 8.4 events that correspond to some of the 215 gamma ray bursts detected from two periods in 2008 and 2009 there are other popular models for the origin of cosmic rays including active galactic nuclei. The Ice Cube Neutrino telescope encompasses a cubic kilometer of ice under [00:28:30] the South Pole and has over 5,000 digital optical modules that track the direction and energy of speeding yuan's which are created when you Trina is collide with Adam's in the ice. On a later episode of spectrum, you'll hear from Spencer Klein and Thorsten Settle Berger about this experiment. Visit ice cube dot [inaudible] w I s c.edu for more information, 

Speaker 2:        thanks to Rick Kaneski [00:29:00] and Lisa cabbage for help producing show music heard during the show is by Lasagna David from his album, folk and acoustic made available through creative Commons attribution license 3.0 spectrum shows are now available online at iTunes university. Go to itunes.berkeley.edu thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send [inaudible] [00:29:30] email address is spectrum dot [inaudible] dot com join us in two weeks. Same time. [inaudible].

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

Jeff Silverman and Nicholas McConnell helped Spectrum present a three part Astronomy survey explaining the ideas, experiments, and observation technology that are transforming Astronomy. This is part three of three. We discuss Dark matter and dark energy.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

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

Speaker 3:        Hello and good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm joined today by spectrum contributors, Rick Karnofsky and Lisa [inaudible]. Our interview is with Dr Jeff Silverman, a recent phd in astrophysics from UC Berkeley and Nicholas McConnell, a phd candidate, unscheduled to be awarded a phd in astrophysics by UC Berkeley this summer. [00:01:00] Jeff and Nicholas have been helping spectrum present a three part astronomy survey, explaining the big ideas, recent experiments, collaborations and improvements in observation technology that are transforming astronomy. This is part three of three and we discuss dark matter, also known as dark energy. Before we talk about dark energy, let me ask you, how do you 

Speaker 4:        relate to time, the human lifetime and then universe lifetime as a scientist [00:01:30] and as a human being, how do you do that? How do you make that stretch? I can't say that I necessarily have an intuitive sense for just how much time has elapsed between the dawn of the universe and me. But I think you can extend it a little bit. You can think of your parents and your parents' parents. And the idea of having ancestry and lineage as a person is a fairly familiar concept. And so I'm the product of generations of people who have done things. And similarly our planet and the conditions that we have and experience every day [00:02:00] are the product of generations and generations of stars being formed and galaxies being formed throughout the universe. And so I think this idea of generations where one thing spawns another and conditions change slightly and gradually over time, but some of the same processes like new stars forming happen over and over and over again is one way to sort of access the, the notion of time throughout the universe. 

Speaker 5:        I think one of the hardest issues for astronomers in astronomy research in general [00:02:30] is the further away we look, the further back in time we look. As Nicholas mentioned, it takes light time to get to us. So if you look at something very far away, it looks like it did much younger in the past, but we can't just watch two galaxies collide and merge. We can't watch a cloud of gas collapse on itself and form a new star and then evolve and then explode as a supernova. We can't wash those processes. We get a snapshot in time, affectively a still of all these processes [00:03:00] all over the universe at different stages. And then the astronomers have to put these pictures in the right order of what's going on, which picture corresponds to which age and how you go from one to the other. And I think that's something that I've had trouble with trying to think about it. 

Speaker 5:        You know, I want to sit down as a scientist and just watch a star evolve and watch it grow up and then die. And then you take your notes and figure it out. Then you're lucky you do get to actually watch them die. I do watch the dying part and you know, with Supernova, with certain kinds of astronomy of phenomena, we [00:03:30] can watch things change on a reasonable basis, on a daily, monthly, yearly basis. But that's the very last bit of a star that has maybe lived for 10 million years or 4 billion years. And one of the things we tried to do is by looking at the death in for a lot about the life, but it is only that small part portion. And there's lots of astronomy where it is basically static and you just see the same thing without any kind of change. There are certain parts of astronomy that do change a little bit with time and we can learn from that. [00:04:00] But the bulk of the star's life, we don't see any change or we just see that tiny bit at the end. 

Speaker 6:        This is spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. We're talking with Dr Jeff Silverman and Nicholas McConnell, astrophysicists from UC Berkeley talking about dark energy. [00:04:30] Let's talk about dark 

Speaker 4:        dark matter. And in so doing, talk about how dark energy or dark matter have become important to astronomy. So one of the interesting things that's happened over the past say half century is that we've profoundly changed our perspective of what the universe contains and what it's fundamentally made of. And so Jeff mentioned through the Supernova in the late nineties we discovered that the universe was expanding faster [00:05:00] and faster and faster. And we think that is due to something that we refer to as dark energy, which we believe makes up about 70 75 5% of the overall mass and energy in the universe. And then when we look at things that we think are sort of more classically as matters stuff that admits gravity and causes things to orbit around it, we've also learned that a very large percentage of gravitational stuff in the universe is made up of this mysterious stuff called dark matter that we know is there [00:05:30] in very large quantities. 

Speaker 4:        It dominates the gravity of how galaxies, for instance, interact with one another. However, we don't know what it's made of. Unlike other kinds of matter, it doesn't emit any light whatsoever. So using telescopes we can learn very little about its actual composition. But on the other side of physics and astronomy, particle physicists have been coming up with theoretical models of the various subatomic particles that constitute universe. And there are certainly space in those [00:06:00] particle models to have particles that are responsible for creating the dark matter. But even though there are a bunch of theories that describe what this dark matter particle might be, it's still not constrained by experiment. We haven't detected definitively any dark matter particle yet, but there are experiments ongoing that are trying to determine what some of these very fundamental particles are. And one that I'll mention because it's led at Berkeley and had an interesting, although definitely not definitive result a couple of years ago is called the cryogenic [00:06:30] dark matter search or cdms. 

Speaker 4:        Uh, and this is an interesting experiment that takes tablets of pure Germanium and buries them, deepen a mine in Minnesota with a lot of equipment and the Germanium is cooled to almost absolute zero as close to absolute zero as we're technologically able to get it. And just sits there waiting for a dark matter particle to come along and collide with one of the atomic nuclei in one of these tablets and the thing about these theorize dark matter particles is that they're extremely noninteractive [00:07:00] to a certain degree. The earth and the galaxy are swimming in a sea of dark matter particles, but they pass through us and never have any noticeable effect on us almost entirely all of the time, but on very, very, very rare occasions you actually do get an interaction in principle between a dark matter particle in something else and so we have these tablets just sitting there waiting for one of these collisions to happen so that we can detect it. 

Speaker 4:        Now there are a bunch of other things that cause collisions in Germanium, things like cosmic rays, which you kind [00:07:30] of get out of the way of by bearing a deep underground electrons and light from other sources, radioactive decay, all of these can set off signals that with a lot of processing and principle, you can distinguish from the ones you expect from having a dark matter particle. Anyway, in 2009 CMS released a statement that they'd been collecting data on collisions inside these tablets for roughly a year's time period and what they found was that based on the best efforts they could do between weeding out [00:08:00] all of the background sources that they're not interested in, they estimated that they would have one false detection that on average statistically they would have missed one background source and classified as a real source. I mean in that same year time period they had found two detections. 

Speaker 4:        So in a very, very, very non-statistical sense, you say, well we found two and we think that one of them statistically is probably false. Maybe we found a dark matter particle. Of course, this is far below the standards of rigor that science requires [00:08:30] for actually saying, yes, we found dark matter, but it's an interesting start and there are certainly ongoing experiments to try to detect these very, very rare interactions between the mysterious dark matter that makes up most of the gravitational stuff in the universe and the ordinary matter that we do know about that. For the large part, it never actually does get to experience it. Are Neutrinos part of dark man or is that another issue entirely? Neutrinos. So I think that some of these particle models suggest that the dark [00:09:00] matter particle is what's called a super symmetric version of a neutrino. So something that has a lot of similar properties to a neutrino but is much, much, much more massive than neutrinos that we do know about have almost no mass whatsoever similar to the dark matter. They also almost never interact with ordinary particles, but there were models run basically saying how would the universe evolve and what would it look like today if dark matter were made up of these neutrinos that we do know about. And those models predict the [00:09:30] overall structure of the universe being very different from what we observe. So we're pretty sure that neutrinos are at most a very small fraction of this dark matter. 

Speaker 5:        Yeah, getting talking a little bit more about the neutrinos. As Nicholas said, they probably are not a huge component of what classically we're referring to as dark matter and that these big experiments are looking for, but they are very interesting weird particles that don't interact very much. They're very hard to detect. They're going through our bodies all the time. The Sun produces them a supernovae produce them [00:10:00] in large amounts as well and even though they're not rigorously really much of this dark matter, they are very interesting and large experiments around the world have been conducted over the past few years to try and detect more of them, to try and classify them and learn more about these neutrino particles. One that Berkeley is very heavily involved in in the, in the Lawrence Berkeley lab is called ice cube down in Antarctica actually. So if you're a poor Grad student in that group, you get to a winter over for six months in Antarctica with lots and lots of DVDs is what I've been told. 

Speaker 5:        [00:10:30] But basically what they do down there is they drill huge vertical holes into the ice shelves and drop down detectors, a photo multiplier tube type devices, things that should light up if they get hit by a neutrino or something like that. And they do a ton of these at various depths and make a greed under the ice. A three dimensional cube under the ice of these detectors could imagine a cubic ice cube and you poke one laser beam through [00:11:00] it. You'll light up a bunch of these detectors in the line and you can connect all of those points with a straight line and sort of see where it's coming from in the sky. And so connecting back a little bit to supernovae. If the Supernova goes off very, very close by, we could possibly detect neutrinos from some of these supernovae and perhaps little deviations from where it goes through and which detectors that lights up could be telling us some interesting information about the neutrinos that are produced in the supernova about our detectors. 

Speaker 5:        So it's a very nice, uh, play back and forth. [00:11:30] Ice Cube has not found neutrinos from a supernova yet. Hopefully we'll have even closer supernovae in the near future and ice cube and other types of neutrino experiments. We'll see possibly some of these and so another great example of big international collaborations even from different types of physics and astronomy getting together the supernova hunters and Supernova Observer, astronomers talking to these neutrino detector particle and trying to come together and answer these questions about the universe from two different sides. Basically two different kinds of science [00:12:00] almost, but coming together with similar observations or related observations is a very interesting prospect. 

Speaker 6:        The show is spectrum. The station is KALX Berkeley. We're talking with Dr Jeff Silverman and Nicholas McConnell there explaining dark matter, dark energy, 

Speaker 7:        dark matter and dark energy as [00:12:30] you called it. Are there other experiments and avenues of research for uncovering this phenomenon or particle, however you want to refer to it? 

Speaker 8:        The direct particle detection experiments that are on earth and we mentioned one of them led by Berkeley are probably the main avenues we have right now for discovering what particle is responsible for the dark matter. There are other ways that we can still collect additional evidence, [00:13:00] although we already have quite a bit for the fact that some strange particle and not ordinary protons and neutrons and electrons are responsible for a lot of the gravitational forces that we see in the universe. One other avenue that might be interesting is the idea that if dark matter is made of subatomic particles, there could be cases where two of those particles interact with one another and Gamma Ray radiation by annihilating them and in that case we have [00:13:30] gamma ray telescopes set up in space that spend a lot of their time detecting more prosaic Cammeray sources. Things like exploding stars, but it's possible perhaps in the near future that these telescopes can also detect gamma ray signatures from the centers of galaxies that we would be able to analyze in such a way that we determined was more likely to be from dark matter particles annihilating one another than from these other astrophysical sources that we already know about. 

Speaker 8:        I'm not sure if that would reveal the identity [00:14:00] of what the dark matter particle is, but it would be more evidence that they do exist. 

Speaker 7:        Dark matter has been hypothesized so that the theory of relativity works or is it devised to prop up the standard model, 

Speaker 5:        the strongest pieces of evidence for the existence of dark matter and sort of the reason that we added it into our pictures of the cosmos is there's not enough stars and gas in galaxies. If you [00:14:30] add up all of the gravity, it's not enough gravity force to hold all those stars and gas together in a galaxy and so we need some other matter that exists that exerts the gravitational force to hold everything together, but it doesn't glow. It's not bright. We can't see it with our normal telescopes at any wavelengths in space or on the ground. And so we've sort of given it this name, dark matter, these dark particles that exert a gravity force but don't give off light in any sense of that word. [00:15:00] We found some candidates over the years. Those have been interesting but they don't add up to enough matter out there and so we hypothesize that there is some other particles, something we haven't figured out yet in particle physics since that is out there and we're not detecting it with our telescopes, we're not detecting it with these other experiments that find subatomic particles and I can see very rare subatomic particles, but I personally think in the next decade we will directly detect one of these particles or a handful of these [00:15:30] particles. 

Speaker 5:        If we don't with these experiments that are online and coming online. If we don't detect these dark matter particles then we're going to have to really rethink how these galaxies, our own galaxy included can exist in their current form with all their stars and gas that we can observe. There'll be some serious issues in our understanding of galaxies and the study of the universe in general, but I think we will find dark matter particles. I think it will match to at least some of the models and theories we have and I like to think that everything is nice and [00:16:00] ordered in. That gives me comfort when I go to sleep at night. 

Speaker 7:        So on that personal level and trying to understand the standard model and your confidence in all that, is there a part of you that's open to the idea that it may not really be as you've as has been imagined for the past 30 years? 

Speaker 8:        I think that at one level of detail or another it's actually very likely that the models we've constructed over the last century, in the case of particle physics in the last 30 years, in [00:16:30] the case of adding dark matter as an ingredient to the universe that we see as astronomers, I think it's very likely that some of those details are going to fall by the wayside and be replaced by a different and more accurate description that people aren't thinking of yet. I think if the history of science teaches us anything, it's that as soon as we get over confident that we've put all the pieces together. If something comes in really forces us to rethink how the universe works as far as dark matter goes. I'd like to point out that there's sort of two [00:17:00] different theories in play and that either one of them I think could be revised in order to explain observations if we do fail to detect dark matter particles soon. 

Speaker 8:        And one of them is Einstein's theory of relativity saying that if we know how much stuff there is that we actually understand the literal force of gravity well enough to determine how mass interacts with one another and how the force of gravity works. And then the other one is different particle physics theories that say that if you have stuff coming and gravity like a dark [00:17:30] matter particle, what are the, the limiting things for what that particle could actually be. And I'm not well versed enough to know whether there's a lot of room for dark matter particles to exist that we wouldn't be able to detect with this generation or the next generation of experiments. But one possible way to fail to detect matter particles now and not have to revise general relativity as if particle physics can come up with a particle that is responsible for dark matter but is well beyond our capacity to detect [00:18:00] at this point. 

Speaker 3:        Nicholas and Jeffrey, thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me. 

Speaker 6:        For people who are interested in getting involved in amateur astronomy, let me mention a few avenues to pursue. The astronomy connection has a website that will lead you to a wide range of observing individuals and groups in the bay area. Their website is observers.org [00:18:30] for those who want to get involved in a crowdsource astronomy project, go to the website, Galaxy zoo.org the University of California observatories have a website that has a great deal of information, particularly under the links heading. Their website is used, c o lik.org or [00:19:00] regular feature of spectrum is to mention a few of the science and technology events happening in the bay area. Over the next few weeks. I'm joined by Rick Kaneski and Lisa Katovich for the calendar. 

Speaker 9:        The science of art is the spring open house at the crucible. This event we'll highlight the scientific principles, inquiry and exploration behind the fine and industrial arts processes taught there. This event will bring together crucible faculty, guest artists, and a curated gallery of exhibits and demonstrations. Also projects from local schools [00:19:30] as well as special performances, food and the participation of a number of other local art and science related organizations and university programs. This event will happen on Saturday, April 7th from 12 to 4:00 PM and the crucibles located at 1260 seventh street in Oakland. 

Speaker 3:        The Oppenheimer Lecture, the Higgs particle pivot of symmetry and mass. The Speaker is [inaudible] to [inaudible] professor of theoretical physics [00:20:00] at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Professor to Hoeft was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1999 in this lecture, professor to Hoeft will reflect on the importance of the as yet undetected Higgs particle and speculate on the Subatomic world once the particle is observed in detail. The lecture is April 9th at 5:00 PM in the Chevron Auditorium at International House [00:20:30] on the UC Berkeley campus. On Monday, April 9th the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco at five nine five market street is hosting Barb Stuckey, the author of taste, what you're missing. The passionate eaters guy too. I good food. Tastes good. Some reviewers say that this book bring science to the of taste. In the same 

Speaker 10:      way that Harold McGee's book on food and cooking popularized food science. She will talk about understanding the science and senses of what you eat. You'll better understand both the psychology and physiology of taste [00:21:00] and learn how to develop and improve your tasting pellet by discerning flavors and detecting and ingredients. A five-thirty checkin proceeds. The 6:00 PM program, which is then followed by a book signing at seven the event is free for members, $20 standard admission and a $7 for students. Visit www.commonwealthclub.org for more info 

Speaker 9:        pioneers in engineering. A nonprofit high school robotics competition organized by UC Berkeley students is holding its fourth annual robotics competition. [00:21:30] The Big Day is Saturday, April 14th at the Lawrence Hall of science in Berkeley. The competition begins at 10:00 AM and continues all day until five. This year's challenge is titled Ballistic Blitz for the seven weeks leading up to the final event. 200 high school students in teams from 21 East Bay high schools each work to design and build a robot. Come see the dramatic culmination of their hard work. This event is included in the price of admission. Admission is [00:22:00] free for UC Berkeley students and staff. For more information, go to the Lawrence Hall of Science website and Click on events. Mount Diablo Astronomical Society presents member planets, our solar system, neighbors, Venus and Mars through telescopes and find out why earth has abundant life but not Mars and Venus. Saturday, April 14th 7:00 PM to 11:00 PM the rendezvous is at Mount Diablo lower summit parking lot [00:22:30] summit road. 

Speaker 9:        Clayton. For more details and contact information, go to the website, m d a s. Dot. Mitt. On Wednesday, April 18th ask a scientist. A monthly lecture series will be co launching the wonder Fest Book Club with USI Professor, biological anthropology and neuroscience, Terrence Deacon's book, incomplete nature, how mind emerged from matter. Professor Deacon's presentation will focus on the idea that key elements of consciousness, [00:23:00] values, meanings, feelings, etc. Emerge from specific constraints on the physical processes of a nervous system. The lecture will be located at the California Institute of Integral Studies at Namaz Day Hall, 1453 Mission Street in San Francisco. It will start at 7:00 PM and it's free. 

Speaker 10:      Cal Day, UC Berkeley's free annual open house will be on Saturday, April 21st 9:00 AM until 4:00 PM there'll be a ton of science related events this year, including [00:23:30] tours of the labs and shops used for molecular and cell biology, synthetic biology, mechanical engineering, Quantum Nano Electronics, space sciences, star dust, nuclear engineering, automation, science, and more. There'll be lectures on diverse topics such as environmental design, geology, and the art and science of prehistoric life, as well as tables for various science and engineering majors and student groups. For more information. Visit [inaudible] dot berkeley.edu [00:24:00] now on to the news, 

Speaker 9:        a February NASA study reports that climatic changes in the polar regions are occurring at a magnitude far greater than the rest of the planet. The oldest and thickest Arctic Sea ice is disappearing at a faster rate than the younger and thinner eyes at the edges of the Arctic oceans floating ice cap, the thicker ice known as multi-year ice survived through the cyclical summer melt season when young ice that has formed over winter. Just as quickly melt again, [00:24:30] Joey Comiso, senior scientists at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and author of a study recently published in the Journal of climate says the rapid disappearance of older ice makes Arctic Sea ice even more vulnerable to further decline in the summer. The surface temperature in the Arctic is going up, which results in a shorter ice forming season. It would take a persistent cold spell for most multi-year CIS and other ice types to grow thick enough in the winter to survive the summer melt season and reverse the trend. [00:25:00] This warming in the Arctic is the warmest 12 month on record. For the region. This means that the region is moving closer to, if not already, breaching climatic tipping points which could see the Arctic's current ecological state being shifted to an entirely new one, having severe ramifications, not only for the biodiversity and ecosystems of the region but also for the rest of the planet. 

Speaker 10:      The April 2nd issue of the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has an article by Francesco Burma of Boston University [00:25:30] and others that reports evidence that humans acquired fire at least 200,000 years earlier than previously believed. The evidence is in the form of sediments from the wonderware cave in the Northern Cape province of South Africa. They were studied by micro morphological and foray transform infrared micro spectroscopy and data to be 1 million years old. The sediment contained burn, sharp bone fragments and plant ashes. The bone seems to have been exposed to temperature is found by a small cooking fires under about [00:26:00] 700 degrees Celsius. Previous to this finding, there was consensus that the earliest fires dated to only 790,000 years ago, and so these reporting older fires tended to be controversial as it is difficult to demonstrate that fires were small and intentional and use for cooking rather than acts of nature. 

Speaker 9:        More than half of all cancer is preventable. Experts say science daily reports that in a review article published in Science Translational Medicine on March 28th the investigators outlined obstacles. [00:26:30] They say stand in the way of making a huge dent in the cancer burden in the u s and around the world. Epidemiologists, Graham Colditz, MD professor at the Washington University School of Medicine and associate director of prevention and control. The Siteman cancer center says, we actually have an enormous amount of data about the causes and preventability of cancer. It's time we made an investment in implementing what we know. According to the American Cancer Society, an estimated 1,600,000 new cancer cases will be diagnosed this year in the u s [00:27:00] also this year, approximately 577,000 Americans are expected to die of cancer according to Kolditz and his co authors individual habits and the structure of society itself from medical research, funding to building design and food subsidies influences the extent of the cancer burden and can be changed to reduce it. 

Speaker 10:      Science news reports on a paper presented at the cognitive neuroscience society by Andrew met her, Ellie, Mika, and CN Beilock. [00:27:30] Both of the University of Chicago. The team use brain scans to find areas in a person's brain whose activity you will predict how well that person functions under pressure. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, the team gave both low and high stakes math problems to volunteers. Stakes were determined by both the size of financial reward and a social pressure via a financial penalty imposed upon teammates. In the case of failure, well, easy questions could be answered regardless of the stakes in the study. More difficult [00:28:00] questions led to a 10% average decrease in performance for volunteers who had decreased performance. There is greater activity in the enterprise [inaudible] circus and the inferior frontal junction of the brain area is linked to working memory. Furthermore, the more the ventral medial prefrontal cortex and area linked with emotions work to keep these two areas in sync, the more likely the volunteer was to choke under pressure. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 6:        [00:28:30] a special thanks to Dr Jeffers Silverman and Nicholas McConnell for spending the time with us. Degenerate three shows on astronomy. Thanks to Rick Karnofsky who helps produce the show and Lisa Katovich for her health 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 6:        the music heard during the show is by Los Donna David and album titled Folk and Acoustic [00:29:00] made available by a creative comments 3.0 attributional license. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

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

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 11:      [inaudible].

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

Nicholas McConnell, PhD candidate in Astrophysics at UCB summer 2012, and Jeff Silverman, PhD of Astrophysics from UCB in 2011, part one of three, talk about their work with supernovae and black holes. To help analyze astronomy data go to www.galaxyzoo.org or www.planethunters.org

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

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

Speaker 3:        Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm joined today by a spectrum of contributors, Rick Karnofsky and Lisa Katovich. Our interview is with Jeff Silverman, a recent phd in astrophysics from UC Berkeley and Nicholas McConnell, a phd [00:01:00] candidate unscheduled to be awarded a phd in astrophysics by UC Berkeley this summer. Jeff and Nicholas have generously agreed to help spectrum present a three part astronomy survey explaining the big ideas, recent experiments, collaborations and improvements in observation technology that are transforming astronomy. This is part two of three and in it we discussed Super Novi and black holes. Jeff, would you please start part two explaining Super Novi [inaudible] 

Speaker 4:        observations [00:01:30] of exploding stars. These supernovae have been going on for thousands of years. Whether or not we knew what we were looking at for most of that time, we now know that those were exploding stars. Something that I did my phd thesis work on as well. I want to talk about a two exploding stars in particular that were found in 2011. The first one I'll talk about was found in late May, early June last year. It was founded by a handful of amateur astronomers, which is they find maybe hundred supernova per year. This has been going on for about a decade [00:02:00] or so. Uh, this one in particular, however, was so young and knew that somebody had emailed somebody who had emailed somebody who had actually tweeted about this new supernova. And so I got forwarded a tweet that said there's a new supernova in this very nearby galaxy and I happen to be using the Keck telescope, one of the biggest optical telescopes in the world, controlling it from UC Berkeley. 

Speaker 4:        Saw this in my inbox. And we pointed at this supernova. We were the first ones to classify what kind of exploding start was confirmed that it was indeed [00:02:30] an exploding star and not some other, uh, asteroid that was just along the line of sight in the way or something else. Uh, and so that was as far as I know, the first time that a supernova was ever classified based on a tweet. The other Supernova, I want to talk about sort of the opposite end of having amateurs looking at a handful of galaxies. I'm part of a large international collaboration known as the Palomar transient factory PTF. And this collaboration uses a telescope down in San Diego to automatically monitor a bunch of these galaxies, [00:03:00] run these big computer programs to try and find if there is a new supernova, new bright spot in any of the images. 

Speaker 4:        And this has been running for about two years now and we've been tweaking the algorithms to get faster and faster detections of these new spots. And so in August of last year there was some images taken in San Diego. Dr Peter Nugent, a professor in the astronomy department, was going through some of the newest candidates of what the computer program spit out and saw what looked like a very good supernova candidate and another very nearby galaxy, [00:03:30] a different one, but about the same distance, 20 or so million light years. We had an image from the night before that was very good and there was absolutely nothing at that position. So this clearly looked like a brand new spot. It couldn't be that old. So he immediately gets on the email list for this international collaboration. This was sort of the afternoon in California, but it was already nighttime in the eastern hemisphere. And we have collaborators who use telescopes in the Canary Islands. 

Speaker 4:        So they point to it. They got not a great observation, but an observation that confirmed there was something there. And it was probably one of these [00:04:00] exploding stars by the time that they had worked on their data and emailed us. It was already nighttime in California and Hawaii. So we had the lick observatory telescopes out in San Jose as well as the Kecks in Hawaii pointing at this and absolutely confirming that it, it was a supernova. And within a few weeks we had already written a bunch of papers looking at the data very carefully. And we had actually found this supernova 11 hours after it exploded. So one of the earliest detections of an exploding star ever. People had speculated what you might [00:04:30] see that early and we actually got to throw out a lot of people's models saying we didn't see these things that you predicted possibly confirming some other predictions at this early time. 

Speaker 4:        And this thing is still bright at its brightest. You could see it in a small backyard telescope are good binoculars from the Oakland hills. Uh, I saw it with my own eyes through a telescope, which was awesome. I think just an amazing, amazing proof of concept or success story of this huge collaboration without the the algorithms to, to run this quickly, we wouldn't have realized it was there until [00:05:00] days later without an international collaboration of friends expanding the globe. We wouldn't have been able to track it and confirm that it was the supernovas so quickly and so early and easily. So if I can ask, what's the biggest mystery about the way stars explode that you help solve by knowing about a supernova? Just a few hours after an explosion is actually happened. We'll solve as a strong word in science, but we can at least help get towards the truth. 

Speaker 4:        As my advisor likes to say, this one that was discovered by the Palomar transient [00:05:30] factory in August is a specific kind of supernova that should have very consistent amount of energy. Sort of, you can think of it as a a hundred watt light bulb. It has the same amount of energy output always basically. So if you see it's very, very faint, it must be very, very far away. If you see it's very, very bright, it must be very, very close because it's sort of each of these objects has the same amount of light coming out of it and so we can measure very accurately how bright they are. We can compare to what we know they should be, how bright they should be, and we get a very accurate distance measurement to [00:06:00] all of these different supernova and figure out very accurate distances. How that distance has changed with time, and this is in fact how the accelerating expansion of the universe was discovered in the late nineties using these types of supernovae, which I will plug did win the Nobel Prize last year for physics and we're all very proud of that. 

Speaker 4:        Saul Perlmutter up at the Berkeley lab was one of the winners and many of our group here at Berkeley and other places have collaborated on those projects over the years. So one thing that we aren't quite sure of, even though these are very, very consistent [00:06:30] explosions, we've observed them for a long time. We don't actually know the details of what stars are involved in the original explosion. We have some idea that a very dense star called a white dwarf made of mostly carbon and oxygen is blowing up. What exactly is around that star that's helping it blow up by actually feeding it some extra material and then pushing it over a limit to explode? We're a little bit unclear and so since this star that is feeding the mass to the white dwarf should be very close by. [00:07:00] They should be right near each other. One of the best ways you're going to observe it is right after the explosion, the explosion goes off. 

Speaker 4:        The light and energy from that explosion could interact with the donor star that's right next door and then very quickly the explosion has expanded much further beyond that neighboring star and then it's sort of just hidden until either much, much later or perhaps never. And so by observing this supernova back in August 11 hours after the explosion and then taking subsequent observations sort of for the following few days, [00:07:30] we could rule out certain ideas of what that other star could be. There are very strong predictions. You should see some extra light in certain ways. If you had a certain type of star sitting there and we didn't see that, so it must be a very small star. Maybe something like the sun, maybe something like two times the mass of the sun. 

Speaker 2:        Nope. This is spectrum k l x Berkeley. And you boys have been talking with Jeff Silverman [00:08:00] and Nicholas McConnell about supernova and black holes. So the Supernova is an issue. 

Speaker 4:        Delusion of carbon and oxygen. You were saying that's great. What's the relationship of those explosions? Supernova to the black holes that were now discovered to be at the heart of every galaxy. So black holes come in a few different flavors, a certain kinds of supernovae uh, not the, the white [00:08:30] door of carbon oxygen ones. I was talking about a different flavor of Supernova that come from very massive stars that have 10 times the mass of the center bigger. They do explode as the different kinds of supernova collapse on themselves and can create black holes. The black holes end up weighing something like a few times the mass of the sun, maybe up to 20, 30 times the mass of the sun at the most. But those are sort of just kind of peppered throughout galaxies. What we've found over the past few decades and did a lot of work on lately is the supermassive black holes that can get up to hundreds of [00:09:00] millions or billions of times as massive as the sun. And those are found in the cores of galaxies as opposed to kind of peppered throughout them. And so there probably is a different formation mechanism that's still a very open question, how you make these giant black holes. But there are many, many orders of magnitude bigger than the ones that come from supernovae. Uh, and, and I'd actually say this is possibly a good segue that some interesting observation, right? 

Speaker 5:        Progress is being made on which the most likely mechanisms are for forming these so-called seed [00:09:30] black holes that eventually grew into the monsters that we now observe at the senators of most galaxies in our own universe, in our current universe. 

Speaker 4:        So was that a big shift then the, the idea of these supermassive black holes, 

Speaker 5:        there's possibly a, a complicated relationship between the black hole at the center of the Galaxy and the galaxy itself, the black holes. Gravity is not sufficient to hold the entire galaxy together even though it is an extremely massive object and very near [00:10:00] to it. There's extremely powerful gravitational forces. Galaxies are so large and so extended that out in the the normal regions of the galaxy out near where the sun orbits in the Milky Way Galaxy. The fact that our Milky Way has a central black hole doesn't have any direct impact on our lives as the sun orbiting in the galaxy. On the other hand, if you consider the life cycle of a black hole starting from when it is formed from some seed object or birth process relatively early in the universe and evolving all the way toward [00:10:30] our present day universe over more than 10 billion years, black holes have very interesting variations in what they're doing over the course of their lifetimes. 

Speaker 5:        In particular, when a black hole comes into proximity with a lot of gas, the gas spirals down and is funnel basically into the black hole and whereas some of the gas goes into the black hole and has never heard from again and increases the mass of the black hole. A lot of the guests on its way down heats up and releases tremendous amounts of light [00:11:00] because it takes time for light to travel. The distance between the object of meeting the light and us some of the furthest and therefore youngest things that we see of corresponding to very early times in the universe are in fact black holes that are swallowing tremendous amounts of gas. And some interesting discoveries that have happened recently is astronomers have been using different observational techniques to push further and further back into the universe's past, finding more and more distant black holes, swallowing [00:11:30] gas and learning about the universe at earlier and earlier times based on these observations. 

Speaker 5:        And I think the current record holder now is a black hole that lived about 800 million years after the big bang, which translates to almost 13 billion years, 13,000 million years before our present day now. So looking that far back in time, we can no, first of all that these tremendous black holes exist that early in the universe. And we [00:12:00] can actually using techniques that follow up on the initial discovery and try to get more detailed analysis of them, we can make estimates of how massive they are. And in the case of the one that occurred when the universe was only 800 million years old, we learned that that black hole is far more massive than the black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy bowed as massive as some of the most massive black holes that we've observed today. Um, so at least in some cases, black holes appear to have been seated by things that were relatively small, bigger than the tens of solar [00:12:30] masses that Jeff mentioned, but maybe a few thousand solar masses. And yet in the very earliest stage of the universe, they were able to grow tremendously fast and actually gain a ton of mass early in the universe. And then may have lived more peacefully throughout most of the duration of the universe. 

Speaker 2:        You're listening to spectrum on k a l x, Berkeley, 90.7 FM. Today we're talking with Jeff Silverman and [00:13:00] Nicholas McConnell, both astrophysicists. We're discussing supernova. I am black homes. This is part two of a series three. 

Speaker 5:        Another interesting outcome of looking at supermassive black holes early in the universe is it's often easier to see them far away than it is nearby because when they're far away and we see them, that's because they're swallowing a lot of gas. Many of the galaxies in today's universe [00:13:30] don't have gas near their black holes of the black holes are quiet. Uh, and in fact, you have to make very, very precise measurements of stars orbiting in their gravitational field to even know that a black hole is there. So one of the mysteries that had been going around for awhile is if you believe the masses of black holes very early in the universe, and you see these tremendously early things, but you want to know where are they now? They've had 13 billion years to evolve. What kind of galaxy is do these black holes live in today? 

Speaker 5:        [00:14:00] Then you need to look in the nearby universe and try to find their quiet, ancient remnants. And recently, along with a couple other researchers at UC Berkeley, some other researchers around the country, my team discovered the two most massive black holes that we know about in today's universe. Black holes more than 10 billion times the mass of our sun, more than 2000 times the mass of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. And because these are the most massive black holes that we know about in today's universe, [00:14:30] and they're roughly correspond to the estimated masses of the most massive black holes that we observe very, very early in the universe. We think we're beginning to answer the question of what kind of environment do these very young black holes actually end up in after the entire history of the universe between them. If I could ask a question, do you other properties of the galaxies that are now hosting these most massive black holes that are different than other nearby galaxies [00:15:00] that may have less massive black holes, something like the Milky Way size. 

Speaker 5:        One interesting thing about the galaxies that we looked at is that they're also anchoring large galaxy clusters. And so specifically we found the most massive black holes at the centers of galaxy clusters. Now that's not a perfectly robust result because to be perfectly honest, we started by looking in the centers of galaxy clusters. And so we haven't done a wide sample of other galaxies and other environments, but it's possible that there is an environmental effect [00:15:30] based on not only the galaxy that the black hole resides in, but the overall neighborhood of how many galaxies are around that central object that may have something to do with the final massive its black hole. And where do you go with this research now, Nicholas, are there specific experiments? Are you relying on certain data? Where are you drawing this information from? And so we use data from a few different telescopes because these galaxies are distant and we're trying to look at stars in a very [00:16:00] small region of space. 

Speaker 5:        We rely on very large telescopes to give us good light collecting power and good spatial resolution. So we use the Keck telescopes in Hawaii. We also use the Gemini telescopes in Hawaii and Sheila and there is a telescope in Texas that we've done some work with and we are trying to use these telescopes to find black holes in as many galaxies as the telescope committees will allow us to look at. Uh, so each semester with the generosity of, of getting, observing time, we're able to look at [00:16:30] two or three more galaxies and hopefully over a few years we'll have a good dozen or so objects that we can search directly for the most massive black holes in addition to a few dozen that have been discovered by other teams throughout the world over the last 10 years or so. And that really is one of the big limiting factors, isn't it? 

Speaker 5:        The access to the equipment because there's so much going on in astronomy. Everybody's in the queue. Yeah, that's right. A, just like most scientists apply for amounts of funding from [00:17:00] various organizations, astronomers do that. In addition to applying for telescope time, the oversubscription rates for many of the biggest telescopes, the Hubble space telescope, the Keck telescopes is something like eight to one 10 to one. So the total number of requested hours is something like eight or 10 times the number of nighttime hours. There are in a semester or in a year, so it's, it's very much like a funding situation and there is so many nighttime hours and there's so many telescopes in the world. It's very competitive and we're very lucky when we do get access to [00:17:30] these huge telescopes with amazing instruments and computing power. How does that allocated time work when you want to make observations within a couple of hours of something that you've just heard about? So that's a great question. There's been something that has been used by astronomers over sort of the last decade but really a lot in the last five years called target of observations 

Speaker 4:        too is as we call them and it's sort of in addition to or separate from your standard classically scheduled nights where you will use the telescope on this night. You can [00:18:00] also apply if you have a good science case, which many of us do, especially for these kinds of exploding stars that go off and we want to look at it very quickly, you can apply for time that is allocated through this t o program. And basically what it is is the telescope committees have said, okay, you get so many times to interrupt any observer and say you have to go look at this. And as an observer at that observatory, you know that that's part of the program and that at any point somebody could call you and say, drop what you're doing and go move over to [00:18:30] this. And many times people want to do the best science and are very happy to help out. And oftentimes there'll be offered co-authorship or at least acknowledged to, you know, thanking them for their help. Uh, certainly for these two Supernova I spoke about earlier, we definitely used our target of opportunity and they did turn out to be these very interesting supernovae 

Speaker 6:        [inaudible]. That concludes part two of our astronomy series. Be sure to join us in two weeks [00:19:00] when we discuss dark energy or dark matter. Part three a regular feature of spectrum is to mention a few of the science and technology events happening in the bay area over the next few weeks. Rick Karnofsky and Lisa Kovich join me for the calendar. 

Speaker 7:        The fix-it clinic will be held on Sunday, March 25th at the Lawrence Hall of science in Berkeley from one to 4:00 PM bring your broken non-functioning [00:19:30] things, electronics, appliances, computers, toys, and so on. For assessment, disassembly and possible repair. We'll provide workspace specialty tools and guidance to help you take apart and troubleshoot your item. Whether we fix it or not, you'll learn more about how it was manufactured and how it worked. This is a family friendly event. Children are hardly invited. This event is included in admission to the Lawrence Hall of Science. 

Speaker 3:        The Mount Diablo Astronomical Society [00:20:00] holds its general monthly meetings the fourth Tuesday of each month, except for November and December. At the March 27th meeting, UC Berkeley Professor Jeff Marcy will speak about the future directions in extra solar planet investigations. The meeting begins at 7:15 PM and lasts until 9:30 PM the event will be held at the Concord Police Association facility. Five zero six zero Avi Law road in Concord. The society website is m [00:20:30] d a s. Dot. N. E. T. The computer history museums Speaker for March 28th will be New York Times magazine writer John Gardner who will talk about his book, the idea factory bell labs and the great age of American innovation to cake. 

Speaker 8:        You edis Dave Iverson Bell labs was the most innovative production and research institution from the 1920s to the 1980s at its peak, bell labs employed nearly 15,000 people. [00:21:00] 1200 had PhDs. 13 would go on to win Nobel prizes. These ingenious, often eccentric men would become revolutionaries and sometimes legends, whether for inventing radio astronomy in their spare time and on the company's dime, riding unicycles through the corridors or pioneering the principles that propelled today's technology. Bell labs combined the best aspects of academic and corporate worlds, hiring the brightest and usually the youngest minds creating a culture and even architecture that [00:21:30] forced employees in different fields to work together in virtually complete intellectual freedom with little pressure to create moneymaking innovations in Gartner's portrait. We come to understand why both researchers and business leaders look to bell labs as a model and long to incorporate its magic into their own work. The talk starts at seven at the Computer History Museum, 14 Zero One north shoreline boulevard and mountain view. Visit www.computer history.org to register 

Speaker 7:        [00:22:00] Thursday April 4th from three to 4:00 PM Andy Grove, Co founder and former CEO of Intel will speak on the UC Berkeley campus. His talk is titled of microchips and Men Tales from the translational medicine front. Andy Grove had a major influence on the ascent of micro electronics. Can a similar technological advance be achieved in medicine? He will discuss how we might open the pipeline to get life changing technologies to market without increasing the cost of care. [00:22:30] This event will be at the Sibley auditorium in the Bechdel engineering center. On the UC Berkeley campus. 

Speaker 8:        The Marine Science seminar brings local engineers, physicians, computer programmers, and research scientists to speak to high school students and other interested people. It happens six Wednesdays per semester, seven 30 to 8:30 PM at the Terra Linda High School in San Rafael in the physiology lab. Two zero seven the guests for April 4th to meeting is the lead [00:23:00] of Pixars research and future spectrum guest, Tony rose. He will present on math in the movies. Film making is undergoing a digital revolution brought on by advances in areas such as computer technology, computational physics, geometry, and approximation theory. Using numerous examples drawn from Pixars feature films. This talk will provide a behind the scenes look at the role that math plays in the revolution. Visit www.marinescienceseminar.com [00:23:30] now news with Rick, Lisa and myself last September, the opera experiment located under the Grand Sazo Mountain in central Italy reported measuring neutrinos moving at faster than the speed of light from cern in Switzerland. 

Speaker 8:        The Icarus experiment located in meters away from opera has published a preprint on the archive on March 15th showing that neutrinos move at speeds close to the speed of light, but that there is no evidence that they exceeded [00:24:00] opera is measurement was conducted with 10 microsecond pulses while Icarus was conducted with pulses that were only four nanoseconds, 2,500 times shorter. This led to far more accurate timing measurements. Opera head claim neutrinos arrived 60 nanoseconds before it would be predicted, but scientists had remained skeptical in part due to issues with timing [inaudible], Icarus, LVD, and opera. We'll all be making new measurements with pulse beams from cern in May to give us the final verdict 

Speaker 7:        [00:24:30] according to technology review.com and the I a. E. A website. The disaster at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi plant a year ago prompted nations that generate atomic power to reexamine the safety of their reactors and even reevaluate their nuclear ambitions. Several countries have completely changed course. Japan has taken offline 52 of its 54 reactors and the future of nuclear power there is extremely uncertain. Germany shutdown seven reactors, [00:25:00] also elected not to restart another that had been down for maintenance and plans to decommission its remaining nine reactors by 2022 Italy, Switzerland and Mexico have each retreated from plans to build new nuclear plants and Belgium's government which took over in 2011 wants to make the country nuclear free by 2025 several other economically developed countries including the u s the United Kingdom and France are still generating roughly the same amount as they were before the Fukushima disaster and maintain [00:25:30] modest plans for future construction of additional reactors. But the future of nuclear power in the developing world is a different story. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency or I, a 45 countries are now considering embarking on nuclear power programs as Vietnam, Bangladesh, United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Belarus are likely to start building this year and Jordan and Saudi Arabia following in 2013 as of this week, the I a report [00:26:00] 63 new reactors under construction in 15 countries. The top constructors are China with 26 Russia with 10 India with seven and South Korea with three. The remaining 11 countries are building one or two reactors. 

Speaker 3:        Technology review.com reports that researchers at Microsoft have made software that can learn the sound of your voice and then use it to speak a language that you don't. The system could be used to make language tutoring software more [00:26:30] personal or to make tools for travelers. In a demonstration at Microsoft's Redmond, Washington campus in early March, Microsoft research scientist Frank soon showed how his software could read out text in Spanish using the voice of his boss, Rick Rashid, who leads Microsoft's research efforts in a second demonstration soon used his software to grant Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer, the ability to speak Mandarin. [00:27:00] Frank soon created the system with his colleagues at Microsoft Research Asia, the company's research lab in Beijing, China. The system needs around an hour of training to develop a model, able to read out any text in a person's own voice. That model is converted into one able to read out text in another language by comparing it with a stock text to speech model for the target language. Individual sounds used by the first model to build up words using a [00:27:30] person's voice and his or her own language are carefully tweaked to give the new texts to speech model, a full ability to sound out phrases. In the second language, someone says that this approach can convert between any pair of 26 languages including Mandarin Chinese, Spanish and Italian 

Speaker 8:        nature. News reports that researchers from the University of California, San Francisco and the Howard Hughes Medical Institutions Janelia Farm Research Center [00:28:00] near Ashburn, Virginia. I found that male fruit players are more likely to choose to consume alcohol if they have been sexually rejected by females. The key seems to be in Neuropeptide F, which is generated as a reward for either sex or alcohol consumption. When fly's denied of sex are given neuropeptide f they avoid alcohol and mammals. No transmitter y might act similarly for more information. You can see their article in the March 15th issue of Science 

Speaker 6:        [00:28:30] [inaudible] [inaudible] spectrum shirts are gradually being made available online at iTunes university. Go to itunes.berkeley.edu and click through to Berkeley on iTunes. Then search for Calex 99.7 FM to finer the spectrum podcasts. [inaudible] [00:29:00] music heard during the show is from a low stone at David's album titled the Folk in Houston made available by creative Commons license 3.0 attribution. [inaudible]. 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 [00:29:30] dot k a l [email protected] join us in two weeks at this same time.

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

Nicholas McConnell, PhD candidate in Astrophysics at UCB summer 2012, and Jeff Silverman, PhD of Astrophysics from UCB in 2011, part one of three, talk about exoplanets and the search for water in the universe. To help analyze data www.galaxyzoo.org or www.planethunters.org

Transcript

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

Speaker 2:        Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm joined today by spectrum contributors, Rick Karnofsky and Lisa Katovich. Our interview is with Jeff Silverman, a recent phd in astrophysics from UC Berkeley and Nicholas McConnell, a phd candidate unscheduled to be awarded his phd in astrophysics by UC Berkeley this summer. [00:01:00] Jeff and Nicholas have generously agreed to help spectrum present three shows on astronomy, explaining the big ideas, recent experiments, international collaborations and improvements and observations on technology that are transforming astronomy. In part one we discuss extra solar planets known as exoplanets and the search for liquid water in the universe. Nicholas McConnell and Jeff Silverman. Welcome to spectrum. Thanks for having us do. You're both astronomers. Yup. And today you're going to talk with us about [00:01:30] what's been happening in astronomy in say, the past five years that really stands out for you. That's very salient that you think's important. Nicholas, why don't you bring up the first topic that we're going to discuss here? 

Speaker 2:        Sure. Well, there are many things to choose from, but for me, one of the most exciting things that I think has been happening is that over the last two or three years, thanks mostly to a NASA satellite called the Kepler mission. Astronomers have been discovering literally thousands of new planets orbiting other stars, uh, in our own galaxy every year. [00:02:00] And one particularly exciting discovery that happened in December, 2011 was we found a planet around another star that appeared to be in the so called habitable zone of that planet. The zone where the distance from the star was appropriate that the temperature on the planet could possibly be not too cold and not too hot to have liquid water. And how much of that exoplanet research is done here in the bay area? Quite a large amount. There's a large healthy exoplanet team in the UC Berkeley Astronomy Department, [00:02:30] and many scientists here are heavily involved in the Kepler mission besides this planet in the habitable zone. 

Speaker 2:        Like Nicholas mentioned, thousands of planets have been discovered by this Kepler mission of all shapes and sizes from nearly earth size to Uranus and Neptune size. Did you put her in a little bit bigger orbiting their stars that are sun-like sometimes a little bit smaller, sometimes a little bit bigger than the sun at various distances. There's maybe a couple of examples where we've seen a system of a few planets that sort [00:03:00] of mimic the sizes of planets in our solar system at some of the distances, but most of these planets are found very close to their host star. Nothing like what we see in our own solar system, things that are the size of Jupiter and Saturn that are orbiting even closer than mercury. And so this is a huge weird question that's outstanding. People are trying to figure out how do you make these systems, how do you make these planetary systems and why are they so prevalent and so different from what we know in our own solar system. 

Speaker 2:        And are there some sort of limitations to the [00:03:30] finding techniques to, to locate these planets that might sort of bias you towards finding these large close planets spoken like a true scientist? Yes, we are absolutely biased to find big planets that are very close to their stars. So the first handful of planets that were found were very big. These so-called hot Jupiters, very big Jupiter sized planets near their stars. We are definitely biased by the techniques to find these kinds of planets. Capillary is doing a bit of a better job finding smaller planets, finding them further out. And so we're getting into a point [00:04:00] in time where we're close to being able to find similar looking systems to the solar system, bigger planets further out earth planets around the distance of earth from the sun and we're not really finding them as often as you might expect. 

Speaker 2:        And so it does seem still that even taking into account some of this bias that our solar system is a bit of an oddball now that's certainly may change in the next few years. This is a huge fast moving field, but right now we're still an odd ball. Yeah. I have to say that the, the Kepler mission was designed [00:04:30] so that over the course of the missions lifetime, which was roughly a three year time period, starting maybe 2010 and going through 2013 or so, it was designed so that over that period it could detect a planet, maybe twice the size of our earth but orbiting at star at the same distance that the earth orbits the sun. So capillary is definitely doing a better job than previous missions, finding planets that aren't quite as small as earth but are getting down in that region where we can say this plant is actually fairly similar to the planet earth. 

Speaker 2:        And because we're now simply becoming [00:05:00] able to start to find planets like this, we can begin to say things about how common are earth like planets relative to these hot Jupiters that Jeff was talking about before when we had only detected the hot Jupiters, there was nothing we could say about their relative abundance in the universe compared to planets like the earth was their technology. And Kepler that made this possible. Was there a breakthrough somehow in the, the instrument? The thing Kepler does is it measures the brightness coming from a star [00:05:30] over and over and over again. Uh, and what happens is that if a planet passes in front of the star along the line of sight to Earth, it blocks a little bit of the disk of the star. And so the star gets very slightly fatter. But these differences in the stars brightness are smaller than a percent. 

Speaker 2:        And so in order to pick out that signal that you need to have an instrument that can measure the brightness of a star very, very accurately, repeatedly over and over again and simply by having it outside ears, atmosphere, having it in space and all of the different instrumental [00:06:00] things they did inside that satellite enables Kepler to measure stellar brightnesses with more precision than any instrument that we'd done this for previously. Another interesting piece of technology that was something that they had to tackle. And it's still sort of one of the limitations actually of Kepler, is because you're measuring the brightness of thousands of stars many, many times over and over and over again. That's a huge amount of data, just pure raw pictures that you have floating on a spacecraft and you need to beam those down to earth, to big computers to hold those. 

Speaker 2:        And so [00:06:30] one of the biggest limitations from my understanding is just the bandwidth. It is hard to move that ms send that many, you know, picture files basically from space down, you know, different satellites to big data centers on earth. And so they kind of do it in big bursts and in chunks and they only take certain subsets of the pictures of different stars. Very, very close, a little snapshot, postage stamps right around each of the stars that they're monitoring. And it's still huge amounts of data. Uh, and so this has been a big breakthrough for a number of different [00:07:00] astronomy discoveries, is the large amount of data being able to move it through the Internet, through fiber optics and storing it and going through it in a fast, efficient way. Do you know if there's any kind of preliminary data analysis actually on the coupler? 

Speaker 2:        I'm not completely sure, but there is some, as far as I know, a basic calibrations and, and basic work that it does before it sends down some of the products. But looking, as Nicholas said, for these very slight amounts of dimming in the stars takes a lot of computing power [00:07:30] and fancy algorithms that are run on big machines back on earth. And one of the really interesting things that's actually been done with the Keppra or data is after this processing, after you have, um, sort of your reduced scientific measurements. Um, recently these data have been put on the Internet so that by crowdsourcing people can go, ah, I think the website is called Kepler Zoo. And look at the period, the, the patterns of brightness versus time for all of these different stars. Um, and humans can try to find patterns that the best computer algorithms have failed to find. Um, and [00:08:00] I think there is a space of patterns that computers don't do very well at, but humans are better at. Um, so we're using the public to try to get more planets, uh, than when we, we'd be able to do just the astronomy community by itself. 

Speaker 1:        [inaudible] this is spectrum on k l x Berkeley. We are talking about exoplanets with Jeff Silverman and Nicholas McConnell [00:08:30] reflecting on coupler. How do you, 

Speaker 2:        I think it's changed your worldview. The entire subfield and astronomy have of exoplanets. Planets around other stars effectively didn't exist until the mid to late nineties. So when I was in elementary school, it was nice to think about planets on around other stars and see it in the movies. But it was very scifi. 

Speaker 3:        Fast forward to to mean in college, in the early two thousands [00:09:00] taking astronomy classes, astronomers had discovered a handful of these exoplanets. And I distinctly remember one of my professors saying, you know, we found a few, we're going to find some more in the future. One day you'll pick up the newspaper and the front page will be a picture of an exoplanet. And sure enough, a few years ago, Berkeley astronomers took a picture of an exoplanet and it made the front page newspaper. Uh, and I'll never forget seeing that picture on the front page of the newspaper, just like my professor in college predicted. This is a very fast moving field. We're going to find even more planets earth-like [00:09:30] around sunlight stars that could very well have liquid water. It'll possibly be not that rare to have an earth-like planet in the very near future. Personally, to me, I think it's great. It makes me hope that perhaps we can find an exact earth analog around a sun analog and perhaps there is intelligent life or some kind of life that we can find. And I think an amazing thing that astronomers can do for the world. 

Speaker 4:        I think with the discovery of planets that are similar [00:10:00] to Earth or at least about the same sizes, or we're beginning to go from detecting one, then a couple to actually doing decent statistics where we can project how many have planets about the same size of earth exist, say in our galaxy. I tried to do a very, very rough calculation this morning. If you ask how many earth sized planets are there in the Milky Way, I think the answer is there's probably about a billion or a couple billion. And so I think that's just another interesting way of looking at how [00:10:30] earth is not necessarily unique environment in the universe, but just as we have so much diversity here on earth than in our galaxy. We have evidence now that there is space and room to have as much diversity possibly throughout our galaxy. So I think we really are getting a profound sense of just what kind of environment we have for possibly life and for different conditions, not only in our own solar system, but in this much larger piece of the universe that we're [00:11:00] only beginning to explore. 

Speaker 5:        [inaudible]

Speaker 6:        you're listening to spectrum on k a l x, Berkeley. We are talking about astrophysics with Nicholas McConnell and Jeff Silverman. 

Speaker 5:        [inaudible]

Speaker 3:        let's talk about water in the universe. So we've found quite a bit of water [00:11:30] in the universe, oddly enough, sort of starting on the biggest scales. There's, there's some nebulae, some clusters of gas and particles out in the universe that are huge reservoirs of water and sort of related huge reservoirs of alcohols, ethanol's, things like that. Coming a little bit closer to home and looking a little bit more recently. In the past maybe five or 10 years, there's been quite a few new detections, new possible detections, new lines of evidence of liquid water, ice water in our solar system in very interesting [00:12:00] places. One, the moon of Saturn known as, and Solidus is a very shiny, very bright object. It's very, very white, snowy, clean looking objects. A handful of craters have much less cratered than our own moon, a little smaller than our moon as well. 

Speaker 3:        But it had some weird features to it. It looks kind of neat. And so the the Cassini spacecraft, which has been around exploring Saturn and its moon systems and its ring system for the past decade or so, did a few very close flybys of this very interesting moon in solidus [00:12:30] figured out that most of the surface is solid ice water, ice, ammonia, hydrocarbons, stuff as well. Also notice that there were geysers coming off of the surface, which we've seen geysers on a couple of other moons of Jupiter and Saturn, but these were kind of interesting and Cassini was there and we lucked out and Cassini actually flew through one of these geysers and got to detect the particles from the geyser itself, right? They're very direct institute measurements of what's in the guys there and it was mostly water and some ammonia, which was [00:13:00] interesting. And then there's evidence that there was actually more organic compounds in there and so possibly there, this could lead to life. 

Speaker 3:        There could be some kind of bacteria down in the innards of in solidus. That's sort of pushing a a little bit, sort of the next step beyond what the evidence is actually telling us. But it's very, very tantalizing. Just about four or five years ago, a NASA panel on moons and moon explorations in the solar system said that in Solidus is probably the best possibility [00:13:30] for current life outside of earth in our own solar system. And the idea is that underneath this sort of very smooth, icy surface, there's probably a liquid ocean, mostly water, maybe a little bit of salt water, like I said, a little ammonia, some organic compounds, perhaps probably not gray whales and great white sharks. Probably not even little fish and shrimp, but it seems reasonable that there could be microscopic organisms, some kind of life, you know, to be determined. 

Speaker 3:        But it's possible. [00:14:00] There's liquid water, there's reasonable conditions. It's not too salty, it's not too acidic, it's not too hot. And there does seem to be at least the building blocks, some of these organic compounds, perhaps one outstanding issue is how thick is this outer ice layer. So there's been some ideas of what we should send another mission that's just going to drill in there and it had the little submarine and go look around for fish and organisms, but we don't actually have a great handle on how thick that ice layer is. Uh, so Cassini is continuing to study this moon along with the [00:14:30] rest of the stuff in the Saturn system. Other moons, the planet itself, the Rings, uh, and we'll hopefully learn a little bit more about it, but they're already in the works, uh, both NASA, Japanese and European missions to go explore in salad. It's even more now if you want to go a little bit closer than Enceladus, one of the most promising planets areas in our solar system where 

Speaker 4:        people have thought about the possibility of liquid water, where we certainly know that frozen water exists and where we have a headstart on [00:15:00] objects actually on the surface exploring is the planet Mars. And there've been some recent discoveries about both water in the past history of Mars and possibly salty liquid water, actually existing present day on Mars that are fueling a lot of excitement in the scientific community. Right now we have two different kinds of instruments that are doing fantastic observations of Mars. One of them is called the Mars or condescends orbiter. It is a satellite in orbit around Mars that can take fantastically detailed [00:15:30] photographs of the Martian surface. You can see features about a few feet across on the Martian surface with the satellite and then the other are the famous Mars Rovers. Spirit and opportunity spirit recently shut down, met its demise even though these two rovers outlasted their nominal mission timeline by a factor of 10 or so, Opportunity is still exploring the Martian surface and in both cases, instruments have found evidence for water on Mars. 

Speaker 4:        In the case of opportunity. The rover fairly recently [00:16:00] discovered this mineral vein in a rock in a crater on Mars that scientists are pretty certain, could only have been created by liquid water flowing through a crack in the rocket, some ancient time and marches history and creating this particular mineral known as gypsum in certain variances what we use to make plaster of Paris here on Earth. So there is evidence that in particular Martian environments, there was almost certainly liquid water on Mars in the past. Combine that with theoretical models of how the planet and its atmosphere would have evolved over time. [00:16:30] And there are some pictures of ancient Mars being this sort of lush liquid water, much warmer environment than it is today. And so possibly Mars in its past was a hospitable environment for life. Although I'll emphasize we've, we have not yet detected any evidence of present day or fossilized life on Mars, but frankly, we haven't explored a very large fraction of that planet yet. 

Speaker 4:        So I wouldn't be entirely surprised if some discovery came along in the future. Another very, very interesting observation on Mars coming [00:17:00] from the Mars reconnaissance orbiter is that looking over time at the edges of some of the craters on Mars in the warm seasons, they actually found stream like features that looked like dark streams were appearing on the edges of craters and over the course of the warm season as these craters were being more exposed to the sun and warming up a little bit, the streams lengthen as you might expect, little trickles of liquid water to flow downhill and based on mineral analysis which you can do using spectroscopy [00:17:30] from the orbiter and just generally the overall pattern of how these streams change with the seasons. We think that's good evidence that some sort of salty water was creating the streams. Unfortunately we were not able to directly detect water. What we see, it looks more to be like residue from a salt water stream where the water evaporated or where the water is just below the surface. But it seems that in certain seasons and certain places of the planet, there could actually be water and liquid form just at the surface or just below the surface [00:18:00] of Mars today. I mean if you have salt water on Mars, then I think there's at least some chance that you could have some kind of primitive life forum thriving in it. [inaudible] 

Speaker 3:        it's been amazing in the last few years using the orbiter and the rovers on Mars, the different lines of evidence that we have for this ice, either on the surface or just below the surface centimeters below the surface, inches below the surface. And so NASA just recently launched a mission to head to Mars and even bigger rover, something like the size of a small car [00:18:30] that's going to go around and specifically look for water, look for organic molecules, building blocks of life in different parts than where we've already explored on Mars. 

Speaker 4:        And that rover is called curiosity and it's supposed to land on the Martian surface this summer. Is there water on the moon? Our Moon, there is water on the moon in the form of hydrous molecules, so where water is directly incorporated into a solid rock, but I don't think there's any evidence for frozen or liquid water on the moon, [00:19:00] certainly not liquid water. 

Speaker 5:        [inaudible]

Speaker 4:        can you reflect on the importance of water being discovered in our solar system or in some other solar system or galaxy? 

Speaker 2:        Clearly on earth, water is essential [00:19:30] for all life forms and so whereas there are ideas about exotic kinds of life that could exist without our requirement of having water. It certainly seems like the most natural place to start looking for life outside of our own planet. So knowing that it exists in liquid form in different places in the universe and knowing Lisa in our own solar system where it exists is I think a really good start toward actually doing an Ernest search for life outside earth, maybe in our own solar system. [00:20:00] And I think just knowing how much water there actually is in our universe makes it seem like the universe is maybe a friendlier place than we thought it was. Okay. 

Speaker 3:        One of the basic questions in astronomy of humanity, one of the things that got me interested in astronomy originally was are we alone in the universe? Is there life out there in the solar system, in our galaxy, and looking for water is probably the best way, the most direct way to find where that life could be. Being able to go visit Mars, the Moon, various [00:20:30] moons in our own solar system. Looking for that life in the water or around the water, I think is is something that's a fundamental question for all humankind, not just scientists and astronomers. 

Speaker 7:        That ends one, Jeff Silverman and Nicholas McConnell. We'll be back with part two on our next show. We'll talk about Super Novi and black holes. Rick Karnofsky and Lisa Catholic joined me [00:21:00] for the calendar and the new black hole, 

Speaker 8:        the harmonic oscillators of the 21st century presented by Andrew Strom and dear professor of physics, Harvard University, Monday, March 12th at four 15 to 5:30 PM La Conte Hall Room Number One in the 20th century. Many problems across all of physics were solved by perturb native methods which reduce them to harmonic oscillators. Black holes are poised to play a similar role for the problems of 21st century physics. They are at once [00:21:30] the simplest and most complex objects in the physical universe. Professors durometer will give an introduction to the subject intended for a general audience 

Speaker 9:        daily and Nardo art science evening rendezvous or laser is a monthly series of lectures, presentations, and networking between artists and scientists. This month, laser is on Monday, March 12th at the [inaudible] room of the front building at the University of San Francisco to one 30 zero Fulton Street. It is free, but [00:22:00] please RSVP to p at [inaudible] dot com the event starts at seven with a talk by [inaudible] Viskontas on the art and neuroscience of effective music performance. What is it about this art form that draws people in? What distinguishes a performance that is technically accurate but unmusical from one that elicits the chills. We will explore how music engages the brain and why it continues to be a worldwide addiction. This will be followed by Rebecca Cayman's talk, making the invisible visible [00:22:30] discoveries between art and science, the history of artists as scientists and scientists as artists will be shared drying from the collections of the American philosophical society and the Chemical Heritage Foundation. The development of new art science collaborations will also be discussed. Shawmut caught true of the Stanford Physics Department. We'll speak on are there more dimensions of space which we'll discuss how the extra dimensions proposed by some models such as string theory may explain and unify puzzles [00:23:00] of modern physics. The night we'll conclude with Scott killed doll and Nathaniel stern who will discuss beaming Twitter messages to glaze five eight one D and exoplanet 20 light years away that can support extra terrestrial life using DIY technology. The website for laser is www.leonardo.info 

Speaker 8:        the creative destruction of medicine Wednesday, March 14th at 6:00 PM at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco on the second [00:23:30] floor of five 95 market street, Eric Topol, MD, director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, Co founder and vice chairman of the West Wireless Health Institute and author of the creative destruction of medicine. Dr Topol says that is poised to go through its biggest shakeup in history and unprecedented convergence of technologies such as the ability to digitize human genomes and the invention of wireless tools is gaining momentum, thrusting the medical field into the digital era. Tickets are $20 [00:24:00] for general public, $8 for members and $7 for students. 

Speaker 9:        Ask a scientist is hosting a puzzle party on Pi Day Wednesday, March 14th at 7:00 PM this is a math and logic puzzle competition for teams of up to six people. It is free, but you're encouraged to support the venue by purchasing foods and or drinks. The winning team will get a round of drinks and an overwhelming sense of pride. Bring a jacket in case there is overflow onto the sidewalk of the bizarre [00:24:30] cafe. Five nine two seven California at 21st in San Francisco visit. Ask a scientist sf.com for more info. 

Speaker 7:        Yeah, 

Speaker 6:        the March Science at cal lecture will be given at 11:00 AM on Saturday, March 17th in the genetics and plant biology building room 100 the talk will be given by Dr Hazel Bane and is entitled The Sun a star in our own backyard. Dr Bain is a post doc with the Ruben Rahmati high energy spectroscopic [00:25:00] solar imager solar physics group at the Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley. Her main area of research involves studying solar eruptive events such as flares, jets, and coronal mass ejections using both space and ground-based instruments. In describing her talk, Dr Bane said the stars in the night sky have always been a source of intrigue and wonder with our very own star at the center of our solar system, the sun offers us a unique [00:25:30] opportunity to study the inner workings of these giant balls of plasma. Starting at the core, I will discuss the processes occurring at the different layers of the sun onto news. 

Speaker 9:        The four mile long t veteran particle accelerator at Chicago's Fermi lab was closed in September, 2011 after being one of the most powerful accelerators for 20 years, but in analyzing 500 trillion subatomic particles, Asians from the CDF and DCO, the team says that they may [00:26:00] have generated about a thousand Higgs Bosons the particle that is responsible for mass in the standard model of physics in a previous episode of spectrum that you can download from iTunes you, we interviewed Dr Simoni Pig Ingreso about the hunt for the Higgs. The probability of these measurements being due to a statistical fluke instead of the measurements of the Higgs is about one in 30 or about 2.2 sigma. This is well below the one chance in 3.5 million or five sigma that will be used to claim the actual discovery of the Higgs. [00:26:30] The energy of the detected events is between 115 billion and 135 billion electron volts, which is in good agreement with the range of 124 billion electron volts to 126 billion electron volts that turns large. Hadron collider established with 3.6 sigma certainty. The large Hadron collider is on winter break, but we'll be fixed up again in April to continue trying to find the Higgs with five sigma certainty. 

Speaker 8:        The Cal Energy Corp is offering internships [00:27:00] around the world from Brazil to Germany to Ghana, to China, as well as in the bay area. During the summer of 2012 internships will offer UC Berkeley undergraduates the opportunity to pursue challenging hands on projects and energy and climate research. According to the office of the vice chancellor for research among the projects, cal energy core interns will be involved in our efforts to create green coal as industrial fuel, helping to produce biofuels, working on improving photovoltaics for integration into the [00:27:30] electricity grid, building models to better understand climate change and designing and testing. Cookstoves. The internship program provides a $600 weekly stipend for all interns as well as funding to cover transportation and housing. All placements are full time, more information and application forms are available at the cow energy core website. 

Speaker 9:        Yeah, 

Speaker 6:        explaining science to an 11 year old. The flame challenge sponsored by the Center for communicating science is an attempt to reach the very core of [00:28:00] science communication. The contest asks scientists and generally clever people to submit their own explanations of what a flame is, explanations that would captivate an 11 year old. The flame challenge contest is open for entries between March 2nd and April 2nd with the winners to be announced in June. Entries can be in writing, video or graphics and they can be playful or serious as long as they are accurate and connect with the young judges. For more information and entry [00:28:30] forms, visit the challenge website. Flame challenge.org 

Speaker 7:        [inaudible] music curse during the show goes by on Donna David [inaudible] on for his album title folk and acoustic [00:29:00] just made available by creative Commons license 3.0 contribution. [inaudible]. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show [inaudible] [00:29:30] to our email address is [inaudible] means in two weeks. It's 

Speaker 6:        the same 

Speaker 5:        [inaudible].

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

Peter Gifford is the President and CTO of Cyromech Inc. He talks about cryogenics, the science of super low temperatures, and the challenges of growing a mid-sized high tech manufacturing company.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next. 

Speaker 2:        Okay. 

Speaker 3:        [inaudible]

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

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

Speaker 4:        Hi and good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Our guest today is Peter Gifford, [00:01:00] president and chief technical officer of crown incorporated, a manufacturer of cryogenic refrigerators for industry and research. Peter was visiting the west coast and we took the opportunity to talk with him. Peter's father, William e Gifford co-invented, the Gifford McMahon's cycle with Howard McMahon in the late 1950s while they both worked at Arthur D. Little company. The Gifford McMahon cycle is a unique method of reliably providing closed cycle refrigeration at temperatures [00:01:30] below 10 degrees Kelvin, which is minus 452 degrees Fahrenheit. The Gifford McMahon cycle became an important standard for the semiconductor industry. It was also vital to the early u s space program by cooling microwave amplifiers in ground stations for satellite communications. Peter Gifford talks about cryogenics and the integration of science, engineering and manufacturing. The day of the interview. Peter had a bad cold and his voice [00:02:00] is scratchy. Rick Karnofsky also joins me for the interview. Peter Gifford, welcome to spectrum. Well thank you. Good to be here. Peter, give us an overview of cryogenics. 

Speaker 5:        The basic definition that I use is all the temperature range from liquid natural gas, colder. That's about a, you know about 120 Calvin and 

Speaker 4:        what are the large scale applications of crowd genics? 

Speaker 5:        Yeah, I wasn't around [00:02:30] in the early 19 hundreds when the early work was, but I think what they were trying to do as they are trying to separate liquid air into oxygen and nitrogen, they are trying to get oxygen so that they could make fire hotter for steel manufacturing. During the Cold War, it started to be wanting to see what the Russians were doing. So we had these satellites and they'd send them these very faint messages from satellites and the receivers. Temperatures had to be reduced low [00:03:00] enough so we can reduce without noise. That vibration of the atoms and the crystal, so we could see lay an egg breast, Jeff's cool pack of cigarettes in his pocket at the wharf and flat a boss Doc, you know, that kind of stuff. That's when the different McMahon segway refrigerator started coming out and with those small refrigerators, the next thing that happened was all the materials scientists and other physicists wanting to use cryogenics and laboratories. They found that they could start [00:03:30] to recognize more stuff, more interesting physics in their a samples at low temperatures. Then after that they started prepping vacuums with thing called cryo pumps. Every chip manufactured in every phone, television, anything is made in the Cryo pumped vacuum with a Gifford McMann type cryo pump bay on those things. We didn't make all that money, so I've had to work for a living. The next big application was cooling MRI [00:04:00] magnets. When you go in those MRI things, they slide you in there and they have that sound. 

Speaker 5:        That's a cry refrigerator is re condensing liquid helium. That's for Calvin. It cools the magnet in there. It's just a little distance away from your body and then after that there'll be a few things coming out with high temperature superconducting future, but right now I have a, as far as HTS, I attempted superconducting applications that [00:04:30] people don't really know yet. And what does Cryo Mek do in particular for this industry? What chromic does is we manufacture crier refrigerators. That means we take heat out of something so that it can reach cryogenic temperatures below 120 Calvin cr refrigerators at our place go down to 1.7 k. It's a very simple device. What my father's invention was is he separated and integral crier [00:05:00] refrigerator with a compression part of it and the expansion part of a write together, he's separated the two and made them more reliable and you could use off the shelf air conditioning parts and the compressor while you made the expanded device. 

Speaker 5:        Very particular, very controlled environment. That's what we do our specially, we've got 32 different crier refrigerators and 54 different products based around them. The area of cryogenics than that [00:05:30] that you work in, how do you describe that? We sort of spend most of our time looking for the new applications. So our manufacturing models, we are open and flexible to new opportunities and then we can manufacture our cry refrigerators efficiently so we can make money and stay in business. And what are some of the unique features of these? Are they larger volumes or do they get down to the lower temperatures? Well, people say small crowd coolers, small crowd colors might be anything. It's [00:06:00] hard to describe. We are talking in Watts here folks. A Wad is one joule per second of heat being taken out of an object. Okay. So we'd go down to maybe a half a watt up to like 600 watts. 

Speaker 5:        Big Air separation plants as large cryogenics, you know, for big research institution where they're talking megawatts, we're talking very small in terms of capacities. I don't know if that defines it. That's a very tough definition. [00:06:30] Do you want to go more into the innovation of your father's invention? My father's basic innovation was back there in 1955 56, he had been working down in a, the redstone arsenal, Donald Huntsville, Alabama for the start of NASA, uh, where they had the Germans brought in to make rockets and rocket fuel, sort of liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen. And so we left there. We'd come in from Boulder, Colorado. We left there and went up to Boston, [00:07:00] uh, precisely so that my father could work on making smaller ground coolers. So this big integral thing that would take about the size of an average living room could be a more portable things so they could set up these receivers for the satellite systems all around. And so to do that, he's, the separation is really the Gifford McMahon Cycle. And uh, it was, it was quite unique and it allowed people to have cry refrigerators anywhere you want [00:07:30] them. Right now. Crier refrigerators on the South Pole on the North Pole on icebreakers. I've got, um, you know, under tents in Ethiopia making liquid nitrogen for artificial insemination purposes for producing milk. 

Speaker 3:        [inaudible]. [00:08:00] Our guest today on Spectra is Peter Gifford, the president, CTO chromic incorporated. In the next segment, Peter Talks about making cryo refrigerators. This is kv LX Berkeley. 

Speaker 5:        What kind of balance between making new instruments and selling these new instruments versus supporting instruments that you already have [00:08:30] out there? Do you have the drive to that? Our customer is pretty much two by yielded. That'll run as long as it can go. When I first got in the business, if you made a career, refrigerated, ran for 5,000 hours, that's you know, the year as eighties six 70 or something, it was considered good. Then it went to 10,000 hours. Then it went to 20,000 hours. About the year 2000 now we're suppressing 30 and moving up to 40,000 [00:09:00] hours. Meantime between any maintenance on these devices, so that's what people expect from crier refrigerators in course of running the company over these many years. How has the manufacturing process on your side changed keep well an adding more products, but the basic products have stayed the same. What has happened is as we've made more, instead of going from one a month to one a week to [00:09:30] one a day to now three a day coming down the line, trying to build the capacity, you can focus as you get to bigger numbers and start to focus on different places, you got more people and you can start to recognize what it is that you ought to be doing at different places. 

Speaker 5:        It's hard to see everything when you're small and you're just doing a few things. It's, it's amazing. Uh, right now my key word is the word recognize. I'm seeing [00:10:00] things clearly. I'm recognizing things a lot clearly in the manufacturing process. Plus I got a lot of people out there that are paying attention. What kind of challenges are you most interested in solving? Are they some of the managerial stuff or some of this stuff on the sales side or some of the engineering and technical challenges still? I wonder whether or not I've ever separated those. There are some interesting things coming at us. Again, recently we've instituted [00:10:30] a new quality management system where we're defining what we need. We're training people better than we audit people and we've gotten a lot better. It's very interesting, these sort of soft sociological things that you do at a company that yets the employee more, the employee starts to feel more included and it's amazing how the whole foundation of the company's quality rises. 

Speaker 5:        [00:11:00] It's been unique to witness for the last year. So I guess what I'm saying is is I liked the manufacturing production side of it. Peter, when you joined the company, at what point in that process did you feel comfortable with the engineering aspects of the, I went back and finished a lot of the engineering courses I hadn't had in my truck. Gated scientific training. I asked my father if I needed a to get a full mechanical engineering [00:11:30] degree and he said, no, don't waste your time comfortable with the technology maybe only in the last 10 years. So that means after 27 years or so messing around, people contact us from everywhere from malaria research in Malawi, needing to have a small liquid nitrogen. People talk to us through technical issues. I think what you do when people talk to you and try [00:12:00] to ask you how they can use cryogenics or can their cryogenic connect to what they need. It took a while to accept that what I was doing just Leslie and well was the best thing I could bring to a field. Then the other thing is if somebody really needs something to, and if they're good, they will take the time to explain it to you clearly. 

Speaker 6:        [inaudible]

Speaker 4:        [00:12:30] you are listening to spectrum on KALX Berkeley. Our guest is Peter Gifford. In the next segment he talks about research funding. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 5:        [00:13:00] have you learned anything from other cryogenics companies? I have seen graduate and companies that spend a lot of money on developing products that people didn't need and wondered why they didn't need them. I've seen cryogenic companies, you know, make a good product that I'm sort of, you know, I missed the boat. Um, but how do you say the relationship [00:13:30] of watching your competitor move? Uh, I don't know. I don't know how to the answer that we don't spend a lot of time reverse engineering. I think historically people have been copying us most that sought. And do you see any gaps that the industry as a whole has to push through? 

Speaker 5:        Well, you know, there are things that I would like to do. The thing is is the question is whether or not somebody needs them. [00:14:00] I guess my head is really stuck there. When you're running a business, do you do what you want to do or what your customers need? I think the answer, and that's pretty simple if you're ready, but there's a sort of a school of thought of pure engineering that you build it regardless of whether or not it's going to have any application or anything like that. It's just because it's sort of a spiritual thing that you have in you. You've got to build it and there are some people, yeah, we'll certainly make money. That's something that historically the government [00:14:30] labs were useful. Here we go. What's looking to see if we can do that? I would like to make a little statement here. 

Speaker 5:        The federal government is not funding research in the United States anywhere at any levels equal to Korea. The Europeans anywhere we have fallen beyond what it was like the 60s and the 70s when this country was on fire and the money has been taken away from it. This idea that basic research [00:15:00] will be dead at corporations. It is not corporations job to do basic research. That tall space race, that paranoia about the communist block at stuff's gone. What is motivating it? Now I've go to Korea. Somebody took me to a university that was being set up 20,000 students, but he told me they are putting up a new one every five years. They had the latest, you know, electron microscopes, the latest big cryogenic plants and recovery [00:15:30] systems and so I'm going, wow, that isn't happening in the United States and aside idea that you don't have to fund this. 

Speaker 5:        That's what made America really good at that time. It's just, it was all hidden from the average person. A lot of side fund research, fun universities and hopefully some of that will trickle down to you too. Some of it will. Right now I would say most [00:16:00] of our business comes from people who actually make products. I'm thinking more about learning what the next applications are. That early Gifford McMahon cycle refrigerator was funded by the government, tried to read messages off of satellites for defense. There's all kinds of stuff, early computers, the chip manufacturing, everything. It was being funded some way that way. 

Speaker 4:        Where do you see research happening now in crowd genics? Are there institutions [00:16:30] and organizations that you follow that you look to? 

Speaker 5:        NIST is still spending quite a bit of money on cryogenic research. That's the old national bureau standards. We'd not seen that much in university labs. As the research gravitated overseas, our strongest competitors we have is basically company in Japan. Everybody said a wondering when there's going to be a Chinese company making cryogenic refrigerators of our time. They haven't seen them yet. [00:17:00] That could be a real game changer, but there were a lot more crier refrigerator manufacturers in the eighties and nineties and some of them have left the picture consolidated under that one big company. So they got bought up basically. Yeah. Or the business took too long to get big for the investors to wait for 

Speaker 4:        how much of the engineering can now sort of pass off to others and how big his engineering team [inaudible]. 

Speaker 5:        Right now we have eight engineers [00:17:30] at Crab Mc, we should be more like 15 we've been having trouble hiring people. We like to get people to different types of somebody with a lot of experience deepen in cryogenics, but most of the time we want to get raw mechanical engineers directly out of school. Somebody with an open mind and with good practical tools sense the chief technical officer, part of my job, everybody calls me an entrepreneur now and entrepreneur. Really [00:18:00] the form that I am who sort of grows with a company out of nothing. We don't really know what we do. You don't really know all the things you do because you take it on naturally to be successful. You're not really that aware of it. But one of the things as I pull him back, I recognize how they need my scientific recognition in the different aspects of the business. 

Speaker 5:        I hope that's not getting too conceptual. You know, you have an engineering perspective [00:18:30] as whether or not form, fit and function is doing what we need. You know, you have the technical perspective, the people whose hands are actually touching the device on the line. You know you have the financial officer's always looking over the shoulder, but in a technical business that's innovative, you don't want them running the show, but you want them to be aware of what's going on. You know? And then there's my point from the chief technical office and just the business thing. Can we do this? Do they get [00:19:00] it? Is there training? Getting in, is the quality being held up? That's sort of, there are different birds of prey. How about birds of friendships, sort of soaring over the situation, recognizing what ought to be done there at any moment on the production line. So that's I think my most important job and also trying to figure out strategically where we go next. 

Speaker 3:        [inaudible] [00:19:30] spectrum is a public affairs show. [inaudible] hail expert. Peter Gifford is cryogenics engineer and our guests could today. In the next segment, Peter Talks about engineering and the stimulation it is brought to his life. 

Speaker 5:        [00:20:00] What sort of technology changes happened over the years you've been running Cromac that affected your business? I would say the most important one for us is the Internet. The Internet allowed us to market and then communicate with people by email. When I first got into the business, the only way to send a drawing and try to figure out what somebody needed [00:20:30] from you was through the mail. Then it went to telexes, then it went to FedEx. Then it went to fax machines and now with the Internet it's just amazing if you've got a draw and you can send to anyone planted real quick and I'd say roughly about 60 to 65% of our business is overseas. In terms of other things, CMC machines, material manufacturers, a CNC, [00:21:00] CNC is computer it basically it's computer machine. In your devices, your pieces and stuff, temperature sensors had been better. 

Speaker 5:        Vacuum equipment is getting better. What's happening is a lot of the equipment that you were working with in the fifties sixties and seventies and eighties have matured. People have been making them for a longer period of time. And that maturation and a mechanical devices is a, Jess gets better with time. That's [00:21:30] just the way it is unless you know the front offices are taking the value out of the product. You talked a little bit earlier about what you look for in a young engineer, a new engineer out of school. Do you want to go into that a little more? Uh, you think that people are maybe getting too much pressure to go to a phd? I'm not that interested in higher and a phd in what we're doing right now. I have a phd in house who is the crowd refrigerator expert [00:22:00] really getting into her career and you know, making work, you know, you gotta be there on the job. 

Speaker 5:        Most of the phd work is laboratory work anyway. At least it is in mechanical engineering. You know, it's that integration between the science and the actual thing that's getting made. That is the important thing. And if you're in the laboratory studying, not getting out there where it's being made, then you miss all that. [00:22:30] The best thing to do is get out there and start doing it right away. It's pretty obvious when you start working with people whether or not they've got the courage to use their intelligence. You know whether or not they're going to work on their communication skills, whether or not they're going to start to recognize the important stuff you see it go out there and get involved. I would recommend sooner than later. Don't be so timid. A lot of people are timid to get involved in the workplace [00:23:00] and it's are you looking for people that have a bachelor's of science or master's degrees right now? 

Speaker 5:        We'd be happy with Bachelor's science and that falls into that whole idea of gets started. Get going. Yeah. Get into the mix. We have a lot of very interesting applications. We recently hired three engineers all about three years ago and all three of those young guys are absolutely slumped with new things to learn and they're just alert. They're sort [00:23:30] of running around and not sitting behind computers. Drafting. They like getting a drawing, going out there, doing something, traveling, answering that service question from Kazakhstan about a little liquid helium plant. They're calling up a and talking about vacuum equipment that learning about thermal conductivity and thermal radiation. They're using size. My father once said for you, he said, Peter, you know the real enemy is, I go, what? I didn't [00:24:00] even know what he's talking about. And he said, boredom. Boredom's the enemy. And since I've been involved in cryogenics I had just not bored. 

Speaker 5:        I'm a 63 and people were saying, oh you kind of step back from business now and I will tell you this, I am afraid of stepping back from the intellectual stimulation of the business. You know some of the stress managing all the people on the floor. Yeah, but the intellectual variation of it. No, I don't [00:24:30] know if I can step back. I think it would be self-destructive. You know, I've been in this business as 1973 and I happened in it because my father had this little company. Here's a full time college professor. So I started making refrigerators. I graduated from high school in 1966 from the best high school in Syracuse, New York, not one of the other people in that graduating class as far as I've been able to see did anything in manufacturing. They became doctors, lawyers, some [00:25:00] other type of businessmen or professional types. 

Speaker 5:        I'm the only one who went into manufacturing and in the eighties and the nineties and the early two thousands everybody thought I was an idiot to be trying to manufacture cryogenic refrigerators and upstate New York and uh, it's been a great career for me. It's just very, very interesting. We built a company up to 105 people. We've been profitable since 1988 no, it's been a very good life [00:25:30] and I'm very pro manufacturing and I don't think that the United States is going to get back on its feet again until people start manufacturing a lot more stuff and seeing it as a reality we can manufacturer for [inaudible]. Thanks very much for coming on spectrum. You're welcome. 

Speaker 2:        [00:26:00] Spectrum is archive 

Speaker 3:        iTunes university. We've made a special link. You can get to the link is tiny url.com/k a l ex spectrum. For this archive version of spectrum, we are for going to calendar the music or during the show was written and produced on my Alex Simon. [00:26:30] Thank you for listening to [inaudible] 

Speaker 7:        Trim. 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 dot k a l [email protected] join us in two weeks at this same time.

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

The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study is doing a new analysis of the surface temperature record in a rigorous manner that addresses the criticism of previous analysis done by other groups.

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

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

Speaker 3:        Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Today's interview is with Elizabeth Mueller, Co founder and executive director of Berkeley Earth surface temperature. The Berkeley Earth surface temperature project is redoing the analysis of the earth surface temperature record in a rigorous manner that addresses the criticisms of previous analysis. [00:01:00] All their work to date is available free at their website, Berkeley earth.org I want to briefly explain two terms that are used in the interview. Creaking is the Geo statistic method devised by Daniel Craig, a mining engineer in 19:51 AM o is the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation. The Oscillation is principally the change of sea surface temperature over time in the North Atlantic Ocean. Onto [00:01:30] the interview. Welcome Elizabeth Mueller to spectrum. Thank you. How did Berkeley Earth come into being? Is that how you'd like to refer to it as at Berkeley? Yes, that's right. I did Berkeley Earth come into being. 

Speaker 4:        Um, rich and I had been working together for a couple of years and we kept being asked about climate issues which had been involved in climate for a long time. He taught his class physics for future presidents and what she goes into global warming and he and I were working together doing consulting on energy and environment issues, but people kept asking [00:02:00] about global warming and we had been uncomfortable with some of the elements of of global warming for some time. There was the station quality issue which had been raised by Anthony Watts, which both of us uncomfortable but we weren't quite sure what to do about it. There were other issues as well. There was the data selection issue. Why did the major groups only use 20% of the data 10% in recent years, but it was also in part the climate gates scandal that really [00:02:30] made us think somebody else needs to come in and have a fresh look at this. We really wanted to be able to lower the barriers to entry. The data was inaccessible, people couldn't get it. It was impossible for any group to come in and easily do an analysis of global warming and this is such an important area of policy work, of economics, of so many elements of the world today that we felt everybody should be able to go in and look at the data themselves, look at the analysis [00:03:00] and really understand what the issues were. So that's why we decided to create the Berkeley Earth project and do exactly that. 

Speaker 3:        For our audience sake, we should identify rich. 

Speaker 4:        Yes. Richard Muller is a long time physicist. He's a MacArthur winner. He's been involved in climate issues for a long time. He wrote a technical book on Ice Ages and astronomical causes. He's been teaching physics for future presidents here at Berkeley for I think about 10 years now. He also wrote the textbook and a popular book called Physics [00:03:30] for future presidents. He's also my dad. He and I started working together about, I guess about four years ago now, and I had been doing consulting mostly in Europe and kept getting asked about energy issues and so I wanted to bring him in to my consulting firm, but instead the two of us ended up creating a business together, which has been great fun. His, he's a lot of fun to work with. 

Speaker 3:        Besides wanting to clarify things or level of playing field, if you will, [00:04:00] and make it more accessible, was there a sense that you were the right group to do it? 

Speaker 4:        Well, we weren't a group. We didn't exist as a group at the time and so it was a question of pulling together the right people from the right backgrounds to create a right group. We did think that we wanted a fresh perspective so that it wasn't necessarily a problem that we were new to this specific area of work. Many of our people had had deep experience with climate change in the past, but we also wanted to combine physics and [00:04:30] statistics. Modern statistics. Bringing in David Berliner early on was an important choice that we wanted to take a fresh look at the problem using modern statistics, which we believed would allow us to use much more of the data than the previous groups had been able to do. 

Speaker 3:        Would you describe the research and planning that you did to form the group and get things started? Sure. 

Speaker 4:        We needed a nonprofit. We discovered pretty quickly that in order to do a study like this and raise funding, we needed to be [00:05:00] a nonprofit. We didn't have a nonprofit and nonprofits take quite some time to create and we weren't quite sure what we were going to do about that. When rich had a call from Michael Ditmore in Santa Barbara with a group called Novem and Michael did more wanted rich to lead a study on geoengineering, and rich said, well, you know, I'm not really that interested in doing a study on geoengineering, but if you really want to do a study that's going to have big impact and be very important, you should consider helping us with a study on global warming. [00:05:30] And a Michael said, hmm, that sounds interesting. Tell me more. So we started talking to him and it seemed like an ideal group for us to work with and so Novem came on to house the Berkeley Earth efforts. 

Speaker 4:        We also started looking into what the other groups had done. We wanted to look at why they hadn't used more than 20% of the data. What were the issues surrounding the station quality issue raised by Anthony Watts? What were the concerns around the urban heat island [00:06:00] that many people had been talking about? This is where people had been saying, yes, there's global warming, but cities, everyone knows cities are warmer than rural areas and the world is getting more urban. So is it possible that the world is getting warmer not because of carbon dioxide, but because it's getting more urbanized? This is something that we wanted to look at as well. We tried to look very carefully at what some of the other groups had done and we discovered that many of the adjustments that they had made to [00:06:30] the data they had done manually and they hadn't really kept very careful track of what exactly they had done. 

Speaker 4:        So even they couldn't go back and duplicate it and this was a concern as well, we we, this is such an important topic. You want to be able to Redo it and make sure you get the same results every time you do. And so that was another thing we looked at carefully trying to pick the brain of the people who had been dealing with the data. Was that extremely helpful and crucial to the project? It was helpful. I mean it was very useful to speak [00:07:00] to them, to meet with them to try and understand what they were doing. But at the same time we knew from pretty early on that we wanted to do something totally different. So we weren't trying to duplicate what they had done. We wanted to take a totally new approach, something that had never been done before use all of the data are pretty close to all of the data and we had to develop a modern statistical technique in order to do this and that was done by Robert Roddy, our lead scientist in conjunction with David Brillinger, a professor of statistics [00:07:30] here at Berkeley and what that meant was that we weren't adding on to the previous research. 

Speaker 4:        We were really starting it totally new from a totally different approach. We didn't know what we were going to find. We didn't know if we were going to find that there was more global warming or if we're going to find that there was less global warming. We only knew or we thought, we knew that we weren't going to find the same results as everybody had found before us, which is why it was such a surprise in the end that even using a totally different technique, we ended up [00:08:00] with results that were so close to what the previous groups had found. I think that's a really strong statement in terms of what they are and what they mean is that even though you're using completely different approaches, you get results that are so, so similar. I think that really strengthens our confidence in the work that we did. 

Speaker 4:        Talk a little bit about the gathering of the team. We wanted people on the team who were comfortable looking through huge quantities of data and had actually in the past made [00:08:30] discoveries by doing so, so it wasn't enough that they were able to pick apart other people's work. We wanted people who were able to dive in, get their hands dirty, and yet make an unexpected and surprising discovery and some of the people we chose, Jonathan wordly, Bob Jacobson had done this before, but also saw promoter who had done this and is working in cosmology and won the Nobel Prize this past year. So those were the people we wanted. People who had experience doing exactly that. 

Speaker 5:        [00:09:00] You're listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Today's guest is Elizabeth Mueller, Co founder and executive director of Berkeley legal earth's surface. 

Speaker 3:        That is really one of the big challenges of all this is the data set size. 

Speaker 4:        It is, it's huge. It's huge. And merging that from the different sources [00:09:30] was really one of the biggest challenges we had to face. I should say Robert had to face, he was the one who really did most of the work, but he had 15 different data sources and almost as many different formats, all kinds of mess that really had to be sorted through. And that in many ways was one of the biggest challenges of the project was just getting through that. And we figured if we did nothing else but sifting through this data and putting together a clean data set, that would already be a huge contribution. 

Speaker 3:        [00:10:00] So given that task, what other sort of methodology had you tried to impose on this data? [inaudible] 

Speaker 4:        well, the other important elements, there's collecting the data, cleaning the data, um, merging the data. But the other part was of course analyzing the data. Um, and the other groups had only been able to use 20% of the data because they had a constraint. They needed to have long continuous records. Well Robert Roady, I'm together with David Berliner developed a new technique [00:10:30] based on creaking in which they're able to, to analyze all of the data, are virtually all of the data and the result was that we were able to use so much more and yet get very good, very carefully calculated error estimates and go much farther back in time than the previous groups had been able to. 

Speaker 3:        And were you satisfied with the data sets that were available or did you look for other data sets? 

Speaker 4:        Robert looked for everything. He really wanted to find all of the data that was out there and he, [00:11:00] he did a very complete job I believe in doing so. 

Speaker 3:        Is that an ongoing process for him or the ongoing process? 

Speaker 4:        The process is going to be updating it. We have now the 15 databases that this comes from and they are going to be updated on a regular basis since we want to be able to update our database on a regular basis and have it all automated so that that will just happen every few months or however often we decided 

Speaker 3:        it needs to be. And so are these data sets pretty broadly accepted as the best available? Yes they are. And the source of them is government, [00:11:30] weather stations, 

Speaker 4:        government, weather station. There's a lot of volunteer weather stations. There's a complete list of the 15 sources, many of which come through Noah 

Speaker 3:        and I guess no is consolidating a lot of data sets from around the world. 

Speaker 4:        Uh, yes. If you look at the data set, it really is around w from all around the world. Um, in the modern day. If you go back in time, it becomes less global. If you look at our earliest measurements, you may see data really only in the u s and Europe, [00:12:00] few places in India, but by the 19 hundreds you're really getting fairly good coverage of the globe accepting Antarctica, which doesn't really come into play until the 1950s 

Speaker 3:        were there any other big challenges 

Speaker 4:        under the cleaning of the data and developing the analysis framework? Where were really the biggest challenges? There were a couple of surprises though. The things that we didn't expect. One of the things that we discovered once we had access to the data, we were able to start playing with and looking [00:12:30] for other things that maybe people hadn't noticed before. One of the biggest surprises was the discovery that the oscillations in the data, which everybody had previously said, oh, those are El Nino are everybody's data goes up and down together and, and that's El Nino. We only looked at it very carefully. We discovered that, yes, it is highly correlated to to El Nino, but in fact it's even more correlated to the Gulf stream and that was a big surprise. We didn't expect that, but because we had access to the data, it [00:13:00] enabled us to look at these sorts of things and we're really very hopeful that now that the world has access to the data, there'll be many other important discoveries of the sort. 

Speaker 3:        I know that you're doing land surface first, then ocean surface. Is that a natural two phase project? Are there more phases? Is there more? 

Speaker 4:        Well, we wanted to start with the land because in large part that's where much of the controversy was, so we figured we wanted to start with a bite sized piece though. [00:13:30] Actually I think it was a much bigger bite than we thought it would be. But by analyzing the land, it looks at the issue of the temperature stations, the station quality issue. Anthony wants the urban heat island effect and this data selection issue was their data selection bias because they only used previous groups that only use 20% of the data. The oceans are going to be interesting in the next phase because of some of the discoveries we've made such as the Gulf stream. So we're really looking forward now to doing that [00:14:00] as a next phase of work because we want to look at this in more detail and see what we can find in terms of the relationship between the Gulf stream and temperature. 

Speaker 4:        The Gulf stream, we found a 60 year cycle in the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation, which for the past 30 years has been going up. So the temperature has been going up and the temperature of the world has been going out temperature of both the Amo and and of the land surface temperature, which was unexpected. But it also [00:14:30] shows that the 60 year cycles is at a peak right now and it's going to start going down. The temperature is going to start going down. What is the impact of this going to be on global warming? Uh, is it possible that we haven't seen any global warming in the past 13 years in part because of this amo cycle and what's going to happen as the amo cycle starts, starts going down? We don't know it will, but we think it's a fascinating issue to look at. That fits in very naturally with our study of the oceans [00:15:00] and as the ocean data set, as extensive as the land, it's very different. 

Speaker 4:        So instead of looking at a single locations, you're looking at mainly boats, so they're moving, there's different problems, different issues, but we think now that we have our framework developed, it shouldn't be as difficult as initially looking at the land was, but the analysis framework does have to change somewhat to accommodate for it. It does have to change some different collection process. Nothing's really out there. Stationary, taking [00:15:30] a reading every they are now in modern times they're boys and there's some fixed locations, but as you get back in time, as you go back in time, more and more of it come from boats. Your methodology for analyzing the data has less reliance on that longevity of sample. That's right. Our statistical techniques mean that we can work with fragments, we can work with little pieces, which has also been an advantage for dealing with some of these issues of station changes. 

Speaker 4:        So you might have a station [00:16:00] that that goes along and it's reading a certain temperature within a certain range, um, fairly regularly for a number of years. And then all of a sudden the pattern is similar, but it's three degrees warmer than it was before. And you say, well, what's that? Um, what happened here? And previous groups would take them to say, okay, well this is probably a station move and this probably not exactly the same location as it was before. Something happened here. Maybe the time of day changed the time of the day that they were taking the, the, the readings. And so they corrected it and then they manually move [00:16:30] those, either they moved one down or they moved the other one up so that it would be a long continuous record. Well, with our statistical technique, we just cut it in into, and we say, okay, well we'll just assume that these are two different locations, two different records and handle it as such. And that means that we don't have to worry about adjusting the data. We just cut it and makes it much more easy to duplicate. And, um, that there's no manual adjustments that analyze why you that's right. And adjustment. [00:17:00] That's right. 

Speaker 5:        [inaudible]

Speaker 4:        tune to k a l s 

Speaker 5:        Berkeley. The show is spectrum. Our guest is Elizabeth Moore, Co founder and executive director of the [inaudible] surface temperature project. 

Speaker 4:        In the peer review process that you've now entered into, yes. Is there a process for integrating the feedback or at least analyzing [00:17:30] what people are saying to you or is it too soon now? We've been getting a lot of feedback so we have the official feedback that comes through the official peer review journals and we've been working with the reviewers and the editors to incorporate that feedback. Um, we discuss it as a group. We had one of the lead authors go through it in bring any issues to the crew, talk about any additional analysis that's required and go in and actually make some of the changes to the papers. But perhaps even more interestingly is the [00:18:00] feedback that we've gotten from the peer review process outside of the official journals. Because we've posted our papers online. We've been contacted by a number of scientists from around the world who have gone through our papers in extraordinary detail and looked at some of the things, raised some important questions, um, raised some issues, some concerns and that's been extremely helpful. I think our papers will be better in the end because of the peer review that we've gotten through the open process, the global [00:18:30] process of putting our papers online. 

Speaker 3:        In terms of longevity of the, the project and the data set, how long do you envision staying with the project? Is there a point at which you just, you're, you're done? 

Speaker 4:        Well I think we're not sure. I think we would love to stay involved. I think there's a need to keep updating the data data set take to keep it live. We would love to do that. I think can we, we have somebody in charge of maintaining the data center, [00:19:00] but we're not a long term project for now. We're based on, on fundraising. We fundraise for the first 18 months for now looking to fundraise for the next 18 months. So we have not yet been able to establish that type of permanent longevity that would be necessary to keep doing this on an ongoing basis. But it's certainly something that we're thinking about. 

Speaker 3:        I went to your website and was looking around and went into the a frequently asked questions and it noted [00:19:30] that none of the scientists involved has taken a public political stand on global warming. And I wondered if that was still the case or if as a result of your first release of data that there was a revision of that or not. 

Speaker 4:        I think that's still true. And our scientists believe that the statement which you might be referring to saying that global warming is real, is now a scientific statement there. There is the data to support that. There's the evidence to support that. There's error bars, uh, to support that. So when we need to make a statement like that, we believe [00:20:00] that it's a scientific statement, not a political statement. We haven't looked into other issues such as how much of it is human caused. And so we haven't taken, I would call political statements on those sorts of issues. We don't want to get into the politics because it muddies the science and we want people to be able to look at our numbers to look at our analysis and say, okay, we know that this is 100% pure scientific analysis, but on the other hand there is a need for [00:20:30] scientific evaluation of policy to see which policies that are on the table would actually make sense according to science, which ones would actually not really help very much. 

Speaker 4:        We don't know how much of this we might get involved and we haven't done any of it so far. It might be a question of only saying is as much as we feel can be stated, that's really grounded in the science. So as far as the group trying to get drawn into choosing a prescription [00:21:00] for affecting or impacting global warming, that's not really something the group is interested in at all, right? I don't, I don't think so. I mean there's certain elements that it does keep coming up as an issue and there are a lot of people asking us to to get more involved in this, but we really want to make sure that anything we did say would be very grounded in the science. There might be some limited statements we could make that would be grounded in the science, but we haven't taken a decision on on that yet. 

Speaker 5:        [00:21:30] You were listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. We're speaking with Elizabeth Miller, Co founder and executive director of the Berkeley Earth surface temperature project. 

Speaker 4:        And from your experience and personal opinion, is there a prescription that you feel is the best available? Well, I think we need a lot of different things. We need energy efficiency. There's a lot that can be done for low cost, no cost even making [00:22:00] money by increasing our energy efficiency. But we also need other things like low cost, solar, low cost, wind, nuclear. There are many things that are all helpful, but it needs to be something that can be affordable, that can be adopted and the developing world, China, India, the rest of the developing world, it needs to be cheap and unless it's cheap enough for them to be able to afford, it's not going to happen there. There are other priorities, so so China, their emissions are growing so fast that anything we do [00:22:30] has live in an impact and less we can set an example that is able to be followed by China. 

Speaker 4:        That means it needs to be cheap if it needs to ideally be profitable so that people in China and India and the rest of the developing world can afford to do the same thing. Unfortunately, I don't see this being addressed in the international debate right now at the UN and it's really an important problem that I wish had more visibility. Is [00:23:00] there anything about the group that I haven't asked you that you'd, you'd want to bring up? Well, everything that I've mentioned today is available on our website, so it's Berkeley earth.org we have all of our papers there. We have our data set and both text format. And in Matlab we have our programs. We also have a lovely video. I don't know if you've seen the video. It shows a map of the world that is getting warmer and colder and you see weather going across the, the different regions [00:23:30] of the world. 

Speaker 4:        And it takes us from 18 hundreds through to the present. So data visualization. Absolutely. Is that something that you've embraced it? It is. It is. And we've actually gotten some requests from some museums who have big globes. I guess they have one up at the Lawrence Hall of science and, and wanting to project our global warming movie onto such a globe, which I think would be a fascinating way of looking at it. There's a couple of other, um, interesting images [00:24:00] on our, on our website. For example, if you look at the u s many people are surprised to learn that out. One third of locations in the U s have cooled. They haven't warmed two-thirds have warmed. But what it means is if you look up your hometown and you might say, Oh, I've never felt any global warming. Well, that's probably true. You probably haven't felt any global warming because the amount of global warming that we've seen is so small that it's absolutely overwhelmed by local weather phenomenon and there's one [00:24:30] third chance that you've been living in a, in a location that's actually seen cooling over the past 50 years. 

Speaker 3:        Yeah. The personal relationship with global warming seems to be where a lot of people stumble and feel that it should be something visceral in their daily lives for it to be real and don't take the intellectual leap to regard the data on a worldwide basis because that's really sort of what your group has tried to do. 

Speaker 4:        Yeah, that's absolutely right. One of the difficulties with global warming is that there's been less than one degree global [00:25:00] warming in the past 50 years. This is not something that you are going to be able to feel. You might think you have. You might say, Oh yes, if weather feel so different today than it did 10 years ago, that must be global warming. And people do that all the time. They say, oh, it's cold today, global warming, or it's warm today, global warming. But the truth is you can't detect it to be, you need hundreds, preferably thousands of records of locations from around the world in order to detect global warming. It's not something that you're going to go out and [00:25:30] feel on your own. 

Speaker 3:        Do you know of any organizations that have embraced your data and are, are going off in some area of research that validates what you started this project to achieve? 

Speaker 4:        Um, there are many organizations who have expressed interest in using our data. I think it's still fresh out there, so we're not quite sure who's going to be adopting it on a permanent basis. But we've gotten a lot of feedback. We've gotten a lot of emails, we've got a lot of people saying thank you for this. I've really been interested in getting into the stat and I was never [00:26:00] able to do it before. So I suspect that as time goes on and as our papers start to be published, there'll be more and more people using our data. 

Speaker 3:        Elizabeth Miller, thanks very much for being on spectrum. Well, thank you. It's been my pleasure. It's been enjoyed being here. 

Speaker 6:        [inaudible]

Speaker 3:        Rick Karnofsky joins me for the calendar and the news. Okay. 

Speaker 6:        Oh, 

Speaker 7:        the mycological society of San Francisco will present flavorful [00:26:30] foul and Far-flung guy on Tuesday the 21st at 7:00 PM in San Francisco's Randall Museum, one 99 museum way. Daniel Winkler, the author of a field guy to edible mushrooms of the will share his experiences collecting and eating wild mushrooms and in his travel agency mushrooming LLC that annually organizes and leads echo tours to Tibet and South America. For more info on this free event, visit www dot m s s f. Dot. [00:27:00] O. R. G. 

Speaker 3:        The science had cow lecture for February. We'll be on Saturday, February 18th at 11:00 AM in Stanley Hall. Room One oh five the talk will be given by Professor Buford price and is entitled single celled microbes in polar ice, a proxy for evolution over 100 million generations. The presence of Pico Sino bacteria in ice at all. Depths in both Greenland and Antarctica provides an opportunity to study [00:27:30] microbial evolution over about 100 million generations. Professor Price, we'll discuss how this vast study is now possible. 

Speaker 7:        Physicist Michio Kaku will appear at the first Congregational Church of Berkeley at two three four five Channing way on Thursday the 23rd from seven 30 to 9:30 PM advanced tickets are $12 or get in at the door for $15 Sunni professor Kaku who cofounded string field theory on popularity's his physics [00:28:00] on his science channel show and on two radio programs. He recently released physics of the future, which gives a vision of the coming century based on interviews with over 300 scientists that discuss cutting edge medicine, computers, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, energy production, and astronautics. Visit kpfa.org for more information. Behavioral neuroscientist, Karen Ersh of the University of Cambridge and her colleagues have an article in the February 3rd [00:28:30] issue of science that studies the genetics of addiction. The team tested 50 pairs of siblings. One in each pair was addicted to cocaine or amphetamines while the other had no history of drug abuse. Participants pressed a left or right Arrow key when seeing a similar arrow on a computer screen unless they heard a tone in which case they were to do nothing. People with poor self control including most drug addicts find it difficult to refrain from pressing the key. Surprisingly, the siblings who are not addicted to drugs perform just as badly as their siblings who were [00:29:00] indeed brain scan showed the pairs had very similar brain irregularities in commentary on the article imaging specialist Nora Volkow of the National Institute of Drug Abuse in Bethesda. Notes that even in children as young as four to 12 traits such as self control and flexibility can be improved by targeted interventions including exercise, train, martial arts, Yoga and computer games designed to enhance working memory. 

Speaker 5:        [inaudible] occurred during the show was by list [00:29:30] on a David from his album folk and acoustic made available under creative Commons license 3.0 attribution. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have 

Speaker 1:        comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l [email protected] join us in two weeks at this same time. 

Speaker 2:        I like that one. [inaudible].

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Martin Mulvihill, the Executive Director of Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry, discusses the Center’s efforts to build an academic program to advance green chemistry through interdisciplinary scholarship. He discussed his views of sustainability in chemistry. bcgc.berkeley.edu

Transcript

Speaker 1:        Spectrum's next 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

Speaker 3:        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 [00:00:30] technologists. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible].

Speaker 1:        Good afternoon. I'm Rick Karnofsky. Brad swift and I are co-hosting today's show today. We have on Martin Mulva Hill, the executive director of the Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry. He'll talk to us about the center's efforts to build a novel academic program and how he views sustainability and chemistry. Marty Mulvihill, welcome to spectrum. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. I wanted [00:01:00] to have you talk about sustainability and then my take on things. Sustainability is fast becoming a cliche, so if you would spell out what you believe sustainability to be. 

Speaker 4:        Yeah. Sustainability is a broad movement towards both dematerialization materialization and trans materialization, so looking at ways to use fewer resources to still meet the means of society such that future generations [00:01:30] can also meet their needs. That comes from the Brundtland report, which is the UN report, which back in 86 sort of defined sustainability. Sustainability includes a lot of different things, which is much broader than any one discipline and even any one interdisciplinary center can really take on, in my opinion, at the Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry, my background and my current position, we really focus on a narrow part of sustainability and that's the chemicals piece. How do we ensure [00:02:00] that at the molecular level, the things we're building, um, are more sustainable, I. E don't use more resources than necessary and are safe for human health and the environment. The overarching goal for the center, how would you characterize that? 

Speaker 4:        And you're the executive director of the center now, right? That's correct. We have like many of the centers on campus, three main purposes. The first is education. So we're teaching [00:02:30] a number of graduate classes and are redoing the undergraduate laboratories in chemistry. So first and foremost, it's about bringing these concepts of sustainability and green chemistry to our students here at UC Berkeley. Secondarily, as a research institution, we're very interested in pushing the bounds of green chemistry. So making the new materials, working with people to make safer materials and understanding the broad consequences of chemicals within [00:03:00] our environment and business supply chains such that we have better and safer chemicals for consumer use. That's the research piece. And the third piece, because this is applied and a big topic is about engagement. So that's working with both local NGOs, the California government, as well as a local businesses to take a look at how do we, beyond the [00:03:30] walls of UC Berkeley, actually improve the chemical footprint, so to speak. 

Speaker 4:        Can you give us an example of a sustainable versus an unsustainable chemical process? Yeah. I'll give you an example of something that we're working on right now. So we don't necessarily have the more sustainable substitute at hand. But in the wake of the recent oil spills, we were taking a close look at what was used, [00:04:00] what was the response? So first we have to characterize what are your options that are available? What are the technologies in the case that dispersants so something that's gonna take that oil slick and turn it into small globules are your only option either because of concerns about the environment or concerns about the human health, safety of the people cleaning up the oil spill. Sometimes these really are your best option. You dig down another level and you talk to the folks in a toxicology [00:04:30] and you find out that the dispersants we use actually break down more slowly than the oil itself. 

Speaker 4:        So if you're going to add something to an oil slick, it seems like what you'd want is something that breaks down at least as fast as the oil you're trying to get rid of. So again, we talked to our colleagues and we're characterizing this issue. So as chemists, we can think about how can we make something that breaks down more quickly. Additionally, you talked to your, our colleagues that have worked out in the Gulf and characterize [00:05:00] the biological communities that actually break down this oil, found that there are a couple of strains of bacteria that are primarily responsible for that and one of those strains of bacteria is adversely effected by the most commonly used oil dispersant. That's a problem. Again, if you want to clean up oil and sometimes it's absolutely necessary to disperse it, you want to make sure that the things that are naturally going to break it down aren't going to be harmed by the thing you're using to disperse it. 

Speaker 4:        So [00:05:30] with those design parameters in mind, the center is now seeking to create an oil dispersant that breaks down as quickly or more quickly than awhile and is not toxic hopefully to any aquatic life, but especially not to the aquatic life that's going to be primarily responsible for breaking down the dispersant in the oil that we're getting rid of in the first place. So it's a way of, in the past, you would have chemists just to create a molecule that effectively disperses [00:06:00] oil. Absolutely good goal. But it wasn't until other people took a look at what they created that you started understanding the environmental fate and the toxicology of these things. Now we have the knowledge upfront, so I'm working with graduate students in toxicology and in chemistry to characterize this solution from beginning to end before we even claim that this is something we can be used out in the environs 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible] [00:06:30] you you're listening to spectrum on KALX we are speaking with Martin Mulvihill, executive director of the Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry. 

Speaker 4:        The the key thing to getting the center off the ground was getting buy in from college chemistry, the School of Public Health, college in natural resources, Haas School of business and the College of Engineering. So getting all [00:07:00] of those folks at the table was actually probably the biggest challenge. The center is so far met because you find that as the disciplines become, you know, more and more focused and more and more advanced, their ability to communicate actually has lost a little bit. So understanding that a chemist doesn't advance in his field without making new products, while at the same time a environmental scientist has a hard time advancing in his or her field if they don't actually [00:07:30] characterize problems. Chemists don't like to hear about problems. Environmental scientists don't necessarily like to hear about the millions of new chemicals we want to make. So those discussions are aren't necessarily, it's easier as natural as we'd want them to be, but we're breaking those barriers down at Berkeley and the people who break them down the most are actually the students because they aren't indoctrinated in one way of thought yet. So they naturally see the connection between making a capital goal and understanding where [00:08:00] it goes. It's really the people who have been trained for the longest have the hardest time breaking down those boundaries. So a bit of a generational issue. Yeah, absolutely. We view a generational shift in the way that we can see of making and distributing chemicals and materials in our society. 

Speaker 4:        And what about the regulatory environment? I know the European Union is very aggressive and the EPA has somewhat, [00:08:30] California's always been very aggressive. How does that play in this with the industry and their costs and how they want to go forward? Yeah, the regulatory question is a very important one and is actually in some ways where you see Berkeley. Got It start. So since 2006 the folks in public health, especially Mike Wilson makes Schwartzman, they were both working actively with California legislation in this area and continue to work [00:09:00] actively in this area. The regulatory piece, at least the way we see it is all about providing more information, more information to the marketplace and also more information to the consumer. So when you look at things like the reach initiative in the European Union, what is really asking for is information. If you produce chemicals at certain scales, you have to, as the scales increased, provide more and more information. 

Speaker 4:        The next step is going to be how do [00:09:30] we figure out what to do with that information. And it is regulation that can create economic barriers or incentives to adoption of safer chemicals. So the California Green Chemistry initiative is still in the phase of deciding what information we're going to ask for. And then how are we going to promote changes to safer chemicals. Those discussions involve both industry folks, academic folks and NGO folks. They're happening in [00:10:00] real time, so there are certainly differences of opinion there, but we are intering a phase of global chemical production where more information is going to become necessary and consumers, governments and other folks are going to start asking for products that perform better environmentally is an international standard, something that's conceivable and possible because what seems to happen is that developing countries create strict standards [00:10:30] and then the companies just dump in the non developed world or company places where they don't have any sort of regulatory framework. 

Speaker 4:        Yeah, certainly from a my viewpoint international action is certain is necessary because if you have different sets of economic and environmental drivers in different places, it's easy to game the system. I mean we do have a, a global chemical manufacturing [00:11:00] system. It's already global so they can easily move things from one place to another. I think that it's in the best interest of all of us in the end, all of the stakeholders, both individual consumers as well as the companies and the governments to do some coordination, um, coordination of international policies, very tough. You sometimes run the risk of being pushed to the lowest common denominator. I think that's the danger [00:11:30] of going that route. The first step. And what I would like to see globally is at least some standard information requirements. So taking a look at what do you have to test for chemicals produced at what levels based on where you're selling them. So you might be producing them somewhere else and you have to worry about all those, uh, waste products and how they're being dealt with. But at least if you have a standard [00:12:00] for a global standard for what information you have to test in order to sell, it does, you know, good to produce a chemical somewhere that you can then sell back into the developed world. 

Speaker 5:        Talk a little bit about your research in nanotechnology. 

Speaker 4:        Yeah. So, um, I've actually been at Berkeley Awhile and my research as a graduate student was in nanotechnology, making [inaudible] new materials, mostly inorganic materials [00:12:30] that had some application for either the energy space or environmental sensing space. So I was able to create a sensor for arsenic in groundwater. That was actually the project that got me excited about this more interdisciplinary approach to science and technology. After that, I did research on the fate of nanoparticles in the environment. So I went up to the national labs, um, Berkeley national labs right up the hill behind campus [00:13:00] and did a year long postdoc in environmental science and material science characterizing the fate of Nano materials in the environment. Because as we create all these new materials, it's important to take a life cycle approach, right? Understand both how as a chemist I can get the function that I want out of a new material, but also make sure that the end of life isn't going to create unfortunate undesirable harms. So that's an exciting area of my own research [00:13:30] where now that I have a better sense of the life cycle of nanomaterials. We're trying to apply some of that too. Water purification technology, so I still work with a show Gad go who's in environmental engineering and e t d at the labs trying to create new, a safer, I'm sorbent for mineral contamination and groundwater so get rid of things like arsenic or excess fluoride. 

Speaker 5:        Nanoscience then could [00:14:00] also have this kind of sustainability issue and push in. It's 

Speaker 4:        growing cause this, this is a brand new science. It's, yeah, I think nanoscience is a great case study. Take a look at Green Chemistry and nanoscience side by side. They actually started around the same time and they have a lot of the same goals. The goal of nanoscience really is to do more with less, right? Let's take small materials that are well-engineered [00:14:30] to more efficiently produce energy. I mean you look at what Nano technologies being used for. It's a lot of, it looks like the same things that green chemistry is trying to do and in fact folks are also it already looking at the end of life issues around nanomaterials. I think it's a perfect example of how greater awareness, greater awareness from the funding agencies is actually taking a more proactive approach to new chemical materials, Nano materials [00:15:00] being a large class of the new materials that we're producing. So you already have large centers throughout the country that are taking a look at what are the environmental implications of nanomaterials, what are the toxicological fates of new nano materials? It's actually a place where I think we're ahead of the historical curve. Are there still concerns and unknown knowns about nanomaterials? Absolutely. Are nanomaterials making it into consumer products? Yeah, they're just beginning to, [00:15:30] I don't think they represent a clear and present danger that's larger than any of the other chemicals that we're using. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 4:        you're listening to spectrum on KLM 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 4:        one exciting thing I'd just plug is that this May, we're going to be having our second conference here on campus. So last March was [00:16:00] our first kind of big open public conference and brought in people representing all of these backgrounds. And we're going to do that again, this May. So take a look at our website, it's going to be on May 3rd here on campus. So you know if you're interested in being involved, always send me an email. We have lots of opportunities. Take a look at our classes and consider coming to our conference in May. And the conference is open to the students and community. Absolutely, absolutely. [00:16:30] Great. And what's the website? The website is BC gc.berkeley.edu so Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry, BC GC. Good. See you there. Excellent. Marty Mulvihill thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Thank you very much. 

Speaker 2:        Pleasure. [inaudible] 

Speaker 6:        [00:17:00] irregular feature of spectrum is a calendar that highlight some of the science and technology events happening in the bay area over the next two weeks. The Audubon society is hosting a winter bird count tomorrow, Saturday, January 28th this is a free event open to families of all ages and sizes. Naturalists will lead a bird walk around lake merit to discover and [00:17:30] count wintered bird species such as ducks cormorants inheritance. Meet at the lake 600 Bellevue Avenue in Oakland. Dress warmly bring binoculars and field guides if you have them, but binoculars will be available to borrow. Bring water into lunch. Please RSVP with the Golden Gate Autobon g g a s [email protected] or (510) 508-1388 or [00:18:00] also visit www.andgoldengateaudubon.org for more information. 

Speaker 1:        Registration is open for she's Geeky Bay area. This event runs January 27th 28th and 29th at the Computer History Museum in mountain view. She's Kiki hosts on conferences across the U s providing a unique environment for women working in technology and other geeky fields including science, engineering and math. To learn from one another. Grow networks, [00:18:30] connect across generations and discuss issues. Women attending. She's Geeky events. Find inspiration and gain self confidence to pursue or continue on stem career paths because they are given the opportunity to present their work often for the first time. Discuss critical issues and build peer networks for support. Visit www dot [inaudible] dot org for more information 

Speaker 5:        producing natural gas from shale opportunities and challenges of a major new energy source. Mark Zoback is the Benjamin M. Page [00:19:00] professor of geophysics at Stanford University. Mark Conducts Research on institute stress, fault mechanics and reservoir geomechanics. He currently serves on the National Academy of Energy Committee investigating the deep water horizon accident and the secretary of Energy's committee on Shale gas development and environmental protection. His presentation is Monday, January 30th at 4:15 PM on the Stanford University campus whining science center [00:19:30] and Video Auditorium. It is free and open to the public conversations at the Herbst, the power of gaming on a planetary basis. We spend 3 billion hours a week playing video games. That's a lot of time enough to change our lives and probably save the world. The real world while we're at it, author of reality is broken, why games make us better and how they can change the world. Dr Jane mcgonigal discusses her belief [00:20:00] that video games can be a positive platform for exploration and problem solving in our lives and for our planet. In conversation with Ryan Wyatt, director of the Morrison Planetarium, Tuesday, January 31st at 8:00 PM at the herps theatre four oh one Venice avenue in San Francisco, tickets start at $22 

Speaker 6:        February's free. Leonardo art center, evening rendezvous or laser will be on the first at Sanford [00:20:30] universities. PGO Hall Room one 13 networking begins at six 45 and a talk starts at seven here from artists, Daniel Small and Luca and two Nucci on firstlight, their art based on the Hubble ultra deep field imaging systems portrait of the visible universe that reveals the first light from 13.5 billion years ago. Architect and photo person will present city of the future as of 2008 over 80% [00:21:00] of land of the world that is suitable for raising crops is in use. Where will we find farmland we need? By 2040 80% of the world's population will reside in urban centers pushing out into the neighboring agricultural land. How will we feed ourselves form a NASA scientists. San Gill will talk about collaborative intelligence and how evolution and natural systems can inform social problem solving. Then I will conclude with artists, Phil Ross, his presentation [00:21:30] on micro architecture. Fungi can be used to transform agricultural waste into durable and low impact materials at room temperature. The future is moldy in this presentation, Phil will describe as research on growing a building out of living fungus. For more about the laser series, browse www.leonardo.info 

Speaker 5:        the February science cafe presents exploding and brains mice [00:22:00] who love cat piss and people who eat too much cake. The hidden ways that microbes manipulate animal behavior. All animals live in close contact with micro organisms of all sorts. These micro organisms depend on animals for food, shelter, places to reproduce, et cetera. These microbes lives are thus affected by ways in which the animal behaves in. Many of these microbes have evolved ways to ensure that their hosts behave in ways that are good for them, often at the [00:22:30] expense of the animals. Dr. Michael Isen, we'll talk about new work from his lab and elsewhere. Looking at a variety of different ways in which micro organisms use chemical signals and targeted disruptions of cells in the nervous system to alter animal behavior. He will also touch on the ongoing battles over public access to the scientific literature. Michael Isen is an evolutionary biologist at UC Berkeley and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Science cafe happens Wednesday, [00:23:00] February 1st at 7:00 PM in the La Pena Cultural Center, 31 oh five Shattuck avenue in Berkeley.

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 5:        you're listening to spectrum 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible]

Speaker 6:        and now for some science news headlines. Here's Brad swift 

Speaker 5:        diesel truck emissions in Oakland fall sharply in January, 2010 [00:23:30] the California Air Resources Board banned all 1993 and older drayage trucks from ports and rail yards statewide. They also ordered trucks built within the years 1994 to 2006 to particle filters by the end of the year 2011 in a paper recently published in environmental science and technology. You see Berkeley Professor Robert Harley and coauthors Tim Dolman and Tom Cush [00:24:00] stutter described the process and the results of their monitoring truck exhaust at a section of highway near the port of Oakland and the Oakland rail yards. They compare data they collected from November, 2009 before the ban with data they collected from the same Oakland site in 2010 after the ban, the comparison found black smoke emissions were reduced by about half and the nitrogen oxide emissions dropped by 40% Harley [00:24:30] and his researchers will return to this section of highway several more times over the next two years. As the remaining 2004 to 2006 truck engines are retrofitted with filters, they expect to study in greater depth the properties of emitted particulate matter. They will also examine more closely the chemical composition of the nitrogen oxide emissions to determine the split between nitric oxide and the nitrogen dioxide. [00:25:00] This diesel emissions control program will go statewide to all trucks over the next several years, including trucks from out of state, 

Speaker 6:        neuro psychopharmacologist, David Nutt and colleagues at the Imperial College. London wrote an article that was published in the January 23rd of the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on how hallucinogens such as magic mushrooms work in the human brain. 15 people with previous history of psychedelic usage were injected with a small amount of psilocybin. [00:25:30] This caused an immediate reaction that peaked within minutes and lasted for about an hour. This differed from those injected with Saltwater Placebo functional magnetic resonance imaging brain scans before and after administration showed decreased blood flow activity through some regions of the brain. The result was found again with a new batch of 15 volunteers and through a different brain scan methodology that showed lower blood oxygenation in the brain. Specific areas [00:26:00] affected included the posterior cingulate cortex and medial prefrontal cortex. Science news reports that Brian Roth of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill who was not involved with the study remarked that they had the complete opposite of what had been predicted. They differ from earlier studies that use positron emission tomography. This work hearkens back to an earlier headline we ran on spectrum that reported that some hallucinogen and phenomena such as synesthesia [00:26:30] may arise from a relaxing of some of the brain's filters. It may also help find drugs or derivatives to be used in the treatment of depression, cluster headaches, obsessive compulsive disorder, and other conditions that linked to too much brain 

Speaker 5:        activity. For the first time ever, stem cells from umbilical cords have been converted into other types of cells, which may eventually lead to new treatment options for spinal cord injuries and multiple sclerosis among [00:27:00] other nervous system diseases. James Hickman at University of central Florida, bioengineer and leader of the research group says we're very excited about where this could lead because it overcomes many of the obstacles present with embryonic stem cells. The main challenge in working with stem cells is figuring out the chemical or other triggers that will convince them to convert into a desired cell type. Had Devika Davis, a postdoctoral researcher in Hickman's lab, [00:27:30] was able to transform umbilical stem cells into oligodendrocytes critical structural cells that insulate nerves in the brain and the spinal cord. There are two main options the group hopes to pursue through further research. The first is that the cells could be injected into the body at the point of a spinal cord injury to promote repair. The other possibility for the Hickman team's work relates to multiple sclerosis [00:28:00] and similar nervous system diseases. 

Speaker 2:        [inaudible] music you heard today was from Lozan and David Sofer. These album Croak and acoustic. It is released under the creative Commons attribution license version 3.0 [inaudible] [00:28:30] spectrum was recorded and edited, and by me, Rick Karnofsky and by Brad swift and Mark Taylor, thank you for listening to spectrum. We are happy to hear from this. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l [email protected] join us in two weeks at this same time. [00:29:00] [inaudible] [00:29:30] [inaudible].

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