Episode 33: Dr. Natalie Batalha talks about exoplanets and the possibility of life in our Milky Way and beyond

Dr. Natalie Batalha’s STEM-Talk interview was so contagious that Dawn Kernagis said it made her dream of returning to school to get a second graduate degree in astronomy.

“Hearing Natalie talk about her research had all of us in the STEM-Talk studio buzzing,” said Dawn, the podcast’s co-host.

Natalie is an astrophysicist and the project scientist for NASA’s Kepler Mission, a space observatory launched by NASA to discover Earth-sized planets orbiting other stars. She sat down with Dawn and veteran astronaut and IHMC senior research scientist Tom Jones for episode 33 of STEM-Talk.

As one of the original co-investigators of the Kepler Mission, Natalie has been a leader in using the telescope to discover exoplanets, which are planets that orbit stars other than our own sun. Natalie has been involved in the Kepler Mission since the proposal stage and has helped identify more than 150,000 stars that are monitored by the telescope.

She holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from The University of California Berkeley, and a doctoral degree in astrophysics from UC Santa Cruz. She taught physics and astronomy for 10 years at San Jose State University before joining the Space Sciences Division of the NASA Ames Research Center, which is located in California’s Silicon Valley.

In 2011, Natalie received a NASA Public Service Medal for her vision in communicating Kepler’s science to the public, and also for her outstanding leadership in coordinating the Kepler science team. That same year Natalie also headed up the analysis that led to the discovery of Kepler 10b, the first confirmed rocky planet outside our solar system.

She joined the leadership team of a new NASA initiative in 2015, which is dedicated to the search for evidence of life beyond our solar system. Called the Nexus for Exoplanet System Science, the program brings together teams from multiple disciplines to understand the diversity of worlds, and which of those exoplanets are most likely to harbor life.

As if Dawn and the STEM-Talk gang weren’t excited enough after talking to Natalie about the search for life beyond our solar system, NASA announced about a month after our interview with Natalie that its Spitzer Space Telescope had revealed the first known system of seven Earth-sized planets around a single star. Three of these planets are firmly located in the habitable zone, the area around the parent star where a rocky planet is most likely to have liquid water.

According to a NASA press release in February, the discovery sets a new record for greatest number of habitable-zone planets found around a single star outside our solar system. All of these seven planets could have liquid water – key to life as we know it – under the right atmospheric conditions, but the chances are highest with the three in the habitable zone.

0:30: Dawn welcomes Ken Ford, IHMC founder and director as well as the chairman of the Double Secret Selection Committee that chooses guests who appear on STEM-Talk. Dawn and Ken then talk about Natalie’s background as an astrophysicist.

4:35: Dawn welcomes her co-host for this episode of STEM-Talk, Tom Jones, and they begin the interview by asking Natalie how she became interested in astronomy.

8:03: Natalie talks about how as an undergrad at Berkeley she met a post-doctoral researcher from Brazil who later became her husband. As a result, she ended up doing her post-doctoral work in Rio de Janeiro.

15:47: Dawn asks Natalie to describe the history of the Kepler mission.

19:00: Tom asks Natalie to describe the difficulty of trying to detect a distant planet.

21:34: Natalie describes how long the Kepler telescope has been in space and provides a summary of its findings.

25:30: Natalie talks about lava worlds, which have oceans larger than the Pacific Ocean, but they’re made of lava, which is why scientists call them lava worlds.

27:30: Dawn asks Natalie about the discovery of Kepler 10b, which was the identification of the first rocky planet outside of our own solar system.

32:30: Natalie describes how the host star that Kepler 10b orbits is almost exactly like Earth’s sun, except that it’s about 8 billion to 11 billion years old as opposed to our sun which is four and a half billion years old.

36:30: Dawn reads a quote that describes the discovery of Kepler 10lb as one of the most profound scientific discoveries in human history and asks Natalie to talk about that.

39:00: Tom asks Natalie to provide statistics on the kinds of planets that the Kepler mission is finding.

42:30: Natalie talks about planets in the Goldilocks Zone.

44:35: Break that features Ken talking about STEM-Talk, an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering groundbreaking technologies, in that leveraging and extending human cognition, perception, locomotion, and resilience.

45:00: Tom comments that Kepler must have detected anomalies over the years, and asks if they occur frequently and what might cause these anomalies.

47:30: Natalie describes one of the most extreme examples of an anomaly, which is a star known as Tabby’s Star, or Boyajian’s Star.

51:30: Natalie talks about micro-lensing, which is a technique used to detect exoplanets.

53:00: Natalie gives an overview of the W First Mission, which is expected to launch in mid-2020s.

59:00: Dawn asks how many scientists are involved in analyzing Kepler’s findings and how the findings are confirmed.

1:00:30: Dawn asks how long the Kepler Mission will continue.

1:04:30: Natalie talks about plans to follow up on the Kepler Mission once its operations shut down.

1:07:00: Natalie talks about the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which is a transit photometry mission that’s complementary to Kepler.

1:10:30: Tom asks Natalie to talk about the likelihood of habitable planets throughout the Milky Way.

1:12:30: Natalie says there are 10 to 20 billion potentially habitable Earth-sized planets in the galaxy.

1:16:00 Dawn asks Natalie for her thoughts about the need for society to prioritize learning about possible other planets that can support life.

1:20:00: Natalie talks about how the process of exploration and the act of pursuing knowledge changes us as a species and directly influences our quality of life on Earth.

1;23:30: Dawn asks Natalie about Pascal Lee and the SETI Institute, also known as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute.

1:24:02: Tom mentions that he’s fascinated by the idea of rogue planets and asks Natalie if they’re real.

1:27:00: Dawn mentions that Ken often comments how astronomers have the coolest scientific jargon, which includes terms like red dwarf stars, gravity waves, gas giants and galactic cannibalism.

1:27:30: When Dawn asks Natalie what she does for fun outside of searching for planets, Natalie talks about growing grapes and making wine with her father.

1:30:00: Natalie ends the interview by encouraging young people to do what they love and to find what gives meaning to their life.

1:33:00: Dawn and Ken sign off.

Episode 32: Dr. Claire Fraser explains how our gut microbes improve our health, prevent disease and even play a role in our mental health

Women who are pregnant often talk how careful they are about what they eat and drink. They’re careful, points out Dr. Claire Fraser, because they’re feeding their baby.

“Well, we should all think about diet in the same way that pregnant women do,” says Fraser. “Everything we put into our mouths, we’re either feeding or not feeding our gut microbes … And it’s important we keep our gut microbes happy.”

Fraser is a pioneer and global leader in genomic medicine, a branch of molecular biology that focuses on the genome. In episode 32 of STEM-Talk, Fraser sits down with host Dawn Kernagis and IHMC founder Ken Ford to explain why we should all pay more attention to our guts, which is the home of more than 100 trillion bacteria.

An endowed professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Fraser is a founder and director of Maryland’s Institute for Genome Sciences. From 1998 to 2007, she was the director of the Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Maryland, and led teams that sequenced the genomes of several microbial organisms, including important human and animal pathogens.

In 1995, she became the first person to map the complete genetic code of a free-living organism, Haemophilus Influenza, the bacterium that causes lower respiratory tract infections and meningitis in infants and young children. This discovery forever changed microbiology and launched a new field of study, microbial genomics.

During this time, she and her team also sequenced the bacteria behind syphilis and Lyme disease, and eventually the first plant genome and the first human-pathogenic parasite. She even helped identify the source of a deadly 2001 anthrax attack in one of the biggest investigations conducted by U.S. law enforcement.

Research into the benefits of gut bacteria has exploded around the world in the past decade.  In this STEM-Talk episode, Fraser explains the role these microbes play in improving health, preventing disease, and keeping us mentally sharp. She even shares how her diet has changed since she started studying the gut microbiome.

Fraser also talks about working with the FBI during the 2001 antrhax attacks and her early work in microbiology that led to the first mapping of a free-living organism’s complete genetic code.

Her recent lecture at IHMC, titled “The Human Gut Microbiome in Health and Disease,” can be viewed at ihmc.us/lectures.

If you’re interested in learning more about the gut microbiome, Fraser in her lecture recommended “The Good Gut: Taking Control of Your Weight, Your Mood, and Your Long-term Health” by Stanford University scientists Justin and Erica Sonnenburg.

1:36: Dawn reads the five-star iTunes review titled “Intellectually Stimulating.”

2:28: Dawn and Ken provide a summary of Claire’s background and research, pointing out that she has authored more than 320 scientific publications, edited three books, and has served on committees of the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, and National Institutes of Health.

4:13: Dawn welcomes Claire to STEM-Talk.

4:27: Claire talks about growing up in a suburb of Boston and taking her first biology course as a freshman in high school, which set her on a path toward a career in science.

5:37: Dawn asks Claire what led her to study microbiology.

6:53: Ken points out that there are more microbes on a person’s hand than there are people in the world. He asks Claire to give listeners a short intro into “Microbiome 101.”

9:34: Claire talks about the role of Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG (LGG), a strain of bacteria that is part of many popular probiotic products and has a reputation as a helpful microbe.

12:00: Ken asks Claire to expand upon the potential of probiotics and their usage in human beings.

14:56: Dawn points out that Claire is internationally known for her role in genome sequencing and asks what led Claire to establish the Institute of Genomics at Maryland.

18:02: Claire talks about her involvement in the first genome sequencing and where the technology stands today.

22:39: Dawn follows up with a question about how the evolution of sequencing technology has changed the way we monitor the spread of pathogens.

29:26: Claire talks about some of the new sequencing technology on the horizon.

32:02: Ken asks Claire to explain the kind of data-analysis challenges that this new technology is creating.

34:29: Claire describes her experience working on the anthrax attacks in 2001, which at the time was one of the biggest investigations conducted by U.S. law enforcement.

41:39: Dawn asks Claire about the effects of antibiotics on the gut.

47:00: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

47:25: Fraser talks about the early science of fecal transplants.

50:04: Ken asks Claire about the role of the microbiome in obesity and chronic diseases like diabetes.

52:38: Dawn asks what kinds of solutions there are against antibiotic-resistant strains.

57:15: Ken talks about increasing evidence of a connection between the gut and brain, and asks Claire to talk about what she has learned about the gut-brain connection.

1:02:47: Claire talks about preliminary research she and her colleagues at Maryland are doing on traumatic brain injury and the microbiome.

1:05:49: Dawn asks Claire to explain how diet affects the microbiome.

1:12:05: Ken points out that dietary fat has been demonized for several decades and asks Claire what she has learned about fat from a microbiome perspective.

1:15:27: Dawn asks Claire if her research into the gut has changed the way she eats.

1:18:48: The podcast ends with Dawn and Ken asking Claire to talk about her hobby of making wine.

Episode 31: Dr. Michael Turner, who coined the phrase ‘dark energy,’ talks about the deepest issues in cosmology

Dr. Michael Turner makes a “big bang” in the world of theoretical cosmology. Translation: He’s an expert on the universe—what it’s made of, what’s in its future, and how it came to be.

Turner is the Rauner Distinguished Service Professor and Director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago. From 2003 until 2006, was Assistant Director for Mathematical and Physical Sciences for the National Science Foundation. He is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, and he is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Turner is most well-known for having coined the phrase “dark energy” in 1998, which he calls “very, very mysterious stuff.” Thought to comprise 70 percent of the universe, dark energy is responsible for both the expansion of the universe and the increasing speed at which that expansion is occurring.

Another five percent of the universe is atoms, and the remaining twenty-five percent is “dark matter”—what Turner calls “the cosmic infrastructure of the universe.” The universe, he adds, has largely “been a battle between the two dark titans: dark energy and dark matter.”

“He [Turner] is able to explain the deepest issues in cosmology with a rare clarity and elegance,” says IHMC Director Ken Ford. “His research focuses on the earliest moments of creation.”

With Chicago cosmologist Rocky Kolb, Turner co-wrote the well-known book “The Early Universe.”

More information on Turner can be found here: https://kicp.uchicago.edu/people/profile/michael_turner.html and here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Turner_(cosmologist).

Turner’s 2011 IHMC lecture, “The Dark Side of the Universe,” can be viewed here: . Turner was also a guest on STEM-Talk for an earlier episode for his interview on the discovery of gravitational waves.

Turner is interviewed by regular STEM-Talk host Dawn Kernagis and guest host Tom Jones, a veteran NASA astronaut and senior research scientist at IHMC.

00:37: Ken calls Dr. Michael Turner “exactly the right guy to talk to about dark energy and dark matter. After all, he coined the phrase dark energy. He is able to explain deepest issues in cosmology with a rare clarity and elegance.”

1:04: Ken pays tribute to Vera Rubin, who passed away on Christmas Day. She confirmed the existence of dark matter and transformed modern physics and astronomy.

2:24: Ken asks for feedback on STEM-Talk and reads 5-star iTunes review from BobRXUF: “With all of the garbage we are bombarded with, listening to STEM-Talk reminds me that there is higher intelligence, the hope for mankind.”

3:35: Dawn and Ken introduce Michael and talk about his background.

4:17: Dawn and Tom welcome Michael to STEM-Talk.

4:39: Tom asks Michael to give listeners the big picture about the structure of our universe and explain how we stumbled upon the phenomenon called dark matter and dark energy?

5:14: Michael explains that a half of one percent of the universe is in the form of stars. The other 99.5 percent is dark.

6:29: Michael talks about how dark matter matter provides the cosmic infrastructure of the universe.

7:45: “Our universe,” says Michael, “has really been a battle between the two dark titans: dark energy and dark matter.”

9:49: Michael explains that’s it’s the stars that give off energy and it’s the atoms we’re made of. “We’re the tip of the iceberg. We’re the special stuff.”

10:52: “Michael talks about producing dark matter particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.

11:25: Tom asks Michael what was the original evidence for dark matter and dark energy and who were the people who made that discovery?

13:20: Michael describes how Vera Rubin, a scientist working at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, was able to confirm dark matter at work in our own galaxy.

15:06: Tom asks if it’s dark matter that holds things together and makes the clock, the universe, tick?

17:37: Michael explains how Fritz Zwicky and Vera Rubin went about building empirical evidence for dark matter.

19:40: Michael talks about research into “neutralinos,” particles that scientists speculate are left over from the Big Bang. “We’re in the midst of this detective story.”

21:24: Tom asks if the facilities and equipment exist to solve the mystery of the neutralinos and the dark-matter particle?

24:31: Commercial break.

24:55: Dawn wonders if our understanding of dark matter and dark energy continues to advance, what future applications might arise from this knowledge?

25:21: Michael explains that if scientists are able to verify the existence of the neutralino, “it would be the first evidence of the super string theory, which unifies all the forces—a very, very bold theory that says there may be additional dimensions in space-time.”

27:20: In continuing to answer Dawn’s question, Michael says, “If history is any guide, any time we understand nature a little better, there will be spin-offs and practical applications that change and improve the way we live.”

27:43: Tom asks Michael to talk about dark energy and the continuous expansion of the universe.

28:54: Michael shares how two teams discovered in 1998 that rather than slowing down, the expansion of the universe is speeding up, suggesting it’s back to the drawing board on the ultimate fate of the universe.

30:18: Michael talks about what he describes as the most profound mystery in all of science: that gravity can be repulsive rather than attractive.

32:48: Michael refers to a theory that could prove to be even grander than Einstein’s. This new theory says that “as the universe thins out, after expanding for 15 billion years, it starts to speed up.

35:27: Tom asks about Congressional funding for the National Science Foundation research and Turner explains that almost every country on earth is grappling with funding allocations for science.

42:22: Michael talks about the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which he describes as big and bold and the kind of project that only the U.S. can do.

43:17: When Dawn asks Michael what led him to become a cosmologist, he talks about how great high school teachers led him into science.

43:51: Michael encourages young people to pursue careers in science. “Just about every challenge that our country and our planet have involves science…trying to understand the secrets of nature and solve the mysteries of mankind are really, really exciting. The career opportunities are good.”

44:41: Michael describes the rewarding nature of his career. “I get to think about the mysteries of the universe. I get to think about how the universe began and how it will end. That’s a pretty good job to have.”

46:3: Tom talks about getting his first telescope when he was 12 years old and how that was a gateway into science.

47:19: Dawn recaps the “mind-boggling statistics” Turner shared in the podcast, staring with 99.5 percent of our universe is dark.

47:38: Ken talks about the great turn of phrases Michael used during the podcast, such as when Michael referred to the evolution of the universe as a “battle between two dark titans.”

48:01 Dawn and Ken sign off.

 

Episode 30: Art De Vany Talks About Hollywood Economics, the Paleo Way, and the Role of Fitness and Diet in Aging

Dr. Art De Vany is an American economist known for his work on the Hollywood film industry. He is perhaps best known, however, as the grandfather of the paleo diet, a high-protein, high-fiber way of eating similar to the way our hunter-gather ancestors ate during the Stone Age.

Born in 1937, he has had a varied career that began right out of high school when he signed a baseball contract with the Hollywood Stars, a minor-league affiliate of the Pittsburg Pirates. Even though he could “run like a deer” and “hit the ball out of sight,” his poor eyesight ended his baseball career and led him the UCLA where earned a doctorate in economics. He spent most of his academic career studying Hollywood and the film industry. His research has ranged from “Hollywood Economics: How Extreme Uncertainty Shapes the Film Industry” to “Quality Revaluations and the Breakdown of Statistical Herding in the Dynamics of Box Office Revenues.”

De Vany turns 80 in August and has spent the past 40 years living the paleo way. He outlined his diet and fitness philosophy in “The New Evolution Diet: What Our Paleolithic Ancestors Can Teach Us About Weight Loss, Fitness and Aging.” https://www.amazon.com/New-Evolution-Diet-Paleolithic-Ancestors-ebook/dp/B004EBT6SS/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1487717091&sr=1-1&keywords=New+evolution

He is working on a new book that’s tentatively titled “Renewing Cycles: Healing the Wounds of Aging Through Improved Cellular Defense and Systemic Signaling.” De Vany gave a lecture at IHMC in Pensacola last December where he talked about the New Evolution Diet” as well as his upcoming book on aging.

In Episode 30 of STEM-Talk, host Dawn Kernagis and IHMC Founder Ken Ford have a wide-ranging conversation with De Vany that covers his statistical study of home-run hitting to the dynamics of box-office revenues to the role that exercise and diet play in aging.

0:15: Dawn welcomes Ken, who talks briefly about Art’s background.

1:32: Dawn announces the winning iTunes review.

2:05: Dawn and Ken give an overview of Art’s career and research.

3:12: – Dawn welcomes Art to the show.

3:50: Art talks about his youth and how he started weightlifting as a teen-ager.

5:23: He signs with the Pittsburg Pirates and talks about playing in segregated baseball parks in the South, which was something he had never experienced before.

7:40: Ken and Art compare the lean physiques of great sluggers active in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s such as Ted Williams, Hank Aaron and Carl Yastrzemski with today’s much larger home run hitters.

10:37: Art recalls how debates with one of his professors at UCLA about central planning versus decentralized control systems led him into economics.

13:10: Dawn asks Art to talk about his research into the economics of Hollywood.

16:17: Art explains the impact of movies like “The Titanic,” which can generate 10 percent of all the box-office revenues during a year that will see 600 to 700 movies that are released.

17:06: Dawn asks Art to share his fondest scientific and professional memories.

18:11: In 1979, Art’s newborn son is diagnosed with type 1 diabetes and leads to Art’s interest and research into metabolism.

20:20: Dawn asks Art to describe the most profound power laws he has discovered in his pursuit to counter the aging process.

22:26: Ken shares his thoughts about “The New Evolution Diet,” which he describes as beautifully built on Art’s personal interest in evolution and his professional interest in complex stochastic systems.

25:26: Art explains how the book grew out of his realization that insulin controls the pathways that drive growth and obesity as well as shutting down the protective pathways.

26:45: Art describes genes as Bayesian forecasters arising from non-genetic influences on genetic expression.

28:17: Ken inquires about Art’s time at the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences, which Art describes as a dream place for him.

30:05: Dawn asks Art to expand upon his comment that there’s no such thing as healthy aging.

33:22: Art responds to Dawn’s question about Blue Zones and points out that the healthiest long-term aging individuals have low insulin, high strength, and they have not exhausted their subcutaneous body fat.

36:10: Ken asks Art about the role that exercise and diet play in epigenetics and molecular-level changes.

41:10: Art addresses how muscle development aids the immune system and how strength is probably the best predictor of a person’s future longevity.

44:13: Ken asks Art to expand on his comments that body composition is one of the best predictors of longevity.

46:25: Ken and Art talk about sarcopenia, the age-related loss of lean muscle mass, strength and functionality, and how baby boomers are looking for ways to fend it off.

50:22: Dawn asks Art to talk about the notion of hierarchical sets in weightlifting and what might account for their effectiveness.

52:55: Art describes his current exercise routine.

55:54 Dawn, Ken and Art discuss the negative impacts of marathons, triathlons and other inefficient training regimens.

58:18: When Dawn asks Art to share his views about the best way for older people to maintain their fast-twitch muscles, he points out that it’s possible for people to double their strength even at age 90.

1:00:39: Art expands upon his thoughts about sarcopenia and how it’s driven by general anabolic resistance. “You’re either building new cells or you’re removing damaged ones and regenerating them,” he says.

1:05:25: Ken asks Art for his thoughts on beta hydroxyl butyrate induced HDAC inhibition in treating diseases and extending longevity.

1:09:14: Art talks about antagonizing the body through fasting, semi-starvation, and intense exercise as ways to prolong longevity.

1:10:07: Dawn asks art about the evidence to support that humans were grazers.

1:12:39: Art explains his thoughts about pre- and post-workout nutrition.

1:15:56: Art gives an overview of the new book he is writing.

1:19:27: Art doesn’t think people appreciate the robust survival capacity they have, which they inherited from their Ice Age ancestors.

1:21:51: Dawn thanks Art for an interview that she describes as great fun and signs off.

Episode 29: Leonard Wong Discusses a Culture of Dishonesty in the Army

Dr. Leonard Wong, a research professor at the Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) of the U.S. Army War College, led an important study titled: “Lying to Ourselves: Dishonesty in the Army Profession.”  The study, which was published in 2015 generated much discussion as well as some consternation and reflection.

www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB1250.pdf

In this episode, Host Dawn Kernagis and IHMC’s Director Ken Ford talk with Wong about his study and its implications. Wong also lectured about his study at IHMC in Pensacola last September:

https://www.ihmc.us/lectures/20160907/.

Wong’s research focuses on the human and organizational dimensions of the military and includes topics such as leadership development in the military profession. He is a retired Army Officer and taught leadership at West Point. He is also an analyst for the Chief of Staff in the Army. Wong’s research has led him Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo and Vietnam. He has testified before Congress and has been featured widely in the media, including the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New York Times, PBS, NPR, 60 Minutes and CNN.

Wong is a professional engineer and holds a Bachelor’s from the U.S. Military Academy. He also has a Master’s and a Ph.D. in business administration from Texas Tech University.

1:43: Ken reads five-star iTunes review from “CC Rider,” which is entitled “Intelligent Podcast: What a Relief:” “What a pleasure to hear intelligent, articulate people discussing worthwhile topics.”

2:17: Dawn describes Wong’s bio.

3:18: Dawn welcomes Wong and Ken.

3:42: Wong describes his role at the U.S. Army War College, as well as the College’s structure. When Army leaders arrive at the War College, they’ve generally been in the Army for twenty years. They’re at the point of thinking strategically about leadership and their roles.

5:27: Wong’s research into this topic started over a decade ago, with the question of how to build more time into the schedule of junior offices to facilitate innovation. Wong and his colleagues discovered an overwhelming amount of requirements, which were stifling Innovation. In the back of his mind, Wong concluded: ‘If we require more than they can possibly do, what are we reporting?’

6:36: Wong, in conversation with his colleague Steve Gerras, once asked him what he was doing on his computer. He was supposedly doing mandatory training, but not really. He said, ‘I know, I’m just saying I did it.’ Wong realized then ‘how casually we approach lying, but we don’t call it lying.’

7:15: The theory of Wong’s subsequent study came from a book entitled “Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What’s Right and What to Do About It,” by Max Bazerman and Ann Tenbrunsel (http://amzn.to/2gBJtib), along with what David Messick called ethical fading. The methodology was to use focus groups from various ranks throughout the Army, including staff officers at the Pentagon.

8:12: Dawn mentions that Wong’s study had a precedent: In 1970, the U.S. Army War College published a study showing that lying in the Army was pervasive. Digitization, the audit culture, and downsizing have made it worse today.

8:43: Wong says, “The Army is like a compulsive hoarder. It collects requirements, and it never gives any up. We always add more. We keep adding to the pile. Technology has made a huge influence on this.” Now, with email and Internet, we can ask people to provide digital signatures, and do various online trainings.

9:42: Wong characterizes another part of the problem: “The Army has had a giant emphasis on being a profession. It’s a good thing, but it’s made us believe that we are better than we are. We forget that we are humans. We forget that we are talking about people who can fall to the same temptations, go the same route, as an ordinary human.”

10:35: Ken asks about Wong’s description of people in the Army being so overwhelmed that they have to prioritize.

10:50: Wong says, “One of the ways to ethically fade is you take away moral aspects…. So you are void of all the baggage that an ethical dilemma brings.” Euphemisms are a common way around this, and prioritize is one way of saying you lied. “Prioritize means taking a risk: We didn’t do it, but are going to still report that we did it. Prioritize is a convenient way to convince ourselves that we haven’t lied.”

12:00: “What this study isn’t saying is we have an institution full of liars, or a cohort of people with low ethics. We’ve created an institution with a bureaucracy…with a system that is putting an onerous burden on people to do everything and report they’ve done it. Inadvertently it creates a culture in which we have to tell a system what it wants to hear or it won’t get done.”

12:39: Wong recalls the old days and how easy it was to take a leave form (31) for travel. Today there is a complicated trips form, in which you have to specify where you are going, when you are stopping, any medications you’re taking, who is traveling with you, vehicle inspections.

13:51: “We’ve surrounded ourselves with an audit culture where we have to tell a system that something has happened when it really hasn’t.”

14:00: Ken comments these are typically for the benefit of “CYA.”

14:13: Wong cites the good intentions of the people behind these requirements.

14:40: Yet he questions whether this is the best system for the desired outcomes. “It’s well-meaning, yet the system we create encourages people to lie to it.”

15:00: Study’s conclusion was that process and paperwork are replacing leadership.

15:38: “We don’t want to replace leadership with a process because a process will always tell us what we want to hear…A leader might not. We can’t always trust leaders because leaders are human. That’s where we may prefer a process, which gives us a green light. But it may not be telling us the truth.”

16:30: Ken comments that the growth of procedures and lack of discretion left to leaders “almost presumes poor leadership, judgment, and I think is a step in the wrong direction.”

17:10: Wong says, “We grow leaders. We shouldn’t be ashamed to use leaders, but at the same time we can’t expect leaders to be perfect or their people to be perfect.”

17:43: Wong describes an Army storyboard: In the old days, after an event, someone had to brief an intelligence officer on what they saw/happened. Now the storyboard “allows us to create PowerPoint slides, derived from a template, that has pictures, a narrative and a map.” These have become burdensome to create.

18:30: “You stop focusing on what happened and start focusing on making the storyboard look correctly. It encouraged people to copy and paste; or ignore the storyboard. They would either omit it, or they’d duplicate it, and fabricate them.”

20:46: “There are many things that allowed them to think that they did tell the truth, and technology is one of them. The further you move away from the why…from a statement that you know is not truthful, it allows our mind to rest at ease, and technology allows us to do that.”

21:20: One example of this is annual ratings forms to council the rated officers, which is supposed to happen every quarter. “You have to show you counseled them every quarter. The clerk will fill in dates. They’ll agonize over picking the right dates so it doesn’t fall on the weekend. Tens of thousands are turned in every year.”

23:00: Ken observes that, “In many agencies and companies, and most particularly DoD, PowerPoint has become the defacto communication tool. PowerPoint can obscure the paucity of thought underlying a particular slide. In NASA we used to have a saying, ‘This guy is one slide deep.’”

23:53:  Wong notes that PowerPoint is a double edged sword — perfect for briefings when used correctly, but it’s very dangerous when used incorrectly.

25:10: Ken comments that “Jeff Bezos famously banned power point on Amazon as a low information communication medium that often supports the illusion that the presenter actually has a coherent position or argument.”

25:35: Wong says, “PowerPoint when used incorrectly is a lazy man’s tool. But when used correctly, it’s a good stimulus for discussion.”

26:40: Ken talks about the APPP: anti-power point political party in Switzerland. Their stance: “Decreasing professional use of PowerPoint and other presentation software, which the party claims, causes national economic damage, and lowers the quality of the presentation in 95 percent of the cases.”

28:44: Some examples of ridiculous training compliance modules: Every Marine, including those that have never smoked, are required to take a smoking cessation class. This year Wong had to take training on fetal alcohol syndrome. “That’s when you get in the mind, ‘This is a dumb requirement,’ and that helps me breeze through it.”

30:00: “The danger of all these trivial examples is that added up, it creates a culture. Some reports are really important…so many reports people view as dumb. Because of this culture we’ve created, we give them permission to lie about what’s dumb.”

31:08: Dawn asks what is worse: the lying, or the pervasive perception that it’s not lying; and that we’re above lying.

31:20: Wong says, “The lying is a problem but can be corrected. If we don’t admit that we do this, then we’re headed for hypocrisy, for hubris, and that’s more of a problem.”

31:42: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

32:24: Wong describes ethical fading as “removing the glare of the bright colors of moral decisions. You make it so it’s not black and white, right or wrong. You make it so it’s gray. One way to do that is to numb us: We start psychologically disconnecting from the ethical part of it.” One example: Every year to use computer systems in Army, they have to sign a statement that says, ‘I have read, understood and agreed with the procedures …” Preceding that is a 1900-word document. “Every single person initials that, and I haven’t met anyone who has actually read it.”

33:26: Wong mentions that in the U.K. they did an experiment where they offered free Wi-Fi to people and one of the agreements was ‘I promise to give my first born.’ “They had to stop that because every single person signed up for it. We don’t think we’re lying to a person; we think we are lying to a system. That distance allows us to convince ourselves that we don’t lie.

34:20: Wong discusses the potentially more serious implications of the lies.

35:05: “You add up all these Iraqi units that were graded green, and we had a very good Iraqi Army on paper. Then we saw what happened when ISIS came in, and suddenly all these green units didn’t perform the way all our power point slides said they did.”

35:28: Wong reflects on his own experience with compliance measures in the Army: “I remember feeling pressured, but not to the degree that they do today.”

36:32: Ken calls Wong’s study “brave.” He asks about the reaction in the Army, and whether it was rank-dependent.

36:55: Wong says it was “eye-opening.” After some initial anger, “I started getting emails, calls, and notes from people throughout the Army: You’ve just exposed what everyone knows about. Senior leaders had a hard time acknowledging it.”

38:02: “The more senior you go in an organization, the less you have to comply with these trivial requirements.”

38:50: After the anger died down, the leadership came to realize people were not under attack, but rather a culture that had been created. “To see policies change because of a 34-page document…I’m glad to be part of that.”

39:09: Ken comments that the military has a track record of leading the way in cultural changes. The problem is much broader than the military; it reflects the culture of which it’s part.

40:18: Wong says the Army could do three things to improve its situation: First, acknowledge the problem…and that it happens at all levels. Secondly, exercise restraint. “Every level of Army likes to create requirements for those below them, but we need to allow those at the bottom to exercise their own judgment.” Third: We have to lead truthfully.

44:30: Ken notes the tendency to make up words so you aren’t committing a bad act; but rather referring to the word. Prioritize is an example.   In the Navy, we used to call it, “Gun Decking or Pencil Whipping.”

45:10: Ken says it is often seen as a key role of a leader to provide “high cover” for subordinates.  When you unpack that, it often implies that the leader took the hit; that’s who checked the boxes.

46:10: Ken says Wong’s work is not seen as a criticism of the Army or people; rather of the audit culture… “Little by little, it diminishes the integrity of the force.”

46:46: Dawn directs listeners to Wong’s IHMC lecture: https://www.ihmc.us/lectures/20160907/

46:50: Dawn and Ken sign off.

 

 

 

Episode 28: Mike Gernhardt Discusses the Overlapping Challenges of Working Undersea and in Space

Mike Gernhardt’s career epitomizes the scientific overlap between the depths of the ocean and space. Prior to his career as a NASA astronaut, Gernhardt was a professional diver and engineer on subsea oil field construction and repair projects around the world.

As a child, Gernhardt vacationed in Florida, where he developed a love of the ocean. Like many children, Gernhardt dreamed of becoming an astronaut. However, unlike most kids, he stuck with his dream and began taking steps to pursue it in high school when, in his own words, he “had already put together that working in space and in the sea were similar.”

Gernhardt received his undergraduate degree in Physics from Vanderbilt University, followed by his Master’s and Ph.D.—both in Bioengineering—from the University of Pennsylvania. At the University of Pennsylvania, he worked with his life-long mentor C.J. Lambertson, who is considered to be one of the godfathers of diving medicine.

Under Lambertson, Gernhardt received unparalleled field work experience, testing real-time the decompression tables that he’d developed and  still constitute the commercial diving standard.

In 1992, Gernhardt was selected to be an astronaut at NASA, where he completed four space flights and space walks. He also started a company called Oceaneering Space Systems, where he transferred his subsea robotics experience to NASA. Gernhardt stated, “There’s really a lot of synergy between working underwater and working in space, and the design of the task for human and robot compatibility.”

Gernhardt has received numerous awards and honors, including the highly coveted NASA Distinguished Service Medal. To view his bios: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_L._Gernhardt ; http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/gernhard.html

In this episode, STEM-Talk Host Dawn Kernagis, an esteemed diver and undersea expert herself, and co-host Tom Jones, a veteran NASA astronaut, engage in a thought-provoking conversation.

1:35: Ken reads a 5-star iTunes review from Paula Olivet: “I wish this podcast aired everyday.” This show takes science as a personal, academic and professional venture, which it entirely is. It’s not all pipettes and mice. It’s ambition, and unquenchable thirst for answers. Even when I think the episode subject matter is not for me, I still find myself completely enthralled.”

2:32: Dawn recounts Gernhardt’s educational and professional background: He hold a Bachelor’s degree in Physics from Vanderbilt University and a Master’s degree and Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania. He has been a professional deep sea diver and engineer on projects around world. He was a manager and Vice President of Special Projects for Oceaneering International, and established Oceaneering Space Systems to transfer subsea technology and operational experience to the international space program.

3:05: Ken adds: “His impact on the agency and how we do human space flight is really extensive.”

4:02: Dawn welcomes Mike and Tom to the episode.

4:31: Gernhardt explains his initial interest in diving: “As a four or five-year old I was always going fishing with my dad in Florida. At nine or ten, I was doing scuba diving on a family vacation. I got certified at age 12 and became a dive instructor at 18.” For the first couple of summers after college, he worked as a scuba instructor and boat captain at St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. Then he got into commercial diving, where he noted the limitations in decompression tables.

5:38: These limitations inspired him to study the physiology and biophysics of diving. In college, he studied physics and math, and was a pre-med major. When he graduated, he wasn’t ready to commit to graduate or medical school, so he worked as a commercial diver.

6:40: Describing his commercial diving experience, he says: “Unlike the more sheltered college environment, here it was like: What can you do in the water at the end of the hose? That really inspired me.”

7:02: The Medical Director of Ocean Systems was C.J. Lambertson, who took him under his wing. Gernhardt decided to go to graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania in order to study with Lambertson. “That turned into a 30-year relationship.”

7:43: “We would generate the new decompression tables, and then I would go out and use them…. We tested them real-time.”

8:05: Lambertson said his ultimate goal was to make the field a laboratory. “In this period of three years, we generated tables that became the Oceaneering standard.” Roughly ten million dives have been done on those tables.

9:09: Dawn calls Lambertson one of the godfathers of diving medicine and asks what it was like to work with him.

9:20: Gernhardt answers: “He was an amazing guy. I started reading his books as an undergraduate. When I then met him for the first time, he looked professorial, older, he had a beard…When you shook his hand, he could squeeze your hand off.” Lambertson was also influential during World War II. “He wrote undersea warfare tactics/strategy that influenced everything, on top of the physiological work he did.”

10:24: Gernhardt adds: “He was a personal friend and father figure. When I was there he would just make the time to sit and talk. He was also a great mentor.” Lambertson read “every word” of Gernhardt’s dissertation. “He was hard on me.”

11:10: Gernhardt explains that Lambertson had been an advisor to NASA for decades and sat on all the review committees. “He was reviewing my work. People at headquarters said that was a conflict of interest. I told them, ‘No one’s going to be harder on me than Dr. Lambertson.’ We kind of fought off the bureaucrats on that and produced stuff that has really enabled the assembly and maintenance of space station.”

13:04: Gernhardt started Oceaneering Space Systems in 1987, where he transferred his sub-sea robotics experience to NASA. He invented the Cryopak, which used liquid oxygen for breathing and cooling to handle issues in micro-gravity. They called it the magnetic intake dewar.

15:02: Of the company, Gernhardt says, “We won a large contract to build a sub-critical liquid oxygen storage system, and we beat out major aerospace contractors. That was exciting for our young company at the time. That transitioned us into the space world.”

17:11: Gernhardt says, “There’s really a lot of synergy between working underwater and working in space, and the design of the task for human and robot compatibility.”

17:34: Gernhardt recalls the aerospace contractors who would go to the shop and think that we were selling atmospheric diving suits that weighed about a ton. “I was selling the concepts, the operational knowledge, the design knowledge, and some of these folks thought they were going to buy a suit from us.”

18:15: His company initially included just him and a secretary. “I hired every commercial diver that I knew, that had gone back and gotten an engineering degree. He combined that with going up to the best universities and interviewing top talent. “We put together this magical combination of seasoned commercial divers and smart as heck MIT and JPL [Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA] grads and really did an amazing amount of work.”

18:55: Tom asks him how he gave that all up to become a “worker-bee astronaut.”

19:35: Gernhardt explains that becoming an astronaut had been a lifelong goal of his. “In my early teens, I had already put together that working in space and in sea were similar.” Athletic as well, he had “set the distant goal to be an astronaut.”

20:20: Of his first year on the job (as astronaut), he recalls: “There’s a pile of manuals that go up from the floor past your desk, and you’ve got to learn all this, and then you’ve gotta learn to fly a T-38 jet…and then next thing you know you’re flying in space.”

20:45: Gernhardt says he was different from most astronauts in that his area of academic expertise was directly related to EVA (extravehicular activity.) That allowed him to design tools.

21:25: Gernhardt had invented the body-restraint tether (BRT) for undersea diving that became useful in space, as well.

23:20: Tom describes his experience using the BRT: “It was a dream. It enabled you to scramble anyplace on the space station and then grab onto a handrail with your third arm, which you provided, and that left your hands free. And you could turn your body left, right, in and out, and then you could carry it around just by bending it over your shoulder, and it was out of the way of your other tools. It was a very handy device on the space station.”

24:25: Dawn asks about the similarities between diving and EVA.

24:40: Gernhardt replies: “What’s similar is you’re working in a three-dimensional hostile environment: no air in sea or in space.” Furthermore, the way you think about planning the operation is similar, in terms of A, B and C. But the mechanics are very different: “Underwater we’re not in pressurized suits, so you have more mobility and dexterity. You use your hands to feel, but you also have poor visibility…you tend to use all of your body senses. In EVA you’re in a pressurized suit with a similar inflation pressure as a football or basketball; so, every time you move, you’re fighting that inflation pressure.”

26:18: In space, Gernhardt explains, even though you are “weightless,” you actually are not massless. “You and the suit weigh over 500 pounds in space. If you go fast, you could tumble out of control. My motto was: ‘You cannot go too slow’. Never let your hands get ahead of your brain.”

27:24: Another difference between the ocean depths and space: “In space, you have unlimited visibility. You can see literally millions of miles.”

27:40: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

28:00: Tom asks about Gernhardt’s first EVA because a few weeks before launch, Gernhardt sustained an injury that might have prevented him from participating.

28:30: Gernhardt tells the story: the mission was delayed a week, so he went on a date in Galveston. It was pouring rain and, after dropping his date off at the Grand Theater, he slipped and dislocated his shoulder while running through the parking lot in the rain.

30:10: “I had a great attitude,” Gernhardt says about his recovery and prospect of missing the mission. “If I can do it, great,” he though. “If not, it’s not about me—it’s about the mission.”

32:00: Gernhardt shares an anecdote about how the doctors okayed him for the mission after he proved that he could get in and out of the space suit. “I was in about as much pain as a human can stand. It was a huge mental focus, but it all worked out.”

37:00: Gernhardt talks about the oxygen prebreathe protocol he developed with his team. Fifty subjects experienced no bends, and very few bubbles.

38:42: Tom says: You can see Mike doing the prebreathe protocol on an Imax movie called “Space Station 3D.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9X84b9t3Do

39:00: Dawn says she was a research assistant on prebreathe protocol at Duke University with Dr. Vann. She assisted with monitoring of subjects and measuring how much they were bubbling at altitude.

40:42: Gernhardt talks about the in-suit light exercise protocol that saves complexity over other exercise protocols. “We use that routinely on space station, and we’ve never had any bends—we’ve had close to 200 EVAs without any decompression sickness.”

41:28: He is working on developing the details of a Phobos Mission in Mars Orbit planned for the 2030s.

42:20: On those missions, he adds, “We would do excursions in a pressurized excursion vehicle,” another of Gernhardt’s inventions. This is a small cabin with great windows; two people live in it for two weeks at a time. The pressure of that cabin is 8.2 pounds per square inch, with 34 percent oxygen.” It puts us at a much better posture for not having to denitrogenate to avoid decompression sickness.”

43:10: Air-lock operations are not fun, Gernhardt says. Tom compares the compressed feeling to “two hippos in the front seat of a Volkswagen.”

43:45: Gernhardt also invented the work efficiency index: the work time you get outside divided by the overhead it took you to get outside. “On the station we spent about two and a half hours inside for every hour outside, and to me that was crazy.”

44:12: “The whole concept is that we have this cabin that is optimized for viewing and low-overhead EVAs. And we can combine that with different mobility elements.”

45:50: Tom characterizes Phobos as a “low-gravity body; the size of a big city.” He asks Gernhardt: “What advantages do we gain from being around Phobos (or Deimos)?”

46:08: Gernhardt answers that Phobos is “very interesting scientifically. It will tell us about the natural history and evolution of Mars… We can pick up pieces of Mars on the Moon of Mars.”

46:55: “It is so much easier to go to the Moon of Mars than Mars’ surface. Mars it the worst place on solar system to try to land because there’s just enough atmosphere to get you hot, but not enough to slow you down.”

47:19: “By going to Phobos, we develop the infrastructure needed to go to Mars.”

48:29: “Phobos is a stepping stone. Ninety-nine percent of everything we would use to go to Phobos takes us towards Mars’ surface.”

48:50: Gernhardt adds that “Mars is only 9,000 Kilometers from Phobos, so every exploration activity or public outreach event that we do will have Mars looming large over the horizon and keep our focus on where we’re going.”

49:10: “My hope is that we sign up to that [going to Mars sometime in the 2030s] and have a plan that we can close a budget around, and really have a focused exploration effort….”

49:50: Gernhardt’s advice to aspiring astronauts: “Get as much education as you can; do things that you like because, if you like them, you’re going to have a good life; you’re going to be good at them…” Do things, he adds, “that are directed towards being an astronaut, but don’t do things that you don’t like in order to be selected as an astronaut.”

50:23: “Learn to be a team player. It’s not about individual super stars.”

50:47: Dawn thanks Mike.

51:48: Dawn marvels at the overlap in the undersea world and space and Gernhardt’s own seamless transition from undersea to space.

52:02: Ken says: “It’s a smooth transition, and Mike depicted it beautifully. He’s a great guy, and a valued collaborator; in fact, he’s truly a man for all seasons.”

52:20: Dawn and Ken sign off.

Episode 27: Robb Wolf Discusses the Paleo Diet, Ketosis, Exercise, Nicotine … and Much More!

For fitness and Paleo Diet aficionados—and perhaps regular STEM-talk listeners—Robb Wolf is the type of esteemed guest who needs no introduction. Many people already know him by his best-selling book, “The Paleo Solution: The Original Human Diet,” (http://amzn.to/2gB6N4c) or his top-ranked podcast by that same name. (http://robbwolf.com/podcast/)

But what some people may not know is that Wolf also started the world’s first cross-fit affiliate gym; that he’s raising his young daughters on a paleo diet—which may account for their mouths having a similar phenotypical expression as hunters and gatherers; and that nicotine—yes, nicotine—can actually be good for you (just not delivered by cigarette) in some contexts.

STEM-Talk Host Dawn Kernagis and IHMC Founder Ken Ford talk to Wolf about these and other fascinating insights in this episode.

Wolf hailed from a relatively unhealthy family, which pushed him towards discovering good health on his own terms. A keen interest and aptitude in science (he was a biochemistry major at California State University-Chico) set Wolf on the path of evolutionary medicine.

He began thinking seriously about pre-agricultural diets in response to his mother’s poor reaction to her consumption of grains, legumes, and dairy. Since that time, Wolf has become an expert, researcher, and self-experimenter of the Paleo Diet. His expertise has led him to become a review editor for Journal of Nutrition and Metabolism; co-founder of The Performance Menu, a nutrition and athletic training journal; and co-owner of NorCal, one of Men’s Health magazine’s top thirty gyms in America. He is also a consultant for the Naval Special Warfare Resiliency Program.

Wolf recently gave a lecture entitled “Darwinian Medicine: Maybe There IS Something to This Evolution Thing” at IHMC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qga4A3vnXmg

2:10: Dawn reads iTunes review entitled “No Bro Science Here” from someone nicknamed “Leafy Sweets:” “Science-based interviews with experts, post-docs and department/lab heads on relevant topics. No Bro Science here!  Interesting discussions relevant to one’s well-being and interests.”

3:46: Dawn welcomes Robb and Ken.

4:10: “I was raised by two well-meaning, but quite ill parents. Both of them smoked, neither of them exercised, both of them developed Type-2 Diabetes pretty early in their lives, and I’m not really sure why…but somewhere along the line I suspected that if I ate better and exercised, that I could maybe have a better outcome.”

5:00: “They really kind of acquiesced all their health to the medical establishment, and I went just as opposite that vector as you can possibly imagine.”

5:30: “I had a pretty good interest in science in general… I got into an organic chemistry class (in high school) and loved it like I had never loved anything before, and actually discovered that I had an aptitude for spinning molecules in my head and thinking about bonding and stuff like that.”

6:55: After his degree in biochemistry, Wolf considered medical school, but he had some personal health problems. That’s when, “The evolutionary approach to health/medicine got on my radar.”

7:28: Plus, he says, “Academia seemed to move at glacial speeds.” “Around 2000-2001, I found this weird thing called Cross-fit. I opened a gym, and it happened to be the first cross-fit affiliate in the world, and I opened a second one (the fourth in the world) … That was kind of the medicine that I wanted to practice. I got to talk to people about sleep, food exercise; and build community.”

9:15: Wolf describes his entry into evolutionary medicine: He was vegan, he was not sleeping and he had moved to Seattle, into a tiny basement where he didn’t see the sun for several months. He had a lot of gastro-intestinal problems, as did his mother, whose rheumatologist told her she was allergic to grains, legumes and dairy.

10:47: Around 1998, Wolf learned about the Paleo Diet through the work of Arthur De Vany and Loren Cordain (who would become Wolf’s mentor). Lauren had written a paper called “Cereal Grains: Humanity’s Double-edged Sword.” (http://www.directms.org/pdf/EvolutionPaleolithic/Cereal%20Sword.pdf)

12:00: Dawn asks about the “contemporary collision between foods we’re wired to eat and what we find on the shelves of local supermarkets.”

12:15: Wolf responds: “We’re set up for failure. I half-jokingly say that if you live in this modern environment and you’re not diabetic and broken, then you are kind of screwing up. You’re not paying attention to your evolutionary history.”

12:45: “We have limitless caloric input. We don’t need to expend effort to obtain these items. We have limitless palate options.”

15:00: Wolf’s short definition of the Paleo Diet: “You’re generally not eating a much in terms of grains, legumes, and dairy. You eat everything else: meat, fruit, roots, shoots, vegetables.”

16:27: He also cautions against the trendy uptake of the diet: “Paleo became this thing where people were asking: ‘Is this Paleo or not?’ instead of ‘Is this a good item for me?’”

17:00: Wolf decries the use of the term “Paleo,” which was used early on in the anthropological literature to describe the diet.

17:25: Wolf says that he has been low-carb for a long time; he currently eats 100-150 grams of carbs a day. “I’ve really enjoyed ketogenic diets in the past. That’s where I get my best cognition from.”

17:35:  “I am playing again with a ketogenic diet again because I am being leaned on by folks like you (Ford) and some other people to see if I can fuel my Brazilian Jujitsu activity.”

17:49: He can eat lentils, beans and corn…but not gluten. “I am highly reactive to gluten and gluten-like grains.”

18:45: Wolf discusses the role of genes in what we ought to eat, and the gut microbiome in modifying those genetics…He cites the studies of the Weizmann group in Israel, in which 800 people were given a sub-cutaneous glucose monitor and then fed a battery of meals. “The glycemic response was all over the map.”

20:00: “One person would eat a banana and have virtually no blood glucose response …Another person would eat a banana and get into nearly diabetic ranges… It’s clear in my mind that there’s massive variation in folks, and that a one size fits all approach is really, really problematic.”

21:00: Ken comments: “It would be surprising to me if Northern Europeans and Kitavans would both be ideally suited to eat exactly the same diet, particularly for genetic reasons, but also for gut microbiome reasons.”

21:50: Dawn asks if anyone has looked at the impact of ancestral diets on people doing manual labor jobs or professional athletes—since our ancestors were more active than we are.

22:00: Robb answers that most of the studies have been done in disease populations, such as people with cardiovascular disease, Type-2 Diabetes, insulin resistance or stage I/II renal disease.

23:43: “Both coaches and elite performers tend to be ahead of academia in empirically figuring out what works well.”

23:55: The Paleo way of eating has reached the Navy’s Special Warfare community.

25:05: “In college, most of us had some sort of horrific diet like pizza and beer for months on end and it didn’t kill us, so my greasy car salesman pitch is why don’t you give it [the Paleo diet] a shot for a month and see how you look, feel and perform; do blood work before and afterwards and see how it works.”

26:30: Dawn asks if an obese individual following a cleaner, healthier diet is enough to shift his/her phenotype to a healthier place.

27:11: “I think for the optimum human experience we need some sort of vigorous physical activity at least occasionally.”

28:00: “Ketogenic diet plus fasting can actually mimic a lot of the physiological processes that we see with exercise, but I’m not sure how much mileage we can get out of that. There’s some indication that a ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting can enhance certain elements of our metabolism, like mitochondrial density [along with] pro-apoptotic and autophagy benefits.”

28:50: “We need periods of relative abundance and some scarcity, and that is then sending signaling that is possibly most consistent with health and longevity.”

29:10: Wolf discusses who food and the metabolic byproducts of food and exercise are often signaling molecules. “There’s an expectation for a certain type of cadence and beat to our physical activity and nutrient intake, and if we get out of step with that, then I think that we’re pre-disposing ourselves to a transcriptome that may be pathogenic at some point.”

30:00: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

31:15: Dawn asks about studies comparing unprocessed, whole-food diets to comparable Paleo diet.

31:46: Robb cites a Lynda Frassetto study comparing the Mediterranean and Paleo diets. (http://jn.nutrition.org/content/early/2016/04/20/jn.115.224048.) The two groups were fed at a level so they would not lose weight. It was hard to get the Paleo group to eat enough food so they would not lose weight. Absent weight loss, they saw dramatically improved blood lipids and systemic inflammatory markers in the Paleo diet group.

34:26: Dawn talks about being vegetarian for 22 years, an emotional decision rooted in growing up on her grandparents’ farm during the summer and being uncomfortable eating what had been killed and that she had helped raise. “When I was seventeen, my grandfather told me who I was eating at the dinner table. So I called it quits…. But a lot of us are interested in the Paleo diet.” She asks about recommendations for vegetarians interested in the Paleo Diet.

36:08: Robb says, “If we’re doing eggs and dairy, it really is pretty easy to make that work. Properly prepared legumes are a great background, primary energy source; lots of coconut, coconut oil; cheese and butter.”

37:38: One possible caveat for those on vegetarian diets is to avoid a monochromatic dietary pattern. We need to be better about rotating foods in and out, like eggs.

39:50: At Wolf’s house, he does 90 percent of the cooking. His wife, who is Italian, was vegan when Wolf met her—and he impressed her with his cooking. She switched to his diet.

41:22: We really don’t eat much in the way of gluten. Many people think it’s just a fad. I’ve spent twenty years studying this from an immunological perspective, and there are a lot of folks that benefit from gluten free.

42:05: The preponderance of what they eat is sweet potatoes, fruit, fish, seafood; both of Wolf’s little girls eat homemade sauerkraut, homemade kimchi; liver.

42:22: His kids’ dentist has noticed that the kids have a lot of space between their teeth—and broad jaws, a notable phenotypic expression. This likely means they won’t have crowding of their teeth. Wolf attributes this to their nutrient-rich diet. On the contrary, lower nutrient-dense foods cause a shortening of the dental arch and crowding of teeth. “That would kill us were it not for modern dentistry.”

45:10: Still, his kids express the same attraction to sweet foods as everyone else. “We have to find some way …so that we aren’t on the losing end of food intake.”

45:48: Ken comments that the neuro-regulation of appetite is currently of huge interest and asks Rob to discuss it.

46:11: In the last fifty years, there have been a lot of macro-nutrient wars such as those between high and low carbs. “At the end of the day, what we want to see is some ability for people to eat an appropriate amount for their energetic needs and not much more/less. [It] boils down to the neuro-regulation of appetites.”

47:10: “The state of ketosis is incredibly satiating, and seems to be disproportionately so relative to caloric intake.

47:22:  “One takeaway that I would love for folks to noodle on is that within medicine and dietetics, there is only one disordered eating that they acknowledge, and that is trying to limit palate options in some way. If you show up eating a big gulp and Twinkies — you are good to go.”

48:00: In every study that’s ever been done comparing the American Dietetics recommended diet with the vegan diet, or the high protein diet, etc. … the diet that fails consistently is the moderate, don’t-exclude-any-food-groups diet.

49:42: Ken asks Robb how he felt in ketosis initially, post-adaptation period.

51:22: Robb says when he first clicked into ketosis, around 1998, “It was amazing. I had incredible mental focus. I could go hours or even days without eating. It just didn’t phase me at all.” He was also very active at the time, doing gymnastics and Brazilian Capoeira.

54:30: Robb says exogenous ketones are “reasonably impressive.” Ketone salts give him GI upset. He is getting ready to play with ketone esters. He mixes MCT oil with soy lecithin and nut butter (as a carrier.) That mitigates his GI problems.

59:30: Robb comments on the cultural tendency to over-train. “We hold elite athletics on a pedestal. We assume their training should be emulated, and I haven’t seen that to be the case. And I see a lot of people break themselves as a consequence of that. Endurance athletes especially are neurotic about training.”

1:01:40: Ken comments: “Marathon running has been a sacred cow, and a symbol of personal virtue…We hear more and more of negative consequences associated with long-term, extreme endurance activities.”

1:04:12: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

1:04:50: Robb used to recommend high dose Omega 3 supplements. Now he recommends getting as much of it from your diet as you can, with deep water fish that are smaller on the food chain such as mackerel and sardines.

1:06:40: He says Omega 3s are “highly reactive poly-unsaturated fats: if we dump that into an already inflamed individual, that could be a disaster.” In certain people, other issues need to be tackled first before using Omega 3s as an adjunctive therapy.

1:08:30: Ken says nicotine gum seems to provide focus and a productivity boost, especially during activities demanding focus such as writing a book.

1:09:09: Robb started researching nicotine when he was giving talks on sleep, nutrition, alcohol and nicotine for the Navy SEALs. He found that nicotine enhances dopamine status; and is beneficial for gastrointestinal issues. The culprit (i.e., cigarettes) is the delivery system.

1:11:03: Robb tried nicotine gum, about which he says: “It was a whole other layer of peeling back the fog, and the focus. Plugging into the matrix for 45 minutes to an hour. I shared this information with the SEAL community. The flight docs just wanted to barbeque me alive.”

1:11:54: He recommends lozenges and gum, not cigarettes.

1:13:55: Dawn says her dad smoked when he did fine-scale modeling.

1:14:27: Ken comments that nicotine is among the most addictive drugs in common use.  Nicotine has a 90 percent addiction liability (90 of 100 people would become addicted). Opiates are 50 percent; and alcohol, about 10 percent. With nicotine, there is not much of a list (unlike for opiates and alcohol) of societal or personal health hazards.

1:16:45: But one should probably be cautious regarding nicotine in cold weather. Robb once did long bow hunting in very cold weather and chewed nicotine gum, and because of the vascular constrictive effects, he went from being completely comfortable to his hands and feet turning into blocks of ice.

1:17:17: If you’re prone to Raynaud’s disease, nicotine would not be a good idea; or in a situation where your extremities need to be warm, it’s not a good idea.

1:18:04: Robb talks about the Lazy Lobo Ranch and the work of Allan Savory, who developed a process to reverse desertification by using smartly controlled grazing animals.

1:19:15: Robb moved to a three-acre ranch in Reno. Comments that Nevada used to be a giant grassland.

1:20:58: He uses a mob grazing technique with electric fencing. Because animals are bunched up tight, they compete to eat everything. The before/after photos of this piece of desert land are just stunning.

1:23:14: Allan Savory makes the point that one third of all the land masses on the planet are grasslands; this is amenable for growing grass/animals, and we’ve shied away from using these areas in these ways.

1:24:15: “I think there’s a real opportunity to produce lots of food, address some soil carbon issues, and heat sinks and water utilization. When you re-establish these grasslands, the water doesn’t just run off; you don’t get flooding. It actually re-fills aquifers.”

1:25:11: Ken says, “Allan Savory is a person that more people should know about and pay attention to.” (http://savory.global)

1:25:49: Robb’s new, upcoming book, “Wired to Eat,” is looking at the evolutionary biology story again. “The thing that seems to pop up again and again is sense of guilt and failure of morality around eating.” He diffuses that in the front of book.

1:28:24: “My hope is that both on a cognitive level and an emotional level people can plug into this and understand: ‘I’m not a failure because this stuff is hard.’” The back part of book contains a 30-day re-set for the neuro-regulation of appetite and getting your insulin in line. The final chapter is titled ‘Hammers, Drills and Ketosis: The Only Tool Your Doctor Will Never Use’. A carpenter wouldn’t argue about whether to use a drill, saw or ax — they each have specific and well-appreciated purposes. Ironically in medicine, the use of ketosis and fasting as tools is a controversial topic.

1:30:20: The book will be out in March or April, 2017. Amazon is taking pre-orders. (http://amzn.to/2hqfJJE)

1:30:46:  Dawn asks about the genesis of Robb’s popular podcast. At first, the podcast was about answering questions from the audience and over time he shifted the podcast to an interview format. Currently, Dobb is thinking about adding a “news round-up” section to the podcast.

1:33:19: Dawn and Ken thank Robb for the interview and his recent IHMC lecture, available for viewing at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qga4A3vnXmg

1:34:38: Dawn and Ken sign off.

 

Episode 26: Richard Moon discusses deep-sea and high-altitude medicine

Dr. Richard Moon had an unusual inspiration to practicing medicine: a television show, in black and white, entitled, “Medicine in the ‘60s.” He remembers being blown away by watching live surgeries performed on the show. This eventually led him to a career in the operating room—not as a surgeon, but an anesthesiologist.

Like many STEM-Talk guests, Moon wears many hats. In addition to being a physician, he is a renowned researcher in the hyperbaric and diving medicine. He is currently a professor of anesthesiology and medicine at Duke University, and the Medical Director of Duke’s Center for Hyperbaric Medicine and Environmental Physiology. http://anesthesiology.duke.edu/?page_id=828766

In this episode, Host Dawn Kernagis, herself a rising research scientist in undersea medicine, as well as a highly experienced diver—earlier this year, she was inducted to the Women Divers Hall of Fame—talks with Moon, one of her mentors. Dawn met Moon when she participated in one of his research projects as a diver, and she went to him with research ideas as a potential research intern. She eventually became one of his graduate students at Duke University.

In this lively and informative mentor-mentee discussion, Dawn and Moon talk about the history of hyperbaric medicine, including the establishment of Duke’s world-renowned Center for Hyperbaric Medicine and Environmental Physiology. They talk about medical conditions that can occur in deep sea diving, such as high pressure nervous syndrome and immersion pulmonary edema, as well as high-altitude sickness.

Moon shares insights about his experiments in both high altitude and deep sea medicine, as well as his own expedition in climbing Mount Everest.

Check out Moon’s home page at Duke: http://anesthesiology.duke.edu/?portfolio=richard-moon-md ; as well as his lecture at IHMC last January: “From the Ocean Depths to the Mountain Tops: How Do Humans Adapt?” https://www.ihmc.us/lectures/20160121/

00:15: Dawn introduces Ken and describes Moon as a world-renowned physician and researcher who works in hyperbaric and diving medicine.

00:40: Dawn says she was “very lucky to have Dr. Moon as a mentor.” She participated in his research projects, as a diver. She then went to him with research ideas, and he accepted her as a graduate student, and he’s been a mentor and colleague ever since.

1:45: Ken reads a five-star iTunes review from “GTG2010” called “Exploding Kid:” “Dear STEM-Talk, I like your show. The super telescope looking at asteroids is cool. I like it so much I’m going to explode. Love, Griffin, age 6.”

2:38: Dawn runs through Moon’s bio. He holds an M.D. and a C.M. from McGill University in Canada, and a Master’s degree in biomedical engineering from the University of Toronto. He is a member of the Royal College of Physicians of Canada, as well as the American Board of Internal Medicine. He has authored hundreds of peer-reviewed publications.

3:48: Dawn welcomes Moon to the podcast.

4:06: Moon describes what sparked his interest in medicine when he was in high school. He watched a television show, in black and white, called “Medicine in the ‘60s.” “It showed operations. It was mind-blowing, so I decided that I had to go into medicine.”

4:49: In medical school, Moon’s first interest was in pulmonary medicine—simply because in the first-year lecture series on organ systems, the one on the pulmonary system was the best. Yet, he felt compelled to do something different and took a couple of years off to study biomedical engineering.

6:20: Moon went to Duke University with a fellowship in pulmonary medicine as well as an opportunity to undergo scientific training in diving physiology. One of his mentors, Enrico Camporesi, encouraged him to go into anesthesiology.

7:20: “Eventually he [Camporesi] won me over. That’s where I am today.”

7:46: Moon’s interest in diving physiology initially came from the television program “Sea Hunt.” He also read the Jacque Cousteau books, which talked about decompression sickness and carbon monoxide poisoning. “When it came time to figure out where I was going to go after internal medicine, since Duke had this mega lab, the best in the world, and some leading lights in diving physiology, I just couldn’t resist.”

8:48: Dawn comments that the F.G. Hall Laboratory, which is now part of the Center for Hyperbaric Medicine and Environmental Physiology “is considered to be one of the best and prestigious environmental physiology labs in the world. Especially back then, there was research being done that wasn’t being done and hasn’t been done anywhere else in the world.”

9:18: Moon talks about the history of the lab. People have always asked, ‘How did this undersea lab get to be in a place that isn’t near the ocean?’ “It was a confluence of interests at Duke at the time. Herb Salzman was a pulmonologist interested in diving; F.G. Hall had been of an earlier generation and interested in altitude physiology; a surgeon named Ivan Brown was interested in cardiac surgery under hyperbaric conditions. This was an era before heart and lung machines were developed. So, the notion of drenching the tissue with oxygen was very appealing – if you could hyperoxygenate tissues in a hyperbaric chamber during surgery, you would have longer available time to perform surgery.”

11:07: One of the chambers at the Duke Hyperbaric Center was built as a hyperbaric operating room. Enough money was put together to create the facility. By the time the chamber was open, heart and lung machines were in place, so the whole concept of surgery in a hyperbaric chamber was out of date; however, the Duke Hyperbaric Center remained a nice facility to treat patients.

12:03: In 1968, after the nuclear submarine disaster, the Navy realized that it didn’t have a facility to do deep diving. So, Saltzman was asked to develop a deep diving program for salvage operations at 1000 feet of seawater.

12:35: In the late ‘60s through mid-70s, there was a perceived expiration of oil. Several labs were created around the world (two labs in the U.S. (University of Pennsylvania, Duke), one lab in Europe, and one lab in Japan) to study the physiology of humans during exposure to relevant depths for oil exploration (1000-2000 feet). Several problems were identified for humans at these extreme depths, including high pressure nervous syndrome (HPNS, where a diver gets tremors, difficulty standing up, nausea, vomiting).

14:08: Part of the Duke endeavor, called the Atlantis Dive Series, was to work out how HPNS could be overcome. One idea: to put a little bit of narcotic gas (nitrogen) in the helium-oxygen breathing mix; it was felt this might offset HPNS. It did work, but it had other effects such as an increase in breathing gas density.

15:00: With an increase in gas density, did lung work to provide enough oxygen to the tissues and remove carbon dioxide?  Duke was the first to measure blood gases, such as oxygen, and pH under those conditions. They found that the lungs actually worked pretty well breathing a denser gas, contrary to common belief. The Duke researchers provided the boundaries on what the lungs could do under those circumstances.

16:15: To get to 2,000 feet, it takes several days: one way to offset HPNS is to add nitrogen to the mix, Decompression is slow – it takes 2-3 weeks to get people to the surface from depth due to decompression issues.

17:10: The Atlantis Dive Series conducted four experiments—each with three male study participants living inside the chamber. “They were stuck inside. If one of them had developed an acute illness, say appendicitis, it would have taken us three weeks to get him out.” They were also in tight quarters and slept in bunks in layers. Food had to be locked in.

18:10: Our part of the experiment was to have each person exercise on an exercise bicycle. The other guys had to place an arterial catheter in the wrist. The blood samples then had to be analyzed in a blood gas machine. “It was an adventure not only in biology, but also in engineering. “

19:10: Dawn compares it to telemedicine, and asks about the psychological issues of the men in the experiment.

19:40: Moon says there were areas of friction: “Three is worse than two or four because one person is always the fall guy. It was a challenge. They were carefully chosen, and they were up to it, and ultimately did a great job.”

20:00: Dawn mentions linking to Duke University’s F.G. Hall Center: http://anesthesiology.duke.edu/?page_id=1061

20:48: One of the benefits of Duke’s chamber is that it is actually within a hospital. “We can expose people to high or low pressure to simulate altitude and have all the accoutrements of medicine available.” Moon adds they’ve been able to do some very interesting studies. He mentions one, led by Dr. Jake Freiberger, which looks at nitrogen narcosis and any cognitive effects of additional carbon dioxide.

22:21: Another study is looking at immersion pulmonary edema, which is basically “drowning from the inside,” or when divers’ or swimmers’ lungs fill up with fluid. They’ve shown: People who are susceptible to pulmonary edema have higher pressures for a given amount of exercise than others. This issue reached public consciousness because Navy Seals have experienced this malady. “These are young, healthy, exceptionally fit individuals who start coughing up fluid/blood in the middle of what would otherwise be a normal swim.”

24:00: Moon explains that the hearts of people susceptible to pulmonary edema are normal, but just a little bit different. Their left ventricle is a little stiffer than normal when the heart fills up with blood. Therefore, in order to fill it, the pressure is a little bit higher; adding to that is extreme exertion, which raises the pressure even higher. That’s enough to break the barrier between the blood within the lung and the air spaces within the lung, and cause fluid to leak.

25:18: To deal with it, a lot of people (including the Navy) have recommended pushing fluids. Dehydration is a bad thing; overloading with fluid tends to make the problem worse. Some potential drugs could be taken.

26:10: Navy SEALs tend to get it; and triathletes—especially during the swim part of the race – can also experience it. “Triathletes are go-go people; want to win the race. They often see it, not as a health problem so much as something that just slows them down.”

26:54: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

27:40: Problem with altitude boils down to one thing: low levels of oxygen. Because pressure is lower, the partial pressure of oxygen is lower as well…low oxygen has a variety of effects on human physiology. People who go to high altitude often experience acute mountain sickness, which is nausea, vomiting. It can cause high altitude cerebral edema or high altitude pulmonary edema, where lung fill up with fluid.

29:07: If you go to 10,000 feet and then exercise, you realize at altitude you really can’t do it as well as you can at a lower altitude (e.g., you are short of breath). One of the mysteries of altitude is people who have lived there, such as Sherpas…on Moon’s trek to Mount Everest, they were continually surpassed by Sherpas with 80 kilos on their back. They were small guys—150 pounds at most.

30:50: On their way to Mount Everest, their blood oxygen saturation started off in the 70s when their place landed; they were often down in the 60s. If you ask the average physician what would happen if blood oxygen is in the 60s, they would say brain damage. It’s also difficult to do field research. On the other hand, you can do things in the field that you can’t do in a lab-based facility. “It’s always a balance, and you get incremental pieces of information from each type of research.”

32:27: Moon mentions a study that was propelled by John Andrews, a Green Beret before medical school, who had experienced altitude issues. They studied a new drug, called Riociguat (for people for pulmonary hypertension); they are interested in whether this drug would increase exercise performance at altitude.

33:50: They found that pulmonary pressure did go down; the drug worked as advertised; but, unfortunately, it didn’t change exercise performance or improve oxygenation. Had it worked, it could have been a very useful drug for special forces deployed in mountainous areas throughout the world.

34:40: Moon discusses hyperbaric oxygen therapy, calling it “essentially a dive in a hyperbaric chamber breathing 100 percent oxygen at double the atmospheric pressure.” It has therapeutic applications for diving injuries and carbon monoxide poisoning. You can wake people up more quickly, prevent long-term complications, and make people feel better very quickly. It can also be used to treat gas gangrene—an infection of soft tissues that is highly lethal. Hyperbaric oxygen facilitates the killing of those organisms. It is also therapeutic for healing wounds in people with atherosclerosis and diabetes (related foot injuries).

37:14: Moon talks about career paths for people interested in studying diving or high-altitude medicine. He says there are several routes: one is doing expeditionary medicine in the Armed Forces. Another is going into a related field such as surgery, internal medicinal pulmonary medicine or anesthesia, and using altitude medicine as a sideline.

38:25: To do it full-time, Moon suggests programs at Duke or the University of Pennsylvania; or the military.

38:48: Dawn adds there are close ties (and opportunities) between both academic and military research centers.

39:30: Moon says he has read a lot of books written by people (like Jacque Cousteau) and many of the mountaineers. In terms of the medicine of diving, the book that really got him into it was edited by Peter Bennett and David Elliot. It’s a classic called “The Physiology and Medicine of Diving.” Fred Bove also edited a book called “Diving Medicine” for several editions.

40:41: Moon talks about his own expedition to Mount Everest, first noting that during the earliest “Hillary” expeditions, they had to walk from Katmandu. Now people fly into Lukla (in Nepal), “the most dangerous airport in the world. There’s no second chance for the pilot. You’re flying in with wingtips close to mountains…the runway goes cliff, runway, cliff…You have this little landing strip, so there’s no way to turn the aircraft around if you miss the landing.”

42:00: “The first day, you have to go down 1,000 feet, and then up 1,000 feet. At the end of that day, you think: ‘If this continues, I don’t think I’m going to be able to do it.’ But the scenery is spectacular: It starts off tropical. [Then it becomes] almost like a hike in a U.S. National Park. The higher you go, eventually it becomes barren, as trees drop away. Eventually it is snow and ice. By the time you get to base camp, it’s totally snow. But it also has a huge diurnal variation in temperature. When you wake up, you’ve gone through minus twenty degrees Fahrenheit. By lunchtime, you’re sitting with very little clothing on. Once the sun goes down behind the mountain, it becomes very cold again.”

43:36: “The Sherpas are delightful people. There is usually one room only that is warm; with a stove in the middle burning yak gum. Food is pretty good. “Despite eating like crazy because you’re hiking, and you’re hungry, we lost weight … It seems to be an altitude effect.”

45:00: Dawn observes that whenever they bring the tools of the trade into the field, whether deep divers or free divers, there’s always always a lot of interest peaked in terms of the research being done.

45:31: A British group had a full-blown lab at 12,000 feet at Namche, and another group had one at base camp: they were doing muscle biopsies, exercise tests…that data is still being crunched. “Climbing community is like the diving community: it’s a very elite group of people. Everyone’s got their own theory on how to do it, how best to prepare for it. There’s a relative lack of science because the experimental conditions are so tough.”

46:25: Dawn thanks Moon.

46:37: Dawn commentates on being able to interview her mentor, and Ken calls Moon “a broad and fascinating fellow.”

46:50: Dawn and Ken sign off.

Episode 25: James Briscione discusses the art & science of food & flavor

James Briscione’s stellar cooking career began humbly: As a teenager, he washed dishes at a now defunct restaurant (named Jubilee) on Pensacola Beach. He quickly rose through the ranks, at age 24 becoming the chef de cuisine at the Highlands Bar and Grill in Birmingham, Alabama, which is considered one of the best restaurants in the South, and later the sous chef at the prestigious New York City restaurant Daniel.

Today Briscione, who lives in New York City, is a top-tier chef, author of three books on cooking, director of culinary development at the Institute of Culinary Education, and a three-time champion on the Food Network’s cooking competition series Chopped. So what is he doing on STEM-Talk, you might ask? Briscione is also versed in the science of cooking and flavor. He partnered with IBM in creating the “Chef Watson” project. This computer-based program generates hundreds of novel flavor combinations based on the compatibility of chemical compounds in food.

In this episode, Briscione talks with IHMC Director Ken Ford and IHMC Chef Blake Rushing about the art and science of food, and Briscione’s career as a chef. Briscione’s three books include: “Just Married and Cooking” (with his wife Brooke Parkhurst): http://amzn.to/2eDIpJD; “Cognitive Cooking with Chef Watson”(http://amzn.to/2g04Kq0); and “The Great Cook: Essential Techniques and Inspired Flavors to Make Every Dish Better.” (http://amzn.to/2elhlDr). He also has his own, new television show on the Food Network called “Cooking with Dad.”

Briscione, his ideas on cooking and his own culinary creations have been featured in the New York Times, NPR, the New Yorker, Time Magazine and hundreds of other media outlets throughout the world. Briscione’s recent talk at IHMC, entitled “Who teaches the cooks to cook?” can be viewed at https://www.ihmc.us/lectures/20160811/

Dive into this delicious interview—an entertaining and informative conversation between three foodies.

00:32: Ken introduces Blake Rushing as the guest co-host of this episode of STEM-Talk. Rushing is IHMC’s chef, as well as the owner of Union Public House in Pensacola.

1:00: Ken introduces James Briscione as, “Working in the boundary spaces between the science of food, science and taste and even AI systems, such as Chef Watson.”

1:49: Dawn reads 5-Star iTunes review from “Beautronical:” “I am continually enthralled by the variety and depth of ideas presented here. Also, it is rare that one finds great minds matched by great voices. Given the ketogenic bent of certain interviewers, perhaps mellifluous is the wrong term, but I’ll use it nonetheless.”

4:42: Ken introduces himself and Blake Rushing as hosts of the interview; and then welcomes James to the interview.

5:05: James says he remembers the food made by his Italian grandmother. Among them: chicken cacciatore (although the mushy carrots bugged him.) The “greatest mashed potatoes… Sunday red sauce; sausage and meatballs loaded down with pecorino cheese.”

6:55: “True learning doesn’t often happen until you’re in the kitchen every day,” Briscione tells his students. He didn’t go to culinary school, but has been in the kitchen since he was 16.

8:15: At 16, he was a bus boy washing dishes for two restaurants: fine dining upstairs and casual beach dining downstairs.

9:33: As a teenager and at the beginning of college, Briscione thought, ‘There’s no way I am going to spend the rest of my life in a kitchen.’ He was working on a degree in sports medicine in Birmingham, and worked summers at the restaurant [in Pensacola]. After his second summer, something clicked: he changed his course of study from sports medicine to nutrition.

11:00: James knocked on the back door of Bottega Cafe [in Birmingham] http://www.bottegarestaurant.com/cafe/ and said, ‘I want to work here.’ He got a job as pizza maker with a wood-fired oven. He remembers stretching the dough and putting the toppings on it, then handing it off to the next guy. “That and lugging firewood to store underneath giant hearth oven.”

12:54: Briscione talks about working with Frank Stitt, owner and chef at the Highlands Bar and Grill in Birmingham http://www.highlandsbarandgrill.com , whom Briscione calls “a great leader.” He fosters a great sense of family in all of his restaurants; his cooks go and work in the farms for harvesting veggies. Briscione attributes his success to the fact that, “I showed up everyday. I was there, and I was there early.”

16:08: Briscione won on Chopped three times. “I always just try to do a little bit more than everybody else. I always want to out-hustle the other guy.”

17:05: He recalls one Chopped experience: “It’s insanely hot in that kitchen; four stoves; four ovens. No hoods pulling the heat away. It’s a warehouse essentially. I was mincing an onion as fast as I could. You could hear the judges say, ‘It seems like Chef James already has something’…I heard that; everyone else heard that. I at least gave the impression that I knew what I was doing. I never touched that onion.”

19:30: Another theme of Briscione’s career has been “being in the right place in the right time.”

20:00: Ken discusses fat as a taste receptor, and one of many taste receptors that humans have. Our tongues have receptors for detecting fat; he asks Briscione if he considers fat a taste or an oral sensation, or both.

21:00: Briscione says that he thinks it’s both.

21:36: “The tongue is a detector of nutrients and toxins. All of these different nutrients that are essential—I think we have receptors for all of those.”

22:10: Ken remarks that people make a distinction between having a receptor and taste; sensitivity of the fat receptor is modulated by a protein called CD36. People vary in their ability to sense fat, and it’s related to the level of that protein.

23:55: Ken adds that “The Physiology of Taste: Or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy,” by Jean Anselme Brillat-Savarin, and translated by M.F.K. Fisher) (http://amzn.to/2f4QkQw) is among the greatest works on food…largely because of the emergence of the wonderful notion of flavor.

24:24: Briscione on taste: When you take a bite of cake, you start to identify it because you smell it. It hits your tongue, which loves the sugar. As you begin to chew, the volatile molecules make their way to the back of the throat and cheeks.

26:00: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

27:00: Chef Watson sifts through data in a way that puts new flavors together. (https://www.ibmchefwatson.com/community)

27:48: Examples include salmon and licorice; pineapple and blue cheese.

29:00: Watson also understands different cultural ingredients.

30:22: Briscione talks about his favorites: gently cooked (sous vide) apples, surrounded by olive oil and fresh sage. Olives and cherries (a jam out of that—the best condiment for a cheese plate.)

31:50: “Mushrooms, strawberries and chicken didn’t make sense. But it works really, really well…. This [Chef Watson] is a great thing: it shows the true collaboration between man and machine.”

33:37: One of Briscione’s favorite compounds: 4-methylpentanoic acid, which is found in pizza. “We have scientific proof that pizza is delicious.”

35:02: A strawberry has 383 compounds that make up the smell of that strawberry; they may not be the ones we recognize right away. The body is still sensing all of those. A lot of matching happens.

35:40: Mesifurane is a key compound in strawberries; on its own, it smells like baked bread.

36:51:  Ken and James discuss Chef Watson as a kind of “cognitive orthotic” enabling increased creativity and efficiency in the kitchen.

37:10: “Creating recipes usually means sitting down with a stack of cookbooks; it’s a long and complicated process, and I liken it to decision fatigue.”

38:48: Chef Watson removes this burden by providing a list of ingredients that will work together, so that chefs can focus on the creative process of putting those ingredients together.

39:40: Briscione talks about using the Golden Ratio in cooking; just as in painting, there are those born with an intuitive understanding of the proportionality in the Golden Ratio, and those that learn it. “[Chef] Watson helps you get to that point: I can find hidden pattern in food that helps me be better at what I do.”

40:40: Ken comments that the Golden Ratio is seen elsewhere, such as in mathematics, with the Fibonacci sequence.

41:56: “One of the strongest pairings is between olives and citrus: they have about 60 percent of compounds in common. Wherever olives grow, so do citrus fruits.”

43:27: In Briscione’s upcoming book, he features a lemon curd dessert with an extra olive oil (not butter) finish. The crumble top is a sort of streusel made with oil-cured olives, a bit of rosemary, brioche crumbs and sweetened almonds. “It’s a beautiful savory-sweet interesting dessert.”

44:37: “Computational creativity can break through the bias/blindness in the cultural underpinnings of cooking.”

45:15: In the Watson method, “We’re looking at ingredients with a complete blank slate.” For example, in looking at a tomato, break free from the basil. “Erasing those pre-conceived notions was key to project.”

47:30: More information on Chef Watson can be found at: www.ibmchefwatson.com.

48:40: Briscione talks about sous vide cooking: ‘under vacuum’ is the literal definition. It is very precise low-temperature cooking held at the exact degree of doneness that we want [whatever food] to be.

52:30: Ken talks about how when he was in the Navy, in the late 70s and 80, he invented a super crude version of sous vide. He vacuum-packed food in the same machine used for electronics. It was “seal-a-meal,” but much better than the green mess-hall food.

54:10: Briscione says the next thing in cooking will be precision temperature control, such as Control Freak (an induction top) from PolyScience Culinary; Combi ovens; and CVap (Controlled Vapor Technology) ovens.

56:15: Briscione talks about hydrocolloids or gums: “People have had them in their kitchens for as long as they’ve lived.” Examples include flour and corn starch, or anything that forms a gel in the presence of water. Xanthan gum is the gateway drug to hydrocolloids. Others are derived from seaweed.

1:00:00: Ken comments on the irony of the public perception that chemicals in food are a bad thing, when food is made up of chemical (compounds.) He shares a funny anecdote about walking in and out of popular restaurant in Atlanta that boasted of no chemicals in their food.

1:01:36: Ken asks Briscione what he eats, and he says, “So far, a muffin and coffee today.” As for Briscione’s favorite foods: “Any piece of the pig is going to make me really, really happy.”

1:02:15: “I can eat a large watermelon by myself in minutes. Vegetables make me really happy.”

1:03:00: A favorite recipe using modernist cooking techniques: Vegan ramen broth, with smoked tofu and dried Shitake mushrooms, ginger, garlic and scallions. With soy sauce and pork.

1:04:15: His own favorite restaurants: The NoMad in NYC: for their “wonderful vegetable entrees. They take a single ingredient and present it to you on the plate in three or four forms.” He’s also a fan of the Gramercy Tavern.

1:06:10: His favorite daddy-daughter date is Dominique Ansel’s bakery in NYC.

1:07:00: When Briscione and his wife Brooke Pankhurst (also a Pensacola native) come home to the South, they enjoy good fried seafood such as fried mullet, snapper throats and mullet backbones — as offered at Chet’s Seafood.

1:09:44: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

1:10:25: Briscione talks about his first cookbook, “Just Married and Cooking” (http://amzn.to/2eDIpJD): “The thing I love about that book is that I can open to any page in that book, and point to a recipe, and tell you a story about the first time we cooked that.” He characterizes the recipes as “everyday meals for ourselves.”

1:11:43: Talking about his book, “The Great Cook,” (http://amzn.to/2elhlDr) which came out last year: “It’s really kind of all these great dishes that all cooks should know.” It reads as if Briscione, a great cooking teacher, is sitting there at the kitchen counter and coaching them through dishes. Plus, it has really beautiful photography.

1:13:34: Also last year, the Chef Watson cookbook came out, “Cognitive Cooking with Chef Watson:” http://amzn.to/2g04Kq0. Briscione talks about one recipe: Spanish almond crescent, conceived as a pastry for a breakfast meeting. “I love Spanish food, and Spain. The almond is a seed for Watson to build the flavor pairings off of: saffron, black pepper, cocoa and coconut milk.”

1:16:30: Ken and Briscione talk about their favorite places in Pensacola, including Joe Patti’s fish market, and Chet’s and Jerry’s Drive-In.

1:17:28: Ken says: “When I have people in town, from NYC or San Francisco, food writers or chefs, I don’t take them to our fine dining restaurants. I get an excellent wine and good wine glasses; and we have a whole feast at Chet’s.” Ken’s favorites: marinated flounder or grouper.

1:19:20: Briscione talks about his new television show on the Food Network, “Cooking with Dad:” (http://www.foodnetwork.com/videos/dad-and-daughter-pasta-0251005.html). He describes it as: “What it looks like for a chef to cook at home with his kids…Or what’s it’s like to just put dinner on table every night. Or snack after tap class. Or Sunday morning brunch.”

It includes Briscione and Brooke, their 7-year-old daughter Parker, and 14-month-old son.

1:21:31: Ken thanks Briscione for the interview as well as his IHMC lecture, which gathered well over 300 people and can be viewed at: https://www.ihmc.us/lectures/20160811/

1:21:58: Ken says this episode “this episode combined two of my favorite topics:  the science of food spiced with a touch of AI.”

1:22:55: Dawn and Ken sign off.

 

 

Episode 24: Doug McGuff talks about resistance training, myokines, strength and health

One could say that Dr. Doug McGuff is one of the pioneers of BMX motocross bike racing in Texas. He built the state’s first race track, having gotten hooked on the sport as a teenager in the 1970s.

The sport also triggered a deeper interest in fitness. As McGuff tried strengthen his core for bike racing, he discovered Arthur Jones’ Nautilus training technique and bartered janitorial services for a Nautilus gym membership.

McGuff’s interest and aptitude for studying the body led him to pursue medicine at the University of Texas in San Antonio. He specialized in emergency medicine, was chief resident of emergency medicine at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock, and a staff physician at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base Hospital in Ohio. McGuff is currently an ER physician with Blue Ridge Emergency Physicians in Seneca, South Carolina.

The other side of McGuff’s career is dedicated to fitness, or as he says—helping people never have to go to the ER. Realizing a lifetime dream, he opened up his own fitness facility in 1997 called Ultimate Exercise. The gym is dedicated to the type of high-intensity fitness training using the Super Slow protocol.

In this episode of STEM-Talk, McGuff talks about why this type of exercise is better for the body, safer, and able to prevent age-related conditions such as sarcopenia.

McGuff is the author of three books: “Body by Science: A Research-Based Program for Strength Training, Body-building and Complete Fitness in 12 Minutes a Week,” http://amzn.to/2fy7vKN (co-authored with John Little), “The Primal Prescription: Surviving the “Sick Care” Sinkhole,” http://amzn.to/2fLTBtl (co-authored with economist Robert Murphy), and “BMX Training: A Scientific Approach.” http://amzn.to/2fUhqPd

He is also featured in several YouTube videos on high-intensity training. His recent IHMC lecture, entitled “Strength Training for Health and Longevity,” is available at https://www.ihmc.us/lectures/20160929/.

2:03: Dawn reads an an iTunes 5-star review from “Guy who likes Chipotle,” which is entitled “Interesting and just complex enough.” “STEM-Talk does an amazing job of delivering high-level information on a variety of topics, without making it too complex to understand.”

4:21: Dawn introduces Doug and Ken.

4:47: McGuff says that as a young teen, shortly after getting interested in BMX bike racing, he started working out with his brother’s weights, which was transformational. “It is still the closest thing to magic or a miracle that I’ve ever experienced in my life.”

6:44: Also as a teen, Doug McGuff bartered janitorial services for a membership to a Nautilus gym, where he found a copy of a book by Nautilus founder Arthur Jones  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Jones_(inventor)) about training principles. “It was the first book I ever read cover to cover. To say that book changed the course of my life would be a massive understatement.”

8:13: During the summer of 1994, McGuff met Arthur Jones, who greatly influenced his thoughts on exercise resistance training.

12:00: McGuff went into ER medicine because “It was rare to find something that I felt that I had intrinsic talent in. I felt like I functioned very well in that environment.” His career has focused on two things: taking care of people who fall down and get hurt; and trying to prevent it from happening in the first place.

13:00: McGuff talks about being a pioneer of BMX in Texas, as he built the first track there and went back to racing in the late 90s and won the state championship. He also trained some world champion level BMX racers.

14:30: Now he characterizes himself as “a practicing physician so busy with the chronically sick and massively debilitated; the chasm between day to day life and actually thinking about prevention is such a wide chasm that it’s hard to imagine.”

15:00: “I would love to see the day where the commercial says, ‘Ask your doctor if diet and exercise are right for you….’ Instead of whatever pill of the day.”

15:44: McGuff notes the idea of physiologic headroom, which economist Arthur De Vany came up with. “Physiologic headroom is the difference between the least you can do and the most you can do.” See De Vany’s book, “The New Evolution Diet”: http://amzn.to/2ewDOJ8

17:50: “The better part of our lives, in terms of our functional ability, are much less than what they should be.”

18:45: McGuff says that high-intensity interval training is what appears to reverse the biomarkers of aging, according to the literature on the topic.

21:00: In McGuff’s book, “Body by Science,” (http://amzn.to/2fy7vKN), he presents the concept of Super Slow training: lifting and lowering weights very slowly. This protocol emerged out of Nautilus, after Arthur Jones commissioned a University of Florida research study on osteoporosis. Ken Hutchins, an employee of Arthur Jones, was the primary person who defined and popularized the Super Slow form of resistance training exercise.

22:40: The protocol applied to younger subjects resulted in similarly good results.

23:18: More important is the style and intent (of lifting weights). “If your intent is to as intensely and deeply fatigue the muscle as you can…if you start weight-lifting with as gradual a load as possible, and then you just try to lift and lower with high effort, during that initial phase, depriving yourself of initial momentum allows the speed to express itself organically.” In one person, that cadence might be 4 seconds up, 4 down; or 8 up; 8 down. In most people that ends up being 10 seconds up; 10 down.

25:03: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

25:23: Ken talks about the importance of avoiding injury when exercising and posits that Super Slow should be good in this respect.

25:48: McGuff says that he opened his gym, Ultimate Exercise, in 1997. They average 100-120 workouts per week. “We’ve never injured anyone in the facility…. That gives some credit to a slow cadence protocol. You can still get hurt [during a slow cadence protocol] if you don’t observe good biomechanics.”

26:40: The mastermind of “congruent exercise” is Bill DeSimone (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_DeSimone), which is based on using biomechanics to prevent injury.

27:45: At his gym, McGuff tells his trainers: “train ‘em hard as hell, don’t injure anyone, give them adequate recovery.”

29:00: “When we talk about sarcopenia, the population has it in their head that it’s a natural consequence of aging. And it’s not. Sarcopenia is a natural consequence of aging with our modern Western lifestyle injected into the equation.” McGuff notes this did not happen in hunter gatherer societies. “That doesn’t mean modern tech cannot be exploited to leverage those evolutionary adaptations.”

30:10: Age-related sarcopenia occurs when there is atrophy in the type II muscle fibers. “When you recruit muscle to do work, that happens in an orderly and sequential function.” You start with lower-order muscles to do work. Finally, you recruit higher-order muscles, which produce a lot of force output, but they fatigue very quickly. The latter are hard to get at, so you have to produce fatigue in a disciplined fashion.

32:54: An elderly person loses balance because if you go off the vertical plane (not on bone and bone tower), the only way to right yourself is by activating very powerful muscles to correct that posture deficit. “They fall because they don’t have the fast-twitch IIB fibers to yank them back into corrective posture. That’s why they go down like a tree in the forest.”

34:00: McGuff defines exercise as protocolized strength training; disciplined and aimed at achieving a deep level of fatigue rapidly. You can’t stand more than 12-15 minutes of that intensity. You want the minimal effective dose.

35:07: “Most people think of exercise as directly causing the adaption. The exercise produces the stimulus; your body receives it and makes a physiologic adaption.”

35:40: “I make a clean distinction between exercise and activity.”

36:41: “Once you create this physiologic headroom, you want to use it. It’s like having a Ferrari and being restricted to the school zone. It just doesn’t work. That’s not a bad thing.”

37:30: McGuff talks about muscular failure, a term coined by Arthur Jones meaning lifting and lowering weight, and getting to a point where you are trying to lift weight, but it won’t go. The problem is that failure in and of itself does not necessarily define an adequate stimulus. The desired stimulus is a meaningful depth of fatigue, or a substantial reduction in one’s starting level of strength. In the gym, one may reach muscular failure in a particular exercise without reaching an adequate depth of fatigue.

41:25: Ken notes that the Super Slow protocol, as described in McGuff’s book, is performed exclusively on machines, and asks whether this training transfers to what are sometimes called “real world” functional movements and basic movement patterns (squat, hinge, push, pull, carry).

41:50: “When people talk about functional movements and movement patterns, I find that they are fairly ill-defined. Human movement in a functional sense is inherent to our physiology and anatomy. What is necessary for those to express themselves in real world applications is that you have to have a motor that is able to drive the movements of that appendage.”

43:00: “The notion that you have to recreate those functional movement patterns in the gym under load for those functional movement patterns to be expressed out of the gym is a little bit of a false construct. Some of those natural movement patterns, when done under load, are very joint incongruent.”

44:47: Ken and Doug note that confusing “sport” and “exercise” can be dangerous.

44:55: Dawn asks Doug about low intensity training as typically prescribed for the elderly.

45:15: Exercise recommendations for the elderly are often off-base. People making them don’t understand how to invoke high-intensity and low force at the same time. Being physically active at a low level of intensity is part of our evolutionary and biological background. If you get at those IIB fibers, that type of activity expresses itself organically.

46:40: What happens is that you carry out a type of long-term, low-intensity activity that says: This animal is carrying out chronic low-level activity. This becomes interpreted as a negative thing—the stimulus to lose type IIB muscle fibers rather than gain them. “In the long term, you’ve jettisoned one of largest glucose reservoirs in your body, and you have therefore undermined insulin sensitivity.” This accelerates sarcopenia.

47:20: Ken notes that one often sees this adaptation in marathon runners. McGuff, says, “That is why marathon and ultra-endurance athletes look cachexic … because they delivered a biological stimulus to their organism that says these type-IIB fibers are unnecessary for this activity and we need to get rid of them.”

48:12: Dawn asks about exercise while traveling and without good access to good equipment.

48:30: Doug, replies that “We’ve gotten the notion that weights are a necessary part of the equation, and they really aren’t. Through infimetrics, I can provide an intensity of workout that exceeds one with weights. It’s hard to describe in a podcast, but Google McGuff’s name and timed static contraction protocol or infimitric YouTube videos.

50:00: Ken notes that Blood flow restriction training, such as Kaatsu, increases localized IGF-1 levels and sensitivity via accumulation of metabolites, particularly lactate and H (+) and asks if McGuff thinks this type of training is useful.

51:53: Doug discusses blood-flow restriction training, which can produce equal hypertrophy and strength adaptions using a much lighter weight. The theory is that you are concentrating the by-products of metabolism that occur during exertion locally within the muscle, for example the entrapment of local IGF production.

52:46:  “I think it is of benefit from several standpoints, one is the fact that it requires less resistance to get an equal result — that increases the safety margin and increases the safety margin for extremely strong people.”

53:37: When you use a slower-cadence protocol, that creates a high degree of sustained muscular tension that produces vascular congestion within musculature that traps metabolites in the same way blood flow restriction does.

54:48: Ken says he’s had good results using blood flow restriction (using the Kaatsu system). He particularly appreciates blood flow restriction training for those with painful or compromised joints given the very light weights.  Also, hotels often have a very limited selection of relatively light weights, which are no problem with blood flow restriction.

55:18: Dawn asks whether electrical muscle stimulation (EMS) training might offer promise as a way to safely hit fast-twitch muscle in all age groups and whether McGuff has experience with EMS?

55:40: Doug discusses his experience with EMS and thinks it does let you hit the fast twitch fibers.

57:07: When you lose motor units, body starts to disconnect enervation of motor units.

57:52: Elderly with sarcopenia also have deconstructed this neuro-motor connection to higher-order motor units. “Where EMS is useful as a therapeutic modality is being able to activate type IIB motor units at the end of the set, so when they reach fatigue, that’s not fatigue like a younger person who still has that connection intact. You could invoke EMS at the end of the set to wake back up those type II motor units. The enervation of those motor units wakes up as well.” He says this is a “stop-gap measure to rehabilitate the enervation of higher-order motor units.

58:55: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

 59:20: Ken mentions that Brian Caulfied at University College Dublin has been doing interesting and important work on EMS in both athletic populations and older cohort groups.

1:00:00: Ken says he’s optimistic about the future of EMS as new companies, such as PowerDot are offering systems that run on smart phones, etc.

1:00:39: Doug notes that people often “conflate athleticism and health.”

1:02:26: Ken notes that myokines have both local actions within the muscle tissue but also hormone like effects that target distant organs.  He asks McGuff to discuss the role of myokines in exercise and the adaptations that occur as a result.

1:03:00: Resistance training is much greater than the sum of its parts.

1:04:30: Skeletal muscle is not just a tissue that produces movement. The muscle is the biggest and most active endocrine organ in our body; there’s a whole host of myokines—probably only of which a handful have been discovered. They are signaling locally and remotely—skin, hair, nervous tissue, cardiovascular system.

1:05:27: “The signals are going everywhere, and very few of them have been delineated thus far…. but the health benefits are becoming more and more obvious.”

1:05:46: The cytokines released by muscles have profound anti-inflammatory effects: they are the antithesis of metabolic syndrome and have anti-neoplastic effects. They are protective and reversive of neoplastic changes. “There’s a treasure trove there.”

1:06:30: Dawn asks about the role of myokines in tumor growth/suppression.

1:08:30: Doug says myokines have been found to arrest tumorigenesis for different types of cancer.

1:09:20: Different myokines are invoked by different forms and intensities of exercise.

1:10:35: Dawn asks how insulin sensitivity influences the production and sensitivity of myokines and Doug discusses their interaction.

1:12:11: Ken observed that recently the ketone body acetoacetate has been shown (in an animal model) to serve as a signaling metabolite in mediating muscle cell function and growth.   Specifically, acetoacetate potentiated the stimulatory effect of IGF1 on muscle cell proliferation and antagonized the inhibitory effect of myostatin. Ken asks McGuff whether he sees a role for endogenous (or exogenous) ketone bodies in augmenting myokine-induced hypertrophy.

1:12:47: “The answer is yeah, I think so.  It is just now becoming evident that those two operate by a similar mechanism.” Myostatin is a myokine that acts as a negative regulator of muscle growth.

1:14:00: With a sedentary lifestyle you can develop an overexpression of myostatin, one of the players in sarcopenia. It is upregulated in HIV, and certain cancer cells involved in cachexia.

1:14:18: “Acetoacetate has been shown to blunt its (myostatin) effect.”

1:15:10: Ketosis is when food supply is dwindling, and you tend to hunt and gather. The highest levels of physical output occur during hunting and gathering; it seems natural that ketosis and high level muscular activity would tend to occur/run in tandem. Those two things are running on parallel tracks biochemically.

1:16:17: Ken comments that both exercise induced myokines and ketone bodies appear to inhibit myostatin … yet pharma has spent decades looking for a safe and effective myostatin inhibitor.

1:17:00: McGuff refers to the Simon Melov paper which he found that 196 genes are expressed differently in youth and the elderly; they found an extensive reversal (back to their youthful levels) of gene expression in the elderly after physical training. Link to paper: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0000465

1:19:42: Dawn asks Doug about his thoughts on nutrition and to what extent does he see nutrition playing a role in skeletal muscle adaptation to exercise?

1:20:10: McGuff is a proponent of the Paleo diet: “You can never exercise your way out of a bad diet.”

1:22:28: Ken and Doug discuss how obesity is a recent phenomenon and that poor nutrition is at the heart of the problem.

1:28:08: Doug talks about his book, “The Primal Prescription: Surviving the Sick Care Sinkhole,” co-authored with economist Robert Murphy (http://amzn.to/2fLTBtl). It talks about the ER as the de facto safety net in the American healthcare system.

1:31:08: “[Writing the book] has given me a front-row seat to decay and collapse of medical system in this country; how it happened; and how recent attempts to address through ACA have put it on steroids, and made the medical system impossible to navigate.”

1:33:10: Dawn closes out the interview. She mentions McGuff’s lecture, entitled “Strength Training for Health and Longevity,” which can be viewed at: https://www.ihmc.us/lectures/20160929/.

1:34:20: Dawn and Ken sign off.

Episode 23: Michael Griffin discusses his tenure as NASA administrator and the challenges of space exploration

On March 11, 2005, President George W. Bush announced his intention to nominate Griffin to serve as the 11th Administrator of NASA. He was confirmed by the Senate on April 13, 2005 and served until January 20, 2009. Griffin knew NASA well. He had been NASA’s associate administrator for exploration in the early 1990s, as well as its chief engineer.

Griffin holds seven academic degrees—a BA in physics from Johns Hopkins University, a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from the University of Maryland, and a handful of Master’s degrees.

He previously served as deputy for technology at the strategic defense initiative organization (SDIO) in the Pentagon.  Griffin’s career has also included academic and corporate positions. He was an eminent scholar and professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Alabama-Huntsville and space department head at the Applied Physics Laboratory at John Hopkins.

Griffin was also president and chief operating officer at In-Q-Tel, a private, nonprofit enterprise funded by the Central Intelligence Agency to identify and invest in companies developing cutting-edge technologies that serve national security interests.

Griffin held leadership positions in as well as the Orbital Sciences Corp and technical positions at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and at Computer Sciences Corporation.

Time magazine named Griffin one of its 100 most influential people in 2008.

In his spare time, Griffin enjoys flying and is a certified flight instructor. He’s also a voracious reader and an avid golfer.

On August 14, 2012, the Schafer Corporation announced that Griffin would assume the role of Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at the company.

Griffin has also been a guest lecturer at IHMC in Pensacola, where in 2009, he delivered a lecture entitled “What the Hubble Space Telescope Teaches Us About Ourselves:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvMdORG8OyU.

In this episode, STEM-Talk host Dawn Kernagis monitors an interview conducted by co-hosts Ken Ford and Tom Jones, both of whom have a long-standing professional relationship with Griffin.

1:09: Ford calls Mike Griffin “a remarkable fellow.” Griffin’s work has spanned academia, government and industry. He holds six graduate degrees and was working on his seventh when President George W. Bush selected him to serve as the eleventh NASA administrator.

2:35: Dawn reads a five-star iTunes review from “Meatballs Mom” entitled “Thumbs up.” “I downloaded this in order to feel intellectually superior to my peers. It’s totally working.”

3:00: Dawn describes Griffin’s career and educational accomplishments.

5:13: Dawn introduces Mike Griffin, along with hosts Ford and Jones.

6:03: Griffin’ interest in science was sparked by the first book, called “A Child’s Book of Stars,” that his mother gave him for Christmas in 1954, when he was five years old.

7:50: “I was already fully committed to a career in math and science and space long before I got to high school,” Griffin recalls, also noting an influential physics teacher in high school who encouraged him on that path.

8:25: “My career has gone back and forth between and among DOD space, civil space, robotic scientific space craft and missions and human space flight.”

8:50: Griffin notes that one of the highlights of his career was being chief engineer for the first space intercept mission accomplished against a booster in powered flight as part of early missile defense program under President Ronald Reagan.

12:08: “Possibly the coolest job that I’ve ever had,” Griffin says, was as President of In-Q-Tel, which he loosely categorizes as the CIA’s venture capital company. “The CIA didn’t have access to the hi-tech of Silicon Valley, so the non-profit was chartered by Congress to allow that access. It was an extraordinarily eye-opening and exciting adventure,” he says, adding that they helped create Google Earth.

14:22: Griffin had an early hunch that he would work for NASA, which he did four different times during his career. “NASA formed in 1958, and I was nine years old. I was already interested in space, and from that time forward, I believed that I would eventually work there.”

15:20: “When I was very young, I thought that being an engineer/scientist was the highest goal anyone could aspire to.”

16:10: Early in his career, Griffin was also spotted for managerial talent, becoming the youngest group supervisor at the jet propulsion laboratory.

17:04: Griffin says that he managed NASA, a 20-billion-dollar organization, just as he would a much smaller organization. “What you are doing is trying very carefully to select a great team of people who can complement your own skills, but who are not the same as you,” he says, adding that managing a large organization is not substantially different than a small one—only there are more layers.

19:50: “Dealing with official Washington” was also challenging during his tenure at NASA; in other words, the organizations that have a stake in what NASA does. And dealing with Congress.

20:20: Space exploration is one area that can elevate a nation’s profile in history. “I contend that a nation that does not explore frontiers of time is consigning itself to the backwaters of history.”

21:15: “I believe the values of Westerners are superior to those which have evolved previously or elsewhere. Space is a human frontier, and some humans somewhere at sometime will open it up and settle it; and we will use the resources of the solar system to our benefit. Decisions will be made by nations that show up. I want my nation to be in the vanguard of those efforts.”

22:25: Griffin explains the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster that occurred in 2003, in which all seven crew members were lost. “It was brought about by the unintended release of a large piece of foam… which impacted a wing at high speed; and broke a hole in the thermal insulation tiles that protect the shuttle on entry, and because of that the vehicle and the crew were lost.”

22:54: “There was never supposed to be any foam release,” Griffins says, adding that there were continual foam release events that were not understood. “When I took over, I chartered a group of people to study that issue.”

24:00: The mentality changed from “always three months from flight” to “We’ll fly when we understand why this is happening and can fix it.” They realized they were never going to completely mitigate foam release, but they could have some control over the size of the pieces and when they came off, as well as the damage statistics to the orbiter. Jim Peters of NASA Johnson Space Center was influential in reading statistical properties of foam release and damage.

26:50: President George W. Bush and Congress supported finishing the space station, but there were “deep divisions of opinion within Washington bureaucracy on whether to do that…. I took it as my most important mission a plan by which we would finish the station.”

28:04: “We went to our European and Russian partners and outlined a plan by which we would finish the station (by minimizing the number of utilization flights—for scientific experiments—and maximizing assembly flights.) The goal was to get the project finished and utilize it later.”

29:49: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

30:46: “In the immediate aftermath of Columbia, only shuttle flights would go to the space station. If there was another Columbia-like incident, you could park the crew at the station until a rescue shuttle could be used to get them off. Other missions were deemed too risky.”

31:32: Griffin disagreed with that pronouncement, arguing that there are only a small percentage of things that can go wrong with an orbiter on ascent for which space station is the answer to the problem. The other thing was that there were ways around having a rescue mission (without having an available space station).

32:40: After joining NASA, Griffin says he “got smart folks from the Johnson Space Center” looking at how we could arrange a safe Hubble repair mission.

34:00: When the Columbia shuttle was lost, any use of another orbiter for a Hubble-type mission put a delay in the space station completion schedule.

34:53: Ford recalls the “STS-125 as the highlight of the shuttle program. The afternoon of launch, looking at two shuttles gleaming in the sun, sitting at the ready on their pads…that was an awesome sight.”

36:10: Jones asks about the inability to launch astronauts to the space station since the shuttles retired in 2011.

36:50: “The plan was to return the shuttle to flight, finish the space station and construct a new system capable of going to the station and to the moon. It was a U.S.-led international effort to develop a lunar base.”

38:56: During the [George W.] Bush administration, we opened up a gap between the last shuttle flight and the first flight of a new system. That gap was supposed to have been two years, and it became four.

39:30: The space station was a 75-billion-dollar endeavor. “I thought we should be doing everything in our power to make sure that it was sustained and used properly. And to do that, you needed to be able to visit the station at least a couple times a year.”

40:45: Griffin talks about the U.S. government’s increased reliance on commercial space companies, which he says was misguided.

43:27: Companies developing these capabilities on government funding are saying 2018 is the earliest successful crew deployment from U.S. shores.

45:18: Griffin calls exploration and science “closely allied enterprises.” “Many explorations in history also yielded important scientific results. But the careful planning of scientific experiments, their conduct, is quite substantially different.” He adds that science is critical to good exploration.

47:37: “Human space flight is replete with opportunities for life science to advance itself. The two enterprises are synergistic.”

48:33: “When I took over NASA, the advisory council seemed to have no really useful end. We had a host of individual advisory committees on specific topics.”

51:40: Griffin organized a NASA advisory council first under Harrison Schmitt and then Ken Ford. All advisory committees reported up through the principals on the NASA Advisory Council who were selected for their expertise in different specialties. “That brought order to discussions/allowed the advisory council to come forward with actionable requests of the NASA career staff; and to shape the budget in ordered/intelligent ways to make better use of the science budget from Congress.”

53:38: “If we have our wits about us, we will be using robots to augment human exploration and humans to augment robotic exploration in every reasonable way that we can do.”

55:04: “No one wants people on Mars more than I do, and I believe the best path to do that is through the Moon, which will in and of itself be fascinating.”

55:45: The vast majority (70 percent) of the U.S. pop supports NASA and its goals. What is missing, Griffin says, is the translation of public approval into coherent policy that can go from one administration to another.

57:15: Griffin calls space exploration “hobby entertainment for newly elected political leaders.” Their stance towards the Marines, or Air Force, for example, is vastly different.

1:00:22: Deep space exploration beyond Mars is very difficult without nuclear propulsion systems.

1:08: Maintaining crew health in closed environments is going to be very difficult. “When we can put a crew on an international space station for 6-7 months and let them de-condition and send them to the moon for a year, back to the space station and then bring them home—then we’ll know we’re ready to go to Mars, and not before.”

1:02:47: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

1:03:30: “We must have a long-term, carefully structured, coherent policy on what the U.S. will do in space, why we will do it, who we will do it with; and how that will be consistent with the funding that we supply.”

1:06:00:  Griffin looks back at Apollo, which “barely succeeded in the political sense.” The White House was cutting the NASA budget during Apollo 11. “’While success was being had, cancellation was occurring,” he says, adding this was “a huge lost opportunity.”

1:07:27: The success of Apollo was partly due to President John F. Kennedy’s succinct declaration of what was to be done: “Land a man on the moon, return him safely to the earth, do it before decade is up.”

1:08:00: The U.S. at that time was also in a battle with the USSR for the hearts and minds of the non-aligning nations of the world, he adds. “We felt it was important to be ahead in space.”

1:08:35: “Apollo probably benefitted from Kennedy’s assassination. It is unlikely we would have been able to go forward had not a martyred president stood behind it.”

1:12:50: One of the problems across the aerospace industry is that people are not entering the profession. The average age of the NASA work force is in fifties. During Apollo the average age was the twenties. “We need a combination.”

1:15:12: Griffin wrote a lengthy paper for the 50^th anniversary of Sputnik saying that it would have been better to use the hardware infrastructure they had developed during Apollo and repurpose it for other things.

1:18:12: Griffin paraphrases Wayne Hale, a former shuttle program manager, and space shuttle flight director, in a speech last October in which Hale said that he was tired of the controversy about whether or not we should build a heavy lifter (versus an orbital assembly of smaller pay loads.) “You cannot prove that you would not have been able to do the Berlin airlift with a large number of piper cups, but the logistics would be forbidding… The laws of physics don’t prevent an in-orbit assembly of very large machines to go to Mars by using many smaller launch vehicles. But it is logistically forbidding. It is likely to be much more expensive and time-consuming.”

1:19:28: “To believe otherwise—that we would not want the largest transportation capability that we could put together—is to single space flight out from all other modes of transportation that humans have ever used.”

1:21:10: “If we are serious about space exploration, we need a heavy lifter.”

1:22:22: Griffin says that during the next trip to the moon, we should mine the lunar crust for oxygen. “The lunar surface is a good source of oxygen, and extractable for solar energy. As an industrial process, I believe that’s one of the first things we’ll do.”

1:23:45: Griffin elaborates on his views regarding the possibility of a commercially-developed space transportation system capable of Mars missions.

1:29:56: The U.S. partnership in space with Russia and other European nations has been a really good thing. We’ve learned a lot from Russians in space, and they’ve learned a lot from us.

1:33:38: Ford asks Griffin about his passion for flying. “I’ve been flying for decades, as a general aviation pilot. Flying is consuming. When you’re departing/arriving other concerns don’t weigh on you in that moment. I enjoy that feeling of commitment.”

1:37:06: Griffin is also a voracious reader. During the period in which the interview was conducted, he was reading “The Innovators” (about the development of the computer industry), as well as “Into the Black,” about the development of the space shuttle. He also likes “junk fiction,” science fiction, The Economist and Science News.

1:38:30: Another hobby: “I do love golf. It appeals to people with an analytical mind set.”

1:39:00:  Ken and Tom thank Mike for the terrific interview on STEM-Talk.

1:39:50 Dawn and Ken talk about the interview, direct the listener to the episode’s show-notes, and sign off.

Episode 22: Dr. Kerry Emanuel Discusses Hurricane Prediction and Projection

Hurricanes are a leading source of insured losses, and a major cause of human and economics loss in the world. But from an insider’s view, they are also breathtakingly beautiful. Dr. Kerry Emanuel, a leading hurricane expert, compares flying into the eye of a hurricane to being inside a white Coliseum, thirty to forty miles wide, with walls resembling “a cascade of ice crystals.”

That’s just one of the fascinating tidbits from this episode of STEM-Talk, with Dr. Emanuel, whom Time Magazine named as one of the 100 most influential people in 2006. The following year, Dr. Emanuel was elected a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

He is a professor of meteorology at MIT, where he also completed his Ph.D. When he returned to teach there, he taught a course in meteorology of the tropics, and discovered that the existing theory of hurricanes was partly wrong. He’s spent the better part of his career disproving that theory and coming up with better theories of hurricane development and progression.

Dr. Emanuel is also a book author of “What We Know About Climate Change,”<http://amzn.to/2cWYQ7O> and “Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes.”<http://amzn.to/2dPXrNb>

His recent lecture at IHMC is entitled “Hurricane Risk: Past, Present and Future”:  https://www.ihmc.us/lectures/20160324/

STEM-Talk Host Dawn Kernagis interviews Dr. Emanuel about his career, the future of climate change and its impact on hurricane development, and the future of hurricane projection and prediction.

1:11: Ken Ford mentions that he met Kerry in 2005-06 when Ford was on the National Science Board’s Hurricane Task Force, which he co-chaired with Kelvin Droegemeier (also a previous STEM-Talk guest: https://www.ihmc.us/stemtalk/episode-13/). That NSF report was entitled “Hurricane Warning: The Critical Need for a National Hurricane Research Initiative: http://www.nsf.gov/nsb/publications/2007/hurricane/initiative.pdf

2:24: Ken reads a 5-star review from “Wheelsuker”: “I’m not always curious, but when I am, I love STEM-Talk, and the deeply learned folks at IHMC. Subjects range from human physiology to the exploration of space, with thoughtful and probing questions that simultaneously teach and entertain. Highly recommended subscription.”

4:53: Dawn introduces Kerry Emanuel.

5:05: Kerry says his older brother told him that as a toddler, Kerry would get excited about thunder storms at home in Ohio.

6:08: His academic interest in science, and weather, developed in high school: “I started reading more professional meteorology books in high school; I got interested in physics and math. By the time I went to MIT [as an undergraduate], I realized you could put those things together.”

6:33: Kerry describes his academic journey: “I was an undergraduate at MIT, and I also did my Ph.D. there in 1978. Then I went and taught at UCLA and was there for three years. I came back to MIT, and I’ve been there ever since.”

7:00: At MIT, he taught about hurricanes in a course called meteorology of the tropics. “Not only did I not understand the existing theory [about hurricanes], but the existing theory had to be wrong, so I had to go about setting it right.”

7:35: The existing theory didn’t pay any attention to transfer of energy from ocean to the atmosphere. “Ironically, earlier scientists thought that was the guiding principle.” He picked up where they left off.

9:43: “Hurricanes cannot arise out of small fluctuations in atmosphere like a thunderstorm or winter storm. Hurricanes are generated by a pretty big push.” He describes it as a giant engine that takes heat out of the ocean and transfers it to the atmosphere whenever water evaporates.

10:54: “The tropical atmosphere has a different temperature than the tropical ocean. What we don’t understand is how they [hurricanes] get started.”

11:30: In the Atlantic, African-Easterly waves flow from East to West. When they move out over the ocean, they will sometimes trigger hurricanes.

12:49: He describes the feedback loop that propels hurricane intensity: once you get the starter engine going, as the winds accelerate at the surface, the evaporation of sea water occurs faster. The stronger the wind blows the more heat is transferred to atmosphere—until you get up to peak intensity.

14:00: Kerry talks about his roughly 10 flights into the eye of hurricanes. “I think everyone should do it. It’s magnificent,” he says—especially the sight of the eye of the hurricane from the inside.

14:30: “When you’re flying in, it’s just like flying in bad weather in a commercial airline. It’s turbulent, but it’s never been as turbulent as I’ve experienced on commercial airliners. Hurricane pilots really know what they’re doing.”

15:52: The eye of the hurricane is actually calm. He compares it to being inside the Roman Coliseum, except it’s white, and instead of a few hundred feet across, it’s 30 or 40 miles across. Sometimes there’s a cascade of ice crystals on the inside of the eye wall.

16:17: “I have fantasized about starting a hurricane safari operation after I retire.”

16:45: The physics of a hurricane is angular momentum conservation. “If you have a spinning body, when you take some part of the mass and move it towards the axis, the spin increases. The classic illustration for that is a spinning ice skater who draws in her arms; by that mechanism, her speed increases; that’s the conservation of angular momentum.” Likewise, in a hurricane, air spirals towards the center of the hurricane within a few thousand feet of the ocean’s surface; once it has moved in so far, it goes rocketing up, forming the wall of the eye.

19:35: The primary remaining challenge associated with hurricane forecasting is knowing the intensity of the hurricane right now. “For most storms, we don’t have aircraft. Just looking at a satellite image doesn’t show you wind speed.”

22:10: Two things prevent most hurricanes from moving up to potential: wind shear (a dampening force that imports dry air into the core of the hurricane—like throwing water on a fire). And the hurricane’s ability to churn up cold water from deeper in the ocean.

23:24: We don’t know much about temperature of the ocean beneath the surface; that limits our ability to forecast.

24:44: Kerry describes Argo robots that submerge more than a mile into the ocean recording temperature information, and then surface and transmit this newly collected data to satellites.

26:08: Kerry explains the difference between hurricane prediction: whereby you take an existing hurricane and predict where it will go; and hurricane projection, which projects a weak or strong hurricane season based on climate change.

27:00: Prediction of the track of path of hurricanes is a wonderful success story. Predicting intensity has been much less successful.

27:57: In forecasting anything at all, you have to know where you’re starting from. It’s a fine art.

30:32: The atmosphere is chaotic, and getting the initial condition right is the really hard part…we can’t computationally resolve all the things that are physically important in the atmosphere.

31:16: There’s an enormous amount of work that goes into computational modeling; the diversity of models gives you a better forecast/appreciation for how uncertain that forecast is likely to be.

31:46: To analyze the current state of the atmosphere, we start with an old forecast. You update it by incorporating measures in present, which is data assimilation. Every forecast has a little bit of history in it.

33:33: If I didn’t have computers/understanding of physics, I’d say, ‘Let’s look for some close analogies in the past.’  This is called analog forecasting.  We know from theoretical work this is not a promising approach. Chaos will always ensure there are differences.

34:25: Computational weather prediction has pulled far ahead of any analog forecasting.

34:32: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

35:07: “We’ve gotten steadily better by all metrics at predicting the track that hurricanes will take. On the other hand, we haven’t gotten much better at forecasting how strong a hurricane will be.”

36:13: “Hurricanes are creatures of warm, tropical ocean waters, and the Gulf of Mexico is a great example of that.” Hurricanes often form in the tropical Atlantic and the Caribbean and then strengthen as they move into the warm Gulf waters.

37:15: “If we look at geological records … we think actually the region (Gulf Coast) has been pretty lucky over the last century compared to what’s been true over the last few thousand years.”

38:40: Dawn asks if the current trend of planetary warming is likely to have any effect on hurricane formation and intensity over the long run.

39:10:  Effect of planetary warming on hurricane formation and intensity: “It’s not a solved problem, but there is a kind of consensus developing about what we think will happen.  The key points of that consensus are this, we think the frequency of very high-category hurricanes will go up as you warm the climate; but at the same time, there’s a little bit more controversy about the frequency of weaker hurricanes. Most studies suggest that the frequency of these will go down.”

40:00: Eighty percent of the damage in the U.S. has been done by category-3 or greater hurricanes. The consensus is that there will be more of these strong storms in the future. They are associated with strong storm surges. In practice they kill a lot of people. There is also a very strong consensus that fresh water flooding from heavy rains is going to get worse, almost for sure as the climate warms.

42:43: “The theory of chaos is often described as a kind of practical limit on what you can forecast … but it’s much more profound than that, it’s not just a practical limit, it’s a theoretical limit that you cannot go beyond not matter what resources you throw at it.”

44:19: For all practical purposes, the system is not deterministic beyond two weeks.  Thus, we will never be able to make precise forecasts beyond that time horizon.

45:25: Discussing how good a forecast is likely to be: “We can forecast how skillful our forecasts are. That is a very profound thing to be able to do.  What we have not mastered is how to convey that to the public.  We struggle with that everyday.”

47:42: To improve forecasting, we need better measurements, better computer models, and better ways of assimilating improved measurements into the better models. High level research on this is taking place all over the world.

48:30: While this should be a cooperative international enterprise, European governments have monetized weather data. “The bad boys are the Europeans—their governments decided they could make money from selling weather data…. Even at the peak of the Cold War, the US and USSR were freely sharing weather observations.”

49:22: Some of best computer forecasts are generated by the Europeans, from the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. “If we want to see them, we have to pay through the nose for them. Everybody else subscribes to the older idea that since the taxpayer has paid for this data, it should be freely available to all.”

50:33: Economists have demonstrated that even if the only thing you are concerned with is how much money the government would make, it’s an inferior model. The freedom of data has led to small enterprises doing specialized forecasting based on the available data. Those companies create jobs and are taxed; the U.S. government gets more money that way, than the Europeans do trying to sell environmental data. Kerry says there are efforts to get Europeans on board with this “more gracious, economic model of sharing environmental data.”

53:19: On quantifying the risk of climate change: If it’s one degree warming by the end of the century, there’s not much difference. If it’s four to five degrees, the world could erupt in a conflict over water and food shortages.

54:03: In thinking about what we should do, if anything, to reduce the rate of warming, it is rational to consider both risk and the possible consequences.

56:10: Look on bright side [of climate change]: “We have an opportunity here to transform our energy systems ahead of the curve.”   If there were no climate change, we would still eventually run out of fossil fuel.

56:45:  Discusses the shortcomings of solar and wind energy.  The wind does not always blow and the sun does not always shine … and we are not very good a storing energy.

57:10: Kerry discusses the positive potential of next generation fission energy. Fourth generation fission reactors can consume the waste that’s been stockpiling around the world and turn it into much safer waste that can be safely buried.  These next generation plants cannot meltdown, they are physical incapable of it.

58:12: Discussing why more fourth-generation nuclear plants are not being built in the U.S.: “It’s almost a “no-brainer” and yet the word ‘nuclear’ is such a red flag for environmentalists and others that the political barriers are immense; the technical barriers are not.”

58:50: “In thirty years are we going to be buying clean energy from China and India or selling it to them? That’s our choice now.”

59:07: Once you put carbon monoxide in the atmosphere, it takes thousands of years for it to go away; unless we develop technology to pull it out of the atmosphere. In next decade or two important decisions will be made.

1:00:06: “If I had a large budget, on the practical side, I would come up with much better ways of monitoring and forecasting hurricanes. One of the great tragic limitations … is we do pretty bad job of estimating their initial intensity. I’d field a fleet of solar powered robotic aircraft in the stratosphere launching pods on parachutes … down into the troposphere to measure the intensity of hurricanes to improve their forecasts.”

1:01:25:   Dawn thanks Dr. Emanuel for joining her on STEM-Talk.

1:01:35:   Ford comments on the interview: “Kerry is incredibly engaging and insightful about the future of weather and hurricane forecasting. He’s truly at the forefront of this increasingly important field.”

1:01:49:  Dawn says that she is eager to follow-up with Dr. Emanuel on his retirement plans to give air tours on hurricanes.

1:01:57: Ford says he also flew into a hurricane when he was in the Navy.

1:02:15: Dawn and Ken sign off.

 

 

 

 

Episode 21: Yorick Wilks Discusses the History and Future of Natural Language Processing

 In this episode of STEM-Talk, we talk to one of our own senior research scientists, Dr. Yorick Wilks, renowned for his work in natural language processing. Wilks is also a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Sheffield in England, and senior research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute at Balliol College.

A “war baby” born in London in the midst of the Second World War, Yorick was sent away to school due to the bombings. He excelled and went to Cambridge, where he studied with Margaret Masterman, a protégé of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Yorick first came to America—L.A. in the 1960s—on a one-year Air Force Research Grant. Yeas later, he moved to Stanford University’s AI Lab, where he worked with John McCarthy, one of the founders of Artificial Intelligence.

Yorick’s research interests have been vast and rich, including machine translation, translating, understanding and extracting meaning from language, belief representation and human and machine communication. He has authored 14 books and many more papers, and has been the recipient of numerous awards, including, in 2008, the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Lifetime Achievement Award.

Yorick also speaks several languages, including Swahili and Japanese.

Yorick is a senior research scientist at IHMC’s Ocala, Florida facility where he was interviewed for this podcast. STEM-Talk Host Dawn Kernagis and IHMC Associate Director and senior research scientist Bonnie Dorr—who is also a leading expert in natural language processing—conduct this rich interview, full of both historical insight and wisdom about the future of AI.  Yorick also spends much of his time in Oxford, England, where he lives with his wife and two beloved dogs, an Italian greyhound and a German Sheppard.

1:07: Ken mentions that Yorick was an easy selection by “a unanimous vote by the double secret selection committee.” He calls Yorick a pioneering researcher, mentor and a raconteur of the first order.

1:31: Ken continues: “Yorick was on the ground floor when AI and the Internet were in nascent stages of development.”

2:30: Dawn reads an iTunes 5-star review of STEM-Talk from “Love the ocean”: “I just listened to Joan Vernikos’ STEM-Talk, and I am convinced that I am on my way to living a healthier life from the changes I’ve made incorporating what she said in her talk. What an inspiration she is, and how proud I am to have met her at NASA, where I currently work, and know that even after her NASA days, she continues to research and publish. STEM-Talk truly finds those brilliant and interesting people and encourages in-depth discussions. Continuous five-stars.”

4:30: Dawn welcomes Yorick and Bonnie.

4:58: Yorick describes upbringing: “I was a war baby, from a poor, working class family.” His parents worked in aircraft factories and sent him to school outside of London because of the bombings.

5:48: He got a scholarship to a good school; and another scholarship to attend Cambridge. “In some ways, I escaped my upbringing completely.”

6:00: Yorick won a school prize at age 16, and asked for Aristotle’s Metaphysics. That marked his first interest in philosophy. At Cambridge, he studied math and physics; he changed to philosophy after a year.

6:50: He considers himself in “apostolic succession from Wittgenstein” via Margaret Masterman, his philosophy tutor at college. “She wasn’t good at teaching; but she was a genius, a guru.”

7:56: Wittgenstein didn’t like women in his classes; he didn’t like ugly people, Yorick says. “But she hung in there, and Wittgenstein was the biggest influence in her life.”

8:22: Wittgenstein thought understanding the world meant understanding language…But he wasn’t anti-science at all. He was an engineer by background. He thought how we saw the world was determined by language.

9:10: Masterman thought she was carrying out a Wittgenstein philosophy, but with new technology (computers.)

9:20: Yorick tells about spending the 1960s in L.A., the era of sex, drugs and rock n roll. He had a one-year Air Force Research Grant and was attached to an offshoot of the Rand Corporation, which was Bob Simmons’ group. He worked on an IBM 360, and started programming (in Lisp) his thesis ideas in L.A.

11:15: Yorick moved to Northern California at the end of the 1960s.

12:09: He took a job John McCarthy’s AI lab at Stanford.

12:25: Yorick recalls some the earliest days of the Internet at Stanford.

13:54: “Margaret Masterman had the idea that you could code the meaning of language with a small number of semantic primitives (features).”

15:11: Yorick’s thesis was building a representation of English that was in another language of semantic primitives. It was ahead of its time. Back then, Noam Chomsky was popular: “Syntax and grammar were what mattered…We were dead set against that. We thought it was completely wrong.”

16:30: Yorick created the first semantically-based machine translation system from English to French. “It was no good as a translation; it was just the idea of doing it that way.”

17:13: Yorick coined semantic parsing, which today is commonplace, but back then was novel.

17:49: Yorick discusses his appreciation for the perspective now often referred to as “human-centered computing.” He was influenced by Martin Kay, a computational linguist who thought that translation was too sophisticated for machines alone, but rather that human/machine teamwork was necessary. “For laws, constitutions, poetry, the human must be in the loop. Machine translation is just a tool for the human.”

22:00: Yorick talks about the two broad approaches—symbolic and statistical—to computerized language processing.

23:10: “The biggest shift in language processing in the past fifty years has been the advent of massive hardware—more so than theoretical advances.”

25:06: All the new Google translations are basically statistical now. “Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t, but they are easily produced given big-data and they are workhorses that deliver. You can get a decent translation and understand almost anything now.”

25:25:  But, “language cannot be, at base, statistical. We cannot be statistical engines generating English. A novel isn’t just a very long Markov Chain… novels have structure… novels are about stuff.”

25:55:  Currently most people seem to agree that some kind of cooperation between statistical and symbolic methods will be most efficacious in AI.

26:25: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

27:00: Yorick talks about the current popularity of network-based methods such as “deep understanding” and “deep learning.”

28:56: “We all know when we say one thing but mean another. Statistics won’t express that, but linguists have spent decades expressing it.”

29:10: “Deep learning is a bigger matter,” he says, calling it an “absurd misnomer.” Yorick continued that it has “produced good results in facial recognition, speech recognition. It hasn’t yet produced striking results in language understanding…I don’t think it’s that different than what went before.

30:19: “We are living in a world, where funding and hype and real science are mixed up in a strange way; to get somewhere and flush our real funding, you have to sound as if you are the new Messiah.”

31:15: “I inherited machine translation because it was the prime task that Masterman’s research center was set up to do. I parlayed that into a representation for language and meaning.”

32:50: “In the 1970s and 80s, I got very interested in the representation of human beliefs…that connected back to my early work on semantic representation. I began to think we couldn’t understand language unless we could understand what the other person believes about language and the world.”

34:00: Yorick has continued to work in belief representation at IHMC, specifically on work funded by the Office of Naval Research that models dialogue to try to determine who is the main influencer and has the leadership role.

34:30: In a chance happening, Yorick met David Levy, author of Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships. Levy got interested in human conversation and wanted to create the best conversational machine. Levy wanted to build a machine to win the Turing Test competition called the Loebner Prize.

35:44: Yorick led the team in 1998 at Sheffield that won for Levy, who funded it.

36:50: Bonnie talks about all the areas of research Yorick has covered: understanding language, translating language, extracting meaning from language, detecting correct word sense from ambiguous words. She asks him about the future of the fields he has worked in.

40:30: “Dialogue systems are very hot. Human-machine cooperation is “the hottest topic in AI right now.”  How we are going to control automated cars?  “They’ve got to talk like us; otherwise it’s hopeless.”

41:20: Yorick talks about working on the EU’s largest project on artificial companions, or conversational companions. “Just as people tell dogs their secrets, people would have computer companions that would live with them. It would be a hand-bag sized type thing. It would be your interface with the web.”

44:12:  Yorick talks about AI systems as “cognitive orthoses.”

44:25: Yorick predicts people will warm to the idea of artificial companions. “A computer program would have photographs and talk to you about them. It would debrief you on your memories and keep your memoires straight; and help to keep you mentally alive. It’s going to be a lot better than no companion at all.”

45:05: “People will have emotional relationships with anything. The bar isn’t that high.”

45:35: Dawn asks Yorick to talk about Ken Ford’s observation that after decades of pundits and philosophers arguing that AI is provably impossible, suddenly that argument has been replaced with the assertion that not only is it possible, but superhuman AI is so inevitable that it is the greatest danger ever faced by the human race.  In only about a decade, the conversation has shifted from you can’t do it … to you shouldn’t do it!

46:42: Yorick says that the media stokes these fears irresponsibly.

46:56: “Stephen Hawking knows no more about AI than anybody who reads the newspapers. His mind is full of cosmology … which is no help.”

47:20: “Automated weapons could do horrible things; but all weapons can do terrible things.”  It’s not what people think the problem is, AI itself is not the problem.

50:14: Yorick enjoys mentoring Ph.D. students; their most common problem is that their writing is so compressed, he says. The only way out of that is to have them write just one paragraph that is completely clear; and to let that grow.

51:38: He describes a different territory for research with respect to fifty years ago, when there was a “virgin territory in research.” His advice to researchers: “If you think you have anything original to say, say it and see where it takes you.”

54:10: Yorick speaks French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Swahili (which has 16 genders, meaning noun clauses, not sex.)

55:05: Knowing languages, you see how badly some are designed.

56:36: “IHMC is quite like John McCarthy’s lab at Stanford. You’re left to do what you want as long as someone is attracted to it; there’s no party line.”

57:58: “I have a very high view of dogs. They remember you. They have a lot of attractive features.” He has an Italian greyhound and a German Sheppard.

1:00:38: Ken muses on the fascinating interview, which covered a broad range of AI topics, Yorick’s rich educational experiences, and his participation in the early days of the Internet.

1:01:20: Ken and Dawn sign off.

Episode 20: Dr. Alessio Fasano discusses the gut microbiome and how it affects our health

When Alessio Fasano entered medical school at the University of Naples (Italy) School of Medicine, his goal was to eliminate childhood diarrhea. Working with a mentor who’d studied the physiology of the gut, Fasano decided to focus on the microorganisms that cause diarrhea. That opened up his world to specialize in overall gut health, and Fasano became a leading expert in celiac disease and gluten-related disorders.

Following medical school, Fasano spent three years at the Center for Vaccine Development in Baltimore, and later returned to the U.S. to pursue his career. Today the world-renowned gastroenterologist is chair of pediatric gastroenterology and nutrition at Harvard Medical School and director of the Center for Celiac Research and Treatment. He is also the director of the Mucosal Immunology and Biology Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Fasano was the lead researcher of a seminal 2003 study showing that 1 in 133 Americans have celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder characterized by gluten-induced damage to the small intestine. His book Gluten Freedom http://tinyurl.com/zdbcdkk has been hailed as “the groundbreaking roadmap to a gluten-free lifestyle.” He is also the author of “A Clinical Guide to Gluten-Related Disorders.” http://tinyurl.com/zbhme6j

His lectures at IHMC “The Gut is Not Like Las Vegas,” (November 2014) http://tinyurl.com/o83y8xz and “People Shall Not Live by Bread Alone: People Shall Not Live by Bread Alone” http://tinyurl.com/pcssk5j have gotten over 70,000 views on YouTube.

Fasano has been featured widely in media, such as NPR, CNN and Bloomberg News. In this episode of STEM-Talk, Fasano talks about his early life as a curious boy in Italy, with a scientist grandfather as his first mentor, the impassioned trajectory of his career, and the underlying importance of gut health in determining our overall health.

00:56: Dawn describes Fasano as “a leading light in the study of the microbiome.” Fifteen years ago, Fasano and his colleagues discovered the pathophysiology of celiac disease and role of the protein zonulin in causing it.

1:10: Ford cites growing evidence that the microbiome content of the intestinal tract influences our metabolism, stress tolerance, immune response, memory and cognitive performance.

2:56: Ford reads five-star iTunes review of STEM-Talk entitled “cognitive satiety:” “Never have all the lobes of your brain been so satisfied. Every episode is fascinating and beautifully orchestrated. The content is interesting and diverse. There’s no room for boredom. The double secret selection committee does a superb job of keeping the listeners educated, engaged and more intelligent with every minute. And the hosts have a linguistic seduction that you wish it would never end. I could listen to STEM-Talk for hours. Thank you, and please keep the talks coming.”

3:51: Dawn introduces Fasano as a world-renowned pediatric gastroenterologist and research scientist. He specializes in treating people with celiac disease, wheat and gluten sensitivities, as well as infants and children with difficult to treat gastro-intestinal problems.

5:15: Dawn welcomes Alessio and Ken to the interview.

5:37: Fasano talks about his childhood in Italy. He was raised largely by his grandfather, a retired physicist who had once worked in Enrico Fermi’s lab. During World War II, Fasano’s grandfather refused to move to Germany as Mussolini had requested, so he ended up teaching high school science.

6:26: “I remember vividly being with him in his lab. [That] sparked an interest in physics and science.”

7:03: Fasano’s initial focus in medical school was eliminating childhood diarrhea— “not a glamorous field to get into.” At that time, five million people died annually from diarrhea, 80 percent of them children.

9:08: On his medical school mentor’s suggestion, Fasano went to the Center for Vaccine development in Baltimore to study micro-organisms in the gut. His two-month term became two years. Afterwards, he went back to Italy for a year and a half, returning to the U.S. in 1993, where he has been ever since.

9:47: Ken points out that Fasano has said that, “Twenty-five hundred years ago, Hippocrates posited all disease begins in gut: emerging understanding of the interplay between gut microbiome, intestinal mucosa and immune and nervous systems seems to support this contention.”

10:05: “Hippocrates was so right, without having all the information that we have right now,” Fasano says.

11:14: Fasano says that his thirty years of studying the gut have boiled down to the past five years, with the emergence of “the perfect storm of knowledge” about the microbiome.

11:50: The intestinal mucosa, a 3,000 square feet interface, negotiates cross-talk between us as human beings, the ecosystem, and our interaction with the environment.

12:30: Besides digesting food, the gut is involved in a continuous discussion with our environment, regulating the friends and foes that enter. The gut is the organ with the most immune cells; it’s also considered the body’s second brain, and has even more neuronal cells than brain itself.

13:28: The gut is a 20-foot-long tube. The epithelial cells interact with various types of immune cells.

16:00: The nervous system cells coordinate the interaction between the immune and epithelial cells, sometimes through messenger cells.

17:17: “Imagine all this decision making,” Fasano says. The epithelial cells have sensors that see who is in the lumen: friends, or if it’s foes, “You have to prepare for war.”

17:50: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

18:33: Recent information indicates that the microbiome develops in the womb during the last trimester of pregnancy, but the major imprinting happens in the birth canal. That is why full-term, vaginal births are best for healthy microbiome development. Then other things—breastfeeding, for example—should occur to ensure sustained microbiome health.

22:05: The immune system developed to fight micro-organisms.

22:52: The microbiome teaches the immune system to work in a child’s first 1,000 days. A good, balanced microbiome is one that teaches the immune system to set the bar high for infections.

23:45: An unbalanced microbiome in infancy may be caused by the Western diet, C-section delivery, and infections. These things teach the immune system to have a low threshold for infections, placing infants at risk for chronic inflammatory diseases later in adulthood.

24:50: Fasano comments on the Human Genome Project: As humans, we have 23,000 genes, most of which we share with other animals; 95 percent of our genes are identical to a mouse. Only 400 genes distinguish us from chimpanzees. Other species have many more genes: Worms, for example, have 75,000 genes.

26:07: What are the implications of our relatively shallow gene pool? “We were not supposed to be dominant creatures on earth,” Fasano says.

26:53: Fasano explains his piano player analogy: Our 23,000 genes are like piano keys. There is an infinite combination of notes. The piano player is the microbiome that decides, based on genetic cross-talk, what notes should be played and when—just as genes express or suppress their activities.

28:10: Whereas previously, we were told that having the genes to develop diseases such as Alzheimer’s Disease, cancer, and multiple sclerosis determined our fate—that we would get those diseases—we now know that’s not true, Fasano says. “It all depends on our lifestyle; and how that affects our microbiome, which in turn affects which genes are turned on or off…. If I have the genes for Lou Gehrig’s disease, that does not mean I will get it. It depends on how I live my life.”

29:00: Until recently, we thought our disease destiny was determined by our piano player—assumed to be an outside. Now we understand that the piano player—our microbiome—is living inside of us.

29:57: Now the questions that we can ask are: What kind of player is there? What kind of music does he play? What kind of music is playing as we speak? “Doing mathematical modeling, we can predict if playing certain kind of music, you will end up with that kind of clinical outcome.”

30:48: “We cannot manipulate our genes, but we may eventually be able to manipulate our microbiome so we can keep ourselves healthy for a much longer period of time.” This is primary prevention; or precision medicine.

31:34: Ken comments: “This interaction between our genome and the microbiome is the part that I find most interesting and hopeful for the future. It explains the riddle of how a simple genome produces such a highly differentiated and complex animal; and opens up new pathways for medicine and human performance and resilience.”

32:10: “This is the best time to be in science,” Fasano says. “Technology and knowledge are moving so fast.”

33:18: “It’s up to us to keep [our microbiome] in a compatible, friendly discussion with the genome we inherited from our parents.” But the health of our microbiome also boils down to our lifestyle. “The way we live will dictate the destiny we have.”

34:54: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

35:30: Two ingredients of auto-immune disease were once thought to be genes and environmental triggers that create inflammation. The question that no one could explain was: “How can these two worlds physically interact to make this happen?”

38:24: Then they stumbled upon zonulin, a protein modulating the permeability of tight junctures between cells in the digestive tract.

39:20: Now zonulin has been linked to a myriad of auto-immune and GI disease such as Crohn’s Disease, as well as multiple sclerosis, cancer, schizophrenia, and autism.

40:12: Larazotide acetate is a promising peptide that blocks zonulin. It is now in in a phase three clinical trial.

44:40: Zonulin negotiates the interaction with the environment when it’s at the forefront of the gut; it also modulates traffic between body compartments, including the blood brain barrier (BBB).

45:00: German scientists have linked the production of zonulin to more advanced stages of glioma; the more compromised the BBB is, the more zonulin is present.

45:30: The microbiome may have a role in autism, since kids with autism have GI upsets. They are trying to understand what the role of the microbiome is in that. Either the activated immune cells create inflammation in the brain; or the microbiome produces metabolites that have a direct effect on the brain.

46:40: The truth of today is the garbage of tomorrow. Science is refurbished every five years. “You need to put yourself in the discussion all the time,” Fasano says. “If you are not open-minded enough, you will go out of business.”

47:35: Fasano’s grandfather told him, “If you want immediate success, science is not your field.” Another attribute of a scientist is humility: you have to question yourself all the time. “Science is a constellation of failures with very few successes, and we live for those. How bored would we be if every experiment that we did was successful?”

49:38: Dawn relays a personal story about scientists’ dedication: As a post-doc, she had a sign in her office that a mentor had given her, which said: “Brick walls are there for a reason. They make you prove how badly you want something.”

50:06: “Science in Italy is a hobby today,” Fasano says. Italy invests less than three percent of its GDP in science. “There’s no way that Italy can keep apace with countries like the U.S. that consider science an investment. Bright people relocate to unleash their creativity and make a difference.”

51:36: He adds, “Italian science has the resources to be at forefront of the story.”

52:47: Fasano recently opened a research institute in his hometown of Salerno called the European Biomedical Research Institute. It is on the site of the first Western medical school, where the first medical school textbook was written; the first diploma to be a doctor was given; and the first female physician practiced.

55:40: This institute is mainly focused on nutritional health.

56:30: Fasano says his biggest adjustment to living in the U.S. has been lifestyle. “Here people live to work.” And of course, the food. “In the beginning I could not adjust to fast food. I am a strong proponent of slow food. Drive-ins in Italy are inconceivable.”

58:00: What he loves about living in the U.S.: “The sky’s is the limit in terms of realizing your potential.”

59:10: Ken wraps up: “We humans appear to be a kind of super organism. Humans and microbes have developed a co-dependency which affects our wellness, including the expression of our genes.”

59:46: Dawn and Ken sign off.

Episode 19: Dr. Dawn Kernagis talks about life undersea during NASA’s NEEMO-21 Mission

For this special episode of STEM-Talk, IHMC Research Scientist and STEM-Talk Host Dawn Kernagis sits on the other side of the microphone. This summer, Dawn was one of six divers selected for NASA’s NEEMO (NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations) 21 mission, and we were able to talk to her live from the Aquarius Reef Base, located 62 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.

During the 16-day mission, Dawn and her colleagues performed field research designed to test operations and equipment for future space exploration. In particular, the international crew of aquanauts performed research both inside and outside the habitat. During simulated spacewalks carried out underwater, they evaluated tools and mission operation techniques that could be used in future space missions. Inside the habitat, the crew’s objectives include testing a DNA sequencer, a medical telemetry device, and HoloLens operational performance for human spaceflight cargo transfer.

In many ways, the NEEMO mission crystalizes Dawn’s career. Her research expertise has been focused on human performance, risk mitigation and resilience in extreme environments—namely undersea and in space. In addition to her accomplishments as a scientist, Dawn is also a long-standing diver, and this year was inducted into the Women Divers Hall of Fame.

Conducting the interview is IHMC Senior Research Scientist and former NASA astronaut Tom Jones. Dawn shares aspects of her daily life in the undersea habitat, from eating freeze dried food to watching thousands of fish from the galley window every night before bed. She also delves into the research that she conducted, which included testing a mini DNA sequencer and deep water dives to collect samples of several coral species and weighted walks on the ocean floor to simulate space walks.

STEM-Talk’s Billy Howell and Jason Conrad, key players in the production of each episode, also join the impromptu conversation with “fanboy” questions for Dawn.

Dawn kept a blog about her experience, which you can read at: https://www.ihmc.us/blog/neemo

2:00: Dawn discussed her experience as manager for the world record-breaking diving exploration project Wakulla Springs.

2:24: On her induction, last April, into the Women Divers Hall of Fame, she said, “It was cool to be sitting with women I have looked up to since I was a little girl.”

3:23: Dawn described certain challenges faced by people working in extreme environments such as Navy divers, deep sea divers and astronauts: decompression sickness, oxygen toxicity and nitrogen narcosis.

5:02: Ken Ford read a 5-star iTunes review (which are piling up): “The best podcast. It is as if the double secret selection committee has hacked my Google search. Keep up the great work, team.”

5:37: Tom Jones explained that the NEEMO mission, now in its 15^th year, is an analog to deep space expedition.

6:09: Dawn said her voice sounded high because of the increase in air density in her undersea habitat.

7:14: Dawn explained that for the in-water work, they gear up and jump out of the habitat in hard hat diving supplies. “There is constant communication with the habitat,” she says.

9:30: “It makes such a difference to have a great team.”

9:50: “The nice thing is we have support divers who bring supplies up and down on a daily basis. It is not as isolated as space expeditions.”

10:50: Dawn described some of the physiological effects of being at a pressure of 3 atmospheres and 62 feet deep:

“I can’t whistle; I have a high voice; we can feel swells pick up overhead—the pressure changes, so our ears are constantly popping. We’re hungry all the time.”

12:12: They performed simulated space walks to identify different species of coral for the Florida International University marine sciences team.

13:25: They used geology sample tools and water-resistant iPads.

14:20: They tested medical telemetry equipment (like miniPCRs for DNA sampling) that may be used at the International Space Station; then relayed the data back to physicians.

18:40: With the cheek swab and saliva samples, they looked for epigenetic changes that occur in response to living in a saturation environment.

19:11: Every morning, they got up around 6:00 or 6:30 and make coffee. Then they did the first round of medical telemetry: collecting blood pressure readings, oxygen saturation, hydration levels, and weight. Those were also collected in the evenings.

20:54: “Every evening we’ve been spending watching the amazing night life outside our window.”

21:07: The free time was spent at the galley window, watching all the different fish swim by. Dawn described a lion fish swimming by…She also saw eagle rays and squid.

21:45: She looked for modifications that occur in response to living in a saturation environment. “We are trying to get a baseline idea. Molecular tags change the way a DNA is read out, expressed, and what protein product is made.”

22:52: Their findings may one day be used to prepare for a Mars expedition. “The Software/hardware in the habitat and planetary exploration analog has been focused on long-range space duration, specifically Mars.”

24:40: “The food has been way better than anticipated; but we can have food sent that’s fresh.” They ate mountain house camping food, using hot water and a microwave. She was able to stick to her vegetarian diet.

25:43: They all bunked out at around the same time. There was a round-the-clock mission control on Aquarius Reef.

26:29: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

27:07: Dawn lauded the NEEMO team: “The people are forward thinking; everyone on this team communicates very well. The mentality where you prioritize team over self; for a mission like this (and space) have to be thinking about team.

28:08: The team comprised astronauts, physicians, engineers, molecular biologists.

30:00: Prior to the mission, they had a week of solid training at Johnson Space Center in Houston. They also had a week of hands-on training in the Keys before going under water.

31:09:  Dawn is startled by support diver in galley window

31:40: In December, Dawn talked to NEEMO founder Bill Todd, about her epigenetics experiment. During that conversation, he asked her to be part of the dive crew.  “I couldn’t speak … I said absolutely, it wasn’t even a question. I was honored.”

34:10: Dawn described the challenge of being in such a beautiful research environment: “Not only are you testing out the procedures; you’re doing it in a place where you enjoy it, and a bad move could be detrimental. You’ve got to keep your situational awareness up and running the entire time while you are doing these other tasks.”

34:47: Tom recalled being in space, enjoying the view of the earth, when his colleague said to him, “Just think Tom, we’re just three inches away from instant death.”

35:15: Before leaving the habitat and returning to the surface, the aquanauts underwent a 16-hour (largely overnight) decompression procedure while breathing 100% oxygen.

38:15: Billy asked Dawn if she can feel the above sea weather in her habitat: “When the seas are rougher above us, you can definitely feel it down here; the habitat connected to life support buoy. With the swells, the pressure changes in your ears. You can see fish moving with the swells. One cool thing… the lightening storms at night: You can see water light up, and it’s absolutely beautiful.”

39:57: Massive heavy dry pots were used to send materials up and down and keep everything dry; the support divers worked really hard to move them back and forth. The electronics were wrapped in plastic bags, in case of any kind of leaking.

42:07: Sometimes there were delays in communication during bad weather.

43:45: Dawn described her experience as a support diver for a day.

46:14: “It was a lot of fun to be on the other side,” she said of the interview. “And having a simulated space walk in the background while I was doing an interview was priceless…”

46:36: Ken said that this live interview from the bottom of the sea “is the kind of thing you’ll only hear on STEM-Talk.”

46:53: Dawn and Ken sign off.

 

Episode 18: Dr. Colin Champ talks about how the right nutrition and exercise can help treat cancer

As STEM-Talk Host Dawn Kernagis points out in this interview, guest Colin Champ looks like he could be featured on the television show “The Bachelor.” But the striking young doctor (who alas, is in a serious relationship) is a radiation oncologist at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Center.

Dr. Champ is also deeply invested in researching how exercise and nutrition can help treat and prevent cancer. In his very popular book entitled, “Misguided Medicine: The Truth Behind Ill-Advised Medical Recommendations and How to Take Health Back into Your Hands,” Champ tackles several popularly-held myths regarding health such as the perils of salt and meat intake. Take a look at: http://tinyurl.com/jokel72

On Dr. Champ’s web site, The Caveman Doctor, http://www.cavemandoctor.com/start-here/, he also challenges conventional wisdom and governmental guidelines on nutrition.

Dr. Champ received his medical degree from Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia and his bachelor’s in chemical engineering from MIT. He grew up, in his own words, in the “blue-collar, steel town” of Pittsburgh, in a mixed lineage family of Austrians, Irish and Southern Italians.

At an early age, he excelled at both sports and science.

Dr. Champ’s lecture at IHMC, “Augmenting Cancer Therapy with Diet,” can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ot96y5-D_K0

He also regularly writes for Health Wire: http://www.myhealthwire.com/editors/dr-colin-champ

In this STEM-Talk episode, Dawn and IHMC Director and CEO Ken Ford talk with Dr. Champ.

3:33: Dawn introduces Dr. Champ as a radiation oncologist focused on breast cancer, cancers of the central nervous system, clinical nutrition/exercise relating to cancer treatment/prevention. He is board certified in both radiation oncology and integrative medicine.

5:00: Champ discusses his upbringing outside of Pittsburgh. “My family structure greatly influenced my life…. My grandfather was the son of Austrian immigrants. My grandmother was Southern Italian. My dad’s side was also Southern Italian and Irish. My grandfather ran the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie railroad accounting with no college education. He built most of his house and was always into health/fitness. He had an organic garden and left a strong imprint on me.”

6:15: Champ’s mother was “a good cop,” and very loving. His father pushed him to work hard, and there were three cornerstones to Champ’s upbringing: sports, health and academics. “Certainly sports played a huge role in my upbringing. I was involved in sports. I played basketball until I hated it.”

7:00: Science was also pushed heavily in the household. “I was good at science and math at a young age.”

7:50: Champ’s father wanted him to go to the Air Force Academy. Champ realized it wasn’t for him and went to MIT instead.

8:55: “From there it was just kind of a springboard of science and really questioning things.” That led him to medical school.

11:20: Champ discusses what drew him to radiation oncology: “I get to see patients everyday. I don’t think in any other field of medicine that you see people so often. It allows you to forge relationships with people. Providing cancer patients with hope is rewarding.” He added that the science of it (for example, working with giant linear accelerators) is a fun aspect of the job.

15:00: Champ says the low-fat diet is a medical myth that makes certain false promises: to make you skinny, prevent diabetes and cancer, and stop your arteries from clogging. Other myths include the need to decrease your salt intake; exercise by running marathons; and stay out of the sun (which has a lot of health benefits). And, “a little stress is not bad for you—it causes body to fight free radicals as innate antioxidant mechanism.”

17:15: Champ discusses the fallacies of the American dietary guidelines.

20:15: Instead, one way to approach diet is by asking questions such as: If you were to not eat anything for the next five days, what would your body eat? A small amount of carbs (50-150 grams per day, for example.)

23:25: Champ says that if you work out a lot, you need to salt load.

26:00: Some epidemiological studies show that eating less fat cholesterol decreases your risk of dying from a heart attack. But that doesn’t decrease your risk of dying from everything else.

29:00: Champ discusses the widely publicized association between processed and red meat and cancer. The findings are based on flawed studies, Champ says: “A lot of the studies group red meat with hot dogs, etc. People are eating these things wrapped around a bun.”

31:20: Meat provides a nutrient-dense resource for our bodies. “Every food can be dangerous to some degree, but we need foods to survive.”

33:20: Vegetarians can also follow the ketogenic diet; they should lean more on macadamia nuts, diary, eggs, and safer oils including those made with avocado, macadamia, and palm.

35:30: Champ discusses his own diet: It’s short on carbs (50-150 grams/day) and high in fat. “I cook a lot; cooking is like meditation. If you don’t cook, it’s pretty hard to maintain a healthy diet.” For breakfast, he eats bone broth or eggs with spinach or Bok Choy; or an omelet; and tea. For lunch, he has a green leafy vegetable, cooked in a fat source like ghee or grass-fed butter; and fish or organ meats. Dinner resembles lunch. The evening before this interview, Champ ate feta cheese-wrapped lamp meatballs, Brussel sprouts, dark chocolate, and red wine.

38:50: Champ does martial arts/lifts weights 3-4 times per week. Low level activity is very good for burning fat; high intensity is good for stimulating muscle growth. “I’m not a fan of long-distance running. It provides a mental benefit for many people. But it wears and tears at the joints and heart.”

42:35: Sun exposure is linked to some skin cancers; squamous and basal cell carcinoma (the latter of which are almost always non-cancerous); and the bad one, melanoma.

44:00: But sun exposure is also associated with a decreased risk of prostate and breast cancer. The sun confers other health benefits including making bones stronger; and lowering blood pressure.

49:00: Mice studies show that combining radiation and the ketogenic diet can kill tumors. “The intriguing thing is that as metabolic therapies come out, the ketogenic diet may provide an escape mechanism for cancer cells.”

54:00: Taking exogenous ketones may make the ketogenic diet easier to follow.

55:00: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

59:00: Although it’s not completely certain that the ketogenic diet does help cancer patients, Champ says, “we have to keep trying.” Especially for patients with low life expectancy, such as those with glioblastoma, who on average survive only 15-17 months.

1:00:53: AMPK down regulates mTOR (one pathway that tells cancer cells to grow.) It pulls sugar from our blood and up regulates mitochondrial biogenesis. It puts body in an anti-cancer state.

1:07:50: New data is coming out that says fasting 13 hours a day may improve breast cancer outcomes.

1:09:10: It’s the era of the active patient: both exercise and diets (like the ketogenic diet) are allowing patients to take control of their own health.

1:09:38: Champ started the Caveman Doctor web site as a medical resident: to look at the whole medical/healthcare system from a historic point of view: evolutionarily, culturally; common sense wise. And, to make it simple for people to understand. “The goal is to get the average person healthier.”

1:11:10: Champ also tries to get people to question their own food narratives. “I have a lot of issues about how our health is dictated by cultural/societal norms. No one thinks about eating organ meats—or insects.”

1:12:50: Champ wrote a Health Wire article entitled: “Is Exercise Making You Fat?” “If you don’t exercise the right way, and don’t eat the right kind of food, exercise might actually make you fatter.”

1:14:35: Champ follows, and tells his patients, to follow this protocol: Question things first; figure out the answers; implement those. “More often than not, in medical school, we avoid numbers one and two and go to three. We’re taught not to question things.”

1:16:15: “The best patients are those that ask questions. More people need to do that with their own health, especially people on a low-fat diet.”

1:19:30: The whole argument against cholesterol/fat was based on a rabbit study; but rabbits eat nothing like humans, Champ says. There are many non scientific interests with clinical trials. “Even with gold-standard trials, special interests come into play.”

1:21:30: Champ travels regularly to Italy and talks about his favorite (non-pasta/pizza) food there: Italian cheese and wine; squid, octopus, Roman tripe; Florentine steak.

1:25:16: The “Mediterranean diet” is a term that gets used a lot, but what does it really mean? In Italy (and Spain), it means “whole foods; but a lot of cured meat; certainly not a low-fat diet; but it’s real food.”

1:26:50: Champ’s health advice in a nutshell: eat real foods; get eight hours of sleep per night; limit carbs; take the stairs, not the elevator, and park far away; cook your own meals.

1:28:50: Ken calls Champ “impressive on many levels.” Champ’s knowledge provides “a ray of hope in a sometimes bleak medical landscape.”

1:29:26: Dawn and Ken sign off.

 

 

 

 

Episode 17: Dr. Pascal Lee talks about preparing for the exploration of Mars & its moons

Dr. Pascal Lee is not the first Renaissance man to be interview on STEM-Talk, but his impressive biography merits that moniker.

“An artist, helicopter pilot, polar researcher, planetary scientist, and a pioneer in thinking about possible human futures in space,” as described by IHMC Director Ken Ford, Lee has an impressive list of accomplishments to his name.

He is co-founder and chairman of the Mars Institute, director of the NASA Haughton-Mars Project at NASA Ames Research Center, and senior planetary scientist at the SETI Institute.

Born in Hong Kong, he was sent to boarding school in Paris as a child, and later graduated from the University of Paris with a degree in geology and geophysics. During his year of civil service after college, he lived with 31 other men in Antarctica—a formative experience that gave him a thirst for field work and hands-on exploration. As Lee himself says in this interview, “Forever in my life there will be before and after Antarctica.”

Lee went on to study astronomy and space science at Cornell University, where he was also Carl Sagan’s teacher’s assistant. He then did a post-doc at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, where he has been ever since.

He continues to search for “new life” in the universe, with a particular interest in preparing for future exploration of Mars. This summer marks Lee’s twentieth summer field trip on Devon Island, the largest uninhabited earth with geological evidence similar to what Lee suspects would be found on Mars.

Lee is also the author of a children’s book, called Mission: Mars, about what it would take for humans to travel to the planet. He is also currently working on a book for adults addressing similar questions.

Several of Lee’s lectures are available on YouTube, or at his page on the SETI website: http://www.seti.org/users/pascal-lee. His personal web site is http://www.pascallee.net.

In this episode, STEM-Talk Host Dawn Kernagis and IHMC senior research scientist Tom Jones, also a veteran NASA astronaut, interview Lee.

00:49: Ken Ford describes Lee’s accomplishments, adding, “Pascal and I share a passion for the moons of Mars—especially Phobos.”

2:10: Ford reads a 5-star iTunes review from “podcast file”: “The STEM-Talk podcast is a must listen. I appreciate how the format of a podcast stays focused and on topic. It is packed with outstanding content that lives up to its name. I truly found useful information and perspectives that impacts how I understand and see the world.”

3:57: Lee describes his upbringing in a Hong Kong that was booming. His father was ethnically Chinese, and his mother was French. As a child, he was sent to boarding school in France—without yet knowing how to speak French. “I started a new life at age eight. I stayed there for fifteen years.”

5:10: He always loved space travel. “I thought that was really inspiring and exciting. It wasn’t just the travel itself. [It was also the fact that there was] more to the universe than what we had on earth. Mars came into the picture a little later, as a teenager. That’s when I got serious about becoming a scientist.”

6:05: Carl Sagan’s book Cosmic Connection “really changed my life at the time…. From that day on, I decided that the planetary sciences were what I wanted to do. The rest was easy because once you have a goal and a focus, it makes a lot of decisions for you.”

6:38: Lee studied science and physics at the University of Paris. He spent his obligatory year of national service in Antarctica.

7:30: “On my way South [to Antarctica], I posted a letter to one graduate school—where Carl Sagan taught. In the middle of winter, I get this Telex from Cornell that I’d gotten in.”

8:28: Lee says his 402 days at a station in Antarctica “was an other-worldly experience. We were 31 people. All men. Forever in my life there will be before and after Antarctica.”

9:48: He went on his first helicopter ride off the coast of Antarctica. Flying through a glacier “was like flying through downtown Manhattan, with ice cliffs on either side.”

10:48: “Helicopters are like the lunar modules of the earth: take you exactly where you want to go.” In Lee’s case, that was an iceberg in the middle of the sea.

11:22: Lee was Carl Sagan’s last TA. After a few snowy winters in Ithaca, Lee was done with cold weather and headed to California. He had a post-doc at NASA Ames and has been there ever since.

12:30: Lee continues to describe his time in Antarctica. “I was expecting it to be trying. In the end, I took more books than I could read. I was so busy doing my work, exploring with colleagues and friends. I can’t say I experienced boredom one minute.”

13:25: He talks about being in a “resource-poor” environment. “You can’t go to a store. All the sudden, small things take on a life of their own. Questions like ‘Who took my pen?’ come up. Tensions arise.”

15:00: Lee was an “ambassador” of the cliques that inevitably formed. “When team leadership is not strongly exercised, then the group splits up into smaller factions. This happens on ships and submarines. That was my experience.”

17:15: He recalls falling into frozen sea ice, which was three-four feet thick when he started walking on it. “Beneath is an abyss of dark, cold, gloomy water. At some point the ice got darker (with the current). It was thinner, and I fell through the ice. I was lucky to be able to swim back to shore and threw one foot onto the ice; my friends came and rescued me.”

18:52: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

19:23: Lee’s driving motivation in science is the search for new life. “I got particularly interested in places you could one day go to: such as the moon, asteroids, Mars.” He did his Ph.D. thesis on asteroids.

21:10: For Lee’s post-doc, he proposed studying a place on earth as Mars-like as possible. “This was a way to go back to the polar regions,” he said.

22:00: He describes Devon Island, where he went for field work, as a “polar desert…. It was cold, dry, barren, dusty, windy—similar to Mars.”

25:25: “We knew from our first summer on Devon Island, that this is a place where we would have to go back, probably for many more years.”

25:40: This summer marks Lee’s twentieth consecutive field trip to Devon Island. “We go to this place for two reasons: to learn about it, so that we can interpret the Martian landscape better; the other reason is that we are using the place as a set where you can test equipment: hardware, space suits, rovers, drills that astronauts or robots could deploy on Mars; airplanes or drones…. It’s an amazing testing ground.”

27:10: Devon Island is also a great place to test operational procedures for a future Mars exploration, in figuring out issues such as how many people should go out on an exploration and how many of them should actually explore at once (versus protect safety.) “Unless you understand exactly what it takes field exploration, you don’t have good requirements for what you want to design and take to Mars.

29:15: Mars has finger-shaped valleys known as small-valley networks. They formed in a thick, warm atmosphere, which became known as “the faint early sun paradox.”

31:10: When they formed, the sun was about 25 percent dimmer than it is today. “The sun was a young star. It was still turning on, and at the time, the valley networks were forming.”

32:54: Lee saw similar things on the valley networks of Devon Island, which were formed by melting ice sheets.

35:40: The two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, are important to study because they are in Mars’ orbit. “Going to Mars’ orbit is a lot easier than going to the surface of Mars itself. You don’t have to re-invent the space suit, for example. It can be done much sooner. It would allow ball to get rolling in Mars exploration.”

38:10: There are several theories about how Mars’ moons developed: that they are giant asteroids; captured comets; or bits and pieces of Mars blasted out into space.

39:40: One of the more substantiated ideas, Lee says, is that they are captured comets.

41:44: The near-Earth Asteroid known as 3552 Don Quixote is emitting CO2. It is the largest D-type asteroid (very dark and red) in the inner solar system. Lee says this is evidence that it’s likely a captured, dying comet.

43:37: Phobos and Deimos are similar to 3552 Don Quixote. “They might be ice-rich bodies captured early in history. There are no signs of ice, but who knows what is happening 100 meters down: there could be lumps of ice. This could be a game-changer for getting humans to Mars…. If we had ready access to ice in Mars’ orbit. You can use it as rocket fuel to break down hydrogen and nitrogen in the water.”

44:55: The Russians looked for Phobos and Deimos in 1988; in their second probe, they made it to Mars’ orbit, but an electronics failure blunted the mission.

45:50: In 2011, the Russians again attempted to go to Phobos. They had a launch problem, causing them to fall back into Pacific Ocean off coast of Chile. They don’t have the finances to repeat such a mission.

46:48: However, the Russians are part of the European Phobos return mission. They conducted a detailed feasibility study this summer.

47:48: The Japanese space agency is pursuing a sample return mission called MMX (Mars Moon Exploration), with a goal of launching in 2022, and bringing samples back to earth in 2025.

48:00: Meanwhile, NASA had three missions to Phobos proposed, but they didn’t select any of them.

50:36: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

51:20: Johnson Space Center and others are looking at human missions to Phobos; a lot of questions are coming up: “I think what we’re seeing is a pretty significant robotic precursor mission that NASA will have to put together.”

52:28: NASA has announced it’s sending a new Rover to collect samples on Mars; in 2022, NASA would launch a Mars communications orbiter.

53:22: Gravity on Phobos is 1,700 times less than the gravity on earth. It’s still not the same as zero gravity.

56:15: Water could be in form of ice; or minerals that are hydrated. Many are carbon-rich and clay-rich. Other resources would be organics.

57:17: These places have loose regolith (soil): that means you could move materials around easily; and shelter yourself from space radiation.

59:10: The regolith on Phobos is “the Library of Alexandria” of life on Mars. The surface of Mars is very oxidizing; aggressive chemicals.

1:00:33: “The irony is that the best record of early life on Mars may be on Phobos.”

1:01:03: Lee says asteroid mining will be hard to pursue, especially without a high enough return on the investment.

1:02:39: “Going to Mars is the mother of all camping trips. But it’s a lot more complicated; and it will never be completely safe. But you need to be able to put the odds on your side to survive the effort.”

1:04:10: “I see NASA being able to do it [go to Mars.] But it will take a certain type of leadership. We’re going to need six or seven rockets before putting a human on Mars.”

1:05:15: Lee discredits certain initiatives aiming to establish a permanent human settlement on Mars, namely one called Mars One, a Netherlands-based not-for-profit foundation: “These undertakings have no technical credibility or underpinning,” he said.

1:06:40: “I think we need a space suit that is significantly lighter; we have one that weighs 300 pounds on earth. That suit, if you took it to the Moon, would have a felt weight on the moon of about 50 pounds. If you take that same suit to Mars, it would have a felt weight of 125 pounds. That is too heavy for a field worker.”

1:12:25: “It’s important that we go back to nuclear thermal rockets, which were developed in the 1960s. Nuclear thermal propulsion is a mature idea that is being tested in the desert. It was tested by Nixon in 1960s, but it’s being revived in a quiet way now. The key way to making a human mission to Mars happen is to cut down on the travel time to Mars.”

1:14:42: “The beauty of a NTR is that the only gas emitted is hydrogen. It could cut the travel time to Mars down to just a few months.”

1:15:50: “There’s a way to do safe nuclear in space. For our future on Mars, and space exploration in general, we have to go nuclear. It’s the way stars are powered, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t do that in space ourselves.”

1:16:58: Lee describes his reason for writing his children’s book, Mission: Mars. “When I was the age of the kids that this book targets, people were walking on the moon. It was clear that the next step would be to go to Mars. There was no book on that for Mars. That was a big incentive for me to write the children’s book.”

1:19:44: Asked what other books he recommends, Lee cites Tom Jones’ memoir Sky Walking, about the ins and outs of being an astronaut; and Bold Endeavors: Lessons from Polar and Space Exploration, by Jack Sester.

1:21:30: Lee is currently working on another book (for adults) dubbed From Earth to Mars, about the necessary steps in getting us to Mars.

1:22:06: Dawn and Ken wrap up.

1:23:17: Dawn and Ken sign off.

 

Episode 16: Joan Vernikos discusses the effects of gravity on humans in space and on earth.

If you want to feel like an astronaut, lie in bed all day. That may seem counter-intuitive, but the body experiences the two scenarios in a similar way. The absence of gravity in space mimics the affects of lying down flat—and not using gravity to our physiological advantage.

Gravity expert Joan Vernikos talked about this and other insights on how gravity affects us, in this episode of STEM-Talk, hosted by Dawn Kernagis and Tom Jones. Vernikos spoke to them right before her IHMC lecture in Pensacola, entitled, “Gravity is Our Friend”

Vernikos’ first mentor in life was her father, who at 17 years of age, left his native Greece for France, determined to study medicine, which he did. His specialization in infectious diseases took him to Egypt, where Joan and her sister were educated at English boarding schools. Her sister became a physician, while Joan “chickened out,” becoming a pharmacologist instead.

After entering academia, she was recruited to NASA, where she became the director of the Life Sciences Division.

Since retiring from NASA 16 years ago, Vernikos says that she’s had “a lot more time to think.” She is the author of the provocatively-titled book, “Sitting Kills, Moving Heals,” which was published in 2011. Her forthcoming book, “Designed to Move,” is about how sedentary lifestyles contribute to poor health and early death; and how movement that challenges gravity can dramatically improve life and longevity.

A dynamic speaker, Dr. Vernikos has given dozens of lectures, some of which can be found at https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=YouTube.com%2FDrJoanVernikos. You can also check out her web site at www.joanvernikos.com

00:47: Ken Ford describes Vernikos as a pioneer in how living in a micro-gravity environment adversely affects astronauts, compared to the benefits of gravity for those of us on earth. “Living in space is like accelerated aging,” she says—which might be instructive for thinking about preventing and treating age-related conditions such as sarcopenia and osteoporosis.

2:01: IHMC Director Ken Ford reads a 5-star iTunes review from “Fellow Musician”: “Unlike the majority of podcasts I find, STEM-Talk is a long format show with extremely in-depth discussions. I can’t believe how much serious information was packed into the first few episodes. A plus.”

2:25: Dawn gives a brief bio of Vernikos, as the former director of life sciences at NASA, who pioneered research in how living in a micro gravity environment adversely affects the health of astronauts. She also studied the effects of microgravity on the physiology of astronauts in space and aging on earth.

3:37: Vernikos talks about the influence of her physician-father, her first mentor. “I learned by apprenticeship, which is the best way to learn.”

5:05: “What I learned from father, which is fundamental to my approach, is that you listen, you ask questions, and you diagnose …. He would discuss cases at the dinner table; he would ask us, what would we do in that case. That was a fantastic preparation that served me well.”

6:24: In Egypt, which was then a British protectorate, Vernikos went to an all-girls’ English school, with other girls of 27 different nationalities. She studied pharmacy at the University of Alexandria, and then pharmacology in the U.K.

8:00: Vernikos talks about a Greek woman physician who was also a mentor. This woman developed the first drugs that lower blood pressure. “She was very unusual…headstrong…attractive…She insisted we go to the hairdresser every week.”

10:23: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

10:50: Vernikos describes her jump from academia to NASA. She was teaching pharmacology at Ohio State, and the physiology chair there was hired at NASA to start a group in biology/biomedical sciences. He needed someone in the stress business, and picked Joan.

12:36: Vernikos talks about her frustrations in pitching gravity as a medical issue to physicians. “To this day, the word gravity has not made it into the medical school textbooks.”

12:57: “I was very fortunate in my career; I never had to apply for a job. Somehow or other, I was invited to do something and it happened.” As such, she was tagged to become the Life Sciences Division Director at NASA. “I ended up in headquarters, which meant it was the end of my research career, but I never really stopped doing research.”

14:12: She calls her role there “very international” in terms of collaborating with the scientific community. She also managed the Division’s budget.

16:37: The program was observational, she said. “Every bit of information was cumulative in figuring out that gravity was more important than we thought.”

17:50: They discovered that in space, muscle wasting occurred, first because of dehydration. Muscles and bones also atrophied. Animal experiments showed that within six hours of flight, protein synthesis stopped in muscles and bones. “The signal for synthesis was gravity-related.”

20:20: She cites other cardiovascular changes: the heart got smaller, and cardiac output was reduced. The endothelium gradually disappeared with time. Joints, ligaments, collagens were lost.

20:53: “It’s not a catabolic state, but it’s a wasting state,” she said, of the micro-gravity environment experienced by astronauts.

21:17: “I think we’re flogging the same thing over and over again,” she said, in answer to Tom Jones’ question: ‘Do astronauts today preserve bone, muscle strength?’

22:03: “All the data we have in space is in the presence of the exercise countermeasure.”

24:29: “Since I left NASA 16 years ago, I had time to think, which I didn’t have when I worked there.”

24:58: “We never really sat down and asked: ‘What is the signal the body sees? / What do you need to replace?’”

25:45: The stimulus that is needed to maintain a physiologically-intact body in a gravity micro-environment is low intensity/high frequency intermittent exposure to gravity.

26:12: The minute you stop exercising in space, you revert to a micro-gravity environment. That is not true on earth. Exercise on earth is different. The minute you stop you are still in gravity.

26:40: The space exercise experiments of astronaut Steve Hawley—who purports to have exercised as hard as he possibly could in space, then felt completely normal in the aftermath—made Vernikos conclude: “We should map what happens right after exercise. To this day, no one has looked at after-effects of exercise.”

27:54: “We are perpetual motion machines. We need to move…exercise every day does not counter act all the sitting we do.”

28:34: We need intermittent gravity stimuli for at least 16 hours a day.

29:42: Even just standing up, if it’s frequent, is better than shorter-term walking.

30:33: Vernikos says astronauts need an artificial gravity device that they can get on and off of easily, many times a day.

31:48: All of the body needs to be stimulated, especially the vestibular system, “the clearing house for blood pressure regulation,” as well as other activities central to the bone and muscle. “When the vestibular system goes silent, you’re in trouble.” Calls for systematic research on future implants.

35:20: Jones says that it took three days for his coordination and balance to come back after space flight. That’s because the maps in the brain telling you where you are in environment disappear.

38:00: A form of anabolic resistance may be at work in space…It’s similar to what happens when you lie in bed.

40:50: We don’t know how the glymphatic and lymphatic system in the brain are affected by a gravity-less environment. But without gravity, our body’s “whole detox system is fouled up.”

43:48: All impediments to detoxification result in inflammation. In space, the body is in a state of chronic inflammation, not to mention stress.

44:25: In space, the light intensity and light cycles are altered. Sleep is not sleep; there is an accumulation of carbon dioxide. “The whole life support system must be looked at again. These are crucial to the design of exploration missions, before we even begin to think about the counter measures.”

48:58: “I think it’s crucial that astronauts go on the ketogenic diet. There is a good chance that it will protect them, preventing a variety of conditions, including inflammation.”

50:00: Vernikos compares astronauts to hibernating animals, who don’t lose muscle and bone while hibernating. Their body temperature drops a little; they rely on fat for energy. They breathe more slowly; and even go through pregnancy.

51:17: Astronauts have trouble sleeping and do not feel refreshed when they wake up. Sleep is important for cognitive function.

53:55: “I firmly believe that space has revealed how gravity affects us here on earth; how it is important to our well-being; and how we should use it to maintain our health.”

55:42: The less we move the more like astronauts we become. The changes in bone loss, from one percent a year on earth to 10-20 percent a year in space has confirmed a ten-fold greater loss of bone in space than on earth.

57:05: From age twenty on, we sit more and more. We are designed to move. One time a day exercise is not enough to counteract the absence of movement throughout the day.

1:00:45: Vernikos discusses her book, “Sitting Kills, Moving Heals.” The catchy title brought initial attention to the book, and public interest in it has grown. She highlights the importance of the last, and often over-looked, chapter called gravity therapy.

1:03:29: Vernikos discusses certain longevity secrets of Greeks. Among them: they use their arms when they speak (part of using gravity); they follow a mostly ketogenic diet; their movement, socialization, and emotional expressiveness is all is conducive to longevity.

1:04:53: Longevity in rural areas is greater—in Greece and around the world.

1:05:32: In her free time, Vernikos reads mysteries. “I feel science is a mystery. I think I am a sleuth who solves a problem.”

1:06:11: She says, “I don’t like studying the human body in pieces. It is a whole; you have to look at the whole picture and see how your approach can solve the problem.”

1:07:21: Dawn and Tom thank Vernikos.

1:07:39: Ford sums up Vernikos’ driving message: “Our willingness to interact with gravity will substantially improve how we age.”

1:08:20: Dawn and Ken sign off.

Episode 15: Brian Shul talks about piloting the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane

Brian Shul speaks softly and carries a big stick. The American war hero every bit worthy of Roosevelt’s words flew 212 missions in the Vietnam War before his nearly fatal crash. With his body severely burned, Shul was in so much pain that he wanted to die.

Then one day, lying in his hospital bed, he heard children playing soccer and the voice of Judy Garland singing “Over the Rainbow” on the radio. Suddenly, Shul, at 25-years-old, realized he had a lot to live for. He set himself on a determined road of recovery that would span 15 reconstructive surgeries and countless hours of physical therapy.

Shul eventually turned his amazing story of survival into his greatest strength, and he went on to be one of fewer than 100 people to pilot the SR-71 Blackbird, a U.S. spy plane largely operational during the Cold War and thereafter.

Shul and flight engineer Walter Watson flew multiple missions in which they escaped missiles over enemy territory including the Soviet Union and Libya, gathering footage and information that would help the U.S. win the Cold War.

Unlike other STEM-Talk guests, Shul is neither engineer nor scientist, but he piloted and knew intimately of one of the greatest feats of both. The plane went 3,400 feet per second, which is faster than most bullets and is the speed of traveling between LA and D.C. in an hour and four minutes.

For more information on Brian Shul, visit his Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Shul. Also, check out the YouTube video of his IHMC lecture, “From Butterflies to Blackbirds,” which has had more than 180,000 viewers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kIMTJRgyn0.

Shul is also the author of Sled Driver: The World’s Fastest Jet: http://amzn.to/29ml4LH and The Untouchables: http://amzn.to/29fn1Yk. Here is a link to Shul’s recently opened photo gallery in Marysville, California: https://galleryonepublishing.com/sleddriver/galleryone.html

00:35: Dawn introduces herself and Ken Ford.

00:51: Ford says the SR-71 was the “remarkable product” of a sustained United States investment in STEM.

2:23: Ford reads an iTunes 5-star review of STEM-Talk from PTL Stan: “I love these interviews with the people who are leading these fields. Good science with amazingly friendly interviews by the experts themselves. The quality is amazingly good, and the subjects move right along with my thinking. Thank you, IHMC.”

2:54: Dawn describes Shul’s background. He became an airshow demonstration pilot and taught at the Air Force’s Top Gun School. He retired from the Air Force in 1990.

3:58: Shul was born in Quantico, Va. His father, who had spent 32 years in the Marine Corp, encouraged Shul to join the Air Force because of his strong interest in flying.

5:30: Shul describes the “moment of peace” before his plane crashed during the Vietnam War. “The inevitability of impacting the earth became quite clear…. For a very brief moment, you could actually see your life flash before your eyes. In a nanosecond, I could see the funeral; I could see my parents standing at graveside. And then of course the crash and the fire brought you back to reality.”

6:43: Shul describes his blind escape from the burning plane: “The heat of the fire and the reality that I had not died and was still alive became apparent to me with the pain of the fire.”

7:40: Shul describes his will to live, despite periods of deep depression and wanting to die.

10:32: ‘I’m the product of a lot of people who helped me along the way, from therapists, to surgeons, to nurses, to doctors, to Air Force flight surgeons. There were a lot of people who had a lot to do with getting Brian Shul out of a hospital bed back into the cockpit.”

13:00: “I was in awe of my own body that wanted to heal itself…. You had to want to do your therapy, and it’s not an easy thing to want when it’s just going to hurt the whole time you’re doing it.”

14:15: Shul describes his tenure of teaching at the Air Force Top Gun school.

15:30: Shul underwent a series of intensive selection process in order to fly the SR-71.

16:25: Brian describes what he means by coming out of his crash experience ‘fearless:’ “You’re not afraid to live your life fully. We’re all terminal; we’re all terminal everyday. Once you’ve come that close [to dying] you have a renewed vitality. Until that happens, you don’t want to miss a minute of [life]. That puts you on a little different frequency than the average person…”

18:16: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

18:37: Ford notes the SR-71 was developed in secrecy by Lockheed Martin Skunk Works. A legendary engineer, Kelly Johnson, played a key, pivotal role in its design.

19:00: Shul refers to the plane as “the most remarkable aircraft of the twentieth century.” It would be exposed to 500 to 900 degrees Fahrenheit; they had to come up with oil, hydraulic fluid and fuel that would work in those temps.

24:04: Missiles were launched against the SR-71 over 4,000 times in 25 years; they never shot one down.

24:39: Shul describes evading two missiles over Libya on April 15, 1986. While evading the missiles, Shul and Watson reached the remarkable speed of Mach 3.5.

25:00: The faster it went, the better it flew.

27:22: “In a way, it’s a difficult shot, but you never feel invulnerable [despite the high altitude and speed.] When you’re sitting out on the tip of the sword, and penetrating enemy air space, and know that everyone is pointing his missile at you…”

28:37: “It was your ’57 Chevy. It was solid. You knew you were in the best thing that was ever built.”

32:35: “It was alone in its superiority to all other planes…. Just in the way it looked.”

35:45: “The spike inlet system was the heart of why they have never been able to duplicate this system.”

36:57: Shul describes refueling right after take-off and then refueling 3-5 times on a mission.

41:24: Reagan went to so many SALT talks, and he’d come home with some concession; people assumed he was the master negotiator. What you didn’t know was that the Russians would say that they weren’t testing those missiles. But we could say, “Walter and Brian have a photo of it…So you knew you were having an effect in fighting Communism and winning.”

42:52: “It was the epitome of Yankee technology.”

43:51: “Walter [Watson] and I are best friends to this day. Brilliant engineer: only African-American officer in Air Force history involved with this program. You needed a guy like that in the back seat. He is the heart of the mission. I kidded that if we were ever shot down, he was the spy; I was just the driver.”

45:22: “You had to learn to work together as a team because both cockpits were radically different. That’s why the training took one year.”

49:18: Shul has a life-long love of photography that started with Sports Illustrated action shots. He got himself a small instamatic during pilot training, when he just started taking pictures. He’d always been a nature lover, too, especially birds and butterflies.

51:04: “As an aviator, I found a deep passion and love for nature’s fliers. I’m in awe of how they do it; what they do. It centers me.” He is now opening up a photo gallery called from Butterflies to Blackbirds.

51:48: “One of the things I learned lying in that hospital bed is if you’re not doing your passion in life, and doing the things you love, you’re wasting those minutes; because it’s all over all too quick.”

53:57: “On April 11^th, of every year, I celebrate my second birthday in life; I could have easily had my life over at 25 years old. I’ve had 42 extra years.”

54:32: Shul’s advice: “Fearlessly approach your passions and do them because you don’t know how many years you have.”

56:27: After retiring from the Blackbird, Shul turned his attention to his lifelong passion of photography. “There’s more to life than just flying an airplane. There’s more to life than just one chapter. I hope my book has more than one chapter.”

58:14: Dawn and Ken sign off.

Episode 14: Dominic D’Agostino discusses the physiological benefits of nutritional ketosis

Dominic D’Agostino looks like a bodybuilder. But that doesn’t mean that he eats a diet typical for that sport; on the contrary, the research scientist—and amateur athlete—can go an entire day without eating and says his performance—both in the lab and in the gym—improves because of it.

D’Agostino is perhaps rare in the world of science in that he practices what he preaches. As associate professor in the department of molecular pharmacology and physiology at the University of South Florida, and a visiting research scientist at IHMC, D’Agostino develops and tests metabolic therapies for a range of diseases and conditions for which the ketogenic diet is the cornerstone.

The low-carb, moderate-protein, high-fat ketogenic diet is what he also follows for health and greater mental clarity.

The ketogenic diet for decades has been used, albeit perhaps sparingly in the clinic, to treat epileptic seizures. D’Agostino is working on the development of exogenous ketones in the form of ketone esters for cancer and neurological disorders as well.

For more information on D’Agostino and his research, visit: http://health.usf.edu/medicine/mpp/faculty/24854/Dominic-DAgostino.aspx or http://www.ketonutrition.org.

His IHMC bio is at https://www.ihmc.us/groups/ddagostino/; and his IHMC talk “Metabolic Therapies: Therapeutic Implications and Practical Application”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gONeCxtyH18

D’Agostino is a long-time friend and colleague to STEM-Talk Host Dawn Kernagis, and the two engage in a rich, cutting-edge conversation with knowledgeable input from IHMC Director Ken Ford in this episode.

00:37: Dawn introduces D’Agostino, who goes by ‘Dom,’ and Ken Ford as co-host.

2:14: Ford reads an iTunes five-star review of STEM-Talk from “A Sweet 81,” which is entitled BAM: “Amazing podcast. It’s like candy for the brain. That is, if candy was good for your brain. So it’s like ketones for your brain.”

2:48: Dawn describes Dom’s research: He develops and tests metabolic therapies for CNS oxygen toxicity, epilepsy, neurodegenerative diseases, brain and metastatic cancer. Main research focus past five years: understanding why the ketogenic diet and ketone esters are anticonvulsant and protective to the brain.

4:15: Dom says his interest in science started in high school: He was a football player and wanted to improve his athletic performance. His honors biology teacher got on him to study hard. “I saw biology and science as a way to understand my own biology and physiology to maximize my performance.”

5:23: During his Ph.D. program in neuroscience and physiology at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, his mentor urged him to be an independent thinker. He describes being “thrown into the fire” when he was asked to apply basic science research to medical situations. He specifically looked at how the brain responded to hypoxia.

7:12: He did a post-doc with Jay Dean and also became a recreational diver. “Dean was the only person studying cellular and molecular mechanisms of extreme environments.”

8:36: Of Dean, he said, “The tools he created are filling gaps in the understanding of dive physiology.”

10:19: Nutritional ketosis is important for the metabolic management of diseases, especially seizures.

10:45: Nutritional ketosis works similarly to fasting: you liberate free fatty acids from the adipose tissue and break down stored glycogen levels in the liver. Once the glycogen levels reach a certain level, you start accelerating the oxidation of fatty acids in liver.

11:11: Dom explains how ketosis works: the heart (and muscles) prefers fatty acids over glucose, but they don’t readily cross the blood-brain barrier. So brain energy metabolism will transition from glucose to a fuel source called ketone bodies, which is a by-product of accelerated fat oxidation in the liver. These represent water soluble fat molecules that readily cross the BBB; they help preserve, maintain and enhance brain energy metabolism in the face of starvation.

11:54: The ketogenic diet has a macronutrient ratio that mimics the physiological state of fasting: high fat, moderate protein, and very low carbohydrate.

12:22: Nutritional ketosis has been used for over 90 years to manage drug-resistant epilepsy.

13:25: The ketogenic diet helps control seizures because it’s effective at achieving brain energy homeostasis.

14:28: The Office of Naval Research has played the key and primary role in sponsoring Dom’s research program to develop and test exogenous ketone esters for mitigation of CNS oxygen toxicity in Navy divers.

14:46: “Here was a substance that could potentially mitigate CNS oxygen toxicity; but also at the same time potentially enhance physical and cognitive performance.”

15:27: Of all the ketone esters that Dom and colleagues tested, the one that would elevate beta hydroxybutyrate and acetoacetate more or less in a one to one ratio was most efficacious in controlling seizures.

19:09: The ketone ester worked in every single experiment we did, which was remarkable.

20:20: Dom says they want to move into human studies of testing cognitive resilience under hypoxia using exogenous ketones.

21:00: Dom talks about the potential for ketones to protect against radiation in space as well as in cancer treatments. Adrienne Scheck at the Barrow Neurological Institute has done animal studies on glioblastoma showing that “If animals are in a state of nutritional ketosis, sensitizes tumors to radiation, and makes the radiation much more lethal because ketones have an anti-cancer effect.”

22:30: Basic science supports idea that nutritional ketosis could preserve cognitive and physical functions under conditions of hypoxia; and also preserve the cellular, tissue and physiology of people exposed to radiation. This is especially important for astronauts, who may suffer long-term from cancer.

23:16: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

23:40: Dawn mentions that Dom is taking a metabolism-centric approach to so many conditions, including seizures, cancer, traumatic brain injury, Alzheimer’s Disease, ALS, and muscle wasting. “How to have traction in so many diseases?”

24:37: Dom explains that cellular metabolism relates to so many different disorders.

27:32: A lot of people are turning their attention to cancer metabolism. Cancer growth is tightly linked to insulin, and the liver creates ketones in response to decreased insulin.

30:31: The ketogenic diet abolishes those spikes in glucose/insulin. “That’s a powerful part of efficacy as a metabolic therapy for cancer/managing seizures.”

31:00: Ketone bodies were once considered a bad thing. But in the past ten years ago, they have been appreciated an efficient metabolic substrate for cells; and in the last five years, a powerful signaling molecule that can influence inflammation and endogenous anti-oxidant in cell.

38:33: Anecdotally, patients with Parkinson’s Disease have improved in nutritional ketosis.

40:00: They are also encouraged by research on the effects of nutritional ketosis on brain injury and stroke.

40:50: Nutritional ketosis can, in some cases, mitigate the consequences of traumatic brain injury.

43:08: 80-90 percent of people with brain injury will have seizures. The VA system is looking into this. “Exogenous ketones would be the way to go. Something could be developed that could be taken to the field—either orally or via IV.”

47:45: Undoubtedly cancer is a genetic disease in that certain oncogenes are activated that can cause transformation of a healthy cell to a cancer cell. We believe that the initial insult associated with genomic instability results from a decrease in mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation. And the nucleus senses that.

48:18: Mitochondria are ultimate tumor suppressor; one way to keep them healthy is by feeding them fuels that are metabolized exclusively in mitochondria; ketones (and fatty acids) are metabolized in the mitochondria. We need to enhance our mitochondrial function and biogenesis. “The more we have, the greater bio-energetic potential the cell has for preservation under stress.”

49:20: We’re studying a bunch of disorders, including Angelman Syndrome, a rare disorder characterized by drug-resistant seizures and severely impaired motor function.

50:50: Nutritional ketosis (perhaps specifically the use of IV esters) could also avert the use of anti-seizure drugs that in children can cause developmental delays.

51:18: Brain cancer patients would be great candidates for nutritional ketosis for managing cancer.

53:34: He notes several challenges to getting ketone esters into widespread medical application: funding; IRB approval; patient recruitment. Many institutes will not run a diet trial for cancer. Metabolic-based therapies are not recognized at this time as an effective treatment for disease management. Medical school students are not taught nutrition.

56:10: Ford shares his own positive experience on the ketogenic diet, which he has been on off and on throughout his whole life and continuously for the last decade. He reports a range of physical and cognitive benefits; and is hopeful about the prophylactic potential for age-related diseases.

57:00: Dom shares his experience on the ketogenic diet, which he embraced in 2009. “I thought it was important for a strength athlete to eat six meals a day; on a carb-based diet I was hungry every few hours.” His hunger went down on the ketogenic diet.

58:30: He says making the transition from glucose to ketones was rough. He had glucose withdrawal symptoms in the brain. “I felt foggy initially; but then, there was clarity after two to three weeks. The more I followed the diet, the easier it got for me.” Specific benefits include cognitive resilience when fasting and improved sleep.

1:02:50: Fasting is the quickest way to activate AMPK; the ketogenic diet mimics caloric restriction that will activate AMPK (the suppression of insulin.) The drug metformin also activates AMPK.

1:07:38: They are also doing a lot of studies on the tissue-specific effects of metformin.

1:10:05: The ketogenic diet mimics metformin. One question is: If we use both, can we get a twofer?

1:13:09: Benefits from ketogenic diet are more beneficial (than metformin) for anti-aging. Using both may be synergistic.

1:14:12: They need to do clinical trials of metformin and ketogenic diet, in order to study the metabolic biomarkers.

1:14:35: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

1:16:37: Dom says the data on mTOR is fascinating; and in some ways confusing and conflicting to get through it all. Ketogenic diet can cause suppression of mTOR.

1:18:18: There are studies on how the ketogenic diet impacts the immune system. Adrienne Scheck published recently a paper on how the ketogenic diet could make the immune system hyper-vigilant in seeking out cancer cells.

1:19:00: The ketogenic diet activates AMPK and decreases mTOR.  Ford and D’Agostino discuss the subtle interplay between AMPK and mTOR and the possible trade-offs between health-span and longevity, especially in the context of sarcopenia.

1:19:25: The ketogenic diet, caloric restriction, intermittent fasting, and metformin converge on these pathways that are of intense interest to pharmaceutical companies.

1:20:00: Dom recommends a ketogenic diet to anyone who has had cancer and wants to prevent its recurrence. “The emerging animal data is enough” to convince him of its efficacy; he also would recommend metformin and intermittent fasting.

1:25:00: Branch chain amino acids that work through the activation of mTOR can preserve weight in animals with cancer cachexia. Could also be useful for sarcopenia.

1:26:52: Dom’s recommendation for muscle building/maintenance: “Lift heavy stuff and eat just enough to recover.”

1:27:55: Ford calls IGF-1 a “Goldilocks hormone: low and high levels both seem problematic.”

1:29:46: Dom says it’s important to make the distinction between circulating and local IGF-1. Strenuous, low-bearing exercises can increase local IGF-1, and the ketogenic diet sensitizes the body to local IGF-1.

1:32:22: Chronically elevated IGF-1 levels are not a good thing.

1:34:00: Ford recounts a significant decrease in his own circulating IGF-1 levels as a result of the ketogenic diet.

1:34:45: Ford notes that aging athletes avoid the ketogenic diet because they think it will lower IGF-1 and therefore lower their muscle protein synthesis. “But they are not making the distinction between local and circulating IGF-1; nor the distinction between a denser collection of receptors and more sensitive receptors.”

1:35:20: Athletes who do well on the ketogenic diet include those doing distance running, cycling, rowing; weight-class restricted sports.

1:36:00: The Elite Gymnast published a study of athletes on a modified Atkins diet and the ketogenic diet; those on the latter had maintenance of strength and more significant body alteration. “The use of the ketogenic diet for performance really shines in the context of trying to make weight for a certain event.” Or where the power to weight ratio is important, such as in wrestling or cycling.

1:37:37: Dom cites study of elite-level endurance athletes by Jeff Volek and Stephen Phinney.

1:39:00: Another study showed that testosterone was 25-30 percent higher in people on the ketogenic diet (vs the Western diet); they also gained muscle strength and size.

1:41:10: We typically become increasingly carb-intolerant with age.

1:42:45: Dom would most like to see FDA approval for exogenous ketones in epilepsy patients soon.

1:43:30: “Developing metabolic-based treatments (where nutritional ketosis is the cornerstone) for neurological diseases and cancer… is the thrust of what I want to accomplish as a scientist.”

1:44:40: Dom mentions a number of people in his lab who are doing excellent work, including his wife Csilla Ari, who spearheaded work on an ALS project and is studying the effects of nutritional ketosis in behavior disorders such as anxiety. Her work showed that animals in nutritional ketosis were easier to handle.

1:48:00: Dom says ketones might have application for treating PTSD in the military.

1:49:00: Dom and Csilla have a rescue dog from the Tampa Humane Society: “He’s our recovery. We go on nightly walks; we go to the beach a lot and bring our dog with us whenever we can.” They also love international travel and visited several countries in Southeast Asia on their recent honeymoon.

1:51:00: Dom explains his optimistic outlook and good nature: “To a large extent, it’s who you surround yourself with. If you’re grateful, it’s hard to be angry.”

1:52:30: His advice to young scientists: “You really have to follow what you’re passionate about. Identify people who are doing what you want to do. Contact those people; follow their paths. If you’re really passionate, and your research is meeting a need for someone, you’re going to be happy and fulfilled.”

1:54:35: Ford calls Dom’s research “important, innovative and impactful.”

1:54:55: Dawn and Ken sign off.