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.

Episode 13: Kelvin Droegemeier talks about the past, present and future of weather prediction

When Kelvin Droegemeier watched the Wizard of Oz as a child, the tornado scenes scared him so much that he didn’t want to look. Today, the esteemed meteorologist watches storms for a living—with a particular interest in tornados.

From his upbringing in central Kansas—where he grew up marveling at weather and storms—to his undergraduate internship with the National Severe Storms Lab, Droegemeier was primed for a brilliant career in meteorology.

Droegemeier is currently the vice president for research at the University of Oklahoma, where he is also Regents Professor of meteorology; Weathernews Chair Emeritus; and Roger and Sherry Teigen Presidential Professor.

He is also the vice-chairman of the national science board at the National Science Foundation. In 1989, he co-founded CAPS, the Center for the Analysis and Prediction of Storms. This center pioneered storm scale numerical weather prediction with data simulation, which ushered in a whole new science of studying the weather.

Droegemeier talks with STEM-Talk Host Dawn Kernagis and co-host Tom Jones about the past, present and future of weather prediction, both in the U.S. and globally.

For more information on Droegemeier, check out his home page at the University of Oklahoma: http://kkd.ou.edu as well as his biography at the National Science Board: http://tinyurl.com/zwwvav9.

Here is also the report that came out of that, entitled “Hurricane Warning: The Critical Need for a National Hurricane Research Initiative: http://www.nsf.gov/nsb/publications/2007/hurricane/initiative.pdf

00:47: Ken Ford describes Droegemeier as a pioneer in understanding thunderstorm dynamics and predictability, computational fluid dynamics, aviation weather, modeling and predicting of extreme weather, among other areas.

1:13: Dawn says: “Kelvin has greatly shaped the scientific landscape in meteorology and storm prediction and tracking. His work has no doubt saved many lives.”

2:00: Ford was co-chairman on the National Science Board Task Force on Hurricanes, Science and Engineering in 2005-06. “Living in Pensacola and having just experienced Hurricane Ivan, and then Hurricane Katrina, I was highly motivated to work on this problem…. Around here we’ve come to fear hurricanes with Russian names like Ivan and Katrina.”

3:20: Ford reads iTunes review from “ARFO6C”: “Brilliant, just brilliant.”

4:37: “Growing up in central Kansas, I was exposed to interesting weather year-round. I remember as a child being fascinated by the power and the grandeur of the atmosphere, and how quickly the weather could change.”

7:00: Droegemeier is especially interested in spring storms and wind. “To me, the perfect day is 60 degrees, low clouds, winds at 40 mph…. [There is something] so wonderful and powerful about the wind.”.

11:06: As a child, Droegemeier was interested in science, but it wasn’t until his undergraduate work study job at the National Severe Storms Lab, where an advisor suggested graduate school, that his academic interest in weather was sparked.

12:35: He went to graduate school at the University of Illinois to work with a person who was a pioneer in using super computers to make 3D models of thunderstorms. They looked at storms’ rotation, or the pathways to understanding how tornados form.

13:50: He describes “seminal changes in the last 20-30 years in meteorology, driven by high-performance computing.”

15:04: Twenty years ago, the first national network of Doppler weather radar also emerged. This allowed sensing the directional movement of precipitation particles.

17:30: He says the data simulation models have “dramatically improved over the last two decades. We are able to predict up to 72 hours more precisely than what we were able to do twenty years ago [predicting] up to 36 hours.”

18:00: CAPS is one of the first 11 science/technology centers funded by the NSF. It was selected out of 323 applicants. The premise was the following question: ‘Could you use a computer model to predict thunderstorms in advance of their occurrence?’

21:45: Droegemeier talks about project Hub-CAPS, with American Airlines, to predict storms. They then created a private company to commercialize the forecasting technology to different types of industries worldwide, including communications and transportation. That company was called Weather Decision Technologies, Inc.

22:49: 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.

26:05: Climate models are much more driven by boundary conditions than initial conditions. Boundary conditions include vegetative cover, changes in biogeochemical cycles, the solar cycle, volcanic eruptions and things like that.

28:01: “Science never ends, and models are never perfect, but I think they’re getting better and better all the time,” Droegemeier says, in describing new climate models that include information about microbiomes and organisms in the ground and how these influence the carbon cycle.

28:33: “The amount of money we spend on research is a pittance compared to the massive economic loss we have from devastating storms.”

28:58: “Fifty percent of the population in the U.S. lives within fifty miles of the coastline.” One area in need of improvement is better building codes.

29:16: Cumulative disruptive events, not just big events, have a major impact/economic toll. They cause delays in construction projects, cancelled flights and energy plant closures.

30:05: Droegemeier emphasizes the importance of the human element in storm tracking and prediction. “The key thing is we are dealing with people who have to make decisions. It’s also a human behavioral problem.” The key to preventing death, he adds, is taking a more comprehensive view of the issues.

31:16: “When someone receives a warning, the first thing they do is seek confirmation: they call a neighbor, turn on the TV. They lose time.”

33:30: In 1956, 519 people died in tornados. In 2011, 550 people died. The population has increased, so this is a successful result, but to reduce the death toll even further, Droegemeier insists on the human element.

34:12: “Understanding how people receive, interpret and act on information. Those pieces are very important. I think once we crack the code on that, we’ll see the death toll go down.”

34:53: Droegemeier says “My mantra is zero deaths.” He compares his goals to reduce tornado deaths to the reduction of wind shear accidents in commercial aviation: There were a lot of deaths in the 1970s; but through training, and better technology, there has not been a crash since the mid-80s.

35:48: The big snow storms in Washington D.C. and New York City last January were well-forecasted. “People saw it coming from a long way away.”

37:20: Droegemeier talks about intense storms in Moore, Oklahoma, where he lives.

38:20: “During a tornado, the last place you want to be is in your car, which becomes like a missile.” Despite this, people will flee en masse in cars after hearing the media report tornado warnings.

39:50 Hyperbolic messaging inspires people to flee instead of stay put (which they often should do.)

40:10: “We have to become more sophisticated in our messaging. It’s not a one-size-fits-all audience.”

42:00: Social media is having a more prominent role in weather prediction/messaging. The challenge is that people are now bombarded with multiple sources of information. The National Weather Service is the single authoritative source. Television stations have their own radars, add their interpretations.

43:00: “How do people navigate this tremendous blast of information? Trust is extremely important; most people seek confirmation.”

43:43: Droegemeier says misinformation risks creating upheaval, but he has never (fortunately) seen that happen.

44:25: 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.

45:05: There are computing facilities in Maryland, and a back up facility in Florida; plus 168 Doppler radar networks (with dual polarization capability; they can detect/distinguish different types of precipitation.)

47:28: Cybersecurity is extremely important for National Weather Service.

48:00: Social scientists at Oklahoma University gather data from Facebook and other social media sources.

49:00: Droegemeier and Ford, when they were on the National Science Board, proposed a National Hurricane Research Initiative. This involved researching hurricanes in a new way; creating a virtual lab; modeling both human behavior and buildings’ reactions.

51:30: The proposal received some Congressional support for a couple of years, but no money was appropriated. That was ten years ago, and the ideas in the report haven’t gone away.

53:03: Hurricanes such as Ivan, Katrina and Rita still have lingering impacts, particularly the economics of closed businesses, lost insurance coverage, etc.

53:40: A lot of building codes just aren’t enforced. A lot of property loss could be prevented.

54:17: Ed Lorenz said that large scale events have greater predictability because the physics driving them is simpler; two dimensional. Forecasting individual clouds/cloud coverage is very difficult.

56:48: Two weeks is the theoretical limit of weather prediction, which we will never be able to surpass.

57:30: Droegemeier foresees the development of a global model for individual thunderstorms in the next 30-40 years.

58:30: Every part of the atmosphere talks to every other part of atmosphere.

58:50: There is a lot of storm energy in the space from the ground up to two or three miles high in the atmosphere, but we don’t have sensors sitting in this area. Drones show promise for getting information.

1:02:39: Droegemeier has personally been very close to tornados, but he has not yet been in a hurricane. He has experienced winds at 120 mph, and been in a situation where his car was totaled.

1:04:30: Studying weather can be comprehensive, involving even humanists: He knows a classics professor studying climate change in Ancient Greek culture/how that affected human health.

1:06:25: The Space program has been valuable in weather forecasting since the 1960s, with the use of satellites. Thunderstorms produce X-rays.

1:08:00: We still have students willing to chase storms and lightning.

1:08:15: Dawn thanks Kelvin for being on the show.

1:09:00: Dawn and Ken sign off.

Episode 12: Dale Bredesen discusses the metabolic factors underlying Alzheimer’s Disease

‘Would you rather remember: the latest episode of Friends, or how to speak?’ asks Dr. Dale Bredesen, a nationally-recognized expert on neurodegenerative diseases.

We don’t have to think about the answer to that question. In fact, we are biologically programmed to preserve speech and forget the television show. But physiological changes occur as we age, which begin to affect our ability to speak, walk, and remember names and faces.

The most extreme and recognizable form of this is Alzheimer’s Disease, which Dr. Bredesen states is the third leading cause of death in the United States. He has come up with a novel therapeutic approach that first investigates the underlying metabolic changes leading to the disease.

Bredesen’s approach, called MEND (metabolic enhancement for neurodegeneration) helped a 65-year-old woman recover her functional memory, after her first physician had written her off as bound to the same demise of her mother, who suffered and died from Alzheimer’s Disease.

Bredesen shares these and other insights in this episode of STEM-Talk, where he and host Dawn Kernagis engage in a rich and thought-provoking conversation about the future of treating neurodegenerative and other diseases.

Bredesen has been on the faculty at UCSF, UCSD. Currently, he divides his time between UCLA and the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, of which he is founder and CEO: http://buckinstitute.org/bredesenLab

For a close-up look at Dr. Bredesen’s work, check out his papers in the Journal Aging: http://www.impactaging.com/papers/v6/n9/full/100690.html ; http://www.impactaging.com/papers/v7/n8/full/100801.html.

As well as is his paper on ApoE4 in the Journal Neuroscience: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26791201

00:55: Dawn introduces Dr. Bredesen as a nationally-recognized expert on neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s Disease.

1:17: Ford explains that Bredesen’s research has found that AD stems from an imbalance in nerve cell signaling. In the normal brain, specific signals foster memory making, while balancing signals support memory breaking. In AD, the balance of these opposing signals is disturbed. Nerve connections are suppressed, and memories are lost.

1:47: Dawn adds that Bredesen’s findings, which support the view that AD is a metabolically driven, neurodegenerative process, are contrary to the popular belief that the disease is derived from an accumulation of plaques in the brain.

2:50: Ford reads Mark Riff’s 5-star iTunes review: “Fantastic line-up. And what a wealth of cutting edge information. Just having access to these incredible minds is unbelievable. Can’t wait to see what’s coming up.”

3:15: Dawn describes Bredesen’s background: college at Caltech, medical school at Duke University, Chief resident in neurology at UCSF, where he was also a post-doc in Nobel Laureate Stanley Prusiner’s laboratory.

4:02: Bredesen describes how he got into research, first as an undergrad at CalTech. He went to medical school to understand how diseases affect the brain, and specifically alter learning and memory.

4:47: “The whole molecular neuroscience revolution of the 1980s and 1990s has really offered us the novel tools to understand these diseases,” adding that until now, treating and reversing neurodegenerative diseases like Huntington’s and Lou Gehrig’s has been the greatest area of biomedical failure. “This is exciting time where we are starting to develop therapies.”

5:52: The development of large data sets and systems biology is having a major impact on illnesses. People would formerly spend their whole career on one mechanism, but now we’re realizing disease is multi-factorial.

7:05: AD is a network imbalance that is very analogous to osteoporosis. Signals contribute to osteoblastic activity, which is laying down the bones. Other signals contribute to osteoclastic activity, or taking up the bones. For most of our lives, these signals are “beautifully balanced,” which becomes imbalanced as we age. In AD, similarly, synaptoblastic activity is imbalanced with synaptoclastic activity, which destroys synapses.

9:53: Bredesen talks about the “dozens and dozens of signals that alter the synaptic balance” in AD, including: ApoE4, estradiol, Free T3, Free T4, testosterone, exercise, sleep, melatonin.

10:50: AD for most people is not a disease. It is a programmatic downsizing of the synaptic network. Much like apoptosis, or synaptosis. “Imagine you have a company of 10,000 employees that is essentially headed for the red. APP (beta-amyloid precursor protein) is essentially like your CFO who is looking at all inputs. The first thing you do is shut down hiring. First thing in AD is you do not store new memories.”

12:20: You’ve spent your whole life selecting out the most important knowledge, much as we are actively forgetting things all the time.

12:43: AD is three subtypes: two are programmatic downsizing and one is truly an illness.

13:13: 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.

16:02: ApoE has turned out to be extremely important, even evolutionarily. When as a species, we transitioned from simians to hominids 5-7 million years ago, an over-representation of inflammatory genes accompanied that change. That is what partly allowed for the transition: We went from being arboreal creatures to roaming the savannah, and fighting with each other/other animals. So we suddenly had to heal wounds and eat microbes in raw meat, which pro-inflammatory genes allowed us to do.

17:30: ApoE4 has conferred certain survival benefits; but it has also increased our risk for AD, cardiovascular disease and is under-represented in centenarians.

19:28: ApoE4 enhances NF-kB and reduces activation of SIRT1.

20:40: ApoE4 helps us during the first forty years of our lives, and if we are living in more challenging, third-world environments. However, later in life, it’s a negative. But it allows you to do well with little food. But bad with too much food.

26:00: With cancer you have tumor suppressor genes and oncogenes; if you have a mutation, you end up with a run-away full forward process of tumor cells.

28:00: Back in 1993, they discovered receptors that respond to withdrawal of trophic support.

30:30: Numerous receptors signal the presence or loss of trophic support.

31:30: APP is an integrating dependence receptor over many of these trophic influences.

32:54: “There is a trophic, anti-trophic balance that is out of balance in people with AD. We can alter this balance in people and make them much, much better.”

33:45: Bredesen describes a 65-year old woman who was having AD symptoms. She consulted Bredesen, who put her on MEND, and three months later, she was back to work, with her memory better than it had been in thirty years.

35:26: You don’t just try to tweak one input, but as many as you can.

36:08: With HIV, it took three drugs to change the landscape of HIV. AD is more complicated.

37:40: This approach works well in all stages, except late stages.

40:10: AD pathophysiology is related to metabolic changes. We start by evaluating the person’s metabolic profile, including: red blood cell magnesium; inorganic and organic mercury status; free and bound testosterone; iodine status. These are things that drive the imbalance.

43:03: People with AD express 10-25 abnormalities; asymptomatic people only express a few.

44:27: Unlike cancer drugs, which often come with side effects, the drugs they are using for these metabolic imbalances in AD first make people feel healthy. The cognitive function follows from the metabolic function.

45:20: AD has been called Type 3 Diabetes.

47:20: For thousands of years we’ve been dealing with small data sets. “But here [with the brain], we are dealing with a very complicated organism. Physicians have had to be intuitive, good guessers.”

48:03: “For 21^st century medicine …. The future is for larger and larger data sets, and less and less guesswork.”

49:13: Why did you get this/what’s driving it metabolically? This is a 21^st century approach to AD. With so many disparate risk factors, this is not a simple situation.

52:00: Contributing factors include insulin resistance; various inflammatory mediators like NF-kB; hormonal imbalance; exposure to toxins like mercury.

55:20: ApoE4 protects against the third group of AD, which is amyloid positive. It strikes younger people. Agraphia (inability to write) anomias (recall names of common objects)—associated with cortical presentations instead of hippocampal presentations.

58:45: Clinical trials deal with one variable. We have to look at multi-variable and personal trials.

1:02:30: The functional medicine movement looks at the biochemical parameters affecting the underlying problem.

1:04:45: In the early 1800s, a doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis was looking at why women were dying after childbirth, at least those whom medical students had delivered. The women using mid-wives did not die. He discovered that it was because medical students were working on cadavers and were transferring something to the women, so they developed hydrochloride approach to preventing this, and the mortality dropped to almost zero. The point is that small overlooked points in medicine can provide big change.

1:7:00: 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.

1:8:05: 75 million Americans are ApoE positive. We should have a national program to get your genome tested and see if you are ApoE positive. “If we initiated this globally, you could dramatically reduce global burden of dementia.”

1:12:42: Bredesen describes his first spark for studying the brain: I was a freshman at CalTech and read the Machinery of the Brain, and I was hooked.

1:14:00: I wanted to go to medical school and study the big picture of driving what’s happening when you get hit in the head, or Huntington’s disease.

1:14:53: There is a schism between 20^th century medicine, where you ask what the problem is; and 21^st century medicine, where you ask why the problem exists.

1:15:55: The metabolic approach will be the foundation upon which future drug development is based.

1:16:45: Bredesen describes his first aha moment: when he discovered that the receptor that was supposed to be involved in supporting neuronal growth instead induced death.

1:21:25: Bredesen says that over the years, he’s modified his diet, with the help of his wife, an integrative physician, to counter the high simple carb tendency in the American diet.

1:22:22: High stress and little sleep…unquestionably impact AD-related balance.

1:23:44: Dawn thanks Dale.

1:25:07: Dawn and Ken sign off.

Episode 11: Kirk Parsley discusses why good sleep is more important than nutrition and exercise

If we could only sell people on the importance of sleep as successfully as we sell them on the pleasures of sex, we’d have a much healthier—and happier bunch. This is one of sleep expert Kirk Parsley’s messages.

Parsley calls sleep “the greatest elixir,” and places its importance above that of both exercise and nutrition. Yet, this simple physiological need is hard to satisfy in a society that glorifies business and overworking—and loves its electronics, which don’t exactly prepare the body for sleep.

Parsley discusses these and other issues with STEM-Talk host Dawn Kernagis. He talks about how his background as a Navy SEAL led him to a career in medicine, focused on sleep. He also explains why sleep is important—and how you can get more of it.

Parsley served as the Naval Special Warfare’s expert on sleep medicine, and has been a member of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine since 2006. He is also the inventor of the Sleep Cocktail, a supplement designed for the sleep optimization of Navy SEALs: http://www.sleepcocktails.com

A much sought-after sleep expert, this podcast marks Parsley’s 100^th podcast interview. You can find more information on him at his web site: www.docparsley.com. You can find his TED talk at http://tinyurl.com/pw9h7qz

4:10: Dawn welcomes Kirk.

5:00: Kirk joined the Navy SEALs after high school and stayed for nearly seven years. “I quickly realized that was a young, single man’s job, and I was becoming neither.”

6:09: Kirk volunteered at the San Diego Sports Medicine Center to qualify for physical therapy school, but found the field too limited, so he shadowed doctors and decided to pursue medicine.

7:00: He attended the military’s medical school. “They were going to pay me to go to medical school instead of the other way around…”

9:58: The SEALs came to him for medical advice. “The most palatable way for me to talk about it in the military was through sleep. They didn’t really want me talking about testosterone. Adrenal fatigue is sort of a pseudo-scientific term. So inadvertently I became a sleep guy.”

10:40: “I don’t think there’s any area of your life that isn’t significantly impacted by sleep. Good quality sleep is probably the most important elixir there is.” He places it above both nutrition and exercise.

11:35: Sleep is a hard sell, with the advent of factory jobs and the idea that time is money.

13:55: “My message is the more you sleep, the more work you get done.”

14:58: “The big problem with sleep is …. Once you fall asleep until you wake up, you don’t really have any objective experience of that.”

15:50: Polysomnographs reveal that some people wake up 300 times a night, but say they slept fine.

16:13: You don’t need the same amount of sleep every day. Seven and a half hours is the average amount of sleep we aim for to enhance the immune system.

17:05: Kirk compares proper sleep to taking your daily vitamin. “You can’t really tell the true benefits of proper sleep until you’ve done it for a month or so.”

17:40: Wearable tech gadgets such as Fitbit and Jawbone measure how much you move during sleep and equate that with sleep quantity. “The truth is you could stare at your ceiling, never move, and never sleep, and it would say you got this awesome night of sleep.”

19:00: Some devices also measure heart rate variability; others, placed under your pillow or on your nightstand, record your respiratory rate. Some iPhone apps capture snoring.

19:40: Polysomnographs are the gold standard for determining how much somebody sleeps.

20:00: Everyone has a different sleep metric: mood, athletic performance, project completion rate/satisfaction.

21:12: Sleep deprivation leads to anxiety, which is already a big problem for entrepreneurs and other professionals.

21:20: 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.

22:55: Stage 1 sleep is the decision to get in bed and try to start falling asleep.

23:19: Stage 2 is “pre-sleep”: when you are not quite asleep, but somewhat aware of your environment.

24:10: Stage 3 and 4 sleep is deep sleep. Delta and Theta brainwaves occur. Predominantly the first four hours are deep sleep; the last four hours are REM (rapid eye movement).

24:53: What happens during deep sleep is the opposite of fight or flight. The immune system is at its highest function; you are secreting maximal growth hormones/testosterone. It is the only time the body is repairing itself.

26:00: Some medications and alcohol interfere with deep sleep.

26:55: During REM, you experience the most most vivid dreaming; emotional categorization.

27:20: People who sleep adequately say they dream a lot because they have gotten lots of REM.

28:00: If you wake up during deep sleep, you’re going to feel bad. The adrenals have to ramp up.

29:25: Kirk discusses iPhone apps that measure sleep cycles.

31:00: During sleep, neurotransmitter changes occur in the brain, and a cleansing of the glymphatic system.

32:32: When we are tense, there is a build-up of adenosine; that’s why when we’ve had a hard day, we feel like sleeping. Sleep pressure is driven by adenosine.

33:34: People with intense schedules fall asleep easily because of a lot of sleep pressure: a lot of adrenal hormones are circulating throughout body. As soon as they flush out all of the neurotoxins/adenosine, the adrenal function wakes them up. They often say, “I fall asleep in 30 seconds” as well as, “I sleep for two hours, and I’m wide awake.”

35:24: We are the only animal that sleep deprives ourselves on purpose. The only time other animals don’t sleep is if they are being stalked by a predator or the brain senses famine.

36:42: Chronic sleep deprivation compromises our pre-frontal cortex-executive functioning, which means: our ability to make decisions and solve problems; our reaction time and attention span.

38:00: When the body is sleep-deprived, it is less anabolic; is has to secrete stress hormones to get through the day; that’s why people use stimulants.

39:17: Sleep adaptation studies show that the average person living in the Western industrialized lifestyle settles down at needing 7.5 hours of sleep.

43:05: A genetic variant allows some people to sleep less and not suffer sleep deprivation as badly as the average person.

45:00: “If you were about to have surgery, and while you were reading consent forms, the surgeon has a shot of whiskey, no one would be comfortable with that. If that guys takes a shot every two hours, he’s performing like someone who has been up for 18 hours in a row; and we accept that all the time.”

45:44: We put pilots in air who have been sleep deprived for four nights—especially transcontinental pilots.

49:28: 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.

50:15: Sleep drugs go after the GABA analogues.

52:45: Sleep drugs on average shorten the time it takes to get to sleep by 15 minutes, and lengthen it by 30 minutes; but they fundamentally damage sleep architecture and damage REM sleep by 80 percent.

53:13: Over the counter drugs such as Benadryl block histamines.

53:34: Alcohol affects stages 3 and 4 sleep and REM.

54:32: Sleep drugs are helpful to get back on track if you are jet lagged or confronted with an emotional trauma. But 69 percent of people taking sleep drugs take them every night.

58:28: Kirk encourages engaging in sleep rituals with the same regularity as you might stick to a workout schedule.

1:00:24: Improve your sleep by decreasing stimulation to the brain an hour before bed by doing yoga, meditation, reading.

1:04:20: Melatonin is major hormone involved with sleep. Most people take way too much, decreasing their brain’s sensitivity to melatonin. From the time the sun goes down, your brain will only produce between 3 and 6 micrograms of melatonin.

1:08:18: Kirks discusses the link between sleep deprivation and depression.

1:09:00: Kirk discusses his sleep supplement. It can cross blood brain barrier. It’s low-dose, for sleep initiation. It’s meant to compensate for whatever is sub-optimal about sleep habits.

1:11:19: Mentions web site: www.docparsley.com where you can see other podcasts, read blogs, find more information. Web site is being re-launched: Will have new blog.

1:12:15: His sleep drug, sleep cocktail, will be renamed because a lot of people think it’s an alcoholic drink.

1:13:43: Dawn thanks Kirk.

1:14:09: STEM-Talk’s “double secret selection committee” may invite Kirk back for a second interview as there is much more to discuss.

1:14:23: Dawn and Ken mention that Dr. Parsley will be visiting IHMC and giving a public lecture in the Evening Lecture Series.

1:14:29: Dawn and Ken thank the audience for terrific support during the launch of STEM-Talk and mention that STEM-Talk was immediately featured in iTunes’ New and Noteworthy category and was actually in the top position at one point.  It has pretty consistently been #1 in both the Science & Medicine and Natural Sciences categories.

1:15:02: Dawn invites the audience to visit the the STEM-Talk webpage where one can find the show notes for this episode and all others.

1:15:10: Dawn and Ken sign off.

Episode 10: Barry Barish discusses gravitational waves, LIGO, and the scientists who made it happen

In many respects, Barry Barish is the quintessential scientist: soft-spoken and modest, he is also completely dedicated to the pursuit of pure science. Barish is currently the Linde professor of physics at Caltech. He’s a leading expert on gravitational waves, and his leadership and advocacy to the National Science Foundation about the need for LIGO (laser interferometer gravitational wave observatory) played a key role in convincing the NSF to fund it. Barish was the principal investigator of LIGO in 1994, before becoming its director in 1997.

The pay-off of Barish’s effort and the NSF decision was huge: Last February, Barish and other scientists announced to the world that they had detected gravitational waves four months before, marking the first ever direct detection since Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves in 1916. The proof came via a chirping sound—played below in this interview—which was the sound-wave translation of the merger of two black holes more than a billion light years away.

Barish talks to STEM-Talk host Dawn Kernagis and co-host and IHMC Director Ken Ford about the history of Einstein’s theory and the science that later ensued to set up this significant discovery. He also talks about the scientists who made it happen.

Barish gave an IHMC lecture in 2009 entitled “Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony: Sounds from the Distant Universe”

Here is a link to the LIGO press conference on the gravitational waves detection: https://cds.cern.ch/record/2131411

1:36: Audio of “the chirp” signaling the detection of a gravity wave emanating from two black holes merging one billion light years away.

2:57: Ford reads a five-star iTunes review from CCPABC: “Love the science-based discussions, which also includes the interviewers, who also know and understand science, a rarity amongst podcast hosts. Love the funny comments along the way. For example, “Stay curious my friends.” And “Walk into a Walmart to see epigenetics at work.” Outlines (show notes) are also helpful for those of us who want to listen to specific sections again for better understanding.”

3:37: Dawn recaps Barish’s career, calling him a “leading light in several areas of physics.”

4:04: In October 2002, Barish was nominated by President George W. Bush to serve on the National Science Board of the NSF. Ford was also on the board. “We immediately connected and worked on the NSB for six years,” Ford said.

5:15: Barish discusses his upbringing and initial interest in science. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, to parents who had not gone to college, Barish said, “I was probably a scientist before I knew it.” The first science question he asked his father was why ice cubes float on water. His father’s answer didn’t satisfy him. “His answers never satisfied me, which I think is kind of the scientific mind.”

6:36: Ford, Kernagis and Barish recall one of their first scientific questions on why the sky is blue.

7:20: Barish grew up around Hollywood, California. “The furthest horizon I could see was Caltech, and that is where I thought I would go to college.” He went to Berkeley instead because he could start mid-year there, and he immediately fell in love with it — and a young girl.

8:55: Barish started as an engineering student, but he liked neither his surveying course nor his engineering drafting course. “By default, I ended up in physics. It’s where I belonged because physics has been great for me.”

11:15: In 1905, Einstein discovered: E=mc^2; and the theory of special relativity: “These solved some long-standing problems in physics in no time at all.”

11:42: In 1915, Einstein came up with the theory of general relativity, which was an extension of the theory of special relativity that added accelerations instead of just velocities.

13:30: In Newton’s theory of gravity, there’s instantaneous action at a distance: When the apple falls, you see it immediately. When something happens in space (a star collapses), it takes light years for the information to get to us. The concept of instantaneous action and distance doesn’t really work for gravity at long distances and Einstein probably realized that.

14:10: In early 1916, Einstein realized in analogy to the theory of electromagnetism, that there would be gravitational waves, but he didn’t prove it very well. He did it by analogy instead of fundamental proof.

14:45: In 1920-21, a British physicist went to the Southern hemisphere and saw a phenomenon that wouldn’t happen in Newton’s theory of gravity, but did in Einstein’s: He had predicted the bending of light: eclipse of sun and as stars went behind the sun their light bent at exactly the amount that Einstein had predicted. “That’s actually what made Einstein a household name.”

15:20: Einstein predicted gravitational waves as a concept, but thought they were too small to ever detect. “Of course that’s because one hundred years ago, he couldn’t envision the types of technologies we would develop.”

16:06: In 1960, Joseph Weber, a student of John Wheeler’s at Princeton decided to look for gravitational waves, using a very clever technique: He made a big cylinder of aluminum, of a diameter equal to his own height and two-three meters long, and if you banged it with a hammer, it rang at some frequency. If a gravitational wave came through, it would ring. “He’s responsible in a very positive way, for starting this field.”

17:10: That student, who turned out to be a “good technologist, but a lousy scientist,” Barish said, wrote a paper touting his own discovery of gravitational waves, which was shot down. “He was bitter that people didn’t believe that he saw gravitational waves, yet he was the one who started the field.”

17:55: A gravitational wave, if it goes through you, stretches you in one direction, and squashes you in another. “It’s like one of these mirrors in an amusement park, where you get taller and thinner if you look at one, and shorter and fatter if you look at the next one. So you get taller and shorter, thinner and fatter at the frequency of a gravitational wave.”

18:25: Barish discusses the creation of interferometers. There are two: in Hanford, Washington (near a Dept of Energy site), and in a pine forest of Louisiana.

20:53: They proposed a final decision to the NSF in 1994. It was the biggest thing at that time that the NSF had ever considered taking on.

21:08: Barish says they made a technical mistake in calling it LIGO, which stands for laser interferometer gravitational wave observatory. The word ‘observatory’ is not a physics word. It is word used by astronomers for their telescopes, and the astronomers thought it was a crazy project.

22:09: “In order to try to find something new, you pretty well have to do something that’s risky, and pushes the technology and pushes the ideas that you have, and oftentimes it doesn’t work. So taking on high-risk, high pay-off projects is something the NSF uniquely does.”

22:30: “Increasingly high-risk projects are getting harder to support. I’m not sure what we got approved in 1994 would get approved by today’s NSF.”

23:00: Ford, referring to the period when Advanced LIGO was under review by the National Science Board, said, “At the time, I was chairing committee on programs and plans (CPP), and certainly I got an earful about why it was a dreadful idea.”

23:50: Barish commends the NSF for taking on a very expensive, high-risk project—and staying with it for 22 years— despite the fact that it had had a certain amount of controversy, and “especially despite the fact that we had not much to show for all those years.”

24:13: The total cost of LIGO was 1.2 billion dollars.

24:36: Barish talks about the major players in getting LIGO up and running: Princeton’s John Wheeler, the father of the general relativity field after Einstein’s generation, and his student Kip Thorne.

26:45: A robust R&D effort started in Europe. At MIT, Ray Weiss assigned his students the idea of doing interferometry.

29:00: Ron Drever from Scotland was brought to Caltech to work on gravitational waves experimentally. MIT and Caltech worked on them together, but Ray was analytical, Drever was intuitive, and they didn’t get along.

30:23: By 1990, a proposal was turned into the NSF, which stimulated the NSF to ask lots of questions.

30:50: The original idea was that the two interferometers would be near the Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California; and in southern Maine. The NSF said that there should be a national competition to decide the respective locations, which as a result, ended up being Washington state and Louisiana.

32:40: “The plan was to make it evolutionary: Build the infrastructure to be flexible enough that we could keep evolving the interferometers as we learned how to do the technology.” That was not the way projects had been done before.

34:37: At a certain point, Barish says that the project got in trouble…it was being done by scientists alone in labs who didn’t get along that well together.

35:20: The NSF was right on the verge of canceling the project when the super collider was canceled by Congress in October of 1993, and around Christmastime, the head of Caltech’s physics department and its president asked Barish to take it over. Within a year, he had hired a lot of good people who were available from the demise of the super collider.

37:00: In 1994 Kip Thorne and Barish testified before the NSF, which is normally done by project managers. The NSF approved LIGO.

37:37: “Continuing with a very strong R&D program through the years has been key to its success. We didn’t over-spend, we met time scale goals. Even though we hadn’t yet made any good science, we managed to satisfy all the goal posts …. They never lost confidence in us.”

38:28: Ford says the detection of gravity waves is a wonderful story: “from Einstein’s initial discovery to the long march of scientists standing on each others’ shoulders…. All of this was for no commercial, military or geopolitical purpose. It was just to know, driven by human curiosity.”

39:08: Barish says, “It’s really emblematic of what the NSF should be about, and of what pure science should be.”

40:09: Barish says we’ve heard the first “beat” or chirp in “Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony” (referring to the title of his IHMC lecture.)

42:22: “Everything we know about our universe comes from the electromagnetic spectrum: looking at visible light, infrared, ultraviolet, x-rays. What we know about the universe has grown tremendously as we move beyond just the optical spectrum.”

43:19: However, all phenomena don’t emit light…black holes don’t emit light. “The two objects we saw were about thirty times the mass of our sun, and about the size of Los Angeles greater area.”

44:20: “It’s going to take years to make more sensitive detectors…both in terms of the future of astronomy/astrophysics and the future of studying the most fundamental things in physics itself…all of this just has a really bright future.”

45:00: Interferometers need to be in extremely quiet environments. But in the Washington location, there were wind generators 10-15 miles away that shook the earth. In LA, huge pipes carried oil from Southern states to Northern states, and they could “hear” the rumbling below.

46:16: “We start with an environment that’s pretty quiet, and then we have to isolate ourselves from everything that’s noisy…but no matter how much we work at it the earth below us shakes at low frequencies, and we have to minimize that.” To do that, they created “a very fancy set of shock absorbers.”

48:24: Barish talks about the international linear collider. “I’m perennially a graduate student; I’m most excited when I’m learning something new.”

52:35: Barish talks about how he pulled together the best physicists from around the world to work on the international linear collider.

55:20: When talking about the likelihood of the international linear collider actually being constructed, Barish said that if it were to be built, that it would probably be in Japan and that the current situation is that the Japanese government has been conducting “super due diligence.”

56:33: Barish discusses being a junior science working with Friedman, Kendall and Taylor (SLAC physicists who won the Nobel Prize for investigations on the deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons). Barish turned down the opportunity to work with them on the project well before their award-winning work.

58:15: Barish talks about his lifelong love of storytelling and fiction.

1:00:46: Dawn thanks Barish for the interview.

1:01:15: Dawn and Ken wrap about the interview. Ford says, “LIGO is a story of courage, curiosity, and intellectual audacity that will be noteworthy for a very long time.”

1:02:10: Dawn and Ken sign off.

 

Episode 9: Rusty Schweickart discusses asteroids and planetary defense

Rusty Schweickart remembers when getting a man on the moon was at the top of the national agenda. JFK’s single minded decision to do that, according to Schweickart, “was perhaps the gutsiest, goal-setting episode in human history.”

And Schweickart was part of that—as the pilot of the first manned test of the lunar module, the lander portion of the spacecraft– during the Apollo 9 Mission in 1969. Schweickart also performed the first space-based test of the portable life support system and spacesuit that was used by the Apollo astronauts who walked on the Moon.

He was later the backup commander of the first Skylab mission in 1973, the first U.S. orbital space station. He served as Director of User Affairs at NASA’s Office of Applications, transferring NASA technology to the private sector. Most recently, he co-founded the B612 Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to defending the earth from an asteroid impact.

In this episode, Schweickart talks with veteran astronaut Tom Jones, also an IHMC senior scientist, about the potential threat of asteroids, the value of space-based asteroid-finding telescopes; and his contributions to getting the U.S. to the Moon in 1969.

Jones and Schweickart also discuss the importance of conveying the hazard posed by asteroids to the general public. The second annual “Asteroid Day” is on June 30^th. For more information: http://asteroidday.org. For more specific information about asteroid hazards, check out: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/neo/groups.html

You can find more information on Rusty at his Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusty_Schweickart

Schweickart has given several lectures, including his IHMC lecture, “Deflecting an Asteroid:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VU5R-x24Wc.

1:18: Schweickart and Jones are both experts in planetary defense against asteroids. When IHMC Director (and STEM-talk co-host) Ken Ford chaired the NASA Advisory Council, Schweickart and Jones co-chaired a council task force for planetary defense. Schweickart also co-founded the B612 foundation, dedicated to the discovery and deflection of asteroids.

2:00: Ford and Jones served as strategic advisors to the B612 Foundation, and its current CEO, former astronaut Ed Lu, will later be interviewed on STEM-Talk.

2:18: Ford said the “sky is falling” syndrome may explain why this issue is not a political or public priority. It’s hard to get political leaders very excited about a potentially cataclysmic event that is certain to happen in the long run, but very unlikely in any given year.

3:23: Ford reads a 5-star iTunes review of STEM-Talk from “Ian”: “I liked the personal aspects of the interviews, and the science is explained at a good level: easy to follow, but not dumbed down.”

3:58: Schweickart talks about the Chelyabinsk asteroid that fell over Russia on Feb. 15, 2013. “It was a pretty good wakeup call. The official attention was relatively narrow and off-base, but the reality is that we have a lot of material now; in addition to that, there’s been some very good analysis showing that we learned a lot from the Chelyabinsk impact.”

6:00: Schweickart discusses the B612 Foundation’s Sentinel Mission, which will be an infrared space telescope orbiting the Sun interior to the orbit of Earth for the purpose of mapping the trajectories of asteroids that may pose a future danger to Earth. “Fundraising for a space telescope has never been done before; it’s a pioneering effort that we got involved in, principally because NASA had not been doing much. We took it on as a private initiative since the government seemed to be lagging a bit.”

8:27: Schweickart explains the importance of space-based telescopes. “Infrared is a very important aspect of these space telescopes that are being proposed. In space, an infrared sensor gives you an advantage. An asteroid is a hot object; it therefore glows in the infrared; the rest of the sky is extremely cold, so you are able to see objects shine very brightly.”

10:45: Schweickart talks about having a telescope between Venus and Earth. It’s a great perch for viewing near-Earth asteroids, but “The price you pay is that you end up very far from earth, and your communication problems/challenges are considerably greater than if you were one million miles from the earth.”

12:40: Schweickart says the NASA NEOCam (near-earth object camera) telescope and the Sentinel Space Telescope would both be a great addition to the overall asteroid armamentarium.

13:40: Smaller objects can only be seen from Earth when they are very close to whatever telescope you are using to look for them.

14:12: “There are about a million city-killer-sized asteroids in the inner solar system, and we’ve found about one percent or less of those. If you go down to the Chelyabinsk impactor size, there are about 10 million of those. We’ve found less than a tenth of one percent of those.”

14:43: “We’ve found a lot of objects that hit the earth every fifty years or so [statistically speaking], and we’d like to find those ahead of time.”

15:15: Schweickart says of the Sentinel Space Telescope: “We’ve calculated that in about ten years, we will find about a quarter of the 20-meter (asteroid) population; and 81% of the city-killer population (40-meter objects).”

16:33: “If you can take something the size of 300 Hiroshima bombs and prevent it from hitting…that’s really the goal. On the other hand, if you can get even a last-minute, hurricane-type warning (2-3 days, a week), even if you can’t prevent it from hitting, you could evacuate a local area, and save a lot of lives.”

17:50: Schweickart talks about the NASA-funded ATLAS (asteroid impact early warning system), following the 2008 entry of an asteroid over Sudan, which was discovered in space 19 hours before it struck Earth.

19:43: 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.

20:02: Jones talks about being an astronaut: “To me, there’s an inescapable education that you get when you’re an astronaut. You can’t help but look down at the earth and see impact scars from past asteroid impacts: both small and large. You look up at the moon from earth orbit and the moon looks very crisp and clear, and it’s of course scarred by thousands and thousands of craters, covering one upon the other.” The goal of planetary protection naturally falls out of this vivid  experience.

21:20: Schweickart says an asteroid impact is the only natural disaster we can potentially prevent. A sizeable asteroid hitting earth might happen only once in a person’s lifetime, and might fall unseen into  the ocean. Yet this largely unseen hazard is real. “If we can use space technology to find these things, to predict an impact and to actually prevent an impact, you’ve gotta do it. That’s a slam dunk.”

23:10: ‘JFK’s goal of getting a man to the moon and back safely by the end of the decade…was perhaps the gutsiest, goal-setting episode in human history.”

24:00: Apollo 9 tested all of the key technologies needed for a lunar landing on the first flight of the lunar module. It also marked the first time the new Apollo space suit was used outside a spacecraft.

27:24: “You spend day after day, and week after week, simulating the things that you are going to do, and in particular, the critical things. In simulations, one thing after another is failing, and you are still trying to get back alive. You get a lot of confidence. The actual flight was much easier.”

29:01: Schweickart recalls testing the Hamilton Standard space suit for Apollo, which he says was far more flexible than previous versions used in the early spacewalks of the Gemini program.

29:40: “Being outside the spacecraft, that’s a real privilege. That’s when the view of the earth comes through to you; this incredibly beautiful planet that we live on; the atmosphere that forms that thin, iridescent blue band that separates this planet we live on from the blackness of space. You come to appreciate ‘mama.’”

30:41: In the mid to late 90s, NASA initiated its program in astrobiology.

31:45: “As soon as you start looking at the origins and history of life on earth, you cannot avoid [considering the effects of] past asteroid and comet impacts on the earth.”

33:35: Schweickart says the next year or so will be a very important time for funding telescopes that are critical to discovering asteroids that might threaten earth. The general public needs to support this issue.

34:20: The Asteroid Day Declaration calls on governments and space agencies of the world to launch an infrared space telescope so we can discover asteroids more rapidly.

34:55: We need to discover asteroids at a rate one hundred times higher than the pace at which we have been discovering them to date. On Asteroid Day, we are asking millions of people involved, to go onto the website, AsteroidDay.org, to sign the Declaration.

36:13: A valuable part of the last planetary defense conference in 2015 was to conduct an Asteroid Impact response exercise.

37:34: Jones said, “One of the biggest problems we face is human nature. How do we get people to plan early to respond to a future and very rare catastrophe so that we have an effective response when the time comes? I think the lessons [from this last exercise] were taken to heart.”

38:45: Schweickart said at that same conference, “national self-interest began to creep in and got in the way of cooperation.” Public confusion about an asteroid impact was also apparent.

42:04: You don’t know precisely where it’s going to hit until very late in the game.

43:40: If we decide to deflect an asteroid, the implications of that effort will affect many countries directly by changing the path of possible future impact points.

44:24: The UN is now on board to take this issue on as a geopolitical challenge.

45:45: The Association of Space Explorers played a key role in advancing UN discussions by commissioning a group of experts to make recommendations for cooperation on the asteroid hazard.

47:30: “For the first time, we are seeing a critical role for the general population to really speak out and insist that we take responsibility for the future of life here on earth.”

48:00: There are two good sources of public information on asteroids: at NASA, neo.jpl.nasa.org (about asteroid hazards); asteroidday.org for information on asteroid day, which is June 30^th.

48:34:  Tom Jones thanks Rusty Schweickart and signs off.

48:43:  STEM-Talk host Dawn Kernagis and co-host Ken Ford briefly discuss episode and invite listeners to visit the STEM-Talk webpage:  stemtalk.us

49:10: Dawn Kernagis and Ken Ford sign off.

Episode 8: Greg Smith discusses the herpes virus

Roughly 80 percent of the U.S. population is infected with the herpes virus. While the virus is very easy to get, it remains dormant in many people, who never even know they have it. This is partly because it effectively evades the immune system, taking up refuge in the central nervous system.

Dr. Greg Smith is a herpes expert. He is a professor in the microbiology-immunology department at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. After obtaining his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, Smith did a post-doc at Princeton University.

His research on herpes looks at novel targets for antivirals and engineering recombinant viral particles as effective gene delivery vehicles.

In this episode, Smith talks with STEM-Talk host Dawn Kernagis about his educational and research path to becoming a herpes expert. He also touches on polio as an example of an earlier virus that was largely defeated, and how that was different than herpes. Finally, Smith touches on the development of viral vectors and vaccines to win against the more severe forms of herpes that some people are genetically predisposed to get.

For a list of Smith’s publications, check out his bio page at web site of Northwestern University: http://tinyurl.com/jl6jsam

:47: Smith’s lab studies the molecular mechanisms that propagate and are responsible for the spreading of Herpes.

2:47: Ken Ford reads 5-star iTunes review of STEM-Talk, from “I prefer DOS IHMC”: ‘Fantastic lineup and well-assembled, informative conversations on fascinating topics. Keep ‘em coming.”

4:18: Smith’s interest in research began in elementary school, when his father bought him an Apple II computer for Christmas—and told him to program his own games. Programming “really helped me think in a logical, progressive way,” Smith said.

5:46: In college, Smith discovered that “molecular biology was a way to get at the programming that underlies life.”

6:12: In graduate school, Smith studied microbes, which he describes as “essentially the best human biologists; if you study them, you are studying yourself.”

7:56: Smith was not interested in viruses initially because they seemed like simple entities. He didn’t want to study just one protein.

8:56: Smith worked with Lynn Enquist at Princeton University, a “bacteriologist-big thinker,” Smith says, who got him thinking: “How do larger, more complex viruses get into our nervous system? That got me started on the path that I’m still on today.”

9:16: Viruses are extremely diverse entities in biology; they are more diverse than the rest of life put together. Any organism is infected by many viruses, which are “small nanomachines that are genetically derived.”

10:43: Smith describes what a virus looks like: a shell made up of a thin layer of protein.

12:00: Smith wanted to study something with a lot of diversity/complexity. With that comes very interesting biology. All viruses have two things in mind: They want to make more copies of themselves, and they want to disseminate those copies all over place. Herpes, because of its larger genetic content and physical size, allows it to do a lot of interesting things to achieve those goals.

13:00: Polio is a small neuro-invasive virus. You ingest it and it replicates in your gut. It can get into your blood, and nerves/spinal chord. This can cause polio myelitis, which was rampant in the 1950s.

14:18: Herpes is evolved to get into nervous system. That is how it survives. It’s extremely good at it.

15:00: Most people know about herpes simplex virus type 1, or HSV-1, which causes cold sores. But it actually goes into the central nerve system (CNS) and sets up shop. It does not express proteins, so essentially lies dormant there. “The immune system doesn’t know it’s there. So now you’ve got it there for the rest of your life.”

17:25: 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.

18:28: Smith answers the question about how the herpes virus gets into the CNS: “The answer here is two-fold: From the virus side, what kind of machinery evolved to allow to achieve that end? From our side, our body’s side, how is it we are protecting our nervous system so that things like this don’t usually happen?”

18:56: Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, our bodies are pretty good at keeping polio at bay. Most people would only get an upset stomach from polio. Most viruses are low-frequency, sporadic things.

20:25: The herpes virus has figured out how to get around all of these barriers—reliably and efficiently.

22:04: The herpes virus has evolved with a big capacity to travel long distances within the body. Smith describes it as “walking from L.A. to New York in a straight line…it travels a very long distance down the nerve fiber to find a neuron deep inside your head.”

23:04: Basically a herpes virus is like a marathon runner. It can’t get lost or stop along the way.

26:52: The best outcome for the virus is for it to effectively go to sleep, so your immune system won’t see that it’s there; and won’t try to remove it. Then it’s established, and you’re carrying it for life.

28:58: Bacteria in our gut is being infected by other viruses, called phages. The complexity of the biology of all this is really astounding, when you look at the bigger picture.

29:19: Dawn comments: “We’re not just human. We seem to be these walking ecosystems.”

29:25: The microbiome would be “one of biggest organs in our body,” Smith said.

30:03: Some people argue that herpes should not be considered pathogenic; but symbiotic. “Nowhere near that many people experience cold sores.” Most people infected don’t exhibit symptomology. But it does replicate in the neurons. “Is this really a pathogen because it doesn’t cause disease most of the time?”

31:56: Chicken pox is also a neuro-invasive herpes virus.

33:11: Herpes simplex virus type I is leading cause of infectious blindness in the U.S. and developing world. On occasion, it will spread from the peripheral nervous system into the central nervous system, and when it does that, the outcome/prognosis is very poor.

34:36: Cold sores are the most common disease manifestation of herpes that you can get. Other complications include: the virus transmitting into the eye and causing loss of vision. Or in the brain, causing encephalitis.

35:34: Herpes type 2 causes genital lesions, which are contagious like cold sores. If a mother giving birth has an active infection, she can transmit the virus to the child, who doesn’t have a developed immune system. C-sections minimize the risk of transmitting the infection.

38:39: Whether or not a person expresses the virus may depend on the genetic background of an individual. You might have a deficiency that doesn’t allow you to mount a good immune response to certain conditions.

39:40: Smith mentions work of Jean-Laurent Casanova at Rockefeller University in New York, who is heading a large project with contributions from several groups. Their research is on children in whom the virus has gone to the brain, which is the most severe form of the infection. Deficient in both copies of gene, so they can’t make the Toll-like receptor-3 protein at all.

43:52: Casanova found that the kids who were deficient in TLR3 were otherwise healthy, which makes some think that the TLR-3 mechanism might have co-evolved with herpes to protect us.

45:00: It turns out the family tree of viruses is consistent with the family tree of mammals. Every species has its own variants of these viruses.

46:07: We are not gong to win this battle by nature alone. Our bodies are not going to develop a way to protect us from the herpes virus. There is no evolutionary path to that end. The viruses are all moving faster than we are.

49:52: Developing viral vectors to deliver genetic information that is beneficial is one long-term application of these studies. And coming up with vaccines.

51:09: If you can make the virus replicate out at the body’s surface, and never get into the nervous system, your immune system will attack and adapt, but the virus won’t be able to hide in the CNS.

52:42: “Reactivation” in the herpes virus can be caused by stress; for example, virus-associated cold sores often show up during times of stress.

55:50: The science of all this is really from the collective enterprise of the researchers. Annually we meet on this specific topic. This is where initial breakthroughs occur…. Where you start putting these puzzle pieces together.

57:53: These viruses will produce these particles, which transmit the virus from cell to cell or person to person. These particles make up a complex machine. It touches a cell, something is triggered, and you get a series of events.

59:40: We’re just starting to understand the nanomachine machine. Every time we understand something, it’s like a wow moment.

1:00:08: Dawn thanks Smith.

1:00:35: Ford caps the interview: “Herpes must be among the more amazing infections; its ability to move about, evade the immune system, and survive in a quiescent but persistent form seems remarkable—and frankly, somewhat worrisome.”

Episode 7: Mark Mattson talks about benefits of intermittent fasting

Intermittent fasting—alternating days in which you fast or eat only a few hundred calories a day—may have significant long-term health benefits, according to some researchers.

Mark Mattson is a leading expert on intermittent fasting, and one of its proponents on a personal level as well. As a neurosciences professor at Johns Hopkins University, and chief of the laboratory of neurosciences at the National Institute on Aging (NIA), Mattson is particularly interested in how fasting can improve cognitive function and reduce the risk of neurodegenerative diseases.

Intermittent fasting might play a role in preventing or postponing neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s, which fifty percent of Americans living into their eighties are predicted to get.

In this episode, Mattson talks with IHMC Director Ken Ford and IHMC visiting research scientist Dominic D’Agostino about the benefits of fasting and the physiological mechanisms behind those benefits.

Mattson is a prolific scientific researcher, and you can find links to some of his work at Mattson ARR 2015 ; Mattson Cell Metabolism 2012 ; and Mattson Sci Amer 2015.

Mattson recently delivered an excellent lecture at IHMC on intermittent fasting and optimizing cognitive performance: http://tinyurl.com/zc2xxhc. You can also find his TED talk at http://tinyurl.com/nt24z5p.

For more information on Mattson’s career and research, check out his Wikipedia page: http://tinyurl.com/gmpd3we

1:30: Ford says, “Intermittent fasting has become very popular and Mark Mattson is, in our view, the premier authority on this matter.”

2:30: Ford reads iTunes five-star review from “Carl”: “Really smart, really interesting people being interviewed by the same. IHMC is a fascinating place, and attracts like-minded people.”

3:57: Mattson’s interest in science began in ninth grade, when he wrote an essay on cryopreservation.

4:29: He got interested in aging during his Ph.D., while studying developmental neurobiology and cell death.

6:37: Mattson spent eleven years at the University of Kentucky at the Sanders Brown Center on Aging.

7:20: Mattson explains the basic rationale behind intermittent fasting: If you challenge yourself/cells bio-energetically through exercise or fasting, nerve cells respond adaptively—and pathways are activated that increase neuronal resistance to stress and age-related neurodegenerative disorders.

8:10: Mattson conducted studies in which he subjected animals to alternative day fasting, with a 10-25 percent calorie-restricted diet on the days in which they ate. “If you repeat that when animals are young, they live 30 percent longer.” The animals’ nerve cells were more resistant to degeneration.

10:10: Mattson explains the “5:2” study: There were one hundred women in two groups: one group ate 25 percent fewer calories daily; the other group ate only 500 calories/day for two days.

10:57: The take-home message: “Women on the 5:2 diet lost more body fat, retained more lean muscle mass, and had an improvement in glucose regulation. This is consistent with what we know about fasting in terms of general energy metabolism.”

12:08: Fasting for 12 or more hours causes fatty acids to go into the blood stream/liver and are converted into ketones, which are a good alternative energy source for cells.

13:00: Mattson describes how fasting may benefit the brain.

14:20: Mattson talks about three types of fasting regimens: the 5:2 diet; alternate day fasting (500-600 calories on “fasting” days); and time-restricted feeding, where you limit time window that you take in calories to six to eight hours.

16:58: Mattson explains the following dietary “myths”: breakfast is the most important meal of the day; it’s necessary to eat three meals a day; it’s healthier to eat mini meals throughout the day than one or two big meals. “Largely this isn’t based on any good science that we can find.”

17:44: Fasting can elevate ketones to high levels—even those higher than are typically induced on a ketogenic diet.

19:34: Ketogenic diets are still used in some patients with epilepsy, and they work.

20:36: Mattson and others have found that both exercise and fasting increase levels of BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor) in the brain.

20:42: We think BDNF is a key mediator of the anti-depressant effects of exercise as well as the most commonly used anti-depressant drugs. Beta-hydroxybutyrate increases BDNF production, which is also important for learning and memory; and neurogenesis.

22:09: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience.

23:00: There is interest in doing controlled clinical trials to test the efficacy of exogenous ketones to enhance brain health. Also, some ongoing trials are looking at the effect of coconut oils and branch chain amino acids on Alzheimer’s Disease.

23:55: There’s been no drug effective in slowing down the disease process in Alzheimer’s Disease.

24:15: With age-related diseases, the biggest impact will be on risk reduction: identifying what people can do in mid-life to reduce the risk of getting these diseases when they get into their seventies and eighties.

25:18: Data now show that if you live to your eighties, you almost have a 50 percent risk of getting Alzheimer’s Disease before you die.

25:42: Studies show that exercise and ketones benefit Parkinson’s Disease patients.

26:47:  Ford discusses a recent study that shows that autophagy is a critical regulator of stem-cell fate, with implications for fostering muscle regeneration in sarcopenia. Autophagy typically declines with age and this may cause stem cells to lose their “steminess” and become senescent. Both intermittent fasting and ketosis increase autophagy …  asks Mattson if this might this account for some of the common benefit sometimes seen in both strategies?  Mattson concurs.

27:36: During the bio-energetic challenge of exercising or fasting, autophagy is increased; in part by inhibiting mTOR. Cells go into a protective mode, reducing overall protein synthesis, and at the same time, improving their ability to remove “molecular garbage.”

28:55: The cells’ recovery period is important for increased protein synthesis, and the growth of muscle cells, dendrites and new synapses. All this could be preventive for sarcopenia.

30:00: Mattson says that it is possible to gain muscle during intermittent fasting, which does not necessarily mean caloric restriction.

31:07: There is quite a bit of evidence that high protein intake is not good for aging.

33:04: Mattson himself practices time-restricted feeding. For four to five days a week, he doesn’t eat breakfast or lunch. Then he will eat after working out and in the evening. “I think I’m more productive this way.” Following this regimen, he has also maintained the same body weight for thirty years.

34:12:  D’Agostino, Mattson and Ford discuss training while fasted.

36:22: “There’s no really solid scientific basis that would support a claim that three meals a day is the healthiest approach.” In fact, it’s very unusual from an evolutionary perspective.

37:00: Mattson’s diet includes fruits, veggies, nuts, fish, yogurt, whole grains, and beans. “At least half my calories are from complex carbohydrates.”

37:48: Exercise changes nerve cell circuits involved in cognition. Antidepressant drugs have a similar effect.

41:13: Plato wrote that he did some of his best thinking while fasting. Upton Sinclair wrote “A Fasting Cure,” and even Mark Twain touted the benefits of fasting.

41:41: “You are able to think more clearly in a fasted state; and you begin to contemplate things that you wouldn’t normally think about if you were in a more satisfied energetic state.”

43:26: The impetus for eating mini meals came from working with diabetes patients. The thinking was, ‘It’s important to avoid big spikes in glucose.’ But evidence shows fasting is better than mini meals for regulating insulin sensitivity.

45:10: Within about one month, people adjust to a fasting diet.

49:45:  Discussion of possible benefits of intermittent activation of mTOR as opposed to chronic low mTOR or continually activated mTOR.

51:45: Mattson explains his role at the NIA as chief of the laboratory of neurosciences. The organization of research at each institute is divided into labs, which are roughly equivalent to departments at a university.

53:15: Most cancer cells rely on glucose and are not able to metabolize ketones. Intermittent fasting and/or ketogenic diets, sometimes in combination with chemotherapy, may slow or stop tumor growth—and perhaps even protect normal cells.

54:56:   Ford and D’Agostino thank Mattson for a great interview.

55:10:   Kernagis and Ford discuss interview and wrap-up show.

 

Episode 6: Michael Turner discusses LIGO & the detection of gravitational waves

Michael Turner is best known for having coined the term “dark energy” in 1998. A theoretical cosmologist at the University of Chicago, Turner has dedicated his career to researching the Big Bang, dark energy and dark matter.

He wrote his Ph.D. thesis on gravitational waves—back in 1978—and nearly four decades later—had a bird’s eye view of their recent detection. Turner was assistant director of the National Science Foundation (NSF), which funded the development of LIGO, which stands for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.

This large-scale physics experiment and observatory, which was led by researchers at MIT and CalTech, discovered, on September 15^th, 2015, the existence of gravitational waves via a chirping noise signaling the merger of two black holes over a billion light-years away. The scientists announced their discovery on February 11^th, 2016.

In this episode, Turner interprets this momentous finding, and talks about some of the big player scientists who worked on LIGO. And some of the behind the scenes activities involved in a “big science” project such as LIGO.

Talking with STEM-Talk host Dawn Kernagis, Turner also shares his early development as a scientist and an important mentorship that shaped his career.

Turner has been a popular presence at IHMC as a guest lecturer. His IHMC talks have over 20,000 YouTube views. https://youtu.be/-rVBLwKuDXA

He is also co-author, with Edward Kolb, of The Early Universe:

1:18: IHMC CEO Ken Ford explains what gravitational waves are.

4:29: Five-star reviews of STEM-Talk on iTunes are starting to roll in. Ken Ford reads one from ‘Bobalapoet’: “The individuals interviewed are articulate, knowledgeable and able to clearly convey information about their fields. The interviewers and the institute are to be congratulated for putting this series together for my and others’ enjoyment.”

6:18: Turner talks about his childhood interest in science. “I was always a curious kid,” he said. He tinkered with electronics and became a ham radio operator, talking to people all over the world. “I almost electrocuted myself several times.”

7:21: “I like to say that I went to best schools that money could buy, in the 1960s, which was public schools in California.” Turner describes various high school chemistry experiments and “creating UFOS over LA.” He loved math, physics, and chemistry.

8:58: Turner discovers that physics is his real passion, and “math was but a tool.”

9:05: Turner’s high school physics teacher took Turner and friends to Monday night lectures at CalTech. “It just opened up this world of stuff that was going on at the forefront of science,” adding that’s when he fell in love with what would become his undergraduate alma mater.

11:00: For his Ph.D., Turner went to Stanford on the advice of Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman.

11:36: Turner went to the University of Chicago in 1978 as an Enrico Fermi fellow. Initially his plan was to return to California as soon as possible, but “I’ve been happily in Chicago ever since.”

12:09: David Schramm, an astrophysicist and Big Bang theory expert, brought Turner to Chicago and mentored him until Schramm’s tragic death from a plane crash in 1997. The two met at CalTech, in the gym, where Schramm was assistant wrestling coach.

14:45: “Dave curved the path of my career from astrophysics and gravitational waves to early universe cosmology.”

16:41: “[Dave’s] toughness and his enthusiasm for science are things that I take with me to this day.”

17:00: “[Dave] really changed the face of cosmology and astronomy at the University of Chicago.”

17:25: 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.

 17:58: Turner discusses his passion for bicycling. He says Chicago is a great place to train because the weather makes you “Chi-town tough.”

18:58: Turner elaborates on calling the gravitational waves discovery “the last big prediction of the theory of relativity.”

20:58: Turner calls the discovery “a Galileo moment.”  “Four hundred years ago Galileo turned the telescopes to the sky, and opened their eyes to the universe, and now we have this new window on the universe.”

22:55: “Galileo would be smiling” about the discovery since he said “make measurable that which is not measurable.” Turner says the challenge in building a gravitational wave detector was to be able to measure such a small distance change over such a large distance.

24:00: When Turner wrote his thesis on gravitational waves in 1978, he thought their discovery was around the corner. It took fifty years.

24:38: The NSF thought LIGO was “moonshot worthy to do.”

25:20: Turner talks about some of the scientists who worked on tools used during LIGO such as the Michelson interferometer (invented by Alan Michelson.)

26:40: LIGO uses lasers and interferometry.

30:11: NSF looked at the proposal for LIGO in the early 1990s and said, “This is a lofty goal. Let’s do this.” CalTech and MIT led the way.

31:05: Turner credits Barry Barish, experimental physicist at CalTech, with really getting the project going.

31:40: LIGO was done in two phases.

33:19: Turner had to make a recommendation to the Director of NSF and subsequently to the National Science Board (which has oversight on large-scale science projects) about continuing the project into the second phase. “It took more than a year for the Board to decide, but they stuck with it.”

35:14: “LIGO is going to earn its O, and become a real observatory. This is going to become a new window on the universe.”

37:00: This discovery qualifies as “Big Science,” a relatively new, post WWII phenomenon.

37:30: “I always harken back to John Kennedy’s quote about going to the moon. He talked about how going to the moon is really hard and said, ‘that’s why we’re doing it.’”

38:18: “Ken Ford was one of these wise people on the National Science Board. They’re the adult supervision in the room.” Turner explains that the Board had to do due diligence to make sure the project was worthy of continuing.

41:31: “These people [National Science Board] were doing a service to the country: by making sure we were spending the money wisely. And also making sure we were taking the calculated risks” behind those really big advances.

43:24: “This is an example where we as Americans can be very proud. Now, other nations including Japan, Germany, and the UK are making investments, but we really led.”

46:48: A year from now, Virgo, the European detector for gravitational waves located near Pisa, Italy, will be done with its upgrades.

49:38: The legacy of the gravitational waves? “The most exciting thing is the thing we haven’t thought of. If history is any guide, there will be wonderful discoveries that will take us in new directions when we open up a new window on the universe.”

51:00: Turner’s next STEM-Talk podcast will be on dark energy and dark matter.

51:23: Also soon up on STEM-Talk: Cal-Tech physicist Barry Barish. Ford says, “I can say with complete confidence that LIGO would not have been successfully constructed without Barry.”

 

Episode 5: Margaret Leinen discusses health of the oceans

Margaret Leinen is a big name in oceanography. She’s the director of the Scripps Oceanographic Institute and vice chancellor of marine sciences at Scripps. She was previously assistant direct of the National Science Foundation, where she worked with IHMC CEO and Director Ken Ford, who calls her “one of the most effective and most pleasant assistant directors of NSF.”

Leinen’s interest in science started early: In high school, she became interested in geology and the history of the earth. When she discovered oceanography in college, she never looked back.

In this episode, Leinen talks about her first dive in the Pacific, where she stumbled onto a huge hydrothermal vent system teeming with worms, clams and other colorful life forms. She also addresses current and future threats to the ocean, a non profit she established to look into mitigating the effects of climate change, and the overall resilience of the oceans.

Host Dawn Kernagis, whose own interest in becoming a scientist—started with her childhood fascination with the ocean—conducts this interview.

3:00: In 2000, NSF director Rita Colwell asked Leinen to come to D.C. to talk to her about working at NSF to coordinate environmental science, engineering and education across entire foundation.

5:32. Leinen says a theme of her career has been cross disciplinary coordination. “I think it takes an optimist, and that’s me, I’m definitely a glass is half full kind of person.”

6:28: “People want to be able to cross boundaries, and most of the time they think that they do, but organizations put obstacles in front of them. My job is to find out what the obstacles are and then embrace them.”

9:10: Leinen talks about her role as director of Scripps, the oldest institute for oceanography, which just celebrated its 114^th birthday.

10:00: Scripps has programs with University of California-San Diego medical and pharmacy schools. The oceans influence human health—and “Not just safety of seafood, red tides, or harmful algal blooms.”

10:24: “When you take a big breath of that wonderful salt air, you’re also inhaling thousands of viruses and bacteria from the ocean.” That may be harmful, or it may confer immunity.

11:57: We’ve gone beyond detecting climate change and attributing it to what is natural or human-induced; and we are now interested in how it impacts humans, the land and oceans—and how we must adapt.”

12:34: Understanding all these threads is “deeply inter-disciplinary.”

13:34: Leinen talks about the non-profit she started, the Climate Response Fund, to research “climate engineering,” or mitigating climate change.

17:15: The Climate Response Fund was a group of scientists and policy experts working with the public, governmental groups, non-profits and scientific groups. “It was a facilitator of discussions.”

18:00: In the U.S., research agencies have been reluctant to fund research in climate engineering, both because of the lack of a good policy framework as well as the potential pubic response. European groups have also struggled.

20:58: Leinen describes her early interest in geology as a high school student. Later, in college, “I just got seduced by oceanography.”

23:05: Leinen talks about the Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFS), which looked at the carbon cycle in the ocean: “The ocean’s role in really the thing that keep the planet alive.”

24:13: The Equitorial Pacific extends across half the planet. “It’s very, very productive,” but that depends on whether it’s an El Nino time or not.

25:05: During normal (non El Nino) times, there is “An upwelling of deep waters,” and the breakdown of organic material by microbes. “During an El Nino this is limited, [the ocean] is not as biologically productive.”

26:50: JGOFS involved nine different two-month long cruises from the U.S. team, with 70 major scientists and their respective teams. There were other teams from Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Ecuador, Chile.

33:00: Leinen describes her first Alvin dive (three-person submersible), in an area off Washington State.

36:00: There he found a huge hydrothermal system, covered with worms and clams and spewing hot water. “My very first Alvin dive landed in the middle of one of the largest hydrothermal vent systems that we’ve ever seen.”

41:43: “I think the biggest threat to the ocean is our ignorance of it.” Some of the biggest threats include acidification, sea level rise, and the warming of the ocean.

45:28: The ocean is “a lot more resilient than we thought.” Coral reefs, for example, are not as endangered as they are perceived to be.

47:00: “The oceans aren’t going to die. We will be powerfully impacted. But they have been through a lot, and there’s a great genetic treasure trove of resilience built into marine organisms over these billions of years of evolution.”

48:12: The problem is the pace at which we are acidifying the ocean. Oceans have previously been acidic—but over tens to hundreds of thousands of years. “We don’t know how resilient things are to rapid change.”

49:18: PH is a measure of the hydrogen iron content of something. It’s hard to measure in the ocean because there are so many different kinds of acids; stable measuring instruments are also lacking.

52:30: Scripps is the home of instrument standards and instrument development for oceanography and related topics.

54:54: Dawn mentions that Pensacola and other coastal cities have a lot of run-off to the ocean, from petroleum and other sources promoting phosphate growth. Leinen comments that this non-point-source runoff results in enhanced growth of algae and phytoplankton and other plants in the ocean.

59:57: “The history of women in science over the last fifty years is really an extraordinarily good news story.”

1:01:00: Leinen notes that some fields, such as biology, have more women than men at the undergraduate level, but not necessarily in faculty/leadership positions. But the geosciences still have more men than women, producing even more of a gender gap than math or physics.

1:03:50: Lack of exposure partially drives imbalance of students in geosciences. “You would be amazed at how many children in San Diego have never been to the beach…. It’s the same in Florida, Virginia, Rhode Island.”

1:05:17: Leinen talks about her role models and mentors, making a distinction between the two. A mentor “takes an active role in your career…. Is an advocate.” A role model, she says, is someone “seen from afar.”

1:07:36: Ken Ford comments that Leinen has had a “terrific career” as a scientist, administrator and policy maker. “She’s impacted science in the U.S. and around the world.”