STEM-Talk

Today’s podcast features Ken Ford and Dawn Kernagis interviewing their colleague, Dr. Jerry Pratt, a senior research scientist at IHMC who heads up the institute’s robotics group. In 2015, Jerry led an IHMC team that placed second out of 23 teams from around the world in the first-ever DARPA Robotics Challenge. IHMC also placed first in the competition which featured humanoid robots that primarily walked bipedally and first among all U.S. teams. Jerry is a graduate of MIT, where he earned a doctorate in electrical engineering and computer science in 2000. As a graduate student at MIT, Jerry built his first robot which was also one of the first bipedal robots that could compliantly walk over rough terrain. As you will learn in today’s interview, it was called “Spring Turkey” and is on display in MIT’s Boston museum. The second robot he built as a graduate student was called “Spring Flamingo,” and is on display in the lobby of IHMC’s Fred Levin Center in Pensacola. After graduation, Jerry and some MIT colleagues founded a small company called Yobotics, which specialized in powered prosthetics, biomimetic robots, simulation software and robotic consulting. He joined IHMC in 2002 and has become a well-known expert in bipedal walking. His algorithms are used in various robots around the world. Recent work on fast-running robots has resulted in ostrich-inspired running models and robot prototypes that are currently believed to be the fastest running robots in the world. Jerry has six U.S. patents and was inducted into the Florida Inventors Hall of Fame in 2015. He lives in Pensacola with his wife Megan and their two children. He and he wife founded a science museum called the Pensacola MESS Hall, which stands for math, engineering, science, and stuff. The MESS Hall is a hands-on science museum for all ages that just celebrated it’s five-year anniversary. Show notes: 4:37: Ken and Dawn welcome Jerry to the show 4:54: Dawn asks Jerry to talk about the time he once stole a science book from school. 5:45: Dawn asks Jerry to discuss his first invention, the knockout keyless door lock, that he came up with for his tree fort when he was a teen. 6:21: Dawn asks Jerry if he recalls his first computer program he wrote on the Commodore 64. 6:47: Ken comments on how in addition to writing computer programs, Jerry had an interest in electronics, particularly Heathkits. 7:08: Dawn discusses how Jerry played a lot of sports as a kid, going on to run varsity track and cross country at MIT. 7:46: Dawn asks Jerry if it was as an undergrad or a graduate student that he first became interested in robotics. 8:20: Ken discusses the first two robots Jerry put together: Spring Turkey then Spring Flamingo. He then asks Jerry to talk about the machines and how he came up with the names. 9:16: Dawn comments on how a few of Jerry’s colleagues have mentioned that much of our understanding of dynamic walking is still based on some of the original work Jerry did at MIT, and she then asks Jerry to talk about that work. 10:03: Ken asks Jerry to talk about how he and his wife, Megan Benson, met. 10:54: Ken asks Jerry to discuss the experience of co-founding Yobotics, which specialized in powered prosthetics, biomimetic robots, simulation software, and robot consulting, with his colleagues at MIT. 11:36: Dawn discusses the growth of robotics at IHMC since Jerry joined the team. She then asks Jerry to give a summary on the types of robots that he and his colleagues have been working on over the last 14 years at IHMC. 13:55: Dawn asks Jerry to talk about the books he often reads on organizational culture and teambuilding. 15:08: Dawn comments on how she has heard that Jerry is one of the worst motivational speakers ever and asks if it is true. 15:28: Ken comments on all of the work that Jerry and the IHMC team put into the DARPA Robotics Challenge, where they placed second in the world and first among the United States teams. He then asks Jerry to describe the experience. 16:24: Ken asks Jerry what it would look like if he were designing a new challenge focused on robotic mobility. 17:03: Dawn comments on a story about Jerry’s daughter Annie telling her kindergarten teacher that her daddy builds robots that fall down. 17:42: Dawn discusses how Jerry has spent most of his career thinking about how humans balance themselves to keep from falling, and how we use these strategies to help balance robots. She then asks Jerry to walk through that process. 18:35: Dawn asks Jerry what happens when a robot recovers its balance. 19:13: Dawn comments on how Jerry’s focus has been on bipedal walking. She then goes on to ask why engineers design robots with legs, and even more specifically, two legs. 20:03: Ken states that one of the advantages of a humanoid robot or bipedal robot is that the physical built world was built assuming our human form factor. 21:02: Ken comments on how Jerry mentioned that walking can be thought of as modeled by an inverted pendu

Today’s episode features an important interview with Dr. Jeff Volek, a researcher who has spent the past 20 years studying how humans adapt to carbohydrate-restricted diets. His most recent work, which is one of the key topics of today’s interview, has focused on the science of ketones and ketogenic diets and their use as a therapeutic tool to manage insulin resistance. In 2014, Volek became a founder and the chief science officer of Virta Health, an online specialty medical clinic dedicated to reversing diabetes, a chronic disease that has become a worldwide epidemic. The company’s ambitious goal is to reverse type 2 diabetes in 100 million people by 2025. Earlier this year, The JMIR Diabetes Journal published a study coordinated by Volek and Virta that showed people with type 2 diabetes can be taught to sustain adequate carbohydrate restriction to achieve nutritional ketosis, thereby improving glycemic control, decreasing medication use, and allowing clinically relevant weight loss. These improvements happened after just 10 weeks on the program that Virta designed for people. In addition to his role at Virta, Volek is a registered dietitian and full professor in the department of human sciences at Ohio State University. He is a co-author of “The New Atkins for a New You,” which came out 2010 and spent 16 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list. The book is an updated, easier-to-use version of Dr. Robert Atkins’ original 1972 book, “Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution.” Volek has co-authored four other books, including “The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living” and “The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance.” Both books are co-authored with and delve somewhat deeper than “The New Atkins” did into the science and application of low-carb diets. Volek received his bachelor’s degree in dietetics from Michigan State University in 1991. He went on to earn a master’s in exercise physiology and a PhD in kinesiology and nutrition from Pennsylvania State University. He has given more than 200 lectures about his research at scientific and industry conferences in a dozen countries. In addition to his five books, he also has published more than 300 peer-reviewed scientific papers. Although numerous studies have confirmed the validity and safety of low-carb and ketogenic diets, Volek and others who support carbohydrate restriction are often criticized for being so one-sided that their work comes across as more advocacy than science. But in “The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living,” Volek writes: “What is the proper response when three decades of debate about carbohydrate restriction have been largely one-sided and driven more by cultural bias than science? Someone needs to stand up and represent the alternate view and science.” As Volek explains in episode 42 of STEM-Talk, this has become his mission. Links: “New Atkins for a New You” — http://amzn.to/2uOjLkF “The Art and Science of Low-Carbohydrate Living”– http://amzn.to/2hh1W9k “The Art and Science of Low-Carbohydrate Performance” — http://amzn.to/2f2oPMV New York Times article: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/well/live/tackling-weight-loss-and-diabetes-with-video-chats.html?_r=0 JMIR DIABETES paper: http://assets.virtahealth.com/docs/Virta_Clinic_10-week_outcomes.pdf https://www.virtahealth.com Show notes: 3:016: Ken and Dawn welcome Jeff to the show. 3:32: Dawn asks Jeff when and how he first became interested in science. 5:24: When Jeff was studying to be a dietitian, he was looking at a low-fat, high-carb diet. But when he began to work with diabetics, something did not seem right. Dawn asks Jeff if that is what led him to begin studying low-carb diets. 6:39: Ken comments on how diabetes is perhaps the greatest healthcare challenge we face as a society, which drives costs to more than $300 billion a year. 7:59: Dawn asks Jeff about the effectiveness of traditional treatment and management approaches for people with diabetes. 8:27: Dawn asks Jeff to talk about Virta Health, a company Jeff helped found, and a recent paper and JMIR Diabetes Journal. The paper reported on the results of a study that looked at whether sustained carbohydrate restriction and nutritional ketosis could be part of a comprehensive intervention that would allow people with type 2 diabetes to improve their health. 11.54: Dawn asks Jeff why this approach would work at the cellular level, whether it is the reduction in glucose alone or if the ketone bodies are playing a role. 14:13: Ken asks Jeff why he thinks some patients respond so remarkably and others not as much. 16:27: Dawn discusses how Virta’s mission is to reverse diabetes for 100 million people by 2025. She asks Jeff if this is a realistic number or a stretch goal. 18:28: Ken asks Jeff to briefly talk about the business model of this process and how he sees it shaking out. 20:09: Dawn asks Jeff how he and Sami Inkinen, founder of Trulia and another co-founder of Virta, crossed paths. 22:00: Da

Frequent STEM-Talk listeners will more than likely recognize today’s guest, veteran NASA astronaut Tom Jones, who joins us today to talk about the threat of near-Earth asteroids. Tom occasionally helps co-host STEM-Talk. But for episode 42, regular co-hosts Ken Ford and Dawn Kernagis turn the microphone around to interview Tom about his days as an astronaut, planetary defense and asteroids. It’s a topic, as you will hear, that Tom is quite passionate about. He also has a great deal of expertise in the field. Before he became an astronaut, Tom earned a doctorate in planetary science from the University of Arizona in 1988. He’s also a graduate of the United States Airforce Academy. His research interests range from the remote sensing of asteroids to meteorite spectroscopy to applications of space resources. He became an astronaut in 1991 and received the NASA Space Flight Medal in 1994, 1996, and 2001. He also received the NASA Exceptional Service Award in 1997 and again in 2000. In 1995, he received the NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal. Tom logged 52 days in space, including three space walks totaling more than 19 hours. He is the author of several books, including Sky Walking: An Astronauts Memoir, which the Wall Street Journal named as one of the five best books about space. His latest book is Ask the Astronaut: A Galaxy of Astonishing Answers to Your Questions about Space. Below are links to Tom’s books as wells the STEM-Talk interview with Pascal Lee, which Ken refers to while interviewing Tom. Links: Pascal Lee interview: http://www.ihmc.us/stemtalk/episode-17/ New Yorker article: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/02/28/vermin-of-the-sky TFPD Report: http://www.ihmc.us/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/TFPD-FINAL-Report-to-NAC-10-6-10_v2.pdf Tom Jones books: “Sky Walking” – http://amzn.to/2t8dSQn “Ask the Astronaut” – http://amzn.to/2vhUxZD “Complete Idiots Guide to NASA” – http://amzn.to/2uWZHun “Planetology” – http://amzn.to/2unXgnP Show notes: 3:36: Ken and Dawn welcome Tom to the show. 4:11: Ken comments on the interesting path that Tom has travelled throughout his life and asks Tom to give a synopsis of his path of reinvention. 6:56: Dawn asks Tom to talk about the goals and highlights of the four shuttle missions he went on. 3:39: Dawn welcomes Tom as a guest on STEM-Talk. 9:23: Dawn comments on how Tom no longer flies in space, but he and some of his colleagues are now involved in another space mission that could save the Earth or a large part of it from destruction. Dawn then asks Tom how he became interested in planetary defense from asteroids. 11:30: Ken asks Tom to explain the differences between asteroids, comets, meteoroids, meteors, and meteorites. 13:37: Ken asks Tom how he would define a near-earth asteroid. 14:06: Dawn asks Tom how frequently asteroids strike the Earth. 16:27: Dawn asks Tom how likely she is to die in an asteroid catastrophe, statistically speaking. 18:27: Dawn discusses an article on planetary defense titled, Vermin of the Sky, published in The New Yorker in February of 2011. She comments on how Ken is quoted in the article as saying, “The very short perspective we have as humans makes the threat of asteroids seem smaller than it is. People of all sorts find it easier to kick the can down the road and hope for a mystical solution.” 20:04: Ken comments on how in the same article Clark Chapman notes that “Unlike Hurricane Katrina, we can do something about an asteroid, the question is whether we would rather be wrong in overprotecting or wrong in under protecting”. Ken then points out that one can imagine a near societal collapse should it be announced that, with high confidence, an asteroid was on a collision course with Earth, and that as a society we have no means to deflect it. Humans, Ken adds, would come to envy the dinosaurs who had no time to ruminate about their fate. Ken asks Tom if he can even imagine the societal disruption of such an announcement. 21:50: Dawn discusses how in January of this year the U.S. Government released a strategy for preparing for a Near-Earth Object (NEO) impact. She then asks Tom if he thinks the strategy is on the right track. 23:29: Dawn asks Tom to give a sense of how NASA deals with the asteroid hazard today. 25:04: Dawn asks Tom if he thinks that as NASA’s interests in asteroids has increased, if it is striking the right balance between science, exploration, and planetary defense. 26:59: Ken discusses how Tom and Rusty Schweickart co-chaired the NASA Advisory Council’s Ad Hoc Task Force on planetary defense, and how in October of 2010, their task force made five primary recommendations. Ken asks Tom to review them and briefly discuss what has transpired in the years since in a lightning round. Recommendation number one: organize for effective action on planetary defense. 28:17: Recommendation number two: acquire essential search, track, and warning capabilities. 29:10: Recommendation number three: investig

Dr. David Diamond is a University of South Florida professor in the departments of psychology, molecular pharmacology and physiology and director of the USF Neuroscience Collaborative. He is well known for research that looks at the effects of stress on brain, memory and synaptic plasticity. A primary research project over the past few decades has been the study of treatments for combat veterans and civilians with PTSD. Although his academic specialty is neuroscience, recently he has been closely examining the role of fat and cholesterol in heart disease. He began looking into lipids after test results showed his triglycerides were through the roof. He also launched a critical look into the effectiveness of statins, a class of drugs doctors frequently prescribe to help people lower cholesterol levels in their blood. Dr. Diamond’s findings contradicted the low-fat, high-carb diet that he, as well as many Americans, had been advised to follow. This led him to explore ways for people to optimize their diet for cardiovascular health. He eventually created a graduate and undergraduate seminar entitled, “Myths and Deception in Medical Research.” A lecture he gave at the university entitled “How Bad Science and Big Business Created the Obesity Epidemic” is now a YouTube video with nearly 200,000 views. The lecture focused on how “flawed and deceptive science demonized saturated fats and created the myth that a low-fat, plant-based diet is good for your health.” Dr. Diamond received his B.S. in biology from the University of California, Irvine in the 1980. He continued his post-graduate work at the university and earned a Ph.D. in biology with a specialization in behavioral neuroscience. From 1986 to 1997, Dr. Diamond was an assistant professor in the Department of Pharmacology in the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver. He then moved to University of South Florida and since 2003 has been a professor in the departments of psychology, molecular pharmacology and physiology. In addition to directing USF’s Neuroscience Collaborative, Dr. Diamond also is the director of the university’s Center for Preclinical and Clinical Research on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. His research projects at the university have ranged from “The Effects of Stress on Brain, Memory and Synaptic Plasticity” to “The Cognitive and Neurobiological Perspectives on Why Parents Lose Awareness of Children in Cars.” Dr. Diamond has served on federal government study sections and committees evaluating research on the neurobiology of stress and memory and has more than 100 publications, reviews, and book chapters on the brain and memory. He is a fellow in the American Institute of Stress and in 2015 he received the award for Outstanding Contribution to Science from the Riga Diabetes and Obesity World Congress. In 2015, Diamond also received the University of South Florida International Travel Award. Links: USF lecture: “How Bad Science and Big Business Created the Obesity Epidemic” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vr-c8GeT34 IHMC lecture: “An Update on Demonization and Deception in Research of Saturday Fat, Cholesterol and Heart Disease —http://www.ihmc.us/lectures/20170531/ Show notes: 4:31: Ken and Dawn welcome David to the show. 4:42: Dawn comments on how David has always been interested in science and even wanted to be a physician as a child. She also asks him about majoring in biology and receiving his PhD from the University of California, Irvine. 5:41: Dawn asks David about his varied research topics at the University of South Florida, including cognitive and neurobiological perspectives on why parents lose awareness of children in cars. 7:00: Ken asks David what led him to research cardiovascular disease and statins, since he has such an extensive background in memory and PTSD research. 7:46: Dawn mentions David’s lecture he gave at the University South Florida entitled, “How Bad Science and Big Business Created the Obesity Epidemic”. 9:51: Dawn comments on how David and one of his colleagues recently published a review paper showing that statins have failed to substantially improve cardiovascular outcomes, yet so many doctors continue to prescribe this drug. 10:39: Dawn asks David what additional risks he sees with statins. 11:44: Ken asks David to discuss relative risk versus absolute risk calculations, as there is much confusion around that topic. 13:41: Dawn asks David if there are any ongoing trials looking at the degree of cholesterol lowering and clinical outcomes using absolute risk statistics. 14:39: Dawn discusses the two interwoven stories: one of possible statistical deception and describing the putative benefits of statins, and the other issue of whether there are instances where it makes sense for physicians to prescribe statins. Dawn asks David if there are any subsets of patients that he would recommend treating with statins, and asks about patients with hypercholesterolemia. 16:24: Dawn asks David if t

Joining us for this special edition of STEM-Talk is Robb Wolf, who will co-host today’s show with Ken Ford, STEM-Talk’s regular co-host and chairman of the Double-Secret Selection Committee which selects all the STEM-Talk guests. Wolf is the New York Times best-selling author of “The Paleo Solution” and “Wired to Eat.” He’s also a friend of today’s guest, Allan Savory, a world-renowned ecologist who advocates for the restoration of the earth’s grasslands. “I’ve known Allan for years as a passionate advocate for restoring the health of the earth, especially grasslands. So when Ken invited me to join him and co-host the podcast with Allan, I jumped at the chance,” said Wolf, who is filling in for regular STEM-Talk co-host Dawn Kernagis. Grasslands take up a third of the earth’s land surface. And, as you will learn in today’s podcast, they are in serious trouble. Seventy percent of grasslands have been degraded by global trends ranging from deforestation to droughts to agricultural and livestock practices. As more and more of earth’s fertile land rapidly turns into deserts, Savory travels the world promoting holistic management as a way to reverse thousands of years of human-caused desertification. Savory is an ecologist, international consultant and the president of the Savory Institute, which promotes large-scale restoration of the world’s grasslands. Desertification, which Savory says is just a fancy word for land that’s turning to desert, directly affects more than 250 million people worldwide and has placed another billion people at risk, according to the United Nations. Savory was born in Southern Rhodesia, which is now the nation of Zimbabwe, and went to college in South Africa where he majored in zoology and biology. He went to work as a research biologist and game ranger in what was then known as Northern Rhodesia, but is now the nation of Zambia. Later in his career, he became a farmer and game rancher in Zimbabwe. As a game ranger in the 1960s, Allen made a significant breakthrough in understanding what was causing the degradation of the world’s grassland ecosystems and became a consultant who worked with groups on four continents to develop sustainable solutions. Most of his time as a game ranger was spent in the country’s savannas and grasslands among antelopes, elephants and lions. It was then that Allan started to notice that the healthiest grasslands were those in which large herds of wild grazers stayed bunched together and were constantly on the move because of predators that hunted in packs. It was this insight that led Savory to develop what he refers to as a “holistic management framework,” a planning process that mimics nature as a means to heal the environment. Once an opponent of livestock, he grew to believe that increasing the number of livestock on grasslands rather than fencing them off for conservation was the way to stop desertification. But when civil war broke in Rhodesia in the ‘60s, Allan ended up leading an elite military squad to fight communist guerrillas. In the latter days of the civil war, Allan became a member of Parliament and the leader of the opposition to the ruling party. He was exiled in 1979 as a result of his opposition to the ruling party and immigrated to the United States. In 1992, Savory and his wife, Jody Butterfield, formed the non-profit Africa Centre for Holistic Management and donated a ranch that serves as learning site for people all over Africa. He and Butterfield then co-founded the Savory Institute in 2009, whose mission is to promote restoration of the world’s grasslands through holistic management. The couple lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and have co-authored books together, including “Holistic Management: A Commonsense Revolution to Restore Our Environment,” which came out last year. In 2003, Allen received Australia’s International Banksia Award for the person or organization doing the most for the environment on a global scale. In 2010, he received the Buckminister Fuller Institute’s Challenge award for work that has significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems. The Savory Institute also is one of 11 finalists in the Virgin Earth Challenge, a $25 million initiative for the successful commercialization of ways to take greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. Links: Savory Institute – http://www.savory.global “Holistic Management: A Commonsense Revolution to Restore Our Environment” – http://amzn.to/2sHBkmm “Holistic Management Handbook – http://amzn.to/2sI0Is7 Show notes: 4:51: Ken and Rob welcome Allan to the show. 5:01: Ken comments on how Allan has travelled an incredibly varied path through life and asks Allan to discuss his experiences as a biologist and park ranger in Africa. 8:23: Ken discusses the time Allan spent fighting communist guerrillas when civil war broke out in Zimbabwe in the 1960s and comments on the elite military group that Allan hand-picked and trained. Ken asks Allan to talk about how a

Prior to Dr. Suzana Herculano-Houzel’s research, scientists assumed that the brains of all mammals were built in the same way and that the overall brain mass as compared to body mass was the critical determinant of cognitive ability. It was to resolve these conundrums about brain mass, body mass, and intelligence that Herculano-Houzel turned to chainsaws, butchers’ knives, and kitchen blenders to concoct what she refers to as brain soup. As STEM-Talk co-hosts Ken Ford and Dawn Kernagis point out during their interview with Herculano-Houzel, epsisode 39 of the podcast turned out to be not only an enlightening conversation, but also one of the most fun STEM-Talk interviews to date. Herculano-Houzel is a Brazilian neuroscientist who devised a way to count the number of neurons in human and animal brains. She writes about this in her book, The Human Advantage: A New Understanding of How Our Brain Became Remarkable. Her method of counting the neurons of human and other animals’ brains allowed her to study the relation between the cerebral cortex and the thickness and number of cortical folds in the brain. She is currently an associate professor of psychology and biological sciences in Vanderbilt University’s psychological sciences department and the Vanderbilt Brain Institute. She grew up in Brazil and received her undergraduate degree in biology at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She went to Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, to get her masters in neuroscience, and completed her Ph.D. in visual neurophysiology at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany. After completing her doctorate, Herculano-Houzel returned to Rio and went to work for the Museum of Life where she designed children’s activities. In 2002 she returned to her alma mater and began researching how human brains compared to other animals. In 2004, she devised a way of reducing brains to liquid as a means to count the number of neurons in them. It is technically known as the “isotropic fractionator.” In 2004 she won the Jose Reis Prize of Science, and in 2010 she received the James S. McDonell Foundation’s Scholar Award in Understanding Human Cognition. She is also the author of a biweekly newspaper column on the neuroscience of everyday life for Folha de São Paulo, the major newspaper in Brazil. Going into its 11th year, the column has appeared more than 270 times since 2006. In addition to “The Human Advantage,” Herculano-Houzel is also the author of six books in Portuguese that focus on the neuroscience of everyday life. She also has a popular blog called “The Neuroscientist on Call,” which she describes as not-so-random thoughts about brains, the universe and everything. She lives in Nashville, TN, with her husband, son and two dogs. Links you may be interested in: “The Human Advantage”: http://amzn.to/2rtvNOY The Neuroscientist on Call blog: http://www.suzanaherculanohouzel.com Show notes: 5:32: Suzana talks about growing up in Rio and how she became interested in science. 7:07: Ken asks Suzana about her work at Rio’s Museum of Life. 12:55: Dawn asks Suzana when she firsts became interested in neuroscience. 16:00: Dawn follows up with a question about the composition of cells in the brain. 29:21: Suzana talks about how the brain represents just 2% of the average human mass, yet requires 25%of person’s energy. 33:14: Dawn tells Suzana she’s curious about Suzana’s method of counting neurons and asks her to talk about how she came up with the idea of brain soup. 38:58: Break 39:24: Dawn reads a portion of a book review that described how Suzana turned to chainsaws, butcher knifes and blenders to concoct brain soup and asks her to elaborate. 42:03: Suzana talks about some of the difficulty she had in locating brains for her research. 53:07: Suzana shares some of the lessons she’s learned from analyzing the brains of more than 100 species. 58:52: Ken asks if the cerebral cortex is the best overall predictor of cognitive ability across species. 59:50: Dawn wonders about whales and asks Suzana what we know about the intelligence of aquatic life. 1:05:41: Ken asks if there are neuronal differences in humans. 1:09:33: Suzana talks about how cooking helped homo erectus, the first modern human species, to double its brain size. 1:14:49: Ken reads an excerpt from an excellent review of “The Human Advantage” that ran in The New York Review of Books. 1:18:35: Ken and Dawn thank Suzana and sign off.

Thyroid cancer is one of the fastest growing cancers in the United States, especially among women. In Florida, thyroid cancer trails only melanoma skin cancer as the state’s fastest rising cancer. Today’s guest on episode 38 of STEM-Talk has made it his mission to not only treat thyroid cancer, but also raise awareness about the disease. Dr. Mark Lupo is founder and medical director of the Thyroid and Endocrine Center of Florida which is based in Sarasota. A graduate of Duke University, he went on to earn his medical degree at the University of Florida where he worked with the world-famous thyroid expert, Dr. Ernie Mazzaferri. Dr. Lupo also did his internship and residency in internal medicine at Florida and then won a fellowship in endocrinology, metabolism and nutrition at the University of California San Diego and the Scripps Clinic. Dr. Lupo’s research and practice are particularly focused on thyroid nodules, which are abnormal growths of thyroid cells that form a lump within the thyroid gland. Although the vast majority of thyroid nodules are benign, a small proportion do contain thyroid cancer. His practice is centered on diagnosing and treating thyroid cancer at the earliest stage and helping people avoid unnecessary surgeries. He also is very involved in teaching neck ultrasound, thyroid cancer and general thyroid disease to other physicians at the national level. He has published book chapters and several articles on thyroid disease and thyroid ultrasound. In addition to his work as the medical director of the Thyroid and Endocrine Center of Florida, he also is a clinical assistant professor on the faculty of the Florida State University College of Medicine. Dr. Lupo also was named the 2017 recipient of the Jack Baskin Endocrine Teaching Award, which is annually presented by the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. You can learn more about the Thyroid and Endocrine Center of Florida by visiting http://www.thyroidflorida.com. Show notes: 3:21: Ken and Dawn welcome Mark to the show and ask him what led him to study medicine at Duke. 4:52: Dawn asks Mark how he ended up choosing endocrinology with a particular interest in thyroid nodules and cancer as a specialty. 6:40: Dawn asks Mark how he found the time to go on incredible adventures, such as climbing Mount Kilimanjaro as he worked to establish a practice. 8:40: Mark provides an overview of the thyroid. 9:46: Dawn asks Mark to clarify about whether a thyroid nodule is the same thing as a goiter. 10:25: Ken comments on how thyroid nodules and cancer seem to be epidemic and how there has been an increase of instances in the United States. He asks Mark if there is a greater incidence of disease or if there is just better detection or a combination of both. 14:33: Dawn asks if we know why thyroid nodules and cancer seems more prevalent in women. 15:01: Dawn inquires about the survival rate for those diagnosed with thyroid cancer, and whether or not it has changed over the years. 17:45: Dawn comments on how she has been looking forward to this interview as a result of a thyroid scare she had in graduate school where there was an inconclusive biopsy. She asks Mark how common it is to have an inconclusive finding and unclear results about a sample. 20:52: Ken comments on his personal experience with thyroid nodules that led to surgery and a positive outcome, and how he met Mark early in this experience after hearing him on a podcast discussing fine needle aspiration. After hearing this podcast, Ken concluded that he most likely needed this procedure. Ken asks Mark to talk about this. 23:37: Dawn asks Mark how often the thyroid nodules are discovered incidentally. 27:34: Dawn asks if there are certain characteristics you can see by ultrasound that give you an idea as to whether you are looking at a benign or malignant nodule. 29:53: Dawn asks what the histological differences are between a benign adenoma and a malignant nodule. 31:16: Ken brings the discussion back to the topic of indeterminate diagnosis, and comments that more of the biopsies are being read as being indeterminate, which leads to more surgeries. Ken asks Mark to discuss this phenomenon. 39:28: Dawn asks which institutions are doing specialized tests. 41:11: Break 41:38: Dawn asks Mark to go into further detail about what we are looking at when we do testing for molecular subtypes. 44:48: Dawn asks Mark if there is a genetic predisposition to any types of thyroid cancer. 48:13: Since positron emission tomography has been helpful in diagnosing metastatic disease in hurthle cell carcinoma, Ken asks if it makes sense to use a ketogenic diet as a supplemental approach to managing the cancer. 52:26: Dawn asks Mark what his thoughts are on the current interest and understanding that cancer is at least partially a metabolic disorder. 53:21: Dawn asks Mark to discuss the different treatment options for thyroid cancer. 1:04:20: Dawn asks Mark to describe the treatment of immunotherapy

The front pages of Gary Taubes’ new book on sugar feature a blurb excerpted from the magazine Scientific American: “Taubes is a science journalist’s science journalist who researches topics to the point of obsession – actually, well beyond that point – and never dumbs things down for readers.” Gary’s most recent obsession is documented in “The Case Against Sugar,” a book that argues that increased consumption of sugar over the past 30 to 40 years has led to a diabetes epidemic not only in the United States, but an epidemic that’s now spreading around the world. Episode 37 of STEM-Talk features a more than two-hour conversation with Gary about his latest research as well as a look back at other nutrition and science topics that have dominated Gary’s journalistic investigations since the 1980s. Gary first burst onto the national scene in 2002 with an article in the New York Times Magazine titled, “What If’s It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?” Gary made the point that Robert Atkins and his high-fat, low-carb diet had a better history and scientific record of helping people lose weight than the low-fat diet that was and remains the centerpiece of the nation’s health policy and food pyramid. The article had an immediate impact. As Michael Pollan pointed out in the introduction of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” in the fall of 2002 bread “abruptly disappeared overnight from the American dinner table.” Virtually overnight, wrote Pollan, Americans changed the way they eat. Gary did not set out to become a science journalist. He graduated from Harvard College in 1977 with an S.B. degree in applied physics and went on to earn an M.S. degree in aeronautical engineering from Stanford University. But while at Stanford, he realized he wasn’t that passionate about becoming an aeronautical engineer and decided to enroll in the Columbia School of Journalism to become an investigative reporter. In the ‘80s, Gary became fascinated with flawed science and started writing a series of magazine articles about bad science. That eventually led to a pair of books: “Nobel Dreams” in 1987 and “Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion” in 1993. After “Bad Science,” Gary turned to nutrition reporting and that resulted in the 2002 article in the New York Times Magazine. He followed up on his research for the article with two books: “Good Calories, Bad Calories” in 2007; and “Why We Get Fat” in 2010. Both books detailed how refined carbohydrates are largely responsible for America’s rising obesity rate and a primary cause of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and other chronic diseases of the Western diet. His new book, “The Case Against Sugar,” takes this argument a step further and shows how the explosion of sugar consumption and sugar-rich products in the United States has led to a global diabetes epidemic. Dan Barber, author of “The Third Plate,” wrote in a New York Times review of Gary’s book, “Comparing the dangers of inhaling cigarettes with chowing down on candy bars may sound like a false equivalence, but Gary Taubes’s “The Case Against Sugar” will persuade you otherwise. Here is a book on sugar that sugarcoats nothing. The stuff kills.” Below are links to Gary’s books: “The Case Against Sugar” http://amzn.to/2ps8Qbl “Good Calories, Bad Calories” http://amzn.to/2qTwJJ6 “Why We Get Fat” http://amzn.to/2qKuv2u “Bad Science” http://amzn.to/2qTjyrI “Nobel Dreams” http://amzn.to/2pXpRgK Show notes: 4:41: Ken and Dawn welcome Gary to the show and ask him to talk about how a Harvard physics major ended up going to journalism school to become an investigative reporter. 12:53: Dawn asks Gary to tell the story behind his 2002 article in The New York Times Magazine, “What If It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?” 21:13: Gary shares how his work for “What If It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?” led to additional research and the book, “Good Calories, Bad Calories.” 31:00: Gary explains how his study of physics gave him a passion for understanding the history of theories, and how that passion has helped him over the years as an investigative reporter. 43:44: Dawn asks Gary to share lessons he learned from the Nutrition Science Initiative (NUSI). 50:06: Ken refers to reports about Kevin Hall, a researcher at NIH, who essentially claims he’s disproven the carbohydrate-insulin hypotheses of obesity, and asks Gary for his thoughts. 1:02:40: Dawn asks Gary if he thinks there are specific populations where it would seem less appropriate to be on a low-carb diet? 1:06:44: Ken asks if elevated LDL-P should be a concern for people on low-carb diets since it’s a concern for people on normal diets. 1:13:17: Gary talks about the history of sugar in America. 1:18:08: Ken asks Gary to provide the background on how diabetes is now becoming a worldwide pandemic. 1:31:31: Gary elaborates on the sugars found in cane sugar and high fructose corn syrup. 1:34:43: Dawn asks Gary, “If you could remove sugar from the modern environment, but keep everything else the same, do you

In a rare departure from interviews with scientists and engineers, STEM-Talk Host Dawn Kernagis and IHMC Director Ken Ford interview Jeffrey “Skunk” Baxter about his life as a musician and founding member of Steely Dan, and how he went on to become a defense consultant on the Senate Armed Services Committee. The two fields seem completely different, but Baxter explains the similarities between them and talks about how improvising in jazz is a skill that can carry over into defense analytics and tactics. Baxter’s bio includes playing with a number of well-known bands, such as Steely Dan and The Doobie Brothers. As a studio musician for 35 years, Baxter recorded with Donna Summer, Dolly Parton, Ringo Starr and Rod Stewart. He was a record producer for Carl Wilson, the Beach Boys and Stray Cats. He also composed music for movies and television. He has achieved a certain renown in Washington as an advisor and consultant for multiple agencies and defense technology companies. He chaired a Congressional Advisory Board on missile defense and was a senior fellow at the Potomac Institute. Baxter also holds a unique affiliation with IHMC as “senior thinker and raconteur.” He and Ken go way back—to Ken’s own days in the rock ‘n’ roll business, which the two discuss in the interview. Baxter’s IHMC bio is available at http://www.ihmc.us/groups/jbaxter/. More information on him is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Baxter or https://www.facebook.com/skunkbaxter/. In 2009, Baxter gave an IHMC lecture entitled “The Revolution in Intelligence.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GRkCyvIz70 2:12: Dawn reads a five-star iTunes review. 3:04: Dawn reads Baxter’s bio and introduces Jeff and Ken. 4:38: Baxter talks about musicians who influenced him growing up, from Beethoven and Chopin to Thelonious Monk and Ella Fitzgerald. 5:05: Baxter was five years old when his mother gave him a great gift: “She taught me to read.” 6:04: Baxter read a lot of military history because of his father, who spent five years in active duty and 20 years in the reserves. 7:00: Baxter describes his beginnings as a musician. 8:00: His love of the complexity and improvisational nature of jazz helped prepare him for work in the intelligence community. 10:25: Ken asks Baxter to talk about his days in the ‘70s as a founding member of Steely Dan. 11:15: Baxter shares his insights about studio recordings. 12:27: Baxter notes that a long time ago Ken was very involved in rock ‘n’ roll as an agent who booked and managed bands. 15:30: Baxter talks about Steely Dan and the unsung hero of the band, Roger Nichols, who was the engineer. 17:30: Baxter describes his transition from Steely Dan to The Doobie Brothers. 21:11: Ken comments that the evolution of The Doobie Brothers was remarkable. He asks Baxter about bringing Mike McDonald to the band. 23:20: Dawn asks about Baxter’s transition from full-time rock musician to advisor on missile defense. 23:30: Baxter quips: “A radar is just an electric guitar on steroids.” 25:35: Writing a paper on converting the Aegis system to do theater missile defense on a mobile platform led Baxter to a position as a missile defense consultant on the Senate Armed Services Committee. 26:28: Baxter describes D.C. as “a whole new world to me” filled with “unbelievably talented, smart patriotic men and women.” 27:25: How Baxter used Beethoven, Bach, Jimmy Hendrix and Pink Floyd to teach radar at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. 28:50: Edward Teller, the Hungarian-American theoretical physicist, was also a concert pianist. Baxter talks about how he began to realize that more and more physicists he met were also musicians. 29:48: Dawn asks how Baxter was received by the defense community in D.C., given his rock band background. 31:33: Baxter talks about his first ‘brutal” press conference on missile defense (not considered back then by the press as a worthy endeavor). 32:48: Ken adds, “It’s important to be disliked by the right people.” 33:00: Baxter describes how the people in Washington that he worked with in government, industry, military and intelligence communities were talented and patriotic people and, for the most part, unsung. 33:43: Baxter sees a connection between creativity in music, which involves problem solving in a non-linear approach, and the way talented people in government work. 34:05: Commercial break. 34:47: Baxter describes how the organizational chart of a symphony orchestra looks frighteningly like the government’s organizational chart. 37:00: The organization of a jazz quintet, however, is the opposite of an orchestra. 38:30: Baxter recalls a magazine article by William Nolte, who teaches intelligence at the University of Maryland, that made a case for teaching analysts to improvise the same way musicians do. 40:15: Baxter talks about how Pachelbel’s Canon has the same chord pattern as “Let It Be Me” by the Everly Brothers, or “When a Man Loves a Woman” by Percy Sledge. 43:25: Dawn asks about war gam

Back pain has become the world’s leading cause of disability. Stuart McGill has been at the forefront of non-surgical approaches to addressing back pain for many years. His 2015 book “Back Mechanic: The Secrets to a Healthy Spine Your Doctor Isn’t Telling You” is a wonderfully accessible account of his methods and perspectives. McGill spent 30 years as a professor of spine biomechanics at the University of Waterloo in Canada. His laboratory has become a renowned destination for everyday people as well as Olympic and professional athletes from around the world who are struggling with back pain. He is the author of more than 300 scientific publications and 3 textbooks that address issues such as lumbar spine function and injury mechanisms, patient assessment, corrective exercise prescription, and performance training. McGill also consults for many medical management groups, governments, corporations, legal firms, and elite sports teams. He has won numerous awards, including the prestigious Volvo Bioengineering Award for Low Back Pain Research. He released his landmark text, “Low Back Disorders: Evidence-Based Prevention and Rehabilitation,” in 2002. It changed the way coaches, bodybuilders, athletes and non-athletes approached core training. His new book, “Back Mechanic,” is written for a lay audience and addresses common misperceptions about back pain. It also provides a step-by-step guide of the McGill Method to fix back pain. Backfitpro.com is a web site also geared for a lay audience and is dedicated to providing access to evidence-based information and products that assist in preventing and rehabilitating back pain. Products featured on the website have been tested in McGill’s lab at the University of Waterloo. McGill and his staff have also produced a video, “The Ultimate Back: Enhancing Performance,” that synthesizes McGill’s approaches for avoiding back injury and enhancing athletic and physical performance. It is available for purchase on Vimeo. 4:23: Stuart talks about how he was more interested in becoming a plumber than a scientist until his high school football coach asked him to return to school and earn his high school degree. That led him to college where he met professors who got him excited about mathematics and physics, and eventually the study of spine biomechanics. 7:00: Ken asks Stuart to describe the remarkable research atmosphere Stuart was able to create at the University of Waterloo. 8:08: Stuart explains that he did not go to medical school, but that he learned he had a unique talent of assessing and relating to people with back pain. 11:00: Ken shares his experience of back pain and traveling to Canada to visit Stuart as a patient, which prompts Stuart to describe his process of assessing people. 14:53: Dawn asks Stuart to talk about his motivation for writing “The Back Mechanic.” 19:53: Although back pain is the world’s leading cause of disability, Dawn asks Stuart why back pain is underappreciated by so many people in the medical community. 22:04: Stuart explains some of the most mechanisms for back injury and ways to prevent them. 26:22: Ken asks Stuart to talk about a study he did several years ago on firefighters with the Pensacola Fire Department. 30:36: Stuart talks about how heavy weightlifting will probably shorten the careers of modern golfers like Rory Mcllroy, and how the great golfers of old who had wonderful long careers – Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player – weren’t weightlifters. 33:53: Stuart talks about the great strikers in mixed martial arts and the UFC are the leaner ones who can unleash muscle. The same is true of the great sprinters, the great golfers, and the great home run hitters, who are the ones who can create a very brief muscle power pulse, and let it go. 34:33: Dawn asks Stuart about reports that the rate of back surgery in the U.S. is five times higher than in other developed countries. 39:31: Stuart provides an overview of the how to about a self-assessment of pain triggers. 46:29: Dawn asks Stuart to explain the McGill method to fixing back pain. 55:03: Ken asks about the technique of power breathing and the implications for spinal disability. 57:15: Ken mentions that he and Stuart are fans of kettlebells, and that power breathing is what a a person does when swinging a kettlebell. Ken asks Stuart to talk about the exercises that he sees as most beneficial with kettlebells. Ken and Stuart discuss the relative benefits of kettlebell swings, farmer’s walks, and bottoms-up carries. 1:06:49: Stuart talks about measuring competitors in the World’s Strongest Man competition, the NFL, heavyweight UFC fighters, and then asks Ken to guess who had the strongest core Stuart had ever measured. Ken says it was probably a kettlebell dude like Pavel. Stuart confirms that yes it was Pavel Tsatsouline. 1:10:29: Dawn asks if it is true the spine is weaker and more vulnerable to injuries in the morning. 1:14:30: Stuart

Blood-flow-restriction training is a topic of growing interest. But as IHMC director and STEM-Talk co-host Dr. Ken Ford points out, there’s also a great deal of misinformation about the training. Episode 34 of STEM-Talk addresses some of that misinformation with our interview of Dr. Jim Stray-Gundersen, who helped pioneer blood flow restriction training and leads the Live Hi/Train Low program for the US Athletic Trust. Since receiving his board certification in general surgery in 1985, Jim has focused his work and research on maximizing human performance, health and resilience. He pioneered the Hi-Low training protocol and played a key role in the development of the anti-doping test, SAFE, which stands for Safe And Fair Events. It is considered the most aggressive blood-profiling test in the fight against doping. He has worked with numerous Olympians in various sports and has an ongoing relationship with world renowned long-distance runner Alberto Salazar, who also is a coach and director of the NIKE Oregon Project. Jeff has been an official physician and consultant of the United States, Norwegian and Canadian Olympic teams. He is an official member of 15 world championships. Jim completed post-doctoral fellowships in cardiovascular physiology and human nutrition at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School. He received appointments as an associate professor of orthopedic surgery and physiology. He spent 20 years on the faculty of UTSW and helped build and direct two human-performance centers at St. Paul and Baylor University hospitals. He has served on international medical committees that include the International Olympic Committee, FIFA, International Biathlon Committee, International Ski Federation and the International Skating Union. Jim also is the sports science advisor for the US Ski and Snowboard Association (USSA), and continues to lead human performance and altitude camps for Olympic athletes, masters athletes, as well as Navy SEALs. He runs The SG Performance Medicine Center and Sport Technologies for Maximal Athletic Performance, overall fitness, weight loss, and recovery in Frisco, Texas, and now the new center in Park City, Utah, located inside The Center of Excellence USSA Building. As if that isn’t enough, he also is the chief medical officer of B STRONG (www.goBstrong.com)., a Utah -based company he co-founded in an effort to make blood flow restriction safe, effective, and affordable for the general public. B STRONG is a patent-pending exercise method based on blood-flow restriction exercise. During the interview, Jim refers to several studies and articles. Below is a link to those studies and papers, and two suppliers of blood flow restriction gear. Be sure to also check out the US Athletic Trust, an organization that supports American Olympic hopefuls, that Jim talks about toward the end of the podcast. Studies: — Rapid increase in plasma growth hormone after low-intensity resistance exercise with vascular occlusion — Effects of resistance exercise combined with moderate vascular occlusion on muscular function in humans — Repetitive restriction of muscle blood flow enhances mTOR signaling pathways in a rat model — Use and safety of KAATSU training: Results of a national survey — Blood flow-restricted exercise in space — Proliferation of myogenic stem cells in human skeletal muscle in response to low-load resistance training with blood flow restriction — Blood flow-restricted strength training displays high functional and biological efficacy in women: a within-subject comparison with high-load strength training — Applications of vascular occlusion diminish disuse atrophy of knee extensor muscles Gear: Kaatsu Global, to get 15% discount use discount code: IHMC Go B Strong, to get 15% discount use discount code: IHMC Show notes: :30: Dawn welcomes Ken, who talks about how he has been using blood flow restriction training for the past several years and what a fascinating fellow Jim is. 2:00: Ken reads the winning five-star iTunes review, titled, “I feel my brain making more connections while I listen.” 3:00: Dawn and Ken review Jim’s background and career. 5:00: Dawn welcomes Jim to the podcast. 5:30: When Dawn asks Jim how he first became interested in science, Jim talks about being a hellion in elementary school and how his mother and teacher worked together to find out what interested Jim. Turns out, it was bugs, and Jim started collecting insects. 8:00: As a child, Jim also was interested in sports and talks about how his father came to the United States from Norway on a track scholarship. 10:50: Dawn points out that Jim studied ethology and animal behavior as an undergrad, and asks him why he decided to jump from that to medicine. 16:11: Dawn follows up by asking Jim how he transitioned into sports medicine. 19:21: Jim gives a general definition of blood flow restriction exercise, followed by a more technical description. 23:51:

Dr. Natalie Batalha’s STEM-Talk interview was so contagious that Dawn Kernagis said it made her dream of returning to school to get a second graduate degree in astronomy. “Hearing Natalie talk about her research had all of us in the STEM-Talk studio buzzing,” said Dawn, the podcast’s co-host. Natalie is an astrophysicist and the project scientist for NASA’s Kepler Mission, a space observatory launched by NASA to discover Earth-sized planets orbiting other stars. She sat down with Dawn and veteran astronaut and IHMC senior research scientist Tom Jones for episode 33 of STEM-Talk. As one of the original co-investigators of the Kepler Mission, Natalie has been a leader in using the telescope to discover exoplanets, which are planets that orbit stars other than our own sun. Natalie has been involved in the Kepler Mission since the proposal stage and has helped identify more than 150,000 stars that are monitored by the telescope. She holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from The University of California Berkeley, and a doctoral degree in astrophysics from UC Santa Cruz. She taught physics and astronomy for 10 years at San Jose State University before joining the Space Sciences Division of the NASA Ames Research Center, which is located in California’s Silicon Valley. In 2011, Natalie received a NASA Public Service Medal for her vision in communicating Kepler’s science to the public, and also for her outstanding leadership in coordinating the Kepler science team. That same year Natalie also headed up the analysis that led to the discovery of Kepler 10b, the first confirmed rocky planet outside our solar system. She joined the leadership team of a new NASA initiative in 2015, which is dedicated to the search for evidence of life beyond our solar system. Called the Nexus for Exoplanet System Science, the program brings together teams from multiple disciplines to understand the diversity of worlds, and which of those exoplanets are most likely to harbor life. As if Dawn and the STEM-Talk gang weren’t excited enough after talking to Natalie about the search for life beyond our solar system, NASA announced about a month after our interview with Natalie that its Spitzer Space Telescope had revealed the first known system of seven Earth-sized planets around a single star. Three of these planets are firmly located in the habitable zone, the area around the parent star where a rocky planet is most likely to have liquid water. According to a NASA press release in February, the discovery sets a new record for greatest number of habitable-zone planets found around a single star outside our solar system. All of these seven planets could have liquid water – key to life as we know it – under the right atmospheric conditions, but the chances are highest with the three in the habitable zone. 0:30: Dawn welcomes Ken Ford, IHMC founder and director as well as the chairman of the Double Secret Selection Committee that chooses guests who appear on STEM-Talk. Dawn and Ken then talk about Natalie’s background as an astrophysicist. 4:35: Dawn welcomes her co-host for this episode of STEM-Talk, Tom Jones, and they begin the interview by asking Natalie how she became interested in astronomy. 8:03: Natalie talks about how as an undergrad at Berkeley she met a post-doctoral researcher from Brazil who later became her husband. As a result, she ended up doing her post-doctoral work in Rio de Janeiro. 15:47: Dawn asks Natalie to describe the history of the Kepler mission. 19:00: Tom asks Natalie to describe the difficulty of trying to detect a distant planet. 21:34: Natalie describes how long the Kepler telescope has been in space and provides a summary of its findings. 25:30: Natalie talks about lava worlds, which have oceans larger than the Pacific Ocean, but they’re made of lava, which is why scientists call them lava worlds. 27:30: Dawn asks Natalie about the discovery of Kepler 10b, which was the identification of the first rocky planet outside of our own solar system. 32:30: Natalie describes how the host star that Kepler 10b orbits is almost exactly like Earth’s sun, except that it’s about 8 billion to 11 billion years old as opposed to our sun which is four and a half billion years old. 36:30: Dawn reads a quote that describes the discovery of Kepler 10lb as one of the most profound scientific discoveries in human history and asks Natalie to talk about that. 39:00: Tom asks Natalie to provide statistics on the kinds of planets that the Kepler mission is finding. 42:30: Natalie talks about planets in the Goldilocks Zone. 44:35: Break that features Ken talking about STEM-Talk, an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering groundbreaking technologies, in that leveraging and extending human cognition, perception, locomotion, and resilience. 45:00: Tom comments that Kepler must have detected anomalies over the years, and asks if they occur frequently and what

Women who are pregnant often talk how careful they are about what they eat and drink. They’re careful, points out Dr. Claire Fraser, because they’re feeding their baby. “Well, we should all think about diet in the same way that pregnant women do,” says Fraser. “Everything we put into our mouths, we’re either feeding or not feeding our gut microbes … And it’s important we keep our gut microbes happy.” Fraser is a pioneer and global leader in genomic medicine, a branch of molecular biology that focuses on the genome. In episode 32 of STEM-Talk, Fraser sits down with host Dawn Kernagis and IHMC founder Ken Ford to explain why we should all pay more attention to our guts, which is the home of more than 100 trillion bacteria. An endowed professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Fraser is a founder and director of Maryland’s Institute for Genome Sciences. From 1998 to 2007, she was the director of the Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Maryland, and led teams that sequenced the genomes of several microbial organisms, including important human and animal pathogens. In 1995, she became the first person to map the complete genetic code of a free-living organism, Haemophilus Influenza, the bacterium that causes lower respiratory tract infections and meningitis in infants and young children. This discovery forever changed microbiology and launched a new field of study, microbial genomics. During this time, she and her team also sequenced the bacteria behind syphilis and Lyme disease, and eventually the first plant genome and the first human-pathogenic parasite. She even helped identify the source of a deadly 2001 anthrax attack in one of the biggest investigations conducted by U.S. law enforcement. Research into the benefits of gut bacteria has exploded around the world in the past decade. In this STEM-Talk episode, Fraser explains the role these microbes play in improving health, preventing disease, and keeping us mentally sharp. She even shares how her diet has changed since she started studying the gut microbiome. Fraser also talks about working with the FBI during the 2001 antrhax attacks and her early work in microbiology that led to the first mapping of a free-living organism’s complete genetic code. Her recent lecture at IHMC, titled “The Human Gut Microbiome in Health and Disease,” can be viewed at ihmc.us/lectures. If you’re interested in learning more about the gut microbiome, Fraser in her lecture recommended “The Good Gut: Taking Control of Your Weight, Your Mood, and Your Long-term Health” by Stanford University scientists Justin and Erica Sonnenburg. 1:36: Dawn reads the five-star iTunes review titled “Intellectually Stimulating.” 2:28: Dawn and Ken provide a summary of Claire’s background and research, pointing out that she has authored more than 320 scientific publications, edited three books, and has served on committees of the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, and National Institutes of Health. 4:13: Dawn welcomes Claire to STEM-Talk. 4:27: Claire talks about growing up in a suburb of Boston and taking her first biology course as a freshman in high school, which set her on a path toward a career in science. 5:37: Dawn asks Claire what led her to study microbiology. 6:53: Ken points out that there are more microbes on a person’s hand than there are people in the world. He asks Claire to give listeners a short intro into “Microbiome 101.” 9:34: Claire talks about the role of Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG (LGG), a strain of bacteria that is part of many popular probiotic products and has a reputation as a helpful microbe. 12:00: Ken asks Claire to expand upon the potential of probiotics and their usage in human beings. 14:56: Dawn points out that Claire is internationally known for her role in genome sequencing and asks what led Claire to establish the Institute of Genomics at Maryland. 18:02: Claire talks about her involvement in the first genome sequencing and where the technology stands today. 22:39: Dawn follows up with a question about how the evolution of sequencing technology has changed the way we monitor the spread of pathogens. 29:26: Claire talks about some of the new sequencing technology on the horizon. 32:02: Ken asks Claire to explain the kind of data-analysis challenges that this new technology is creating. 34:29: Claire describes her experience working on the anthrax attacks in 2001, which at the time was one of the biggest investigations conducted by U.S. law enforcement. 41:39: Dawn asks Claire about the effects of antibiotics on the gut. 47:00: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience. 47:25: Fraser talks about the early science of fecal transplants. 50:04: Ken asks Claire about the role of the microbiome in obesity and chronic di

Dr. Michael Turner makes a “big bang” in the world of theoretical cosmology. Translation: He’s an expert on the universe—what it’s made of, what’s in its future, and how it came to be. Turner is the Rauner Distinguished Service Professor and Director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago. From 2003 until 2006, was Assistant Director for Mathematical and Physical Sciences for the National Science Foundation. He is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, and he is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Michael Turner and Vera Rubben, who recently passed away. Turner is most well-known for having coined the phrase “dark energy” in 1998, which he calls “very, very mysterious stuff.” Thought to comprise 70 percent of the universe, dark energy is responsible for both the expansion of the universe and the increasing speed at which that expansion is occurring. Another five percent of the universe is atoms, and the remaining twenty-five percent is “dark matter”—what Turner calls “the cosmic infrastructure of the universe.” The universe, he adds, has largely “been a battle between the two dark titans: dark energy and dark matter.” “He [Turner] is able to explain the deepest issues in cosmology with a rare clarity and elegance,” says IHMC Director Ken Ford. “His research focuses on the earliest moments of creation.” With Chicago cosmologist Rocky Kolb, Turner co-wrote the well-known book “The Early Universe.” More information on Turner can be found here: https://kicp.uchicago.edu/people/profile/michael_turner.html and here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Turner_(cosmologist). Turner’s 2011 IHMC lecture, “The Dark Side of the Universe,” can be viewed here: . Turner was also a guest on STEM-Talk for an earlier episode for his interview on the discovery of gravitational waves. Turner is interviewed by regular STEM-Talk host Dawn Kernagis and guest host Tom Jones, a veteran NASA astronaut and senior research scientist at IHMC. 00:37: Ken calls Dr. Michael Turner “exactly the right guy to talk to about dark energy and dark matter. After all, he coined the phrase dark energy. He is able to explain deepest issues in cosmology with a rare clarity and elegance.” 1:04: Ken pays tribute to Vera Rubin, who passed away on Christmas Day. She confirmed the existence of dark matter and transformed modern physics and astronomy. 2:24: Ken asks for feedback on STEM-Talk and reads 5-star iTunes review from BobRXUF: “With all of the garbage we are bombarded with, listening to STEM-Talk reminds me that there is higher intelligence, the hope for mankind.” 3:35: Dawn and Ken introduce Michael and talk about his background. 4:17: Dawn and Tom welcome Michael to STEM-Talk. 4:39: Tom asks Michael to give listeners the big picture about the structure of our universe and explain how we stumbled upon the phenomenon called dark matter and dark energy? 5:14: Michael explains that a half of one percent of the universe is in the form of stars. The other 99.5 percent is dark. 6:29: Michael talks about how dark matter matter provides the cosmic infrastructure of the universe. 7:45: “Our universe,” says Michael, “has really been a battle between the two dark titans: dark energy and dark matter.” 9:49: Michael explains that’s it’s the stars that give off energy and it’s the atoms we’re made of. “We’re the tip of the iceberg. We’re the special stuff.” 10:52: “Michael talks about producing dark matter particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. 11:25: Tom asks Michael what was the original evidence for dark matter and dark energy and who were the people who made that discovery? 13:20: Michael describes how Vera Rubin, a scientist working at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, was able to confirm dark matter at work in our own galaxy. 15:06: Tom asks if it’s dark matter that holds things together and makes the clock, the universe, tick? 17:37: Michael explains how Fritz Zwicky and Vera Rubin went about building empirical evidence for dark matter. 19:40: Michael talks about research into “neutralinos,” particles that scientists speculate are left over from the Big Bang. “We’re in the midst of this detective story.” 21:24: Tom asks if the facilities and equipment exist to solve the mystery of the neutralinos and the dark-matter particle? 24:31: Commercial break. 24:55: Dawn wonders if our understanding of dark matter and dark energy continues to advance, what future applications might arise from this knowledge? 25:21: Michael explains that if scientists are able to verify the existence of the neutralino, “it would be the first evidence of the super string theory, which unifies all the forces—a very, very bold theory that says there may be additional dimensions in space-time.” 27:20: In continuing to answer Dawn’s question, Michael says, “If history is any

Dr. Art De Vany is an American economist known for his work on the Hollywood film industry. He is perhaps best known, however, as the grandfather of the paleo diet, a high-protein, high-fiber way of eating similar to the way our hunter-gather ancestors ate during the Stone Age. Born in 1937, he has had a varied career that began right out of high school when he signed a baseball contract with the Hollywood Stars, a minor-league affiliate of the Pittsburg Pirates. Even though he could “run like a deer” and “hit the ball out of sight,” his poor eyesight ended his baseball career and led him the UCLA where earned a doctorate in economics. He spent most of his academic career studying Hollywood and the film industry. His research has ranged from “Hollywood Economics: How Extreme Uncertainty Shapes the Film Industry” to “Quality Revaluations and the Breakdown of Statistical Herding in the Dynamics of Box Office Revenues.” De Vany turns 80 in August and has spent the past 40 years living the paleo way. He outlined his diet and fitness philosophy in “The New Evolution Diet: What Our Paleolithic Ancestors Can Teach Us About Weight Loss, Fitness and Aging.” https://www.amazon.com/New-Evolution-Diet-Paleolithic-Ancestors-ebook/dp/B004EBT6SS/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1487717091&sr=1-1&keywords=New+evolution He is working on a new book that’s tentatively titled “Renewing Cycles: Healing the Wounds of Aging Through Improved Cellular Defense and Systemic Signaling.” De Vany gave a lecture at IHMC in Pensacola last December where he talked about the New Evolution Diet” as well as his upcoming book on aging. In Episode 30 of STEM-Talk, host Dawn Kernagis and IHMC Founder Ken Ford have a wide-ranging conversation with De Vany that covers his statistical study of home-run hitting to the dynamics of box-office revenues to the role that exercise and diet play in aging. 0:15: Dawn welcomes Ken, who talks briefly about Art’s background. 1:32: Dawn announces the winning iTunes review. 2:05: Dawn and Ken give an overview of Art’s career and research. 3:12: – Dawn welcomes Art to the show. 3:50: Art talks about his youth and how he started weightlifting as a teen-ager. 5:23: He signs with the Pittsburg Pirates and talks about playing in segregated baseball parks in the South, which was something he had never experienced before. 7:40: Ken and Art compare the lean physiques of great sluggers active in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s such as Ted Williams, Hank Aaron and Carl Yastrzemski with today’s much larger home run hitters. 10:37: Art recalls how debates with one of his professors at UCLA about central planning versus decentralized control systems led him into economics. 13:10: Dawn asks Art to talk about his research into the economics of Hollywood. 16:17: Art explains the impact of movies like “The Titanic,” which can generate 10 percent of all the box-office revenues during a year that will see 600 to 700 movies that are released. 17:06: Dawn asks Art to share his fondest scientific and professional memories. 18:11: In 1979, Art’s newborn son is diagnosed with type 1 diabetes and leads to Art’s interest and research into metabolism. 20:20: Dawn asks Art to describe the most profound power laws he has discovered in his pursuit to counter the aging process. 22:26: Ken shares his thoughts about “The New Evolution Diet,” which he describes as beautifully built on Art’s personal interest in evolution and his professional interest in complex stochastic systems. 25:26: Art explains how the book grew out of his realization that insulin controls the pathways that drive growth and obesity as well as shutting down the protective pathways. 26:45: Art describes genes as Bayesian forecasters arising from non-genetic influences on genetic expression. 28:17: Ken inquires about Art’s time at the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences, which Art describes as a dream place for him. 30:05: Dawn asks Art to expand upon his comment that there’s no such thing as healthy aging. 33:22: Art responds to Dawn’s question about Blue Zones and points out that the healthiest long-term aging individuals have low insulin, high strength, and they have not exhausted their subcutaneous body fat. 36:10: Ken asks Art about the role that exercise and diet play in epigenetics and molecular-level changes. 41:10: Art addresses how muscle development aids the immune system and how strength is probably the best predictor of a person’s future longevity. 44:13: Ken asks Art to expand on his comments that body composition is one of the best predictors of longevity. 46:25: Ken and Art talk about sarcopenia, the age-related loss of lean muscle mass, strength and functionality, and how baby boomers are looking for ways to fend it off. 50:22: Dawn asks Art to talk about the notion of hierarchical sets in weightlifting and what might account for their effectiveness. 52:55: Art describes his current exercise routine. 55:54 Dawn, Ken and Art discuss the negati

Dr. Leonard Wong, a research professor at the Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) of the U.S. Army War College, led an important study titled: “Lying to Ourselves: Dishonesty in the Army Profession.” The study, which was published in 2015 generated much discussion as well as some consternation and reflection. www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB1250.pdf In this episode, Host Dawn Kernagis and IHMC’s Director Ken Ford talk with Wong about his study and its implications. Wong also lectured about his study at IHMC in Pensacola last September: http://www.ihmc.us/lectures/20160907/. Wong’s research focuses on the human and organizational dimensions of the military and includes topics such as leadership development in the military profession. He is a retired Army Officer and taught leadership at West Point. He is also an analyst for the Chief of Staff in the Army. Wong’s research has led him Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo and Vietnam. He has testified before Congress and has been featured widely in the media, including the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New York Times, PBS, NPR, 60 Minutes and CNN. Wong is a professional engineer and holds a Bachelor’s from the U.S. Military Academy. He also has a Master’s and a Ph.D. in business administration from Texas Tech University. 1:43: Ken reads five-star iTunes review from “CC Rider,” which is entitled “Intelligent Podcast: What a Relief:” “What a pleasure to hear intelligent, articulate people discussing worthwhile topics.” 2:17: Dawn describes Wong’s bio. 3:18: Dawn welcomes Wong and Ken. 3:42: Wong describes his role at the U.S. Army War College, as well as the College’s structure. When Army leaders arrive at the War College, they’ve generally been in the Army for twenty years. They’re at the point of thinking strategically about leadership and their roles. 5:27: Wong’s research into this topic started over a decade ago, with the question of how to build more time into the schedule of junior offices to facilitate innovation. Wong and his colleagues discovered an overwhelming amount of requirements, which were stifling Innovation. In the back of his mind, Wong concluded: ‘If we require more than they can possibly do, what are we reporting?’ 6:36: Wong, in conversation with his colleague Steve Gerras, once asked him what he was doing on his computer. He was supposedly doing mandatory training, but not really. He said, ‘I know, I’m just saying I did it.’ Wong realized then ‘how casually we approach lying, but we don’t call it lying.’ 7:15: The theory of Wong’s subsequent study came from a book entitled “Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What’s Right and What to Do About It,” by Max Bazerman and Ann Tenbrunsel (http://amzn.to/2gBJtib), along with what David Messick called ethical fading. The methodology was to use focus groups from various ranks throughout the Army, including staff officers at the Pentagon. 8:12: Dawn mentions that Wong’s study had a precedent: In 1970, the U.S. Army War College published a study showing that lying in the Army was pervasive. Digitization, the audit culture, and downsizing have made it worse today. 8:43: Wong says, “The Army is like a compulsive hoarder. It collects requirements, and it never gives any up. We always add more. We keep adding to the pile. Technology has made a huge influence on this.” Now, with email and Internet, we can ask people to provide digital signatures, and do various online trainings. 9:42: Wong characterizes another part of the problem: “The Army has had a giant emphasis on being a profession. It’s a good thing, but it’s made us believe that we are better than we are. We forget that we are humans. We forget that we are talking about people who can fall to the same temptations, go the same route, as an ordinary human.” 10:35: Ken asks about Wong’s description of people in the Army being so overwhelmed that they have to prioritize. 10:50: Wong says, “One of the ways to ethically fade is you take away moral aspects…. So you are void of all the baggage that an ethical dilemma brings.” Euphemisms are a common way around this, and prioritize is one way of saying you lied. “Prioritize means taking a risk: We didn’t do it, but are going to still report that we did it. Prioritize is a convenient way to convince ourselves that we haven’t lied.” 12:00: “What this study isn’t saying is we have an institution full of liars, or a cohort of people with low ethics. We’ve created an institution with a bureaucracy…with a system that is putting an onerous burden on people to do everything and report they’ve done it. Inadvertently it creates a culture in which we have to tell a system what it wants to hear or it won’t get done.” 12:39: Wong recalls the old days and how easy it was to take a leave form (31) for travel. Today there is a complicated trips form, in which you have to specify where you are going, when you are stopping, any medications you’re taking, who is traveling with you, vehicle inspections. 13:51:

Mike Gernhardt’s career epitomizes the scientific overlap between the depths of the ocean and space. Prior to his career as a NASA astronaut, Gernhardt was a professional diver and engineer on subsea oil field construction and repair projects around the world. As a child, Gernhardt vacationed in Florida, where he developed a love of the ocean. Like many children, Gernhardt dreamed of becoming an astronaut. However, unlike most kids, he stuck with his dream and began taking steps to pursue it in high school when, in his own words, he “had already put together that working in space and in the sea were similar.” Gernhardt received his undergraduate degree in Physics from Vanderbilt University, followed by his Master’s and Ph.D.—both in Bioengineering—from the University of Pennsylvania. At the University of Pennsylvania, he worked with his life-long mentor C.J. Lambertson, who is considered to be one of the godfathers of diving medicine. Under Lambertson, Gernhardt received unparalleled field work experience, testing real-time the decompression tables that he’d developed and still constitute the commercial diving standard. In 1992, Gernhardt was selected to be an astronaut at NASA, where he completed four space flights and space walks. He also started a company called Oceaneering Space Systems, where he transferred his subsea robotics experience to NASA. Gernhardt stated, “There’s really a lot of synergy between working underwater and working in space, and the design of the task for human and robot compatibility.” Gernhardt has received numerous awards and honors, including the highly coveted NASA Distinguished Service Medal. To view his bios: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_L._Gernhardt ; http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/gernhard.html In this episode, STEM-Talk Host Dawn Kernagis, an esteemed diver and undersea expert herself, and co-host Tom Jones, a veteran NASA astronaut, engage in a thought-provoking conversation. 1:35: Ken reads a 5-star iTunes review from Paula Olivet: “I wish this podcast aired everyday.” This show takes science as a personal, academic and professional venture, which it entirely is. It’s not all pipettes and mice. It’s ambition, and unquenchable thirst for answers. Even when I think the episode subject matter is not for me, I still find myself completely enthralled.” 2:32: Dawn recounts Gernhardt’s educational and professional background: He hold a Bachelor’s degree in Physics from Vanderbilt University and a Master’s degree and Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania. He has been a professional deep sea diver and engineer on projects around world. He was a manager and Vice President of Special Projects for Oceaneering International, and established Oceaneering Space Systems to transfer subsea technology and operational experience to the international space program. 3:05: Ken adds: “His impact on the agency and how we do human space flight is really extensive.” 4:02: Dawn welcomes Mike and Tom to the episode. 4:31: Gernhardt explains his initial interest in diving: “As a four or five-year old I was always going fishing with my dad in Florida. At nine or ten, I was doing scuba diving on a family vacation. I got certified at age 12 and became a dive instructor at 18.” For the first couple of summers after college, he worked as a scuba instructor and boat captain at St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. Then he got into commercial diving, where he noted the limitations in decompression tables. 5:38: These limitations inspired him to study the physiology and biophysics of diving. In college, he studied physics and math, and was a pre-med major. When he graduated, he wasn’t ready to commit to graduate or medical school, so he worked as a commercial diver. 6:40: Describing his commercial diving experience, he says: “Unlike the more sheltered college environment, here it was like: What can you do in the water at the end of the hose? That really inspired me.” 7:02: The Medical Director of Ocean Systems was C.J. Lambertson, who took him under his wing. Gernhardt decided to go to graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania in order to study with Lambertson. “That turned into a 30-year relationship.” 7:43: “We would generate the new decompression tables, and then I would go out and use them…. We tested them real-time.” 8:05: Lambertson said his ultimate goal was to make the field a laboratory. “In this period of three years, we generated tables that became the Oceaneering standard.” Roughly ten million dives have been done on those tables. 9:09: Dawn calls Lambertson one of the godfathers of diving medicine and asks what it was like to work with him. 9:20: Gernhardt answers: “He was an amazing guy. I started reading his books as an undergraduate. When I then met him for the first time, he looked professorial, older, he had a beard…When you shook his hand, he could squeeze your hand off.” Lambertson was also influential during World War II. “He wrote undersea warfa

For fitness and Paleo Diet aficionados—and perhaps regular STEM-talk listeners—Robb Wolf is the type of esteemed guest who needs no introduction. Many people already know him by his best-selling book, “The Paleo Solution: The Original Human Diet,” (http://amzn.to/2gB6N4c) or his top-ranked podcast by that same name. (http://robbwolf.com/podcast/) But what some people may not know is that Wolf also started the world’s first cross-fit affiliate gym; that he’s raising his young daughters on a paleo diet—which may account for their mouths having a similar phenotypical expression as hunters and gatherers; and that nicotine—yes, nicotine—can actually be good for you (just not delivered by cigarette) in some contexts. STEM-Talk Host Dawn Kernagis and IHMC Founder Ken Ford talk to Wolf about these and other fascinating insights in this episode. Wolf hailed from a relatively unhealthy family, which pushed him towards discovering good health on his own terms. A keen interest and aptitude in science (he was a biochemistry major at California State University-Chico) set Wolf on the path of evolutionary medicine. He began thinking seriously about pre-agricultural diets in response to his mother’s poor reaction to her consumption of grains, legumes, and dairy. Since that time, Wolf has become an expert, researcher, and self-experimenter of the Paleo Diet. His expertise has led him to become a review editor for Journal of Nutrition and Metabolism; co-founder of The Performance Menu, a nutrition and athletic training journal; and co-owner of NorCal, one of Men’s Health magazine’s top thirty gyms in America. He is also a consultant for the Naval Special Warfare Resiliency Program. Wolf recently gave a lecture entitled “Darwinian Medicine: Maybe There IS Something to This Evolution Thing” at IHMC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qga4A3vnXmg 2:10: Dawn reads iTunes review entitled “No Bro Science Here” from someone nicknamed “Leafy Sweets:” “Science-based interviews with experts, post-docs and department/lab heads on relevant topics. No Bro Science here! Interesting discussions relevant to one’s well-being and interests.” 3:46: Dawn welcomes Robb and Ken. 4:10: “I was raised by two well-meaning, but quite ill parents. Both of them smoked, neither of them exercised, both of them developed Type-2 Diabetes pretty early in their lives, and I’m not really sure why…but somewhere along the line I suspected that if I ate better and exercised, that I could maybe have a better outcome.” 5:00: “They really kind of acquiesced all their health to the medical establishment, and I went just as opposite that vector as you can possibly imagine.” 5:30: “I had a pretty good interest in science in general… I got into an organic chemistry class (in high school) and loved it like I had never loved anything before, and actually discovered that I had an aptitude for spinning molecules in my head and thinking about bonding and stuff like that.” 6:55: After his degree in biochemistry, Wolf considered medical school, but he had some personal health problems. That’s when, “The evolutionary approach to health/medicine got on my radar.” 7:28: Plus, he says, “Academia seemed to move at glacial speeds.” “Around 2000-2001, I found this weird thing called Cross-fit. I opened a gym, and it happened to be the first cross-fit affiliate in the world, and I opened a second one (the fourth in the world) … That was kind of the medicine that I wanted to practice. I got to talk to people about sleep, food exercise; and build community.” 9:15: Wolf describes his entry into evolutionary medicine: He was vegan, he was not sleeping and he had moved to Seattle, into a tiny basement where he didn’t see the sun for several months. He had a lot of gastro-intestinal problems, as did his mother, whose rheumatologist told her she was allergic to grains, legumes and dairy. 10:47: Around 1998, Wolf learned about the Paleo Diet through the work of Arthur De Vany and Loren Cordain (who would become Wolf’s mentor). Lauren had written a paper called “Cereal Grains: Humanity’s Double-edged Sword.” (http://www.directms.org/pdf/EvolutionPaleolithic/Cereal%20Sword.pdf) 12:00: Dawn asks about the “contemporary collision between foods we’re wired to eat and what we find on the shelves of local supermarkets.” 12:15: Wolf responds: “We’re set up for failure. I half-jokingly say that if you live in this modern environment and you’re not diabetic and broken, then you are kind of screwing up. You’re not paying attention to your evolutionary history.” 12:45: “We have limitless caloric input. We don’t need to expend effort to obtain these items. We have limitless palate options.” 15:00: Wolf’s short definition of the Paleo Diet: “You’re generally not eating a much in terms of grains, legumes, and dairy. You eat everything else: meat, fruit, roots, shoots, vegetables.” 16:27: He also cautions against the trendy uptake of the diet: “Paleo became this thing where people were asking: ‘Is this Paleo or

Dr. Richard Moon had an unusual inspiration to practicing medicine: a television show, in black and white, entitled, “Medicine in the ‘60s.” He remembers being blown away by watching live surgeries performed on the show. This eventually led him to a career in the operating room—not as a surgeon, but an anesthesiologist. Like many STEM-Talk guests, Moon wears many hats. In addition to being a physician, he is a renowned researcher in the hyperbaric and diving medicine. He is currently a professor of anesthesiology and medicine at Duke University, and the Medical Director of Duke’s Center for Hyperbaric Medicine and Environmental Physiology. http://anesthesiology.duke.edu/?page_id=828766 In this episode, Host Dawn Kernagis, herself a rising research scientist in undersea medicine, as well as a highly experienced diver—earlier this year, she was inducted to the Women Divers Hall of Fame—talks with Moon, one of her mentors. Dawn met Moon when she participated in one of his research projects as a diver, and she went to him with research ideas as a potential research intern. She eventually became one of his graduate students at Duke University. In this lively and informative mentor-mentee discussion, Dawn and Moon talk about the history of hyperbaric medicine, including the establishment of Duke’s world-renowned Center for Hyperbaric Medicine and Environmental Physiology. They talk about medical conditions that can occur in deep sea diving, such as high pressure nervous syndrome and immersion pulmonary edema, as well as high-altitude sickness. Moon shares insights about his experiments in both high altitude and deep sea medicine, as well as his own expedition in climbing Mount Everest. Check out Moon’s home page at Duke: http://anesthesiology.duke.edu/?portfolio=richard-moon-md ; as well as his lecture at IHMC last January: “From the Ocean Depths to the Mountain Tops: How Do Humans Adapt?” http://www.ihmc.us/lectures/20160121/ 00:15: Dawn introduces Ken and describes Moon as a world-renowned physician and researcher who works in hyperbaric and diving medicine. 00:40: Dawn says she was “very lucky to have Dr. Moon as a mentor.” She participated in his research projects, as a diver. She then went to him with research ideas, and he accepted her as a graduate student, and he’s been a mentor and colleague ever since. 1:45: Ken reads a five-star iTunes review from “GTG2010” called “Exploding Kid:” “Dear STEM-Talk, I like your show. The super telescope looking at asteroids is cool. I like it so much I’m going to explode. Love, Griffin, age 6.” 2:38: Dawn runs through Moon’s bio. He holds an M.D. and a C.M. from McGill University in Canada, and a Master’s degree in biomedical engineering from the University of Toronto. He is a member of the Royal College of Physicians of Canada, as well as the American Board of Internal Medicine. He has authored hundreds of peer-reviewed publications. 3:48: Dawn welcomes Moon to the podcast. 4:06: Moon describes what sparked his interest in medicine when he was in high school. He watched a television show, in black and white, called “Medicine in the ‘60s.” “It showed operations. It was mind-blowing, so I decided that I had to go into medicine.” 4:49: In medical school, Moon’s first interest was in pulmonary medicine—simply because in the first-year lecture series on organ systems, the one on the pulmonary system was the best. Yet, he felt compelled to do something different and took a couple of years off to study biomedical engineering. 6:20: Moon went to Duke University with a fellowship in pulmonary medicine as well as an opportunity to undergo scientific training in diving physiology. One of his mentors, Enrico Camporesi, encouraged him to go into anesthesiology. 7:20: “Eventually he [Camporesi] won me over. That’s where I am today.” 7:46: Moon’s interest in diving physiology initially came from the television program “Sea Hunt.” He also read the Jacque Cousteau books, which talked about decompression sickness and carbon monoxide poisoning. “When it came time to figure out where I was going to go after internal medicine, since Duke had this mega lab, the best in the world, and some leading lights in diving physiology, I just couldn’t resist.” 8:48: Dawn comments that the F.G. Hall Laboratory, which is now part of the Center for Hyperbaric Medicine and Environmental Physiology “is considered to be one of the best and prestigious environmental physiology labs in the world. Especially back then, there was research being done that wasn’t being done and hasn’t been done anywhere else in the world.” 9:18: Moon talks about the history of the lab. People have always asked, ‘How did this undersea lab get to be in a place that isn’t near the ocean?’ “It was a confluence of interests at Duke at the time. Herb Salzman was a pulmonologist interested in diving; F.G. Hall had been of an earlier generation and interested in altitude physiology; a surgeon named Ivan Brown was interested in cardiac sur

James Briscione’s stellar cooking career began humbly: As a teenager, he washed dishes at a now defunct restaurant (named Jubilee) on Pensacola Beach. He quickly rose through the ranks, at age 24 becoming the chef de cuisine at the Highlands Bar and Grill in Birmingham, Alabama, which is considered one of the best restaurants in the South, and later the sous chef at the prestigious New York City restaurant Daniel. Today Briscione, who lives in New York City, is a top-tier chef, author of three books on cooking, director of culinary development at the Institute of Culinary Education, and a three-time champion on the Food Network’s cooking competition series Chopped. So what is he doing on STEM-Talk, you might ask? Briscione is also versed in the science of cooking and flavor. He partnered with IBM in creating the “Chef Watson” project. This computer-based program generates hundreds of novel flavor combinations based on the compatibility of chemical compounds in food. In this episode, Briscione talks with IHMC Director Ken Ford and IHMC Chef Blake Rushing about the art and science of food, and Briscione’s career as a chef. Briscione’s three books include: “Just Married and Cooking” (with his wife Brooke Parkhurst): http://amzn.to/2eDIpJD; “Cognitive Cooking with Chef Watson”(http://amzn.to/2g04Kq0); and “The Great Cook: Essential Techniques and Inspired Flavors to Make Every Dish Better.” (http://amzn.to/2elhlDr). He also has his own, new television show on the Food Network called “Cooking with Dad.” Briscione, his ideas on cooking and his own culinary creations have been featured in the New York Times, NPR, the New Yorker, Time Magazine and hundreds of other media outlets throughout the world. Briscione’s recent talk at IHMC, entitled “Who teaches the cooks to cook?” can be viewed at http://www.ihmc.us/lectures/20160811/ Dive into this delicious interview—an entertaining and informative conversation between three foodies. 00:32: Ken introduces Blake Rushing as the guest co-host of this episode of STEM-Talk. Rushing is IHMC’s chef, as well as the owner of Union Public House in Pensacola. 1:00: Ken introduces James Briscione as, “Working in the boundary spaces between the science of food, science and taste and even AI systems, such as Chef Watson.” 1:49: Dawn reads 5-Star iTunes review from “Beautronical:” “I am continually enthralled by the variety and depth of ideas presented here. Also, it is rare that one finds great minds matched by great voices. Given the ketogenic bent of certain interviewers, perhaps mellifluous is the wrong term, but I’ll use it nonetheless.” 4:42: Ken introduces himself and Blake Rushing as hosts of the interview; and then welcomes James to the interview. 5:05: James says he remembers the food made by his Italian grandmother. Among them: chicken cacciatore (although the mushy carrots bugged him.) The “greatest mashed potatoes… Sunday red sauce; sausage and meatballs loaded down with pecorino cheese.” 6:55: “True learning doesn’t often happen until you’re in the kitchen every day,” Briscione tells his students. He didn’t go to culinary school, but has been in the kitchen since he was 16. 8:15: At 16, he was a bus boy washing dishes for two restaurants: fine dining upstairs and casual beach dining downstairs. 9:33: As a teenager and at the beginning of college, Briscione thought, ‘There’s no way I am going to spend the rest of my life in a kitchen.’ He was working on a degree in sports medicine in Birmingham, and worked summers at the restaurant [in Pensacola]. After his second summer, something clicked: he changed his course of study from sports medicine to nutrition. 11:00: James knocked on the back door of Bottega Cafe [in Birmingham] http://www.bottegarestaurant.com/cafe/ and said, ‘I want to work here.’ He got a job as pizza maker with a wood-fired oven. He remembers stretching the dough and putting the toppings on it, then handing it off to the next guy. “That and lugging firewood to store underneath giant hearth oven.” 12:54: Briscione talks about working with Frank Stitt, owner and chef at the Highlands Bar and Grill in Birmingham http://www.highlandsbarandgrill.com , whom Briscione calls “a great leader.” He fosters a great sense of family in all of his restaurants; his cooks go and work in the farms for harvesting veggies. Briscione attributes his success to the fact that, “I showed up everyday. I was there, and I was there early.” 16:08: Briscione won on Chopped three times. “I always just try to do a little bit more than everybody else. I always want to out-hustle the other guy.” 17:05: He recalls one Chopped experience: “It’s insanely hot in that kitchen; four stoves; four ovens. No hoods pulling the heat away. It’s a warehouse essentially. I was mincing an onion as fast as I could. You could hear the judges say, ‘It seems like Chef James already has something’…I heard that; everyone else heard that. I at least gave the impression that I knew what I was doing. I never touc

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 http://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 resulte

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 deal

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”: http://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: http://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 h

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

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 wit

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: http://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 15th 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

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 medi

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 grou

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 at

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

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 http://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 expe

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 clim

‘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 In

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 100th 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 c

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 o

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 30th. 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

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 li

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

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 15th, 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 11th, 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 interfe

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 114th 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 chang

In this episode, we talk with Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, the first and only scientist to land on the moon. Schmitt was part of the Apollo 17 Mission in 1972, the last Apollo mission. The geologist turned NASA Astronaut, turned U.S. senator, talks about first seeing the advertisement, in 1964, for scientists interested in space missions. “When I saw that on the bulletin board, I hesitated about ten seconds,” he said. Called “Dr. Rock” by his colleagues in the Apollo program, Schmitt recounts walking, falling and singing on the moon; and his discovery of orange ash, probably of volcanic in origin at Shorty Crater. Schmitt says returning to the moon is a gateway to Mars, and that private investors may have a stake in funding future space exploration. Schmitt recently lectured at IHMC; view his lecture on youtube. Check out his book, “Return to the Moon,” on Amazon. STEM-Talk’s host Dawn Kernagis and co-host Tom Jones, a veteran NASA astronaut himself, talk to Schmitt. 3:53: Historic audio tape of Schmitt throwing geologist’s hammer on the moon. 5:11: Historic audio tape of Schmitt and Gene Cernan singing on the moon. 6:00: Historic audio tape of Schmitt discovering orange soil on the moon. 7:12: Jack excitedly reports from the Moon that he could see ‘orange soil’ on the rim of Shorty Crater in the Taurus-Littrow Valley. When the samples were returned to Earth, they were shown to consist of millions of very small brown-orange glass spheres. These are now thought to represent pyroclastic volcanic activity (“fire fountains”) that occurred about 3.5 billion years ago. 9:39: Schmitt’s parents inspired his interest in science from an early age. His father was an economic geologist who studied ore deposits, and his mother had an interest in botany and ornithology. 12:57: Schmitt’s thoughts on his selection as the first and only science to go to the moon. 15:31: Schmitt describes right before take-off, monitoring gauges in cabin; “becoming competitive with flight controllers” in Houston. 19:12: Schmitt says thoughts of mortality did not go through his mind pre-launch. What was he thinking? “You don’t want to recycle. That means another month of training.” 20:41: Schmitt describes first impressions of the moon: “spectacular mountains.” 22:27: Marvels at the mountains on either side: 1,600-2,100 meters above surface, which is higher than the depth of the Grand Canyon. Also notes tracks of boulders rolling down mountain. 24:30: Apollo 17 flight controllers used to call Dr. Schmitt “Dr. Rock.” 25:31: Schmitt spent his free time reading operations manual to be “the best lunar module pilot.” 27:11: Historic audio footage of Schmitt saying “dad-gummit” on the moon. 28:57: Schmitt says the Apollo A7LB spacesuit was a remarkable development. Water-cooled underwear allowed the team to control body temperature long enough for explorations. 30:38: Schmitt discusses samples from Apollo 17 mission: “The samples are the gift that keeps on giving.” 32:56: Apollo 17’s most important result: “an understanding of the early history of the earth.” 33:44: Earth’s early history was “extraordinarily violent.” Complex molecular evolution that led to life was taking place. 34:33: Schmitt believes that the moon was formed (by accretion) near earth’s orbit — not by a Mars-sized object impacting the Earth. 36:09: The orange volcanic ash found on the moon makes it unlikely that the moon was formed by a giant impact. Schmitt calls it the most important finding from Apollo 17. 38:29: Commercial break: 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. 39:00: Jack answers the question, “why return to the Moon?” To mine it as a reservoir of isotopic helium. And, “It’s the fastest way to Mars.” 41:25: “It’s going to take at least two generations of men and women to get us to Mars.” It’s a much higher-risk environment than the near-earth orbit. 42:56: “If I were to make make one recommendation on what it’s going to take to get us to Mars, it’s an agency that can stay young.” Cites Navy as an example of recruiting and keeping young generations. 44:24: “The initial decision to limit the Apollo program was made in the Johnson Administration.” It was a budgetary decision to only buy ten Saturn Vs, “the true enabling technology for working in deep space.” 47:14: Schmitt explains why the moon is a good source of Helium-3: Because of its lack of lunar atmosphere. “It’s [Helium-3] not abundant, but it’s so valuable in terms of its energy content, that the economics I think begin to make sense.” 49:34: Describes role of robotic explorers on moon in pre-planning human exploration and in follow-up. 51:10: Schmitt says robot field assistant “might get in the way”—at least more so than a graduate student. 53:52: “A settlement on

Before Rhonda Perciavalle Patrick “stumbled into research”—at the renowned Salk Institute—the Southern California native was a biochemistry major and a passionate surfer. She’s still an avid surfer, but of her college major, Patrick said, “I wasn’t feeling connected to synthesizing peptides in the lab, so I decided that I wanted to try out biology.” After earning her undergraduate degree in biochemistry from the University of California at San Diego, Patrick worked at the Salk Institute’s aging laboratory, where she became fascinated with watching how much the lifespan of nematode worms could fluctuate depending on the experiments done on them. Hooked on aging research, she pursued that thread all the way to the laboratory of renowned scientist Dr. Bruce Ames, who developed the Triage Theory of Aging, which focuses on the long-term damage of micro-nutrient deficiencies. Patrick is currently working with Ames as a post-doc at the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Hospital. Together, they are looking at strategies to reverse the aging process. She also received her Ph.D. in biomedical sciences from the University of Tennessee, where she worked at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Patrick lectured at IHMC in Ocala in December. https://youtu.be/wQZz5PklDB0. She also has her own podcast show, called “Found My Fitness,” at: http://www.foundmyfitness.com STEM-Talk host Dawn Kernagis and co-host Ken Ford talked with Patrick about her research and development as a young scientist who is now at the forefront of the longevity field. :35: Dawn introduces Rhonda Patrick as “an American biochemist, cell biologist, science communicator and podcaster.” Patrick is currently studying the effects of micro-nutrient inadequacies on metabolism, inflammation, DNA damage and aging. 4:23: Patrick discusses her appreciation for her graduate school mentor. “I got a lot of micro-management,” she said, adding that she acquired the tools she would need to answer interesting biological questions regarding cancer metabolism, apoptosis, and nutrition. 6:00: Nutrigenomics, Patrick said, is a “complex interaction between the nutrients, micro-nutrients, macro-nutrients (fat) and certain genes that we have.” 6:43: As humans, Patrick said, “We all have the same genes, but alternative forms of these genes for unknown reasons. A single nucleotide change in the DNA sequence of a gene can alter the gene function.” 7:13: Certain polymorphisms, or genetic variants, probably emerged because of environmentally-induced genetic stressors, Patrick said. For example, soil high in selenium may have caused people to develop a polymorphism that inhibits the absorption of selenium because they get so much of it naturally. 8:11: Even if the polymorphism changes the gene in a negative way, you can often find a benefit, Patrick said. “That’s probably why it’s survived.” 8:42: Commercial break: STEM-Talk is an educational service of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a not-for-profit research lab pioneering ground-breaking technologies aimed at leveraging human cognition, perception, locomotion and resilience. 9:25: Hundreds of genes interact with micro-nutrients and macro-nutrients that we take in. For example, half the population has a polymorphism that changes the way your body metabolizes folate and folic acid, the oxidized form of folate. 11:05: Folate helps us make methyl groups, which are used for various biological functions. The MTHFR gene helps with that process, so people with a genetic polymorphism need to take a methyl folate 5 supplement. 12:00: The TRPM6 gene is a transporter of magnesium, an essential micronutrient required in over 300 enzymes in body. Some of its functions include making/using ATP; repairing DNA damage; establishing new neuronal connections in the brain. 12:27: People with a genetic polymorphism cannot transport magnesium in/out of cells, and have a significantly higher risk of diabetes than the average population. 12:52: Forty-five percent of the U.S. population does not meet the Recommended Daily Allowance for magnesium, which is 350-400 milligrams a day, Patrick said. “That, coupled with a high refined carbohydrate diet is like a ticking time bomb for Type 2 diabetes.” 13:19: Patrick notes another polymorphism for the PPAR gamma-macronutrient, which is very important for how the body metabolizes certain types of fat; and how the body can deactivate carcinogenic xenobiotics, foreign chemical substances within organisms. 13:34: “Our bodies are beautifully designed to handle all types of stress; but our genes have to be working; they have to have the right nutrients.” 14:08: Gene polymorphisms regulate our phenotype—including features such as eye and hair color. But they also regulate our risk of diseases; and the type/amount of certain foods we should take in or avoid. 15:05: Clinical trials in nutrition are often not done adequately, Patrick said. This is because of cost, and the heterogeneity of the

Guy Consolmagno is not your typical scientist. The director of Vatican Observatory is also a Jesuit Brother, astronomer extraordinaire, MIT graduate, former Peace Corp volunteer and self-described science fiction geek. The second-generation Italian-American, born in Detroit, now divides his time between the Vatican Observatory in Italy and the Mount Graham International Observatory in Tucson, Arizona. In 2014, Brother Guy received the Carl Sagan Medal from the American Astronomical Society for his unique position as a scientist and man of faith, and he believes firmly that the scientific and spiritual inquiry are more complementary than conflictual. Consolmagno is the author of several books about astronomy, and science and faith, including most recently, “Would You Baptize an Extra-terrestrial?” He also authored “God’s Mechanics: How Scientists and Engineers Make Sense of Religion,” and gave a lecture at IHMC on that topic. That lecture can be found on YouTube at https://youtu.be/MJGsdY2bcsk In another IHMC lecture, Brother Guy discusses “Discarded Worlds: Astronomical Ideas that Were Almost Correct”: https://youtu.be/Gr0R5oiIoak Brother Guy writes for a blog called the Catholic Astronomer, which can be found at www.vofoundation.org/blog STEM-Talk co-host Tom Jones, a former NASA astronaut who shares Brother Guy’s love of astronomy—as well as the same MIT thesis advisor, John Lewis—interviews Brother Guy about his life-long journey to understand the universe and the role of faith in that pursuit. Introducing this podcast episode is host Dawn Kernagis and IHMC CEO Ken Ford. 1:15: The Vatican Observatory is in a town outside of Rome called Castel Gandolfo, which is also the Pope’s summer residence. Ford and his wife Nancy first met Brother Guy there a few years ago. 3:52: A day in the life of Brother Guy in Rome: after his 6 a.m. wake-up call, he works until the Italian coffee break at 10 a.m., then goes back to work until the big meal of the day at 1:30 p.m., which is followed by an afternoon siesta. In late afternoon, he spends an hour of prayer walking in the gardens, followed by Mass. Then he works again until 9 or 10 p.m., responding to emails from America. 4:44: “It’s a full day, but it’s almost like getting two days of work in,” Brother Guys says of his daily routine. “It’s exhilarating because it reminds me of all the different worlds I get to live in.” 5:07: A “Sputnik kid,” Brother Guy was in kindergarten when the Soviets launched the first satellite into the earth’s orbit. He was a high school senior when NASA astronauts landed on the moon. “How could you not be crazy about astronomy and science?” 6:18: Brother Guy followed his best friend to MIT for college. “I discovered MIT had weekend movies, and pinball machines, and the world’s largest collection of science fiction, and I knew I had to go there.” 6:55: At MIT, he studied geology, quickly discovering meteorites. “From then on meteorites were where my heart was. I never looked back.” 7:36: Astronomy reminded Brother Guy about “bigger things than what’s for lunch”; and also our human intellectual capacity to puzzle about these things. 7:52: Since the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church has backed the study of astronomy at universities, Brother Guys says. “In those days, understanding how universe works was a way of understanding how the creator works.” 9:01: In 1891, Pope Leo XIII established the Vatican Observatory to show that the church supported science. This came during a politically-charged atmosphere of anti-clericalism in France and Italy, based in part on the church’s opposition to the fashionable science of eugenics. 9:45: “You can’t do science without faith,” Brother Guy says. This means that you must have a positive world view to sustain scientific inquiry—in other words, “not think people are inherently evil.” 10:34: Not every religion can support science. 11:15: Noblemen and clergymen founded science in the 17th and 18th centuries because they had the free time to explore and think about the world. 11:41: “It’s a nineteenth-century myth that the church opposed Galileo.” 15:03: “What science has done is to remind us forcibly over and over again how big, how incredible, the creator of the universe must be. So science can only enrich our view of God.” 17:55: Brother Guy briefly considered becoming a priest, but realized he wasn’t a people person, so went to “nerd school” instead. After MIT, he did his Ph.D. at the University of Arizona, followed by two post-docs, at Harvard and MIT. 19:32: Brother Guy leaves academia to join the Peace Corp in Kenya. “I was lying in bed wondering, ‘Why am I doing astronomy when people are starving in the world?’” 20:30: He reaffirms his love of astronomy in Kenya, teaching it to graduate students, and observing the stars with villagers. “To be able to share with people that thrill of seeing the universe outside yourself; to remind them that we’re all part of the human race that went to the moon. That’s w

Dr. Peter Attia, the guest for this episode of STEM-Talk, is a modern-day “Renaissance man,” says IHMC CEO Ken Ford. That term gets tossed around a lot, but in Attia’s case, it’s true. He is a top-notch physician, a former McKinsey consultant, and an ultra endurance athlete—who once swam twenty-something miles to Catalina Island, off the coast of California. During the podcast show, Attia talks about his academic journey, from studying math and engineering, to then pursuing clinical medicine and developing research interests in longevity. The birth of Attia’s daughter marked his interest in quantity of life—as well as quality of life. Attia discusses his eight “drivers of longevity,” all of which depart from the concept of preventing the onset of chronic disease. These include optimal nutrition, exercise, sleep habits, hormone optimization, stress management, sense of purpose/social connections, medications, and avoidance of harmful behaviors. Check out Peter Attia’s blog “The Eating Academy,” at http://eatingacademy.com. You can also check out his TED talk “Is the obesity crisis hiding a bigger problem? https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_attia_what_if_we_re_wrong_about_diabetes?language=en STEM-Talk’s host Dawn Kernagis and Ken Ford chats with Peter Attia. 3:25: In college, Attia volunteered at a children’s hospital, which inspired his interest in medicine. 4:08: Ford notes that math and engineering provide a useful background for medicine. Attia later notes that his early academic background in both these subjects “still colors how I look at the world.” 4:32: Attia’s advice to college students who are aspiring physicians: “I think you should study anything that you are not going to learn in medical school.” 5:25: Two things drive significant change in a person’s life: “abject misery and profound inspiration.” The former drove Attia out of clinical medicine. 6:27: The birth of Attia’s daughter spurred his interest in longevity. 7:05: Commercial break: 8:32: Centenarians get diseases 20-30 years later than most people. 9:20: Longevity is first and foremost about delaying the onset of chronic disease. 10:13: Animal literature shows that caloric restriction increases longevity; so do drugs that prevent mTOR (mammalian target of rapamycin). 11:52: Eight things improve longevity and quality of life: food, exercise, sleep patterns, management of chronic stress, hormone optimization, medications, sense of purpose/social support network, avoidance of harmful behaviors. 12:28: Accidental death is the fourth or fifth leading cause of death in the U.S.; 80 percent of these are auto accidents, accidental poisoning and falls. 13:09: Ford and Attia agree that trade-offs sometimes exist between interventions likely to increase lifespan and those aimed at aimed at increasing healthspan. 15:50: People who consume fewer calories are likely to have a lower risk of diabetes, heart disease and cancer; they may also have more deficient immune systems and greater susceptibility to catastrophes like falls. 16:10: Caloric restriction creates an environment of cell signaling, cell growth, and nutrient sensing that slows down aging. 16:36: One of the greatest challenges in studying longevity is the inability to accurately measure biologic signals such as mTOR activity. 17:08: Attia characterizes protein optimization: “We want to see IGF-1 levels lower; AMP kinase more active; Ras less active.” 18:36: “Three things I walk through life wanting to keep at a minimum,” Attia says: How to minimize mean level glucose, variability of glucose, and insulin AUC (area under the curve). 19:24: Attia eats 125-150 grams of specific carbs per day, at times when he can maximally dispose of it. He also wears a continue glucose monitor that measures glucose every five minutes. 20:47: Ford and Attia discuss the benefits of a ketogenic diets and the implications for IGF-1, mTOR, insulin, and amino acids. 22:18: The ideal diet minimizes glucose and has moderate but sufficient protein; the majority of the diet becomes fat. 23:30: Ketogenic diets do not work for everyone. The efficacy of the ketogenic diets mqy have a genetic basis and it does not seem appropriate for everyone. 24:27: We should talk about molecules and physiology instead of diets. 25:19: Ford and Attia discuss the trade-offs associated with leucine supplementation which increases mTOR1 … which in turn stimulates protein synthesis necessary for maintaining and increasing muscle mass and staving off sarcopenia. On the other hand, chronic elevation of mTOR is not desirable in terms of lifespan. Attia and Ford discuss how they use amino acids around exercise. 28:00: Attia discusses his blog “The Eating Academy,” which he initially called “The War on Insulin.” 30:30: In the blog, Attia discusses how the ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting increase longevity. 30:57: A recent, retrospective paper on exceptionally long-lived humans finds they have low levels of IGF-1. 32:34: Low IGF from neck dow