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www.nasonline.org  |  Programs  |  Distinctive Voices  |  Podcasts |   Podcasts

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Distinctive Voices Podcasts

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New podcasts every other Friday

Cellular Immunotherapy for treatment of cancer: from transplant to gene therapy: Stephen Forman, City of Hope: One of the first demonstrations of the immune systems ability to recognize and reject cancer came from the work done in stem cell transplantation as a treatment for leukemia. This therapeutic effect has been now shown for many other cancers including lymphoma, leukemia, and myeloma and actually contributes to the cure of patients undergoing this procedure. In the years that followed, research was conducted to develop an immune therapy that was specific for a given cancer by introducing new genes into healthy immune cells( T cells) that endows the cells with the ability to recognize proteins on the surface of the cancer cell and eliminate it, similar to what the immune system does against viruses. This has now lead to a new therapy that is being increasingly utilized in the treatment of people with cancer using genetically engineered immune cells in addition to the traditional treatments of chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation. For some cancers, we can now imagine a time when immune based therapies will replace many of the chemotherapy approaches we now use for cancer.

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An overall objective of research in the study of brain aging is to identify effective intervention strategies to reduce age-related cognitive decline. Over the past few years, there has been a growing focus on the importance of exercise for promoting healthy brain function, particularly in the aged and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) brain. Studies on the mechanisms by which exercise can improve brain health and reduce aging-related cognitive decline have revealed that physical exercise increases brain levels of brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). BDNF mobilizes a sequence of molecular and cellular events which promote synaptic plasticity, learning and memory and brain health. Overall, it appears that a moderate to high level of physical for the elderly can reprogram the brain’s gene expression patterns to a more youthful state. Currently, a 300 person multisite clinical exercise trial for people with mild cognitive impairment is ongoing to evaluate the impact of aerobic exercise vs stretching and toning on biomarkers and cognitive function in this population.

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CRISPR gene editing is transforming biology. Fundamental research to understand how bacteria fight viral infections uncovered how the CRISPR system uses Cas proteins with RNA as a programmable guide to detect and cut specific DNA sequences. Cas/RNA complexes constitute a powerful toolkit for genome editing in animals, plants and bacteria.She discussed research into this amazing family of proteins: where they came from, how they work and how CRISPR technologies are revolutionizing research, biomedicine and agriculture. She also discussed the ethical challenges of some of these applications with a focus on what our decisions now might mean for future generations.

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For nearly 60 years, the U.S. government has been investing in the development, testing and standardization of automated technologies for recognizing persons by their faces. In this talk, Dr. James Wayman gave a brief history of the development of automated facial recognition, explained how the computer algorithms really work, showed recent government test results on system accuracies, looked at current state and local legislation limiting both government and private applications, then explored criticisms of racial bias and function creep.

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Do you ever wonder what the heart of a baby planet is like? NASA does, too! Psyche is an orbiter mission now in development to visit the asteroid named Psyche, one of our solar system’s most unique objects. As far as scientists can tell by examining it from the Earth, it is a large, perhaps mostly-metal asteroid big enough to span the distance from Los Angeles to San Diego... and it may be the now-exposed core of a protoplanet. Come learn about the details from Tracy Drain, the mission’s Deputy Project System Engineer.

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The planet’s human population is rapidly expanding towards 8 billion people. More people live in cities and developed areas than in rural or non-developed areas. Around the world, we are progressively becoming more urban, and less familiar with the natural world. This trend is highlighted by the continued removal of nature words from the Oxford Junior Dictionary. Recently, words like acorn, fungus, fern, and willow were removed from the dictionary, and replaced with blog, MP3 player, and chatroom. The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County is tackling this trend head on, to connect people to their urban nature and create an environmentally literate public. Lila Higgins will speak about her leadership in the community science field, from co-founding the large global City Nature Challenge event, to her work in the local community that bring people together, in their own neighborhoods, to learn about and document nature. She will talk about the NSF, Wellcome Trust, and ESRC funded learning research she is conducting on international youth’s development of environmental science agency, and various other projects that work to communicate urban nature concepts to a wide audience. Projects such as the Museum’s Nature Gardens & Nature Lab exhibits, the recently published Wild LA book, and use of novel social media practices with @NatureinLA.

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We expect that the products we use every day will be safe, reliable, and effective. However, that does not always occur. A computer battery can unexpectedly catch fire, bedroom furniture can be unstable and topple, and food can be contaminated. Consumer Reports (CR) is committed to revealing the truth and raising the bar for safety and fairness, and empowering consumers with trusted information. Learn how CR uses science for good, applying its scientific findings for diverse audiences—from consumers to rulemakers, industry to government, all with the goal of driving marketplace change that benefits everyone.

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This year marks the semi-centennial celebration of the accomplishments of the Apollo lunar landing missions, some saying these were the crowning achievements of human space exploration. Our generation’s fingerprints on the next saga of human space exploration can surpass those amazing milestones by leveraging technology, data analytics, non-government capital and partnerships. Beyond reaching the lunar surface … again, today’s challenges include the development of a sustainable extraterrestrial ecosystem supportive of extended lunar exploration with the added goals of burning down the risks of humans to Mars. This presentation discussed systems assessments leading to strategies for making the space program of the “Artemis generation” relevant through the long cycle effort of reaching these goals.

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Nepal’s Himalaya and the Cordillera Blanca of Peru have both provided ecosystem services for local people for thousands of years. However, new economic possibilities combined with climate change impacts on local resources have changed local community vulnerabilities and resilience to change. From 1996 to 2006, civil war engulfed Nepal. The insurgents used the Himalayan national parks as their bases and this had severe social and environmental consequences – consequences that have continued to this day. John All was on Everest leading an NSF-supported expedition during the 2014 icefall and subsequent closure of the mountain by the former Maoist insurgents. John’s research team was in the middle of the icefall that, at the time, had the greatest death toll in Everest history, and one member of his team was killed as they studied climate change impacts on the Everest massif. He discussed the positive and negative environmental impacts resulting from the Maoist insurgency and how these impacts have reshaped the cultural and social dynamics of the area. Dr. All then linked this project with similar work in Peru as the Mountain Environments Research Institute conducts holistic, interdisciplinary research in the world's highest mountains. The interaction of local resource decision-making and climate change impacts will continue to shape mountain landscapes as environmental and population stresses increase for the foreseeable future.

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Learn about research that is shaping global policies for digital forensics and redefining what is possible in cyber investigations. How do the latest solid state drives and cloud computing effect evidence recovery? How do criminologists profile online predators and understand the effects of social networking in criminal behavior?

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As driverless vehicles are on the horizon, decisions about how they react in different situations need to be determined. If a driverless vehicle is in a situation where a collision is unavoidable, should it take the option that minimizes the overall impact at the possible expense of its occupants or should it always make the decision to protect itself? Should drivers get to make the decision themselves? Should the age of the occupants, criminal history, driving record, marital status, family situation, cost of vehicle, legal liability, and potential contribution of the occupants to society be considered? These and many other questions related to the ethics and technological innovations with driverless vehicles will be discussed.

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The Darwinian revolution began in a new understanding of how species change through time by means of natural selection, and affirms that each species, including our own, is genetically adapted in exquisite detail for life in a particular environment. The studies of adaptation through time and the diversity of the millions of other species are the core of evolutionary biology. Functional biology, including medical research, will do well to incorporate the study of biodiversity and the process of evolution that has created it. Edward Osborne Wilson is an American biologist, researcher (sociobiology, biodiversity), theorist (consilience, biophilia), naturalist (conservationist) and author. His biological specialty is myrmecology, the study of ants. Wilson is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. He is known for his career as a scientist, his advocacy for environmentalism, and his secular-humanist and deist ideas pertaining to religious and ethical matters. As of 2007, he is Pellegrino University Research Professor in Entomology for the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He is a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism.

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Nuclear technology, the basis for well-known energy production via nuclear power, has also been harnessed to serve a plethora of humanitarian functions in the fields of in agriculture, medicine, electricity generation, modern industry, transportation, public safety, environmental protection, space exploration, and even archeology and the arts. This talk explores continuous improvement in many areas of science, industry, and medicine through tapping the incredible potential of nuclear technology.

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Observations of very distant exploding stars show that the expansion of the Universe is now speeding up, rather than slowing down due to gravity as expected. Over the largest distances, our Universe seems to be dominated by a repulsive "dark energy" of unknown origin that stretches the very fabric of space itself faster and faster with time. Alex Filippenko (NAS), University of California, Berkeley, was a member of both teams that discovered in 1998 the accelerating expansion of the Universe, driven by "dark energy."

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Non-state-backed, decentralized “cryptocurrencies” such as bitcoin have introduced new paradigms for money movement in which transfers are public but the identities of the individuals behind the transfers are masked. This presents both opportunities and challenges. On the one hand, cryptocurrencies have important speed, efficiency and (in some respects) security advantages over traditional approaches. Yet, all mechanisms for moving and storing money—new and old—involve risks and the potential for misuse. This presentation will discuss what bitcoin is, how it works, and the broader implications of systems built on the concept of decentralized trust. John Villasenor is a professor of electrical engineering and public policy at UCLA, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a national fellow at the Hoover Institution.

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What if extinction is not forever? Recent advances in ancient DNA research and genome engineering technologies have opened the door to turning this idea from science fiction into science fact. But, how close are we to actually making de-extinction happen, and, are there compelling reasons to do so? In this talk, ancient DNA scientist Beth Shapiro discussed the science and ethics of de-extinction, including what is and what is not technically possible today and how scientists might overcome the existing barriers to bringing extinct species back to life.

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One of the most striking creations of the brain is the mind … of other people. What I mean is: each human brain faces the critical challenge of predicting and explaining the choices and behaviours of other human brains. Because the true full causal story of how brains work is preposterously complicated, our brains invent simplified causal models of other people, that are not exactly true, but nevertheless very useful. This simplified, useful model of other's brain is called our “theory of mind”. This talk will give an introduction to how theory of mind works in the brain. We’ll see that each of us has whole patches of brain cortex dedicated to the puzzle of understanding others, and that we use these patches not just to predict and explain but also to evaluate others actions. We’ll see that understanding others is not the same as empathizing with them. The final lesson is that our brain’s models of other minds is imperfect, but not immutable or limited to minds similar to our own. It is up to us to learn enough, to listen enough, to model the minds that matter.

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In 2017, Jevin West and a colleague developed a course titled “Calling BS.” The goal is to teach students how to spot and refute BS, especially the kind wrapped in numbers, data, figures, and statistics. The class discusses the role that social media and misdirected algorithms play in spreading this and other forms of misinformation, and how the breakdown of communication systems in science and journalism have made it more difficult to combat it. Since the inception of the class, more than 70 universities have shown interest in adopting some version of the course. The content is now expanding into into high schools and middle schools (sans “BS”). Hear what has been learned teaching the class, and, more broadly, the rise of misinformation, specifically within and about science, and what can be done in education, policy, and technology to address this threat to democracy and the integrity of science.

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Media and technology are ubiquitous elements of modern life, and their use can offer benefits and rewards. At the same time, decisions about how we structure our use of media can be informed by consideration of whether and, if so, how the mind and brain are shaped by different media use patterns. Anthony Wagner discussed seminal findings from psychological science that demonstrate that humans cannot multitask—rather, attempts at multitasking result in frequent task switching— and how task switching creates performance costs. There is a growing body of research into the cognitive and neural profiles of individuals who differ in the extent to which they "simultaneously" engage with multiple media streams, or ‘media multitasking’, in everyday life. Evidence suggests that, relative to lighter media multitaskers, heavier media multitaskers exhibit poorer performance in a number of cognitive domains, including working memory and sustained goal-directed attention, even when they are performing such tasks in isolation. Given the potential implications of these findings, there is a critical need for further research that uncovers the mechanistic underpinnings of the observed differences, including determining the direction of causality. Through psychological science and neuroscience, we ultimately aim to inform decisions about how to minimize the potential costs and maximize the many benefits of our ever-evolving media landscape.

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Nearly 50 years ago, it was proposed that microbes in the ocean can regulate planetary health by maintaining a homeostatic balance through the exchange of chemical species with the atmosphere. Ocean microbes including phytoplankton, viruses, and bacteria have been coined the canaries in the coal mine as they show faster adaptive responses to our changing climate than other organisms. When waves break, these microbes are transferred into the atmosphere and profoundly influence human and planetary health. This presentation will focus on recent studies aimed at advancing the understanding of the control of ocean biology on the atmosphere, clouds, and climate. Highlights will be presented of a novel laboratory mesocosm approach developed in the NSF Center for Aerosol Impacts on Chemistry of the Environment (CAICE) that transfers the physical, chemical, and biological complexity of the ocean/atmosphere system into the laboratory. A discussion is presented on new insights that have been obtained using this approach as well as next steps, and a future vision for how to unravel human versus microbial impacts on the changing Earth’s system.

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Prescription drug costs in the United States have risen to an unsustainable level, accounting for 1 in 6 dollars spent on health care and compromising many patients’ ability to afford the medications they need. Although there is broad, bipartisan agreement that policy action is required, several aspects of the problem make it unusually hard to solve. Drawing on a recent report by a committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, Dr. Mello will discuss those problems and paths forward recommended by the committee.

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We generate genetic information for research, clinical care and personal curiosity at exponential rates. Sharing these genetic datasets is vital for accelerating the pace of biomedical discoveries and for fully realizing the promises of the genetic revolution. However, one of the key issues of broad dissemination of genetic data is finding an adequate balance that ensures data privacy. Yaniv Erlich will present several strategies to breach genetic privacy using open internet tools, including a systematic analysis of the strategy that implicated the Golden State Killer. Our analyses show that these strategies can identify major parts of the U.S. population from their allegedly anonymous genetic information by anyone in the world. The talk will conclude with practical suggestions to reconcile genetic privacy with the need to share genetic information.

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Over the past decades our diets have become sweeter because of the use of sugar as a food additive: today over 75% of foods sold at grocery stores contain added sugar. During the same time, the number of calories consumed per day has increased by 20%. What is the connection between food environment and obesity? Does excess dietary sugar reshape our eating patterns to promote overconsumption? Monica Dus will present recent neuroscience research in humans and animal models on the effects of dietary sugar on taste perception, food intake, and obesity.

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There is a building boom for tall buildings for West Coast Cities; daring architectural designs trumpet that they are designed to withstand the 2,500-yr earthquake shaking. In this talk, Dr. Heaton will explore whether or not these claims are scientifically based; or are scientists being used as “useful idiots” to facilitate the ambitions of developers? Cutting through the claims of current high-rise development is surprisingly difficult. Technical reports describing the attributes of real buildings are mostly proprietary and the deliberations of peer-review committees are secret. To help better understand the collapse resistance of typical tall buildings Dr. Heaton has worked with his colleagues and students to simulate the response of steel buildings designed to meet building codes that have evolved considerably since the 1950’s.

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Are we alone in the Universe? This is a question that has puzzled countless generations. While we are still unable to say whether there is life out there we are beginning to think about whether there are planets that remind us of home. The Kepler spacecraft has been used to identify several planets in the habitable zone of other star - a region around a star where a planet could host liquid water at its surface given an appropriate atmosphere. Of particular note is Kepler-186f which is an Earth-sized planet that orbits within the habitable zone of a star that is smaller and cooler than the Sun. This talk will focus on the search for Earth-like worlds, discuss what we know about the planets we have found and look at what we don't know right now but hope to learn from future NASA missions.

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Earth’s ecosystems are changing faster now than any time since the last ice age. Ironically we know little about most ecosystems, especially those in remote areas unexplored by scientists. To address this challenge, Greg Asner’s team combines laser and spectral instrumentation aboard a fixed-wing aircraft, the Carnegie Airborne Observatory, to produce detailed, 3-D imagery revealing the composition and health of ecosystems. Dr. Asner will discuss the Observatory’s revolutionary capabilities, and how it is yielding new scientific discoveries while accelerating conservation and management of our planet’s resources.

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Concussion is a hot topic in the media and on many people's minds, particularly in terms of sports-related brain injuries. This presentation will review what we know and do not know about concussion: Its acute effects, recovery, risks, and association with cognitive disorders later in life. This will include a review of recent studies of retired professional athletes with a history of concussion utilizing brain imaging, diagnostic, and neurobehavioral assessment techniques. Additional topics will include traumatic brain injury as a risk factor for the later development of cognitive impairment and dementia.

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Urban infrastructure systems, such as highways, potable water systems, and the electric power grid, form the foundation for life in the US. Yet many critical components were designed more than fifty years ago and are reaching the end of their intended service life. Issues related to managing and improving these complex systems will be discussed.

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From Alaska to the Amazon, wildfires are rapidly changing. Climate change is expected to influence drought and wildfires by the middle of the 21st century, and possible consequences for forests and human health. This lecture will focus on three research examples: Changing patterns of lightening that may enable forest expansion into the Artic; the unique differences of Santa Ana conditions and summer wildfires in Southern California; and how the 2015/2016 El Nino has influenced drought and wildfire activity in the important tropical forest ecosystem of the Amazon.

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Our written and spoken language provides a wealth of data that can be used to inform legal disputes. In matters ranging from criminal prosecutions (some of which can be elucidated by speaker or author identification) to trademark litigation (for which consumer confusion can be dispositive) to wrongful-termination suits (which may call for assessment of a co-worker’s accusations), linguists have been called upon to direct their analytical skills to issues that may be of importance to the finder of fact. For example, a combination of vocal overtones and dialect shadings served to cast doubt on suspicions that a disgruntled employee had phoned in anonymous bomb threats to his company. Linguistic quantification techniques helped to end a dispute between two competing mortgage lenders with similar-sounding trademarks. And a survey of the psycholinguistic factors which may impede the aural recognition of a familiar voice was instrumental in challenging the attribution of a threat by 15 confident and outspoken earwitnesses. These and other examples will illustrate some of the possibilities afforded by forensic linguistics.

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Where is the best place to find living life beyond Earth? It may be that the small, ice-covered moons of Jupiter and Saturn harbor some of the most habitable real estate in our Solar System. Life loves liquid water and these moons have lots of it! These oceans worlds of the outer solar system have likely persisted for much of the history of the solar system and as a result they are highly compelling targets in our search for life beyond Earth. Dr. Hand will explain the science behind why we think we know these oceans exist and what we know about the conditions on these worlds. He will focus on Jupiter's moon Europa, which is a top priority for future NASA missions. Dr. Hand will also show how the exploration of Earth's ocean is helping to inform our understanding of the potential habitability of worlds like Europa.

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Urbanization and coastal development in southern California over last 100 years resulted in considerable impacts to the marine ecosystem through habitat loss, pollution, and overfishing. This stimulated substantial state and federal regulations over the last 40 years to reduce these impacts, particularly necessary with a growing human population. One indicator of ecosystem restoration can be seen in recovery of marine predator populations, including meso and apex predators (e.g. teleosts, sharks, seals, whales). While direct protection for many marine predator species have been in place for at least a decade, improved fisheries management, water quality and coastal habitat restoration have likely aided predator recovery.

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Our climate is changing. C02 levels in the atmosphere are growing at unprecedented rates and temperatures are increasing so quickly that in less than one hundred years humans will be living on a planet that will be hotter than at any time in the evolution of the human species. Increasing concentrations of atmospheric C02 are already effecting insects and plants. Rainfall patterns are changing. These effects lead to series of critical challenges that we must overcome even as human populations are rapidly growing. Clearly, we must find ways to increase the global food supply. Among our biggest competitors will be insects. Climate change and global travel are enhancing the introduction of new agriculturally and medically important insects into natural and agricultural systems. Some of these movements are predictable and plans for their introductions should be made in advance. From a scientific viewpoint, the likely ecological changes in insect-plant interactions are fascinating. From a societal point of view, now is the time to begin training the next generation of agricultural scientists and farmers. Unfortunately, the current trend is for universities to cut back on agricultural departments, and many students do not find agricultural disciplines to be as exciting (or as profitable) as manufacturing, engineering, and the sciences that have taken us into space. We have to do a better job of showing our students how advanced and interesting agricultural sciences really are. Eventually the need for food will drive the need for more scientists and improved farming techniques, but unless we act on all of these challenges now, we risk falling too far behind to sustain either the population or our environment.

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Origami is the ancient Japanese practice of paper folding, where cuts are not allowed, to make intricate works of art that are sometimes minimalist and sometimes amazingly complex and realistic. The past 5-10 years have seen a surge of interest in origami for applications in engineering, physics, architecture, and other branches of science. Origami is being used to design solar sails that unfold without the aid of human hands in outer space. It is being used to design innovative heart stents, automobile airbags, and even micro-scale robots. Materials scientists are finding ways to fold everything from graphene to polymer gels to sheet metal. This presentation will describe how origami is being used in science, how mathematics has unlocked the power of origami to make it useful in such applications, and how origami is being used in education as a hands-on way to teach math.

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Have you ever wondered what is in the toy that your baby just put in their mouth? Or about what goes into your hair conditioner and what happens when it gets washed down the drain? Chemicals, both natural and synthetic, are the building blocks of everything that you interact with every day. At Safer Made we support companies that create chemicals and materials that make our consumer products healthier for people and the natural world. This means creating alternatives to harmful chemicals and thinking about product design, from manufacturing through the end of a product’s useful life. In today’s marketplace, consumers are demanding safer and more sustainable products and this translates into a multi-billion opportunity for safer chemistry and product innovation. I will highlight current innovation trends in safer chemistry that are reshaping the way that packaging, textile and apparel, building materials, and formulated products are made. At Safer Made we believe that everyone plays a role in shaping the future of chemistry and this talk will share ways that you can get involved in supporting the creation of safer and more sustainable products.

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The key outcomes of the Paris COP21 meeting in 2015 included: first, both an acknowledgement that global warming must be held below two degrees Celsius and national commitments to start down the road of deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions; second, a multinational recognition that clean energy technology innovation is at the center of solutions to the climate challenge with associated commitments to double their innovation R&D budgets. Today, a consensus is emerging that we are collectively well behind any semblance of a successful trajectory to those ends. We must dramatically accelerate the clean energy transformation to a deeply decarbonized energy economy. This calls for a significantly expanded and refocused innovation agenda across multiple sectors of the economy – not just the electricity sector. The innovation pathway to a deeply decarbonized energy economy will be addressed.

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Katharine Hayhoe, Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University, founder and CEO of ATMOS Research and author of A Climate for Change.

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Have you ever eaten food after it has been dropped on the floor or double-dipped a chip? What about the cleanliness of restaurant menus or how sanitary it is to play beer pong. Paul Dawson will talk about what the research says on these and other topics related to the bacterial transfer on and around food. We’ll look at the ways bacteria live and move around the surfaces where we eat, drink and celebrate. Ice, lemon slices, sharing food, and even blowing out birthday candles will be placed under the microscope for close examination. So if you are still wondering who was correct, George Costanza (the infamous double-dipper from Seinfeld) or Timmy (the dip protestor), then come out on September 12th to hear some trivia and find the answer to these and other questions about food and bacteria.

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Touch is essential for communicating our emotions. Indeed our earliest socio-emotional experience may be the protective embrace of a parent. Humans and non-human primates use touch to build and maintain bonds throughout life, yet little is known about how the brain extracts the emotional content of social touch. This talk will focus on the role of the amygdala, the emotional hub of the brain, in processing touch and in extracting the positive or negative valence of touch stimuli. Dr. Gothard will explain how neuroscientists explore questions related to touch and emotion, emphasizing the value and the benefits of gaining new, significant knowledge in this area of research.

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New technologies hold great promise for sustainable control of malaria parasite transmission by mosquitoes. The science of these technologies has advanced so quickly that the public understanding of their benefits and risks lags far behind. The challenge is to develop these new disease control methods while at the same time recruiting public support for the efforts.

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Neuroscience research over the past several decades has revolutionized our understanding of the change processes in the brain that underlie the development and elaboration of our skills and abilities in younger life, and that account for their predictable, progressive decline at an older age. Neuroplasticity studies also provide us with important new insights into strategies for overcoming those losses, and for managing our brain health all across the span of our lives. Our goal is to explain how this science relates to YOUR health--and to explain how the great personal endowment of "brain plasticity" contributes to YOUR potential for continuous personal growth.

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Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the leading cause of blindness in the United States. The most common factor that increases the risk of AMD is increasing age. However, environmental factors including cigarette smoking and nutrition also play important roles in the development of AMD. This lecture will discuss specifically how researchers examined the role of diets and the use of nutritional supplements for the treatment of AMD. Unlike other medical conditions, nutritional supplements are effective in reducing the risk of progression to vision-threatening AMD. While the role of genetics may be important in AMD but the use of genetic testing in the treatment of AMD is not warranted. These recommendations of nutritional supplements and genetic testing for AMD will be discussed.

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California relies on a network of dams and aqueducts to store and transport water from the primary source areas (e.g., Sierra Nevada mountains and foothills) to usage areas (e.g., Central Valley farms and coastal urban regions). Southern California, in particular, relies on this infrastructure for 60% of its water, with the primary supply aqueducts importing from Owens Valley (eastern Sierra), Colorado River, and the California Bay-Delta Region. In this seminar, the presenter will define the meaning of resilience as applied to water systems. He will provide examples of stressing events in which the subsequent response demonstrated resilience (Los Angeles water system following Northridge earthquake) and did not (communities in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina). He will then describe seismic threats to California’s water systems and opine upon critical system components with and without suitable resilience.

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Magic is dramatized deception, lying as performance art, cons as theatre. Magicians trick our brains into seeing what isn’t real, and for whatever reason our brains let them get away with it.Turns out, you can learn a lot about how the mind works—and why it sometimes doesn’t—by looking at how magicians distort our perception.Through a mix of psychology, storytelling, and sleight-of-hand, Stone explores the cognitive underpinnings of misdirection, illusion, scams, and secrecy, pulling back the curtain on the many curious and powerful ways our brains deceive us—not just when we’re watching a magician stage his swindles, but throughout our daily lives.

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If you want to find life on other worlds, then you may want to start by searching the deepest, most remote areas of our seafloor. At hydrothermal vents, high pressure and heat from volcanic activity transforms seawater into hot, mineral-laden water. These hot springs support thriving ecosystems that exist completely devoid of sunlight. Chemical clues in hydrothermal vent fluids reveal the presence of a subseafloor biosphere, and recent exploration in the Arctic uncovers the nature of hydrothermal venting below meter-thick ice at the top of the world.

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One in ten human beings does not have access to clean potable water, a number that the United Nations predicts will more than quadruple in the next 13 years, mostly due to population growth in developing nations. These water needs can be met by desalination of ocean water but that requires a capital investment exceeding one trillion U.S. dollars. Therefore, development of affordable technologies to desalinate salt water for human consumption and agriculture is important. Toward this, my group recently invented a process for sunlight-driven desalination that can theoretically generate potable water 20 times faster than the competing process of solar thermal distillation. Central to our approach is a mechanism for direct conversion of sunlight into ionic power that we have demonstrated using inexpensive and scalable sheets of plastic.

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Since 1981 when Richard Feynman proposed a device called a "quantum computer" to take advantage of the laws of quantum physics to achieve computational speed-ups over classical methods, quantum algorithms have been developed that offer fast solutions to problems in a variety of fields including number theory, optimization, chemistry, physics, and materials science. Quantum devices have also significantly advanced such that components of a scalable quantum computer have been demonstrated; the promise of implementing quantum algorithms is in our near future. This talk will reveal some of the mysteries of this disruptive, revolutionary computational paradigm and how it will transform our digital age.

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Microscopic beasts including viruses, bacteria, and fungi often associate with hosts to facilitate their spread and reproduction. Host-microbial interactions stretch back to the origins of cellular life. These alliances range from hostile to cooperative and from transient to permanent. We will explore the influence of microbes on their hosts and how they gain the ability to manipulate cell functions and organismal behavior. Understanding how microbes control hosts is helping unlock the secrets of our own biology and behavior.

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This lecture will explore what happens when you look at online learning as a complex system, analogous to the yearly development of the flu vaccine. Dr. Rubin will draw on the complexity theory behind two-sided networks (critical to understanding both the economics of Health Maintenance Organizations and vaccine creation) and identify fundamental gaps in learning systems. He will then describe how Microsoft applied this work to the reskilling challenge in Data Science. Drawing on the work enabled from the analysis of big data by learning scientists, we can understand the DNA of a professional program and the behaviors of successful learners. This work led to a dramatic increase in ROI for education/workforce skilling, and has introduced approximately 2000 newly trained Data Scientists in little over a year.

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Traumatic injury in the United States presents a staggering national economic and social burden. Unfortunately, despite the burden, trauma care does not garner the leadership, funding or research commensurate to it. If there is any positive to armed conflict, one might be that war advances trauma care in both the military and civilian sectors. It is important that these hard-earned lessons, paid for in blood, be translated diffusely across the civilian sector. Recommendations from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine committee’s report A national trauma care system: Integrating military and civilian trauma systems to achieve zero preventable deaths after injury, provide a roadmap to improve survival, but will require concerted leadership and engagement from the point of injury through a return to daily living.

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We live in an era where the values of an open society are being challenged by rising xenophobia. It is timely then to remind ourselves of the multiple gifts we have received from other cultures, from morphine to the alphabet, from our cultivars to our mathematics. Culture is the human way of adapting to local ecologies, social and political forces, and each one offers thousands of years of collective experiment. We still have very much to learn from these well-honed solutions both practically and scientifically. Critically, we need the foil of cultural diversity to help us understand the fundamentals of human nature – to distinguish native propensities from cultural formation. There is an urgency to this endeavor – the 7000 odd cultures of the world are being rapidly eroded by the forces of globalization, ethnic cleansing and state centralization or collapse.

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Human milk contains numerous components that shape the microbial content of the developing infant gastrointestinal tract. Studies suggest a co-evolutionary relationship between mammalian milk glycans, infant-borne bifidobacteria and the infant host resulting in a programmed enrichment of a protective bifidobacterial-dominant community during a critical stage of infant development. Disruption of this programmed enrichment, by poor environmental transfer, antibiotic use, or infection, can lead to a “poorly functioning” milk-oriented microbiota that may pose a risk for negative health outcomes. Further analysis of this naturally evolved system will shed light on effective pre- and probiotic tools that support and ensure a protective gut microbiota for at-risk infants.

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Each year tiny sandpipers -- red knots -- undertake a near miraculous 19,000 mile journey from one end of the earth to the other and back. In this firsthand account, Deborah Cramer accompanies them on their extraordinary odyssey along the length of two continents, tracking birds from remote Tierra del Fuego to the icy Arctic. On the full moon of spring's highest tides, she seeks out horseshoe crabs -- ancient, primordial animals whose eggs are essential to migrating shorebirds, and whose blue blood, unbeknownst to most people, safeguards human health. The Narrow Edge offers unique insight into how the lives of humans, red knots and horseshoe crabs are intertwined. It is an inspiring portrait of loss and resilience, of the tenacity of birds, and the courage of the many people who bird by bird and beach by beach, keep red knots flying.

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Neuroscientist James Fallon was looking at brain scans of serial killers at the same time that he was also doing a study on Alzheimer’s and had brain scans from himself and members of his family on his desk. He discovered that the psychopathic brain pictured in a particular scan was his own. The fact that a person with the genes and brain of a psychopath could end up a non-violent, stable and successful scientist made Fallon reconsider the ambiguity of the term. Research shows that a serotonin transporter protein present in the brain put people at higher risk for psychopathic tendencies, but also opens up the ventromedial prefrontal cortex region to be more significantly affected by environmental influences such that a positive (or negative) childhood is especially pivotal in determining behavioral outcomes.

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Europa is one of the most enticing targets in the search for life beyond Earth. With an icy outer shell hiding a global ocean, Europa exists in a dynamic environment and sources of energy that could sustain a biosphere. Beneath ice shelves on Earth, processes such as accretion, melt and circulation mediate the ice as an important element of the climate system. Here, ice-ocean exchange may be similar to that on Europa, but the harsh environment and thickness of the ice make it difficult to observe.
This presentation will explore environments on Europa and their analogs here on Earth. NASA will launch the Europa Clipper Mission in 2021, but while we wait to get there, current research is being conducted on the McMurdo and Ross Ice Shelves using the under ice AUV/ROV Icefin. This new robotic capability is used to gather unique new data relevant to climate and planetary science, and develop techniques for exploring Europa, an ice covered world not so unlike our own.

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American taxpayers spend about $30 billion a year to support the National Institutes of Health. Most of that funding supports research at universities, at the boundary of medicine and biology. Unfortunately it appears that a great deal of that research is not robust, and can't be reproduced in other labs. Richard Harris took a year's leave from his job as science correspondent at National Public Radio to explore the reasons for these failings and to explore ways that the scientific enterprise can be improved. The result was his book, Rigor Mortis.
» Richard Harris, National Public Radio

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There is much potential for robots to support older adults in their goal of successful aging with high quality of life. However, for human-robot interactions to be successful, the robots must be designed with user needs, preferences, and attitudes in mind. The Human Factors and Aging Laboratory is specifically oriented toward developing a fundamental understanding of aging and bringing that knowledge to bear on design issues important to the enjoyment, quality, and safety of everyday activities of older adults. Our research does not emphasize loss of function associated with aging; rather, we wish to understand how to enhance a person's ability to function well in later life, perhaps through technology. In this presentation, I will describe our research with robots: personal, social, telepresence. We focus on the human side of human-robot interaction, answering questions such as, are older adults willing to interact with a robot? What do they want the robot to do? To look like? How do they want to communicate with a robot? Through research examples, I will illustrate the potential for robots to support successful aging as well as the challenges that remain for the design and widespread deployment of robots in this context.
» Wendy Rogers, University of Illinois

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For many, the phrase “brain aging” is accompanied by thoughts of cognitive decline or even dementia. In reality, brain aging is far more complex – involving both gains and losses with a high degree of variability from person to person. Changes to the brain in healthy aging can best be understood as a lifelong process of adaptation to biological, psychological, and environmental factors. This talk will focus on what has been learned from studying seniors with high levels of cognitive function. It will tackle questions such as, how do "optimally aging" brains respond to challenges like stress and memory demand? And, how do the the brains of optimally-aging seniors compensate for decline in important cognitive functions like learning and memory? In addressing these questions, this presentation will highlight discoveries in the neuroscience of aging and provide a better understanding of the possibilities and limitations of the aging brain.
» Nichole Lighthall, University of Central Florida

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