 I do have voice yes welcome yes surprise we can walk right from the ground into into the sea so we thought we were standing on the ground because actually the beach and the uh the top of the ocean is above us so maybe 10 meters above us and if you look up you will see a sea lion eating a fish up there yes so we have here to my right ahead the kelp forest there are small fish of sardine mackerel type of fish prey fish that live there you'll also see sea urchins the remains of scallop shells that somebody cleaned out some starfish walking along that the parting of the waters it's amazing the kind of powers we have here in second life that we I can actually part the waters um so you have the starfish the uh the horseshoe crab and a couple of crabs that are you know crabs are just uh adventurous little creatures and some of them crawled out of the water and are up on what used to be a table but they'll go back in the water soon in fact we have another kind of crab too over to my left is a small coral reef with some better anemone and some a couple of different corals and these corals surprisingly were finding live not only in the hot water the warm water but the deep cold water along the the continental shells so we're just exploring some of those in the last couple of years but in the warmer edges of the water you'll see a little spider crab there an arrow crab version you look up a little bit you'll see a leopard shark that is thinking of eating small some of the the smaller fish so in all of the habitat builds that I do we have both flour and fauna we have appropriate to the kind of location and we have prey and predators so that uh although not everything that you will see at the abyss observatory in the habitats there will necessarily live right next to each other in the the solid world they each live in that particular kind of a habitat so you will not see tropical mixed with uh subarctic for instance we have chosen the scenes the habitats that we have at the abyss observatory because each of those is threatened is a threatened habitat in its own way um as you probably know the entire ocean is uh is threatened oh um Rob I didn't see your question for for a minute yeah the corals have been around for a very long time um and they have adjusted to the particular temperature and conditions of acidity in the water and as that changes they don't move fast they grow thousands of years in the same place so they can't just pick up and swim away so that you have um the acidic water that has absorbed the carbon dioxide from the air is a real threat in a sense you know it's it's burning the corals it's bleaching them out but so far the deep water corals that are cold water corals that we didn't even know about 15 years ago are are doing okay so um at the abyss observatory we've highlighted all of these different kinds we have a tropical area with the the tropical corals but we also have the the deep water uh cold water corals and as more research is done as more research comes to light we keep updating the the notes and the commentary and the the tours that we do so the same thing that is affecting the corals though the the change in temperature and the change in acidity is also affecting the the kelp forest and those aren't actually trees they're not actually forest in that sense they're algae and so in the habitats at the abyss we have a number of different kinds here we only have three kinds but it gives you a sense of what that is and these are very much the the nursery areas so that you have the spawning areas you also have the fishing areas the sharks will come in and out of there the bluefish will come in and out of here i didn't get to put bluefish out but i will shortly but this is just kind of to give you a little taste of the the vast extent of the threatened habitats that we have over at the this observatory the sign in the back behind me on the back wall does have a landmark and we certainly encourage you to come visit there are coastal as well as undersea habitats there so the coastal includes two sets of rainforests you have the um the modern temperate rainforest and its complete kind of habitat you also have the uh the southern rainforest not the kind that you find in the amazon but um the southern temperate so that you have this is the coast of tasmania and southern australia that's a good question they they have detected shallow they have detected radiation in some of the the animals that they have captured and tested but they don't know what the long-term effect will be they don't know if it's going to have a genetic um changes generation after generation so they're still testing this out you know it's only it's not that long ago and so you have some of the sea animals that will have generation multiple generations but not all of them in that time one of the um yeah they're still checking around chernobyl and like wildlife has come back around chernobyl so you have deer you have wolves you have are those being negatively affected we don't yet know that either um so it's it's an exciting area to investigate because so many changes are happening now one of the things that you don't see in the water actually there are two things that i talked about it on our tour the other day last week and one is that everywhere in all of the oceans now they are finding microplastics and whether those are in the water or whether they are in the animals that they are everywhere even in the Arctic so although the water looks clean and pristine you know it does have the microplastics and i don't know that that will ever get cleaned out in our in our species lifetime i mean this is a long-term damage that has been done in that sense the other thing that i talked about and this is something that people don't typically think about we think about the importance of the forests in the oxygen cycle but what people don't normally think about or even know is the cycle of oxygen that is uh generated in the ocean so that in the Arctic for instance uh and particularly because you have that the great differential in temperature um you have the um quite dead that rises and sinks and it is that rising and sinking of billions and billions and billions of plankton over every day that churns the water in the Arctic and churns nutrients up to the surface and oxygen up to the surface so questions and i want to take up a lot of time but i'd be glad to do more tours over at the abyss and uh if you just want to hang up hang out up here there's a uh sitting seashell on the the beach in the rock up top you can just hang out and read i'd be glad to answer any questions i did the display of layers because that's the way it is in the ocean um you have the the shore layer and you have the uh uh many layers underneath so that um words are important but there's nothing like an experience and that's one of the beauties of second life to me anyway that you can uh talk about things but if i go and i step into the kelp it has an entirely different feel than standing out and looking at it or talking about it i see the fish swimming around above me i i can feel the the rough sand below so it's an entirely different experience oh i did i was saying yes you're right i did have a this was years ago the glacier build that was when we had the center for water studies and we did have a a glacier build and every once in a while we did tours where we would melt the glacier and uh raise the sea level yeah yeah that was uh oh god that's gotta be at least 10 years ago um yeah so we at the abyss observatory we do have the the deep layers of course we can't do the thousand meters so it's a um and as if um but you have the um the hot water um yeah you do have the uh the deep water there and it it's probably down about 100 um meters in in our exhibit but it would be down thousands of meters so you have the hydrothermal vents down there and the the uh tube worms and all that would be along the the vents um this is a barricade uh dillie do you mind if i interrupt no i think we have about 12 minutes per booth so if you don't mind um i think we should uh um uh let's go ahead and uh move along to our next booth if everyone's ready yes absolutely go along come visit me at the abyss observatory and hang out back here anytime okay great um so i don't know if everyone has the note card but um our next booth will be um mike shaw so uh let's all follow mike over these okay hopefully you can hear me and now i have to figure out where my booth is so um i haven't done a mic um check so i'm hoping that people can hear me let's see la la la la i am all confused how scary are you all right it's like unless i'm mistaken it'd be like the blind leading the digital right so yeah i've got zoom going and oh here we are okay duh duh all right so um i kept my booth fairly simple um because i've got a whole region over um or a whole uh part of this sim over in the northeast uh so um i also prepared uh some um uh texts that i can feed into text chat so um basically i thought i'd go with uh start start organize organize my talk with some of the questions that shantalan just posed today and the first one was what have you done in the last year so i'm going to tell you a little bit about that uh so um for those of you don't know me here's a little bit more about me professionally it's basically my orchid um id uh page publications grants and stuff like that i'm gonna tell you a little bit about what i've been doing uh for science circle in addition uh to um some of some of the science uh so um always support or i always like to acknowledge MSF for uh supporting what we do basically uh the current grant which ends on sunday night um is is that one there is a new grant um so you know in the last year i've been on the science and station um board i hope i've been an asset uh i had to help with management issues and fundraising i'll talk a bit about that uh general brain storming and hopefully moral support or not or at least not actively immoral support uh so what have i done in the last year given some talks made some model maintain an exhibit on the northeast corner of the sim so there's giant models of molecules some of the things i love about second life is that i can take um single crystal x-ray diffraction data from the public databases um feed it through visualization uh software on my pc then feed it through blender then upload it in the second life i'm actually wearing some very stylish molecules um ones from my research i'll tell you about those in a second so um being able to import actual um molecular structures these look like ball and stick models but the distances between the atoms are faithful to what is found in nature these are the measured distances and angles so these are like snapshots 3d snapshots but being able to use these to help students um visualize more the 3d aspects of the um of chemistry um and of course uh you'll notice i am uh still drinking coffee that's that's how i teach in in my classroom as well and the other things i've done is uh shown um atomic and molecular orbitals and um understanding the shape of where electrons can wander in atoms and molecules i built an intuitive understanding of what chemistry is possible so um you know my recordings have been used in my classes um the um um the silicon life recording uh they really liked that for his classroom my bio and organic students loved it so um you know the recordings we've done for second life um in uh science circle then have found their way into my teaching so um so i show a couple of models here uh basically on the table so the one in the middle um has an animation um associated with it so if i click on it it'll start and basically those are the orbitals um they're the regions where electrons can wander on particular elements like iron for example and there's a little cube a little cube has six atoms one embedded in the middle of every face and the cube basically shows how these um orbitals break into two groups there's one group where the lobes point directly at the atoms and there's another group where uh the lobes point in between the atoms so you basically get the um pattern of uh two orbitals above uh three that remain below well uh this is this splitting in um energy is the basis of why so many metal compounds have such gorgeous colors and it's basically the basis of what's called crystal field theory which is uh you know used by geologists to explain the color of rubies emerald sapphires um azurite all the beautiful uh copper aluminum iron um compounds that uh exist in nature i'm gonna stop that yeah yay it stops eventually no click okay i didn't click on it right so um the more see-through um models on the table are um showing how um atoms interact with each other to make turn their atomic orbitals like where electrons can go if they're just associated with single atom into molecular orbitals and how those molecular orbitals can interact with um you know from from an atom to like an organic molecule so let's see uh i want to talk a little bit about grant proposals this year uh we submitted two grant proposals uh they that weren't funded uh one to slown foundation one to nsf um for uh science education now to reach through virtual worlds um um my um my my reserve giver is not um working for you guys i'll i'll show you that in a second i've got a uh i'll i'll i'll i'll fix that eventually um come back and have them so um the latter the second nsf grant was a team from my institution and from science circle this was a wonderful experience and um it's the resubmit would be due in november so we're starting to look at uh redoing that one um let's see we've got starting monday my newest grant with george riftaradu university of oklahoma he's been my friend for many many years and we've been collaborating oh almost 20 years now um yeah he is yeah i actually visit oh you uh once or twice a year to hang out with the group um so yeah george was chair of the university of oklahoma's chemistry department for about a oh i wonder if you know my dad was a uh a chemist at uh university of oklahoma but i think well before uh his time probably he started there in about 1993 so uh probably might be unless your dad's are unless you're much younger than i think you are um i'm not yeah so yeah so basically we've got a little bit of money from um from there there's the new award um so as i said fourth award in a row so uh that's what i'm um that's actually some of the results from the third award or what i'm wearing right now um so um a little bit of science uh for you what i'm wearing heme uh it's a big planar organic molecule which uh has an iron atom in the center um the effect when you look at it looks like Saturn right so the rings are the organic part the metal is the uh big uh planet in the middle the heme is found in heme aglow it's what oxygen binds to for transport from your lungs to tissues um and i've got let's see on my my right hand shoulder that is um an actual heme on my left hand shoulder it's not a heme it's an optical porphine it looks very similar chemists just kind of change minor parts of structures and give them uh totally different names um the uh the compound on my left shoulder has six um things attached to the central metal atom that's that um red atom right in the middle the one on my right shoulder has five things attached and that ended up being kind of important um so heme's found in many proteins there's some examples i learned all about these when i taught my bio-inorganic class this spring i have no training in biochemistry so teaching a class on biochemistry was delightful i learned a lot um so um other things i've been doing in the last year learning how to use google cardboard a little more a little better we take um some of these structures plop them into unity i got a classroom set of 30 google cardboard um devices that we can take my students in through tours of giant molecules um the uh and uh that's a google exposition or x the expedition link that should work in chrome if you want to look at it so uh yourself at some other point um and on that yes yes sir oh i'm sorry mike i i didn't mean to step on you there i'm just getting a little anxious about the time because i do think uh i think we have a limited amount of time to fit this first group of booths in so sure do you mind if we maybe move along yes i'm uh perfectly happy doing that all right uh thank you very much for question very good thank you for uh that was very good thank you and um so uh our next booth will be uh vik malicek uh dr philly young blood so uh why don't we all uh follow him over to his booth actually if you just kind of turn around uh and go over to the other side of this walkway you'll see the booth talking to the sheep yeah i like to talk to the sheep to talk back i talked to my dog okay uh since there is some time for me uh my presentation here is somewhat um expertise um bordering on impromptu i kind of threw everything together in the last years uh because this last year has been a blur and i just got a brand new computer i wouldn't even get into second life so i got a brand new computer and it's doing just fine thank you um right it's interesting going through the inventory after about 11 years so i threw some things together and let me start to show you a couple things that's going on uh i had the privilege of being in second life um and in science circle from the very beginning i gave the first presentation actually for this time back in march of 2000 if you'd like there's a copy of the the channel slides for the first presentation on the to the far left um if you've been in science circle for long enough you'll know that we've been in many many places uh before we had this island here we were visited by number of places um and same thing for my university we've had three islands they're all coming down in fact one of them should have already they're probably going to charge for the month whatever uh and i've had um relationships with other universities for example over here the prominent piece or the prominent article here is this area and what that presents is back in 2009 i think it is i had class with uh vinton mexico and france and a professor in france with the cacotata programming class in java and we had the students uh present or converse with each other in english and in french and they built things like this airplane if you want there's a picture self airplane kit now i will work you that and one of the things that don't see a lot in second life these days is actual physics um in other words making objects which instead of standing they uh sit there in other words most of us sit here but if you actually make objects that have physical properties that will drop and bang into a picture i'm going to try more of those in the near future but this airplane actually flies etc you can make your own if you do it yourself airplane kit now you have to be one of the things that is it helps for people to work together it helps uh you have to be precise in how you put things together otherwise the airplane's going to fly like an airplane that doesn't put together there's some other objects here that you may find an interest over on this other side are a few of the presentations i've done in for the science circle including the let's see my avatar is kind of being squarely right now up on the very top you have to get a copy of the presentation done for the 10th anniversary that was in 2018 the um let's see my habit like i said my avatar is kind of squarely i don't know i can't uh walk over there so you have to i get within hearing distances um the fall here is to teach a class in other words i just retired i've been working for 45 years i've been teaching for 21 at university and i figure it's time to do something else and so i'm going to get back to where i have a lot more time is a different science circle and stuff and i'm going to teach a full class in the fall and what i thought i'd do is to uh go around to all the different places in second life and to see what the students wanted to see and to explain all of what's going on in kind of science in second life in other words kind of a student led or student um driven type of class and i might get down to something a little more um i always like this type of where it's not formal in other words people get together you never know people from all over the world they're all interested and so i'm very much looking forward to that and i'll tell you later this summer about more about what it's like i've been talking to uh shantel and jess about the tax presentations i've done in the past just like the very first one had to do a global climate change and the uh experiencing that right now fact uh was 113 degrees Fahrenheit the other day the highest it's ever been recorded um we will find of course the climate change is continuing to uh be a big issue and i'm doing um so that's one of my bigger um presentations i also uh minor in astronomy so i've been doing those and computer technology um i'll probably have uh future time periods where i present a computer uh science and allow people to like put together uh networks in secondly publications work and stuff like that i don't a lot of those i see a lot of some of the other types of presentations um let's see i don't know how much more like 10 minutes uh is but luckily we have these lists for some time and so um i think i will wrap mine up now and so we can allow us to see some of the other bits any questions very good thank you vick i appreciate that so who you have next okay so uh thank you i was just taking care of a little housekeeping here uh next we have uh syria guia uh dr robert larson if he is uh lawson rather uh robert lawson brown i should say um should uh um is he ready uh robert yes we'll be speaking in voice okay very good all right uh so let's uh follow uh robert or rather uh syria guia to his hello everyone uh my name is robert lawson brown and i prefer the pronunciation in second life of syria guia syria guia uh guia being the name given to uh the entire system of the world and syria is related to seeking for knowledge um basically i'm a retired physicist i got my doctorate back in 1978 and for my career i've been working in industry in the deep dark recesses of industry in particular in the uh areas of however uh i also uh have been engaged in photography and a little videography i thought that now that i'm retired i might try to produce some educational materials when my first efforts has been in the area of photography i had noticed uh online that uh a number of uh people that uh would be producing instructional videos for often did not seem to have a understanding of the optics and the physical process you bring my chat back up yeah i'm afraid there may be some network lag problems in fact uh earlier uh during one of the uh talkers here uh the network gods uh kicked me out and i had to come back but uh we'll press forward so anyway um i thought that uh instructional videos uh things as basic optics and basic color theory would be useful for people that new photography especially with whom that has resulted from the availability of digital care so i've done two lectures for the science circles so far uh one was on the uh optics photography which i introduced ray tracing and uh some of the basic lens configurations talked about perspective and uh relationship to focal length at the focus uh another one was on color where i kind of stumbled through an explanation of the chromaticity diagram uh and uh i actually have a little short tutorial that you can download if you want uh in my note card there's a note card vendor just behind me here uh and uh you know we'll see what i come up with in the future for additional talks along the same line i'm not sure what else to say at this point um you know it's quite a milestone getting into retirement as i have uh my age and years now exceeds my height than inches something that all of us will face well maybe not the europeans because you use centimeters for your height so you have a big very big advantage there um uh i'm 66 inches high and 68 and 68 years old uh so that that's where that uh uh merge happens um so maybe some questions as i mentioned i do have a uh a short little tutorial you can download and maybe i'll get one up for basic optics as well uh and uh we'll see how that goes did have a uh lawyer from my formal industry association to do a tutorial one day that's the kind of thing i'm looking at doing hey um all right because it's about it this is a this is barragon again um uh maybe so in the interest of time which is i'm kind of obsessed with this morning um why don't we uh go ahead and uh advance along to our next booth then our next booth presenter is uh steven geyser who we know here is student steven zodify very familiar to our science circle uh students and uh steven let's uh let's uh follow you to your booth all right thanks i'm glad everyone could be here it's right behind me at the corner at this way yes i can promise i'll probably be not as short as everyone clusters around i'll get started one thing you can do is click on this box we can grab a no-card landmark a little bit of history about myself so just in terms of what i've been doing in second life uh my background is really informed by the fact that i'm a molecular biology phd that was very interested in doing research but when that career path as a research academic didn't work out i went into straight teaching and i started at the university of new warlands well there's always been a bit of a technical file growing up though i found second life as kind of a fun thing to do when it was offered by a grant that had been awarded for developing classes at the university and the class i decided to teach was non-science majors biology something that was trying to give again non-science majors a survey of what science is about the thinking some of the basic ideas not necessarily extremely in depth but i like to get students to try and think about the world and the background of chemistry and biology and how it is important today but then also to try and leverage second life to be interactive so i taught that class three or four times in different years i did different things one thing i'll direct your attention to here or even if you look sorry if you look above my booth you'll see like mike shaw had some fully res 3d versions of molecules that are faithful to the uh bond length and orientation of the chemistry the balls and sticks there the bonds and the atoms these were made with high rose reservoir who um developed it some some time ago early in the days but i mean you should i mean i would use these as props during class but what i really want students to do was to interact and try and think about how chemistry works and so i developed this uh couple of tools take a look at this one here this is just a shallow model of molecules and what i would do is the little yellow dots are electrons and so i really challenge students to understand the bonding and challenge properties of getting electrons to go together and this molecule is an example of why nitrogen has three hydrogens that stick to it as compared to say four for carbon and i really ask them to build these types of things uh by giving them reserves and the basic molecules uh similar again not worrying so much about orientation and bond length and all that make similar types of objects that were worth a ball and stick model that again ask the students to put them together really try and construct them and you know be interactive with the world uh the other one the um i don't know how many of you how many can i get it like a show of yeses or a show of hands of how many people did any sort of breedable type of things in second life for a while anybody remember the breedable bunnies those again those didn't have true genetics as you would think about for men dealing genetics but as a way to challenge the students to think about it because i asked them to actually breed a pair of bunnies uh during the course of the semester they have to go back and check on them and feed them and make sure that they're doing okay and they could pick them up and pet them and then i asked them to make pedigrees now i pre-made all of the uh diagrams to charts everything as you see them on these pedigrees but then i challenged the students well what sort of genetic inheritance pattern would explain this and in fact non-mendealian could just be an answer to try and accommodate that again i actually had a student who got incredibly upset and cried because she the the food thing didn't link to her bunny at it basically died and i got it to revive so it's kind of interesting seeing students really kind of get involved and interact uh again a lot of other things i've done i had i don't have really space here to display some of their things but i had to do posters and they could get animal avatars which i would help them buy from grendels for like five or ten linden and then a lot of them present on the animals and really enjoyed that so again my feeling about teaching was really to be make advantage of second life make it interactive for them uh as someone just mentioned we did do lots of tours of genome island there were great interactive displays there and that was a great place in fact these two cells that you see here are variants of max's big cell this one here displaying the mitochondria where i talked about energy conversion rates where you have mitochondria versus this cell over here where again you get less energy we don't have the mitochondria and so yeah i have lots i have i have a huge ton of rabbits because i took them all back from the students um in my inventory somewhere they're all past dead um okay so and at one point i left university of irland's and i went to go teach at ball state and there i really didn't teach basic biology actually taught an honors course and that's where i was also developing more into open simulator i actually had a full tour interactive activity and around this time also finished off a build on population genetics which is actually hosted over there in the corner there's a landmark there's no caregiver and if anybody wants to over the coffee break i can give them a little bit of a tour of how that works so i'm not teaching anymore i love teaching and i'm currently doing genome engineering uh enabling technology again trying to make genetic engineering work better work faster more efficiently in corn as a part of quartet agri sciences based here in Des Moines, Iowa uh again this is giving back to my micro biology uh research roots but i'm still very interested in philosophy history of science so i've been continued excuse me continuing to present for science circle uh you know the there's a back of my booth i have the opening slide for i wish i could create super bunnies that would be pretty cool but now i just just letting them letting them be happy little bunnies and do things that bunnies do that display the titles of some of the majority of my talks or panels and you'll see that i do have a little bit more of a philosophy of science uh bent as well as how it influences current culture i um still find it interesting and continuing to keep my lecture series going uh in that note card and also on the science circle website there is my the majority of my videography of the talks that i've done and so if you want to go back and view those on youtube anytime and i will be continuing to have some more topics so that's a very nice booth um and i did want to uh point out actually a number of the booths have note card givers so uh uh so feel free to as you wander along here pick up uh note cards about each topic um so uh if you don't mind trying to keep with our schedule again i think we have one more presenter before our eight o'clock break um and we're going to switch switch up the order a little bit and uh let uh fostick um uh give us his presentation so everybody try to find fostick and let's follow him to his booth where is he i don't see him i saw him here earlier uh hey i'm on voice can people hear me yes i hear you good if there's any trouble with the voice please let me know oh the place is breaking up i wonder what i can do about lots of people seem to be having that problem yeah i'm not sure you know i'm not the greatest with the uh with the voice so um if it gets out of hand let me know otherwise i'll just go with it all right so i guess i will start um so um let's see looking at the time so i'll just keep this to um five or maybe i don't know seven minutes and if people have questions um i'm happy to take questions in fact i don't know this is a very short presentation so i think people should feel free to jump in on voice anytime immediately um as i'm going along um i'd be happy to i'd be happy to listen and just make it a short conversation um in any event so uh yeah so feel feel free to jump in you know um i worked hard on my images and the content but i'm not i'm not a real builder so for three-dimensional stuff i guess i have to leave it to others but but thank you um so um so basically i have a graduate background in microbiology where i studied um bacteria oh thanks thanks for the compliments where i study bacteria that metabolize really strange things they they they live in strange environments and metabolize uh heavy metals and weird things like that it you just got me generally interested in in uh sort of strange or extremophile microbes yep extremophiles and and that led me to an interest in um search for microbial life like bacteria beyond earth um so that then led me eventually to uh more relatively more recently since i'm getting old to uh an interest in essentially subsurface oceans or subsurface bodies of water so i think it's really intriguing that in in relatively recent years it has become clear that in moons in the solar system not not the moon but in moons of Jupiter and Mars for example there are um moons i mean the moons of those planets have uh subsurface oceans ocean bodies of water essentially under usually under ice are actually always under ice that we know of uh let me read as we're going along they've discovered microbes that can digest plastic right there are microbes that can live in weird environments and and metabolize metabolize or digest all sorts of things and that makes the prospects for microbes that can live beyond earth in unusual conditions relative to earth uh more possible seemingly possible so right so on other on other moons like Europa which is a moon of jupiter and i have the side displays on that there are these bodies of liquid water and i just find this intriguing right off the bat that there are these enormous bodies of not just ice but liquid water uh trapped under the ice surface of the moons and the water exists basically because the layer on top gives pressure to order liquid and there's heat provided essentially from the pull of the gravity of the host planet let's see if i remember correctly Europa has more liquid water than earth i don't know if that's true but uh i think it's got a ton of liquid water you know uh subsurface ocean and i would bet it would be i don't know actually but it's a lot so it's just fascinating so what's in that water i mean water is the fundamental medium of life and it seems to be the the thing that most likely uh be most important for uh life to develop potentially uh outside of earth and that that's what that's what's so intriguing to me fundamentally on these other moons in the solar system have the basic chemistry that you might think could lead to life and in particular as the display on my left shows there are believed to be and some of these moons particularly Europa uh features underneath the surface with a lot of minerals and chemistry and even sort of mixing with geysers um and so and so there you have real possibilities for life in terms of chemistry water and the mixing um right as far as there might be microbial life on mars too you know the research that i've done on mars suggests that there is almost i mean i don't know i could be wrong but it seems to me that there is almost certainly not microbial life on mars present day because it's just so dry there's there's essentially no liquid water there might be some transient liquid water for a little while and it disappears i think even under the surface of present day mars there's essentially no water don't get me wrong there's tons of ice but life needs liquid water at least life that we know it so who knows but i also think that if you notice one of my slides that on the top i think it's the third one from my let's see would be my left there's a slide on mars that like way way back millions of years ago mars could have had liquid water could have flowing water it might have had life we just wouldn't know today so who knows and right there are features on mars that suggest potential canals that might have had liquid water in the past i think that's entirely possible and it's just fascinating just reading from vik two sources say from two to four times of water on europea as on earth so that's just intriguing is and i mean imagine the oceans of earth right imagine an underwater ocean larger than that of on earth on a foreign planet on a moon of another planet it's almost hard for me to believe that there aren't microbes in that i mean where there's water there seems to be the potential for life and i mean indeed water is what makes the chemistry of life basically possible um so yeah uh in on europea i remember that the belief strong belief now is that the there is um oodles of liquid water but it's way better beneath miles of ice so to get down there i mean uh it would be hard to uh let's see so we're going to need to step up or to want to get the same see what this says the same concentration of micro oh yeah that that part i don't know when it comes to micro plastics and all that's that's beyond my i know it's but um anyway so i'll just go on for maybe i'll stop in a minute because this is a short presentation so let me just look at some questions let's see last year they discovered signs of underwater lakes near mars south pole so i'd have to read that i i would think that it'd be next to impossible that there would currently order liquid water lakes on present day mars but if there is i would be intrigued um in any event there's definitely uh underwater liquid water throughout the solar system and one thing that they can do is the satellites can pick up like detritus from like uh from geysers and such that might spew chemicals into the air and that could give chemical signatures of life um can could lead to further exploration i'll read just a couple more questions maybe and i'm happy to cut it off i know time is is a bit tight let's see i worry about the bottom of the ocean yeah guys have you uh have you seen the recent reports about high meth methane levels on mars um i don't know much about it but i saw a headline about that yeah you know i did and it's intriguing and i haven't had the chance to read more about it i think i'll do so today when you see reports of high levels of things like methane um it definitely um there are natural causes that are not you know too exciting but there could be organic you know life-based causes that are very exciting in fact on one of the images that i have up i think it's the one on titan um yeah the one on the one on titan on the bottom i guess it's my bottom left so they uh there's evidence of um potentially like uh surface liquid uh i think it's methane and ethane so far where you where you get that kind of thing you get the possibility of methanogenic or different types of bacteria so yeah that's intriguing i need to read about it i hope i really hope that i'm just dead wrong about mars anyway um so right so it's been about eight minutes i'm happy to take any other questions or i'm happy to cut it off well thanks very much james that's a really nice booth and it's a great topic hey thanks a lot i think that's better thank you thanks everyone for uh for listening and if anyone wants to contact me about anything feel free thanks sisi thanks delia thanks vick have a good weekend well we're at the uh eight o'clock hour i think uh we're scheduled to have a little break here i think um shantall has planned uh some musical entertainment so feel free to wander around and explore the booths more also uh we will reconvene at uh nine a.m second lifetime um for our second uh panel of booth presenters so stick around um so uh looks like we're just at nine o'clock um fumon uh are you ready to uh start us off uh with your booth um if not we can uh move along um uh i should also mention um that uh we do have a booth from deep thinker o who is not present today but i did want to point out that uh we do have a booth so feel free to uh visit the booth even though we don't have a presenter for it today and uh maybe just also some housekeeping i did want to remind everyone that um the science circle here in second life is a grant funded non-profit organization um um that uh sort of with the goal of developing uh virtual world platforms for science education um and uh sort of uh concomitant with that mission um the science circle does uh by necessity have to enforce you know certain um uh conventions of good behavior and um and uh good dress and so forth uh you know modesty modesty and friendliness um so um so i just wanted to uh uh i guess uh explain that uh and this our final um sort of uh science circle event before the summer break uh so i'm not quite sure if fumon is ready to go with her booth um um she will be um uh presenting in text in the nearby chat oh looks like she's heading over to her booth and um uh i will uh read her uh her text in voice for purposes of uh recording from fumon and i look kind of hilarious close together because of our height differences um so uh fumon welcomes everyone hello science circle this is the fukushima booth as we know very well welcome in this april wto world trade organization judged that korea can forbid to import fish of fukushima and seven japan seven japan prefectures of course almost all fukushima fish are almost safe and free about radiation but nowadays too many japanese persons have the very narrow uh and small and childish nationalism as like as mr donald trump i'm very sad for this prime minister shinzo abe did not meet president moon jain korea at g20 osaka summit personally this was the very bad attitude i have many korean friends and i can use korean language a bit hello i want to say this to all uh science circle friends thank you yeah you'll be waiting a long time i should say that the fumon has done a fantastic job of documenting the recovery of the fukushima reactor um here in second life well i think fumon uh um popped over to the fukushima exhibit maybe to pick up a landmark um should we move along to the next booth i'm not quite sure if um oh she um she poofed on uh on my screen should we move along to the next booth then okay if you do want to learn more about the fukushima reactor i really recommend going to um her um her main exhibit so um uh so the next on my list is dodge three beards uh greg perrier um dodge are you uh prepared to uh um present your booth to us all right great lead the way see dodge where is the booth uh yes i hear uh i hear your voice oh good fumon is back oh thank you fumon all right uh fumon do you have uh more a presentation to continue with or are you ready for us to move along okay very good it looks like she's continuing so fumon asks how do you think about g20 well i would like to say that uh um the g20 is one of the many multilateral institutions that were created after the horrors of world war two to suppress nationalism the nationalism that gave rise to world war one and world war two and um i am in favor of those kinds of institutions and i think they should endure well um i think uh i need to be a little bit disciplined on time here uh fumon do you mind if we uh move along to uh to dodge's uh booth now i think we've um timed this out to about 12 minutes per booth and we're at just about 9 uh 9 15 so thank you very much fumon a wonderful booth and let's uh move along to uh dodge's booth now across the bridge yeah there we go another voice is working i'm going to mute my microphone while you talk oh can everybody hear me yep okay i'll just talk in voice then if somebody has an issue let me know um i will do some texting then um i'm great perry i uh manage a college campus in uh second life it's the northern virginia community college um i've been doing this for about well since 2012 so i've been up on seven years now so what you're seeing here are some of the things that we have at the campus um you're always welcome to visit it we call even those call the northern virginia community college we call it nova and so you'll see at the top there there's a you can click on that and teleport to nova it's campus if you want to any time uh after this and uh visit it you're welcome to come and look around um so basically we deal with uh biology there i'm a biologist and so i had a preference for that and we put in a bunch of about 22 different activities for students we get about 400 students over an academic year doing stuff and so you're just seeing some of the things here that we have put out for students for example on the back of the birth you see a poster uh we one of our professors has her students doing um poster sessions and they do this in second life and so all the students make a poster uh we import that into second life we put it up and so we have a big poster session so that's an example of a student's poster one of the better ones um and they get experience at actually making a poster which they might do later in life at a conference or something like that uh we have a place where the students um collect different balls of different sizes you're seeing this here this is a glucose molecule the black balls are carbon the green balls are oxygen and the pink balls are hydrogen the student gets one of each they make copies as needed and they move them around and put it together and they actually make a glucose molecule so the student can look at a glucose molecule in a textbook or picture of a glucose molecule but actually building it you get a much better feel for how that molecule is put together and so this is a situation where our students can actually um build a glucose molecule and get a feel for that we have them building uh fatty acid we have them building a protein um all these things are possible at that activity um sort of over here this tall green thing is a plant um and we have a plant science exhibit we put this in uh not too long ago but a year and a half ago and what you're going to see here we have several different things at that at that activity for students the one you're looking at here though is uh the fertilization of plants and it's kind of different from animals and so instead of a bunch of sperm they only have two sperm and at the top there is a pollen grain that reddish thing and coming out of that's a pollen tube a pollen grain is two cells a tube cell and inside of that there's a generator cell that comes down you see that cells gonna enter there and divide so I click on this little sign at the bottom it's kind of a blue sign there and you see it starts to label things for you might want to zoom in on that and you can always welcome to come back and look at it so we label everything for the for the students first so they see the different parts of the this is a couple of a plant and then you're going to see these labels will disappear and we'll start getting the animation here so the pollen tube and you're going to see the generator cell comes in out of the pollen grain and these are growing from the pollen grain as the tube starts to grow down the style there it divides into the two sperm and so those sperm are going to move down the pollen tube as you're seeing here and it's going to come around and it's going to come into the ovule and it's going to actually the first sperm will fertilize that egg the pink cell there is the egg cell so now we have a zygote a fertilized cell there and the second sperm joins those two blue cells in the middle of the polar nuclei and they form the endosperm which becomes the food for the for the growing plant once the seed germinates and so students can watch this and you can actually look at this in a textbook but it's actually more fun I think for students to actually see this visually and be able to understand how this takes place so another thing we have there for students some fun things for you guys we have a biodiversity activity one for plants and one for animals so this pot here has a plant in it and what is that plant the students try to we give them some information on that and they try to figure out what phyla we have there's 10 phyla plants we have all those 10 phyla on the campus and they can go around they find these different plants so they're given the coordinates for those so they can find them and they look at them and then they click on that and actually click below on those signs you'll get a note card it's going to give you some information about that and this note card gives you four possibilities of what that plant could be and see if you can figure it out that's kind of the idea there and so that's for plants over here we have biodiversity for animals that's what that A sign stands for all these things are kind of labeled around the campus if you go there you'll see a bunch of these signs when I click on there you'll see a petri dish appeared behind you and in that petri dish there's an animal that's going to start moving and so your idea is to figure out what is that animal and again it's going to be one of the phyla that we have and I hope it's not a kitten and it's moving slowly around that petri dish and as it's you get four another four examples of which the select from which and you can try to figure out now the students try to put this into a tree a genetic tree and they label these so we they'll work out what the different phyla are how they're related to each other both for the plants and the animals and so you can see how that kind of works for students there um quite a bit of experience from teaching we made a lot of mistakes we've learned a lot from doing it and we try to capture all that and this uh book you see here on the table uh and if you click down below there you'll get a url you can go to um and get it get this book it's free it's about 40 pages it covers our experience in and teaching in second life um we've learned a lot from the mistakes that we've uh actually made and uh try to correct those and things that worked and things that don't work this book what doesn't really give you that it's not 40 pages there but it does this give you the idea in the in the cover at the top of the book um is the first page of the of the um paper it's just document it's great a manual for teaching in virtual worlds is what the name of it is and so you're welcome to go and get that and have a look at that and um and again any questions on that or any of this other stuff or visit the campus there's a lot of other stuff there uh day we'll be talking a little bit about the grand canyon we have a grand canyon you can actually visit and walk down if you want to um that was a lot of work to put that in and and it's a kind of a fun thing to do we have the 11 different strata there and each strata is explained and the fossils associated with those are explained okay um i think that's pretty much it for this display oh wait one more thing and we have some fun stuff well two things when we have behind over here next to the plant there's a the curiosity martian rover it just uh found methane pretty clearly found methane now on mars and so in the news on the last week or two there's an example of that um it's kind of fun to see and then for folks who want to do something fun and we have this on our campus too for students um this is a hoverboard you can fly on this guy i'm not going to do that but you can we had a guy last night flying around in here uh it's pretty fun so um afterwards if you want to come back and uh fly around go ahead and you can shoot around this campus this goes pretty fast it's quite fun uh just stand when you're done it will go away a new one appears at this site so i think that's it for me because of our time limits but thank you very much Greg what a fantastic uh uh booth you put together here this is great thank you i'm sorry to interrupt but we really do need to move along to keep without keep on schedule um so uh is rob here i believe but i guess i am here our next uh presenter so back over the bridge against the other side i'm waving here i am hello a little bit like herding cat here let's uh let's all migrate over to uh rob across the bridge stand behind the booth here for no adequately explained reason all right well hello everybody for some reason i'm facing off to the left i think it's just my stand animation um but we'll try and turn a little so i'm facing to the right whatever um so my claim to fame it comes from 20 years ago between 1996 and for about eight or 10 years i was one of the core members of the supernova cosmology project which was sol perlmutter's team and we were one of the two teams that discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating and sol perlmutter got the Nobel Prize in 2000 was it 2011 i think for that and a few years later there was the breakthrough prize which all the teams shared so that was my claim to fame um i have a lesser claim to fame that will be meaningful in this crowd and is not meaningful almost anywhere else um i actually left academia for a couple of years and from 2007 to 2009 i was prospero linden i was a operations engineer working for linden lab in second life around the same time um i started giving science talks in second life i think the first couple i gave were associated with troi mcluen's um science center which occasionally i mix up science circle and science center because they start with c and i have a one character hashing algorithm in my brain um and then i was with mica while i was at linden lab i fell in with mica george drogowski and pete hut we were trying to make an astronomy department in second life and we actually had some people come in and give professional seminars i gave a lot of public outreach talks i gave them very frequently back then and nowadays i give talks with science circle and i do a few a year depending on i mean i've i've gone some years where i'm only showing up once or twice uh it depends how good shantel and jess are at corraling me really is what it comes down to so what i've gotten in front of me here are small versions of some of the things i've made for some of the talks that i've given i've they're usually bigger when i pull them out during my talks but um over on your right side or my left side here uh this first thing actually is one of the older things that i made it was um this is supposed to be the progenitor of a type 1a supernova oops i walked through the back of my thing it's all phantom so i can walk through it um this is a red giant star and then pulling off of the red giant star some of the gas into an accretion disk around a white dwarf which is the little glowing thing at the middle of the disk eventually the white dwarf builds up enough mass that it explodes is a supernova and that's pretty exciting just to the right of that i have a pulsar it's a neutron star that's rotating has some hot spots when the hot spots point at you you see a pulsation the next one is a little cutaway star it's not highly detailed it has a envelope and a nucleus yay not very exciting um but i actually have a few little features on it i can turn on these arrows let's see if it actually listens to me it doesn't seem to be listening to me oh i can turn on arrows but i failed to rescale the particles um so that was a little uh overwhelming uh i have i i didn't rescale everything right so um yes sorry about that um it to demonstrate the conflict between gravity and pressure inside the star and so now i should have turned it all back off again yeah everyone's just died well it was pressure and i think i've turned off but it seems to still be going so um please stop sure off there we go i think it stopped good um next this is one of these next two on the right are more recent things and these are actually mesh objects which i started playing around with in the last few years as did lots of people well actually most people started before i did but um this funnel looking thing you probably recognize as being a visualization of a black hole and actually it's mathematically correct it turns out i built it in blender and i uh put the things in the right place so that's a real embedding diagram of a black hole and then the next thing over here is for the most recent black hole talk i gave this is a black hole with an accretion disk and two jets coming out of it that's a structure that you see at the core of active galactic nuclei which is kind of a cool thing there too yeah it was actually m87 was the one that we gave a talk about and i once won a nickel because i uh correctly identified a messier galaxy a guy was giving a talk and he put up a picture of m81 and he said it was m87 and i said oh that's actually m81 and he was pretty sure and i was pretty sure and it didn't really matter it was just a name and i said i'll bet you a nickel he said okay and he went on with this talk well a week later this is Ethan Siegel he's actually a um a blogger that you could find on Forbes a very good uh cosmology blogger and i got a check for five cents from him because he looked it up and in fact the galaxy was m81 so i still have that check for five cents epic scientific bets you know so anyway that's what these things are if above me i've got two things rotating the one right above you right now is a binary star which i pulled out when i was giving a talk about finding extrasolar planets um on the other side there is a planet orbiting a star and you can see the wobble reflex motion of the star which is one of the things that we look for when we're trying to find extrasolar planets um so all of these things actually some of these i made way back in the day in uh 10 or 12 years ago i sort of had an astronomy gallery in second life when i was working at linden lab i was paid better than i'm paid now and uh i actually had i didn't never had my own region but i did have a lot of mainland that i had a little astronomy museum that some of these things were in but some of these others were things that i made for talks um all of these objects should be set to be copyable so if you want one just right click on it and select take a copy and you'll have your very own uh active galactic nucleus core if you want and then i've got three boxes over here which are um t-shirts one for mesh avatars one for classic avatars and then a box of planets the planets are the same planets that behind me depending on what your draw distance is you can probably see a big brick dome and um um way back behind me with a bunch of planets in front of me and those are that's my planetarium which i a year or two ago i gave a tour of that planetarium um i think that was in a december for the for the science circle you can go in there and play around with it it's not the easiest thing in the world to use but there are some buttons in there you can try and set your latitude and longitude and time and you can see what stars would be up and what planets would be up there that sort of thing um so uh if you want your own version of those planets go ahead and uh go ahead and click on the box over there and get that yes i'm sorry i don't have any dino shirts i just have astronomy t-shirts um but yes don't say beetle juice three times um i guess if you say it backwards it someone's rumble still skin or something i'm not actually sure how that works anyway so i will uh i will stop there um unless anybody has any questions that they want to ask me know the next thing i am scheduled to do is together with scissi g and i forgot who the other person was is a panel about the most exciting things in our fields plans for the future well you know what my plans for the future are complicated my life has been a little complicated i was supposed to go to vanderbilt and get 10 year and stay there forever and i had a little trouble getting funding that's why i went to linden lab for a couple years well i have now been at two different small liberal arts colleges the first one was in canada and for family reasons i had to come back to the us and i am now at westminster college and they like a lot of small liberal arts colleges in the us are having financial problems and they are going to reduce the size of the physics department from three to two i am the most recent arrival so after next year i'm going to be out so i'm going to be looking for another job this year so i have no idea what's going to happen i may end up being out of academia i will find out as for talks i'm going to give all i know is the uh the panel and i probably will give two or three talks next year in science circle and just watch the science circle calendar to see when all the talks are yeah i think this is our um oops hello hello testing testing we hear you oh you do okay i can't see oh there we go i wasn't i think it's just lag i couldn't see my sound waves uh yeah i was going to say i think uh shunt all you can confirm this but i believe this is our final um event for this academic year with the science circle will be on summer hiatus but we will be resuming our presentations and panel discussions in the fall and forgive me i'm having a little bit of lag i just heard a video start playing and i think that's um steven's booth over there uh kip so um why don't we work our way over to kip's booth so steven can tell us a little bit about um his work with educational media in second life and in podcast yep thank you rob it's always a pleasure to uh listen to you present great thanks even on the other side of the bridge uh yes i think he's across the bridge he was near the piano he's actually near the piano uh where arie was playing hello just a quick check make sure my audio is working looks like it's okay you go ahead and poke me when you're ready there uh barrigan you uh take it away i'm having a lag attack here we've we've got a nice crowd here today so i'm moving through molasses but don't wait for me go ahead and get started okay i appreciate it well i am steven huck i'm kip brappo kip wafo i don't get to say that any much anymore i will keep it brief uh barrigan bet says a master timekeeper i'm not going to put him to the test i know this is no easy uh task keeping us all on track and you do it so well barrigan if you haven't been thanked numerous times by now let me add my name to the list uh what we got here are some samples of education or communication resources this is what i offer in my online and on ground classes uh and on my parcels here on uh the science circle sim just a few steps from here you can see it there in the background i started that build about the first of the year uh i've been working on educational builds for about 12 years here in second life in fact i just double checked that june 24th raised my resume just a couple days ago exactly 20 uh 12 years ago my math isn't right we've got as a system you can double i've uh done some larger builds uh one time an entire island uh spinning way way way too many hours you know how that goes and this time around i am making it much more practical uh than playful though i love all your toys i don't have any toys here you got such a great toys uh you've been showing off uh but nonetheless i have been squeezing in uh what work when i can and minimizing any of the fun this time around you know how easily that all gets away next thing you spent two hours making sure your turtle has enough swimming room um so let me just quickly let me run through just some of the stuff that i've got here and you can click whatever might grab your attention i'm still very much a working educator there's my institutions there behind me i teach for four different universities i'm one of those road running adjunct professors of communications at ucla ucsb california lutheran national university and a few others i've done about 20 years now after returning from overseas work in media and public education programs so i do lots of multitasking i've been multitasking this morning listening to your great presentations in the background and also work evenings and weekends and uh on uh saturdays and sundays i often do uh captain and chaplain work i live here on a harbor i have been uh working since 2000 the year 2000 to push my departments at these universities to expand their use of technological tools for learners that's what my doctor did is in transcultural distance learning and they've been very receptive to a lot of what i've done um i have also been showing uh second life possibilities off to department heads and as you know they can be a little reluctant sometimes to pick it up ironically ucsb and ucla where i teach were ground zero of the internet the first emails sent over the internet between ucsb ucla stanford university and i think it was the university of utah i always forget what the fourth one was but here they are seriously lagging behind and they admit it you know academia moves very glacially uh sometimes but nonetheless uh at a recent meeting at ucla with their global futures program it's an institution program they were very excited about it that we were going to set up uh some trial uh exhibits a seminar or something like that unfortunately then the program imploded uh and it's beginning to settle now they got a new dean coming in so i think yeah ucla is actually uh going to take some interest in this it may take a while i tend to think in terms of months and years rather than hours and days like i did in the media mostly what they're interested in is the sense of place they love that idea for gatherings and and lectures and seminars where people can come in and sit with each other look at each other and if they're going to be attending a live seminar any anyway i'm one of the other platforms why not do it in a virtual world where there's more interactivity and and some play going on now and then educational play of course so that's where i'm keeping my focus is i'm trying to bring these institutions in is very much a practical use of some of these materials so that's what we see here is very practical uh educational uh sorts of materials uh i also uh design open source courses for sailor academy so at one point i actually had one of their full courses happening in world and that worked very well so i'm working on a number of fronts trying to bring educational institutions into this expand the outreach some of the resources you see here i am a researcher in transcultural teaching a multi-class uh multicultural classrooms so you've got some of my research and writings here including an article published not long ago by the united nations unesco and a recent article on developments in education technology that was published in the journal of distance learning administration that's pretty much where my focus is now how are we going to how are we going to expand these learning resources especially to uh precluded people so the science circle podcast uh when science circle mentioned they were looking for a podcast i thought that might be a good time to reach out in this area i've been doing this about six months now there's about some 15 different episodes hosted on about a dozen different platforms uh you see the science here you click on any one sign that looks interesting to you it might take you where you want to go including our list of topics and they have been excellent and that is no doubt one of the reasons every single platform that's been submitted to has picked us up including some of the big guys if you click on that platform link it's got direct links embedded that will take you directly to the science circle uh podcast uh on uh the build that i've got over here there's lots of videos and materials for uh communication students there's a learning lab for english uh as well as featured presentations by science circle scientists and educators i've got two signs here uh right in front of me you click the black one that's going to give you some links to in world uh videos you can take a look at those from some of our very best science circle presenters and if you click the white sign that'll give you some uh landmarks to learning resources uh that we've got here in the build now the globe does nothing but i've just always loved globes and kaleidoscope so that's one my one toy here uh for the future uh yes it does spin is it spinning the right direction it it is spinning the right direction i saw neil grass Tyson once pointed out that the world's spinning on the daily show is spinning in the wrong direction watch for that i wonder if they fix that or if they're even still using it anyway for the future uh definitely looking for expanded interactivity and social experience for learners trying to minimize that overhead that is the number one complaint i hear from my institutions too much overhead too many system demands uh and too much of a learning curve the students aren't going to do it the instructors aren't going to do it so the simpler everything gets the easier it's going to be to try to bring them in on it um i'm looking to put in a few sample areas for these different universities i teach for basically just a few lecture videos that i use in the classes that i teach for them maybe a promo video whatever the university's put out just something that they could come in take a look and possibly a sample lecture uh so they can see how that would fit together and invite some students in and that's pretty much what i got here feel free to click take whatever you want that i'd link to whatever you want these are all open source videos learning materials use them as however they might serve you and uh just thank you for stopping by thank you just a chance for all your good work putting this together there are gone bets for your excellent timing uh just that you're here today this group that says you are on the cutting edge of education you are the heroes of reform the avatars of the future and i thank you all for that and uh right on thank you so much steven a really nice booth i really love all the materials you've provided here um so uh little change of plan uh turns out that uh dp was able to attend today and she has a booth so um before we finish up with day miami at the end i want to squeeze uh dp in to tell us a little bit about uh her materials um she uh prefers to speak in uh to present in text so i will read her text in voice for purposes of any recording that we have going on here um so uh let's see if we can here she is uh over here by the bridge and the lion statue behind the hotdog stand over here and uh thank you dp really glad you could make it today a dp you can go ahead and just type in nearby chat and then i'll just read it in voice hello everyone i'm dp and i write science articles for the science circle by the way these articles are posted at the science circle website so um uh don't forget about the science circle website it's a great resource uh new articles are posted on the first and 15th of each month and here is a link to find them articles to date are june 15th islands in our minds june 1st science and philosophy may 15th the fascination of science may be first a new beginning this sounds like good topics and my next column uh publishes on july 1st and it features an interview with vik i'm always looking for people to interview for my next column some upcoming column ideas are below if you have expertise in any of these areas or have an interesting research program contact me and we'll arrange an interview how do astronomers make pictures from radio signals for example the recent picture of a black hole black swan events does anyone know of a recent event that's really compelling and can anyone explain in simple terms how prime numbers are used in pgp what is pgp the privacy actually is the name of it it's a oh it's the passion word ah yeah very good that's cool okay the algorithms that use are the same algorithms that are used to encrypt everything on that goes through secure channels on the web fantastic so those are uh those are all really good topics i look forward to the articles anything else dp before we move along i want to uh well i guess we still have a little time actually uh dp is the uh is sort of the title of your um uh i guess a blog or or platform hypothesis all right well thanks very much dp this is a great resource to to know about i'm really glad we could bring it to the attention of our students um we do have one final presenter today a day miami um who i think is going to say a few words about the grand canyon build so why don't we find a day and he'll be our final presenter okay i'm here all right i hear you i think i'm across the bridge am i not i'm next to to greg spoof okay we'll find you oh wait a minute no hold it i'm mistaken here's greg spoof so we're over here i'm all messed up i've walked around so much man we have a really good crowd here today we've got uh 26 people here that's good uh thanks again dp that was really nice i'm glad you could make it today thank you i didn't realize i was going to be last but in a way this works out well um and i'm a little embarrassed because some of you did such an amazing job i've been up in new york visiting relatives all over the last about for the last week so i haven't had as much time to put into this as i'd like shantel told me about the science circle uh science fair photo was a really cool idea and encouraged me to talk about uh the grand canyon and you've already heard greg speak a little bit to you about uh the the grand canyon sim on second life and the amazing job that no one's done in fact if you look at the booth i did go to the grand canyon sim and i took a picture inside the booth on the far right hand side you can fly around that's sort of a fun thing to do because it's hard to do in the grand canyon itself and one of the things that greg didn't say that i thought was amazing was as you fly around there are little signs and you click on them and you get a note card about each layer in the canyon which i think is very informative and and helpful for students whilst there's a platform at the very bottom of the of the canyon which has got a series of diagrams and so on yeah right barrigan i've i've led several field trips now i did one i think for this d and this d maybe the science circle and talked about the geology of the grand canyon so um after we did that one last summer what happened was i was talking with vixen juicy ventucci who's the senior paleontologist at the grand canyon at the time i just wanted to do a sim on eagle rock here in virginia and vinsco's yeah it's really cool sim the the eagle rock one why don't you do one for the grand canyon and i thought he was joking he wasn't he said oh no we we're here at the national park service we would love to have you do a grand canyon simulation and we would sink it in with our hundred centennial celebration that we're going to be doing with the national park service this year it's actually going to be coming up um in i believe it's september october and i'm invited to go out to arizona uh to be part of that i'm not sure if i can because it also is right in the middle when i'm teaching um but i'm trying to work that out though uh i said absolutely and i created a couple of versions of the grand canyon simulation by the way word got out oh my gosh it was you talked about online collaboration within a day i was getting code from germany i was getting uh texturing software from australia um it was that sort of collaboration that made it real easy for me to knock this project out and and i had a prototype to send to the national park service within two days uh that they thought was amazing and then we refined it um so there's a version there's a multiplayer version on by woley and i'll type in the for those of you that have an account on that it's dot org or it might be dot com uh but they are mainly for k-12 education so um you'd have to get permission to go on there um and then after that what i did was a virtual reality one for the oculus rift um and i've demonstrated that at uh the visti conference um in virginia beach last year i presented for the virginia or the mines mills and energy uh last spring had some state geologists on there i've got some pictures of it somewhere um but one of the things that i realized was that not everybody has a gaming rig in an oculus rift so what i did was i put together a version scaled it down by about a factor of 10 and created a simple version that will run on cheaper school computers and that's available on this website if you go there um i don't know why it's not coming up as a url if you go there right on the homepage at the bottom right it'll say click here to oh it's a comma that's what it is kind of trouble there we go and now we have a url if you go to that uh website in the lower right hand corner you'll see a link uh on my website to download um both the software other developed for the national park service also there are student activities that you can do i've done them at the college level they work at k-12 as well they're not really complicated but you basically make a geologic map after you've done this tour um one thing that you're going to see when you go to that website at the very top as they'll say this is an insecure website uh please don't believe that yeah that's true uh very good please do not believe the comment about this being insecure i have talked to go daddy who is my main hosting thing um and what they've told me is that um unless you pay 80 bucks for an ssl um google is going to put that message up there to me it's technological blackmail all right um and what they are worried about is websites like amazon or target that have been hacked all right where people got on there and they've got secure information uh and i have told google go daddy and i told google there is nothing on my website there's no account information i don't collect information on clients i don't have account names on there i don't have passwords on there i certainly don't have credit card information on there there is nothing um there's nothing insecure about that oh really rob go daddy want to charge me somewhere around 60 to 80 bucks all right we have to talk later about that okay if you know a way to get around that um and i said no i'm not though anyway um go ahead and and click away i've run that software oh thanks for the url check that out later um and okay so those are the uh the websites like i said you see a box on the table says click here to get an lm and urls for the grandcandy um through the right of me here is panty and um we i talked with her we were setting up the booth i think this was last week and she was telling me about a really cool uh thing called dreamscapes that is opened in la and what it is is an exhibit and go in there it's totally vr but um it's from what i heard they're really doing a nice job on you put the headset on and you have a choice of going through a there's like a virtual alien zoo or there's what else uh there's an ocean simulation you go into there's a believe and Oracle simulation as well on there um all the information is uh all the information is on there and um uh in that card the net card that you can grab and say a little bit about since i'm at the end of not only this science fair project but also um also for the um you know for the session that we've been doing uh what i've been working on this summer is researching the mass extinctions i sort of gave a hint of my last presentation on this um that i'd be talking about the late portavision mass extinction i've been out in the field i've been sharing some videos with shantel a couple weeks ago and uh coming this fall i'm going to present my research on the late portavision and interestingly enough it's not just a research topic for research and universities um this is filtering down to the k-12 and my high school now i'm required to talk about mass extinctions and fossils and fossil evidence what so that is coming up in the fall and we are just a few minutes past one o'clock uh does anybody have any questions if not i wish you all a good afternoon thanks to you yay applause uh okay um and with that i will bring our science fair presentations to a close i'm going to declare this a tremendous success i hope we can do it again next year um thank you to all the uh booth providers and content providers you guys all did great uh and thanks to shantel and jess for organizing all of this um you all have a great summer and we'll see you again in the fall with another slate of presentations and panel discussions also of course these booths will remain up so feel free to uh come by and uh explore them in more detail at your leisure