 Here is the three o'clock clock on a given Monday with Melody Lindsey, who was in East Booth Bay, Maine. Hi Melody. Hi Jay. Happy New Year. Yeah, I want to ask our friend Alexa. Alexa, what is Bigelow Laboratory? Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences founded in 1974 is an independent non-profit oceanography research institute. She got it. She got it right that time. Yeah. She got it right that time. Yeah. Good for you, good for you, Alexa. Thank you, Alexa. Don't ask her what a microbialite is though. No, I won't do that. Microbiolite. I mean, I, weren't they in the Bible, the microbialites across the desert went through the Red Sea and they formed a little country called Microbia? Is that the one? I mean, that's funny. I mean, you might, you may find them in an environment such as the Red Sea, but I don't know if they established any roots in another land mass there after their accident. I want to help people remember that word, microbialite. It really is a wonderful word. Yeah, well, actually, today we're going to talk about the microbialites in Great Salt Lake. And Melody's going to tell us about her research, but let me tell you about Melody first. Well, she's a local girl and graduated from, uh, what, Elani, but also went to Punahou. And then she took a PhD ultimately in Montana State University only a couple of years ago and her thesis was focused on how hydrogen from water-rock interactions can fuel microbial. Is that word again? Microbial primary production in Yellowstone, hot springs. You're all about that. Hot water. You're in hot water, actually, Melody. Yes. And I was doing her work in Eric Boyd's geomicrobiology lab, but she learned about enigmatic microbialites in Great Salt Lake. She worked on several projects investigating microbial, like microbiology of microbialites and how they contribute to the GSL food web, which GSL, Melody. Great Salt Lake. Sorry. I shouldn't have known that. She was still intrigued by these unique microbial, microbially built mineral structures and wants to see them in person again soon. I guess you have a relationship with the microbialites then, eh? Yeah. Now, sadly, it's long distance now. I haven't seen, I haven't, I mean, I haven't gone back west, especially since the pandemic hit, but even before that, because I was just starting out my postdoc here in Maine. It's a little, it's a little bit far, although not quite as far from Hawaii. But yeah, this, this, I did research on these microbialites kind of as a side project during my PhD, but it ended up having some really interesting findings that we published in a few journals, and it even got turned into a museum exhibit at the National History Museum in Utah. And so there's, there are just these really cool structures that have astrobiological implications. And so you talked about like water rock interactions and hot environment. So it's kind of the same thing, except in sort of hot environments, it's now a super salty environment. So if we could look at micro... Did you say astrobiological? Astro, that's from the stars, isn't it? Yeah, that's another tack on to biology there. So instead of microbiological, astrobiological. Yeah. And actually I was thinking, you know, what, what to say. But for, you know, topics for, for this discussion. And one of, one of the coolest implications for what we're, we're calling microbialites is that they represent the oldest evidence we have for life on earth. And so there's these really quite simple. Oh, here we go. Yeah, thank you. This is a slide showing some Archean microbialites. And you can see in the left hand inset picture, there are these lumpy structures that look like domes with mats or with lines in them. And those are actually layers upon layers of microbial mats. So something that, you know, is, is you can see when you go to the beach and it's on the rocks, that kind of green algae substance, that is a microbial mat. And so when those build on top of each other, they form these mounted structures in certain environments, not in all environments, but in the Great Salt Lake, they can form these mounted structures. As we can see on the pictures to the right. And so they're rare on modern day earth. They only happen in a few places. Unfortunately, Hawaii isn't one of them, but they do occur in Australia and also Great Salt Lake and also the Bahamas. Why do we care about microbialites? Yeah, that's a good question. It gets back to the astrobiological implications. And so as you, as you know, as the audience may know, of course, NASA just landed a new rover on Mars in Jezero Crater in the lakebed in this ancient lakebed. And so one of the goals of this new rover is to search for signs of life that could have been present on Mars back when there was water in this area on Mars in this lakebed. And so one of those could be microbialites, which tend to form in, you know, flat lake areas. And so that that is one one way to look for life elsewhere in the universe is to look for these microbialites. So finding astrobiological structures, what is that thesis about astro? And what is that thesis about microbiology? Yeah, so, yeah, astrobiology is a little bit of a funny term because we don't have any evidence for astrobiology yet. We have, you know, astrochemistry and astronomy, of course, but astrobiology is a little bit of a hopeful study of a hopeful, hopeful term. And so by studying Earth based structures such as these great microbiolites out of Great Salt Lake, we can infer what may occur on other planetary bodies such as Mars. So it informs on the search for extraterrestrial life while also helping us to understand our home planet of Earth. Yeah, is there any, you know, I mean, I did read about that as one of the one of the mission factors, you know, of the trip to Mars. But is there any evidence up to this point that there has been life on Mars? Yeah, that's a good question. There I mean, obviously there have been missions and people much, much better versed in extra planetary stuff. I will know way more about this, but it's your brother Christopher. Christopher will help you on it. Yeah, exactly. Footnote to that is Christopher is an astronomer. Yeah, he's a Yale now. Yes, yeah, he's in grad school at Yale, so he's he's doing good. But yeah, my my general goal that I haven't told him about is that he'll find the planet and then I'll find the life on the planet. Right on. Perfect. But oh, gosh, yeah. So there have been studies looking specifically for life on Mars specifically. And I think that and this is controversial. But the closest I think we've come to saying, oh, yes, this is some evidence of life is on one of the Viking missions. They did a study with radio labeled carbon. And so they had a sample of the Martian soil and they added this radio labeled carbon and they were able to measure what they inferred was possibly microbial breathing or respiration of this carbon. And that didn't happen in the sample that they killed. And so, you know, something living in the other sample was changing the form of this carbon. Could that be microbial? I think that's one of the one of the more famous and possibly controversial evidence for life on on Mars. Well, so it's so interesting about that. And let me preface my question with with a lesson that I learned here on Think Tech, and that is that the table, the periodic table of elements is the same all over our solar system. You're going to find an element on any planet that's that's outside of the periodic table of elements that's really quite something. And therefore, well, this is my question, really, if we find life, OK, on some other planet, what does that mean? What does it mean to a scientist? How exciting is that and why? Yeah, I mean, it means we're not alone, right? That's the that's the grand question of humanity, I'd say. First of all, but, you know, if we if like going back to your point on the different elements and or not different elements that we all everything within the universe would share this common set of elements, whether or not we've discovered them or not. But everything shares that common set. And so there have been microbiological studies looking at organisms that instead of phosphorus, phosphorus is a really common building block of humans of life on Earth. You need phosphorus in your DNA. You need phosphorus in other parts. But there was work that tried to look at, say, you know, instead of phosphorus, maybe life could be arsenic based instead of phosphorus based. And so that was something that was investigated a couple couple of years, decades ago, I'm not quite sure. But it ended up the study maybe failed a little bit. But could there be arsenic based life on another planet? Maybe, you know, the possibilities are almost endless. But yes, you would be bounded by the laws of that would be so interesting to to get to one of these planets one day and find this life. And really, it's not just human life. But that's that's too that's too science fiction. Life at all life at all. Somehow there's a kinship between life here and life there. Any life is related to all life. Am I right? I mean, that's the most remarkable thing about it to me. Yeah, and I mean, that that's also a one of the theories for how life may have ended up on Earth. Did did our very ancient ancestors come here on a comet from another area? Or did it originate on Earth? And there's there's a whole bunch of theories out there. But you bring up a good point and there's a reason why you've said the word microbial so much, and that's because microbes are able to do a whole heck of a lot more than, you know, your standard human or any of the animals or any of the plants. Microbes make up the majority of biodiversity on Earth and not just, you know, genomic in your genes, biodiversity. But they can not only, you know, breathe oxygen like we can, but they can breathe breathe methane. They can breathe sulfur. They can live off of rocks at the bottom of the ocean and in hydrothermal vents like they can. If if any if anything is out there, it's going to be microbes. Wouldn't it be fair to say that microbes are our ancestors long time ago? I would say that that all life has a universal common ancestor. It's known as the last universal common ancestor. And that last universal common ancestor was likely a single cell. Yeah. And when you say microbe, we're excluding. Are we excluding both virus and bacteria or just virus? That's a good question. And that brings the question of are viruses alive? But when I say microbe, I do specifically mean either I mean a single cell organism and usually that consists of bacteria, the kingdom of bacteria, the kingdom of archaea and then also some single cell eukaryotes. So eukaryotes generally include all mammals, include all plants and fungi, but they also include some single cells. But and also bacteria and archaea are also microbes. Microbes are everywhere. So while you say they're the biggest factor in in the diversity of our planet. So, you know, I think we have to respect them. You know, we have to see them as living in a in a what do you want to call it an environment with us? We have symbiotic relationships with microbes. Am I right? Yes, for sure. In fact, the majority of the cells that are in a human body are actually microbial. They're not human, but microbial cells are much smaller. So there's that. But in terms of number of cells, you are mostly microbe. You're mainly microbe, as the saying goes. Some mornings, I get up a few. I feel a strong sense of that. Most of them are there to help you. Most of them are very friendly, but some of them are not. Absolutely. It's it's those mornings when I feel they're not friendly. Anyway, so let us not tarry. You had a number of other slides we should cover. Oh, yes. Yeah. So I'll I'll preface this by saying I'm right now. I'm at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences. But yeah, this was with the work in the slides is all work that I did back when I was a PhD student looking specifically at Great Salt Lake. So I don't I don't really go out there anymore, which is why I'm sad that I don't get to see the microbialites. But if you want to bring back the slides, it's fine, but either way. Let's let's let's move forward. One of the one of the things that that interests me are people from Hawaii who do research, scientific research, especially. And, you know, you're you're in a cutting edge area here with the microbialites and, you know, these special environments and special questions of bioscience. And the question is, why don't you do that here? Why don't you do that in Manoa? Why do you why do you have to go to East Booth Bay, Maine? Yeah, that's a good that's a good question. So so really, especially in this day and age, lots of things can be done anywhere in the world. However, this this isn't this is an academic, mostly academic research position that I have right now and what I had for grad school. And it's really a matter of where can I get a job with the projects that interest me. And so actually, we have currently and prior to we have collaborators in Hawaii. And so it's like, could could I do that with them, perhaps? But I'm here to work with the people that I'm working with at Bigelow. So it's really, you know, it's a bit of a give and take there. And especially now, the academic job and going forward, like right now, you know, I did not apply and get this job within COVID times. This was pre-COVID and I really wanted this job at Bigelow. So I'm really lucky to be here to work with the people that I'm working with and to work on the projects that I'm working on. But nowadays, like moving forward in my career, I will have, you know, it'll depend on where I can get a job if I can get a job in academia, because it's a tough market out there. Why is the job at Bigelow Laboratory in East Booth Bay so precious and valuable? Why isn't it special? Why did you aspire to it? Yeah, so at Bigelow Lab, I'm a postdoctoral scholar. And so I'm not quite, you know, the head of a lab or anything like that. I don't do a lot of, you know, driving grants and proposals such as such like that. But I came here because I really wanted to work with two scientists in particular, who are both my postdoc advisors, Dr. Beth Orcut, who specializes in deep biosphere research. And so she, her focus, a lot of the times, she has other projects, of course, too. But she has a lot of expertise and projects to work on that involve the microbes that live underneath the bottom of the ocean. So getting into these hydrothermal fluids that go through the ocean crust. And so I really wanted to learn from her there and gain expertise in that area. And then my other advisor is Dr. David Emerson, also at Bigelow. And he is a crackerjack, microbial ecologist. And so he knows a lot about microbes, what they can do and their metabolisms. And he has expertise in a bunch of other areas. So I really wanted to work with both of them. And also the project that I'm working on is a multi-million dollar NSF funded grant to look at how microbes function across all sorts of challenging environments. And so that ties into what I have been interested in from my PhD, what I became interested in when I was a college student, which is these interesting microbes and what they can do in all sorts of different environments. So that's, that was the impetus there. People I wanted to work with and the project that I could be involved with as a postdoctoral research researcher. I have so many questions for you Melody, but one of them is NSF, you know, you mentioned you're not in the grant department, but somebody has to be. And every scientific career has to involve grants and NSF is a big source of grant money. Has that been affected by the Trump administration? Trump administration was not wild and crazy about science or maybe they were wild and crazy, but not about science. And the question is, you know, how important is NSF? And, you know, has NSF been, shall I say, actively interested in your area of research? Yeah, so I'll back up a little and say, so I'm a postdoc and so while I'm not, you know, I just can't be a principal investigator on these grants. And so that has to be somebody who has their own lab and is set up to do that. But I can certainly help with writing them and such. And they'll have grad student and postdoc funded grants that I can tap into too. So basically I'm getting trained to do all of that eventually. But to answer your real question, yes, NSF and NASA and the EPA and all the NOAA and all these places, I think were affected, you know, to different, to differing degrees. Like I'm speaking out of ignorance here, but NASA for example, maybe did not have as many budget cuts because it was seen as, you know, something cool and, you know. Maybe closer to military research, you know, have national purpose there. But climate science and environmental protection science, all of those were severely impacted by the last administration. And things have already changed so much since January of this year. Tell me about that. Yeah, I'm not an expert in it, but the people have been hired back at these institutions. The money that is available for grants, I think has largely been unfrozen from what it was a year ago. And, you know, I get emails on this from Bigelow every so often from folks at Bigelow, but that are reporting on, you know, the NSF's policies are changing or this new pot of money is now available for applications, for grant applications. And so in general, both the morale and what seems to be available is increasing greatly. Oh, that's great because that ultimately will help you in your career. Because your career depends on those grants, you know. And job openings. Job openings, right? Well, jobs for organizations that have grants. Somebody has got to write the check. So just also to put it in perspective. So you have Bigelow and according to Alexa, Bigelow is a big deal, but what other big deal? Ocean Sciences Research Laboratories exist around the country. Can you name some that are famous? Yeah, for sure. So Bigelow is actually, I mean, Bigelow is very famous for many different reasons and it's a great institution full of wonderful scientists who do great work and they publish a lot and they get a lot of grant money. But as you say, it's definitely not the only oceanographic specific institution out there. And so I can think of a couple and there are some that are tied to universities and some that are not tied to universities. Bigelow has agreements with some other universities, but is maybe not a part of a university, but something like the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in San Diego is closely tied to UC San Diego. Huey, which is the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, they are a very, I would say, a larger ocean laboratory than Bigelow is and they actually run, like for example, the Alvin submersible, the Alvin submersible, which is a human-occupied submersible that found the wreckage of the Titanic, for example. They run that out of Huey and I can, there are others that are tied, there are many others, but I'm just listing a few off of the top of my head. There's ones that are tied to UH Manoa in Hawaii and there are certainly lots of labs there who are doing wonderful oceanographic research on all parts of the ocean. So there's a lot out there. There was more than I thought coming from a terrestrial hydrothermal ecosystem background going into ocean sciences. What about overseas? What about Asia and Europe? Do you find laboratories focused on this area there too? Yes, for sure. There's a whole lot out of England and other great Britain, I guess, Germany has a lot, Denmark has a lot as well. Those are just some of the European countries that I personally know people who have come from, so I'm saying those countries out loud, but a lot in Asia too, Japan, China, all over the place. It's a fair to say that the United States is a leader in this kind of oceanography research. The United States definitely has a lot of funding towards oceanographic research. I mean, it is one of the, I would have to be a diplomat, to put it diplomatically, it is one of the leaders. But for example, if you want to say, oh, who's the leader in scientific ocean drilling? Well, then you'd really have to think, is it the USA or is it maybe Japan? Because Japan has an incredible program if you wanted to drill something at the bottom of the ocean and look at these cores coming out. I am from the US, so I'm biased, but Japan is maybe where I'd put that, but yeah. What's great about ocean research is that the ocean doesn't belong to anybody, or rather it shouldn't. There are some exclusive economic zones now that have been popping up here and there where countries lay claim to it and they, for mineral resources basically. But in many of the ocean endeavors and ocean science endeavors, it really is a collaborative process between different countries. Just as an example, I'm scheduled, it may not happen, but I'm scheduled to go on a drilling expedition this summer to the ocean around Iceland. And that is through the Integrated Ocean Discovery Program. It used to be called the International Ocean Drilling Program, but they changed the name to better focus on what. Drilling is such a negative word these days. Yeah, I mean, they do ocean drilling, but it's to look at, you know, past climate, science, past climates of the earth and environmental, things like that. And also cool hydrothermal microbes maybe. But that is a cooperation between many different countries. And so that what's great about ocean science is it is so collaborative. Yeah, that'll be a great trip. I went to Iceland a couple of years ago. I found that it was very interesting. You know, the apartment buildings are heated and the water is heated by thermal installations all over Iceland. They just pick it up out of the ground and they don't have to heat their water. Very interesting. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Yeah, they recently had some rumblings there. So maybe if our expedition ends up going, it's currently a little bit up in the air, so I hope it goes. But maybe we'll see the volcano go off or something. Well, Matthew, that was my next question to you, Ashley Melody. I mean, whether in your job, you know, in the Bigelow Laboratory, you are collaborating with people. And if so, whom? Yeah, so I'll say very, this is only one example, but on the project that I was directly hired to work on, so that NSF, EPSCOR funded project. And so EPSCOR is basically a part of the NSF that focuses on states of the United States that typically don't have a lot of research funds coming in. So for example, Massachusetts is not an EPSCOR state, but Maine and New Hampshire are EPSCOR states. For example, Florida is not an EPSCOR state, but South Carolina is an EPSCOR state. So it's just states that don't have typically a lot of funding through universities and such like that. So the project I'm working on is funded by NSF EPSCOR and we work with scientists from University of New Hampshire and through the Desert Research Institute, which is based out of Nevada, which is also in those are both EPSCOR states. So just that is what we collaborate on back. And I'll say for a project I was involved with when I was an undergraduate student, we had collaborators in South Africa. When I was in grad school, we had collaborators from New Zealand and also from Iceland. So that was kind of cool. So really all over the world and all across the US. That's great. That's a plus for a scientific career. Yeah. And I was also going to ask you, how do you spend your day? I mean, there's all these students out there, Melody, who are looking at or will look at this video and try to figure out whether they want to be a scientist and in what area. How does a scientist spend her day? Yeah, well, it differs from day to day, especially during the pandemic. We were fortunate at Bigelow to never lose access to the laboratory, so I was able to go in. But yeah, it varies wildly. I'd say, I'll give an example, for example today, you wake up, you have your coffee, you go into lab, you meet with somebody, if they're there to meet with you or they need advice or you need advice, and then you go into the lab for a couple of hours, maybe more than a couple of hours, you come back out, you sit at your computer, you run into your emails, have a meeting with your collaborators, which happens about once a week or more. I have about five Zoom meetings a week, I'd say. But really that's a typical day, but it can vary wildly. And back when I was a student, it would involve getting in the car and driving to my field site in Yellowstone when I was a grad student. And so I got to hike around Yellowstone all day for a couple of weeks worth of time during grad school, or it could involve getting your research ready for a conference, it can involve meeting with school children to teach them about what you're doing, or it could involve me chatting with you right now on Zoom. I consider this a large part of being a scientist, the communication with everybody in the public, your collaborators, with your grant funders, that is key in the life of a scientist. But what about keeping current? I mean, we live in a very complex world and science is more complex than the world of most of us. And you have these people, collaborators, and otherwise in the same area of scientific research all over the place, and it's your job, isn't it, to keep current on what they are doing and to know everything, I mean, everything that is happening in the entire planet in your area, you have to know the last thing that happened like yesterday. It's like doctors, they really have to know. So my question to you is, how do you keep current in your daily life and routine? How do you keep current? Yeah, I'd say you have to be reading all the time, whether it's emails or grants or papers, mostly papers, the world of science and the currency of science is really in your journal published articles, what you can write. So you have to be a good writer in order to be a scientist or at least a decent writer. You have to be able to communicate your science so that other people who are close to you in the field who have the same goals and knowledge, they can be appraised of what you're doing at any given time through your journal articles. So I'd say reading, reading is the most important thing and there's email clients that will gather all the relevant journal articles and send it to you and stuff like that to make it a little easier. But really, if you search for something, you'll find the journal article and then you should read it if it's interesting and written well. And one last thing, I wanna know from you how you envision your career. Now, how is it going to unfold? And how would you know whether it's successful? I mean, how successful can you make it? How successful is it likely to be? Not in terms of financial success, but in terms of the intellectual success, the reason you went to all this training in school, the reason you joined Bigelow. What kind of success do you hope for? Yeah, I mean, yeah, success in academia, especially is not quite measured in monetary gain but definitely in what you can impart. So you have all this knowledge and you run these experiments to test these things but it's worth nothing unless you can communicate it. So really the measure of success is how can you get your knowledge and what you have found out asking questions, running experiments to the general public and to everybody else in the scientific community. So really, again, writing papers and doing outreach events like this or working with schools and other teachers is really important in science, I think. And that's how I would hopefully measure my success. Right now, in my stage of the career, my measurement of success is if I can get a job when my postdoc ends. But after that, it becomes communicating all of this. I mean, all the time it's communication but especially after that it's communication. So, you know, back in my own career path, I was looking at science and it was one course. It was in statistics back in a long time ago and I really didn't like it at all and that course turned me off. And so then I went into social sciences instead. But maybe it was a mistake. I'm not sure, I'm not sure yet. Social science and science too. Yes, thank you for that. That's quotable. But my question to you is, you know, here, we only have a minute left and what would you say to students who are at the same point, the juncture of making a decision as to what path they will take in terms of studying and career, in terms of the rest of their lives. What would you say to them? A message to leave with them? Yeah, I'd say if you're interested in something, you know, seek out an expert in that field, be it your teacher, your science teacher and they can, you know, hopefully connect you with somebody else at, you know, a university or something like that, but reach out to scientists. If you're interested in the subject, we're always happy to answer emails, particularly from students. And there's always gonna be somebody who does like cool work with geology or microbiology who's willing to, you know, if you reach out to them, they'll respond and hopefully, you know, give you some insight into their field or something like that. But really some advice, you know, for high school or college student is if you take, if you're interested in something and you take a class in it that you don't like, maybe drop that class and take another one. For example, statistics. I did not like statistics. However, I scraped my way through with a C and went on to take other classes. But my advice- I wonder if you had the same teacher I had. Yeah, statistics will turn you off of anything, I think. But yeah, take something interesting even if it seems really out there. If you're interested in it at all, if you're interested in astrobiology and aliens and take a geology class or take a microbiology class. It expands your consciousness and improves the quality of your life. It's so important to do what you like doing. It's that simple, isn't it? And if you think you're meant for one thing, but you really think something else is interesting but something's keeping you from it. Yeah, there's no harm in trying it. And looking into it a little bit. Yeah, and you can have multiple chapters. It's another great lesson. And it's a great luxury actually, in our world today, that you can do that. You can go from one lily pad to another and improve it all the time. Well, thank you so much, Melody. I do wanna follow your career. I wanna come back again and learn what projects you're working on and how your career is unfolding. Melody Lindsay at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in East Booth Bay, Maine where it is now about nine o'clock at night. Yep, thank you so much. Thank you, it's a pleasure. Yeah. I love you, Melody.