 I should have asked him for a brochure of some sort. There were stormtroopers in Baltimore and then we see R2-D2 in Philadelphia. That's right. We see all these things. Stormtroopers, R2-D2, it's a Star Wars world. Hooray! Oh my goodness. Is he in custody? What's the situation? I just need to know. They're still going to be alive. They're way back. You're like, what is he wearing? No, I was joking. What's going on Facebook, whatever you said? I had a valid question. Why is he wearing a hat? I guess R2-D2 is in trouble. The only explanation. Oh, my Facebook is down. It's like free. Oh, it's updating. Outputs. Input. That's good. That's working awesome. There's my forehead. All right. Are we excited? We're so excited. We're so excited. Are they letting people in? I think they're letting people in. We'll wave at everyone. I know. Welcome, welcome, welcome to the Young Innovators Fair. We are This Week in Science, and we are here to talk about science all weekend long. We are a family that brings science to you on a weekly basis every Wednesday night at 8pm. I don't know how loud we are here, but how you doing? How's it going, Blair? Hi, Justin. Hi. I'm so excited to be here. I love science. I love teaching about science. That's why we do what we do. Young people are the future, as they say. As they say. We used to be the future, but now we're just the present. We're just the present. The children now are younger people than us, who are now the future. Oddly, we're both here at the same time. We're all here at the same time. What I'm hoping is that we'll get a chance to speak with some of these young innovators, some of these young people who are excited to get their hands on science this weekend, and some of the adults who have brought science here this weekend to find out so many wonderful scientific ideas. Moving forward, and we are going to be fighting with music. For real. I think we might have to have some karaoke, Leigh. We might have to have some karaoke. Absolutely. We were invited to the Young Innovators Fair to bring out the joys of science, to do what we do weekly, to talk about science. That's what we're going to be doing all weekend long. We're going to be discussing really interesting, exciting science stories. We're also going to be talking with people who are running around here. This weekend science is a very fun program. I want you to believe it. Okay, I got to get them to turn it down. Can we ask them from the fair? Should I go with our customers? Yeah. Okay, Blair's going to go take care of some things. Take care of some business. But we can go, we can grab people and see if they want to come up and say hi and tell us what they're all excited about. Run into the science. Run into the science things. Right now there are a bunch of people coming in. Young-inspired enthusiasts who are coming into the Innovators Fair and watching them wander and walking over to all of the exhibits and displays that are currently out right now. Everybody's pretty excited. Everyone's got smiles on their faces. They're interested in what they're doing, and they're excited about what is in store for them for science today. I'm going to go grab somebody. A moment ago I saw R2-D2 wandering around on his own. Yeah, don't look down. There's a stormtrooper behind you, Justin. Please alert them. There are stormtroopers also present currently. If you see R2, give them a heads up. Yeah, I think Blair just asked them to turn it down a little bit because it was kind of overpowered. We're good. Okay, awesome. Thanks. Cool. I saw that we have the Educators Experience over here. I love all the alliteration in all the different zones this weekend. I'm pretty excited. We have robots over there. We have the biology. Blitz. I don't remember what it was called. Over in the back room. I am so excited to run around and visit with all the scientists that are here. On this week in science, we have guests often who have research coming out or books coming out about their research. We're always interested to dig deeper and see the story behind the story so that when you read those articles on the Internet about the latest scientific discoveries, we can talk about the implications of those studies and what's next in science. Hopefully today and tomorrow, we'll get to talk to some of the researchers around the fair and we can talk to them about what's coming up in science because that's really I think what this weekend is about is what's coming. What's coming and part of the name of this event, the Young Innovators Fairs, there's a lot of innovations going on in robotics, in 3D printing, in biology, so much innovation and that is really what's going to build the basis for the next steps in science and technology. Hi there. How are you doing? I'm waving at you. Are you excited for your day today? Yes. Us too. Awesome. We're excited also. I know. I certainly wish there was stuff like this around when I was a kid. I remember science when I was in school meant putting a lima bean in a plastic bag and watching it grow. Science has a lot more to offer these days and it's pretty exciting. Yeah. So I was going to ask you guys, do you remember about science growing up? I mean, when we were young, it's that I remember we had in the classroom a little bit, but not a lot, really a lot of, you know, those little classroom experiments, but there was usually from sixth grade onward a science fair that everybody had to prepare for, but there were no events like this. There were the only in the California area, there was the Exploratorium, which was one museum, one science museum that you could go to, and then maybe there was the Planetarium at, and that was it. Yeah. I'm very happy that science is no longer only associated with the smell of formaldehyde, the pasty looking frog on a dissecting table. Right. That was kind of it. That was it. It was that smell of formaldehyde that most people, I mean, everybody remembers that. Let's dissect something. Right. Which that's biology, right? And everything was so siloed too when I was a kid. Biology was biology. Math was math. Engineering was engineering. It was all very separate. And I think that's really what makes right now so exciting is that things aren't as siloed as they used to be. You have to be somewhat familiar with tech to do pretty much any science now. And you, it's a lot easier to recognize how those different disciplines play together. Also, steam didn't exist when I was a kid, and I don't think it's even called STEM yet. But the idea of incorporating arts into science is a huge part of what we do, obviously. We're in the performing ops. So it's fantastic to see this kind of interdisciplinary approach. And it's also really fantastic to see teachers embracing the use of nonprofits and environmental education facilities like the California Academy of Sciences that we had when we were kids. But now pretty much if you go anywhere, there are zoos, aquariums, science set museums. All of those things kind of can play together to bring science to classrooms, even if the teacher isn't super comfortable teaching it, which happens. It absolutely does. And that does happen, especially in the younger grades where people are trained to be generalists as teachers. They're not trained to be science specialists. And so in the early years, when it's really important to inspire kids to start asking questions, if a teacher or an educator feels uncomfortable with the subject matter, it's going to be really hard for them to inspire. So here at the Young Innovators Fair, there's actually an educator's experience here to help educators get a little bit more comfortable to learn a few new ideas that they can take back with them to their classrooms to be able to help get their young students to be inspired, to grow, and to potentially innovate themselves. Yeah. And then with the new next generation science standards, the thing that I love about these new science standards is not only the multidisciplinary approach, but that it's all supposed to be practical and towards an actual goal. So you're not doing a scientific experiment, doing your hypothesis and then your observation and then your procedure and all of these things kind of in a cut and dried approach. The year is actually an arc where you start with a problem, you design a solution, and you test a solution over the school year, which is why we do science, right? So this is actually using techniques to solve a real problem in a classroom, which empowers kids to then use science when they grow up, I would think. Because science is a tool. It's not a belief system. It's an actual, it's a tool, and there are, right? It's a procedure, a set of steps that you can use to investigate the world, to be able to answer questions and to be able to get rid of hypotheses. You know, like, oh, that didn't work out. Let's change our view of how something works and ask new questions. Let's innovate in a way that, and be creative in the way that we ask questions, in the way that we actually start designing experiments. I mean, we talk all the time about animal intelligence on the show, and there's always, you know, the story where we're like, oh, this bird species is smarter than we thought it was. This one has, you know, more abilities than we thought it did. And the reason that we find that out is because someone figured out a way to ask the question in a different and new way. Right. And one of the best ways you can pass that sort of ability on to the next generation is not by having all the answers, not giving kids the answers. Actually, my kids think I'm basically an idiot. They think I know nothing. Because whenever we come up against a problem, I act like there couldn't possibly be a solution. And I let them come up with their own. That's fantastic. You're raising little science. They'll have no respect for me, am I right? But they'll be brilliant young people. They'll find out much later that you were actually teaching them a valuable lesson and actually dad knew everything the whole time. Yeah. He was actually a genius. That's how they used to teach science. Here are, here's all the answers. Memorize them, apply them when you get the proper question. And actually, that's not the best way to teach science. The best way to teach science is to show them problems and have people work on coming up with their own solutions. Right. See what doesn't. Absolutely. Yeah. I think also it's really important to remember. We talk about every week on the show, recent discoveries in science. But there are all these different areas of science that don't involve an actual discovery. Figuring out methodology. Figuring out that old methodology doesn't work is actually a really important scientific discovery. And then also hypothesis. Proving that this hypothesis didn't work like you were talking about before. Figuring out an option is actually really important science. Yeah. I mean science, the scientific method isn't about proving things. It's about disproving things. Exactly. And that's one of the misconceptions that so many people have. I mean you talk about the way media, science. Science proved that. You know, science proved this. And it's the reality is science hasn't ever proved anything. There's nothing proven. Yeah. I mean you can do a mathematical proof. You disprove. You'd hack things away. Yeah. So that you get closer and closer and closer to the correct answer. There were a lot of bulky bridges built. We kind of figured out, oh, okay. This is how you go about this. Arches are really strong. Arches, yeah. The pyramid shape. Maybe some sort of suspension system would help. Right. Maybe suspension. Oh. Yeah. All those poor early primates falling in the ravines as they were trying. So they put together their rope bridges. Wait a second. Yeah. Do you guys want to come up here and talk with us? Join us. Come up. You can talk about. Thank you. All right. So what is your name? My name is Steve Isaacs. And what's your name? I'm Grace. Grace, so what brings you to the Young Innovators Fair today? One of the producers for Mind Fair, which is one of our other shows, and we've been very involved in a lot of these productions. In fact, actually, with this group from coming to the first Young Innovators Fair where my daughter Layla, not this one, my other daughter, and I presented at that event. I just had such a great time and got unity and such. My child would be very, very interested in your Mind Fair event. He loves Minecraft. Yeah. Yeah. He's very excited. Yeah. He's excited. He's going to go see Dan TDM. Yes. We live in Portland, Oregon, and Dan TDM is coming through. He and his brother are very excited. Just thrilled. So Minecraft has some science based in it. Can you explain a bit about how science and Minecraft are connected? Sure. So one of the coolest things in Minecraft is the use of something called Redstone. And Redstone allows you to automate functions and to build circuits and all kinds of engineering. So I'm a teacher and I teach game design and have my kids use Minecraft pretty extensively. And having them Redstone and actually design them and build them, I mean, it's pure science, absolutely. Things in Minecraft? No. No. You're like, no. I mean, I walked around a little bit in the world over there, but that was it. So are you interested in science? Sometimes. Well, I think that's a really important answer. I mean, there's a lot to have that there's a lot having to do with how it applies to you and your life and your own personal interests. I mean, I liked biology and physics more than chemistry because like for me, chemistry was kind of hard to put into like real like, like, because like it didn't like feel real. So like it didn't like it didn't click in my head. But like, yeah. Yeah. In Minecraft, there is actually a chemistry organization that have created a chemistry world where you can walk through molecules and you can investigate their, how they're built in all of the bonds between the different atoms in the molecules to be able to understand a little, get a better visualization of what they are and then potentially be able to put together that structure and how it relates to function. So maybe something a little bit more tangible. I mean, chemistry is like thing. It's really small. And yeah, I could think about chemistry. What's your favorite chemical? I don't even know. Talk into the microphone. I don't even know. I don't remember anything. Do you like, do you like breathing? Yeah. Yeah. I like to breathe. There's oxygen. Oxygen. How's it done? Yeah. There's a wonderful mixture of chemicals. It's a good one to have. H2O. It's another fabulous chemical. There we go. Molecule that works. Caffeine. I like caffeine. I like caffeine. I'm running on caffeine at the moment. Eventually I'm going to need to refill my caffeine stores. There's a bunch of shirts that has the chemical breakdown of caffeine. I see those often. My mug at work is a beaker with a handle on it. It has the caffeine molecule on it. So let's talk about physics. Have you launched rockets? Do you like dropping eggs off of roofs of buildings? I did do an egg drop lab. We had it construct. It was actually like the shape of the microphone stand. We had a kind of, I don't know what to call it, like a little chamber in the middle that held the egg. And then we had to drop it from our atrium above the stairs in our school. We just said it broke, but I didn't really think it did. I mean, either it breaks or it doesn't break. Was there yolk in there? No, it fell out. It fell out of our contraption, but it didn't go all over the place. I think he was just messing with us. So this is the question. What did you learn from the egg drop? Well, I classed it like a trampoline. So that helped keep it safe. And then ours was out of straw. So we had to keep making it more sturdy to make it work. Iteration. Do you use iteration at all in your daily life? Well, iteration is my favorite word in the English language, actually. Again, teaching game design, iterative design process is what I focus everything in life. Yes, it's all about iteration. Everything's about iteration, right? Try, improve, try again. Design. Is there a science of game design? I mean, there's systems involved. I mean, it's interesting because it uses the same. There's definitely science in the design process. You know, I mean, design thinking is all science. So it's all about, you know, but again, it goes back to kind of that iteration. I'm trying to think the computer science aspect for sure. So in the case where my kids are creating digital games, they're incorporating all of that. They're incorporating a lot of coding. So, yeah, absolutely. Do you teach much or think much about the psychology of games? People are talking a lot now about, you know, there's games like Candy Crush. Or even if not a game, but our social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, the way that they design their algorithms is meant to keep you scrolling kind of like a slot machine is meant to keep you pulling on that slot. A lot of what my kids are supposed to strive for is replayability in their games. So a lot of that is kind of that. But it's also, it all is based on like the ramp of difficulty. And so that's a really interesting thing for my kids to try to go through is figuring out, okay, so we want it to be challenging, but we want people to build their confidence, which is a lot of psychology, and then get to this point like the best thing you could do in a game for the end users to have them getting to that point where they don't complete something but have that feeling like if I try it one more time, I know I can do it, and then that one more time, even if it's 10,000 times, but without getting them to that point of frustration. So there's a whole lot of that. And the games like Candy Crush and all that, it's really amazing when they, the push and pull of getting you back, you know, collect your login each day and all that. I don't overly encourage that kind of piece of it, but the idea of wanting people to be engaged and to want to keep playing absolutely. I think I'm like the game designer's worst customer, because I'm just not our best because I have absolutely, I don't have a gambling mentality. I don't get stuck in it. I don't follow the carrot. I don't keep going. I'm like, okay, I played it twice. I'm done. I have 15 minutes. The way you're describing that though is something that really could inform the system because that's what the education system has been moving towards, but gaming kind of got it right off the bat. Here's the challenge. Here's take a run at it. Hey, it didn't work. Now you got a little bit of a look at it. Let's go again. Yeah. Again, failure, learning through failure. Like it's so funny how we, you know, we have these weird perceptions of failure, but in games, failure is part of it. And that's where the learning happens. Quite honestly, we need to generalize that notion of failure as being part of it. I mean, you know, in science, I mean, look at what you were talking before about how many bridges completely failed before we had it, right? Right? Without failure to happen, we were nowhere, right? So, I mean, that part. And yet we saw this weird kind of love-hate relationship with failure. But in science, I think it's a... In science, and it's got to be in programming too. It's a lot of trial and error, something new. You see if it works, right? And if it, maybe it works a little bit, but then at some point fails, you go in and you drill down on that and see how you can fix it. Yeah, yeah. Do you think your teachers are using any kind of game ideas in your classrooms? Is there, is there anything that makes you think like, oh, my teacher's trying to make this be, you know, something I'm aiming for? Well, like for some of my labs in physics this year, we would do like, there was, I don't know what website it was, but we did play games for like the labs to try to get like a better sense of it because it wasn't something that he could like really bring into the classroom. So we did that a lot. And like last year in chemistry for like building molecules and stuff, we would, yeah, he had like, it was a physical game, not a computer game, but like we would build them ourselves just to like actually see it. So like, yeah. Nice. Game, games and education. It's really good. What are you excited about seeing here today? Anything that you're interested in particularly? The maker labs look really cool, that whole area. I, I, I, we're going to be stuck here a lot. I want to, I want to run around and see so much stuff here. What are you interested in seeing? Well, there's a guy right now on the stage showing some drones and things and that's super cool. I'm also excited about the maker space. They have some virtual have, they have some neat Lego tables that were designed and built that I think, you know, so it'll be an interesting combination of people having fun with Legos, but also kind of getting, oh, this one's got meat. How they designed, you know, this press, you know, that's, I don't have a robot stuff too. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the presentations too is about, is the Girl Scouts who have a, a, you know, a robotics team and they'll be talking and stuff, so that's exciting. I want to see all these things. We have to, we have to run around and tell them to come, we have to come around and go grab people and bring them here. We need to bring them here for conversations. Yes. We're, we're going to be live here all day long for all eight hours. I'm going to have no voice by the end of the weekend. I packed a lot of cough drops for this trip. I need to get my water. Losages. Yes. Send us the scientists as you guys walk around. We would love to speak with them. Send us, send us more scientists. Yes. Yeah. If you find anybody interesting, say, hey, you should head on over to this weekend science. Come talk to them. We're happy to talk to people all day, all weekend. I'll send people over. I am. We are. We want to hear all the stories. Perfect. Send people. Yeah. We'll bring, we'll bring my wife over and bring, we'll bring all sorts of people. I'll get you. I'll get people over. Yes. This is what we need. We need the art. Our envoys. The twist stage is where it's at. So that's right. Are you effectively live streaming then the whole event or are you recording? Yeah. We're going to see how long the internet works and how well it works. We're on Facebook live. We're also on a Google Hangout also. So we're on YouTube live. I can also tweet those links out. Yes. And if you're watching right now, you can tweet the links out. You can share the Facebook links. You can try to get it out there for C as well. And what's the, I was looking for you on Twitter. Do you have it? Twitter is, oh, there it is. It is this week in science. So Facebook, no. Facebook is this week in science. Twitter is at twist. It's T-W-I-S-C-I-E and twist science. Twist science. T-W-I science. T-W-I science. That's Twitter. Yes. This week in science on Facebook and then. The links to the streams going out to Twitter as well. I mean, I'll throw them there as well. But can we see those links from your Twitter? Yes. So I'm putting them out on our Twitter as well so that hopefully the links are out there. And you can just retweets, share and reshare. We will do that. That's awesome. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. Thank you. You're welcome. Go enjoy the rest of the show. Have fun. Thanks for having us. You're welcome. Thank you for joining us. Yes. You're welcome. All right, you guys. That was fun. Justin, get back up here. Stop flagging. We're going to bring Justin back up. We do need to start during our wanders. It's now 9.30 AM. We've been here for so far. But we've been broadcasting for about a half hour and we will continue broadcasting for the rest of the day. We are still enjoying watching some of the VIPs coming in. We got early access to the show this morning so they get a chance to see things for a little while before the crush of madness begins. That's right. Yeah. I kind of like the handheld mic thing. Yeah. It's more comfy. Feel more relaxed. Blair likes to be a little bit more relaxed as opposed to tense. I'm uptight. I've had a lot of coffee. I'm sitting in front of my phone. I don't know what you're talking about. I'm just the most laid back, quiet, mellow individual. This is the show. Definitely. Tell me this again. A test. Yeah. So we are going to be battling all sorts of audio through the day. Let us know how it's going in terms of sound. I know the Facebook feed is probably a decent video, but I don't know how the audio is. Because we'd love to know how it looks, how it sounds on the various streams. So tweet us. You can also, if you want to watch the feed, you can go to twist.org slash YouTube. Twist.org slash YouTube is where you can also join our chat room. If you're online, you can talk with other people who are in the chat room if there are any people there. Yeah. You can just go to any free node carrier also. That room name is twist. So I'm going to do a little tweet. Yeah. I'm going to tweet that. I got to send out a message. Yes. The key bird makes a tweet sound. Tweet, tweet, tweet. Quotes. Justin, you see anything good this morning yet? Yeah. This is actually one that you may like. Of course. There's a group of scientists who are considering adding little tags to the names of extinct that we bring back. Explaining what? Explain this. So instead of just the bully mammoth by its classical scientific definition, they would create a new name for it. This shouldn't be here right now? Yeah. Is that what it's called? Mammoth 2.0 or whatever. Bully mammoth, I feel awkward. Where do I even go? Yeah. Explore what that means. Microphone's too close together. They want to determine how much extinct DNA in the living animals genome qualifies. Also, they may not, whether it's a hybrid because they're going to be hybrids because we're not going to have them. Right. Because you have to just state it in an elephant. Right. That's our example item. Right. So yes, if we're bringing back the mammoth, it's going to be genetically partially an elephant. Right. So they're saying the new species is basically what we would be creating. We need a new scientific name completely. You can't just use the extinct name. They want to make sure we've got that point of differentiation. I mean, that makes sense. I mean, at first, I thought you were saying that just if we brought back an extinct animal that you would change the name, which doesn't really make sense because genetically it'd be the same. But if you are making genetic alterations, that makes sense. Definitely. Especially with the hybrid. Wait, what? So genetically modifying the mammoths that they're trying to bring back to life? Well, because you have to, right? I know. So even if you had a perfectly pristine woolly mammoth specimen, so you've gotten DNA from a bone or a hair follicle that's preserved. And then you make a sperm and you make an egg somehow and you make a zygote. You still have to put that in an elephant. It means that during the process of growing, they won't end up purely woolly mammoths. There will be some contamination. And also suggesting this for backbreeding, where you're taking a creature that used to be here on the planet as its own species and has over years crossbred to the point where it no longer really exists. And trying to re-breed it back into existence with pairs of its crossbred mammoths. So this is how they saved, what was it? Cheetahs, right? Didn't they incorporate different, I'm going to look. But I think they just got to look things up. Cheetahs, I think they introduced DNA from a close relative to kind of broaden the gene pool. But I'm not, let's see. I'm not sure. Was it, yeah, because the cheetah population is declining and so they wanted to, yeah, at one point they only had, I think, 50 individuals of this particular type of cheetah, because cheetahs aren't that endangered. I think at one point there were only 50 wild cheetahs. Period. Go to the Google. I know, I'm looking, I'm looking. So according to the Cheetah Conservation Fund, it's been bred in North American zoological facilities since 1956. It's grown to about 200 animals. That's the grown amount. From 1982 to 1986, the captive birth rate declined by 50% because of a low frequency of breeding individuals. So what they did is, yeah, they've had a huge drop in the success of breeding in American zoos. This is very interesting. So let's see. Genetic diversity. Because they have so few cheetahs, right, even now there's only 200 in zoos, their genetic diversity is really low. For environmental variability to cheetah population is high because if anything changes in the environment, there's no gene pool to kind of allow for adjustment to that, right? Right. Yeah. This is the problem with population bottlenecks where a population ends up basically isolated in the fact that there are not enough individuals to allow for that diversification, the natural diversification of the genome to take place. Is that a specific type of cheetah though? Because according to the National Geographic, there's 7100 of the big cats in the wild. Okay. So it might have been a specific, it's probably a subspecies or a specific group. Yeah. Oh, looks like we have some people. Hi. Oh, it's first robotics, maybe? Yes. Okay. We're going to have a chat. Blair can do a little bit of background research and we will chat with these young robot, robot makers, roboticists. Thank you. This is wonderful. We've got envoys to the world. I love it. So here's, we set this up, give you a microphone. You have to talk with it fairly close to your mouth. Thank you. All right. So tell me who you are. My name's Ian. Ian. And I'm Laura. And Laura, and where are you from? downtown Pennsylvania. All right. And what are you here for? We have a first robotics team, team 1640 and we are, we build a robot each year for a competition part of first. Yeah. So we're an organization known as first that runs a few different levels. We're in the high school level. And what we do is we have six weeks to design and build a robot that competes against teams from across the world. This year we made it to the world championship and actually won our division. We made it out of the playoffs onto the final field, which was really exciting. Wow. That is so exciting. So where, where were the world championships this year? It was in St. Louis this year. Okay. So you didn't travel to someplace far off, far away. No, it was still in the US, but it was a lot of fun. So what kind of robot did you build? Like how, what, what, what was the designs? What was the design challenge? And then what for your engineering, how you designed it? The challenge involved a few hours was shooting wiffle ball sized objects into a basketball type structure. And so we had to figure out how to get those into a robot and then how to direct them to a shooter. And then that shooter had to shoot them into the eight foot tall object. Wow. Okay. The other half of the game was to take plastic gears about this big from one side of the field and deliver it to the other side without dropping it. Since there are six robots on the field at a time, two of which are the other three are your opponents. You're just snacking into the robot. So it has to be, your robot has to be well put together and you have to be secure enough that you won't drop the gear. Yeah. And so was it the same robot that had to do both of these challenges? Yes. So one robot to do multiple, like this is a multi-purpose robot. And we actually climb a rope, which is pretty exciting. We use Velcro to latch on and then climb to the top. I'm sure that robot can climb a rope much better than I can. That's pretty fast, about five seconds. Do you guys have any competitions? Humans get two ropes, person versus robot, who will win? Not yet, but that's a good idea. I mean, that's kind of the challenge right now. We've got Google, it's deep learning, we're beating the Go Champion, has beat the Go Champion of the world. So we've got AI that's starting to beat people. Will they beat us at rope climbing? Maybe. Maybe. It's pretty fast. All right. So your bot has to have a launching mechanism, has to be accurate in how it throws these balls. It also has to be able to throw a very specific kind of ball, kind of a light weight as opposed to, and kind of unpredictable in the way it flies, as opposed to, I don't know, I think that would be more solid and have a straight or true trajectory. Then you also have to, and then the gears, you have to have some kind of pinching mechanism or lifting mechanism. And then durability. So you've got this accuracy, and kind of lightweight control, and then it has to be strong. Exactly. One of the things we do for accuracy is we have two cameras on our robot that can see the target and automatically line up. That way the drivers don't have to do it, which is helpful because it's faster and a lot more accurate. Absolutely. So that's a really good way to solve that problem because the driver can put the robot in the right position. But then if the robot can actually up or solve that part of the problem, it's going to humans and robots working together. Yes. The other really cool thing about our robot that is pretty unique to our team is our drivetrain. So each wheel can actually spin independently. So we can drive sideways. We can spin while moving. Go at pretty much any angle we want, which is really when we're, you know, opposing defense, we can just go right around them as opposed to having to spin the whole robot. So yeah, it's going to work. It takes about a week for us to build each wheel. But it's definitely worth it. Six weeks from when you get the challenge to the first competition. Yeah, after six weeks the robot goes in a bag and we can't touch it anymore. So one of the things we do is we actually build a second identical robot that we can keep playing with. So in six weeks we actually build two robots. Yes. So after school, or do you have a program during school or is it just after school? What is your time commitment during these six weeks? It is after school. Our team does three hours each weekday and then weekends we do a little bit more, more like seven hours on a weekend. Not everyone comes every day, but it's open every day for us to do work and we are working every day. You would have to be. I'm just imagining, you know, I'm just thinking about how much time each of the components and putting the robot together, how much time that would take. And then once you've got it all put together, you have to make it work together as a cohesive unit. And we're certainly, even throughout the competitions, we're improving this thing, improving different things. So even though we only have six weeks to build, we have a lot longer to keep improving it. What got you guys interested in robotics in being a part of this competition? For me, it started in eighth grade. I got exposed to the beginner level first, which is First Lego League. There was a team at my school and I joined it and from there I've been hooked. For me, back in fifth grade I also joined First Lego League, which was a great intro because you learn a lot of things that apply later on. So a lot of the sensors you use and the programming is all very relevant. Even though it's out of Legos, you still learn a lot about building and gear ratios and how to build a robust robot. And then from there we were both on the same team and we made it to the World Championship that year too and saw the team that we were about to join and from there we met them and joined with them. That's so exciting. So this is kind of a long term since you were younger and you're really, is this something that you want to keep going with? Do you think it will be a fun pastime for you or is this driving your interest in what you want to do in your future? Well, for me I'm planning on majoring in robotics engineering so it's certainly what I hope to do for my career. For me actually and I'll also be continue my involvement in first programs after high school. So this kind of competition where it's a robot built for a particular challenge and it's, you know, you're playing basketball basically you're lifting up some things. It's a very mechanical robot. What kind of robot applications are you potentially interested in working on? Well one of the things that I find really cool are like the humanoid robots. The ones, like for example they have ones that they're developing for responses to like, you know replacing firefighters so that we're not risking things like that that are similar in the way that they're very mechanical and there's a lot going into it and they also have, you know, some really in-depth programming that works with, you know, like just like our cameras that works with software and with people so that application would be very interesting to me. I also think the autonomous aspect of robots is very interesting with driving with the self-driving cars and it's just a very new field that is constantly developing and I think it's really interesting where it will go. Yeah, I have a friend who worked on Google's self-driving car. He loved every minute of working with them and then he left and joined a company called Auto which created the first self-driving semi-trucks and so he is having the time of his life playing with cars and making them drive by themselves, you know. So it's like he came from the direction that's how this aspect from the robotic aspect working on cars, working on planes, working on all sorts of aspects. Acute cleaners, we've got rumors. I need a mop. So you guys can you make me a bot that will help my house. I don't need the vacuum cleaner. I want the thing that... That's certainly possible and that's one of the things I love about first is like they say every kid can go pro. So it's one of the only extracurriculars where everyone has an opportunity to go into some sort of there's over $50 million in scholarships available to first students so it really is something that can shape your future even if you don't go into robotics specifically but some sort of engineering or STEM or business or things like that. Our team has an outreach team that runs our social media they set up our demos, they do our fundraising. Is this all kids? Is it all of everybody who's part of the team like takes on a role in the organization doing these jobs? Yes. So we have some mentors that help us besides that simple we have corporate sponsors so and Boeing and Lockheed Martin Comcast are to fund the robot because it can be quite expensive so reach out to them and try and get as many sponsors and improve our fundraising that's one aspect of our team so more than just the robot. You guys are going to go out into the world after high school so well prepared you're going to be like I can be your social media expert I'll be your fundraiser I'll be your office manager your business manager and I'll build your office robots. It's all good. You're going to be prepared for anything. This is just fabulous. It's an amazing program and what's great is it's all across the world so students are doing this everywhere there's teams from China, from Canada, from Israel, from Australia so it's really something that's very widespread that we're always trying to get more students involved it's just an amazing program. So today and this weekend what are you doing here at the fair? What's your agenda and your schedule? So we brought our robots so we're over there driving around shooting some balls delivering the gears so we'll be here the rest of the day so we're hoping to get as many students to see the program and whether they're in middle school age for the FLL, for the First Lego League get them involved in that if they're high school age they certainly get them involved in one of their local teams there's other middle school high school programs involved so we have all of them over there demoing so we're just trying to get as many involved as possible. Great, so just throughout the day you're going to be demoing, talking to people and you can see the robot watch it run. Excited, I will have to come by. I'm going to take breaks occasionally so that we can run and see things and meet people I'll have to come shake your robot's hands. Is there anything that you guys are really excited to see this weekend? I'm excited to see a lot of the exhibits I haven't looked too much into what all the options are but walking around I've seen a lot of things that I want to stop by and get a little bit more of an in-depth glance at so. Excellent Yeah, well thank you so much for joining us up here and I hope that you have a great weekend and that your robot does wonderful demonstrations and inspires many more, many more youth Thank you Thank you very much. Welcome. Thanks Alright everybody this is This Week in Science and we are at the Young Innovators Fair. We were just speaking with some wonderful inspiring high school students who are a part of the first robotics program. Speaking with well spoken young people goodness it just inspires me so much it makes me hopeful about the future of our world Although I can tell by Blair's expression she's a little bit afraid of the autonomous I'm not afraid of autonomous vehicles I don't know what you're talking about It's when the robot overlords come I'll be just so happy about it I don't know what you're talking about My one fear about the autonomous robot thing driving cars traffic one day and totally frustrated how many cars on the road. I'm going to look to the left and look to the right and in front and behind and there's going to be all these cars on the road with nobody in them It's human actually That's not Why would we just send cars Why would you bother going to get the oil change yourself when you can just send the car Why go to the grocery store and what is supposed to happen with the autonomous vehicles with the self-driving cars is that they will make infrastructure that streamlines things So essentially it'll basically be like you're in a train because it'll be on a track or a road where it'll be just for those sorts of things going at a specific speed yielding to each other in a specific way It'll be a well-oiled machine but you'll just be in your own little pod AKA your car So it's kind of our way of getting to public transit but keeping all of the autonomy that we want which is why we have cars So if the infrastructure works properly so that instead of a carpool lane you now have an autonomous vehicle lane the cars will drive in a specific way so that there should not be traffic No, no, I totally disagree I think there's going to be way more cars on the road But you have to make the right infrastructure so it won't be as big of a problem because sometimes your traffic jam is because one person hit the brakes for the wrong reason five miles up and then it's this domino effect So if you have computers doing this in theory, you're stopping, you're starting smoothly you're yielding to people the way you're supposed to you're going at a specific speed you can read based on a network where other cars are ahead of time And all the cars will be going the speed limit They will all Yeah, so you're going to get there exactly in as long as Google tells you it's going to take Exactly, yeah No speeding, Justin, no more speed So one interesting thing about autonomous vehicles I read a post by a roboticist from Stanford University who tested out a Tesla in autonomous mode and they drove this car in autonomous mode on windy roads they went up California's Highway 1 along Highway 1 they encountered people riding bicycles and what they found when they analyzed the data from the vehicle from the drive is that the the vehicle does really well at identifying people really well at identifying bicycles actually identifying what is in the road so the vehicle identifies that there is something moving at a slower speed at a location in the road but it doesn't it is not yet good enough at knowing what that thing is and so the improvements that still need to be made to the AI system, the algorithms of these kinds of vehicles is actual identification of potential threats Right, absolutely and that's where this kind of bridge in the middle works so well is the Tesla and things like that that have an autonomous mode where you still have steering wheel, you still have pedals they still want you to have your hands on the wheel if you take your hands off the wheel for too long it yells at you so in theory having all of that is basically just a data farm for the next decade they are going to collect all of this information from real life experience and be able to make a much more effective autonomous vehicle and Honda is already doing this Honda vehicles, actually there is a number of vehicles out there again cameras that can see the lanes they can track with camera and radar a vehicle in front and trail it all the way down to a stop they can match speeds with the vehicle ahead, keep distances but this is for you know if it's just on the highway then it's no problem but like Kiki says you get off the highway you get into the city streets, there's bicycles there's pedestrians, there's all these other things that the AI isn't quite yet capable of tracking can we speak with the stormtroopers oh yeah there are stormtroopers here, can we speak to the stormtroopers come up, come up on stage please bring them up, bring them up Justin you're on duty alright everyone the stormtroopers hold on I gotta turn this around oh I saw it a little bit ago no we didn't no yeah yeah we will live stream you're on camera alright tell us what the stormtroopers are doing here at the fair we're doing a blessed trooper for charity for Toys for Tots so come on back to the back wall there's a bunch of characters we've got a couple pictures, blessed couple troopers and done it charity so we actually get to blast stormtroopers that is correct I've always had a question why do stormtroopers wear armor if it doesn't seem like it actually does any good that is a good question our union rep has been asking that to lord vader himself it just looks cool it does look cool is it a comfortable outfit there you got a lot of freedom of movement you feel like you can take on the r2 unit if you need to so comfortable let me tell you I can do barrel rolls and everything this bad boy jump and everything so it's very comfortable the empire provides for us it's a good style the empire provides and you're his guard yes I'm Peril Skinny from the empire strikes oh dear this is intimidating me a little bit who did we see we saw stormtroopers in Baltimore stormtroopers in now in Philadelphia the stormtroopers and the imperial guard are all over the east coast it's almost like they're following you Kiki if you are around June 21st we'll be at the Philly's game awesome it's the baseball game that's wonderful alright thank you very much have fun blasted trooper for charity everybody so I have a cheetah update I actually did my little research I have an answer to the questions about the cheetahs Justin did you want to hear about the cheetahs let's talk cheetahs there were 50 cheetahs in Iran so the Iranian subpopulation there was only 50 left what I was thinking about was the Florida panther so the Florida panther there were only 30 of them left in the 1990s and then what they did is they actually took eight female um pumas mountain lions whatever you want to call them and they used them to yeah female pumas from Texas they used them to kind of inject new genetics into the Florida panther population so my question was from your story that you were bringing up earlier if they're renaming extinct animals that they bring back with new injections of genes would they have to rename the Florida panther very interesting part of conservation biology they kind of can't be avoided and actually it's a really great technology that we've discovered that we can use related species to help keep the genetic population alive and healthy but yeah are we going to have to start editing all of our species so they're going to need to tag the name of it as a hybrid version because thinking about it scientifically then we have this differentiation of something through a fossil record and if we're in the future making comparisons between the two we need to know which one we're talking about yeah that makes sense but I do think that somebody is going to have a lot of paperwork ahead of them because it's not just these mammoths that we haven't brought back yet there's already species like I was saying there's already species we've done this with there's also species that it's happened accidentally with there have been genetically modified versions of things that have kind of escaped into the ecosystem and now that's in the genetic population yeah it brings a lot of questions so yeah I mean they're already kind of putting sub-demarcations on genetically modified organisms so like genetically modified corn genetically modified rice these have like demarcations in their name that they are they are a particular strain of these organisms and so if you think of it in the agricultural sense but put it into the biological paradigm then you're making a new strain new subspecies I guess then the question is if a genetically modified seed gets out that's now in the wild population do we have to change that change the wild populations name yeah yeah well if it is I mean there these are so many interesting questions because in genetics everything is blurry we like talking in discrete units we like as humans we like characterizing things and naming and classifying but the reality is biology is a spectrum and genetics is actually a spectrum I mean in plants as well as bacteria we actually have horizontal gene transfer and if you know we can talk about ourselves putting genes into organisms but organisms are already swapping genes all the time so what are we even really talking about when we're talking about classification or naming one gene or another yeah and we talk in the show all the time about how they've discovered that this species is actually a subspecies or that these two species are actually the same or actually that there's only four subspecies of giraffes not seven and so we talk all the time about how the species and really we've decided it makes the most sense right which is you know a reproductive barrier but then the question is with things like ring species one of my favorite things where there's these let's say five different species of tiger salamanders found in different places and then the ones next to each other can interbreed but the ones across from each other cannot they're all technically the same species any kind of guidelines we come up with to categorize things there's going to be options because like you said we like to put things in a neat little box and label them with our little label maker in our brain right so we can't do that with everything because it's not all cut and dried nature is not cut and dried it's not I mean we we also talk we've been naming organisms forever based on phenotype or how they look right you know we decided that certain birds are related yeah morphology it's like you know like koala bears wait what what's wrong with koala bears they're not bears they're marsupials but that's okay so should we call them koala marsupials you should call them koalas just like you shouldn't call it a starfish you could you should call it a sea star and seagulls are not seagulls they are gulls ladies and gentlemen welcome to the young innovators fair and as the young innovators fair is kicking off the age of modern humans just got a whole lot older actually we humans are as old as we have ever been but now we know now we have evidence that pushes back the understanding of the evolution of us by 100,000 years fossils found in Morocco have been dated to 300,000 years old previous oldest confirmed humans are 195,000 years old from Omokibish site in Ethiopia we've had clues we've had some clues previously were older DNA from Neanderthals in Siberia hinted modern human interactions possibly as far back as 230,000 years and additionally cranium from one of the Moroccan skulls has great similarity to as of yet unconfirmed modern human in South Africa dated to 260,000 years so we humans are getting older as our innovators are getting younger I love the idea that we have been around for so long but then I look at us culturally and socially and I'm like really we've been around for that long and we are not more advanced than this please but Kiki we're simulcasting to Facebook right now so much technology that's just because Kiki hasn't walked the fair yet as soon as she walks the fair she'll realize we're actually way more advanced than she thinks she is I want my I used to think we wanted flying cars now I think flying cars are just going to be annoying I want my my I want my jet that's going to take me to Mars I want my instantaneous my instantaneous communication and transportation I want a teleporter for sure I want a teleporter I do want my teleporter I want an in-car coffee maker you mean a replicator I want a replicator well we do have 30 printers there are some here maybe we can do a demo for us on the stage well tomorrow we are going to be joined by Biobots and Biobots are going they create a biological 3D printer that prints with cells and so we're going to get a demo tomorrow I am so excited I have so many questions we yes we do it's going to be amazing over here there's a ghostbuster and slimer hanging out here at the fair slimer has been jealous right about now yeah go get a picture for Kai also what's slimer doing here you want to come up on the stage right here it's going pretty good how are you also my name is Ryan and we're part of the New York City ghostbusters oh there's a slimer by the way we are actually running our slime polymer experiment so if you want to make your own slime we have our special booth right in the corner over there the New York City ghostbusters booth just look for the car I definitely want to make my own slime how do you make slime so we actually make a polymer based slime so it's glue borax water and some food coloring and you got some slime if you come by and make it we're going to be doing also two live shows today oh great we're at 12.30 and 3 o'clock right over there excellent what do you do as a live show so we call up lucky slimantists up on stage to make some slime awesome and they get to take some slime and make some and bring it home and not get it in the carpet or in the hair as a parent I appreciate that yeah funliness is a key in ghost busting absolutely I mean I'm sure the ghost busters themselves had to clean slime off of themselves I still have something that doesn't come off my suit so you know have you ever had a full body slime no not yet no we're setting you up yeah fun time live is later yeah that's true I haven't had a full body slime yet so my family we are huge fans of the ghost busters we've seen all films multiple times what got you into dressing up and being part of a ghost busters group ghost buster fan all my life I actually don't remember the first time I saw ghost busters I was very young but it was just always something that's been there and I always told my mom mom one day I'm gonna be a ghost buster because ghost busting isn't pay but on the weekends I've heard that busting makes you feel good it does make me feel real good but our group what we try to do is we go to schools we go to libraries we teach science lessons on how to make slime we also go to conventions which is fun and I love the idea that you can have fun and put it together with science and so it's kind of mixing up these different worlds for people especially young kids they can see that you can have all these interests and have fun with them absolutely so I hope you have a lot of fun today thank you I need to get a picture with you we need a ghost buster picture of course wait wait wait thank you guys ghost buster slime our picture this is already so fun I love that there are so many diverse things at this fair there's just so much you know what it is a little after 10 a.m. here people are enjoying beginning to enjoy all of the wonders that this fair has to offer hey Justin you want to tell us a few things that are on the schedule for the live stages today let's see the inspiration stage at 11 a.m. we've got Girl Scouts Robotics Patrol on the science stage cracking the picky eater code hungry education looks like on the performer stage there will be an all-star ensemble for performers paradise and what time are we going on to the main stage what time do we go on we're not on this that would be a good thing for us to know probably the science will be on the science stage at 130 with a science quiz that's right we will be quizzing people about science so do you want a story I have a fun story I love stories bring a story so I have a story about mastication chewing mastication we love the big long words in science mastication so what do horses and cows have in common well they chew basically the same way so that's the interesting thing they have multiple stomachs horses are not but they chew like ruminants a recent study from the University of Zurich found that horses have the same chewing mechanisms as cows so it might show us something about how they're related the horses when cows eat they swallow it goes into their rumen they're kind of foregut and it partially ferments which is why cows' breath is always so fragrant and then they cough that back up into their mouth and they chew some more so they found that the horses actually have the same chewing movements the same rhythmic mastication so that it actually sounds like this chewing might be a kind of forebear to the rumenation so it helps them process food that is really difficult to process that are really difficult to break down that's why we definitely don't eat grass we don't have the stomach for it that's why the cows have to digest it multiple times they're just trying to grind it down as best as they can despite the fact that they don't have that foregut fermentation happening that's what, you know I actually thought they did eat all the same things and hang out around the same area at least yeah so they fragment their food with the same rhythmic chewing movements as cows so that they're essentially ruminating so that's kind of the weirdness here the argument is that even though they don't have a ruminant they're still ruminating so this is a really interesting adaptation because one thing that's the reason that this rumination has evolved is to get as much energy out of this food source as possible and the problem is there's not a lot of energy in the food unless you can break down the cellulose lignin and cellulose in these grasses and these are hard hard materials to chew, to digest and unless you can digest them you're not going to get the energy out that you need to survive this is why grazers have to be grazing all the time so rumination is that strategy to be able to really digest that stuff and get all the energy out of it that they possibly can so these horses and deer probably are doing this mastication multiple mastication to be able to really, I mean rabbits they eat their own poop because they're trying to get all the energy out they're coprophages they eat their own poop because grass just doesn't have that much energy in it and it's really difficult to get the energy out of so what they think is actually they're just constantly chewing their food in their mouth they're just constantly chewing it could you imagine that would be like having a piece of gum forever and so our jaws really not made for it if we do something really hard we start to feel it I'm actually going to see if I can show you so if you ever look at a horse skull their mandible, their jaw bone is enormous and that's because they're holding these huge mastication muscles so if you look at a cat skull they might have this picture is enormous if you look at a cat skull they have muscles that are up here but horses have giant chewing muscles and this is exactly what so they can chew and chew and chew and chew and chew all day long and they don't have any problems it's really interesting and this is something that as a physiologist I've always been interested in is how function follows structure and also how structure informs function and so the shape of the skull is really determinant in what kind of forces can be created because of the way the muscles can attach to the bone itself so if you have a short jaw you're not going to be able to create as much power in that bite and so you need that longer jaw or you need a taller jaw to be able to create for the physics of the action to actually work yeah absolutely so right now I'm showing a picture of a horse skull and you can see this enormous enormous mandible that holds those chewing muscles and so you can see it yeah they're chewing all day air day just chewing chewing chewing chewing it's because they're fermenting the food in their mouth mouth fermentation you heard it here there's a lot of work to be a grazer which is why I prefer to eat the than all the work now it's just easy nutrients yeah well I mean that's part of why carnivory evolved is because it's an easier way to get energy there's in ecology there's this idea of trophic levels where one where we have the bottom level the producers who produce energy and then you have the first layer of consumers who will consume most of the energy except about 10% is lost and the idea is that about 10% of energy is lost at every level going up and so carnivores even though we can access a lot of the energy we are not getting the majority of the energy because it's already been consumed with energy being lost to the environment all the way up the scale yeah it's kind of like I don't know electrical wire transmission where there's electricity lost to all stages unless you have a really good insulator anyway well that's also why so conservation wise I know there's a conservationist corner here today so that's a good thing to just mention as well one of the great things that you can do to help conserve our planet is to eat a little bit less meat so for example a meatless Monday or something like that is another way there's lots of other ways but just eating less I'm not saying don't eat any but if you eat a little bit less you can use the same space to raise cattle or you can use that space to raise plant food and you can actually feed 10 times as many people on that same space but you mentioned there was another way you mentioned there was another way there's a bunch of different ways you can help conserve the planet but we need to do all of them but not all at once can we prioritize how about a meatless Monday can we go to other things first so talking about eating meat or not eating meat there is one philosophical idea that has been floated recently this last week we had an interview with Adrienne Gottschalks who's a plant biologist working on plant defenses and we got kind of into the conversation of plant communication and this idea that plants are constantly communicating with each other chemically they're sending chemical signals into the air they're sending chemical signals below ground oh where did our video go what happened you know just technical difficulties just minor technical difficulties we're good we're fine we'll fix it thank you but we were talking about plants so plants are communicating with each other constantly and people based on this idea of plants having communication and also being responsive to their environment you know we talked about Adrienne mentioned how when a grazer comes along and bites a leaf the plant actually will respond to that and will send chemical signals into the ground and into the air that kind of warn the rest of the plant and also its neighbors that there is a threat to figure out to increase the production of toxins or take other measures to protect itself so people have put forward the philosophical idea plants have this capability of sensing and responding to the environment and also communicating about it that they are sentient and if they're sentient does that mean that we shouldn't be eating plants either I mean we're talking about like to eat them I don't know but this is cracking me up I'm like alright so plants are sentient we're saying dolphins and other primates are sentient people want to give human status to other mammals, dolphins and primates what about plants well until my replicator arrives we don't really have any other choices people we have to eat something energy this is how biology works and then all bacteria are sentient because bacteria sense things in their environment communicate about it and so then I'm just a city bus basically because I'm full of bacteria yes so we're on a crowded bus that's my body right now that's disgusting just Blair Blair you're disgusting thank you most science is gross yeah well we're gonna showing you us right now but we can show everybody no we have two different spots the other video this one is going to Google Hangouts yeah so speaking of plants sentient so we talked about that this week a little bit ago a few months ago we talked about how plants could sense water running water that was pretty crazy they can actually hear I don't know what we want to call it but they can sense the running water and they would actually be able to tell the difference between running water that was accessible and not which is pretty interesting and then on top of that we also know that plants can produce clicking sounds which is my personal favorite plants top so there's lots of different ways that plants actually communicate with the world and with one another they also release chemical cues to attract animals of course so there's lots going on with plants that it's a lot more than meets the eye and then recently I also took a trip to the Exploratorium in San Francisco and I was able to see more of the Mimosa plants that actually respond to touch which I love we did a little twist short about that and so plants yeah they actually can respond to touch and if they have a if they have a system that allows for it they actually have a memory which is what I had reported on at the Exploratorium a long time ago is that these Mimosa plants got desensitized to certain touches or actions so that they would no longer close up anymore from those they know that they were in a threat so plants they can talk they can listen they can send out chemical signals and they have a memory so I guess we just can't eat anything nope humans must starve or just 3D print all our food I guess I mean there's a certain point yes we can argue about all this stuff philosophically but I mean this is the way life works organisms live off of other organisms and so you can decide as a human whether or not you want to eat meat or vegetables or whatever it is other animals don't have that luxury but we can talk about this until our face turns blue but that doesn't change the facts of biology which is that life requires energy and that energy has to come from somewhere and very often it's other living organisms that's how life has evolved so at the end of the day are you surviving in a way that is the least possible detriment to your ecosystem that's kind of the question right so are you taking up the right amount of space are you using the right amount of energy are you doing things in a sustainable way that's really the question no and so I think as a species we could work a little harder but I think that we've already made some great strides just by figuring out how sustainability works and all these kinds of things that we have some good ideas I think we're working on it I like it I'm going to ask them to turn down music because they were saying yeah so I mean one of the greatest things about innovation we're at the young innovators fair is that new technologies help us find ways to keep the things we care about eat the things we want to eat have the fun we want to have but do it in a way that is more self perpetuating which is basically what sustainability is right so we hear the buzzword sustainability a lot and we don't really kind of blind to what it means but really what we're talking about is being able to get a return from what we put out so we have closer to a zero sum with the environment so that we're not draining any resources so that's really what it's about and you know things like solar panels are suddenly becoming more and more efficient and more and more affordable and before we know it we will be able to power all of our amazing technologies off of wind solar and things like that so that we can turn around and those things won't be as difficult to keep going won't be as expensive to keep going and won't be as detrimental but I wonder what the low hanging fruit is I mean I wonder I would say it's solar because in one second there is enough solar energy hitting this planet to power all of our electronics if everything was a solar panel so think about okay so think about for example think about a big city think about Philadelphia and think about every single rooftop in Philadelphia I would guarantee you that more than 50% of surface area of Philadelphia could have solar panels on it that's the point there's all these empty tops that are just rooftops you can put solar panels on a rooftop feedback loop the more we sell the better the technology we'll get the more we sell the cheaper it'll get and there's technology there's solar paint that's been being developed getting closer and closer where you can just paint your house whatever color it is that you choose and it's become a solar panel your entire house I'm a really big fan of the solar ivy I someday when I own a house I would really like to buy the solar ivy for these little leaves that actually they look pretty realistic there are little leaves that you have kind of growing up the side of your house and they actually can move in response to the direction of sunlight to collect solar energy with as much efficiency as possible yeah solar ivy that's a really great idea so solar ivy is one idea and then there's the new idea out of solar city and tesla which are the solar roof tiles we all shingle roofs and they're a very interesting design because of the way that they are built they have a curve to them so that they will capture light for a greater proportion of the day and they're supposed to be fairly efficient and there's subsidies there's a way to make it almost as affordable maybe a little bit more expensive still but almost as affordable as a normal roof so if you're going to retile your roof with quality tiles maybe consider tiles and powering your house we're having some welcome to the young innovators fair if you're just getting here in about a half an hour down builders at 11am the girl scouts robotics patrol will be there lab rats lair on the science stage at 11 cracking the picky eater codes if you've got a picky eater there'll be some food hungry education going on over there and there's a performers stage and the performers paradise during all star ensembles until it looks like about 12 30 also if you're just getting a be on the outlook there are two competing groups attending the fair today R2-D2 has been spotted amongst the crowd as have stormtroopers there's stormtroopers and R2-D2 I know that the stormtroopers are on high droid alert they're looking for some droids you know I saw droid but I don't think it was the droid they were looking for very well done Blair the stormtroopers today are having a non-profit fundraiser you can blast a stormtrooper today if you're interested that could be a lot of fun also check out first robotics down here at the end of the hall they are demonstrating their robots first robotics is a competitive robot building endeavor where middle school and high school kids build robots and compete with other robot assists from around the world on various designs to address certain challenges so there's a story that was just sent to me Virgil Curriotto over on Twitter are being used by scientists to collect whale snot yes yes that's some droid action I can get behind alright so the ocean alliance has been working with roboticists to create a drone to collect whale snot it comes out of the blow holes on the tops of whales heads it's a mucus like substance so basically snot and this drone are you ready for it? I'm ready it's called the snot bot yes I want a t-shirt that says I heart snot bot so the interesting why do researchers want to collect whale snot why is this interesting oh because you can learn a lot about the health of the bacteria DNA is probably in there bacteria so this snot contains DNA, microbiome information, hormone levels as well and they can get information about the whales metabolism so the bot they go out on a boat and they deploy the bot over pods of whales or individual whales when they find them the drone hovers above the whale as they surface and then lowers a petri dish the snot that comes out of the whales blow hole as they have breath because as we know and they actually have to hold their breath when they go underwater they take a breath every time they surface and so that's what you see when the plume of water vapor explodes into the air from the top of the whales body that is the whales exhaling in order to inhale so they can dive back down food so snot bot also has a camera to collect video and footage of these whales surfacing they can understand the body features of the whales to identify them more closely and also to figure out if they're injured what kind of organisms are living on them all sorts of things like that and then they can also and address how the whales themselves are behaving what kind of behaviors are they showing up and keeping the whales at all because the boat can be really far away from the whales because of the the far range of the drones the drones are actually using artificial intelligence to analyze the data that they collect and to identify particular whales to assess their health in real time nice so this isn't like oh we'll take the data back to the lab and figure out how the whales are doing this is taking images looking at the whales and identifying and figuring out how you're doing how you're doing whale snot bots here how you're doing whale so here I'm trying to display I think it's working the video he's sending out the snot bot right now they're fixing it with what appears like a fishing net but that's clearly the petri dish situation yes what do you do for a living oh I harvest whale snot cool cool cool cool cool cool so there are drones here at the young innovators fair there are people who have brought drones and are demonstrating drone technology over in the corner over here every once in a while I've seen a drone fly up into the air and kind of fly around a little bit maybe we can get some drone drivers over here to talk with us a little bit later yes I would love to get a drone tutorial I've never used a drone actually is that a yeti? yeti walking in no not a yeti captain cold captain cold captain cold just walked in I don't know what's going on there people are still coming in it's amazing watching all these people enjoying the young innovators fair 1130 on the science stage I like this one how to become a superhero cardboard hot glue and patience so Jeremy Faulkner in the YouTube chat room is asking whether the snot bot is piloted or does it observe the whale in the water to position itself above it I believe that the drone is piloted at 1230 on the science stage physics and flight drones in the physics curriculum maybe you can get your drone learn on over there drone learn on that's a lot better than a teacher droning on ha oh my magazines are falling down I put them down in a stack on top of things there's a lot of good girl stuff going on three o'clock on the inspiration stage in the builder's boulevard become a super science girl a super science girl I'm a super science lady at two o'clock in performers paradise super mad science live mad science is that you? I'm not doing mad science mad science is a wonderful organization that does after school programs and will also do birthday parties and events just like young innovators fair to demonstrate various fun science ideas and to let kids work on an experience playing with science and I say playing with science because that's really what they do at my son's son chi school had science after school program for an hour once a week in a couple of the school sessions and they do things like can roll or they do the science of airplanes and they build paper airplanes and do experiments with waiting the nose and various things and so they get to build a plane and throw it around and there are always little things coming home that the kids have built themselves of it mad science all sorts of mad fun mad fun awesomeness so there is into the building very shiny top I don't know what that box is for what's in the box is it again it was just it's not it was up but then it went completely black so I started a new one good we might have to do that occasionally so for everyone are you going to put them in your backpack? so we're currently live on youtube here on stage and we're currently trying to fix our facebook feed to get it back out so we have to re-new refresh that feed every so often throughout the day as we move forward on this live stream so much fun though seeing the smiles on everybody's faces everyone's so excited about getting their hands on science today I am getting ready though to run around and I need some water I also would like to find people to bring back here to talk to there's a ghost in the background in the background Justin is surfing the internet right now I think we need to talk about some more science so I've got some fun science stories to discuss let's see what's a good story oh let's talk about sleep you guys want to talk about sleep what's sleep? I don't even know what that is anymore yeah I feel like I forgot so one new study out this last week has been looking at how the brain what the brain is doing while you sleep why sleep is important and a study out of the University of Wisconsin Madison out of the lab of Chiara Sirelli recently published in Science Magazine Direct Evidence that your synapses in your brain reset at night so this is a hypothesis that researchers have had for a very very long time that sleep is necessary for our cognitive functioning and what they've actually done is finally gotten that direct evidence that they needed that yes indeed while you sleep a process called synaptic pruning goes on so while you're awake you grow and little fingers come out of your neurons the ends of your neurons this is a metaphor metaphorical fingers come out of the ends of your neurons to connect with other neurons and make new connections some of those connections are very very strong and others are much weaker and while you sleep the weak connections get pruned away so only the strong connections remain and this is part of the process of memory consolidation to allow your memories to be strongly retained or not so the memories that kind of fade away are maybe those weak connections that never really had a chance to grow stronger so during sleep your neurons need that time to make your memories better so that your brain function better so I shouldn't pull an all nighter before a test yes so applicable take home information here is sleep is really important sleep is important especially before high intensity tests or basketball games there was another study that came out this last week suggesting that people who are up late at night on social media tweeting don't function as well the next day they looked at basketball players and how they performed on and how many baskets they made how they performed during their games and looked at what they were doing the night before on social media those players who were tweeting late at night before their game did not perform as well as their normal average so their performance compared to their average performance was reduced this is correlated to late night social media oh I have a question from the audience come on up come on up and join us this is very very interesting good stuff most of us multitask and don't in enough hours sleep sleep people in management positions they function on probably 5-6 hours of sleep what do you recommend what do you call a good night's sleep that is a really good question so what is a good night's sleep this is something that is hotly debated because it depends on the person really everybody's metabolism is different and some individuals will perform just fine 5-6 hours of sleep some people like myself I need a good 8 hours of sleep the average that has been recommended from various studies is 7 hours of sleep for people to get on a nightly basis just like anything we can do one night of reduced sleep and still manage your performance might not be as great the next day but it's that chronic lack of sleep that will eventually reduce your cognitive abilities it will reduce your reaction times it will reduce your ability to think through things and so you might think working on 5-6 hours of sleep I'm doing great I'm on top of the world think about how much more you might be able to do if you actually gave yourself more sleep again it's going to come down to the individual great great friend of mine over the years he sleeps more than 4 hours in a night and he goes out there and he hits his BMX or his 10 speed what a road bike he'll go out on a 20 mile bike ride start the morning and then he'll come to work with me for 8 hours and then he's doing his studying for university which he was doing full 18 units at the time he was working like a full time job with me but it never seemed to affect him he frustrated me because I'm like I had to sleep 8 hours otherwise I'm just foolish the whole rest of the next day yeah yeah so yeah yeah right so it's about 7 so recently there was a study that came out that really they were saying for most people you need right around 7 hours a night and we actually did another study a couple maybe last year that they gave people reduced sleep or not as good of sleep for a few days in a row and they found that their driving abilities were on par with someone who had had I think it was 2 drinks or something like that so lack of sleep actually reduces your abilities impairs your abilities in the same way that drinking alcohol does yeah right so for height yeah so the question yes they do so adolescents are supposed to the number of hours of sleep reduce every few years as you get older until you reach adulthood but adolescents are supposed to get 9 or 10 10 can you imagine that yeah no definitely not but there's circadian rhythms are different too this is the other important thing they've been trying to institute later start times at schools because as they've been learning it's not about the kids just being unwilling to go to sleep it's that they're built different they're built to stay up later than the rest of us and they still need all those hours of sleep and so they do need to sleep in later it's not that teenagers have been lazy time has been with us people like to think that they're catching up they're catching up to the fact that yeah we've had this phenomenon of teenagers wanting to stay up late and sleep in and sleep for a long period of time it's not new once you have realized hey maybe there's a reason that all of our teenagers are built this way and so schools like at least in my local school district not a whole lot but they push the start time 45 minutes later than it used to be so we're catching up to what's been obviously in front of our faces this whole time yeah oh thank you yes there is a website here they don't get it they want to keep me up ah yes you can back up yeah so we've got resources on our website and the studies that I was just talking about we will put those on the website as well so that you can find them easily yes thanks for the questions people like their sleep people like to talk about their sleep so I think sleep is such an interesting thing because it's something that we have to do and Blair this morning that quote that I saw it was E.B. White said something to the effect of I wake up every morning fired by the things that I want to do to change the world but also inspired and wanting to enjoy the world yes and the problem is figuring out how to do them both right right so it's like that's like our scheduling time I also I want to sleep but I don't want to sleep because there's so much to do and there's so much to see and there's so much science to learn about and I I stay up late so many nights like reading articles and just learning about things having conversations with people on Twitter about science you know scientific topics or you know there's just so many there's so little time every Wednesday at 8 p.m. Pacific time we start a live broadcast and I go I'm going to finish early tonight that's right no because there's too much science I can't not talk about the science it must be discussed if not us who if not now okay so I want to go back to one thing the pruning pruning you need to get sleep so that you're pruning off the maybe less reinforced things that took place during the day but now what about late night cramming yeah if you're studying all night late into the night at least and you get very little sleep does that mean you'll prune off less of the things you just learned no it means that you will not incorporate most of the things that learning the cramming that learning will not really take place you might put things in a fairly short term we talk about short term and long term memory but it's kind of like this in between space because it'll go into your memory kind of long enough for you to take the test maybe the next morning be there you're not actually integrating that information or memory it's not becoming a part cramming does not allow the strengthening the reinforcing of certain neural connections and so it's not just the weak is going away it's also the strengthening of the strong connections and so if you're not sleeping and you're cramming you might be putting stuff in there it's all going to get pruned away eventually as opposed to the strengthening so really what I need to do is pull in the all day and then sleep and then sleep or pull in all nighter no no no to study on a schedule study on a schedule would be a wonderful idea because Justin mentioned earlier that we have circadian rhythms our bodies work on a clock and so if you are able to schedule study time in your body will respond to that and be ready to learn and your brain will actually be better prepared to learn if it knows what's coming so that's number one number two is that learning is an ongoing process repetition repetition I talked about strengthening neural connections repetition is necessary to make that happen so studying in short sessions over time and repeatable will allow you to learn better so you do something in class you read something take notes put it down on cards test yourself read the material over and add new material by the time you get to the test you're going to do much better you don't need to pull in all nighter you may be review everything a day or two before you're perfectly good to go but if I say I procrastinated I didn't do the 15 minutes here 20 minutes there I didn't do the proper schedule of studying and I have no choice but to cram tonight is there a trick is there some way that I could unlock the memories of last night the next day magic there are your brains do really well so many people are procrastinators and have done this throughout time I pulled all nighters when I was in college I did well on the tests it works for people but like I said it's not going to be integrated into your long term noetic consciousness of the world there are so many things that I wish I remembered better like I have to go back and look things up all the time from college because even though I got an A on that test and I knew it it didn't get integrated into my knowing would you like to draw my ptosis diagram? keep getting turned up ah coming up on the builders boulevard right now actually 3 minutes from now robotics patrol patrols 3 minutes away on the builders boulevard scouts robotics patrol also cracking the picky eater code on the science lab that's about to start he is kaya picky eater oh yeah I was going to answer a question Jeremy in the chat room he asks what about afternoon naps does that prune your neurons as well no so this pruning takes place because of the sleep cycle so you have to get in you have to have the REM sleep and the slow wave sleep and the various levels of sleep you have to get into that deep sleep and also the lighter sleep to be able to get to the point and a 20 minute nap is not going to give you all the brain cycle that you need for that pruning to take place so studying and then taking a nap wouldn't work no unless it's like a 3 hour nap 3 minutes for a sleep cycle so you need long enough for you to fall asleep 90 minutes for an entire sleep cycle and then maybe an additional sleep cycle for it to really do something so you need at least 90 minutes if not 3 hours for that nap right sleep cycles are so interesting I it's kind of like we were talking about a minute ago about how everybody needs a different amount of sleep right but that's also because each individual sleep cycle is different the kind of entry period into the sleep cycle is different for everybody so to just set your clock for 8 hours I recently found out I've been sleeping until usually my alarm goes off at 7 and I wake up very very very groggy and I started noticing that I would naturally wake up at 6 30 every day and go oh I still have a half an hour and go back to sleep and I found that if I actually get up at 6 30 when I naturally wake up I am awake and alert and it's because I didn't enter a new sleep cycle I just exited a sleep cycle if you go back into a sleep cycle you end up in the quagmires of unconsciousness ooh quagmires of unconsciousness that's the name of my you know my new wave band yeah alright you asked about picky eating yes they have the picky eater what is it Justin on the stage yeah cracking the picky eater code hungry education on the science science stage lab rats layer yeah is Kai a picky eater yeah he did not use to be a picky eater but he has become more of a picky eater and but I assume that we introduced him to a lot of foods when he was very young so once he gets through this adolescent stage maybe he'll start trying things again yeah I know kids can be really picky eaters I know notoriously the kind of the stereotype is that little boys are really picky eaters right I know my older brother had about three foods that he ate cheese pizza peanut butter and peanut butter sandwiches not peanut butter and jelly he would not jelly that's just peanut butter and egg o'waffles those are the three things he would eat when we were children wow and if my mama really pushed he might eat some baby carrots or some green bell pepper well bell pepper there you go it's a good vegetable yes but I knew you really have to push I knew a little girl that would only eat I had one little girl that would only eat white foods white bread white pasta rice that's where you go you will eat these peas I've got a white kind of big eater but my youngest who's for is a goat oh a goat she'll eat a couch if you don't tell her to stop so there's an idea in dietary and nutritional research that this picky eating in children is actually beneficial that it kept kids from eating things that might have been bad for them in early days of our species evolution when there were lots of dangers and we didn't really know what things did that the kids had to be careful about what they ate what they ate my language is working really well today yeah but now we've got all these foods but what food were that have been like evolutionarily like could you survive as a picky eater that's a great question I mean could you have survived for dinner that's it no choice then there's the alternative hypothesis that picky eating is actually something that only a very small percentage of the population has and may not have survived very well but because of the fact that we have such an ample food variety available for us that these kids now are surviving very well yeah and that maybe more picky eaters are living in the population today obviously because they would have died off so here we have a couple of hypotheses that could be investigated by science yeah so I guess it's kind of the new version of adaptive radiation right now because we have so much more food there's essentially more niches available so you can be somebody who only wants to eat white foods and you'll survive I'll only put that niches niches niche are you a niche or niche camp person I'd say niche but household our kids sort of finding their food niche within the house one kid only wants jelly sandwiches I definitely had my own food niche yeah for sure so for example when we would eat when we got a little bit older my brother kind of expanded his horizons a little bit we would occasionally eat brie he only liked the really soft inside part of the brie he wouldn't eat the rind and I developed a pretty good taste for the rind that was my cheese niche your cheese niche I know there's food here I'll eat the rind I am a brat, I would eat no fat I would eat no lean I guess I'm kind of a cheese scavenger or cheese opportunist I will eat any and all cheeses I like the idea of being a cheese opportunist oh yes that's definitely me I think I'm kind of similar in that way yeah we were talking this morning over breakfast about fermentation of foods and whether or not the softness of foods and whether or not pregnant women can eat them and Blair was telling me that there's a new thing where pregnant women are saying they can't eat soft eggs yeah you know what I'm going to look and see if I can find any actual sites I looked at Blair in a very confused way a few of my friends recently they were like oh I can't wait until I can eat runny eggs again because they were pregnant and so they're not eating runny eggs no, you can't eat soft cheese you can't eat raw fish because there's a bacterial google auto filled I just wrote no runny eggs and it went when pregnant nobody is supposed to eat raw eggs I mean that's the new advice always an egg possibility but soft eggs if it's a hardish white and a runny yolk I mean if you want your eggs over medium I don't understand so in January 2016 the UK advisory committee on the microbiological safety of food found a major reduction in the potential risk of eating raw or lightly cooked UK eggs leading experts to conclude that it is now safe for pregnant women to eat their eggs running soft boiled or raw or raw here's the lesson from this as a father of three I've learned as well give the pregnant mother anything she wants yes and this is a father's survival strategy so if we're talking about science we're going to bring it back to survival strategies give the pregnant mama everything and anything she wants and it turns out she was right so there we go yeah I'm seeing lots of forums that are saying don't eat runny eggs while you're pregnant the doctor told me not to eat runny eggs while you're pregnant I'm not seeing any scientific study there's no scientific study I mean seriously the idea is that the yolk is runny there should be no bacteria in the yolk to begin with because eggs are have a sterile interior there is a membrane and there is a shell that this is how you grow inside those eggs it's a sterile interior the old egg in which a lot of the moisture has wicked out and it's allowed the membrane to come away from the inside of the egg I mean you shouldn't be eating the really old eggs anyway the interior of an egg should not be bacterially contaminated and if you're making if this is an issue about salmonella I mean there could be something on the exterior of the egg that maybe it's transferred to the stuff on the inside when you crack it potentially but then you've got whatever that is all over your hands because you are touching the egg I think the general advice not to eat raw eggs oh it's salmonella again the red herring salmonella the FDA is saying that you should not eat raw or under cooked eggs because of salmonella so alright but under cooked if I have an egg over medium the white is cooked the yolk is raw the yolk is encased in the white alright everybody I want to see the science that really supports this how many people are getting how many pregnant women are getting salmonella infections as a result of eating eggs yeah they're saying raw eggs don't eat Caesar salad dressing okay fine that's a raw egg that's raw raw cookie dough that's raw egg when eating out they say ask if pasteurized eggs were used unused pasteurized eggs at home although I reported last year that we found out that over sterilizing our eggs actually making them more susceptible to infection because the eggs come out with this kind of slick coating and we power wash our eggs basically before they come to the grocery store and they become porous as a result and that's why we refrigerate our eggs in America but if you go to other countries they don't wash the eggs they're smooth and they're not refrigerated and not penetrate the egg so that's really about is about the fact that we over sterilize our things over sterilization of our eggs that's an interesting question see I love digging into things like this as opposed to taking information just at face value to figure out exactly why certain advice is given obviously the FDA is advising this for a particular reason but what is that reason what are the scientific studies that are what epidemiological studies are suggesting this is smart what scientific studies and like again I'm going to say Caesar salad dressing eggnog all these things are raw eggs they're not even partially cooked the FDA is saying cook eggs until yolks and whites are firm alright FDA I hope they've got the science to back that up there is some cool stuff coming up the inspiration stage builders boulevard 1130 bricks for earth with Raiden Coleman is going to be compressed earth bricks that's something I'm very interested in I might disappear to go do that if you're into superheroes how to become a superhero blue and patience might be J. Griffiths will be going on in the science stage 1130 and it looks like we got performers on the performers stage in performers paradise you guys love elephants so recently yeah recently we haven't actually talked about this one on the show yet even though it came out a week or two ago it was something that I was looking at for last week's show but there were too many stories and interview and whatever anyhow a new study we revamped the elephant family tree and it is revealing that a species of giant elephant five million to 100,000 years ago across Eurasia before it went extinct and is more closely related to today's African forest elephant than the forest elephant is to its nearest living relative the African savanna elephant analysis has determined that these what we thought was a close relative is not the closest we thought there were two kinds of elephants currently on the planet African elephants and Asian elephants that's it done nope there's three there's the Asian elephant there's the African plains elephant and now there's the African forest elephant so this is yeah so this is another situation where we took animals based on location and morphology and group them together and it's taken a long time for us to now figure out family tree connection is actually with an animal no longer alive it goes far back but it just seems like Africa is still the place where elephants can do well well I mean we don't have we don't have elephants ranging across the plains of North America no they don't range yeah either yes the mammoth um species name you don't belong here we'll be ranging in North America very soon I'm sure so I'm interested Blair North Americas Blair you work at a zoo and so conservation is near and dear to your heart and elephants are species which are hunted for their ivory and so we are around the world but the efforts are specifically in Africa trying to increase our conservation efforts how does a genetic study like this influence the way we conserve them does it matter or is this just interesting ha ha fun genetic stuff this is so monumentally important for a few reasons the main one being that if we know that there's this unique species that is only found in the forests in Africa and it's not related to the other African elephants that population we lose that species it's gone so to take the African plains elephant population back into the forest is not going to be the same if they're not genetically the same species so first of all there's the fact of this this physical geographical separation that actually is preserving a species a unique species but then on top of that as populations decline so kind of work we're facing the problem that elephants have two fold the first of course is trying to reduce ivory trade but the second is trying to grow the elephant populations so the way that we do that is going to be drastically different so for example zoos and wildlife preserves are currently breeding elephants with the sole purpose of growing the captive population because right now it's not a great time to release elephants because they're still being killed almost 100 of them a day for their ivory so once that number drops it is then safe to release elephants back into the wild but we are not going to release them back into the wild just to get poached so we're trying to grow this population in captivity for when it is finally safe kind of like storing up food for the winter almost right so when it's time for us to actually be able to release these elephants back into the wild there will be a good genetically healthy population so if now we discover that this is a completely different species we have to make sure we have a genetically healthy population of both species in our reserves and zoos and so first of all we've probably been interbreeding these this whole time so now they're mixed so now what are we going to continue with this mixed breed or are we going to try to get these two genetic separate populations on board and if we are we're going to need some genetic donors we're going to need to bring in some specimens from the wild that's a huge undertaking that's a huge undertaking so it's time for the kind of the higher ups in the taxonomic advisory group and the species survival plan of elephants to get together at a round table look at this information and make a new action plan they have to completely change their action plan now so the implications of this study are actually quite far reaching they're only going to influence new management plans they're going to be influencing animal parks they're going to be influencing the preserves around the world wow I had no idea so every species but particularly endangered species have a species survival plan which is like a stud book which is an action plan for how to grow the species and where these individuals will go when they're born but they also have a taxonomic advisory group a tag and that is directly related to pairing animals for family planning so it's basically online dating for animals so once a year a taxonomic advisory group for let's say mandrels they'll get together at a zoo or a wildlife center and they'll actually spend days matchmaking and it's quite advanced we're talking about F1, F2 generations all this kind of stuff trying to figure out how best pair up animals based on who has facilities available who is of the right age and who has the most genetically different stock so that we can think F5, F6, F7 down the line so many generations down the line and still have a viable population huge effort it's very intense yeah and that's just one species if you're just talking about the mandrel and then you have to consider I know pandas are not your favorite example of this but they're pickiness where the pandas don't necessarily want to breed with each other they don't necessarily like the other individual that has been brought in as the other F1 representative this matchmaking is actually matchmaking it's something that you have to these are animals with their own preferences and that's the other thing a lot of people ask us why don't you just inseminate them but your preference is actually a really big deal so unless a species is in a really bad shape and this is their only chance at survival is insemination we will not do an insemination process with animals because if they're nice discouraging them from matching with another animal there's usually a reason for that they can smell, they can sense they know things that we don't even by looking at their genes they can identify sometimes a bad combination or it happens and so if a couple of animals don't want to reproduce together there's usually a reason for that so we kind of go okay you know best we'll find another tiger for you or what have you that's fascinating animals know best when it comes to who they would like to pair with so that's an interesting conservation connotations as we're also thinking about the elephants and how and the efforts that are going to be made moving forward in the breeding programs when you talk about bringing an animal from the wild are these animals that have maybe been injured through poaching and that have survived and maybe wouldn't survive on their own or do the zoos go out and the other question is these are two completely separate questions and then my other question is in zoos maybe not so much in wild animal parks you have the caregivers interacting with the animals is that going to going to make it more dangerous for them when they go out into the wild because they'll be used to humans and not as afraid as they should be yes these are great questions so I'll address the second one first so when an animal is born and raised in a captive environment they absolutely they trouble adjusting to life in the wild so when an animal is part of a recovery program or a species is part of a recovery program they know that taxonomic advisory group and the species survival plan know from the day that animal is born if there is a possibility that animal may be released into the wild and if they know that then they take a completely different care approach with that animal so either that animal is going to raise animals that will then go out into the wild or their hands off from day one the kind of middle ground is that if there are wildlife reserves that are kind of partially enclosed or partially protected those are often situations that are perfect for an animal born and raised in captivity because then you can still they're not as scared of humans so you can keep tabs on them in a partially wild environment and it's a nice in-between and then those babies their babies are the ones that will be able to go out into the wild so it's very a measured approach and if there are animals that they're planning on releasing into the wild even a slight chance right now at the San Francisco Zoo they have Mexican gray wolves that are 10 years old those are old wolves but they only hands off with them so they chance they might go into the wild as part of a recovery program so for their entire life their management was completely different they don't do hands-on training when they go into the exhibit space the animals are moved into another space or they're not interacted with at all they're fed from a timer so that they don't associate humans with food so the management strategy is very different depending the other question that you had about how those animals get into the zoo there are three ways that animals end up in zoos but when we talk about recovery programs their enters a fourth so the most common way animals are found in zoos is because they're born in captivity and like we were talking about they were raised with humans and with care and with veterinary care and all these sorts of things so that they would not be able to survive in the wild the second most common is that they are injured in the wild which is kind of what you were getting at with poaching or traps or even a bald eagle being hit by a car and losing its wing so any of those realities would result in an animal not being able to survive in the wild and so then we take them in the first so the third reason is if it's an animal that has a conflict with humans so a lot of bears that you see in zoos they're problem bears and what that means is that they have huge habitats normally and when we build a freeway or a small town or anything like that that fragments their huge habitat and they regularly start wandering into human space bears will eat anything they're definitely opportunists and so if they see a dump or somebody's trash can or any sort of food source that is easier than foraging for food in a forest they're going to capitalize on that and if animals that are good at defending their territory they can then identify human territory as what they want to protect and then they become a problem because human bear conflict doesn't end well for either party so then that animal gets a few chances usually they're tranquilized and relocated if they get three strikes as we all know three strikes you're out right so then usually you try to find a place to place them in captivity because they obviously will not be able to find a wild place where they won't be tempted to go where humans go because they've identified human space as free food it's bear jail it's kind of bear jail if bear jail was the fanciest spa that you ever imagine five star food primo healthcare you got to do whatever you want within that space whenever you want it it's definitely a misrepresentation we can get into that later it's jail with all yard time it is an all expenses paid resort that you are not allowed to leave so I will say if I was a wild animal of any description I would prefer a zoo because I don't want to be eaten or have to chase things all day and hope that life in the wild is a constant struggle for survival so without a struggle your life becomes a lot easier yes of course we want animals in the wild but let me finish so that's the third way problem animals the fourth way that we get animals in captivity if there is a declining population that is right on the brink of extinction and we do not have enough of a genetic base to continue to pull in an individual from the wild to inject new genetics into the captive population so a perfect example of that I will bring it up again the Mexican gray wolf they thought the Mexican gray wolf was extinct completely gone and then in the 1970s they found a few of them they found I think it was four males and one pregnant female that's all they found so do you think five individuals could sustain a population in the wild? not well so what they did is they pulled all five of them a wolf center and they started a strategic breeding program and now there are over 200 wolves in the wild no there are 100 wolves in the wild and 200 in captivity and the reason they are continuing to grow as a species is that they have managed the genetic of this species extremely carefully and so some animals we can do a complete start over but some animals we have to do some catch up with which is what happened with rhinos so we found out rhinos were almost all gone still all species of rhinos are endangered and so occasionally an individual may have to be pulled from the wild and the genetic population going or the species has no chance whatsoever so it's an injection of genetics one of my favorite stories of conservation actually takes place outside of a zoo in the American Bald Eagle where they will they're in zoos too but they have a I don't know what you'd call a sustainability program a conservation program a species survival plan so they actually helicopter out to the site of a nest of a Bald Eagle they will take the egg away they will put a full egg in its place they will take that egg the egg back incubate it is the little chick can sit back into the nest and take the fake egg away so I think actually you're thinking is it on? Bald Eagle is what they did actually is they started breeding programs in captivity and they raised them with little Bald Eagle puppets programs so they also do this in California with the Bald Eagle you can go and it's because it's so much DDT the eggs I guess aren't as big shells aren't as marble so in the 70s they discovered what was happening with DDT they outlawed DDT the egg thing with DDT in the Americas is no longer a problem the Bald Eagle actually was recently removed from the species list because of the recovery programs other countries are still using DDT and they have an ongoing issue but maybe they have large enough populations and diversity that things are fine or at least are stable we had just a dramatic response to DDT in the ecosystem here in the United States our response was warranted but other countries it is a pesticide that works and other countries are still using it successfully but one thing about the Bald Eagle program actually one of my favorite things about that program is that it was a multifaceted approach that saved a species if we hadn't done anything about it there would be no more Bald Eagles at this point in 2017 but because there were a lot of bird watchers this is what I love about the Bald Eagle story since the 1940s they had been recording Bald Eagle migration just people who loved birds and who loved watching birds through binoculars and a magnificent bird to spot noticed spotting birds of prey during migration takes a trained eye because it is a lot of the main causeways of migration it's hundreds or sometimes thousands of birds all up very very very high above you so you have to be able to recognize silhouettes count very quickly or estimate based on kind of quadrants and then also estimate different color morphs this is what was really important they had been taking data just citizen scientists, just people who liked to watch birds had been recording data of Bald Eagles and all birds of prey during the Great Migration since the 1940s and all of a sudden they found there were still Bald Eagles but there were no juveniles so the Bald Eagles they're famous for their white head Juvenile Bald Eagles look pretty much just like golden eagles, they're kind of specially brown all over but they saw no Juvenile Bald Eagles for a couple of years and these birders notice they notice this and population dynamicists know that if you lose juvenile populations that means your population is going to drop because the youth they are the youth are those are the individuals that are going to go on to produce new birds later you need to have successful fledging populations in order to continue without dramatic population decline because the older individuals get usually the fewer offspring they continue to have their offspring their contribution to the population decreases with time yeah, absolutely and so these birders just citizen scientists just civilians essentially raise the flag they raise the alarm they got in contact with conservation biologists and then they were kind of able to follow the trail backwards and discover that it was the DDT that was making their eggs soft so they were crushing all the babies when they were going to sit on their eggs and then there were no babies it's so sad, I crushed my baby so they figured it out within a couple of years of this effect so they were able to figure it out so fast because of citizen scientists who are just doing what they loved and this very exciting thing this is like 40 odd years now this is in the 70s they figured this out and now we have a booming citizen science movement it's so exciting I don't know if we're going to see her this weekend but Darlene Cavalier which is a website where people can go to find citizen science projects to become involved in you can tell people researchers put their projects out this is like a a place where it's a portal to find information you can put in your interests your age your location whether or not you want to do it from your couch whether or not you want to be a citizen scientist who goes outside and does stuff projects for every kind of person the exciting thing is is that 40 odd 50 years ago when citizen science was not a thing people were making an impact now that there are fairs now that there is a citizen science movement now that there are ways for people to actually get involved with research can you imagine how much faster we're going to figure things out how much bigger the impact is going to be it's mind boggling to me I love it we just have a baseline on this now which is great we have our baseline that's really what this came down to we wouldn't have known about the bald eagles if we didn't have this baseline from the 1940s of what the great migration looked like that's what saved us this and then there was this collaboration between conservation biologists and the government and that kind of three pronged approach saved the species because conservation biologists figured out it was the DDT and made a recovery plan that was anticipated in the recovery plan by again pulling individuals from the wild having them raise dummy eggs essentially and then pulling the eggs incubating them using a puppet to feed them they never saw a human for their entire lives and then released them tagged were able to track them for their life discovered that it was working and that they were not going towards people the program funded that and outlawed DDT so that kind of three pronged approach is what got it done and I would like to add the fourth prong of the citizen scientists and everyday people everyday people government nonprofits scientists and everyday people that's what it takes to make a difference and save a species I think I don't know if this is common around the world but it seems as though for the past several decades people kind of got disconnected from their influence on the environment and the world and we we're taught to be consumers we're taught to buy things computers things that we buy have kind of an internal termination date so that you'll have to buy a new one it is a recyclable culture we weren't taught to recycle until much much more recently and so I think things like citizen science and these hands-on science fairs museums zoos are in a position now to reeducate people into how their everyday actions actually have an influence on the world we're not just standing here and not having an influence on the world I mean right now we're using a bunch of power we're using either fluorescent or I think we're using fluorescent lights though I do want to go look at the bricks for earth exhibit real quick I'll be right back if you're going to stay here you need to bring people back for interviews I'm going to tell this person to come see us right now bring some legos find at least you have to come back with two potential interviews Justin yeah so that's such a good point you're taking time off you better bring something back dude one of my favorite one of my favorite data points to talk to people about especially when I'm talking to new volunteers or new staff at the zoo is that 180 million people visit zoos and aquariums every year and that's more than all of the people in the united states that go to every professional sport activity that's amazing yes that is a huge audience and all of the people think that people are only interested in sports turns out zoos and cranes are a big deal too we're going to talk to people awesome we're having a seat oh fantastic alright would you like to have a seat you can scoot in a little if you want who else do we have here my son Logan would you like to have a seat Logan so I know Blair's excited to stand up for a second so alright tell us who you are um you gotta talk right up to the mic alright my name is Frankie Light this is my son Logan Amy Light oh Frankie I think I saw you on Facebook did you say you were coming by that's awesome thanks for stopping by I was like wait names the same on the internet the world where there's rare times that happens right so what were you excited about coming out to the fair for um robot domination we do appreciate the robot domination here at twist all the diversity of what's here and a lot of exciting cool things nice and are you excited about seeing anything in particular on the biology bay oh cool I don't even know what's over there I've been stuck in this little corner so maybe you can go what's happening over there and come back and tell me about it okay awesome and are you excited about anything in particular Amy in the conservation I was interested in the clean drinking water for people who don't have it that's a really interesting one recently there's been so much news people talked about Flint, Michigan it's a terrible drinking water quality but there have been recent studies in California that all over California the drinking water is even more contaminated with arsenic than in Flint, Michigan because it's coming from groundwater and so people are pumping it up out of wells and it's getting more and more concentrated the more agriculture is moving water out of those underwater aquifers and so people are getting more and more arsenic and so communities all over the United States that probably have really really dirty water and we really don't know it rural communities especially where they're just coming from the groundwater ignorance is a bliss yeah and water is such a huge issue we're constantly talking about the distribution of water to different places new membrane technologies to clean and filter water we talk on the show a lot about you know, hormones from birth control pills and all of our pharmaceuticals ending up in the water I don't know we can't drink the water either we can't eat the meat we can't eat the plants anymore because they're sentient and now we can't drink the water at least we can still breathe no, can't breathe either no it's all bad for us it's all bad for us is there anything in particular for the water sustainability that you're looking for or are you just looking to check it out just checking it out nice, yeah there's so many things also what do you do as a family like sustainability stuff just a minute ago what do you do as a family for sustainability water, like, you know, little things from, you know, short showers or turning off lights or are you switching to LED bulbs or I don't know we have LED bulbs and we garden so we have a lot of our fruits and vegetables in the summer recycle everything I was even looking at the worm composting I was looking that up oh, that worm composting is awesome they call it the worm juice or the worm gold or something like that you're gardening also we try to be environmental sustainable are you worried about the earth that you're going to be inheriting yes, very much so I would be too I mean, what have we done I think he's more concerned with the animals not the humans yeah I think that's a very good thing to be concerned about are you concerned at all about climate change yes, yes everything's just going to be flooded yeah weather is going to be changing the coasts are going to be flooded because the water levels are going to rise there's questions we're talking about where water is going to be available there, you know are we going to run out of water in the midwest are we going to run out of water in the southwest are we going to experience another dust bowl what's going to happen are we all moving to Canada nah, I think my son's afraid he's going to inherit climate I know we don't want that he's like what dad he listens to the show with me a lot how long have you been listening to twist 10 years 10 years click wheel iPod when I started listening oh my yes, if you're watching right now 10 year veteran 10 year minion great to meet you I was so excited when I heard you guys were coming and I was like yeah, I get to meet you guys I did too I knew somebody who worked with the organizing committee and so they ended up inviting us over here we get to lose our voices for science you got a long day ahead of you here yeah a long day of talking I don't know, it's gone by pretty fast we've been here almost 3 hours talking almost nonstop and it's alright I think this is what we do I don't know I can't talk for that long good luck she's a talker there's a talker, that's right alright alright explore come back and report on what you liked most on biology bay if you remember to I want to hear about that and yeah, we'll talk to you guys again today thank you so much for saying hi I'm so excited it's always we do this internet thing and we never actually meet people in person I like to think we're talking to people but I never really know I know is everybody out there thank you so much are we yeah, we lost our signal thank you that camera keeps dropping it's because my computer went to sleep yeah, you want a sticker there you go sticker patch, other things alright, that was fun it's always good to meet people who listen to twists oh my goodness, if you are at the Philadelphia young innovators fair you listen to twists let us know we want to know you're here don't just think that we're too busy to say hi because we're not we're just talking up here we like saying hi to people and I do want to find out what people are doing here at the fair so something else sustainability wise Blair and I were talking about last night at the hotel we're talking about educational opportunities for a sustainable step earlier just now we were talking about zoos and museums and how they educate even more people than sporting events than those who go to sporting events and additionally hotels are now good educators for sustainability we're going to ask what do you mean hotels are good educators for sustainability well it turns out that hotels now are using they're changing the way that they wash your sheets and blankets and your can you make it big here, make it big there it'll go to the big I selected on top of my head so hotels now instead of automatically washing your clothes your bedding and your sheets immediately they now ask you to put a card on your bed if you want them washed otherwise they're not going to wash your bedding if you want your towels washed drop them on the floor if you hang them up they will not wash them and what is this teaching you you you don't need to wash your stuff all the time and it can serve water by choosing to not have everything washed every day now yes of course you can be a clean neat freak and have all your bedding washed and request that to happen but if hotels which use a massive amount of water and put a lot of phosphates into the ground because of the phosphate containing the detergents that they possibly use Blair's looking at shoes that was funny on the screen we don't dare to fail we've got a lot of things going on here it's a lot of fun we have a lot of things going on I keep watching people come in and out I want to find out about some more education opportunities in the sustainability realm what are people teaching and what opportunities are out there yeah and the main thing is to make it the norm you want a social norm these new methods which we already do think about things like recycling it's you know 30 years ago recycling was not normal recycling was not the default but now recycling is the default so basically you find yourself in a situation where the the the people always take or in most cases people will take the easiest route so I was just having a conversation with someone recently about how in a classroom sorry in a bathroom if you have I noticed we have hand dryers here if you have a hand dryer and you have paper towels both in the restroom most people will go for the paper towels because they're faster right and that's what they're used to using if you put the hand dryer next to the sink and you put the paper towels across the room people will start to use the hand dryers more and then that's funny so it's like that much more difficult to go use the paper towels because now you have to walk all the way across the room and so I've started to notice a lot of bathrooms now they've started putting those kind of Dyson dryers if anyone's used those but they put them behind you when you're at the sink and the sinks still have paper towels on either side of them so people grab paper towels turn around and then notice the hand dryer so part of social norming and kind of normalizing new behaviors is making the new behavior easier than the old behavior right which we see with technology all the time the reason certain technologies catch on is because they make something that you used to do easier if you take a technology and you add a click or you add a process to it it's not going to catch on adoption is going to be that much harder to make happen in terms of washing your hands once upon a time I used to straighten my hair blow it dry and straighten it and of course you know I would have to wash my hands using a paper towel or the electric blowing dryer now that I'm into the wavy look I use my hair to dry my hands it's the easiest it refreshes my hair style does your hair smell like soap? and it's easier on the earth my hair doesn't smell like soap alright I'm going to take a little lap around you should if people don't mind I'm going to do a quick lap it is almost noon now we are going to be moving over to a stage at 1.30 the lab rat stage at 3.30pm so probably in a little bit we're going to be taking a little break here so that we will go over there and maybe grab food and that kind of stuff around 1 o'clock so we've got about an hour left here we will be taking a little break in our stream for our live show and a little bit of lunch and then we will be back at this afternoon so we've got about another hour everybody we are this week in science and we are a weekly podcast we do science every single week and you know what we've already been here talking about science for 3 hours oh that's only about 45 minutes more than normal it's true it's true except for that one time we did it for 21 hours once we did have a 21 hour program yeah we should do that again yeah we'll have to have a nap schedule because Justin fell asleep on air multiple times look on your face and I said that is ridiculous I'm off for it some science yeah so I just took a nice walk around this place what did you see I almost didn't come back I almost didn't come back you have a job to do there's so much going on out there right now it's incredible this place is packed with people of all ages but there seems to be more kids than adults there's lots of young people here and they are all actively engaged in checking out all the exhibits that are here this place is pretty amazing pretty amazing event I'm actually looking forward to at 12.30 on performers paradise on the performers stage it's sort of in the very middle of the place Slime Time Live is that like Ghostbusters it's going to be a ghost busting performance I don't know how scientific ghost busting actually is but it still sounds pretty busting just makes you feel good busting makes you feel good that's pretty great I was just thinking the other day seeing you slime on the science stage at the same time and the lab rats there drones in the physics curriculum we have to have a drone on we have to be there also at 12.30 we should definitely have a drone on later I see an animal which I don't know it is but I kind of have to know now isn't that just a person with a needle and thread oh ok I feel like that's probably what that is it says something about super socks yeah I love socks I have robot socks on today so Slime so I was thinking about Oobleck with your kids is that with the glue it's corn starch and water and maybe Elmer's glue yeah Oobleck is really interesting because it's a non-Newtonian fluid liquid yeah like you tap it and it becomes more firm yeah it's non-Newtonian it's fascinating because if you just kind of like turn the bowl then it will gush it will kind of move like an ooze but then if you slap it it's hard it's non-Newtonian so don't use it for a swimming pool because if you dive in that's the ultimate belly flop right there and then once you belly flop you will like quicksand slowly get oozed in right, yes so that would be an interesting way to way to go what's behind us is Biologists Bay what did you say? Biologists Bay I was over on Builders Boulevard how could you not go to Biologists Bay? I was in Builders Bay I got pulled over to Robotics Retreat and then how could you not go to Biologists Bay I missed it I went the other way it's also a source servers square source servers square I'm going to definitely to Biologists Bay conservationist square conservationist corner I like that, put the conservationist in the corner and actually they're not in the corner they're not in the corner but it's called conservationist corner guess what, all of us are conservationists everyone is a conservationist or can be some of us may be better than others we all can though because together we can save the world it's true also I heard the children are our future they're here today it's actually literally true though they are the future of science they have more future ahead of them certainly than you and I you don't know that the singularity I'm hoping that the Robotics Retreat that they'll have an answer for me over there so that I can download my consciousness into a robot Robot there I can live forever, that's my plan I wonder if Robot there starts becoming worry about conservation of other robots let's go on the animal Robotics Robotics Robotics polar bears I don't think that's how it would work I have a feeling that's what it would be No Robot there is going to be like consciousness of a polar bear into a robot polar bear No Robot player would never do that False False Do you have any more science you want to talk about? No We have a lot of hours left so hopefully you do Let's see what was something that I got really excited about recently I I reported on a few interesting things recently but my page isn't loading Do you want to talk about something? What was it? It was so interesting Thank you so much My internet is lagging My internet is lagging You just didn't do enough pruning I didn't do enough pruning. My computer didn't do enough pruning I think is what happened I'm trying to find a story but my internet didn't want to load Yeah, I need to fix my internet I like this story A couple of weeks ago I talked about tadpoles Frogs are pretty interesting parents for a few reasons Frogs are amphibians They are known for having porous eggs Instead of like a chicken egg we were talking about earlier has that hard shell Frogs and other amphibians have eggs that are very tiny and also they're porous like fish eggs They're like a sponge on the outside or they'll dry out So, amphibians have a tough job in that they need to find a place to lay eggs that's nice and wet or they won't get eaten Very important not to be eaten when you're... Yes, very important to not get your eggs eaten Beyond that it becomes more difficult when they become tadpoles when they come out of the eggs because then if the tadpoles don't find food fast enough they start to eat each other So, the parent's job, usually the dad the frog dad's job is to go to the little pool where they deposited their eggs to grow up into tadpoles and to transfer the tadpoles one or two at a time from their back the tadpoles hop onto dad's back and then they find a different pool to deposit the tadpole and so he kind of separates them out so he's saying you go to your room and you go to your room, stop fighting It's also spreading the chances of survivability Yes, absolutely One of those pools will have all the right resources for them They're hedging their bets as it were, for sure So, a recent study looked at what happens when the dad doesn't come right away So, if you're a tadpole and you're waiting to be rescued by dad you're about to get beaten up or even eaten by your brothers and sisters and dad doesn't come turns out tadpoles would jump on to pretty much anybody's back So, as I call it any port in a storm, right? So, these tadpoles would jump on to other species of frogs other, you know, male female, they don't care any frog at all they'll jump onto their back but they will not jump onto the back of a fake frog, they know the difference Interesting, how do they know the difference? Great question, we don't know maybe that's the next study The fake frog, I think was plastic so there's something about I don't know if it's the skin or if it's the smell or chemo reception I would guess it has to do with that I would guess that the frogs can shimmy down into the pool to allow the tadpole to jump on So, there's no chemical transfer, I would guess in the water from the frog to the tadpole, that would be my guess but I think that they would have to do some research to figure out exactly what it is that the tadpoles know that it's a no-go, essentially So, it's it's very interesting for a few reasons One thing that we categorize these animals as having this very specific behavior that the dads go to the pool to pick up tadpoles but maybe it's actually the other way around and it's the tadpoles developed into this behavior of jumping onto a back and it's the dads are near just doing what they normally do Right, so then I start to wonder how many times have we observed this behavior? What percentage of the time are they hopping on the dad's back and what percentage of the time are they just hopping on anybody's back So, this is kind of a reverse If it's in the lab and you've just got the family So, it all started I think from an observation out in the wild but the question is whether they saw this once and went, oh, this makes perfect sense this is what the STC's does and then they kind of would see that again and again or if it's something they saw in a lab Right, so from there the question is if it's the dad coming to the pool or if it's the tadpoles trying to get out or if it's both first, there's lots of there's lots of questions that arise from this study because once it's clear that they'll jump on any frog then is that something that that evolves secondarily as mail started to disappear it's a very interesting kind of chicken and egg question So, this is sort of interesting I've gone through and looked at all this amazing, innovative stuff we've got robotics labs all over the place we've got one robot that's launching Frisbees at a castle that's pretty wild and all this is being done with the technology that we have today, there's a team including several Carnegie scientists they've developed a form of ultra-strong, lightweight carbon also elastic and electrically conductive brand new material being invented now so, one of the things like our show is constantly covering things that are just coming out all this is available all you need to do is google science news and there are thousands of stories every month of new stuff that's just being discovered or just being implemented in the scientific world we're seeing a lot of applied science there's a I think it's a the angular momentum there's a booth two angular momentum here that's fantastic well you're just talking about materials right, so let's talk about plastic for a second I know this is one of your favorite materials yeah, plastic so plastic it's everywhere, it turns out there are new technologies coming out to help remove plastic from the water column it would be great to just stop it from getting there to begin with there were familiar plastics that are like everything that we touch when you wash your clothes there plastics that go out into the water yeah, so when you wash your clothes micro plastic so if you have fleece a lot of people know fleece is made out of plastic usually it's recycled it's made from petroleum and so when you wash that teeny tiny pieces end up in the water column we don't have filtration systems advanced enough to pull that stuff out before it gets out into the ocean that's something definitely I would hope some innovators would be working on soon so there's definitely a future in plastic extraction if anyone is interested in looking into that but looking at salt we were looking at this on episode recently sea salts actually come with micro plastic now because it's just everywhere in the ocean so it's not anything that they think is a health risk at this point but it's a great reminder that bio accumulation is really the problem there's a teeny tiny bit of plastics in our salt they found some it's again nothing that we personally should be worried about from a health risk standpoint but if you're a fish in the ocean you're a filter feeder you're swimming, you're a little sardine you're swimming with your mouth open and you're grabbing little zooplankton and little krill or whatever else that you're grabbing to eat you're also going to get a dose of plastics and again for that individual animal it's not too much but then if you're a larger fish if you're a a California sheep head let's say one of my favorite fish you eat a whole bunch of sardines now you have let's say you eat 10 sardines for lunch you have 10 times of a very tiny amount of plastic then it's 4 sheep heads for lunch now we have 40 times the amount of plastic so bioaccumulation so we were talking about trophic levels before kind of in the opposite way when you're going up the trophic levels you can bioaccumulate all of these plastics so we're still starting to learn kind of what the impact of that is identifying all of the places where plastics exist and where they're coming from is a really important part of science and a really burgeoning it's a growing part of science right now because we're trying to figure out where's it coming from and what are the effects and then how can we remove it so microplastic is polluting the ocean how do we get it out of there one of my favorite stories actually is about something called the ocean array was invented by a teenager so the ocean array it actually is shaped kind of like a giant chevron you've got giant V just glides along the top of the ocean and it collects plastic so do the microplastics tend to float to the surface in so this one works mostly for larger pieces so ocean trash like in the gyres yeah so if anyone's familiar with the idea of gyres there are five actual ocean gyres those are kind of circulation systems kind of like giant whirlpools that are just part of the ocean current system and so a lot of ocean plastic and trash gets trapped in the ocean gyre so you just kind of have this whirlpool where they're hanging out kind of like all of the hair in your bathtub collects right over the drain let's say I don't know what you're talking about so anyway the gyres are where a lot of the larger ocean trash ends up as it swirls around this gyre it gets broken up into tiny pieces so a lot of microplastics were once big plastics in the ocean and so the ocean array actually pulls some of those bigger pieces out I've seen stuff like this where there's islands of floating plastic so these aren't the middle of those gyres yes absolutely there are two others but it looks like an awesome spaceship it looks like an awesome spaceship it landed on the ocean yeah that's the ocean array let me see if I can do it I'm having a lot of trouble with my displays today but I think I can do it so right here is the ocean array definitely so I need to buy more data for that you can go you can try the oaks you can try the event sorry no problem so here's the ocean array so it does look like a fancy spaceship and this is the inventor Boyan Slatt who started working on this one I think he was 14 when he started oh wow so there's a young innovator right there yes so he saw a problem ocean plastics and he designed a new solution for it so there's this awesome array that sweeps out ocean plastic and if I was an investor I would be investing among other things in new filtration systems for water treatment to pull out microplastics because some things we can correct like micro beads we figured out now whoops maybe we shouldn't put tiny plastic balls in our soap my bad so we're starting to use less things than micro beads but certain things like the plastics that are shed off of our clothing I'm not going to stop washing my clothes and that's not what we want people to do but we can figure out a way to pull out the plastics before they enter the water column so the ocean array is a great example of a young innovator who figured out how to use technology to solve an environmental problem yeah this is another there's another story not related to plastics but related to young innovators who have seen problems and then tried to solve them more recently the Intel Science Fair there was one of the finalists was from Portland Oregon yeah and what he saw as a student in his community was that salmon were no longer coming to spawn in the in the stream that was in his house it wasn't a large stream but in the Pacific Northwest salmon make their way up rivers to streams and kind of very very far into these little tributaries and so what he saw was that over his childhood fewer and fewer salmon were making it to this little tributary and he also at one point saw that there were lots more geese coming in and ducks and there was a lot of algae showing up and it just was green and kind of overgrown and community at a certain point re that area of the stream they got rid of the ducks and the geese and the water cleared up and they made some other efforts to clean the water that was entering the waterway in their community and then came back and so he ended up doing an experiment looking at different ways that water and other and different routes for contamination to enter these small waterways and how that affects the salmon the fish and the other life forms that can come and use that and so he's actually gotten involved in environmental causes and helping communities figure out how they can clean their waterways so that they can enable a re-diversification of the population that's there, the ecological habitat yeah I mean, fish like fresh water I mean, they were clean water none of this, there's fish that obviously don't live in it's seeing a problem watching how it observing how it gets it starts kind of how it goes and then how to fix it what can we do to actually change things, what do we have the power to change Jessica Young won the Intel ISAF Best Category award in animal sciences this year for her study of synthesis of a soy protein hydrogel for invasive snail control in agricultural settings so this is using a soy protein to control these keep away these invasive snails let's see what also people done Shantu Jack Jackety also in Florida sustainable mosquito control a chemical free low cost approach to controlling 80s Egypti a vector of Zika virus yeah there's very interesting stuff a lot of kids working on very applicable applicable questions and being rewarded for their work I love the Intel science fair it's just they if you can make the Intel science fair you're doing some really amazing work some really amazing science well I don't be very interested to see what happens when the whole next generation science standards are being implemented fully throughout the country hopefully because since they're addressing problems and trying to design real world solutions we might actually see some real world solutions coming out of elementary middle or high school classrooms how great would that be that you could say oh such in such elementary school from Phoenixville found out how to make a better water filter to pull out micro plastics that would be so cool you could actually see wouldn't it if you could actually see a classroom come up with a possible solution to a real world problem and even better take the next step and then connect the scientists yeah there is a program out of MIT I believe that it works on this collaborative effort where there are various levels to it where it's based on climate change teaching it's an integrative method that gets kids learning about climate change and also going out and doing research themselves in their communities to see how various things like rainfall or weather have been during a coastal community looking at how salinity and the acidity in the oceans pH levels looking at fisheries and trash and plastics and getting kids out into the environment and then the MIT platform actually allows the kids to communicate with other the world who are working on a similar collaboration with other students in other schools on research projects and so and then they can also ask questions of researchers and get professional scientist input within this collaborative research online community that makes the world smaller that's so important because that's actually have so much of science is done yeah we cover a lot of times we start out a study with an international group of scientists because it's usually not just one scientist working alone but a team of scientists from multiple universities and often from multiple countries working together on a problem yeah right now we are looking at a lot of people from Philadelphia who are interested in learning more about the sciences and what's out there a lot of kids getting inspired hopefully to go home do their own projects ask their own questions try things out maybe embark on a future in science maybe embark on a future in art maybe embark on whatever future but hopefully it's one involves curiosity and creativity like you mentioned the new educational standards the science educational standards and just across the board I know that the initial rollout was very difficult for teachers and for students especially not necessarily in kindergarten because kindergarten is kind of like the starting point for everything and so it's the beginning but for the rollout it didn't have a staggered rollout it was just everybody you're going to be doing this level stuff in this grade and so all of a sudden the math was harder because it was different for sixth graders and the teachers had to get it right away and the students had to get it right away but but now it's been a couple of years and so I hope that it's getting easier and that the the strategy that people who put together Frankie like Frankie like come back Justin wants a picture so they have the same cell phone covered I can speak to what's going on in California because that's what I'm most knowledgeable about since I run education programs that have to adhere to the new standard so I've had to be kind of ensconced in the process but it's very interesting because first you adopt basically you're saying yes we like the standards we will at some point do the standards but then you have to plan you have to implement and you have to set up a testing system because all of this ultimately has to come down to state testing too right because that's how you track the learning of what's happening with the new system and how do you track creativity and curiosity that's the question which is fascinating so it goes through the the standards they have to make certain decisions such as you know K through 5 fairly straightforward not too much editing to do but for middle school each state and each district in that state has the opportunity to do specified or integrated subject matter in middle school so you can do middle school physics, engineering and biology kind of all at once or you can do it you know 6th grade you do physics, 7th grade you do biology you know sort of thing and honestly I'm largely opposed to a lot of this I wish there was a way to create a more flexible system that's a great way to start any sentence I'm generally opposed to everything that you're talking about because when we're talking about these standards for instance a perfect example was the young lady we had visited this morning who not interested in chemistry but loved physics there should be a way for your interests like you say your creativity but also your interest in the subject to propel you further down that direction at an accelerated pace however the related everything is related that's why if you get a biology degree you need a certain amount of chemistry and physics in your portfolio so is you know they say either integrated or specific approach I see there's a spaceman coming there's a spaceman walking toward us hello astronauts there's an astronaut would you like to come up on stage we're going to be joined by an astronaut now I'll talk more about science education I can talk about that for hours shocking we have hours so that's alright we have an astronaut here let me make sure I've got you in this frame you might be able to see it we've got our astronaut centrifuge and science museum that's Blair I'm Kiki it's very nice to meet you are we able to talk with you no because there's no air in space well there's very little air in space we have crowd control control we'll have the astronaut joined by ground control this is perfect questions about what kind of about what you're doing here what is the johnsville centrifuge and science museum doing here at the young innovators there well it's raising money for the museum itself and are you the astronaut handler I'm the astronaut handler yes I am so it's a great website to go to the website take a look at their website and if you can donate it will be a great cause what is the website what is the website well if you look on the form it talks about all the different things and it goes to schools and he provides here we go NADC museum dot org NADC museum dot org for the johnsville centrifuge and science museum oh wow there it is it's right here well branded what kind of things are at the museum that you're working on getting funding for well if you look there's the one centrifuge if you look at that one form right there it'll talk about right there where it's talking about we're back in 1958 where the original astronauts when they were training they sat on that this is what spun the astronauts during their training for their time and space to get used to the high G's vomit when you're going to space no this is why we have centrifuge jading us is great this kind of a museum getting in touch with the youth can maybe excite them to be astronauts one day yeah and we know that NASA was just choosing their new class of astronauts right we have a few new astronauts are there in the process of the finalists right now so exciting maybe there's some new astronauts that are here great place to look is right here at that website and we can get some astronauts from here to go there yes well I love meeting astronauts thank you so much for coming up on the stage johnsville centrifuge and science museum inspiring future astronauts in America thank you for stopping by we have many tripping hazards for astronauts and there's a lot of gravity still here on earth just as walked around like three times I haven't left the stage yet that's because he's just the way this is what happens oh this is cool yeah and they do see museum org so the long story short on the science standards yes they've so state adopts the standards but then they actually need to make an action plan so some states and some districts really a lot of districts that comes down to them in particular they hire a non-profit or company or they contract somebody to design curriculum because teachers aren't instantly going to be able to teach new standards right they need tools they need a kit they need a plan they need an action plan so they get an action plan and then they also have to adjust their testing and the tests obviously do need to be very different they're going to be very practical it's going to be a lot more about comprehension of processes and about solutions based and it's going to be a lot less scantrons there are less scantrons in our children's future I'm very excited about it yeah we were talking before you asked the question of whether or not it would be more integrated with all the subjects together I mean that's like more question based or project based learning where you have a question you design an experiment or a project around that question and you follow it wherever it takes you if it's into chemistry if it's into physics if it's into history you know it puts all the different educational paradigms together if it's project or question based whereas you can also teach from this is chemistry we're going to teach you chemistry but then maybe it will lead into questions about biology physics you know and I do love that middle school because you first of all you can reach every child no matter what their interest is throughout the year so if it's supposed to be a year of physics and they don't like physics or not care as much right? that's going to push kids away from the sciences and if it's integrated and you give a project and you like to engineer it'll give you a chance to engineer right? and then kind of when you move on to high school you have the opportunity to more categorize yourself a little bit more it's kind of getting in middle school to put out feelers and try different stuff which I think in middle school that's the time to do that and then in high school if you want to kind of specialize allow more specialization for sure yeah I mean research in general from the university academic environment I mean you go into this phase of specialization for your PhD where you dig down into one particular question in one particular question however as you do that you also have to there are many projects that require collaboration with people with other skill sets you might not have the skill sets necessary to answer the questions that you want to ask and so suddenly you're digging down into your very very specialization but then you need to reach out and so what used to be these walls between disciplines in academia are coming down they're falling down and integration is happening much more often and actually grants that grading different disciplines are getting higher scores now in the granting agencies and so you see you know biologists suddenly working with chemists and with I'm not environmental scientists be able to ask questions and they get they get awarded grants more often because of these integrative approaches and so you have your specialization you reach out but it's all about finding the thing that makes you passionate yeah absolutely and finding other people who are passionate and working together yes Justin what did you see on your on your lumps where did you go what did you do I saw a very long line at the food court going to get coffee that's all you said that's all I saw this place is jam packed fun looking stuff going on everywhere there's all kinds of hands-on projects build your own Lego figurines lots of yeah you can go build a mini Blair on Cosmer who's watching on facebook glimmerglass radio green news he says hello we were talking about some sustainability stuff before hello to Marshall and Kai if you're still watching hi hi long guys end up doing some other stuff hey Janisku in the chat we got our out hash SMB in Florida the neuro it's hashtag twist to get into web.net if you want to get in the chat room who else is out there who's watching on you you kka yeah we've got the ability to point time thank you I wish I could we're working on a system that we've got we have a quick announcement people in the chat rooms what it's been that we should guess are already eating softshelled turtle egg there's been a spread of cholera I wouldn't eat turtle eggs anyway but I know some people do but you are supposed to eat uncooked turtle eggs softshelled turtle eggs we had a small cholera outbreak earlier oh dear I don't want to get cholera from turtle eggs terrible we keep having to take breaks and do walkabouts this is pretty fun we each need to get out and about and see what's going on there I'm going to wave hello people walking by so dinosaurs I like dinosaurs you like dinosaurs? I think they're pretty awesome dinosaurs, feathers Blair's having a hard time walking away because I brought up dinosaurs and feathers I'll bring up the bird intelligence story while you're gone too alright recent study out looking at fossilized dinosaur skin looking at different parts of t-rex bodies found that t-rexes were most likely covered in scales not feathers I think this is a juvenile cell is it an adulterer juvenile because that's a picture I always got was that it's the baby t-rexes that have some amount of feathery plumage but I guess there was question as to whether or not they kept them to adulthood yes there's a question well now we know that they do not and they have scales although the backs they don't have fossilized representations of the skin from the backs of these t-rexes whatever reason in this part maybe it's more exposed more often but that skin is lost to science for the most part so we don't know if there are feathers along the spinal region of the t-rex but now we know that adult t-rexes were covered in scales of evidence though there's feathers and proto-feathers all over many different forest cousins of the t-rex and so this made scientists ask the question whether or not there were feathers on t-rexes is this something that is common across this clade of dinosaurs and the answer is no t-rexes got rid of it I don't need no skin in feathers living relative to the tyrannosaurus rex today but chicken which is covered in feathers but that chicken came from a cousin there was a lot of evolution in between but the idea is that the new hypothesis that scientists are putting forward is that t-rexes didn't need feathers like their cousins because they were much bigger and the bigger body size made them warmer and less requiring of insulation that the feathers would give but every time but just every time you eat chicken, keep in mind this is as close to the taste of a t-rex as you can go and I think it's probably a little bit of sweet revenge too t-rexes were probably bubbling up left and right yeah who wants t-rexes were probably bubbling up now the evolutionary tides have turned we shall feast upon t-rexes we shall eat their chicken cousins oh my goodness oh we talked about this on the show this last week thought it was a really fun story the idea moving on from dinosaurs continuing in dinosaurs maybe it was a couple of weeks ago researchers study in crocodiles they trapped crocodiles they lassoed them and then they got these giant crocodiles to bite onto something very similar it's a force transducer something very similar to a bathroom scale they got them to bite it bite down see how much force was imparted the jaw imparted and then they looked at different scales and they calculated how much force different size skulls would be able to impart the maximum amount of force these crocodiles would be able to impart and then they used this information to come up with a completely different study relating to the bite force of t-rexes oh ok cause this is a great question cause t-rex obviously very big obviously giant skull a question of how much force they really needed to bite if they're a scavenger to rip off right they had it little tiny arms a big jaw Blair was talking earlier about the mastication in horses and how they have these giant jaw muscles to be able to impart a lot of to chew a lot so the same thing was happening in the t-rex the t-rex jaw of allowing for massive amounts the point of the 1,000 pounds per inch and then extrapolating out mouth and the force of the entire mouth biting the t-rex jaw could bite with a force of 8,000 pounds I can't do that as I'm looking at this t-rex skull the jaw doesn't look nearly as pronounced as out of the horse but then you've got the top of the skull a lot more muscle attachment is more pronounced so the overall biting force would be greater it would be greater there's nothing greater I'm going to turn down the bandwidth of my feed they're saying the feed went away in the chat room said it went away oh no they're talking about this is the feed there you guys we got some feed t-rex skull so anyway t-rex is massive amount of bite force I mean you would expect it with a head that big they're jaws huge they're not nibbling what could you possibly be eating to crush bones getting into the marrow to crush the bones to be able to get to the nutritional marrow inside the bones and maybe possibly even eat the bones themselves so maybe this is one creature as we've learned a lesson from I think multiple dinosaur worlds maybe the Jurassic Park Jurassic World maybe this is one creature we shouldn't bring back the t-rex I love the vegetarian the research from a few years back where researchers were they weren't exactly trying to resurrect the dinosaur by messing with the genes of the chicken they dialed it back so they're able to dial back the clock so to speak and have chickens form eggs form teeth and change their behaviors and change their developmental patterns by messing with the molecules of development and so I would love to have chicken with teeth that would be a little creepy if it had teeth would it then be a meat eating chicken I think it would try I think they're constantly trying to have teeth that's still no teeth I think as soon as you let chickens have teeth they'll be all about chasing cats around la la la la la that's the neighborhood has been mystery has been solved Kiki's giant toothed was just being being darn it I'm trying to get more data on my wifi plan we're starting to have some wifi difficulties I understand that would happen as more people got here we'll see how we can make this work and keep the feed going place is packed full of people streaming, uploading doing all sorts of stuff yeah we have all sorts of science going on I wonder if Blair is finding people to talk to do you think Blair is finding people to talk to probably in the stall next door what other fun stuff is going on out in the world going to go to science with a twist which is moderated by Ed Dyer he does the twist minion hangout which is a really fun hangout every week oh yeah Pamela posted, our Australian friend Pamela, she posted in science with a twist this week about some birds from Australia that these birds create this is a research out of Macquarie University is the very first nest and that the bird was made in Australia and that birds across the world make this derived from this nest type that was first created by birds in Australia when was the first nest we're talking millions of years ago 40 million years ago 40 million years ago is our oldest known nest more than 40 million years ago is when it was first came to be the songbirds and the cup shape the open cup nest contains and the open cup nest is one that was in Australia so Australia innovating 40 million years ago on nests this is a really interesting the bird nest is a very interesting adaptation of birds to protect their young and different nests have arisen throughout time so probably the first kind of nest that we saw from dinosaurs is the scrape and that's basically just a shallow depression in the dirt maybe rocks slightly moved out of the way to make room for eggs in between them it's usually not anything that's got it usually doesn't have soft material in it it's just dirt on the ground and that's probably the original nest type coming from dinosaurs and then throughout the years incubation and predation pressures led to the development of many different types of nest among them open shape which evolved several different times in different lineages but as I said the chat room is saying dino has had to walk uphill both ways and it flares walking back there's no hills inside this building though except the downhill slide to a love of science come up with this stuff I'm sorry I'm sorry newest farmers are at highest risk contracting monkey malaria yeah no farmers here oh one big question that researchers are looking at now so there was a recent Ebola in Africa and outbreaks from time to time you know you have these small outbreaks many times controllable and they are not a big problem but other times they are very huge like the one from a couple of years ago which was very hard to contain finally contained a little less than a year ago this more recent outbreak though has led researchers into really trying to figure out the Ebola where does it live are the animals that hold Ebola and keep it circulating from which can come from species to species and they think it's bats it's always bats they always blame the bats well it seems to me the trail does seem to be pointing back to bats yet again that bats and their droppings and their interactions with other animals even with deer and then primates but where are the bats the bats infect the deer the deer infect the gorillas maybe the gorillas or chimpanzees will maybe eat deer or other small animals and then potentially become infected and then bush meat is hunted and the infected animal is brought into it the problem is not bats the problem is bush meat the problem is bush meat hang on first is something that bats and chimps both eat if these are if it's fruit fruit or insects yeah whenever we're trying to track down one of these reservoirs we need to look further down into the diets of what these things share in common with each other I bet you it's going to end up being an insect something that doesn't maybe bite people or bite anything but is eaten by animals really that's a story according to an article in science magazine the Ebola virus infects multiple mammal species but kills most of them bats are thought to be its reservoir where it waits harmlessly until conditions favor its emergence researchers are tracing the paths along which it might then spread it's also thought that there are additional unknown hosts potentially insects like you're talking about I would not I would not guess insects though but you did yes but they're saying that the modes of transmission between the bats and the chimpanzees are contact with the droppings of an infected animal consuming the meat of an infected animal contact with dead bodies of infected animals contact with in the human sense contact with infected medical equipment contact with infected living entities and then ingesting fruit that's partially eaten by an infected animal so there are multiple modes of transmission that are potential for this particular disease so to recap so to recap what we learned today we'll help Mike here to recap what we learned today don't eat anything don't drink anything and don't touch anything that's what we learned today that's right especially not dead bats in Africa yeah maybe don't touch any dead bats yeah we can always hope you know you're talking chimps but really a lot of its monkeys that we're talking about is the bush meat smaller primates these aren't likely themselves eating bats getting into primary contact with bats they're both eating the same fruits that one makes sense but I like the insect one too because I think that's a good part of the diet of both and then it's I think that's more of a vector source than a fruit would be a fruit is a transmission but not the source yeah so it's reminding me though of the of the story that you talked about Dustin recently I'll see if I can find it about how to interact with monkeys in the wild reading rhesus expressions yeah so we know loyal listeners to twists knows that when you smile it's actually a side of aggression in monkeys but a lot of people don't know that people don't know that monkeys being cute monkeys being nice and cute yes yes yes what's the loyalty here we're being visited by all the star wars people today it's fantastic all right princess Leia what are you doing at the young innovators fair I'm at two different booths so I'm helping run the eastern ms levinia robotics alliance booths where they're shooting and driving robots with kids as well as over in the blasted trooper booth with garrison kareeda for the rebel ejin are you blasted troopers yourself no I'm in there getting shot oh that's a bummer rhesus leia is not supposed to get shot I stand there and point at the stormtroopers and hope for the best right so tell me we've talked about the blasted the fundraiser that you're doing currently but with the stormtrooper that was here but tell me about the robotics foundation so we are a robotics program that is for kindergarten through 12th grade we're located in delora county we run both all year programs and summer camps so our all year round programs are based off the age level and every age level actually gets to a competition with that we actually have our high school age level team which has actually made it to world championships before it's a pretty great thing we have people able to come in and drive robots they actually get to shoot our frisbee and dodgeball shooting robot we have our regional winner robot actually on display so it's the first time she's been working in like a few years and then we also are talking about our summer camps that are running we're running 10 weeks of summer camp all throughout the summer everything from the science of explosions to the science of star wars to space camp, robotics camps lots of different options that's really fun what were you going to say our program is actually made up of three different nonprofits so our overhead nonprofit is the eastern Pennsylvania robotics alliance which is actually a parent group created to allow the expansion of robotics programs in the area as well as governing bodies of girl scouts which run our all girls teams and 4H of Delaware county which runs our co-ed teams alright so it's a lot of collaboration between different organizations to make it happen very worth it very worth it absolutely in terms of the different age groups that you've got I mean the skill level of high schoolers I can see they're going to be building pretty complex robots they're putting a lot of thought into it I have a kindergartener going into first grade he has an interest in robots but what can he build, what can he do what do you do with the younger kids okay so for our K-3 program what they do is each year they get a challenge and the challenge is a theme so my very first year of coaching was disaster blaster and they had to pick a natural disaster that they wanted to learn about and present about so what they did was my group learned about tornadoes so they went through and then they built a Lego model of a tornado but they learned how to program and they learned how to do those things with a very simple programming language to give them that introduction into STEM learning about gears and motors as well as teamwork our 4th or 8th grade program is one step up from that and their challenge always matches the younger kids challenge so the year of that the older challenge was nature's fury each year they have a robot that they have to design and create new tasks on a board as well as they have to solve a world problem based on the year's challenge so for nature's fury one of our groups did flooding and they created a box that would sit down in the creek and when the creek rise to a certain level it would text the people on the street near the creek for them to move their cars it's flooding move your car don't have a flooded car as well as they have a whole third of their score is based on how they treat each other our core values so that's a huge part is learning how to be gracious and learning how to work with others because it's important in the work world and sometimes that's not always shown through other sports this is the sport for the mind and they need to understand to be able to work in the working world that's fantastic so instilling life life helpful values as skills it really does help you in the long run I actually just graduated from high school yesterday congratulations I actually started this program in seventh grade when the program was created and I had no idea anything about robotics or whatever my friend said hey you want to do something fun I was like why not so I'm actually majoring in mechanical engineering and I have over two thirds of my college tuition paid for and all the scholarship opportunities through it and the life skills I've gained that is amazing there's nothing better than watching a kindergartener hold out a programming binder and talk to an engineer as if he has no idea what's going on I would love to see that yes because I learned those when they teach me public speaking skills all the way down in kindergarten I think that's so important and it's this young interaction like you said you got involved in seventh grade when did you get involved I got involved in seventh grade as well I started on the middle school co-ed team and I had a very hot time with the other students I was the only girl and I was there and I tried and the teacher really wanted me to be there because he knew I was interested but the boys really didn't want to hear what I had to say because well they're middle school boys and that happens and we got to competition and I saw a girl scout team there and I came back and I said dad can we do this and he said what sucker is going to do that for you he's the head of the robotics program over there so it was him but I started that in seventh grade and then eighth grade the robotics team started and Katie came along with me that's fantastic do you think I mean it's hard to say what you would have done given other situations but do you find that as your young girls come into the program you're involved with do you see them continuing with it and being interested in like you going into mechanical engineering going into the computer sciences going into robotics are you seeing that we have one of our girls her mom sent us a picture of what her gold art was for what she wanted to do when she was older this is her in fourth grade she said be like Miss Erin was the first one and the second one was be an engineer engineer was spelled wrong but it was close enough they were sitting there and I'm looking at this this is what this is about is the fact that I think being an engineer is a possibility absolutely when I first started I actually thought that I could be a vet tech that's all I can do as a girl and going through this program and seeing even as a high school in fact that I could build 120 pound robot in six weeks I can pretty much do anything now you can't pretty much do anything you don't know what limitations there are or imposed limitations there are until it's out of the time that you might not realize that you're being told that engineering is not for girls or whatever it is until suddenly you realize no actually it can be for girls so it's definitely yeah I'm so happy to hear that these programs are out there that are really trying to broaden possibilities for everybody but especially young women in science that's great so good luck in what your college and your career choices and also have fun today don't get blasted too much and thank you for coming up here and thanks for inspiring more young girls to go into these thanks for having us have fun alright we have some more guests we got some more on deck we have people who have been helping us plan this a little bit better come on up so we have to talk right into the microphone oh ladies you have to talk right into the microphone why don't you guys introduce yourselves and tell us what you're here representing I'm Tobi and this is Olga and we're representing GLIST from Ballokinwood Middle School and what is what is GLIST? GLIST is Girls Lead in Science and Technology we are a club devoted to teaching girls how to program and use technology to make different robots and projects how old are you? I am 14 I'm 11 and how long have you been involved in this program? I've been involved ever since I got into the middle school when I got into sixth grade I got interested in the club it's like hey there's a bunch of girls coding and stuff like that and I thought hey I should join how long have you been involved? this is my first year because I just got into middle school I'm in sixth grade I I have been coding since third grade and I wanted to get involved in a club but I didn't find one until I found GLIST because there aren't many clubs like this this is like a really unique experience how many coding clubs for girls are there? so who got you started coding why did you start coding? I have to owe it all to my dad he is he works in a lot of technology at CHOP so he decided to get me a bunch of different robotics kids and he got me a raspberry pie so that was my first step in programming so I started on scratch tinker how did you get started? I'm not really the type of person you would know as the coding type of person I've mostly drawn stuff like that but I got really interested in GLIST because one time during the activities assembly when they introduced all the clubs I saw the GLIST video it was actually kind of funny this would actually be pretty interesting I could actually get into science and technology so I joined in the library where every girl ever since I've stayed in GLIST so now that you're into coding and you're doing this stuff what has it kind of opened up for you as far as things you think about doing and what do you want to do with coding? well my kind of dream job would be a computer engineer or a robotics engineer so it was kind of a new way for me to step into that kind of field so when I'm able to code I can use that to enhance my robotics and my computer science that I'm learning it's great what about you? I think you're creating a video game for a little bit although there are a lot of different engines I think it would be it would actually probably be an easier project than Python and so then I could probably use Python in order to make my own video game what languages, what coding languages do you know right now? I know I know the tiniest bit of javascript but I'm most comfortable with Python with Python and all that I've delved a little bit into scratch it's really simple, just a drag and drop kind of coding thing but I've mostly been using Python I'm really impressed I learned a little bit of coding a long time ago and I haven't done much of it and I keep looking at things and going I need to get, I need to learn coding because that would just be something very useful it's a new language it opens up a whole new door to technology alright so what do you have over it at your booth, are you at a booth do you have robots we are teaching programming with Turtle Turtle is like the computer's notepad, so it's what it used to draw all the images that you see on the screen so we are programming the code for letters of people's initials, so we pre-made all of the letters at our club so we meet every Friday and we've been planning for this event for a little while, so now that we're here we have a few girls who will say oh you want to learn code and then they'll teach younger kids and older kids it's really like a very wide age range that's fantastic, so I know nothing about coding at all, would you be able to teach me how to code something at the booth I'll come by you should, learn a little coding it's good, do you guys want to say anything else before we finish here well Glyst is like it's opened up so much for me as a person I've learned so much over the past of this one year that I could probably make like a whole cartoon or something because it's it's really it's really a fun and inspiring club that helps me a lot that's fantastic also I'd like to add to whoever is interested in computer science and if you're a girl, don't worry about it computer science is a male dominated group and I feel like a lot of females should actually join it as well and even if there are a lot of boys there don't let that stop you, keep coding keep doing your thing thank you for saying that, it's true don't let it stop you and I hope you girls just keep going and doing your thing, it's fantastic thank you so much thank you for stopping by I'll definitely come by the booth I love it Glyst, coding for girls do you want to come up we're waiting to come say hi we have some first robotics people coming up here we do like first robotics hello I've got a couple of microphones here we have to make sure you talk with it fairly close thank you very much talk like this I think we got this going on can you introduce yourself please I'm Tom Zewislack and I'm the affiliate partner for the first tech challenge program of first in the state of Pennsylvania fantastic, the whole state for the state, that's correct you manage all the regional competitions I do, that's correct what is your name? I'm a student on the first tech challenge and first robotics competition in Pennsylvania what have you brought here today? we brought here today all four programs are first represented here today so we started with first lego league junior then the first tech challenge program and FRC so we want to make sure that the attendees here today were exposed to all the programs for different age groups here and they are kindergarten through 12th grade so first is a progression of programs that starts, as I said, with junior first lego league and then moves on up through the programs so it's designed so that they learn more as they get older and they get more challenges as they get older as well as they go through the programs what stage are you in? I'm currently in the first tech challenge and first robotics competition stages basically I started in first tech challenge when I was in eighth grade went through that program for two years and now I'm first robotics competition the learning just continues to build upon itself and when I first walked into robotics I barely knew how to screw in a bolt but now I have extensive programming skills and machining skills which is something that I never thought I would have yeah, I imagine that all the things that you learn, it's not just oh, I can now make robots now I have these skills that I can apply to so many other things and that's one of the beauties of this program it's not just about engineering and electrical, mechanical programming skills what our students really learn are real life skills that they can take with them in their careers, educational careers and also into their jobs so communication skills, I was just telling Nikila her communication skills have improved in the years that I've known her she was a shy young girl and now she's just sitting up here doing interviews and expressing herself in such a fantastic manner that's one of the skills they learn and team building skills, very important as you've probably learned from other first students that you've interviewed absolutely, so do you think that you've gained a lot of communication skills that were you very shy before? absolutely, I was so scared to even go up at a restaurant and ask someone to take my order but now I can talk to most anybody and work with anybody just because of first what first has given me actually first motto is more than robots and that's what all the students learn from our program that it's not just about the building and the engineering it's programming, but it's about building the team work and skills and the relational skills I think that's invaluable what part of the team do you have a role in your team? yeah, so I work on the design team, like the building team as well as the communications team which manages grant writing getting sponsorships getting outreach events and all of that alright, so you're learning how to raise money for your robotics efforts absolutely, which is necessary because as we know robots are expensive yes, robots are expensive and the other key besides the fundraising you've got to remember this is a mentor based program so the students are learning from mentors from various backgrounds they're not just engineers we've got engineers, we've got lawyers we have teachers, we have people from all walks and backgrounds that are coming here and working with these kids and we're all volunteers even the program leaders of state such as myself and other people in our organization are all volunteers we all have regular paid jobs and I think that the kids really do recognize that and appreciate it what got you into volunteering and getting into first it's a great question, I had two sons that got into first in their senior year and they got involved in first and I saw what this mentor based program did for them they got away from their parents and they learned from other adults and they learned much more from other adults than they would and in isolated family matters, so I saw the benefit to them once they graduated I stuck with the program began volunteering in FRC and since volunteered in all four of the programs that's amazing I love that you kept it going even after your sons finished because many people will get involved I now have a six year old and so I'm starting to get involved in things because he's involved in them but to keep it going and to make it your own passion and your own interest it's obviously very very important to you it's important to me because we see these kids grow up and we see them grow up into responsible adults and then they come back and volunteer so that's what he said, it's about volunteering as well and the passion to volunteer and to have an impact on other people's lives there's nothing like it, nothing like it in the world absolutely not, so what have you been mentoring younger students yet? Absolutely one of the big parts of our FRC team is we actually mentor the first lego league teams in our area these are kids from third through about seventh or eighth grade we have a number of FLL teams in our area and we take it upon ourselves to let them come into our workshop and to teach them skills that we've learned in our experiences to help them become successful in theirs what's your favorite part of building robots? I think my favorite part of this whole program is getting to meet all the people and getting to make invaluable connections with people like Todd and everybody who's involved in these compositions but my favorite part of building robots is finally seeing it work that, yes that makes sense science technology, there's a lot of failure there's a lot of troubleshooting there's a lot of turning it on and hoping it's going to work and then it doesn't go and that back to the drawing board kind of feeling where you know you have to figure out what's wrong and then the time that it finally works is this elation right? there's this feeling of excitement and you've done it right I mean that's how we learn the failure, test failures and everything is how we build our new skills and how we learn have you learned how to deal with failure? do you think that that's something that is definitely, yeah a lot of the times we'll spend so much time building these robots and doing the programming and it'll work perfectly in our workshop and then we get to the tournament day so that's something that we've just learned to deal with as the years have gone by I think that that itself is also an important life skill absolutely and the core part about the program as well, just not building a robot but competing with a robot so there are, you know, you go through again a progression of competitions that start out regionally and then go out in state level and then on an international level so the kids get exposed, we all get exposed to other people in other regions of the United States throughout our own state and region but also the international if you get to go to world championships it's the most amazing experience did you go this year? we did go this year our team actually got to play in the World Finals which was a really great experience wow and your robot worked when you turned it on that day? yes actually at the beginning of the tournament it didn't work but we got it working through the end is there anything else that you want to say about either the competition or what you're experiencing here this weekend? what we're experiencing here is actually just giving people great exposure to the program also providing them with the resources to find out more about the program we have a lot of teams that are kids that are here that are interested in either joining existing teams or starting teams themselves so that's what we're here to do is to advise them on how to get into the program to share our excitement mostly to share our excitement our enthusiasm for what the program can bring the kids here and we're projecting that to the adults we hope that the adults are getting it as well I hope so anything else you wanted to mention? thank you thank you very much good luck in all of your future endeavors is this something are you going to go into a technical field now? what are you going to do? what do you want to do? I was thinking computer science and computer engineering awesome this is what I'm loving we've talked so far to a few young women and they've been exposed to either robotics or coding and all of them are now excited about going into technical fields and I just get so excited hearing the excitement of these young women like yourself so thank you and good luck thank you very much thank you thank you guys so Kiki, I see we have more people waiting in the wings but I'm also looking at the clock here it's 10.15 it's 1.15 and we're supposed to be on a stage at 1.30 I think we can do one more interview Justin, why don't you come up here we miss you we can do one more interview maybe and then we have to come on up for a minute and then we're going to head over to our program Justin, come up here too yes is it only you or the other people oh this is great you're going to kind of we're on the internet hold the microphone fairly close yes that's perfect so can you tell me your name and what you're doing here at the young innovators fair Mark Saul I'm the executive director of Julia Robinson math festival and we're reaching out to kids with interesting mathematics what do you consider interesting mathematics well that doesn't matter much just as what do the kids consider interesting mathematics so what do kids these days find interesting mathematics my feeling is in general mathematics is interesting to kids researchers have told us up to about third or fourth grade if you ask a kid what's their favorite subject in school they will say arithmetic mathematics we teach them not to be interested we teach them that mathematics is drudgery is difficult there's something to be afraid of grades four five six around that for that other experiences they take to it like a doctor water I think that's wonderful so what are you introducing here at the fair we have a variety of things we have six tables with different things so we have one problem which you should come and try it's a topology problem so shape and how things are connected they have to unknock themselves from a certain configuration there are puzzles with your geometry make a shape that's the same as another shape there are puzzles in logic there are games we use logic in certain ways we have a game which is a simulation of how we think of grammar how we generate grammar linguistics is very mathematical fascinating I love it how to put squares together to form bigger things it's a variety of things you're making it sound really interesting already just with all these things that you've brought here it's interesting math is terrific we agree with you already math is fantastic then I started studying zoology probably you didn't have the greatest teachers in college my feeling as a teacher I want to get the kids involved I want them to like it if they don't like it I failed if they ask me what use is this I've already failed I want to keep them so they don't even think about that they'll find use for it so the Julia Roberts Robinson mathematics festival is this a festival that takes place in time it takes place where you want it to take place we're a central organization that supports local people who do this kind of thing we get them the mathematics we explain to them what they need to do they get the venue they get the facilitators people who can do the math they get the kids and we just cause it to happen and it's sweeping the country it's growing exponentially we get more and more people calling us we have it in eight or nine foreign countries already I just came back from Bulgaria and Romania where they did one we did it in China and Taiwan and Hong Kong and India next in September in August math it's the international language it's national but at the same time we need people from all over to do it because we don't know who's going to make the next discovery we don't know where the discoveries come from in math any more than in art or music or science so we have to have people from many different backgrounds feeding into it to make these discoveries we have to go over to a stage and do another stage performance right now but thank you so much for joining us my pleasure come say the boo thank you so much we have it's time to be on our YouTube channel thanks you can just go we're going to take a break we're doing a quiz show a science quiz show over at the lab rat stage at 1.30 so in 10 minutes so we're going to stop our live broadcast for a little while everyone who's there we'll see you later thanks once again for joining us everybody we'll be back in about an hour yes and the facebook live feed we're going to terminate now as well and we'll be back in one hour we'll be back thanks for watching this week in science stay tuned for more