 Okay, then we get to the second keynote of EuroPyphone. You're ready? You're ready as well? Okay, yes, you're ready. I have one question though. We've been with EuroPyphone to Florence, Bilbao and Rimini, and who think it's too cold here in Edinburgh? I wasn't aware of so many locals around. Okay, but if you think like 22 degrees in Edinburgh is too cold, let me tell you about some guys in Antarctica. They probably have like minus 80 degrees Celsius now, and we're now going live to basically the other side of the world. You see them already sitting there. They're more isolated than the astronauts on the ISS because there's only certain time spots where they actually can leave the Antarctica station, and they're going to tell you a lot about their work, their research, the team in a bit, so please give them a warm welcome to Antarctica. I was supposed to be there with you also this year, but actually I'm a little bit far from Europe. This, as Alessandro told you before, is Concordia Station. It's the European outpost in Antarctica, in the middle of Antarctica, and it's a French-Italian facility, and during the winter season, it host 13 other people, and we are, yes, the more isolated on Earth more than the astronauts in the International Space Station, because between February and November, there is no way to move from here, and no one can come because the temperature is really low. It can be lower than minus 80 Celsius degrees, and now I want to share a little bit of, I share the screen because I want to show you a little bit of slides, and so we will see in about five minutes, just one second. Okay, no, it's not okay, okay, perfect. So Concordia is 1,200 kilometers far from the closest base on the coast, and there are 3.2 kilometers of snow and ice on the field. There is lack of oxygen because the air is rife-eyed as it is at 4,000 meters of altitude at normal latitudes. And it's highly dry because this is the largest desert on Earth. There is no life here except for us, and the last time we saw the sun was exactly 80 days ago. Concordia is the most similar place on Earth to another planet, and that's why the European Space Agency is making biological research on us in order to better understand how the human body behaves in such extraterrestrial environment. So imagine to have a continent 1.5 times larger than Europe, totally covered from a layer of two kilometers of ice and snow. That's Antarctica, the highest continent on Earth with an average altitude of two kilometers from the sea level. Approximately 61% of all fresh water on the Earth, basically potable water, is here. If you melt all this ice, the fresh water, the sea level will increase everywhere of the three-eight meters. During the Antarctic winter between February and November, the total population of the continent is more or less the people in your room. Most of them live in the coast and a few in the middle of the plateau. In fact, there are only three permanent places in the middle of Antarctica. The base with 13 people, the Vostok base managed by Russia with 13 people as well, and also a USA base with 45 people. The population is here in order to perform scientific research because I hope this place will be an example for the rest of the world because it's a huge laboratory for science where nations cooperate peacefully to reach a common purpose. The goal is to know more about our planet and the universe. Okay. Okay. To have power, we use three generators. One generates until 100 kilowatts, and two until 150 kilowatts. We consume about 5,000 liters of fuel per month, and this fuel is similar to some kerosene we touch in order to move down its freezing temperature to 255 Celsius degrees. It's stored outside the base, and we keep about 25 cubic meters always warm in order for them to be immediately available. The fuel and the majority of the food comes here transported by some catapult like the one we use in the picture. And it's driven by around 12 people. It's a long trip of about 15 days, 1,300 liters starting from the coast, and they usually travel twice a year, exclusively during the summer season, of course, because in winter time, Concordia is an attainable. Okay. As I told you before, we are here to perform scientific research in different fields. One of them is the astronomy, and that's my duty. And we have two telescopes observing the sky, the optical frequencies. The one you see in the picture on the left follows just one star for the whole winter because we expect to transit off a planet and maybe we are lucky also some months. And why is this place so important for astronomy? Because there are no artificial lights and no humidity. So the sky is really clear, but also because we have three months of dark, so we cannot serve continuously as we can only from space. Python is the most used programming language here, but programming is hard and contributing to open source projects is almost impossible because we only have 512 kilobits of bandwidth for all the stations. We don't have internet on our personal computers and to access the network we use a common desktop. Now I show you just a couple of pictures before introducing my colleagues. This one is Concordia sunset. I took this picture at the beginning of the winter. It's the last time we saw the sun, it was 80 days ago. And this one is 50 under the moon. Also this picture is at the beginning of the winter. OK, now it's time for Coco, Collin will speak about glaciology. So hello everybody, I'm Collin as I just told you Marco and me I'm a glaciologist here. I will then speak a little bit about glaciology and with a point. OK, so while we study glaciology here, here glaciology is a tool to better understand our surrounding climate, so in the present day but as well in the past. And here is a very good environment because we don't have a lot of pollution around because Antarctica is really desertic and because at least we are three kilometers above the ice. So here on the cross section you can see where we are. So it's not really complicated but Concordia here. So it means that we are on what we call the high plateau of Antarctica and here is very good to realize ice or reality. Why? Because as we are on the plateau we are almost in the middle of the ice cap and so there is absolutely no velocity. So no velocity means that the layer of ice are not disturbed going in the depths. After is very good because we have a lot of ice, three kilometers and the accumulation of snow equivalent ice is very, very low. We have approximately a millimeter of ice corresponding to one year. Why we are doing some ice core? It's because so I told you we want to understand better the climate of the past. So the snow when it's falling it captures some air and some particles of the atmosphere after it's going to compact it and become ice. The ice is impermeable material and so does the bubble of air stay in prison into the ice. So in practical this is what we are doing. So on the first picture on the left you see the ice which is into the drilling instrument. Just under it you see the ice coming out the drilling instrument and on the right this is the section of ice that we analyze and what we analyze on it we don't analyze all the ice but we analyze the bubble of air which are in prison and the ice. And so as this is no accumulation at the beginning if you remember in the surface this is the present day more or less whereas at the more you go on depth and the more you can find information of the past. With EPICA we drove for three kilometers and so we arrived to 800,000 years ago. So we arrived to get some information about a long long time ago. So the main results of this I am and so many of I tell you that we analysis those ice car but now we have analyzed only one quarter of the ice car and all the rest is is keeping a kept here because by intact case the biggest freezer of the world. So why not keep the ice here? So the main results of EPICA is really what we are talking now in the business day. It's the correlation between the temperature and the greenhouse gases of the concentration so here on graph you can see that when the concentration is the pressure sorry is going up the CO2 for example and methane are the following same train so with EPICA we could have we can have a focus more about the consequence of the augmentation of greenhouse gases on the temperature of the atmosphere but we wanted there is another project now running because EPICA finished in 2005-6 more or less and so we want to perform another drilling at 40 kilometers far from Concordia where we think that we can find some ice of one million years ago or up to probably 1.5 million years ago. So why we want to perform another drilling and the way it is interesting on it? The project is called beyond EPICA all the ice and we are interested of going more than 1 million years ago because the cycle of glaciation and inter glaciation until a 1 million years ago was a cycle of 100,000 years whereas after 1 million years ago the cycle are way more shorter and this is like the cycle takes more or less 40,000 years ago. This formation we have things to sediment cores or some like information of the ubiquity of the earth and this kind of parameters. So that's why if we if we arrive to perform a drilling after 1 million years ago then we think that we can have more information about why the spirit of glaciation becomes shorter and there is as well a technological goal on this is because EPICA was what we call the destroyed, destroyed drilling. It means that we put the drilling instrument to the ice, we take the ice, we bring it up in the surface then we bring it to Europe and in Europe we make the analysis whereas here we develop so you can see on the picture. Here you have the heating fingers so it melts the ice and go down and after somewhere on this tube you have the spectrometer. The spectrometer is what allows to analyze the bubble of gas and so the past position of the atmosphere. It's way more fast than to take out all the ice core and everything and so in normally in one year so in one summer plane we will have perform all this drilling and so have immediate results on the composition of the bubble of gas. So this is the new project of Concordia. Unfortunately does the drilling and does a huge project are performed only in summer because the problem is that in winter the drilling like yeah it's more complicated to perfect the drilling because of the instrument because the electronic inside because you you have more chance to put your instrument like a stock on the ice and but we are still doing a glaciology during winter but that's more small scale so more in the surface and so here you can see for example that we are making what we call snow. So you dig a hole in the snow and you take samples, you take some physical properties of the snow to better understand the climate, the present climate and the climate of the past. And so for the glaciology I will stop here and thank you for listening. Thanks. Hello everybody. I am Cyprien Verso and I'm the station leader of the base but I'm also a glaciologist but don't worry I'm not gonna talk about snow again because actually glaciology is not my background normally I'm a biologist I'm doing space biology and well the reason why I am here is not so much for my background in glaciology because I've been trained specifically for coming here but it's because I've been doing other missions in isolated and confined environments one of which I'm gonna talk about as soon as we can get our computer to work. Just a second. Okay, it's coming. So the mission I was talking about is called high cities 4 and it's a mission which is funded by NASA and the purpose was to simulate a one-year mission on Mars and the reason why NASA is funding this program is because and the reason why NASA is funding this program is because it's planning to send humans to Mars in the 2030s even though their exact plan is not very accurate yet but there are still some questions to answer including whether astronauts after spending months in isolation and confinement would still be able to perform at a higher level and would still be able to work as a team and to answer those questions and some others NASA is funding a program called high cities which is basically simulations of missions to Mars which happen in this dome here which is about 11 meters in diameter and which is isolating the slope of the Monaloa volcano in Hawaii and their crew of six people spend different periods of time going from four months to one year. There was one one year mission in which I took part and there during those missions the six people leave as if they were on Mars which means for instance that they don't interact in real time with anybody because the only way to talk to people is using emails with a delay in 20 minutes in both directions which means that you send an email it takes 20 minutes to arrive and then after the person has insert takes again 20 minutes to come back to you. So for a year I have not talked to or seen anybody besides my five crewmates. Another important particularity of this is that the crew members are never exposed to fresh air or sunlight because when they go outside but once or twice a week maximum they have some analogues of spaces which I'm gonna show a bit later. This is how it looks inside the dome. So this is how it looks inside the dome as you can see it's like basically it looks like a bit like the hemispheric movie theaters so it's quite voluminous it gives an impression of space even though the surface is quite small and we have basically one big room on the lower floor and then you have a maid dining with some bedrooms it's the drawers that you can see and those bedrooms are basically the size of big closets and there is very very little sound insulation which is actually funny because just by listening I could always know where my crewmates were and what they were doing. There was a lot of let's say proximate you really had no intimacy. As for resources we were basically behaving as if we were on Mars and so for food for instance we only freeze dried food or mostly freeze dried food. I can see some examples here with some cubes of dried chicken, dried cherries, dried vegetables and so on. Simply because on a trip to Mars you would basically bring some food that you can store or extend it for a time. And we did grow a little bit of fresh food using basically what we could find but to be true the amounts were quite limited. There you can see our first harvest of cherry tomatoes as you can see it's not crazy amounts and this is our bathroom and you can see that there is a toilet but the toilet since we have to spare as much water as possible was a dry toilet which means that you go there you do what you have to do and then back to you take care of turning what you produce into some things that smells a bit less. And water also would be very precious and you can see that we have a shower which would be quite a luxury for Mars mission but since we were saving as much as possible we're talking about two showers of about 30 seconds each a week and then we're collecting the water and using it for cleaning the ground. What we're doing most of the time was research. We all had our own research projects because all researchers or engineers or something approaching but we're mostly test subjects. Here for instance you can see that I was taking some here samples from a permit of mine which was an analyze for looking at stress hormones. We also gave urine samples, saliva samples, we had questioners, we had various tests, we tested some technologies for instance the drug reality goggles to say mitigate the effects of isolation confinement, our sleep was monitored, our physical activity was monitored. We also had something called sociometric badges which is basically some devices that we're wearing around our necks and they were able to know who we were talking to, how we were talking to them, how close we were and so on. We also had some experiments outside. We had for instance some collaboration experiments where we had some objectives that we had to reach together and where we interacted was rated. We also had some geology tasks to perform in rare conditions that we were doing similar work and most. We were working on the ground outside or under the ground in what is called lava tubes and in addition to that we also had our own research projects. There I was working for instance, that's me when I was younger. I was a PhD student back then and I was working at the development of technologies that could allow you to produce what you need on Mars from what is already there using microbes. So yes, that's me on that mostly why I'm here and here I'm not doing biology simply because it's so called outside that you have no plants, no animals and even microbes do not proliferate. So if you find them just work heard by the wind, don't really divide. So that's basically why I came here and thanks for your attention. Hello everyone. My name is Moreno Paricevich. In the real life I work as computer scientists for the Italian National Research Council and here in Concordia I cover the position of electro science which basically means that I take care of both the hardware and the software side of data acquisition or the experiments we conduct here. I'm responsible for 12 experiments in geophysics among which the observatory for seismology, geomagnetism and space weather. Usually when you think about Antarctica you see something like this. You should see a picture. So you should see the continent covered by ice and what is important to research in this part of the world is that is because the southern atmosphere as you can see from the next picture is covered mostly by the oceans 80% is water and the Antarctic itself to cover the south part of the planet and the southern atmosphere is not as densely populated as the northern one. We have less observatories. We have less stations. In Antarctica it's extremely important to have as much as possible observation points and we have one here for various experiments and concerning seismology the continent resides completely on a stable, tectonic plate as you can see in the picture. So it means there are no local events. Whatever we are registering here with seismometers are events that happen somewhere else in the world. So there's no much noise from activities. Our station is isolated, especially in winter there's no movements or anything that can interfere with the measurements. Of course earthquakes use seismic wave that propagates inside the planets and they carry some information due to the fact that the propagation is affected by some phenomena like a reflection and something that resemble a reflection as well and there are some effects that are introduced in the propagation of the waves like the day, the changes of phase or polarization, attenuation, there are echoes and so forth and all the information is waves carries gives a lot of information, a lot of insights about the inner part of our planet and most of the information we have about the planet like the solid core, the solid inner core, the liquid, the inner core, the lower mantle, the upper mantle and the crust all becomes from these different styles. As you can see this is just a plot of an earthquake. You can see you're going to see that thing yet. Okay, that's it. And you can see that there are several waves they propagate with different speeds and different depending on the material, the air crossing and so forth. So this is an example of what we detect here with estimators. But as well we can detect other phenomena like in this case it is an eruption of another Y in May of this year and as well we can detect some local events. In the next picture you're going to see some spikes and those are just ice cracks that happen sometimes when the different temperature is higher. In this case was a delta in temperature of like 20 degrees and the ice was really cracking and we can as well. As well we detect the activity and in the next picture you will see it is the traversed ride, the caterpillar that brings the container with fuels, the food and all the material we need on this station. As well since we are located close to the south pole we are still in magnetism of course and as you probably know we have north and the south pole, the graphic poles and they are related to the rotation axis of the planet but as well we have magnetic poles and these poles do not coincide with the geographic poles and they are continually moving and so the measurement we are taking here allows to track the motion of these poles and as well we have what we call the geomagnetic poles that belongs to another coordinate system and this is corresponded to a perfect default in the center of the planet and that is usually used for numerical modeling and they will also explain why Aurora Loval is centered above us and not on the south pole or magnetic pole. The south pole corresponds to the Demonson station and the magnetic pole is 100 kilometers far away from the coast close to the DDU, the DuMondreville French station on the coast and the geomagnetic pole is close to us. As well we conduct studies concerning the space weather so the interaction between the solar activity and the magnetosphere, the atmosphere and this phenomena is particularly important close to the poles because there are particles that are injected into the atmosphere and that can interfere with our use of human activity both in space and on the planet and especially for what is concerned about the satellite operativity and telecommunication as well, the power grid, the electricity distribution basically. Here I take care of about 50 computers of different form factors from rec mounted servers to add the devices, appliances, Raspberry Pi's or Pino's whatever device we can use for data acquisition. We use Python mainly for processing of data, validation of data visualization of data but most of the data we collect are sent to the search groups in Europe where the data is further analyzed and then contributed to create models that geographical and global scale. Concerning the telecommunication here, are you still seeing yet? Take care of the maintenance and the administration of the local network and as well of the telecommunication via satellite and via radio. We have a satellite connection of 500 kilopit per second so we are very good in whatever activity we are conducting here. For instance, for this conference, the bandwidth is completely dedicated to the connection as it is possible and while we are sharing the same connection for email, whatever other services that we need at the station, web browsing, research and whatever and we send all this data to Europe so a larger part of the bandwidth is dedicated just to send this data via SSH, RCNC and whatever is tunnel to Europe where the other groups are analyzing this data. Okay, we are cutting, sorry. Okay, it's time for... Hi everybody, my name is Carmen Bostek and I'm here working for the European Space Agency and so ESA sends a doctor down here every year to study the adaptation of the human body to these extreme environments here and this is a perfect spot to do this because Concordia is the best analogon we have on Earth to a base on Mars, for example, or to a long-distance space flight. This is of course because of the extreme environment we have outside so we have the cold that forces us to dress up accordingly before we go outside. We have the three and a half months of darkness, the complete isolation during the winter months and a small crew size so we are 13 people for nine months and all this makes it a perfect place to study for future human spaceflight missions. So I have four different experiments for different scientists laboratories throughout Europe, two of which are turning the immune system. So what I do is, well, basically I study my crew members here. I take monthly blood samples and urine samples and stool samples and hair samples and saliva and all that fun stuff and I analyze it in a little lab I have here. With two studies I'm looking at evolution of the immune cells in the isolation, which is very interesting because as Leon told you, we have no microbes outside that could attack us and since we are always the same 13 people inside here, there's also nothing new coming from us anymore after a few months. So we are looking at how the immune cells react to this kind of stress and what we can see now is that in the first months, also because of the hyperbaric hypoxia we have here, in the first months, actually the activity of the immune cells is decreasing because they have nothing to do. But as soon as it turns to chronic hypoxia status, we can see that the immune cells are actually having an overreaction and doing more than they were doing than they would usually do back in Europe, for example, which is also why we usually get sick as soon as the new summer people come in around November. So this is quite interesting. And then another study looks at the acclimatization of our bodies to the hypoxia and the high altitude, practically, so you can never really adapt to this, but you can acclimatize. We are at 3,300 meters, which is about 3,800 as it would be around Europe. Yeah, so basically this is also blood tests and urine tests and a lot of questionnaires on altitude sickness. And while the fourth experiment is concerning the decrease of piloting skills and fine motor skills, so Mario is going to put a picture. We have here is a simulator of the Soyuz capsule, which is, of course, the space rocket that currently brings astronauts to the ISS. And yeah, you can see it here. So this is, well, it's like a computer game, basically. It's the cockpit of the Soyuz with three monitors, two toy sticks. And what we do is we fly the Soyuz to the ISS and we dock. And my crew mates do this every month and I monitor their skills. And along with other fine motor tests and cognitive tests and more questionnaires, I look at how their skills are improving or decreasing or staying the same during the isolation period. And this, of course, is very important, because if you send a crew of astronauts to Mars, for example, you want to make absolutely sure that once they arrive, they will still be able to land the spaceship on Mars and return safely home back to Earth as well, of course. So yeah, that's what I'm doing here. Okay, we take just a couple of minutes for Fifi. Hello, everybody. I'm Filippo Cali-Quaglia. I'm a physicist. And I'm here for taking about around three projects, mainly. These projects concern meteorology, so kind of meteorological measurements. The study of the solar radiation. We have a solar radiation observatory linked to like a worldwide network for measuring radiation in coming, out coming, and all sort of, all this kind of, all different wavelength. And also, I'm running measurements to a lighter facility, which allows us to study the lower stratosphere, where the polar stratosphere clouds form and dissolve and enhance the solution of the ozone. And as you can see in this picture, that will soon arrive from Antarctica to Edinburgh, I hope. This is our lighter facilities, facility which is located in a shelter outside the base around some hundreds of meters out of the base. And in the next picture, you will see the facility for the measurement of the solar radiation. And radiometers measuring longwave and shortwave are situated, located on a device called the solar tracker, which allows this instrument to follow the sun and perform this kind of measurements. And at the end, I have the, as I told you, we are measuring a temperature, humidity, and so forth. And I will just briefly show you a plot. And I will probably recognize that it has been made with Python. And this is one of, this is a plot showing wind chill, which is an interesting measure that combines temperature and wind speed and allows us to have, just in a glance, have an idea of what's the weather like outside. As you can see from the statistics in the bottom of the screen, we reached a temperature of wind chill temperature of minus 99, while the minimum temperature, real temperature, we reached during this winter. And until now, it's around the minus 77.1, which is not a record, but I can tell you that it's already quite a fresh environment, a fresh and cold environment. And lastly, every day I'm performing a radio sounding. It means that I'm launching a balloon full of helium in order to track the condition of the atmosphere, of the lower atmosphere. It means from the ground until 30 kilometers in the summer and only 15 during this time of the year. And for this reason, we, with collaboration of my crewmates, we prepared a special balloon, a special edition balloon just to celebrate this Skype with you. And so, please, Mark, help me. We will launch this balloon tomorrow evening. And we hope that it will reach a really high elevation altitude. And it will measure for us with measure temperature, relative humidity, and all this kind of variable that are really important for studying atmosphere for meteorological reason and for a better understanding and better improve our models. Thank you. Thank you very much. I don't know, I don't know whether you can actually see this. Oh, actually, it's slipped. You can't see this. So this is the audience. So please, a big hand to Antarctica, waving. I hope you can see this. So it's for room. We have like another five minutes for two questions. If you have a question, please come here and be quick, because we already have a little delay. So which pattern version do you use? Oh, good. So the trick question. Which pattern version do you use? No, what is the trick question? No. Okay. I think you need to repeat the question. Oh, which Python version do you use asks Jill? Python 2.7. Oh. He was coding in Python 3.6. I'm not yet at the development level, but I'm working hard, so maybe we will meet in some years, a few years in the next Python. I have a question about this NASA experiment on people behavior. There's a question on the NASA experiments on the people behavior. So how NASA to make sure that people are safe during these experiments? And are there any regulations that must be followed on such experiments? And how does NASA make sure that people are safe during these experiments? People are monitored quite extensively. There are cameras inside the dome that feel continuously the common areas for research, but that would allow to detect an emergency. Then we have the reason emergency phones that can be used, like, exactly the reason emergency and there is like the simulations need to stop for safety reasons. We have a way to contact health. And then there are the procedures which have been developed for basically any possible emergency. For instance, if there is a volcanic eruption, there would be a helicopter taking us up. So we're isolated, but we're quite monitored. So there was no, like NASA is very careful about the safety of the test subjects. No, it's easy. Why should I repeat all the questions? Come upstairs and ask the question directly. Just it's easier. Hello. Next question here. All right. Hi. So I was wondering, I think three months of darkness now, how has this affected your group dynamics for better or worse? Or better, maybe both one example for better and one example for worse? I have to say that it's fine also because in the middle of the winter, the 21 of June, there is one week of holiday. It's called midwinter and it's one week of party, so we enjoy all together. It's really fine because you know that the sun is coming, so it's a good week. We wait this week from the beginning of the winter. Okay. So thank you very much. I think this was on the farthest away ever keynote for Europe Python ever, and probably also the coldest one. So thank you very much. I think this gave us all great insight into your work and how is life in Antarctica. Yeah, and thanks again and again.